Katz begins the essay with a masterful analysis of how a "Global Intifada" has been created on the model of the Palestinian refusal to negotiate with Israel, in an honest give and take in recognition of Israeli and regional security realities, by those favouring instead a "hologram" of the Palestinians' (or analogous victim group's) unquestionable victimization and necessary redemption by the "world community" and "international law". He then moves on to discuss how a new American politics might organize itself against the "Global Intifada" in which many American elites now collude in a parasitic corrosion of their own nation. This new politics can emerge through alliances among conservatives, libertarians, and constitutionalists, focussing on how to make constitutional amendments that would limit the role of victimary culture as dictated by our expert class. Our opinion makers and judicial elites, acting from institutional self-interest and imperialistic antagonism towards popular Western and national histories, make and enforce calls to put recognition of our supposed victims centre stage, while detaching themselves - and, by extension, everyone else - from any actual responsibility and accountability in the real world where hard decisions need to be made in defense of our national covenant against its internal and external erosion. This denial of elite accountability - e.g. by scapegoating the likes of George Bush for everything under the sun, including global warming - unfolds our historical national attachment to a democratically-constituted reality as so much of our political and cultural debate now takes place in a world of politically-correct holograms.
As a matter of cause and effect, human reality can be created through moral or physical coercion, or through covenanting. Most simply, the job of covenanters like ourselves is to network and act so as to make and reattach ourselves to the kind of shared human reality that serves our true spiritual and intellectual needs:
Such an amending politics would help inaugurate what David Brin has called the “century of amateurs.” Mark Steyn has surely been right to claim that if there is one thing that our post-9/11 history has revealed, it is the complete uselessness of “experts.” Every power granted to some expert (everything, that is, outside of the circumscribed sphere of client and professional, a specific skill or delegation and the practical task to which it is applied) is one taken away from someone on the ground, someone who might reasonably be held responsible if we give him enough space and who has the best chance of dealing with the situation intelligently rather than formulaically. And the Global Intifada draws its strength, like a postmodern Antaeus, from our formulas. To take one example, racial, ethnic, or religious profiling can, indeed, become formulaic, once it is turned into a “checklist” of “things to look for.” But it can never be nearly as destructive a formula as one forbidding all such profiling, because the former is inherently open to input and the empirical (yes, terrorists can start to draw upon Western converts, and have them keep their original names—but that will just give us something new to look for, the point is that we are looking)—the latter, though, which is the type of counter-intuitive formula that most perfectly marks today’s expert, closes off the give and take between reality and the intellect. And it is only that give and take, which we are now, after a century of totalitarian unreality infecting our own, able to see as extraordinarily difficult to sustain, which provides us with all we need in our current war; it is examples of that give and take, what we can call “iconic intelligences,” that must be sanctified as our constitutional order draws new life from the amateur, he or she who acts out of sheer love for the activity.Read the whole thing...
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