Why I Won’t Work With People Who Hate Me

This article is dedicated to Newsweek Opinion Editor (and insane person) Josh Hammer, who said the following in his most recent syndicated column published on 4/2/2021:

The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and identity politics, to say nothing of vogue concepts such as “critical race theory” and “racial equity,” overtly discriminate on the basis of race and thus undermine the preeminent American ethos of equal protection under the law.

Tell us how you really feel.

Of course, the United States has faced similar threats to what Hammer is talking about going as far back to our founding. The threat of censorship goes back to our second President, John Adams, signing the Alien and Sedition Act into law in 1798, and events like the Palmer Raids and the SMITH Act show this can happen even in more recent times. Being “outright racist” has also been fairly common in American History, as it is in the history of basically any country, up until around half a century ago. And if Hammer wants to make the argument that these groups do this in the name of equality and therefore they’re more dangerous, well I’ll just say it’s rather odd a lawyer doesn’t know what “separate but equal” was.

Much of this article is filled with dishonesty, and actually knowing Hammer and the people who he’s talking about makes reading his articles infuriating. Take this snippet about Hammer’s crush Yoram Hazony:

As Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony carefully outlined in a Quillette essay last August, “The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists,” but “their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism.”

Hey Josh, you going to mention the part where Hazony says he in many ways agrees with Marx’s critique of liberalism? (An opinion which, as I pointed out on my podcast, if anyone even slightly left-of-center held he’d be declared a communist.)

Or how about this:

Liberalism — real, actual, Enlightenment liberalism — is increasingly on the defensive in America.

What Hammer leaves out, because he has to leave out, is that he is not a fan of classical liberalism and has encouraged conservatives to reject in favor of a more classical conservativism (which he also insists is populism, because Hammer has no idea what words mean).

But don’t you worry, because Hammer has a solution, not to his own dishonesty, but to the threat of “woke.”

The solution is for a political coalition of the un-woke. Admittedly, this coalition will be somewhat crass and, for many, uncomfortable. But much like the conservative “fusionism” that ascended to the status of the mainstream Republican Party platform during the era when the Right’s disparate factions all had their various reasons to oppose Soviet Communism, so, too, can a coalition of the un-woke be based around a commonality of interests arrayed against a mutually shared, authoritarian foe. As Schmitz wrote, “Liberals who stress the provisional nature of knowledge, resist all-encompassing political claims and seek space for public error and disagreement, have grounds for agreement with Jews, Christians and others who believe that men are sinful and fallen.”

Schmitz, for those unaware, is Matthew Schmitz, a big name over at the Catholic magazine and website First Things. So in order to defeat “woke,” I have to team up with two Orthodox Jews and one Fundamentalist Catholic, both of whom are nationalists and social conservatives. Considering I was literally born yesterday, I think you can see my issue with this.

It’s funny Hammer mentions the “fusionism” of the Republican Party during the Reagan era, by the way. For those who don’t know, Reagan was basically the end-result of three-decades of William Buckley attempting to unite the Conservative Movement. Libertarians, who are by-in-large socially liberal and economically conservative at the time, were screwed over by a President who started civil-asset forfeiture, surged the war on drugs, and preached social conservativism everywhere he went. Economic conservatives also got some bones threw their way (in the opinion of this author, the bones were also in all the wrong places), but the overall results of the administration were still underwhelming.

Here’s what Sheldon L. Richman of the Mises Institute wrote in October 1988 about the Reagan administration:

Reagan’s fans argue that he has changed the terms of public-policy debate, that no one today dares propose big spending programs. I contend that the alleged spending-shyness of politicians is not the result of an ideological sea-change, but rather of their constituents’ fiscal fright brought about by $250 billion Reagan budget deficits. If the deficit ever shrinks, the demand for spending will resume.

This is the Reagan legacy. He was to be the man who would turn things around. But he didn’t even try. As he so dramatically illustrated when he accepted the plant-closing bill, there has been no sea-change in thinking about the role of government.

Over the past couple of years, the Conservative Movement has spent much time telling us that is unable to stand on its own two feet and needs to make “alliances” with other ideologies. In 2018, Christopher Chase Rachels wrote a book called White, Right, And Libertarian which argued that libertarians should be willing to work with the alt-right, made up mainly of fascists and white supremacists. (The fact that the book has a foreword by Hans Hermann Hoppe, who once allowed Richard Spencer to give a speech at his annual Property And Freedom Society conference can be taken as it may.)

Of course, the left does this as well. Throughout the early days of the 2020 Primaries, I repeatedly noted that Democrats were trying to appeal to “swing-voters” with candidates like Tim Ryan, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, and even the nomination Joe Biden ran on their ability to appeal to Republicans. The message because that Trump won because of “racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and every form of bigotry,” and Democrats would win in 2020 by “appealing to Trump voters.”

However, in a compromise, it’s important that both sides give up something. What did social conservatives give up by voting for Reagan? Sure, they didn’t get prayer in schools or a handful of other things that were declared unconstitutional decades before Reagan became President, but those unrealistic goals were nothing compared to what libertarians who voted for Reagan had to give up.

What does the alt-right give up by working with libertarians? Their entire goal is to create a white-ethnostate, will they be forced to become more libertarian on the issue of free trade? Because if so, even unapologetic free trade supporters like myself find that to be rather shallow in comparison to what the libertarians would be giving up.

And on Hammer’s recent “fusion” between classical liberals and people who openly hate classical liberals, what do the classical liberals get out of it? They get an end to critical race theory — I guess. But to do that, they have to accept calls for theocracy, limits of freedom of speech, and increased foreign intervention — all things Hammer has called for in the past.

Speaking personally, I’m an openly bisexual male. The two Supreme Court cases Josh Hammer complains the most about are Obergefell v. Hodges, which allowed same-sex marriage nationwide, and Bostock v. Clayton County, which determined that anti-discrimination laws also ban discrimination against members of the LGBT community. What do I get from working with someone who wants to outlaw the idea of me marrying someone I love assuming I don’t live in the right state and who wants it to be legal for me to be discriminated against? I get to defeat the enemy of “woke,” truth be told, I’d much rather have to fight them on my own in my own way than submit to Hammer and his buddies before allowing them to have a free reign over American politics for a good while.

Sorry Josh, I’m not fighting with you against “the woke,” I’m more interested in my own survival.