As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city.
Robert Cardinal Sarah
Alaric entering Athens, 395.
On August 6, 1979, Newsweek came out with a surprising cover depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill. The caption was "Where Have All The Heroes Gone". I can remember laying on the couch in the living room looking at the issue. I would have been about fifteen.
That was right about the time the nation was getting ready to see Carter square off against Reagan, and if the author of that article thought the choices were uninspiring, I have to wonder what he'd think now.
Anyhow, in reading about the contest between Reagan and Carter I was compelled to ask my father, "What's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?", trying to figure out what it was, and what I was, in that context. I'm actually surprised, in looking back, that I was asking this question at that age, as in my mind, this was earlier. And in fact I may very well be remembering this inaccurate, as to when I asked this question and what brought it about.
I do recall his answer. He informed me that "the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats".
It was an interesting answer. He didn't say that the Republicans were conservative or that the Democrats were not. He said the Republicans were more conservative than the Democrats, implying that they were sort of in the middle.
I decided at the ripe old age of 12, or so, that I was more conservative, and therefore I was a Republican.
When I registered to vote six years later, I in fact registered as a Republican, which is what I thought I likely was. It didn't last a real long time, however, as by age 20, I was registering as a Democrat.
Conservation was the reason why. Even by my late teens I as clearly a conservationist, and I teetered on the edge of, and crossed into, environmentalism. While I didn't see myself being on the political left, those around me did. I recall one friend of mine in junior college, who had known me since high school, remarking in a conversation about the Vietnam War protests that if I'd been college age at that time, I'd be in the protesters, a comment that really surprised me as I was in the National Guard at the time, and I was a defense hawk, part of the reason I'd originally registered as a Republican. The now late mother of a friend of mine loaned me The Monkey Wrench Gang on the basis that I'd like it, and while I was surprised by that when I read the cover about a group of fictional who were basically environmental terrorists, I in fact did like the 1975 Edward Abby novel. It probably didn't hurt that I had a crush on the daughter of that lender, the sister of one of my friends, and that entire family were obviously environmentally centered, eccentric, Democrats.
It wasn't a facade, however. I wasn't a DINO, if there is such a thing. Going through my undergraduate years and through law school, and into at least my first decade of practicing law, I remained a Democrat. It was rural issues that did it. The Democrats were for preserving the wilderness, at a time that the Reagan Republicans never saw a tree they didn't want to cut down. The Democrats were for keeping Wyoming's wildlife a public resource when a Republican legislature wanted to give it to landowners in a bill, I'd note, that our current Congressman's father promoted. The Republicans always saw wild lands as something to be exploited, the Democrats normally saw them as something to be preserved.
Ultimately I left the Democratic Party for the Republicans as I couldn't stomach being in a party that embraced death so closely. I wasn't alone. Really significant Wyoming Democrats, like Ray Hunkins, who had campaigned as Democrats, left the party and became Republican politicians. The overall impact was a good one, however, for the state's GOP. It took a party that was already highly independent and frankly middle of the road on most things, and made it more so. It was a Wyoming Party.
Those days are dead and gone.
It's hard to describe where we are politically in this country today, and that's in no small part because it's hard to explain where we are culturally. The absolute insanity of social movements in the Western World, unleashed since the annus horbillus of 1968, but with roots dating back at least to the 1790s, has created as sort of cultural hellscape which now, very late in the day, average people are reacting to, but reacting in way that expresses their ignorance of their own culture and existential nature. It's been a long time in the making.
Some thirty years ago I was at a not very well done bachelor's party, no not one of that type, that I hosted for a friend getting married. At the party was a young man who had just been admitted to a university in New York. He was pretty impressed with getting into it, and had already taken up calling New York City, "the city", even though he knew just about as little about NYC as I did.
At the party he raised the question of whether the United States was existentially a liberal, or conservative, nation. In thinking about it there in my late 20s, when I was somewhat more liberal than I am now, I thought the country basically existentially liberal.
I'm not certain that I think that now. But then, back then, in the late 1980s, being liberal didn't mean I had to pretend that biological truths weren't just that, truths.
Educated people, including educated conservatives like me, as that's basically what I am, are to a large extent baffled by the phenomenon of Donald Trump. How, we wonder, could anyone vote for a person like him, particularly after he attempted a coup to overthrow the 2020 election?
The Judicial Coup of 2015 has everything to do with that, as we warned that it would, in 2015.
Yes, we warned what was in store:
And we warned about it more than once.
We educated people, including we social conservatives, had acclimated ourselves to accepting that an unelected body of jurist could decree social liberality on the society, and everyone had to accept it. To a large extent, frankly, we grew comfortable with being conservatives of varying stripes, but not getting much of what we wanted.
Obergefell was clearly a bridge too far, and it was right from the beginning. And what liberals promised, that "this would never mean", very rapidly turned out to be a whopping lie.
The contempt that's come for evolutionary biology and basic nature out of the American left, and indeed, the European left, since 2015 has been epic. But it didn't start in 2015. It started well before, with major events marking the path. May 9, 1960, the entire year of 1968, 1969, 1973. What marked it all, during the very period in which the left embraced everything in nature outside of ourselves, was the rejection of our natures. We didn't see ourselves as men in nature any longer, but like gods, outside of it.
What the left apparently they didn't grasp is that no matter what the educated conservative "establishment elite" was willing to accept, the rank and file, instinctively conservative middle, wasn't, and isn't, once things went too far.
For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.
If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
1 Timothy, Chapter 6.
At the same time, however, a combination of two of the oldest malevolent forces in the world had already united to make any reaction abhorrent. Ignorance had combined with greed.
People like to spout a lot of babble about the settlement of North America, and the United States, that is just that. People imagine that hardworking benighted immigrants came in and built a new land out of the sweat of their brows. Yes, there's an element of truth in that, but the larger truth is that they were massively assisted by their governments, which removed the native population by force at public expense, and then sold or gave the land to the settlers for no value or grossly undervalue. It's impossible to look at what occured and not regard it as deeply immoral, and claims to the opposite as deeply hypocritical. When Wyoming politicians today proudly declare that they're fourth generation Wyoming rancher who built their enterprises from nothing but their own hard work, they're deluding themselves. Their ancestors were, as a rule, dirt poor people who benefitted from what was effectively a government hand out, in part, and in part from a program that made that possible by what today would be regarded as ethnic genocide.
There's really no two ways about it.
Nonetheless, in being honest about it, we can also be honest about the fact that the beneficiaries of those programs did not have in mind killing people.
They also largely didn't have in mind getting rich.
The goal was to have a family, and provide for it.
We recently spent a lot of time on our companion blog looking at the laws and social conditions prior to the fateful legislature of 1977. Those laws were geared towards that end. And, prior to the 1970s, the laws in the country largely were. Laws on "domestic" topics were geared towards the preservation of the family and the protection of children.
And before Ronald Reagan, the tax structure and the structure of the Federal Government was aimed at regulating excessive accumulation of wealth and reigning in big business. It was widely held, and correctly, that people needed protection against large business and that vast accumulation of wealth could result in the wealthy paying their own way. The wealthy were not worshiped, and big business was not seen as the little man's friend.
A figure like Donald Trump was not regarded as admirable.
Reagan came in and changed that, selling the public the lie that as the wealthy got wealthier everyone else did as well. It made some sense, until you thought it out. And to a certain degree its true, as the wealthier a society becomes, the wealthier everyone in it is. But it only goes so far, and it didn't go nearly as far as its backers claimed. Moreover, the advance of technology, accelerated by World War Two and the Cold War, marched on irrespective of tinkering with the tax rates, and that is likely what made the reason difference.
Something that didn't withstand the tinkering was the assault on education. The Great Depression, followed by World War Two, followed by the Cold War, had emphasized the need for science and engineering like nothing else. World War Two, in turn, flooded universities with servicemen after the war, making college educations common. But with Reagan came a reduction in support for science and engineering. University remained important, but degrees suffered value erosion. Degrees like law, which could be societally beneficial, or destructive, evolved towards the latter, as a Reagan era emphasis on greed set in.
Just as societal structures started to break down due to the battering rams of the left, therefore, they were replaced by a lack of education and an emphasis that everything was about money. It was not a combined intentional attack. The left would not have made everything about money, and the right would not have broken down societal structures, but the combined assault of both had that effect. This left an American, and Western, culture with no existential values and nothing to measure individual self-worth other than economic success. Like the concurrent assault of Germanic, Slavic, and Eastern tribes in the Middle Ages, the damage on the American metaphorical Rome was too much to bear.
Rome, of course, had the Church. And as Rome fell, the Church stepped in, preserving what was worthwhile of the existing culture, and educating the Barbarians. The United States is not, however, Imperial Rome. When Rome fell, which was over time, the Roman culture could look towards the Church and realize that it held existential truths Roman civilization did not. As the American culture falls today, it has instead the adulterated American Civil Religion, a light and reduced content variant of original strict Protestant sects that reflected the product of the Reformation. And people retain their native instincts, although not in a restrained or educated fashion.
This has left the reeling street level populist reacting against things they know are wrong, but mixing them with ignorance and confusion. That it's absurd that some claim there are more than two genders is self-evident, and wrong, and that steps like Chloe's law must be taken to combat it is apparent. What is not is that this depraved state of affairs stems from one that divorced sex from marriage, or the concept that marriage is natural, and not a set of highly advanced sexual dates which allow for discarded partners. Hence, you have some railing against sexual mutilation, who practice chemical sterilization, or who are serial polygamists themselves.
And the substitution of money as the supreme value over family remains in the same class, with some seriously believing, as some have asserted since the 1980s, that God basically endorses their occupations as surely he must. It can't be the case, they think, that their occupations could do harm. Therefore, you have those who, like James Watt, can't grasp the thought that natural resources must be conserved, and that this is conservative, let alone that there are things that are being economically exploited which may very well destroy the ability for us to exist. In their heart of hearts there are those on the populist right who believe that the use of fossil fuels is Divinely sanctioned, just as there are those on the left who believe that altering our psychological and physical natures is some sort of existential, if not Devine, right.
This sort of thing has put us in the untenable position we now find ourselves it.
It ought to be possible, in other words, for a thoughtful conservative to oppose infanticide, genocide, and ecocide. That is, it ought to be perfectly possible to oppose abortion, gender mutilation, Russian aggression in Ukraine while supporting conservation and indeed be concerned about the environment. That would, in fact, be thoughtful conservatism.
There's no need, and indeed no sense whatsoever, in feeling that because you are worried about gender disorder, that you need to support Putin in Ukraine, or hail a serial polygamist as somebody who presents as a modern Cyrus the Great.
But where to go from here, especially for a thoughtful conservative.
It's clear at this point that neither the modern Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to do anything to solve this. They are both too far corrupted in an existential sense. The Democratic Party is virtually at war with Human Nature and the Devine, while the GOP is at war with intelligence, Science and thought. Between the two parties, the Democrats have revived a belief in democracy they lost in 1973, however, whereas the Republicans view everyone who doesn't agree with their Caudillo as a class enemy.
The populists know that something is deeply amiss with the assault on human nature. The progressives know that there's something deeply wrong with the assault on science and nature. Progressives sense that a worship of money is wrong, whereas the Republicans are outright worshiping it. Populists sense that a worship of yourself as a demigod is perverse, but only embrace that up to the point that it's not personally inconvenient.
National Conservatives and their fellow travelers claim they're the answer. C. C. Peckhold, a university professor who seems to be in this camp, gives about as good of a justification of this as can be given in an episode of Catholic Answers live that's well worth listing to, but also a little disturbing in some ways as well. Like Patrick Dineen, he's big on "order".
What he seems to be missing, in so far as that interview goes, is that corporate capitalism has imposed its own order. He regards "liberalism", as in the classic meaning of this word, to be the problem, and seeks a "post liberal order", and is one of the contributors to the Post Liberal Podcast whose blog we've linked in our companion site as its interesting. What they miss, however, is that what they are seeking is effete, which to a large degree is what took down "post liberalism", by which them mean the pre liberal ancient regime, and that it was also corrupt, as concentration of order encourages corruptness. Indeed, that's what we have now, to a degree, concentrated in capitalism.
Only in a Distributist Agrarianism, by whatever name, is the solution to this found.
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