May 16, 2022
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
National Unity is A
Mirage—We Must Understand That or Perish
Friends,
Now, after what may have been a racially-motivated mass
shooting in Buffalo (May 14) by a deranged young man, new insistent calls go
out for the government to fight “white nationalism” and “right wing domestic
terrorism.” Attorney General Merrick Garland has already signaled more than
once that this is the nation’s major challenge—not the illegal drugs epidemic,
not the rampant criminality tearing our cities apart, not the huge spike in
gang violence, not the literally millions of illegals coming across our
borders; no, not any of these, but homegrown “extremism” coming from
disaffected, white segments of the American population.
In addition to new surveillance and potential censorship measures,
such as the Disinformation Governance Board, and additional government
intrusion into the lives of American citizens, also come the now-accustomed demands
from various anguished personalities, political and otherwise, with pained
expressions on their faces, pleading for national unity. “Can’t we all get
along,” they mumble, echoing words uttered decades ago by Rodney King.
(Remember him from the violence in the streets of Los Angeles?).
But such desired “unity” is always one-sided, meaning that we
must discard our beliefs, our principles, and accept the latest agenda
item, the latest conquest advanced by the post-Marxist Left. Far too many
so-called “conservatives” in positions of leadership in America have embraced
this elastic strategy, of first opposing something (e.g. same sex marriage),
then almost abruptly reversing course, even showcasing their about-face, while
defending it as completely consistent with “conservative principles.”
Then, whether from pundits at Fox News or from the Rich Lowry
and Kevin Williamson types at National Review, we are instructed to
follow suit, to unite around a refashioned definition of conservatism which always
seems to tag along just a few steps behind the worst outrages of the radical
Left.
The great Southern author, Robert Lewis Dabney, writing a
decade after the end of the War Between the States (1875), expressed
presciently this tendency of dominant, post-war Northern conservatism:
“This is a
party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to
each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a
respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the
innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the
accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting
to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its
timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and
then adopted in its turn.”
Thus, a Robert E. Lee and a “Stonewall” Jackson were only a
few years ago honored not just by conservatives but nationally, but now lightweight
Neoconservative historians like Allen Guelzo dictate for us positions scarcely distinguishable
from views current on the extreme Left. And Fox News personalities like Bret
Baier and Brian Kilmeade do their damnedest in unserious, ghostwritten
potboilers to publicize the greatness and sublime conservative vision of
figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, and Abe Lincoln.
We are told that we must discard what once we believed were fundamental
principles, that we must unite around the evolving definition of conservatism.
But what are those beliefs around which we should unify? If
what was once posited as fundamental truth can simply be discarded, tossed on
the ash heap, or ignored, where does that leave us in the immense culture war
that we have been losing now for more than half a century?
The strategy of the present-day “conservative movement” almost
exactly parallels the observation made by Dabney nearly 150 years ago. It has
failed abysmally, and, in fact, its most significant achievement is to lead
well-meaning citizens away from genuine and effective opposition to the rot
which threatens to engulf us.
On the contrary, my mentor the late Dr. Russell Kirk, who in
many ways was the father of an older conservatism (back in the 1950s), stated
what should and must be our essential credo: We hold a series of immutable beliefs
as fundamental, and those principles and that vision are necessary for a just
society. Those beliefs and principles come to us as a precious legacy from our
ancestors and from our Western Christian traditions.
And as a necessary corollary: there can be no real agreement, no
real unity with those who openly and forcefully reject that foundation and
those essential principles as poisoned by racism, sexism, homophobia, and
“white privilege,” not to mention hints of “fascism” and other not-so-pleasant
“isms.”
Let’s consider some history.
The old American republic was formed through a kind of
understood compromise between the colonies; the Authors of our constitutional
system fully comprehended that there were diverse elements and interests that
must be balanced to make the new nation at all workable. But in 1787 there was
essential agreement on fundamentals that a seemingly miraculous result was
possible. Yet, those far-sighted men also feared what might happen should that
which they created be perverted or turned from its original propositions.
The central Federal government was counter-balanced and
limited by newly and fiercely independent states which jealously guarded a
large portion of their own sovereignty. Voting was universally restricted to
those considered most qualified to exercise the franchise. Universal suffrage
was considered by the near totality of the Fathers of our Constitution to be a
sure means of destroying the young republic: absolute democracy and
across-the-board egalitarian views were considered fatal for the future of the
country. Such views were sidelined to the periphery, without practical voice in
the running of the commonwealth.
Above all the American republic was, in all but name, a
“Christian” republic. Certainly, the basic documents of our founding did not
formally state as much. There was no formal national “religious establishment,”
as existed in almost all European countries. Yet, despite that lack of national
confessionality, the new nation, while demanding freedom for religious expression, professed de facto the Christian faith as a kind of understood basis of the
new nation. As is often pointed out, almost immediately after adopting the Bill
of Rights in 1791 (authored, ironically, by slaveholder James Madison),
including the “freedom of religion” First Amendment, Congress provided for paid
Christian chaplains in the new Northwest Territories. Even more confirming is
the fact that nearly every one of the original thirteen colonies/new states had
a “religious establishment” or religious test of some sort on the state
level, and those establishments were left completely untouched by the First
Amendment, which was understood to mean only the formal establishment of a national supported state church.
Above all, there existed amongst the new Americans the ability
to converse and communicate with each other, using the same language,
and employing the same symbols and imagery that had brought them
together originally as a country. Appeals to traditional English law and the
historic “rights of Englishmen,” the belief in a God of the Old and New
Testaments whose prescriptions found in Holy Writ informed both the laws of the
state and the understanding of justice and virtue, and an implicit, if not
explicit, agreement that there were certain limits of thought and action beyond
which one could not go without endangering the republican experiment, formed a
kind of accepted public orthodoxy.
That modus vivendi—that
ability to get along and agree on most essentials—continued, sometimes
fitfully, until 1861. The bloody War Between the States that erupted that year
might have been avoided if the warnings of the Authors of the Constitution had
been heeded, if the Federal executive in 1861 had understood the original
intentions of 1787 and the precarious structural balance that the Philadelphia
Convention had erected. But that was not the case, and four years of brutal war
followed, with over half a million dead and thousands more maimed, and, most
tragically, that essential “via media” between an increasingly powerful central
government and the rights of the states and of communities, and eventually, of
persons, distorted and perverted.
The resulting trajectory towards centralization, the growth of
a powerful Federal government, has continued nearly unabated for 150 years.
With it and with the gradual destruction of not just the rights of the states,
but also of communities and persons, came the institutionalization of a large
and mostly unseen permanent bureaucracy, a managerial and political class, that
took upon itself the role of actually ruling and running the nation. James
Burnham and the late Samuel Francis have written profoundly on this creation of
a managerial state within the state.
Indeed, in more recent days we have come to label this establishment the
“Deep State.”
Concurrent with this transformation governmentally and
politically, our society and our culture have equally been transformed. It is
certainly arguable that the defeat of the Confederate states in 1865, that is,
the removal of what was essentially a conservative and countervailing element
in American polity, enabled the nearly inevitable advance of a more “liberal”
vision of the nation. At base, it was above all the acceptance by post-war
Americans of nearly all persuasions of the Idea of Progress, the vision that
“things”—events, developments in thought and in the sciences and in culture, as
well in governing—were inevitably moving towards a bright new future. It was
not so much to the past we would now look, but to the “new” which always lay
ahead of us. And that future was based
squarely on the idea of an “enlightenment” that always seemed to move to the
political and cultural Left.
While loudly professing and pushing for more “openness” and
more “freedom,” liberation from the “straight jacket” of traditional religion
and religious taboos, and propounding equality in practically every field of
public and private endeavor, ironically, the underlying effect and result of
this “progress” has brought with it, in reality, a severe curtailment of not
just many of our personal liberties, but of the guaranteed rights once
considered sacrosanct under our old Constitution.
This long term, concerted movement, and eventual triumph of
nineteenth liberalism and twentieth century progressivism, politically,
culturally, and in our churches, not only placed into doubt those essential and
agreed-upon foundations that permitted the country to exist in some form of
“unity,” but also enabled the growth of ideologies and belief systems that, at
base, rejected those very foundations, the fragile creed, of that origination.
In one of the amazing turnarounds in history, the fall of
Soviet Communism in 1991—hollowed out and decaying after years of boasting that
it would “bury” the West—witnessed almost concurrently the exponential growth
and flourishing of an even more insidious and seductive version of post-Marxism
in the old Christian West, in Europe and the United States. A century of the
ravages and termite-like devastation by liberalism and progressivist ideology
had debilitated the foundations—and the required will—to resist the attractions
of a cultural Marxism that eventually pervaded our culture, our education, our
entertainment industry, and our religious thought. Older and gravely weakened
inherited standards and once-revered benchmarks of right and wrong, of justice,
of rights and duties, were replaced by what the Germans call a “gestalt,” or a
kind of settled overarching Marxist view of society and culture which had no
room for opposing views. Dr. Paul Gottfried has written extensively on this
phenomenon.
That dogmatic vision now pervades our colleges and public
education; it almost totally dominates Hollywood; it controls the Democratic
Party and huge swathes of the Republican Party; it speaks with ecclesiastical
authority through the heresiarchs who govern most of our churches; and, most
critically, it provides a linguistic template—an approved language—that must be
accepted and employed, lest the offender be charged with “hate speech” or “hate
thought.” Its goals—the imposition of a phony democracy not just in the United
States but across the face of the globe—the legislation of an across-the-board
equality which is reminiscent of the kind of “equality” the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm “legislated”—the
perpetuation of a largely unseen, unanswerable, unstoppable managerial and
political class, secure in its power and omnipotence—the proclamation of the
United States (and Europe) as an “open nation with no physical borders”—have
been and are being realized.
It is this overlay, this suffocating ideological blanket, with
its dogmas of multicultural political correctness, its anathematization of
perceived “racism,” “sexism,” homophobia,” “white supremacy,” and other
characterized forms of “bigotry” as unforgivable sins, that now has assumed
near total dominance in our society. The older forms of liberalism were
incapable of offering effective opposition, for cultural Marxism utilized
liberalism’s arguments to essentially undo it, and eventually, absorb it.
Yet, there are still millions of Americans—and Europeans—who
have been left behind, not yet swept up in that supposedly ineluctable movement
to the Left. They are variously labeled the “deplorables,” or perhaps if they
do not share completely the reigning presumptions of the Mainstream Media and
academia, they are “bigots” or “yahoos,” uninformed “rednecks,” and,
increasingly, maybe “white nationalists,” or worse. The prevailing utter
condescension and contempt for them by the established Deep State would make
the most severe witch-burner of the 17th century envious.
So I ask: we are asked to unify around what? Unite with whom?
On what basis and on what set of fundamental principles? Can there be unity
with those who wish our extinction and replacement, or with those who urge us
to surrender our beliefs?
Frankly, such unity is neither possible nor desirable…unless
millions have a “road to Damascus” conversion, or some major conflagration
occurs to radically change hearts and minds.
Never read your blog before, got sent here from a link from WRSA. Excellent summation and execution of thought. I'm sure you've heard Robert Gore's blog header, "Never underestimate the power of a question", as you so well ended your article. Keep at it. This country needs questions as you posed, "Who, or what do we unite around?" The conflagration you speak of that will probably do it, is one we won't start ourselves.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading and commenting!
ReplyDeleteWar is coming, Dr. Cathey; the time for talk is long past.
ReplyDelete"For what fellowship hath light with darkness?"
ReplyDelete"WE" cannot peacefully coexist with 'them'. Period. We tried to secede once and they used terrorism, mass murder and rape committed by foreign mercenaries and conscripted, starving European immigrants to stop it. (((they))) won't be so successful this time, I pray.
Oh, and btw... the perpetrator of the OBVIOUS false flag in buffalo has a jewish surname... An 8 year old can see thru all that.