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Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was far more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world's super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate in October: "The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they're taking too many posts down. The issue is that they're leaving too many dangerous posts up."
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
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 | Appreciate the work Glenn. I find it hard not to be demoralized daily with the knowledge that even attempting civil conversation on this very issue (the primary reason I supported Trump over the Democrats after previously never supporting a republican party candidate) will get me lambasted even at home for even considering that Trump was not that bad. That we could and are doing by giving the reigns to someone as corrupt as Biden (China) or as fake as Kamala. The smear campaign of the establishment was so effective that was it clear and obvious fake platitudes and politicking coming from Biden/Harris is eaten up like candy in light of the orange man being bad narrative. I still consider myself a liberal, but I also recognize that there are other ways to address problems because one viewpoint can't have all the answers to all the social and economic ills of a country. It would be stupid to think otherwise. I see what the policies of one party have historically been doing to the many major cities and it just seems like commone sense to give the other guys a shot, since what has been tried clearly isn't working and may not be intended to work in the first place. But if the people want despots I guess they get what they asked for and deserve. This is just depressing. I dont know how to get beyond this. Where has BLM gone since the summer? Silence. Yet the people who praised and defended their antics are just as silent. No orange man tp rally against. No more funds to be raised for democrat candidates, rather than local communities that could use them. What does it take to get the average person to realize they are wrong about something? |
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire audiobook by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) http://free-audio-books.info/history/... The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a major literary achievement of the 18th century published in six volumes, was written by the celebrated English historian Edward Gibbon. \\
Volume I was published in 1776, and went through six printings (a remarkable feat for its time). Volumes II and III were published in 1781; volumes IV, V, VI in 1788-89.
The original volumes were published as quartos, a common publishing practice of the time. The books cover the period of the Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius, from just before 180 to 1453 and beyond, concluding in 1590.
They take as their material the behaviour and decisions that led to the decay and eventual fall of the Roman Empire in the East and West, offering an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell.
Gibbon is sometimes called the first "modern historian of ancient Rome." By virtue of its mostly objective approach and highly accurate use of reference material, Gibbon's work was adopted as a model for the methodologies of 19th and 20th century historians. (Summary from Wikipedia)
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/biden-should-beware-of-nemesis/
" Biden will be our next president. But he will face Nemesis in a way that few other presidents have ever encountered the cruel Greek god.
Biden’s hubris and that of the media/Democratic Party fusion almost guarantee such divine retribution.
Once the last of the other Democratic-primary candidates dropped out and Biden was nominated, all prior negative media stories about
his apparent cognitive decline and his family’s financial entanglements disappeared. From April 2020 on, a virtual news blackout surrounded Biden. His rare interviews were scripted. Biden
communiqués were teleprompted. Press conferences were either nonexistent or revolved around his favorite milkshake or his socks.
Mentions of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and Ukraine were taboo. It was sinful to reference reports of a Hunter Biden
email allegedly detailing a 10 percent distribution of such revenue to the “Big Guy” — identified as Joe Biden by Hunter Biden’s business partner.
Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden never really campaigned. After the primaries, he outsourced his fall 2020 campaign to subordinates and pet journalists to attack Trump.
So is Biden the centrist old Joe from Scranton, or the recently reinvented hard-left running mate of Kamala Harris? Both or
neither? Will he keep the booming pre-COVID-19 Trump economy to claim as his own? Or will he go full socialist to apply a Bernie Sanders–style makeover to it?
A President Biden cannot avoid the press forever. He will soon face unscripted meetings with foreign leaders. He will have to meet
dozens of movers and shakers each week. Is he or the nation prepared for the consequences of his return to normality after nearly a year of media fawning and forced isolation?
To win, the Democrats knowingly drafted the 77-year-old Biden (who has since turned 78) to put a familiar veneer on radical agendas that had frightened primary voters. At times, Democrats seemed
fated to be directly tied to the statue toppling, protesting, rioting, and violence that plagued American cities for much of the summer.
Given the Democrats’ Faustian bargain with their leftmost faction, destructive rumors about Biden’s faculties or his family’s financial escapades will more likely come from his own party’s left wing,
eager for a Harris presidency, rather than from the Republican opposition.
Biden will enter office with an ethical cloud hanging over his head — one that could have been vetted and adjudicated rather than blacked out for most of 2020. His son, brother, and perhaps family
associates may talk if faced with FBI and IRS probes, if not a special-counsel investigation.
But that precedent ended with the ill-conceived Robert Mueller investigation. By spring, Biden could have done to him what was done to Trump — and what Biden himself so frequently cheered on.
Nor do we impeach presidents often, especially knowing that the Senate will acquit them when there is no alleged crime as outlined in the Constitution. That bar is also gone. Should the Republicans hold the Senate and take the House in 2022, they could do what the Democrats did in 2020. But if they were to impeach Biden as a possible beneficiary of his family’s foreign influence-peddling, a Republican-controlled Senate might not so easily acquit him.
Biden variously called Trump supporters “ugly folk” and “chumps.” He compared the president to Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propagandist. Biden smeared Trump by referring to him as the nation’s first racist president.
Half the nation will take some time to forget all that. The repair of warped protocols will take longer, given that the Left forgot the ancient Thucydidean warning to us not to destroy the very institutions whose protections we may one day need.
Biden should hope that a rogue FBI does not conduct freelance investigations of him the way it did of Trump. Let Biden pray there is not a partisan medical community to diagnose him as impaired and suited for 25th Amendment removal, as was the case with Trump.
Biden should hope that if Republicans hold the Senate in January, they do not mimic the Democratic habit of voting against nearly every Trump nominee. If they were to do that as a majority party in both chambers of Congress, Biden would have trouble confirming even a single judge.
So let us celebrate Biden’s call to unity.
But Biden should hope that the opposition will not do to him and his party what the Democrats did so bitterly to Trump.
Victor Davis Hanson accuses BLM of trying to hijack American
history Dec. 18, 2020 - 5:30 - Hoover Institution senior fellow
discusses the connection between corporate America and radicals on
'Tucker Carlson Tonight'
t his is the first video in a series of lectures from George Grant to go up in the Atheneum playlist. George Grant's first lecture from his CBC Massey lecture series titled "Time as History" given in 1969.
In this lecture series, Grant takes up the crisis of the modern West as a crisis of who we are and what we are becoming. Engaging with the
thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Grant explicates the concept of time as history and argues that it is not a conception in which one can live a fully human life.
I am citing the Wikipedia article about this unknown or forgotten Canadian thinker. If anyone is interested it's always to read the works (listed below) for yourself than to rely on summaries which are not always nearly accurate. However they are often useful as directions or introductions, but not necessarily on the mark!
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| Born | George Parkin Grant 13 November 1918 |
| Died | 27 September 1988 (aged 69) Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada |
| Spouse(s) | Sheila Allen (m. 1947) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman (1950) |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | |
| School or tradition | |
| Institutions | |
| Main interests | |
| Notable works | Lament for a Nation (1965) |
| Influenced | |
George Parkin Grant OC FRSC (1918–1988) was a Canadian philosopher and political commentator. He is best known for his Canadian nationalism, political conservatism, and his views on technology, pacifism, and Christian faith. He is often seen as one of Canada's most original thinkers.
Academically, his writings express a complex meditation on the great books, and confrontation with the great thinkers, of Western civilization.[citation needed] His influences include the "ancients" such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine of Hippo,[citation needed] as well as "moderns" like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, James Doull, Simone Weil, and Jacques Ellul.[6]
Although he is considered the main theoretician of red Toryism, he expressed dislike of the term when applied to his deeper philosophical interests, which he saw as his primary work as a thinker.[7] Recent research on Grant uncovers his debt to a neo-Hegelian idealist tradition, Canadian idealism, that had a major influence on many Canadian scholars and Canadian political culture more broadly.[8]
Grant was born in Toronto on 13 November 1918, the son of Maude Erskine (née Parkin) and William Lawson Grant.[9] He came from a distinguished Canadian family of scholars and educators. His father was the principal of Upper Canada College, and his paternal grandfather George Monro Grant was the dynamic principal of Queen's University. His maternal grandfather was Sir George Robert Parkin, also a principal at Upper Canada College, whose daughter Alice married Vincent Massey, the Canadian diplomat and first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada.[citation needed] Both of his grandfathers were vehement proponents of the bonds between Canada and the British Empire, and this greatly influenced their grandson.[10] His nephew is public scholar and former Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons, Michael Ignatieff.[11] On 1 July 1947 he married Sheila Allen[12] whom he had met at Oxford.
Grant was educated at Upper Canada College and Queen's University from which he graduated with a history degree.[13] He attended Balliol College at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, a trust his grandfather, George Parkin, had headed at one time.[14] Upon winning the Rhodes Scholarship, he enrolled towards a degree in law at Oxford,[15] but after the Second World War ended, and Grant had experienced a deeper personal bond with Christianity, he decided to change studies. His Doctor of Philosophy research was interrupted by the war, and he was already teaching in Dalhousie University's philosophy department when he completed his thesis, The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman, during a year-long sabbatical in 1950. Grant was a faculty member at Dalhousie twice (1947–1960, 1980–1988), York University (1960–1961; he resigned before teaching) and McMaster University's religion department (1961–1980), which he founded and led in the 1960s and early 1970s.[16] In 1977, he became an editorial advisor of the journal Dionysius,[citation needed] which published his essay "Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship" in 1979.[17]
In George Grant: A Biography his struggles as a self-taught philosopher are highlighted.[16]
Grant was not readily accepted into the traditional academic community of scholars in Canada. Resistance was provoked by some of Grant's less "progressive" stances, most notably the definition of philosophy he published in 1949: "The study of philosophy is the analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of the Perfections of God". Especially angered and upset was Fulton Anderson of the University of Toronto's philosophy department. Grant's definition is telling, in that it marks his unique take on the philosophy's human perspective, which did not necessarily include assumptions regarding the objectivity of science, or the blind acceptance of the Enlightenment's fact–value distinction.
Throughout his career Grant was seen as a unique voice within academic institutions, and thus had strong appeal beyond the strict "community of scholars". In fact, Grant criticized the trend in universities to move away from the "unity" of the traditional academy to a "multi-versity" comprising separate hives of undergraduate students, graduate students, professional faculties, and professors (years before the American Allan Bloom would become famous for similar themes).[18]
Grant died on 27 September 1988.
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In 1965 Grant published his most widely known work, Lament for a Nation, in which he deplored what he claimed was Canada's inevitable cultural absorption by the United States,[19] a phenomenon he saw as an instance of "continentalism". He argued that the homogenizing effect in current affairs during the period when it was written would see the demise of Canadian cultural nationality. The importance of the text is reflected in its selection in 2005 as one of The Literary Review of Canada's 100 most important Canadian books. Grant articulated a political philosophy which was becoming known as red Toryism. It promoted the collectivist and communitarian aspects of an older English conservative tradition, which stood in direct opposition to the individualist traditions of liberalism and subsequently neo-liberalism.[20]
The subjects of his books, essays, public lectures, and radio addresses (many on CBC Radio in Canada) quite frequently combined philosophy, religion, and political thought. Grant strongly critiqued what he believed were the worst facets of modernity, namely unbridled technological advancement and a loss of moral foundations to guide humanity. He defined philosophy as the search for the "purpose and meaning and unity [of] life".[21] What he proposed in place of the modern spirit was a synthesis of Christian and Platonic thought which embodied contemplation of the "good". It is a synthesis that was given form by his neo-Hegelian Canadian idealism, which had been a part of his upbringing (his grandfather had been student of John Caird and a close friend of John Watson) but only really took explicit form when he was introduced to Hegel's work by James Doull.[8]
His first book, Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959), was his most explicitly Hegelian book. It began as a series of CBC lectures, and in it he posed the question of how human beings can reconcile moral freedom with acceptance of the view that an order exists in the universe beyond space and time. He applied a neo-Hegelian concept of history to the modern dilemma of reconciling freedom and order.[22] He saw history as the progressive development of humanity's consciousness of freedom and argued that Canada's unique combination of British traditional institutions and American individualism put it at the forefront of this final stage of history. In 1965, furious that the Liberal government had agreed to accept nuclear weapons, he published Lament for a Nation. At this point, Grant had been influenced by Leo Strauss and his neo-Hegelian conception of historical progress became more restrained, losing the hope that we had reached or were on the verge of reaching the fullest consciousness of freedom. Lament for a Nation created a sensation with its argument that Canada was destined to disappear into a universal and homogeneous state whose centre was the United States. The idea of progress had lost its connection to our moral development and had been co-opted into a utilitarian mastery of nature to satisfy human appetites. Technology and Empire (1969), a collection of essays edited by poet and friend Dennis Lee, deepened his critique of technological modernity;[citation needed] and Time as History, his 1969 Massey Lecture,[23] explained the worsening predicament of the West through an examination of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. Grant's works of the 1960s had a strong influence on the nationalist movement of the 1970s, though many of the New Left were uncomfortable with Grant's conservatism, his conventional Anglican Tory beliefs, Christian-Platonist perspective, and his uncompromising position against abortion.[24]
Grant's last work was Technology and Justice (1986), which he prepared together with his wife, Sheila Grant. His three-decades-long meditation on French philosopher Simone Weil's works led to the conclusion that there were fundamental moral and spiritual flaws in Western civilization, consigning it to a fate of inevitable collapse. Nevertheless, Grant affirmed his belief that a better civilization could eventually replace it.[25]
In 1981, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for having "become a major force in Canadian intellectual life"[26] and was also awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Pierre Chauveau Medal. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
In 2005 Grant's book Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism was voted one of The Literary Review of Canada's 100 most important Canadian books.[27]
The George Grant fonds is held by Library and Archives Canada. The archival reference number is R4526; the former archival reference number is MG31-D75. The fonds consists of 6 metres of textual records, 25 photographs, and a small amount of other media.[28] The description includes a finding aid.
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Further Reading
Charles Taylor, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada (1982); William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (1993); William Christian and Sheila Grant, The George Grant Reader (1997).
, Grant received many honorary degrees, as well as The Order of Canada and many other honours.
Further links
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/george-grant
http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/George_Grant_(philosopher)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grant_(philosopher)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Grant
ANOTHER opinion piece, Glenn? No new news reported?
I certainly agree with your perspective, but DUH!
How about INVESTIGATING and REPORTING real news, for once.
How about INVESTIGATING and REPORTING on all the shocking evidence contained in HUNDREDS of affidavits from election workers presenting evidence of ELECTION FRAUD when the MSM claims there is "no evidence" ?
How about INVESTIGATING and REPORTING on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop ?
Honestly, I can't believe I paid $50 for this BS.