“He who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but he who is not a conservative after thirty has no head.”
—Jules Claretie—
✦✦✦
What is another word for conversion?
Betrayal.
And I am, in a sense, a traitor. Not only when it comes to my return to the Christian faith (and I cannot stress enough how many previous readers that will confuse and infuriate), but I’m also a traitor when it comes to ideology. In a span of only two-and-a-half years, I’ve gone from being leftwing to culturally conservative. Here I wish to offer a tepid defense before moving on and getting more aggressive, by pointing out that these past two-and-a-half years have seen about fifty years worth of social upheaval that would make anyone question where they stood and why. I mean the sheer amount of “disruptive events” that have occurred from 2016 to today, but really accelerating after 2020, have been unrelenting in a way that feels abnormal even in my short lifetime (and much older people have told me feels abnormal even in theirs).
That out of the way, it’s time to admit I no longer consider myself to be on the left.
More than a few who I’ve locked horns with in the past could retort (with some contempt) that my exit from the left is little surprise given the extent to which I was ever really leftwing in the first place. Sure, I had worked as an organizer (and agitator) for the AFL-CIO in 2014, and sure, I represented the Texas veteran caucus for the Democratic National Committee in 2015. And yeah, I had been a campaign coordinator for Martin O’Malley’s short-lived presidential bid in 2016. But from the very start I was vocally anti-woke at a time when “woke” and “left” were seen to be synonymous. I detested critical race theory and the bullying tactics of the transgender movement. I couldn’t stand the revisionist, dishonest, and one-sided accounts of America’s past being passed off by radical academics as “history” (e.g. Howard Zinn, the 1619 Project). Moreover, even as a leftist, I always clung stubbornly to my love for shooting guns and eating meat, belief in the benefits of homeschooling, my Texas pride, and support for the State of Israel (the country of my ancestral origin, and where I resided for three years making memories so magnificent they will warm me even in the coldest days of old age; my Zionism, more than any other ideological outlier, was—and will always be—so hopelessly entangled with my heart that any attempt at detachment would be a death before dying).
After Trump’s victory in 2016, I decided to take on the identity politics and social justice zealotry of leftwing circles in magazines like Areo, The Humanist, Paste Magazine, and Merion-West, while also writing my first book in 2017 (now out of print) A Letter To The Left: What We Get Wrong About Terrorism, The Economy, Equality, & Social Justice. The following year, I penned an open letter to the Democratic Socialists of America protesting their support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel while ignoring Palestinian terrorism and rampant antisemitism in the Arab world. The year after that, I criticized modern feminism and the MeToo movement in what was perhaps the riskiest essay I’ve ever written to date. And this was because from the beginning of my involvement with liberalism and the left, I always made it clear I wasn’t one to carry water. If what you did or said was stupid, I was going to let you know.
Still, in fairness, there were views I held contrary to the left that the left actually had right right from the start. Though generally very skeptical of America’s wars and foreign interventions, I was a supporter of our military’s presence in Afghanistan to stop Islamic fascism under the Taliban, and romanticized my own participation in that war from 2016-18 (as a contractor) as being similar to George Orwell in the Spanish Revolution. In hindsight I was no Orwell, and Afghanistan was a lost cause just as Spain had been.
Yet, at the end of the day, contrarianism aside, I was a leftist because I was a socialist. It was obvious to me that the majority of Americans were struggling to get by with wages unfit for establishing any kind of meaningful future, and it was also obvious that American infrastructure—much like our social fabric—was disintegrating. I loved Bernie Sanders, not only for the hell he was giving Hillary Clinton and her braindead “girlboss” followers, but also because his message resonated as genuine and true: Our country was built by the working class. The super wealthy were getting wealthier while the rest of us were left behind. Free trade hadn’t led to “national prosperity”, but instead allowed China to dominate manufacturing at the expense of America’s small towns. After Sanders’ primary loss in 2016, I began learning about some of the great rabblerousers and politicians of labor past: Eugene Debs, Mary “Mother” Jones, Peter McGuire, and of course President Franklin Roosevelt. I read Huey Long’s Every Man A King like it was a fifth gospel. And the examples of these figures inspired my economic convictions: I believed in some form of nationalized healthcare, I believed in a mandatory living wage, I believed in workers organizing unions and bargaining. In fact… come to think of it… I still believe in those things. So what happened? Why, ultimately, did I embrace cultural conservatism? And what do I mean by “cultural conservatism”?
My political change, as with my change of stance on religion, began with the outbreak of Covid-19 and the restrictions that soon followed.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a classic example of a barking chihuahua casting a wolf’s shadow and scaring off a whole village. This was a virus that had a 99% survival rate. If you were under the age of 78, your chances of being hospitalized and/or dying of the virus (and known variants) were extremely small. 1%. If you were over the age of 78 or were immunocompromised, you would have had to have taken extra precautions, but even then, contracting Covid was not a death sentence. You had a 10% risk of dying. We also were made aware of preventable measures fairly early on: Getting vaccinated significantly lowered chances of infection, as well as lots of sunlight, a healthy diet, and regular exercise. What’s more, if you contracted Covid once, you had greater immunity against it going forward. By the summer of 2020, and certainly by the fall, it became clear this was not the emergency it had been portrayed as. Panic was not justified.
But despite knowing all of this, Americans insisted on losing their minds long after the worst of the virus had come and gone. For well over a year in most states, children were prevented from returning to school in person, and even when pediatric expert after pediatric expert lined up to warn us that forcing children to wear masks for indefinite periods—and to see others masked for indefinite periods—would do incalculable developmental and psychological damage, partisan bureaucrats and their media goons who thought panic was good for careers and ratings had no problem advocating and enforcing continued masking. And if requiring kids (who were the least likely to transmit Covid) to wear masks for six-to-seven hours a day in schools were not enough, there were the mask mandates on airplanes; modes of travel where the oxygen is filtered every two minutes. Airline executives from American, Delta, Atlas, JetBlue, United, and Southwest urged President Biden in an open letter to lift the federal mask mandate for air travel, and testified in congress to the same effect, insisting that forcing passengers to cover their faces was not necessary when masking requirements had already been lifted in stores, restaurants, and bars. But none of it mattered. No amount of careful reasoning, no amount of gentle pushback, no amount of pleading for a risk/precaution balance mattered against a sea of paranoid op-eds about how even the smallest relaxation of restrictions would trigger a death toll so catastrophic the bodies would have to be piled in the streets (read Tom Woods’ free PDF Covid Charts CNN Forgot, and compare that data to the hysterical shrieking of Jill Filipovic on CNN’s website between 2020-21).
We were being conditioned to do things that didn’t make sense.
We were being conditioned to do things simply because we were told to do them.
We were being conditioned to view our freedom as selfish.
Over and over we were subjected to the zombified glassy-eyed drumbeat of “Stay Home, Save Lives”, which conveyed the preposterous idea that going to the grocery store to buy food, taking the dog for a walk, flying a kite in the park, or visiting aging parents was tantamount to negligent homicide. The signaling of political virtue was prioritized over personal freedom, quality of life, and common sense. And I felt then, as I feel now, that those who were attempting to eliminate all risk from life were instead making it suffocating and empty. You wanna wrap yourself in plastic bubble until all danger is entirely eradicated? Be my guest. But stop trying to make me do it. You want masks forever (plus face shields), and six-feet social distancing for the next hundred years? Tough luck, eat shit. If there was only one Covid case in a city of a hundred-thousand people, there were (and still are) folks who genuinely believed that that would be enough to justify shutting down every business, family gathering, and event. But more alarming to me in 2020 and 2021 was the fact that the majority of the politicians who were so enthusiastic for continued restrictions were Democrats: Newsom (CA), Cuomo (NY), Whitmer (MI), Murphy (NJ), Carney (DE).
Yet, looking back, if I’m being completely honest with myself, the response to Covid had simply been the tipping point at the top of a mountain of grievances already accumulated.
Upon the conclusion of the Democratic primary in 2020, I slowly came to grips with the fact that the “labor left” had been a corpse for a long time. Bernie Sanders may have used a defibrillator to make it twitch, but judging by the appearance of the maggots, the labor left died when Jimmy Hoffa did. It was a relic. Something to be featured on an episode of American Pickers: “Let’s see, we got a Flash Gordon tin lunchbox, a 1957 Chevrolet, and- what’s that over there? Oh wow, trade unionism!” Any pretense otherwise was simply retro New Deal pastiche; the “dirtbag left” an indulgence in cosplay.
To join the ranks of the real left, today, is to surround oneself with a nightmarish horde of MeToo feminists, race grifters, and “non-binaries” who either look like bridge trolls or Waldo or a Waldo bridge troll. The picket line has been replaced by the HR department. The camaraderie and close bonds of previous activists has given way to new movements full of “allies” but no friends. Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion officers are the modern day Politburo. The rotten tree of identity politics has corrupted the soil around it down to the lowest levels: outside the Democratic Party, every leftwing organization is unanimously anti-Israel; there is an aggressive push to get tech companies to classify any dissenting opinions online as “hate speech” and “misinformation”; drag queens in libraries are reading stories to our children; and the desire to own property and a rifle—once thought to be a normal staple of American adulthood—is considered now to be bigoted small-mindedness.
But even if identity politics hadn’t taken over the left like a bloodsucking octopus, there still would exist the problem the labor left has actually always had of defining what a “class” even is, and who the “elites” are in one. This isn’t to say I doubt the existence of elites or class. Not at all. But here’s the rub: you can’t define class or elitism in purely economic terms. A man who owns a plumbing business and makes $150,000 a year but listens to Lynyrd Skynyrd and watches Monday Night Football is culturally blue collar, and would likely consider issues that affect the working class to be important to him. Meanwhile, an academic might make $30,000 a year but enjoy abstract modern art and think the working class are a bunch of idiots. One of these has an elitist outlook, but a blindfolded Marxist would pick the wrong one every time. And it’s interesting, the more I study the history of the 20th century—especially the Soviet Union, Cuba after the revolution, and Maoist China—the more I’m coming to understand that societies really aren’t capable of eradicating their elites without perpetrating extreme injustice in the process. The most a regular person can hope for, then, it seems, is the creation of a composite system (equal parts reinvigorated law, art, and religion) that confines and manages elites to the point where they can’t get up to too much mischief. Beyond that, we kinda just have to shrug and live our lives. But leftists don’t do “just live your life”. They can never shrug because the leftist can’t fathom being at peace at the same time a single problem in the world exists. Call it “frenzied obsessive do-gooderism”.
This is to say nothing of the sweeping changes to the American justice system the left have proposed—and in some places, have already carried out—in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Sweeping changes which, in the three years since, have been incoherent, inconsistent, and outright unjust. They won’t fund federal marshals to put an end to riots in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, or Memphis, but they’ll fund the FBI so they can monitor parents at school board meetings. They’ll prosecute a 13-year-old boy for “misgendering” a classmate, but they won’t prosecute armed robbery, trespassing, theft, resisting arrest, or gang violence. They wanted to abolish the police in 2020, but they were also mad at the police in 2022 for not responding fast enough to a school shooting. This funhouse mirror Jonestown clown world they would have us all live in isn’t just nonsensical, it’s abhorrent.
So... I was finally done. Done with the protesters who, when the scales fell from my eyes, I saw clearly as being little more than overgrown petulant teenagers who treat the society around them like a father they both hate and ask favors from. Done with bad actors disingenuously playing “oppressed” while dominating every media and cultural institution. Done with a fossilized not-so-counter counterculture adept at critiquing a world built before it, but no idea how to build anything itself.
“Good riddance,” I said, forcing the driver of the Koolaid bus to stop and let me off in the middle of nowhere. And as the wheels spun and kicked dirt in my face, I yelled “I hope your movements crash and burn” while the cavalcade of smug little cretins disappeared over a distant hilltop. But then, looking around in the heat and hearing the birds caw, there was the instant recognition that I was stranded with no ideological ride for miles to hitch with. The MAGA Trumpers were still nuts. The “Never Trumpers” were about as exciting as band geeks on prom night. And the Whatever-Floats-Your-Boat Libertarianism of my late teens—though a happy nostalgia in some respects—was incapable of promoting a shared culture of truth, goodness, and beauty, instead promoting a tasteless mishmash of atomized individualism. With the cicadas beginning to chirp and the sun beginning to dip, it was time to start walking with my thumb out, consoling myself along the way that “The vast wilderness of trampled and forgotten social philosophies may offer some treasures yet to a wandering soul.”
And they did.
After renouncing my near-decade of progressivism as an extended period of Sanders-fueled antiquing, my library became an eclectic mix of ancient Roman historians, English monarchists, Irish republicans, Slavic anarchists, and even czarists (yeah the Anastasia kind). But I didn’t need to lift my nose out of those books to notice the air getting a little stuffy, a little too serious, a little too somber, and I realized that all crises of belief need a tad bit of fun. The first stop on that front was Tolkien (“Of course Tolkien. Why wouldn’t it be Tolkien, you unoriginal shit.” Tolkien is to conservative Christian guys what cheerleader fetishes are to middle aged uncles: while you can’t fairly accuse 100% of interest, the interest is safely assumed of each one encountered.) Then I went on to Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Le Carré, Jane Austen, and—in a bid to stay close to my Texas roots—Larry McMurtry and Jim Thompson. But my favorite fiction writer was Roald Dahl (and if you haven’t read Dahl before, you must check out his collection of dark adult short stories). Yet, facing the dilemma of my reading list now being too broad—with Pope Pius IX’s Quanta Cura stacked next to O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It, and Dante’s Inferno sitting atop a biography of Blondie—I was forced to admit this was becoming little more than the book collection of somebody that, if not on the spectrum, was so close the makers of toy trains were getting excited. So I narrowed my focus and picked up Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, followed by Morris Berman’s Twilight Of American Culture, followed by Anthony Esolen’s Sex & The Unreal City.
Upon their seeing my suspicion of modernity, these three books called history class to session and made the case really well that the “Age of Enlightenment” so called, was, by and large, an age that did not make good on its promises; instead, it unleashed so many of the forces that have caused our existential void. Our “meaning crisis”. Democracy for example—rather than resulting in free and educated peoples electing governments that respect their rights and protect their interests—encourages resentment, envy, impulsivity, and chaos. Consumer capitalism, like gasoline to fire, accelerates these diseases brought by democracy, while a quasi-religious belief in science—not as a formal process of inquiry, which is fine enough, but as some kind of oracle capable of yielding all answers to all types of questions—has not, in fact, made human beings more wise, but merely a little more knowledgeable and a lot more arrogant.
What Deneen, Berman, and Esolen revealed was that the decay of the secular neoliberal order—in which all Western politics whether liberal, libertarian, or “conservative” has marinated—has primarily been one of moral decay, not just economic. And that unless everyday ordinary people en masse recover a concept of God and a common spiritual language, whatever still remains that is true or good or beautiful about art, cinema, music, literature, dating, public space, and food will vanish along with what has vanished already; while daily life itself will—yes—become even more vacuous and bleak, but with our children and grandchildren unable to articulate its vacuousness or bleakness, instead feeling lost in a tinted malaise they were born into but know they don’t belong in. Like birds born without wings intuiting that something is terribly absent, but unable to imagine the concept of flight. More striking, these authors (and Deneen especially) thundered with conviction that any discussion of rights must always be accompanied by a discussion of correlating responsibilities. “You have ___, but that means you must ___.” And by presenting freedom as only one half of the life of the citizen, their words created in me a political demeanor that was freedom-oriented, but paradoxically traditionalist too, recognizing that our culture is grossly nihilistic with the little freedom it has left.
And yet, were freedom and duty truly a paradox in that they were two contradictory things to be “balanced”? Did being a conservative mean living forever with a tension between freedom and duty, resigned at their never being perfectly resolved? No! Not according to these writers. Rather, the coexistence of rights and duties—and how we know what constitutes both—means giving freedom a better definition: from merely “doing that which we want” to the unhindered pursuit of dignity and virtue, which itself leads to a self-mastery that brings one closer to theosis. By recovering divinity and a transcendent order, we regain a unified concept of the good (and the true and the beautiful) that transcends law, consensus, and even emotion, cutting right to the heart of the body’s inextricability from soul and giving us (what Tillich called) “the courage to be”. The great stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood this when writing his Meditations; the renowned Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers understood this when he commented on the Catholic Catechism’s definition of human liberty as “freedom for excellence”; and in fact the American founders understood this when they achieved independence from the British (with Benjamin Franklin writing that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom” and George Washington proclaiming in his first inaugural address that “the sacred fire of liberty” could not be kept alight if a nation’s people “disregard the eternal rules of order and right”).
Anthony Esolen, in his Sex & The Unreal City, expounds on this a bit further by connecting a people’s pursuit of dignity and virtue with a necessary distance of bureaucracy: “People are free not because they get to cast a marked piece of confetti for their distant rulers, but because their distant rulers have only very distant things to do with them, if anything at all. Liberty is to be defined not by how many things you or your representatives get to vote about, with your own vote so diluted that it would be like a grain of sand in the Sahara desert, but rather by how many things no one needs to vote about, or no one dares vote about, because they get done by ordinary people pursuing their own good and the common good in ordinary ways.”
Yet even these three authors, in their three wonderful books, provided little in the way of “know-how” about what kind of politics, what kind of social philosophy, what kind of government specifically would replace the status quo. For the question of authentic conservatism has never been “How do we go back” just as the definition of a conservative has never been to stand athwart the tide of history weakly yelling “Stop!” The question is how to invent a post-Enlightenment, hierarchical, re-enchanted, quasi-mystical conservatism inoculated against chaos, complacency, tyranny, and the very worst of human impulse. A conservatism at once very old and very new. Nothing our great-grandfathers or even great-great-grandfathers would have known, but containing elements the ancients in many cultures would have identified as familiar and future humans could identify as useful. A kind of conservatism America has never experienced before and initially would not know how to process, but at the same time, a conservatism not so foreign to basic human instinct it could never gain momentum.
It felt like divine providence, then, when I was told by an acquaintance at an Antiochian Orthodox parish near Phoenix about Yoram Hazony’s (at the time newly published) 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery.
Hazony’s Conservatism is a noticeable break from other primers attempting to define conservatism written by past intellectuals and statesmen like Barry Goldwater, George F. Will, Thomas Sowell, Andrew Bacevich (to say nothing of the lesser pundit class like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, the late Rush Limbaugh, and Dinesh D’Souza, who have done more recruiting for the left than DSA and Oberlin College combined). The only close runners-up to Hazony’s Conservatism I can think of are Roger Scruton’s Conservatism: An Invitation To The Great Tradition and Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide To Conservatism, but even so, Hazony’s book is refreshing in that it’s not a regurgitation of well-worn aphorisms nor a book which tells us conservatism is merely the “conservation” of yesterday’s liberalism. It gives the reader space to imagine how modernity might be dismantled, but also does the necessary work of explaining how not to have a hellscape thereafter.
A quick quote:
“There is extraordinary confusion over what distinguishes Anglo-American conservatism from Enlightenment liberalism (or ‘classical liberalism’ or ‘libertarianism’ or, for that matter, from the philosophy of Ayn Rand). Indeed, for decades now, many prominent ‘conservatives’ have had little interest in political ideas other than those that can be used to justify free trade and lower taxes, and, more generally, to advance the supposition that what is always needed and helpful is a greater measure of personal liberty.
And if anyone has tried to point out that these are well-known liberal views, and that they have no power to conserve anything at all, he has been met with the glib rejoinder that ‘What we are conserving is liberalism’, or that ‘Conservatism is a branch or species within liberalism’, or that ‘Liberalism is the new conservatism.’ For the most part, these comments are made out of ignorance, although on rare occasions it does seem as though there may be other motives involved.
At any rate, it is now clear that this confusion concerning the content and purposes of political conservatism has paralyzed the conservative impulse in the English-speaking world, rendering it weak and ineffective. For the truth—which at this point cannot be repeated frequently enough—is that Enlightenment liberalism, as a political ideology, is bereft of any interest in conserving anything. It is devoted entirely to freedom, and in particular to freedom from the past. In other words, liberalism is an ideology that promises to liberate us from precisely one thing, and that thing is conservatism. That is, it seeks to liberate us from the kind of public and private life in which men and women know what must be done to propagate beneficial ideas, behaviors, and institutions across generations and see to it that these things really are done.
To the extent that Anglo-American conservatism has become confused with liberalism, it has, for just this reason, become incapable of conserving anything at all. Indeed, in our day conservatives have largely become bystanders gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.
So that I should not be misunderstood, I must emphasize that liberty of the individual is a fine thing, both good in itself and worthwhile for its beneficial effects when taken in the right proportion. It has, and always will have, an important place in a broader theory of political conservatism. But under the present conditions of permanent revolution and cultural devastation, the most important thing to remember about individual liberties is that, in and of themselves, they have no power to make anything stable or permanent. […] If we care about making anything stable and permanent, we must have other tools at our disposal besides the list of individual freedoms and proscribed forms of discrimination that liberals have been so busy compiling and attempting to impose on the world since the 1940s. We must have other tools at our disposal, and these will have to be conservative tools, not liberal ones. However, to have such conservative tools at their disposal, nations will have to let go of their postwar obsession with liberalism. They will have to turn to other older philosophies which are concerned with how things are propagated in time, and learn from them again.”
If you’re looking for a book that is unique and creative and bold and delightfully odd, Hazony’s is a stick of dynamite for the conservative imagination all the way to the turning of the last page.
And in that vein of imagining a different future—as a way of concluding this two-part return (I will avoid calling them “coming out” essays)—I’ve been toying a little bit in recent months with a kind of “outline” for a new culture. Some of these ideas will be familiar, while others will sound foreign and outlandish and be attributed to my strange personality. What’s more, you’ll notice these proposals are not ones that could be implemented at the same time, as they would contradict each other, and hence, are proposals a determined conservative majority could only implement in stages.
Dismantle the national security apparatus and its surveillance and intimidation capabilities, which it routinely weaponizes against its own citizens and makes us less safe. To be a bit more clear, “dismantling the national security apparatus” would entail abolishing the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, DEA, DOJ, and DHS (including TSA).
Break up Big Tech. Ban virtual reality. Strip social media of its addictive features, learning algorithms, and advertising.
Eliminate as many cars, highways, parking lots, and large sprawling chain stores as possible. As an alternative, encourage trains for domestic travel, planes for foreign travel, rental trucks for moving only large equipment or multiple items, bicycles and horses/wagons for commutes, and small mom-and-pop shops whose buildings don’t take up large chunks of land. For too long, anti-industrialism has been perceived as the domain of clueless hippies and a certain man who liked to send surprise packages. But in fact, industrialism has been a crime against nature, and as such—if conservatives are to view, as they should, the natural world as a gift from God and therefore essential to the wellbeing of the human soul—then there has to be a reckoning over how much concrete, steel, and air pollution have laid waste to our landscapes. “Rewilding” cannot be a concept surrendered to the Greta Thunbergs and Klaus Schwabs of the world (who would use the idea for dark and authoritarian purposes), but must be seen by conservatives as a way of bringing Middle Earth to our own.
The phasing out of plastic for consumer products and the return of glass, metal, paper, and wood packaging.
Forcefully shutter all corporations who routinely undermine traditional values in their advertising, and arrest all CEOs, directors, and board members complicit in “deliberate sabotage of public moral cohesion” (corporations that have a track record of promoting androgyny, pedophilia, transgenderism, “queerness”, the occult).
Eliminate skyscrapers, abstract modern sculptures, and brutalist architecture, replacing them with gothic, neoclassical, and romanesque styles; buildings and monuments that inspire beauty and the pursuit of meaning. Destroy art and sculpture that promote ugliness, degeneracy, and relativism.
Recognize cities as being inherently anti-human. The density, noise level, surveillance, and restricted movement is antithetical to human flourishing, and thus all communities should have enforceable quotas specifying how many people can live there without sacrificing quality of life.
Break up the United States into a bunch of tiny countries, or even to the point where each town is its own country. Destroy large centralized unaccountable administrative and regulatory bureaucracies, and replace them with small locally elected councils who will regulate food, medicine, construction, and safety in ways that are best for the communities they live in.
Resurrect social gathering spaces—the pub, the coffeeshop, the church, the theater, the 24-hour diner—by instituting a community-wide time block where internet is unavailable; a “wifi blackout” of a few or several hours per day.
Workdays no longer than six hours four days a week + a living wage. Leisure and family time should be prioritized over profit. Labor unions will play a central role in the bargaining between employers and workers. Formations of worker cooperatives should also be encouraged over CEO/board structures.
All businesses should be closed and there should be no entertainment events on Saturdays and Sundays, so Jews and Christians may observe them as their respective sabbaths (and even those who are not religious may enjoy that time for rest, quiet, meditation, and “slowing down”).
All non co-op businesses must provide defined-benefit pension plans for workers who have been employed with them 15+ years, and it will be against the law to fire an employee near that length (14 years) for the purpose of avoiding pension payout (with a legal presumption of guilt against companies who claim they fired said employee for “other reasons”).
Return to distinctive markers of manhood and womanhood. For men, the growing of beards, the building of muscle, and participation in physically demanding or dangerous activities (which all point toward looking and becoming formidable); for women, the wearing of dresses, growing long hair, and participation in activities that charm like piano or ballet (which all point toward looking and becoming delightful). The modern progressive dream of the Great Androgynous Utopia has been the most disgusting and wicked movement of the 2010s and 20s, and it absolutely needs to be trampled and spat on.
Return all money to a gold standard. Make bartering normal again. No more fiat currency or credit.
Abolish public schools and universities. Make all education private and recognize a parent’s right to homeschool as inalienable. All future universities must be entirely funded by donation and not receive a penny from taxpayers. Promote the classical education model.
Encourage the proliferation of—and proficiency in—weaponry. The armed citizen is the free citizen.
Revive a culture of reading and literature that praises and focuses on authors over pop stars, reality TV, and games.
Outlaw pornography. Life in prison for producers, rehabilitation for performers and addicts.
Free housing, medical and mental care, food, and clothing for those who demonstrably and beyond a reasonable doubt are incapable of working or caring for themselves; with the aim being to completely eradicate homelessness and societal neglect of those most in need.
Reintroduce to society the concept of sacred realms; wherein marriage, family, childhood innocence, and the private ownership of land belong, and against which no outsider dare intrude under penalty of death.
Tackle even minuscule aspects of daily life that, though minuscule, compound and drain our joy. For example: No automated voice systems at the other end of telephone calls that actively prevent you from reaching a living breathing employee; no text tones, ring tones, or noisy apps that disrupt the peace of surrounding people (vibrate-only cell phones); no more roadside billboards (allowing individuals to take in views of landscapes without never-ending rows of corporate bombardment); harsh penalties for littering, street harassment, talking in theaters, graffiti.
Of course all of this must become a demand from the ground up if it is ever to become real at all. Very little of this, if any of it, can be initiated from the top down. These have to be desires planted in the hearts of ordinary people, and if this seems like a “pie in the sky” dream, well, it is. It most definitely is. But any world worth building must necessarily begin as so. And if the “New Old Conservatism”, so to speak, seeks to reintroduce transcendence, worship, and tradition into the consciousness of a largely secular, individualistic, liberal public, we have to work toward building a re-enchanted world. To be slightly tongue-in-cheek, a cedar-scented, hickory-smoked, torchlit Shire. Charlotte Brontë the IPA. Charles Dickens with a viking beard. A John Hughes-meets-Carnival Row universe filled with twisted tales, tobacco, wolves, fire, dense snow-covered forests, and enough danger to provide the bold with purpose and excitement, yet with enough social safety nets to catch those whose deepest and only purpose will ever be to simply live one day to the next. And libraries. Very big, gorgeous, ostentatious libraries with large courtyards where people can duel over honor (including for stolen french fries as well as stolen lovers).
Not a small number of folks would consider this level of fantasizing irresponsible, immature, even infantile. Because admittedly my conservatism is one that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Senate, or the House, or whatever eye-gougingly boring, wonkish, nerdy policy debate is being conducted on increasingly-irrelevent cable channels by “contributors” who likewise don’t give a rat’s ass about me or you.
But if crafting a vision for a better world that bears little resemblance to the one we currently occupy is “not a grown up thing to do”, then fine. I don’t care. I’m ready to talk about things that are absent from basic political discussion. Let’s talk aesthetics. Let’s talk daily life. Let’s get into the things you and I and everyone else actually sees when we leave our houses. And let’s dream. The rest of the bullshit really is for the birds.
This doesn’t mean my writing won’t occasionally veer into politics, as “not ever getting into politics” renders idealistic visions as ineffectual as the kingdoms children imagine ruling in their playhouses. But inasmuch as is possible, I want to avoid politics because politics-obsessed people become icky. Would you rather be Mark Twain or Bill Kristol? Would you rather be Walt Whitman or Jennifer Rubin? Would you rather be Edgar Allan Poe or Jonathan Chait? I know my answer.
One last thing: in my absence I read a lot of articles published since 2021 that, together, acted as wind to my sails on my journey from the left to conservatism. I’ve decided to link them below as a kind of “quick reading” list for those who want more thoughtful content from other people before my next essay comes out. Enjoy!
