The other day, I was looking around for ideas and stumbled across this article at the ironically named American Conservative. I mock the name because there is not much about it that is conservative. Even their anti-war positions are reflexive and not very well thought out. Rod Dreher has been the main guy for a while and he has lurched from one fad to the next, looking for a cult to give meaning to his life. The new editor appears to be trying to make the site more like other legacy right operations.

That article got my attention, because at the top was this note, “Editor’s Note: This is the first in a collaborative series with the R Street Institute exploring conservative approaches to criminal justice reform.” Never having heard of the R Street Institute, I looked up their financials and saw that it was the usual suspects. Any operation that includes David Frum must be working against the interests of white America. He is a despicable person and a subversive.

If you look at their website, they pitch themselves as libertarians. The word “free market” has become an abracadabra word to the donor class that subsidizes these outfits. It basically means these guys are fine with the cultural strip mining that passes for capitalism these days. Just as over-class jargon about “diversity” always signals a war on white people, the use of “free market” means a war on the middle class by the globalists that see America as nothing more than a pirate’s cove.

Ironically, these R Street guys have landed on prison reform as an issue they will champion as conservative. Anyone over the age of forty-five knows that “prison reform” is code for “throw open the prison doors so the blacks can run wild.” There has never been a prison reform effort with the goal of making the streets safe. Instead, it is either anarchy and free weed or a Progressive assault on order. The effort to make this a conservative principle is just another example of the death of conservatism.

Now, the right was always just the dancing partner for the left. A great way of putting it is from Robert Louis Dabney, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” You will note that he wrote that over a century ago. What tends to lead people into dissident politics is the realization that the so-called conservatives are just body men for the people they claim to oppose. Their ideas are intended to enhance, rather than reject, the morality of the Left.

The reason the modern Right seems like a barren field with tumbleweed bouncing across it is that their dancing partner is now just a shuffling zombie. The Left has not generated a serious insight into modern society in over a generation. Their last big public policy idea was ObamaCare. Otherwise, it has been a series of bizarre gestures toward increasingly narrow fringe groups. They are the dog that caught the car. The Left has a free hand to do what they please in America and they have no idea what to do.

The result of this lack of ideas is that politics is now just a combination of money grubbing and hysterical public tantrums. The hilariously over-the-top reactions in the media to Trump’s meeting with Putin is a good example. None of these people can tell us why Putin is suddenly the devil. They do not even try. Instead, they carry on like teenagers in a slasher film. They took turns trying to outdo the previous loon’s contrived outrage. It is as if they are trying to scream the devil into existence, so they can have a reason to scream.

Much gets written about the impact of cosmopolitan globalism on the middle class and the cultural identity of western nations. It is assumed that the people doing this to us have a purpose, but in reality, they are working on inertia. They do not move forward toward a goal, rather, they just move forward because that is what they do. The politicians are feckless airheads, and their advisers are craven ninnies. Everything is a bust-out now, not because they are crooks, but because they cannot think of another reason to get up in the morning.

That is the other consequence of cosmopolitan globalism. It hollows out the intellectual elite, just as it kills the middle-class. This was evident a century ago, the last time the world was sure globalism was the cure. The great powers staggered into the abyss because they lacked the ability to question their own policies. A war that should never have started went on for years, because both sides kept doing the same things over and over, hoping for a different result. They murdered themselves for lack of a new idea.

Of course, I could have the cause and effect backwards. Maybe the cultural collapse of the West naturally makes one-world utopianism appealing. The Left ran out of ideas fifty years ago and the Right has been on fumes since the 1980’s. Europe has not had a new idea since Marxism. Without a reason to argue and debate, maybe it is natural to assume there is nothing left to debate. All the big problems have been solved and it is time to step into the glorious future. The lack of competition has made our ruling class dull.

Youth participation in soccer continues to decline, despite the best efforts of the cultural elite to promote it.

Over the past three years, the percentage of 6- to 12-year-olds playing soccer regularly has dropped nearly 14 percent, to 2.3 million players, according to a study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which has analyzed youth athletic trends for 40 years. The number of children who touched a soccer ball even once during the year, in organized play or otherwise, also has fallen significantly.

In general, participation in youth sports nationwide has declined in the past decade, as children gravitate to electronic diversions and other distractions.

Yet in recent years, while soccer continued declining, baseball and basketball experienced upticks, buoyed by developmental programs begun by Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.

This not a surprise. Soccer never had strong appeal in America. Youth soccer leagues were suburban safe spaces for white kids. No one says it that way, but that is the reality of youth soccer in America. As a result, the soccer infrastructure is tied to the white suburbs, which means it requires lots of parents volunteering to make it work and lots of cash to hold it all together. Maintaining a segregated anything in modern America is expensive and complicated.

In fairness, all sports have seen a decline in youth participation. People like to blame video games and social media, but those are symptoms. Youth sports require a high degree of parental support and involvement. They also require infrastructure. That local ball field exists because the city, town or county makes it a priority. That happens when you have a society of strong families adhering to traditional roles. Get rid of the strong families and community, and the leagues go away too.

Most people struggle to understand long term trends, so it is not surprising that it is easy to peddle the idea that video games are the cause of this. Parents today see the decline and just assume it is a new thing. The fact is kids vegetating in front of a video screen is just another symptom of the same main cause. When most kids grew up in normal homes, there was a more organic structure to their lives, so they were less likely to indulge in whatever strikes the fancy of a child.

It is the hidden cost of putting women to work. Those mothers and grandmothers, staying home to raise their kids, provided an infrastructure to life. In stable, healthy societies, women maintain the social life of the community. When women are working ten hours a day at an office, that social work does not get done, so something else fills the void left by those working women. That has been the sewage of popular culture, along with state- provided stand-ins for the parents.

Traditional sex roles also work as a bulwark against mischief. Fifty years ago, even public schools in poor areas could expect plenty of mothers volunteering to help with various school projects. They would also be the main labor pool at the church and other voluntary community organizations. It is hard to corrupt these organizations when mothers and grandmothers, people with skin in the game, are there to make sure those organizations serve their interests.

The fact is, if you were looking to exterminate a people, by that I mean destroy their culture and identity, the first thing you would do is put the women to work. It is not an accident that invaders who kill off the men and marry the women almost always adapt to the culture they conquered. The culture of a people is their women. Men have a role, but primarily as the guardians of the engine of their culture. Women are the ovens that bake the bread. Take away the oven and there can be no bread.

By ripping women out of their homes and putting them to work like field slaves, modernity has destroyed the natural framework of society. The state has tried to fill the void, which is why per capita, inflation adjusted government spending has quadrupled as women moved from the home to the workplace. All that government supervision of children and maintenance of synthetic community organizations comes with a direct cost, which shows up in paychecks and the cost of goods.

On a more note. What the modern age has been is an elaborate strip-mining operation, where the social capital is monetized and carried away. Another example is what we see with Amazon destroying retail. The price of cheap stuff delivered to your office is the harvesting of the social value of local business. Instead of Johnny’s Appliance Warehouse sponsoring your kid’s baseball team, it is a government run program paid for by your property taxes.

Again, if the point is to kill a people, the first step is to put their women to work, turning them into economic units, like farm animals. From there, it is easy to strip out the rest of the social capital that maintains the culture. Before long you have a collection of people with no identity of their own, wholly dependent upon their masters. That is where we are headed as a society. It is also why fertility rates are falling in the West. Why would anyone bring a child into a life of pointless work and consumption?

One reading of the 20th century is that it was the concluding chapter of the great battle between aristocracy and liberal democracy that began with the English Civil War. The Great War started when the Austro-Hungarian Empire delivered a set of demands on Serbia, knowing it would provoke a wider war in Europe. At the start of the war, three major European empires governed most of Europe. By the end, all three empires were gone, and the victors were the republics, who imposed their political system on the losers.

American involvement in the Great War is usually characterized as the great coming out event for the country. The hesitant Woodrow Wilson, goaded into joining the fight by the bellicose Teddy Roosevelt, moved the country from its traditional isolationist position into a fully engaged world power. That fits the preferred narrative of our elites, as it makes it sound like they rule the world reluctantly. The Europeans could not manage their affairs, so noble America had to step in, defeat the bad guys and impose order on the West.

Another part of America’s decision to enter the war was the deep hatred Wilson and his advisers had for the European empires. Wilson thought the Kaiser was deeply immoral, but he really hated the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wilson was influenced by Giuseppe Mazzini, who was a zealous nationalist and republican. He not only rejected the concept of empire, but he also lived it as an Italian nationalist. Mazzini also rejected materialism and class struggle, which had a natural appeal to the moralizing idealists in charge of America.

The American entry into the Great War, tipped the balance in favor of Britain and France, but it came with a price. Wilson played a prominent role in the post-war diplomacy and that meant the dismembering of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the imposition of draconian punishments on Germany. The fact that Hitler came from Austria suggests history has a sense of humor. The point though is that the extreme expression of liberal democracy conquered and destroyed the last empires of Europe and imposed its will on the West.

This conflict between democracy and monarchy is the launching pad for Hans-Herman Hoppe’s critique of democracy. Hoppe is a libertarian, so his critique is aimed at elevating his preferred social arrangements, which he calls the natural order. As a libertarian, his concern is purely on the material, but others have picked up on the idea and extended it into the cultural realm. Whatever the defects of monarchy, it provides a much more robust cultural framework than democracy, which tends to reward the worst instincts of citizens.

Another angle to this way of thinking of the 20th century is that the West struck a bargain of sorts. In exchange for accepting American imposition of liberal democracy, the West got peace and prosperity. That worked fine as long as the American ruling class accepted the fundamentals of the nation state. That is, a nation was the geographic boundary of a single people, who were ruled by people chosen from their own ranks, by the people themselves. Stable borders and stable cultures defined the modern political entity.

Like doing business with the mafia, accepting the American hegemony meant going along with the rules set by America. That was fine when America was ruled by white men with a strong attachment to the West and Western traditions. That changed toward the end of 20th century as the complexion of the American population slowly changed and the attitudes of the American ruling class began to change. America no longer believes in the nation state and has tried hard imposing that belief on the ruling classes of Europe.

Up until the last few years, it appeared that this abandonment of the old order was going to go on without much resistance. But the revolts we are seeing in Europe, with the rise of nationalist parties and growing resistance to immigration, suggests the American hegemony is beginning to unravel. More important, the rise of Trump and his push to make the Europeans stand on their own feet suggests the American retreat is not without some support in the ruling class. The Wilsonian order may finally be about to unravel.

This does not mean we will see the return of monarchy. Hoppe’s critique of democracy has merit, but his error is the same made by the Western ruling class over the last half century. That is, the assumption that political economy is the horse that pulls the cart of human society. What Muslim immigration is teaching Europe is that biology is what drives society. Get the biology right and you can make any political system work, but the only way social democracy can work is in a homogeneous population.

The unraveling of the American hegemony is the retreat of the universalism that has always animated progressivism. It is not so much that democracy failed, as Hoppe claims, but that universalism has failed. The reason Europeans have reacted so strongly to a relatively small influx of foreigners, is universalism has never been a part of continental culture. Tossing it off will be much easier for them than for Americans, but the reality of demographics will force the issue everywhere.

One of the basic errors the so-called conservatives made when dealing with their Progressive betters is to assume the Left has a rational plan. The Buckleyites always started from the assumption that there was some logical plan behind the liberal schemes, so they spent a lot of time trying to abductively arrive at the motivation. The Right spent most of their time making well-reasoned arguments against what they assumed was the true motivation of the Left. The result was the Left won every battle in the culture war.

This post from an English professor at Emory University about the logical ends of diversity is a rare example of someone noticing the flaw in this approach. He starts by doing what no one on the conventional Right dares, and that is admit defeat.

Conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and classical liberals need to get clear on something: the ideological contests are fading. What Irving Kristol famously said in his 2001 Bradley Lecture, “We in America fought a culture war, and we [conservatives] lost,” applies well to higher education. Conservatives fought wars over multiculturalism, Western Civilization, affirmative action, the Academic Bill of Rights, and political bias in hiring, and we lost every time. The educators have no reason to debate ideas, much less ideology. None of those old issues are up for discussion.

(It should be said that Kristol noted that conservatives still had some influence in one theater of American life, religion, but that exemption is irrelevant to the 21st-century campus.)

You can tell ideology is a settled matter by the way in which faculty and administrators handle the core terms—diversity, inclusion. No moral or conceptual examination of those terms ever takes place. Liberals and leftists mouth them without even pondering what they mean save for the simple-minded aspiration of “more women in science” or “more blacks among the leadership.” The only rejoinder conservatives have is, “What about the diversity of thought and opinion?” to which the educators respond, “Oh, yes, that’s good, too,” then proceed on what they were thinking before. When it comes to diversity, everyone’s a bureaucrat.

He then points out the inherent irrationality of the diversity rackets, at least on the college campus.

Now, diversity means just that: getting more underrepresented people in place. That’s all. The campus managers don’t think about what will happen then. Diversity among the personnel—that is, more proportionate representation of all “underserved” identities—is an end in itself. If you asked a dean what diversity is for, what purpose it serves, he wouldn’t have an immediate answer. He spends so much time in a habitat of tautology (“diversity is good for . . . diversity”) that the very question stumps him until he remembers blather from the Old Times about diverse perspectives and educational benefits and repeats it like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But don’t try pressing him on it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. The self-evident good of diversity has long been established, and he clings to it like a Catholic does his rosary.

The professor does not have the courage to point out the obvious. Replacing capable white people in college positions with non-whites, reduces the quality of the staff. It is not so obvious in the humanities or social sciences, where much of the work has been nonsense for a long time. In the STEM fields, it is a recipe for disaster. Any effort to scale up the diversity rackets popular on campus, to society as a whole, is a recipe for rolling back a millennium of human progress. Without white men, there is no modern world.

At the end, the professor suggests an answer whites should use when asked by a white interviewer about diversity. It is good advice, only if you know going in you will not be selected because you are white. It would be fun to point out to the diversity spewing white person that the best thing they can do for diversity is quit their job. It is, however, an example of that old habit of the Right. The professor thinks such a “gotcha” response will result in the great Progressive awakening when the blindfold will drop from Lefty’s eyes.

It is why the Left in America went from one victory to the next in the culture war. They never faced an adversary willing to fight them on their own terms. The American Left has always been a spiritual movement. Talking a lefty believer out of their beliefs is as rational as talking a Muslim out of his faith. No one ever argues that the solution to violent Islam is a well-reasoned argument with facts and examples. Even the dullest American understands that this is not how religions work. By definition, faith is not about facts.

American Progressivism grew out of the Puritanism associated with the founding stock of New England. Reform movements of the 19th century all had their roots in New England Christianity. Just read the writings of abolitionists and the Christian foundation is plainly obvious. Then in the 20th century, as Norman Podhoretz explained, Jewish intellectuals embraced Progressivism as their religion. The Left lost its Christianity, but it remained a spiritual movement that became more intense, more exotic, and esoteric.

It is an important lesson to learn from the failure of the American Right, in their 20th century fight with the Left. They lost because they never understood the enemy. They invested all of their time conjuring an enemy they could beat with facts and reason, while the Left went about destroying the enemies they had in their path. It is not a mistake that a new alternative can afford to make. You do not beat a moral order with reason. You defeat it by attacking it on moral grounds, while offering an alternative moral framework.