Anyone who has played sports knows that strange feeling where you look up and see you’re not just losing but getting clobbered, despite feeling like you were doing well. Maybe the last time you looked up it was close and now it is a blowout. Perhaps you feel like you’re competing, but the other side just keeps pulling away. When you’re in the heat of the battle, it is easy to not only lose sight of the bigger picture, but get a wildly incorrect view of that bigger picture.
Reading conservative sites the last week, I’m getting that vibe from both the chattering skulls and their readers who show up in the comments. There’s a state of shock at what has transpired over the two weeks.Their preferred party sold them out to please global finance. The court untethered itself from the English language and made itself the enforcer for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Not only was the Right not winning, they were blown off the field.
As I pointed out the other day, the gay marriage ruling is the biggest assault on religious liberty in the history of the nation. One cannot read the majority opinion without wondering how long before the courts declare Christianity illegal.
The ObamaCare decision is the most radical in the history of the court. Judge Roberts literally declared that the English language is no longer a constraint on the court, which means they no longer have to read the relevant laws in future cases.
Most of the Right is in shock, unable to muster more than the old complaints that sound rather silly given what has just transpired. Surprisingly, Rod Dreher gets it, as far where things stand for people of his faith. That’s a well written essay displaying the right amount of sadness for what he and his coreligionists face in the coming years.
No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically.
It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.
Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America.
What Rod and others got wrong is they thought they were in the fight. They truly thought they were giving the other side a battle over who will control society. The fact is, they never had a chance. They were getting their butt kicked for decades. The last week is just the part where the other team does the outrageous celebration on the loser’s team logo.
Last week was part of the mopping up phase of the culture war. The major institutions of the West have all been converted to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. There are no cultural institutions that stand in opposition to any of this stuff.
Their breathless support is seen in the speed with which retailers banished the rebel flag. A white guy shoots up a black church and the Cult demands a sacrifice in return. Hours after the gay marriage ruling major companies were celebrating it in TV commercials. You would not be cynical to think that maybe this has all been coordinated.
It’s tempting to think that normal people will resist, but history says otherwise. The Catholic Church is maneuvering to join the Cult on global warming. The Pope has already made noises about embracing the homosexual agenda. Everyone with something to lose is figuring out that it is time to join the winning side. You can be sure that the rest of the Christian sects will follow the Catholics into the abyss.
I received an e-mail from Paul Gottfried a while back, in response to one I sent him. I don’t know Professor Gottfried and he does not know me. I doubt he knows of this blog. Today, no one thinks twice about firing off an e-mail to a stranger and I’m no different. I sent off my query after reading this column.
It occurred to me that we are losing a lot of important knowledge as the geezers of the Old Right die off. They are the last ones to remember the old fights and why we find ourselves where we are. Professor Gottfried would do us all a great service by putting together a list of writers and books that the next generation could use in the resistance.
He was not interested and sounded a bitter tone in his response. Professor Gottfried, like many on the Old Right, has been shunned and forced to live on the fringes. The fringes of the public intellectual space, that is. Almost all of these guys used to write for mainstream publications and conservative publications with wide circulations. One by one they were proscribed starting in the 1980’s.
I really don’t blame these guys for being bitter, assuming they are bitter. They were right from the start. In the 80’s, when being Right was suddenly cool, all sorts of faddish sorts jumped on board, but few possessed the social core required to carry the fight to the Progressives. Instead they went in for whatever was fashionable to sell books, radio shows and ugly ties. Instead of building a movement that could displace the Left, they sucked it dry. The so-called paleo-cons predicted this result.
That’s all water under the bridge now. There’s value in learning from past defeats, but the time for that has passed as well. The only job left is to pack up the old books and articles in the hope that some future generation, looking for a way out, discovers them and find some inspiration.
While it certainly seems like the Left has won, it is always darkest before the dawn, no?
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
Many of us who still hew to conservative values and understand the superiority of Western thought and culture are feeling beaten and on the verge of despair. Maybe what this country needs is a good old fashioned Great(er) Depression to wake people up.
The greatness that was Western Civilization was entirely Caucasian, and reached it’s apogee under Anglo-Saxon influence. “The English had progressed furthest of all people in three important things–piety, commerce and freedom.”-Montesquieu
We assume advances in civilization are natural because they provide for so much that is good, but not only is it not natural, advances are in every case anti-instinctual. The peculiar characteristics of unprecedented out-bred populations allowed for the advances of the Renaissance and still later English law. But a peculiar asset may well come with a peculiar liability, and that peculiar liability has now flipped it’s better half to the ground. The invisible hand is difficult to defend, being invisible. The Marxist will defend his positions appealing to instinct, which needs no understanding. He has no tribe but Marx and he believes he will control lesser tribes with his intellect.
When a people feel the need to rediscover what ordered liberty is, it will not and cannot be a multi-cultural affair, which would leave America, as it now exists, out. A tribe that is inbred or unintelligent is not peculiar, it is natural. Even the Chinese, who have many personal assets, have little aptitude for liberty. Tocqueville–“When Europeans landed in China three hundred years ago, they found there that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection and were surprised that they had not improved beyond that point. It was an industrial nation where most scientific processes had been preserved, while science itself was dead. That explained the unusually static quality of mind of this nation. The Chinese, in following the path of their ancestors, had mislaid the reasons for the direction the latter had chosen. They still used the formula without asking why; they kept the tool but they had lost the skills to adapt or replace it. The Chinese were, therefore, not able to change anything and had to abandon any notion of improvement. The well of human knowledge had dried up and although the flow still ran, it could neither increase its volume nor change its course.
We should not, therefore, complacently think that the barbarians are still far away for, if some nations allow the torch to be snatched from their hands, others stamp it out themselves.”
Meanwhile, we still have to live in this world. Dreher’s got the right idea, but it’s not likely many of us will be moving off to form religious communes in the wilderness. Most of us will stay right where we are, and if we want to avoid being trampled by every leftist jackass that comes trotting down the street, we should try to think of ways of protecting ourselves.
We might as well try using laws to our advantage, as long as its possible. We’re now in a low-trust culture, so let’s start acting like it. No more guileless Christian bakers smiling at every customer who walks in, and helpfully telling the nice homosexual couple that she can’t help them with their wedding cake inquiries, but there’s a very good bakery in the next street who’d be glad to. That sort of innocent trust is over. We now must realize that our society is full of people who mean to do us harm and are hunting for opportunities to do so.
All Christian or conservative companies who are targets for leftist scalp-hunters now have to protect themselves with contracts for every transaction. (It has to be EVERY transaction, because any attempt to restrict ONLY homos and other leftist troublemakers will leave one open to charges of (gasp!) discrimination.) Every customer must sign a waiver, forfeiting all right to sue or take legal action in the event the seller welches on the deal. This is unusual, but the response will be that the buyer will simply have to accept the word of a Christian that the goods will be delivered properly. For fellow Christians, this will not be a problem. For predatory leftists, they will suddenly find themselves with something to lose. As a Christian, I would have no hesitation messing up a wedding cake I’ve been coerced into making. It could just turn out bad, as often happens in baking, or the oven could just happen to conk out and there was nothing I could do. The buyers would have to figure out just how much their “wedding” actually means to them, that they would be willing to take a risk that their showboating could backfire, and there would be no legal way of punishing me.
And this tactic would be implemented for any vulnerable business. It would then be in their interest to boldly advertise themselves as Christian companies that use “Trust Treaties” for all their business. Their fellow religionists could support them, and their enemies would know there was nothing to gain from baiting them.
All of this is a sign of the times we live in. Things are so damn good that we have nothing to fight for. No crime, no external enemies, nobody starves. That’s why the CML is picking the bones of conservatives. They have nothing left in the tank either. The next manoeuvres will be those of ridiculousness and hubris. They have never held power very well because they are cowards and idiots. What we await is the dollar to tank or the oil to start to dry up. When that panic sets in, the last thing we are going to worry about is gay men getting “married,” black “discrimination” or health “subsidies.” The church is going to have plenty of business too. As UKer notes, that’s when people will get real again.
I take your points, Z, but there is one thing that the elites and the progressives (or whatever they choose to call themselves) can never beat.
People will remain people.
For all the shouting of some and celebrating of their ‘friends’ and among all the demands for sacrificing symbols, deep down people will remain what they are. Not all of those beaming about ‘progress’ and the new world order actually like it as much as they pretend. Somewhere along the line they will say, quietly at first but possibly louder as they find more allies, that some things now worshipped are distasteful. They will curl their lip and regard the dancing monkeys as pitiful clowns.
What people really are will surface again. It may be hard to see right now, but it will slowly change back from the pretend to the real.
https://youtu.be/rwLg4alLjbg
Thanks Z, your response took me back to when as a lad my father took me to an amateur film awards show in London and this movie was the only thing I can remember from that afternoon out. It was probably my ‘awakening’ to what movies were as storytelling devices. It made a big impact on me, so thanks again.
I’m surprised that film is not more popular today. It is pretty powerful stuff for a film. Kinda of cool that it is free on-line. Things are not all bad, I guess.
Now your redesign makes sense. I guess the republicans are the dude offering up the boy.
In Erik the Red’s Saga, proud Pagans are sailing off to confront the unknown. In the Greenland Saga, the few remaining Pagans have to sneak off to pay respects to the Norse Gods in secret. That represents one or two generations, maximum.
On the other hand, the Maccabees faced an elite who had almost completely given themselves up to Greek paganism and their Greek masters. They won.
I disagree. The “Old Right” was as pathetic as the current bunch, if not more so. WFB was a trust fund dilletante. Russell Kirk was a silly fool. “Conservatism” just is not and never has been a meaningful response to the problems of the times.
A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.