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.

Why Fake News Matters

Fake news, as I discussed last month (“Faking It,” The Rockford Files), is a very real problem, though less for the reasons commonly given (the potentially destructive effects it may have on our “democracy”) and more for the fact that it both flows from a lack of concern for truth (and thus says something about the character of those who consume and disseminate it) and reinforces that lack of concern through the “rush” that sharing fake news (on social media especially) provides.  (As Aaron Wolf explains in his Heresies column this month, social media encourages this disregard for truth through the short-term dopamine “hit” that one gets from striking out at one’s enemies, real or imagined.)  The explosion of fake news, or rather the credulity with which it is accepted and promulgated, is in the end just another symptom of our subjugation of culture (of which the transmission of truth must always be not merely a central concern but the central concern) to politics, in which the only “truth”—or, at least, the only one that “matters”—is winning.

A sober, rational discussion of the danger of fake news has been hampered by the problem of definition: What, exactly, qualifies as fake news?  In the roughly eight weeks (at the time of this writing) since the rise of fake news became a real news story, the definition has morphed repeatedly, depending on the circumstances and the political leanings of the person or institution offering the definition.

The first definition, which most people, left and right, seemed initially prepared to accept, was fairly clear—a fake news story is an Onion-style satire or parody presented by its publisher, and accepted by significant numbers of readers, as if it were true.  Mainstream news outlets, most notably the Washington Post and the New York Times, ran extensive profiles of fake-news publishers, often in Eastern Europe (a very high number are based in Macedonia, for some reason), who crank out poorly crafted (and almost always poorly written) satire by the gigabyte, hoping that one story or another will go viral and lead to millions of page views, thus driving up revenue from ad networks (including, despite its supposed concern for truth and reliability in search results, the one owned by Google).  These fakesters assured the Times and the Post that they are essentially equal-opportunity, throwing stories left and right and not caring which ones will stick, so long as something does.  (Indeed, many of their fake-news stories have nothing to do with U.S. politics and everything to do with trending topics; Pope Francis is another frequent subject of such pieces.)

The second definition of fake news followed only a week or so later, and quickly eclipsed the first.  As I discussed last month, the fake news stories that were most frequently shared on social media in 2016 were those targeting Hillary Clinton and her campaign, rather than Donald Trump and his.  That imbalance was worth exploring, though few reporters from mainstream publications were able to do so well, because the reason for the imbalance has to do not simply with “right-wing echo chambers” on Facebook and other social media, but with an overreaction to the left-wing echo chambers found in mainstream newsrooms.  This manifests itself among self-identified “conservatives” in an odd mix of cynicism and credulity, in which any news story, no matter how pedestrian, reported by the mainstream media is immediately suspect, while the fact that an outlandish claim, such as the “Pizzagate” rumor, did not appear in mainstream publications is seen not as evidence of some remaining level of journalistic standards at those publications but as evidence that the story must be true.

Unable to cop to their own role in engendering a backlash that fostered the acceptance of fake news, mainstream reporters had to come up with another reason for the imbalance.  Despite the fact that fake-news purveyors had gone on the record to say that all they wanted to do was to make money, and that in creating fake-news stories they targeted Donald Trump as often as they did Hillary Clinton, and that they were themselves surprised by the fact that negative fake stories about Clinton were shared more often than negative fake stories about Trump, mainstream reporters sensed a grand conspiracy: The imbalance must be proof of a massive fake-news propaganda campaign designed to aid Donald Trump.  That the imbalance existed in the subject of the articles most shared, and not in the subject of the articles created, should have made it clear from the beginning that this theory had problems, but coming as it did at the same time that CIA leaks were alleging that the Russian government had tried to swing the election in Trump’s favor by obtaining and releasing emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the theory quickly became accepted as fact.  After all, many of these fake-news sites were based in Eastern Europe, and Russia’s somewhere over there, right?

Where the first definition of fake news made it seem a crass commercial enterprise that may have had some unintended consequences because of the gullibility of American voters, the second took on a much darker cast.  And that led to another backlash, this time among Trump voters and other political conservatives who decided that, if “fake news” were now to be defined as “Russian propaganda,” then those who expressed a concern about fake news could only be doing so in order to call into question the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election—which, to be fair, does seem quite often to have been the case (particularly among writers for the Washington Post).  But it does not follow—as many then concluded—that there is no such thing as fake news, and that the very concept was simply ginned up by the mainstream media for political purposes.  The first, straightforward, definition of fake news can still be correct, while the second may be ideologically driven and wrong.

Yet when truth is subjugated to political necessity, such rational distinctions fall by the wayside.  And so a third definition of fake news arose among Trump voters and fellow travelers: Fake news is all a matter of perspective.  If Pizzagate can be called “fake news,” then so can “Gropegate.”  In this definition, what makes something “fake” is not whether it actually happened—that is, whether there is some element of truth to it (Donald Trump did, after all, actually say what he was recorded saying)—but whether disseminating the story advances or hinders one’s own political agenda.  And so a not insignificant number of people who have for years decried the rise of “relativism” have become relativists themselves.

A concrete example can be found in the abandonment of Pizzagate by its chief promoters (Alex Jones of InfoWars and his ilk) when, in the wake of the shooting at Comet Pizza (the supposed site of Hillary Clinton’s and John Podesta’s “underage sex-slave ring”), the story became a political liability.  Jones and others who had promoted Pizzagate did not recant the story, much less apologize for having promoted it; they simply expunged it from their websites and social-media outlets, trying to send it down an Orwellian memory hole (after, it should be noted, a brief attempt to claim that the shooter was simply an actor hired to try to discredit the promoters of Pizzagate—a particularly odious claim considering the role that they had played in destroying this man’s life, yet one that was not surprising, coming as it did from people who had also claimed that the massacre of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 was a “false flag” operation designed to further the Obama administration’s gun-control agenda).  Either the allegations that formed the core of Pizzagate were true, or they weren’t; that they were politically useful before the election and no longer so after some poor patsy landed himself in jail because he believed them shows that a concern for the truth played no part whatsoever in the decision of Jones and others to promote Pizzagate.

A concern for the truth—no matter how politically inconvenient it may be, or how politically useful a lie may prove—lies at the heart of any true conservatism (and, it goes without saying, at the heart of Christianity).  Those who cannot see that—or, rather, refuse to see that—are as much the enemies of civilization as those who deliberately attempt to undermine it.  Like everything else in life, sharing something on Facebook or Twitter is a moral act; failing to determine whether something is true because you hope to harm your “enemies” by spreading the story around does not mitigate the sin of calumny—it deepens your culpability.        

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

Faking It

If one were to believe the mainstream media—and who doesn’t believe the mainstream media?—Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of these United States this month because over 60 million Americans are unable, and possibly unwilling, to tell the difference between true, objective reporting, filled with facts and designed only to help the citizens of this great nation make enlightened decisions, and “fake news,” chock-full of Russian propaganda designed to put a latter-day Manchurian candidate in the White House.

It’s easy, of course, to tell the difference between real news and “fake news”: Real news is found in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in the Washington Post and on CNN, while “fake news” is found—well, almost anywhere else.  The proof that “fake news” is responsible for the election of Donald Trump is equally obvious: Donald Trump was elected, and anyone who relied solely on the purveyors of real news would clearly have voted for Hillary Clinton.  The frustration that reporters and editors for the Times and the Post and the Journal have expressed over the role that “fake news” supposedly played in this election cycle belies their own claim to objectivity, which just might lead the cynic to question whether the real news offered up by the mainstream media is so very different from “fake news” after all.

None of which is to say that “fake news” isn’t a problem, though it’s hardly the new one that the postelection hysteria would seem to indicate.  To take just one example: Back in 1999, a columnist for Chronicles sent his text well past his deadline.  This wouldn’t normally be a problem—we editors are writers ourselves, and therefore understand the bad habit of procrastination—but this column included a lengthy quotation from Attorney General Janet Reno, supposedly delivered in an interview with Reader’s Digest some time before, which seemed to herald an imminent federal crackdown on homeschooling families.  Eighteen years ago, very little could be fact-checked on the internet; we actually had to go to the library and examine books and magazines and newspapers, and if we couldn’t confirm a quotation, we would have to contact the publication directly.  Under deadline, unable to confirm the Reno lines and still waiting on a response from Reader’s Digest, a former editor of Chronicles made the call: So long as the columnist was certain of the quotation, we would run it.  And so we did.

One needs no imagination whatsoever to see where this story is going.  A week after the issue went to press, Reader’s Digest answered our inquiry—they had been forced to examine hard copy as well; they had no electronic index of all their text—and the lines in question had never appeared in the magazine.  I then spent several weeks trying to determine if the quotation might be real but incorrectly sourced, a process akin to hunting for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster: Even today, two decades further along in the internet age, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.  But finally, when a friend with access to LexisNexis (the premier search database of its day for news sources, and incredibly expensive, which was why Chronicles did not have a subscription) turned up nothing, we reached the reasonable conclusion: The quotation was fake.

Today, fake quotations, fake statistics, and entire fake narratives (“news stories”) are even more prevalent than in 1999—a paradox of sorts, since it would seem that ubiquitous internet access and the magic of Google indexing would make it easier to determine what is real and what is not.  Yet the ease of finding things on the internet is matched by the ease of placing things on the internet, and once something is retweeted, shared, and blogged a handful of times, it takes on a life of its own.  Even those publications that pride themselves on setting the standard for real news look to Twitter and Facebook for trends, and routinely include tweets (and not just those of the President-Elect) in their news articles.

Once the genie is out of the bottle—once a fake quotation or even just a mistaken “fact” has gained enough traction online—there’s no way to prevent it from spreading, or to stop people from believing it.  And the next thing you know, a man is traveling from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and walking into a pizza parlor with a rifle to search its kitchen for tunnels where children are supposedly being held for use as sex slaves in a child-abuse ring run by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

And no, this is not fake news.  (The man with the rifle, not the sex-slave ring, lest there be any doubt to which part I am referring.)  A North Carolina man really did walk into a D.C. pizza parlor on December 4, and even fired two shots to encourage customers and staff to leave, the better to conduct his “investigation” in peace.  And the fake news story that led to the man’s pilgrimage had been retweeted during the general election by Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Donald Trump’s choice for national-security advisor, and retweeted many times by Flynn’s Twitter followers, some of whom also shared it to Facebook.  You can see the reasoning (or at least part of the reasoning): If a respected retired lieutenant general retweeted this “story,” there must be something to it, right?

But respected retired lieutenant generals are people (and politicians), too, and like the rest of us—including the gatekeepers of real news in the mainstream media (like those at the Washington Post who seriously reported the rumor that Hillary Clinton’s fainting spell at the 9/11 memorial service may have been the result of poisoning by Russian operatives)—they can let the wish become the father of the thought.  The flip side of our widespread cynicism concerning political elites is all too often an expansive credulity when it comes to stories about any elites whom we particularly despise.  (In the wake of the December 4 shooting, Michael Flynn’s son, who had previously worked as Flynn’s chief of staff and for whom the Trump transition team had attempted to get security clearance, continued to promote the false “Pizzagate” story on Twitter.  After the younger Flynn suggested on Twitter that the shooting was a hoax designed to discredit those who had promoted Pizzagate, he was fired from the Trump transition team on December 6.)

That combination of cynicism and credulity may explain, at least in part, the anecdotal evidence that suggests that there was more “fake news” targeting Hillary Clinton and her campaign in 2016 than there was targeting Trump and his.  It’s certainly true that more stories involving Clinton gained traction.  Much of this has been blamed on the “echo chamber” effect of social media.  While people may start their social circles on Twitter and especially Facebook by friending or following their real-life friends and acquaintances, which allows for some initial diversity of social and political views, they tend to expand those circles by finding others (or being found by others) who share similar opinions and views.  From there, especially on Facebook, the algorithm takes over, and people routinely discover stories in their feed that are similar to the ones they and their friends have previously liked.  And if they like or repost the new stories, the funnel continues to narrow.  Those who arrive at a fake news story because someone they respect and admire (such as a retired lieutenant general) tweeted or posted it are more likely to believe, like, and repost it, and thus unintentionally to signal to Facebook that they want more of the same.

In other words, the artificiality of social networks creates and reinforces the echo chamber.  But is that really all that different from certain “real life” social networks—such as the newsrooms at mainstream newspapers and TV networks?  No one in the business argues anymore that the mainstream media doesn’t exhibit a liberal bias.  And those few outside of the media who still try to explain away entire newsrooms with an 80- to 90-percent record of voting Democratic by claiming that the mainstream media has a “bias toward reality” simply confirm the suspicions of those who wonder why “reality” would, after several millennia, suddenly lurch to the left.

And so cynicism about liberal elites spills over into cynicism about the media elites who vote for them, and the echo chamber of the mainstream newsroom helps create a very different kind of echo chamber among those who distrust the mainstream media, one in which cynicism about political and media elites turns into credulity concerning all those who seem also to mistrust the political and media elites.  Inside the latter echo chamber, the fact that a fake news story doesn’t appear in the New York Times or the Washington Post or on CNN is not evidence of its falsity but a reason to suspect that it may be true.

There is no easy solution to the problem of fake news.  Structural solutions—Facebook algorithm changes, Google flagging sites for having “knowingly” promulgated fake news—open up potential avenues for abuse, and that very possibility, even in the absence of any evidence of such abuse, will just reinforce the echo chamber.  The only way out is individually—a healthy skepticism about any “news” one may read—but even there, the signs are not promising.

After Chronicles published the fake quotation from Janet Reno, I spent five or six years handling requests from readers for confirmation of the quotation, even though we had published a correction in a later issue.  A few of those readers desperately wanted the quotation to be true, but they felt compelled to confirm it before distributing it to others.  Most, however, had attempted to confirm it for themselves, found that they could not, and decided that they should let us know.

The behavior of both groups seems almost quaint today.  Much of the truly fake news that is distributed on Twitter and Facebook is simply retweeted or reposted by people who haven’t bothered to read much (if at all) beyond the headline, much less attempted to verify its veracity.  And those of us who routinely but gently point out false information posted by those in our networks are less likely to receive thanks for having done so than to get a cold shoulder—or, all too often, attempts at justification that quickly descend into belligerence.

In the end, the real problem that lies at the root of fake news is a disregard for the truth—an ideological frame of mind that sees “news” as nothing but a tool in political battles.  The mainstream media have taken a side, while denying that they fix the facts to their preferred narrative; why shouldn’t those who stand up for everything that’s under attack not do the same?

Those who cannot answer that question will be stuck in the echo chamber forever. 

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