* Is Vladimir Putin, as is often alleged, no more than a revenant of the Soviet Union? Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council argues that the Russian strongman’s world view owes more to the tsars than the commissars: a melding of “persistent imperial nostalgia, internal demographic pressures, and an appealing ideology of expansionist destiny”.
While at least some hope in the West remains that, post Putin, Russia will trend in a more pluralistic and open direction, such a future is far from assured. In fact, in historical terms, it is far more likely that Russia undergoes what political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz have described as an “autocratic to autocratic” transition, in which Putin is replaced by another strongman or analogous illiberal figure. Once he is, the same strategic factors that have preoccupied Putin to date can be expected to weigh upon his successor as well, irrespective of the way in which they ascend to power in Russia’s fractious domestic political scene. [footnotes omitted]
* Theodore Kupfer asks, “Where Did Wokeness Come From?” and reviews the leading theories: idealist (“the offspring of long-gestating intellectual trends”), psychological (either a quasi-religion “filling a spiritual vacuum in American life” or “a byproduct of the infantilization of young Americans”), materialist (“woke capital” finding money making opportunities in fads like ESG or “woke labor”, “a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security”) and legalist (the metastasis of civil rights laws intended to combat discrimination into a set of legal doctrines that actively promote it). Mr. Kupfer doesn’t think that any of these has sufficient explanatory power by itself.
Left with a set of theories that don’t seem to work on their own but complement each other well, one could embrace a synthesis: a perfect-storm view, in which all these different phenomena happen at once. Thus, a certain brand of overprotective parent raised a generation of kids susceptible, in an era of declining religiosity, to morally urgent ideologies. The theory-suffused academy was happy to supply such an ideology, which these kids took up with gusto upon arriving on campus, despite its evident shortcomings. When they graduated and started entering the white-collar work force, litigation-averse corporations – already seasoned in adjusting their behavior to comply with civil rights laws – happily indulged the political demands of this socially engaged class of workers. And, thanks to the immense cultural power of well-educated Americans and the economic power of large companies, that ideology became increasingly visible, and eventually all but inescapable.
Well, maybe. My theory is that progressives become Woke by taking ergot supplements.
* James Carroll, a veteran anti-Christian polemicist, offers a screed in The New Yorker fulminating against the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Ho, hum, you say. What makes it noteworthy is this bit of lunacy:
The elevation of the issue of abortion as the be-all and end-all of Catholic orthodoxy echoes the anti-modern battles that the nineteenth-century Church fought. A pair of dates tells the story. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and the idea of biological evolution began to grip the Western imagination. In 1869, Pope Pius IX, in his pronouncement “Apostolicae Sedis,” forbade the abortion of a pregnancy from the moment of conception forward – an effective locating of human “ensoulment” at the joining of the ovum and sperm, an all but explicit rejection of evolutionary theory. [emphasis added]
So the Pope’s recognition of biological reality – that conception brings into being a new, unique organism of the human species – was a rejection of science? A couple of paragraphs later, Mr. Carroll endorses “the idea that ensoulment unfolds during the process of fetal development, at some indeterminate point weeks or months after conception”, an idea with no scientific grounding at all. Next to this nincompoop, Pio Nono was Charles Darwin’s blood brother.
* The invaluable Steven Hayward calls attention to a draft report by a committee of Yale University faculty on “Size and Growth of Administration and Bureaucracy at Yale”. It’s a draft report, because, although it was completed last January, Yale administrators have fought vigorously to suppress it, after a determined effort to deny the committee access to pertinent data. Professor Hayward’s source is an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication whose outlook is far from conservative or anti-bureaucratic. You can read the article here if you don’t mind signing up to get e-mail traffic from the Chronicle.
* And, in conclusion, this is the most appalling thing you will read today. Theodore Bilbo has soul siblings in the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.
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