“Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this … may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.”— Abraham Lincoln, letter to the Missouri abolitionist Charles D. Drake, 1863
At midnight, in the crack between August 23-24, 1572, the Eve of the Feast of Saint Bartholomew, the streets of Paris erupted in a gruesome carnage that quickly spread throughout France and took as many as thirty-thousand lives. The adversaries were French Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) fighting, as usual, over the throne. The political machinations that set off the orgy of bloodshed are less important than the fact that, once it started, it couldn’t be stopped until the threshold of disgust had been crossed and the urge to kill had exhausted itself. That’s the way of mob violence. As William Bernstein, author of The Delusions of Crowds, writes: “…the violence ends only if it boils over into a containable cataclysm.” The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre was a signal event in the French Wars of Religion, though hardly the only one. The thirty-six year conflict caused the deaths of from two to four million human beings. Although it’s probably a gross oversimplification, the casus belli was the rise of Protestantism, and specifically militant Calvinism, in response to a growing sense that the reigning Roman Catholic Church had become incurably corrupt and lost all connection with the original Christian tradition. The Calvinists were not wrong about this, but they were very impatient, convinced that the Reformation they sought was too manifestly righteous to be kept waiting. Like the Jacobins of two centuries later, their cry was “We want the world and we want it now!” Both the hard right and the hard left of today’s polarized politics seem driven by a Calvinist/Jacobin thirst, and in the end, it may take blood to quench it.
The Catholic Church was, in many ways, the Deep State of its day, perceived as the malevolent hand behind the distribution of power and wealth in the world. Its mission was no longer the saving of souls, but the preservation of its own status (and like QAnon’s imagined behemoth, it was probably thought to be more than capable of running secret pedophile rings and drinking the blood of babies). As with the mainstream media-academic cabal imagined today by denizens of the alt-right and the unflagging partisans of MAGA nation, it controlled the narrative. As the two sides in the conflict became more and more deeply entrenched, ideology and identity merged, and whatever legitimate issues lay at the root of the polarization became secondary to the war between two different mindsets about how the world ought to be. As Vicky Franznetti, a veteran of the Italian anarchist syndicate Lotta Continua, is quoted in a recent Atlantic Monthly piece on The New Anarchy, “If you move from what you want to who you are, there is very little scope for real dialogue.” In today’s riven world, everything is about who you are. We have come to call this massive loss of big picture perspective identity politics, and its upshot is culture war.
God only knows how many times, in how many opinion pieces, the opening lyrics to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” have been quoted, usually to convey the incomprehensibility of some contemporary conflict. But what’s happening here, now, in the United States of America (and elsewhere, since “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold”), is absolutely clear. We are preparing to go to war with each other, not so much over differences in ideology or religion, but over feelings. A more dignified word would be sentiments, but sentiments are, after all, felt things, and there’s nothing dignified about a dictatorship of sentiment. Its expression is mob rule. On both sides of the left-right divide (arguably a questionable dichotomy), feelings are hurt. People are wounded and cornered, and as we’re all taught, a wounded animal, especially when it has no route of escape, is the most dangerous kind. It isn’t just that, to cite another oft-quoted line, “the center cannot hold,” it’s that, via the distorted close-up lens of contemporary media (social and otherwise), the center has collapsed into a sinkhole. If the center abdicates, the cornered animals of “left” and “right” will, sooner or later, seize the abandoned ground for a blood match.
The big problem with extreme polarization is that it obscures truth, just as your polarized sunglasses, while very nice to look through, give a false impression of light by making its waves line up neatly. Here, at the substantial risk of being torpedoed by both sides, I want to drill into a few of the most deeply polarizing issues of our latter-day Wars of Religion to ask whether the gray lines have been lost amongst all the screaming primary colors. Because make no mistake, the opposing dogmas of extreme progressivism and extreme reactionarism are subscribed to with the fervency of religious belief. Here goes nothing:
ABORTION
On the left: A woman is the absolute sovereign over all that happens in and to her body. Like a medieval kingdom, her boundaries are inviolable, and can be breached only with her express consent. Pregnancy is something that happens “to” a woman as a result of an outside force, and can therefore be seen as a kind of invasion of her space. If she chooses to make a pact with her invader, then an alliance of thrones can be (at least temporarily) arranged, and a new life can be allowed to take root within her. But this is entirely her choice, and the fetus has only the status of a tenant. If she decides, “eh, maybe not,” she can evict it pretty much at will. Anything less than this would render her a kind of broodmare, which would be a denial of her bodily autonomy.
On the right: A woman’s body is the incubator of new life. It was made to be that. It is the gracious host, an inn that’s never closed. Because her body is indispensable to the furtherance of the species, it can’t be run as a sole proprietorship. A long time ago, a woman’s body was thought to be the property of her husband. This notion is, of course, passé in our times, and was anyway just a placeholder for a deeper truth, which is that her body—or at least her womb—is in some part in the trust of her community, and the community can exercise, through law, control over if, when, and how a pregnancy is terminated. A fetus is a life distinct from that of its host, so for the community to sanction abortion would be for it to permit the murder of one of its own.
The Gray Area: Neither position, in its most uncompromising expression, can be held for long in a world where your fourteen year-old gets knocked up, nor is either position ‘wrong’ on its face. Bodily sovereignty is critical to the notion of human rights, and to deny it would be to return to slavery and barbarism. Pregnancy should never be penitential. Rape and incest are unacceptable under any circumstance, and a child conceived through violence is lamed from conception. Society can and should protect women from being forced to carry to term a child so conceived. But the concept of “abortion on demand” is equally flawed, for the community is indeed a stakeholder in the business of life. To remove it entirely from the picture is to take autonomy to the point of anarchy. The community speaks through law, and the limits set by many socially progressive European countries seem a reasonable place to start.
IMMIGRATION
On the right: Like a river of human poison, they stream out of the blighted ‘shithole countries’ of the Global South, fleeing drought, broken economies, and tribal wars straight out of the 19th century, into the great cities of the West, taking cynical advantage of Christian hospitality and democratic openness and bringing with them disease, crime, and the cultural baggage of ignorance and religious extremism. If they refuse to be assimilated, which many do, they undermine the shared values that underpin Western Civilization. As they mess with both the gene pool and the language, they dissolve the very idea of nation as ethno-religio-political entity, and their increasingly unsutainable numbers are slowly but surely turning the world into one big Eritrea or Northern Triangle.
On the left: Build bridges, not walls. Migration from South to North is a consequence of colonialism, and colonialism was nothing more than racism in brutal practice. The children of imperialism are coming home to roost, and the countries of the North/West must accept this as a kind of penance for their historical sins and throw open the borders in welcome. After all, borders are so 19th century. If immigrants commit crimes, it’s only because they are poor and oppressed, and if they’re poor and oppressed, it’s because the rich countries have made them so. Indeed, the truly Christian thing is to say, “It’s your turn now. Come on in.” Moreover, we cannot turn a blind eye to the human suffering of refugees and migrants yearning to breathe free.
The Gray Area: Deny it if you will, but there is indeed a problem, and it’s no longer just at the southern borders. New York City alone has seen 110,000 migrants since August 2022, and its Democratic mayor recently declared that swelling migration “will destroy the city.” According to a recent NYT article co-authored by Jonathan Wiseman and Nicholas Fandos, “the city is sheltering 59,000 migrants each night and projects that caring for them could eat up $12 billion in the next few years, threatening the viability of other city services,” including services to already underserved communities. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., the situation is equally dire, and it isn’t sustainable. To allow more people in than we can provide for is as inhumane as fencing them out altogether. As long as there are nations, and as long as some nations take better care of their citizens than others, those nations will need control of borders. Long-term relief can only come from bringing serious diplomatic and economic pressure to bear on the corrupt, violence-plagued, and poorly governed countries from which the migrants are fleeing. That would be humane. However, any immigration reform made without the leavening of compassion, the highest of human qualities and the one thing—other than self-interest—that keeps us from killing each other, will be bad policy.
TRANSGENDER RIGHTS
On the left: (from a recent Quillette article by Jonathan Kay): “Genderwang is a quasi-religious ideological movement that demands public acceptance of the claim that all humans are infused with a soul-like ether known as gender identity—a spirit whose nature trumps the objective reality of biological sex when it comes to policymaking and even interpersonal relationships.” (Yes, Genderwang is a real thing). In the land of gender fluidity, biological sex is not determinative of gender. It’s merely an accident (perhaps an unfortunate one) of cell division and organ growth. And if those organs (genitalia, breasts, etc.) conflict with one’s deeper sense of gender identity, then one has a perfect right to get rid of them (“If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out”). This right must be assured by law (and covered by health insurance). What you say you are, you are. This is not fantasy, but simply an expansion of human freedom.
On the right: This is all dangerous nonsense, cooked up in ivory towers by bloodless social theorists with Daddy and Mommy issues. It’s also the most insidious kind of subversion, since it causes us to question the evidence of our own senses and instincts and undermines the bedrock of social cohesion, which is the man-woman dyad and the family. Anyone with eyes can see what a woman is, and she is not “a menstruating person.” Anyone with a pulse can see what a man is, and it isn’t a “chick with a dick.” Wear what you want and call yourself by whatever name and personal pronoun you like, but don’t expect public institutions to do cartwheels for your chosen gender identity. The heteronormative is still the normative and always will be.
The Gray Area: This issue, maybe above all others, is where left and right become confused as if by some bizarre osmosis. Historically, we trace the lineage of left>liberal>progressive thought from the Enlightenment, and define it as characterized by rational thinking, scientific method, empiricism, etc. In contrast, the educated classes have defined the extreme right as characterized by blind impulse, irrationality, and willful self-delusion. Yet in the arena of transgender rights, we see the left lining up in support of a manifesto for which there is no classically rational argument or empirical evidence. It is all about feeling. “I feel (that I am a woman, man, tree, fish, etc.). Therefore I am.” Some of the ideas advanced by queer theory, and by transgender-transhmanists like Martine Rothblatt, sound as outlandish as the origin story of Scientology. Meanwhile, so-called TERFS (TransExclusionaryRadical Feminists) like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling are hounded in the streets and pilloried in the press as bigots and crypto-Nazis, simply for affirming things that Gloria Steinem said in the 1970s. Transgender politics are the thing most likely to produce a food fight at your Thanksgiving dinner, to cause a parent-teacher conflict to spring up in the suburbs, to turn lifelong liberals out of their tribe, and worse, to re-elect Donald Trump. If we drill to the core of today’s polarization for the one issue that unites the European right of Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin, et al with the Steve Bannon-style “neo-populists” of the U.S., this is the vein we will find. And now, mushrooming from the post-2012 social media explosion, we have an entirely new cohort of kids suffering from what’s been labeled Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria (SOGD), mostly adolescent girls who never, ever want to become women. This, I fear, is the tipping point from which we fall back into reaction. Unless some common sense common ground can be found, the right will take the issue to the polls and win. As gender queer and all sorts of gender non-conforming people find their place in the world, they must be allowed to do so without harrassment, and be afforded equal protection under the law, but it is another thing entirely to expect “cisgendered” people to suddenly and unconditionally accept that transwomen should be allowed to compete among natal women in Olympic sports. Why does transgender politics provoke such an emotional response? Because it’s not just politics, and it’s not simply a social justice issue. It’s a new reality laminating the old, long familiar one.
WOKE IDEOLOGY
On the left: “Doing the work”
On the right: “Woke Mind Virus”
Strictly My Opinion: As with #MeToo, the expression “woke” (as in, awake to the reality of social injustice, and specifically, structural racism), was cribbed from black people by rich white people. And as with #MeToo, its co-option by the privileged has lead to the formation of a new orthodoxy that its originators would never have imagined, and which now governs the thoughts and deeds of corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, and school teachers. Unbelievably, to resist the tide of wokeness is now to be “punk” (or “based,” which is some strange post-postmodern version of punk), another example of left and right doing a do-si-do. It would be amusing, as pious social movements often are, except that the outsized reaction to wokeness (once political correctness) has fueled the global rise of so-called “populist”autocrats who play expertly on the resentment of those ordinary rubes who can’t quite bring themselves to use words like intersectional, cisgendered or heteronormative, and feel themselves being slowly dispossessed of social capital. Vlaams Belang, once a laughable right-wing insurgency that sought to ban both Muslim immigrants and the French language, is now Belgium’s most popular party. In France itself, the land of liberte, egalite, fraternite, Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic National Rally and Reconquest, another anti-immigrant party, now hold the largest voting bloc in the country. Italy is now led by the FdI, a party with its lineage in fascism, and Deutschland’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling at 22%, rivaling the showing that the Nazis made in the 1920s. Poland and Hungary are already lost to this wave. Are these people angry? Yes, but let’s not forget that anger begins with hurt and humiliation. If we’re not very careful, bruised feelings will re-elect Donald Trump, make Vladimir Putin a czar, and God knows where that will end. A Russo-American axis?
I have lived for the past five years in Eastern Europe, where right-wing fomentation is never far below the surface of things. Donald Trump has as big a fan base here as he does in the American Heartland. Many people have a not-so-hidden longing for a Hungarian-style “illiberal democracy.” But the most curious and paradoxical thing is that, on the broader socio-economic issues (support for working people, labor unions, and the poor), these right-wingers don’t talk like Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman. They talk like FDR Democrats. Here lies the potential common ground, the lost center. Left-leaning people of America and the West would be well-advised to abandon identity as the touchstone of their politics, and return to the pursuit of economic justice. An eloquent, charismatic leader who was able to assail “the elites” from the left rather than the right (and perhaps one who can pray as fervently as he/she postulates), would likely be able to peel off a good piece of both Donald Trump’s and Victor Orban’s hardcore following, and save us all from another Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
We talk a great deal these days about the importance of lived experience, which in some progressive corners (and increasingly, on the right, too) is thought to trump (no wordplay intended) what used to be called knowledge. The pandemic of hurt feelings (along with sidecars of depression and despair) that now rivals Covid-19 for virality (and number of variants) is directly attributable to this blinkered focus on personal experience, for if nothing else matters, then nothing can transcend it. Nothing can be equally true for both white people and people of color, for men, women and gender non-conforming people, for Republicans and Democrats. Where on earth do we think this can possibly lead but to violent conflict? Let’s not make the Calvinist mistake. Or veer wildly toward the Jacobin terror of Robespierre or Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, who wrote that “what constitutes a revolution is the total destruction of everything that stands opposed to it,” a position that sounds frighteningly close to that of both House Freedom Caucus Republicans and the “illiberal left.” Big cultural and political change should be a slow jam. There are real problems here that demand real discussion unencumbered by the hyper-emotionality that surrounds them. Look for the gray areas where compromise is still possible, and look—above all—for wisdom, lest our parents end up in the guillotine and our children in the body cart.