Disclaimer: What follows is a critique of feminism. I’m aware that getting a white guy to maneuver the intricacies of oppression is like one of those blind cave newts trying to cross a highway. Nonetheless, my goal is an impartial, balanced account, with all bloviations pierced and deflated, all privileges checked at the door. The last thing I want is to resemble recent Republican commentary on the issue of women’s rights, reminiscent of a pileup on the freeway. The force of impact from a chain reaction of bizarrely inaccurate remarks on the subjects of rape and basic anatomy results in near-fatal insertions of foot into mouth such that Q-tips have been issued to undergraduate political interns for the gentle swabbing of toe jam out of synaptic pathways.

The following story is true. I changed the names, and despite the inevitable interpolation in recalling decade-old dialogue, the gist is still there.

My first two semesters of college, I took Dr. M’s 17^th and 20^th century French literature courses. Twice a week the rest of the students and I sat around a Harkness table and fumbled through conversations in a language we didn’t know that well about a book we didn’t understand (or read to begin with). The perfunctory fumbling petered out after about twenty minutes, and the rest of the hour was mercifully filled by Dr. M, who, with impeccable French spoken in a long, unapologetic middle-Georgia accent, parsed the tenets of Cartesianism from a photo of one of Louis XIV’s chairs.

When Dr. M was awarded a research grant, he chose me from a pool of applicants for a research assistant position (my only distinguishing credentials included the ability to stay awake in class and once recognizing Irene Papas from a clip of Iphigenia). Dr. M. had dedicated thirty years of his life to the Mélusine manuscripts of Jean D’Arras, which is a medieval legend about a French fairy woman who could turn into a dragon. My mother, who wanted me to be a dentist, later bought me a butterfly net so that I could “go catch medieval fairies in the woods with Dr. M” as part of my “research” (her implied quotation marks).

He had already done the grunt-work: trips to French monasteries, bargaining with librarians, amassing a small mountain of microfilm slides printed from photocopied manuscripts. He had a draft of his book, which was to be a critical bilingual edition of the legend. The problem was that the printed microfilm photos of the manuscript were too small to decipher. He had a system of arranging two magnifying glasses in front of the paper in order to proofread his transcriptions. We had to be careful not to work in direct sunlight, for fear of fire. He wanted me to align the magnifying glasses while he read.

You should have seen his face when I brought him a poster-sized copy of a manuscript page from the Xerox machine. His eyes looked like they still had the magnifying glasses in front of them. So after a couple of hours in the copy room I was able to save him a few months of eye-strain. For my efforts, I was given two things: 1) a shout-out in the acknowledgements: “For his valuable assistance in solving problems related to manuscript access, I wish to express sincere thanks to my research assistant, William S. Bradford” and 2) a level of trust that granted the opportunity for completely open discussion.

I remember discussing Hinduism, Lorca, Cervantes, his time serving in Vietnam, the pettiness of academia. He told me how he met his wife. He got me into Proust, and I remember him reading this long passage where Proust chronicles the hues of ripening asparagus for the entirety of a page.

“You see how it matters?” he said. “It all matters with Proust. Everything is important.”

I had a vision of the purple-green asparagus with a scintillating halo of St. Elmo’s fire. Everything was important. That page was a challenge to the reader – an aesthetic rebellion. Admittedly, it’s not hard to blow the mind of a nineteen-year-old. My reaction was something like this:

The semester ended, and we stayed on good terms. Every once in a while we met up for supper.

My senior year of college I briefly dated (three months) a girl — let’s call her Genevieve — who was a triple major in psychology, religion, and women’s studies. I’m pretty sure she ended up graduating summa cum laude, but I don’t know because we graduated at different times. She was also a feminist, and not the everyone-should-care-about-equality garden variety, but more the symposium-attending-Vagina-Monolouging -may-or-may-not-have-held-up-a-banner-on-the-steps-of-the-capitol variety.

“So what are you doing tonight?” she asked me one evening. This was early in the relationship, the part where you are respectful of the other person’s freedom, but already affecting it by virtue of the Observer Principle.

“I’m going to dinner with Dr. M.”

“The French professor?”

“Yeah. Did you have him?”

“Ugh. Yes.” I am in no way trying to belittle this woman, even though this is the weird situation of describing a former liaison. Keep in mind that she won a scholarship, had written a novel while in high school, and now speaks, I’m pretty sure, a few different languages. All that aside, however, I think I remember her making the “gag me” face when I mentioned Dr. M’s name.

“Why don’t you like him?”

“He made the most sexist remark that I’ve ever heard.”

I couldn’t imagine him saying anything insensitive. The man was sensitive enough to induce epiphanies from asparagus.

“Gosh. What did he say?”

“You know how he always made us speak French in his class?”

“Yeah.”

“Well I was trying to answer his question once, and he cut me off in the middle of my answer. He told me I was too timid. That I needed to be bold with French.”

“And that’s sexist because he’s presuming that you’re timid —”

“No, Sam. C’mon. I haven’t gotten to the sexist part yet: he told me that I needed to elocute like harlots on a piano.”

“Harlots? As in, like, two of them?”

“Yup. On a piano.”

“Wow. That’s quite an image.” I imagined some sweaty, gap-toothed saloon girl sprawled across the top of an upright. “He never talked to me like that.”

“Well, you’re a guy.”

“Yeah, I guess that is pretty sexist.”

“You guess? It’s horrific.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I wrote about it on the course evaluation, but naturally the professors never read those, so I took it to Dr. O’Brien-Stuart.” Dr. Pamela O’Brien-Stuart. That’s not her real name, but I want you to know that I’m not taking a cheap-shot; her initials really are P.O.S. Anyway, she’s a professor in the women’s studies department, and would later serve on Genevieve’s thesis committee.

“What’d you say to her?” I asked.

“I told her what he said.”

“What’d she do?”

“I don’t know. She took it seriously. She’s on a lot of committees and everything.”

“I had no idea Dr. M said things like that.”

“Well, he does. So enjoy your dinner with him.”

At dinner that night, we entered the familiar and lovely trance of jumping from esoteric idea to esoteric idea. We measured out the time in bathroom breaks from all the post-dessert coffee. Dr. M was in rare form – his book, the culmination of his career, was very well received in France. He glowed like asparagus.

But I still couldn’t shake the image of the harlots.

“I started dating a girl,” I told him. “I think she’s a former student of yours.”

“Who is she?”

I told him. He squinted at the ceiling, and after a moment, started to chuckle to himself silently.

“What is it?”

“I remember her. She wrote the most curious thing on my course evaluation.”

“Did she?”

“She said I told her to elocute like harlots on a piano!”

“You didn’t?

“Why, no, Guillaume. That’s the funniest thing I ever heard. I told her to have confidence – elocute like Horowitz on the piano.”

Vladimir Horowitz, the pianist bruited for his bold, percussive interpretations of Chopin.

Dr. M’s southern accent was so impressive, Horowitz glissandoed into Harlots.

We laughed.

“I hope you two are happy together,” he said, thumbing a chuckle-induced tear from his eye.

This kind of sentence makes for bad writing, but the truth of it is so rumbling and pervasive that I cannot strike it: I sighed in great relief.

“And how are you doing?” I asked.

“Well, Guillaume, I have to tell you. I’m not returning to school in the fall.”

“What? Why?”

“My performance was up for review, and they didn’t grant me tenure.”

“I can’t believe it! But, your book! People like it!”

“It is what it is. I’m too old to keep fighting for it, so I’m retiring early.”

He picked up the tab while I was in shock. The consummate genteel liberal arts scholar. What about fairies? What about asparagus?

Dr. P.O.S. carries a lot of weight on the faculty. Now, I’m not saying that Genevieve’s complaint is what caused Dr. M’s tenure to be declined, but I am saying that it certainly couldn’t have helped things. I’m also not saying that this whole thing is what caused our breakup not too much later, but I am saying that it certainly couldn’t have helped things.

Wordsworth has that line in Tintern Abbey that gets at what I’m trying to get at: “of all that we behold/ From this green earth; of all the mighty world /Of eye and ear,–both what they half create,/ And what perceive.”

Perception is not just perception. We half-perceive and half-create.

I’ve done it. When I was writing my thesis on Old English riddles, I could walk down the street and gurgle out tomes describing how every fluttering pigeon, every piece of trash, every “eat more chicken” advertisement related directly to this one particular manuscript from ten-and-a-half centuries ago. Foaming with zeal, I wondered how no one else could see the connection. Graduate school is a unique form of madness.

Just consider what’s wrong in half-creating something that has the potential to condemn. My wife keeps up with the feminist blogosphere, and her segue into that portion of our conversation, which has become a running joke between us, is always “And the feminists are outraged again.” I want to suggest that pointing out the good must play more of a role because Wordsworth leaves room for the opposite to be true as well: look for good, and you will half-create it.

As a teacher, I do that all the time. If a student is off-task, I act aloof and comment on something good that the kid is doing. If I continually point out an error, the kid will start to identify him/herself with being the bad kid, which is only a stone’s throw (and just consider who’s throwing the first stone) from not caring that he/she is a bad kid. I want the students to associate themselves with being well-behaved and thoughtful. In most cases, the student will feel guilty and auto-correct the bad behavior, because now bad behavior is not part of who he/she is. I’d like to see more of that in feminist rhetoric. Perhaps, for example, there could be a blog that chronicles exemplary instances of people not being sexist. If that sounds like a toothless approach, you have to ask yourself: are you seeing something, or are you seeing what’s been on your mind a while?

I’m worried that people will read this and their faces will tug into smug smiles and they’ll say “oh, those crazy feminists!” and dismiss it. Don’t do that. If you think about it, this is not just a critique of feminism; it’s a critique of the general mindset of politics. Republicans and Democrats fall into this same Wordsworth Romantic Idealist trap[1]. If anything, they want to up the percentages on the half-create side. Take this example, where one side hears “It takes a village to raise a child” while the other side hears “The villagers are going to take your child away from you and raise it.”

I can forgive Genevieve’s blunder because she was unaware of what she was doing. In that case, a conversation, a blog post, or an ecumenical David Foster Wallace Youtube video about awareness can improve things. In fact, I did explain the whole situation to Genevieve the next day, and she was stunned into silence (whether her conscience was pricked enough to attempt fixing her error — or at least apologize — is another story on which I don’t have the details). At the very least, she became aware. But what is moderately frightening is when the Wordsworth Phenomenon becomes a deliberate political tactic: it behooves the party to purposefully misconstrue a statement in the way that is as detrimental as possible to the other party because a certain percentage of people will take what you say at face value no matter what. This becomes a higher priority than critical reasoning. Cut your losses with the few followers who take context into consideration and are subsequently appalled by you.

The universal complaint regarding politics is that one side never listens to the other side, right? On the contrary, it ironically requires an almost monastic level of devotion to the other side in order to make such a calculated miscalculation. Take the Republican pronoun-antecedent obliteration of context in Obama’s “You didn’t build that” speech as an example (that = the business owner’s business vs. that = the roads and bridges). Targeting such an innocuous phrase is like plucking a fly from the air with a pair of tweezers. The Republican response was not an innocent grammar error, and no remedial lesson in pronouns is going to stop that kind of thing from happening.

Look, feminism isn’t to blame. Sexism is there. It’s real, and it’s a huge problem that needs a lot of attention. I’m not denying that. But a concern I have is that passions can become hallucinations, and the greater concern: political parties exploit that potential. And if that’s the case, Proust’s asparagus is reduced to a phallic symbol. Horowitz becomes at least two harlots.

Now, all of this uproar over a relatively innocuous turn of phrase, (innocuous compared to, say, drone strikes against innocent women in Yemen and Pakistan), might seem a bit overblown. Far be it from me to wander unwittingly into the linguistic hinterland that is home to the contemporary gender-equality movement. However, behind all of this debate over the President’s language, I think something much more profound- and troubling- is taking place here.

What is really being objected to is not so much the President’s choice of words but a particular understanding of human nature. The current culturally-prevalent view of human nature rests on an anthropological assumption that posits womankind as consisting, ultimately, of atomized female  individuals with no inherent social or familial obligations to any other individuals (male or female). Speaking generously, one could perhaps attribute this individualistic view of human nature to a misguided affirmation of the undeniable value of each individual man or woman. But to the extent that this modern anthropology advances each woman’s individual identity as an alternative to the preponderance of social/familial identities that traditionally have held sway over both genders, one can easily expect those (quite legitimate) relational identities to be seen as a threat to a woman’s true worth, which proponents of this view argue is internal and non-relational. In other words, to the extent that women see their relationships with other individuals (or with the Divine) as an integral part of their being, their status as women is somehow suspect. Melissa McEwan, who started the We the People petition against Obama’s “wives, mothers, and daughters” language, did so because she took exception to any expression of femininity that “defines women by their relationships to other people.”

The problem with all of this is that society cannot long remain functional once its members (both male and female) reject their traditional obligations to one another. The foreseeable social consequences of such a radical break in human self-understanding sound all too familiar today:

-          an increase in divorce and abortion rates

-          an increase in the number of children born out-of-wedlock or raised in single-parent households

-          an increasing, culturally-pervasive materialism that attempts to fill relational voids with physical possessions

-          an increase in interpersonal egocentrism that sees other people as mere tools to be used for one’s own gratification

-          a decreasing amount of mutual respect among relationships (particularly inter-gender relationships) of all forms

If these indications of social disintegration sound familiar to the modern ear, it is because of the enormous extent to which modern American society (with considerable help from the welfare state) has successfully stripped modern men of those relationships- as husbands, fathers , brothers, etc.- that historically have given male life meaning. Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon references as much when she writes that  “women are still living in a world where we, unlike our male counterparts, are defined by our relationships to others.”

From a relational and familial standpoint, American society today seems to be on the verge of going completely off the rails, if it hasn’t already. To the extent that proponents of gender-equality are troubled by the perceived increase in destructive behavior patterns among American males (especially in regard to their relationships with women), they recognize this problem. To then present women in an individualistic manner- particularly to the exclusion of the relational components of human nature- is not only to deprive each female life of a significant source of meaning, but to exacerbate their own social disintegration.

Justice Alito (“the Burkean justice“) asks, “You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean . . . we do not have the ability to see the future.” It looks like some of the others are at least open to throwing the case out for lack of standing. (Ironically, such a “setback” would only happen because the petulant Governor Brown refused to defend Prop. 8 in court!) Dismissing for standing would leave the lower court ruling against Prop. 8 in place, but would stop short of imposing the Court’s definition of marriage on the rest of the country.

The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak writes that the justices are partially motivated by fear of creating a new Roe v. Wade, which, rather than settling cultural disputes, only exacerbates them. According to Liptak, even Justice Ginsburg has her qualms:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal and a champion of women’s rights, has long harbored doubts about the ruling.

“It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far, too fast,” she said last year at Columbia Law School.

I have no basis to predict how a pro-gay-marriage ruling would compare to Roe. And predicting rulings on controversial cases is generally a loser’s game. Months from now, all of today’s armchair speculation might look incredibly naive.

But, at the very least, it’s nice to see the justices expressing a little more skepticism against pushing the entire country in their preferred cultural direction. Why, after all, do Alabama and California need to have the same marriage laws? And why should Anthony Kennedy be the one to decide that?

She opens up her piece with a reference to Peter Viereck. His thought weighs down heavily throughout the entire article, with copious quotations and excerpts from the essay of his on which I also relied for quotations, in my last post on the “challenge” that Viereck poses to contemporary conservatism and conservatives. But hers is a much better use of his work.

I think her article provides an opportunity for us at Beyond the GOP to consider where it is that we fit in with contemporary conservatism, and where it is that we want to fit. Are we a part of this post-movement conservatism? Are our potential allies that she mentions: Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf and other journalists, bloggers, pundits and intellectuals who neither follow the party nor the movement?

Or are those figures a part of the problem? As is specified in the article, is a “post-movement conservatism” a type of myth?

As Ben, Kelse, and others seem to suggest in their writings, for conservatism to be effective—for conservation to occur—conservatives must act radically. Conservatives cannot accept the welfare state, it cannot accept the centralization of the government, but rather there must be an intellectually sophisticated, philosophically robust and principled outlook that privileges culture, and its change, above the exercise of political power.

In that decision to prioritize cultural power above political power, I think we follow the tone set by Viereck’s “pre-political conservatism” more than the political-power-oriented conservatism of the figures who are a part of her “post-movement” group. And because of their emphasis on changing the political climate, it may be the case that those figures singled out as “post-movement conservatives” are a part of the problem. They are the conservatives who cause us at Beyond the GOP to scratch our heads and worry about their conservative bona fides. As a result, at least as the article conceives of it, “post-movement conservatism” would seem to be a myth. At the end of the day, they are just a part of that conservative movement.

Unless . . . we are part of this movement. It seems that at times we are as concerned with ideological purity as any “movement” conservative organization or media organ. Take the narrative of Judeo-Christian foundations on decline; secession; or history, tradition, and rationalism. We seem to rehash debates that occurred decades ago. We’re just a part of that stale, self-contained dialog that the “post-movement” conservatives have broken out beyond. Where do we fit in the movement/post-movement scheme?

Here are some passages which, I think, require contemporary conservatives to face some unpleasant political realities.

(from page 134 of the Transaction edition 2005)

In America, Southern agrarianism has long been the most gifted literary manifestation of the conservatism of yearning. Its most important intellectual manifesto was the Southern Symposium I’ll Take My Stand, 1930, contrasting
the cultivated human values of a lost aristocratic agrarianism with Northern commercialism and liberal materialism. At their best, these and more recent examples of the conservatism of yearning are needed warnings against shallow practicality. The fact that such warnings often come from the losing side of our Civil War is in itself a merit; thereby they caution a nation of success-worshippers against the price of success. But at their worst, such books of the 1930s, and again of today, lack the living roots of genuine conservatism and have only lifeless ones. The lifeless ones are really a synthetic substitute for roots, contrived by romantic nostalgia.

Such romanticizing conservatives refuse to face up to the old and solid historical roots of most or much American liberalism. What is really rootless and abstract is not the increasingly conservatized New Deal liberalism but the romantic conservatives’ own utopian dream of an aristocratic agrarian restoration. Their unhistorical appeal to history, their traditionless worship of tradition, characterize the conservatism of writers like Russell Kirk.

In contrast, a genuinely rooted, history-minded conservative conserves the roots that are really there, exactly as Burke did when he conserved not only the monarchist-conservative aspects of William the Third’s bloodless revolution of 1688 but also its constitutional-liberal aspects. The latter aspects, formulated by the British philosopher John Locke, have been summarized in England and America ever since by the word “Lockean.”

And he states further (this on page 142 of the previously mentioned edition)

What about the argument (very sincerely believed by National Review and Old Guard Republicans) that denies the label “conservative” to those of us who support trade unionism and who selectively support many New Deal reforms? According to this argument, our support of such humane and revolution-preventing reforms in politics—by New Dealers and democratic socialists—makes us indistinguishable from liberals in philosophy. Shall we then cease to call ourselves philosophical conservatives, despite our conservative view of history and human nature?

So, conservatives, what is your answer to his question?

So I’m very excited to see this new movie (with a screenplay by Bill Kauffman, no less!) about Yankee opposition to the Civil War.

At least in the book version, the hero of the story is not an abolitionist. Still, it’s nice to see a portrayal of the Civil War that admits that other people wanted peace besides slaveholding southerners. There’s a whole forgotten tradition of Yankee libertarianism—perhaps best exemplified by the abolitionist Boston lawyer Lysander Spooner—that supported both the right to secede and the slaves’ rights to emancipation. After all, both derive from the uniquely libertarian right to private property.

As conservatives and libertarians, the three of us believe that we’d all be better served if government extricated itself from the business of marriage altogether, leaving it as a private contractual matter. Government is already big and intrusive enough, and too invested in telling ordinary Americans what is right and wrong. And as Senator Rand Paul said last week, getting government out of marriage would also take away the time-worn opposition talking point about efforts to “redefine marriage.”

However, for the time being, getting the government out of marriage is not a realistic possibility, especially given the many legal issues tied to marriage today. The next best thing, then, is for the government to act equitably in its involvement in marriage, and that means allowing all committed couples the freedom to marry and to have their marriages recognized by all levels of government.

This is an argument you often see on the libertarian left. I wonder, though: is there any other issue where libertarians would say that the cure for a government entitlement is to expand and federalize it, so that it involves more people?

You would never hear a libertarian say, “I believe that we should end foreign aid. But until we end it, it’s only fair that each country gets an equal share.” Most people would realize that, far from ending foreign aid, a program of “aid equality” would just increase the demand for it.

So why is gay marriage any different? If it is “unrealistic” to imagine the government leaving the marriage business today, won’t it be even less realistic when millions more people are entitled to federal marriage benefits?

You can read it here.

Lochner is a case that all law students are taught to hate. It involved a New York law that limited the amount of hours that a bake shop employee could legally work. Later revisionist scholarship has shown that the law was actually a piece self-serving special interest legislation, backed by the unions that represented established bake shop employees, who feared new immigrant competitors. The immigrant bakers tended to work long hours in order to catch up with and displace their established competitors.

But regardless, Lochner has earned the hatred of the legal mainstream because the Supreme Court ultimately invalidated the law, holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protected workers’ freedom to contract with their employees for whatever terms they wanted. By limiting the amount of hours they could work, New York violated the workers’ “liberty of contract.” It wasn’t until the New Deal that the so-called “Lochner era,” in which the Court would strike down these kinds of economic regulations on “liberty of contract” grounds, was actually reversed.

It is pretty impressive that Rand Paul could speak extemporaneously (and accurately) on Lochner, hours into his filibuster. Even more impressive are his references to the extremely obscure  Buchanan v. Warley case: another Lochner-era decision, where the Supreme Court struck down a segregationist law prohibiting people in majority white neighborhoods from selling their homes to black buyers (and vice versa). Obviously, this law also interfered with the liberty of contract—legal scholar David Mayer believes that, if it had been allowed to stand, it could have ushered in a South Africa-style apartheid system in America.

I certainly support liberty of contract too, and I want desperately to be able to applaud the Lochner era. After all, as Paul stated, the liberty that the Supreme Court protected wasn’t just about economic freedom, narrowly defined. The justices understood it to refer to a broader liberty to live your life free of legislative interference, unless there was some overriding reason for the government to step in. (David Bernstein and David Mayer have explained this in more detail in two excellent books.) If the Court still protected individual liberty the way they did in the Lochner era, it is hard to believe that it would stand for drone bombings of American citizens. As it is, however, Lochner‘s concern for actual rights has given way to the mushy Mathews v. Eldridge case, where life, liberty, and property are just personal “interests” that can always be tossed aside without a prior hearing if the government has a good enough reason to do so. Unsurprisingly, Mathews is one of the first cases cited in the Obama administration’s notorious drone memo.

But, while the Lochner justices’ hearts were in the right place, the era is best considered a tactical mistake—kind of like YAL endorsing Ted Cruz or Murray Rothbard going hippie.

For one thing, much of the Lochner era’s advances came from overturning state—rather than federal—laws. In the short term, it is certainly nice to see obnoxious state regulations get knocked down. But in knocking them down, the Lochner Court really just transferred power from local communities to the central government, treating the federal government as the ultimate source of power.

At the time, that might not have been so bad, given that the federal government was relatively laissez-faire. But when the old laissez-faire was replaced by Hoover and FDR’s statism, the central government could only face resistance from weakened and emasculated states. By focusing on immediate gains, the Lochner justices undermined the states’ power to fight bigger threats to liberty later on.

Second, the whole premise of “rehabilitating Lochner” assumes the Supreme Court as the proper arbiter of all constitutional issues. I’ve commented before on Murray Rothbard’s anecdote about the eighteenth-century “Burgundy Circle,” which also tried to impose top-down reform and failed miserably—the Burgundy Circle is, I think, a great cautionary tale for contemporary libertarian centralists. Over-reliance on the Supreme Court places our faith in a group of people who don’t necessarily have any personal interest in promoting liberty. And even if they did, there are only nine of them, which means that small changes in personnel could lead to huge reversals of earlier gains. The Lochner era famously ended when a single justice, Owen Roberts, switched allegiance from liberty of contract to the New Deal. Even if we work as hard as we can to revive Lochner, a similar switch—our even something as banal as Clarence Thomas forgetting to look both ways before crossing the street—could prove our undoing.

Unlike Rand Paul, I can only muster at most one cheer for Lochner. The mainstream hatred for it stems mostly from an unwarranted hatred for libertarianism in general. But, as a libertarian, I see more hope in empowering individuals and local communities to check the central government than I do in convincing the central government to check itself.