Thomas Chatterton Williams recently wrote:
A very strange thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is the degree to which so many writers and editors at so many ostensibly mainstream institutions seem to proceed from the premise that there is no possibly valid or compelling way to be conservative. I am myself liberal but this is crazy and deeply harmful to the culture and politics of the county.
I spend very little time concerning myself with contemporary politics or political opinion writers. Like with the K-cars and the Mustang IIs of the 80s, I simply acknowledge that they don’t measure up to the performance of their predecessors and are mere shadows of what once was. Odd that, because Morning In America was a pretty good time for me.
It wasn’t until after, but it wasn’t 9/11 alone that made me second-guess my Progressive political upbringing. It was a number of things I’m sure I remembered better a decade ago. Subscribers, see below. Yet I certainly recall a time when conservatism, as mysteriously opaque as it was to me then, still was considered reasonable and logical. I understand why Progressives now think conservatism today is neither reasonable and logical and that is because both parties have succumbed to cults of personality and their respective Nomenklatura. Americans really have no idea of the names and ideas of the people who run the government. Do you know who Jeff Zients is? When is the last time his name was in the news? Americans know only the celebrity pols, and everything is heaped upon the bonfires of their personalities as pundits read the smoke signals.
But it wasn’t always so. We once hashed through substantial ideas with seriousness, respect and a sense of humility and even humor. Not the snarky sort, Jane you ignorant slut, but of the sort that made modest people smile with the confidence that their representatives and critics were not hacks, flacks and automatons. Isn’t it strange how much people now expect from AI and how little they expect from each other?
When I created and sustained the Conservative Brotherhood in the then booming Blogosphere, we centered our talk around several organizing virtuous principles. It was, in fact, the only way we could maintain any unity. Race alone did not suffice, neither did party lines. We were a group of thoughtful folks taking the American political scene seriously. Since that band broke up I haven’t kept track of most of them. I know they are still around, yet few have the writing bug as deeply as it has infected me. Still I know that a time could come again when political life won’t be so trivial, thin and shrill. More Americans will have the opportunity to engage as genuinely as we did. Or we might all go down in flames, who knows?
My optimism is grounded in a supreme faith in human imagination and inspiration - things that are decidely absent from a lot of corporate employment, news reporting, political analysis and academic publishing. Oh, did I mention intellectual integrity? Yeah we need a bit more of that.
Pride, Patriotism, Family, Industry, Piety, Liberty, Pluralism.
These were our organizing principles. I’m still a nationalist, I think the prospects of nationhood are good, even in a global context. The fate of most of us comes from the quality of life in our cities and I think we understand when a mega-city gets out of control. That’s certainly been the case in California. The nation sets the tone and the federal framework should be lighter. In short with regard to power and authority, decentralize until it breaks culture then centralize until it works but doesn’t capture. We have some extremes on both ends. But yes I’m still a patriot.
My black cultural pride is too obscure to be a rally point. It’s very particular, rather in the way French Horn majors at Julliard know their mates. So I say I just love music and I try to play. Pride comes before hubris, and I really have no time or desire for that.
‘Family First’ is still an operating principle, and I think this is where I am most often at odds with liberals and conservatives both. It’s a declaration of priorities apropos a peasant view of the world. There is a serious and consequential thing called a broken home and when society politicizes that incorrectly, its quite destructive. We have broken culture in our decentralization and marginalization of families. The very fact that we have to say ‘traditional’ families demonstrates what’s broken. The very fact that we attempt to legislate morality and means-test multiculturalism demonstrates the poison and rot. I’m kind of getting to the point at which I’m angry that I get applause for my 30 year marriage. Then again, I have to announce it.
Industry should be self-explanatory and yet the zeitgeist hovers around the fate of oligarchs, billionaires, UBI and neoliberal taxation. What a shit-show. With grade inflation and obeisity I think we absolutely demonstrate our contempt for industry, thrift, hard-work and merit. With an Ivy Cabal of Zucks running around breaking things and driving cars that cost a quarter million dollars, we have completely lost the plot. Since I’m nationalist, I’m blaming an overzealous globalism for a loss of a domestic set of industries that would make working families thrive. I don’t understand how people who blather on about ‘inequality’ do the exact wrong things about it.
Piety is served by intellectual integrity of the sort I once described in the difference between Religion, Technology, Science and Magic. Two of those are humble and aim for inspired discovery and two of those are willful and aim for dazzling subjugation. I’m still pious.
Since I believe most Americans still would rather have liberty than luxury, I’m only distrubed by what they actually squabble over. And since I understand, sadly, that perhaps as with the American Revolution, only 3% of citizen / colonists fought when it came down to it, that our competent officer corps may be the geniuses that save the republic. Yes there are outstanding attorneys and professionals of other stripes who will defend us. But the apparent ease with which we have lost the plot of the Humanities, I find myself horrified sometimes. So yeah. Liberty is threatened. But here, I think we all know it.
The trick of course is to get Americans to find these challenged virtues championed in their individual hearts and minds rather than as political partisans and social activists. I say you should think carefully about those creatives whose work you consume.
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