David French: Against Conservative Cultural Defeatism

David French:

“One of the strange realities of the current fight over the direction of the conservative movement — double down on classical liberalism or reject many of its tenets in favor of a version of Christian statism? — is that it is taking place in the presence of an unjustified sense of despair and defeat. There is a wholly incorrect sense that the previous approach to the hot-button cultural issues of our day, centered around appeals to constitutional rights conducted (mostly) with civility and dignity, has failed. The argument is, in short: We lose, so we must change. …


Yes, the Left wins many fights. No question. It has enormous cultural power. But the idea that the Right is weak — and that classical liberalism is a dead end, a source of that weakness — is pure fiction …”

I’m looking around the world and trying to think of the countries where social conservatism has thrived under classical liberalism:

Is it true of the United States? The Trump administration is currently waging a global crusade to promote feminism and homosexuality. The largest group of illegal aliens ever recently crossed the border. Miley Cyrus is a role model for young women in our society. Virtually every major corporation in the United States is promoting #PrideMonth. The mainstream has moved on from legalizing sodomy and gay marriage to considering normalizing transgenderism with Drag Queen Story Hour. The political correctness is also worse than ever under Blompf.

Oh … but David French seriously believes that the Roberts Court is going to strike down the Roe decision. Yeah, well, I don’t believe that is going to happen at all. Abortion is way down because the Baby Boomers grew up and fewer people are even bothering to have children. Far from becoming more socially conservative, Millennials are hooking up on Tinder now and have simply become better at practicing birth control. They’re also abandoning David French-style evangelicalism for atheism. There is nothing compelling about David French or Russell Moore milquetoast Christianity.

I could explain how the whole arc of American history from the time of the American Revolution has been the steady expansion of classical liberalism at the expense of our traditional culture (taking liberty, equality, individualism, tolerance and rights to ever greater extremes), but I have written that article like a hundred times now in the archives. The United States has been in a permanent state of social revolution for centuries. The battles in the culture war over abortion, sodomy and gay marriage are just the latest fronts in a series of pitched battles since the leveling philosophy that is classical liberalism was invoked in the Declaration to justify the overthrow of the British monarchy in the American colonies.

The rest of the English-speaking world hasn’t fared any better under classical liberalism and is arguably much worse. I would argue these people are all behaving rationally from the perspective of classical liberalism given its assumptions about authority and the individual:

These photos from were from last year’s anti-Trump protest in London. The same crowd was back on the streets this afternoon:

This is the sort of culture that classical liberalism inexorably leads to in every country in which it has become the basis of the social order. It is true of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain and the whole of the degenerate West. These are the symptoms of cultural decline, not cultural progress.

Thomas Carlyle explained why in his Latter-Day Pamphlets in 1850:

“To rectify the relation that exists between two men, is there no method, then, but that of ending it? The old relation has become unsuitable, obsolete, perhaps unjust; and the remedy is, abolish it; let there henceforth be no relation at all. From the ‘sacrament of marriage’ downwards, human beings used to be manifoldly related one to another, and each to all; and there was no relation among human beings, just or unjust, that had not its grievances and its difficulties, its necessities on both sides to bear and forbear. But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that by favor of Heaven; the ‘voluntary principle’ has come up, which will itself do the business for us; and now let a new sacrament, that of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our platforms, be universally the order of the day!Have men considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly enough betokens? Cut every human relation that has any where grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of the nomadic; in other words, LOOSEN BY ASSIDUOUS WEDGES, in every joint, the whole fabrice of social existence, stone from stone, till at last, all lie now quite loose enough, it can, as we already see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of revolutionary rage; and lying as mere mountains of anarchic rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c. over it, and rejoice in the now remarkable era of human progress we have arrived at.”

A conservatism based on classical liberalism is an oxymoron.

As Louis Hartz explained in 1955, American conservatism is classical liberalism. There is no authentic American conservatism outside of Southern conservatism which was grounded in slavery and which rejected liberalism in favor of Aristotle and Christianity in the 1850s.

Note: Sorry to burst your balloon of bullshit, David, but someone has to do it.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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6 Comments

  1. French wants to lose the culture wars with civility and dignity. He is an impotent masochist pretending to be a strong moralist. His cooperation with evil, when he’s in a position of influence, is truly sick and unforgivable.

  2. From the Democratic front:

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kirsten-gillibrand-pete-buttigieg-al-franken_n_5cf67a90e4b0e346ce8516b1

    Mayor Buttfag has finally shown his true rainbow.

    Gay men are known in the ‘queer’ and political feminist movement to hate women, at least in some quarters. They rank among the lowest for respecting women’s rights in rape cases.

    Narcissism and jealousy cause this hatred. And I don’t even dislike all homosexuals, men or women. A gay man has no business as president of any country, though. Buttfag wants to ‘leave it up to’ Franken to decide whether he should be shunned from the Democratic Party (he was forced out by a bunch of women politicians lead by Kirsten Gillibrand).

    Franken groped Ariana Huffington’s breast in some photo shoot, and in another famous photo pretended to grab a woman reporter’s breasts when she was sleeping. He’s a disgusting jew trying to degrade our white european culture with his filth. What white man of his supposed stature would have made such a vile joke?

    Rates of narcissistic personality disorder go off the scales for gay men.

    XOX Jewboy + Buttboy XOX

  3. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/05/25/howard_stern_trump_needs_therapy_for_childhood_trauma_wanted_me_to_endorse_him_speak_at_rnc.html

    More filthy jews turn on Donald Trump. No matter how zionist he gets, the jews will always hate him because he once dared acknowledge that white people have equal rights with blacks and jews. No matter how friendly they were with him, he is still a traitor to their genocidal covenant.

    Listen to the disgusting yid. This is truly how many jews speak in the tri-state area. Treachery and vileness are the lifeblood of these vampires, preaching psycho-therapy for the gentile they envy. All their inbreeding just makes them hideous as opposed to ‘intelligent.’

    More pro-whites need to learn to see through the jew and its bag of tricks. I heard a rumor that Stern advised his audience at some point to hit women during sex as a means of intensifying male orgasm from the woman’s vaginal contraction – her pain.

    I’m not gunning for Trump in any way as president, just venting spleen over the filth these monsters unleash on us. I just went to a major midwest northern city to hear from some black Uber driver that ‘Mexicans and blacks are the only people who weren’t immigrants.’ Jewish grant money is literally rewriting our history right out from under us. Some negro thinks that a bunch of spanish arrived in America before the whites in Jamestown and Plymouth.

  4. “The TAPS Act has all the earmarks of a paranoid police state that considers everyone a potential threat.”
    http://theroperreport.whitenationalists.net/2019/06/04/what-is-the-taps-act/

    [Gee, ya think?]

    Liberalism is SATANIC. We need to reinstate public stoning, a complete shakedown on aberrant activity, thought, and action. We need Biblical Law, and the freedom to limit the satanist’s freedoms, in order to purify this and every land where the “West’s” Heresy has taken root- from New Zealand to Norway, from the Urals to the USA.

    And the Left/Loons know that they are very close to having/achieving the Orwellian State THEY desire, but God DAMNS. Which would literally be ‘Hell on earth.’

    “All they that hate me [YHWH] love death.” Prov. 8:36

  5. There is a good criticism of Trump/Farage/Johnson now. The exchange about the NHS “on the table”. It’s known that Farage is backed by an insurance mogul called Arron Banks who covets the privatization of the NHS. Trump’s son in law and brother Joshua are now two of the biggest health insurance marketers. It smacks of pure evil. Sadly the serious left had to go around parading with these strange ghouls in drag yesterday. If you are going to defend Yang and his bag you should think about what Corbyn is now articulating because Trump handed the socialists in the U.K. an opening they should exploit. Most Labour voters are pretty decent and ordinary making ends meet and want their bag too.

  6. “It began at Abel and hath ever since continued and shall—I doubt not—until the last day. And the hypocrites have alway° the world on their sides, as thou seest in time of Christ. They had the elders—that is to wit the rulers of the Jews—on their side. They had Pilate and the emperor’s power on their side. They had Herod also on their side. Moreover, they brought all their worldly wisdom to pass and all that they could think or imagine to serve for their purpose. First, to fear° the people withal, they excommunicated all that believed in him, and put them out of the temple, as thou seest (John 9).25 Secondly, they found the means to have him condemned by the Emperor’s power and made it treason to Caesar to believe in him.c Thirdly, they obtained to have him hanged as a thief or murderer,d which after their full stomach was a cause above all causes, that no man should believe in him. For the Jews take it for a sure token of everlasting damnation if a man be hanged. For it is written in their law (Deuteronomy 21) cursed is whosoever hangeth on a tree.e Moses also in the same place commandeth, if any man be hanged, to take him down the same day and bury him, for fear of polluting or defiling the country, that is, lest they should bring the wrath and curse of God upon them. And therefore the wicked Jews themselves, which with so venomous hate persecuted the doctrine of Christ and did all the shame that they could do unto him though they would fain° have had Christ to hang still on the cross and there to rot.”—William Tyndale’s Obedience.

    Trump made his peace with the Yids so I don’t begrudge the crazy leftists their dirigible blimp of Trump. Farage’s Brexit Party was exposed as a front for insurance policy scammers yesterday by Blompf. Corbyn has been under vicious assault as an Anti-Jew by the press the elders and every Jew in the U.K. something will give now.

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