A realist-left primer?

Clockwise from top left: Lasch, Solzhenitsyn, Mailer, Berry

Someone – and I would be more than happy to work together with the Realist Left and Lord Keynes on this – should put together a primer on the realist left, encompassing primarily (but not exclusively) American thinkers, poets, activists and essayists of the past century who embraced the sort of values we stand for: firm commitments to the working class, to fair trade and to the family, but also a deep-seated scepticism toward crypto-libertarian fragmentation, regressive identitarianism and the ‘lifestyle’ elements kindled by the American New Left. My modest suggestions, at this point, would include Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Norman Mailer and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Advisedly, of course, as I realise that these are all ‘cultural’ scholars, and the interests of Lord Keynes and Realist Left do swing more toward the economic side of the equation. I still hope that they would generate some interest.

Christopher Lasch is something of a no-brainer here. He began his idiosyncratic sociological career as a Freud-inspired Marxist, and throughout his career he never lost his deep-seated leftist revulsion at the entire capitalist structure or the narcissistic personality traits it encouraged. But as his career went on he began to see these same narcissistic predilections at work in the same ‘radical’ elements of the counterculture that claimed to want to displace capitalism. He saw in this ‘radicalism’ several decidedly non-radical, alienating elements: the abandonment of the family; the managerial revolution in the liberal arts; the obsession with youth and its maintenance; the elevation of ‘busyness’ as virtue; the pursuit of sexual pleasure at all costs and the corresponding ‘flight from feeling’; the shift from grassroots-radical producerism to the accommodationist language of ‘social mobility’; and the encroachment of a welfare system run by degree-holding ‘experts’ (usually with faux-‘radical’ lifestylist social agendas) upon the lives of working-class families. He grew deeply, perhaps even overly, critical of the communitarians for a ‘sentimentality’ which corroded their insistence on overlapping meshes of rights and responsibilities – but he embraced environmentalism as a form of politics which encouraged class solidarity and continuity between generations. Together with Lawrence Goodwyn (with whom he studied), he is one of the foremost historians of the populists of the 1880’s and 1890’s, whose heterodox economic and monetary ideas find echoes in modern monetary theory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may not be as much of a no-brainer, on account of the obscurantist and reactionary reputation he has gotten in American circles as a result of his Harvard address in 1978. And it is true: he supported the continuation of the Vietnam War, and the critique implicit in his address to Harvard was as much aimed at the ‘softness’ and mushy-headedness of the American academic and countercultural left as it was against the Communists who took over his motherland. He was no friend to the antecedents of the regressive left. He was a true patriot who loved both the nation he was exiled from, and the nation which sheltered him. Yet he was no war hawk – he spoke out with his wonted prophetic vehemence against the military campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. His economic ideas themselves tended toward a kind of decentralised economic democracy. Not only did he speak up (perhaps surprisingly to some) in favour of a form of the local soviet model as it had been originally envisioned in the early days of the Russian revolution, but he also had a high respect and admiration for the backwoods-Yankee town hall culture as it was practised in his adoptive Vermont. Also, similarly to Lasch, even though he wasn’t anti-industry per se, he endorsed an environmental-conservationist ethic because he felt that high-profile, top-down, wasteful boondoggles were ruining Russian communities and laying waste to Russian families, selling off Russia’s true patrimony to support its sprawling imperial ambitions abroad.

Wendell Berry is another kindred spirit in the same vein: the poet-prophet of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, the American farmer and the disappearing small town. The realist left may find some to disagree with in his sceptical treatments of (in particular) the ‘food industry’ (though I’d hope they appreciate his principled opposition to ‘free trade’ dogmas), but, critical as they are of globalism, they will also find much to love in his championing of local communities and local businesses, his championing of ‘producerism’, and his opposition to the proletarianisation of much of rural America. They may also enjoy the well-deserved literary lashing he once delivered to his gender-feminist critics back in 2003, as he defended the family, the family economy, and the growth of family-based industry and production. On the topic of immigration, he has decried the ‘mean’ sloganeering of both the xenophobic right and the regressive left, and called for a balanced, humane approach which respected all three of the law, the local economy, and the demands of those genuinely fleeing from violence and deprivation.

Last but certainly not least on my current list is the prodigious counterculture essayist and novelist Norman Mailer. I confess that I’ve been quite remiss on my Mailer for these several years in which he’s been on my radar; I have yet to read anything by him longer than a publicly-available essay. Yet what I have read from and about him has been intriguing. He was an ideologically-evasive and politically-incorrect man-of-letters, often (literally) pugilistic in his high-profile academic and literary feuds. He was, in the words of Taki Theodoracopulos, ‘anathema to those censorious leftists and middlebrow novelists who are taken seriously nowadays’. But he called himself a ‘left-conservative’, and his critics described him as a ‘radical moralist’: he wants to promote equality and alternatives to capitalism while at the same time conserving, in his own words, ‘family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance’ and other ‘dependable human virtues’. Yet at first glance, his books seem suffused with the horrifying possibility that neither, ultimately, may be possible in our current cultural moment… Certainly some more in-depth reading is due on my part in order to get the gist of his thinking, but I would like to give him a tentative boost here.

At any rate, perhaps a project to consider, in the broader interests of keeping it real and keeping it left.

A very happy 2,567th birthday to Confucius!

Celebration of the birth of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong

It is supremely important for China to remember, with fondness and with sober reflection, her Uncrowned King, her Sage, her Great Teacher, as she forges her bold way forward. A classical educator who hailed back to the wisdom of the Zhou in his own time, Confucius taught us that we should not forget nor despise the past. He taught that sovereigns should be obeyed, but also that they should exercise humane government and cultivate the personal, family virtues. He taught that sovereigns should not seek to expand their own kingdoms by force, but instead through the power of virtuous persuasion. He taught that relationships within a family – between husbands and wives, between parents and children, between elder and younger siblings – should be warm, caring and harmonious, even if not egalitarian. His egalitarianism, however, showed up in other ways: he counselled against small-minded cupidity and excoriated greed. He taught that poor people and even barbarians are capable of knowing the Way. He thought it more important that students understand the Odes than that they be skilled in reciting them. He chided his own wealthier and more powerful countrymen that they preferred flattery and conceit to the truth.

It is necessary – indeed, of vital importance – for China to regain and find a footing for the unique, radical public witness of the followers of Confucius, from Dong Zhongshu and Ban Zhao to Kang Youwei, Kang Xiaoguang and Jiang Qing. And so much the better if this discourse runs against the coarse, crass, greedy and depersonalising demands of globalist liberal capitalism!

Let it be known that even 2,567 years after the birth of China’s Great Sage, his words and works still hold great moral power and inspire great love in the Chinese people. Ten thousand years to the Uncrowned King!

Remembering Merciful and Right-believing Martyr-Duke Václav (Přemyslovec) of Bohemia

Václav, the martyr and saint for whom the holiday song ‘Good King Wenceslaus’ was written, and who is held in particular esteem by both the Czech and the English nations, is remembered today on the New Calendar, in particular for the zeal of his faith, his generosity toward the poor and suffering, and the holy, uncomplaining, self-giving and Christlike way in which he met his death, similar to the manner in which the Princely Martyrs Boris and Gleb met their own.

Václav was born in particularly troubled times. His grandfather Bořivoj was the first of the Přemyslovcí to be baptised, along with his grandmother Saint Ludmila, uncle Spyhtiněv and father Vratislav, into the Holy Orthodox Church, by the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius. At the time of his birth, the lands of the Western Slavs were being torn asunder in many ways. Amongst themselves, the pagans still disputed with the Christians. In foreign policy too: from the east they were attacked by the Magyars; from the west they were undermined and conquered by the Franks. Some of the rulers of the Czech people attempted to side with the Franks for protection – this was the policy of Spyhtiněv. Václav’s father Bořivoj, a zealous follower of Cyril and Methodius himself, pursued the independence of the Czech people from foreign dominance, and spent much of his career fighting the Franks. Duke Bořivoj eventually fell in battle, and Václav’s education fell to his pious Orthodox grandmother Ludmila. However, his pagan retainers, hoping not to let Václav out of their grasp, began whispering rumours against Ludmila to Drahomíra, Václav’s mother, and fomenting her jealousy over her son. Drahomíra ordered her own saintly mother-in-law to be assassinated by strangulation; thus Saint Ludmila met her martyrdom.

But this vain and wicked plan was to no avail. Václav continued in his Christian faith even under his mother’s heathen tutelage, going to receive the Holy Mysteries in the middle of the night, even donating wheat and grapes from his own fields to prepare them. Drahomíra’s devilry was exposed, and she was banished by the Bohemian nobles for her connivance at the murder of the regent. However, the filial Václav pardoned her and welcomed her back to the Czech lands when he took the Duchy of Bohemia upon himself.

Václav had a deep and heartfelt generosity of spirit that extended far beyond his immediate family, and he took great pains upon himself to ease the plight of the poor and to guarantee peace and stability within his realm. His court was famed for its hospitality, and he opened his castle and his stores of food to homeless and to pilgrims alike, and also to orphans and widows. He personally delivered firewood to poor families in his duchy to keep warm in winter. He bought the freedom of many of his fellow Slavs who had become slaves. In the law, he actively took the part of peasants who were cheated, beaten or oppressed by the nobility. He built churches throughout his realm for the sake of bringing his people into the Orthodox faith. In the interests of peace and of the integrity of the Czech nation, he maintained a steady, if somewhat one-sided, friendship with the East Frankish monarch, Kaiser Heinrich ‘der Finkler’, from whom he was given the relics of Holy Martyr Vitus (in whose honour he then built a great church for these relics to be housed).

However, even though he had been reconciled to his mother Drahomíra, his relationship with his younger brother Boleslav was not so easy. Boleslav connived along with some of the still-heathen nobility to bring about his elder brother’s downfall – playing, as he supposed, on Duke Václav’s piety, he arranged a feast in honour of the Holy Wonderworking Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian, at which he was in fact secretly plotting to kill him. Václav, though he was made aware of his brother’s murderous intent by one of his loyal retainers, nevertheless placed all his trust in Christ and went to the Liturgy, and stayed for the feast afterward. When the bell rang for Matins the next day and Václav proceeded to the Church, Boleslav waylaid him on the road, and – together with three of his co-conspirators – stabbed his brother, beat him, and then ran him through with a lance, even on the very steps of the Church; however, as he fell, his blood did not sink into the ground. As he died, Václav blessed his brother and forgave him. His mother Drahomíra was told of his death, and she ran grieving to her son’s side. She later fled the court, fearing the wrath of her younger son Boleslav, and spent her last days in what is now Croatia, in exile and in repentance for her own and her younger son’s misdeeds.

The blood of the martyred Duke stayed and drew itself up over his body; even after his body was interred, his subjects came to pray over his grave. His recognition as a saint came very quickly afterward, and the sainted Václav worked for his people many miracles. One pagan who was in prison called upon the God and the good deeds of Václav, and the chains fell off his wrists no matter how many times his guards tried to fasten him down; upon this prisoner’s release he was baptised into Christianity and lived the remainder of his life piously. A poor old woman who was blind and lame came to pray over Martyr Václav’s relics, and her sight and the use of her limbs was restored. Another lame man in Germany was ordered by the vision of a man to go to Praha and pray over the relics of Holy Martyr Vitus; he ignored this vision at first, but when the man reappeared and asked imperiously why his order hadn’t been carried out, the lame man went, with much assistance, to Praha and did as he was bidden. At once his legs and ankles and feet were healed, and he could walk freely.

A legend quickly arose that Martyr-Duke Václav was only sleeping, and when the motherland is in danger, he will rise from beneath Blaník and, mounted on a white war-horse, lead his great army of loyal retainers to Praha and defeat their enemies. Possibly because of this legend and its similarity to the king-in-the-mountain legends surrounding Harold and Arthur, folk devotions to the Martyr-Duke Václav sprang up in England as well as in Czechia. But these pious folk legends aside, the good deeds of the holy and right-believing Václav retain their own power in witness to Christ Our God.

Through the tender-hearted prayers of St. Wenceslas,
Young father of many,
O Christ our God, release us from our shackles of sin,
Heal our souls, and save us!

God bless the land of Saint Euphrosyne

From the Belarusian Telegraph Agency, with a translation by Pravoslavie.RU:

Modern Belarus is fulfilling a God-given peacekeeping mission, Metropolitan of Minsk and Zaslavl Pavel, Patriarchal Exarch of All Belarus, said when speaking at the 5th Belarusian People's Congress, BelTA has learned.

“I believe that Belarus has a special mission given to us by God, and the country's leadership has not hesitated to make proper use of this divine gift. In light of the tragic events in the neighboring country, Minsk became a platform for peacemaking initiatives. It is here, in Belarus, that the settlement is being sought to the most difficult international problems,” Metropolitan Pavel said.

Exarch considers that this role is a result of the course of history. “In the 20th century, the Belarusian people walked their own Golgotha. Wars, repressions, all sorts of troubles befell Belarus. Our people survived the crucible of suffering, and this is why we know the value of peace and the price of human life,” Metropolitan Pavel stressed.

The Hierarch emphasized that there is no hostility and confrontation between people, including between representatives of different religious denominations and social groups. “Of course, we understand that this is not just a happy coincidence. On the one hand, this is the result of the relevant policy of the state, and on the other, this shows that the society has certain moral values. The Belarusian Orthodox Church is ready to do everything to ensure that peace strengthen in our land, and that the relations between people develop based on the principles of mutual understanding, mutual respect, trust and mutual support. We constantly pray for peace, and preach the need to cherish this precious gift,” the Patriarchal Exarch noted.

He also said that responsible interaction between Church and State is a guarantee of people's well-being and prosperity. “I rejoice in the fact that over the past decade Belarus has developed a stable system of Church-State relations, which gives us the possibility to create and work together to achieve civil peace and harmony,” Metropolitan Pavel said.

He expressed gratitude to Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko “for the words in the defense of Christian values. I believe that this is a very courageous, bold but conscious and meaningful position. Nowadays such state position is extremely important despite the fact that it is sometimes at odds with the outside world because we see aggressive secularism and a tendency to abandon traditional spiritual and moral values gaining strength in a number of countries,” Metropolitan Pavel said.

It is to be recalled, that Belarus under Lukashenko was one of four countries to voluntarily disarm all of its nuclear weapons when it achieved independence from the Soviet Union – the other three being the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and post-apartheid South Africa. Now that the Ukraine is again attempting to regain its nuclear arsenal, gripped as it is in extremism in its fratricidal struggle against its own Russian-speaking population, the role of Belarus as peacemaker becomes all the more vital.

In marked contradistinction to its southern neighbour, Belarus has adopted in its language policies and preferred reading of history, a cultural and civilisational affinity for the Russian mir which coexists with a multi-confessional civic patriotism on the one hand, and a repudiation of the extremes of ethnic and interracial hatred on the other. And the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has been given the task of witnessing to and building the harmony between state and society, in the sort of virtuous cycle that was hinted at by the proponents of classical Orthodox political thinking. The Great Patriotic War has become, in the official Belarusian history, a point of civic solidarity with its neighbours and with its own Jewish population – ironically, the basis for its modern status as a neutral state uniquely poised to act as a broker of peace.

God bless and grant strength and prosperity to the people and land under the protection and patronage of Saint Euphrosyne! For He knows that in this uncertain world of ours, we have great need of such states as can exert a pacifying and stabilising influence on their neighbours.

Congrats to Jezza!

Jeremy Corbyn has now twice won the Labour leadership election, with, as David Lindsay notes, 62,000 more votes than last year, and an increase in the voting share from 59.5 per cent to 61.8. If he didn’t have a mandate to swing Labour leftward going in, he certainly does now.

I am not, by any means, an uncritical supporter of Corbyn. His stance on the European Union I find a bit credulous. His support of Amnesty International I find irritating. His support of Irish unification outside the UK I find distressing. His republicanism (very much a back-burner issue for him, thankfully) I find repugnant. But at the same time, Corbyn represents a few of the very, very best traditions of Old Labour: realism in international politics; embracing real working-class values; treating unions as though they aren’t simply outmoded anachronisms; championing (what ought to be) national institutions like mail and rail; and treating young people as though their voices matter. As a member of the unabashedly Old Left he represents, at bottom, a socialism which owes far more to the moralists of the early 1800’s, than to the British Marxists of the later 1800’s – and that’s a very good thing. But Corbyn’s moralism is emphatically not of the hectoring, totalitarian and Puritanical type; contrary to popular assertions, he is neither a pacifist nor a tea-totaller, and even his vegetarianism represents a practically-Johnsonian personal preference and sympathy rather than a rigid ideological position.

My heartfelt congratulations to this distinguished veteran of the British trade union and peace movements, and I, for one, wish him all the best. Godspeed, sir!

Global leadership: not a Christian imperative

Answering the call to dialogue from Providence Magazine’s manifesto, ‘A Christian Declaration on American Foreign Policy’, I feel I must offer this response.

I should state from the outset that I belong to what has historically been an imperial church. I do not say this in approbation or in any kind of adverse judgement upon the tradition I have willingly embraced: it is nothing more than a statement of fact. The One, Holy, Conciliar and Apostolic Right-Believing Church has been, from the 313 Milan Edict of Emperor Saint Constantine the Great, Equal-to-the-Apostles, to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the state-tolerated, later -recognised and -supported, religion of the (Eastern) Roman Empire. In addition, it has been, from the marriage of Tsar Ivan III the Great to the Roman refugee-princess Sophia Palaiologina in 1472, to the martyrdom of the blessed and God-bearing Emperor Saint Nikolai II in 1918, the state religion of the Russian Empire. (After the fall of the City, Russia was often conceived of in Orthodox writings, polemics and prophecies as the Third Rome, after which there would be no fourth.) Today, Holy Orthodoxy retains close symbiotic relationships with the governments of Greece, Georgia and Bulgaria, and has been repairing those with the governments of Russia, Belarus and the Balkan states for the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Eastern, Orthodox Christianity preaches an eschatological renunciation of earthly libido dominandi, power, wealth and self-will unmatched by any other religion’s call to the same (apart, perhaps, from some of the Protestant ‘peace churches’), is nevertheless the one Christian tradition which has maintained the closest proximity to earthly political power, even in its rawest and most absolute forms. The Orthodox witness is therefore often criticised in strident tones by Western thinkers – even amongst ourselves – for being, alternately, either politically-quietist or opportunistically wedded to authoritarian governments (often both at once). However, the political and social witness of the Holy Orthodox Church, precisely because of its paradoxical relation to power, remains vibrant and brimming with potential, particularly in a world positively aching for some kind of moral orientation. It is out of this long tradition of political-theological witness that I hope to respond to this manifesto.

To start with, there is much that I can agree with in this epistle. To begin with: the notion that authority is not a bad thing in itself, but can be beautiful, creative and nurturing is one that the Church readily and gladly acknowledges. Parental authority to their children, teacherly to students, husbandly to wife, elder brotherly to younger brother – can at its best be among the highest expressions of self-sacrificial love and self-giving. Secondly: the related idea that the purpose of the state is to exercise authority in a spirit of justice, as the authors rightly note, ‘as a check against the worst abuses of human sin and evil’. This idea is one which the Russian Orthodox Church has put forward most strongly: ‘Holy Scripture calls upon powers that be to use the power of state for restricting evil and supporting good, in which it sees the moral meaning of the existence of state’ (Basis of the Social Concept III.2).

These are good principles to build upon, but we must examine why they are so. The sorts of authority wielded by fathers, mothers, teachers, rulers and so on are present in the human anthropology only by the impress of God, our Creator. As Christ Our God said to Pilate: ‘Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.’ Authority is only authoritative because our Author authored us in perfect, self-emptying love – in the truth that He wanted us to be united to Him. As the Prophet Isaiah said on God’s behalf: ‘So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.’ Authority is not arbitrary; it is based on the truth of the author, and the accountability of the author for what she says. Subjects must be given reason to trust what the author directs.

The trustworthiness which God showed to us is present in the story of Genesis. God called us human beings to life, even to eternal life, from the very dust of the earth, and He had prepared for us a garden with every good thing needed to allow that life to sustain itself and flourish. He did not condemn us to solitude, but created us male and female: to work together, to live together, to raise children together – all before the Fall. Anthropologically speaking, in the differences of sex God ordered human society before the state ever arose: ‘[t]he family represented the initial cell of human society’ (Basis III.1). The authority of God is manifest in His word to us to ‘be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’.

However, we disregarded the authority of God, who did all things so that we might live. We trusted instead in the false promises of the Evil One, and ate the fruit which God forbade us to eat. Instead of the eternal life which was our birthright, we chose the inheritance of death. Instead of the equality with God, that we would ‘be as gods’ as the serpent promised, we found ourselves degraded and exiled from the Garden, doomed to a fallen state subject to the laws of sin, corruption and death. Though the Orthodox Church is very far from denying the right purposes or raison d’être of the state, it is clear that is only in our fallen condition that the institution of the state becomes needful. ‘Thus, the emergence of the temporal state should not be understood as a reality originally established by God. It was rather God’s granting human being an opportunity to order their social life by their own free will’ (Basis III.1).

Here’s where the Providence epistle begins to get, at least from an Orthodox Christian view, more than a little strange. Amstutz et al equate the Garden – the Paradise God has ordered for us – with the ‘international system’, and direct the mandates to take care of the Garden to the postlapsarian institution of the state, and in particular the American state, on account of its unmatched power. Leaving aside for the moment the dubious eisegesis of the God-planted Garden as metaphor for a human-constructed international order, this reading makes for a most peculiar and nationalistic anthropology which, as we have seen, not even the supposedly-nationalistic and imperial Russian Church has dared to articulate! But the directive to the man and the woman to work and to take care of the Garden is not given because they are powerful, but because they are loved in such a way that enables them to show love to other created things and to each other, in a way that mirrors, emulates and approaches their Creator. This is the true basis of the sophic logic of the Edenic economy, which is the end of our striving as human beings: as social beings, as working beings, and – yes – as subjects of states.

Instead, in spite of the Providence editors’ protestations that ‘there is no perfect political order’, when the ‘international order’ is identified with Eden and the ‘liberal order’ identified (a propos of literally nothing) as the ‘best means’ of accomplishing the ends of government, the epistle begins to take on an alarmingly triumphalist and imperialist tenor, and Amstutz et al open themselves to the very same temptations to ‘hubris and selfishness’, the ‘strategic and moral myopia’ they later decry. On what empirical grounds, I must ask, do Amstutz and his co-signers assert that our ‘passivity’ has enabled ‘actors with scant regard for the responsible use of power’ to ‘[step] into the vacuum’ we’ve ostensibly left? For that matter, the innuendo is unbecoming – to which ‘actors’, specifically, do they refer?

Remember: the basis and the ideal for earthly authority is not power, but rather truth to life and the trustworthiness of the author, whose model is the Author of Life. It is only from here that a truly Christian realism can proceed. It ought to be recognised, speaking of ‘scant regard for the responsible use of power’, that the reason Americans have withdrawn so heavily from supporting the projects of their own state abroad, even in support of the ‘liberal order’, have to do with the lack of trust they have in the American state. The American state has squandered its own citizens’ trust in military adventures waged on morally- and practically-dubious grounds, beginning with the dismantling of the Yugoslav state and the reckless eastward expansion of NATO, continuing through the mindbogglingly wasteful and bloody crime that was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and perpetuating itself today through less-publicised but equally ill-conceived projections of American power in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. As a result, not only thousands of innocent people have perished and hundreds of thousands if not millions more find themselves homeless and displaced, but also we, the American people, have failed to secure any of the benefits to our own safety or prestige as a nation we were told these international projects would bring us. None of these sins are the primary responsibility or the fault of the shadowy, unspecified outside ‘actors’ which Amstutz et al darkly hint are the cause of the world’s problems.

Sadly, this Providence epistle, proceeding as it does from a faulty anthropology of the state coupled with an extreme, blood-curdlingly nationalistic reading of Genesis, does not and cannot offer a morally-sound or even realistic prescription for introspection and reflection on the proper role of the United States on the world stage. Ironically, even as they lay claim to ‘deep sense of responsibility to see such power used well and caution because of how such immensity of power can be misused’, Amstutz et al display, in consigning any serious and profound conversation on the hard limits of American power to the outer darkness of ‘reactive populism’ and ‘withdrawal’, a thoroughgoing lack of both responsibility and caution.

Christian realism has to be shaped, first and foremost, in the full knowledge and awareness of the fallen nature of man, and in the understanding that the state itself (and not only individual human beings, or our society) is always already conditioned by the limitations of sin. It is not for nothing that such astute and subtle Christian ethicists as Vladimir Solovyov (who was certainly no pacifist and no anarchist) have explicitly said that it is not the state’s primary job ‘to transform the world which lies in evil into the kingdom of God, but only to prevent it from changing too soon into hell’. He understood how, all too easily, the desire to do the former ends up resulting in the latter. May God have mercy on us.

Left-realism, with qualifications

I do like what I see. Oh, yes, indeed.

My own Tory-populist, fiat-monetary sentiments, though they draw on older heterodox economic theorists like John Ruskin and Edward Kellogg, do happen to overlap quite nicely with post-Keynesianism and modern monetary theory. And of course they render me hostile to goldbuggery, usury, opaque top-down semi- or fully-privatised financial systems, neoliberalism, libertarianism, deindustrialisation, ideological free-trade absolutism and the whole bit. Immigration is neither something to be mindlessly supported nor implacably opposed, but rather carefully regulated in correspondence with economic and cultural conditions. Political-correctness culture on college campuses is a real problem, though it is symptomatic of a broader set of problems in our approach to education. Islam is something to be approached realistically, and in full view of its theological flaws. Foreign adventurism of the idealistic and militaristic variety generally hurts more than it helps. The idea that police practices should be subject to a certain level of scrutiny ought to be upheld alongside the idea that the police and the state have rightful powers and responsibilities which should be respected. All of these ideas put forward by the realist left hold very strong appeal for me.

That said, though, given certain intellectual, religious and cultural commitments, I have a couple of reservations.

I am neither opposed to the idea nor to the defence of Western culture. But it ought to be recognised that the roots of that culture do stem, in part, from non-Western sources. I think much of the malaise that has gripped modern education is the result of making it about power (per Machiavelli, among others) rather than about objective truth (something with which the Iranians were and remain highly concerned). As a result, even as an Anglophile Tory, I often feel a greater kinship with Iranian, Russian and Chinese cultural priorities than with modern American ones.

Still, a very promising direction for political engagement. Long live the realist left!