National Conservatism, Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and The Law of Unintended Consequences.* **

 

Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”

Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.

The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out.  I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.

And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.

But Trump's hard to figure.

I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.

I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.¹ 

That's hard to judge at a distance.  Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be.  One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.

Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others.  By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage.  If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock.  He doesn't even seem like the same person.

That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately.  Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent.  People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset.  His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first.  It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.

Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect.  That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora.  Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart.  Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.

If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence.  He's a good salesman.

I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once.  But he is a good salesman.  He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling.  He doesn't have to believe it.

Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell.  They'd often move between one sales job and another.  If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever.  Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling.  It was the selling that they were interested in.

I strongly suspect Trump is like that.

At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016.  Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas.  People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.

Populist Outrage.

Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now.  It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew.  You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group.  But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.

J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.

I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to.  When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence.  That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.

Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable.  He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does.  He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.

He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.

For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.

That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird".  All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying.  If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.

Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.

                               More this                                              than this.

We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020.  Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes.  It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:

Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things.  Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category.  It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers.  Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism.  What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced.  It sets its manifesto out as follows:

1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression. 

2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image. 

3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.

4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes. 

5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end. 

6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed. 

7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs. 

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order. 

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration. 

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen²  and Reno³ do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher⁴ , who for a while just urged societal retreat.  Now Kevin Roberts⁵. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction.  He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic.  It's Amazon write up states:

America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.

In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.

Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.

All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.

The good news is, we’re going to win.

The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.

Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.

The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.

That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.

Vance's biography really demonstrates this.  He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism.  He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one.  Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition.  While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.⁶ 

So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?

It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.

It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion.  Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it.  I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.

So is this "weird"?

Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy.  And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall⁷ and the Simone and Malcolm Collins⁸ of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".

Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets.  The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.

Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird  ⁹ while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird.  If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird.  The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.

Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.

The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart.  Very smart, in fact.  And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not.  Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.

They do.

They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.

But what they've gambled on was two things.  One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda.  They did that for him, through Project 2025.  They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.

They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term.  He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.

That figure is J. D. Vance.  And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.

Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for.  He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump.  Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.

Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.

The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.

Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President.  But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it.  Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.

Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem.  But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.

And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution.  Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt.  Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.  

Footnotes

*  This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.

**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing.  It isn't.  Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.

What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church.  That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion.  Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians. 

1.  I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb.  So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.

It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.  

2.  Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.

3.  R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism.  He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.

4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option.  He's moved to Hungary.  Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.

5.  Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.

6.  It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years.  These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.

7.  Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican.  He's on the fringe right.

8.  Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird.  Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out.  The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world.  They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.

Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.

Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.

Related threads:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and Liberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.

Lex Anteinternet: Project 2025. Breaking it down, part 1.

Christian Nationalism, National Conservatism and Southern Populism. Eh?

Additiona Labels: 2016 Election, 2020 Election, 2020s, 2024, 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, Mike Johnson, Patrick Dineen, Populism, R. R. Reno, Republican Party, Rod Dreher, Ronald Reagan,Catholic, Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, Mike Johnson, New Apostolic Reformation, Old Age, Pro Natalism, Project 2025, Protestant, religion, Simone and Michael Collins, Wokeism, Wyoming Catholic College

Elemental activities.

Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force. 

Hillaire Belloc

A confused liberal notion

There was a confused liberal notion that toleration was in some way a virtue in itself.

Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic.

Hilaire Belloc: On Islam

It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

Hilaire Belloc-- The Great Heresies, Ch. 4, "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed." Published in 1936.

Puritans, Medicos, and thirsty folks. Concepts of drinking and health

President Roosevelt signs the bill legalizing the sale of beer, March 22, 1933.  Contrary to what people generally imagine, the repeal of the Constitutional prohibition on the sale of alcohol did not legalize all alcohol overnight as a Federal proposition.  It came in, in stages.  This is true of the states as well, including Wyoming, which had its own prohibition laws that had to be addressed before alcohol could be sold again, and with Wyoming as well, it was beer that was first legalized.

I've written on the topic of alcohol a few times before here (but not, apparently, as many times as I thought that I had).  This post however looks at a topic that's only been sort of addressed in the prior ones. That being, how much is too much.

No, actually that isn't the topic either.

The topic is, how much is perceived as being too much, which is, after all, a completely different topic.

This comes about for a couple of reasons.  The first one is that I happened to stumble across an item regarding the cause for canonization of the great G. K. Chesterton.

I wouldn't expect everyone who stops in here (not that this is a lot of folks) to be familiar with Chesterton, although I'll put up one of his quotes from time to time here.  He is a man who is very hard to define, so even though who are familiar with him in one way or another may be surprised that there is a cause for his canonization.  Of course, not everyone would know what that means. That is, he's being considered for a formal declaration of sainthood by the Catholic Church.  It's far from certain, as all such matters are, and it can take decades and decades for a cause to be fully examined.  Chesterton is up for consideration, however, as amongst his many writings, he was a true polymath, are a whole selection of those which are deeply religious in nature.  He, together with Hillaire Belloc, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis formed a group of highly Christian writers all in the same period of English history and they all knew each other.  Of that group, all were Catholic except for Lewis, who was a very dedicated Anglican.  Chesterton and Lewis were converts to their faiths, Chesterton having converted from a lukewarm Anglican upbringing and Lewis having converted from Atheism.

All of which would seemingly be way off topic and mostly is.

Anyhow, like all such individuals, there are those who are dedicated in opposition to them, and in Chesterton's case those individuals, apparently have claimed he lacked temperance.

Well, in reading the article, I didn't come away with the impression that he was not intemperate at all. Rather, what I came away with was the impression that he was one of those peculiar intellectual people who we run across from time to time, more in the past than now, who were sort of indifferent to their own care.  It seems that Chesterton was just always sort of personally sloppy and that in addition his dietary habits didn't meet the current puritanical definition of what they should be.  That is, he wasn't thin as a pipe rail in later years (early on he was) and he didn't spend hours at the gym.

He did die, probably, of complications from being hugely overweight in his late years.  But that doesn't mean he was drinking it up for his entire life.  In actuality, there were large portions of his life where he didn't drink at all, or only barely did.  In later years he tended to drink beer by observation, and as he was a huge man, he many have been able to drink a beer more than most people who drink beer might consider the amount you should drink.

Or, rather, let's rephrase that.  He drank a beer more than most people who do not drink beer regard as the amount you should (or shouldn't) drink.  He was quoted on drink, as follows:

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

He also  ate pretty much a meat and potatoes diet, which is also something a lot of people today regard as intemperate.

I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow / I like beer / It helps me unwind / And sometimes it makes me feel mellow.

Read More: Top 10 Country Songs About Beer | http://theboot.com/country-songs-about-beer/?trackback=tsmclip

I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow / I like beer / It helps me unwind / And sometimes it makes me feel mellow.

Read More: Top 10 Country Songs About Beer | http://theboot.com/country-songs-about-beer/?trackback=tsmclip

I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow / I like beer / It helps me unwind / And sometimes it makes me feel mellow.

Read More: Top 10 Country Songs About Beer | http://theboot.com/country-songs-about-beer/?trackback=tsmclip

I don't know of Lone Star is the "national" beer of Texas, but at least by my limited observation, it's pretty bad.  Ack.  But it does show how widespread regional brands of beer have been.

Which gets me to my point.

The way it strikes me is that Chesterton is being criticized by some, as are others, under a current contemporary standard that may not be all that realistic itself, and which may also be very temporary.  We live in a very puritanical age regarding food, and like all things puritanical, the current concepts of what is proper are perhaps not only not well grounded, they are frequently ignored, but they are also the source of much shaming.

Eating a Reuben sandwich for lunch?  Shame on you.

Roast beef and a glass of wine for dinner last night?  Shame on you.

You get the point.

Now, as I've also noted here on this blog, these things really change.  When I was in my teens we were lead to belief that eating eggs for breakfast would surely kill you by the time you were seventeen years old, and probably cause senility, and result in our loss of the war in Vietnam, the triumph of Communism in Cuba, and confusion over whether the Mets or the Yankees were really New York's baseball team.  Now were' told that they are a great breakfast item, and even better if you have them with sausage.

Geez, so people ate like cows for breakfast for two decades for nothing?

Apparently yes.

This isn't to suggest being hugely overweight, as Chesterton was towards the end of his life, is good. Rather, what it is to suggest is that prior to the 1970s, people didn't actually obsess about that, that much.  As we've addressed in our linking in of Fairlie's The Cow's Revenge, there's good reasons for that.

Falstaff, named for the jolly, chubby, king of literary fame.  Apparently there was a time when beer companies didn't think the beer ideal were hyperactive, over funded, 20 somethings who spend all their time partying at the beach but needing to watch their caloric intake.

Part of the neo-Puritanism that we've seen in recent years is a dedicated focus on alcohol consumption. There is good reason for this, but there are also social reasons for this.  Interestingly, the focus has probably been at least as great in Europe as the United States, and in the various European nations, some of which have strong drinking cultures of one type or another, their various governments have taken a role in that.

None of which answers the question, is there a safe level of alcohol consumption and if there is, what is it?

Well, we probably have to start off with, we don't really know.  But what we can also do, is take a little bit of a look at the history of this topic, which might be illustrative.

 You can say "Jax", but I doubt you'll get one.  I've never heard of it.

It seems that people have created alcoholic beverages as far back as we can determine. Alcohol, we know, is a poison, but many human cultures are adapted to intake it at a certain level. That means that for many human beings there is an evolutionary adaptation to alcohol, suggesting that it was something that we took on very early.  And we know from other sources that this is true.  Early recipes for brewing beer go all the way back to Mesopotamia, making those writings amongst the very oldest to be preserved. Likewise, we know that Egyptian laborers in ancient times received  part of their pay in beer.  In the Western Hemisphere, we know that Central American Indians were brewing corn beer early on.  In Africa, a type of beer called something like kraal is likewise a local indigenous drink.  Beer at least goes way back.  Indeed, it would seem to be unique amongst toxins and drugs in that its long, and actually purposeful, associated with our species is has some evolutionary adaptation in many populations to some extent.  Beer is truly ancient.

So is wine, but I don't know how far back wine goes. Far back, however.  It shows up in the Old Testament as a drink that the Jews were drinking at that time, showing that they'd developed the ability to ferment wine quite early.  Christ's first public miracle, we know, was turning water into wine at a wedding.  Wine figures very prominently in the Last Supper and in the Apostolic churches and those based closely on them is a necessary species for the transformation that gives rise for Communion. The Greeks and the Romans of course are famously associated with wine early on.

So people have been drinking for a very long time.

How much they were drinking, and how strong it was, is another matter.   The evidence suggests that wine, in the ancient world, was typically heavily watered down.  Drinking wine was a necessity for a variety of reasons (the water could kill you) but it was also commonly watered.  Indeed, at least the early Greeks believed that drinking straight out fermented wine, which does not have all that high of alcohol content, would make you insane.  And, of course, if you are in fact drinking it all day long, it

might.

Ancient beer was likely that way as well, simply from the brewing process.  It was also flat.  It was, therefore, not only a drink, it was basically food.  Think of it like Guinness Stout.  Low alcohol (Guinness is only 3%) and like bread. Beer, indeed, was likely as much of a food item as it was a drink, sharing a status in those regards perhaps only also shared by milk.

Okay, so that's alcohol in antiquity.  So what? What does that tell us. Well, it tells us humans have been drinking it for a long time and there's also some level of evolutionary adaptation to it in most human populations.  This was done for good reason, water was often dangerous.  However, it's also been known that too much alcohol has real risks, and this too was noted by ancient sources.

Let's take this forward.  Actually, let's take it way forward, as I don't really have any ability with my limited resources to cover it in depth.  We know that by the Middle Ages people were drinking quite a lot.  Something on the order of a liter a day of beer was included in the pay of itinerant farm workers in Northern Europe at that time, which means that they were likely consuming that much, if we consider that such a farm worker likely had a wife and children, and they .  Oh, wait, that means he really wasn't drinking that much. . . .Well anyhow, beer was also rationed to Medieval monks in surprisingly large quantities as well, and they brewed the stuff at that, as well as operating wineries.  That might not be as much as it sounds like either, quite frankly as we don't know how much of that was being distributed to others, but we do know that it seems that the consumption of beer and wine, depending upon region (in the wine regions they weren't drinking beer, and vice versa) was a daily occurrence, and no doubt down to the child level.

Now, this seems shocking, and some people who like to be shocked have been, but once again we have to consider the reasons and meaning of this.  People in the Middle Ages weren't drinking wine and beer because they were hoping to get sloshed.  Rather, they were  drinking this much as the water could be lethal.  Wine and beer is much less likely to be lethal for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, alcohol itself will kill some bacteria, rather obviously.  Additionally, however, the care that goes into making beer and wine, including the vessels it is made in, and the care to the product, helps explain it as well.  In addition, at least in the case of beer, it has a nutritional value that's easy to preserve.  Barely and other grains can be kept, but they do risk spoiling.  Beer and wine can spoil as well, but it's less likely that they will.  It's worth noting, of course, and part of its story, that hard alcohol, like whiskey and vodka, will not spoil.

 Renaissance print circa 1592 demonstrating that there's certainly always been risks on drinking.  "

"Osculum sumis quid tu nisi toxica sumis".  "You would not be getting a kiss if she was not drunk".

Taking that forward again, this also seems to be more or less the rule in the Renaissance.  And perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.  The real difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages is so slight that it might not actually even exist, and rather it might be a creation by Reformation era historians simply to create a distinction, false though it might have been, between their own era and a slightly prior one.

Going on to the Age of Enlightenment this was also true, but perhaps things were beginning to change a bit.  Daily drinking was common, and at levels that would shock most of us.  John Adams, as an example, drank Madeira, a very common and popular wine at that time, with breakfast, a practice which strikes me as absolutely gross.  Ick. (I've find "champagne breakfasts or morning mimosas to be a gross thought as well).  And he certainly wasn't the only one, the practice was fairly common.  Nobody worried a great deal about that sort of thing at the time, which isn't to suggest that people approved of people being drunk all the time either.  The Mayflower, carrying the Puritans we call the "Pilgrims" put in because it was out of beer, not because it was just at the right spot.

A wine celebrating the dueling culture of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.  Personally, I think the very common consumption of wine at the time might help explain why dueling seemed like a good idea. . . .

Indeed, early European Americans had a much closer relationship with alcohol than we imagine.  The Puritans, as noted, did not abstain from alcohol, which makes the title of our entry here a bit misleading, but that's because people have tended to be mislead about this, as well as certain other Puritan beliefs.  The Puritans certainly were harsh on all sorts of things, but they didn't advocate for Prohibition.  And this followed on for Colonial Americans for a long while.  Brewing of beer was common in the Colonies and early United States, as was the fermenting of wine.  Indeed one of the things that British soldiers noted about North America is that the beer was bad, not that it wasn't.

At some point in here things began to change.  For one thing, at least in North America, and prior to that the British Isles, the distilling of whiskey increasingly became a big thing.  Distilled drinks are, by their very nature, quite a bit different from simply fermented ones.

When people first learned the peculiar art of distillation is not known.  Some things may have been distilled prior to alcoholic beverages, such as aromatics.  Anyhow, the process is obviously quite old, but it doesn't seem to have been widely engaged in prior to the 1500s and at that, when it really started coming in on the British Isles, it was done first for medicinal reasons.  That soon gave way to simply consumption.  "Whiskey" is a Gaelic word itself, and the process crossed over to the New World with the Scots and took root in regions of North America that they immigrated to so that even by the time of the American Revolution the distillation of "corn likker" was pretty common in North America.

 

Bottle of Wyoming Whiskey, a bourbon.  Bourbons are distilled from a corn mash.  This one is distilled in Wyoming.  While I posted on this topic quite awhile back, and it was once one of the most read posts on the forum, I don't know enough about whiskey to opine on this one other than that one bottle we had from the first batch seemed good, and the other not so much, but then, I don't like bourbon as a rule.

 

There's something industrial about distilled beverages, and that's often missed about them.  Compared to whiskey, fermenting wine or brewing beer is pretty easy, even good wine or beer.  Distilled beverages are a real process however, and while its certainly possible to do it just because you want to, by and large there's more of a reason to do it than that.  In the case of North America, distilling corn became the easiest way to get remote corn crops to market.  Hauling harvested corn before it spoils to a remote market is tough.  Hauling distilled whiskey less so.

 Really primitive distillery, or still.  Interestingly, a Jewish distillery in Central Asia is depicted here, no doubt a cultural depiction now long past.

The reason that I mention the industrial nature of whiskey, if we accept that even small scale industry is in fact industry, is that this somewhat changed the nature of drinking.  It's certainly possible and not uncommon for people to become beer or wine alcoholics, but it's much more efficient to do that with distilled alcohol.

Indeed, the distinction between beer and hard alcohol and rural traditional life and industrial life was noted so early that it was the subject of an English industrial revolution era etching called Beer Alley and Gin Lane, with Beer Alley being the scene of happy peasant life and Gin Lane being a scene of dissolute drunkenness.  That seems extreme, but perhaps there's a little something to that.  If there is, what it might be is that rural conditions of heavy labor with light alcohol weren't as destructive as urban conditions with hard alcohol.  We might be able to take that a bit further forward and note that the first real concerns with heavy drinking seem on a society wide scale seem to have come in early in the 18th Century, which is not to say that drunkenness as a problem was not noted earlier.  Indeed, St. Paul noted that drunkenness was a condition that would keep a person out of Heaven.  St. Paul, it probably also noted, was a Roman citizen and familiar with urban Roman life, which again may have been a bit different than the conditions that the rural people of the same era generally dealth with, so the same sort of conditions are somewhat analogous.

 Temperance poster, 1846.

By the concern for drink in society really began to ramp up in modern times in the Industrial Revolution, and it does seem that the level of drinking became truly stunning.  Alcohol was largely unregulated in most places, including most of the United States, so no restrictions of any kind existed on the sale of alcohol. Members of all elements of society and individuals of all ages became addicted to drink, and with that the Temperance movement rose.

The Temperance movement came into being as part of the society wide rise in various other progressive movements, some of which are now fully incorporated into the mainstream and some of which have passed into forgotten history.  Existing for decades, the movement reached the pinnacle of its popularity during World War One, and frankly because of World War One, although it had a long run prior to that.  It ramped up, as noted, after the Civil War, and at a time when when various other movements were also in circulation.  Like abolition, it acquired an association with some religions at the same time, although unlike abolition it was not well theologically grounded in that the early Apostolic Churches had very clearly never advocated for the position that Christianity prohibited any consumption of alcohol and they had also always taken the position that wine was a necessary element for transubstantiation.  As temperance movements gained strength in the US, however, some of them mixed their beliefs with interpretations of Christianity that they asserted supported their views.  However, it was a wide scale acceptance in a wide cross section of the American population over a long period of time that convinced legislatures and utlimatley the natioal legislature to ban the consumption of alcohol.  The movement was so strong that it had its own political party, the Prohibition Party, which amazingly still exists.  States and counties began to ban alcohol slowly after the Civil War, even as a saloon trade thrived where legal.  In 1881 Kansas banned the sale of alcohol by way of its state constitution.  Just prior to World War One Virginia banned the sale by statute, taking that step in 1916.

  Temperance poster, immediate post World War One period.

But it was World War One that pushed things over the top.  The fear that the war would turn young men into drunks, which of course sometimes it did, pushed the movement over the top to success.  The seeming veracity of the fear in the post war era brought about the Volstead Act in 1919, and prohibition came to the United States, but not just the US.  Most of the English speaking world also had strong prohibition movements, although not always so strong as to cause Prohibition to become law.  The UK did not, for example, ever pass prohibition, nor did Ireland, but prohibition laws were passed in Canada.  Partial prohibition came to Australia, but not to New Zealand in spite of a majority of New Zealanders voting for it in a referendum (it fell below the required 60% vote).  All the Scandinavian countries passed prohibition bills of varying degrees of strictness, and in fact they still all strongly regulate the sale of alcohol.

 Meeting just days after the end of World War One, the National Conference for World Wide Prohibition.

Prohibition, of course, was very unpopular in the United States.  Part of that was cultural, and part of it reflects a split in the views of different generations, although it is rarely looked at that way.  Prohibition was very popular in much of the United States. As much as it might surprise Wyomingites now, it was at first popular in Wyoming and our very own Senator Francis E. Warren pushed it over the top in Congress. Wyoming, like much of the West, had suffered under a completely unregulated saloon trade that was clearly bad for all sort of things.  Indeed, the law on everything had been very loosely enforced in the "Wild" West to start with, and in much of the West that went on a lot longer than we now recall.  Free flowing, unlicensed, dispensing of alcohol and the gathering of men in an almost all male congress of drinking is going to result in problems rather obviously.  When the Prohibition movement came, therefore, it was very widely supported here.

 

Trade card for Wiedemann Beer. This is a company that I've never heard of, but it turns out, they survived Prohibition, and they're still around.  Apparently folks like Senator Warren, and probably for good reason, didn't think of all the cowboy drinkers being like this somewhat long in the tooth puncher, but more like the ones in Remington and Russell paintings.  Hmmm. . . this graying puncher with mustache and gray stubble is someone I'm starting to sort of resemble. . . maybe I better to have a Widemann's.

It was much less supported in those established areas of the United States with large immigrant populations from Germany and Ireland, which had their own drinking cultures.  Beer was an integrated part of the German and Irish social structure.  Likewise, in Canada, wine was an integrated part of the Quebecois culture, as it also was in the growing Italian community in the United States.  A split, therefore, existed right from the onset.

A Klu Klux Klan poster if favor of the 18th Amendment.  If this seems exceedingly odd, and it is, keep in mind that the KKK was an organization that was racist in the sense of being not only white racist, but white, Anglo Saxon Protestant.  It hated blacks, Jews, and Catholics, the latter two of which had historical associates with alcohol in one form or another.

It also existed in regards to younger Americans who had been exposed to alcohol in a different fashion just recently in World War One. The American troops who made it overseas to the fighting were stationed in France, mostly, and therefore became familiar with a culture that, at the at time, drank daily and fairly heavily.  French water was still quite bad in the early 20th Century and the routine consumption of wine at meals and social events was something that could not be missed.  Troops who served in the Army of Occupation in Germany were additionally exposed to a German culture that treated beer in a similar fashion.  Additionally, World War One came, oddly enough, at the height of the cocktail boom in the US and Europe and therefore officers in particular came home knowing at least one or two cocktails, including the French 75, the recipe for that being:

Pinch sugar

Dash sweet and sour mix

³⁄₄ oz. dry gin

³⁄₄ oz. French brandy

Club soda

2 oz. champagne

Slice of lemon

It sounds ghastly.

And it also would be exceedingly stout, which is the point.  The concept of fancy cocktails of which a single example would make most people woozy and sick in the morning was new to the US, and not really welcome by an older generation of any type, understandingly.

So, Prohibition came, becoming the law on October 28, 1919.

 

A pro Temperance song, with a somewhat creepy illustration.

 Not everyone had always viewed things that way.


Oh well.

But it wasn't universally well received, including, ironically, even places like Wyoming that had supported it all along.  There's something, apparently, about being told "no" that inspires a unique kind of graft, greed and corruption and that followed everywhere.  It became so bad, of course, that everyone knows the end of the story.  By 1932, a mere thirteen years after it had become the law, it started to be phased out, but not all at once.  It was actually stepped out, beer being slowly allowed first, other alcohols being allowed in later.

 Crowded New York City bar the evening Prohibition went into effect, getting their last legal drink.

Unfortunately, really, the law was changed during the  Great Depression, when a lot of people really felt like they needed a drink and some of them shouldn't have been drinking. That masked the real success that even the temporary Prohibition had been.  Health problems associated with alcohol actually did diminish notably, at least at first, and while it was on.  And even after it was repealed, the fact that the states came in and freed things up slowly meant that alcohol came back in with a set of rules.  Really rules that existed for the very first time.

 Destroying individual bottles of beer during Prohibition.

It had unfortunate collateral effects of various types, including wiping out some of the well established breweries and distilleries that had made fine products prior to Prohibition.  Rye whiskey acquired a bad name during Prohibition simply because it had such a good one prior to it, as bootleggers attempted to pass their product off as Rye.  A permanent smuggling culture seemed to arise as a result of it as well, and in some ways that has never left us.

 Budweiser came right back and associated itself with various outdoor sports and farming when it was first allowed back on the scene.

The repeal coming when it did was, as noted, also unfortunate as the Great Depression was not universally conducive to sobriety and World War Two definitely was not.  World War Two had a huge impact on the young drinking and would for a very long time.  The Bill Mauldin cartoons showing a drunk Willie and Joe were really not very far removed from the truth, and a high level of acceptance for casual drinking came into the culture.  Period movies that show hard alcohol being served at any hour of the day and in any setting, including in hte office, are not  far off the mark by any means.  For a very long time after World War Two the expectation that a gentleman would have a liquor cabinet was universal, even if that just meant a bottle of Canadian Whiskey behind the glass is the cupboard.  

This probably only really began to change in the 1970s.  Booze managed to hold its own in the 1960s even against the influx of all sorts of other competing drugs.  Indeed, the wine industry aimed at the young with "pop" wines specifically marketed towards them  In the 1970s, however, the boomers became focused on physical fitness and they started associating beer with being fat.  The beer industry with "Lite Beer", which was generally lager style beer down at or below the 3% range.  Ironically, maybe, English beers that are usually associated with being "heavy" were already down that low as a rule, as they were "session beers", meant to be consumed at a pub session with friends, and hence low in alcohol.  Americans generally preferred lagers of around 5% at the time, however, so it seemed new to them.

A lot of American beer was pretty bad at the time, and had been for quite some time, which isn't to say that it all was.  Starting in the 1980s "craft" beers started to come in and there was a renewed interest in better beers.  Or, perhaps more accurately, Americans became interested for the first time in better beers.  There's been a huge explosion in local and craft breweries since that time, but as that has occurred, there's also been an increased concern about how bad alcohol may before you.  And the concern hasn't just been in the United States, which is sort of fanatically health conscious anyhow, but in Europe as well.

As this has occurred, people have been confronted with a blizzard of news of one kind or another for about twenty years.  Some would suggest, including some governments, that no level of alcohol is safe for anyone.  Quite a few official studies and unofficial ones seem to suggest that a safe level maybe up to three "units" (careful there) per day may be okay for men, and two for women, but others legitimately note that with some drinks, wine and hard alcohol in particular, people nearly always exceed the unit right off the bat.  It's harder to do that with beer, due to the way its packaged, but really easy to do with wine, which is sometimes poured into massive glasses that are never meant to be full, ever.  Same with hard alcohol, particularly in the case of people who don't measure it, and many don't.

So, right from the onset there's a problem in that there are definite health risks.  Alcohol is associated with cancer and liver damage, just to start off with. However, it's also associated with some reduced health risks, such as  reduction, at moderate levels, in the risk for heart disease. Go figure.

Added to that, nobody really truly has a very good grasp of how much is too much, for a daily drinker. It's really clear that getting hammered is universally bad.  It seems pretty clear that exceeding three "units", ever, is bad, if you are a man, but then maybe you should stay down at two. . . or maybe one.  The British government says none.  Health benefits can easily be outweighed by health risks.

Added to that, when exactly a person is regarded as addicted to alcohol is not at all clear.  This is in part because there's a real distinction between psychological and physical addiction, and you can be addicted either way.  Physical addiction is pretty easy to spot in some instances.  If a person suffers due to alcohol withdrawal, and some people can to the extent its life threatening and they really should be hospitalized, well they're addicted.  If a person just feels they must, however, they may be addicted in a different fashion.   

This has lead, over time and place, to actual differences in opinion over what a "drunk" or an alcoholic actually is.  Way back in law school, for example, I recall attending a talk of a student's year in Australia in which he made a comment that the amount of alcohol consumed by many Australians would cause a person to be regarded as an alcoholic in the US.  I doubted that, but in later looking it up that was in fact actually somewhat correct at that time.  They weren't regarded that way there, however.  As another example, some time ago I saw an item where it was being discussed that a worker at the Sam Adams brewery remarked on one of the beers there being his favorite daily beer, with another person reacting in horror that only alcoholics drank daily.  Some may think that, but that's definitely not true.

Indeed, as noted, now some physicians are sort of endorsing the benefits of one drink, or maybe two (if you are male) per day. That's sort of cautious advice, I'd note, as others note that while that level of drink may have its benefits, alcohol's overall health risks out weigh any benefits in a larger sense.

Well, this all goes to this.  Just because in former eras people didn't worry about this nearly as much doesn't mean we've discovered everything.  Nor does it mean that those people in former eras were intemperate.

Which I suppose is that while I was finishing this post, I was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Not a Sam Adams, Fat Tire, Newcastle or Blue Moon, but oh well, some times good enough, is good enough.