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.

Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, have a peculiar relationship with modern literary giants such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They remain completely unaware the extent to which these men, having keenly developed mythical-historical states of mind, would completely despise the lifestyle and cultural instincts of the modern mass.

Those components of contemporary life that are deemed evidence of human progress (such as technology and suburbanism), are to Tolkien and Lewis aspects of man’s surrender to new and strange gods. They represent a Faustian abandonment of history in exchange for the fleeting experiences of momentary titillation.

“Western civilization” is a thing not to be preserved, for Tolkien and Lewis, so much as it is something to be remembered as having once been, something that has been deserted and conquered to make room for its civilizational replacement: modernity.

With this perspective, we read with interest the English translation (from French) of Armand Berger’s short monograph Tolkien, Europe, and Tradition. Tolkien, we are reminded, was not just a man with a fantastical imagination, but a uniquely skilled philologist who sought to craft for his beloved England a mythos analogous to the founding myths of Scandinavian and Germanic cultures.

Berger informs us of Tolkien’s awareness of the English “mythological crisis:”

When Tolkien was introduced to philology and mythology, it soon became clear to him that England, although an heir to our European civilization, lacked the kind of authentic tradition that man naturally feels drawn to connect to. Germany has its Nibelungenlied, Italy has its Commedia, and France has its Chanson de Roland. But what about England?

While Beowulf was written in Old English, it was Scandinavian in setting and cultural periphery. Thus, Tolkien’s earliest thrust was to integrate into broader European mythology the English experience, something that could provide the imaginative tapestry against which the more recent sociological dogmas of England could be said to have their backdrop. Such an inspiration works heavily against the impulses of modern man, who amuses himself in a quest to rationalize all things; that is, to de-mythologize and de-sacralize the world. Tolkien then, from his very beginnings swam against the current.

Not interested in the modern project of mere material advancement for the sake of sensational prosperity, Tolkien emphasizes the indispensable nature of an historical consciousness in the development and binding of men with fellow men. A metaphysic community—rather than an artificial community of material coincidence that characterizes modernist geographical groupings of men—requires a shared mythology of history. History is not facts and data points, but a vision of cosmic proportions.

To this end, Tokien labors to integrate his mythos into the world of greater European legend, crafting it in a way that serves the interests of particularly and profoundly English experiences and sentiments. From the races and languages and symbolism that flood his world of Middle Earth—and the scenic peripheries of his earlier poems, songs, and stories—there is constant reworking of Anglo-Saxon themes, drawing clear and clever analogies to a universe of forgotten and abandoned pre-England literature. The purpose of imagination, for Tolkien, was not to created irrelevant worlds, but to write the mythic history of his own people. This is mythic history in a way that strikes the modern mood as ridiculous and distracting from the more important occupations centered around consumption, entertainment, and money-making.

Tolkien therefore must engage with lost themes from the classical world—themes completely at odds with modern life. Among these themes include culturally-particular views of heroism, royal duties, and self-denying courage; all of them emphasizing the metaphysical connection between man and his fellow man; the individual and his particular people. There are enemies in Tolkien’s world, and these enemies take on themes that Tolkien sensed were analogous to the threats that conspired against his own country of England.

It was the function of heroes to adopt an aristocratic imagination and live with honor against a world that mocked such ideals. In repudiation of modernity’s emphasis on individualism and consumption, Tolkien’s work issued a call to return to ages of valor, hero-worship, and the spirit of aristocratic exemplification. To this end, Tolkien sees in Anglo-Saxon legendarium an impulse that prefers the harmonious relationship between culture and nature to the excesses of either. Nature without culture is barbarianism, culture without nature collapses into philistinism.

Thus, Tolkien ties the impulses of industrial modernization to the great enemy of Middle Earth: Sauron. Sauron casts his efforts against not against great cities, but in pursuit of great cities. He seeks to liquidate the Forests because in the landscape of trees and hills lies ancient memory. It is the creation that has observed the march of history, bearing witness to the struggles of Tolkien’s people and the mindless hysteria of these new agents of Evil who wish to tear down the people’s memory. The key to severing a people from their past, from their historical consciousness, is to wipe out the sensual landscape. This includes old structures, memorials, forests, and streams, and so on. He writes of the destruction of the countryside in the following way, in The Two Towers:

Once it had been green and filled with avenues and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams that flowed from the mountain to a lake. But no green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman. The roads were paved with stone-flags, dark and hard; and beside their borders instead of trees there marched long lines of pillars, some of marble, some of copper and of iron, joined by heavy chains.

It was a technological revolution—which of course Tolkien saw before the rise of digital technology as we now know it— that Tolkien recognized as the threat of his people. They were be subsumed by it; they were not to be conquered purely by swords, but by visions of material splendor.

Berger offers an interesting reference to Junger’s own admonition of a Forest retreat when he writes:

“Tolkien’s strong criticism of the modernization, mechanization, and industrialization of the world, in his work decorated with traditional elements drawn from the riches of our civilization, bears witness to an ecological way of thinking. In a letter dated 6 October 1944, Tolkien wrote to his son: “if a ragnarok would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs, it could for me burn all the works of art—and I’d go back to trees.” We are not far from Ernst Junger’s "Recourse to the Forest.”

For Berger, Tolkien’s project is a grand stand on behalf of Europe and her civilization. It was not the creation of irrelevant worlds, but a mythologization effort in pursuit of European civilizational restoration. It is historical because only in light of history can modern man find his true place among his people; it is mythological because in “archetype and myth” man can truly see the “unveiling of a strangely… familiar civilization.”

Berger quotes Stefan George to say:

A new degree of culture occurs when one or more original minds reveal their life-rhythm, which is taken on first by a community and then by a larger section of the population. The original spirit does not act by its doctrine, but by its rhythm: doctrine is later made by the disciples.”

Thus, says Berger, Tolkien is a great defender of old Europe, a Europe that stood majestic before the coming of Saruman and other prophets of revolutionary material upheavals.

Little by little, as the work of the weavers [among whom is Tolkien] takes shape, a monumental tapestry rises before us. What is blurry now becomes clearer. The contours and shapes become more precise. We finally take a step back, after being thrown into it, to contemplate with new eyes the whole piece that comes to life before our fixed gaze. We can hardly believe it. Middle-earth, this enclosure of men dear to the Germanic imagination, is in reality a projection of our world, that of our Europe, into more remote times.

He built an “imaginary time, but kept his feet on his own mother-earth for place.”

Tolkien, Berger reflects in conclusion, “like an Anglo-Saxon bard,… is one of those noble heralds who have brought our civilization wealth to its pinnacle.” Middle-earth is European; specifically, it is the origin story of the English sentimental framework. His legendarium belongs to Europe.

Tolkien as Christian

While not derived from the book, one further thought is relevant to this article. It is an aspect of modernist “Conservative” Evangelicalism to seek in Tolkien and Lewis analogies to the Christian gospel. This is an obvious example of my own accusation regarding Evangelicalism, which I describe as:

the product of carving out the evangelical side of certain historical-theological debates within the metaphysical-sociological paradigm of Christian Europe and making the evangelical position into the whole of the Christian religion while casting away the metaphysical-sociological paradigm and letting it crash by the wayside.

Taking Tolkien as drawing up a Christian-infused project is completely fair and true; but relegating this infusion to the narrowness of evangelical categories is ridiculous. Tolkien is a serious Christian in the classical sense, in the Augustinian sense; in the sense that he sees in world history a grand theater for cosmic forces. It is a battlefield of the gods that takes place ultimately in the realm of metaphysics; yet being Christian, he of course sees such a battle as culminating in the victory of Christ over all other claimants to the cosmic throne. In history we see the unfolding of a grand drama; there is Providence in history, for his engagement with history and its mythological renditions is to assert that historical unfolding is sanctified.

Tolkien takes the world of gods and myths seriously. They are not the products of unenlightened pre-rationalist man, but rather vital endeavors to explain and pass on what has really happened in the clash between men and higher beings. Mythological history is real for Tolkien, and in that sense he is Christian against the Darwinian animal that strips history and destiny of transcendent meaning. There is meaning in history because God is a God of history and its dynamics.

Behind our material struggles lies metaphysical realities that are, as Brad Birzer points out, perhaps more real than our obsession with “facts” and information and materialist-nominalist understandings of sensual objects.

It is in this sense that Tolkien draws upon his classical Christian instincts to assault modernist empiricism and the sociological projects that derive from it. The world of Tolkien is an indictment of his evangelical bourgeois consumer base that has participated gleefully in what Max Weber has referred to as the disenchantment of the modern world.

As I’ve harked on in the past, one of themes that has risen to the surface in my own political developments is a renewed emphasis on what I call particularism: the recognition that each political order is faced with specific circumstances, interests, threats, needs, and struggles such that political systems and laws vary between nations. There is no universalistic political code as is implied in most modern political theories: libertarianism, liberal-democracy, theonomy, marxism, etc.

I consider this to be one of the defining features of Classical Conservative thought from Russell Kirk back through Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke. I remember reading the section on Thomas Hobbes in Paul Gottfried’s study of Carl Schmitt (truly one of history’s more eminent particularists) and finding interest in his connection between Hobbes and the sort of legendary Anglican divine Richard Hooker, a great defender of Queen Elizabeth’s religious settlement. Hooker had sought to grapple with the weaknesses of the conformists against their Puritan critics in a much more holistic way so as to justify and defend the English political regime.

As most people who have looked into Hooker are aware, Brad Littlejohn is one of the most important popularizers of Hooker’s thought. I don’t agree with everything he does—or associates with—but I will be forever grateful for his work in synthesizing the academic contributions of Hooker studies. Especially in light of my need for a political theology to comport with my budding paleoconservatism.

Several years ago he wrote an article for the American Conservative on Hooker and I’ve read it a few times. As I continue to emphasize what I have learned from Hooker and certain themes become crystalized in my mind amidst increasingly rightward shifts among Christians, I want to comment on some aspects of that article that stand out to me. I want to do this so as to constantly clarify that while I am tired of the pietist, secularist classical liberal thinking that pervades American evangelicalism, I am equally unsettled by the transformationalist, Neo-Puritan political thinking of the theonomists.

Hooker to me is the great advocate of continuity and political realism; that is, unlike universalists like the Puritan agitators, he saw in legal revolutions the seeds of political destruction not unlike how Edmund Burke critiqued the French Revolution. In fact, it is obvious that Burke followed Hooker here. To be anti-revolutionary was to be keenly aware of the destruction that will ensue in the unleashing of holistic programs to overhaul the laws of the realm. The stability of the order, from which the harmonies of private life find their footing, is more vital than efforts to bring legal systems into conformity with utopian visions.

As Littlejohn observes:

it is not enough to show that a proposed reform will be better in the abstract, for laws do not have the luxury of governing abstractions. Laws govern people, and people tend to respond poorly to sudden social or legal changes. Laws, however much people grumble about them, become familiar features of the social landscape, and if suddenly altered, people lose their practical and moral bearings. Indeed, the very moral authority that we seek to instill into our laws can backfire when they are changed too often.

Yet Hooker was indeed a particularist, siding with Calvin’s recognition that every political order had its own political and legal needs, which could shift over time and circumstance. In this, in his siding with the magisterial political tradition, he stood against both stubborn status quo thinking, and the universalist political instincts of the Puritans, led by Thomas Cartwright, among others.

Littlejohn quotes Hooker to say:

Laws are “instruments to rule by, and…instruments must always be designed not merely according to their general purpose, but also according to the particular context and matter upon which they are made to work. The end for which a law is made may be permanent, but the law may still need changing if the means it prescribes no longer serve that end.”

This was the confrontation that presented itself to the political Puritans:

In fact, it was precisely the Puritan revolutionaries who did not seem to appreciate this point. Although they were eager to raze the current regime, the one they planned to erect in its place was to be for all time, since it was authorized by God. This fanaticism of revelation would exhibit startling similarities to the fanaticism of reason two centuries later, as Eric Voegelin observed in The New Science of Politics.

From this, following Hooker, we can appreciate the fact that politics has a constant theme of flexibility to it; if politics is unwilling to confront the dynamics of social changes and developments it is subject to either takeover or collapse. Hooker then used “natural law” (an extremely difficult and varying concept that often pits its own advocates against each other) to emphasize that those holding power have the authority to “what may be done” or what is prudent to do in order to address constantly changing political realities. Natural law doesn’t function, for Hooker, like a universalist would like it to: one fixed law for all time and circumstance. I would like to discuss the difficulties of natural law at another time.

One of the implications of particularism is that political authority becomes absolutely vital. Aside from all the myths and good feelings with regard to the “sovereignty of the people” with American democratic rhetoric, someone actually has to decide when laws should be applied, in what way, and when they should be suspended. If we are particularists, then circumstances could render the need to determine exceptions. This is the true sovereign of a system, the true political power. The sovereign is a person, granted authority to act politically by God. Human authority therefore is a key aspect to this way of thinking.

Human laws and institutions, then, rest upon a foundation of tradition, experience, and trial and error. Beneath these, to be sure, is the deeper bedrock of transcendent moral order, but only the long, hard work of human reason and ingenuity can adapt this order to the needs of each society. While law as such carries divine sanction, the authority of particular laws rests chiefly on human authority. Though imperfect and uncertain, such authority is, for Hooker, sufficient.

Hooker proves his classical conservatism in his embrace of historical development. Besides particularism, another pillar of authentic classical conservatism is its historicism. One of the things that the late twentieth and twenty-first century conservative movement gets most wrong about conservatism is its rabid opposition to any form of historicism. I have discussed this in another context when discussing Leo Strauss. The classical conservative, like Hooker, sees in the historical process the stabilizing effects of collective wisdom, permeating out into the forwarding stepping present. The denial of historical guidance is a willingness to be sociologically blinded.

Hence arises the conservative respect for tradition. When it comes to law-making, the wisdom that is gleaned from long study of human nature is indispensable. Good lawmakers will recognize that much more than one lifetime is needed for such wisdom. Tradition, for Hooker, is simply the accumulated wisdom of centuries, which we would be foolhardy to ignore.

This applies to particularism specifically in that particularism emphasizes the uniqueness of each and every people’s particular experiences. One of the primary problems with internationalism, multiculturalism, and all these post-enlightenment projects is that they deny the particularity of people groups. It is in customs, cultural, collective memories that national priorities find their basis. One cannot find universal political solutions precisely because a people’s struggles and the things that are good for them vary from place to place.

What is implied here is a type of “national conservatism;” that is, a conservatism of independent nations (in America, historically, this would probably have been regions). The authority of law, Littlejohn points out, “rests on a foundation of local custom and accumulated practice.” If history provides boundaries for group identities, and politics relates to these boundaries, then customs and traditions playing a key function in the political priorities of varying peoples. Because of this, Hooker follows Calvin against the modern theonomist movement:

Littlejohn: “Hooker recognized that even God himself did not attempt to legislate civil laws for every time and place. The laws of Moses, he notes,” 

were established with careful thought for the places and persons to which they applied, as all good positive laws must be. Given that not all nations are the same, and God prescribed these laws with such an eye to the particular needs of Israel, how could we think that the fact that God made these laws unchangeable for one people means they should govern all nations forever. (—Hooker)

In Hooker’s day, the advocates of universalist, internationalist conformity were the Puritans:

The English Reformation had grown in large part out of the assertion of national freedom against what was seen as the overreaching universal aspirations of the papacy.

The Puritans were a bit like modern globalists: idealists who thought they knew the best way to run things and wanted all countries to follow that same model. Hooker responds like a good nationalist: what’s best for Switzerland or the Netherlands may not be best for England. Hooker’s defense of the Church of England was framed as a defense of national sovereignty, of the freedom of each particular Christian community to determine the form of its corporate life. 

The Puritan demand for international uniformity, he argued, rested on three confusions. The first, which Hooker has already addressed, was the idea that polity and ceremonies were essentially matters of divine, rather than human, law. The second was a flattened view of human nature that ignored history, politics, and social context: if an institution or practice was good for one people, Cartwright reasoned, then surely it must be good for all. Third, Cartwright proposed this international uniformity, as internationalists of every age do, as a peace program: Christians of every nation will dwell together in peace and unity if they all have the same laws and customs.

The above was merely a scattershot collection of some themes that have been meaningful to me in my own thinking, but the contributions of Hooker are legion. What is important to me about Hooker is that he provides the link between the greater political traditions of classical Europe and modern problems. There are tremendous implications for having a Hookerian state of mind when it comes to circumstantial political particularity.

On one hand, we can be more conscious of the march of history that is absent post-enlightenment anglo-American political thought. We can reject the Cult of Presentism that permeates of contemporary mind. On the other hand, particularism allows us to recognize that we currently sit on the other side of the revolution that Hooker and Burke warned against. I think doubling down on this fact places me in a different position than current advocates of Burke (such as Hazony and the National Conservatism folks). If legal upheaval would cause a type of destabilizing chaos, and if we have already experienced this legal revolution, in the Civil Rights Revolution, we already live in post-America. We have already been politically severed from our past. Historical continuity was vital in Elizabethan and Burkean England. It was vital too in prewar American political life (much to the chagrin of the Progressive establishment).

But we live on other other side of the revolutions that have actually already expired Western Civilization. Particularism allows us to accept this and not be restrained by legal norms that no longer exist, in our quest to politically confront our existential enemies. If we believe in circumstantial particularity, and we are honest about the situation, we can be politically liberated from the restraints that the Left uses against conservatives to subdue us.

Earlier this year, my essay The Triumph of the Political was published in Paul Gottfried’s recent anthology. Several people have expressed interest in reading the essay but the volume is expensive and I’m not really allowed to share the whole essay in digital form. This post serves as a summary statement of the content therein.

While that essay was written in the particular context of explaining why many (such as myself) have left the libertarian political ideology, I think it is of broader value. The reason for this, I am convinced, and as I explain in that essay, is that libertarianism is the most precise and pure formulation of a more general classical liberalism that reaches back into the contributions of Enlightenment political theory.

This isn’t to say that the strictures of libertarianism cannot be severed from Enlightenment presuppositions, if one really wants to make use of them on different grounds. But the point here is that the prevailing body of political rhetoric from which all major political stances are taken in the twentieth century stem from Enlightenment thinking. And therefore, to critique libertarianism is in many ways to critique a general spirit that sits behind the American mythos as it has developed since World War II.

The American Ideology is characterized by a number of different features and it would take a full essay to explore these. But in short, the American ideology leverages the enlightenment rhetoric of individual rights, equality, and democracy and seeks to administer these things via bureaucracy, expertise, and central management, even to the point of militantly exporting these “values” around the Western world.

It is obvious that the purported ideology of the Western establishment (individual rights, democracy, equality, and liberty) do not, in point of fact, describe the actions of the Western regimes themselves. Any historical definition of “liberalism” clearly does not describe the actual nature of Western power, but nevertheless, I do think we can say that the political rhetoric of the twentieth century largely fits the enlightenment liberal paradigm. That is to say, the West is lying about being liberal; and liberalism no longer has real world meaning.

This is actually part of my point: it was a fundamental aspect of the American ideology to think of politics as having been overcome, having been proved outdated and superseded by things like expertise, legal rationalism, liberal ideals, and political science as an objective and perfectible approach to statecraft. But, I heartily contend, this has failed; politics has triumphed. Politics remains, and we see before us a Total Politicalization.

The subtitle of my essay is “Post-libertarianism at the end of the American ideology.” I argue that in the 70s and 80s especially, there was an alliance between the libertarians and the conservatives that reflected a dual opposition to the American Federal Government and its twentieth-century transformation into an increasingly totalitarian administrative state. Robert Nisbet called libertarians and conservatives “uneasy cousins.”

The traditionalist conservatives and the paleoconservatives (these are distinct categories, with much overlap) opposed the American Ideology and the Government that sought to bring it to fruition for different reasons than did the libertarians. Their alliance was one of circumstance, not of fundamental approach to political affairs. Libertarians rightly argued that the American administrative state made a mockery of liberal ideals and that the essence of the American system in the twentieth century was one of a totalizing Absolute Bureaucracy. The libertarian rejected the entire trajectory of the American state, and called for the actual implementation of liberalism’s most basic foundations. On the other hand, the traditionalist/paleos, rejected not only the actual form taken by the American Administrative State, but also the political worldview on which this system pretends to have been constructed.1

I then make my distinction between Particularism and Universalism. I’ve greatly explicated this distinction here. In sum, I believe that most modern political theories seek to develop a political system, tied closely to a concomitant system of legal principles, that should sit above all human political orders and act as the standard by which political systems are to be judged, and conformed. For libertarians, they believe that political orders should take on libertarian formulations, to be maximally just or prosperous or harmonious (etc). For Marxists and theonomists and Jacobins and so forth, they have their own universalist system that the nations should adopt.

That Universalism is juxtaposed to Particularism which instead urges that one’s society should do and act and prioritize what is good for that specific society, in light to changing real world political threats and the interests of the metaphysical community, informed by its own traditions, customs, and way of life. As I previously wrote:

This conservative-particularist approach to political priorities values historically rooted institutions, organic hierarchies, and inherited socio-political customs. Such inherited customs include rights, obligations, and political procedures that are aspects of specific social orders and their members. Thus, the particularist disposition perceives social problems not through the lens of universal abstractions and political ideals that transcend specific issues, but focuses rather on the peculiar needs and conditions of the varying interests within an actual, real-world political order.

Having distinguished between libertarianism (liberalism) and traditionalism/paleoconservatism as types, I then turn to four fundamental weaknesses of the liberalism/libertarianism camp that have, in the last two decades especially motivated the rise of paleoconservatism’s rediscovery.

These four critiques, in my opinion, are the strongest reasons why someone should not be libertarian. But in offering these, I’m actually seeking to critique an overall approach that applies to Americanized modernity2: the impulses of Liberals, most contemporary Conservatives, Progressives, and even tiny groups like theonomists and even some operating under the Christian Nationalist label (but not Stephen Wolfe—a particularist—and those who have really digested his book).

The four critiques are categorized as follows

1. The nature of society.

2. Lessons regarding power, through the insights of James Burnham

3. Lessons regarding the political, through the insights of Carl Schmitt

4. Lessons regarding cultural hegemony, through the insights of Antonio Gramsci

The Nature of Society

It’s difficult to be brief here, but the essence of the argument is that, for the particularist conservative, rights and duties are the product of the historical-political process, usually over the course of centuries. This is because society is structured around the theme of representation: parents, have the authority to represent and act on behalf of their children. The parents too were born into the social order in this way, as the social order precedes any given individual going back thousands of years. The libertarian philosopher Hans Hoppe convinced many libertarians of the legitimacy of what he called “Covenant Communities.” It is when one realizes that all individuals were born into previously structured orders and inherit certain rights and duties, one becomes a conservative. The idea that one can make demands that the social order conform to universal claims of right and liberty is nonsense in this paradigm. Western (Anglo-Saxon) rights and liberties were products of historical development.

Lessons of Power: James Burnham

James Burnham emphasized the point that power can only be constrained by competing units of power; it cannot be constrained by ideological commitments. The libertarian and the classical liberal do not take into account the fact that, in pursuit of their quest for the implementation of liberty, they are actually undermining their own objectives in denying to themselves the legitimacy of wielding power. Liberty is the product of Power confronting and stalemating Power.

Burnham’s famous lines from The Machiavellians were:

there are no exceptions. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders or businessman, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Only power restrains power. That restraining power is expressed in the existence and activity of oppositions. When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do.

The appeal to Constitutional restraints, while certainly alluring, are not an actual exercise of power. The only way to implement Constitutional restraints is the implementation of political will against those who do not care about the Constitutionalism. This political will, of course, would require unconstitutional actions. The Constitution needs a defender who is above the prescribed limits of the Constitution, especially in our post-Constitutional epoch.

In short: the well-meaning liberal and the libertarian must face the fact that wielding-power is non-negotiable if the objective is to meaningfully confront the political tyrants who rule over us.

Lessons of the Political: Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt, the controversial German jurist, was heavily critical of the theories of those who thought society could order themselves in a way that transcended politics. The political, for Schmitt, was the manifestation of the fundamental fact that there are always competing visions of the social order such that, if one vision is successful, it will eliminate the way of life of those operating under mutually exclusive visions. He articulated this using the distinction between political Friends and Enemies. Politics, he argued, was at its essence not in the ready-to-compromise meeting of the minds between compatriots, but in the recognition that there exist interested parties who would seek to make of the social order a system that would eliminate other parties.

It is a denial of the Concept of the Political to pretend like a completely open society can exist, which offers all types of ideologues and participants an equal seat at the table. Schmitt made many of these observations in the context of the (purportedly liberal) Weimar Constitution: if Germany was to pretend like all groups have equal access to power, what would prevent Marxists or Nazis from legitimately and legally acquiring the reigns of the state, and then deciding to shut down the liberal structure of things? Was not Schmitt vindicated in his 1930s writings? Liberalism does not have the means to prevent its own takeover, and it ignores this weakness because it refuses to admit that there are mutually exclusive political actors in the world, all vying for power.

Schmitt observed that liberalism ignores this political essence of man’s existence. I wrote in my essay:

[Liberalism] attempts to supersede so-called outdated levels of intense political hostility by relegating such tensions to private economic competition, the “marketplace of ideas,” or competing ideological sects. Thus, conflict over once existential “ways of life” can be pacified and consigned to personal preference, allegedly. A core aspect of the meaning of liberalism itself, according to Schmitt, is that it is dedicated to the “negation of the political.” Paul Gottfried sums up this position as follows: “Liberals minimize the importance of the state in order to avoid political struggle. At the same time, they reduce governing to procedural matters and the interplay of parliamentary parties…. Liberalism brings about or accelerates the dissolution of state and politics, subordinating both to the ‘individualistic domain of private law and morality’ and finally to economics.”

For Schmitt overcoming the basic presence of the political antithesis (friend vs. enemy) in society is impossible, so the liberal experiment will actually result in the total politicization of the liberal regimes.

Lessons of Cultural Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci

I’ve also written about this section separately here. The role of Gramsci’s thinking in undermining the liberal-libertarian instinct has to do with the political implications of the radical capture of cultural institutions. If there’s anything in the present political situation that should speak volumes to the anti-Left, it’s the emergency of cultural capture. It’s hard to think of a historical moment in the last thousand years of the West when the cultural has been so totally captured by an impulse so hostile to our history, heritage, and way of life. And this capture has donned the rhetoric of freedom and the rights of expression, speech, and property.

Gramsci comprehended that this apparently open society provided certain opportunities for takeover. In contradiction to the liberal narrative, the state was not constrained in its interests merely to those activities having to do with coercion. Rather, its power, as well as its character and activity, rested on its ability to organize consent outside its technical governing tasks. Under the regime of Liberalism, those in power exercised two forms of control: coer- cion (its formal power) and at least the possibility of cultural hegemony. This possibility was already inherent in the liberal political framework and could be enlisted for radical change.

If political power in the West depended on the organization of a general consensus, those who sought to capture power in the West ought to take command of that condition and shape it to their advantage. The subversion of minds, the undermining of organic culture, and a long-term siege of civil society would prove to be the appropriate path for breaking down resistance. Gramsci therefore is a pioneer in the subfield of political science that concentrates on the element of socio-political life neglected by the enthusiasts for Liberalism: namely, the subversion of civil society through revolutionary forces. The Liberal Democratic model held that coercion pertained to the state but that freedom operated in civil society. Gramsci saw that both the state and civil society were vulnerable to takeover by revolutionaries.

He realized that norms and customs, habits, and ways of life, were not brought to society by socially detached individuals. They were the products of already existing institutions, some of which stretched back thousands of years. Churches, families, guilds, trades, land holdings, academies, and associations were the shapers of our ideas and basic suppositions about the world. Once those institutions fell to revolutionary ideologies at odds with the old liberal state, the liberal regime had no mechanism to prevent its takeover. The state was, after all, formally neutral: that is, it could be swayed by determined, well-organized power blocs. No matter how large the liberal state became, it was always necessarily weak, unable by definition to prevent its own occupation by totalitarian movements operating within the legitimate boundaries of its own creation. Once the institutions were captured, the state would come to support those who captured it. The state’s coercive capabilities would be at the disposal of those anti-liberals who took command of it.

Conclusion

Given that this “summary” is already excessive, I’ll keep my conclusion brief. The above four points have bolstered an understanding of political theory that is necessarily circumstantial and particular: our threats, and our needs, depend on political and cultural circumstance. Our threats are not those of Italy in the 15th century; and neither are the institutions that are worth defending. What Americans need in our time is not whimsical sentimentality (“Why can’t we just peaceably live and let live?”) or ideological universals (here is the universal code of justice we must submit to), but the employment of power against specific political threats—even if these political threats are being born within what used to be called “private society.”

Our way of life, and the very real and empirical people that constitute our political order, are under threat. While we celebrated our Overcoming of History and the implementation of a Propositional Nation dedicated to equality, universal ideals, and the brotherhood of man, we pretended like the Political element of man’s experience had been conquered.

I’ll conclude here in quotation from my original essay:

The political has triumphed. Liberalism was unable to maintain itself and to prevent its own capture. It only operated for as long as no serious opponent captured it as the champion of a more expansive liberalism.

[O]ne becomes a true paleoconservative, a true man of the Right, when one comes to terms with the fact that the defenders of social order must always face political enemies, the iron laws of power, and aspirants for cultural hegemony. The “temporary” nature of specific political problems and struggles is a constant element of human life.

Politics is forever an aspect of the human experience and to deny this does not change the reality. In the real world of the political, as summarized by Auron MacIntyre, “the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.”

This Substack was originally meant to focus on a range of content, but not so much political theology. But since the Christian religion is so tied up into the way I see the unfolding of world history and the dynamics of social theory, I constantly get sucked back in. The great German political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose thought I, through the academic work of Paul Gottfied, have been so influenced by, was keen to note that only those who understand the religious backdrop of European history can truly understand modern political theory.

I had originally planned an essay dealing with the history of political theology so as to prepare a dehomogenization effort between two schools of thought operating under the same label. I will still do this, but am going to take more time on it. Because I think it’s worth it. Nevertheless, this different post will accomplish similar objectives, even if the means are different.

In this present post, I’m instead going to produce a series of statements that describe how my understanding of certain themes from Christian political theology flow into my traditionalist, right-wing, Paleoconservatism. I want to differentiate myself from other schools of thinking such as the variations of “Transformationalism”1 on one hand, but also what I’ll call the “Neutralist”2 camps.3

I consider my position to be that, more or less, of the Magisterial Reformers. It has taken me quite a while to get here. One of the major themes that I have picked up from the Magisterial position (and elsewhere) is that of particularity: the function of politics is not to craft an ideal situation, but to constantly be making judgements about what is possible, what needs to be defended with power, and what needs to be confronted with power. Circumstances and threats change. By the way, it is fascinating to me that, despite the heavy number of Roman Catholics in traditional conservative circles, Gottfried himself thinks that Calvin, Luther, and Hooker had more preferable political theologies, as they relate to his own understanding of political sovereigns.

The purpose of this piece isn’t to “prove” Paleoconservatism from my religious grounding so much as it is to explain the connection between what I believe about the basics of political theology, and the rhetoric and framing of my Paleoconservative political observations. In short, I don’t believe I could be a very good paleoconservative if my political theological foundations were Transformationalist on one hand, or Neutralist on the other.

What Is Paleoconservatism?

Paleoconservatism was and is a reaction to the political and ideological corruption of the Conservative Movement in America. Paleoconservatism therefore is particularistic (as opposed to universalistic), pro Heritage America (it recognizes that politics is chiefly about group interests), pro Anglo-traditionalism (while it benefits from the Western tradition broadly, it knows that America has British cultural origins), and pro-Christianity (it recognizes that the moral and metaphysical backbone of the West is a product of the spirit and labor of the Christian religion). If Christianity is its metaphysical lens, and it urges the solidarity of common peoples toward the preservation of their commonality, Paleoconservatism is consistent as a particular expression of the spirit of a “Christian nationalism” (so long as one doesn’t confuse nationalism with the American nation state in some sort of absolute sense).

The below statements will be brutally brief. Elaboration can come over time. What can also come over time are answers to all the obvious objections. This is just a reference-post.

Two Kingdoms Theology

My position is that of Classical Two Kingdoms (C2K). So that I don’t have to type it all out, here is a selection of Calvin, taken from Brad Littlejohn’s fantastic guide The Two Kingdoms.

I thus distinguish between Christ’s spiritual kingdom that is co-extensive with the elect (the justified) and the temporal, or creational kingdom, which includes the visible, institutional church as a mixed company of elect and unelect. In this model, both institutional/visible church, and the state, are part of the same kingdom, while the “mystical union with Christ” is sealed off into the spiritual kingdom.

The R2K position on the other hand is that the visible, institutional church is also part of the spiritual kingdom. The implication of my position is that the institutional church, being part of the temporal kingdom, therefore participates in the mosaic of political society. The other implication is that, as the visible church is part of the temporal society, so the state is, at the very minimum, not breaching some vital stricture in recognizing, defending, and upholding the duty of the institutional church to fulfill a sociological function unique to its own, Christian nature. The state has an interest in the well-being of the true religion, and the church as an interest in the favorability of the state.

Unlike the Transformationalists on the other hand, I do not apply gospel categories and the advancing of Christ’s spiritual kingdom to the domain of political involvement in an equivocal sense. The essence of the political state is not to bring mankind into subjection to Christ or bring about the realization of the new creation. Though promoting the true religion and protecting and advancing the interests of the Church is a legitimate function of state, since all kingdoms need some sort of religious hegemony to bind them.

My political interest is in shaping temporal political affairs in accordance with what is good for the well being of my natural family and nation (which includes, again, religious aspects), not building the kingdom of God.

The great commission therefore, is not a political assignment (though it can have political ramifications), but pertains to the conversion of souls.

Nature and Grace

This flows into the absolutely vital topic of the relation between Nature and Grace. Questions relating to the dynamic between Nature (creational institutions—family bonds, reason, sexuality, physical desire, civil law, etc) and Grace (salvation, the invisibility of the true Church, eternal rewards, redemption, etc) are ancient and complicated.

The concept that teaches that Grace restores Nature rather than defeats it, is a key element of my thinking. As Jan Veenhof stressed in his exposition of Bavinck, the age of Grace has its war on sin, not nature. Creation is still good.

Restricting the relevance of Nature-Grace specifically to political theology, I reject the modern evangelical view—so commonly assumed in the rhetoric of critics of right-wing politics—that Christ’s coming marked the end of Natural relations as an animating feature of political interests. I reject the methodology of political analysis that leverages features of the age of grace in a way that seeks to sabotage nature. What is precisely relevant here is that I do not think of the dispensation of Grace as rendering irrelevant or void natural affinities, obligations, or political societies. It is still the duty of families, and by extension tribes, and by extension kin groups, and by extension nations, to work in solidarity with each other, and for each other, and with priority toward each other.

Is there any argument more irrelevant to questions of political, civil society relating to cultural interests than the citation of Gal 3:28, which specifies its own parameters (in Christ)? By citing this theme, they make one of the most basic mistakes in the history of Christian political theology.

All those evangelicals therefore (and left-leaning theonomists) who denounce the advocacy of temporary kingdoms fighting for their own, against Others, operate on the reversal of my own understand of the nature-grace framework.

This also applies, in a different way, to transformationalists who see in the restoration of Nature the building of a New Creation. In my understanding, the restoration means the affirmation of temporal institutions (the creation order, being under a Covenant of Works, was always temporal and heaven-oriented) as a good and worthy object of our care, attention, and participation. And working for the well-being of these institutions is a good unto itself, even if the institutions are not eternal.

Biblicism vs. Historicism (or Particularism)

I do not understand the function of the Bible in the same way that the theonomists do as it relates to temporal society. I do not think all political action needs to be exegetically sourced or defended any more than all business action needs to be exegetically sourced or defended. Unlike the theonomists, I don’t demand of political theory and the exercise of statecraft that it be constantly derived from the Bible alone. I believe flexibility and the constant awareness of real world political threats are key components of political activity. This means that I do not operate on the method that seeks to introduce themes from Mosaic civil law into modern society except inasmuch as the situation may call for it; it is a legitimate and authority-bearing (because it is infallible) source of guidance, and it is part of our heritage.

This was John Calvin’s view:

There may be a country which, if murder were not visited with fearful punishments, would instantly become a prey to robbery and slaughter. There may be an age requiring that the severity of punishments should be increased. If the state is in troubled condition, those things from which disturbances usually arise must be corrected by new edicts. […] One nation might be more prone to a particular vice, were it not most severely repressed. How malignant were it, and invidious of the public good, to be offended at this diversity….

The allegation, that insult is offered to the law of God enacted by Moses, where it is abrogated, and other new laws are preferred to it, is most absurd. Others are not preferred when they are more approved, not absolutely, but from regard to time and place, and the condition of the people, or when those things are abrogated which were never enacted for us. The Lord did not deliver it by the hand of Moses to be promulgated in all countries, and to be everywhere enforced.

Rather, I believe in the mixture of Tradition that stems from Christendom’s overall experience, Custom that stems from unique national-cultural experience, Scripture that comes from the mind of God, and Reason which is the ability of human minds to make judgements about the applicability of the above, in light of constantly changing and ever-unique situations.

I believe that rights, duties, legal principles, and political protocols are historically developed, within the context of particular societies. I disagree equally with the claim that “rights are given by God” and “only God’s law should be applied.” Rather, such political artifacts come about through socio-political experience and historical dynamics.

Politics vs. Legalism

The fourth glaring distinction between myself and the theonomists is that, since I don’t believe in an absolute and universal civil law, I believe the essential and supreme nature of the political society lies in the “concept of the political,” rather than in the essence of the laws.

What I mean by this is that I don’t approach political dynamics as if it were a matter of discovering good laws and applying them perfectly. An example is in order here. David Gordon, in a 1990s review of Paul Gottfried’s study of Carl Schmitt, wrote the following of the great debate between Schmitt and Hans Kelsen:

Schmitt maintained that liberals overemphasized legality: their quest for a precisely organized system of legal rules was a futile effort to avoid political decision. Thus, Kelsen, the leading liberal jurist of the German-speaking world and Schmitt’s arch rival, argued that every legal system stems from a basic rule or Grundnorm. From the basic rule, the entire legal system can be logically deduced.

[For Schmitt], the key to sovereignty lies not in a system of principles, but rather in the power to make exceptions to customary legality in order to deal with emergencies.

This is precisely how theonomists and biblicists (CS Lewis, in commentary on Richard Hooker, called the anti-conformist Puritan theologians promoters of a “Bibliocracy”) approach political questions: the pure application of the Grundnorm (in their case, Mosaic Civil Law).

Gottfried points out that it is Schmitt’s view of the state and the political that is the traditional European view and the view held by Kelsen (and also, I should add, by modern theonomy) is modernist and anti-political.

Is it any wonder that the Magisterial Reformers from Luther and Calvin to Richard Hooker spoke about the monarch as the image-bearer of God as King? Here was the embodiment of the sovereign, a true political actor in the purest, traditional sense.

Eschatology

There’s not too much more to say in this category that can be said briefly, beyond what was implied above. I’m a very convinced Amillennialist and therefore believe that there is no political preparation for the millennium, the rule of Christ. Since the cross, he has been in a place of kingship. The millennium is all of church history, as the Pagan gods have been toppled over a thousand years. I believe this to be most common historical, catholic, and Reformed traditional teaching. I do not look forward to a future millennium that theonomists think is in store for a world that applies Biblical political ideals.

Particular examples

Now that some key tenants have been presented, we can offer a few particular examples of common claims and see how I react to them. There could be pages of these, so I’ll just choose a handful of types I’ve seen over the last month.

• Common R2K sentiment: “This world is not our home, therefore political involvement is futile.” Actually this world is our home, it’s just not our ultimate home. But since grace restores nature, we have a renewed obligation to take care of our temporary home and pass it on to our children. We must not reject the principles of stewardship.

• Common Theonomy sentiment: “There is no neutrality; it’s God’s law or anarchy.” Indeed, there is no neutrality, but this is a false dilemma, because God has given men the ability to craft laws necessary for the preservation and well-being of particular societies, in light of specific situations, threats, and needs.

• Common R2K sentiment: “You cannot use the state to force conversions.” No one in the Reformed tradition would ever claim this and anyone who objects in this way is not a serious correspondent.

• Common Theonomy sentiment: “No king but Christ. Christ rules the nations.” Christ rules the nations through the mediation of magistrates, kings, governors, emperors, etc. Sometimes these rulers are very bad men, sometimes they are good men. Claiming that there is no king but Christ is subversive and anarchical.

• Common R2K sentiment: “The historical record of Christendom shows that very bad things happened under its watch.” Wait until you hear about post-Christendom. Very bad things happening is the essence of the human drama. The abuse of something does not render the thing inherently abusive and the abolition of that thing has led to even worse things.

• Common Theonomy sentiment: “We are going to bring the laws of [our nation] into conformity with the Biblical model of political and civil order.” This isn’t politically realist, nor is it imperative on us as Christians to operate on this way. It is imperative though, to use the tools available to us to work for the well-being of those around us and to honor our own, Natural, ancestors.

Conclusion

All of this is basically consistent with Stephen Wolfe’s book. I do think he is going to have to reiterate the extent of his non-theonomic views (even though he’s written on it before, and it should be implied), as they have adopted his label.

Given that politics is particular and does not exist in the pursuit of some ideal social order, but operates on the basis of the constant Friend-Enemy distinction, my politics is realist. And because I have a specific way of life and people and heritage that I want to defend, rather than recreate the political order along universal standards, I am indeed very traditionalist-conservative. This particularity, along with the need for flexible political strategies (sometimes, the situation may call for vicious acts of authoritarianism in states of emergency), puts me on the reactionary right.

All the distinctions expressed above flow into this political outlook.

One of the most brilliant elaborations of the development of modern power comes from the Frenchman Bertrand de Jouvenel’s book On Power.

I was looking over my notes yesterday and saw this quote:

“Where will [modern individualism] all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state.

In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.”

This wonderfully captures what was happening in the political explosions and shifts of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe. The mood in the Western world was largely about throwing off any civilizational restraints that were interpreted as unfairly holding back the freedom of the individual: religion, family, community structures, even private property (especially the aristocratic estates). All these efforts sought the emancipation of the individual. Here was a corrupted and viciously subversive ideology of that old principle of “liberty.”

Other observers of power, such as James Burnham in his Machiavellians offered similar critiques of the modern trajectory.

And yet, part of me wonders if the post-60s Western world began a different path than was originally foreseen. After all, what is happening in the world, I am increasingly convinced, is not truly individualist in the original emancipatory Rousseauian spirit. Certainly, this was there in the beginning but it seems to me that our future is— to be honest— much more akin to something out of Camp of the Saints (read this marvelous piece from First Things) and the South Africanization of the West. Where there is a new hierarchy under construction built along lines of race, cultural residues of religious expression, and things of that nature.

I’m not opposed to de Jouvenel’s understanding of world developments at the time of his writing, but I am sensing that this trajectory has actually expired somewhat. I don’t know that we have a “common bondage to the state” in an equalitarian way at all. It appears much worse than that, from the perspective of Legacy Americans. Paul Gottfried recently hinted at this (I’m going to discuss this with him soon). Rather, it seems like we are transitioning to a new phase of history in America where historical minorities are subsidized, protected, and benefitted while historical American majorities (not just ethnically, but culturally as well) are humiliated and placed on a much lower rung within the social hierarchy.

In Nathan’s article linked above, he writes:

Western multiculturalists are aware of this dynamic, which is why their activism increasingly tends toward the nihilism depicted by Raspail. The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity. The new civic liturgy of Western nations must express submission to the morally superior non-Western “other.” Those in the West need to be trained to take the knee, though they are expected to rise from time to time to fight fascist phantoms.

Indeed, this description of Raspail’s themes indicate that a new dynamic is at play. There is an incredibly disconcerting dilemma that characterizes the American situation: migrants from the third world are taught to think of their group interests, their group identities, their group cohesion against a hostile White host population. At the same time, Whites are taught that group thinking is dangerous, irrational, and immoral. Whites are taught the gospel of individualism and not judging based on group identity. Think about this, please, in a politically realist way. This isn’t about the truth, this is about political dynamics and narratives.

This is the dilemma: an army is being prepared that has been given ideological armaments and inspiration, while their perceived enemies have been given ideological toxins and demoralization. Where exactly do you think this is going?

Certainly, if we were all equal in our oppression, we could find solidarity across older cultural and ethnic lines. I simply suspect that the next decade is going to prove this impossible. Whether we like it or not, whether we want to wish away this type of thinking, I believe deep down that the ideology and instincts of the masses are malleable and being shaped by media, corporations, and the administrative state and that they will produce cultural and racial hot wars. And they will do this via artificial and administered hierarchies that permeate through cultural, financial, and institutional mechanisms. This seems to be the theme going forward.

He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted; for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through the ages of the world we have fought the Long Defeat.”

    [Galadriel, The Fellowship of the Ring]

As I was considering different titles for the name of this Substack, I first used Reactionary Imperative, and then Tory Anarch. I liked the first, taken from Mel Bradford’s collection of essays, because it was a reminder that to “merely conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous.” But I dropped it because I had a sense that, within the American context, reestablishing the sociological framework of our past was at this point impossible.

I then moved, for a few days, to the Tory Anarch, borrowing from Junger’s figure of the man who takes the Forest Passage, who is committed to no regime, who lives on the memory of an aristocratic ideal in a world that is debased, degenerate, and un-reformable. He is a man who finds a certain inner peace, having come to terms with the fact that his world has been lost, that the achievements of his ancestors have been recklessly liquidated in a spirit of hysteria and false triumph.

And yet, while my own lifestyle in the country and on property away from the City reflects the demeanor of the Tory Anarch, it dawned on me that the very fact of raising a family required me to partake in a spirit of higher duty. I can survive in the world around us, but I have to ensure that my children can survive in a world that will be even more hostile to them. And even if “saving America” (the reactionary imperative) is an objective now expired—a short defeat— I still had a duty to participate in the Long Defeat.

Having a catholic, Augustinian, Amillennial view of meta-history I have deeply absorbed Tolkien’s sense of things when he noted that “actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains… some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

What stands out to me in the unfolding of his own narrative regarding partakers in the Long Defeat (Celeborn and Galadriel and the Elvish race) is this: there is a sheer refusal to imply in their defeat a justification of inaction. What does duty have to do with victory guarantees?

Like Tolkien, and all orthodox Christians, we believe in Final Victory. But, unlike the Evangelical premillennialism that pervades the American “conservative” religion, I absolutely do not share the attitude that says “we cannot win so we should not partake in political or institutional-cultural conflicts.” These real world battles are reflections of spiritual confrontation. Out of the depths of the spirit world plays out before our eyes tensions and vicious battles that aim to reflect ultimate principles. The world is a mirror that reveals greater realities.

I believe it is my duty to stand strong Contra Mordor, as did the participants in Tolkien’s Long Defeat.

All this has been motivated by a conservative evangelical on Twitter who recently wrote the following:

A pragmatic thought on CN [Christian Nationalism]:

This country has 300M people in it & the majority are given over to wokeness.

But somehow you think that you & your band of merry men are going to swoop in & take over & change it all? Hmm.

We are the "few that find it" & they are the many who don't.

The point here is not a defense of “Christian Nationalism.”

Aside from the misunderstanding of the essence of the political and the implied belief in the myth of democracy, there is here reflected an attitude of the beautiful loser.

Take note, I responded on Twitter, the difference between the New Left minority in the 60s and the Regimevangelical today is that the former was willing to fight against the odds while the latter is smug in his state of political defeat.

Even if you are civilizationally pessimistic, compare with this alternative attitude, expressed by Spengler:

“Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.”

I’ll end with this, since raising children is what motivated my present mentality about the world, and Mordor’s contemporary reinvigoration:

Raise your boys to be manly, to take up the virtue of courage. Teach them that duty is not tied to guarantees of victory. Teach them that Lost Causes can be noble, and that man is not called to act on the basis of odds or the fleeting beliefs of majorities.

_______

By Paul Gottfried

Although I have always been a man of the Right, some of the major influences on my thought have come from the classical Left. Many years ago, when I was being considered for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Senator Jesse Helms, who ended up supporting my candidacy, asked his friend Sam Francis why I had written so often for Marxist publications. Sam answered: “He may be too conservative for conservative ones.”

I made the same observation to a Marxist acquaintance to whom I loaned Sam’s posthumously published notes on managerialism, when they came out in the volume Leviathan and its Enemies in 2016. This acquaintance had asked whether the author, who examined the relationship of managerial government to the growth of global corporate capitalism, was a Marxist like himself. “No, he’s not. He’s on the far Right,” I responded. “But why don’t conservatives publish him? He’s really very smart,” my interlocutor continued. “Because he was too conservative” was my answer.

I was not being simply arch when I offered this response. All the Marxists, and a fortiori the recovering ones, I have known were far more conservative than the laughable carnival of imitators of the cultural Left who now elect to call themselves “conservatives.” Unlike Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, John Podhoretz and the Fox News All Stars, my Marxist mentors and friends never celebrated gay marriage as a family value. They also never called for pulling down Confederate memorial statues and never assigned victim status to LGBT representatives. True, they were soft on Communist dictatorships, and I certainly argued with them on this point.

Yet having witnessed the moral and cultural disintegration of the “democratic West” after the collapse of the Soviet empire, I cannot work up my old fervor for the Cold War anti-Communism of an earlier era. (I shall leave that to the neocons, with their characteristic enthusiasm.) I am now at the point that George Kennan reached when he saw seedy-looking war protesters blocking a street in Copenhagen in the 1970s. Kennan, who was a true man of the Right, happily imagined Soviet tanks rolling over these decadent youths. Needless to say, I would have no problem taking the side of the tanks in this imaginary confrontation.

Moreover, as I observe the culturally leftist politics of large corporations, I find it impossible to give even one cheer (let alone Irving Kristol’s “two cheers”) for capitalism. There is no morally subversive position, including support for infanticide and mandatory transgendered rest rooms, which our corporate boards will not energetically support. Likewise evil are the defense industries that payroll our fake conservative “think tanks” and nurture their eagerness to push the US into wars. Last year I examined in a commentary the incestuous relations between The American Heritage Foundation and Boeing and considered the likelihood at the time that Heritage’s next president would be a defense industry official. This connection was hardly accidental but entirely typical of the inseparability of war making and neoconservative foundations and publications.

At an earlier stage in our economic and cultural development it would have been possible for me to endorse capitalists who were running family enterprises and who represented traditional American Protestant morality. I still sympathize with the owners of Hobby Lobby and of other relatively small companies who are guided in their daily conduct and relations with employees by “biblical morality.” But I could not care less about what happens to the fortunes of Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, or those who sit on the boards of Citibank and Coca Cola and who promote “transgender rights” and gay exhibitionism.

James Burnham once asked: “Who would give his life for the GNP?” I for one would not give even one minute of what remains of my life to keep our transnational capitalist elites in the lap of luxury. The only reason I would ever be on their side is that I fear the power of the central state even more than I dislike the beneficiaries of corporate wealth. Of course, most of the time they work in tandem.

During my years of attachment to a now vanished conservatism, I typically ignored corporate economic interests in explaining why political causes acted as they did. I was quite content attributing what I did not like to “bad ideas” and “ideology.” Although I would not dismiss such factors, it seems to me now that the desire for wealth and power have much more to do with who dominates whom than I once cared to notice. In reaching this perception, I have been guided not so much by avowed Marxists as I have by recovering ones: James Burnham, Will Herberg, Paul Piccone, Christopher Lasch, the Greek Germanophone political theorist Panajotis Kondylis, the onetime East German Marxist scholars, Peter Furth, and Frank Böckelmann.

I have also learned a great deal from browsing through Antonio Gramsci’s Notebooks, which I recommend as a primer for the study of power relations. What has impressed me about all these scholars (except for Gramsci, who died a communist) is not the orthodox Marxism that they left behind, but what they took from it: an understanding of the social dynamics of global capitalism, the relationship between dominant classes and their worldviews, and the irreversibility of historical change. Political and social developments do not take place in a pendulum fashion. Whatever follows our late modernity, with its peculiar configuration of conditions, will not bring us back to anything that preceded it. The future will look different from the past because it is the radicalizing present that propels it.

Mass democracy under public administration is only possible when a certain level of material wealth permits the development of a consumer society and when markets and material “stuff” allow citizens to be reborn as consumers. Citizenship at this point does not depend on ethnic or ancestral ties. Anyone can become a citizen, providing he, she or whatever lies in between can buy and consume. All human relationships are characterized by hierarchies of material and acquisitive values. In practice, like the material world, identity is plastic or becomes whatever government or its media and academic priesthood decide to make it mean.

Just like consumer goods under this dispensation, gender and race are inventions that can be exchanged like a car one has grown tired of. “Democratic” and “Republican” administrations succeed each other in the US, as purveyors of entitlements and other benefits that will increase acquisition and consumption for their competing voting blocks. The attainment of a certain level of affluence and the consumer power that it brings goes under the name of the “American Dream,” which is the mass democratic equivalent of Aristotle’s teleology. If in classical philosophy the highest form of human life lay in the full development of all human abilities, in American politics it has shrunk down to reserve resources of spending power.

This combination of mass democracy and consumption does not explain entirely one of the topics on which I have written at great length, namely, the cultural dominance of the post-Marxist Left. But it does underline a precondition without which a Left that only imitates Marxism would not have gained its present sway in First World countries. Since identities are now plastic and provide the ontological counterparts of disposable consumer goods, they can be manipulated or changed whenever it pleases those in “democratic” authority to do so. Here, of course, I am repeating the observation of onetime Marxists, who later turned decidedly to the Right.

Modern democracy features victimology as a public creed because it brings together two foundational principles of the regime: exchangeable and even disposable identities and the worship of equality. I first began moving toward a recognition of the first principle as a student of the self-described (somewhat eccentric) Marxist Herbert Marcuse. The one-dimensionality that Marcuse (and later Lasch) attributed to late capitalist societies characterizes the culture of consumption that is now extolled as “democratic capitalism.” Economic development, for better or worse, shapes the view that everything can be purchased and exchanged. Human successes and identities present themselves as market commodities that exist, or so we are told, to suit our needs. This furnishes a model of social control, in which subjects can be manipulated in return for being given access to comforts and amusements.

For me, this adaptation of Marxism explains how Political Correctness has become the unifying doctrine of the post-Christian, post-bourgeois West. Consumerism and the function of government in furnishing clients with ever greater resources for consumer choices have permitted what might otherwise seem humiliating circumstances for certain groups to prevail, with minimal protest. Indeed, for many white men, so long as they have disposable income and thus can enjoy new smartphones and other gadgets, it does not matter what feminists or racial minorities say about them. It does not matter that such supposed victim groups, along with the media and the government itself, demonize them rhetorically, treating them as the source of all prejudice and social injustice. In fact, these targets of abuse, like figures in a tragicomedy, are often pleased to go along with their worst detractors since equality, they have been told, is “who we are.”

This may answer a question that some members of the Alt-right have put to me: Why do white men submit to a political culture that demeans them? A partial answer is that they have undergone two forms of control. Their minds have been crammed full of egalitarian slogans and the politics of guilt in school, through the media, and even in churches. In recent years we have seen increasing discrimination against whites, and white men in particular—the controversy concerning Covington Catholic High School is but one of many examples. Still, many white men have not had to face the implications of their being unofficial scapegoats, for they are economically shielded and teeming with creature comforts—although, make no mistake, such conditions are not guaranteed to last.

The present situation is not foreign to the nature of the regime under which we all live. What distinguishes mass democracy is what Peter Furth describes as the “compromise” offered between free market capitalism and socialism. Mass democracy provides a mixed economy in which the desire for further equality is provisionally satisfied through the availability of consumer goods. Political Correctness becomes its dominant ideology because it pushes the ideal of compensatory equality. Although the social justice warriors constantly chatter about “structural inequality,” their primary effect has been to highlight racial, feminist, and LGBT grievances. Needless to say, when these activists also call for wild-eyed economic change, their capitalist friends—Howard Schultz, Michael Bloomberg, and the like—are quick to denounce them. With respect to the future, it will be interesting to see how men like Schultz and Bloomberg deal with the thorny contradictions that await them: They are only too happy to conform to the leveling cultural mores of their consumers; meanwhile, in response, those consumers grow only more insolent in their utopian economic demands.

In our time, there is a global stirring of dissatisfaction against the present world order. This dissatisfaction is focused not merely on the political and economic structures that constitute a global framework, but also on its most cherished and deeply rooted narratives; namely, those related to the alleged goodness of multiculturalism, unconstrained migration, radical individualism, state-protected degeneracy, democracy, and, especially, the modernist commitment to material prosperity and economic efficiency. Wilhelm Ropke called this latter commitment the “standard of living cult.”

Economics and Sociology

Whereas the libertarian so often singularly focuses directly on the state itself, and it cannot be reasonably denied that the modern managerial state played a fundamental role in our troubled path, the modern state exists in an interesting historical context. This context does not have mere and simplistic ethical reference, but it also has an equally important, though tragically less discussed, sociological component. What are the structural, social, and cultural conditions of a strong, stable, and healthy social order? This is a discussion that cannot be reasonably limited to the theory of the state, economic theory, or personal standards of morality.

The rediscovery of a conservative sociology inevitably leads one back to folks like Robert Nisbet and Max Weber who focused much of their work on the institutions and structural frameworks of the social orders of ages past. These pre-Americanized social orders were characterized by the relations and associations of groups of people which dealt which each other in terms other than monetary-commercial reference.

While economics played then, and has played for centuries, an important role in the development of society, we find in the past both a smaller influence from the state on the whole of society and, concomitantly, a smaller influence of the role of commercial institutions. The point is—and this is shown quite convincingly in Nisbet’s Quest for Community—that it was first the “emancipation” of the individual from the bounds and bonds of community and other associative institutions, and then the rise of the omnipotent state that began to fill the gaps where the former associations once sat.

This gap into which the state wedged its hegemonic power widened over the course of the post-enlightenment era and one can see in the twentieth century a great battle waged between the central states and all decentralized governments, “lesser magistrates,” churches, guilds, associations, communities, small businesses, business associations, and, more recently, families themselves.

Once the dispersed and fabric-like nexus of the old institutions (the true balance of powers in pre-modern Europe) was broken down, it was only then that there arose the modern theories of economic science to put forth a non-state arrangement for human cooperation. Economics, Mises, a liberal, noted in Human Action, was the youngest of the social sciences. There were of course economically-related writings going back as far as Aristotle, but modern economics developed to confront the new urge for the modern state to plan for the wealth of nations. As the old institutions fell to the march of history, so the theory of the market arose to offer an alternative interpretation of man’s cooperation outside the machinations of the political state.

If the old institutions and Nisbet-described bonds of community were broken down as the vestiges of alternatives to the modern nation state, only two options were to remain: the market and the state. Economics was needed primarily because the nation states promised to give what it could not provide: material prosperity for all who would turn to it.

In this context, we turn to the nature of the Austrian School of Economics, so often the blame for all our modern woes despite their being explicitly denied a seat at the table of economic orthodoxy and academic legitimacy over the past century and a half. It was the Austrians above all other schools of economic thought that considered its role to lie in repudiating the economic promises of the Managerial Statist revolution. Even if the Austrian political liberals had a deficient understanding of power, they were certainly unique among modern economic theorists in their refusal to use the state to institute market forces. For this reason, they never were favored among Western Court Economists, the "regime free-marketers" and "free market technocrats."

The Viennese Sociological Tradition?

Several years ago, there was an interesting book written by Erwin Dekker entitled The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered. In this book, the author observes something often overlooked by conservatives wary (for great reason!) of economics as a profession: the Austrians are, unlike the economic planners for modern liberalism (including libertarians like Milton Friedman of the Chicago School), students of civilization, not architects. Civilization is not something that can be rationally planned and put into place. Dekker writes:

the Viennese students of civilization argue that we cannot fully know or understand our civilization, and hence we should be very careful in trying to reconstruct it rationally. The organically grown institutions often contain a lot of knowledge, which is not always easily accessible to the student of civilization…

Hayek argues that culture makes individual autonomy possible; cultural institutions such as language and markets ‘make us intelligent’. Intelligence for him is a cultural product, and that implies limitations to what we can know about that culture… we cannot step outside our own civilization to observe it… as is the ideal in natural science.

The thrust of the claim here is fascinatingly historicist and at odds with the rationalistic-individual model that pervades everything from pure libertarianism to Neo-conservatism. That man as a product of his world, his culture, is a Burkean/Maistrean point, not a Thomas Painean one.

The idea that culture guides the individual and that the individual depends upon the institutions into which he was born is a very conservative point. It is a great danger to assume that one can emancipate the individual from his sociological context and not see him revert backward to his primitive past. In our time of concomitant attempted individual self-actualization and loneliness and despair, this sociological observation is of supreme importance. This means that while individual freedom is immensely important (a point defended at length in Nisbet’s Quest for Community), there are actual social dangers of the predominance of individual liberty as a chief motivating impulse without constraints. Dekker points out:

… there is, contrary to my expectation, a surprising consensus on what the central element is of any type of civilization: restraint. Hayek… argues that civilization has become possible through restraint: the restraint of our natural inclinations, our instincts. But also, and that is especially important for Hayek, the restraint on our rationalism, the recognition of the limits of our rational faculties: our ability to know and design.

… freedom, for all these thinkers, is only possible through restraints: freedom is made possible by civilization. Civilization, the norms and institutions which regulate human interaction, enable us to be free.

Since these “norms and institutions which regulate human interaction,” are organic and have developed over a thousand years of Western history, we cannot be surprised that, when these institutions are rebelled against, individual man is cast adrift. Moreover, often in the misguided attempt to save the individual man from his tragedy, we cannot be surprised when the central state, in all its power-hungry delusions of grandeur, interprets its own role in the world as basically messianic.

In this way, the historical nature of civilization’s institutions into which men are born and come to age strikes one as quite Burkean flavored. And indeed, in the Austrian School founder Carl Menger’s book Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, we find high praise for the important anti-revolutionary British statesman:

Burke was probably the first, who, trained for it by the spirit of English jurisprudence, emphasized with full awareness the significance of the organic structures of social life and the partly unintended origin of these. He taught most convincingly that numerous institutions of his country, which were to a high degree of common benefit and filled every Briton with pride, were not the result of positive legislation or of the conscious common will of society directed toward establishing this, but the unintended result of historical development. He first taught that what existed and had stood the test, what had developed historically, was again to be respected, in contrast to the projects of immature desire for innovation. Herewith he made the first breach in the one-sided rationalism and pragmatism of the Anglo-French Age of Enlightenment.

Indeed, Menger even contrasts Burke's stress of the importance of the organic nature of society over against the enlightenment-pragmatists:

[Pragmatism] therefore, did not know how to value the significance of "organic" social structures for society in general and economy in particular and therefore was nowhere concerned to preserve them. What characterizes the theories of [Adam] Smith and his followers is the one-sided rationalistic liberalism, the not infrequently impetuous effort to do away with what exists, with what is not always sufficiently understood, the just as impetuous urge to create something new in the realm of political institutions-often enough without sufficient knowledge and experience.

Seeing Menger position himself on the side of Burke over against the fathers of English Manchesterism is indeed not what one would instinctually expect of Austrians. And indeed, Menger continues his disapproval of “man in the abstract:”

The organically developed institutions of economy had usually cared so wisely for the living, for things already existing, for what was close and immediate. Pragmatism in economy was concerned about the welfare of man in the abstract, about remote things, about things which did not yet exist, about future things. In this effort it only all too often overlooked the living, justified interests of the present.

Against these efforts of the Smithian school there was revealed to our science a vast realm of fruitful activity in the sense of the orientation of Burke-Savigny-not in the sense of simply maintaining what had organically developed as unassailable, as if it were the higher wisdom in human affairs as opposed to the intended ordering of social conditions.

The aim of the efforts under discussion here had to be, on the contrary, the full understanding of existing social institutions in general and of organically created institutions in particular, the retention of what had proved its worth against the one-sidedly rationalistic mania for innovation in the field of economy. The object was to prevent the dissolution of the organically developed economy by means of a partially superficial pragmatism, a pragmatism that contrary to the intention of its representatives inexorably leads to socialism.

Imagine that! Menger, more Burkean than Burke's friend Adam Smith, the godfather of free markets.

It is this Burkean understanding of society as adopted by the Mengerian tradition that causes it to stand distinct, sociologically, from other “pro-market” economists in the twentieth century. While the American empire and its crony-corporatist managerialist economic project brought on board a plethora of economic advisors who pretended they could manage Western society into a blissfully prosperous future, the Austrians stood resolutely against the tide of state-planning for capitalism’s mandated expansion.

Contrary to the “free market” economic establishment, the Austrians, and especially Misesians, completely deny the neo-classical construct of homo economicus. As conservatives such as Russell Kirk rightly point out the actual unrealistic nature of this construct, the Austrians are forever exempt from the criticisms related to the “economism” of man. It is true that man does not live by bread alone, as Wilhelm Ropke echoed the Biblical phrasing; his sociological needs, fulfilled by his community setting and connection to place and kin, are often more important than a singular emphasis on his material opportunities. The Austrians recognized this more than the typical policy-advising economists of the twentieth century.

Thusly, Arnold King says of Dekker’s book:

In The Viennese Students of Civilization, Erwin Dekker provides a new interpretation of the work of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and other economists of the Austrian school. In the process, he identifies a number of tensions in their thought: the economist as detached observer versus the economist as political participant; progress versus decline; liberty versus restraint; individualism versus culture; modernity versus tradition; and what Jacob T. Levy would call rationalist versus pluralist.

Austrian economists respect civilization as an emergent order and are skeptical of attempts to design society using rational expertise. This makes them much less inclined than other economists to be policy activists.

It makes complete sense that the Austrian economists, sociologists, and political scientists during the turn of the century would be despised by the more policy-oriented market technicians, including the advisors that came from the Chicago School. The Viennese, after all, were more interested in describing civilization and the economic process than they were in creating material blessings. In this way, emphasizing the spontaneity of society and culture, they warned against planning, against monetary shenanigans, against the forced expansion of crony “capitalism,” against centralized socialism.

They stood wholly innocent of Burke's objection to the turn toward the age of "sophisters, economists, and calculators." And it is precisely because they sought to understand the organic and natural process of the market order, that they also stood firm against attempts by central states to create prosperity from the top. The Austrians were, and remain, the anti-planners, the anti-calculators, the anti-court economists.

In the coming turn toward a rediscovery of conservative sociology and the revival of Old Rightism, no school of economic thought is as enduringly relevant as the Austrian School. Only they, with their subjective theory of value, can account for the displeasure of those Westerners who are not experiencing the mythical wonders of booming GDP. It was they who derided the absurdity of using formulas of aggregation to pronounce the successes of central economic decision making. It was the Austrians who alone among economists could account for the fact that mankind's wants were so much more complicated and complex than just a cold material prosperity could fulfill.

This tradition does not say that man will be happier with market mechanisms alone, it merely points out in advance the failures of the promises of planning. It offers the content of the potential sociological-economic trade-offs, but it does not decide on behalf of the localities and regions what, exactly, should be preferred. In our age of secession and political decentralization, the Austrians must stay relevant. If we, as we should, are going to return to community and region and nation over internationalism, if we are going to learn from the social models of ages past, we cannot simply ignore economic logic. Nor can we wish it away. The logic of economics will be vital in the transformation toward the age to come.

One doesn’t have to be a believer in unfettered markets or political liberalism to benefit from this unique tradition.

Contemporary Americans have a deficient and ahistorical understanding of culture. They usually employ this word in reference to the various means of entertainment and leisure and amusement that are available for purchase and consumption. They refer to popular music, TV shows, and various lifestyle choices as examples of American culture.

In fact, however, these products of the American consumer economy are elements of a general spirit of anti-culture that was born in postwar America and has by now permeated the entire Western world.

What is considered to be culture in popular parlance is actually a sociological revolution against Western culture and represents civilizational subversion.

To understand the true meaning of culture, we can look to the first chapter of Russell Kirk’s America’s British Culture in which he argues that America’s original culture—sustained from the age of the Pilgrims to the Second World War— was British in origin to such a fundamental degree that “if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States… why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.”

Kirk takes a sociological view of culture and quotes the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson to say:

A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment. . . . It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any unanimity of physical type. . . . Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.

From this, we get two senses of the meaning of culture (Kirk borrows the two senses from TS Eliot): first, we get culture in the sense of organic folkways (my phrasing, not Kirk’s). These are the habits, norms, instincts, and artistic derivatives from these habits and norms among people groups that have a common way of life “conditioned by a common environment,” to quote Dawson. For instance, authentic Country Music (not the weaponized culturally subversive Country Music funded and promoted by Capital), is the way that it is because the spirit of that music is tied to the way of life of the people from which it came.

This means that authentic country music is the product of a culture in a way that prevents just any human being from meaningfully producing the same genre in a sustained and organic way. That is, the arts and other cultural accidents are not the culture, but they come out of, and are produced by, the culture. The cultural accidents are not merely a product of individual interest, but of community context. The social order is the maker of men.

That is to say, contrary to the liberal-enlightenment-individualist way of thinking, human beings are not interchangeable but are rather shaped and constituted by the milieu and setting into which they were born. This is what de Maistre was observing when he wrote:

Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.

The entire cruz of the postwar American project is to counter this traditionalist approach to culture and to echo the Jacobins in their vision of the universal man.

These cultural folkways, Kirk argues, are the product of the people at large within a given group absorbing and passively receiving the culture-making of its leaders over time. He calls these folkways the “democratic culture” and argues that they “ordinarily had [their] origins, perhaps long ago, in the concepts and customs of a cultural aristocracy….” Folkways are organic and develop cultures over time, but they are founded upon, and carried along, by the aristocratic culture-drivers.

It is the responsibility of the aristocratic members of a culture to be connected with the folkways of their people, and yet to push the culture to correspond with Higher Things. This is the second sense of culture Kirk draws from TS Eliot. If we called the first sense of culture organic folkways, we can call the other sense of culture a society’s High Culture. The objective of the High Culture should be to inspire the populace to correspond their folkways with some culturally-relevant social ideal; or, in TS Eliot’s phrasing, “the improvement of the human mind and spirit.”

High Culture is what produced the great achievements of Western Civilization: Mozart, Chaucer, Michelangelo, etc. Kirk writes that “the preferences, mores, and customs that make up the democratic culture used to find their sanction in the judgement of individuals of remarkable talents, or on the manners and attitudes of a class or group of arbiters of culture.” The two senses of culture are related to each other as one reflects the organic instants of the people at large, but they are always learning from, and should be inspired by, the Heroes of High Culture.

A healthy society has both, working together for mutual reinforcement. Organic culture without High Culture degrades into debasement and barbarity as there is no guiding light to set the boundaries of culture and nothing to inform its improvement. But a High Culture without a derivative culture for the people at large eliminates the social relationship between a people and its cultural leaders and turns the responsible aristocracy into society-damaging aloof plutocrats with no interest in the well-being of its people. It must never be forgotten that the majority of human beings within a socio-political order do not have the capacity to spiritually sustain themselves at the level of the High Culture. They must follow and absorb the lives and role-modeling of leaders.

Kirk notes that for TS Eliot, “any healthy culture is represented at its higher levels by a class or body of persons of remarkable intelligence and taste, leaders in mind and conscience. Often such persons inherit their positions as guardians of culture; to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke, these are the men and women who have been reared in the ‘unbought grace of life.’”

The integration of High Culture and organic folkways to create a civilizational culture implies ethnic relevance. As I recently stated on Twitter, culture is not ethnically absolutist, but neither is it ethnically agnostic. It is not ethnically absolutist because it is possible for individuals of foreign ethnicity, from time to time, to assimilate into a given culture. Such as Benjamin Disraeli in England. But we must be honest enough to maintain that it is not ethnically agnostic. After all, if we are to follow Dawson, a culture is formed by a “common tradition and conditioned by a common environment.” The importation of foreign ethnicities en masse will destroy a culture, even if done “legally” because there are no common traditions nor commonality of environment.

The pursuit of a multicultural society is actually an assault on the host culture, and will be the cause of its undoing.

Does America still have its old culture?

Writing this book in the early 1990s, Kirk warned that “what American culture urgently requires just now is solidarity: that is, a common front against the operation of Chaos and Old Night.” (By the way, it is the tragedy of the collapse of American culture that most people have no idea where that phrase comes from).

Kirk adamantly opposes the forces seeking to tear down what has been derided as “Euroculture.” Without Euroculture, we are nothing. More specifically, without the British particularities of Euroculture, we had been undergoing a Long Transformation, from Old America to New America and at the time of Kirk’s writing it was a state of emergency. I suspect, knowing Kirk’s more somber and honest writings, he may have considered it too late in some ways. He may have agreed with CS Lewis that Old Western Man is now a thing of memory (though perhaps by 2023 there is no longer even a memory).

While Kirk did comment on the flooding of America by the third world in the 70s-90s (a common culture cannot survive a flood of imported uncommon cultures), he rested most of his blame for the undoing of American culture on three groups: “militant blacks; white radicals, mostly ‘civil rights’ zealots of yesteryear; and a mob of bored, indolent students to whom any culture but pop culture is anathema.” I would like to comment on this later, but for now, we can merely recognize the extent to which they have succeeded in severing American society from its cultural roots.

Immigration was vital to the replacement of Old American culture because it viciously dissolves commonality of tradition and environment. Mainstream conservatives will hone in on illegal immigration, but the subversion of cultural commonality knows not the status of formal legalities and regulatory technicalities. The pursuit of a multi-ethnic society that is not natural to the organic development of a culture (such as in, say, the Austro-Hungarian empire), but was rather the result of social engineering and ideological politics, has been a cornerstone of the collapse of American culture.

In pursuing the overturning of Euroculture, the postwar liberalism helped to facilitate a society absent of the very commonalities that once characterized the American way, and therefore the British culture on which America was based. This was a combination both of immigration, which by its essence denies to a society cultural commonality, and consumer capitalism, which replaces heritage culture rooted in place and continuity over time, with titillating distractions. The obligation of the presently living to be facilitators of their cultural inheritance to their posterity was eradicated from the popular mind and instead they became radical “Presentists.”

Caring only for the here and now, they became preoccupied with the material gratification and amusements that, because of the fleeting nature of human desire, would be in constant flux. A society engrossed in consumer interests that change from year to year cannot at the same time sustain a culture over decades, not to mention centuries. Whereas Western cultural norms were passed down over dozens of generations before the postwar Mass Capitalism, as the New America replaced the Old, change and fluidity became the new norm. The only constant was that nothing was constant. There was no common way of life, except mindless consumption and material gratification.

That is to say, the American culture was replaced by the American Anti-Culture, which was then exported to the entire Western world.

Indeed, one of the great interpreters of the Americanized West as Anti-Culture, Philip Rieff, has made it a key element of his analysis to hone in on our post-cultural society. Carl Trueman once summarized Rieff’s outlook in the following way:

Indeed, it leads Rieff to call this type of culture an anti-culture. Its purpose is not to transmit beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. Its purpose is quite the opposite: to shatter past values and to engage in the constant revolutionizing of beliefs and behavior.

Our music, our art, our phraseology and expressions, the way we dress, the entertainment we consume, the products and goods that we buy…. all aspects of Western commercial life exist in a unified conspiracy to transgress the Sacred and the Western culture that once acted as a soil for the garden of our human experiences. It is not an expression of culture that we are saddled with technology, efficiency, functionality, and mindless innovation; these are aspects of the Western assault on culture. The cultural revolution exists here, not as the making of a new culture, but as the ever constant tearing down of what existed before.

The replacement of the grandfather instructing and imparting wisdom to his grandson, with the grandson trying to keep his grandfather up to date with Wi-Fi, iPhones, and digital experiences, is the true cultural revolution in our midst. The trans movement is just an offshoot of the greater transformation of society.

It is not the crass and crude content that permeates our minds on social media that is an expression of our dying culture, but the existence of social media as the replacement for older forms of organic community. The degraded content that fills television entertainment, advertising, and popular music, are not the primary aspect of cultural revolution; the revolution is in the mere existence of these things as constant crafters of our sentiments and instincts.

We have reached a situation in the West where what we refer to as culture (the things we consume, are amused by, and that occupy our attention), is a sustained assault on True Culture. The things produced on “the market” have facilitated the destruction of our cultural patrimony.

It is a great irony of history that the momentous opponent of Western traditional social order, Karl Marx, was completely correct in what he foresaw as the effects of liberal capitalism:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….

Continuity and the facilitation of experience from one generation to the next, not constant innovation and economic progress, is the true Cultural Conservatism; and its absence is the real explanation of our continued Leftist momentum.

TS Eliot, the Rock (1934)

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 knowlege brings us near to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, no nearer to God.
Where the 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.

I will never not find Eliot’s “the Rock” haunting.

It so presciently and eerily captures the delusions of our modern and post-modern claims of Progress. Our age is one that fetishizes information, data, facts, empirical studies; because it is through these things that contemporary man is able to justify his course toward individual emancipation from both the perceived oppressions from the past, as well as the restraints of the natural world.

He has no use for wisdom, or the virtue of stillness and reflection, because such things impede his potential of constant titillation. He instead pursues only those things, such as “knowledge of facts,” that can aid him in his quest down the path toward pure sensation, toward pure consumption. All our discoveries, all our innovations, all our material creations have only brought us “farther from God and nearer to the Dust.” Why is this?

Richard Weaver, in his critique of the Modern Age, expresses something similar:

Barbarism and Philistinism cannot see that knowledge of material reality is a knowledge of death. The desire to get ever closer to the source of physical sensation—this is the downward pull which puts an end to ideational life.

No education is worthy of the name which fails to make the point that the world is best understood from a certain dis­tance or that the most elementary understanding requires a degree of abstraction. To insist on less is to merge ourselves with the exterior reality or to capitulate to the endless in­duction of empiricism.

Take as well the great English Catholic and proponent of Distributism Hillaire Belloc. He recognized before even the First World War that a tide of New Men were coming that would serve to re-orient the world away from the old European forms and toward a spirit of consumption and material obsession. The word consumption, used here, is deeper than just a reference to the masses that buy things as a matter of addiction (and boredom).

Rather, the spirit of Consumption lies in the fact that the new Mass Man does not see his existence within the social order as constituting a duty to build his civilization (Christendom); rather, he has the “right” to expend it. He sees himself as just passing through, the entire structure of European civilization that preceded him is a mere ghost, something that can be utilized, as it is found, to benefit his own subjective style, priorities, preferences, and way of life.

Belloc writes:

The Barbarian hopes—and that is the very mark of him—that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

Far from being some sort of free market observation that people need to produce before they consume, Belloc rather has in mind something far larger: the replacement of civilizational goods can only be achieved when the spirit of the age has been adequately integrated with the civilizational heritage of Christian Europe. To the extent that our present cultural spirit stands in fierce opposition to our civilizational past, to that extent our activity serves to tear down Christian civilization.

The Barbarian is all around us, celebrating his total unfamiliarity with things that came before, his ignorance of the great order of the cosmos. Full of information, he adorns himself with the products and innovations and leisures that distract him from the reality of his actual proximity to Dust. I remain unconvinced that Man, as a whole, has the strength to overcome the spiritual ravages of prosperity.

The Barbarian was once embodied in the revolutionary spirit, standing as an outlier against society, ready to join the French revolutionaries, the anarchists in central Europe, or perhaps the Bolsheviks. But Barbarianism has, since Belloc, integrated its spirit into the mainstream of the West. It is here that Weaver calls them Philistines: Barbarians living amongst culture. Here lies the character not of the ascendent Left, but of the Western liberal middle class.

Such is the state of our entertainment, our advertisers, the “goods and services” of our economy. We laugh, we consume, we indulge the spirit of Barbarism that exists in total throughout every aspect of our modern lives. Barbarism amuses us and serves to absorb our attention as it wreaks havoc on the Old Culture on whose ruins Barbarism parades itself. And why shouldn’t we be amused and indulge? All is well. The past has been defeated. The superstitions and constraints and duties subdued.

The Barbarian, having by now integrated himself into the mainstream society, cannot see that he is a mere symptom of something deeper, something darker. Belloc observes that he is an actor behind whom lies a spirit that observes, that surveys the burning of Christendom.

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.

We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh.

But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile. 

Farther away from God, indeed.

And nearer to the Dust.

The present age in American history begins with the Great War. When the guns of August opened fire in 1914, no one in America could have reasonably foreseen that within three years that foreign war not only would have drawn America into it but also would have, by the sheer magnitude of the changes it brought about on the American scene, set the nation on another course from which it has not deviated significantly since. The Great War was the setting of America’s entry into modernity—economic, political, social, and cultural. By 1920 the country had passed, within a mere three years, from the premodern to the distinctly and ineffaceably modern. Gone forever now the age of American innocence.

When the war broke out in Europe in 1914 America was still, remarkably, strikingly, pretty much the same country in moral, social, and cultural respects that it had been for a century. We were still, in 1914, a people rooted largely in the mentality of the village and small town, still suspicious of large cities and the styles of living that went with these cities. The states were immensely important, just as the Founding Fathers and the Framers had intended them to be. It was hard to find a truly national culture, a national consciousness, in 1914.

In terms of habits of mind, customs, traditions, folk literature, indeed written literature, speech accent, dress, and so forth, America could still be looked at as a miscellany of cultures held together, but not otherwise much influenced, by the federal government in Washington. For the vast majority of Americans, from east to west, north to south, the principal, if not sole, link with the national government was the postal system—and perhaps also the federal income tax, which was approved at long last by constitutional amendment in 1913.

The Great War changed all of this. By November 1918 after four years of war in Europe and nearly two years of it for America, the whole world was changed, Europe itself ceased in substantial degree to be a contained civilization, and the United States, after close to two years of what can only be called wrenching military nationalism under the charismatic Woodrow Wilson, was brought at last into the modern world of nations. State loyalties and appeals to states’ rights would not vanish overnight; they aren’t gone yet in constitutional law, and aren’t likely to be. But whereas prior to 1914 one still saw the gravamen of American development in the four dozen states, “provinces” in European terms, by 1920, it had shifted to the national culture, with the states becoming increasingly archaic.

War, sufficiently large, encompassing, and persisting, is one of the most powerful media of social and cultural—and also material, physical, and mechanical—change known to man. It was in circumstances of war in primordial times that the political state arose, and at the expense of the kinship order that had from the beginning been the individual’s sole community. Ever since, war has had a nourishing effect upon the state; it is “the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne observed darkly but accurately, when America went to war in 1917. Werner Sombart, historian of capitalism, devoted a volume to the tonic effects of war on the rise and development of capitalism. But no less true is Max Weber’s pronouncement of war and the barracks life of warriors as the true cause of communism. War communism precedes, indeed gives birth to, civil communism, Weber argued. The Communism of Soviet Russia has been based from the very beginning upon war preparation, upon the Red Army and its absolute power in the Soviet state.

War tends to stimulate intellectual and cultural ferment if only because of the mixture of ideas and values that is a by-product of combat, of victory and defeat, in any war. In both world wars, millions of Americans, men and women alike, knew the broadening and enriching effects of travel abroad, of stations in exotic places for the first time, as the result of enlistment or conscription. Granted that some were killed. Far more were not.

War tends to break up the cake of custom, the net of tradition. By so doing, especially in times of crisis, it allows the individual a better chance of being seen and heard in the interstices, in the crevasses opened by the cracking up of old customs, statuses, and conventionalities. This was remarkably true once the European war touched the millions of lives which had been for so long familiar with only the authorities and rhythms of an existence largely rural and pretty much limited to towns of the hinterland.

What the Great War did is what all major wars do for large numbers of people: relieve, if only briefly, the tedium, monotony, and sheer boredom which have accompanied so many millions of lives in all ages. In this respect war can compete with liquor, sex, drugs, and domestic violence as an anodyne. War, its tragedies and devastations understood here, breaks down social walls and by so doing stimulates a new individualism.

Old traditions, conventions, dogmas, and taboos are opened under war conditions to a challenge, especially from the young, that is less likely in long periods of peace. The very uncertainty of life brought by war can seem a welcome liberation from the tyranny of the ever-predictable, from what a poet has called the “long littleness of life.” It is not the certainties but the uncertainties in life which excite and stimulate—if they do not catastrophically obliterate—the energies of men.

Sometimes, indeed, more than simple reform becomes entwined with war. Revolution takes place. This was one of Lenin’s insights. The German Socialists had made peace and pacifism almost as prominent as the revolutionary cause itself. Lenin broke utterly with this position, insisting that every national war should be supported in one way or other in the hope of converting war into revolution. America did not, of course, go into revolution as a result of the Great War, nor did England or France. But a good many of the countries engaged in that war, on both sides, did know very well, sometimes very painfully, the surge of revolution. What can be said of America in the war is that the people participated widely in a revolutionary upsurge of patriotism and of consecration to the improvement of the world in the very process of making “the world safe for democracy,” as the moralistic President Wilson put it.

Rarely has the sense of national community been stronger than it was in America during the Great War. True, that sense had to be artificially stimulated by a relentless flow of war propaganda from Washington and a few other pricks of conscience, but by the end of the war a stronger national consciousness and sense of cohesion were apparent. But, as we know in today’s retrospect, with these gains came distinct losses in constitutional birthright.

All wars of any appreciable length have a secularizing effect upon engaged societies, a diminution of the authority of old religious and moral values and a parallel elevation of new utilitarian, hedonistic, or pragmatic values. Wars, to be successfully fought, demand a reduction in the taboos regarding life, dignity, property, family, and religion; there must be nothing of merely moral nature left standing between the fighting forces and victory, not even, or especially, taboos on sexual encounters. Wars have an individualizing effect upon their involved societies, a loosening of the accustomed social bond in favor of a tightening of the military ethic. Military, or at least war-born, relationships among individuals tend to supersede relationships of family, parish, and ordinary walks of life. Ideas of chastity, modesty, decorum, respectability change quickly in wartime.

Giving help and assistance to Parkinson’s Law in the predictable prosperity of the military establishment in our time is what can only be called Wilson’s Law. That is, Woodrow Wilson, whose fundamental axiom “What America touches, she makes holy” was given wording by his great biographer, Lord Devlin. The single most powerful cause of the present size and the worldwide deployment of the military establishment is the moralization of foreign policy and military ventures that has been deeply ingrained, especially in the minds of presidents, for a long time. Although it was Woodrow Wilson who, by virtue of a charismatic presence and a boundless moral fervor, gave firm and lasting foundation to American moralism, it was not unknown earlier in our history.

The staying power of the Puritan image of America as a “city upon a hill” was considerable throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. America the Redeemer Nation was very much a presence in the minds of a great many Americans. American “exceptionalism” began in the conviction that God had created one truly free and democratic nation on earth and that it was to the best interests of all other nations to study America and learn from her. Even the conservative and essentially noninterventionist President Taft, in 1912, sent a detachment of marines into Nicaragua with instructions to announced to the Nicaraguan government that “The United States has a moral mandate to exert its influence for the general peace in Central America which is seriously menaced. . . . America’s purpose is to foster true constitutional government and free elections.”

Woodrow Wilson is without question the key mind; Roosevelt was simply a Wilsonian without the charismatic will and absolute power of mind that Wilson had. One thinks here of Karl Marx when someone reminded him that Hegel had opined that history occasionally repeats its events and great personages. Yes, said Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Wilson was pure tragedy, Roosevelt farce. Wilson sought to invoke all the powers of his Calvinist god and his beloved city upon a hill, the United States of America, in order to bring about a world assembly, the League of Nations, that would realize for the entire planet the sweetness and light of America. This he sought, preached, and died for.

Wilson above any other figure is the patriarch of American foreign policy moralism and interventionism. Churchill wrote, in his The World Crisis shortly after the Great War, that to Wilson alone had to go credit for America’s entry into that war; everything depended “upon the workings of this man’s mind and spirit to the exclusion of almost every other factor. . . . He played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.” His book The State enables us to see how in his mind the true church for him had become not the historic church, the institutional church, but rather the state—provided, of course, that it was permeated by virtue, goodness, and redemptiveness.

The passion and wholeness of his desire to reform and to redeem can be seen first at Princeton where as president he put Princeton “in the nation’s service.” When he decided to reform the eating clubs, thus dividing university and trustees into bitter camps, he likened his work to that of the Redeemer in the cause of humanity; he did much the same thing when a little later he and Graduate Dean West were opposed as to where exactly to locate the new graduate school at Princeton. Virtually everything he touched became instantly transformed into an Armageddon. As president of Princeton, as governor for two years of New Jersey, and finally as president of the United States, Wilson burned and burned as moralist, seeing crises where others saw only problems, and endowing even his dispatch of American troops into Mexico, in retaliation for Mexican bandit crossings of the border, with a mighty purpose that would benefit all mankind.

World war was thus cut out for a mind of Wilson’s passionate moralism. What he and America did had to be eternally right, before mankind and God. He had been appointed by God to serve the blessed American republic and to determine what was right in the war. His final decision, which germinated all through 1916, the year of his reelection under the banner of “He kept us out of the war,” and came to thundering expression in early 1917, was that neutrality must be scrapped for intervention. He had been right in his policy of neutrality but the world and the war had changed; and now he must, with equal godliness and righteousness, do the very opposite—that is, plead with heart and soul for immediate American intervention.

Thus the birth of twentieth-century moralism in foreign policy and war. From Wilson’s day to ours the embedded purpose—sometimes articulated in words, more often not—of American foreign policy, under Democrats and Republicans alike oftentimes, has boiled down to America-on-a-Permanent-Mission; a mission to make the rest of the world a little more like America the Beautiful. Plant a little “democracy” here and tomorrow a little “liberalism” there, not hesitating once in a while to add a pinch of American-style social democracy.

Today, forty years later, moralism continues to inflame American foreign policy, Ronald Reagan being the devoutest successor thus far to Wilsonianism as interpreted by Roosevelt. He too loves to divide the world into the Good and the Evil, and to define American foreign policy as relentless punishment of the Evil by the Good—led by America. He too sees every Nicaragua, every Lebanon, Iran, Persian Gulf, and Grenada as a little bit of Armageddon, with all means justified by purity of mind.

And conceivably bankrupt. If our foreign policy were one of protecting our national security and looking out for the preservation of our political nationhood and general well-being, from time to time doing what little good for others our capacities permitted, we would not require a six-hundred-ship navy, one bulging with supercarriers, battleships, and weaponry better suited to the now historic battles of Jutland in World War I and Midway in World War II than to defense of ourselves against Soviet aggression. General de Gaulle correctly referred to “America’s itch to intervene.”

When we intervene the act is almost compulsively cloaked, even as Wilson’s acts were, in rhetoric of pious universalism. We use our variants of Kant’s categorical imperative in international affairs. We must always explain that behind our intervention lies the imperative of moral goodness—nothing less.

No nation in history has ever managed permanent war and a permanent military Leviathan at its heart and been able to maintain a truly representative character. The transformation of the Roman Republic into the dictatorial empire was accomplished solely through war and the military. Is the United States somehow the divinely created exception to this ubiquitous fact of world history? Not, assuredly, if instead of a foreign policy based upon national security and finite objectives associated with this security, we indulge ourselves in a foreign policy with an “itch to intervene,” and a purpose flowing out of the preposterous fantasy of a world recreated in the image and likeness of that city on a hill known as the United States of America. That way lies total confusion abroad and an ever more monolithic and absolute military bureaucracy at home.

Joe Walsh reflects the general liberal framing on political attempts to confront the present stage of the sexual revolution:

As I mentioned on Twitter: this is the opinion that can be taken when your ideology has achieved hegemonic status within the social order.

Classical liberalism was built on the notion that things like sexual mores can be neutral; everyone can believe what they want and it is up to the rational individual to decide for himself what best suits his priorities, principles, and convictions. But classical liberalism arose against the backdrop of Christendom; wherein there was a continuity between the (Christian-derived) values of the political institutions and the public order writ large. That is to say, after a long struggle against the Pagan world, Christianity, most completely in the West but also extending in different forms into Eastern Europe, achieved what should be called cultural hegemony.

As I discussed at length in my essay on Antonio Gramsci, every society has something at its base that should be considered culturally hegemonic. It is the standard by which changes, revolutionary rhetoric, and trends are judged; it constitutes the instinct of the people and is not derived from “facts and logic” (or from a Biblicist exegetical process) but is rather imparted to the people by way of sentiment and absorption. People mostly formulate their opinions by absorbing the world around them. When the world around them is constituted by Christian themes, they become a “Christian” people.

Now, under this way of things, if dissidents and activists sought to challenge the mores that come out these Christian hegemonic social instincts, what would the response be by protectors of the hegemonic narrative, the ideological reinforcers of “the [Christian] system?” How would the key proponents of the Christian view of things respond when there was a rising tide of dissent that sought to undermine the norms and conventions that were inherently built into the community at a hegemonic level?

Try this:

This is the type of response to dissent that can come when the cathedral is constituted by the the inheritors of the Long Revolution. Curtis Yarvin was correct.

When you have hegemony, you can let the teachers promote what they want; because what they want is generally consistent when your hegemonic cultural values. Hegemony determines what is normal and regular and “common sensical.” When political actors seek to fight against these things, those political actors are seen to be dictators or authoritarians, dangerous to freedom and liberty. This is how Christendom once viewed the Left, and now that the Left has attained hegemonic status, this is how they view their own subversives who are not part of the Left.

The teachers have been radicalized. The teachers have digested the ideas committed to by the Cathedral, and function as catalysts through which these ideas are propagated to children. To seek a response to this realization by political means is to incite the liberal rhetoric by people like Joe Walsh in their defense. They own the framing, they own decisions regarding “normal,” they own the meaning of “free speech,” and they own the application of censorship and “fascism.” This is why the Regime doesn't worry about conservatives outraged by censorship: the American supra-political regime decides what is censorship and what is violent and hurtful speech.

Media and Movement Conservatives (think Chris Rufo) will often react to this reality by arguing that teachers should stay within the bounds of their own administrative function: talk of sex and marriage doesn’t belong in the classroom! There are ways in which this is true, but it actually misses the point. There was a video going around a few months ago where a female teacher shared her engagement news with her class of fifth graders. The Leftists, naturally, were loudly proclaiming that conservatives would have a problem with this if it was gay engagement. So, they point out, conservatives are being hypocrites on the matter.

This isn’t entirely wrong. Conservatives have retreated back toward the framework of neutralist, Classical Liberalism in the face of a Regime that has a positive vision of things inversely analogous to the pre-liberal Christendom. Whereas enlightenment classical liberalism used the rhetoric of neutrality and individualism to break apart the dam of Christendom over hundreds of years, the new Cathedral is too committed to its own total power to fall for agreements in liberal compromise. They fight to win. Conservatives fight for a truce.

The reality of the situation must be this: a teacher that shares her heterosexual engagement with her class is positive reinforcement at the level of absorption and sentiment with regard to the institution of marriage within the Natural Order, and therefore it is good. A teacher that shares of homosexual relations is subversive of the Natural Order and therefore bad.

Of course, public school teachers in the age of the Administrative State are merely functionaries for the advancement of the interests and objectives of the system. So while it would be better to attack the public school system itself, the idea that the solution lies merely in restricting the topics teachers can promote misunderstands hegemonic elements to society. The very presence of the teacher, the way she dresses, the ring on her finger, the picture of her fiancee she keeps on her key ring, all these things craft, build, mold the sentiments and instincts of the children she teaches. Everything is culture war; everything shapes; everything teaches; everything normalizes and contributes to the making of these children.

When you are not part of the Regime and live outside the boundaries of the socially-hegemonic value system, it is your duty to seek the demise of that system. Not to seek truce. The Left used liberalism’s truce-rhetoric to gain positions of power, to replace and old hegemony with a new one. They understood the importance of hegemonic power. Conservatives have yet to understand this.

A New Strategy for a New Left

By now, almost a quarter into the twenty-first century, it is plain to anyone willing to keep up with the dynamics of Leftwing agitation, that we are facing a truly post-Marxist Left. The Marxist framework of historical development and class struggle rested within the realm of economics. Yet with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the materialist communism that went with it, the Left has sought new horizons.

While James Lindsay and others consider our present left to be a new version of the same Marxist framework, others such as Paul Gottfried really see it as something altogether unique. There is a new metaphysic at play and while there are still classes of oppressors vs their victims, this theme of class tension was present with anyone who was not a liberal; class dynamics are not relegated to Marxist theories of the social order.

Classical Marxism emphasized the economic proletariate in class tension with the owners of the means of production (the capitalists) who exploited the dynamic for access to the profit, produced by an artificial and unjust relationship with the wage earner. Why is it that the Left now has this economic dynamic on a back burner, preferring instead the rhetoric of cultural victimhood? As discussed elaborately by Paul Gottfried in his The Strange Death of Marxism, economic injustice gave way to what we now see everywhere: social justice. Race oppression, sexual/gender exploitation, cultural-based bigotry… all these have so obviously replaced economic narratives as the struggle of our time.

One of the reasons why few conservatives saw this coming is because they had (and often still do) approached problems in accordance with the Liberal Democratic framework. Under this model, the state is the primary object of discussion. The debate the animated twentieth century party polemics was over its size and scope: should we have a big government, welfare, warfare, state-provision of goods and services? Under this approach, the “conservatives” say less; the “liberals” say more.

Living in the United States, the epicenter of the new international Western political framework, it is difficult to look beyond this. There is zero understanding or appreciation for what Antonio Gramsci described as "meta-politics:" everything from culture and aesthetics to commerce and capital to philosophy and worldview to power dynamics as all being necessarily thrust into the domain of the political, specifically because we live under a liberal political framework. We sometimes hear about Gramsci's strategies for achieving political success, but what we need to understand is that his strategies were the result of his interpretation of power dynamics under a democratic-liberal political order.

Gramsci’s context

Antonio Gramsci was born in Italy in the late nineteenth century and like many young intellectuals of his generation, became infatuated with the rational approach to politics and society under a framework of socialism. Gramsci and the PSI (the Italian Socialist Party) battled their cause in Italy, dealing with the power dynamics of Western Europe, motivated by the Lenin-led Bolsheviks that had successfully overcome the Tsarist government in the East (Russia) years before. Gramsci and his party made strides in Italy during the early 1920s, but they were ultimately overcome by the Italian fascists led, of course, by Mussolini.  

Having been imprisoned by the Fascist regime in Italy, Gramsci spent his remaining eleven years there, reconceptualizing the idea of a socialist strategy as it needed to be employed in the West. To be clear, Gramsci was indeed a socialist, not really a figure of the post-Marxist Left. Nevertheless, his reworking of socialist strategy into a culture war would become a main feature of the Left’s capture of the West in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The purpose of studying Gramsci is not to uncover a hidden Marxist agenda in the West, but to understand better the reason why our society is so monumentally decadent, why it seems like every aspect of our lives has become so eminently political, tense, and full of strife. Thus, his method is important because they expose precisely where the cultural revolutionaries of our own time have penetrated, and why.

His strategy was not conceived as an arbitrary conspiracy. Gramsci was able to reconstruct the idea of a socialist strategy on the basis of the weaknesses inherent within a liberal democratic order. He understood above all else that conventional politics in the west would yield results that bolstered the very systems that he despised. He was therefore a keen student of political realism: dealing with the political world as we find it without engaging in wishful thinking about the prospects of voting or even militant revolution.

The reason socialist strategy needed to be re-conceived was because of the relation of the state to the civil institutions that characterized Western social order. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was such that to eliminate the Tsar and his family and capture the reigns of political power was to achieve total victory. However, in the West, the strength of the non-state civil institutions were much stronger and more culturally independent from the formal state, as the apparatus of coercion.

In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The State was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.

(Prison Notebooks, Volume 3)

Thus, Gramsci observed, the Bolshevik Revolution was successful precisely because, in Russia, the state encapsulated all of civil life and its capture would be the mere prerequisite to establishing a socialist regime. This was not so in the West. The West had a long established nexus of mediating institutions that stood between the individual and the state. Here, the state and the society were distinct and could be identified independent of the other. To capture the state alone would have put one in direct opposition of an intricate structure of culture, habits, norms, conventions, institutions, group interests, and lower political bodies that would swiftly overcome some socialist capture. That is, in the West, the institutions were more fundamental to social life than was the State.

Gramsci’s Burden

Gramsci’s burden, then, was to grapple with the particular Western problem. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, there was an epochal shift underway in which the monarchies and absolute governments of the Middle Ages were faltering, giving way to the rising tide of Democracy, a value-neutral state that emphasizes the widespread participation of all social blocks and interests. It was the age of Liberal Democracy; democratic because the sovereignty was allegedly with “the people,” and liberal because the state would assume a position of absolute neutrality with regard to the moral, cultural, religious, and economic desires of the mass of individuals.

What Gramsci began to understand was that the advocates of Leninism in the West had fallen for a certain narrative about the relationship between the political world (the state apparatus of coercion), and the civil world (the private sector of culture, economy, and intellectual life). Under Western liberal theory, Gramsci came to realize, the state was simply relegated to the political, to the coercive activities, and everything else existed outside the state and was therefore positively non-political. Thus, the communist assumption about the need to take over the government alone was a result of their accepting the misleading liberal construction of the relation between the civil and political society. The revolution worked in Russia accidentally; that is, only because, there, a civil society distinct from the state was nonexistent.  

And yet, Gramsci recognized that the theoretical construct of the liberal society was actually faulty. In reality, that is, in distinction with the political myths, the state was not constrained in its interests merely to those activities having to do with coercion. Rather, its power, as well as its character and activity, rested on its ability to organize consent outside its technical governing tasks. The observation here is that, the under the regime of Liberal Democracy, those in Power exercised two forms of control: coercion (its formal power) and cultural hegemony (it’s informal power, the power that sits underneath shallow observation).

Culture Hegemony Characterizes All Societies

That is to say, Gramsci concluded that cultural hegemony was already (especially in Europe) an operative aspect of the modern Liberal Democratic political framework, it was not something that he made up as a method of strategy to achieve his socialist goals. He did not see himself as creating cultural hegemony, but as having discovered it, and decided that victory rested on its capture.

The West was built on a cultural hegemony of Christendom, it was never a culturally neutral social order. This cultural hegemony needed to be replaced and liberalism, which denied the existence of cultural hegemony, provided the opportunity for the New Left. Gramsci’s contribution to the ascendent left was to expose the myths of liberalism in a way that conservatives have never been able to digest.

Such is the theme of James Burnham’s book The Suicide of the West where he describes liberalism as the political theory which opens its gates to the barbarians; refusing to make explicitly political decisions, it claims to be an order where anyone can choose his own path in life. This results in anti-liberals who are willing to dominate the political order having the ability to capture the state without contest.

Gramsci therefore is a pioneer in the subfield of political science that concentrates on the forgotten element of socio-political life: the character of civil society and its role in power-dynamics.

Here, Gramsci realized that norms and customs, habits and ways of life, were not brought to society from freely-floating individuals rationalizing their way toward their beliefs; rather, they were the result of the social institutions and settings into which individual man was born, raised, educated, and molded.

Individuals are a product of years of impression and cultural settings that, all across the European continent, extended back thousands of years. Churches, families, guilds, trades, land holdings, academies, and associations were the crafters and shapers of man’s ideas and basic suppositions about the world.

Gramsci’s Strategy

To bring forth the socialist ideal in this complex Western setting therefore required control of these institutions, rather than mere control of the political reins. The objective of the Gramscian strategist is not merely convince people to join the institutions, but rather to recognize that individuals by their very nature as social beings believed and behaved in accordance without how they were molded and developed by the institutions. To capture the institutions was to completely reorient society and change its very make up.

But just as importantly, Liberal Democracy as it developed in real time has no mechanism to prevent its own takeover by an ideology foreign to its historical backdrop, especially once that ideology had entered the general spirit of the institutions within its domain. The state was, after all neutral in its own essence; that is, it would be swayed in accordance with the desires and will of its own managers.

No matter how large the Liberal state became, it was always necessarily weak, unable by definition to prevent its own takeover by those operating within the legitimate boundaries of its own creation.  Thus, the political-coercion apparatus of government is of secondary importance to securing the civil institutions. Once the institutions were captured, the state would begin to reflect this capture and could only then ensure that its coercion capabilities were leveraged to support and enhance the new spirit of the institutions.

The theorized Liberal Democratic model was that there was a realm of coercion (state) on one hand and freedom (civil society) on the other. Gramsci sought to reinterpret the civil society as “hegemony,” not mere freedom. The cultural arena was the backbone and root of a giant system wherein the state was limited merely by what it could accomplish via force. As Joseph Buttigieg (yes, Pete’s father), a renown Gramsci scholar emphasized:

“civil society, in other words, far from being a threat to political society in a liberal democracy, reinforces it—this is the fundamental meaning of hegemony.”

How, then, should the institutions be captured? Buttigieg recognizes that for Gramsci, radicals needed to step back and rethink their rhetoric and temperament. Buttigieg writes:

"one should refrain from facile rhetoric about direct attacks against the State and concentrate instead on the difficult and immensely complicated tasks that a 'war of position' within civil society entails”

This “war of position” was how Gramsci distinguished between subversion as a strategy and the Leninist tactic of “war of maneuver.” The meta complex of society and government, the “superstructure” was always and necessarily to be interpreted as a battlefield. Sometimes, a war of maneuver (defined as the effort to physically overwhelm the state) is required, as in the French Revolution; but in other socio-political settings, a war of position is needed. The world is different, Gramsci argued, than it was in 1776 or 1789. Culture, under this model, must be weaponized; the Progressivist Capitalist regime was so focused on domination of the coercive apparatus that it would neglect the civil realm. The radical socialist, therefore, needed to shift its resources elsewhere to subversively and under the radar play the long game.

Gramsci therefore perceived the dominating class as having hegemony in the culture, convictions, and attitudes of the world at large. This hegemony needed to be met with a counter-hegemony. This counter-hegemony needed to capture the press, the education system, and the arts. By implication, the Gramscian methodology would need to capture Hollywood, the churches, the music industry, technology, etc. Everywhere the political consciousness of the masses once sat in dormant darkness, there needed to be an awakening. All of life was to become political because all of life was an aspect of the superstructure under a Liberal Democratic order.

What is being observed here is not that there is a secret cabal of Gramsci-survivors who have, originating in the prisons of Italy, infiltrated society; rather, what is being observed is that Gramsci exposed the weakness of the Liberal Democratic socio-political structure and identified where, precisely, the true Achilles’ heel was to be found. Gramsci realized the very same thing that the legal theorist on the Old German Right, Carl Schmitt, once realized: the open society, neutral government, mass participation, and a state without the means to prevent legitimate takeover, would be a temporary situation in the grand development of meta-history.

If Schmitt saw the liberal order as the temporary moment between the absolute state and the “total state,” Gramsci saw it as a mechanism by which a new hegemony could be built up to replace the old. And thus, the Democratic-Liberal order had ingrained within it the means of its own capture.

Everything has been thrown into the mix: sexual licentiousness and a praise of pleasure above all else, expressed via the controlled mediums of entertainment (music, sports, movies, art); takeover of the English language and the crafting of rhetoric to suit the narratives of the time (“racism,” “bigotry,” “human rights,” “hate”); ideologies in the classroom and in the churches; food and medicine; family structure. Everything that once made the West good and beautiful was to be held in moral suspicion and undermined as long-established obstacles on the human quest toward Utopia.

After grotesque Super Bowl halftime shows and Grammy Award events that portray the glories of sexual degradation, well crafted cultural-conflict narratives, and an overall spirit of civilizational primitivity, these sentiments are often heard: “don’t like it, don’t watch it” or “it’s a distraction! The state is the real issue.”

These reactions expose the continued belief that the modern world is separated into a political sphere and a civil sphere. But this is a lie; under Liberal Democracy, all of life has become political. Everything has to do with power and politics. The culture war is the political war of our time, a contest for the true soul and power of Western life. We have collapsed into an all-against-all struggle within the Liberal superstructure.

In my essay for the Paleoconservative Anthology, I made the observation that the development of history undermines the approach to political theory which begins and concludes in the abstract—this is one of the key differences between an authentic conservatism and the libertarian doctrine; the latter being the product of the revolution of social rationalism in the Western world.

I argued that libertarianism rested on the presumption that its technical formulations had obvious relevance to the complex structure of the fabric of society's institutions. In short, history is a long winded development of legitimate and just associations, groupings, orderings... coupled with moments of illegitimate coups, conquests, and unjust centralizations of power. That is, the social fabric that had been built up in the West could not be said to be fully unjust or fully just and unraveling it has been a recipe for disaster. Indeed, the spirit of upheaval has largely facilitated the rise of an entirely new, totalitarian, civilization.

One of the key theorists who helped me out of libertarianism—despite his own intentions—was Hans Hoppe. In several of his writings, he emphasized an aspect of the organic growth of political orders by explaining that families bonded with other families into associations, villages, towns, and so on. These decisions are made not by the consent of every individual, but by the representative head of each lower body. Fathers, community leaders, heads of tribe, judges, and so on. Every situation is different. But individuals are always born into a complex arrangement with a certain particular dynamic of "rights and restrictions." And the social order outlasts the life of any one individual.

This is, without a doubt, about as "Burkean" as it gets. Burke, that eloquent opponent of the French revolutionary spirit, wrote:

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 burthensome 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. If the social ties and ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will....

Burke did not come to this observation ex nihilo. He was a student of a particular English political and legal tradition. In 2017, Ofer Haivry published John Selden and the Western Political Tradition. On page 5, he writes:

The influence of Selden's ideas on the constitutional views of such figures as Clarendon, Hale, and Edmund Burke makes him a founding figure of what we may term the traditionalist approach to constitutionalism—of continuity through change—that to this day exerts a strong influence on the political thought of the UK, the US, and other countries.

The English political tradition, Haivry takes a considerable portion of his book to demonstrate, can be seen in four major streams: Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Filmer, and John Selden. The political and historical context of these streams took place on the back of an intellectual crisis at the dawn of the modern Western world: the collapse of the stronghold of the Scholastic legal tradition. Summarizing these streams would make a fascinating future article, but for the moment, Selden's understanding of the origins of social orders is quite interesting with regard to their obvious influence on Edmund Burke.

We find in Selden's (1584-1654) works, particularly his Mare Clausum, some fascinating observations regarding the origin of property, law, and, especially, political authority. Selden takes up the model that all of human history is a series of associations toward union, de-association toward "secession," migrations of groups not individuals, and everything in between. To take up Hoppe's own meta-narrative, families combined into clans, clans into tribes, tribes into nations. These decisions were not made with the consent of every individual, but with the authority representative of each particular body. Fathers, chiefs, leaders, judges, etc. Complexity, not clarity, is the story of the human past.

Selden echos this model. In Mare Clausum, Book 1, Chapter IV, he amazingly explains that the world was divided into three domains by the Biblical Noah for his three sons. These "lords of the earth" did not hold their domains "in common" but belonged to them specifically as proprietors of large domains.

[Noah] admonish[ed] them altogether, that no man should invade the Bounds of his Brother, nor should they wrong one another; becaus it would of necessitie occasion Discords and deadly Wars among them."  

(note: older English spelling and stylism kept in place for all quotes. Deal with it.)

The original proprietors of the land then chose the terms and conditions under which this social order was to be divided for his own heirs:

But yet, whether it were by Donation, Assignment, or any other Grant whatsoever, it appear's (before hee died or left any Heir to succeed him) his children did enjoy their several Bounds and Territories, in a way of peculiar Dominion or Possession.

The reference to "peculiar dominion or possession" is to juxtapose this private property nature of the land with the model of "common" or shared land (some forms of utopian communism). The nature of this model necessitates that, at least several hundred years in, there would be far less proprietors than there were common folk living on the proprietor's land. Across the world, each area developed unique customs, laws, norms, and interpretations of these three.

The custom developed naturally into new activities and social roles:

After this, Exchanges, Buying, and selling came in fashion; and besides Weights and Measures, they appointed Judges of Co∣venants and Contracts, and added Bounds or Limits to Fields and Pastures.

So at length came in private Dominions or Possessions; which (whether by vir∣tue onely of a preceding universal dominion of a single person, as in Adam; or of som universal and common interest in Things, as betwixt Noah and his Sons) hapned first by the Donation, Assignment, or som other Grant of those whom it concerned, either to Princes, or Communities representing a single per∣son, or to any others whomsoever, as particular Lords.

It gets even more interesting as Selden notes that those who were not inheritors of land did, by compact, agree that they had no "right" to the land being passed on to the proprietor's posterity:

But in this division of Bounds and Territories, there intervened, as it were, a consent of the whole bodie or universalitie of mankinde (by the mediation of something like a compact, which might binde their posteritie) for quitting of the common interest or antient right in those things that were made over thus by distribu∣tion to particular Proprietors; in the same manner as when Partners or Co-heirs do share between themselvs any portions of those things which they hold in com∣mon.

That is, it was the social arrangement of the development of ancient society that the passing on of territories could be made to particular heirs. But vitally (and with reference to what Burke would one day call an "eternal contract"), it was not just the ownership of the land that was passed on, it was also the role and office of the particular social order which the proprietor was to oversee.

Nor can it otherwise bee conceived in the case of Partners or Co-heirs (such as all men seem to have been in the State of Communitie) how those things which com not under division, should not con∣tinue common, as before. Therefore (I suppose) it must bee yielded, that som such Compact or Covenant was passed in the very first beginnings of private Dominion or possession, and that it was in full force and virtue transmitted to posteritie by the Fathers, who had the power of distributing possessions...

So that wee may conclude no less concerning distri∣bution by Assignment, then touching Seisure by occu∣pation of things relinquish it at pleasure, that a general compact or Agreement was made or ratified, either expressly in words, or implicitly by custom.

The origin of these communities were not some creative version of a social contract theory where consenting property owners came together and signed a charter, which dissolves upon their death or exit. This is the typical interpretation, by libertarians, of Hoppe’s covenant community concept. Rather, their origin laid in those who came to a protector, the owner of a territory, who would approve of them for settling on his lands.

Here is the important part, and where libertarianism falls apart: the proprietor would sell them portions of the land and yet withhold certain rights. He sold the rights to a piece of land, except for the rights to do certain things in what might be considered public space; not publicly owned, but publicly interactable. The ownership was conditional and not absolute. All actual Western property ownership came about in this way: within a context of pre-existing conditions and rules and restraints. (Or otherwise by plunder.)

Hoppe once noted: “Originally, such covenants were based on kinship relations, with the role of the proprietor performed by the head of a family or clan.” Man is born into the world not in a state of nature, naked in the absence of any construct, but rather in the context of a structure of rules and regulations, rights and duties, in a house and land that did not belong to him. These families, then, either entered the jurisdiction of a proprietor, or else cultivated their land such that they were able to be the proprietor themselves for other entering families.

The Burkean-Selden camp is not that "tradition makes right," it is that the complex development of the relation of associations, some of which are legitimate and organic, some of which are not, precludes us from making universalistic pronouncements about how all societies must be organized; that is, it is against rationalistic formulations or blueprints for planning the social order. It is a rejection of what Thomas Sowell described as the Quest for Cosmic Justice.

Hence Paul Gottfried, himself friendly to libertarians (especially Rothbard and Hoppe), cannot find it in him to adopt the label. After noting his general sympathies, he writes in Revisions and Dissents:

The notion of individuals defending their values and identities—while inhabiting an imaginary state of nature—does not seem to be a convincing account of where we come from as human beings. [...] Unlike the essentialist Right's reading of Aristotle or Burke, Libertarians understand freedom as a universally shared good to which everyone everywhere is entitled by virtue of being an individual. [...] The classical conservative view of liberty flows from the legal implications of someone's standing in a particular society, held together by shared custom and distributed duties.

From this view that obtained among opponents of the French Revolution there arose a concept of socially situated liberty, which stands in vivid contrast to the Libertarian idea of unfettered individual liberty. Libertarians are seen from the Right as promoting a leftist position, which presupposes the idea of universal equality and even universal citizenship. The doctrinaire [libertarians] scorned [by the Old Right] rejected the conservative notion of the social bond and were proclaiming principles that issued from the French Revolution.

Vivek Ramaswamy announced last night that he is throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination. A self-described capitalist and entrepreneur, he alleges himself to be a conservative who is determined to fight the Woke agenda that has within the last decade taken the Democratic Party and regime orthodoxy by storm.

Recognizing that the immigration issue is at the mental forefront for a vast number of Americans, especially in flyover America, he made this one of his early talking points. And in doing so, he embodied the precise problem with the framework of American political discourse relating to American identity.

His bait and switch on the immigration problem came in a typical way: he immediately shifted from problems of our immigration dynamics to emphasizing that the problem is with illegal immigration. As if the transformations of American culture over the last half a century or more were a matter of legislative technicality. And could our crisis of the clash of civilizations be solved by simply legalizing the import of the non-Western world?

Indeed, he made the claim to Tucker that he thinks we should have more immigrants like his parents (from India), citing the classic case for merit above affirmative action. It is no longer acceptable in political discourse to dismiss both of these as irrelevant to the question of cultural compatibility: to what extent would these southeast Asians find themselves sentimentally disposed to defend the honor and integrity of historically Anglo-American cultural norms?

CONTINUE READING AT CHRONICLES MAGAZINE

My friend Ben Lewis has written a reflection on Conservatism and the Problem of Power in which he warns against a certain over-correction among those conservatives who are leaving the framework of a libertarian-influenced conservatism. If there were elements of conservatism as a movement that had adopted some of the liberal framing of the libertarian framework, then in leaving this behind (likely due to the successes of the political Left in recent years), Ben warns against not going too far the other way into a full-blown thrust for pure power.

I cannot help but think he somewhat has my own developments in mind, as I read through the approach of his article— if not, then I am a seething narcissist; so I hope he does! Regardless, I do see myself in some of his points and I would like to take this opportunity not so much to “respond” but rather to interact with his observations for the benefit of those seeking clarity as our world enters politically unknown waters.

Ben is not a libertarian, so he sees in the legitimate function of statecraft the possibility of participation in the political elements of the culture wars. That is, there is a role for the exercise of actual power, by the state, in dealing with those aspects of this increasingly political war that affect the common good. However, “suspicion of power is a foundational tenet of conservative political theory” and therefore to lose this demeanor in the will to wage political battles would constitute abandoning the “conservative mind” altogether.

And then he hones in on those who might be taking lessons from Carl Schmitt (me) by claiming: “This is even more true of the suggestion that politics can be reduced to a winner take all battle between inveterate enemies.” We will get to this.

What struck me most about this essay is that it seems to also reflect the differences that Paul Gottfried had with Russell Kirk during the 1990s. I would like to emphasize that it is my understanding that Kirk and Gottfried were on good terms (I am a year into a Gottfried biography project and have correspondence) and mostly in agreement regarding the meaning of Conservatism against the Neo-conservatives. Both of them rejected the universalist-ideological conservatism of the postwar Media Conservatives and ground their conservatism in place, people, and empirical heritage.

However, Kirk would emphasize TS Eliot’s permanent things and the enduring treasures of our past that could not ultimately be taken away by the evils of the Long Revolution. Gottfried, on the other hand, had much more an interpretation that emphasized our political doom.

Gottfried once noted in a symposium in celebration of Kirk, published at the Kirk center:

Moreover, my quarrel with Russell has less to do with his conservative vision than with the application of that vision to the present age. In my view, Russell’s picture of a conservative order, as put forth in the first edition of The Conservative Mind, has no significant connection to political and social life for most of the current residents of the United States and Western Europe. And that might have been the case even when his book was published in 1953. Reading Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community about the disintegration of modern society, a consumerist culture, and the pseudo-scientific administrative state, a work produced at about the same time as The Conservative Mind, one obtains a more up-to-date sense of the course of modern Western societies than one does from Kirk’s magnum opus.

This is relevant because I think it strikes at the heart of Ben’s urge, which is built upon the great founder of Conservatism as a meaningful Western political tradition, Edmund Burke. In my essay contribution to Gottfried’s paleoconservative anthology, I emphasized three students of power that are actively being read by what I called “post-libertarians.” They were James Burnham, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci. Of these, only Schmitt can claim to have been influenced by Burke; but Schmitt himself began to see Burke’s world as having been structurally eliminated by the very Devil that Burke warned against in his tirade against the “new conquering empire of light and reason” (which was the French-sourced political rationalism embodied in Jacobinism).

So we have here two streams of thought that might criticize from different angles the liberalism of libertarianism, and the libertarianism of the fusionist project. It is my personal opinion, perhaps disagreeable to Ben, that both of these streams of thought are useful and productive as Rightist counters to the Leftwing insurgency. I don’t hold it at all against Ben that he may not be interested in the post-Hobbesian “Science of Power,” but I hope he would believe me that I love the world and demeanor of Kirk and the Imaginative Conservatism he inspired. Hence my Tolkienesque Substack title.

Ben quotes Burke to say that

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.

And he continues to quote the eminent British Burkean Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton, one of Burke’s best modern interpreters, criticized the kind of man who would “set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person.”

These are employed to express the conservative hesitancy toward using government as a weapon of power against enemies, a function of state that would be more the emphasis of Schmitt and the Rightwing reactionaries in the present moment. The difference between Gottfried and Kirk would rest in whether or not Burke’s statement is still applicable. If Kirk would say this advice reflects a permanent aspect of government, then Gottfried would say it is context-and-time-bound.

Another way of looking at it is that Burke’s warnings against the ideological absolutism of Thomas Paine emphasized that undoing an entire political system would not return us to peace and harmony, but to political absolutism and political chaos.

Burke was very clear that in the beginning of kingdoms, politics was built on blood and violence, on the distinction between friends and enemies. Yet it was the accomplishment of the historical process, of history and experience, that nations could earn themselves a type of political scenario highlighted above by Burke and Scruton. He warned, however, that seeking to tear down this achievement due to perceived imperfections would destroy civilization. In one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the Anglo tradition of letters, he wrote:

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 torn off. All the super-added 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.

What Gottfried and Schmitt and others of the “Science of Power” stream would emphasize is that this already happened. We cannot employ Scruton’s Burkean framework to the extent we may want to because Burke’s warnings 230+ years ago were not heeded. We are a conquered people who are not advocating that we return to the pre-Burkian time of the friend-enemy nature of politics, but rather that we have had the return forced upon us. It is not that Gottfried might think Burke was wrong, it is that he was right, and we should have listened; for his wildest warnings became true.

None of this is to say that Ben’s article contains anything disagreeable. I do think that conservatives should pay attention to the warnings of Kirk and Burke and Scruton about the problems of power. They do represent the very best of the conservative tradition; it cannot be denied that when the state absorbs the authority and hegemony of the civil institutions up into itself, the health of the nation is undermined. This is the essence of Anglo political traditionalism. And I absolutely agree; and will admit that the online hard right will ignore this fact, therein making me more traditionalist than they.

But if Ben senses in people like me an urge to throw off these warnings, it is not because I don’t believe in the idea of the prudent exercise of power, but because we may be further down the road than Kirk anticipated in his lifetime. I share with Scruton (and no doubt Ben himself), a deep pessimism (which is distinct from despair) about our trajectory, but it may be unique to people in the Gottfried stream to interpret our situation as being beyond the horizons of the possibility of a Burkean political demeanor.

If we have already lost the world picture advanced by Burke, Kirk, Nisbet, and Scruton, it is not the case that I consider them wrong but, painfully and with a somber heart, see the world as having been already remade. And this rebirth means we must reconsider the role of the state in moving forward. It may no longer be possible to see “power [as] gentle and obedience [as] liberal.”

One of the key themes of Paul Gottfried’s vast insights over the decades has been his grappling with the nature of the postwar American conservative movement. He has in several places argued that most of what operates under the conservative banner was the creation of certain anti-Communist writers and intellectuals. And that therefore, being an artificial construct with a specific political end, it was distinct in character from a more meaningful, organic, conservatism that preceded this movement.

For Gottfried, the conservative movement in America (a postwar phenomenon) is a complete myth in that it is actually not meaningfully on the right in a truly historic sense. While this can be seen obviously in the celebrity-cons such as Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Dinesh D’Souza, Gottfried’s work is dedicated to the philosophical foundation that stretches much deeper and farther into the rhetoric and impulse of most in America who consider themselves conservative.  

Thus, Gottfried does not merely make this argument as an accusation of an unfortunate gap between what the conservatives (GOP) argue rhetorically and how they act once in office. Gottfried’s analysis is not chiefly about the failures of politicians. Rather, he argues that the entire conservative approach to socio-political analysis—to political theory itself—in our time is a grand divergence from an historically authentic rightism. The postwar conservative movement in America was at odds with the commitments that could be identified from the moment of the inception of a Western Conservatism as a conscious reaction against the French Revolution. Thus, we have in America an “invented right” that, as Gottfried’s work has dedicated to show, actively downplays pre-World War II conservatism and, more paradigmatically, conservativism as it originally came into the Western world with the thought and politics of Edmund Burke in Britain and Joseph de Maitre on the European continent.

While all this can be gathered in various Gottfried works, especially his work on Hegel and the Postwar American Right, he considers as especially important to his observations the influence of Leo Strauss and the band of academic Straussians who follow in his footsteps. His book length treatment of Strauss is Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.

Gottfried argues that while the Neoconservative political actors supplied the journalists and columnists and political advisors (and thus were more publicly visible), it was the Straussians that worked in the academic setting and succeeded in influencing the new conservatism at that level.

There are many elements to Gottfried’s presentation, including the biographical backdrop to the way Strauss saw the world and the various contributions Strauss made methodologically to the interpretation of historical writings. But for this current reflection, I am interested in how Gottfried finds in Leo Strauss the seeds of the rhetoric we most often hear in the American Conservative Movement and especially, how this should be contrasted with a more meaningful (historical) conservatism.

To start, we might point to Strauss’ frustration with the Burkean tradition of distrust regarding universal, propositional politics. For Edmund Burke, political problems were particular problems: they were in reference to specific people, specific laws, specific traditions, and a specific context of time and place. This meant that it was vital, or perhaps indispensable, to refrain from universalizing such political problems away from the particular context. The art of politics is about dealing with a real “people” (the “American people,” or the “British people,” etc., rather than “the people” as a conceptual and Platonic ideal) and the actual problems of a real nation with the actual provided tools relevant to the particular legal and political context. I have discussed this theme before in my essay on particularism vs universalism.

Contrary to the constant accusation by those who have taken up a Straussian state of mind (and this becomes a recurring theme in the interaction that Straussians have had with representatives of the older right), those who conceive of political problems in the above Burkean approach do not deny universal truth and transcendent principles of right, wrong, good, and evil. Rather, they emphasize “the significance of particularity in filtering and humanizing” and applying whatever are to be conceived as transcendent. The art of socio-political activity is interacting at the particular level and in light of the specific characteristics of a specific social order.

An important example comes to the surface in Gottfried’s book, which will springboard further discussion.

In the American setting, there was a shift from the way the Old Right spoke about the founding of the United States to the way the founding was interpreted by Strauss and his followers (who became the intellectual foundation for the postwar New Right). For the Old Right, which in chapter four Gottfried refers to as the anti-Straussians, the American founding was based on a particular dynamic between a specific people and the social, political, and legal context of their setting; that is, the founders were chiefly motivated by the particular grievances they had with the British monarchy. These grievances could be articulated with reference to perceived artificial power-grabs by the King over against the actual English tradition of liberties to which the Americans were, as Englishmen themselves, rightfully entitled.

The American founding generation therefore worked not to construct a political body dedicated to certain universalistic ideals, but rather to mimic what they perceived to be their actual tradition of law, custom, liberty, and in light of the fact that the various regions in the colonial setting had different interests, habits, norms, and social structures.

For this “particularist” interpretation, Gottfried points to the following “anti-Straussians: [Barry] Shain, the Southern cultural historian M.E. Bradford, the Burke-scholar Peter Stanlis, the critic of liberalism James Kalb, the Swedish-American philosopher Claes Ryn, and the traditionalist man of letters Russell Kirk.” There is a particular reference in this section to Kirk’s The Roots of American Order.

This is to be contrasted with the Straussian view, a view which dominates the rhetoric of the American conservative movement in our time (which most of us grew up with). This view focuses instead on the idea of a “propositional nation;” the idea that America was founded on a body of universal ideals related to the equality of all men and the importance of democracy and natural rights in the construction of a consciously-constructed nation. In contrast to the older conservatism, “liberal democracy” becomes the particular genius of the American project and the dedication to the “nation built upon ideals” becomes one of the most important achievements of “Western progress.”

One can begin to see why Abraham Lincoln is the model President for the post-Straussian Conservative Movement, and why he was seen as a betrayer of the original associative union by the Old Right. Gottfried references the Lincoln issue on multiple occasions as an example of the “second founding” that plays much more favorably into the hands of the Straussians over against the Old Right’s unfashionable commitment to pre-Lincolnian American decentralism.

Now, this is not just a mere topic of technical reference to the motivations of the founders; for here we have the foundation for the way each group tends to think of the role of the United States government in the world. And this of course is the foundation for the actual political goals and rhetoric in America. If politics is about particular people in particular settings, and if the nature of America’s founding supports that, we have no overriding justification for the twentieth-century Federal Government practice of the promotion and spread of American-style democracy and “rights” on the domestic front, or the world scene.

All this would strike the modern conservative, influenced without knowing it by the framework of the Straussians, as out of the question. The American nation must be united around a series of universal ideals, and therefore with an actual purpose to fulfill on the socio-political scene, both foreign and domestic. Among these purposes would be its commitment to the advancement of the contributions of the liberal era, the democratic nature of the modern nation state, and the universal importance of Western-style natural rights.

Indeed, this brings us to the question of what, exactly, these universal political ideals are supposed to be. It is here that we find a particularly modernist (anti-conservative) nature in the political theory of the Straussians.

Gottfried points to a number of things.

First, there is much more of an emphasis on equality of participation in the “liberal democracy” that is allegedly at the core of a universally good political system. Whereas an authentic rightism would stress the quality of the law over the democratic participation of the citizenry (even observing that increased democratic participation can be the means by which law is distorted and abused), the new American conservatism that arose on the back of the Straussians would stress the essentially democratic nature of “popular sovereignty.” Old Conservatism did not, for instance, oppose an American monarchical structure because it was somehow a violation of eternal democratic rights but rather because it did not make sense in the context of America’s development (there was no organic royalty in the colonial setting).

Or, as perhaps the most important Straussian, Harry Jaffa, once argued in National Review, “equality is a conservative principle.” Traditional conservative M.E. Bradford, on the other hand responded:

“Let us have no foolishness indeed. Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself—Equality, with the capital "E"—is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. Contrary to most Liberals, new and old, it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity (equal starts in the "race of life") and equality of condition (equal results).”

Thus, there is in modern “conservatism” particular weight given to the duty of individual participation, extension of voting rights, and other forms of popular involvement. They therefore support the fourteenth amendment and the new role of the Federal Government in interacting directly, instead of via the state governments, toward the realization of universal and natural rights of individuals.

This latter point gives a new meaning to the “universalist” character of the new conservatism in that they are not just proponents of American style democratic liberty for the entire world, but also within the context of the repudiation of Old Federalism. The Federal Government, then, extends the rights of the people not just outward to the international scene, but inward within the jurisdiction of what was once considered to be the domain of state governments. This, truly, is a path toward centralization in our time. Thus writes Gottfried:

From the standpoint of [the] older republicanism, Lincoln, FDR, and other Straussian heroes were dangerous centralizers and levelers, certainly not paradigms of great statesmanship.

And moreover, most of the Straussians, in contrast to the older conservative supporters of Senator Robert Taft, spent no time seeking to rollback the centralizing power grabs of the Progressive era (including the sixteenth amendment’s income tax, centralization of money and banking in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and international agreements that committed us to Europe’s problems during the World Wars), nor the continued efforts during the New Deal era with its various permanent national welfare programs.

Further, the universalist and propositional nature of our “liberal democracy” often reveals itself in the Straussian opinion that we ought to extol the virtues of cultural diversity in America, liberal immigration policies, and legal experiments in the promotion of racial, sexual, and religious egalitarianism. Thus, in a way that is completely at odds with the Old Right, the post-Straussian conservative movement has embraced, and refuses to entertain dissent from, “the progressive measures of the 1960’s, whether the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, or the Immigration Reform of 1965, as necessary steps to mobilize our liberal democracy against the Soviet threat.”

Here, we also find reference to the striking difference between the Straussian-influenced conservative movement and the older rightist-conservative tendency on the topic of war. Gottfried observes that you could hardly find in a meaningful historical rightism a quest to militarily fight for “universal ideals” and propositions. Rather, you find in the Old Right a refusal to take part in Progressivist military adventures and a strict position that war is intended to be taken up in defense of actual threats to the nation over which the state governs. Writes Gottfried,

“Fighting wars for universal, egalitarian propositions was never a priority for authoritarian conservatives like Antonio Salazar or Francisco Franco. Nor is this type of crusade an activity that one might associate with American conservative isolationists like Robert Taft. It is an expression of progressive militarism, a form of principled belligerence that French Jacobinism, Wilsonianism, and wars of communist liberation have all exemplified at different times.”

The Era of Trump and Nationalism

In their emphasis on the triumph of the ideal of liberal democracy, propositional nationhood, and the preference for universality of politics over its particularity, the Straussians have contributed to the ideological underpinnings of the American empire’s global narratives. It is for this reason that those who take up this way of thinking (most of the conservative movement in our time, as well as establishment GOPers) have had difficulty adjusting to the reactionary-flavor of the present revolt against the postwar international political consensus.

In the United States, Trump has been a figure of this reaction. In Western Europe we have secessionist and nationalist movements, such as Brexit, but also in Spain, Italy, and Scotland. In Eastern Europe this reaction is perhaps most developed (though completely ignored by Western media) and nationalist anti-EU/NATO/UN sentiments are higher than they have been in over half a century. In Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, there are strong reactions against the American ideology of universalism and liberal democracy.

All these are, essentially, particularist movements. They are the representation of a stirring realization that people are more committed to their own history, their own way of life, their own people, their own traditions than to some universal set of ideals that is supposed to be the uniting foundation for political unification. One finds this especially in Eastern European politicians such as Viktor Orban who has essentially declared war on the Western influence of multiculturalism, moral relativism, and the anti-family narratives that pervade the Western elite. Instead, these nationalist movements are centered around protection from the “godless liberalism” of the west and reject the notion of liberal neutrality as not good for their own ethnically-united people.

It must be stated here that the “West Coast Straussians” at the Claremont Institute have done well in seeing the fruits of the original Straussian impulse. While they still think in universalistic political terms and Michael Anton, for instance, has great difficulty buying the particularist interpretation of the American founding, they have begun to turn away from the Bush era obsession with championing democracy and liberal rights. However, the conservative movement at large is still rhetorically and ideological committed to these impulses, which can especially be seen on topics like the Civil Rights era and their refusal to grapple with the American dilemma of ethnic heritage.

Of relevance to this article is how Paul Gottfried might react to the way the conservative movement in America has tried to deal with these developments. Whereas in Europe nationalism makes a good deal of historic sense given the centuries-long development of Europe as a collection of particular nationalities, the nature of the United States’ own history leads Gottfried to be immensely skeptical of American nationalism, preferring instead the Old American tradition of regionalism. That is to say, in Europe, nationalism is a decentralizing force whereas in the United States nationalism is inherently a centralizing force.

Now, this is not to say that in the age of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama and its misguided democratic internationalism that an “America First!” shift is not refreshing and welcome, but Gottfried’s observations allow one to be especially aware of the way the Straussian mentality will corrupt this reaction in America if not understood historically. Thus we find the sudden endorsement of “nationalism” all over the Conservative Movement as it tries desperately to keep up with the sudden world revolt against the artificial construct of universal ideals-based political bodies.

Gottfried finds humorous the recent embrace of “nationalism” by National Review editor Rich Lowry, who long considered nationalism to be in the same racist spirit of fascism and Nazism. Suddenly, in a quest to stay politically relevant, nationalism is useful. But those aware of the Straussian view of political problems will recognize that much of this new nationalism as pushed by a variety of key outlets in the nominally “conservative” world contains the very rhetoric of propositional nationhood and bedrock of “our ideals.” It is characterized by an acceptance of the global repudiation of Wilsonian internationalism, but it is not essentially “rightist.”  Lowry, promoting his book in The Atlantic, points to the same Straussian heroes of universal ideals and centralization in American history:

The essence of true conservatism is that it emphasizes the particularity in the application and interpretation of ideas; it mixes them with the actual needs, traditions, customs, priorities and sentiments of a given people with a shared cultural history and identity. Themes like liberalism, democracy, equality, religious neutrality, and tolerance are not essentially conservative, even if particular societies find versions of their use consistent with their way of life. Any meaningful conservatism is going to recognize this fact and therefore to the extent that the American conservative movement has abandoned the old Burkean tradition of particular politics in favor of universalism, to that extent they have deviated from authentic, traditional, or old conservatism.

In our time, this traditionalist conservatism is not at all what is seen in the “conservative movement” at large. Rather, Old Rightism is, as suggested in the title of Paul Gottfried’s anthology of essays sadly a “vanishing tradition.”

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime… nothing which is true of beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history… nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone." —Reinhold Niebuhr

It is a peculiar characteristic of modern man to think in terms of changing the world, either in triumph over our sinful past or in some grand return to better days. In a world dominated by the political, when all things are related in one way or another to public institutions managed and upheld by the social-administrative nature of Western government—and especially its narratives—so many have a tendency to push toward improvement at a universal scale. As the political extends to the globe, so does the framing of our problems and search for solution.

Whether seeking to overcome the prejudices and cultural inclinations of yesterday, or seeking to re-instill them, our thinking is geared toward colossal shifts that must happen in order to achieve the improvements which we imagine. Our vision is cosmic and there is no hope except in contributing consciously and readily to the unfolding of progress in our time. Man is thrust into the grand and epochal battle for the future of the world, always needing to hone and craft his ideology for the sake of victory over the present conditions of insecurity and tension. Indeed, man feels an obligation, a pull, to jump into the mix and “do something about it.”

Thus, as we sit on the precipice of the Western socio-political framework in decline, there is a constant and implicit demand that we offer an ideological replacement to fill the void created by the Neo-liberal social order (with not only its political structure, but its overall social milieu and interpretive framework). The question constantly asked is: “how do we achieve the successful implementation of our vision?” We each believe that if the world could adapt, however slightly, our own suggestions, the future might indeed be saved.

In a social environment of strife and upheaval, where the animosity and social hostility felt comes via media of entertainment, news, formal education, social media campaigns, and even the narratives that dominate corporate culture, it is becoming obvious that the state is not our only problem. While the managerial state in the West played—and plays— a core role in the transformation of society, the fact remains that it has, undeniably, transformed society itself.

The question therefore is increasingly not merely how do we roll back the influence of the progressive state, the question is what are the causes of a healthy and stable society? In this sense, the answer is not to be found in a loud chorus of ideas offered, understood, and accepted. Civilizations, I’ve said so many times of late, are not phenomena rising out of the application of mutually agreed upon ideological frameworks.  The individuals who make up society at large have rarely (perhaps examples can be found in certain religious sects) in history consented to live peacefully among themselves on the basis of a shared ideological vision.

Moreover, the birth and development of sound civilizations are not projects that span the lifetime of a single reformer, whether or not he is fully dedicated to his cause. Western civilization and all its institutions and cultural contributions was the result of over a thousand years of crisis, struggle, and maturation; it was not the result of the intended goal of constructing a brilliant vision for the future.  Even more profoundly, the roots of European civilization, which nestled in at the collapse of the Roman Empire, were not the product of revolutionaries seeking to set forth a plan of concerted action.

Throughout American (and European history), the majority of real, everyday, people did not operate their lives in terms of a some fight for liberty; they barely thought about it. The politicization of our thinking has coincided not with the buildup of a strong society, but as it has come at the expense of attention on more important, non-political things, the politicalization of our passions and mental bandwidth has been a key element of the growth of the state and the fracturing of social continuity. Robert Nisbet describes this social breakdown as follows:

It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought.”

In a review of Patrick Deneen’s book on the failures of Liberalism, (a book which may not be agreeable in total), Sam Goldman concludes:

Deneen is probably right that the demand for an ideological replacement for liberalism is not only distinctively modern, but actually part of the problem. In seeking out a course beyond liberalism, we may find ourselves in a position that more closely resembles that of the ancients, who did not possess—and did not generally seek—a comprehensive political and moral doctrine.  

Whether one finds fault with the difficult-to-define project of “liberalism,” the point still stands: constructing a socio-political framework for our human future is not the sole way out. This makes the mistake of presuming that the health of society is a result of a comprehensive and shared vision. In truth, naturally arising social context must come first, it is the soil in which the fruit trees can grow. In the words of Robert Nisbet (Quest for Community):

The family, religious association, and local community—these, the  conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man’s thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions.

Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.

What we learn from all this is that our strategy may be found in the opposite of our modern inclination. Consider the following suggestion: we may not need a mere mob of more voices on behalf of a better ideology at the expense of the actual development of the roots that are required for civilization to rest on solid ground.

The social mood of our late stage democratic progressivism puts a particular emphasis on the primacy of political involvement, politicized chatter, and the sham of making “your voice be heard.” There is a general atmosphere that encourages one to think in terms of creating a movement, of overcoming the power elite, of rallying the proverbial militia, of changing hearts and minds of the world around us.

But imagine, if you will, the sheer audacity of traveling back in time to the degenerative collapse of the Roman world and rallying a handful of people to tell their neighbors about the Good News of Lockean-style private property rights. What is being posited here is certainly not a plea to ignore ideas, but rather, to direct and preserve them in more meaningful, even self-fulfilling ways.

One must consider finding fulfillment and satisfaction in a completely different civilizational role than that of a visible hero. To echo Warren Harding’s campaign speech on a slightly different context, we need, at a personal level, to “return to normalcy:”

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise;

Such a return to normalcy must be motivated in a change of personal perspective. We must learn to love the everyday; to cherish the mundane; to appreciate the regular; to invest time and happiness in the ordinary. This is the long-lasting and measurable path forward. A people that find their sole identity in the fight against the zeitgeist will so often find that the fight came at the expense of the truly meaningful elements of our person. And the negative effects of non-meaningful political identities have negative effects on those that come after us, long after we draw our last breath.

Indeed, as Nisbet writes:

the major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church. Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition. And within them also have been engendered or intensified the principal incentives of work, love, prayer, and devotion to freedom and order.”

Each of us tend to flatter ourselves that we will follow in the footsteps of Cato the Younger or Ron Paul, yet the odds are unfavorable that this is the role for our personal taking.  Thus, it is high time that we come to terms with the suggestion that we might take up a similar function of the Celts in those dark years in the vacuum of Rome’s former glory.

Rather than a pursuit of some vague agenda of saving the world, the Irish monks, as told in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, took the path of restoration and preservation on the home front— their scribes took it upon themselves to collect, copy, and preserve the literary contributions of a world that was quickly slipping away. In an age of barbarianism, anti-intellectualism, and revolt against civilization, the role of St. Patrick and the monks he inspired was to act as a silent medium through an era of cultural darkness.

For, as the Roman Empire fell, as barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed.

Without this service of the scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly rebounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would not have come to be.

And Kenneth Clark, in his chapter "The Skin of Our Teeth," in his own Civilisation writes:

Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

Their objective was far from hoisting a civilized society back on to the then-dead Roman society, it was rather to be faithful in the small things; to accomplish some obtainable and something accessible. In the scheme of things, the Irish saved civilization because they became the living preservation of the elements of goodness taken from Rome in decay.

From their activities of preservation came forth the eventual outward growth and spread of these memories via an impressive chain of monasteries from Ireland back through continental Europe and blossomed into the roots of the soil of what would one day be European civilization. Literature, art, religious writings, history, records, all the recordings of Roman life were transferred across time via the Irish monks.

This is all analogy, of course. We do not need to run for the caves, build fortresses in the mountains. We don’t need to ignore or neglect the arena of the political and in fact the political is a vital stadium for our duties in the struggle against Darkness— but the analogy is obvious: in a world of politicization, the most prudent use of our time is not to be another voice in the crowd.

What, in our context, might it look like to partake somewhat in the mentality of preservation, to “save the books,” rather than have delusions of immediately reshaping the present world? One thing in particular would be to restore, in our personal lives, the social primacy of the family. This is immediate, it is measurable, it is meaningful, and it is long-lasting. It is quite remarkable that such suggestion might come off as a bland and out of fashion in our age of individual liberation.

And yet, the idea of family—the idea of a partnership between those who have passed on, those currently living, and those yet to be born—this is itself a proven model that can act as a via media, or a conduit, if our goal is the preservation and promulgation of the goodness of civilization. These goods, what TS Eliot and Russell Kirk called “permanent things,” must be passed on in a world dominated by the enemies of permanent things.

In our time, our strategy must be to turn back toward the home, a shelter from the broken and loney world around us. In a world of upheaval, there is solace and meaning in the activities of raising a family. The greatest legacy that many of us will pass on are those of our own flesh and blood.  The opportunity that we get to impart our own memories and passions, wisdom and insight, habits and prejudices, to the next generation is made manifest in the raising of a family. In a Progressivist world that downplays the importance of the family and sings the praises of alternative arrangements, few things are more important—but certainly not political activity— than just being a dedicated spouse and parent.

Far from defeatism, there rests a very real sense of hope in walking away from the primacy of the political and tending to the care and development of one’s children. To be a voice in the crowd will likely change no one; to be parent is to homestead a living being that can embody the very things worth passing forward to the world unknown.

If you want to have a role on the future, something measurable and something identifiable to your own hand, stop trying to change the world. Go home and hug your kids. If you don't have any, get married and make some. If you don’t know how, ask your parents about it.

Homeschool them, if at all possible. Enjoy them. Teach them. Impart the memories and customs of your past—their past—onto their soul, that they might bring them forward to posterity. Make them read— most kids can’t; make them write—still fewer know how.

Raise boys to be men. Raise girls to be women. This is the new counter-cultural. But it is the foundation of culture.

Don't envision yourself as a hero of world change and bringer of hope to the world. Be a father or mother. Be a hero to your family. Gramsci had his long march through the institutions. By now his march has swarmed Main Street. Stand opposed to the radicalization of the bourgeoisie.

To leave a legacy, first look homeward.

It must be remembered that we the living are the catalyst bringing the past to the future.

We must be vigilant to treat this duty with care, for we are our children’s present and tomorrow we will be their past.