Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Last week, yet another ginned up scandal was laid at the Trump administration’s door––this one attacking another favorite target of the Dems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As usual, one of the Democrat’s favorite press agents, The Washington Post, replete with “unidentified sources,” broke the story. During an attack in the Caribbean on a drug cartel boat, the Def Sec allegedly ordered that no survivors be left alive, which led to a second missile hitting the boat and killing survivors.
In other words, Hegseth’s critics are miffed that our forces didn’t let live murderers of hundreds of thousands of Americans with fentanyl, so they can return to work and transport more drugs to kill more Americans. Or more likely, so they could be rescued and brought back to the U.S., where the oikophobic Dems and Soros- judges would slap them on the wrist and send them back home.
This sorry story, which was quickly debunked, like the similar protests of laws being enforced by ICE against illegal aliens, many of them felons, rapists, and murderers, reminds me of Mark Twain’s caustic satire of Victorian “woke Karens.’’In Tom Sawyer, Twain satirized the “committee of sappy women” who are petitioning the governor to pardon the murderous half-breed Injun Joe: “If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanent leaky water-works.”
The modern expression of what psychiatrist Dr. Judith Orloff calls “toxic empathy,” is found in political terms, in order to express policy positions and actions that are suicidal in their effect. For example, “toxic empathy” includes protests and interference against officers tracking down criminal illegal aliens, and fabrications of charges and distortions of the law by the Dems, including military brass, attacking Trump and Hegseth. In other words, a partisan political weapon––one as narcissistic as virtue-signaling.
The real question is, how did our war-fighting become hamstrung by idealistic protocols, while the rest of the world outside the West still fights their wars in order to win and achieve their aims that serve their interests? The answer is by the same idealizing hubris that has damaged our foreign policy with attempts to create a “kinder and gentler” war-fighting by employing the “rules-based, international order.”
This fantasy pretends that war can be something other than what Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest defined it: “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” And what Abraham Lincoln called the “terrible arithmetic.”
A related cultural change in the West reinforcing the retreat from realism was the Romantic movement, which prized feeling and sentiment as higher goods, and reflections of a superior character. It’s what Alan Bloom called “conspicuous compassion”––like “toxic empathy,” a dangerous political weapon that sacrifices reason and common sense to emotion and naïve idealizations of human nature to serve partisan aims.
Both emotions have a long history of being trivialized and politicized in Western culture. They followed the idealizing of “sensitivity” that began in the late 18th century. Novels such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling––whose hero bursts into tears every ten pages–– marked the point when showy displays of “feelings” like compassion, often called “luxurious” at the time, became a virtue-signaling status symbol.
This is the fad that Jane Austen satirized in her 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility. As many other critics at the time pointed out, compassion was the justifying virtue that masked what often was nothing more than emotional solipsism for those whose concern for others seldom led to action that improved their lot. When employed against military or policing polices––as we have seen in the current protests against ICE’s attempt to apprehend and deport criminal illegal aliens––these preening status-mongers and cheap emotional political weapons cost the lives of innocent citizens rather than the arrest of criminals.
By the mid-19th century, even a master of sentimentalism such as Charles Dickens recognized that such public displays of compassion for the poor or native peoples abroad were often a self-indulgence for the rich and comfortable. In Bleak House, he created Mrs. Jellyby, the archetype of today’s purveyors of virtue-signaling compassion, who bleed and weep for distant suffering, but neglected that of her fellow citizens. As Mrs. Jellyby strives to settle impoverished Londoners among heathen Africans so that they will convert to Christianity, her shabby household and neglected children continue to fall into ruin.
Dickens called this hypocrisy “telescopic philanthropy,” a combination of moral and intellectual idiocy worsened by an unearned claim of superior virtue. This combination of “conspicuous compassion,” “telescopic philanthropy,” “toxic empathy,” and suicidal self-loathing is the essence of Third-Worldism, that “woke” idealization of the non-Western “other” combined with showy self-flagellation over the original sins of imperialism and colonialism.
French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote a brilliant analysis of this cultural neurosis in Tears of the White Man. Bruckner describes how Third-World suffering has become a lucrative commodity for the modern media, who provide the images and commentary that we consume in order to enjoy cost-free pathos and smug superiority about our righteous compassion, as well as providing a showy penance that compensates for our “certain essential evil,”––which Bruckner calls the West’s original sin, “that must be atoned for.”
Finally, and most destructive for our foreign policy and national interests, in our times “these fake virtues” function as political weapons for progressives, leftists, and “woke” Dems, most of whom have no knowledge of the actual history of imperialism and colonialism.
The best example of this dangerous ignorance can be seen in the vicious lies told by the enemies of Israel and its “settler colonialism.” In fact, as Middle East historian Efraim Karsh writes in his indispensable book Islamic Imperialism, Islam has been one of history’s most successful conquerors, and empire-builders, which “acted in a typical imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.”
It takes monumental hutzpah for Israel’s Muslim enemies to whine about “settler colonialism” or imperialism; and it bespeaks the West’s ignorance of history for Western nations to accept such a Hitlerian “big lie.”
But such lies have been at the heart of the left for centuries, and as we’ve seen, have increased exponentially among the Dems during the Trump era. This latest whopper about the drug-transport attack is as predictable as it is preposterous, and no match for the obvious truth which indeed is making us free.
