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.

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.

Taking Back the Culture

By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books.  If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020.

Or perhaps not, because some of those who have routinely claimed that each presidential election since 1992 has been the most important election of our lifetime changed their tune this year: This, they said, was the last election that would ever matter.  After November 8, the deluge.

In the words of everybody’s favorite pseudonymous paleo-Straussian, the 2016 contest was the “Flight 93 Election.”  If we failed to rush the cockpit by prevailing on November 8, this country that we all love so much—even though, to listen to us, we seemingly cannot stand anything about it—would come crashing to the ground.  A few months ago, Donald Trump declared that, if he were not elected president, the Republicans would never win the White House again.  In mid-October, in a speech in Florida, he upped the ante: “This is not simply another four-year election,” Trump said.  “This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization [emphasis mine] that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.”

Forget Flight 93; the pseudonymous paleo-Straussian was thinking too small.  The 2016 election was the Siege of Vienna; it was Charles Martel at Tours; it was Horatio at the bridge.  Pat Buchanan, a veteran of two White Houses and a presidential election of his own, emphatically agreed with the Republican presidential nominee who, in 1999, called him “a very dangerous man” who “has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler.”  Politics, as we know, makes for strange bedfellows, and everyone in this bed agrees that, by 2020, it will be too late to fight back.  The demography of the United States is changing too rapidly, and demographics is destiny.

There are many half-truths in all of these statements, but a half-truth, as John Lukacs has often said, is sometimes more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth makes it easy to ignore the element of untruth.  On virtually every measure that true conservatives care about, the country will almost certainly be worse off in 2020 than it is today—just as, on all of those same measures, the country was worse off in 2008 than it was in 2000, a reality that played no small part in the election of Barack Obama.

One definition of insanity, we are told, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Yet that’s exactly what we have done by investing each presidential election with monumental importance—and finally, in this year, apocalyptic importance.

There is a way, though, in which this year was different.  Donald Trump ran the tables and defeated 16 other Republican candidates in the primaries, because he was willing to champion issues that no Republican presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan in 2000 has had any desire to touch.  Those issues are the very ones that we at Chronicles have advocated for the last 30 of our 40 years of publication.  We have known all along that these issues were more important to more of the American people than the things that MSNBC and FOX News, the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR, spend all of their time discussing and debating, and we—and other authors and editors of Chronicles, especially the late Sam Francis—correctly predicted that any presidential candidate who took them on forthrightly would garner tremendous support.

How could we have been so certain?

Because, at root, all of these issues are neither political nor economic but cultural.  Immigration, trade, manufacturing, law and order, even the question of foreign wars and the role of the United States in world affairs—all of these are just as much a matter of culture as are, say, abortion and gay “marriage.”  But just as with abortion and gay “marriage,” we tend to forget the irreducible cultural nature of these issues when we find ourselves in the heat of political battles.  We begin to act as if politics—especially national politics—is all that really matters.  And, as so often happens, thought follows action.  So we convince ourselves that abortion can be brought to an end by Congress passing a “Personhood Amendment” or by the Supreme Court taking up another Roe v. Wade and deciding it rightly this time.  That a president or Congress can somehow reduce local crime without increasing the federal government’s near-tyrannical powers.  That the heads of multinational (or, more correctly, transnational) corporations have shuttered factories in the United States while opening new ones in China and Mexico simply because Congress passed laws and the president signed treaties that made it economically viable to do so, rather than that Congress passed those laws and the president signed those treaties because politicians of both political parties were heavily lobbied to do so by corporate executives who have next to nothing in common with the workers in their factories because those executives long ago quit thinking of themselves as Americans in anything more than a purely accidental way.  That the executives of other companies that cannot take advantage of such trade agreements to move their operations overseas because it costs too much to ship a frozen chicken from China have repeatedly chosen to employ illegal immigrants illegally simply because those immigrants are here, and not because the stock grants that their board has promised them if they beat projections on the next quarterly earnings report are more important to those executives than whether the grandchildren of the farmers whose way of life their corporate forebears destroyed in the middle of the last century are able to provide for their families and to remain within at least driving distance of the graves of their ancestors.

As we have said consistently in these pages, there are no political solutions to cultural problems—and every one of these is, at root, a cultural problem.  And the greatest cultural problem that we face today is the all-encompassing nature of modern politics, which, especially at the national level, has proved to be an extraordinarily efficient means of destruction of traditional society, morality, and culture.  Attempting to harness that destructive power to restore the culture, revitalize morality, and rebuild society is like trying to perform open-heart surgery with a chainsaw.  Anyone who tries to do so is just going to make a huge mess.

In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, an octogenarian grandmother in Indiana vowed to Mike Pence that she would fight a revolution should voters choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.  What that grandmother does not realize—what all of us, to the extent that we are captivated by national politics, do not realize—is that we are living today in the midst of an institutionalized revolution.  Hillary Clinton is part of that revolution, and Barack Obama is, too, but as Billy Joel would say, they didn’t start the fire.  That fire has been burning brightly in the minds of men for two and a half centuries—and not just a few men but all those who, like the French revolutionaries, elevate ideology above truth and politics above culture.

Russell Kirk used to say that “the American Revolution was no revolution truly, but simply a War of Independence—a revolution (in Burke’s phrase concerning the Glorious Revolution of 1688) ‘not made, but prevented.’”  Dr. Kirk was right, of course, but American history did not stop once we had won our independence.  The move from the English unwritten constitution to the written Constitution of the United States of America, and the adoption of a written Bill of Rights, were very good things in the context of their time, but they also gave the modern revolutionary spirit something to take and to twist, and by the time of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the process had begun.  Instead of being confined to its proper sphere, as the Framers of the Constitution wished it to be, national politics took on greater and greater importance, and society and culture were deliberately subordinated to politics.

All of this, as I noted last month, is there from the beginning in the writings of the godfather of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, implicit in his concept of the general or national will that required the destruction of all social and cultural institutions that stand between the individual and the nation-state—especially the family, the Church, and the patriotic attachment to one’s native place and the people therein.  But later philosophers of the revolution, such as Antonio Gramsci, were explicit about the need to subordinate culture to politics.  The point of the “long march through the institutions” was to subvert the family and the Church and the schools and the news and entertainment media from within, by transforming these cultural institutions into political ones.  Once the forces of revolution succeeded in doing that, the revolution would become unstoppable.  Because this is the reality of the modern world: Whenever the battle is confined to the political arena, the revolutionaries always win.  In politics, ideology always trumps tradition.  Why?  Because anyone who elevates politics above culture, abstraction above reality, even if he thinks of himself as a conservative, is, from the vantage point of tradition, an ideologue, a revolutionary.

And that is where we are today.  Historically, we stand at the apotheosis of revolution.  The rapid pace of cultural change over the last few years has been surprising, even astonishing, to most people—not just those of us who are opposed to that cultural change, but even those who are in favor of it.  But we make a grave mistake if we think that political action brought about that change more than such action reflected it.  Gay “marriage” did not come out of the blue (no pun intended), imposed by the political powers that be, any more than, in an earlier day, no-fault divorce and legalized abortion did.  In each case, the courts and the politicians ratified a cultural revolution that had already taken place.

Think back to 2008, when Barack Obama told us that he did not believe in gay marriage.  Or to 2012, when Hillary Clinton continued to say the same.  To dismiss these statements as mere lies is to fail to understand that even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been driven by the long march through the institutions as much as, or even more than, they have driven it.

One of the best insights that true conservatives have had about the Republican Party over the past 30 years is that, when the Democrats have power, they push the revolution forward; and when the Republicans gain power, they institutionalize the revolutionary changes that the Democrats have made.  That analysis is true, as far as it goes; but it doesn’t go far enough.  The reality is that Gramsci and his disciples were right: By its very nature, cultural revolution drives political change.  All of modern politics, Republican or Democratic, left or right, consists of the institutionalization of a revolution that has taken place, and continues to take place, in the culture.

Conservatives have been warning about “Cultural Marxism” for years while fundamentally misunderstanding the underlying strategy of the long march through the institutions.  Rather than resisting any attempt to politicize the institutions of culture—the family, the Church, the schools, arts and literature—we have responded to the revolutionary subversion of these institutions by politicizing them in a different way.  But the end result is the same: Those institutions have become thoroughly politicized; truth has been replaced by ideology; the revolution has advanced.

So we fight for “family values” as if this abstract phrase is more important than the family itself; we march under the banners of “academic freedom” and “free speech” when what we should be promoting are truth and beauty and goodness.  We blithely import Christian language into our political rhetoric, labeling our political adversaries demons or the devil incarnate and ignoring Christ’s injunction to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and God that which is God’s” by citing the fact that God not only could but did use a Constantine for His own purposes as undeniable proof that He is clearly doing so right now, in the United States, in 2016.  We start out by joking about “God Emperor Trump” and end up believing our own joke with a fervor that we should reserve for the clauses of the Nicene Creed.

And along the way we have lost sight of a reality that conservatives of a previous generation understood: that investing secular politics with religious significance is itself a form of the long march through the institutions, a subversion of the Church and the subordination of her divine mission to the revolutionary agenda of modern politics.

In The Screwtape Letters, written in the midst of World War II—long considered an existential crisis of the West, though one, I must admit, that pales in comparison with the election of 2016—C.S. Lewis has the superior demon Uncle Screwtape offer this advice to the novice Wormwood:

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy [God], are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. . . .

Whichever [the patient] adopts, your main task will be the same.  Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. . . . Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.  Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours.

My point is not to suggest that politics is unimportant—far from it—but that we need to return politics to its proper sphere, to recognize (as I wrote last month) that culture is prior to politics, both in the sense of existing before politics and in the sense of being more important than politics.  When we invest politics with religious importance, we profane religion, we undermine the culture, and we become unwitting soldiers in the long march through the institutions, doing the very work to which our political adversaries have devoted their lives.

Let us turn to Lewis once more, this time from The Weight of Glory:

A man may have to die for his country: but no man must in any exclusive sense live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering unto Caesar that which of all things most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

What, then, should we do?  After all, no true conservative can deny the element of truth in all of those half-truths I mentioned earlier.  The hour is late; the long march through the institutions is nearly complete; we stand, as I said, at the apotheosis of revolution.  And standing here, we face a choice: We can choose to continue on the path of revolution, by accepting the domination of politics over culture, and steel ourselves for an unceasing but always losing battle in the political arena; or we can become counterrevolutionaries, returning politics to its proper place by focusing our efforts on taking back the culture.  And in doing so, we might just win.

If we choose the latter option, the struggle will not be easy.  Nor will it be as exciting as waging political campaigns or watching FOX News or reading political blogs or even tweeting and Facebooking the latest political meme.  What it will be is living our lives the way that we were intended to do so, conforming ourselves to the unchanging truths revealed to us by nature and nature’s God.  It will mean starting our own long march through the institutions, not in order to politicize them but to restore them.  And rather than resembling an army marching in lockstep while wearing redshirts or brownshirts, we will look a lot more like a band of pilgrims, making our way back to the sources of our culture and to the institutions that are closest to those sources—chief among them the family (the natural source) and the Church (the supernatural one).

While the process may be hard, it is also quite simple.  If you’re not married, get married.  If you are married, stay married.  If you can have children, have one.  Have another.  And another.  Keep repeating, not until you can’t afford to have more, but for as long as you can’t afford not to.  Baptize your children.  Raise them in the Faith.  Treat your parish as an extension of your family.  Encourage your fellow churchgoers to have children of their own.  Educate your children well, in whatever way you need to do so.  Make sure they understand that the purpose of education is not to make them good citizens or good workers but to cultivate in them a lifelong desire for goodness and truth and beauty, the critical faculties to discern what is good and true and beautiful, and the imagination to become co-creators with God, increasing the treasury of goodness, truth, and beauty in this world.

Introduce yourself to your neighbor.  Introduce your neighbor to your other neighbor.  Treat your neighborhood as an extension of your family.  If you can share a turkey with Uncle Charlie at Thanksgiving even though he had a Hillary sign in his yard just a month before, you can be civil to your neighbor who had a Hillary sign, too.  If you don’t want to share a turkey with Uncle Charlie because he had a Hillary sign, do it anyway.

Shop at that local store run by the young guy with sleeve tattoos and his wife with the multicolored hair and piercings.  The jobs they create will never be sent overseas by some heartless corporate executive.  Say nice things about the child that they chose to bring into this world rather than to abort.  Don’t worry about whether they think of themselves as liberals or voted for Hillary.  Pray that they stay married and have more children and continue to live in your town and contribute to your shared economic independence.  All of those things mean that their children will be more instinctually conservative—that is, more connected to reality—than they are, just as your children will be more instinctually conservative than you were if you raise them this way.

Every once in a while, turn off FOX News, and MSNBC, and CNN, and NPR.  Pick up a book.  Read poetry to your children.  Read a novel with your spouse.  Study history.  Learn what an existential crisis really looks like.  Watch television shows and movies, but be discriminating.  Don’t worry about whether a particular actor or director holds political views with which you disagree; consider whether what he has created is a worthwhile work of art.  Listen to music.  Make music, if you have the talent to do so.  Make music even if you do not have the talent to do so.  Encourage your children to do the same.

Subscribe to your local newspaper, no matter how poorly written and edited the stories may be, and how biased the national coverage is.  Read it for the local coverage, for the things happening within a few miles of you that will never make the national news.  The quality of your water is more important to you and your family than “global climate change” will ever be.  Use that water to grow a garden.  Plant vegetables and flowers.  Plan for the future by planting fruit trees.  Mow your lawn and paint your house and wax your car and act as if material possessions have spiritual value, because they do.

And don’t forget to vote.  Not just every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but every time there’s an election.  Try to learn enough about the candidates for every office so that you can make an informed decision.  Give every office the weight that it deserves.  The dogcatcher who removes a rabid animal from your neighborhood may do more for you and your family than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ever would.  So, too, the city councilman who fights to have a stoplight installed at the dangerous intersection down the block.  And the sheriff who arrests real criminals whose crimes threaten you and your family.  Spend more time learning about local candidates than you do about state candidates, because they affect more aspects of your everyday life, and it’s easier to learn the truth about them, because they are closer to you.  Spend more time learning about state candidates than about national candidates, for the same reason.  And candidates for Congress more than those for the Senate.  And those for the Senate more than those for president.

Take the long view.  Don’t worry about “winning” within your lifetime.  When Gramsci’s disciple Rudi Dutschke coined the slogan “the long march through the institutions” 50 years ago, the march had already been under way for at least a quarter of a century.  Our countermarch may take just as long.  But we have an advantage that the Cultural Marxists did not: The Gods of the Copybook Headings are on our side.  We’re bringing people back to reality.  And living your life in harmony with reality is its own reward.

After all, what have we got to lose?  Remember: This was not only the most important election of our lifetime, but the last one that will ever matter.  We might as well do something with the rest of our lives. 

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

The Day After

Imagine how the electoral map would have looked if the 2016 presidential election hadn’t been rigged.

Donald Trump pulled off a yuge upset, and in the Upper East Coast and up and down the entire West Coast, people who have never flown over the vast swath of red in the midst of the country, let alone set foot in it, are wondering how they could have been so wrong.

Oh, who am I kidding? They’re not considering the possibility that they could have been wrong; they’re blaming the racists, the sexists, the rich, the poor, the toothless masses yearning to shoot horse. Hillary only lost (in their minds) because somewhere north of 59 million of their fellow Americans are so evil that they would vote for Hitler, so long as he came back with a massive blond combover and a bright-orange spray tan.

Turns out orange is the new black, after all. After eight years of being decried as evil by those who could not conceive of any other reason why someone would vote for Barack Obama, stalwart liberals have fallen into the very pattern of thought held by the people they despise. Perhaps this country is more united in its division than we realize. But that’s a topic for another day.

Today, we need to consider the challenges faced by those who are celebrating Trump’s victory. And the most important challenge is the temptation to make it personal. Those who were attracted to Trump because he adopted the issues that we at Chronicles have championed for 30 years have every reason to celebrate right now—and every reason to be concerned that the policies they are hoping to see may not fully materialize. I’m not referring simply to the problems that the future President Trump may face with his own party in Congress. The Republican Congress may, in fact, largely fall into line, as Paul Ryan is suggesting. The bigger problem lies in the staffing of the administration.

The best-case scenario is that Trump and his transition team want very much to make good on the promises he made over the last year and a half. But even in that case, they need people in the administration who believe in those promises and the policies that would flow from them. The reality, though, is that most of the people who line up for positions in a Republican administration—even this particular administration—aren’t likely to be overly attached to those promises, much less concerned with translating them into concrete policies. And the exigencies of governance mean that the Trump transition team isn’t going to be drawing from the editorial board of Chronicles, much less from among our readers.

So, even assuming the best of intentions, there will be some significant number of people in the Trump administration who have little or no attachment to realist positions on (among other things) trade, immigration, manufacturing, and foreign policy. And that will inevitably mean that President Trump will occasionally do or support things that run contrary to what his supporters expect and hope for.

How his supporters respond to those occasions will determine whether the Trump administration turns out to be a mere speed bump on the road toward a “progressive” future, or the start of a principled return to a limited federal government, acting in the best interests of the citizens of these United States. Justifying compromises or even the occasional outright betrayal because Trump is “our guy” the way Barack Obama was “theirs” might very well mean that this hard-won victory will, after a detour of a few years, leave us back where we started.

The late M. Stanton Evans saw this clearly many years ago. “The trouble with conservatives,” Stan was fond of saying, “is that too many of them come to Washington thinking they are going to drain the swamp, only to discover that Washington makes a great hot tub.”

Conservatives don’t pursue power for its own sake; power cannot be an end in itself. In the afterglow of a great victory, it’s all too easy to forget this most important of conservative principles.

First published on ChroniclesMagazine.org on November 9, 2016.

A teachable moment for Catholic leaders →

The politicization of every aspect of human life, a process that has been under way since the Renaissance, has had some unexpected consequences.

It’s not surprising to find governments and politicians encroaching on the rights of churches and attempting to redefine freedom of religion (which threatens the supremacy of politics) as freedom to worship (which keeps religion confined within church walls). What is surprising, though, is the extent to which Christian leaders voluntarily accept these limits and shy away from opportunities to reveal the transformative power of the Gospel.