Economic Patriotism

In an essay first published in Chronicles in 2006 and collected in the Chronicles Press volume Life, Literature, and Lincoln, the late Tom Landess relates a story about Arizona Sen. John McCain. While stumping in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the Mad Bomber encountered a textile-mill worker who was not a fan of Senator McCain’s support for free trade. The millworker had made a good living in textiles, and he had hoped his children would as well, but just as Bruce Springsteen sang two decades earlier about the textile mills of New Jersey, down in South Carolina “the foreman says those jobs are going, boys / and they ain’t coming back.”

It didn’t have to be that way, and the millworker knew it. So, for that matter, did John McCain, but having done his damnedest to change the economic landscape not just of South Carolina but of the United States as a whole, he wasn’t about to back down. “Sir,” he said to the millworker,

I did not know that your ambitions were for your children to work in a textile mill, to be honest with you. I would rather have them work in a high-tech industry. I would rather have them work in the computer industry. I would rather give them the kind of education and training that’s necessary in order for them to really [sic] have prosperous and full lives.

I thought of this anecdote when Wayne Allensworth sent me a link to a piece by National Review “roving editor” Kevin D. Williamson. Entitled “If Your Town Is Failing, Just Go,” and subtitled “A prescription for impoverished communities,” the article reminded me why I quit reading National Review over a quarter of a century ago.

Williamson’s piece was, in other words, nothing new, and if it strikes me now as more horrific than similar articles NR had published in the mid–1980’s, it is only because it hardly seems possible that the editors and writers of National Review could have matured so little in the intervening years.

A few short selections from the first three paragraphs of Kevin Williamson’s article will set the stage:

The town where my parents grew up and where my grandparents lived no longer exists. Phillips, Texas, is a ghost town. Before that it was a company town, a more or less wholly owned subsidiary of the Phillips Petroleum Company. . . .

Phillips, Inc., in the end decided it had no need for Phillips, Texas, and the town was scrubbed right off the map. The local homeowners owned their houses but not the land they sat on, which belonged to the company. . . . Many of the residents of Phillips were uneager to be evicted from their homes, and they sued the company with the help of the famously theatrical Texas trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes, who informed the good people of Phillips: “They might whup us fair and square, but they better bring lunch.” Lunch was served, and Phillips is just gone.

It was the right thing to do. Some towns are better off dead.

It turns my stomach even now to read those words. Phillips, Texas, was a town of about 2,000 souls—the same as my hometown of Spring Lake, Michigan—and Kevin Williamson is a few years younger than I am. But one of the reasons I quit subscribing to National Review while Mr. Williamson was still in high school and turned, in June 1989, to Chronicles instead is because I saw what deindustrialization had done to the small communities of my native Midwest starting in the early 1970’s, and I realized even then that the mainstream conservative movement and the Republican Party had neither the will nor the desire to stop it. When it suits their purposes, the media and politicians of both parties focus on the closing of factories and the loss of jobs, but that is never the end of the destruction; it is only the beginning. When the presidential candidates move on to the next state and the TV cameras follow them, the men and women who have lived in the same town, and perhaps even the same house, for decades and generations are left alone to make the painful decision to uproot their families, to leave behind loved ones and friends and the places that have formed the fabric of their lives and memories in order to do what’s necessary to provide for their children.

To reduce everything that those heart-wrenching decisions entail to the imperious imperative “If Your Town Is Failing, Just Go” is proof—as if we needed any more—that many, even most, of those who call themselves conservatives in this country have no desire to conserve anything other than the political power of the central state and the economic power of multinational—or, rather, transnational—corporations.

That, as I say, is one of the main reasons why I started reading Chronicles, which led, 20 years ago, to my joining the editorial staff of Chronicles, and my desire to find a way to halt the deindustrialization of the Midwest is why I have consistently, over the better part of the last three decades, referred to myself as an “economic nationalist.” The recognition that there is something worth conserving beyond the almighty dollar—that small towns and family farms and the neighborhoods of big cities, and all of the residents thereof, are valuable in ways that cannot be measured on a balance sheet and make little or no “impact” on Gross Domestic Product—lies at the heart of any conservatism worthy of the name. There will always be—as there always have been—some people, of course, who must face the painful choice of whether to stay and struggle in the place where they were planted or to tear themselves up in the hope of forging a better (or at least less bad) future for their family, but the idea that this should be the natural and normal situation of most people in most places in most times is quite simply monstrous. Kevin Williamson would no doubt accuse me (in words he used in his article) of the “cheap sentimentalism that informs the Trump-Buchanan-Sanders view of globalization,” but the connection between civilization and cultivation is obvious to any student of history, and equally obvious is the reality that the phrase “nomadic civilization” is an oxymoron.  Nomads cultivate nothing, much less civilization, and they generally leave little but destruction in their wake. Such matters do not concern Williamson, however, because he has no desire ever to return to Phillips, Texas, much less to visit Rockford, Illinois.

A decade ago, I wrote dozens of Rockford Files columns in Chronicles documenting the shuttering of factories and the hemorrhaging of jobs in my adopted hometown, and it would be wonderful to say that I quit writing them because it all came to an end. It has not; and while the rate of deindustrialization may have slowed, the destruction that comes after the jobs are lost continues apace.

Yet trying to think more deeply about all of this over the past several years has led me to conclude, reluctantly and unhappily, that the McCains and the Williamsons, and the Bushes and the Clintons, and all of the other supporters, in government and in business, of trade policies that have laid waste to America’s industrial base have won. They achieved what they wanted; those jobs “ain’t coming back” to your hometown or mine.

It’s not simply that the necessary change in trade policy at the national level is unlikely to happen, even if, say, Donald Trump is elected president; it’s that even if such a change in policy were to occur, it wouldn’t bring those particular jobs back, because they no longer exist.

I spent scores of hours working on that collection of Tom Landess’s writing, and it was Landess who helped that realization slowly sink in. Here is what he wrote immediately after quoting Senator McCain’s response to the millworker:

Putting aside the effrontery of publicly lecturing a father on what’s best for his children, Senator McCain was up to his chin in shallow water. Like earlier boosters of textile mills, he [that is, John McCain] clearly believed in the immortality of present economic conditions, the inviolability of the fragile industrial dream. He drew the wrong lesson from the father’s complaint. The global marketplace is just as dicey as Las Vegas, whether the industry be textiles or high-tech or computers.

In other words, for those who value rootedness, who understand that civilization requires cultivation and will never arise among nomads, the basic problem that we face is endemic to industrialism itself. Economic conditions change. Manufacturing processes change.  The shape of industry has changed, and will continue to change. The plum job of yesterday and the plum job of today have one thing in common: They’re both unlikely to be the plum job of tomorrow.

For four decades, those of us who have called ourselves economic nationalists have been fighting the same battle, even though the conditions have changed. We speak of jobs “going overseas,” as if this has occurred in a one-to-one ratio—one job lost in Rockford or Cleveland; one job gained in Beijing or Seoul. Yes, one reason American multinationals lobbied hard for trade agreements that allowed them to move manufacturing operations overseas was that they could calculate the cost savings on labor and benefits. But they were counting on other savings and advantages as well, and those are much more important when we talk about bringing manufacturing—and especially manufacturing jobs—back to this country.

The mechanization and robotization of manufacturing was easier to accomplish when building new factories in other countries rather than attempting to retrofit existing factories here. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why it was easier for foreign automakers to open operations here in the United States in the 1980’s and 90’s than it was for domestic automakers to increase production: Starting from scratch provided a tremendous competitive advantage, even within the same industry in the same country.

We can see this even on a more micro level. At the same time that Rockford has suffered the loss of numerous factories and tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, the city has seen new manufacturing startups arise and do well. But the new companies are starting from scratch and begin by investing in technology that reduces their need for labor, so a startup with revenue roughly equivalent to that of an existing manufacturer may employ as few as one fifth of the people as the existing manufacturer does.

But wasn’t that Senator McCain’s point? Aren’t all of those people who used to work in what we might call “legacy factories” better off when they lose their jobs and are forced to switch professions? And if they can’t find new jobs where they currently live, shouldn’t they “Just go,” as Kevin Williamson commands?

Absolutely—if you believe that man is made for the economy, and not the economy for man. But if the reason you call yourself an “economic nationalist” is that you believe there’s something more to life than being an interchangeable cog in the great industrial machine—that living among a certain people and in a certain place has value in itself—then you have to face the fact that globalization hasn’t really created a new class of problems but has instead accelerated problems that are inherent in the industrial system itself. And those problems have been obscured by the “national” focus of our economic nationalism.

Consider this: If someone used to work for GM in Michigan, does it matter whether he lost his job because GM opened a new factory in Tennessee, rather than in Mexico or China? If your response is, “Well, at least he could move to Tennessee,” how exactly is your position different from that of Kevin Williamson? If your response is, “Well, at least the cars are still manufactured in this country, so our trade deficit didn’t grow,” then you are essentially saying that man is made for the national economy, and not the nation or the economy for man.

We need to take a step back and consider what it is that we hope to accomplish through our promotion of economic nationalism. Is the only thing we’re concerned about the health of the national economy, measured in terms of job creation, unemployment rates, and trade deficits? If so, then we can keep our focus firmly on Washington, D.C., trade agreements, tariffs, and border-adjusted VATs.

But if, instead, we’re concerned about the disruptive effects that industrialism, exacerbated by globalization, has on families and communities, then it’s time to change our rhetoric and to take a more comprehensive approach. Just as a foreign policy that places the American national interest above the interest of other countries and of international organizations is not only perfectly compatible with federalism at home but can help to ensure it, the economic nationalism that we have promoted for decades is better seen as an integral part of what I now call “economic patriotism.”

You could call it by other names—autarchy, for instance, or subsidiarity—but I prefer the term economic patriotism because it drives home the idea that healthy economic structures should serve a particular people in a particular place.  No, I’m not talking about “Buy American” campaigns, though there is nothing wrong with that and much that is good. I’m talking about local and regional efforts to create sound economies—plural, not singular—that make it possible for people to bloom where they’re planted. To help people understand why it might be to their benefit, and the benefit of their communities, to buy from local producers. To help such producers see the benefits in attempting to meet the needs of their local community first, rather than assume that everything needs to be measured in terms of one’s contribution to the national economy—which really exists only as a series of abstract numbers that provide a sum total of those local and regional economies.

If this sounds utopian or “sentimental,” that in itself is a measure of how far removed economic activity in the United States has become from the reality faced by most people in most places throughout most of history. Midwesterners who shop at Walmart and eat at McDonald’s are astonished at what they see when they walk the streets of the smallest Italian town, because virtually all economic activity in the United States—all the way down to our food production—has become industrialized and thus centralized. Even organic produce is largely grown on factory farms and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles across the country to be sold at a premium in a Whole Foods Market. But when I walk down the street and buy a tomato at my local farmers’ market on a Saturday in August, I pay less than I do in a supermarket for an inferior tomato—and the tomato tastes better than any that’s ever crossed the threshold of Whole Foods.  Chains like Whole Foods are part of the problem, not the solution; those who cannot see that have no idea what the core problem really is.

A local economy that is primarily dependent on national chains and producers is not a local economy at all. It is just another cog in an industrial machine, just another textile mill or auto factory whose days are numbered, just another Phillips, Texas, waiting for lunch to be served.

The underlying problem of the American economy has its roots in the destruction of local and regional cultures. We need to quit treating the economy as an end in itself and view it instead as a new front in the culture war, pouring our efforts into building the economies of our hometowns and regions in ways that will give people a reason and a means to stay in one place. No presidential candidate of either party is going to make this a part of his platform, but Chronicles can and will lead the way, by not simply lamenting the past but highlighting efforts, great and small, from every corner of this country to build a strong economic foundation for the future.

There are times to defend the past at all costs, and there are times when we must build upon it. Many of the cathedrals of Europe were erected not only on the foundations of pagan temples, but in part out of their rubble, by people who understood when to quit propping up an empty shell so that they could dedicate themselves to building a civilization for generations to come.

First published in the March 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Cheap Trick of Whiteness

A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at the level of the family, the city, or the nation—without a unifying culture.  (That, and not the claim that all cultures are equally “valid” or valuable, or even that all other cultures are more to be admired than ours, is the greatest danger posed by multiculturalism.) Despite the evident falsity of this claim (history presents no example of a lasting society without a dominant, unifying culture), the ideology of multiculturalism has flourished in the United States not because it has been imposed by political and cultural institutions, such as public schools and universities (though it has), nor because the former elites of the once-dominant culture in this country have been ill prepared to defend that culture as a unifying force (though they have), but because of the element of truth that the proponents of multiculturalism use like a katana to slice through any resistance to their destructive agenda: Diversity, like unity, is a positive good.

We do not have to draw on parallels from agriculture about the dangers of large-scale monoculture, or from genetics about the dead end of restrictive gene pools, to recognize this truth. It is not simply boredom that leads us to seek out new friends and to sample different cuisines, to learn languages other than the one we were born into and to study the history of other civilizations, or even the far-flung corners of our own. Russell Kirk argued that diversity—true diversity, not multiculturalism masquerading under that name—is a conservative principle, because (like all other true conservative principles) it is a reflection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Christian God Himself is a diversity in unity.

The problem, as always, is one of balance. Unity is a positive good; diversity is a positive good; but either one, taken to the extreme, destroys the other. Variety (the saying goes) is the spice of life, and sometimes a dish can become unbalanced because too little salt has been added. Yet, as any good cook knows, it is easier to destroy a dish through an overabundance of spices. Multiculturalism, as practiced in the United States, isn’t a measured dose of garlic or cumin or harissa incorporated into a hearty beef stew; it’s a cup of MSG poured on top of a Big Mac. The initial dish is toxic enough without any help from the Orient’s secret salt.

If the half-truth of multiculturalism is that diversity is a positive good, the half-truth that some opponents of multiculturalism push beyond the limit is that unity is a positive good. When unity becomes the highest value, we end up not with, say, the vibrant yet diverse Christian civilization of Europe in the Middle Ages but with the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism and (as I discussed last month) the post-Christian hypermonotheism of Islam. And among the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism is found an obsession with race as a unifying principle, among both liberals who see “whiteness” as the root of all evil, and some of their opponents who increasingly see it as the sole source and foundation of everything worth preserving.

A.D. 2015 will long be remembered here in Rockford as the year when that great “white power” band Cheap Trick (“Mommy’s all white / Daddy’s all white / They just seem a little weird”) finally received the recognition that they deserve, with the announcement that they will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Bad puns aside, it is hard to imagine four men who are collectively more white than Rick Nielsen, Robin Zander, Tom Petersson, and Bun E. Carlos (Brad M. Carlson, who says that he chose his stage surname because “We sounded like a bunch of Swedes”).  Yet it is absurd to speak of Cheap Trick as a “white” band, even in the sense that it is legitimate to speak of their fellow 2016 inductees N.W.A. as a black one.  Cheap Trick’s music cannot be reduced to a product of their “genetic endowment,” or even to some generic “white culture.”  Nielsen, Zander, Petersson, and Carlos are men of a certain time and a certain place—the mid–20th to early 21st century Upper Midwest, and specifically Northern Illinois—and their music has its feeder roots here and now (and then), even if other roots run deeper. Their longevity is the result, in large part, of their continued connection to this place and to the people who make their home here. As my barber recently noted, Rockford has changed a lot since he was young, but if you’re trying to find out something about a fellow Rockfordian you’ve never met, chances are you know not just one but several people who have worked with him, eaten with him, had one too many drinks with him, or worshiped with him.

Too many use the terms patriotism and nationalism today as if they were interchangeable, but they mean radically different things, especially in the context of a nation spread across an entire continent. Patriotism not only implies a connection to a certain people but demands a mutual connection to a certain place. There may be reasons why it is hard for me, a native of West Michigan, to be a Rockford patriot even after 20 years of living here, but it is many orders of magnitude easier than being a generically American one. America is not a place; it is many places—thousands of towns and regions and 50 states, all within the bounds of a continental empire that even in its infancy was more political than cultural. (The cultural differences between the original states, and even within each state, are almost incomprehensible to those whose historical imaginations have been fed from infancy on a steady diet of Thanksgiving turkey.) This country has always had, by its very nature, an inherent diversity that nationalism at best glosses over and at worst, reflecting its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, seeks to destroy in favor of an artificial unity. The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Fame, alas, is fleeting, and the music of Cheap Trick may not be remembered outside of Rockford a century from now, much less four centuries, but what is true of Nielsen and Zander, Petersson and Carlos is just as true of Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. When the multiculturalists dismiss the latter as “Dead White European Males,” and some of their opponents respond by lumping them together as “White Western Christians,” both sides turn these great composers into abstractions, as if the works of each one were (absurdly) interchangeable with those of any of the others. Notre Dame de Paris, Hagia Sophia, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and Sagrada Família were all built by Christian men of varying shades of whiteness, but the individual beauty and majesty of each edifice arises from the differences between those men and their cultures as much as it does from their underlying unity. Those who look at these churches through a monochromatic lens will never experience their full beauty—much less the fullness of truth that each represents and was built to honor. That some of those people, in fact, celebrated the blasphemous suicide of Dominique Venner in Notre Dame de Paris in May 2013 speaks volumes about what they truly worship.

Ostensibly, one of the reasons Venner chose to commit his “eminently political” act in the sanctuary at Notre Dame was to awaken the people of Europe to the dangers of Islamic immigration—a real threat that he correctly understood might spell the death of Europe as we know it. But the nations of Europe have faced this threat before, and they did not repel it through individual or mass suicide. Jan Sobieski, Janos Hunyadi, and Giovanni da Capestrano were all Western white Christian men named John who fought Islam, but they did not do so on behalf of the abstractions of “Europe” or “the West,” much less of “whiteness.” Each fought for the truth incarnate in his native land and people, in “the ashes of his fathers / and the temples of his gods.”

Abstractions draw man away from reality and lead him to despair; a firm grounding in reality gives man hope—or at least something that he can fight for when the odds seem overwhelming. A man, history shows us, will fight for his wife and children; for his family and friends; for his home and native land. Given time, talent, and resources, he may build things that last for generations yet to come. He may go to his grave knowing that his name may be lost to the ages within a century or two, but his presence will still be felt.

If, however, he abjures all of this, cuts his ties to his native soil (and never puts down roots anywhere else), makes few lasting friendships, chooses not to marry (or, if he marries, refuses to have children), and devotes his life instead to battles that are so large they cannot be won on behalf of an abstraction spun out of centuries of mass delusion—then such a man has not fought the enemies of civilization; he has joined forces with them.       

First published in the February 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Eternal Memory

As we round the curve, the driver pulls up short—at least, as short as you can when you’re only going five miles per hour in the first place.  As the minibus shudders to a halt, we all shift in our seats to get a better view out of the windshield.  There, up ahead on the single-lane “road,” mired in the clay mud and tilted to the right, toward the sheer edge of the cliff and the valley thousands of feet below, is a bread truck.

Our driver takes stock of the situation,  shifts the bus into reverse, and begins backing down the side of the mountain, oblivious to the groans of his passengers.  The bread truck follows, its driver preparing to take another run at the mud patch.  Forty or fifty yards down, he believes that he has the distance to pick up enough speed to carry him through.  He throws the truck into drive and guns the engine.

Our driver hits the gas, too, not waiting to see whether the bread truck will make it through the mud.  We’re only about 15 yards behind when the truck driver cuts left again just as he hits the mud patch, and the bread truck’s wheels start spinning.  Our driver swings to the right—this curve is the widest spot we’ve seen on the mountain road, almost one-and-a-half cars (but not buses or bread trucks) wide, and, for a moment, he seems to think that he might be able to pass the bread truck on the cliff side.  Then he hits the brakes, thinking better of his plan.

Less than a kilometer down the road, we had picked up a young man in a slightly oversized, rumpled suit, carrying in each hand a two-liter bottle filled either with water or a clear distilled beverage—most likely the latter.  He had thanked us profusely for offering him a ride, but he’s getting impatient now, leaning forward in the front seat, tapping his foot, and he finally says something to the driver, who opens the door to let him out.  As he leaps from the bus, he shouts over his shoulder, and Srdja Trifkovic, laughing, translates for the rest of us: “Thank you, but I’m in a hurry.”  The man scurries around the right side of the bread truck and disappears up the road.

It’s been a long day already.  We had departed Budva, on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro, before seven A.M., and the more realistic of us hadn’t even tried to go to sleep before two.  Budva’s annual carnivale had taken place the night before, and the stage for the live bands and, later, d.j.’s had been set up at the base of the old city’s medieval walls, right across from our hotel rooms.  As if the sound system itself weren’t loud enough, the wall amplified the noise.  After we had returned from an excellent seafood dinner and the others had gone up to their rooms, Tom Fleming, Jürgen Elsässer, and I sat on the hotel’s terrace, drinking cheap but excellent Montenegrin beer and watching crowds of young Serbs dance the night away to the rhythmic thump thump thump of turbofolk.

The bus ride might have been an opportunity to recapture some lost sleep, but, as we climbed up the long, winding road out of Budva back into the mountains of Montenegro, our vehicle began to make a rather strange noise, and any thoughts of rest were quickly banished.  We stopped a few times while the driver circled the bus, opened the hood, and kicked the right front tire, before he decided that stopping in itself had lessened the noise, and we continued on our nervous way, passing a half-dozen closed service stations in Podgorica, about the time that the noise came back, louder than before.

It became clear, as he increased his speed on the other side of Podgorica, that our driver was now in his element.  Away from the sea, we were hurtling through the heart of the Montenegrin mountains, traveling on a well-kept two-lane asphalt highway high on the edge of a sheer chasm, with a brilliant blue-green river at its bottom, hundreds of feet below.  The bus sat up high enough that those of us on the chasm side could see, at every turn of the road, the burnt-out, rusted carcasses, usually hanging upside down on outcroppings of rock, of the cars that had failed to stay on the highway.  With a few fingers of one hand on the wheel, the other pressed into service to make his point, our driver would look over his shoulder to answer Srdja’s questions just as we came up on each curve.

Then we flew through a dark, two-lane tunnel through the heart of the mountain, and, emerging on the other side, found ourselves on a rather beautifully engineered bridge, high above the valley below.  Our driver slowed and pulled over to talk to a woman who, oddly, was walking across this bridge, miles from the nearest house that we’d seen.  She pointed over at the side of the mountain on the opposite end of the bridge, then raised her arm up and to the right, her finger extended toward the sky.  Following her gesture, we saw several cars crawling, quite literally, along the side of the mountain.  “That,” said Srdja, “is where we have to go.“

And thus began our ten-kilometer trek.  Fifty minutes later, having backed even farther down the path to a point where the bread truck could pull over and let us (just barely) pass, we have made our own run through the mud and entered the final stretch.  Up ahead, at a hairpin curve, a number of trucks are parked, and our driver makes the turn and then backs down into an open spot.  An hour up the mountain, and now we’re completing our pilgrimage on foot, walking the final hundred yards to the newly consecrated Serbian Orthodox monastery of Saint Mark, whose feast day is today, a week after Orthodox Easter.

We are met at the steps at the base of the monastery’s wall by two children around eight years old—one holding a tray of blessed bread and salt; the other, a tray of slivovitz.  We take the bread, dip it in the salt, and follow it up with a bracing shot of the plum liquor before climbing the stairs, which lead us to the clearing in front of the newly constructed church.  The liturgy has just ended, and Metropolitan Amphilochius, the spiritual leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro (and once a guest at Chronicles’ offices in Rockford, Illinois), is emerging from the church.  The program to celebrate the consecration of the monastery, and to honor the family who funded its construction in memory of their son, is about to begin.  Tom, his wife, Gail, Jürgen, Joe Bissett (the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, at the time of the breakup), Srdja, and I take our seats in the front row with the metropolitan.

As children come around with more slivovitz and the sun bakes our skin in the thin, dry mountain air, 4,500 feet up, Srdja tells me what he knows: how the son had left Montenegro to go fight alongside his fellow Serbs, who were being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in the Krajina region, now part of the newly formed state of Croatia.  How he had died defending his countrymen, and his father had found comfort in Saint Mark.  How Saint Mark had once appeared on this mountaintop, and the spot had long been revered as holy.

The father is speaking now, telling us of his decision to give 60 gold pieces to fund the construction of the church and monastery in honor of his son.  The guslar, a storyteller who, in Serbian folk customs, plays a quasireligious role, plucks his one-stringed instrument and recites a litany that he composed for today—extolling the names and deeds of the ancestors of the young man, back to the first one to convert to Christianity, centuries ago.  This boy, not yet a man (he was only 21), had yet, sings the guslar, the virtues of a man, as he proved in fighting and dying for his people and his Faith.  He was a warrior and a Christian, from a long line of Christian warriors.

As each member of our little band of pilgrims is called up onto the stage to offer our words of celebration, time seems to melt away, and the sun stands still in the sky.  To these people, so deeply steeped in history and inseparable from this rugged and beautiful land, this young man’s ancestors and he are still alive, as alive as the Christ in Whom they place their faith and His evangelist to whom they dedicate this spot.  If Heaven is a Timeless Moment, then moments when we are caught up out of time are a small foretaste of eternal life.  Intellectually, this is not a difficult concept, and Christians have always understood their liturgy to be one of those moments out of time, but now, suddenly, I see that all of Christian life strives not just for Heaven but for moments such as this.  Thy Kingdom come—and right now, right here, it has.

America, we incessantly repeat, is a nation of immigrants, a grand experiment, a country that threw off the shackles of the past and started anew—and therein lies our problem.  We have never stopped starting anew; we constantly change the parameters of our experiment; our migration never ceases long enough for us to put down roots, let alone throw up branches.  We sever the ties between generations—sometimes unthinkingly, sometimes with a glee bordering on the demonic.  Many of us do not know where our grandfathers came from, and some of us do not even know their names, much less the name of the man who first committed our family to Christ, in Whom time and the Timeless meet.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream

bears all her sons away.

They fly forgotten as a dream

dies at the op’ning day.

Yet here in this place, here at this moment, the stream quiets, time and the Timeless meet, the amnesia of modern life melts away, and the New World, humbled, learns from the Old.

Eternal memory. Eternal memory. Grant to your servant, O Lord, blessed repose and eternal memory.

First published in the July 2005 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Chaos and Community

I tune the radio to WLS, and the insistent voice of Tony Brown breaks me out of my trance. It’s Saturday, December 9, the day after a bitterly divided Florida Supreme Court stretched (and possibly broke) Florida law in order to allow a statewide recount of undervotes in the presidential election. My family and I are driving back to Rockford from Chicago’s Midway Airport, just hours before an equally divided U.S. Supreme Court will stop the recount in an activist decision more reminiscent of Earl Warren's reign as chief justice than William Rehnquist’s.

“The state of Florida is in chaos! Absolute chaos!” claims Brown, and his caller agrees: “I just saw a headline that reads, ‘Anarchy Reigns in Florida.’” That’s funny; we’ve just returned from a week in Orlando—or rather, Walt Disney World, that Never-Never-Land that bears about as much resemblance to Orlando as Washington, D.C., does to the rest of the country. I can’t say that I saw any anarchy or chaos; in fact, everything seemed perfectly scripted, right down to the airplanes and buses—which always arrived and departed on time—and the restaurants, which may have charged an arm and a leg but served their meals promptly and courteously. If this be chaos, let us make the most of it.

As Rockford draws closer, I’m hoping a bit of that Florida anarchy has rubbed off on my adopted hometown. When we left, our own recount was under way; with any luck, it created enough chaos that our streets have been properly plowed, which would be the first time in the six winters we’ve lived here.

Our contested election is for the 13th District seat on the Winnebago County Board. That may not seem nearly as exciting as the presidential recount, but it made a splash here in Rockford. As in the “important” election, the margin of victory was very small (45 votes), and the loser has asked for a hand recount because the counting machines appear to have classified some actual votes as undervotes. With Al Gore’s loss, the Democrats have effectively been frozen out of the presidency and both houses of Congress, but there’s a fair amount at stake here, too: If the election is reversed, one party will control three quarters of the seats on the county board, allowing it to impose its will even on issues where a supermajority is required. At the very least, that would mean local campaign contributors won’t have to spread their money around.

Our recount, however, has come at the request of William Peterson, the Republican incumbent who lost to Democratic challenger James Peterson. As you might expect, when the roles are reversed, the rhetoric is, too. The Democratic executive director of the Rockford Board of Elections, Nancy Strain, has told the local Gannett paper (LGP) that “Hand counts are never as accurate as the machines.” After a discovery recount of five of the 19 precincts in the district, she dismissed concerns that the number of ballots in two precincts didn’t match the reported totals. “There were a few ballots missing,” she said, “but that's because they’re in another box.”

Meanwhile, David Brown, the attorney for the Republican Peterson, sounds oddly like Gore attorney David Boies. “What we’re concerned about is the high number of undervotes and illegible votes that maybe weren’t picked up by the machines . . . What we want to make sure is that the will of the voter is followed,” he told the LCP. That wouldn’t mean counting chads—hanging, pregnant, or dimpled: Rockford has adopted a new optical-scanning system which combines the efficiency of a machine count with a much more secure paper trail than that left by our old punch-card system.

I know David Brown; he’s a good attorney and an even better man, and if he believes there are grounds for a hand recount, he’s probably right. I suspect, though, that there are any number of people in Florida who would say the same about Judge Charles Burton in Palm Beach County or his counterpart in Broward County. And that, in the end, is the point. If we truly want equal protection under the law, we’re not going to get it from black-robed state or federal justices relying on a skewed interpretation of an illegally passed constitutional amendment. True equal protection comes from living in a community where we may not know everyone, but we know someone who knows someone who does. David Brown undoubtedly wants to win this contest for his client, but he also has a stake in Rockford and Winnebago County. Both his life in this community and his character—formed in large part by that life—place limits on how far he will go.

That’s the reason why almost all states leave most of the details of elections—including federal ones—up to counties or local municipalities. The problem comes when outsiders—politicians, lawyers, even judges—view our communities merely as resources to be mined for votes. Does Al Gore or David Boies or the Florida Supreme Court really care about making sure that “all the voters are heard” in West Palm Beach? Of course not, but Charles Burton probably does, if only because they are the people among whom he lives and works. Who’s more likely to have the interests of the residents of Winnebago County Board District 13 at heart, David Brown or some hired gun from state or national Republican headquarters? There's no doubt in my mind.

The radio signal is breaking up as another caller tells Tony Brown that too few people realize that God reigns, not men. Brown heartily agrees, saying that he assumes this means the caller isn’t too concerned which man becomes president. Oh, no, the caller replies. “Its important that Bush win because of the Supreme Court. Without liberal activist judges, there would be no abortions in this country.”

I sigh as we exit I-90 onto the unplowed streets of Rockford. Chaos or no, it’s good to be home.

First published in the February 2001 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Power to the People!

The world is broken.

There was a time when those words would have been considered unremarkable—a truism, even.  Of course the world is broken: Our first parents, Adam and Eve, broke it.  They did so by their sin.  They had everything that any man or woman could ever reasonably want: a paradise to live in, all the food they would ever need, the ultimate healthcare plan (that is, no need for one), human companionship and the company of animals, leisure.  The God Who had given them life had blessed them and given them a mission, too: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”  Their leisure was meant to be the basis of a true culture.  They had no need of faith, as Hebrews 11 defines it: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  They could see everything they needed to see—not through a glass darkly, as we do now, but face to face.  They walked with God.  Had they kept to their mission, had they used their leisure properly, their children would have walked with God, too.

But they didn’t keep to their mission.  They didn’t use their leisure properly.  They broke the world.  And their children kept on breaking and breaking and breaking, starting with Cain, and continuing down to this very day.

Leo Strauss said that Eve was the first philosopher, because she valued the pursuit of knowledge above “tradition”—that is, above her love for, and her duty to, the God Who had created her.  Now, I do not agree with the Straussian conception of philosophy as atheism, of Athens as the enemy of Jerusalem.  Strauss’s conception is a subversion of the classical and Christian conception of philosophy as the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful; and of theology not as the enemy of philosophy but as the completion of it.  But I do think there’s a lesson in political theory to be learned by analogy in the story of the Fall.  Rather than seeing Eve as the first philosopher, I see the serpent as the first politician.  We might even say he’s the first populist politician.  While Christ tells Pilate that he would have no power over Him were that power not given to him by God above, and Saint Paul tells us that all true authority—including political authority—comes from God, the serpent spins a different story to Eve.  It’s a tale of a corrupt elite—God Himself—ruling capriciously over His creation, making laws and even environmental regulations (do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!) designed to keep Adam and Eve from rising up and taking full advantage of their rightful place at the top of the order of creation.  “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  All of that flowery language can be summed up in modern terms in a phrase that would fit in a tweet, with 120 characters left over for a string of hashtags and a clenched-fist emoji: “Power to the People!”

And yet, when Eve fell for the rhetoric of the serpent, and Adam, like a dutiful husband, followed suit, they didn’t become as gods.  Their power didn’t increase; worse yet, they forfeited much of the authority that God had given them, as the pinnacle of His Creation, on the sixth day.  They broke the world, and they broke themselves.  They had been meant to live forever; now, they would grow old, and frail, and die as a result of their sin.

The serpent had accused God of lying, of trying to keep the man down, but when Adam and Eve fell, the serpent was revealed as the liar.  For his lie, the serpent was punished, but like so many politicians, he was never much more than an empty snakeskin.  Only one creature emerged from the Garden of Eden more powerful than he had been when he entered it: Satan was now the ruler of this world, and his rule would continue unchallenged and unbroken until Christ conquered death by death.  But even in the wake of Christ’s Resurrection—indeed, even 2,000 years later—the Devil has made it clear that he has no intention of giving up power without a fight.

And that should come as no surprise.  First, because Satan is Satan.  Unlike Adam and Eve, when Satan fell, he fell completely; there was no good left in him, no matter what such diverse sources as Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Book of Mormon and NBC’s Lucifer would like you to believe.  And second, because the nature of Power (with a capital P), as opposed to authority (with a lower-case a), is such that those who have it always want more of it, as such diverse men as Lord Acton and Bertrand de Jouvenal and J.R.R. Tolkien understood.

Which brings us to the obvious question, back here in the “real world” (that is, the world broken by sin): Who, in this little tale, is Satan, exactly?  Is he Barack Obama or Donald Trump?  Hillary Clinton or Steve Bannon?  Is he a Democrat or a Republican?  A liberal or a conservative?  A nationalist or a socialist?

The answer, as Aaron Wolf reminded us in his column for the April 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture (“K Is for Vendetta”), is none of the above.  The Devil is the devil; and Obama and Trump, and Clinton and Bannon, and all of the Democrats and all of the Republicans, and all of the liberals and all of the conservatives, and even all of the nationalists and all of the socialists, are just men and women.  They aren’t demons, devoid of any good; but like Adam and Eve—because of Adam and Eve—they are all fallen creatures.  Like us, they are broken.  And they are living broken lives in a broken world.

But that means that all of these men and women have something in common with Adam and Eve, and with Satan, too: the desire to be as gods.  And in those moments when we set aside the constant distractions of the modern world and are brutally honest with ourselves, when we pause to look into our own hearts, we know that the same desire resides there.  And that desire manifests itself in a lust for power.

Indeed, the lust for power is so much a part of fallen man that Satan himself has found it useful, and not just in attempting to lead us astray.  Most Christians today assume that, when Satan was tempting Jesus in the desert, he knew exactly Who and what Jesus was, and that his sole purpose in putting Jesus to the test was to get the new Adam to fall, as he had the old Adam.  But many of the Fathers of the Church read this text differently: When Satan addressed Jesus, saying, “If thou be the Son of God,” he was, those Fathers said, uncertain.  The trial was the Devil’s attempt to determine whether Jesus was indeed Who Satan suspected He was.  Read in that manner, Luke’s account of the trial takes on a different light:

And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

That Jesus was able to resist the temptation of unlimited worldly power was not only a reversal of Adam’s sin but the proof the Devil needed that Jesus, unlike all other children of Adam, was not fallen: He was indeed the Son of God.  Only an unbroken man could resist Satan’s offer of unlimited power on this earth.

The term Deep State has recently begun to pop up in mainstream political reporting.  Like fake news, it has different meanings, depending on who uses it.  It seems to have originated in Turkey; but here in the United States, it was first used by the radical left as shorthand for a conspiracy theory that argued that popular government was a sham; a cabal of unelected intelligence officials and longtime military men, not the president and Congress, were really calling the shots (quite literally, it was alleged, in the case of the assassination of JFK), using the immense power of the U.S. government for their nefarious purposes.

Over time, the term was adopted by more mainstream political analysts to signify something less ominous, though still troubling to those who prefer limited government and a representative democracy—what we used to call a republic.  In this view, the Deep State was the governmental wing of what James Burnham called the “Managerial Revolution.”  The Deep State wasn’t actively nefarious; it was composed of unelected bureaucrats, in both the executive and legislative branches, who technically answered to elected officials, but were concerned, in a rather mundane way, with maintaining and expanding the power of their various agencies.

Now the term has come full-circle, and once again is being used to signify a cabal of unelected intelligence officials (though perhaps no longer of military men) who are actively working to undermine popular government.  The twist is that the Deep State is no longer a left-wing conspiracy theory, but a right-wing one.

I have never believed in conspiracy theories of any kind, not because I don’t believe that human beings attempt to engage in conspiracies—any father of more than one child has witnessed conspiracies unfolding in his own household—but because those who engage in conspiracies are, in the end, people just like us.  By definition, they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and no amount of power or technical expertise can change that fact.  They are incapable of the degree of control that every conspiracy theory assumes they must have.  They act on incomplete knowledge; they make mistakes.  They are prideful and capricious and impulsive.  They are, in a word, broken, just like we are.

But since that brokenness manifests itself in all of us in a lust for power, the more mainstream, non-conspiracy-theory use of the term Deep State simply describes the effects of fallen human nature in our modern bureaucratic age.  Those who have power desire to maintain it, and to expand it when they can.  And, as Lord Acton reminds us, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Acton said a lot of other things about power, but most of them are not as well known.  For instance: “Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance”; “Bureaucracy is undoubtedly the weapon and sign of a despotic government, inasmuch as it gives whatever government it serves, despotic power”; and “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”  Acton was a man who seldom hedged his judgments, but in his various discussions of power, there was never a need to do so.

Tolkien was a rather different man from Lord Acton, but he shared with Acton the Catholic understanding of Original Sin, of the brokenness of man and the world, and of the corruption of morality that goes hand in hand with the lust for, and concentration of, power.  There are many layers to The Lord of the Rings, but at its center lies a cautionary tale of the danger of Power and the way in which Power, left unchecked, always becomes more concentrated and leads not to the restoration of culture and the world, but to its destruction.

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”  Taken by itself, the line engraved on the One Ring, forged in the fires of Mordor by Sauron, is easy to misinterpret.  The pronoun them seems to refer to all of the creatures of Middle Earth—the men, the elves, the dwarves, the hobbits—and on one level, it does.  But that line is taken from a longer verse:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all,

One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

The pronoun them refers first to the 19 other rings, collectively known as the Rings of Power.  The One Ring, the most powerful of them all, was meant to draw all of the other Rings of Power to itself, to centralize power in the hands of the tyrant Sauron, who had set himself up as ruler of Middle Earth, as Satan rules our world.  Tolkien shows us the horrifying effect that the nine Rings of Power which were given to men had on those who wore them; they were so corrupted that they became the Nazgûl, the Ring Wraiths.  Sauron promised “Power to the People,” but like Satan, only Sauron gained more power when the men put on the rings.

Tolkien was always adamant that The Lord of the Rings was not to be read as an allegory, but taken on its own terms; yet he did address the question of power in our world, and the corruption that accompanies it, in a discussion of the enigmatic character of Tom Bombadil.  Unlike all of the others who wore the One Ring (or even spent time in close proximity to it, in the case of Boromir), Tom Bombadil was not corrupted by it; in fact, the One Ring had no effect on him whatsoever—it did not make him invisible, and even when Frodo was wearing the One Ring and was invisible to everyone else, Tom Bombadil could see him.  Tolkien explained this mystery thusly:

The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken “a vow of poverty,” renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless . . .

Tolkien goes on to describe this “vow of poverty” as “a natural pacifist view,” but to those familiar with Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, “renounc[ing] control, and tak[ing] your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing” sounds a lot like the classical and Christian conception of philosophy as the contemplation of goodness, beauty, and truth.

Whether we call it pacifism or philosophy, how Tom Bombadil can renounce the lust for power is, Tolkien admits, an intentional enigma.  Even the elves, angelic creatures that they are, avoided the fate of the men who became Ring Wraiths only by refusing to wear their three Rings of Power, and hiding them to avoid the temptation.  And if others were capable of imitating Bombadil and gaining an immunity to the corruption of power, that could not, Tolkien indicates, be the basis for a lasting, desirable political order: “Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive.  Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”

In other words, men must take other measures if they desire to resist the centralization of power and the corruption that inevitably accompanies it.  If Power becomes too concentrated, something like the War of the Ring may be the only way to destroy it, but victory in such a struggle always comes at the expense of great loss, as Frodo discovers.  The best defense—the only defense—against the inevitable corruption that flows from the concentration of power is to prevent the concentration of power in the first place.

Lord Acton understood this; Tolkien did as well.  So did the advocates of republicanism, both classical and modern, including the Framers of the U.S. Constitution.  So did the Twelve Southerners who wrote I’ll Take My Stand, and G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and the Distributists who joined the Agrarians in Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, the lesser-known but just as important sequel to I’ll Take My Stand.  So, too, did Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum novarum, and Pope Pius XI, in Quadragesimo anno, and even John Paul II in Centesimus annus, despite the best attempts by certain partisans of power to distort that encyclical into an endorsement of a centralized “democratic capitalism.”

All of these men had the same fundamental insight, expressed with characteristic pithiness by Lord Acton: “Liberty consists in the division of power.  Absolutism, in concentration of power.”  Or, to look at it from a different direction: “It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.”

Republicanism, federalism, decentralism, distributism, agrarianism, subsidiarity—the fundamental insight of each of these political theories is that the only way to preserve liberty, confine politics to its proper sphere, and provide a world in which a true culture and morality can flourish is to prevent the inordinate concentration of power.  One cannot be a classical republican and believe that an emperor or a tyrant is fine, so long as he professes to believe in classical republican principles; one cannot be a federalist and believe that it is all right to tip the balance of power between the states and the national government in favor of the national government because “our” party now controls the latter.  One cannot espouse the principle of subsidiarity while turning it on its head, and insisting that the proper flow of authority is downward from a central government, rather than outward from the family.

And yet, as power becomes more concentrated over time, and the corruption of morality that accompanies the centralization of power increases, the temptation to use that power for our own purposes increases as well.  Rather than reasserting the proper authority of the family, of the Church, of local and state governments, and of a thousand other intermediary institutions, we start thinking about the good that we could do, if only the One Ring were to pass to us.  Why put ourselves through the monumental effort required to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, in which it was forged, when we are certain that we, alone among all men, are immune to its corrupting force?

Why, indeed?  Because, as Lord Acton writes, “Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad.”  Or, in the words of the principle that has guided our work at Chronicles for the last 40 years, “There are no political solutions to cultural problems.”

At the very beginning of the American republic, another man expressed this reality with the clarity of a prophet.  Edmund Burke had supported the American Revolution, and he had high hopes that the federalist system enshrined in our Constitution would diffuse power, and thus preserve liberty.  But Burke was a Christian, and he understood that we are broken, and he knew that the ultimate battle lies not in the halls of Congress or in Parliament, but in the souls of men:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites . . . Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Their passions: such as the pride which cries out that others may be broken, but we are not; and the rage against external corruption that all too often is no more than a fig leaf masking our own moral nakedness.  But pride and rage are revolutionary impulses, not conservative (much less traditional) ones: As Satan did in the Garden of Eden, these passions promise “Power to the People!” but lead only to slavery.

But the converse, as Burke saw so clearly, is true: When we give up the sin of pride and embrace the virtue of humility, we break the chains we have wrapped around our own souls and can build a culture that will sustain true liberty.  Humility is not simply a Christian virtue; it is, as John Lukacs writes, “a recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind.”  The world is broken; we are broken; and the first step in rebuilding anything is realizing that we cannot rebuild everything, no matter how much power we arrogate to ourselves.

That is why the real division today is not between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, nationalists and socialists; it is, rather, what it has always been: between the partisans of power who work endlessly for its centralization, and those who realize that true political, economic, and even moral freedom in a broken world requires the diffusion of power and the reassertion of proper authority at every level, starting with our control over our passions and the restoration of the family as the fundamental unit of culture and society.  Charmed by the snake, we have tried to become as gods; we have cried “Power to the People!” while forging the very chains that keep us in bondage.

The centralization of power has gone hand in hand with the decline of Christian belief, each fueling the other in an unbroken cycle of death and destruction.  Yet as Christians, we know that the restoration of our broken world began with the ultimate act of humility, the triumph of Powerlessness over Power, in the death of Christ on the Cross.  In our baptismal vows, we reject the empty promises of Satan, because we know that God is faithful, and He has promised true “Power to the People!”—the power of His grace, offered freely to the people of God, if only we will humble ourselves enough to admit that we need it.

If we desire any kind of freedom in our life on this earth—moral, cultural, economic, political—we have to fight to prevent the centralization of power.  Struggle is our lot in life; that die was cast long ago, by Adam and Eve in the Garden.  The world is broken.

But not forever.       

First published in the May 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.