“Jen realized she had by no means skilled this earlier than — profound cognitive dissonance.”
A second of disaster strikes the title character of George Leef’s new novel, The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale (Bombardier Books, 2022). How will Jen deal with it? Does she suppress the sensation and observe what George Orwell known as Doublethink: “The facility of holding two contradictory beliefs in a single’s thoughts concurrently, and accepting each of them?”
Or does her thoughts reject the contradiction and actively search out the reality?
In his story, Leef gives what his subtitle calls “A Political Fable For Our Time.” Jen is a progressive political journalist for the Washington Submit, extremely expert at crafting what real-life practitioners name “the narrative.”
It’s a telling time period of in the present day’s journalism, “narrative.” It implies storytelling, which isn’t a recounting of info however extra the kind of “storytelling” that Southern mothers discuss after they warn their little ones about mendacity. Not way back, as I can personally attest, the craft of journalism nonetheless aimed to provide readers the who, what, when, the place, why, and how in as expeditious and compelling a trend as doable, this to maintain readers’ consideration lengthy sufficient to be absolutely knowledgeable. Now it’s to withhold from readers as a lot of the who, what, when, the place, why, and how as doable to slop out a graspable “narrative,” signaling what they’re supposed to consider one thing and nothing extra. An editorializing “information” headline now normally suffices.
Leef’s protagonist, we be taught, is a information storyteller par excellence.
It’s this present of hers that results in Jen getting the provide of a lifetime. Her idol, the nation’s first feminine president, Patricia Farnsworth, has requested her to put in writing her official biography, and he or she’s agreed. Farnsworth remembered how one in all Jen’s deftly delivered fictions helped torpedo her first opponent’s marketing campaign. Jen known as it “my very own ‘October Shock,’” and he or she did it unflinchingly out of a then-unquestioned dedication to her concept of the better good. As president, “Pat” radically remade America, working outdoors and round constitutional limitations.
Earlier than her awakening, Jen’s view of the previous president was heroic:
Pat Farnsworth had united the nation, nearly eradicated unemployment, ensured medical look after all, and ended America’s dependancy to fossil fuels, amongst many different nice accomplishments. For any president to have so reworked the nation, placing equality, security, and social justice forward of the nation’s previous obsessions with cash and revenue and founding rules was superb. And that it was a lady who had carried out it was actually one thing to savor.
Her interviews with Farnsworth happen at Pat’s luxurious California mansion nestled amid the surprising, crime-ridden squalor of Laguna Seaside. Jen registers however dismisses the contradiction. In these interviews, readers choose up how Farnsworth consolidated energy. It included finagling a Senate majority, eliminating the filibuster, packing (“revitalizing”) the Supreme Court docket, after which, removed from reaping the same old political rewards of such an imbalance of energy, she tore on. Her unchallengeable Court docket started issuing preemptive “advisory opinions” on issues not even earlier than the Court docket or worse, on older issues beforehand determined (chosen for such evaluate on the arbitrary query of “Did the previous case hinder the flexibility of the federal government to result in wanted reforms?”). Naturally, speech and gun rights have been among the many earliest casualties, however extra importantly, freedom-minded organizations that normally problem such intolerant grabs determined to not combat a misplaced trigger.
Subsequent, she federalized elections and “received” a second time period strolling away. To do away with “dissidents,” she weaponized federal companies towards them, threatened and incentivized Huge Tech to close them out, and relied on runaway courts to punish them. Her mantra was a chilling ode to autocracy: “The worst abuse of energy is to not use it to perform one thing good.”
A reader might be forgiven for failing to recollect Leef’s e-book is fable, not prophecy.
From this angle, Farnsworth is a tyrant as vicious and unfeeling as any granite-brained Communist premier. But it surely wasn’t a perspective Jen may share. That began to vary, nonetheless, when she was attacked within the police-deserted streets of Laguna Seaside and saved by a person her preloaded ideology couldn’t have imagined.
The person is a retired electrician, a Navy veteran, who out of concern for his crumbling neighborhood has been patrolling the streets with a couple of like-minded others. He’s black. And he has an unlawful gun. For which Jen was very grateful.
Will was there when she wanted a hero, and Jen needed to know extra about him. And what she discovered introduced her to her second of profound cognitive dissonance. Will lamented the devastation wrought to his state by “power-hungry politicians,” together with the previous Gov. Farnsworth. He talked in regards to the piles of legal guidelines and laws that made it “tougher and tougher to run a enterprise, to search out good employees, to afford a house.” Schooling didn’t put together children for all times and work. Electrical energy has turn out to be a luxurious when it was once an afterthought, and so has water. Misuse of eminent area has led to tent cities for the homeless. Systemic election fraud ensured voters have been caught with the leaders chargeable for all of it. As Will talks and Jen probes, she will get shocking solutions about many issues, together with transportation, gun insurance policies, crime, racial reparations, range insurance policies, and what Will known as “group equality rhetoric.”
Can even tells her of the group fashioned by his late spouse, Veronica, “the Free Individuals of Laguna Seaside,” who assist one another with numerous providers and in addition provide the lacking sense of neighborhood that years of misrule has robbed them of. His spouse, we be taught, had died of an undiagnosed mind tumor as a result of COVID-19 restrictions forbid her from searching for therapy of her complications. The identical heartlessness wouldn’t permit her a correct funeral.
To Jen’s credit score, she desires to fulfill the Free Individuals, and when she does, she continues to appreciate issues aren’t in any respect what she has been instructed to suppose contained in the Beltway. Now a significant downside looms: What’s Jen going to put in writing in her e-book?
One of many strengths of Leef’s e-book is knowing what motivates Jen. Like us, she navigates a pressured binary world of viewing all political selections in Marvel comics phrases. Each coverage query about which individuals might moderately differ, which contain trade-offs, is as a substitute seen by way of an apocalyptic lens of Good vs. Evil, and the destiny of your complete world hinges on the selection. With a lot at stake, persuasion is deserted, and victory “by any means needed” turns into all that issues.
At its core, although, Jen’s concern is to do good, serving the better good as she sees it. As Leef explains, “Her political philosophy was premised on the necessity for presidency to guard atypical individuals towards the grasping designs of enterprise.” Sincerity of her want for the safety of atypical individuals units her other than the tyrant Farnsworth.
In her pre-awakened naivete, Jen lacked three vital insights: one, that different individuals, not less than equally well-intentioned, wanting to supply the better good for society, can differ from her with out evil intent; two, their concepts and selections may even be higher, so having authorities preclude them may really serve a better unhealthy; and three, grasping, power-hungry politicians like Farnsworth can reap the benefits of (and even inculcate) this notion of disagreement being rooted in evil to be able to destroy their political foes, be they citizen, custom, or structure.
Jen’s expertise and discussions with Will and the Free Individuals — which type the center of The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale — assist her acquire the primary two insights. Her conservations with others from Farnsworth’s previous drive residence the third.
One thing else helps Jen alongside the best way: her love for classical music, a fact of artwork that transcends the progressive reflex to tear greatness down and suppose it could actually merely get replaced. From the very starting, she is aware of the “narrative” amongst her fellow progressives is that classical music is “‘problematic’ resulting from its ‘white male dominance,’” however she additionally is aware of that’s bunk. Even so, when she attends a live performance she takes an absurd quantity of precautions to keep away from being acknowledged.
Regardless of her skilled devotion to political expediency over goal fact, when it got here to music, Jen noticed clearly:
Why did they need to let ideology get in the best way of objectivity and equity? Sure, the world of classical music was largely white, however all that individuals actually cared about was the music. If you happen to may play effectively sufficient, no one cared about anything about you. You shut your eyes and hear. As for composers, those who have been hottest had achieved their rank as a result of they related listeners most deeply with the music, not due to their race or sexual identification.
In America, it was doable to pretend many issues. You would faux to be an artist by splashing paint on a canvas. You would faux to be a author by producing phrase salads. However to compose nice music took actual expertise. Nobody had come together with sufficient of that to shoulder apart Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt.
If [progressive critics] obtained their manner and compelled classical music to be “equitable,” music lovers would undergo. And America wouldn’t be the slightest bit higher, both.
Jen was to find a mutual enjoyment of classical music along with her pals among the many Free. They shared this common language even earlier than they shared different concepts in frequent.
With this notion, Leef’s fable evinces a delicate optimism. The lesson for these of us who hew to the thought of goal fact and are perplexed by the Jens round us is that there are areas the place they reject relativism. These areas might be private and studied and can present inroads to opening their eyes to the everlasting values of freedom for people slightly than collectivism enforced by grasping, egocentric politicians (who are usually not gods or superheroes, however individuals with flaws).
For some it will likely be the impropriety of inculcating the youngest amongst us with extremely controversial, very grownup points slightly than educating them phonics and math. For others it will likely be overrunning sports activities with political posturing. For some, artwork; for some, structure; and for some, delicacies. I do know a fellow lover of Shakespeare who’s a progressive however who deserted longstanding monetary assist of a regional Shakespeare theater when it out of the blue introduced alignment with the calls for of one thing known as the “We See You White American Theater” manifesto.
With The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale, Leef reveals that somebody who actually desires one of the best for his or her neighbors and fellow residents can’t perpetually ignore the compounding contradictions of rote progressivism. The seeds of recognition are there, and with them, the hope of a flowering appreciation for fact and particular person liberty.
Some might even discover this awakening by way of Leef’s fable itself.
Jon Sanders
Jon Sanders is an economist and the senior fellow of regulatory research and analysis editor on the John Locke Basis in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Jon researches a broad vary of areas, together with power and electrical energy coverage, occupational licensing, pink tape and overregulation, alcohol coverage, govt orders and overreach, poverty and alternative, cronyism and different public-choice issues, rising concepts and financial development, and different points as they come up.
