A Meditation on the Benedict Option and Community

My attention was recently called to an article* in the New Yorker (of all places, since they are the foremost promoters of the terminally hip urban lifestyle, which seems incompatible with serious spirituality) on Rod Dreher and his book “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation”. The term is defined in the article, not unfairly, as including the following ideas:

• “... places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole”

• “(Dreher) urges Christians... to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism.”

• (quoting Dreher) “I believe that politics in the Benedict Option should be localist.” (Catholic social teaching refers to this as “subsidiarity")

• “Christians should consider living in tight-knit, faith-centered communities, in the manner of Modern Orthodox Jews.” (to which I would add, the Amish and certain Mormon offshoots)

• “Surviving this new age of darkness might call for the construction of local forms of community, where a realist approach to morality lives on.”

The same idea can be found in some of the writings of the late John Senior, Catholic educator extraordinare:

• “Now we have come to another bitter time of discontent; and the age of Saint Benedict has returned.” (from “Hidden Grace”)**

• “In times of great crisis, in the spiritual life of persons and of nations and the Church, anything but flight is folly.” (in a discussion of Newman in the same essay)

The New Yorker article, while biographical to a great extent, and anthropological as well (since the author seems highly bemused by the whole concept as well as the various versions of its implementation), does outline the numerous issues and dilemmas surrounding the Benedict Option, and I do recommend it as at least an introduction to the issue.

I was familiar with Dreher because of his work on The American Conservative, which is, BTW, one of the few truly conservative media outlets. (Most of the ones self-styled “conservative” are actually neoconservative, the critical difference being that the neocons advocate a “muscular” foreign policy, which is another way of saying we are the world's policeman – and we see how well that has worked out.)

As to The Benedict Option, I had heard the term before, and I always enjoy thinking about my older son, who has elected the Benedict Option in the literal sense by becoming a Benedictine monk. And the first thing that I think of in that regard, from the social, political, and economic points of view, is the self-sufficiency of the Benedictine monastery. It is not total – i.e. they are still “on the grid” to some extent – electricity, phone service (but virtually no cell phone service and very little Internet activity). But they are moving (it's still a fairly new place) toward ever-increasing self-sufficiency when it comes to food, drink, and various maintenance issues. (Once a given part of the monastery is built – it's happening in stages – the maintenance falls to the monks. They have no live-in, on-site secular employees.)

I guess one could think of that as one “extreme”, on the end of the continuum, although in times past the monastic life was considered quite normal and not at all freakish. Of course, self-sufficiency in general was pretty much the rule in the old days; even my home town was a far more self-sufficient place when I was a kid than it is now. And most of the people who worked there lived there, and vice versa (except for the guys who drove in to work in the “plants” on the outskirts of Buffalo). But it was a true community in that people knew each other, and you could go a long time without ever seeing a “stranger”. (By contrast, I see people I've never seen before every day right on my street. And no, it's not Alzheimer's where you meet new people every day.)

But to call my home town a “community” is not to imply some sort of uniformity. There was religious diversity within the Protestant mold... a large Catholic contingent (anchored by Poles and Germans, with some Italians in the mix)... two Jewish families... and, I'm sure, plenty of skeptics, unbelievers, and the otherwise “unchurched”. Politically, it was a Republican town in the sense that the dominant middle class were pretty much all Republican – although I suspect that some of the blue-collar folks had Democratic leanings (especially the union members).

The other major vector when talking about the Benedict Option, besides community per se, is what some refer to as the “culture wars”. The premise – or one premise -- behind the Benedict Option is that the culture wars have been lost, so rather than keep fighting in vain it's time to retreat, get off the battlefield, and get back to basics – spiritual as well as material. Of course this motive was behind all of the countless Utopian communities that sprang up, particularly in upstate New York, in the 1800s. Already at that early date there was a feeling that some sort of purification was in order, and the way to accomplish that was to get off what at that time passed for “the grid”. But speaking of purification, let's not forget that the Pilgrims and Puritans (hence the name) had the same motive; for them the way to renewal was to get out of Europe and settle in the New World, where it was just them, God, and nature. And, oh yeah, a few Indians.

So you have this motive that recurs so many times in history that it almost seems like part of human nature. It's certainly part of human nature in the collective – but it's also always a minority opinion. Most people are content with things as they are – or if not content then at least willing to put up with it. In the modern era you had the hippies, who rebelled against materialism (as well as war and what Wilhelm Reich called character armoring) – first on campuses and in the cities, and then in the form of communes which sprang up everywhere, but especially in California. And they too had given up – at least for a while – on the mainstream (AKA “square”) culture. Some of the communes survive to this day – usually because they came up with some marketable goods and services. Others pretty much evaporated. But the same is true of the Utopian religious communities.

But this raises the interesting question of religious vs. secular communities. So many of the dynamics and motives, and trajectories, are similar, and yet there is this one significant difference – that the older communities were, pretty much without exception, motivated by religious or at least spiritual ideals, whereas the communes were more about getting away from the establishment juggernaut and finding peace and tranquility (and a place to get high without getting hassled -- “Tune in, turn on, drop out” being the mantra). And yet for the latter there was a “spiritual” -- if I can stretch the definition a bit – element. Many of those involved had become interested in Buddhism, for example – and that has a long monastic tradition as well. Others were more into the general, somewhat catch-all and at times nebulous, New Age “thing” -- which persists to this day, of course, becoming more mainstream all the time. (Next time you walk past a GNC store or pass the large yogurt section in the supermarket, thank a hippie.) And even that didn't start with the hippies; there were communities of the old school that dabbled in what we would call holistic health, alternative medicine, esoteric sexual practices, and Spiritualism (and many kindred pursuits).

It would be tempting to say that the old timers paved the way for the hippies... and that the Old World monasteries paved the way for the old timers. Again, if you want to talk about human nature in the collective, there are many parallels. But the European monasteries were all Catholic, whereas the New World Utopian communities were, as far as I know, all either Protestant or somehow spiritual and humanistic, but definitely not Catholic. And the hippie communes don't seem to have gotten the idea from the Utopian communities, although I recall there was a certain degree of interest there – especially in the Shakers, which is ironic since the Shakers were celibate whereas the hippies were anything but.

What I'm saying is that any continuity that appears in a historical survey is based more on human nature than on the direct descent of ideas. Like so many other social or political movements or ideas, there is a kind of cyclic phenomenon whereby a given idea first becomes widespread and implemented in a variety of ways, then the initial energy wanes a bit and we have a period of stability, after which things tend to kind of fade and the whole idea goes underground again (except for a few isolated proponents) until the next “wave”. There are very few phenomena, whether one is talking about politics, religion, or culture in general, that are not subject to this cyclic pattern – which leads one to imagine that there is a kind of long-term drive toward homeostasis in human history. We talk a lot about “pendulum swings”, and I think that refers to something quite real and quite embedded in the human psyche. Things go too far in one direction, and then there is a correction, and then things head off in the opposite direction. (I also imagine that the Hegelian concept of the dialectic, or thesis/antithesis/synthesis, is another way of expressing the same idea.)

The Benedict Option clearly refers back to St. Benedict himself and the establishment of the monasteries – although as metaphor, it could certainly describe any movement away from the “business” (busy-ness) of the world and toward a simpler form of existence. And I'm not claiming that it's always motivated by a feeling of giving up, or despair, vis-a-vis the world at large. It could boil down simply to choosing something better. However, if someone who is traditionally-minded and who is also religious in a traditional sense were to keep a scorecard with wins and losses in the culture wars, it would definitely seem that the floodwaters are rising and that it's time to flee to the hills (figuratively at least). The current political war is certainly a case in point, although not a clear one. For one thing, Donald Trump is not a conservative in the strict sense, although he does seem to have traditionalist leanings. But his opposition, AKA the Resistance, is definitely that which Dreher seems to be advocating we avoid. For they have won the culture wars on pretty much every front – and this is not to say that they have won all “hearts and minds” -- far from it. What they have managed to do is take over the culture – and there is nothing sudden or overnight about this; the campaign has been waged for many decades – lifetimes, even. And they have not taken over everything; there is still a remnant – a few voices of opposition left. (They don't seem to have had much of an impact on NASCAR yet, for example. But the NFL counts as the most recent casualty.) What is shrinking more than the number of people who believe in “values” is their opportunities to make their convictions known, and their status in society in general – and I don't see the Trump Event as more than a temporary slowing down of the overall trend. The “forgotten Americans” stood up and voted Trump into office, but they and their values are no less under siege now than they were prior to the 2016 election. Congress is helpless to do anything about it, and the Supreme Court can't be totally relied on even with a “conservative” majority.

Now, it has to be said that for many people this is all good news. They are 100% on the side of “progress” and “social change” and all the rest of it, and the events of the past few decades, despite the occasional setback, can hardly be anything but an occasion for rejoicing. Catch a Hillary supporter fleeing to the hills! Why should they? The mainstream culture is going their way, and getting better every day. They are happy as pigs in stuff, as the saying goes.

No, clearly the Benedict Option is for the “bloodied but unbowed” veterans of the culture wars who have grown old and weary of fighting, and convinced that much more can be accomplished on the local level, and in a community of like-minded people, and with family, home and hearth at the center. I believe this myself, of course – and try to live it out as best I can given my particular circumstances. One can always do the right thing. Even someone in prison, in solitary confinement, can practice righteousness.

I should insert something here on the issue of planning, as in “planned”, vs. “organic”, communities. Organic communities just sort of happen – they grow up – there is a history there, having to do with agriculture, or industry, mining, transportation, whatever... but the community as community is not the result of a blueprint (other than the ones used by the real estate developers). It winds up being a collection of people that appears quite random at times; even if the original settlers were of one mind, relatively speaking, can that be said of their descendants? Not unless there was a serious, well-established and overt cultural groundwork. And yet, “random” communities do, in fact, survive and may even prosper, whereas many “planned” communities fold up for some reason, often because that original vision was lost or proved to be either delusional or insufficient in some other way. Another thing that happens is that the planned community gives way to a less-planned community, which gives way to a non-planned community, even if there is some claim to history or to tradition referring back to the founders. Show me any of the planned communities of old that are still operating on as strict, uniform, and coherent basis as they did when founded – I daresay there are few if any left (monasteries being an exception, of course).

Now, what does this imply? That planned communities are always a mistake? Or sometimes a mistake? Or worth a try, but don't be surprised if things don't work out in the long run? One can point to plenty of the old-time Utopian communities that did much good for their members, and which continue to represent a certain set of values; the fact that the original uniformity is lost should not count against the original idea or against what has evolved.

We should also – if we're studying this issue – take a look at the original basis for any given community. Was it an idea, or a movement (religious or otherwise)? Or was it, perhaps, a single, charismatic leader who, once deceased, was succeeded by people with less firm convictions, or simply less social dominance? The communities that have both succeeded and persisted seem, in fact, to be characterized be a combination of original factors – yes, there was a strong and charismatic leader, but he or she also had coherent ideas – an ideational system, even. And those ideas were sufficiently appealing to be passed down – and at the same time the original leader didn't leave a vacuum but developed the next generation.

Another factor, as the article implies, is that – human nature again – there are people who are willing and able to live in a community of like-minded people. They are, by nature, cooperative and willing to blend in – AND (important point) abide by whatever hierarchical authority structure the community might have. They aren't rebels, in other words – and not chronic malcontents, gripers, or complainers. But there are also those who may be willing, but are not able – they just can't “hack it” in that sort of setting, so wind up leaving, regretfully. So any discussion of the Benedict Option has to take this very natural continuum into account – not only human nature in the aggregate but human nature on an individual basis. Just as there is a spectrum of human nature, so there should be a spectrum of available options within the larger Benedict Option idea – and there should be no arbitrary attempts to rank or assign levels of merit based on which option is chosen.

This, in turn, brings up the sub-option of what I will call the Benedict Option “in place” -- i.e. not requiring an actual physical retreat (heading for the hills) and also not requiring entering an organized community. If the family is, in a sense, a “little church”, then it should also be fully capable of embracing, and implementing, many if not all possible elements of the Benedict Option within the four walls of the home. And family life should be valued not just as the way things are, and the best way to bring up children, but also as a perfectly respectable way of retreating from the world (that “retreat” occurring on a daily basis, or as often as need be, when dealings with the wider world are done). I know families that have, perhaps implicitly, adopted this strategy. Admittedly, most of them live in rural areas or small towns, and some live near monasteries, from which they gain spiritual strength and which generate like-minded families with which at least a loose community can form. And the beauty of all of this is that it's happening “below radar”, i.e. without attracting the notice of the Regime, or of the media (except on rare occasions), and yet this remnant may serve as the seed for future generations as they attempt to reverse the overwhelming tide of secularism and materialism.

Can this even be done in urban contexts? Or – unlikely as it seems – in the suburbs? Well, we know that there is a significant Mormon presence in many suburban areas in the U.S. -- and even many of the Hassidic Jews live in what is, for all intents and purposes, a suburban area in Rockland County, New York – having migrated there over the years from densely-populated Brooklyn. So yes, it can happen anywhere, and where one finds oneself is no excuse for not at least trying to walk a different path from the one that popular culture seems to require. (I note that even the hippies of the 1960s bifurcated – from their start in college towns and large cities, some stayed in urban areas and others wound up in the countryside. Each environment presented challenges, of course; the idea is not to insist on a certain place, but on a certain set of principles that will be followed regardless of place.)

To sum up, a lingering question might be – isn't all of this the same as giving up... as despair? Well, there are wars that eventually result in victory for one side and defeat for the other, and conceding defeat is not shameful if one has fought the good fight. And as to despair, that would be if one capitulated but then failed to come up with an alternative – a Plan B – and the Benedict Option is clearly the Plan B of our time. It's difficult for individuals or families to assemble the resources to live an alternative lifestyle, but it can be done in community, as it has been countless times over the millennia. The skeptic will always come up with quibbles – what's wrong with the world the way it is? It won't work! It's too much trouble! Et cetera. Well, it's that attitude that keeps them in place and keeps them subject to the whims of their rulers. I'd rather be open to alternatives, even if I can't take advantage of all of them. It's good just knowing they're there, and that there are people out there who are trying to.... not create a new world (that's a “progressive” project) but take one small portion of the existing world and make it into something that is nourishing and uplifting rather than toxic and oppressive.

*Article reference: The Seeker, by Joshua Rothman. The New Yorker, May 1, 2017, pp. 46-55.

** This essay can be found in “The Remnants: The Final Essays of John Senior”. The Remnant Press, 2013.

Statuary Rape

It's a truism – but true, nonetheless – that the most dangerous enemy is one that has nothing to lose. The Confederacy was – and continues to be – a defeated nation. And “nation” is what it was; let's not quibble about that. It did exist, for four short years, and the Civil War, AKA The War Between the States, was not so much a “civil war” as a war between nations. Why do we call the South “rebels” but accept without question all of the other “separatist” movements and their resulting nations (think: South Sudan) as perfectly reasonable historical events? Why are we not exerting pressure on Russia to do something to “preserve the (Soviet) union”? (Heaven knows, they'd like to, and they have, in fact, made moves in that direction.) Why do we not wax nostalgic about the long-lost glory days of Yugoslavia? And how did we manage to let Czechoslovakia break in half after all the effort we went to to unite the Czechs and the Slovaks? And why aren't we all over England's case when it comes to Scotland and Wales? And so on.

But as William Faulkner said in so many words, to a Southerner the Civil War is not so much history as current events. Because the battle rages on, and in our time the battle is heating up again, for the umpteenth time. For the inconvenient truth is that defeated nations do, in fact survive – culturally and in spirit at least, as well as politically, and even economically.

The lesson is that winning is not always winning, and losing is not always losing. In the long, or very long, run, surprising things happen. The Ottoman Empire was supposedly reduced to a faint memory after World War I, and yet here we are nearly 100 years later dealing with an alleged caliphate in the form of ISIS. The intrusions of Islam into Europe were turned back by events like the Battle of Vienna (1683 – again, current events) but the descendants of the Ottoman forces are now flooding into Europe (and the U.S.), propelled by not only economic forces but by sheer demographics, i.e. “population pressure”. It turns out that people who are willing to reproduce beyond their “replacement numbers” can, in fact, not only come back to life but constitute a dominant force – and it doesn't have to be about sheer firepower. Turkey was once termed “the sick man of Europe”, but it has now become a freeway for a “soft invasion” of countries which can now be called “sick”, simply because of their lack of political and spiritual willingness to survive. They contracept and abort, and the Moslems just keep having kids. The term “suicide” for what's happening in Europe is not too strong.

Call it what you will – invasion, immigration, migration, whatever – the point is that the powers that be – the global elite with their headquarters in Western Europe – are now reduced to hunkering down in their ancient stone fortresses (or Brussels highrises) while the Moslems take over large sections of their large (and not so large) cities. And all of the traditions and cultural history of Western Europe are turning out to be no match for this human wave; what's remarkable is that what is happening now didn't happen sooner.

Likewise, we are experiencing our own human wave, namely that from Latin America. But no one ever asks, why now? Why not sooner? After all, Latin America has always been there – or at least since the time of Columbus. And there have always been, if you'll pardon the expression, “wetbacks” who have braved the mighty waters of the Rio Grande in order to gain a foothold in the Southwest, and reclaim what was lost in the Mexican War. So why this sudden flood of humanity? The answers, of course, are many – and debatable. Economics, of course, is at the top of the list (no, not “ideas” or “freedom” in general) – people looking for “opportunity”, but also fleeing violence and chaos in their home countries – much of which can be attributed to “drugs”. But why are “drugs” such a big deal all of a sudden? Well, where are these drugs headed? Who are the customers... the buyers? Americans, of course, and everyone wants a piece of that ever-expanding pie. And it's not just about the cities, or about the “inner cities”; the Middle South is becoming a wasteland of drug addiction, with opioids replacing moonshine as the substance of choice. And what is addiction, after all, but an expression of despair – and the more dominant the drug culture becomes, the deeper the despair becomes. But what causes, or at least contributes mightily, to despair? Hopelessness... alienation... desperation... a feeling of being left out, of having been bypassed on the road to high-tech Utopia. When an individual is declared a non-person, or a group is declared “deplorables”, they tend to act accordingly, unless they have sufficient resources and self-esteem to overcome bigotry and persecution by the ruling elite. People are highly suggestible, after all – especially in the aggregate. Pronounce a given group “victims” often enough and they start to agree with you, and think of themselves as victims; this is the essence of victimology – the politics of division, of divide-and-conquer. The East and West Coasts sit fat and happy while the heartland appears helpless and depressed. You don't need outright cultural genocide to get this effect; the gradual erosion of identity and self-respect is enough. The Middle South is the inner city writ large, but with different skin tones.

To draw a bright line between the Civil War, and its aftermath, and the current pathologies of the American South is to oversimplify, certainly. And yet the South's own spokesmen over the years – think not only Faulkner but Tennessee Williams, and many others – were perfectly willing to draw a line of this sort, if only indirectly by implication. Ever since the conclusion of “the late unpleasantness” -- which was anything but a “conclusion”, but only the start of a new stage – the South has been on the defensive – politically, economically, and culturally. Much has been made of “the New South”, where, thanks to migration from the North (not to mention air conditioning) the South has remade itself into a respectable ally in the inevitable drive toward a socialist paradise, where (to paraphrase St. Paul) there is no South vs. North, no black vs. white, no rural vs. urban – where we are all united in the ongoing pursuit of American exceptionalism and hegemony. (An interesting sidebar to all of this is that the U.S. military, particularly the Army, is still, in many ways, a Southern institution, thanks to a military tradition that predates the Civil War but that persists, nonetheless, to the present day.)

But the truth is far different, as we are, once again, seeing. It's no longer simply a matter of racial integration – that battle was won in the courts a couple of generations back, and eventually “hearts and minds” followed suit, by and large (or the older generation died out, which has the same effect). Economically, the South and the North are joined as never before; you don't have to go through customs to travel on an odd-numbered interstate highway in either direction. Politically, it can be argued that the South has, at various times, more or less taken over Congress, not to mention the presidency, which has been blessed (ahem) with a sorry gaggle of Southern governors and other politicians (LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and Bush II).

But what is it that has stood fast, and has remained as the last redoubt of Southern pride? Tradition, basically (cue Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof”). And what constitutes that tradition? Patriotism, but of an odd sort – the patriotism of a defeated nation, and of those who identify and express solidarity with it, for whatever reasons. And it's precisely because they were defeated – and defamed, mainly but not exclusively because of slavery – that this patriotism, this pride, has survived pretty much intact up to the present day. “The love that dare not speak its name” has become the love of, and pride in, place -- “blood and soil” -- something the perpetually restless and money-grubbing North cannot fathom. And it's not as if the North doesn't have these things; they just don't put much stake in them. For Northerners (of which I am one, by the way) it is enough to seek one's fortune wherever the odds favor it; “place” is secondary, and “blood” is strictly forbidden as a source of anything honorable. So we have a “nation” of, basically, (1) perpetual gypsies and migrants ever on the quest for the almighty dollar, and (2) people for whom the land -- “place” -- is everything, which explains why they persist in staying in “poverty pockets” in the Appalachians and elsewhere. Poor land is still land, whereas you can't grow corn or raise pigs in a stock portfolio or bank account.

So there is a profound lack of understanding, not to mention empathy, between the two – a lack that no politician or national leader has yet managed to remedy. (And yes, that includes Southern presidents.)

(It bears mentioning that the location of the nation's capital was chosen explicitly as a meeting place between North and South – the idea being that, with that strong a symbol, the two preexisting cultures would there find common ground. And this was, needless to say, generations before warfare broke out between the two.  And I have always found it amusing that while Washington, D.C. was firmly in the North – and well-defended – Alexandria, Virginia was firmly in the South, just a few miles down what is now U.S. 1. Yes, there were forts between D.C. and Alexandria, the sites of which remain, in many cases – unless they've been obliterated by housing developments.)

So, yes – the Old South is truly “gone with the wind”, and the Confederacy is the Lost Cause. No one can realistically argue about that. However, it is one thing to declare peace and work for reconciliation, and another to drive a stake into the heart of the losing nation/society/culture. The North, AKA the U.S., AKA the preserved Union, was at least smart enough to leave the South with its memories, its pride, and its icons – military and political. There was considerable tolerance for the remaining symbols of the South as well – flags in particular. (And what is it about flags? Well, that's a discussion for another time.) We could all chuckle indulgently when someone said, at least half in jest, “Save your Confederate money, boys, 'cause the South will rise again!” And – unless I'm sadly mistaken -- “Dixie” was a permitted song in music class in my (New York state) public school, because... well, it was historic, after all. In fact, if memory serves, we even had a perfectly courteous North/South debate in junior high social studies class. Try that these days! You'd have a SWAT team breaking the door down in five minutes, followed by an army of social workers, grief counselors, and facilitators toting teddy bears and Play-Doh.

The fact remains that for believers in the Lost Cause, just about all they have left is iconography, the first and foremost of which is – you guessed it – statuary. It's the only tangible, and public, record of that which was, is not, and is never more to be – of a dream that died. Now, we can debate all day and into the night as to whether slavery was an essential element of antebellum Southern culture. It was certainly key to the Southern economy, no doubt – and a major factor in politics, especially on the national level, where Southern legislators had to trek to Washington and be beat over the head on a regular basis by the abolitionists. But I'm talking about culture here – about the self-image of a people... a highly complex matter that includes, yes, “blood and soil”, but also traditions from whatever source, customs, approaches to government (recall that the Confederacy was much more libertarian than the Union, even at that time, not to mention ever since), religion (and yes, the South had a different mix of denominations then, as it continues to have – possibly the most stable remnant of former times), dress, manners, class structure... you name it. The South was another country then, not only literally for four years, but figuratively – as it continues to be, but only in the pale, ghostly remnants that Tennessee Williams was so fond of putting on stage. The Middle South – the “border states” -- were a kind of hybrid in many ways, as I found out when I lived in Missouri for a few years. And as such, they had, and continue to have, a kind of identity crisis – and it bears noting that many contemporary dysfunctions (like opioid addiction) seem to have inflicted the Middle South much more severely than the Deep South. One might say that anyone born and raised in the Deep South is a Southerner, without a doubt – whereas a person born and raised in the Middle South has a choice. They can adopt, and immerse themselves in, the Southern way of life (such as it remains in an increasingly cosmopolitan, rootless society), or they can be more like Midwesterners, or even Westerners; the choice is theirs. But with that choice comes, potentially, disorientation, and a frustrated search for identity.

But to have, or adopt, the “Southern” point of view is not simply a matter of geography, either. Witness the fact that there are “country-western” radio stations in every state of the union; this is, among other things, Southern pride asserting itself wherever its proponents may be, and in public, no less – and in a forum that the Regime seems indifferent to (the same way they don't harass NASCAR about its “carbon footprint”). And of course “Southern” also correlates highly with “Scotch-Irish”, with the Appalachians, and with – dare I say it? -- being white. So to celebrate, or take pride in, being of the South, and to memorialize the Confederacy and its key figures, is pretty much automatically to express white pride, if not outright white supremacy (or at least wishing for it). And white pride is something that must be banned, banished, crushed, and stamped out at all costs, according to the masters of the political, media, and entertainment universes. Southerners have to be kept on as the butt of jokes and satire, but to take them seriously would be a great breach of P. C. etiquette.

And after all, since when do we allow the losing side in any war to celebrate... anything? Do we allow aging Nazis to chant the Horst Wessel Song with weak, quavering voices? To we allow the Japanese to raise cups of sake in celebration of the Bataan Death March? Not bloody likely. A defeated enemy is still an enemy, basically – no matter how much rehabilitation has gone on in the meantime. Any hint of the mindset that led to war must be quashed without mercy, even if it is only one small element of overall national history, pride, and remembrance.

And likewise with the Confederacy. It is a particular mark of totalitarianism to give no quarter... to tolerate not the slightest deviation from the party line, either in word or symbol... and to allow no breaks, no days off, no truces from the ongoing and perpetual hate that must be expressed at all times, through all channels and media, by all right-thinking people. This has characterized repressive regimes throughout the 20^th Century, and now characterizes our own in this one respect, at least – that the Confederacy has become, in retrospect, the Great Satan, and deserves no recognition for anything other than having been totally and irredeemably evil. Which means, as far as all forms of nostalgia for the Lost Cause or for what it represents in the present day, game over – no more flags, no more statues, no more names on buildings, bridges, highways, etc. -- no more graves (!) -- no more anything. History is not being rewritten, it's being destroyed. And who feels the pain the most? Basically, those who have adopted the Confederacy and its Lost Cause as a symbol of their own cause – as a group and as individuals. And yes, these are the same “deplorables” who voted for Donald Trump, and who saw him as their last, best hope for preserving some self-respect against the assaults of the larger culture and the Regime, as embodied in that which lies “inside the Beltway”.

When an entire people has been declared anathema and beyond the pale, and their culture is assaulted on all sides, and they find themselves economically disadvantaged for whatever reasons, and they find themselves exploited by ever newer and more exotic drugs, and they are treated as buffoons and laughingstocks by the popular culture... what do they have left? Symbols, basically. Flags and statues. The flags have been banned already, so the statues are all that's left, and they are, in many cases, being actively defended by those who at least believe in not tossing greats chunks of our collective history down the memory hole.

So how are they supposed to react? The election of Trump certainly gave them an at least temporary feeling of empowerment – at least as long as it takes for a few thousand of them to be put in uniform and sent over to Afghanistan – but did it improve their lot in any tangible way? Not that I'm aware. Not unlike the election of Barack Obama, which was supposed to be such a boon to the black community, but which seems only to have aggravated its problems, the people who voted for Trump had high expectations – finally “one of us” in the White House! He'll stand up for us, even if no one else (including mainstream Republicans) has. Of course, expectations like this are bound to run up against cold political realities, not to mention personal ones, like – through what fantastical thought processes did they end up with the idea that a New York City billionaire was one of them? But for the time being, nonetheless, there is an assertiveness afoot that has the Establishment going literally mad.

And it's not as if Trump truly “represents” any given grievance group, from the “alt-right” on down to much lower life forms. What counts (again, as with Obama) is that people think he represents them, and that will lead only to frustration when their collective lot doesn't change. But again, statistics and “bean counting” by clerks in Washington, D.C. wearing green eyeshades don't really express the essence of this issue, or any other. One can be poor but have pride, or rich but in despair. What sustains a culture – as we should know by now – is not material prosperity; in fact, that can actually hasten a culture's demise by causing a shift in priorities among its members. And it's not technology or being more “in touch” with the “modern world”. It is, after all, tradition (Tevye again) – and that tradition can be obvious, out in the open, and celebrated with great gusto, or it can be more like a quiet stream that permeates daily life and is expressed most clearly in rites of passage, or it can become a kind of subversive element – a sign of rebellion (or of the failure thereof). But it might be said that the smaller the remnant, the more zeal with which people cling to it. Would statues and flags be as important if the Confederacy still existed? It seems unlikely, because there would be so many other things sustaining the culture as well (hopefully not including slavery). But as a gesture of defiance they loom large, and so the reaction of the ruling elite, with their commitment to totalitarianism, looms large as well.

You can snuff out the symbols if you snuff out the people first; that's called genocide. But to snuff out the symbols while the people remain is fraught with risks, and the establishment won't know what those risks are, or their magnitude, until it's too late.