Blog Mirror: Just Another Day On the Prairie. Thoughts on "Freedom Day" and the spirit of the times.

I really hesitate to post this, as I don't want it to seem to be some sort of an endorsement.  I'm copying it over as a link for another reason.

Freedom Day

This is from the following blog:

Just Another Day On The Prairie

The diary and musings of an Alberta ranch wife.

So, what of it?

I like this blog as the photos on it are beautiful.  

And also, as a Wyomingite, and a rural one, and an agricultural one in one of my three vocations/avocations, Alberta is part of the same region I'm from, different country though it is.

Indeed, I sometimes think Easterners don't really grasp that in a lot of ways, natives of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Prairie states have more in common with the Canadian western provinces than they do with any other region of their own country.  Indeed, they have quite a bit in common with the highly rural ares of northern Mexico as well, but they very much do with western Canada.

Rural Western Canadians are part of the exact same agricultural/livestock/hunting/rural culture that real Western Americans, not imports from other regions, including quite frankly the South, are from.  Indeed, ranching in Alberta has the same roots as ranching in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado do.  At one time ranchers went back and forth across the border as if it wasn't there.  Many of Charles Russell's paintings of ranch life are actually set in Alberta, not Montana.

So not too surprisingly, rural Albertans, and rural Canadians from much of the rest of the Canadian West, have the same views that rural Western Americans do.

This isn't really true, I'd note, of Canadians as a whole. While I don't mention it often, I'm a dual citizen and hold Canadian as well as American citizenship, but my Canadian relatives are all Eastern Canadians by origin, and their views are extremely different on many things than Western Americans' are.

Now, I mean to be careful here, as I do not wish to offer insult.

When I speak of the views of Wyomingites, Montanans, and rural Coloradans, etc., I'm speaking of their views.  I'm not speaking of the views of Texans and Oklahomans.

I'm not slamming Texans and Oklahomans here.

I'm noting this, because we're an oil province here, we have lots of people here, from time to time, who come from the oil provinces of Texas and Oklahoma.  Interestingly, as Alberta and Saskatchewan are also oil provinces, we also have quite a few people from these regions who make an appearance as well, although they don't tend to have much of an influence on local culture and politics.  Indeed, they're pretty quiet on both, and they'd nearly have to be on the latter, as of course they can't vote after being here a year. Texans and Oklahomans can, of course.  I note this as during oil booms the latter groups tend to be somewhat influential in local politics, and often their local views are imported.  Canadians in the US tend to be really quiet if they're not in numbers.

Canadians in Canada are not, and to a fair degree, prior to COVID 19 Canadians were expressing a fair amount of contempt for American culture.  Donald Trump really brought it on.^[1]

Note, I'm still not commenting on any of this.

What I will note is that open contempt tend to inspire contempt back, and people should be careful about that.

Anyhow, what I"m now noting is that Western Canada has had, for a long time, the same relationship with the Canadian East that the Western United States tend to with our East, and this entry really shows that.  Note:

This Convoy is not just for the truckers mandates. It’s for the 30 million people that Trudeaus government approved to allowed to be spied on their cell phones. It’s for the family members banned from visiting family in nursing homes. It’s for the censorship on all social media platforms. It’s for all the people afraid to speak In fear of being called conspiracy theorists. It’s for the people who didn’t want to give up their freedom of choice! It’s for the people who don’t want to give up their right to bear arms. It’s for the people who don’t want to be in debt for the next 100 years. 

Did you just read a Canadian post referencing a "right to bear arms".

Yes you did.

Now, this post also deals with a lot of other things, and as is typically the case, most Americans are going to be completely clueless about what's going on.  We don't tend to follow Canadian news here, and we don't tend to get it.  Both are inexcusable.

I do, or at least I used to. With the news being what it is recently, I've grown a bit numb to it.  Well, really numb.  I was aware, vaguely, that something was going on, but not that aware.  I had to look it up.

I looked it up on the BBC.

The BBC's Toronto reporter notes (original font, bold text and mother tongue speallings):

After a week-long drive across Canada, a convoy of big rigs has arrived in the national capital to protest vaccine mandates and Covid-19 measures. Organisers insist it will be peaceful, but police say they're prepared for trouble.

The article goes on:

The movement was sparked by a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the US-Canada border, implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government earlier this month.

Upset with the new measure that would require unvaccinated Canadian truckers crossing the two nations' boundary to quarantine once they've returned home, a loose coalition of truckers and conservative groups began to organise the cross-country drive that began in western Canada.

It picked up steam and gathered support as it drove east. Many supporters, already opposed to Mr Trudeau and his politics, have grown frustrated with pandemic measures they see as political overreach.

Okay, a couple of things.

I've thought about noting it before, but because we're so focused on our own selves in the US, we tend to view the entire COVID 19 mask and vaccine story as exclusively our own.  Heck, for the most part, if the entire population of the globe had died of COVID 19 it probably would have taken most Americans a couple of weeks to actually notice it.

We tend to be rather self-absorbed.

Part of that self-absorption, however, is our failure to note that a lot of big social and political stores around here are actually international ones  and some of those have widespread regional expression.  

There have been huge mask protests in Australia and parts of Europe, including, for example, Germany. Refusals to vaccinate have occurred in at least Australia and across Europe as well.

Now, I'll note that as I'm not hugely familiar with this story, I don't want to go too far in commenting on it.  I was dimly aware of some provisions in Canada as a friend of mine had recently been to British Columbia, and I'd asked him about things, and he noted mask requirements for where he was, stating beyond that bluntly that Canadians "didn't tolerate stupidity".  That's a very blunt comment, but I'd also note that my Canadian contacts also would not be critical of Prime Minster Trudeau's policies here.  Frankly, I don't know that I am, either.

On that, our luck in our small family finally ran out.  My daughter now has COVID 19.  I'm so weary at this point, I'm not angry, and hopefully it'll be mild.  She's away from home and I can't do anything about it, or even to help.

And I've watched COVID 19 rip through places I know and people I know.  I don't understand the reluctance to get vaccinated at all.  A rancher I vaguely knew died of COVID 19 and left a devastated widow.  A bunch of people who were with him at a cattle sale where he surely picked it up got it and were pretty sick.  My daughter got the disease, potentially, from being exposed to a person who didn't get vaccinated and who went here and there before that person finally had to acknowledge the infection.

None of that had to be.

Maybe we couldn't have beat the virus.  But our refusals made it certain that we could not.  It will go on to become endemic now.  Is Trudeau being unreasonable for trying to keep American infections from spreading back across the border?

Without really commenting on it, this may be the one area where I agree with Trudeau.  I haven't followed Canada's response to COVID 19 now for some time (I did at first) but Canada has had a hard time with the disease. The US started off with a bad start, but Canada somehow fell into a bad situation.

I'll also note that at this point Canadian news in the US started to drop off because, well, Canadians were suddenly less condescending towards the United States than they had been for awhile.  As the weirdeness surrounding the Trump lie that he won an election he lost has caused many in the US to wonder about the future of their democracy, and many outside of the country to wonder the same thing, that's returned a bit.

That might drop off again as Trudeau went into hiding yesterday during the protests. . . shades of insurrection. . . 

Anyhow, as noted, I don't know that I'm not sympathetic to Trudeau's response here to COVID 19.  Truckers are entering a country where the Omicron variant is infecting many and the chances of them bringing it home. . . well, they seem pretty high.

Which will make this the one area where I'll ever say that, most likely.  I don't like Justin Trudeau as a politician, and I never have.  Indeed, I've characterized him as a soy boy at one point.  

It used to be pretty clear that Western Canadians took a much different view of a lot of Canadian politics than Easterners did, and obviously that's still the case. But for that matter, our regional political culture used to be a lot clearer here, too.  Things like gun control have always been hugely unpopular in the rural West, but even here that's gone from "don't mess with me taking my pistol and rifle out in the sticks" to the "we need to be prepared to fight Stalingrad" sort of atmosphere.  And, starting with the campaign which pitted our current Governor against Foster Freiss, you'd have thought that some people were running for the Governor of Alabama in the 1970s.  Freiss' campaign even sported lightly clad young women in a state which has winter about nine months out of the year, which inspires a "geez, doesn't somebody have a coat for those poor girls" type of reaction rather than a "whoa. . . look at those Daisy Dukes".  Underlying it all, however, the old views, by us old residents, are still there.

Globally it seems a lot of the same strains are also at work everywhere.  Populism, something that never had much of an appeal here, has taken over in the state's GOP and across the nation in Republican organizations.  But not just here.  Populism helps explain how Boris Johnson rose to power in the UK.  Populist dominate the Hungarian government, which is strongly right wing.  Populists threaten to take over the Polish government.  Strong populist elements exist in French politics, and you can find populist elements everywhere.

That would seemingly have nothing to do with COVID 19 and it doesn't, but what it does have to do with is politics in the era of COVID, so it gets mixed in. And there's a really strong cultural element at work here that the political left wants to dismiss and even pejoratively label, but it shouldn't.  A big part of what's given rise to right wing populism is a feeling that traditional culture is being attacked.  To some degree, it is being attacked.

That's serious for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that in the US, and elsewhere it would seem, a lot of rank and file people who are of the traditional culture feel that they have nowhere to go democratically.  People who are basically traditionally Western European and Christian in culture are being told that clearly Christian values are obsolete, their inherited European values are wrongheaded if not outright racist, and they just have to lump it, at best.  

A big part of that has been a radical reconstruction of domestic values, which are inherited from a Christian heritage. Christianity has always focused on families as the center of secular life, and took what was the radical view early on that marriage meant one man, one woman, until one of them died.  Pagans didn't believe any of that.

That Christian belief, in part, gave rise to the success of Christianity in spite of huge governmental and cultural repression.  Christian families were solid because of that belief, and Christians cared for their own in times of trouble, even caring for others where they could.  They therefore survived repression, oppression, wars, and plagues in spite of being in cultures that held "don't be stupid, you can abandon the sick. . .don't be stupid, you can kill the infirm. . . don't be stupid, if you are male you can screw who or what you want, and by force if you want."

Now, we're darned near back there in signficant ways, although we certainly didn't arrive at this spot in an instant.  The assault on marriage began as far back, really, as 1534.  It arrived in a flood fashion after World War Two, with that war having damaged so much of Western morality, and achieved legal assistance from, of course, California starting in 1969.

European values, including democratic values, were also inherited from the Church  A body that held that everyone was equal in God's eyes necessarily would spill into the secular world.  Indeed, the poor and common born could and did rise to position in the Church long before that became the case in secular society.^[2]

Western culture is essentially Christian in its values and even non practicing people, and non Christians for that matter, tend to hold Christian philosophical values without realizing it.  One non-Christian friend of mine, but one who lives in the Western world, noted to me once that culturally, "we're all Catholics".  There's a lot of truth to that.

But progressives have been acting for some time now to rip that down and are offering, in its place, a construct based on what individual's "feel", which is not a very solid basis for any sort of larger philosophy.  Reality keeps on keeping on, irrespective of what we feel about it.

And at the same time, progressives have been big on "you must", including what you must think.  It doesn't matter if your moral code holds one thing, if the current progressive view is to the opposite, you must not think that and you must not say that.  Canada has gone a lot further down this road than the U.S.

But that very "feel" and "must" ethos leads us to where we are now, ironically, in regard to the COVID 19 virus and what we feel about it.  While the science is solid as to what it is and how to avoid it, a nearly century long campaign on deconstructing our focus and changing it into one based on what we "feel", as long as we also feel to be consumers, set us up for the current crisis. And that dovetails into the "must".  A group of people who have been told that they "must" think something that is contrary to centuries of their cultural values and their own experiences, because of what we individually feel, is going to lose, at some point, a willingness to accept what its being told, no matter how extremely well founded one particular item may be.

In other words, introducing these same policies in 1950, in a different U.S. and a different Canada, probably wouldn't be provoking this result, as it would have come in the context of little else being under assault.

Whether it's a 500-year attack on our central foundational values, or only a 75-year-long one, at some point we reached a tipping point.  A good case can be made that for the United States that point came in 2015 and I warned at that time that a Supreme Court case in which the Court sought to redefine a traditional view of the world contrary to the long run of human culture would have future dire consequences.  It seems to me that I was proven to be right.  The Court, in its waning liberal days, usurped the legislatures, created a result, and those benefitting from it, as well as those who were on the political left, ran with it far beyond what was predicted, including what its author predicted.  Where as that result only took one more step on a road that had mile markers at 1534, 1953, 1963, 1968, and 1969, it seems to have been a societal bridge too far.  The same movement had already made large impacts across the globe legislatively, making the US somewhat unique in that it was done judicially.

It is not what a person thinks of that movement per se, but rather what occurs when a very large percentage of the population gets the sense, even just vaguely, that it's being attacked and has no place to go.  In the case of the US, a large, formerly Democratic demographic, has had its economic foundation stripped away and exported, and its traditional values eroded.  Much of that is a rust belt sort of thing, which is where the epicenter of discontent can be found.  But it spreads out elsewhere in areas of economic distress, including the rural West, where what we're essentially told is that we ought to get computer jobs and become urban cubicle dwellers.  Even our own governments aid in this process by eroding, on occasion, what local business there is.

As massive as the change is here, the post-war change is even more dramatic for Canadians.  Canada was a fundamentally conservative country founded in agriculture with a strong tie to the United Kingdom. Going into World War Two, most of Canada, outside of Quebec, was extremely rural and extremely British.  Quebec was divided, but the bulk of the Francophone population was not only very conservative, but rural and agrarian, the only thing that had kept it from being absorbed into the larger Canadian whole.

War, we've noted here, changes anything, and the Canada that came out of World War Two started to change pretty rapidly.  Not all at once, to be sure.  As late as the late 1950s, people moving to Toronto could expect to be moving to an essentially English city that closed up on Sundays entirely.  

Much of that has now been swept away. Canada is an urban country, like Australia is, with urban values.  The US is actually much more rural, by and large, than Canada, in spite of its much larger population.  But the rural areas do remain, and the strong East/West divide does as well.  What's also occurred, however, is a huge cultural shift in which Canada has become a very liberal country.

Or it makes pretense to being so.

In the homes, out on the farms and ranches, you'll get rumblings of another view.  Many I know, and again I know more in the East than the West, are certainly very "progressive" in outlook.  Nonetheless, I could never get a straight answer from anyone why people were enthralled with Justin Trudeau.  And in individual news I see the photos of people visiting the traditional Canada, including Canadians, not the side streets of the Second City.  

And out in the West, Western Canadians often seem distressed about how a society that isn't and wasn't that much different than the Western US has become so controlled in a fashion.  The comment on the Canadian right to bear arms, which in Canadian law doesn't exist, is telling on that.

A lot of these same factors are playing out in every country in the Western world simultaneously.  This helps explain, I think, a lot of the reaction to masks and the like.  People have actually been upset with the direction of things dating back to the 1980s, or even the 1970s.  They're reacting now. What probably pushed them over the edge, however, happened before COVID 19.

These are dangerous times.  The assumption that democracy is an inevitably victorious force is an assumption, not an historical fact.  History teaches us that when a large minority feels it can get no voice, it puts a country at risk.  In those times, the people who tend to pick up the voice are: 1) demagogues (Huey Long, Donald Trump, 2) Caudillos (Franco, Petain) and would be Caesars (Hitler, Putin).

Of course, in such times others can rise to save the day, and that's more often the case.

It's clear that the United States is a lot more down this disastrous path than Canada is, but the protests show that it isn't the case that everyone in Canada is thrilled with the path its been on since, really, 1945.  The same forces are at work in nearly every Western democracy right now.

The solution?  

That may be for true conservatives to offer.  Finding uncompromised ones who haven't sold out partially to populist and demagogues is pretty tough in the US right now, however.  Canada's politics are different, so perhaps they have a different path forward.

Footnotes

1.  Anyone who is a dual citizen or who has Canadian relatives probably speant some time trying to explain Donald Trump and often being embarrased for the country by having to explain Trump.

At the same time, we also would occasionally get unsolicited emails and comments from Canadian friends who were big Trump fans, but had to keep their opinions more or less silent themselves, which is also embarassing as they would tend to assume that any American they knew probably held the same view.  Indeed, the assumption that everyone you know personally holds the same views you do is probably a default human assumption.

2.  Indeed, the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church's prohibition on clergymen marrying came about in order to prevent the priesthood from becoming an inherited position.  After the seperation of the English Church from the Catholic Church in 1534 this was changed in in the UK and in the UK itself the priesthood did become somewhat of an inherited position.

The Conservative Tide?

NOTE:  This is one of the many posts here that were written over a series of days, or even weeks. Given that, there are events in it and references to posts not yet posted, or which were posted, that may seem sort of out of order, as they in fact are.

The crest of the modern, and quite liberal. . . for the moment, Canadian province of Quebec.  The fleur de lis recalls the Kingdom of France, the lion the United Kingdom, and the maple leafs Canada.  Below it all. . . "I remember".

This might seem like a bad time to bring this particular thread back up, particularly on a blog that ostensibly deals with historical topics rather than others, although this blog very obviously deals with a lot of things.

And besides that, the November election hasn't happened yet.

Barack Obama, the nation's first post Boomer President by some measures, or a late Boomer President by others, with Joe Biden (dob 1942) and Donald Trump (dob 1946).

And added to that, much of what we'll relate here is completely counterintuitive. . . at first blush.  Indeed, at the time we're typing this we're about to elect the most left wing administration in seventy years, protesters backing the most radical agendas imaginable have been out in the streets and their views are now regarded as quasi main stream, and the Pope just made a statement that's clearly contrary to long held Catholic morals and which gave comfort to Catholic radicals like Fr. James Martin, S.J. and left orthodox Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, feeling betrayed and bewildered.

Pope Francis, (dob 1936), "A_Szentév_kapujának_megnyitása_2015_-_Opening_of_the_Holy_Door_2015_4.jpeg ‎(431 × 435 pixels, file size: 138 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)"  Wikipedia Free Use.

So you  may ask, therefore, are you out of your mind?

Nope.

Having said all of that, we'll launch in.  If this topic isn't ripe, and we feel that it is, it will be soon.

But it is ripe.

Let's start by recapping the past four years and where that's taken us, although that four is really only part of seventy really, as we're about to end an era.  The Boomer Era.

The Short Term.

During the 2016 election one of the things we wrote about here is that the GOP would have to live with the results of a Trump Presidency.  Our feeling, at that time, was that Trump didn't reflect the old conservatism of the GOP but something else, with that something else being a sort of new, alt right, populism.  This isn't meant as a criticism although some might take it that way.  And frankly our predictions were only partially correct.

In reality, the Trump administration has been exceedingly difficult to define.  On some topics it has definitely been conservative in the most traditional and cultural sense. There's been, for example, no administration that was more "pro life" than Donald Trump's, a fact which has caused some people who would not otherwise do so to support him.  In other ways the administration has been purely populist.  

Personally, as has sometimes been noted, Donald Trump himself has been a strange and unlikely standard bearer for the conservative cause, a rich man with a problematic personal history and a crass personality, rather than a man representing national tradition in the conservative mold.

One thing that seems evident this election season, this pandemic season, and during the Red Summer of 2020 is that Conservatives have done a bad job of defining and advancing conservatism.

It isn't that conservatism doesn't have a set of values, goals and definitions.  It very much does.  It's more like the post Buckley conservatives have abandoned them for something else, even while still vaguely recalling that they are there.  In some ways, therefore, modern conservatism has been a blend of really old conservatism, of the pre Buckley and indeed even Pre Second World War type, combined with a remnant of Reaganism and mixed with populism.  That mix might work, but what it lacks overall is a figure who can cogently distill it into a discernible form.  Buckley, who would not have agreed with Trump on many things, was just such a man in an earlier era.  Such figures as Mark Steyn and Victor David Hanson seem unlikely to fit the bill.  Ross Douthat (dob 1979) might be the most likely person to occupy that position, but he clearly is outside of the Trump arena . . .which indeed may very well put him in first position.

What seems clear to me at this point is that following November 3, which is now very close, there's going to be a Republican reckoning.  If current trends hold, Joe Biden will be the next President and the Senate will probably be Democratic.  There will be a reckoning, we'd note, simply because of the first matter, but there will very much be one if both of those things come true.

Indeed, if they don't, the adjustment period for the GOP will be slower and more measured.  Figures like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham who have been significant Republicans in government, but outside of the Administration itself, will be major influencers in what is to come for the party, much as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been over the last four years.  That this is the case in the Democratic Party may not be evident as its lurched to the left, but Pelosi and Schumer were a brake on that trend. But for them, the party would now be much, much more left leaning than it currently is and chances are overwhelming that Joe Biden wouldn't be the current nominee.  Readers will note that Schumer is out of a position of overall leadership, but Pelosi is not and over the past two years that's been a hugely significant factor in the Democratic Party, which Schumer has participated in.

I doubt very much that Senate Republicans, should the body fall to the Democrats, will be in a similar position.  House Republicans have practically been unheard of in leadership matters for the past two years, which says something quite significant.

So where are things headed?

Well lets look back and look forward, as the direction of things may be clearer than it might at first seem.

In the immediate near term, we'd note, the entire country is going to be taking a big leftward leap. Big.  

But only in terms of the national legislature and the executive.

Now, that is pretty big, but at the same time we're about to experience a "conservative" return in the United States Supreme Court following the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (dob 1972).  That doesn't really mean what people seem to think it does, for reasons we've noted here repeatedly.  But it does mean that the Court may be sending things back to Congress and the state legislatures in record amounts. That will mean that both of those institutions will have to act in areas, particularly Congress, where they have not for eons.

What's much less clear right now is whether the GOP misfortune at the national level will translate into a local one anywhere. The Democrats control eighteen state legislatures.  Minnesota's is divided between the parties.  Every other legislature is Republican, if you include Nebraska, where the majority of legislators are Republicans but where the legislative races are non partisan.  

That's a closer split than we might presume.  It isn't as if legislators elect Senators anymore, of course, which would make a giant difference at the national level, but the seven state lead that the Republicans now have means that a generally conservative agenda will be in evidence at the state level overall, but barely overall, assuming that lead holds.

The Democrats, however, have targeted thirteen states this election where they think they might be able to flip them, and chances are good that at least Minnesota will go into the Democratic camp.  States where the GOP doesn't have a large legislature lead may be vulnerable this election.  The GOP lead has only existed since 2010 and therefore it represented a rightward drift, but that all came before the big left surge brought about by the Trump administration.

The reason this matters is this.  In Republican states legislation will continue to be generally conservative, but probably less conservative, than it has been in the past.  For a state like Wyoming, however, the legislature is probably about to do inot reaction over the next four years.

It won't go into reaction forever, nor will other similarly situated states where there has been an alt right drift, as at a national level things are going to happen that we're not going to like and simply complaining about it isn't going to do anything, nor is pretending that it isn't happening.  At first there will be some naive hope that the Court will reverse everything that Congress will be doing, but it won't.

And that will mean that there's a real danger that states that have been having a strong alt right drift are just going to be left out of things.  In recent years Wyoming politicians that tacked to Trump's views have been frequently in the national news.  But chances are high that the branch of the Republican Party that's strongly associated with Trump's administration are going to be left out of the a re-formed GOP.  Politicians that took an independent view in the GOP, such as Liz Cheney did during her last two years, are much better situated to rise in the party.  

As part of that the days of platforms that expressed really strong alt right concept that had some appeal to that wing, but not to the base, are likely over.  A Wyoming Senator was responsible for the insertion of a plank seeking to "return" the Federal lands to the states even though locals are adamantly opposed to such ideas.  Ideas like that are now part of the past.

As part of all of this the GOP, as a conservative party, is going to have to contemplate what its about.  Perhaps fortunately for it, what it will end up being about is already a demographic trend that will reform conservatism whether it wants to or not.  It's the passing of the bulge in the snake.

Before we get to that, however, we need to deal with society at large.

Or perhaps Boomer society would be more accurate.

The leftward tilt in politics has more than its fair share of young politicians. Still, it's impossible not to notice that is mostly lead by left leaning Boomers who came up in politics following 1968.  People like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer not only feature in it, but still lead it.  Joe Biden can't be really regarded as part of it so much as somebody benefiting from the current political tide.  Kamala Harris (dob 1964) is, however, in the same demographic as Barack Obama, either an immediate post boomer or a very late term Boomer.  Anyone in that demographic, which includes your humble author, can't deny that politic and culture for this gap generation has been heavily influenced by the Boomers.

Now, not all Boomers are left leaning politically or culturally, to be sure. Witness, for example, teh current administration. But the events of the post war era were generally left leaning culturally and became very much so after 1968.  Culturally, the events that started off in the immeidate post war really bloomed into fruition and impacted every sector of society.  Insertion of libaralism impacted all of the political parties to some degree for awhile, and certainly moved the center line of the center significantly.  In the culture the single biggest impacts were the change in the work status of women, something brought about most significantly due to domestic industrialization, and the disastrous Sexual Revolution, somethign that is still being worked out most particularly among the aging boomers who are in charge of cultural definition due to their positions in the world.

We've written about this before here but one of the real ironies of this current election is that in some ways it's really the end and last gasp of Boomer liberalism, just as the election is also in some ways the end of late Boomer conservatism.  Political ideologies that were strongly formed post World War Two are still dominating the discussion on both end of the spectrum. That's about to end, and as it does, what is also coming up behind it is a large demographic change coincident, oddly enough, with the begging of the global decline in the population.

Where we're headed.

The trend was identified some time ago by demographer Eric Kaufman, a Canadian who teaches in the United Kingdom.  A well knowna nd respected demographer, he surprised people some time ago by presenting the pretty clear evidence that, coincident with population decline, there's been a giant increase in the percentage of the population globally that identified generally with what we'd regard as conservative or traditional ideals. Bits and pieces of the trend, sometimes attributed to completely disparate factors, have been picked up from other social sciences.  In some ways the the world has walked out of the long shadow of World War Two and the Cold War and into a new era.  That doesn't mean an era of universal peace and brotherly love, or anything of the kind, but rather a new, and much more conservative, era.

Kaufman noted in his work that the percentage of the population all over the world that identified with traditionalism and conservatism, and even nationalism, is dramatically rising.  And much of it is occuring in an old European cultural fashion, although not all of it.  Contrary to what American pollsters have noted on a very localized American level, religion is massively on the rise globally.  The fastest growing religion appears to be Islam, although there's some doubt on that, but right behind it is Catholicism.  Orthodoxy has massively revived in the Slavic East.  Traditional Hinduism is on the rise in India.  

In individual religious groups, moreover, the trend is even more pronounced.  In the United States, for example, a majority of Americans will be Catholics by mid Century.  Conservative Orthodox Judaism will make up nearly 1/3d if not 1/2s of American Judaism by the end of the current decade.  While "mainline" Protestantism has been suffering in the US as it has increasingly become theologically liberal, conservative Protestants of all types are on the rise.  

Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church in Cheyenne, Wyoming. This Orthodox Church was founded by another Greek Orthodox Church in Cheyenne, but it emphasizes its Orthodox nature and completely omits an ethnic reference.

This is the case in the Catholic church as well, which is overall regarded as theologically conservative but which had a large swing to the religious left in some quarters in the 60s and 70s.  Church leaders in the Church today retain a fair number of individuals who came up in this era and who continue to have a mark upon the church, ironically frequently against the views of their younger parishioners who are theologically very well educated and conservative.  People form the outside tend to confuse this with the "Rad Trads", which they are not, but the mere existence of Rad Trads shows how much this is the case.  Among younger Catholics the line tends to be drawn between the orthodox young and the Rad Trads, which are two conservative camps.  Liberals exist, but they're increasingly a thing of the past and tend to be supported in existence only where there are remaining liberals form the 1970s.

Among the Orthodox in the US, at the same time, and evolution has occurred in which the Orthodox communities have moved from having a strong and declining national identity to instead focusing on their Orthodox nature, which in turn has brought in converts from Protestant faiths which have turned liberal.  It's also caused some Catholics from very liberal areas to make the move as well.*  Overall, however, Catholicism is set to become much more orthodox as older Bishops retire and younger, highly orthodox priests move into their place. As that section of the church has always been well represented, the change will be very swift in the Northern hemisphere when it comes.  It's already dominant in Africa and Asia.

Immaculate Conception Church in Rapid City, South Dakota.  This Catholic Church offers the Mass only in the traditional Latin Mass.  This church is the most frequently searched and hit on our companion blog, Churches of the West.

A lot of this has to do with a focus in these groups on families in a traditional sense.  To put it purely in the US context, but to provide an example that's illustrative globally, the main line Protestant religions have been traditionally white and upwardly mobile, the same demographic in the US which, starting in the 1970s, basically quit replacing itself.  If demographics is destiny, as liberals like to proclaim, that's a strategy for demographic death.  And its now happening.  Overall population in the European world will continue to decline.  In the US its population increase is solely due to immigration, which is set in the US at a massively  high rate compared to other nations.  In both of these instances, however, that amplifies the trend.  In most countries where there isn't an ethos that requires a high immigration rate for misunderstood economic beliefs or myths, the overall population will continue to go down while the percentage of those being discussed here, paradoxically, goes up.  In the US this is also true, but it's amplified by the immigration of populations from religiously traditional regions.

But viewing this solely as a religious family situation would be in error.  In other ways it's clear that a return to traditionalism, albeit modified traditionalism, is now a definite trend.  You can see it in all sorts of things, including popular culture.

One of the oddest things I've seen during my adult years is the explosion of food programs. That may seem like an odd thing to note here, but their existence and their evolution is telling in this context.  

In the 1970s and early 80s there was sort of an odd theme about how young women didn't know how to cook anymore, and young men never had.  There was no such thing as a "Foodie".  Young people were presumed to live on Ramen noodles (which are disgusting) until they married, and when they did they go by somehow if they didn't have means.  If they did, and were a double income couple ("dinc's"), then sort of the social ideal they ate out.  And then came November 1993.

On November 22, 1993, the Food Network began broadcasting. That may not seem significant in this story, but it is.  Prior to 1993 cooking shows were regarded as an amusing anachronism of the 1950s, which were seen as a remnant of an image of the 1950s that never was.  Never mind that the acme of television cooking, Julia Childs, was actually a World War Two OSS agent whose fellow former OSS husband lost his job during the McCarthy era, she and the entire genre were regularly lampooned by the hip, cool, and persistently left wing Saturday Night Live for years.

Well at some point people quit making fun of the food programs, and for their part, they no longer were what they once were. They were hip, cool and aimed at the young, and full of advice on how to prepare the gourmet dishes they were offering at home. For that matter, not all were gourmet by any means, and one Food Network bastion, Rachel Ray, went from traveling on "Forty Dollars A Day" to preparing basic home meals, like your mother who used to cook for the entire family used to make (assuming your mother did that) in thirty minutes.

None of that may seem like a cultural conservative revolution, but food reflects on the culture and it is.  In the early 70s the concept was that the young were getting stoned at Studio 54, and nobody thought of much of the spouse of the Canadian Prime Minster being photographed sitting on its floor wearing a miniskirt and showing too much.  By the late 1970s and 1980s dinc's still viewed eating out as the standard and people proudly stated "I never eat at home". Well, by the 1990s they were and by now a staple of the food channels are home cooked meals for a family, often with an ethnic emphasis.

That latter item also is demonstrative of a developing type of conservatism that's being missed.  For most of American history conservatism was defined in a WASPish way, except in rural areas of strong other ethnic character.  The "Protestant Work Ethic" defined an aspect of American culture and an aspect of "Americanism" was conforming to a certain WASPish ideal.  Ethnic communities strove to conform to it.  One individual I know whose grandparents were from Armenia noted how they strove to abandon their Armenian identification and to be identified as "Americans", including speaking in a foreign tongue they'd not grown up with.  In my childhood many people resented even the commonly claimed ethnic identifiers, like "Irish Americans", and noted they were Americans, not hyphenated anything.  My own father, whose father spoke German and English due to his place of birth, and who was half Irish and half German by descent, never identified with either and never made any effort to observe the Americanized Irish national day, St. Patrick's Day (my Canadian born mother, however, certainly observed it, but in a much more traditionally Irish way).

Certainly, of course, "ethnic" food existed, but it wasn't domestic in the way its become and remained often distinctly eating out ethnic. Nearly any town of substance had an Italian restaurant and, at least in this region, one or more Mexican restaurant. Chinese restaurants seem to be universal everywhere.  But beyond that, there wasn't much, and not much in terms of restaurants that incorporated those fares into their menu outside of those categories.  Our town had a couple of restaurants that were run by Greek immigrants, for example, but you would not have known it but for maybe one or two speciality items on the menu.  When I was a kid a German immigrant had a family diner and it did have some items that German Americans would recognize, but there was no particular emphasis on it (and indeed, well into the 70s in some areas emphasizing a German menu might have been a mistake).  In big cities ethnic neighborhoods usually had ethnic restaurants, of course.

None of that is surprising and all of that would seem to cut against the point.  But here is the point.  Food Network spends hours and hours per day with programming that shows the viewers how to cook Italian (or whatever) meals at home, "like my mother did", with the idea that you are going to do that. When not doing that, its spending hours and hours per day showing you how to make fast American meals large enough to feed an army, or in at least one case how to feed your presumed big ranch family.  To at least some extent, people watching The Pioneer Woman see themselves in her role, the matron of an agricultural family where the men are out working, and she's manning the large capacity and high demand kitchen.

Indeed, riffing from that, television has become fascinated with families in general, and particularly large ones.  The Duggars, a giant family living an extremely conservative lifestyle, commanded television viewership for years before one of their sons took them down due to a fascination with procreating that strayed outside of his family fold and which was generally icky.   At the same time viewers watched "Kate" and her eight children which wasn't any more interesting other than that she had a bunch of kids at one time.  That too fell to domestic discontent, but now viewers can watch Out Daughtered about a somehat whiney husband and his cute but tough as nails wife and their large collection of kinder.  None of this really resembles watching the single protagonist in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, or her friend Rhoda, or Maude.

Indeed one such liberal television female of the 70s is emblematic of this transformation in some ways.  Valerie Bertinelli portrayed the liberal teenager in One Day At A Time in the 70s, a member of an all female household.  Now 60 years old, she's cooking traditional Italian meals on. . . the Food Channel.

Hmm. . . 

Of course, careful readers of this august cyber tome will note that we've noted the moral sewer which is television before and declaring, therefore, a cultural conservative revival being reflected in it is problematic.  And it is.

But there are several things here to consider.  First of all, television reflects back at us as to who we are, but it also reflects forwards as to what the producers are.  Hollywood has been a moral sinkhole for reasons of its own since day one, and as part of that its always pitched as low to our baser instincts as possible.  Early big film productions were frequently pornographic even by today's standards, a situation that was brought temporarily to heel only by the Film Production Code.  Television operated in restraint out of fear of FCC regulation until its boundaries were slowly expanded and broken.    Pitching to baser instincts work, as long as people are willing to tolerate them, as people are interested in them.

But non fiction shows that are aimed at something else appeal at a different level, if even to the same people.  Food shows and shows depicting families are aimed at something else.  That people are interested in sex on television may mean nothing more than than that are interested in sex, although television has certainly been part of the missive change of the Sexual Revolution and the destructiveness that it's brought in with it.  Interest in such basics as food and raising kids are aimed at something else and reflective of something going on in the culture.

Even on the small screen elsewhere something is going on, even if it remains, almost by prescription, routinely morally problematic.  Having said that the recent film Greyhound may be telling.  Taken from the CS Forester novel The Good Shepherd, its notable that Tom Hanks' (who is Russian Orthodox) adaptation is apparently the only Forester novel in which the captain of the ship is outwardly religious, with even the title referring to the New Testament.  In Hank's adaptation he definitely is.  Elisabeth Shue shows up as a love interest, but in a remarkably understated and traditionally Christian way.  The entire movie is one of virtue in the most traditional sense, emphasizing deep personal sacrifice.  Greyhound looks like a morality play compared to The Big Red One, even though, in some ways, their underlying theme is extremely similar.

This is also evident in other activities that people are participating in, some of them now amplified by the Coronavirus Pandemic.  Hunting, an activity that was decreasing in the 70s and 80s, started to rebound in the 1990s and now significantly has.  As part of that women are joining the activity in unprecedented numbers, something that reflects not only a return to the civilization status quo ante, but the way that this topic has evolved, something we'll address more below.  Women coming to hunting doesn't reflect a sort of feminist statement so much as it does an interesting conservative evolution. At any rate, this trend was ongoing before, but the pandemic has hugely amplified it, as it is many of these trends.

It's also amplifying gardening, a highly related activity.

The most extreme version of this is the agrarian "homesteading" movement, featuring a definite misuse of the word. Strongly rooted in a sort of agrarian ideal, it's been it the works now for probably a decade.  While its easy to find information regarding it in the US, it's spread to Canada as well and is also going on in Europe where young farmers have returned either to old farms owned by their families or purchased small farms that production farmers are no longer using as part of larger units.  During the recent economic downturn in Greece, a long term and systemic problem, it was particularly noted that young people whose grandparents had last been on family farms were going back to them, effectively skipping an entire generation in the process in sort of an Agrarian "Okay, Boomer" moment.  The situation in France has been similar, but with a longer generational gap involved.

Women, it should be noted, have been part of the last several items in a way that they were not in earlier eras. Certainly women gardeners are nothing new, but women agrarian farmers in their current roles are an evolution from prior eras. Women hunters and fishermen are at all time high rates in human history, which should show that what's occured, in some ways, is that feminism has cycled through the left and come back out, in this form, on the right.

This is also true of careerism.

The entire story of women in the workplace has been really badly done. As we've noted here before, it was never really the case that women worked during World War Two, suddenly were acclimated to work and then came the "Women's Liberation" movement. Rather, as we've maintained here, the advent of domestic machinery in the 20th Century reached a critical point following the Second World War which made women's domestic labor surplus to the households and freed them for other employment, which they took up pretty rapidly. That was coincident with the Second World War's employment of women in the emergency, but that had also occurred to a remarkable extent during the First World War as well.

What did occur is that a group of social movements, some of which had roots at least as far back as the 1910s, benefitted from this and to some extent co-opted it.  Feminism as a movement didn't have its origins in the 1960s and 70s, but rather in the Suffrage movement that dated back to the 1860s.  The suffrage movement was split all along between radical and focused elements, with the focused element (the majority) really focused singly on the vote.  Radical elements, however, resembled later feminist to a large degree, but in ways that were of course central to their times.  By the 1910s the more radial elements had broken into other causes, with perhaps Margaret Sanger's birth control movement being the most notable. Generally understood later on to be a woman's cause, Sanger's movement had a strongly racist element in that she was fearful of the growth of the African American population.  Nonetheless, the movement gave an early indication on how women's causes were either being developed or other causes were co-opting existing women's movements.

In the 1960s this expanded into a radical feminist alliance with what effectively was the pronography industry following the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control  Playboy, introduced in 1953, taught that all women were big boobed, easy, dumb, and sterile.  With the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control radical feminist allied themselves partially with pornographers, and indeed Cosmopolitan was semi pornographic, in order to argue the easy part as an attack on marriage.  The concept at the time was that with rising female employment, something that had been a year by year feature of the 20th Century since its dawn, an era had now been reached in which marriage could be eliminated or redefined to exclude much of its traditional aspects, and therefore they pushed the "easy" and sterile parts of the Playboy myth, if not the big boobed and dumb parts (Coso women were think, barely dressed, and smart in their portrayals).

With this came the real push in careerism that was otherwise already occurring post World War Two.

Prior to World War Two a majority of American men didn't graduate from high school, although the situation was approaching parity with those who did. A majority of American women by 1940 did, but a large percentage still did not.  My father and his siblings, all of whom were in school during World War Two, did graduate from high school but my father's father had not and in fact had not even attended it.  My mother, like my father, was a college graduate but interestingly not a high school graduate as she'd been taken out of school at age 16 to work.  It's important to note that all of these people were highly intelligent.  It's the situation that was different.

One of the differences is that was that work was generally grasped by the majority of people as something they needed to do to support themselves and their families.  Often the economic quality fo work was judged in that fashion.  Statements at the time, and even into my teen years, about the need to "get a good job to support a family" were common.  I never heard, the entire time I was growing up, about anyone needing a good job in order to buy nice things or go on vacations.  Rich people were not despised but they also were not really quite envied the way that they later were.

All of that started changing after World War Two but it really took into the 1970s and 80s for it to really get rolling. The generation that started the 1970s off singing Taking Care Of Business was digging Wall Street by the 1980s. Entire professions have ultimately come to be entirely money focused the way they never were before.  As an example, in the 1910s and 20s it was common in mid sized cities and even in large towns for a physician to start a private hospital as sort of a community focused charitable and humanitarian endeavor.  By the 1930s communities everywhere had taken over those institutions.  Now, the government owned ones are being taken over by for profit companies.  We've reprivatized, but now with the same focus.

Starting about a decade ago, however, Boomer employers started to notice that the generation just entering work had a much different focus on work.  They were no longer that dedicated to it as an end all and be all.  Large numbers of the entering generation were willing to drop out of work for long periods of time just to "experience things".  Alternative work situations sprung up.  As noted already on the discussion on agrarian returnees, many young, and well educated, members of society dropped out of traditional work situations entirely.

This lead to the quasi myth of the "slacker".  To some extent this image has some validity as some members of the youngest work age generation came to give up hope of productive lives in an economy that's become increasingly urban and alien to human impulses.  And the reduction in the societal expectation that couples marry and undertake the responsibilities that come along with that has lengthened childhood, particularly for men.  But all throughout society the careerist goals and focus that existed into the 1990s has really declined and is almost dead among younger generations.  

With women, this means that the lie about people finding "fulfillment" in their work, something promised by feminist, has been fully exposed.  Almost nobody finds fulfillment at work. Now very few believe that and the discussion about that as an aspect of employment has vanished.  

We're just on the cusp of this development and where it leads is hard to discern.  To an extent, however, it returns people to a more traditional way of looking at work.

Also more traditional is the return of domestic situations which had seemed to vanish forever.  

In 1981 when I graduated from high school it was the case that some high school colleagues were leaving their parents homes immediately and forever.  This view is one that had come up in the 60s and 70s.  But prior to that, as we've discussed before, it was uncommon.  Men usually remained in their parents households until they married, or if they didn't, they usually had what they viewed as temporary living arrangements that were necessitated by work or school.  Women exhibited this to an even larger degree.  By the late 60s this was changing and a new world, imagined as glamours, came in.  This was reflected to a degree in entertainment in such films as The Apartment from 1960, which depicted two young, unmarried, people who had living arrangements reflective of the period.  Protagonist C. C. "Bud" Baxter has an apartment, in a building which we learn is otherwise generally urban and middle class (his neighbor is a married physician).  The female protagonist, Fran Kubelik, is living with her sister and brother in law and engaged in an illicit relationship with the senior figure at her office.

Citing a movie might seem to be bad form, but that 1960 depiction is telling in many ways. Baxter is of an age at which in an earlier era he might be like the male figures in It's A Wonderful Life, living at home if they're not married.  Kubelik isn't living at home, but the female protagonist is living with her married sister.  She's also engaged in an illicit sexual affair but is not negatively portrayed in the film for it.  Her last name, Kubelik, is one of strong ethnicity (Czech) and her brother in law is a blue collar taxi driver.  Without really mentioning it, its subtly suggested that Kubelik isn't really fallen, and the budding romance between the WASP Baxter and the almost certainly Catholic Kubelik will work out.

We can read a lot into that, and The Apartment isn't regarded as a risque film by any measure.  It stands in blistering contrast, however, to Marty, which portrayed a much different set of urban realities just five years earlier in 1955.  The male protagonist is an aging blue collar meat cutter who wants to get married. He lives with his mother.  The female protagonist is an aging school teacher who also wants to get married.  Marty, when introducing his situation to her, emphasizes that he can likely buy the butcher shop where he works.  Both of the characters are Catholic.  A more recent treatment of the same themes is presented in the recent film Brooklyn, which is set in the same locality in the same era and basically treats all of the same issues identically.

Looking at it from a personal angle, my father left home for the first time, to live, when he went to the University of Nebraska.  He then entered the Air Force. But when he got out of the service he returned home and lived at his mother's home (his father had died a decade prior) until my parents married.  My mother, on the other hand, had entered the work force during World War Two due to economic desperation in her family in Quebec.  She boldly moved out to Alberta at the invitation of an uncle who had employment for her there, and who wanted to try to separate her from the situation in Quebec which he felt was one of low prospect. At some point, and I"m not sure where, she lived with her sister, who also had left home and was working.  She came to the United States to be a bridesmaid for another sister in Denver, over the objection of her uncle, and then came to this town as it had work, taking a basement apartment where the upstairs was occupied by the owner and her husband.

Now, we find, press reports that are full of the "new" trend of adult children returning to their parents homes.

This was going on before the recent Coronavirus pandemic, we should note, although there are now lots of news stories emphasizing it in that context, as its increased it. But this isn't a "new" phenomenon in real terms, but a return to a prior living standards, as noted above.  

Some of this is due, we'd note, to the bulge in the snake phenomenon we've noted before.  World War Two brought about a change in living conditions, although it took some time to fully manifest, as it forcibly separated a lot of young men from their households and it demanded the employment of a lot of young women.  When the generation that fought the Second World War was sending its kids to school in the 1960s, in a lot of ways it was sending them away.  This didn't seem that odd to them, as they'd been displaced young, and a generation that had been forced to enter the adult world before its time naturally, if highly imperfectly, saw that as the  norm.  The Baby Boom generation that had experienced that did as well, although they recall it imperfectly.  

In reality we now know that people in their 20s fit into nearly another age related class than other people, or actually do. They're definitely not teenagers but they don't really have the reasoning faculties that pertain to adulthood in the same fashion that adults do.  If they don't resemble teenagers in their thinking they often don't resemble adults of just a few years later either.  Part of the massive disruption brought about by the 1960s reflected that as not only was it a time of great social change and cultural change, but the very young were being forced into it.

Since some point in the 1990s the same age demographic has taken themselves back out of that arena in large measure.  Part of this is that they're simply smarker, and older if you will, than the same age group was in the 1960s and 1970s.  It's created some interesting conflicts as the Boomer generation has continued to assume that life for it is as it was for them, in the 2020s, even though a lot of their generational decision making was horrifically bad.

At any rate, as this has played out, individuals in their 20s and 30s have found themselves moving back in with their parents. A lot of those parents are either very late stage Boomers or post Boomers themselves.  The Boomer generation has reacted with some horror and surprise to this, and indeed, I've personally been told by one 1969 high school graduate that sending children far, far away to from their homes is part of the necessary experience of university.  Maybe it is, or isn't, but if it is, it' ssomething that seems to reflect the view of those who went to university in the 60s, 70s and to some extent in the 80s.  And a lot of that has to due with how people view work, which we've addressed above.  Suffice it to say, however, that if the purpose of going to university is to get a "good job" and then pursue that job at all costs, well that's one thing.  If its for something else, and may even be ancillary to your life, it's something else. That will impact a lot of a person's approach to these topics.

Not everything is changing, of course, and we're also not saying that Chesterton's observations about "going back" are coming into fruition, at least not in full.  But some of going forward involves going back, and cultures are plastic and sticky.  We've been living through an unprecedented era of history that goes back to the 1930s and present to our very day.  The generation that came up in the 30s and 40s is still in power, but it very rapidly will cease to be. The ones taking their seats at the table are generations that have lived in the wake of the history of the Boomers and who have, in varying but large degrees, but unhappy with it.  As the country is about to take a big jump to the political left, the evidence is that they're already looking for the exit to the right.

___________________________________________________________________________________

*While guessing is premature, my guess is that Pope Francis recent statement on same gender "civil unions", made after we started this thread, will cause a small move from Catholicism to Orthodoxy among some Rad Tad Catholics, although it would be a bit ironic as what Pope Francis is suggesting appears to be an accomodation to the current civil reality, albeit one that's clearly extraordinary problematic from a Catholic perspective and one which requires correction.  It's ironic in that the Orthodox did the same thing many years ago in regard to divorce and remarriage, which Orthodoxy tolerates up to three times in some instances.

Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

Wheat field, Walla Walla Washington, 1941.

This interesting item appeared on the always interesting A Hundred Years Ago blog just recently:

1919 Farwell & Rhines Gluten Flour Advertisement

As folks here know, I'll riff off of the excellent blog A Hundred Years Ago from time to time. When I do, I usually have already posted on the thread there and I usually post a link to my item here, if I build one based on one of the many interesting topics there.

In this case, I didn't comment and I'm not going to post a link back, as I want to avoid unintentionally offending, which would be easy to do with this post.

That's because I'm a "Gluten Skeptic", if you will, and somebody there has already noted in a comment to this post that they've had to give up foods with gluten.  I'm frankly of the opinion that most people who give up foods with gluten don't need to, just as I'm of the opinion that about 90% of our modern "must give up" food fads is not only a fad, it's part of the remaining Puritan DNA in our American culture.*  If we're not suffering we're just not living right.

Before we look at this, what the heck is gluten anyway?  Well, here's a snipped from an article in Scientific American:

Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, rye and barley. It's found in most breads, cereals, pastas and many processed foods, according to WebMD. People who have a condition called celiac disease develop an immune reaction to gluten that damages the intestine, and so they need to avoid the protein. About 1 percent of the population has celiac disease.

Wait a minute. . . not only do we now know what gluten is, but did that say 1% of the population has celiac disease?

Yes it did.

1%.

Now, in a country that is as populated as the United States is, 1% is not a small number.  It'd mean something like 3,600,000 people.  That's a lot.

But if you go through the store and read the articles and talk to people who really follow the latest trends in things, you'd be left with the impression that something like 30% of the population is wheat intolerant now, and that's just flat out bull.

The headline of that article was, by the way, the following:

Most People Shouldn't Eat Gluten-Free

Gluten-free products made with refined grains can be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals

Yup, most people ought to knock that off.

The article further noted:

For most other people, a gluten-free diet won't provide a benefit, said Katherine Tallmadge, a dietitian and the author of "Diet Simple" (LifeLine Press, 2011). What's more, people who unnecessarily shun gluten may do so at the expense of their health, Tallmadge said.

This article, I'd note, is kind.  I've seen others that just flat out state that most of the people who are dead set convinced they have some sort of intolerance to gluten are just flat out wrong.

While I'll not go into it, I'll also note that there's some speculation why we've arrived at a point where this is a concern when it wasn't previously.  If it hasn't always been the case that 1% of the population has been so afflicted, then there's something going on. And nearly anyone over 30 years of age can recall a time when there was no concern in this area whatsoever. That would suggest that this is a disease, for those who actually have it that has come on in very modern times. Why?

The same has been noted for allergies, I'll note.  The percentage of the population that suffers from allergies is higher today than at any time in t he past, and I'm in that group.  Why?

In my case, I'm certain its genetic.  I didn't lead a sheltered life indoors as a kid prior to my developing asthma, and my mother didn't douse the house with more anti biologic agents than are used in a biological weapons lab like most modern mothers seem to do (Americans are insanely germ phobic).  It's in my DNA, darn it.  And so is the case, no doubt for most of those with celiac disease. 

But if more people than the historical norm are developing this condition otherwise. . . something is going on.

Humans have eaten grains, we now know, back to the neolithic age.  For years and years archaeologists and anthropologists used to have the nonsensical idea, which a lot of them still advance, that there were hunters and gathers and then suddenly one day farmers sprang up and everyone moved to the farm.  That never made any sense and we now know that hunters and gatherers, in the regions friendly to grains, started cultivating it.  They did that for an extremely long, long time, before they settled on farms.  While that's another story, one we've already told, what that also tells us is that humans have been eating grains for a really long time, although not necessarily wheat for the whole time, but other grasses in addition to, or in place of, wheat.  Wheat has been cultivated, according to archaeologists from between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, which means that in reality it's almost certainly been cultivated for 10,000 to 14,000 years.

It's never been grown everywhere, and that's important to note. The reason for this is that it's also fairly clear, but widely ignored, that individual human populations are evolved to eat certain foods more than others, or even where others are not. This is the entire basis of certain people being lactose intolerant. Cultures that have drank cow's milk for a long time are not lactose intolerant, as evolution operated against that condition.  Where cow's milk was not drunk, it wouldn't matter, and when the ancestors of people from those cultures encounter milk it can be unpleasant.

Mediterranean cultures have been growing wheat forever and it spread all over the grain growing regions of Europe in antiquity.  It was grown way out in the steppes, all over North Africa, as far north as Greenland, and into regions of Africa that are deserts and grow nothing today.  But that isn't everywhere.  That alone may explain the rise in gluten, which is in wheat of course, but also in rye and barely.  It isn't in rice, which is the other major grain spread all over the world.

But it isn't in simply everything either, and if its a much bigger problem now than it once was, there's a reason for that. The reason may not be there and it might not be a much bigger problem than it once was.  Or, if it is there, there's an explanation, but what is it?

One of the hypothesis that was advanced is that modern wheat flours had more gluten in them.  Indeed, the item noted above had been blended to triple the amount of gluten in the what in issue.  At least one study, however, has been skeptical of that explanation.

In response to the suggestion that an increase in the incidence of celiac disease might be attributable to an increase in the gluten content of wheat resulting from wheat breeding, a survey of data from the 20th and 21st centuries for the United States was carried out. The results do not support the likelihood that wheat breeding has increased the protein content (proportional to gluten content) of wheat in the United States. Possible roles for changes in the per capita consumption of wheat flour and the use of vital gluten as a food additive are discussed.

None of which gets back to the item originally linked in. . . or does it? 

A century ago, we find an advertisement, amazingly, for something with added gluten.  Why was that?

One thing is that it changed the consistency of bread, improving it.  It also boosted protein, but I don't know that this was the reason.  Indeed, I don't know what the real reason for really adding gluten was.

Quite a change from what we see today, of course, at the grocery store, where there are things you darned well know never had gluten in them, advertised as "gluten free".

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*The Puritan comment alone is likely to offend some and be cheered by others for the wrong reasons, but its meant sincerely.  One of the real offshoots of the Reformation was that certain strands of Protestant theology that rapidly developed contained a very strong sense of suffering and double predestination which provided no relief from it.  The Puritans, if recalled today positively for their "work ethic" and various virtues, were notable in this regard, although contrary to what people imagine, they weren't opposed to alcohol and they were very much not opposed to marital sex (something nearly completely forgotten about them).

This post doesn't deal with their theology in any meaningful sense, and it's not going to.  There are still those who fairly closely adhere to some variants of it, and this isn't intended to debate them. Rather, what it notes is that their early views and developed ones had a very strong influence on current cultural views, and likewise strains of thought developed during the Reformation continue to have an influence on European secular thought as well, even though those holding them would hardly recognize that and in fact would likely deny it.  A certain irony exists here, however, as the cliches of "Catholic guilt" and "Jewish guilt" are in fact largely wholesale myths, whereas the inherited need for suffering that springs to some degree from the Reformation isn't even really recognized.

The Puritans, whom we used to cite, and did cite up until very recently, as the foundational cultural pioneers of America, were opposed to all other religions and religious tolerance itself, and they were also extremely strictly opposed to a lot of activities that average people enjoyed, including sports, for example.  Activities on Sundays were extremely strictly limited where they held sway.  All this caused them to really be hated by people who had to deal with them who were not Puritans, including outright banning their presence in some areas of Colonial North America, but none the less,  as time developed in the United States, offshoots of their lines of thought continued to be influential and highly opposed to certain things.  Added to this, a very literal reading of certain portions of the New Testament, and the omission of study of others, lead to a sense that everything was foreordained and that most people were going to Hell, which made suffering on Earth the basic norm.  This line of thought, we should note, was by no means limited to the Puritans and it spread to some other Protestant regions during the Reformation, although it did not characterize all of them by any means and it has very much waned even among those Protestant faiths that descend from denominations that were sympathetic to that view.  Of interest to an upcoming post, it spread to Scandinavia late but took hold very strongly there, which has an impact on certain things today.

Be all that as it may, and without intending to offend anyone, in the modern United States the Puritan heritage in particular, and certain reformation strains elsewhere in Europe in general, while very much cast off by the population in religious terms continues to express itself in the idea that we must suffer, and suffering in diet is a good way to do that.  It also expresses itself in a certain desire to spread the suffering in a puritanical cultural way.  A person can hardly go to a restaurant, for example, in a group without somebody who has chosen to endure food deprivation of some sort making it public in the group and basically casting implied aspersions on those who don't join in the culinary grief.  We like to imagine that all of this is very much past us, but it isn't.  A person ordering a steak with a big side of wheat rolls is just as welcome at a lot of dinner tables in 2019 as a person ordering a bucket of beer would have been in 1919, or a person suggesting in a that everyone go enjoy a football game in England in 1645.

Again, this isn't intended to be a religious comment.  There remain those who hold views very close to those held by the Puritans, the Congregationalist is a direct descendant of them, and there are those who hold views that are close to theirs on most things or even stricter in regard to some.  The theological points that could be debated regarding those views aren't going to be debated here now or at any time. Rather, what's interesting about this is that the United States, culturally, is a very Protestant country, as are some European countries, even among those who don't recognize that or who are not Protestants of any kind.  It gets back to our Third Law of History.

A look at Wyoming's economic history and government spending

Today's Tribune has an article by Samuel Western on the history of government spending in Wyoming, entitled:

Western: Big government has been a staple of the Wyoming economy since territorial time

It's a really interesting read.

I'll note that this is a compliment coming from me in that I have sort of a visceral reaction to Sam Western in the first place, and not in a positive way.  I frankly regard him in the category of annoying carpetbagger full of unwanted advice.

That's harsh and may be completely unwarranted, but as a Wyoming native, sooner or later you'll feel that way about something.  We tend to be constantly enduring East Coasters who have no connection to the state moving in and offering advice on how to convert the state into the blight they just fled, or temporary residents who moved into from the country's other oil provinces who are full of opinions on how the state is just like wherever they left or should be.  I don't know that Western, whom I put in the first category, deserve that feeling on my part but I tend to feel that way about him in part because of his book Pushed Off The Mountain Sold Down The River, which I admittedly have not read but which my mother was a fanatic fan of.

Western has a lot of opinions about Wyoming's economy and has managed to go from being a writer as The Economist to being regarded as as local author. I don't regard him as a local author so much as I regard him as somebody whose means or remote occupation allowed him to relocate to someplace else, which isn't like being from the region, or anywhere else for that matter, and relocating due to work.  So, suffice it to say, I'm predisposed to disregard Western.

Be that as it may, his Tribune article points out what Wyomingites simply hate to acknowledge, which is that we're a big government state and always have been.  This goes all the way back to the state's beginning, and at first, because our politics were significantly different than they are now, we were quite comfortable with that.  He might not quite grasp the reasons for that, or perhaps he's unaware of the history of it, but Wyoming was a Republican state early on, just like it is now, but in an era when the GOP was the liberal party.  While the state's typically been too cheap to fund much of what it tries to create, early on the state was "progressive" in the original sense of the word when the Democrats were conservatives who looked back to the ante bellum era to a large degree.

Western's point, I think, is that this impacts the state today, which it does.  But one thing I think he misses, somewhat, is the degree to which that history simply isn't grasped, even though it leaves a large legacy, and the extent to which some current residents claim an imagined historical and political heritage that's actually quite contrary to the actual one.  In our current election year, for example, candidates like Hageman, Haynes or Barrasso who argue for turning land over to the state government are really taking a position that's contrary to the actual Wyoming one, at least historically, in terms of its view.  Or put another way, they're sort of on what would have been regarded as the loosing side of history for much of Wyoming's history, on that sort of thing.