Dean Acheson, U.S. secretary of state from 1949 until 1953, is buried in Washington’s Oak Hill Cemetery. When I read recently that Acheson’s 20th successor, Antony Blinken, had sent a cable subtitled “Gender Identity Best Practices” to American diplomats around the world, warning against “harmful, exclusionary messages” conveyed by the use of terms like “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife,” I was tempted to visit Oak Hill, to determine if Secretary’s Acheson’s mortal remains were spinning in his grave.
Acheson titled his brilliant 1969 memoir Present at the Creation, which he certainly was, as initiatives in which he played a key role, such as the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Japanese peace treaty, became the international security architecture that underwrote communism’s defeat in the Cold War. Might Secretary Blinken riff on his distinguished predecessor and entitle his memoirs, Present at the Destruction? Of what, you ask? Of what Acheson and others wrought.
Consider what was afoot in the world when Mr. Blinken dispatched that cable. Wars were raging in Ukraine and Gaza. Latin America was falling apart politically and economically, one result of which was an unprecedented migrant-and-refugee crisis on America’s southern border. Russia was building a space-based nuclear weapon that could eliminate America’s satellite-based communications network. Iranian proxies were creating mayhem throughout the Middle East and disrupting vital international commerce in the Red Sea. China continued its saber-rattling attempts to intimidate Taiwan. The crises of governance in sub-Saharan Africa were too numerous to count. The president of the United States couldn’t keep the presidents of Mexico and Egypt straight. The leading Republican candidate for the presidency was informing his adoring fans that he would tell Vladimir Putin to “do whatever the hell [he] wanted” to NATO allies not spending 2% of GDP on defense.
And amidst all that, the U.S. secretary of state thought it important to instruct his diplomats to “remain attuned to and supportive of shifts in pronouns” while substituting “you all” or “folks” for the potentially offensive “ladies and gentlemen”?
This is not just nonsense; it is dangerous nonsense. It is a distraction from the real work of diplomacy. It further erodes American credibility in the eyes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the apocalyptic mullahs in Tehran, who may well conclude that a putative superpower obsessed with “fluid gender identity” will not pose an obstacle to their aggressive designs. It sends a signal of terminal unseriousness to the rest of the world. It offends what are often termed “traditional” nations and cultures, but which are in fact repositories of common sense.
From the point of view of the Catholic analyst of world affairs, for whom politics is always downstream from culture, this is what happens when what scholars call “expressive individualism” — self-absorption on steroids — displaces the biblical view of the human condition: That there are truths built into the world and into us, including the truth that we are male and female, distinct but complementary, ordered to communion and fruitfulness. Ideas, as always, have consequences, and the desperately defective ideas of woke culture — the cult of the false trinity of Me, Myself, and I — have now corrupted American diplomacy, endangering both our country and the world.
As is typically the case with falsehood, the gender ideology now infesting the Department of State seeks to impose itself by bureaucratic power and personal intimidation. Thus under Mr. Blinken, State has decreed a third gender “marker” on U.S. passports for those who don’t “identify” as male or female; appointed the first U.S “Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQ+) Persons;” and informed State Department personnel that those seeking promotion must “advance” DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as wokesters understand those otherwise honorable terms). This is not quite the totalitarian future that George Orwell described as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” But it’s coercion in the name of falsehood, nonetheless.
A friend with a keen sense of history, returning from Rome to Washington via London last month, e-mailed me acerbically from a Heathrow lounge, saying he felt like he was going from Sodom to the Fall of Constantinople. I advised him to have another drink, not least because “Rome” is fixable. But Secretary Blinken’s cable suggests that the analogy between our American moment and the Fall of Constantinople isn’t completely far-fetched. And that new fall is not going to be arrested by either of two narcissistic, elderly presidential candidates who embody, rather than challenge, the culture of self-absorption that is killing America and impeding our capacity to help shape a better world.
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Thank you George, spot on. Oh for some more like Dean Acheson and Harry Truman: men of integrity. Our political parties have disintegrated and both are pandering to demigods and sacrificing noble ends to base means. May God help us.
Agree with your comment, James.
At a time when our country is in desperate need of strong and wise political leadership, we have Biden vs Trump and weak, woke idiots like Anthony Blinken.
Thank you Mr. Weigel very interesting article. Let the reader beware that if you don’t support the old, rude, obnoxious, and whatever else you may call the potential Republican candidate, this is what you get. It’s like the lesser of the two evils.
The most glaring absence in our current culture is plain old common sense. Whether it’s normalizing sodomy, men trying to marry men, aborting unborn babies, playing God with Petri dishes, transgender ideology, vaccine madness, race baiting, or unfettered immigration, what’s lacking is common sense. What’s most unfortunate is that all those who should know better keep their mouths shut and defer to those obviously lacking in common sense.
One of my children sent me a link to a Cambridge lecture by Iain Mc Gilchrist. He basically said what you’ve said here. But sadly because he lives & works in the UK he couldn’t say it as clearly without getting canceled.
Mr. Weigel,
Again you write with erudite talent. You say, “This is not just nonsense; it is dangerous nonsense.” Mr. Weigel, as a Catholic man, and not as a fellow American patriot, just exactly why, from a spiritual sense, is this nonsense really dangerous nonsense? Pray tell, please. Your not telling us anything that we already know that is nonsensical. And if I may, let me humbly suggest to you that it is the “Spirit of the World” that has brought about this EVIL that you refer to as dangerous nonsense. The “Spirit of the World” that our Blessed Jesus often referred to. Again, I will refer you to our Lord and Savior’s simple truth about the end times that we are now living in: “In the end, white will become black and black will become white.” Therein lies the answer to what is really happening. Come Lord Jesus!
JCALAS!Forever!
This about “EVIL” and Weigel’s reference to the fall of Constantinople in times not totally unlike our own:
“By now, too, the omens had begun. On 22 May [A.D. 1453] there was a lunar eclipse; a day or two later, as the holiest icon of the Virgin was being carried through the streets in one last appeal for her intercession, it slipped from its platform. A few hundred yards further on, a violent thunderstorm caused the whole procession to be abandoned. The next morning the city was shrouded in fog, unheard-of at the end of May; the same night the dome of Santa Sophia was suffused with an unearthly red glow that crept slowly up from the base to the summit and then went out. The past phenomenon was also seen by the Turks in Galata; Mehmet himself was greatly disturbed, and was reassured only after his astrologers had interpreted it as a sign that the building would soon be illuminated by the True Faith. For the Byzantines, the meaning was clear: the Spirit of God itself had deserted their city” (John Julius Norwich, “A Short History of Byzantium,” 1997, pp. 377-8).
Allow me to quote President Andrew Shepard: “We have serious problems and we need serious people to solve them.”
Repeat: “We have serious problems and we need serious people to solve them.”
And this guy is a DEMOCRAT
Similar signaling from a spontaneous “couple,” Blinken and Fernandez?
And, this about the fall of Constantinople in earlier times not totally unlike our own:
“By now, too, the omens had begun. On 22 May [A.D. 1453] there was a lunar eclipse; a day or two later, as the holiest icon of the Virgin was being carried through the streets in one last appeal for her intercession, it slipped from its platform. A few hundred yards further on, a violent thunderstorm caused the whole procession to be abandoned. The next morning the city was shrouded in fog, unheard-of at the end of May; the same night the dome of Santa Sophia was suffused with an unearthly red glow that crept slowly up from the base to the summit and then went out. The past phenomenon was also seen by the Turks in Galata; Mehmet himself was greatly disturbed, and was reassured only after his astrologers had interpreted it as a sign that the building would soon be illuminated by the True Faith. For the Byzantines, the meaning was clear: the Spirit of God itself had deserted their city” (John Julius Norwich, “A Short History of Byzantium,” 1997, pp. 377-8).
Not so long ago, Weigel was arguing that the Catechism (2309: “… The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.) means that no one may second-guess the national leaders. Thus, even Popes John Paul and Benedict were out of line in criticizing George W. Bush’s war, though it “at one and the same time” arguably violated each of the necessary requirements for a just war. Interestingly, Weigel does not apply the same argument to Putin’s war that he does to W’s war. He would have some credibility if he claimed to have learned from his earlier mistake, but without that acknowledgement, he has none.
You are misunderstanding a hypothetical. The proposition you cite is only premised on a moral prudential judgment. Not an immoral prudential judgment. It is generally true that a head of state has access to more information than the average citizen and is better equipped to make a sober prudential judgement, but this is not inferred to be necessarily the case in the CCC.
You are a bit too vague; I am not sure what you mean to be “the proposition [I] cite”.
Is it that Weigel tried to use this passage to defend W’s declaration of war? But he DEFINITELY did make that argument.
Or do you mean “the proposition” to be Weigel’s argument? His argument was astonishingly weak. For one thing (among many), the USA is not an absolute monarchy; “those who have responsibility for the common good” are the citizens, not merely the elected officials; but among elected officials, the only ones given the power to declare war by the Constitution are the members of Congress. Weigel really based the entirety of his argument on the bit about to whom the evaluation of these conditions belongs as a means of sidestepping the obvious violations of Just War Theory, and even then he gets it wrong.
None of this is hypothetical. W declared war and sent America into Iraq. Weigel said mere citizens must defer to the President of the USA. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine. Weigel, a mere citizen of a third-party nation, feels no obligation to defer to the President of Russia.
Either we are allowed to use our eyes and our brains in both cases, or in neither. In either case, Weigel is neither an authority nor an expert.
I didn’t say Weigel didn’t make that argument. The section that YOU cite from the CCC does not implicitly endorse any and all prudential judgments of all heads of state. In Weigel’s judgment Catholic just war principles were appropriately applied to Bush’s decisions but not to Putin’s. There is not, as you contend, any inconsistency. It is simply his judgement of just war principles. There was reason to take Iraq’s repeatedly expressed threats against the United States and the complete extermination of Israel seriously. There is no reason to find Putin’s Hitlerian type ambitions as a morally equivalent form of an innocent pursuit of ending non-existent national threats.
The section that *I* cited was the basis of WEIGEL’S argument. You are correct that it does not say that only God can question the moral judgement of a national leader, BUT that is exactly what Weigel was arguing. He did NOT attempt to argue that, at one and the same time:
– the damage inflicted by Iraq on the USA or community of nations was lasting, grave, and certain;
– all other means of putting an end to the conflict had been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
– there was serious prospects of success;
– the use of arms would not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
There is a good reason he did not confront these requirements; he could not win with that kind of argument. Instead, he chose a particularly Catholic version of the then-common argument, “The President has secret knowledge that would justify a war.” (Interestingly, Bush himself claimed the attack was justified not by what he knew, but by what he did NOT know.)
Sorry, but Weigel IS being inconsistent.
No reply button at your last response so I’ll double up here:
How can Weigel be “inconsistent” when there is a day and night difference between Putin’s war of aggression on no basis of any threat, by his own admission, to his nation’s national interest and a war intended as preemptive against the nuclear annihilation of two nations from a nation with a leader that publicly and repeatedly stated such intentions? And when did I say only God can question the moral judgment of a national leader? That’s ridiculous. Anyone can and should, all the time. A Catholic can even question a pope. What we cannot know is what another human being knows or does not know at any given time, especially a head of state making grave decisions. They should not be judged frivolously, even by popes, even by good popes. And no one should ever be judged by consequentialist reasoning. The validity of any prudential judgment is never judged by consequences at a later time.
Two decades ago, Weigel said that mere hoi polloi have no right to evaluate a president on the president’s evaluation of the just war criteria; national leaders may be rightly judged by God alone. Not even the pope is right to second-guess a president, which both John Paul II and Benedict XVI did. But, hey, the guy wrote a pope’s biography, so he has about the same authority as a pope, at least in the eyes of some people.
However, today there is a president fighting a war of which Weigel does not approve. In THIS CASE, (perhaps because it is a furriner and not a US president), a member of the hoi polloi like Weigel is free to question the divine right of national leaders to start wars.
The problem is not that Weigel applied the Just War criteria wrongly. The problem is that he attempted to shut down any Just War considerations as being above the pay grade of both popes and American voters, but now he thinks they are definitely NOT above his own pay grade as a niche author. That is inconsistency.
Again, no reply button at the end of your reply, so I’ll place mine here.
Your reasoning is incoherent. First, Weigel didn’t say what you say he said. He never said the citizenry had no right to judge the decisions of their presidents. So, please stop trashing the Eighth Commandment. And it is true that no one has the right to judge the ultimate culpability of any moral judgment of the decision-making process of another human being no matter how much we can judge the nature of objective morality. And your contention that being a biographer projects self-promotion is juvenile, to use a stale metaphor, on steroids.
Objecting to the objective moral depravity of Putin, and those who implicitly trivialize his actions, like you, is hardly a matter of geography, nor a question of transgressing a “divine right” which Weigel has never asserted, despite your trashing of the Eighth Commandment, yet again, to infer that he has.
However much you might jump up and down to insist on an inconsistency where none exists, there will never be an identical circumstance between outsiders making judgments of insiders making judgments of imminent catastrophes and condemnations of fascist/communist superpowers initiating crimes against humanity for no reason at all and those who rationalize their crimes who, in so doing, share their crimes.
I’ve felt that watching recent events in the West is a bit like listening to the podcast “Fall of Civilizations.” It’s unsettling when you hear stories from empires centuries ago & think they sound local.
It’s an excellent podcast by the way if you can locate it on YouTube.
To me, it’s more like a fever dream. If you had told anyone 25 years ago how things would be today, they would have said you were making ridiculous exaggerations — that you were replacing Democrats with cartoon caricatures of Democrats written by hostile Republicans, and replacing Republicans with cartoon caricatures of Republicans written by hostile Democrats. And they would have been right. Only, the caricatures are reality now.
Americans 25 years ago might not have recognized what’s going on today but I think the Romans might.
🙂
Maybe. Even at its most decadent, though, Rome knew the difference between a man and a woman. It is one thing to know the difference but ignore it in behavior, and that is bad enough; it is another to fail to know the difference (or, as is much more commonly the case, to know the difference but to pretend not to know).
I saw something last year about a prophecy from Padre Pio that Russia would convert “quickly” and America would convert “slowly”. That is by far my best reason for believing that America will still be a thing in decades to come.
Rome had its issues, too. They might not have had our sophisticated surgeries to make men appear like women but Romans removed body parts to fashion male slaves to suit their fancy.
@mrscracker — Yes, they had eunuchs, and they had every kind of debauchery, but they never banned an expression like “ladies and gentlemen” as being too offensive.
I’ll have to see if I can find that. I was most disturbed by reading about the Calhoun Mouse Utopia experiments.
http://www.victorpest.com/articles/what-humans-can-learn-from-calhouns-rodent-utopia
Who knew mousetrap companies provide info. like that?
Mice are my favorite animals but sadly I have to take out a few each year after the cane’s harvested & the field mice are looking for a new home in my cupboards. I don’t mind the mouse visitors so much but they leave their little calling cards all over the place.
🙂
Whatever the value of the majority of the article, Weigel cannot refrain, in the last sentence, from indicating the moral equivalence of Biden and Trump. He has total tunnel vision regarding this, and it detracts from what is sometimes worthwhile articles.
Maybe some time he could list what actions and policies of Trump in his term as president he opposes, as opposed to his “narcissistic” personality.
Anyone who endorses Bud Light or Disney World in 2024 is unworthy of my vote.
This is what happens when what scholars call “expressive individualism” — self-absorption on steroids — displaces the biblical view of the human condition:
Not exactly George. This is what happens when we have an anti-Catholic Catholic sitting in the Chair of Peter intently busy construing endless silly ways to deconstruct the Catholic religion, no matter how many lives are slaughtered through the death of Catholic witness on the world stage, and those who should know better have been too cowardly to speak out forcefully and identify and oppose the source for eleven years.
Wow. Another never Trump essay. How boring. Trump is well known for using exaggeration to make a point. So what?? I well recall Trump once hosting a college team and saying a “million” burgers had been ordered. No one with a brain cell took that literally. Except of course the propagandized leftist sho discovered the actual number of burgers and declared Trump a liar. Many of us are sick of this idiotic, selective persecution. Regarding NATO—Other than verbal threats how is he to get these western countries to pay?? Is it ok that they sit fat snd happy while Americans alone foot the bill?? Really??Yes, Trump is willing to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Bravo! This is not Switzerland.
Finally. Comparing Trump to stumbling, bumbling Biden is not true and is completely unacceptable . Those who vote for Biden and the dems have blood on their hands. The country is measurably more dangerous and expensive than 4 years ago.
I read an article in a Catholic publication several years ago that explained Donald Trump’s humor and rhetorical style as being like the old school Jewish comedians who played the borscht belt. I’d never thought about it that way but I think there’s some truth in that.
Many of those comedians have gone on to their reward and I doubt they could perform today without being canceled. I believe what initially attracted voters to Donald Trump was his absolute indifference to being shamed and canceled. If we fold, the opposition gains ground. That’s their strategy and Trump understood that.
I simply chalk it up to Trump being from New York, or at least I assume he is. I’m from the mid-West and obviously, we are very different in culture.
I’m different in culture, too & it’s not my sort of humor but Trump’s style really does remind me of those older comedians who used to appear on late night TV years ago. As LJ pointed out, we’re not supposed to take everything Mr. Trump says literally.
Different culture? The reason he resonates with so many everywhere, despite his many flaws, is his anti-elitism, for which every decent human being has been starving to see in a political figure for…well, in America at least, since Reagan, and before him, Calvin Coolidge. Sensible people know that “experts” possess more conceit than knowledge or wisdom and are more prone to crimes against humanity than benevolence. If anything, conservative New Yorkers, like me, who still enjoy the culture of NY (I’d be depressed if I had to live away from live performances of classical music.) are more prone to welcome a Trump-led rebellion against the phoniness of sophistication.
Does State’s ideological idiocy extend to how it teaches languages to its ideological diplomats?
Imagine a U.S.Ambassador calling on a European Foreign Minister:
Minister, before we address how best both our nations can support Ukraine against Russia, can you please first tell me how your government sees the U.S. proposal to eliminate all gendered nouns in your language and replace them all with neutral usage? And to agree to this before President Biden’s re-election this year? As you know, Mr. Bid—er, he, er, they really want to announce your agreement to this initiative so they can win their second term as President.
And so no one thinks it important to mention Antony Blinken’s alleged religion because it might be relevant?