Thoughts on “The Past Is a Future Country. The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution,” Part 1: My Awakening

Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
Weak men create bad times, and
Bad times create strong men.

The Past Is a Future Country. The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution
Edward Dutton & J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles
Societas, 2022

The end is nigh …

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Part I: My Awakening

The world is falling apart: a simple anecdote.

My family lives in a large exurb outside of a major American city. Our town is sizable — it is both economically and demographically diverse. It is also very safe. Across the United States, there are similar towns outside of every major city in that it represents a middle point — somewhere in between rich and hoity-toity towns and towns that are depressed and dangerous. It is firmly a middle-class town albeit with sizable pockets of poverty, the latter phenomenon exacerbated by a large and recent infusion of illegal immigrants. Our children, like most, play youth sports. One of the town fields is located near one of these pockets of poverty that is mostly comprised of government subsidized housing. On a random Sunday afternoon last year, one of our children played in a sports contest on that field — the only people watching were the parents and families of the participants. Close to the field was the thing that is both the bane and salvation of every sports parent: a portable toilet (or “Porta Potti”). On this otherwise unremarkable day, a swarm of fifteen or so minority children — aged between ten to fifteen — emerged from the housing development and began hitting the Porta Potti with an aluminum baseball bat every time an unfortunate parent used it. It was clear that this was a type of dangerous game to these children — something they had done before — as they wildly guffawed with each strike of the bat. I can only imagine what the experience was for the parent inside of the thing. The field was big enough such that there were not enough people around it to dissuade the “gang” — after all, no one wants to watch a sporting event near the Porta Potti. My wife and I looked on in disbelief as we watched this happen from a distance to a few unsuspecting parents. Eventually, I walked over to the Porta Potti and stood a kind of silent guard over it for the duration of the game. The “gang” was most unhappy, and I thought it possible that the next target for the baseball bat might be me. Other than scowling and aggressive glances, however, my presence next to the Porta Potti ended that afternoon’s hijinks.

On the way home from the event, the reality of such behavior dismayed my wife and me. Perchance I am overstating it, but there was a feral and dehumanized aspect to these children in the way that they took glee in terrorizing people in vulnerable positions. This was removed from childish antics by kind, not degree. There was something so unseemly about it that it felt a little like Western civilization had cracked in the manner of something like Clockwork Orange. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have never looked at our town the same way after that experience. Parenthetically, it fits together with a noticeably increasing baser and more imbecilic feature of many of the people of the community in which I live. Without any hyperbole, a walk in our local suburban mall today reveals a seeming degeneracy and indecency, culturally and physically, that has appeared as if one waved an instantaneous dysgenic magic wand.

It is an astounding thing.

Never in my life have I experienced directly “White Flight” — but I have a sense now of what motivated it in urban areas during the 1950s and 60s. I think that may change, and areas once considered immune from that phenomenon in the United States, like middle-class American suburbs, are now changing in a way that might mirror what happened in American urban areas some sixty years ago.

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One of the ironclad ideological laws that has spanned my entire political life in the United States is that the culture only moves in one direction — leftwards. As a political contrarian and conservative, I have watched American culture descend one depressing rung of debasement after another. Even as my adult life has spanned a full generation, I am amazed and confounded by how quickly and oppressively the culture has sunk into ever greater displays of depravity and lawlessness. Without belaboring it — because if what I am saying is not self-evident, no amount of elaboration will suffice — the culture has fully embraced a self-destructive nihilism and hedonism that is both appalling and unsustainable. Pornography, homosexuality, fornication, infidelity, feminism, abortion, transgenderism, atheism, blasphemy, and every other sort of political and social pathology are not merely tolerated — they are celebrated by a decadent elite who rules the government, media, entertainment, and educational establishments. Add to this an open and revolting attack on the historic stock of the country (i.e., Whites or ethnic Europeans) in which discrimination against them and their children is based solely on their ancestors’ alleged crimes. Alongside the grievance culture, the debased elites intentionally open the borders to Third World illegal immigration to “brown” the country as both a vote-gathering ploy and to punish the historic stock’s alleged colonialism and exploitation of the Third World. And ever more outrageously does it drift — yesterday’s shock (e.g., gay “marriage”) looks anodyne compared to today’s shock (e.g., “sex change” operations for children). Yesterday’s demand for a “color-blind” society has given way to today’s “Woke” demand for open borders, minority reparations, and institutionalized discrimination against White Americans. Yesterday’s plea for tolerance of sexual deviance has become today’s demand for categorical social conformity in favor of the basest forms of degeneracy. What comes next in this diabolical descent is hard to predict other than it will be something even more wicked or racially charged.

If the culture’s deterioration were not enough, the nihilistic guardians of this cultural destruction do everything in their incredible power to ostracize, censor, and destroy that segment of the population resistant to these cultural “innovations” and otherwise refuse to apologize for their continued existence. Simply stated, contrary views to the predominant liberal-left orthodoxy are to be crushed. We are the people famously mocked by then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 as follows: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” We are the people then-candidate Hilary Clinton labeled as the “deplorables.”  Our liberal masters deride vital social institutions like traditional marriage and family, stay-at-home mothers, regular church attendance, social homogeneity (and the preference for it), and patriotism as anachronisms of ignorance, oppression, superstition, and violence. We who celebrate our ancestors for the contribution they made as explorers, inventors, philosophers, theologians, artists, scientists, musicians, or warriors are derided as racists who dare to live without the burden of White Guilt that those same elites insist that we wallow in — in what amounts to a demand that we offer a never-ending apology to the automatically righteous “People of Color.” The moorings of Western Civilization — and all that binds it in blood, temperament, and history — are coming undone with shocking speed. As a lifelong political junkie and conservative, I am a firsthand witness to the dreadful collapse in real time.

It cannot go on like this much longer — and it will not.

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Words are difficult for me to summon to convey adequately the revulsion I hold for what my country and the broader West has become — I have become a stranger in a bizarre land. As the culture has hurtled downward into more disturbing displays of anti-social behavior, stupidity, and vice, my views have become more hardened as a result. I have evolved, as it were, into something more retrograde. It is a far place from where I started: my first political inklings were conventionally conservative and communitarian. At its heart, as a naïve young man, I wished to live in a country where law-abiding people got along, venerated the traditions of family and nation, and were inculcated with the virtues of thrift, hard work, and respect. These were the values my parents taught me. I anchored these communitarian hopes to a belief in the “American Way,” which was implicitly an endorsement of the classical liberal antecedents of Americanism itself. Thus, when I was young, I saw the American flag as embodying all these hopes. To put a bow on it: all of it can be summed up in my admiration for everything that President Ronald Reagan represented at the time. He was the personification of my convictions and my hope for the U.S. as a young man.

As the country has changed, so have I. My conventional conservatism gave way to something different as I grew older. The belief in classical liberalism as part of my patriotic fervor has waned; hence, my belief in Americanism as an ideology has all but vanished. I am more Catholic, more European, and more ancient in my political thinking now. Blood, soil, and faith animate my political thought much more than the promise of constitutional government; ergo, it is the people and their values and virtues — and not the system — that matters. Call me a “paleo-conservative,” “alt-right,” or the “dissident right,” but whatever pejorative I am called, it means that my communitarian impulses found a home in a recognition that I belong to a people (broadly European) with a long and storied shared culture and civilization — and a predicate for any successful society depends, at least in part, on the broad homogeneity and shared culture of that society. To put it more crudely, race, for the lack of a better word, became real to me as a part of my political thought. That, of course, makes me liable for the current political heresy of “racism” — especially when one considers that my view of race, broadly speaking, now includes a preference for political existence that is racially homogeneous as opposed to heterogeneous. Not only do I not think that “diversity is our strength,” I dare to think that diversity and pluralism, which are exponentially expanding under the rule of our present elites, are invitations to social chaos and declining levels of social trust and cohesion. To be sure, race is not an idol for me or a mechanism for supremacist thinking — nor could it ever be. Rather, I accept the notion that relative racial homogeneity is necessary for a functioning society. The collapse of American society is driven, at least in significant part, by increasing diversity and the dilution of America’s European stock. In present terms, there are few statements that are more retrograde than this one.

The crucible for my political evolution has been two-fold — first, I became a traditional Catholic years ago, which, by its nature, carries with it a thoroughgoing critique of Americanism as an extension and instantiation of Enlightenment thought. Second, I lived through — and am living through — the fever pitch of anti-White insanity right now. The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the general lawlessness that has continued since radicalized me on the question of race in a way that I neither sought nor invited. It is amazing what the concentrated hate of a people — White people — does to a constituent of those same people. It makes them inevitably come to terms with their corporate identity. Even if it had been something that I consciously refused to countenance for the entirety of my prior life, the issue found me. No, I am hated because I am White and so are others because they are White. I am bombarded with messages, subtle and not-so-subtle, that I belong to an especially odious category of human beings on account of my Whiteness. Setting aside that such an accusation is false and malicious, it has a boomerang effect. The net impact of all this hate that has rained down upon my kind — Whites — and how that hate has been mainstreamed over the last decade has forced a moral reckoning in my soul. It is as if I screamed in frustration that I am not ashamed of myself or my heritage — I am proud to be of European blood and, when pushed, I am proud of the immense accomplishments of my people. If I am “racist” because of these thoughts — if I am odious and retrograde for these opinions — my creation as such has only the haters to blame. Quite simply, without the vitriol against me or my kind, I would have never reached this point. I surmise that if I feel this way — even in the face of internal pressures of my mind to ignore it — others have been similarly changed by it as well. Our elites are creating a backlash White identity movement by their racism.

To be sure, traditional Catholicism is silent on the question of race or racial homogeneity. “Liberal Catholicism” spouts that pluralism and diversity are religious commandments, and liberal churchmen opine that support for “open borders” is not merely a political good but a moral command. Setting aside the theological discussion of Christianity’s position on the question of ethnos or race, suffice it to say from my perspective, the only affirmative obligation that Christianity imposes is the belief that God created all men in His image and likeness and all men share an equal dignity before Him and His Church. But that view, which is one to which I readily accede, does not command, as an article of faith, that the tribes and nations of the earth must meld into a single amorphous coffee-colored people, or, more pointedly, that the conscious preservation of a particular tribe or nation is, in and of itself, a sin. Not only do I not scruple over my preference for racial homogeneity as a predicate for social and political cohesion or even the comfort I feel with my own, but I also find the liberal supposition of my “sin” in preferring it to be laughable. Put more bluntly, I reject the moralizing on this topic from the same people who say I must celebrate sodomy or feminism. My views on race — as well as my views on about everything else — are the same as how intelligent Westerners believed a century ago; ergo, I worship like them, think like them, raise my family like them, and hope like them. Their way of life was self-evidently better than our way of life today even if we have more technological “bells and whistles.” If I am going to follow an example of life, better theirs than the degenerate leaders and culture of today.

Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel as if I have voluntarily made myself into a dinosaur. Not only have I rebelled against every liberalizing trend, but I have also rebelled against them with greater intensity as I have aged. While I am no genius, I am an educated and successful professional in the United States. Being a milquetoast liberal would have made my life “easier,” as it were, because I would have simply followed the current that everyone in my professional class appears to have done. I would have dutifully put pronouns in my LinkedIn profile like everyone else; I would have stopped having children at the conformist number of two and sent my erstwhile employable spouse back to work; I would have enjoyed the creature comforts that come with two professional incomes at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the developed world. And more to the point, I would not have had to continuously bite my tongue when liberal after liberal in my professional circles out-virtue-signaled each other with one notion more ridiculous than the other. I could have leaned into the smugness that comes with guilt-free first-class air travel because I assiduously recycle and hate Donald Trump. Yes, life would have been easier as a beta male and simp. Perhaps I would have had to become a vegetarian, but the quinoa salad is delicious.

But alas I could not stomach it. Now, this is not to say I am heroic — far from it. I do not advertise my culturally seditious thought — I am mostly silent in professional settings with respect to what I think. Indeed, my colleagues would be positively horrified if they knew the full depth of my opinions about them and the world. I have chosen a middle path of resistance: I work silently in their world and offer resistance where and when I can without overtly betraying just how subversive my thought really is. In the confines of my home — and in the confines of the pew before God — I am freer to be myself without the charade. With my friends of similar thinking, and there are many in my life, I am free to unload on what I think. And, of course, there is the outlet of writing, which is the apogee of my ability to disentangle my thoughts about the dystopic world I inherited from my parents.

All of this is said to underscore the point that notwithstanding the ease of accommodation — the allure of just getting along with the world in obedience to its dictates — I just cannot do it because I am a natural contrarian. I did not ask to be one, but I take comfort in it all the same. To put it in very trite terms, being on the winning team is less important to me than being on the right team. And, for whatever reason, God gave me the gumption to say the magic word of ‘no’ even if — and especially if — pressure is applied to me to force a ‘yes’. This obviously does not make me a saint, but it is the only way that I know to live.

The contrarian’s lot is a lonely one; whether he is culpable for it or not, there he is, by himself, against the world. While I have come to accept the social sentence of intellectual and moral isolation and disempowerment that comes from being a contrarian against today’s inexorable liberal tide, I do not relish it. That said, I have recently read something that promised relief from my isolation even if that relief would come during social chaos and political breakdown.