The Fight for the New Right
A constant undercurrent of the conference was the oscillation between equally eloquent articulations of despair at the present and an intrinsically Christian hope for the future.
A constant undercurrent of the conference was the oscillation between equally eloquent articulations of despair at the present and an intrinsically Christian hope for the future.
To engage in judicial activism is to embrace a spirit of anarchy, in which the means of determining law are dependent upon who happens to be in power at a given moment. As Lincoln said, “we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.”
From Europe’s north to her south, it is difficult to avoid the sense that the prevailing order is coming apart, that the cultural revolution to which her people have been subjected is being met with some real resistance.
Like the world which Kojève observed in 1945 and again in 1957, ours is a world of great powers vying for global dominance.
Police now show at least as much interest, if not more, in what people think and say as they do in obvious kinds of criminal behaviour. The new paramilitary social worker will sooner quiz a TERF than catch a thief.
While there may be fewer rainbow flags around and more room for self-expression on sensitive topics than is present in Western societies of today, ‘woke culture’ is spreading in Poland.
I would go so far as to argue that unadulterated liberalism corrodes democracy, and true democracy is opposed to liberalism. Illiberal democracy is capable of integrating what is valuable in liberalism without allowing the liberal framework to take over.
The desire of boys to carry pocketknives, it seems to me, is one that should be nurtured. A pocketknife makes one more useful to others, and being at the service of others is what turns a boy into a man.
Without the root of prayer, Europe is like a drowning museum and a place of cynical intrigue, but at prayer Europe is in the fight of her life—where darkness and collapse beckon the annihilation of identity. In such times, civilisations require saints.
Though kitsch wears the costume of reality’s vocabulary, it does not describe things as they are. You could only call it good without qualms of conscience after downing a Dionysian dose of expired boxed wine.
No totalitarian state can firmly establish itself without identifying its enemies, those who are deemed to be dangerous for both state and society. This time, the scapegoats are the unvaccinated.
Gone is the bombast of economic progress as a good in itself. It seems much of the Right has finally recovered from the hangover of an era in which it was necessary to evidence the superiority of Western capitalism over eastern Bolshevism.
Fred Dibnah, MBE, the late and great, was a steeplejack. He was also a self-taught engineer, a documentarian, and a daredevil who brought down exactly ninety disused industrial chimneys using—with rare exceptions—nothing but a hammer and chisel.
The champions of an imperial and of a national world order were and are sons to a mixed heritage. This essay explores the deeper compatibility of Europe’s Greco-Roman and Biblical inheritances, as well as of national political entities and broader universal commitments.
If a new framework for freedom is to emerge in the West, it must be recognizable. The stories of anchored freedom must be told, and they must be disseminated with the same adamance in mass culture, whenever and wherever possible, as the Boomer myth of freedom.
How is it, we may ask ourselves, sexuality is widely deemed something fluid, unless its fluidity runs towards heterosexuality, and then all of a sudden sexuality becomes a binary phenomenon that cannot undergo any change?
It is the ordinary nature of their goodness that makes the story of Le Chambon such a miracle. It was weathered men and women with brittle hands, shiny with callouses from backbreaking work, hard as oak and often gnarled with age, who did these things.
As I knelt to pray my rosary before the Blessed Sacrament, I was struck by the astonishing confidence required to build Sacré-Cœur. In 1789, France, the Church’s eldest daughter, declared herself no longer a disciple of Jesus Christ but an apostate.
If Europe is to enter a new, restorative cycle, it will not do merely to push against contemporary ‘woke’ elites and the consequences of mass immigration. Her defenders must attend to what drove some of her most perceptive sons and daughters away.
The ideal of responsibility is based on the simple assumption that with maturity should come a certain readiness to accept the sufferings and burdens of life with dignity. This, if you like, is part of the backbone of Western Civilization.
Humanity’s ongoing plastic saga suggests that mass production and mass disposability—the same process that replaces fabrication and craftsmanship with production—also reduces our ability to make ourselves, that is, to reproduce.
For the first time in many decades, German politicians must learn to think, rather than feel— and to assert Germany’s vital national interests.
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