February 13, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
LATEST PUBLISHED ESSAY
at The Abbeville Institute: “The Idea of Equality in America”
Friends,
The installment of MY CORNER by
Boyd Cathey from February 10, 2019 [see:
https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2019/02/february-10-2019-my-corner-by.html ] has
been edited and is now published by The Abbeville Institute [February 13,
2019]. I believe it is now a stronger
piece, and that it makes a more complete, if brief case sharply questioning the
idea of equality as the founding principle—the “propositional idea”—on which
America was founded.
At the heart of the efforts to transform America into something
totally different from the republic established by the Framers, there is the shibboleth,
the sacralized totem, “the idea of equality” as a never-reached, always just
ahead objective to be achieved, if only—if
only—the forces of “reaction” and “opposition to Progress” can somehow be
dislodged, shamed, and destroyed. Like all talismans based on unrealizable but
fanatical desires, it has become the banner and standard under which all sorts
of mischief, devastation, and horror are justified and inflicted on what remains
of these United States and its citizens. And in America it has served,
certainly since 1865, as the guiding and overarching ideology for change and
transformation—and for the painful destruction of the old republic created with
such high hope at Philadelphia in 1787.
Until this realization is understood and measures taken to counter
and reverse it, we shall continue on our headlong plunge into historical impotence,
a once-great nation like other once-great nations, with grand aspirations which have now passed from the scene—the British (of the 19th
century), the Spanish (of the 16th century), and the Roman. But our
decline and passing will be largely of our own making, our own incredibly
demonic urge for national suicide, our own supine turning away from those
actual principles and that actual foundation that once inspired our
forefathers.
It is not a pretty sight to watch a nation die from a raging
internal cancer: if it declines and falls, better that it perish manfully on
the field of battle, heroically.
On our present course, our great-great grandchildren—if there are
any who remain—will remember the American citizenry of 2019 with anger and
regret. They will recall the corrupt political class, the insidiously vile
entertainment culture, our poisonous educational system, and they will curse
both the actions and the inaction of this generation.
The election of 2016 may have offered a brief respite, a kind of
opportunity to begin a reversal of course. But those invested in the onrushing
destruction and perversion, the forces of the Deep State in both political
parties and in our decadent and dominant culture, have reacted with fury. And
too many of “our” people still seem to be sleepwalking through time and space,
afraid to become involved.
On December 7, 1941, Americans were summoned to a united war effort
as never before. In 2019 there is no
Pearl Harbor, no great attack or immense disaster that exists to rouse the
unconcerned or convert the misled. Yet, even with the slight door left ajar by
the results of 2016, the hour is late, very late, and the issues never more
critical to address than at this moment.
And there are many false prophets in our midst: establishment-style
conservatives who share the basic precepts of their supposed opponents on the
far Left—Republicans who profess to be our representatives, but go along with
the Progressivist Left for fear of being labeled a “racist” or “sexist”—white
males who have been cajoled and cowed into believing that natural “maleness” is
somehow “toxic.”
With such defenders the cause of restoration is lost. Far better it is to look to Tucker Carlson
on primetime television (and read his superb book SHIP
OF FOOLS), and to read essays by
knowledgeable writers such as Paul Gottfried, Jack Kerwick, Anthony Esolen, Christopher
De Groot, Heather MacDonald, Jesse Merriam, and Amy Wax. And dip into sites like
Takimag (www.takimag.com), The
Abbeville Institute (www.abbeville.com),
Reckonin.com, The Agonist (www.agonist.org), Chronicles Magazine (www.chroniclesmagazine.org),
and others.
Here is my essay at The Abbeville Institute:
ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE
The Idea of
Equality in America
Boyd Cathey on Feb
13, 2019
Given
what is occurring in our society and culture, the ever increasing frenzy and
hysteria associated with what is called “the women’s movement” and the
ever-changing, always-increasing “racism test,” a review of the basics, a
return to and familiarity with our history, is incumbent on us if we are to
survive as a nation.
Yet,
the real problem is that American history, that is, American history that is
not completely warped by a predetermined progressivist ideology, hardly exists
today as a subject taught in most US colleges and universities. And on the high
school level, one is fortunate these days to find a teacher who is not
convinced that “race” and “sex” are the only factors that actually shaped our
nation, or who is not so cowed by political correctness that he or she doesn’t
fear to deviate from the new ironclad template.
This
disastrous situation in education should be self-evident to most observers of
academia, but it is not…and apparently not for many conservatives and
Republicans.
Wonder
why and how so many millions of Millenials now ardently believe extreme
socialism is the way of the future? Or, why an innocent college prank from
forty years ago brands you as a “racist” or “sexist” for life? Or, why most
students now believe the United States at its founding was dominated by “white
racists” who imposed a “toxic [white] masculinity” on these shores?
Look
to our schools and colleges.
Just
this past week I attended a legislative reception for North Carolina
legislators hosted by the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans. Outside,
surrounding the host facility were shouting and screaming demonstrators, mostly
Millenials, from several radical leftist groups located in central North
Carolina, including the Workers’ World
Party, the Hillsborough
Progressives Taking Action, and Antifa of North
Carolina.
Their
praxis is to attempt to shut down opponents of their world-view. On an
increasing number of college campuses the concept of “free speech” for those
who dissent from the far Leftist viewpoint is no longer acceptable. The Yale
[University] Daily News [February 8, 2019] now advocates spying on
“white boys” so that when these “privileged” males reach fame, the silly words
or pranks they committed in college decades before can be used against them:
“I’m watching you white boy. And this time, I’m taking the screenshot!” wrote
the editorialist. And the student newspaper of Dickinson College in
Pennsylvania, asked: “should white boys still be allowed to share their
‘opinions’? Should we be forced to listen? In honor of Black History Month, I’m
gonna go with a hell no.”
At
the reception as legislators and their wives got out of their cars, the
screaming Leftists would approach them, hurling epithets and demanding to know
why they “supported racism and the KKK.” Additionally, they had cameras filming
each and every guest, shouting “we know who you are and where you live, and we
are coming for you!”
This,
then, is what your college
dollars—the tuition you pay—have
produced. And this is the result of the bounty and largesse of such globalist
financiers as George Soros and those like him, who bankroll these folks and
their mob demonstrations.
This
is the result of an educational narrative that dominates our educational
system. And it is a fundamental template that is now shared not only by the
frenzied revolutionary Left who get up in the faces of conservative legislators
and attempt to shame them or scare them into silence or compliance, and who
will follow them to their homes, but also, in effect, ironically by nearly all
of the major conservative voices we hear on Fox or read in such publications
as National Review.
You
read that correctly….
That
narrative is that America was founded on an “idea,” and that idea was “equality
for all.” America, according to both the Progressivist Left and the Neoconservatives
who dominate the “conservative movement,” is a “propositional nation,” based on
the nebulous idea of “equality.” But, according to this version of our history,
from the beginning that “idea” was perverted by evil white men and even more,
by evil slaveholders who prevented America from living up to its ideals.
That
is not only inculcated into the minds of our children and students, but also is
propagated as fact by the near-totality of our political class, whether in
Congress or via the media.
Of
course, Mainstream Conservatism attempts in its own way to rescue the idea by
prattling on about “equality of opportunity” and that the Left has taken the
concept “too far.” Yet, by accepting this as our original foundational
principle, they inevitably fall to those who carry it to its logical extreme,
and, thus, end up enabling them and, in a way, normalizing their narrative.
That
this nation is founded on the idea of equality is historically false. And
converted into policy it means the end of this country, the death of the
republic, and the triumph of the far Left, enabled by a pseudo-conservative
opposition that accepts the fundamental precepts of the Left.
Among
the voices who have demurred and who have demonstrated the falsity of this view
and its eventually fatal results for what remains of our republic have been
such historians and authors as George Carey, Mel Bradford, and Barry Alan
Shain. Bradford back in 1976 warned presciently in a long essay in the
pages of the Modern Age quarterly
(Winter issue, 1976) of the incompatibility of the Neoconservative
“propositional nation” vision with the inherited traditions and decentralized
republican constitutionalism of the Founders and Framers. In that stand-alone
essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” Bradford laid bare the
clear intentions of those who came together to form the American nation, while
giving the lie to the Neocon narrative that the republic was founded on
universalized propositions—“ideas”—of equality and liberal democracy. Those
notions, he pointed out, were a hangover from their days and immersion in the
globalist universalism that owed its origin to Marx and Trotsky, and to the
Rationalist “philosophes” of the 18th century, rather than to
the legacy of kinship and blood, an attachment to community and to the land,
and a central religious core that annealed this tradition and continued to make
it viable.
What
Bradford revealed in his research about our original Constitution was
ultimately distilled in his superb volume, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the
American Constitution (Athens, GA, 1993). It remains a primary
source for anyone interested in how we got our Constitution and what it means.
Along
with Bradford, Colgate University historian Barry Alan Shain has confirmed in
his well-documented The
Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers,
Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congresses (2014)
that our old republic was not founded on abstractions about “equality” or
“democracy,” or some fanatical zeal to “impose our democracy and equality” on
the rest of the globe, or that we were “the model for the rest of the world,”
to paraphrase the neoconservative writer Allan Bloom. We were a country founded
by those who had left the old world in family and community, from England and
Scotland, from Germany and France, and eventually from other countries, in
search of better lands for them and more opportunity for them and their
children.
Historian
David Hackett Fisher’s impressive study, Albion’s Seed: British Folkways in America (1989),
details and traces that quest, a quest that carried with it the beliefs, the
blood, and the culture of those immigrants from the old world to the new.
Unlike the Puritans of Massachusetts, most of the new Americans did not come to
these shores to establish some “new City of God,” some new “Shining City on a
Hill.” Their goal was not to establish an egalitarian Utopia. Rather, they
brought with them their customs, their folklore, their music and arts, and
their religion which were uniquely theirs, their inheritance. And as they moved
West across the Appalachians and across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains
they carried that culture with them, giving body to the American nation.
My
father’s own family originally came to Philadelphia in 1716, having passed a
few decades in County Monaghan in what is now Northern Ireland, and before that
from Ayrshire, Scotland. Coming down the Great Wagon Road they made their way
to old Rowan and Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina by the 1740s, from
which they spread out, a few finally reaching the California gold fields in
1848, some founding a town that continues to exist even today, Catheys Valley,
close to Yosemite National Park.
And
what is fascinating is to scan a phone book from 1950 for Catheys Valley and
compare it with the parish registries from old Ayrshire and Monaghan counties
from three centuries before: the family surnames in large part remain the same.
Those people who departed Scotland in the early 1600s left in family, and they
remained together when they came to America. In the Colonial Period they
established small, largely autonomous communities which gave being and form to
the colonies that became fiercely independent states which, in turn, created
the American confederation.
Robert
W. Ramsey’s study, Carolina
Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 (1964),
maps the “Scotch-Irish Settlement” in Rowan County, North Carolina, in the
1740s. And those recorded surnames are in the main the same as a century before
and as two centuries after in places like Catheys Valley. Like other immigrants
my ancestors came as part of an already-existent society. The concept that they
were somehow possessed of a mission to “remake” and democratize the world and
that they were in the vanguard of a globalized and Utopian egalitarianism,
would have struck them as the antithesis of their shared beliefs.
But
that is what we are told is the mission of America, that is what our schools
and colleges teach, and that is what we have failed to accomplish. And it is
the door ajar that has permitted the growing extremist Left to seize the
initiative and apply these “propositions” in such a way as to facilitate their
success on the road to converting the republic into what will be an
authoritarian state that will make present-day Venezuela look desirable. For
“equality” is a chimerical goal. In the hands of ideologues it becomes the
cudgel to enslave those who disagree, the triumph of the savage pigs of
Orwell’s Animal Farm,
who accomplish their evil under the rubric of equality: “All animals are equal,
but some animals
are more equal than others!” Inherently, the Leftist revolutionaries
recognize this: Power is the ultimate goal, complete power over us and power to
transform what is left of this nation into something that even Orwell’s pigs
might find unimaginable.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European
history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was
a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University
of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author
and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State
Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has
published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as
classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations. More from Boyd Cathey
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