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.

Losing Our Minds

Most years, writing a column that is due on October 15 for an issue cover-dated December, which will go to press six days before a general election but appear in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands about two weeks after, would be a recipe for frustration.

This year, it strikes me as an opportunity.

I have never had a dog in this presidential election.  That has been true for a long time; the first time I voted in a presidential election was in 1988, and that was the last time I voted for a major-party candidate.  By the time President George H.W. Bush had proved himself “worse than unimaginative—merely silly, often” (as Russell Kirk wrote in his memoir, The Sword of Imagination), I had come to regret my folly.

In 1992, if I could have been bothered to go through the hassle of registering to vote in Washington, D.C. (where I was pursuing my graduate studies), I would have cast my ballot for Ross Perot (though if Perot, the only presidential candidate in recent memory who could make John McCain look stable, had had any chance of winning, I probably would have abstained).

In 1996, 2000, and 2004, I voted for third-party candidates: Ralph Nader in the first and last; Pat Buchanan in between.  And (as I write) with 20 days left before November 4, I still have not decided which third-party candidate to waste my vote on.  (Since, in his current run, Ralph Nader has explicitly endorsed both abortion and homosexual “marriage,” I will not be able to mark the ballot for him even as a protest vote.)

Thus, with each election cycle for the past 20 years, I have come closer, one might say, to practicing the supposedly dispassionate political science that I studied as an undergraduate.  And I have come to view the behavior of most voters—at least, most avowedly partisan voters—as something akin to mental illness.

This is not exactly an original thought, though most who have entertained it speak of “cognitive dissonance” or compare voter loyalty to people’s irrational (used in a nonpejorative sense) attachment to a sports team, or even to their families.

But as I look at the increasingly irrational (used pejoratively now) behavior of many partisan voters, I think that a more pointed label, such as mental illness (or perhaps schizophrenia or merely insanity), is called for.

It is not simply that, say, McCain voters so easily accept the claim that Barack Obama wanted to abandon U.S. soldiers in Iraq when he voted against continued funding of the war, provided that the bill was not tied to a timeline for withdrawal, yet seem unable to process the fact that John McCain (as Joe Biden rightly pointed out in the vice-presidential debate) also voted against continued funding, when it was tied to a timeline.

In other words, the disagreement between the two candidates was over setting a timeline for withdrawal, not over continued funding of the war.  Yet many McCain voters seemed unable to see it—just as many Obama voters who oppose the war have taken Obama’s vote as evidence that he will end the war tout de suite upon taking the presidential oath of office.  (And yes, he will do it in French, and correct French too, dammit, because that’s just the kind of cosmopolitehomme he is!)

No, the inability to discern the real issue at stake in such disagreements between the candidates is not the sign of mental illness.  It is the willingness—or, perhaps more accurately, the determination or even eagerness—of otherwise decent people to let such disagreements (and mistaken disagreements at that) tear apart families and friends.

Up through my teen years, my father’s family (those who still lived in West Michigan) would gather almost every Sunday at my grandparents’ house for dinner.  Before the mashed potatoes had made a complete circuit of the massive dining-room table, the political arguments would begin.  And, especially in an election year, they would become quite heated, to the point where a look of fear or panic might even begin to creep into the eyes of the women and young children.

My grandfather and his second-eldest son were devout Democrats; my father was a Republican; my youngest uncle was a conservative turned increasingly libertarian.  (At holidays or during the summer when relatives came to visit from Indiana, other political shades were thrown into the mix, new alliances were formed, and the political tides would turn in different directions.)  The debates would rage throughout dinner, pausing only for my grandfather to complain that “that woman” (my grandmother, seated at the other end of the table) had once again given him the only slice of cherry pie with a pit in it.

At some point, long after dinner concluded and the men and boys had retired to the living room to play euchre while the women and girls cleared the table and washed the dishes, the argument would finally draw to a close.  Depending on the topic being debated at that point, my grandfather might pull out this splendid non sequitur that he wielded as if it were the right bower: “The only Republican I ever voted for was Richard Nixon, and look what they did to him!”

I shudder to think how many years these weekly increases in blood pressure stripped off of the back ends of the lives of people I loved.  My grandfather, who died in February 1992, might still be alive today had dinner-table conversation never strayed from the weather.

And yet, every week, we assembled at the same table again.  The conversation might pick up where it had left off (“Speaking of Richard Nixon . . . ”), but at least it continued.

Two decades later, I know of dozens of families where the conversation has stopped.  I have had people tell me during this election cycle that they are glad that they have moved away from their families and no longer have to see them, because they cannot put up with the things that their fathers say about Barack Obama, or the e-mails that their sisters-in-law forward them making fun of Sarah Palin.

Maybe, when it all comes to an end, these families will sit down together for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, bow their heads in prayer, and recognize, even for just one brief moment, that being a part of a family is far more important than being just one of 120 million votes cast for John McCain or Barack Obama.

Maybe, but I doubt it.  I know people who are still not talking because “You Republicans stole the election from Al Gore” or “You Democrats wanted to pull out of Iraq and surrender to the terrorists.”  The unreality of national politics, including the distortions and outright lies that candidates tell about each other, have somehow become more real to them than their own flesh and blood.

What is grasping at phantasms while rebelling against reality if not mental illness?

As if on cue, I have just received an e-mail from my colleague Chris Check with a link to a FOX News story from October 14 headlined “Father Secretly Names Newborn Sarah McCain Palin.”  The five short paragraphs read like something out of The Onion: Mark Ciptak “said he named his third child after John McCain and Sarah Palin  ‘to get the word out’ about the campaign.”  That makes perfect sense: After all, how would the Republican presidential ticket receive enough publicity in these final weeks of the campaign unless a father named his daughter after the candidates rather than, say, after his mother or grandmothers?

“‘I took one for the cause,’ he said.”  (No, in fact, his newborn daughter did, and she had no choice in the matter.)  “‘I can’t give a lot of financial support for the (McCain/Palin) campaign.  I do have a sign up in my yard, but I can do very little.’”

Even more astounding, however, is Mr. Ciptak’s revelation that he took this action against the wishes of his wife, who wanted to name the girl Ava Grace.  “I don’t think she believes me yet . . . It’s going to take some more convincing.”

FOX News, of course, shows no interest whatsoever in what might happen to the Ciptaks’ marriage and their three children if he fails to convince his wife that the deception was worth it.  But why should they?  Were the Cip­taks to wind up in divorce court, the result might be two households in which FOX News is on the TV 24/7, rather than just one.

Politics today is big business—not just for the politicians, but for the news media.  For all the talk about the “need to unite” and “to come together as a nation,” politicians and the media profit from division—not simply at the national level every four or two years, but every day, among families and neighborhoods and churches.

At this point, you might expect me to say that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more civilized discourse is possible, that as a nation we can return to the heated debates around my grandparents’ dining-room table.  But I don’t think we can.  This destruction of everything that matters in life is the logical end of modern democratic politics, which is built on removing all that stands between the “individual” and the state.

Despite our political differences, my family continued to gather around my grandparents’ table because we were a family, and that is what has changed.  Modern politics has accelerated the destruction of families, but the destruction of families has also helped make modern politics into a form of mental illness.

One sunny but cool day in early fall, during the first year or two of the George H.W. Bush administration, I drove out to visit my grandparents before heading off to graduate school.  As my grandfather and I sat in the front yard, our conversation trailed off.  Then, unexpectedly, Grandpa told me that he thought that the President was doing a pretty good job so far.

“That’s the problem,” I said.  “People like you are happy with what he’s doing.”

I simply meant that I could understand why a lifelong Democrat was more pleased with the Bush administration than a budding paleoconservative was.  Young and full of myself, I couldn’t hear how those words must have sounded to his ears.  He simply looked at me, a small, sad smile on his face, and didn’t say a word.

Looking back, I don’t know whether he even believed what he had said about President Bush; but I realize now that it was something that he thought I would like to hear.  His silence afterward, in such marked contrast to years of heated debates, was his way of letting me know that some things are more important than politics.

I wish I had learned that lesson a little earlier.  Between that day, when I suffered my bout of temporary insanity, and my grandfather’s death not all that long after, I don’t remember discussing politics with him ever again.

In Confessions of an Original Sinner, John Lukacs writes that, in the 1950’s, his diocesan newspaper regularly reminded readers that “The family that prays together stays together.”  But, he asks, “isn’t the converse of that even more true?”

Now, when one of my friends or relatives starts rattling off the latest FOX News talking point, I find myself keeping quiet, a small (but not sad) smile on my face.  McCain, Obama, Biden, Palin, Democrats, Republicans—none of it is more important than the years I spent around my grandparents’ table, or the time my children will spend around theirs.  A big bowl of mashed potatoes does wonders to ward off mental illness. 

First published in the December 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I've Got a Secret

Back in November and December, while Republicans across the country were writing letters, calling in to talk radio, and even taking to the streets to protest Al Gore's attempt to steal the election in Florida, their fellow party members in Rockford remained strangely silent. They must have found it disquieting when the Bush campaign kept insisting that machines are more accurate than humans. After all, it's been a staple of local Republican belief for almost 20 years that Rockford Democrats have manipulated computerized counting machines to steal at least three of the last five mayoral elections.

In theory, at least, it's possible. As James J. Condit argued in Chronicles four years ago ("A House Without Doors," Views, November 1996), the same technology that simplifies the process of counting votes also makes it much easier to steal an election. Since computerized counting is conducted at central locations, ballots must be moved, which means there's an opportunity to substitute pre-punched ballots for the ones voters actually used. If that fails, the counting machines' computers can be programmed to return the desired result.

While I have been a poll-watcher during one local election and have observed the vote counting after another, I've seen no evidence that local Democrats have actually tampered with either ballots or counting machines. But I am convinced of the truth of a related conspiracy theory: Most politicians in Rockford are heavily influenced by a small group of public contractors and real-estate developers. Their own campaign-finance disclosure statements on the Illinois Board of Elections website (www.elections.state.il.us) provide plenty of evidence.

But if everyone here in Rockford has heard that the last two mayors have simply been pawns of monied interests (and everyone has), then why have the Democrats won the last five mayoral elections in a city routinely described as Republican? The simple answer could be that local voters just don't care.

There may, however, be more at work here. When most people—in Rockford or elsewhere—hear the word "conspiracy," they think of a cabal aimed at overturning the will of the people. That's certainly the way popular literature, movies, and TV shows portray conspiracies. But if you were trying to gain power (or wealth) in the modern world, why would you set yourself against the people? It's much easier to present yourself as their champion. Give them what they want, and they will return the favor.

Both Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and the Cigarette-Smoking Man on The X-Files understood this. So, too, did the interests that backed Rockford Democratic mayoral candidate John McNamara in 1981. A blue-collar town heavily dependent on the aerospace industry, Rockford had been hit hard by the recession of the late 70's and early 80's. Unemployment was over 20 percent; factories were closing; new businesses weren't taking up the slack. Rockford was on its way to becoming a ghost town.

Helped along by the Reagan military buildup (which revitalized Rockford's industries), John McNamara gave the people what they wanted—economic recovery—while enriching his benefactors through a series of public-works projects (knocking down Rockford's historic buildings and erecting Soviet-style ones), tax breaks, and zoning changes that encouraged private development. By the time McNamara left office in 1989, Rockford's economy had not only rebounded but added a service sector (read: strip malls and chain restaurants). The public-works contractors and real-estate developers who had supported him were firmly entrenched, and he was able to handpick his successor: our current mayor. Democrat Charles Box. Box has nurtured the city's relationship with McNamara's benefactors, and McNamara himself became president of the parent company of the chief public-works contractor, Rockford Blacktop.

Because many of us don't like the intimate connection between Rockford Blacktop and our city government, we often forget that most people in Winnebago County don't mind as long as the roads that Blacktop builds make it easier for them to drive from the vinyl-sided ranch houses they bought from Gambino Realtors to the strip malls that Sunil Puri's First Rockford Group built. In other words, those who supported John McNamara in 1981 have triumphed—not by working against the people, but by recognizing what they wanted and using that knowledge to gain power and wealth. (If government weren't involved, libertarians would undoubtedly proclaim this a stunning example of the virtues of the free market.)

That doesn't change the fact that a small elite dominates the government of Rockford and Winnebago County for its own enrichment, but it changes the political dynamic. Those of us who recognize what's wrong here in Rockford can't count on setting it right by winning elections—particularly since politicians in both parties realize which side their bread is buttered on. Our next mayoral election (in April) will pit a Democratic state representative with strong ties to the McNamara/Box machine against a Republican businessman who shares a campaign- finance chairman—and several key supporters—with the current Democratic mayor. What's the point of having two parties?

At its root, the degeneration of modern democracy is a cultural problem, not a political one. Once political power is vested in the people, all that stands between oligarchy and freedom is the virtue of the masses. In the 18th and 19th centuries, "popular" revolutions failed because the revolutionaries didn't realize the extent to which the people were still attached to throne and altar. But now, the throne is occupied by the likes of Bill Clinton and the altar is attended by Jesse Jackson, and Americans don't mind. They may say they do; they may even think they do; but their actions speak louder than their words. Bill Clinton could have awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Prince of Lies, and he would still have left office with a 70-percent approval rating. (Come to think of it, he did award the medal to the Reverend Jackson.)

So why do local Republicans continue to believe that the only way Mayors McNamara and Box could have won power was by stealing elections? The trouble is not that they can't see the forest for the trees, but that they mistake one tiny leaf for the whole of human existence. Yes, many who desire power are corrupt; yes, sometimes they break the law to achieve their ends; but often, they don't have to. Why overthrow governments, stuff ballot boxes, or manipulate counting machines when you can achieve your ends simply by saying what the people think they want to hear, while doing what the people actually want done?

At the end of George W. Bush's four or eight years as President, Roe v. Wade will still be the law of the land, more states will have recognized homosexual "marriages," more American businesses will have moved overseas, more women and homosexuals will have joined the military, more Americans will have died while killing innocent civilians in countries we have no business attacking, multiculturalism and bilingualism will have increased their hold on American education (remember, Pater's Department of Education first dreamed up Goals 2000), and immigration—both illegal and legal—will have increased. And here in Rockford, no matter which party wins the next mayoral election, Rockford Blacktop will still pave our streets, Sunil Puri will still level farmland and forests to put up strip malls and vinyl-sided ranches, and "Dr." Richard Ragsdale will still murder babies. Because, in the end, that's what the people want.

History is indeed made by men in a room somewhere; but in the modern era, those men have found that it's easier to control the course of events by adding on to the room and letting more folks inside. Soon—perhaps already—those of us on the outside will be in the minority.

***

Psst. Hey, you—the guy at the keyboard. Your conclusions may he right, hut your theory's all wrong. Wanna know the truth about the presidential election? It was all rigged from the beginning—has been, in fact, since at least 1988. That's why George Senior was so smug in those early primaries, and Bob Dole was so frustrated. He knew he couldn't win; wasn't supposed to. And 1992? Give me a break. No sitting president could run such a bad campaign unless he were trying to throw the election. 

You see, it was all a setup. The Skull and Bones know that the American people are a bunch of suckers who can't get past the appearance of a two-party system. What better way to hide the fact that they're pulling the strings than to remove the pachyderm puppet from the stage once in a while, and replace him with a jackass marionette? Clinton's not a Bonesman, but he is Yale Law, so he knows the score. This year, however, it was time to bring the presidency back home. So they crowned Dubya almost a year before the first primary and forced the only man who represented a threat out of the GOP and into a dead-end third party. The stage was set: They knew Al Gore would play along—after all, he'd picked a graduate of Yale and Yale Law as his running mate. (Surely you didn't think Bill Buckley took such a shine to Joe Lieberman because of his religious values?) 

But then the Boners made a mistake: They thought it would be fun to have a real horse race, but they cut it too close in Florida. Tired of playing second fiddle to his father, to Clinton, to Tipper, to Joe, and now to some smug son of a Bonesman—Al grabbed the bow and started calling the dance. But he forgot one thing: Clarence Thomas. Yale Law. (You didn't think George Senior nominated him just because of his race, did you?) The poor sap didn't have a chance. 

Funny thing is, it all worked out better for the Bonesmen this way. Al couldn't let the American people know just what he was fighting against—most of them would have thought he was nuts. And now, all those conspiracy theorists who used to think that Skull and Bones or the CFR or the Trilateral Commission or the Rockefellers or the Bilderbergers might be calling the shots have fallen right into line. After all, the Democrats tried to steal the election, and the Republicans would never do that, right? Next time, the Bonesmen may not even need to swap marionettes. 

Anyway, that's the real reason those Republicans in Rockford were so quiet during the Florida recount: THEY KNEW. 

Pass it on. 

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

One Moment in Time

“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over a hell, conceivably.  There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation.  Most of them are private.”

Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building.  Turner School, built in 1898, is no Balgrummo Lodging, the Scottish manor house that is the setting of Russell Kirk’s Lord of the Hollow Dark, and not simply because the massive brick-and-stone structure sits right in the heart of Rockford, Illinois, about as far geographically and culturally as you can get from the suburbs of Edinburgh.

Still, as I draw near to the building for the first time, the words play over and over again in my mind.  For in Turner School, as in Balgrummo Lodging, unspeakable horrors—indeed, ritual murders—have taken place, and the closer we come, the more strongly I feel the possibility of unavenged souls trapped in the place of their bodies’ destruction—and the souls of some of their destroyers as well, returned here, years later, to the site of their sin.  If there is such a thing as a Hell on earth (and theologians as late as St. Alphonsus Ligouri have argued that Hell is, indeed, a physical place), Turner School, I can have no doubt, is one.

Over the past eight-and-a-half years, I have passed by here countless times, but always in a car.  Driving down Broadway, headed to a bookstore or restaurant, you cannot help but shudder as you pass, if you know what Turner School has become.  The moment, however, passes quickly, aided by the speed of Dr. Kirk’s “mechanical Jacobin.”  Only approaching by foot, and with the intent of being here, does the full weight of this place come to bear.

For Turner School is no longer a school but a victim, like the children it used to house, of America’s 50-year-long failed “experiment” in school desegregation.  Rockford suffered for 13 years (from 1989 to 2002) under a federal desegregation lawsuit whose educational and social effects will be felt for decades to come and which may, in fact, have destroyed this town.  And Turner School was there at the beginning, closed by the Rockford School Board in 1978 after parents, led by the courageous David Strommer (later, in the 1990’s, a school-board member and one of the fiercest opponents of desegregation, school consolidation, and judicial taxation), rose up against a plan to bus students from Turner to other schools to satisfy state “integration” guidelines.  In the end, the board decided it was simply easier to force the issue by shuttering the school and scattering the children to the wind.

In doing so, the board not only sacrificed the students then at Turner School to the gods of “progress” and “diversity” but offered up future generations to something even worse: The building now houses the Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic (N.I.W.C.), the euphemistic name attached to Rockford’s only abortuary.

Partisans of state-sanctioned murder, such as Planned Parenthood, like to portray the “procedure” as “safe” and “clinical,” performed as an “outpatient service” in “modern facilities.”  Fort Turner (as its owner, Wayne Webster, refers to the decommissioned school) gives the lie to the glowing description.

In the pro-death mythology, thousands of women died every year in back alleys across America until an “enlightened” Supreme Court, in 1973, overturned the laws of all 50 states regulating the barbaric “procedure.”  From the outside, however, Fort Turner has much in common with the alley to its east, where, as we walk down it, Aaron Wolf finds tattered porn magazines and empty liquor bottles.  The horrifying thought crosses both of our minds: Are children being conceived out here, only to be butchered inside?  At the very least, it seems likely that less “respectable” partisans of death—less respectable, that is, than politicians and doctors—may get a sick thrill from performing their own ritual acts so close to the gates of Hell, where even the mulberry trees in the fencerow refuse to bear fruit.

While the 50,000 or more children he has murdered over the past 30 years will never have names by which they can be remembered, the butcher of Fort Turner, “Dr.” Richard Ragsdale (I refuse to use his title without the inverted commas), will go down in history for his “contribution” to “a woman’s right to choose.”  Showing exquisite care for his “patients,” Ragsdale filed suit in 1988 to overturn an Illinois law that required “clinics” like N.I.W.C. to have operating rooms that meet hospital standards.  (Ragsdale was already operating out of Fort Turner by that point.)  Turnock v. Ragsdale, scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on December 5, 1989, was expected to provide the Court with an opportunity to revisit Roe v. Wade (or at least to clarify questions raised earlier that year in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services).  On November 22, however, the case was settled out of court, when the state of Illinois agreed to create a new class of lightly regulated abortion “clinics” (that just happened to include Ragsdale’s chamber of horrors at Fort Turner) and guaranteed the “right” to an abortion with essentially no restraints through the 18th week of pregnancy.

“Dr.” Ragsdale has privileges at two of the hospitals in town, SwedishAmerican and Rockford Memorial.  (St. Anthony’s does not let him in the door.)  As we walk back up the alley to Broadway and the front of Fort Turner, I wonder: Do any members of the board of either hospital ever pass by here?  If so, what do they think of the rubber chickens hanging in the gable windows, Wayne Webster’s sick slap at the pro-lifers who meet out on the sidewalk every week to pray?  Or the signs in other windows: “What the Hell You Looking Up Here For?”; “PROTECTED BY MR. SMITH & MR. WESSON”; and, just to show his concern for his tenant’s “patients,” “BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS AND WILD WOMEN”?  (Previous signs were even worse: “Jesus loves these braindead a--holes,” “These Bible-thumpers suffer from lack-o-nookie,” “Free coat hangers to picketer’s wives and mothers,” “God bless these horny old sweat-hogs.”)  Or the mocking little shrine Webster has created of items—a crucifix, a nun doll, a picture of Pope John Paul II—left behind by pro-lifers?  Do they know that Webster’s own son went to Turner School, where now 25 to 70 children are slaughtered every week?  Do they even care?

The answer is obvious.  The “pro-life” Republican candidate for mayor in 2001, Denny Johnson, sits on the board of SwedishAmerican.  When I questioned him on a radio talk show during the campaign, he gave the standard dodge—Ragsdale doesn’t perform abortions in our hospital—and dismissed my suggestion that he take a pledge that, as mayor, he would use zoning regulations to close down Fort Turner.  (The idea, he admitted, had never even crossed his mind.)

Webster and Ragsdale are both living proof that abortion is not simply a “service” that someone can “provide” while being otherwise normal and well adjusted.  Webster has confronted pro-lifers outside of Fort Turner wearing a devil costume; he once hired someone to pass out helium-filled condoms to pro-lifers’ children.  On killing days, he broadcasts loud music and other sounds from loudspeakers mounted on the outside of the building, to drown out the voices of the faithful praying the rosary.  Ragsdale and his wife, Debbie DeMars, were charged in September 1994 with four counts of producing and distributing child pornography, after they took film to a local developer that included pictures of their three-year-old foster daughter in suggestive poses, wearing a black-lace thong, with her genitals exposed.  When Ragsdale and his lawyer claimed that the charges were politically motivated, Winnebago County’s Republican “pro-life” state’s attorney, Paul Logli, quickly cut a deal in which, in exchange for the charges being dropped, DeMars signed a statement admitting that the photos “were of an inappropriate nature and could constitute a violation of state law.”  (If the photos “could constitute a violation of state law,” isn’t it the duty of the state’s attorney to prosecute?)  State child-protection services apparently regarded the situation more seriously than Logli did: The girl was removed from the home and never returned to Ragsdale and DeMars.

Walking down the sidewalk on Broadway, I understand clearly for the first time the deepest dimensions of this battle.  If they knew where the gates of Hell were, would the faithful not keep constant vigil outside, offering—as in a scene from a medieval fresco—rosaries as lifelines to those being dragged down into the pit by leering demons?  And these doors—once the girls’ entrance to Turner School—are truly a gate to Hell.

Most pro-lifers speak reflexively of abortion as “the destruction of innocent human life.”  Would that it were.  Looking at the doors, I begin to understand the frustration and the horror that must have overwhelmed Fr. John Earl when, in September 2000, he smashed his car into Fort Turner and set about destroying the inside with an ax, before Webster, who lives in his house of horrors, convinced him to stop by firing two shotgun blasts into the wall.  For Father Earl remembers the words of the Psalmist: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”  The children sacrificed on Richard Ragsdale’s altar of progress bear no personal guilt, but they have inherited Adam’s sin.  That is why abortion is perhaps the most perfect weapon Satan has ever devised: Deprived of Baptism, the souls of these children may never find true rest.  That—more so than the death and destruction of the body—is the true horror of the act.

Father Earl, by his reception of Holy Orders, is an alter Christus, and perhaps he thought he was acting as such.  Some acts in salvation history, however, are only to be performed once, and Christ Himself descended into Hell, throwing the gates wide.  Our struggles are out in this world, not inside the doors of Fort Turner.

Some abortionists undoubtedly understand what they accomplish when they destroy an unborn child; does Richard Ragsdale understand as well?  We can only pray that he does, because then there is the possibility that his victims are, in some sense, martyrs, and that their souls may thus find rest.

In Kirk’s novel, 12 disciples gather at Balgrummo Lodging, where their leader, Apollinax, promises to grant them a “Timeless Moment”—an experience to be gained through the murder of a mother and her fatherless child.  In the midst of their act of depravity, Apollinax arranges for them, too, to die; and he knows that he will have created the only kind of Timeless Moment man can gain through his actions alone: the inverse of the Beatific Vision; an eternity in Hell.

Confused and beguiled by the lies of the god of progress, the prince of this world, the women who enter the gates of this hell, if they emerge again, may, in time and through the prayers of the faithful, come to recognize and—more importantly—repent of their sin.  And, in time, Richard Ragsdale and Wayne Webster will pass on, and Fort Turner may once again lie vacant, except for those souls trapped in a Timeless Moment within its walls—and possibly those other souls who, having repented, are graciously granted the ability, after their death, to continue, in time, to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.

“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over a hell, conceivably.  There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation.”

First published in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.