The Rise Of The Middle American Radicals (MARS)

 https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/conservatism-reconfigured

About forty years ago the hard-right columnist and political theorist Sam Francis began to devise a new framework for understanding power in modern America. Francis accepted as true James Burnham’s argument that a “managerial revolution” had superseded the old class struggle between labor and capital and resulted in a new human type, the “managerial class.” To this Francis added an idea borrowed from the sociologist Donald Warren, who in The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation (1976) described men and women who might today be called “populists” (or “deplorables”) as “Middle American Radicals,” or mars. Francis recognized them as the population left behind and disenfranchised by the accumulation of power in the hands of the managerial elite. The class conflict of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as he saw it, was between the mars and the managers.

"Managers" have mutated into Bureaucrats and the Administrative State. 

The article goes through a some attenuated history of how we moved from monarchy to "Democratic Oligarchy" over the last couple hundred years. It is worth reading. 

The new capitalist class that rose to prominence in society beginning in the nineteenth century was itself informed by Christianity—many of the great industrialists came from Dissenting Protestant backgrounds—and recognized the value of religion for instilling habits of hard work and honesty among the laboring masses. That Christianity promised a heavenly reward that would more than compensate for economic disappointments in this life also helped to defuse any revolutionary resentments among the masses.

Yet one element in the new industrial society was acutely uncomfortable with all of this. These were the heirs to the Enlightenment philosophes who had hated the Church for its moral authority over their lives. John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most important of these nineteenth-century spiritual revolutionaries, wished to be free not only of the Church’s power but also of its prestige.

Christianity worked to create a productive cohesive society, but it had those pesky morals! Mill and others figured out that the way to win was via "education" ... they needed to make Christianity and Conservatism "stupid" -- and they did. 

Conservatism from Peel and Disraeli to Thatcher and Reagan rested on three social foundations: the patriotism of the masses, the enduring cultural hegemony of Christianity, and the business community’s need for mass-based conservatism as a protection against the threat of socialism. Today the business community feels little threatened by socialism; economic nationalism and Christian morality are a greater nuisance as much of corporate America is concerned. Christianity’s cultural hegemony is over. And the national masses no longer exist. In their place, business interests and political progressives now import multinational immigrant populations. The educational establishment, meanwhile, encourages immigrants to see themselves as members of victim groups who should feel aggrieved rather than grateful toward the nation that has accepted them.

America has had many divisions in the past, but even in the Civil War both sides read the same Scripture and spoke the same language. Immigrants in earlier times were encouraged to identify with the nation’s history and its Christian, English-speaking majority. And in the epoch of the industrial masses, there were economic interests that could unify whole regions and classes, if not quite every region and class at once. Shared economic interests now tend to be more diffuse, with great divides between the educated and uneducated and between the financial elite and the educated but not very wealthy sub-elite.

Four types of "conservatives" are identified.   

• The Restorationists - believe in a return to the industrial economy and a Christian culture is possible. 
• The Nihilists - They don't have a plan, they just hate where we are. 
• The Withdrawalists - Essentially "The Benedict Option" 
• The Accomodationalists - They live in the suburbs, worship success and Wokeism 

The author goes with the Restorationalists as the most likely path forward, with DeSantis and Trump being the best available leadership for this ilk. As the county chair for DeSantis, that is where I am. I voted for Trump twice, but believe "he fought the swamp, and the swamp won". He is the walking dead politically, and likely physically if the Administrative State believes they can get away with it. They see him as a "clear and present danger", which he would be if the Administrative State was not as dominant as it is. 

To some degree, sitting here in total fly over Iowa, I'm praying for Restoration, but suspecting Benedict. 

Recommended. 

Conservatism Has Failed

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/american-conservatism-is-fiddling-while-rome-burns/

What is conservatism in America today? It’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent fiddling while Rome burns. It’s ideas with little to no consequence. It’s getting trampled all over by History, but while yelling Stop!

  Conservatism has failed (as has liberalism).

And yet conservatism, in its dotage, cannot shake the nagging suspicion that it no longer speaks to the country it loves, in particular to those who have no living memory of the Cold War. This dawning realization could be amplified through probing questions: is America today more conservative than it was when the conservative movement began 70 or so years ago? Is conservatism itself as conservative as it was then? On the off chance that the conservative agenda were to be implemented, would it fundamentally transform the United States of America and lead to conservative hegemony (or would it simply save us money and buy us time)?

 
Across the board, the answer is a resounding no. Conservatism must therefore overhaul itself. If it refuses, then it should be left to die with the passage of time. A new Right, in any case, is already overtaking it. 

This new right, which of yet has no name, is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna” [Sparta is Yours: Adorn It, and the more general, You Were Born With Talents: Develop Them. Author: Euripides].

—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her. The "New Right" needs a name, some intellectual coherency, and some faces to represent it. 

Perhaps "Creedalism" would be a reasonable new name ? Webster defines creedealism  as "undue insistence upon traditional statements of belief". 

Who gets to define "undue"?  I suppose "there are two genders" would be and example of "undue insistence on traditional statements of belief". 

In the dogma of "progressivism" are there any "traditional statements" that can be invoked without the approbation "undue"? 

As the linked makes clear, "conservative" is a very imprecise term today. 

How Sir Roger Scruton Became Conservative

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2003/2/why-i-became-a-conservative

A superb answer to why I am a conservative. Your time would be well spent reading the article! A few nuggets ...

Law is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it. Moreover the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

The abstract is unconstrained, reality is always constrained.

Whether you call it "modernism", "progressivism", "materialism", or "liberalism" it all boils down to the faith that there is no such thing as transcendence or God, it is ALL "particles and progress".

Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.

A snippet of Sir Rogers thoughts after being allowed a visit to Communist Prague in 1979, and his closing of why he does not despair. Just read it!

To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision of Satan and his work—the very same vision that had shaken Burke to the depths of his being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect of Burke’s philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth.

Henceforth, I understood conservatism not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living. But I do not despair, since experience has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long, that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values, and that the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity will excite them only in the short-term.

As to the task of transcribing, into the practice and process of modern politics, the philosophy that Burke made plain to the world, this is perhaps the greatest task that we now confront. I do not despair of it; but the task cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It requires not a collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.