As you know, I’ve moved to Tennessee. I did this with Andrew Isker and the various people involved in the Ridge Runner initiative. It’s been over a year since I gave an update. And you need to know what’s going on!

New Christendom Press really set off momentum with their plea for building Christian Boroughs. Our American empire is in tumultuous moments, and our culture—our anticulture—is in dire straits. Rather than wallowing in it, we all have to do what we can to rebuild, and set the stage for an epoch of rebuilding. Setting roots, creating businesses, helping families survive through the crisis.

I’m intensively busy in the building of the Tennessee outpost of this meta-project. Ridge Runner has purchased, among other things, a massive area in rural Tennessee where many families over the coming years will join us in setting up homes and lives here. Already we have 20+families. And we anticipate hundreds.

At the center of the flagship development is a church, architected with meaning, built slowly and with care and longevity in mind. It will provide a spiritual home for the people of Whitleyville Reformation Church.

But that is not all that I am doing. I am working on—to be vague for the moment—an alternative funding enterprise to help with construction loans for families who want to build outside the banking cartel system. I am also building a gas and general merchandise storefront (Rockwell’s!) and going through the regulatory and legal requirements of this. I am working on other things too: sales team programs to provide jobs, some manufacturing infrastructure for jobs, farmstead networks, civil rights initiatives (to be announced) related to Heritage Americans (which of course transcend the TN borough) and so much else.

I’ve signed a book deal with NCP for a book on Heritage Americanism. Andrew and I are completely revamping the Contra Mundum podcast— the Appeal to Heaven history series is in production, and I’ll even now have my own discussions format without Andrew, to couple with our flagship show which is now pre-recorded and pre-produced for quality. I’m doubling down on my Canterbury Trails podcast with Jared Lovell and upping the quality of this Anglican-inspired show.

Canterbury Trails and the Contra Mundum Discussions show will premier every Wednesday (starting tomorrow!)

Blood and sweat and savings are all being poured into this.

But the church! The church is the center of it all. It unites the families, provides spiritual sustenance for longing families, and a home in which we can worship and fellowship.

People ask, with all this, how they can help. Is there investment opportunities? Yes, please. But more than that, I don’t need direct funds. I need the church to grow. If you have investment interests, you can message me. But please consider supporting the church itself. It costs about a million dollars to build this thing right, and also to support staff and overhead in the meantime. Just throw in $50 or $250 if you can. Some of you can do more.

WhitleyvilleChurch.com/donate

It is the center of all this. It is the center of us all. Please help us build. From time to time, Christendom depends on mutual aid. What can you do?

Thanks to all and contact me at any time: cjay.engel90[at]gmail[dot]com.

Since my last post here at my Substack, I’ve uprooted everything to move my family across the country; and it’s been a whirlwind. Naturally, there’s not a high demand for my soulful reflections on leaving my homeland, so I’ll keep it to a few sentences before moving on.

I’ve never moved before and my family has deep roots throughout Northern California. I also very much have a rooted frame of mind in which a significant aspect of my own identity is mixed with the pine tree-laden periphery of my childhood. I thus left my soul in the forests of the West, but felt a strange conviction that I needed to do it. So we packed and left. And here I am.

Here I am in Middle Tennessee, taking part in a regional vision where my friends and I are betting on meta-trends that will reinforce a natural cultural segregation. This segregation is such that conservatives will seek to live peacefully with conservatives and liberals will seek to live—elsewhere—with liberals. America is ideologically and culturally bifurcating and I am here to set something up that might last beyond my own life.

Since I’ve been on the ground, certain internal trends of my own mind have been allowed to release and express themselves into my real life—something that wasn’t really possible where I was. I look forward to being more involved in a local SACR chapter—which is a civil renewal organization— that we are starting in Middle Tennessee and considering further how I might be involved in the broader reinvigoration of the American Right.

I was able to bring my business out here and jumpstart the whole thing into a new market on the East Coast and the Southeast. I am excited to be growing it and challenging myself to be a good steward of employees, hard assets, manual labor, and so forth.

Things are growing quite swiftly with the Contra Mundum podcast I do with Andrew Isker—we have just this week announced an official partnership with New Christendom Press. NCP will serve as our production partner and will platform our various media endeavors on their network as part of a broader initiative to unite the New Christian Right. Our site has the specifics on support and new media release schedule.

Here is a recent promo for our new series:

I’ve also been given an outlet to develop myself theologically into more of an Anglo-Lutheran direction— away from my 1689 Federalist past. I am able to do this through my participation in a new (small—for now) podcast with Jared Lovell, by serving in a layman capacity at a local church (more on this later), and by helping to publish the physical edition of the North American Anglican journal.

The other big news is that Stephen Wolfe and I have just signed an editor’s agreement with New Christendom Press for a new volume on the New Christian Right. More on that soon—but it will be a rallying cry for our group, as a vanguard of the blossoming American Christian right wing. We look to a political ethos of renewal and reinvigoration of our heritage; we seek to be forward looking, yet well founded on the heroes of our past.

And by the way, the Paul Gottfried biography continues—slowly, but surely. Hope to have the draft finally completed end of summer.

I will also be on panels at the New Christendom Press conference in June and the Right Response conference in April, and will be speaking again Grace Anglican Church’s October conference—this time on the theme of vocation and work.

Our age is one of a mixture of tragedy and hope. The America of our fathers remains unrecoverable, yet there also exists an exhaustion of the postwar American Regime such that it is possible to carve out for ourselves—and our posterity—something that may indeed thrive. The technological system at the center, I am convinced, will actually grow worse in several aspects. But the nature of this new system will allow manifestations of the Network State for those that can break out.

The future remains perilous in many ways, though I believe strongly in a return of a Heroic Dynamic--that may yet allow for various regional fortifications. And that’s what I’m doing in middle Tennessee—far away from the American promised land of California, yet with eyes fixed on the future stage of our human drama.

Perhaps I’ll have the time to write more about it as I go.

I recently responded to an Ad Fontes essay by John Ehrett. I corrected his presentation of the Schmittian political framework. Read it here at American Reformer.

As the New Christian Right continues to blossom and absorb the literature and philosophy of Right wing thought from over the centuries, they are taking on a much more self-consciously anti-liberal framework. While the postwar liberal consensus would emphasize things like individualism, ethnic neutrality when it comes to culture, and America as a nation of universal propositions, the true Right has long opposed all these things.

CONTINUE READING AT AMERICAN REFORMER.

I have a long essay posted over at American Reformer today. It’s a truncated look at Sam Francis’ concept of the Revolution from the Middle, along with some other derivative thoughts on how we Heritage Americans ought to think about things moving forward, in a political environment that is increasingly hostile.

I published it over there, because I think it needed a bigger audience—but please like or comment and give me feedback here at Substack too. I want to have these types of discussions.

As some of you know, it is very likely I will be leaving my homeland of California this year. Part of the reason for this is that I want to act in precisely the way I call for in this article. The details of this move will come later this summer. This article drives at the spirit of my move

It was intended as a set up for a follow-up essay exploring the application of the politics of Andrew Jackson, and a call for a New Jacksonianism.

Give it a read! Here is the link.

As the modern world continues to crater, and our culture of material desire caves in on itself, many are jostled from positions of ideological comfort and are seeking a fresh orientation in something more permanent. Something that precedes the moment. One significant way this manifests itself is a large movement away from nineteenth and twentieth century evangelical trends, back toward religious expressions that are more deeply rooted. I myself have felt this pull, thrusting me back into Augustine and Athanasius, the Anglican Divines, first and second generation Lutheran theologians, the Magisterial Reformers, and other traditions within the catholic faith. A few days ago, I spoke for Chronicles Magazine with an old friend who has sought spiritual refuge in the Orthodox tradition.

The question that seemed relevant to my mind was: how do I engage more meaningfully in the Christian tradition in a way that isn’t itself just pure emotion; a catapult of reaction against the dead end of materialist modern secularism, in all its rationalist, scientific, individualist, and nominalist trappings? That is, where do I turn? There’s obviously much to cover if I’m to express the developments of my own faith and its trajectory—people may know my background is Reformed Baptist—but I suppose I could kick things off in the realm of metaphysics.

The reason for this is several-fold. First, it is clear that post-enlightenment Evangelicalism is metaphysically bankrupt. I am completely convinced that the secularization of our world is downstream from the collapse of classical metaphysics. Certainly, this isn’t any particularly novel insight among conservative Christians—there are legions of books and projects being produced in the genre of repudiating the nominalism of early modern Europe. But secondly, one cannot understand earlier meanings of religious symbols and dogmas without first setting them in what is by now a foreign metaphysical landscape. How can I properly interact with the Sacraments unless I first absorb the metaphysical bedrock on which they were developed? Doctrine is downstream from our deepest vision of the cosmos.

One book I read recently that touches on these topics provides a decent starting place for such a discussion. The book is Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. I can use this book as a foil for discussion, but please note that this post is not a full review or interaction with all its themes.

One of the interesting things that came out of reading this, is that it proved to be the singular area of my thinking where my oldest convictions about some theological topic were reinforced, rather than challenged. In short, Boersma makes the case that the Platonic-Augustinian tradition needs to be kept distinct from the Scholastic-Thomist tradition.1 This book is, in part, intended to address the crisis of Modernity within the Christian religion; and rather than having us return to Thomas Aquinas to save ourselves from Nominalism, Boersma points to the Neo-Thomists for the rise of Nominalism in the first place.

In this way, clearly, Boersma has been influenced by the work of Henri de Lubac and the French ressourcement movement in the early twentieth century.2 For my own purposes, I was interested in understanding the relation of the collapse of the Platonic-Christian metaphysic and the rise of materialist Modernity, especially taking into account the question of the Protestant Reformation. These nouvelle theologie Catholic philosophers were controversial in the midst of Roman officialdom because they refused to lay the blame for the collapse of traditional metaphysics at the feet of the Reformers alone, though of course they were not Protestant sympathizers—perhaps this makes their case more compelling. In any case, in their estimation, such a cheap exercise in finger-pointing was intellectually lazy. In this way, far from embodying any sort of “New Theology” (nouvelle theologie was the label applied to them by their critics), this group sought a sort of philosophical return to the first millennium.

Many of us have heard the meta-narrative offered by Roman Catholic apologists to explain the collapse of Christendom and the rise of twentieth century materialistic modernism: Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformers abandoned the medieval synthesis, built a system on top of the new trend of European nominalism, and everything was downstream from this fatal decision. There are several angles one can take to interact with this narrative, one of the most obvious ones is to recognize that, whatever one can say about Martin Luther’s personal education background, Richard Muller and others have gone to gargantuan lengths to describe the post-reformation Protestantism as a sustained project in the rediscovery of Scholasticism. Imagine, for instance, calling Richard Hooker or Francis Turretin a Nominalist.

The Lutheran popularizer Jordan Cooper has spent a decent amount of time pointing out the blatant nominalism assumed in the most important Roman Catholic philosophers in post-1600s Europe, working as they did to counter the effects of the Reformation and struggling to uphold the Rome’s hegemony in an age of Christendom’s fractioning.

Boersma takes another helpful approach that can be implied in the historical work of Reformation scholars such as Heiko Oberman (who also influenced Matthew Barrett’s Reformation as Renewal). Here, the emphasis is on the fact that Nominalism was born in the context of the Roman Catholic Church. For over two hundred years prior to the Reformation, Thomism was undermined and challenged from within. The Roman Catholic Church was therefore the garden in which the seeds of modernism were planted, sponsored, cared for, and raised; strongly preceding Luther and the Protestants. So why blame Protestantism?

But what Boersma also observes is that Protestants failed to reverse the trajectory that had long been built into the theological cake. The ultimate problems were not yet on anyone’s radar. Instead, the mainstream of Protestants took the metaphysical trends in one direction, while the counter-reformers took them in another. Neither group saw clearly the metaphysical vision that long preceded the rediscovery of Aristotle. The Roman counter-reformers sought to dogmatize Neo-Thomism, and the Protestants spent little time on metaphysics, concerned as they were on more specific doctrinal formulations and practical political-ecclesiastical concerns. Boersma’s approach is not necessarily to scold either party for spending their limited time on the matters of the day, but rather to lament the entire meaning of the dynamic from a distance, from the advantaged standpoint of twenty-first century, looking back on it all.

Boersma states on page 87:

“What the positive effects of the Reformation failed to do was repair the tapestry that the late Middle Ages had unravelled and cut. In other words, the Reformation, while focusing on doctrinal issues and abusive practices that certainly needed to be addressed, failed to address appropriately the underlying problems that had given rise to the need for reform.”

Boersma argues that it was in its very response to the Protestant Reformation that Rome solidified its commitment to (a particular reading of) Thomas Aquinas, when what they should have done was worked to rediscover the Christian Platonists. And at the same time, the Protestants should have ground their own doctrines more explicitly in the pre-scholastic era of the Church Fathers. This latter point strikes me as not entirely fair. While it is obviously true that post-Enlightenment Protestantism—and certainly American evangelicalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—constitute a vacuum of historical depth, reading Calvin and Luther and others of that era demonstrates their fealty to the early Church Fathers over against the Scholastic philosophy of the Late Middle Ages.3 And scholars like Torrance Kirby have gone to impressive lengths investigating the explicit Augustinian-Platonism of the Church of England’s Richard Hooker.

Connecting modern evangelicalism to historic Protestantism serves the interests of both Rome (in their Decline theory of the Reformation) and Modernist Evangelicalism (in their Whig theory of the Reformation). But both interpretations are unsustainable. At the same time, what appears fair to both the modernist evangelicals and the committed post-Trent Roman Catholics, is that Western evangelicals have had, in the post-Enlightenment era, a poor relationship with the Augustinian tradition. That is to say, there is an important line of severance between nineteenth/twentieth century evangelicalism, and the first several generations of Protestant Reformers. But I digress.

The Great Tradition

Boersma advances what has been referred to as the Great Tradition, but does so in a way that precedes and leaves out the rise of Scholasticism, allowing him to look to the twelfth century for the mistakes that were dogmatized during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. For Boersma, the story told by de Lubac and Yves Congar is most convincing; namely, that it was in the twelfth century discovery of nature as self-existing that the world began to be desacramentalized. Max Weber would eventually describe modernity as the disenchantment of the world, but perhaps describing this as a de-sacramentalization is more useful for our purposes.

One Modern who quite profoundly understood the collapse of the Augustinian world picture was C.S. Lewis, who Boersma characterizes as advocating a “Real Presence” view of nature and the world. Rather than sharply distinguishing between Nature and Supernatural, as was done in the Thomist tradition, Lewis would return to Athanasius and the Christian Platonists who emphasized that we can speak of God consisting in all things, penetrating the world in a constant, permeating presence. This is described as the Sacramental Tapestry.

The entire universe, for this tradition, was sacramental. The very concept of human existence was participation in the being of God (“in Him we live and move and have our being”). Church tradition is sacramental time, Truth is sacramental reality, Biblical Interpretation is a sacramental discipline, and, well, the Church Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist are really efficacious means of Grace. In the framing of Lewis, the symbol contains the thing it symbolizes. We may call this a Participatory Metaphysic.

Thus, we find the relevance of that old Neo-Platonic phrase Procession and Return: all ideas are sourced in God and they emanate outward from God, and all that is reflects the outward flow from God as the Original One. And thence, all ideas eventually return to God, collapsing back into Him as the final sum and destination of all things. The flow of time is that magnificent emanation from Him, to the periphery, and back home. Procession, and Return.

Or, as Paul puts it in Colossians,

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created… through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. […] For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

Beautiful. Procession, and return. Outward to the periphery, and back home again. To know truly is to enter the Mind of God, and to be saved is to be united with the risen Christ.

The Revolt of Nature

Against this Participatory Metaphysic loomed the challenge of the rising Scholasticism. The older participatory ontological framework, Boersma argues, is not the same as that put forth by these Neo-Aristotelians. The story here gets complicated and I can only summarize. But, leveraging the studies of Yves Congar,4 Boersma looks at four components of the revolt against the Great Tradition and the rise of the High Middle Ages, which set context for the Reformation:

1. The Juridicizing of the Church - the Church became the vehicle of God’s presence on earth whereas before, all things were emanations from God, and therefore participated in his being.

2. The Discovery of Nature - nature became self-existent and therefore distinct from the “supernatural.”

3. The separation of physical and spiritual meaning in the Eucharist (with Berengar of Tours [d. 1088])

4. The separation of Scripture and the Church - Scripture and Church became their own separate things, whereas before the second millennium, the two were bound up together; the latter being the context and protector of the former.

All these things, Boersma argues following Congar, can be summarized in the “sharp distinction” between the natural and the supernatural. It was this sharp distinction, emphasized in Scholasticism, that undermined the Sacramental Tapestry, the Participatory Metaphysic. Without this distinction, neither the Council of Trent’s Eucharistic or ecclesiological dogmas, could have arisen. Boersma labels these trends as “the unraveling of the tapestry.”

Boersma writes that

Aquinas and others celebrated the goodness and (at least relative) autonomy of the natural order vis-a-vis the supernatural, with the “desacralizing” of Western culture as the inevitable result."

As the natural world gained autonomy, the supernatural was forced into an inevitable retreat. The ressourcement theologians maintained that the sacramental tapestry of the Great Tradition, in which nature participated in the supernatural, made way for a new—and ultimately secular—configuration.

It was in this context of a preceding unraveling of the Sacramental Metaphysic, Boersma and the nouvelle theologians argue, that the Reformation found itself. The tragedy of the Reformation, in light of the unraveling Great Tradition, was that in order to maintain authority in Christendom, “[Roman] Catholic theologians overreacted to their opponents and in so doing exacerbated the problems that [have already been] described.”

The point here, in my mind, is specifically to reject the view that to find meaning in Church history and the Christian tradition one must first call into question the Reformation, because it marked some sort of initial metaphysical crisis. If the tearing of the metaphysical foundation is partially to blame for our modern woes, the Reformation is does not constitute such a tearing. This much needs to be said in light of the number of people that find solace in the Roman Catholic Church, adopting a distorted and dishonest view of the historical difficulties of these questions with regard to the Protestant moment.

Procession and Retvrn

A fundamental aspect of Boersma’s book is to make the general case that ecumenism and the re-uniting of Christendom relies on a Roman-evangelical truce; an agreement to return to the first millennium. This is not here my purpose in pondering these things. It actually strikes me as completely untenable: all that needs to be done is the two parties who have been at war for six centuries should agree with each other! Moreover, one should actually fear that if you push for a new ecumenism, you’d get it good and hard—and it’ll be more Progressive and Left-wing than you can possibly imagine. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the Institutions have been subverted and are now wholly occupied.

Rather, this is primarily personal and familial: the world that lies directly ahead is one of darkness; the consequences of Man’s revolt against Light, the hubris of Babel as Man flaunts his creations in the face of a God whom he pretends doesn’t even exist. The survival of the soul in the midst of total spiritual collapse depends upon repudiating the foundations of that collapse. In seeking spiritual refuge from the grotesque character of man unhinged from any moral center, there is life in pre-modern ways of thinking that allow us to find gravitas as we move forward into the civilizational unknown.

It is also to bear witness to those that come after, such as our children: take no part in the chaos, there is a better way. Man cannot live wholly in the presentism of this world, for such an instinct drains one of the spiritual nourishment available in prior ages, prior frameworks of the world picture. There’s a sense in which we as moderns have been to the edge of the abyss and seen where it all leads. We have gone out to the periphery from the metaphysical center in which the Christian tradition was once sourced. We have undergone a sort of Procession of our own, outward, and have peered over the cultural cliff.

One may not find much meaning in the practice of attempting to trace out present disarray in the philosophical debates of the early second millennium—though I myself find it intriguing. But the lesson here remains that atomistic materialism has proven to have emptied out the soul of man, and the wisdom of the Great Tradition offers refreshment for all who seek it. The participatory metaphysic is the ultimate repudiation and rejection of every major myth of our age— it flips our entire, sinking, post-cultural civilization on its head and allows us to reorient ourselves toward a cosmos in which God is ever-near.

There’s something elegant in the medieval metaphysic of Procession and Return, challenging us to Participate in God, rather than just scientifically investigate the world as if he gave it for our consumption. I think of the reflections of Richard Weaver when he noted:

Now the return which we propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically.

We are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. [We] are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and [we] point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible also, as a movement from unity to individualism.

In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them. A recovery of certain viewpoints associated with the past would be a recovery of understanding as such, and this, unless we admit ourselves to be helpless in the movement of a deterministic march, is possible at any time.

In brief, one does not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless. Let us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.

Procession and retvrn indeed.

Two of the noteworthy recent episodes are my conversation with Michael Millerman on Aleksandr Dugin, and also my conversation with William Watkins on John Taylor of Caroline.

The RSS feed is here (will be fully updated this weekend)

The YouTube videos of the above mentioned two are below:

“The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of nature, her voice is but his instrument.”
—Richard Hooker—

Several weeks ago I wrote an essay on Thomas Hobbes that could be summarized in this way: though I am not a “Hobbesian,”—and indeed am a committed political Augustinian in so many ways, as eventually will be elaborated some day—I cannot ignore his particular observations with regard to the function of the Sovereign within a society on the brink of chaos. After writing this essay, it dawned on me that the specific lesson that could be drawn from a Schmittian reading (see that previous post) of Hobbes can be generalized to actually be a lesson drawn from a sort of Political Realism of the post-enlightenment age.

In other words, the things we Augustinians are most repelled by in Hobbes—his nominalism and materialism— are not necessary to the particular observations he makes about sovereignty. How do I know this? Because Schmitt himself, the great expositor of the post-enlightenment realist tradition, points past Hobbes to the counter-revolutionary Catholics Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Donoso Cortes to find the fruition of Hobbes’ contributions on the theory of the political sovereign. And these three are magnificent proponents of traditional Christendom and vicious dissenters from the revolutionary trends of eighteenth century Europe.

It was they, more perhaps than any other dissenters from post-Enlightenment politics (such as Edmund Burke), who absorbed the lessons of sovereignty in ways that those before Modernity were unable to. The great political theorists of Christendom—from Augustine to Aquinas to Marsilius to Hooker— were not situated in a position that would require them to grapple with the collapse of Christendom as the hegemonic metaphysic. But the post-Enlightenment counter-revolutionaries were. Thus, it is these counter-revolutionaries, in particular Cortes, who will help us to sanctify the lessons of Bodin and Hobbes in our next essay.

For this essay though, I want to give an overall summary of my political theology. The reason for this is because I think it helps set the tone for understanding my association with what we can call the New Christian Right; it also helps contextualize the increasingly reactionary flavor of right wing tendencies in our time; it roots them in something that transcends the moment. Questions as to where our political strategies must take us, given the present state of affairs, can come in the next essay, but the theoretical problems we seek to answer are sourced somewhere. This essay sets up that paradigm.

The Two Kingdoms

My political theory is essentially—that is, in essence—religiously grounded. Though I often insist that I want to focus on more general political things, it is impossible for me to avoid the roots of political theory in our Christian-religious past. As such, I am somewhat forced to interact with certain theological debates that pertain to questions of political society.

The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms1 is an extremely important framework in delineating the way I conceive of the function of political society within the Great Ordering of the cosmos. This doctrine has been a predominant feature—in various flavors and variants—of Christian political theory since at least Augustine. After the Reformation, it was a doctrine heavily emphasized so as to properly understand the dynamics between the Christian’s citizenship both in heaven and on earth in light of the political transformation happening throughout Europe.

The recovery of Classical Two Kingdoms theology, in our time, consists of a self-conscious and emphatic rejection of more One Kingdom models such as transformationalism, Kuyperianism, Theonomy, Covenantalism, and so on. This view has the tendency to confuse (blur together) the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ talked about with the civil kingdoms tasked with ordering political society.

Adherence to C2K also consists of a self-conscious and emphatic rejection of the Modern Two Kingdoms model, wherein there is a strict and impenetrable separation between “church and state” such that the latter cannot, among other things, be particularly concerned with the unique well-being of Christianity beyond what it might afford to any other religious (or anti-religious) community within the political society.

The reason I bring this up is that the New Christian Right is constantly being blamed for trying to “politicize the gospel” or advocate for divisions between men that Christ allegedly came to tear down. But with the Two Kingdoms model, it is clear that the problems of political society are restrained to the one— temporary, civil kingdom—and do not undermine the integrity or essence of the other eternal, invisible kingdom.

Or, as John Calvin wrote:

We may call the one the spiritual, the other the civil kingdom. Now these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other. For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside.

By attending to this distinction, we will not erroneously transfer the doctrine of the gospel concerning spiritual liberty to civil order, as if in regard to eternal government Christians were less subject to human laws, because their consciouses are unbound before God, as if they were exempted from all carnal service, because in regard to the Spirit they are free.

The difference between the two kingdoms is that the one—the Civil Kingdom— is ordered around Natural Relations. It pertains to the relationships, concerns, dynamics, needs, and ordering of mankind as created beings. There are no men outside this category. God’s sovereign rule is here mediated via other men:2 Kings/magistrates/governors, etc (depending on the political structure of a given society). The rule of God is indirect here in this kingdom, because it is mediated. This kingdom of “created relations” is natural to man. This is the Natural Order.

On the other hand, the Spiritual Kingdom (Invisible might be better here, for reasons unnecessary to bring up now) is ordered around supernatural relations. It pertains to the relationships, concerns, dynamics, needs, and order of those united together in Christ; in other words, the Invisible Kingdom of Christ pertains to Gospel categories. Only those united to Christ exist within this kingdom. Here, God’s rule is mediated by Christ, who is God, and therefore it is not mediated by other men. The rule of God is direct. This kingdom of grace-relations is supernatural to man, given the Fall. This the Spiritual Order.

Ergo, the objectives of a Christian political theory are not directed to binding or making demands of the conscience; for in seeking solutions to political problems, we have “called off our minds” to such internal affairs, leaving them to God. The objectives of political theory have to do with the realm of Natural Relations. One absolutely cannot draw from this that the religious character of a society is unimportant or irrelevant, and indeed, political society must grapple with and uphold the religious nature of mankind—for to operate otherwise would be an anthropological error that presumes man can exist outside of the realm of mind and spirit; a materialism that ends in moral and cultural degradation.

Political Society and its Origins

Thus, we must now deal with political society as such. There is a significant debate about the origins of political society—from where does political society come? There are several currents of thinking, but among them two are most prominent and general enough to contain many other theories.

The first is the Naturalist view, and the second is the Conventionalist view.

The naturalist view can be seen in the Aristotelian tradition and posits that man is by nature a social being and government is an organic mechanism that man instinctively longs for; it sees government as natural and beneficial for the well-being of the community to direct men to the good life, and to order society toward higher things. Governments are downstream from society, in a sense; government embodies, reinforces, and directs the social order to actualize its tendencies. This Naturalist view is taken up by Stephen Wolfe in his Christian Nationalism book, it is the view of many of the continental Reformers, the scholastics, and others in the Thomist and Neo-Aristotelian tradition. On this view, political society and the magistrates who oversee it function in a role that originates prior to the Fall of Man.

The second view is the Conventionalist view. This, unlike the naturalist view, sees political society strictly as the result of man’s sinful nature; it is specifically unnatural, forced, and oppressive against man’s nature—which is good, because man is a wicked creature, liable to chaos absent enforced order, and always prone to anti-social behavior. Society, in this view, is downstream from the establishment political order. This is the view taken up by Thomas Hobbes, Martin Luther, and many other modern Reformers (including Modern 2Kers). It was also taken up by Carl Schmitt when he wrote that “All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.” On this view, the state was added after the Fall; it was added because of man’s sins.

One should not draw the conclusion that those in the first category have a positive view of man—though some in the Aristotelian tradition might tend in that direction. Many here too—especially Augustinians— think that political organization has taken on additional characteristics as a result of man’s Fall. Additionally, we should not assume that the latter category implies a nominalistic view of man or Hobbesian definitions of man’s total wickedness such that no social or cultural good can flow from men in the context of society. There are key passages from Augustine himself that demonstrate his adherence to postlapsarian views of Civil Government’s origins.

Interacting with the Natural vs. Constructionist views would take an entire series of essays—and they are important debates; many of the neo-Integralists and proponents of Richard Hooker over at the Davenant Institute for instance, will be immensely critical of the Friend-Enemy distinction as a key animating feature of politics—but as Schmitt shows, this is one of the fundamental conclusions about politics that one must draw on the Conventionalist view.

Despite my truncated treatment here, it is obvious and central to me that the best political theory with the widest grasp of political problems must be a synthesis of both of these views. Man does have a nature that precedes his Fall; and this nature was intended to permit and assist man in pursuing an ordered and heaven-oriented society. One of the vital features in this Aristotelian vision of society is the unity of purpose and underlying metaphysic. In a world where Man’s heart is ordered toward Heaven and the Good, all men are in harmony on ultimate principles.

For this reason, we can say that in Natural Politics, there are no friends and enemies. Natural Law reigns above the political society and all know it and live in harmony with it. There are rulers in the Natural Political Society and they function to coordinate the complexities of their realm, not in a way that deals with evil man, but in a way that amalgamates and gives unity to the order, organizing it in a way that mirrors the Heavenly Ideal.3

We can also say that in “Artificial Politics”—the political character of society under corrupted man—there are Friends and Enemies. Politics is transformed into an arena where there are competing combatants who seek the domination necessary to impose their vision of society. The “Political” is that area of the human experience where the contest is waged between various would-be holders of power, each striving for the position required to eliminate their enemy and institute the social conditions sought after by their friends. Such a political characteristic is not prescription, but description of the world as it is, as we find it, fallen and immersed in sustained antagonism.

Reiteration on the Concept of the Political

It is absolutely necessary to stress that I am not here talking merely about the use of political means to restrain the passions of the citizenry—this is where debates and discussions on political theory usually default back to ("what laws should we create or enforce to better society?”). I am not simply focusing on the need of the state to enforce laws against murder or rape or theft and so on.

Obviously these are included; but when I talk about the Political, I am referring back to everything I’ve said about the proponents of Sovereignty doctrine, and anticipating everything I will say; namely, that the function of the Political in the post-Fall world is to absorb the conflict of competing visions for the social order and provide an arena on which these Friend-Enemy groupings can work themselves out.

This would not be necessary in a pre-fall world, because all would-be leaders are operating on the Heavenward metaphysic. The primary problems of Hobbesian politics are not what laws should we have? but rather, who will defeat who in the inevitable conflict of proponents of competing mutually exclusive political visions? Or, Who? Whom?

The Implications of the Augustinian Synthesis

It is not that the political apparatus of a society is a result of man’s wickedness (in agreement with Aristotelianism), but that the particular Hobbesian character of the state came about as a result of man’s wickedness. That’s the Augustinian synthesis.4

I’m not the first to stress such a synthesis of these views.5 Torrance Kirby, who is among those who attributes an Augustinianism to Richard Hooker (as somewhat distinct from the traditional Thomism of Roman Catholic political theology) has noted the following on the question of whether Hooker’s view of political origins is more Aristotelian or Hobbesian:

Richard Hooker is more of an Aristotelian in his judgement concerning the origins of "politique societie"--his translation of "koinonia politike", a formula from Aristotle's Politics. It is interesting that both Church and Commonwealth are forms of "politique societie"--and thus the Royal Supremacy follows logically.

Hobbes's notion of the condition of nature as a state of war is echoed in Hooker's account of human nature:

"Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment amongst men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast, they do accordingly provide notwithstanding so to frame his outward actions, that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted: unless they do this, they are not perfect." (Lawes Book I, chap. x.)

So I guess rather than a "via media" I would say that he is both/and.6

The synthesis between these two views shows up in additional important ways in the thinking of Richard Hooker, and others in the Augustinian political tradition. One key example that is relevant here is the dual source of political authority: the divinely ordained function (corresponding to Natural Politics), coupled with the humanly ordained figure or method of selecting such figure (corresponding to Hobbesian Politics). On the question of whether sovereign magistrates (regardless of the political structure) are given their authority directly from God (such as under Divine Right of Kings or Israelite Theocracy) or from the original consent of the people (Hobbes), Hooker (similar to Samuel Rutherford and even Edmund Burke) take the position that authority is given indirectly from God, via the conduit of the original consent of a people.

In Hooker’s expression:

'The law appointeth no man to be an husband, but if a man have betaken himself unto that condition, it giveth him the authority over his own wife. That the christian world should be ordered by kingly regiment, the law of God doth not anywhere command; and yet the law of God doth give them right, which once are exalted to that estate, to exact at the hands of their subjects general obediences in whatsoever affairs their power may serve to command. So God doth ratify the work of that Sovereign authority which kings have received by men.

And Samuel Rutherford too argues that, in contrast to the situation in Old Testament Israel, there is now “no prophetical and immediate calling to kingdoms.” Yet, despite this denial of direct Divine Right of Kings, God functions through the people to fill an office that he authorized:

for of six willing and gifted to reign, what makes one a king and not the other five? Certainly by God’s disposing the people to choose this man, and not another man. it cannot be said but God gives the kingly power immediately; and by him kings reign, that is true. This office is immediately from God, but the question now is, What is that which formally applies the office and royal power to this person rather than to the other five as meet? Nothing can here be dreamed of but God’s inclining the hearts of the states to choose this man and not that man.

There are aspects of Rutherford that I think make him slightly weaker than Hooker with regard to the natural prerogative of peoples to withdraw their consent (Rutherford anticipates the pathway against of my own tendencies to emphasize the “perpetual contract” of political society), among other things; but nevertheless, both have a similar model in this area.7

The Sanctification of History

This emphasis on the employment of a people (corporately conceived) to be the mechanism or conduit of providence strikes at the heart of my Augustinian historicism. This is why I emphasize so often the concept of Heritage (as in my reference to Heritage America). Heritage is the inheritance, by a people, of a particular way of life, including and especially the original consent. The key phrase we ought to use here is inhereted consent. If the consent is inherited, then the power conferred is inherited, and the political society has that rooted dynamic of continuity over time. John Locke was so wrong to inject into Western political philosophy the notion of the constant re-creation and reaffirmation of consent.

Heritage, therefore, contains things implied by the inherited complex of consent and conferred power. It also includes customs, norms, mores, cultural memories, stories, myths, rights, and obligations; that is, heritage is a particular experience that one people have in working out, over the struggles of time, the meaning and application of Natural Law. Heritage is everything. Natural Law without heritage is nonsensical, even revolutionary. One of the ways modern adaptions of Natural Rights have abused natural law thinking is by severing the process of discovering “natural laws” from the historical process. Heritage embodies Natural Law as it has been applied to a people in the face of peculiar circumstance.

Brad Littlejohn hit the nail on the head here when he made the case that:

“It is important to recognize that for Hooker at least, it is misleading to speak in terms of the Anglican “three-legged stool” of Scripture, reason, and tradition. This terminology fails to realize the extent to which for Hooker, the last of these is simply the second, considered diachronically, and to which the second is almost always to some extent understood corporately.”8

That is to say, in Hooker’s words:

“The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of nature, her voice is but his instrument.”

We have thus a vision of history as the actualization of God’s providence, which generates in political society. A Christian historicism embodies the theme of the Sanctification of History. Natural Law is continually discovered by applying reason and custom to real work problems. History is the lab in which a people uncover the meaning and content of Natural Law. The Mind of God is revealed in the process of history. A people can work out, for themselves, and within the range of possibilities particular to that people, the structures and institutions necessary for that people to live well.

This is precisely the understanding of history taken up by Edmund Burke. In an important study on Burke and others, Alfred Cobban writes the following of Burke:

Society, he assumes, has been divinely ordained and its working is subject to the rule of Providence. […] To God, working through the community, embodying His will in its customs, laws, and institutions, we can safely trust.

Burke is [here] reproducing in a slightly different form the medieval philosophy of history.

[Lord Acton]…fastened on to the historic idea as, from his point of view, the dangerous aspect of Burke’s theory. His criticism is based on the conviction that truth and the eternal order… are not deduced from history.

Accepting in theory the idea of a universal court of appeal, the eternal order, he goes on to draw an analogy between the general order of the world and the life of each particular society; for the contract of each single State is ‘but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society.’

It must not be overlooked that the legendary classical liberal Lord Acton once declared that “I would have hanged Mr. Burke on the same gallows as Robespierre.”

This view of history—as the screen on which the projector of natural law displays its content—implies two important things: first, it implies that political rights and duties are socially-situated. This means that one should have a cynical attitude about the sudden contrivance of newly-discovered “rights” (such as “gay rights” or the right to consume pornography). Second, it implies that the limits on power can be found within the context, the heritage, of the social order itself.

Lex Rex?

We thus come to a final implication of the sketch offered above, which will set us up for interpreting the political possibilities of our present crisis. I noted elsewhere that I had an uneasy relationship with the concept of Lex Rex, Samuel Rutherford’s expression for the idea that the Law was above the King. We can now understand better the way in which I approach the problem.

On the one hand, we have to clarify that, in order to have any significance, Lex Rex has a historicist element to it. It’s not talking about some mere conjectural Law, an un-actuated Law that theoretically should restrain the King, but rather the Natural Law as it was realized within the context of the British political dynamics over the historical process. Lex Rex is most meaningful when it is the product of historical development, not a blueprint intended to revolt against history and create a better world on new grounds.

Realism, not idealism, is the essence of Samuel Rutherford’s thesis. In this, Lex Rex is a healthy approach in its mobilization of heritage against perceived innovation. I should stress here that the present discussion is not meant to take a side on the Royalist-Scottish conflict; in fact, we self-consciously avoid taking a side. For our point is the type of argument being made. Lex Rex is part of our tradition; the particular application of that tradition in defense of the interests of Rutherford and his “Friends” is not the point here.9

On the other hand, and just as fundamentally, we remember that the nature of the Sovereign is that he sustains the order, having one foot in the state of nature, and another foot inside political society. He determines when the political society is in a state of normalcy, and therefore when the Law as a complex of historically-revealed and constitutionally absorbed obligations even has relevance at all. From the position of Schmittian realism, the Law is not sovereign; only real men in real positions of power are choosing to continually legitimize—for political reasons— and enforce the law. Schmitt noted that "for a legal system to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists."

As I wrote in the Hobbes piece,

What Schmitt and Gottfried take from Hobbes is that [the supremacy of law] is a political myth. There is always a human actor, or human institutions, even if we don’t admit it, behind the veil sanctioning the legal order, interpreting it, applying it, determining its meaning, and its exceptions. This what Schmitt meant when he elaborates on the “challenge of the exception.” No matter how brilliantly exposited or constructed, the legal order cannot account for all situations and there is always a human element upholding the order based on judgement, interests, calculations, and a complex network of myriad factors. The legal order is not a machine that works itself out.

Every political society has a sovereign, even if A) one isn’t written into the structuring documents of the political society or B) no one knows who that sovereign is. As George Schwab (a key expositor of Schmitt) once noted:10

For Schmitt the sovereign authority not only was bound to the normally valid legal order but also transcended it. As I put it elsewhere,11 his sovereign slumbers in normal times but suddenly awakens when a normal situation threatens to become an exception. The core of this authority is its exclusive possession of the right of, or its monopoly of, political decision making.

Thus, the Sovereign makes possible any dynamic between Lex and Rex at all. “Lex Rex” is downstream from the employment of Power. If you want to uphold the Anglo tradition of the magistrate being subsumed under the legal order, and who therefore cannot act in arbitrary ways (one the better meanings of “tyranny”), you first must ensure the integrity of the Political Order. Schwab elsewhere noted that “the restoration of order and stability was the precondition for the reinstatement of norms.” Rex Lex—or Lex Rex, either way—the Order must precede the Constitutional system. The American Constitution—and the Magna Carta for that matter—were enforceable because the state of nature had been abrogated by those who held power and legitimacy before the Constitutional system had been defined and consented to.

Law is downstream from the Political, and the best political societies are those that are able to politically protect the integrity of the order so that a legal system is possible—even if that legal system incorporates boundaries on power.

Conclusion

We conclude here by noting that we ought to distinguish between A) when political life exists in conditions of normalcy, when we have our cherished heritage in a durable environment, and the threat of mutually exclusive enemies is being adequately suppressed; and B) the situation when we may be in conditions of abnormality, or when there is no order by which we can determine a state of normalcy at all.

This abnormality can be found when there is significant weakness in the Regime such that it may fall to invading forces. However, as we will talk about in the next essay, there are also times when the Regime itself has been subverted such that it is repudiating, rather than upholding, the heritage of a given people. If the heritage contains both the inherited consent of the people and the inherited conferred power of the ruler, then war declared on the heritage breaks apart the entire relationship.

The abnormal state must be declared, and we’ve entered into extraordinary times.

Happy Robert E. Lee Day!

Today is the twenty-ninth and final day of my month long heritage history posts in which I offer a few somewhat arbitrary reflections on important figures from our past. The entire point of this series was to counter-signal the ethos and spirit of the Regime’s mobilization of history to serve as a humiliation of our traditions and undermine our cultural inheritance.

I can think of no greater symbol of defiance against this spirit than concluding in celebration of Robert E Lee. A descendent of George Washington and heir of the American experience of Virginia, Lee embodies so many of the ideals necessary in our age of dissolution.

There are many things to say about Lee: he was a gentleman who had a keen sense of his own noblesse oblige; he was a Christian man who made constant reference to his role in a Christian society; he was a man who exemplified the classical ethics of ordered loves, always prioritizing the interests of his family and his people over any other more general obligations. He represents the now-dissipated obligations of Southern Honor codes, the dual duty of both forgiveness and resolve, and the ancient paradox of giving of oneself to find true happiness.

Robert E. Lee of course was a man not of unrestrained passion, but of Aristotelian moderation; his decision to arise and defend the well-being and integrity of his Southern people came not out of ideological disposition, but duty to hearth and home in a moment of crisis between two loves. He loved the United States in the sense that there was a common experience between two factions that had long been held in a complex of uneasy tension. He had given of himself for the stability of the United States during the Mexican-American war, and continued in service to his country throughout the 1850s.

The news of a civil war was painful to Lee. Having long sought a commanding position in the United States Army, it came to pass that his first opportunity would be in the context of a crisis between this army and the people of Virginia (among other Souther states, of course). He was not after secession, preferring instead to defend the Old Republic as it was constituted in the first decades of its life. When asked by Lincoln to be the Union Army’s commander-in chief though, he could not bring himself to accept.

He stated in his rejection:

“If the Union is dissolved and the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people and save in defense will draw my sword on none.”

His wife later wrote:

“My husband has wept tears of blood over this terrible war, but as a man of honour, and a Virginian, he must follow the destiny of his state.”

This to me is the thing that strikes me most about Robert E Lee: his people and their well-being always meant more to him than any ideological crusade, any grand experiment, and certainly anything that could be conceived as a propositional nationhood. People—real people, in the social-corporate sense—have a more fundamental claim on his duties than all other endeavors. He could not be paid to betray his heritage.

At the moment when both North and South needed him—when he by nature and experience would have preferred to serve both—his sense of duty fell toward the ageless guidance on Ordered Loves: those closest to you are owed your most fundamental affections. And in retrospect, though having experienced a painful defeat, Lee never regretted his decision: to lose for one’s people is more preferable than to win in opposition to those people.

Over the course of the next century, Lee would become a symbol of unity. There were still—understandably—Lost Causers who remained bitter; but Lee taught us that we as humans must accept the experiences of History and make the best of it. More venomous enemies would eventually come to America and this would require recalculation as to the Friend-Enemy distinction. In a world where the despisers of American and Western civilization seek to tear down the very memory of Robert E Lee, we whose roots are in both North and South and West must raise it back up. He must be the symbol of our unity against the occupied Regime.

Few things symbolize our present moment more forcefully than the act of tearing down Robert E Lee’s statues. This act is an outflow of a deeply spiritual problem that has permeated its way into every aspect of our social context. We are at war with those who would seek to sever us from our very historical being. There’s an element of the medieval doctrine of “Participation” in our connection to our heritage, and the Regime that seeks to sever us from our past is actually seeking our spiritual death; for we are connected to our heritage in our very souls.

I think Dwight Eisenhower summarized his legacy so wonderfully when he noted:

“Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.”

We are all Robert E Lee. And the tearing down of his memory is an act of socio-cultural homicide. We must defend him, for in defending him we are defending ourselves, and those who are yet to be born.

It’s been an honor fighting for our identity together with you all.

Happy Heritage History Month.

Happy Johann Bach Day!

It is day twenty-eight of heritage history month and while I’ve done some literary figures, I’d be remiss to not have someone representing our musical inheritance— music is a catalyst for the culture spirit of strength and beauty, or it is a catalyst for the wretched, the chaotic. Everyone is sharing that video of the deranged sorority girls, but few have recognized that the music they are dancing to is the channel through which the spirits of revolution have entered our society.

Plato once declared that “musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” It is no coincidence that the political transformations that took place after the 1960s were coordinated, by the deep state, with occultic musical themes. It is for reasons such as these that we on a journey of historical rediscovery should consider our heritage of sacred music and classical arrangements.

There are a lot of composers I could have chosen for today, and I considered the leaders of the Romantic movement, such as Mozart and Beethoven, but in the end I had to choose a master of both. Johann Bach was a German participant of the Baroque period of European music and was perhaps the final figure in the classical age of music. In many ways, he synthesized the main features of musical classicalism and was in this way a master of the inherited traditions in European musical development. Unlike the Romantics like Mozart or Beethoven, Bach shied away from excessive innovation.

Bach was largely a church composer, writing Latin church music, while incorporating in important Lutheran hymns for the benefit primarily of the churches in Leipzig. Bach’s music carried with it a keen sense of the divinity of music; its purpose was to reflect the majesty of God. Beauty therefore was objective and music, like all arts, were not primarily intended to please the individual but rather to inspire his soul to arise to meet God. Beauty in music was a mechanism for the soul and it was the responsibility of the composer to foster this pathway to Heaven.

Whereas the Romantic era saw the influence of composers who would write for performance and sought to please the individual souls, Bach had much more of a church-oriented mind, focused on the corporate quality of the gathered society. In this way, critics of his day, while of course recognizing his genius, would hold that he was old-fashioned, disinterested in the bourgeoning styles of musical experimentation.

It’s important to note about Bach too that while he wrote as a German, for the context of German ecclesiastical culture, Bach fully absorbed the sort of pan-Europeanism that was essential to the particular character of early modern Europe. He drew extensively from the Latin world, and especially composers of the high tradition such as Vivaldi. In this way, Bach was a participant in the greater European civilization, reaching out to grasp the best of Europe, and then contextualizing it for his own cultural substratum.

European civilization, like other civilizations, has developed for itself a musical accompaniment to chaperone its cycle of life. This has been true since the development of medieval Sacred Music, it was true during the very end of the Classical period in Bach, and it remains true today.

Music is not morally neutral; it carries the spirit of a people along with it; it is not downstream of culture, but more often shapes it and leads it. Sometimes, in the case of Bach, music uplifts its world. And other times music tears it down. The great contributions of Bach and others like him must be preserved as we undergo an era of culture Night.

Happy Queen Elizabeth Day!

For day twenty-seven of heritage history month, we celebrate the role of Queen Elizabeth I in the development of our Anglo-American past. This another one of those pivotal figures that would frustrate my RomCath (and Puritan!) friends, yet we must emphasize the importance of the Elizabethan moment in the making of our world.

Elizabeth ascended to the monarchy in the tense heat of a calamitous Tudor political crisis. Her father Henry VIII of course had been the catalyst, employed by God despite his sins, of English separation from the religious jurisdiction of Rome. After Henry came his son Edward VI, who controversially selected as his successor Lady Jane Grey in discordance with the rules of Succession, in order to stave off a Roman Catholic reversal of Protestant gains.

In a swift series of well-coordinated moves over only 9 days, Edward’s half-sister Mary Tudor captured and executed Queen Jane. A Roman Catholic reversal was implemented. Mary’s reign would only has five years and, having no child of her own, died with no means of preventing the ascension of her half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant.

Elizabeth oversaw in England a time of relative peace through strength and cultural robustness. The Elizabethan half-century was a golden age of English culture, commerce, and religious debate. Elizabeth ruled as a moderate overseeing and largely deescalating religious tensions among both Roman Catholic and Puritan factions who sought, respectively, further implementation of their own visions.

It was during Elizabeth’s reign that Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser would compose their masterpieces, and Shakespeare developed an imaginative vision of English life that would last centuries. Elizabeth would stand down Spanish expansionism into English territory and oversee the maritime achievements of adventurers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. She would give life force to the character and identity of the Church of England, supporting continental Reformers living in the precarious context of Romish consolidation.

Queen Elizabeth developed a persona of immense dedication to the well-being of her English people, recognizing her own self as the embodiment of their will and identity. Acknowledging the explosion of unrest that could ensue by her marriage and pursuit of a biological heir, she refrained from marriage totally. It was an act of her dedication to the stability of the realm. By not getting married, she kept her political opposition at bay, further securing the impenetrability of her government.

In a tumultuous world such as Tudor England, with cultural and political explosions preceding her reign and taking place across Europe, it is a testament to her wisdom (and that of her advisors) that she absorbed and therefore stifled immense political intensity that may have ripped apart the fragile British situation. Not only was she able to harmonize the civil and ecclesiastical politics of Tudor England, but she was able to arrange the conditions for the blossoming of English customs and social norms.

[At a time] when wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries round about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to thy afflicted Church. The love of my people hath appeared firm, and the devices of my enemies frustrate.

As some are aware, I spent a few intellectually formative years as a proponent and expositor of libertarian political theory; dealing with some intricate aspects of its doctrine and definition, countering deviations in libertarianism, and laboring to defend it in a robust, systematic way. I took it seriously.

I was never intrigued by utilitarian arguments for libertarianism as a political theory. These would be along the line that libertarianism produces the best economic outcomes for the greatest number of people; or perhaps that libertarianism deals most effectively with the dangers of abuse of power. Instead, I had very much what was called a “deontological” approach: libertarianism was the best political theory precisely because it most consistently and purely applied the basics of an ethical standard.

For me, libertarianism was the only logically applied political theory on the basis of individual rights, which preceded society, and were granted directly by God as logically implied by commands such as Thou Shall Not Steal and others that could be related to the integrity of bodily freedom from the initiation of aggression. I was, though, open to non-theological formulations of man’s natural individual property rights, such as those conceived by Murray Rothbard (Ethics of Liberty) or even Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Argumentation Ethics).

My definition of libertarianism was (and is) the proposition that “individuals have an absolute right to their body and the external property they have acquired by non-aggressive means (such as trade, inheritance, original appropriation, creation, etc.).” The implied corollary to this is that “no man has the legal right to breach the rights of the property owner.” Man’s rights are individually held, and they originate in man’s nature prior to society and political order. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of laws flow from these propositions. A good law reinforces these standards, and bad laws breach them. Such is libertarianism.

Now, I must make it plain that for me, perhaps more than other ex-libertarians, one would first have to demonstrate the invalidity of this theory before honestly leaving it behind. Many ex-libertarians haven’t had the personal burden of needing to grapple with self-persuasion like I did. “Libertarianism no longer works” or “things are so bad that we shouldn’t be such sticklers in our present emergency” are not arguments that really meant much to me. At the very end of my libertarianism, my view was that libertarianism was still the only true and just theory, even if it isn’t viable or it could no longer do anything to save our liberties from our enemies. The question was whether Libertarianism was true, not whether it should be practiced. And on this, I was firm.

In my essay on the Triumph of the Political, I gave three general reasons why people are leaving libertarianism and pursuing a more reactionary or right-wing engagement with politics: the realist nature of power (in Burnham), the fundamental character of the political (in Schmitt) and the Achilles’ Heel of private-cultural radicalization (in Gramsci). I think these are very powerful arguments about the weaknesses of libertarianism. But none of these, really, get to the core of undermining libertarianism. So this short post explains how I justified my way out, never to look back.

I began to realize that my way out was in understanding the actual nature of the individual’s relation to society, which preceded him. All individuals are born into a family. The Natural Order of course has as the family a married Father and Mother and their children. We can address this topic by looking at the actual world around us, or we can go back to the beginning of society itself. Since looking at the present is considered to be a nonstarter for libertarians, who appeal to the state of nature (that is, Man independent of the society as it is) to understand the essence of rights, then we can do the same.

Incidentally though, this is precisely the way of thinking that so bothered counter-revolutionaries like Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke; the fruit of intellectually reconstructing society are not a grand rebuilding on justice and peace, but a tearing down without the means to build back. Nevertheless, I will engage the problem because understanding it properly is how I left libertarianism.

A fundamental aspect of the human experience is that individuals enter the world in pre-existing arrangements. If one takes up a Christian view of origin myths, as I do, there have only been two exceptions. There was a sort of reconstituting of the world with the Noahic story, so we can shift forward to that by working off the view that Noah’s three sons and their wives went forth to re-populate the world. Their children were born under the authority and legitimacy of their fathers as heads of the original political society, so to speak. This inevitably means that they had certain rights, but also certain restrictions as downstream members of a hierarchy. It could only have been this way, as children are wholly dependent on their parents not only for survival, but for the absorption of good and bad social behavior.

As families grow over generations, first brothers, and then cousins, must work out rules for living together, passing on the complex of rights and duties, liberties and constraints. Families transform into clans, which transform into tribes, and so on. Nations are downstream from this process. At all points in the growth process, the complex of rights and duties are passed forward, often changing, sometimes leaning in the direction of more freedom, other times in the direction of less. But always as the product of historical circumstances, leadership decisions, the adoption of new religions, the failures of certain customs, and the triumphs of others.

There has never been any man born outside such a context. One can think of alleged exceptions, in the abstract. But not only are these not fundamental to any actual society in history, but they also must somehow relate to society, even if they understand enough to know that they cannot breach the complex of the rights/duties by simply entering the society’s territory: they would be opposed with legitimate force.

Thus, rights are always socially-situated. They are always identified in the context of something, and are balanced against other restraints that prevent the society from disintegrating into chaos. Rights then, are the product of historical development; sometimes with appeal to higher ideals, but always within the limits of culture, political dynamics, and pre-existing legal formulations including definitions, institutions, and settled claims of authority.

While I will talk about this in a future essay, I’m willing to say that there are God given rights, but they are given indirectly through the historical development of the social order, rather than imputed directly. History is the mechanism by which God can, if he chooses, “give” rights. (I tell people often that I am basically a historicist, and then they are surprised when I have historicist takes.)

Now, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has talked about the idea of a Covenant Community—of individuals participating in a social order where there are rules that, by virtue of the Covenant consented to, restrict individual behavior. But what struck me about this concept was first that it is only in rare circumstances historically (I can’t actually think of any—because this isn’t the way pre-nineteenth century people thought) that such a covenant would depend on the ongoing, unanimous consent of its members. The covenant itself outlasts the individuals who designed it and their children, by virtue of their non-consensual tie to their fathers, are bound by it without ongoing formal consent.

While people like Burke and Hooker would actually describe this as consent (made on behalf of children and posterity), this isn’t the type of individualist consent that post-enlightenment thinkers (like Locke) have in mind. It’s a “covenant,” sure, but because it outlasts the originators of the covenant and binds those who are brought up in the context of this society, it should be described merely as a “society.” The society, then, is an entity of its own life; it is made up not merely of the individuals who actively and formally give over consent, but is characterized by a bond that transcends the living. This view of society, of course, would reject sociological nominalism (only the physical individuals are “real.”)

The other thing that struck me about this Covenant is that this describes much of the historical development of Western Europe; far from being a new innovative solution to the problems of libertine degeneracy for right-leaning libertarians, if you add a layer of perpetuity to the Covenant for reasons relating to organic family ties, you have the traditionalist understanding of the social order.

Now, naturally, the history of society is not always built on peaceful relations. There are elements of conquering, of plundering, of stolen land and occupied peoples. The debate then becomes what is to be done with the messiness of history? Thomas Paine and the revolutionaries who targeted inherited society advocated its unraveling and its reconstruction upon just and rational grounds. Burke famously warned against such moralizing radicalism. The historical details of societies, of nations, is cloudy and unknowable; one is completely unable to delineate accurately which ties and relations are just, and which are unjust. Burke declared:

Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort.

Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things. Men come in that manner into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation.

What Burke means here is that history is complex and its purity level of Just relations unascertainable; in unraveling alleged unjust relations to try and refit society to be consistent with pure rules of natural rights, revolutionaries will be unwinding not only artificially formed relations, but also good and organic ones.

Now, the result of all this is that no man’s rights are more fundamental than the political order itself. The Order is upstream of the Liberty. This is what is meant by ordered liberty. In the Western tradition, this meant that our liberties were the benefit of our being connected to ancestors who earned them for us and bequeathed them to us. They are inherited liberties, not abstract liberties. They are liberties that derived from our being born of a People with a history, not as individuals disconnected to any heritage.

What this means is that we must not be pigeon holed by those who seek to prevent us from advocating political responses to activities that subvert and undermine the character of our culture and the integrity of our way of life. We don’t need to be hamstrung politically from exercising power against those who utilize claims of liberty in ways that weaken the very political order upon which our liberties were once dependent. We live in a world where the state has been weaponized against Heritage America and there should be nothing holding us back from exercising whatever power is necessary to confront enemies both public and private.

On this front, I agree with so much of the (paleo)libertarian opposition to the Managerial State, the Conservative Movement, global militarism, the American Empire, central banking and so on. But it is because all these things are antithetical or threatening to my heritage, the customs I want to uphold, and the traditions I want recovered… not because they breach the Non-Aggression Principle.

The problem with liberalism is precisely that it became an “ism.” And libertarianism is liberalism perfectly applied. There are contexts where we could be just fine with more politically liberal tendencies (liberalism being the absence of government intervention—like in the eighteenth century), but there are also times when liberal dynamics and restraints on power can undermine a society. The historicist view of liberalism (as opposed to the universalist liberalism) is that there are moments (say, in a relatively homogenous, Christian, and cultured society) where we wouldn’t oppose liberality as viciously as we must now (in an age of moral anarchy, ugliness, and privately-sponsored cultural revolution).

We seek political solutions to our political problems, because underlying all our old ways of life, as free as it was, sat a layer of political hegemony that produced and passed on the rights and liberties once enjoyed by our fathers. Because my conception of this complex network of rights and restrains stem from history and are therefore not universal, and not pre-social, I am not a libertarian.

It follows from this core aspect of my political thought that I am free to make the derivative observations about the typical libertarian personality, neglect of political realism, and any contradictions in application. I can now continue to emphasize the three big weaknesses of libertarianism (power per Burnham, the political per Schmitt, civil subversion per Gramsci), now that I have expressed the core of my transformation.

Happy John Dickinson Day!

It is day twenty-six of Heritage History Month and we will focus on a lesser known Founding Father who had a peculiar take on the entire enterprise of separation from Britain, and who dealt uneasily with the developing institutions and documents of the United States’ early years.

Dickinson was a participant in the politics of both Delaware and Pennsylvania, though he was raised in Delaware, he would become President first of Delaware, and then of Pennsylvania, back to back. One of the wealthiest landowners in the American colonies, Dickinson had also acquired a deep understanding of history and theory largely of his own initiative and lifelong study. It was this knowledge of history and the Western tradition that would leave him in turmoil over the meaning and consequences of Revolution against Britain.

Dickinson had a lifelong concern with the preservation of the inherited and established liberties of Americans as heirs of British tradition over against the innovative and abstract rights of the radicals, both in America and in France. Dickinson was concerned that a clean separation from Britain would eventually give way to an integrated spirit of constant revolution that, while beginning with separation from the King, would end in separation from the British way of life. The inherited liberties cherished by these Americans may disappear on the suicide path toward abstract liberties.

Dickinson therefore sought to engage in political relations with Britain that would allow many of the American concerns to be met, without complete independence. The problem with independence, for Dickinson, was one of real politik: there were radical agitators in the American midst that would take the reins of complete independence and continue for a long push against tradition and organic hierarchy.

His frustration at the King was that his actions and behavior was fueling radicalism in the American political culture. His great fear was that a revolution would produce an internal transformation toward democratic ends, culminating in mob rule. Dickinson therefore shied away from signing the Declaration of Independence and left his Congressional post to become a brigadier general in the Pennsylvania militia so that he would not be present at the moment of its adoption.

However, once that move had been made and America was politically independent, Dickinson would not retire and dream of lost causes; he would instead be an active participant in addressing the real world problems of his countrymen and the political order that needed to be worked out. He loved his American experience, as rendered to him through his ancestry and rootedness in the North part of the Union. He was dedicated to leaving his world better than when he had entered it.

Dickinson had an uneasy relationship with both sides of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate. On the one hand, he had more aristocratic and traditionalist impulses that made him cynical about some of the radical objectives of the anti-federalists. But on the other hand, he agreed with the anti-federalists that there were aspects of the Federalist mentality that would construct an artificial political order, with an artificial aristocracy placed into power by fiat and administrative connections. This is a quite typical fear of an established landowner.

It is for these reasons that Mel Bradford would refer to Dickinson as “the American Burke,” who was “the faithful steward of the old regime.” Bradford’s description of Dickinson serve as a great summary:

“He had a devotion to an American variant of English constitutionalism, rooted in Saxon antiquity and enthroned as sovereign in 1688. Neither wealth nor enlightenment was, in his view, a primary reason for strengthening the Union. Instead, the reasons were the preservation of an inherited way of life and the liberty needed to practice it.”

Happy TS Eliot Day!

It is day twenty-five of Heritage History month and today we celebrate the reflections of TS Eliot, a cultural critic, poet, and man of letters who spent much of his literary life reflecting on the goodness of culture, in light of its present decline.

Eliot lived a life in search of pathways of Retvrn. Born and raised in St. Louis Missouri to a dedicated Unitarian family, Eliot would eventually betray both his Unitarian and American roots, renounce his US citizenship, and become a British subject and convert to Anglicanism. This to him was core to his overall search for a historically rooted world that repudiated the spirit of change and cultural collapse that was represented by twentieth-century America.

Eliot is known for both his poetry and his essays in social criticism. His most famous poems include “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” His best known essays include “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture” and “Christianity and Culture.” Though if you want an introduction to Eliot, I would heartily recommend Russell Kirk’s “Eliot and his Age.”

Much of his poetry acts as a platform for him to reflect on the collapse Western culture in light of the ravages of World War I (Eliot was viscously against the Treaty of Versailles) and the culture dangers of the Industrial Revolution. Eliot had a dark view of man and the present age; though wrapped in promises of Progress, Eliot refused to buy in to what he considered a cheap sort of optimism.

Eliot believed, and expressed through his essays in Criticism, that liberalism could not be sustained. The view that every individual was to set his own path in life, to determine his or destiny, and set his own values, was a path to cultural collapse. He recognized the possibility that such a social impulse could temporarily produce material abundance, but that it would concomitantly sever society from Culture. And in separating society from culture, both society and culture would disappear. Western man would forget the religious impulse that once ground him, that chastened him, and he would convince himself that man could actually be irreligious. But all this was a lie, in the eyes of Eliot.

He once noted:

“The tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women – of all classes – detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.”

The problem, however, that made our epoch especially difficult, was that it had wrapped its new social impulses in the language and dress of Christianity; such Christianity was mobilized on behalf of a sociological impulse that was undermining Christian tradition. A Christianity without tradition, for Eliot, was actually just Jacobinism. In order for Modern Man to deal seriously with his predicament, he needed the very thing he hated the most: a rejection of his own hubris, drunken optimism, and a sense of piety about the world and man’s own limits therein.

My favorite set of lines from Eliot is a reflection on modern man’s collapse, wrapped as it is the the language of progress. It comes from “The Rock.”

“O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.”

Happy Edmund Burke Day!

It is Day Twenty-Four of Heritage History Month and we are going to look today to the great critic of the French Revolution and the coming of the “Empire of Light and Reason” that would characterize rationalistic modernism. Burke himself cannot be said to embody the full spirit of the Tory traditionalists (he was a Whig), but his understanding of the cataclysmic effects of revolting against the past were profound.

One of the things that I am going to focus on in a coming series of essays is what I call the Sanction of History; history is the vehicle by which Providence manifests our nexus of rights and duties, and this is a major theme of Burke’s Reflections. Man without historical context, without the particularity that shapes him and precedes him, is a dangerous abstract. Burke anticipated the twentieth century’s deracinated mankind; now a cultish belief about individual man that permeates western thinking.

Edmund Burke was intensely opposed to the tendency of political rationalists to reconstruct society in pursuit of claims of justice. While people like Thomas Paine and other agitators of political revolution in America and Western Europe were emphasizing that societies birthed in injustice must be leveled and built anew, Burke would warn that such an attitude toward political affairs would produce the destruction, but never the reconstruction. What history had afforded us, as inheritors of Western Civilization, was a blessing that need to be cherished and protected.

Burke then would have a strong historicist bent that has caused some debate among scholars about his commitment to (a transcendent) natural law vs his implied cynicism about such a concept. I will express my views on this soon enough, but the fact remains that Burke is not of the same genus as those who find political laws as transcending the social order. Alfred Cobban and Francis Canavan have argued well that Burke’s use of Locke’s language, was cultural rather than philosophical.

Burke was of the most moving and stirring writers in the early modern age. And I will end with this profound reflection of the meaning of the French Revolution in what he took to be the close of Western Civilization. Here was an eerie lament at the age to come, the age which we now endure:

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely tom off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Happy William Shakespeare Day!

We are now less than a week away from completion and are on day twenty-three of Heritage History month. Today, we will celebrate the person and contributions of Shakespeare as a literary figure who looms large behind our Anglo-American deep sentiments toward our own culture. Literature is one of these areas of culture studies that people can often miss because they don’t realize how key a role literature plays in culture-making. The idea of a culture without any literary soil is a highly deficient culture, if it can’t even be called a true culture.

I debated whether to place John Milton or Shakespeare in this role, for the former’s impact on our understanding of the meta-narrative of Heaven and Earth obviously penetrates our moral imagination in deep ways, but Milton stands on Shakespeare’s shoulders and depends upon his contributions. Shakespeare of course wrote in the marvelous Elizabethan era of England, an era of immense development in English High Culture.

Shakespeare’s rendition of classic figures in Western Civilization, such as King Richard and Caesar, are often the very first things Anglo peoples have absorbed about them, and are nestled the deepest into our collective psyche. But more than just the transmission of historical “fact,” Shakespeare’s employment of history in the presentation of drama infuses into culture a type of historical understanding of the past the builds the present. This is the function of literature as foundational to culture.

Throughout his works, Shakespeare also relays moral lessons. Not the cheap modern type of arbitrary behavioral strictures; but narratives that touch on duty, tragedy, and the frailty of man. Hamlet portrays the story of a man who must take up his inherited duties to the social order, and Shylock offers cultural warning of the influence of moneylenders. Richard Weaver famously used Macbeth’s three witches as a foil to present Modern Man’s decision to engage in cultural descent.

Shakespeare’s use of language helped to standardize the spelling of English, and he contributed a vast number of phrases, words, and sayings that are now deeply part of our everyday life. “Wild goose chase,” “in a pickle,” “for goodness’ sake,” be-all, end-all,” melted into thin air,” and “neither rhyme nor reason” are all from Shakespeare, and there are plenty more.

This will have to do on Shakespeare for now, but I’ll leave you with this, from the Julius Caesar play:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

Happy St Augustine Day!

It is day twenty-two of Heritage History Month and we will remember one of the great intellectual forebears of Western Civilization. It’s difficult to summarize how profound the contributions of St Augustine were for the development of the West after the fall of Rome—his influence permeated the major streams of intellectual though, political momentum, and ecclesiastical dynamics. He set a masterful framework into play in Christianizing the theme of the unfolding of historical drama.

Born of a Pagan father (who converted to the Christian faith on his deathbed) and a Christian mother who were citizens of Rome, Augustine was well educated and poised for the life of a philosopher and teacher. Dabbling in various other religious movements of his time, his spiritual collapse into Christianity was expressed in one of the triumphs of Christian literature: St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine’s City of God set a tone for Christendom in reflecting on the dynamics of history as the struggle between two worlds, each with their own destinations, each bound up in a temporary tension on the stage of history. As Christianity was blamed for the collapse of Rome by its dishonor toward the gods, Augustine turned the blame back onto the moral and spiritual destitution of a degenerated people.

Augustine was prolific writer full of inward reflection, pastoral insight, philosophical profundities, and masterpieces of meta-narrative. Augustine recognized the function of Greek and Roman philosophers in the preparation for the Christian moment on the scene of world history. Heavily influenced by Plato, yet with his own Christian formulation infused into the system, Augustine would cast a vision of the world picture that promoted unity under the eternal Mind of the Logos. For Augustine, knowledge is participation in the Mind of God; is only in God that we see truly.

Augustine is one of the most important figures claimed by all major branches of post-Nicene Christianity from Rome to Eastern Orthodox to varying Protestant traditions; he therefore weighs heavily in the theology, political theory, ethics, and historiography of Christendom at large. He was a master of the doctrines of grace, especially with juxtaposed reference to the sovereignty of God over both the human soul and the experiences of Nations.

"Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved thee. For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made. Thou wast with me, but I was not with thee. These things kept me far from thee; even though they were not at all unless they were in thee. Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open my deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness."

Happy Pat Buchanan Day!

It is day twenty-one of Heritage History Month and we are going to focus on the one person in this series who is still alive. Buchanan represents the last major political contender within conservatism who understood the nature of, and was prepared to categorically oppose, the Neoconservative hegemony within the Conservative movement.

Buchanan is one of the few figures who rejects the view of America as a propositional nation, and spent his years urging people to recognize us as a place and a people, not a body of ideas that anyone the world round could simply adopt to become an American. Thus, our political “values” cannot be exported around the world because our values are actually caught up with who we are, and the experiences we have gone through as a people.

Buchanan therefore adopted the non-interventionist foreign policy impulse to concern ourselves with what was good for our people and identity, rather than the government-sponsored militaristic and financial promotion of abstract political ideals. In doing so, he drew the ire of the War Party in Washington and the fake conservatives that sat as one faction of this more general American Regime. It was he who resurrected the phrase from the 1930s: America First!

Buchanan saw in the government-sponsored “free trade” deals of the 80s and 90s a giant mechanism of cultural decline. By exporting jobs overseas and restructuring American economic order, our nation would experience a flux of cheap consumer goods at the expense of social stability, the continuity of culture, and the character of our communities.

Additionally, he warned decades ago that America’s moral fabric was coming undone in our obsession of licentious conceptions of individual rights, that distorted the American tradition of liberty into a weapon of cultural degradation. Buchanan was considered a loon for warning about the Homosexual Agenda, and now we are fighting against sustained pedophilic activities and demonic transhumanists who operate under the guise of mere sexual deviants.

Buchanan was unable in 1992 to defeat the Establishment choice in George Bush for the GOP nomination. In accepting his defeat and subsequently endorsing Bush to oppose Clinton, he gave one of his most important speeches, known now as the Culture War speech. Buchanan, deeply aware as a Catholic that holistic culture wars are fundamental to the transformation of the soul of a nation, predicted the consequences of ignoring this Culture War. Buchanan recognized before so many others the culture of death that would arise in America’s repudiation of the catholic Faith she had inherited in either its Roman or Protestant forms.

Buchanan was one of the biggest political commentators to call into question things like the goodness of World War II, increased secularization, mass immigration, homosexual unions, the Israel Lobby in America, and the cultural genocide of Southern heritage (he is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans). 

He also was keenly aware of the corruption of America’s elites and endorsed Sam Francis’ call for a “Revolution from the Middle,” finding the residues of Heritage America nestled deep in the Heartland. He issued a clarion call to these heartlanders to rise and awake, a call they may only now be heeding.

Before there was Trump, there was Buchanan. Long live the spirit of Pitchfork Pat.

Happy Christopher Columbus Day!

It’s not actually Columbus Day, we already have one of those. But as I dedicated February to considering key figures in the development of the American heritage, it would be ridiculous to not include Christopher Columbus.

Columbus of course is a key object of the Left’s deconstruction campaign, the effort to reconstruct our heroes into villains and therefore challenge the moral legitimacy of those that laid the foundation of our modern self-identity. But impulses like this are precisely why I am engaging in a Heritage History Month in the first place— to reassert the heroic character of our forebears and pay homage to those who prepared the way.

Hailing from the Republic of Genoa in northern Italy, Columbus proved himself to be a tireless explorer with unceasing ambition. Raised in the humble home of a shop owner, Columbus would take up apprenticeships and work related to the activities of merchants and trading. Keen on the political economy of trades routes and import/exports, Columbus’ background made him aware of the value of economic expansion.

Thus, the context of the mid fifteenth century crisis of the Silk Road closure (due to the fall of Constantinople) was fundamental in making of Columbus’ motivations and political strategies. He understood the value of trade and new ways to the East that could earn for him a royal sponsorship/investment.

Columbus demonstrated a particular relentlessness in his determination to reach his destination of the East, via the Atlantic. A leader that was able to push his men to the brink, he had a sense of destiny that inspired his journey into the unknown as he faced numerous catastrophes from natural disasters, to unpredictable savages, to shipwrecks, to the frustrations of political dealings.

Columbus of course had material objectives in play— both personal and political. But he also had a keen sense of the civilizational stakes; he operated on behalf of the integrity and strength of Christendom; to permeate worlds yet to be reached by the Christian religion, Columbus understood, was to take part in a divine drama. The Christian religion was tied up closely, for Columbus, in the destiny of European expansion.

We operate now in a century of civilizational unraveling. The mythos of Columbus, so vital for our self-understanding, is under sustained assault. We can push back against this by asserting his heroism, and refusing to take part in the ritual apologies expected of us as inheritors of his great deeds.

Happy John Tyler Day!

On this nineteenth day of Heritage History month, it happens to be Presidents Day and I decided to go ahead and write on my favorite US president. I won’t make the full case here for Tyler as the greatest, but certainly one can see in Tyler a presidential character who represents a world we have lost.

Tyler of course became president when William Harrison died, just over a month into his term. As Tyler was the first VP to take the reigns upon the death of the President, it was unclear exactly what this would mean: should he assume the duties and be the Acting President, or be sworn into the office and take up the presidential title? While some wanted otherwise (John Quincy Adams never referred to him as the legitimate President), Tyler ignored the critics and was sworn in.

Tyler represents probably the most constitutionally purist President in a world where that was both politically possible, and socio-politically wise. Tyler was an uncompromising believer in the restraints of his own office, and Congress’ as well. He stood firm against various forms of economic nationalization, especially as it concerned the creation of a central bank. Tyler spent his presidency saying “no” to one of the nineteenth century’s most ruthless political characters in the person of Henry Clay, brainstormer of the “American System” and architect of economic and structural centralization.

Clay was so ruthless in the machinations of political dynamics that at one point, trying to put intense pressure on Tyler to comply with his economic program, he literally accomplished the mass resignation of Tyler’s entire cabinet. Tyler responded by simply stacking the entire administration with His Guys. Based.

In addition to refusing to participate in various schemes of economic centralization, he also held a traditional non-intervention view of foreign policy. As such he was able to slash the budget by shrinking the expenditures on the maintenance of American soldiers and refusing to be engaged in prolonged military adventures where it did not concern actual American interests. He was a realist on foreign policy though, and applied the Monroe Doctrine to the kingdom of Hawaii, warning Britain to keep its hands off, as doing otherwise would be interpreted as a threat to American security.

Finally, Tyler, a southerner, was a defender of his homeland in a context where tensions were heightening. He supported Calhoun’s nullification doctrines against Jackson in the Nullification crisis and always recognized that the Union was a product of the voluntary participation of sovereign states. He saw the American system in an originalist sense where the states formed a general government to achieve certain purposes which could only be sustained if the federal government adhered to these purposes. His commitment to the well-being of his region as a priority even to the well being of the union was a clear reflection of the anti-federalist spirit in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Tyler should be remembered for his fierce commitment to the restraints of his own office and for constantly thwarting schemes of Progressive transformation. I don’t think Tyler is the man we need at the moment—his world has already been conquered—but we should see Tyler as a counter signal to the disastrous twentieth century.