Can You Love A Racist? The Slippery Slope Of Moral Certainty

Writing in the New York Times a few years ago Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender woman, wondered whether the Salvation Army should be universally condemned for its conservative views on gender and LGBTQ+.  Or, should this one ‘fault’ be overlooked in light of its decades of selfless service to the poor?

Today's cancel culture suggests that it cannot be.  One serious moral failing - and racism and homophobia are the most serious sins - and all else is dismissed, forgotten, and expunged from history.  Thomas Jefferson, author of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, a man of vision, philosophy, and intelligence should, these latter-day critics charge, be removed from the American pantheon because he had sex with one of his slaves. 

Benjamin Franklin, another man of rectitude and resolute morality, a diplomat, statesman, and scientist, must also be removed because he was a slaveowner and owner of the Pennsylvania Gazette which published advertisements for slave auctions.  Every one of the men for whom Yale colleges have been named had some financial or political interest in slavery, and despite the charges of historical revisionism at the heart of removing their names, the University has capitulated to reformist demands and will proceed. 

George Washington owned slaves at Mt. Vernon.  The Capitol was built with slave labor as was the C&O Canal, the most important commercial waterway of the early 19th century.  Most important New England families had at least a partial interest in the Three Cornered slave trade, and invested their profits on Wall Street where this money circulated throughout the economy. 

The entire South in some liberal quarters must still pay for its crimes against humanity, and anyone visiting Mississippi or Alabama is nothing less than a traitor. 

This myopic, revisionist view of history, society, and human nature has been spreading for years with no signs of remission.  The intolerance and philosophical ignorance seem to have no bounds.  Every one of us must be vetted for what social reformists consider anti-social attitudes.  We, our forbears, and our friends come under the lens of these advocates for social justice.  One slip, one suspect reference, one insulting phrase, and we must be marginalized, dunned out of prescribed society, and eliminated from social discourse. 

After years of bad haircuts, an acquaintance of mine finally found a barber who could deal with his wild, curly hair. He was as magical as Edward Scissorhands, a master. The problem with Tony, however, was that he had a particular animus against blacks, a criticism that bordered on racial intolerance.  His reasonable view that blacks are disproportionately responsible for crime became a generalization - the black community itself was in his sights, and this was what was so disturbing to his client.  

If looked at through the lens of human psychology and the evolution of personal political philosophy, however, the barber's convictions were quite understandable. None of us are models of perfect rectitude. 

After a year of this, the client had had enough. His unease at hearing the barber's screeds trumped his delight at having a decent haircut.  No matter how good Tony was a cutting hair – and he was a genius – the client judged him to be a bad person, a reprobate, and dismissed him, never again sat in his chair. 

Yet this judgement might be the first slide on a slippery slope.  If one judged the Tonys of the world on just one thing, no matter how reprehensible it may seem, then why shouldn’t one judge others in the same way?  It takes all kinds, and clients sit in Tony’s chair to get a haircut, not to engage him in racial politics.  Why not simply tune him out?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great, courageous man; but he was also a Lothario who cheated on his wife and was more of a sexual wastrel than JFK.  Did these moral failings disqualify both men from leadership or high public office?

Many women immediately disqualified Bill Clinton from any further political consideration after he had sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. If he cheated on his wife, they said, he will most certainly cheat on us. Yet the Bill Clinton years look good in the light of recent White House debacles.

Ezra Pound and H.L. Mencken were both rabid anti-Semites, but their work was notable.  Immanuel Kant said, “'The Jews still cannot claim any true genius, any truly great man. All their talents and skills revolve around stratagems and low cunning ... They are a nation of swindlers.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “Stop being Jews and start being human beings”. Theodore Dreiser said, “New York is a 'kike's dream of a ghetto,' and Jews are not 'pure Americans' and 'lack integrity”.
Are we to burn their books? Consign them to the trash heaps of literary history?

It doesn’t take much scraping of the surface to find something in public, literary, scientific, sports, or Hollywood to offend our current sensibilities. Mel Gibson, a decent actor, is also a raging anti-Semite. Gay slurs are common in our football and basketball heroes.  Wilt Chamberlain boasted of the fact that he had slept with 1000 women and the clock was still ticking.  In many people’s mind he was a degenerate, a profligate, and an irresponsible reprobate.  Yet, he was one of the greatest basketball players ever and changed forever the way the game of professional basketball was played.

Most people have some prejudice somewhere. While we may not like to admit it, there is some irrational, unfounded, and totally unnecessarily negative feelings about others lurking inside us.
It is often hard to distinguish between prejudice and strongly-held and rational belief.  Many liberals have branded conscientious conservatives as racist because of their rejection of liberal approaches to poverty and social welfare.

What about this ‘disqualification clause’? Should one cut off communication with a friend because his political views are radically different? Perhaps such difference is not just a matter of political opinion, but one of morals and ethics.  One’s political philosophy, according to this view, is a defining personal characteristic.  A conservative is not simply one who believes in small government and individual enterprise but someone who has a cribbed and narrow view of life, lacks generosity and compassion, and is cynical about human potential.

Yet, despite political differences, if two friends have known each other since childhood and have always liked each other for reasons discovered at age 12 – energy, enthusiasm, brains, allure, adventure - why should one thing – political philosophy – get in the way of love, passion, and insight?

There are Northerners who condemn anyone visiting the Deep South - traitors to liberalism, giving succor to still unrepentant racists.  Yet without understanding the South, one can never understand American history.

Is it wrong to have friends who persistently harbor questionable racial beliefs? Or whose political views are so far to the left or right on one's own that they are dismissed out of hand?

Which brings us to the question of Ms. Boylan, LGBTQ+, and the Salvation Army. While her experience is upfront and personal, it raises once again the issue of ‘unique wrong’. Without a doubt the Salvation Army – a Christian conservative church – holds traditional views of sexuality which have little or nothing to do with the performance of their mission.  The Boy Scouts also have a conservatively Christian foundation, and their views are predictably similar to those of the Salvation Army. 

The Catholic Church is very open about its views of traditional marriage, sex, and sexuality. 
Should these organizations be ignored?  A dismissal of homosexuality on Biblical grounds is not homophobia.  If the Salvation Army and its leadership were openly hostile to LGBTQ+, and displayed hatred, anger, and virulence towards gays; and if this emotional and irrational stance were clearly that of the organization, then one might consider withholding contributions, but not before.

Ms. Boylan illustrates the difference well:

That knowledge put an end to my days as one of their [Salvation Army] volunteers. The organization advocated celibacy for homosexuals and resisted offering benefits to employees’ same-sex partners. Then, shockingly, a major in an Australian branch of the Salvation Army appeared to suggest in an interview that putting gay people to death was “part of our belief system.”

The American Salvation Army was acting on principle, whether or not one agreed with it.  The branch of the Australian Army exhibited hatred, prejudice, and unacceptable behavior. Ms. Boylan, or any reasonable person would keep them at arm’s length.

One issue morality like single-issue politics is never good for it  ignores complexity, the ability to hold conflicting views, to be inconsistent, and to be ignorant and brilliant at the same time.

Why One Marriage Is Never Enough - Romantic Trial And Error Ending Up In The Same Unlikely Place

Bob Porter was 'on his third' as he liked to tell his cronies over beer and poker at the 19th hole, this time a keeper, he said, a young woman from Seattle on her second, lawyer, mother of twins, partner, a sure thing in bed and boardroom. 

 

Bob's first marriage had been his first romance, a Thousand and One Nights at the Taft Hotel, a sweet glimpse of what life would be like. They married in a proper wedding, white dress, floral bouquets, ushers and bridesmaids, Bach's airs for organ and chorus, champagne and caviar, and a honeymoon on St. Bart's. 

The marriage went bad because they were too young and too ambitious. After the first year Bob was on the Staten Island Ferry with his wife's cousin and she, an apple falling not far from the tree of her sexually liberated, feminist mother, had every man in Cold Spring Harbor.

It might have been youth, but more likely two people who never should have been together, two spatially distant beings, farther apart in sexual inclinations, personal ambitions, and social aspirations than Neptune and The Sun. 

Bob wandered for a while after a Mexican divorce - no children, few assets, no contention - and found the single life exhilarating, for a while at least until women, despite their infinite variety, all began to lose distinction, difference. Janey, for all her curls and optimism was very little different from Laura, hopeful, desirous, and  clingy, both of whom were still floundering in the roiled seas of 'who am I as a woman?' 

Antoinette was different, or so Bob thought.  A girl from an aristocratic New Bedford family, legatee to the fortunes of shipbuilders, slave traders, transatlantic entrepreneurs and a Wall Street wunderkind, she combined sophistication with adventure.  Some of that old Barbary Pirate blood ran in her veins. 

But that was not enough to anneal the ring. She hewed towards Beacon Hill, Nantucket, and Gstaad while he was still sowing seeds in Shawnee Mission and Napa Valley - two not dissimilar experiences given their certain wealthy, well-to-do common cadre, but different enough to cause friction.

They married anyway, this now his second and her third, a bit off-putting at first being behind in sexual experience. The wedding was another gala event, chic enough to make the New York Times. 'The bride, daughter of etc. etc. granddaughter of Edson Parfry Herrington, niece of Harford Margate, CEO and founding partner of....and...' with scant mention of Bob's family tree, full and productive as it had been.  

They married for...here neither one of them could put their finger on the actual reason, and both lapsed into a kind of love sonnet reverie, but the moth holes in the quilt began to show soon after marriage.  Those Pilkingtons again? Bob snapped at his wife as she wrote out the catering list and gave the maid her orders. His wife took it personally that her husband could find fault with Honor Pilkington of the New York Farnsworths, who were the bloody founders of the New York Stock Exchange. 

Now, Bob was no rube. On the contrary, he had a more than decent pedigree and storied family history, and was put out and put off by his wife's insinuations.  Why had they married in the first place, he wondered? Yes, she was far more beautiful than his first wife, and considerably more intelligent, and without a doubt more wealthy, but still....what was he thinking?

Again, no children, no compromises, just far more wealth to divide, but since by now both Bob and his wife were both legally savvy and personally protective of their accounts, the divorce never went to court. 

So, Bob was again on his own, now much older, close to fifty, but still an attractive, desirable man, eager for Casanova pursuits and Petrarchan romance, his bed was never empty.  Yet the same itchy, scratchy wondering about longevity kept him awake at nights. Life was a far too uncertain and upsetting place to go through alone, so better to settle for third best than risk can-heated soup in a cold flat. 

 

By this time women of his age were hardened and as determined to secure their future as he was, but heirs to oppressive patriarchy they knew that they had better feather their nests; and so, made up, jeweled, and furred, upped the ante.

The game had changed and so had the rules, but he was up for it, and so he fell for Nancy Ames, a good girl on a string of bad luck, deaths and responsibilities. She, like him had married early, still loved her first husband, but had resigned herself to a kind of self-imposed sexual penury. 

They married - he swore, without a great deal of conviction, that this would be his last - and moved to an old Victorian house in Indianola, Mississippi, the ancestral home of his wife’s antebellum plantation forbears who had chosen to live in town rather than on the cotton fields and there had led the good life, the Cavalier life, the cultured life of manners and grace.  

Bob and his wife both had enough income, both private and earned, but the patrician life of a Southern grandee did not suit him, and he grew restless with the bass boats and squirrel hunting good ol' boys on one hand and the descendants of the fifth generation Caradines, Harpers, and Forests on the other. He taught a course at Oxford, resuscitated his interest in Choctaw pottery, but languished without sexual adventure or anything resembling social class. 

His wife, thrilled to be back in her native place took to it all with great enthusiasm. She became matron par excellence of Delta society, and never gave a second thought to returning North or to accommodating her husband who was clearly unhappy.

Now close to sixty, Bob found himself thinking more about existential things; but tethered as he was to his wife who had no such preoccupations, he was convinced that this marriage was there to stay.  One needed a caretaker.

At the same time he knew that his wealth, well-protected in off-shore accounts and private securities, would attract any number of younger, ambitious women.  A December-May marriage could and perhaps should be in the offing,  'Granted, she is not my first love', says  aging Coleman Silk in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain;’and granted, she's not my best love, but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

 

'Why not?', he asked himself when a pretty young thing from Chillicothe sat next to him at Happy Hour at McCormick's Bar and told him of her internship and its promises.  

And so he gave in. Like the Roth character, love was to be taken whenever and wherever it popped up.  Dotage is not pretty but the sweet young thing, Bob's fourth, decided not long after the wedding to leave and not empty handed, and so left for Aspen and her young lover well endowed. 

As for Bob?  He died not long afterwards.  His obituary, written by his sister, avoided reference to his serial marriages and focused on his achievements; but on his deathbed, reflecting on his life and particularly his women, he muttered something like, 'Aren't they wonderful'. No one had a clue to what he meant.

The Vaporous Campaign Of Kamala Harris - Saying Nothing And Meaning It

'Who knows what's in that cunt's head', said Aitch in Jonathan Glazer's movie Sexy Beast, referring to the crazed and sadistic Don Logan who terrorizes him and the happy group of ex-cons and their wives vacationing in Spain; and so it was said in the corridors of Washington about the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, Kamala Harris.

Week after week Harris said nothing of substance, spinning webs of the most spidery, insubstantial notions about time, history, and womanhood, all floating in the breeze, all those squares and hectogons, changing shape with the wind.  Nostrums of marvelous fantasy, visions of some imagined future based on an imagined past, an airy, flighty handbasket of posies meaning nothing at all. 

 

Her crowds loved her - her proud, defiant stance as a black woman appealing for the right to serve the American people.  She would not only advocate tirelessly for the rights of women and black people, nor simply channel them, she would incorporate, assume, absorb them into her very being.  Whenever she stood before this chorus of young women, enamored with the very idea of one of their own sitting in the Oval Office, chills ran up and down their spines. 

The treacle, the tinsel, the soft lights of compassion, unity, and inclusivity were part of her aura. Energy, immigration, and foreign wars were unwelcome nettles, burrs under the saddle, nasty bits of irrelevance given the historic nature of a Black Woman President. 

Working this complicity to its roots, Harris went from state to state claiming the innate, final privilege of women - the highest office in the land.  'I will be the President for all the people', she said in Baton Rouge, overlooking a crowd of comers - black women, mulattoes like her, mixed race Cajun Cherokee women, swamp rats, and shrimp peelers, 'but especially for you!' and waiting until the cheering subsided, she went on, 'No American will be left behind, and all Americans will prosper.  

You....', she said, pointing and waving her hand over the motley, multi-colored, raft of the outlier Louisianans who had come to see her.  'I am yours, and you are mine'. 

She didn't actually avoid the press as her critics claimed.  There was simply no need to get mired in pettiness, having to answer the carping questions about debt service and interest rates.  All that would take care of itself once she was elected.  No one ever questioned Jesus' agenda, or tried to pin him down on his ideas of compassion, tolerance, and charity.  He was good.  That was all that mattered, and the same went for her. 

Everything she said was woven into the web. 'Energy', she said, 'is the lifeblood of America, a magic potion of prosperity and well-being, a gift from the earth, the sun, and the wind, all to be used to power this great country of ours.  We are caretakers of the world, ministers to its health, ambassadors to its bounty.' 

Again, the crowd of enthusiastic supporters cheered every phrase, every pregnant pause, every salient innuendo,  They knew exactly what she meant and hugged each other with love and profound emotion,  Tears were in the eyes of these young women as they left the parade grounds and waved to the Harris motorcade. 'Isn't she wonderful?, a feeling endorsed by every last one of them who had turned out to hear her. 

She was accused by the conservative press of changing her accent depending on the crowd - black when talking to blacks, white to white; and so she did as the videos showed, but she did so unapologetically. 'Diversity within, diversity without', she proudly said, implying that no person was anything but a polyglot, all that DNA tangled up and reconfigured in the most intriguing ways.

Of course the hectors on the Right never let up.  How could she talk white when there was no white in her at all.  No matter how much Indians might claim they were Caucasians, they were nothing of the sort, so the white thing was an ascribed thing, an assimilated thing, so for her to talk white was cultural appropriation writ large, the shoe on the other foot. 

 

They recalled her infamous trip to Anacostia, an inner city black ghetto of Washington, the Capital's worst, most pestilential, hopeless slum, where she went to deliver her message of inclusion and blackness and was roundly shooed out of town by hecklers. 'Whatchoo doin' down here, you white bitch?', shouted one woman from the window of the projects. 'Get yo' fat ass up outta here'. 

Kamala knew then that there was limit to her black thang, her identity politics, and the whole shebang of race, gender, and ethnicity. 'Gotta be more careful', she told herself.  So she avoided deep ghetto blacks - they didn't know to vote in the first place, and wouldn't even if they could - and turned to the more politically attuned; but it was to white liberals she addressed most of her remarks. White women would vote for her ipso facto, automatically, and absolutely; but some of them went to college and veered unhealthily into policy issues, so she had to throw a few statistics in the sweet pudding served to them. 

Every liberal redoubt of America loved her passionate embrace of diversity and inclusivity.  Finally America's wealth would be distributed fairly, taken from the greedy capitalist barons and given to the poor, the disenfranchised, and the forgotten.  Finally the black man would be placed on the pinnacle of the human pyramid where he belonged; and finally heterosexuality would disappear as a discredited notion.  'We love her', her supporters said. 

And so it went. Kamala was indefatigable, and never lost her way.  Yes, occasionally when she went off script she got mixed up in her famous word salads, but her supporters knew how to parse these meanderings and extract the kernels of brilliance within them.  On and on she went, saying absolutely nothing, revealing nothing but the complete vacuity within her head, but confident that what she said was enough; and apparently it was for millions of voters were on her side. 

As the campaign went into its final days, she only ramped up her familiar, airy, transparent, patent medicine prescriptions.  Why change a good thing?  Why open oneself to the partisan, bellowing nonsense of her opponent?  None whatsoever.  None at all. 

As of this writing the election is barely a month away, so only time will tell if this arriviste makes it up the ladder and will sit on the Jefferson chair in the Lincoln bedroom. 

The Northern Slave Trade, Shipping, Textiles, And Banking - Complicity In That 'Peculiar Institution'

According to most Northerners, Northern progressives in particular, slavery is a Southern institution, and the South should be forever reviled and marginalized for its participation in an immoral if not inhuman activity.  The South in this view is retrograde, fundamentalist, and ignorant – all due to the legacy of slavery.  The mark of Cain has been indelibly branded on to the South’s collective forehead, and Northern idealists are determined that the South will never, ever rise again.

Northern liberals come by this jaundiced view honestly.  Abolitionists took a principled but inflexible moral position – that slavery was against the laws of God and man – and significantly set back Lincoln’s efforts at reconciliation and reunification. In league with Johnson and the Radical Republicans they did their best to destroy the South once and for all and to complete the job that Sherman’s march had begun.

Out of the War and Reconstruction to follow, Northern opinion hardened. Not only had Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy, but a superior moral system had prevailed. Free labor – the right and duty of every man to reap rewards from his own toil – won out over indentured and forced servitude.  Enlightenment principles, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of Rights, were never endorsed or embraced by the South, and its defeat in the Civil War was a vindication of the righteousness of the North.

The ascendency of the industrial North after the War assured the muscular application of these ideals, and despite the reestablishment of many of the traditions and policies of the Confederacy, it was for a century the backward, country cousin of the North.  Not only had the North prevailed in the War, and become a world economic power after it, the South had never learned its lesson.  It is quite understandable, then, that Northern liberals continue to disparage the South as a region, consider Southerners an inferior social and intellectual class, and keep them far more isolated and marginalized than Lincoln ever intended.

Out of this moral certainty has come arrogance, sanctimony, and self-righteousness.  An American pop singer had chosen the Nottoway Plantation, an elegant antebellum home in Louisiana, to hold an artistic retreat organized to bring together artists and musicians to discuss creative production.  She was forced to cancel the event because of the loud hue and cry from the progressive community.  How could she even think of holding an event in the home of a Confederate slaver?

It is hardly worth mentioning that if one is to boycott Southern antebellum homes because of their link to slavery, then one should certainly boycott the Pyramids of Egypt, built with thousands of slaves who died by the hundreds in brutal conditions.  Or the Taj Mahal built by the cruel and heartless Emperor Shah Jahan.

 

One should avoid the Capitol Building in Washington, built in part with slave labor; and never walk on the C&O Canal, its towpath and locks built with slave and indentured labor, or visit the Smithsonian Castle. These and many other buildings and public works in the Nation’s Capital were built with slave labor.

One should certainly not visit Angola, Gambia, or Sierra Leone where African slavers provided human capital to Arab middlemen who then traded with European businessmen.  The Great Wall of China was not built by well-paid, well-treated in the First Dynasty of  Qin Shi Huang but by slaves, so visits there should be off-limits. The great cathedrals of Europe were built by serfs, another name for European slaves.

All of which brings us to the North and its role in the slave trade – a history which Northern liberals conveniently overlook.  First, while the number of slaves in the North were insignificant compared to the South, it was common and widely accepted.

Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves (Slavery in the North, Andrew Harper, www.slavenorth.com)

Like many Northerners Franklin's slave ownership was not the only way he benefited from the institution.  He gained profits from the domestic and international slave trade.  As the editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette he benefited financially from the advertisements for runaway slaves and slave auction advertisements paid for by slave owners and traders. 

 

Second, while the New England slave trade was small in comparison to the Europeans, there is no doubt that great wealth was generated by Northerners.  In 2006 a team of Hartford Courant journalists wrote a series called Complicity in which they chronicled the North’s role in slavery.

New York slowly and reluctantly abolished slavery; federal census figures showed slaves in the state until 1850. But the death of slavery in New York scarcely impeded the city’s business in the slave trade. In the peak years of 1859 and 1860, two slave ships bound for Africa left New York harbor every month. Although the trade was technically illegal, no one cared: A slave bought for $50 in Africa could be sold for $1,000 in Cuba, a profit margin so high that loss of slave life was easily absorbed. For every hundred slaves purchased in Africa, perhaps 48 survived the trip to the New World. By the end of the voyage, the ships that held the packed, shackled and naked human cargo were so filthy that it was cheaper to burn some vessels than decontaminate them (Reported in The Northern Slave Trade, Phyllis Eckhaus, In These Times, 1.6.06)

                              New England Slave Ship ca. 1825

The slave trade in particular was dominated by the northern maritime industry. Rhode Island alone was responsible for half of all U.S. slave voyages. The DeWolfs may have been the biggest slavers in U.S. history, but there were many others involved. For example, members of the Brown family of Providence, some of whom were prominent in the slave trade, gave substantial gifts to Rhode Island College, which was later renamed Brown University (Traces of the Trade – A Story from the Deep North, www.tracesofthetrade.org)

Money was certainly made by the transatlantic shipping of slaves; but the greatest Northern wealth was generated from the cotton trade.  Northern textile mills flourished in the antebellum period largely because of Southern, slave-picked cotton.  Industrialists in the booming New England and Mid-Atlantic states thrived, and the basis for a vigorous American capitalism was established.

“King Cotton” was to antebellum America what oil is to the Middle East. Whole New England textile cities sprang up to manufacture cloth from cotton picked and processed by millions of slaves. In 1861, the United States produced more than 2 billion pounds of cotton, exporting much of it to Great Britain via New York (Eckhaus).

Those Northern traders, industrialists, and shippers invested the money realized from the slave and cotton trade back into America.  Wall Street made millions thanks to the investment of New England and New York capitalists, and lent that money out to thousands of large and small entrepreneurs throughout the rapidly growing country.  In other words, slave money infiltrated everywhere in the new United States. Looked at from the modern PC perspective of disinvestment, we should boycott everything.

The network of slavery extends throughout the world; and those who refuse to stay in an antebellum Southern home or even visit one should stay away from Portugal and the Netherlands, the countries responsible for the trading and shipping of at least 10 million African slaves.  Without them, the transatlantic slave trade would not have been possible.

The point is not to demonize the South and characterize it as the devil within, but to understand its history, to learn how and why it developed as it did, and to derive lessons from its past.  The history of the North is intimately linked with that of the South; and it is certain that without the harsh, punitive policies of the Radical (Northern) Republicans during Reconstruction, the South might not have been so determined to re-establish its old ways.  Without Northern shipping and textile mills, cotton and its slave economy would never have flourished as it did. 

History is neither good nor bad.  It simply happened.  Every event or period has antecedents, some hundreds of years in the past. Moral principles, scientific inquiry, and political philosophy all change with the times. The great civilizations of Egypt, Rome, Persia, and China were built on the backs of slaves; but is this enough to condemn them?  Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths, but should we never set foot in Mongolia, Russia, or China?

 

The study of history allows us to cut others a little slack.  If we understood how and why the South got to where it is now, we might be a little more tolerant; and as importantly we might be able to forge more complete and respectful alliances.  The point is not to keep blaming the South for its past, but to address the present.  

If we can forget the horrors of the Portuguese slave trade and eat well in Lisbon; forget the thousands of Nubian slaves who died at Giza building the Pyramids and enjoy Ancient History; or pretend that Mao never killed millions of his own people while we marvel at the vibrant, modern, forward-looking cities of China, then we can fast-forward our Southern movie reel to the present.

The Greatest Show On Earth Returns To Washington - Trump's Big Top Is Bigger Than Ever

 'Impossible', say progressive Democrats who have assumed that someone as evil as Donald Trump would be gone forever, dismissed, discredited, and eliminated.  If evil were not enough, his various lawsuits should be compelling evidence of his moral, civic, and financial corruption.  Yet, here is is, beating Kamala Harris in battleground states, coming on like gangbusters, not chastened or diminished one bit by the legal initiatives against him but energized and as comedic, insulting, and outrageous as he ever has been.

 "I'm back"

Meanwhile Harris supporters are nonplussed - befuddled, shocked, and in paralytic disbelief.  All their work, all their efforts to ridicule the former president has come to naught.  Their claims of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and capitalist greed have fallen on deaf ears.  If anything Donald Trump is more popular than ever before.  How could this be?

It certainly could be and is the perfect storm -  a wildly popular former president and a changeling, successor to the former candidate by palace coup, an ambitious interloper, a presumptuous woman whose only claims are to racial legitimacy and historical destiny - her time, the time of woman.  

The choice is even more stark than ever before - a bombastic tummler, a showman, a vaudevillian, a big top circus performer with not an ounce of political correctness in his blood, a savage attacker of the Left's drifty, utopian vision, and a vicious lambasting of a woman without ideas, credentials, or logic; and a political foundling turned poseur and campaign harridan, handled, manipulated, and spoon fed the old chestnuts of progressivism which come out garbled and turned into some fantastical metaphorical mess. 

The more the Left ramps up demands for transgender athletes and double-surrogate mother/father gay men; the more they hammer on about the rightful place of the black man atop the human pyramid and the toppling of the white man; and the more they howl about the rightness of unlimited brown people from below the border, the more Trump gains in the polls 

Enough wokeness, enough 'infrastructure' blank checks for corrupt municipalities, enough billions for a Ukrainian war supported on the basis of principle not geopolitical reality and too little support for Israel, America's only true ally. Enough shilly-shallying on energy independence, backtracking on illegal immigration, 'necessary reconfigurations' to share the wealth from the most productive to the least, punitive restrictions on private enterprise.  Enough censorship, historical revisionism, and encouragement of demeaning and dissimulative programs of affirmative action, 

Americans love Trump's Borscht Belt one-liners, roasting Harris and her claques, pillorying the side show transgender sideshow headliners showing in the Administration, exposing the weird eccentricities of 'inclusivity' and revival of discredited Soviet-era ideas.  He is a one man Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, and Buddy Hackett - a hilarious, untamed, outrageous spieler.  

His imitations, his accents, his build-ups and pauses had a comedian’s timing.  His lambasting of the Left’s toppling of the statues of Jefferson, Grant, and Washington showed the comedic master’s understanding that ridicule, not umbrage, gets laughs and exposes the idiocy of the cancel culture.

Every Northern liberal, shouts Trump, has a slaver in his family tree; a greedy, land-grabbing capitalist, and anti-Semitic misogynist, so what’s the big fucking deal?  He goes after the secular, anti-religious liberal creeds. “Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Love Is Love, and Kindness Is Everything” nostrums that have replaced the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

This president has been one of a kind – a one-man circus act and vaudeville headliner all rolled into one, a Borscht Belt comedian with timing, irreverence, and honest humor.  Who said that there was one way of ‘acting presidential’? Who said that the Eastern image, the Upper West Side image of a president was the only one?  

Most Americans are either like Trump or want to be like him – rich enough to have trophy wives and girlfriends, yachts, five homes, and enough money to say screw you.  They are as Las Vegas glitz and cheap glamour as he is.  They are as fake news, soap opera, Hollywood, and the mean streets as he is.  Finally they have a president who is one of them.

He, more than any temperate middle-of-the-road political observer who laments the erosion of free speech, the rise of the cancel culture, the pervasiveness of intellectual campus shutdowns, calls out progressives for their rabid, hump-and-jump faux reformist hysteria.  Of course he has played fast and loose with the law.  

Who said that New York real estate was a fussy, girly-girly girl, make nice business?  What man of Hollywood and Las Vegas ever played close to the vest?  And who cares? The man in the White House is past-his-pull-date fairytale idealist whose bedtime reading is Goodnight Moon. 

Donald Trump has a genius for understanding Americans, our love of glitz, ribbons, and tinsel, our dismissal of the somber and the presumptuous   Thanks to his intelligence, arrogant confidence, absolute ambition, and vaudevillian sense of timing and audience appeal, he has just begun another perfect electoral campaign. 

Donald Trump is a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, vaudeville, and Barnum & Bailey.  He is the first candidate to understand – and embody – our deliberately illogical preferences, our passionate anti-intellectual populism, and our anti-establishment moral rectitude. Issues don’t matter for either him or for his supporters.  Not even Ronald Reagan stirred so many legitimate aspirations.  No more logic, issues, and moderation.  The way forward is visceral, and absolute.  There is no on-the-one-hand-on-the-other dispassionate consideration here. The circus is the message.

The problem is that Harris is running against the most savvy vaudevillian circus performer in the nation’s history.  Trump’s entire first term was resetting the political calculus.  No more political correctness, compromise, respectful debate, or honorable disagreement.  Trump has been a clown, a comedian, a bare-knuckles John L Sullivan street fighter, a man cut from an American cloth with an amoral approach to power and individual interest.  Harris is sorely tested by this master of sarcasm, cynical darts, and innuendos.

Trump has always played fast and loose with the facts, and by so doing  has invigorated his base and enraged his opposition.  His supporters know that there is no such thing as ‘the truth’ – everything is distorted, manipulated, transformed, and reconfigured to suit political ends; every politician is venal and self-serving; and that there is no such thing as higher values in politics.  So his supporters love Trump’s railing at the media’s fake news; at  his dismissal of Democrats’ Salem witch hunts and rigged trials; at his low blows and irremediable politically incorrect references.

So the flaps to the Big Top are now open, and the circus is coming to town.  This will be a once in a lifetime campaign, and win or lose, the Trump circus has been a wild, unpredictable and fun ride. 

Are Politics Who We Are? The Defining, Inescapable Nature Of Political Choice

They couldn't have turned out more differently, Bob and Dave, despite having come from the same privileged corner of New Brighton, from the storied families of Northumberland, the American Industrial Revolution, and the post-War privilege of Nantucket, and Biarritz. 

There had been no cracks in the walls of the elite redoubt of the West End - Christmas balls, skiing in Aspen, and the long summers on the Vineyard.  Theirs was a comfortable, pleasant life, and neither one thought about it, the legacy they both inherited, or their ordained future.  Both boys were enrolled at Groton went on to Yale, and were expected to prosper.  Perhaps most importantly, they were friends.  

At New Haven their lives began to differ.  Bob joined Fence Club, dined at Mory's, and entertained young women from Boston and New York, girls with similar upbringing, tastes, and social inclinations.  Dave was a Scholar of the House in his Senior Year and well on the way to an academic career in history or economics.  Neither one had an interest in politics - Yale was still a a calm, conservative reserve in their day, on the cusp of the protests and civil disobedience of the Sixties, but still a place solidly and happily apolitical. 

 

There were a few outliers - young men who went on Freedom Rides, marched across the Pettis bridge, and challenged Bull Connor and George Wallace - but they were few and far between.  Their convictions were too obvious and too irreconcilably passionate for the singular, well-heeled, comfortable lack of convictions  Neither Bob nor Dave had any interest in issues, for both were taken enough with sociability or academics to bother. 

Both Bob and Dave had grown up without politics. While their parents were Republican, such affiliation had more to do with their family legacy than any particular electoral interest or political philosophy, and Yale did nothing to change this; but somewhere along the way Dave began a different journey. 

Perhaps it was Chicago that did it - left-leaning academics at the university who were just beginning to apply European Deconstructionism and the New Historicism to traditional American curricula. Deconstruction called into question the fundamental concepts and hierarchies of Western philosophy and dislocated and destabilized the structures and assumptions that shape human history. 

Whatever it was, or however this philosophy made its way into a once conservative, traditional, legatee of old New England and the Enlightenment, was a mystery; for when Dave returned east and met up with Dave, he had profoundly changed.  While he had no interest in electoral politics - inconsequential bandies on both sides - his political philosophy had changed.  He had become deeply committed to the  changes that must and can occur in the privileged, over-estimated, coddled, and arrogant society from which they both came.  

America was not the land of opportunity, but the land of oppression.  It was not a nation of individualism, but crass personal greed. Progressive change towards a more fair, equitable, verdant, and compassionate world was possible. 

  

Bob had changed as well, but rather than straying from his family principles, he saw for the first time how they were far more than just aspects of inherited privilege.  Individualism, private enterprise, unaltered and uninhibited personal freedom, competition, and a healthy respect for excellence were the bedrock of American history and would be for generations to come.  Human nature - competitive, self-interested, territorial, and aggressive - had not changed since the first human settlements and likely never would; and conservatives who understood, accepted, and embraced this reality, were America's future.  

So these two young men who had grown up together, skied and summered together, danced at the same cotillions, and dated the same bright girls from Smith and Holyoke now found themselves at odds.  The childhood friendship that was formed before politics, philosophy, or economics were ever issues, was a matter of instinct and natural affinity.  They liked each other.  It was as simple as that; and given this fundamental, essential bond, nothing should ever change it. 

For years they tried to overcome their growing political differences. Bob believed that the essential, uncomplicated, innocent childhood friendship that was based on an instinctive, natural affection trumped all else. They as adults were no different from the twelve-year old boys that swam off Gay Head and bunked together at St. Moritz.  Childhood friendships are elemental, permanent, and defining. 

Dave said that the reasons how and why he had become a committed progressive were incidental. As an adult he found Bob's very sedentary attitudes and life of complacency and arrogant class assuredness off-putting at best.  He could no longer be friends with such a person. 

Bob was disappointed, hurt, and surprised by his friend's decision.  How could he throw away a friendship of so many years - a more intimate, undeniable friendship that could never be found between any two adults.  They had shared childhood, after all, and discovered something ineffable about the character and personality of the other. What was he doing?

Yet, Bob could not deny that contrary beliefs do not simply define politics, but the way one behaves. One's understanding of man’s relationship to God, secular institutions, society, and the geo-ecological environment are profoundly different. Our reactions to and sympathy/empathy for others is determined by a moral philosophy which either blesses and anoints others as brothers and sisters; or sees them as evolutionary competitors struggling for survival, dominance, and genetic longevity.

Some researchers have even suggested that political philosophy has a genetic basis.  Although society, culture, education, and upbringing certainly have a role, it is bits of DNA which align in certain ways to produce conservatives or liberals.  Journalist John Judis wrote in 2014:

Over the last two decades, political scientists, and psychologists have used genetics and neuroscience to claim that people’s political beliefs are predetermined at birth. Genetic inheritance, they argue, helps to explain why some people are liberal and others conservative...The field itself has a name—genopolitics—and in the last four years alone, over 40 journal articles on the subject have appeared in academic journals. 

As much as this theory has been contested in recent years, the genopolitics proponents are right in one regard – nurture alone cannot be responsible for the selfless or selfish individual.  Somewhere in the double helix there is some combination of DNA bits and strands which predispose some of us to love and caring, while others of us are naturally willful, fearless, and ambitious.

The good news is that Bob and Dave reconciled thanks to Dave's admission - progressivism was not all he hoped it would be, and that he had become more moderate and tolerant of Bob's point of view.  A social historian and critical observer of politics recently wrote:

Liberals do not become conservatives overnight.  There has to be a  gradual unclogging of arteries, more fluidity, clarity, and accelerated thought; but it takes only one illuminating event to bring the past to a close.  If, after all the predation, territorial wars, brutality, and inhumanity of the Twentieth Century, such offenses still continue; and if the same disregard for polity and community continues to be repeated despite the most optimistic predictions, there must be something to the idea of historical permanence.  Once grasped, never forgotten.  A progressive early, a conservative late, a historical imperative as conclusive as quenching a thirst.