I began writing
the Twilight Patriot blog in February of 2019. While the landscape of American
politics has changed a bit over that almost-three-year period, my opinions
about my country’s past, present, and likely future have remained fairly constant.
Sometimes, I voiced
those opinions by criticizing the same things that most Right-wingers criticize:
the size of government, a welfare state that disincentivizes work and thrift,
the dictatorial role of SCOTUS. Sometimes, I criticized things that the Right
used to approve of, but has recently soured on, like military adventurism, or the
dismantling of America’s industrial plant in favor of cheap imports.
Sometimes, I
took positions that are heretical on the Right: ‘Global warming is real,’ I
said, ‘and President Trump is only pretending to care about the border wall.’ And
sometimes, I simply sounded alarmist: ‘Inflation is two or three times worse
than the official numbers say, and the US military has grown so weak that even
third and fourth-rate enemies can prevail against it.’
And I made a
consistent set of predictions: The American Empire was going to continue its
process of decline and fall. It didn’t really matter which party won the next
election; neither party would make the changes that really mattered. In a
little while – historically speaking – the United States would be a third world
country, with third world levels of poverty, inflation, unemployment, political
dysfunction, crime, and military ineptitude.
And I was
saying all of this before the re-engineered bat virus, the
five-month-long nonstop race riot, and the attempted coup.
I was talking
decline and fall before the Afghanistan route, before the police
and the military started using vaccine mandates to purge out their less
conformist members, before… well, you get the point.
But there’s
another curious thing. If you follow political commentary for a while, you’ll
notice that whenever a big crisis happens, or seems likely to happen, a lot of
people start talking doomsday scenarios: The coronavirus is going to kill
>10% of the people who get it, causing a total collapse of the government in
the process. Or the vaccines are going to do the same thing.
Or the Floyd
Riots will be the permanent end of law and order throughout the United States.
Or some other imminent event is going to cause the world as we know it to roll
over and die.
When Qasem
Soleimani was killed, I heard people saying it was going to spark World War III
– but it didn’t, and a few days later, the excitement had died down. For years
before the 2020 election, people on both sides of the aisle were insisting that
if the Democrat won in a way that Trump’s base believed was unfair, we would
have a civil war on our hands. Then Trump lost, and most Republicans did indeed
believe that Biden had cheated… but one hour of LARPing does not a civil war
make.
So we were left
in the great in-between. We’ve seen, over and over again, that our civilization
is not on the track of upward progress. It is not even maintaining a
comfortable status quo. But in most people’s imaginations, the only alternative
to those things is instant apocalypse, and we’re not getting that,
either.
Just a gradual
decline and fall, a slow slide into third world conditions.
It is a disappointment.
We Americans feel that our nation is so unique that if it doesn’t keep
progressing onward and upward indefinitely (to the point that we eventually
learn how to make people immortal, or colonize outer space, or what have you)
then it at least deserves to go out with a uniquely memorable bang.
But here I am,
predicting that neither of these things will happen. Just a slow slide into the
mud. ‘Look at the situation in Mexico,’ I say. ‘Look how the people are getting
poorer and poorer, and central authority is weakening, and many of the rural
areas are being divided between warring militias and gangs. That will probably be our future, too. Hopefully, our technology will decline quickly enough that
our overlords don’t get a chance to set up a universal surveillance state like in
China.’
And then, as if
I wanted to make my readers go ‘huh?’ one more time, I say that I don’t
find this depressing, that it’s far from the worst future we could have,
and that there’s a lot of room, in the future that I’m sketching out, for hope,
optimism, and plans to rebuild.
In large part,
this is possible because of my belief in God and my fundamentally religious worldview.
Generally
speaking, religious people – in other words, people who have hung their hopes
of ultimate victory on something less feeble than human beings or institutions built
by human beings – have no reason to hide from the reality of decline and fall.
In the Western religions,
this is because the material world, and everything in it, is transient, and
irreparably marred by mankind’s sins. We are only here on earth for a brief moment
– ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ and all that – and if we happen to
live in an age of worldly decline, it shouldn’t be a source of sorrow to us,
only another reason to serve God faithfully and lay up our treasures in Heaven.
The Eastern
religions conceive things a bit differently. In their view, the world itself
may well have no beginning and no end, but everything in it lasts for only a brief
moment amid the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Each of us has lived many
lives already, and can look forward to many lives yet to come, and the way to wisdom
and happiness lays in recognizing transient things for what they are, enjoying
them while they last, and refusing to cling to them when it’s time to leave
them behind.
Since Twilight
Patriot is not a religious blog, I’m not going to comment on which of those two
overarching philosophies I find more convincing. Suffice it to say that people
who follow either of them will have an easier time weathering the storms ahead
than the materialists who lean, for their sense of meaning and purpose, on the
frail reed of human progress.
If you’re a
regular reader of Twilight Patriot, and perhaps even if you aren’t, then you
probably admire a lot of the same people as I do: George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, Frederick
Douglas, Winston Churchill, etc.
Men like that
can only exist during times of adversity. And with that in mind, is it really depressing
for me to say that America’s future will involve regression, fragmentation,
poverty, and violence? Nothing else could toughen up the soft, effete, atomized
people who presently live here into the kind of men and women who can do great
things. As in nature, so with mankind – some trees can only take root in in the
ashes left by a fire.
George
Washington and the other founders grew up in a country that was poorer, more
violent, and more technologically backward than the country we live in today. Because
of my conviction that history is cyclical and that progress is never permanent,
I am free to believe that America may yet produce a thousand Washingtons. Is
that really such a bad future?
But what does
that mean for the here and now? It means that each of us – each of us who
desires to in some way be a part of building the next great North American
civilization – should be eager to score a win against the system.
And we can win against the system by detaching ourselves from the system.
Whenever some
American kid realizes that America’s days as the nonproducing consumer among
nations are numbered, and decides to learn a trade that involves working with
his hands instead of pushing numbers around, that’s a win.
Whenever a trad
wife gives birth to three or more children, and raises them up in such a way
that they imitate her decision to make family a bigger priority than the
pursuit of wealth, that’s a win.
Whenever
someone opens the town newspaper, reads a letter like this one, and is
dissuaded from disfiguring his or her child’s mind with ADHD medication, that’s
a win.
Whenever an
American couple refuses to send their children to woke public schools where
race hatred and gender dysphoria are taught, that’s a win.
Whenever someone
grows his own food, and builds or at least repairs his own house, car,
appliances, furniture, etc., rather than relying for those things on an increasingly
dysfunctional global supply chain, that’s a win.
Whenever someone
finds a way to work for himself, taking payment in cash and/or barter when
possible, and depriving corporate and
government middlemen of the chance to skim off of his labor, that’s a win.
Whenever
someone realizes that the fossil-fueled economy is going to wind down over the
next few generations, and acts on that realization by making a hobby out of
preserving the technologies that are appropriate to a more primitive world – technologies
like sailing ships, home-built radios, letterpress printing, or traditional
glassmaking, to name a few – that’s a win.
Acts of
resistance against the state can be wins, but we need to be realistic
about our expectations in this regard. People who do not have the courage to
seek asylum abroad when their own children’s genders are changed by court order
do not have the courage to repeat the events of 1776, or even 1989. Which is
why the only kinds of resistance that I expect will be done, successfully, during
the next few decades are the small and local kinds.
Our side does
not have a path to nationwide victory – indeed, in times like these it makes
little sense to speak of “our side” at all.
My favorite
metaphor for the collapse of American civilization is the Blind Men and the
Elephant. Just as the six blind men, though feeling different things, all knew
that they had grasped onto some part of a large animal, a lot of the people
living in the United States in 2021 can feel that their country is falling
apart. But because we each feel only some aspects of the rolling collapse, it
is easy to quarrel with one another about the real nature and causes of it.
Yet in our
quarreling, we’re often all partly in the right. The people who think that the
sexual revolution was a mistake, and those who think that treating petroleum as
if it’s a renewable resource is a mistake, tend to be political enemies… for
now. But the collapse of the gasoline economy, the re-agrarianization of
America, and the disappearance of the technologies that make it easy to manage
venereal diseases will, I think, bring each around to the other’s point of
view.
None of this is
going to be easy or pleasant or quick. There is, at this point, no turning back
from the future that America has earned for itself. We will not get continued
progress, nor will we get instant apocalypse; just a long, slow,
multigenerational decline into third world conditions – into impoverished,
violent, and politically repressive conditions – followed by an opportunity to
rebuild. Or rather, several opportunities to rebuild, since by that time the United
States will almost certainly have fragmented into multiple pieces.
So that, then,
is what optimism means for me. It means looking at the situation as it is, with
its challenges and opportunities, and choosing to meet the challenges manfully,
and act on the opportunities.
It does not mean believing that one’s political party has its act together when the evidence suggests that it does not. Nor does it mean insulting the founders by saying that the constitution we have today is, for the most part, the same one they established, and that our country can be saved if only we protect said constitution from future assaults, when in reality the old constitution has been dead for a long time, and ought to have been given a decent burial already.
And once you admit that dead things are dead things, you can focus on the real challenges of our time: disengagement, survival, and rebuilding.
The subject of this particular, and very interesting, essay deserves a serious, thoughful symposium of the best thinkers around. But even if we could arrange that, we would find that there was no consensus, because we're trying to predict the future.
ReplyDeleteThere are good reasons to believe that the future is not predictable in any useful detail. Nobody knows the future.
Wars and revolutions are history-altering events. At the beginning of the 20th Century, you might have predicted with some confidence that big wars and deep-going revolutions were things of the past.
Wars were obsolete because there was nothing to fight over any more -- all the weakly-held territory in the Third World had been grabbed. Plus, advances in technology had made future wars between great powers far more fearsome, and far more expensive, than in the past. Many intelligent people believed this. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion ] [ https://contraryperspective.com/2013/11/17/war-is-becoming-obsolete-in-1884/ ]
Revolutions were obsolete because the ruling classes of the major powers had finally understood that they needed to reform in order to hold on to power. And even where the ruling powers were a bit dim, and obstructed the reforms that their wiser advisors tried to carry through -- in Russia and China -- the 'revolutions' would simply be modernizing ones, attempting to emulate the Europeans by achieving republics or constitutional monarchies, complete with social welfare measures.
But these optimistic predictions were wrong, as we know. Devastating wars, and deep-going revolutions occurred. Of course, there were those who had predicted them: the entire Marxist movement was trained to expect wars and revolutions, as the inevitable outcome of the competition of capitalist states with each other, and the collapse of the capitalist economy.
But ... if we look deeper into the causes of these wars and revolutions, we notice something: the decisive influence of individuals on history.
To take one case: no one who studies the Russian Revolution in any detail will believe that without Lenin, the Russian Revolution of 1917 -- and all that flowed from it -- would have occurred. Had he been detained in exile in Switzerland in February of 1917, there would have been no Russian Revolution. The German Socialists would have remained united, and, arguably, the Nazis would have remained a tiny minority (they got less than 3% of the vote in 1928). Even if they had grown in strength, the anti- and non-Nazi parties in the Reichstag would have had a majority, and Hitler would not have been invited to assume the political leadership of Germany.
Nobody knows the future. We can expand on this by noting the nature of 'knowledge', and how different it is for objective physical reality, and social reality. The bete noire of the Right, George Soros, has written about it very well, as applied to just a small segment of reality, the stock market. [ https://macro-ops.com/understanding-george-soross-theory-of-reflexivity-in-markets/ ]
So ... yes, we might see the slow, relatively peaceful decline of the US, spreading over many decades. Or we might see something else, perhaps some galvanizing event which brings things to a head in some dramatic way.
For example, if the Chinese militarily humiliate the US in the course of seizing Taiwan. Or if Mr Putin rolls the dice and moves into the Ukraine, without an effective American response. These are just current possibilities -- in the unstable world we live in, there will be many more possibilities in the future.
Continued in next comment.
ReplyDeleteSo what should patriots do now? I personally have mixed feelings about the proposal to "detach ourselves from society".
In the complete sense, this is simply not possible for the overwhelming majority of people. A few hermits in remote caves in Idaho may escape the power of the state and participation in the modern economy, but this is simply not possible for large numbers of people. (Note that the Twilight Patriot himself endeavors to make ever-greater numbers of people enmeshed in the interent, by writing a blog that he hopes will gain thousands of captivated readers. No more interesting things to read on this blog if you've seriously 'detached yourself from society' because the internet depends on 'society' to exist.)
The division of labor and specialization are essential steps upwards from the primitive hunter-gatherer stage. If we return to that stage, it will only be as the result of some devastating war. If we are all required to know how to build our own house, repair our own car, build our own radios (and television sets?), be our own doctors, fix our own plumbing, make our own glass ... but enough. It will not happen.
Similarly, money is a huge advance over barter.
However, I think I may be caricaturing the author's views here.
Perhaps what he is really proposing is that patriots should start to 'withdraw' from official society, but re-form societies in miniature, in their own communities -- keeping the division of labor and specialization, but trying to make sure that interchanges are between likeminded people, shopping at mom-and-pop stores rather than 'woke' corporate behemoths, even if it costs a bit more.
This can only be partly successful -- no small town is going to manufacture its own automobiles and computers, or even refine its own ironore -- shades of the Great Leap Forward! -- but it can't hurt. And an emphasis on learning skills that might become necessary in the event of some social collapse is not wrong, either.
Or maybe, like most of us, he's doing his best to feel his way in an unprecedented situation, in which no one knows the future.
In any case, perhaps we can agree that what is needed is a new perspective for patriots. For the last few generations, we have largely acted as atomized individuals, voting for the lesser evil, watching society decay around us.
Getting together in our local communities, taking advantge of the range of skills that are found among 'ordinary' people, getting ready to as self-sufficient as possible in the face of a general social collapse -- I personally think this is the way forward.
Doing this has the advantage that it has almost no downsides: if by some wonderful historic miracle, America pulls itself together, decisively rejects the progressive vision, and re-emerges as a strong, confident Republic ... what have you wasted by becoming more reliant on your neighbors rather than multi-national corporations? A bit of money, perhaps. Some time spent learning first aid or disaster-engineering skills, or the military skills that our ancestors took for granted, on the frontier at least. Time that could have been spent watching TV. And on the other hand, these new friends and new skills may enrich your life in a way that no purchases from a multi-national company can.
And if that miracle doesn't occur, and we see some major social trauma -- perhaps sparked by events overseas -- then your preparation with your neighbors will not have been in vain.
It's sort of like Pascal's Wager: [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager ] if you expect disaster, and prepare for it, and it doesn't happen... you 'lose', but in a larger sense you win. Or to come forward four hundred years, it's a kind of "minimaxing" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax ]
Continued and finished in next comment.
ReplyDeleteSo, although I have some reservations about the author's apparent certainty that we face a long, peaceful decline, and am equally skeptical about the extent to which most people can cut themselves off from existing socity, I am basically in agreement with his proposals.
And I'm not alone. The most serious group I have been able to find, on a national level, which is preparing, in an organized way, for an uncertain future, may be found here: https://USCPT.org
It's almost as if the leaders of this group, which has been around for a couple of years, had read the Twilight Patriot's essay here, and decided to put it into practice. Or maybe perceptive people everywhere are beginning to see what's happening, and taking the obvious steps to prepare.
Doug,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see that you're still interested in my work.
Now to respond to some of the points you've made. First, nobody thinks that the future is precisely predictable... but some people's (rough) predictions are better than others. So far, my repeated predictions of gradual decline - rather than stabilization, a return to upward progress, or sudden apocalypse - have panned out remarkably well.
Second, I am not predicting that America's decline is going to be "peaceful." I'm a bit baffled that you got that impression from this essay, in which I repeatedly described our likely future as "violent" and compared it to the present situation in Mexico. Now, it's true that I'm not predicting an overnight doomsday scenario, or a carefully-planned Marxian (or counter-Marxian) revolution, or an 1861-style civil war in which people from red states and blue states line up on opposite sides and shoot each other. But there is a big middle ground between "Mad Max" and "Pollyanna," and I'm predicting that our future will lie somewhere in the middle ground.
Third, when I talk about detaching from a decadent society, you've got to realize that attachment/detachment is a spectrum, not a boolean; there are a lot of different degrees of detachment... and being a hermit is only the most extreme way to do it (and, arguably, one of the less productive ways.) This is why I provided a long list of ways that individuals can win against the system, which do not involve becoming hermits. And they often don't look all that dramatic, but each of them can, under the right circumstances, make all the difference - at least for the individual/family involved.
No, we are not going to become hunter-gatherers again. But there is a middle ground between living like Squanto's people, and being fully reliant on the global money economy. When inflation and unemployment make it harder to pay for things with money, it will be good to be able to grow some of your own food, and repair things in your own house, like most Americans could a century ago - this is not the Middle Ages we are talking about!
Similarly, I don't expect everyone to make their own glass. But in a poorer, less interconnected future, living in a town with a glassblower who knows how make glass with simple tools will be a big deal. Ditto for all the other handicrafts which, today, are practiced mainly as hobbies - but which once were important parts of the economy, and which could be again.
So to recap: The future is not going to be peaceful, but the decline will be slow and ragged. Things will not fall to pieces all at once. And the coming society will be shaped by the people who put in the effort to resist the decay in small but real ways.
I agree and I have always enjoyed this blog for exactly the view here. The world goes on and dark times give us a chance to grow and repent.
ReplyDeleteI plan to leave abroad for saner lands, whether Russia or China, but to return here and see what can be done will be good, too.