All posts tagged Jennifer Burns

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Some of the big stories n stuff about ILYBYGTH themes from around the interwebs this week:

The big one: Trump administration might redefine gender, at NYT.

Reactions:

What will it mean to be a transgender Republican? At WaPo.
A “cruel, unnecessary attack,” at WB.
Nothing less than erasing an entire group of people, at TP.
A “return to reality and the law,” at NR.
Finally, some “common sense.” At AC.

Oh, no. Iowan burns gay-friendly books, at DMR.

Want to start your own NFL team? The Green Bay Packers got started for only $500, at HT.

Got 500 bucks?

Want to succeed in life? Go to a rich-kids’ high school, at IHE. HT: MM

Why did Saudi Arabia kill Khashoggi? Mark Perry says he pointed out an unbearable truth, at AC.

David Berliner on the real roots of America’s school problems, at WaPo.

Difficult truths: Peter Greene on the hardest part of a teacher’s job.

Creationism and climate-change denial lose the standards fight in Arizona, at NCSE.

The latest from the Harvard trial: If you want diversity, forget about race and use this factor instead, at CHE.

Ouch. After all the shouting, Jennifer Burns offers yet another scholarly take on Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, at HPE.

Democracy in Chains promised to do many important things: insert Buchanan and public choice theory into our history of conservative thought and politics; highlight antidemocratic tendencies in libertarian thought; and probe the intersection of midcentury libertarianism, Southern segregation, and white supremacy. Unfortunately, the book is too heated, partisan, and shallow to accomplish these tasks successfully. Even more unfortunately, at a moment when the nation desperately needs new and creative political thinking, of the kind that often emerges out of liminal spaces between ideologies and academic disciplines, the book serves to reinscribe a Manichean right/ left binary onto the past. Rife with distortions and inaccuracies, the book is above all a missed opportunity to encourage critical thought about intellectual and political change on the American right. . . . MacLean’s eagerness for a conviction leads her to browbeat the jury. . . . Ultimately it is not a book of scholarship, but of partisanship, written to reinforce existing divides and confirm existing biases. As such it will not stand the test of time, but will stand rather as testimony to its time.

Thomas Aquinas and evolution, at Touchstone.

Catholics for Fundamentalist U: Notre Dame men’s group requests a porn filter for campus.

Can Atheists Be Conservatives? Can Conservatives Be Atheists?

Sorry, Charlie.

That was what the Conservative Political Action Conference told the American Atheists recently when CPAC rescinded the atheists’ invitation to have a booth at the upcoming CPAC meeting.

The conservative planners apparently took offense to American Atheist leader David Silverman’s plans to shake up the meanings of American conservatism. As Silverman told CNN,

Conservative isn’t a synonym for religious. . . . I am not worried about making the Christian right angry. The Christian right should be angry that we are going in to enlighten conservatives. The Christian right should be threatened by us.

Threatened or not, conservative Christian leaders objected to the atheists’ presence at the meeting, a gathering that plans to attract 10,000 conservative activists to Maryland next week. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council crowed, if the atheists are welcomed, “they will have to pack up and put away the ‘C’ in CPAC!”

Other conservatives disagreed. As the proudly atheist conservative Charles C. W. Cooke opined in the pages of National Review,

given the troubled waters into which American religious liberty has of late been pushed, it strikes me that conservatives ought to be courting atheists — not shunning them. I will happily take to the barricades for religious conscience rights, not least because my own security as a heretic is bound up with that of those who differ from me, and because a truly free country seeks to leave alone as many people as possible — however eccentric I might find their views or they might find mine. In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious.

From an historic point of view, Cooke seems to have the better of this argument. As Jennifer Burns has argued, the atheism of Ayn Rand has played a crucial formative role in post-war American conservatism. Though some contemporaries such as William F. Buckley rejected Rand precisely because of her atheism and her aggressive moral embrace of capitalism, later conservative leaders such as Paul Ryan proudly claimed Rand’s influence.

But even when Ryan did so, he explicitly rejected the atheism at the heart of Rand’s thinking. David Silverman is asking CPAC to do something much more difficult: welcome conservative atheists as atheists, not in spite of their atheism.