Dear Intelligent American,
Short and sweet because Yours Truly is Over There and using the power of jet lag to whip up the new edition of this intrepid journal.
Do read the National Review item that He of Much Opinion has penned about a stunning—yes, stunning—monument that will be installed in September in Washington, D.C. Sculpted by the amazing Sabin Howard, it is called A Soldier’s Journey, and it’s yours, all 58 feet of it: It is the official National World War I Memorial.
You will find that item here. Promise: It will invigorate you, hearten you.
Now, let us fix bayonets and charge!
A Mere Dozen—Enough to Satisfy Your Big, Intellectual Appetite
1. At Fusion, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney reflects on Lenin, a century after the madman’s death. From the piece:
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn established beyond a reasonable doubt in The Gulag Archipelago, it was Lenin, not Stalin, who created the infrastructure and ideological rationale for the totalitarian state in the U.S.S.R., and elsewhere. The concentration camps—as a vehicle for repressing “enemies of the people”—were Lenin’s ‘contribution’ to the twentieth century’s catalogue of horrors. Lenin’s role as the architect of totalitarianism is well documented, if, alas, typically ignored, and completely unknown to the young. He transformed the beautiful monasteries on the Solovetsky Islands in the Arctic North—noble places of pilgrimage and penitence for centuries on end—into the first instantiation of what would become the gulag system of forced labor camps. With fanatical zeal, Lenin encouraged the taking of “bourgeois hostages” who were put on barges in the old imperial capital of St. Petersburg, then sunk in the Neva river.
Lenin’s enthusiasm for such “methods” is well documented in writing from the Communist party’s “Secret Archive” collected by the historian Richard Pipes in The Unknown Lenin, published in English in the Annals of Communism series by Yale University in 1996. The interested reader should, in particular, read Document 24. There, Lenin calls for kulaks—relatively prosperous or ideologically-suspect peasants—in the Penza region to be “mercilessly suppressed” with no fewer than 100 to be immediately taken hostage and hanged and all their grain confiscated. No wonder that over two hundred peasant revolts occurred in the early years of the Soviet regime, the largest in the Tambov province of Russia. Lenin declared ruthless war on the independent peasantry and could see in their self-defense nothing but perfidy. These poor souls were for him nothing more than “bloodsucker kulaks” to be destroyed.
2. At The Wall Street Journal, Gary Saul Morson finds in Marxism the excellence of linguistic gymnastics, as well as projection. From the article:
On paper, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was the most liberal in the world. It granted universal suffrage, direct elections, the right to work and equal status to all ethnicities. It also established freedom of conscience, religion and speech. In practice, of course, none of it was true. The Soviets persecuted religious believers and arrested people for the mildest criticisms—even for supposedly anti-Soviet thoughts. The right to work meant the obligation to work, often in appalling conditions and with lateness punishable by exile to Siberia.
Other examples come to mind. Think of some “peace” movements. My Russian history teacher, Firuz Kazemzadeh, recalled that after World War II ardent pacifists in Western European cities asked people to sign petitions demanding unilateral disarmament. Kazemzadeh was well aware that the Soviets, who were rebuilding their military and surreptitiously solidifying control of Eastern European countries, sponsored European peace movements. If you had expansionist aims, wouldn’t you want your enemy to disarm?
The Marxist impulse is always to accuse your opponent of what you are doing or plan to do. It resembles what Freudians call “projection,” except that in Freudian theory projection happens outside the person’s awareness and is governed by an unconscious desire not to recognize one’s own intentions. For the leaders of Marxist and quasi-Marxist movements, the technique of accusing others of one’s own aggressive plans is entirely conscious. Call it “the political projection principle.”
3. At The Free Press, Madeleine Rowley reports that liberal nonprofits are . . . profiting . . . billions off of America’s border crisis. (Really, is anyone shocked?) From the investigation:
Endeavors, Inc., based in San Antonio, Texas, is run by Chip Fulghum. Formerly the chief financial officer of the Department of Homeland Security, he signed on as Endeavors’ chief operating officer in 2019 and was promoted to CEO this year.
In 2022, Fulghum was paid almost $600,000, while the compensation for Endeavors’ then-CEO, Jon Allman, was $700,000. Endeavors’ payroll went from $20 million in 2018 to a whopping $150 million in 2022, with seven other executives earning more than $300,000.
Perhaps the most shocking figure was the size of Endeavors’s 2022 contract with the government: a staggering $1.3 billion, by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border. (In 2023, Endeavors’ government funds shrank to $324 million because the shelter was closed for six months. Endeavors says this was because the beds were not needed, the border crisis notwithstanding.)
4. At Discourse, Martin Gurri checks in from the front lines of the struggle between the “normies” and the elites—he finds the latter looking scared. From the article:
What is the conflict about?
The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.
The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong—only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”
The normies, by their very nature a disorganized crowd, fight back by pouring into the streets in frighteningly large numbers and electing politicians loathed by the elites, like Donald Trump in the U.S. and Javier Milei in Argentina. The elites, as creatures of hierarchy, are hyperorganized, and can summon to their side the established political parties, the national and transnational bureaucracies and the activist class. They can get you from above—with government mandates—or from below—with the sloganeering mob—and would seem, therefore, to have all the advantages. Yet the conflict rolls on around the world, undecided, and it’s the elites, it seems to me, who have that frightened, desperate look.
5. At Public Discourse, Mark Dooley describes why beauty in architecture is as important to the community as ugliness is harmful. From the essay:
It is a simple truth that people will only respect what they value and cherish, and they will only value those things with which they can identify. No art form more profoundly symbolizes the identity of a people than its architecture. That is because it is founded on their desire to dwell in a place, to shape it in accordance with their needs and interests, and to ensure that it harmonizes with the natural environment so that our buildings enhance rather than defy the world that surrounds them. That explains why, up to quite recently, the ancient cities of Europe had unique characteristics that distinguished them from one another. The way they were built expressed their history, identity, and political and religious values. However, in changing the way we build, we not only change the way we live, but completely alter the identity of the common home.
For example, to insert a building of steel and glass into a classically planned street is not only to defy prevailing architectural norms, but also, to use a symbol of homelessness to undermine a traditional settlement. You cannot identify with a sheet of glass devoid of a proper doorway, its primary purpose being to disorient rather than to welcome. Having no defining characteristics or personality, it stands faceless and unresponsive before us. It does not testify to the history or the culture of the place in which it is set, but speaks to us of nowhere when what we desire is to belong somewhere. It is a monument to alienation and estrangement totally disconnected from the natural, social, and cultural fabric of the world that is obscured by its formless shadow.
6. At City Journal, Kay Hymowitz reports from the chasm between Gen Z men and women. From the piece:
Sex and politics are clickbait material, so it’s little surprise that The Economist’s early March article “Why Young Men and Women Are Drifting Apart” went viral. In this case, the attention was warranted. The article adds to our understanding of the long-standing gender gap in politics to include the often-puzzling Generation Z, spotlighting trends with implications reaching far beyond any particular election.
The upshot of the article is that young adult women and men are politically divided. This divide has three striking features. First, it’s driven by a strong leftward shift among women. While young men describe themselves as liberal or conservative at roughly the same rates that they have for decades, today’s young women are 27 percentage points more likely than men to call themselves liberal. Second, though a gender divide in voting choices is not altogether new, Axios reports that the gap is now five times larger than it was in 2000. In fact, as things stand, the gender political gap is twice as large as the highly consequential diploma political gap between college-educated Americans and their fellow citizens without a degree, a divide undergirding realignments that have swayed presidential elections since the Reagan era. Third, The Economist chronicles a growing mistrust between young men and women.
7. At Tablet Magazine, Michael Lind explains that no matter the day’s cause, count on your friendly neighborhood university to be increasing its relentless DEI-hiring binge. From the analysis:
In 2015 the polling website FiveThirtyEight, relying on information gathered by a website called The Demands, listed the demands of campus protests following the death of Michael Brown. The most common demands presented by campus “anti-racist” protesters to university administrations in 2015 were “Increase diversity of professors” (38%), “Require diversity training” (35%), “Fund cultural centers” (25%), “Require classes for students” (21%), and “Increase diversity of students” (21%). None of these policies would increase the safety of Black civilians—or those of any race—in altercations with police. The manifest if unstated purpose of all of these reforms was to expand the bureaucratic empires of campus ethnic studies programs.
The thinly disguised, self-serving lobbying of the ethnic studies programs never stops. On March 3, 2024, the editorial board of The Georgetown Voice, a student newspaper, wrote: “For over 50 years, student activists have pushed for the establishment of ethnic studies programs at universities across the United States. Currently, 43 American universities offer degrees in ethnic studies, and waves of students have demanded that Georgetown implement a similar degree.” Noting that Georgetown already has a “Black studies department,” the student paper called on the university to “work with the existing Black studies department and establish programs in Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, and Latinx studies. The editorial board calls on the Office of the President and the Provost to cluster-hire a group of tenure-line faculty members in these fields who would launch a pilot program in ethnic studies and advance a university-wide ethnic studies pedagogy.”
8. At The American Conservative, James Pinkerton reflects on the legacy and continued relevance of Russell Kirk, 30 years after the conservative scholar’s passing away. From the piece:
So come what may, this year and next, the permanent things seem destined for a collision with big-box politics. But then, Kirk always saw conservatism as at odds with modernity.
So what can the rest of us do? We can take inspiration from T.S. Eliot, shoring up our shards—and everything else we own—against the prospect of ruin. That means keeping hard, or analog, copies of books, music, photographs, memorabilia, etc. so that they’re safe from sneaky digital censorship, to say nothing of hacking, ransoming, and electro-magnetic pulsing. Already, great intellectual treasures seem to have been deleted. So we need the spontaneous order of DIY preservation, somewhere between what the Mormons do already and The Benedict Option.
What else needs permanence? All the cultural and social structures of our lives, that’s what. From churches to fraternities—frats are back in favor now, at least in some circles, thanks to a new display of manly virtues—from private schools to home schools, from the separation of powers to the sovereignty of the states. While we’re at it, let’s take care to preserve and protect the decent drapery of life: Burkean “little platoons” and Tocquevillean “habits of the heart.”
9. At National Review, Dominic Pino argues: Privatize airports. From the article:
Rather than having to battle against all the other funding demands in a government budget, privatized airports control their own revenues and can invest them in making the airport better. One of the main rationales governments use to argue for privatization is to allow airports to catch up on overdue investment that the government didn’t properly fund while removing the airport from the tax burden going forward.
Airports, when well-managed, should be profitable enterprises. They are not public goods in the economic sense of the term. A public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable, meaning that one person’s use of the good doesn’t leave less of it for others and there is no feasible way to prevent free-riding. Neither of these conditions holds for airports. One plane landing or using a gate means another plane cannot, and even publicly owned airports charge various fees to planes to prevent free-riding.
The U.S. has almost entirely excluded itself from privatization and the benefits it can provide. Rather than make any moves toward privatization, the federal government in 2021 doubled down on the government-run nature of airports in its campaign for the bipartisan infrastructure law. The only significant airports in the U.S. under public–private partnerships are in New Haven, Conn., and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
10. At Philanthropy Daily, Patrice Onwuka says there are ways higher-ed donors can steer clear of bankrolling chaos and campus antisemitism. From the article:
However, donors need not abandon academia entirely. With thousands of higher education institutions, donors should direct their dollars toward colleges and universities that share their values. Big donors have outsized influence on academia: gifts of $1 million or more made up less than 1% of donors but 57% of total donations in 2022. But don’t underestimate the generosity of other alumni and smaller donors in telegraphing their disapproval of an administration’s actions.
Through charitable giving, Americans can support reforms, extract accountability and demand change in higher education. Allying with academic institutions and issues-based think tanks that share their values and goals, donors can do the legwork with fundraising staff, administrators, faculty, and researchers, leading to lasting relationships.
By maintaining those relationships, Americans can be active participants in how their gifts are used by establishing clear grant agreements that protect donor intent and rights. Two great ways to guard against donations not being used as intended—or even worse, to support abhorrent activities—are to make restricted gifts and give while living as opposed to leaving funds to institutions in your will.
11. At First Things, Carl Trueman warns against churches embracing “pop Nietzscheanism,” where the lust for political power obliterates the mission of spirituality. From the reflection:
For those of us who grew up in Europe in the latter half of the twentieth century, confessional orthodox Protestantism has always been culturally marginal and despised. Ours was always the negative world, albeit perhaps less intensely so than now. For American evangelicals, this is a new experience, one that is disorienting and infuriating. That is why it is important to remember that the message of the Christian gospel has always stood in antithesis to the thinking of the surrounding world, even when the churches and that world had a broadly shared moral imagination. The antithesis is merely more obvious and more socially significant now. But it has always been there.
That means that the task of the Church and her ministers has always stood in antithesis to the world as well. She has a prophetic voice and answers to a higher authority. She must pursue her task regardless of the crises of the political moment. Nathan hardly did Israel a favor when he confronted David over his relationship with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. But he did his job and he saved David’s soul. That’s prophetic ministry. “Prophetic” does not mean “triggering the libs.” It means calling anyone and everyone to faith and repentance, no matter the social and political exigencies of the day.
The faithful Christian ministry is not very glamorous. It consists of baptizing, preaching, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper. It is about pointing people to a God on a cross whose strength, like that of his followers, is made perfect in weakness. Of course, none of this quite compares to engaging in an apocalyptic culture war or crushing one’s opponents or seizing worldly power by worldly means.
12. At Comment Magazine, Ilana Reimer argues why communal design must consider all members of the ’hood. From the essay:
Those of us whose bodies currently have significant needs have the most to gain from a robust view of the body’s dignity and the most to lose if we don’t get it right. “The narrower our ideas about whose bodies matter—who is our neighbor—the less likely we will be to help, love, or even see others,” writes journalist and writer Leah Libresco Sargeant. “And with the body unacknowledged, it is easier to overlook the more permanent but more elusive soul.” Accepting the dignity of human bodies—their diversities, frailties, and finitudes—transforms our framework of care. It means care is not earned by productivity or how little trouble we manage to produce for others. It means we design structures and shape communities with and for the most vulnerable.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made; our bodies are also humblingly temporary. As our society ages, this finitude will become an increasing public concern. If we accept our own dependencies, this will soften our hearts to love others who require more care. It should also spur us toward designs that prioritize a range of experiences. Those at the Jacob’s Well Bible study, for instance, are often excluded and forgotten in inflexible environments that don’t adapt to include their behaviours, movements, and appearances. Not only does that exclusion isolate them, but the wider community is poorer because of their absence. Social and physical structures shaped to welcome a diversity of people are a way of visibly affirming that human value is not based on units of productivity. By adopting designs that aid real people in our lives, we keep our efforts targeted and personal, finely tuned to the intricacies of individual needs. In this way, our built world’s defaults can become more hospitable—one lift, ramp, and semicircle at a time.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. The Center for Civil Society offers a slew of important “master classes” that are vital for nonprofit worker bees. For example, should you need intensive training on “Major Gifts” (after all, they account for a supermajority of nonprofit support) consider attending the Center’s in-person seminar in Washington, D.C. (September 4 to 6). Find out more about this vital training right here.
Due. The recent Center for Civil Society webinar on “American Jews, Philanthropic Traditions, and Harsh New Realities” can be watched on the C4CS YouTube channel, right here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why didn’t the French boy like pancakes?
A: They gave him the crêpes.
A Dios
May we heartily recommend a trip to Chartres, and a proper tour of this amazing cathedral? We do. Listen and you too may even hear the angels sing there.
May We Embrace Those Traditions That Point Us toward the Everlasting,
Jack Fowler, who is pretending to be Jacques at jfowler@amphil.com.
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