Linkage

This is just heartbreaking. And this was two years ago!

As some states become increasingly hostile to transgender youth, families are weighing a difficult decision of whether to leave their schools, jobs and communities behind to flee to a state with greater LGBTQ protections.

There's a freaking pandemic going on!

In short:

The government will introduce laws to restrict protesters in Victoria, following a series of anti-Semitic incidents across the state.

Face coverings, certain flags and attachment devices will be banned at protests.

The government will also introduce legislation which would establish protest-free zones around places of worship.

There's a place of worship on practically every block in the CBD!

Premier Jacinta Allan said recent discussions with Victoria's Jewish community in the wake of the recent suspected terror attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue had informed the move.

[…]

"There are too many who want to qualify anti-Semitism or make excuses for it, and I want to make it absolutely clear that I never will."

Yes, well, it really wouldn't do have a precise definition of anti-Semitism, would it? Best to just define it as "anything I don't like". That's appropriately respectful of Jewish people. This is just disgraceful and obviously targeted at the weekly pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne.

To paraphrase Judi Bari, I hope the Victorian Police catch whoever was responsible for the synagogue fire. And sack them.

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people. They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people and the tradeoffs made there. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored back benchers. They want all-empowered career “experts” like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.

And in America, the scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the FBI, NSA, and CIA, are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The FBI is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The NSA is surveilling the conversations of citizens. Therefore, the hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country against it toward self-government once again, and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage.

Whatever the term or image, the imperative that conservatives must break from the past and forge a new political identity cannot be overstated. It is time now for something new, for a new way of thinking and speaking about what conservative politics should be. The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.

[…]

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant. 

[…]

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road. 

Ideologically, the Claremont Institute is the home of West Coast Straussianism, a term pointing to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss. His disciple Harry Jaffa, a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition. It was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s.

West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding – and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism – ideologies that seek to remake man and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the Left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America – they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

In 1954, William F. Buckley and his best friend and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. Both men were in their late twenties. Their full-throated defense of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist crusade received a lot of attention and furthered their status as rising stars on the Right. One year later, Buckley founded National Review. I re-read McCarthy and His Enemies this fall in preparation for a graduate course on “Conservatism and the Far Right” I taught at Georgetown this past semester. And what stood out to me was the book’s final chapter, titled “The New Conformity” in which the authors left no doubt that all societies must indeed impose some conformity, defined as “its prevailing value preferences” – “or else they cease to exist. The members of a society must share certain values if that society is to cohere; and cohere it must if it is to survive.”

[…] 

In this quest, Buckley and Bozell were certain to have the support of the “vast majority of the American people” who agreed there was no place for communism in America – McCarthyism was therefore only aiming “to harden the existing conformity.” What about the danger of censoring and sanctioning anyone and anything associated with “the Left”? Certainly, Buckley and Bozell agreed, “Whenever the anti-Communist conformity excludes well-meaning Liberals, we should … go to their rescue.” But they dismissed the idea that the anti-communist crusade might have produced such dangerous excesses – in fact, they claimed, McCarthy “fixes its goals with precision.”

That, however, is a very disingenuous depiction of Red Scare America and the pervasive anti-communist hysteria of the post-war period. And beyond the machinations of senator Joe McCarthy: It’s difficult to accept such reassurances that conservatives were targeting *just* communism when we remember that Modern Conservatism’s leading thinkers like Whittaker Chambers explicitly claimed that there was little difference between communism and liberalism, that both represented merely different guises of the same fundamental threat.

[…]

The overriding goal of Modern Conservatism has been to uphold what its leading intellectuals in the 1950s explicitly defined as the “natural” or divinely ordained order. If “traditional” conservatism – of the preserving kind, or the Burkean/Oakshottean variety, if you will – was no longer commensurate with that challenge, more radical measures would have to be taken.

The leaders of today’s Trumpist Right aren’t conservatives. But they continue, in a profound sense, the tradition of Modern Conservatism.

Q. It wasn’t just Trumpism. Some Democratic voices say it’s time to move beyond the issue of trans rights in areas like sports, which affect very few people.

A. You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority. Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?

[…]

We have a pernicious history of misogyny, which is being celebrated in the person of Trump. Guilty of sexual crimes, he has done more than any other American person to demean and degrade women as a class. The people who say, “Oh, I don’t like that part of his behavior, but I’m going to vote for him anyway because of the economy,” they’re admitting that they are willing to live with that misogyny and look away from his sexual violence. The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger. I see a kind of restoration fantasy at play in many right-wing movements in the U.S. People want to go back to the idea of being a white country or the idea of the patriarchal family, the principle that marriages are for heterosexuals. I call it a nostalgic fury for an impossible past. Those in the grip of that fury are effectively saying: “I don’t like the complexity of this world, and all these people speaking all these languages. I’m fearful that my family will become destroyed by gender ideology.” As a consequence of that, they’re furiously turning against some of the most vulnerable people in this country, stripping of them of rights as they fear that the same will be done to them.

One of the principles upon which provision of puberty blockers to young trans people was made was Gillick competence – the law that says that young people over the age of 12 can be individually assessed by medical professionals to determine whether or not they’re competent to make medical decisions for themselves. This was hard fought for by feminist campaigners back in the 1980s and it led to the passing of the Age Of Legal Capacity Act in Scotland in 1991. It’s a principle of particular importance when it comes to reproductive healthcare, as it helps young people to access the services they need even if, for instance, they feel unsafe discussing them with their parents. As such, it helps to protect them from abuse and to get used to the idea that they have ownership of their bodies, which is important as they grow up and negotiate boundaries in romantic and social relationships.

By overriding Gillick competence where trans people are concerned, Streeting has created a risk that it will be ignored in other cases too. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. He seems shaky on the concept of medical consent more generally, as demonstrated by his suggestion that obese unemployed people should be given the weight loss drug Ozempic to improve their health and get them back into work. Although his initial comments on this, which provoked a public outcry, were quickly followed by assurances that it would not be compulsory, concern remains about the vulnerability of people who depend on the state for support, especially those who are disabled, who make up a significant part of the obese population. Like most drugs, Ozempic has side effects and is not appropriate for everyone.

In Austin, attorney Meghan Alexander used to receive maybe three calls a week about second-parent adoptions. The week after the election, she received 26. The calls and emails haven’t stopped.

“The advice is the same as it’s been for the last couple of decades, which is to do a second-parent adoption. Do not depend on the federal government or the gay right to marry to give you parental rights,” Alexander said.

Alexander recommends to her clients that parents get an adoption instead of a parentage order because in Texas, for example, parentage orders for LGBTQ+ families have not been thoroughly challenged in the court system, Alexander said, while adoptions have been upheld by the courts many times.

Adoptions are a popular option because they are also more commonly understood and “universally recognized” across states and countries, said Nancy Polikoff, professor emerita at American University Washington College of Law and an expert in LGBTQ+ family law. Still, it ultimately will depend on state laws and the parents’ preferences as to which avenue they pursue.

[…]

“When we are looking at the possibility of cutting back on LGBT family recognition, states that are not inclined to recognize the legitimacy of parenting by LGBT people are going to be emboldened to deny that status whenever they can,” she said.

Polikoff said she does not believe that gay marriage will be overturned in the next four years, but what may be more likely to happen is that states and courts will try to cut back on some protections LGBTQ+ people have recently secured. Parenting relationships could become easy prey.