Jason Scott Montoya

“…people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.”

"Liberal “suckers” and postliberal “fighters” are going to wrestle for control over the direction of the Democratic Party. And while the suckers stand a better chance of winning this fight than they did on the rotten American right, their chances will depend partly on Trump: The more corruptly he behaves in his second term and the more tolerant of that corruption voters prove to be, the weaker the electoral incentive for Democrats to follow liberal norms will get. At some points, “suckers” really are suckers."

"Whoopi Goldberg’s argument for pardoning Hunter Biden, that Joe Biden would be a fool to “bust his behind to stay straight … when no one else is,” is a Democratic version of Trump’s populist anti-morality. If the ruling class—now represented by Donald Trump and his postliberal vandals—doesn’t care about norms, why should the Bidens? Why should they be “suckers” who follow traditional pardon practices if it means leaving the president’s son to rot in prison rather than “fighters” who emulate Trump’s brand of cronyism by doing whatever they can to immunize Hunter from legal consequences?"

"“Suckers and Fighters” was the title of my first newsletter for The Dispatch. Trump has concocted a sort of populist anti-morality for the American right, I argued in that piece, in which “ruthlessness in pursuit of cultural dominance” was the only true virtue. According to that anti-morality, dishonorable behavior is a qualification for political leadership rather than a disqualifier because it demonstrates a ruthless willingness to ignore norms in pursuit of one’s interests. It’s the hallmark of a “fighter,” whereas observance of norms is characteristic of a “sucker” who prefers to lose honorably than win dirty."

"Should Democrats now recommit to liberalism, a morally superior political ethos that would constrain their own political tactics and which, frankly, no longer has much of a public constituency? Or should they emulate amoral Trumpism forthrightly by disdaining liberal norms as nuisances that impede effective action?"

“In a virtuous country, the pardon power is a way for the president to show mercy to repentant convicts. In a country as rotten as ours, it’s a license for the president to break the law with impunity.”

“Here is another way to understand the Western Void: it was Christ who once possessed us - but then we exorcised him. Now we are a Christian culture without Christ. What does this mean? Spiritually it means we are lost, wandering and vulnerable to new kinds of possession. Mythologically, it means we have no story to bind or direct us. Or rather, we think we have no story. In fact, the exorcism was incomplete. You can’t shrug off a foundational story that easily: a culture cannot survive without one. In reality, Western culture remains, at some fundamental, and even unconscious level, Christian. We are in a spiritual holding pattern, endlessly circling the airport but never landing.”

“…a spiritual void is not filled by a human collective making a rational choice to construct something called a ‘religion.’ Rather, it is possessed by an external something of much greater - and much less explicable - power.”

“…we are living in a Void: a nowhere-place. We believe in nothing at all, at least with any conviction. That’s not to say that individuals or collectives within the West do not have religious beliefs or practices - obviously they do. But there is no spiritual core to this ‘West’ as a whole, assuming it can even be said to exist anymore.”

“Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.”

“We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.”

“There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.”