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Aristotle, Niccol Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life.

The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution.

The United States stood on the cusp of revolution a fact President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence amid the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s. Roosevelt responded by aggressively curbing the power of the oligarchs. The federal government dealt with massive unemployment by creating 12 million jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), making the government the largest employer in the country. It legalized unions, many of which had been outlawed, and through the National Labor Relations Act empowered organizing. It approved banking regulations, including the Emergency Banking Act, the Banking Act and the Securities Act, all in 1933, to prevent another stock market crash. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided the equivalent in todays money of $9.88 billion for relief operations in cities and states. The Democratic president heavily taxed the rich and corporations. (The Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was still taxing the highest earners at 91%.) Roosevelts administration instituted programs such as Social Security and a public pension program. It provided financial assistance to tenant farmers and migrant workers. It funded arts and culture. It created the United States Housing Authority and instituted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the minimum wage and set a limit on mandatory work hours. This heavy government intervention lifted the country out of the Great Depression. It also made Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented fourth term, and the Democratic Party wildly popular among working and middle-class families. The Democratic Party, should it resurrect such policies, would win every election in a landslide.

But the New Deal was the bte noire of the oligarchs. They began to undo Roosevelts New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate.

The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious and undemocratic, to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination. The New York Times interviewed 93 of the more than 700 superdelegates, appointed by the party and permitted to vote in the second round if no candidate receives the required 1,991 delegates to win in the first round. Most of those interviewed said they would seek to prevent Sanders from being the nominee if he did not have a majority of delegates in the first count, even if it required drafting someone who did not run in the primaries Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio was mentioned and even if it led to Sanders supporters abandoning the party in disgust. If Sanders fails to obtain 1,991 delegates before the convention, which appears likely, it seems nearly certain he will be blocked by the party from becoming the Democratic candidate. The damage done to the Democratic Party, if this happens, will be catastrophic. It will also all but ensure that Trump wins a second term.

As I wrote in my Feb. 17 column, The New Rules of the Games, Sanders democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for Medicare for All, abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.

Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries, I continued. He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and businesses. He does not promise to halt the governments wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes, as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate.

The Democratic Party leaders are acutely aware that in a functioning democracy, one where the rich do not buy elections and send lobbyists to Washington and state capitals to write laws and legislation, one where the danger of oligarchic rule is understood and part of the national debate, they would be out of a job.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats, along with the Republicans, authorized $738 billion for our bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the Republicans, took from us our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process. The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the rich and corporations to transform our electoral process into a system of legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized our police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the worlds prisoners, although the United States has only 5% of the worlds population. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the oligarchy.

The leaders of the Democratic Party the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez would rather implode the party and the democratic state than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a bulwark against despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit, betrayal of working men and women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump possible. Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be offered by Sanders as the partys nominee, will see the Democratic elites unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.

What will we do if the oligarchs in the Democratic Party once again steal the nomination from Sanders? Will we finally abandon a system that has always been gamed against us? Will we turn on the oligarchic state to build parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power? Will we organize unions, third parties and militant movements that speak in the language of class warfare? Will we form community development organizations that provide local currencies, public banks and food cooperatives? Will we carry out strikes and sustained civil disobedience to wrest power back from the oligarchs to save ourselves and our planet?

In 2016 I did not believe that the Democratic elites would permit Sanders to be the nominee and feared, correctly, they would use him after the convention to herd his followers into the voting booths for Hillary Clinton. I do not believe this animus against Sanders has changed in 2020. The theft this time may be more naked, and for this reason more revealing of the forces involved. If all this plays out as I expect and if those on the left continue to put their faith and energy into the Democratic Party, they are not simply willfully naive but complicit in their own enslavement. No successful political movement will be built within the embrace of the Democratic Party, nor will such a movement be built in one election cycle. The struggle to end oligarchic rule will be hard and bitter. It will take time. It will require self-sacrifice, including sustained protest and going to jail. It will be rooted in class warfare. The oligarchs will stop at nothing to crush it. Open, nonviolent revolt against the oligarchic state is our only hope. Oligarchic rule must be destroyed. If we fail, our democracy, and finally our species, will become extinct.

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Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget - Truthdig

Were Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray to hold the same kinds of views about Jews as they do about Muslims and transpeole, they would not have shared a stage at Jewish Book Week (JBW).

Had Phillips said it was the Jewish world that is given a free pass, had Murray called the whole antisemitism issue a delusion, the pair would be public enemy numbers one and two among British Jews.

As it was, our most prestigious cultural event welcomed them with open arms. Perhaps the same logic that distinguishes brown migrants from white expatriates turns those with unsavoury views into provocateurs.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Welcoming the JBW audience on Tuesday night, Phillips acknowledged her and Murrays reputation as enfants terribles: The fact that both of us are on this platform, she told the packed-out auditorium, should warrant a trigger alert.

Phillips had been invited to interview Murray about his latest contribution to the culture wars, The Madness of Crowds. Yet when she opened with the most basic of questions why Murray had written the book there was little clarity. Speaking with all the fluency of a chocolate fountain recycling brown liquid, Murray suggested that certain subjects had become unsayable. What those subjects were, he was unable to say.

Murray was practising a skill that both he and Phillips have honed over the course of their careers: the ability to talk in a way that makes crystal clear what you think, without having to come out and say it. Murray would never openly state that he disdains trans people; instead he says that trans people too often top the news agenda and asserts that the notion that the basic facts of trans identity are complicated.

We are Jewish Solidarity Action (JSA), came a cry from the gallery. Solidarity with trans women! As the protesters were escorted from the auditorium, I thought perhaps ideas like Murray and Phillipss shouldnt be quietly listened to, but loudly protested. Perhaps the events quasi-intellectual framing was inviting us to seriously consider viewpoints that in my view should not be even momentarily entertained.

I stayed, but decided to confront the speakers after the event. Yet my impassioned spiel went out the window when I found myself drawn into a lively tete-a-tete with Phillips. I suppose well just have to agree to disagree! I chirruped. Here we were, at another stall in the marketplace of ideas, and here I was, buying Phillipss wares.

Sadly, the organisers response to the protest was to double down. Jewish Book Week has always been a platform for a diversity of voices, they tweeted last night, in response to JSAs action. We take pride in providing our audiences with the opportunity to hear and question different perspectives - including those they may not themselves share - on the topics that matter.

Yet Phillips and Murray are not simply right-wing thinkers with whom we might disagree. They are the polite faces of a dangerousideology.

Parleying in their plush armchairs, contemplating whether trans women are women and whether racism exists, the wolfishness of these sheep was entirely apparent to me. Yet to many in my community, it is not.

Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that both Murray and Phillips's thinking makes an exception for Jews Phillips for obvious reasons, Murray for less obvious ones (though Phillips joked that she suspected him a secret Jew).

Murray a man seemingly unbothered by some forms of prejudice has called antisemitism the vilest and most deadly prejudice of all. Why Murray is so appalled by antisemitism but not by Phillipss alleged Islamophobia is hard to say.

Phillips, meanwhile, complained at the event that identity politics produced a binary view of power: either one is a victim or a victimiser, but never both. I put to Phillips that this sounded a hell of a lot like a certain Jewish state. In an apparent volte-face, she asserted that this was a binary conflict, with Israel the victim, Palestinians the victimisers. For her own people, Phillips seemed willing to undermine her own argument.

This selective prejudice brings to mind a certain Boris Johnson, doling out bagels to Jews and insults to Muslims. Too many Jewish people have become happy to humour those who oppress others, so long as they dont doesnt oppress us.

This kind of political nimbyism is not just morally abhorrent it is dangerous short-sighted. A politics that targets one minority targets us all.

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The Jewish community should see Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray for what they are wolves in sheep's clothing - The Independent

Several years back, the estimable Father Paul Scalia observed, of some cultural idiocy or other, Who knew the end of civilization would be so amusing?

I detected a subtle theological point within that mordant comment: a point worth reflecting upon during Lent. Christians are the people who know how history is going to turn outGod is, finally, going to get what God intended from the beginning, which is the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the New Jerusalem. (The trailer, so to speak, is in Revelation 21.) So Christians can afford to relax a bit about the vicissitudes and traumas of history. To be sure, faith that Gods purposes in creation and redemption will ultimately be vindicated ought not lead to insouciance about here-and-now; we have responsibilities within history and we should take them seriously. But faith in the triumph of the Kingdom for which we pray daily should invite us to chill (as the kids used to say).

Thats what I did during a recent skirmish in the American culture wars, which erupted a few weeks back over a leaked memo suggesting that President Trump would issue an Executive Order creating a preference that federal courthouses and other federal buildings be designed in a classical style. There isnt much to laugh at along the Potomac these days. But the freak-out from the high priests and priestesses of the concrete-and-glass boxthe modernist architectural establishment and its acolytes in the mainstream mediawas (as I think the kids still say, at least in text messages) LOL.

The ever-more-ludicrous New York Times, in high editorial dudgeon, asked why the republic should be festooned with more fake Roman templesas if the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, and similar architectural masterpieces were a blight on the national aesthetic. Does the high priesthood of architectural modernism really want to defend such grotesqueries as the Robert H. Weaver Federal Building (headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development), aptly described by a government worker as ten floors of basement? Or the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, another concrete-and-glass eyesore that (as my friend Andrew Ferguson wrote) is even more obnoxious than its namesake? Or the Hirshhorn Museum, a concrete Bundt cake squatting on the National Mall?

Alas, these horrors are precisely what the modernist architectural establishment wants to defend, and continues to defend with some success: most recently, in ramming through the Frank Gehry design of the Eisenhower Memorial in the nations capital, a gargantuan nonsense better suited to the Berlin imagined by Albert Speer after the triumph of the Third Reich.

The idea of Donald Trump as a promoter of architectural classicism is not without its ironies, of course, given the designs of his own buildings. But as the good folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line have been known to observe, Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then. And in the current madhouse of American national politics, one takes with gratitude any signs of sanity one can get.

Modernist architectural fanaticism is not about aesthetics only. As critics like Tom Wolfe (From Bauhaus to Our House) and John Silber (Architecture of the Absurd) have demonstrated, the International Style, Brutalism, and the rest of the modernist canon embody a worldview and an anthropologyan idea of the human person. The worldview is resolutely secular and lacks any sense of transcendence. The anthropology is similar: Human beings are cogs in various machines, economic or political, and cogs need neither beauty nor uplift nor charm, only surroundings defined by the ultimate value of efficiency. (That a lot of modernist buildings dont work, rapidly decay, and require enormous sums to maintain compounds the problem even while underscoring the point: Dumbing down the human has its costs, including its financial costs.)

The modernist curse afflicted Catholic church architecture in the U.S. for a while, but that unhappy period is now passing. Marcel Breuers Brutalist-inspired abbey church at St. Johns in Minnesota was often considered the most important U.S. Catholic building of the mid-20th century. Compare it to Duncan Stroiks chapel at Thomas Aquinas College in California, which Id suggest is the most important U.S. Catholic building yet erected in the 21st century. Stroik, not Breuer, is the future, because the TAC chapels classicism and decorative beauty call us out of ourselves and into the Kingdom; the Breuer church depresses the spirit.

Back to the future, then, in both civic and ecclesiastical architecture.

George Weigelis Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

Photo by Ted Eytan via CreativeCommons. Image cropped.

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The Clerisy of the Concrete-and-Glass Box Freaks Out | George Weigel - First Things

There is a frightening word to which many people in the Church have closed their minds, which is gaining support at a rapid rate of knots and threatens to leave practising Catholics behind in its wake. That word is "humanist".

With that word, humanist, many people now describe not just themselves, but also the things they respect. Often Catholics do not approve of the word. Disapproving, they ignore the change; ignoring it, they drop out of the culture.

Last year the number of humanist funerals soared in Scotland and humanist weddings did so in England and Wales. English couples rushed to use Scotlands more post-Christian arrangements. This Christmas, humanist pastors started work in Northern Ireland.

Christians usually see these trends as events impinging on Christianity, when in fact they are occurring without it and have positive content themselves. Perhaps the feeling of being on the back foot in these culture wars has again made it congenial to Catholics to think institutionally and defensively. But thats no good.

A missionary Church cannot fall behind the things which its audience cares about, especially if it does not want to fall in with them. Yet how many Catholics inquire to see what makes humanism so attractive a term or to wonder if anything in that attraction is Christian?

What is happening is that humanist has become the main way to describe and defend that which is spiritual.

In the Observer, Mark Kermode praised 1917 and The Shawshank Redemption as humanist films because they speak about hope. The website Spiked! defends humanism, and by that means that Spiked! champions agency, the new term for free will and emancipation, and free speech, the sphere of conscience.

The album Humanist has just been released by a songwriter who says he is not religious but does "recognise the need for deities. Humanism is often associated with real feelings rather than formality: its what likeable in Hockney; its how Vox praises the new film Emma.

Not speaking this lingo means tacitly neglecting any defence of conscience, free will, and spirituality, made in terms that todays society can accept: the very concepts at the heart of Gaudium et spes. The very things in papers and websites which Christians should be latching onto as seeds of the Gospel are not being shared or said by them at all. Around us is a renewed culture, and Christians need to appropriate it.

In his book True Humanism (1936), Jacques Maritain argued that philosophers taking the human being as their starting point did not need to reduce reality to the human, or reduce what is human to the simply material.

Maritains thought was that when Christine de Pizan and Pico della Mirandola were flourishing, humanism was Christian humanism, but that by 1936, humanism became short for secular humanism.

If the Church engages at all, it opposes secular humanism with its Christian humanism as though 1936 were the present day. But often, in 2020, humanists recognise the need for the spiritual. The way people use humanism as a term of approval shows that New Atheism (Dawkins neo-Darwinism and so forth) is not now the problem.

Humanism now is not anti-Christian in tone. This is actually worse for the Church. The urgent problem is the currency of strong alternative language for good that the Church cannot hear and will not speak.

Nietzsche is somewhere in this story, too, Maritain was right about that; with the Nietzschean idea that Christianity encourages weakness. Every human sin confirms that bias. Marxism features too, because the Soviet version of the texts was published for a generation before Marx-before-Engels (what Maritain calls the young Marx) was rediscovered. Before long it looked like two forms of un-freedom: religion and politics, church and state.

When students grow up, it is more the questions that have been closed down for them that come to define their choices, than the skills which they are meant to have acquired. There is great danger now that atheists are defending agency, free expression and the human spirit, while the Church comes to be associated with cruelty, cover-up and grief.

Look no further than Philip Pullmans celebrity to see that the tables have been turned. Atheists who reject an idea of God that was never worthy of acceptance will defend humanity, they will be the humanists; and Catholics will fail to put across their trust in the God-made-man.

The century now underway is not unlike the fourth century in this respect. Then as well there was a more sympathetic hearing for Christians who presented Christ as divine but human than for Christians who emphasised divinity at the expense of humanity. The successful proselytisers were the Arians.

The fallacies promulgated in schools should be lanced. Before modern science, no one was trying (and failing) to do science. Before natural science existed, people engaged with the same real world, just in different terms. Their sacramental idea of nature, with God as the first, final and primary cause, can co-exist with our success in mastering secondary causes.

What is more important? When you meet someone whom Karl Rahner considers an anonymous Christian, who considers himself not religious; what matters first? To win an argument which to him is theoretical? To speak in your own institutions language? Or to relate to him in what Escriva calls the one same language of the heart? If you thought the natural virtues can be built on by the theological ones, why would you start with theology, bowdlerising theology in the process?

Why would the Church start with that bureaucratic aridity the Pope has rejected when we could achieve dialogue with the mercy Francis commends?

At a time when public discourse is being cut up into echo chambers and silos, when people seek actively to confirm their bias, the Church is another silo: one which does not communicate what it means and seems to say the opposite. So we need to start with the word that means something to others.

The integral humanism Maritain advocated means seeing the transcendent and the individual together, but it is with individuals that all individuals must begin. Catholics and the Catholic clergy should stand up for humanism, and use exactly that word.

Only by using an intelligible language can the Church gain a hearing for its claim to have a longer and deeper view. The Church has "baptised" natural theology before. Christ is the true human being. Humanism is the beginning of a faith that works.

Andrew Macdonald Powney works in publishing but used to teach RS in schools.

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Have atheists become defenders of the good? - The Tablet

The Connecticut Association of Boards of Education recognizes a need to embrace diversity so that the folks making policy and teachingreflect the diversity of the students in the seats. It starts at the top with the school boards, notes the nonprofit organization that represents the interests of boards across Connecticut.

According to CABE, only a small number of board members in Connecticut are of color, about 12% African American, 4% Latino, the latter number particularly alarming given the states expanding Latino population.

In Norwich and New London, diverse boards of education do reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of those communities, but not so in Groton. We agree with CABEs observation that local political parties should strive to attract more people of color to run for school boards.

In a recently published Equity Toolkit for Connecticut Boards of Education, the association not only lays out succinctly why diversity is important, but also provides practical steps how school systems can start working toward that goal.

The toolkit defines equity as giving students what they need to be successful, academically and socially. To reach equity, students will need to see themselves in their curriculum and instructional materials.

Its lofty, meritorious goal is to reach a point when there are no systematic disparities in academic outcomes based upon race, ethnicity, gender, economic status, or zip code. The state remains far away from that destination, but getting their begins, as CABE recognizes in quoting the vision statement of the State Board of Education, with the core principle that, with the right supports and rich learning opportunities, every student will meet high academic standards, regardless of a childs life circumstances.

Credit the organization, whose association represents school boards controlled by both Republicans and Democrats, with tackling a subject which, unfortunately, gets dragged into the political culture wars. CABE has long advocated for recruiting great teachers, but also ones who, through minority recruitment efforts, reflect student diversity.

The Equity Toolkit outlines how to begin community conversations that allow people from diverse backgrounds to speak openly about how well, or not, they think students are being served and families supported. The aim is to engage members of the community who are not typically involved in conversations about excellence in education, helping all better understand how the needs of students can be met, and how parents can contribute.

This worthy effort by CABE deserves consideration by local school boards.

The Day editorial board meets regularly with political, business and community leaders and convenes weekly to formulate editorial viewpoints. It is composed of President and Publisher Tim Dwyer, Editorial Page Editor Paul Choiniere, Managing Editor Tim Cotter, Staff Writer Julia Bergman and retired deputy managing editor Lisa McGinley. However, only the publisher and editorial page editor are responsible for developing the editorial opinions. The board operates independently from the Day newsroom.

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