The New Era

October 8, 2020 Hunter Wallace Aesthetics, Culture, History, Identity, Liberalism, Modernism 41

As I have argued, Modern America emerged in the 1920s. The Victorian consensus on identity, culture and morality began its long term decline in this period when the Losters rebelled against their parents after World War I. The rifts that began to open up in the 1920s were temporarily overshadowed by the mirage of unity created by the shared experience of the Great Depression and World War II.

The following excerpt comes from George Donelson Moss’s book The Rise of Modern America: A History of the American People, 1890-1945:

“The most important trend of the 1920s was the emergence of a new mass consumer culture that fostered changes in the ways many Americans worked, lived, and cared for one another. It also brought changes in manners, morals, and personal identities. Consumerism also shifted the American sense of community – from communities based on shared values toward communities based on shared styles of consumption. But beneath the surface unity of mass consumerism and participation in new leisure activities, cultural conflicts and tensions seethed. American society was fragmented along many fault lines – urbanites versus rural folks, WASPs versus ethnics, white against black, and perhaps the profoundest divide: between those who embraced a modernist culture and those who retained traditional values. …”

“Traditional values” are Victorian values.

Among other things, Victorians had believed in White identity, the inequality of races and cultures, the separation of the sexes into separate spheres, making sharp distinctions between “civilized” and “savage” cultures and behaviors, an ethic based on religious piety and moral virtues which together produced “character” that was instilled into children in the household, self-denial, thrift, hard work, diligence, persistence, modesty, a rational and orderly universe and moral progress.

“The 1920s also marked a beginning, a time when millions of American adapted to urban patterns of existence. They centered their new urban lifestyle around ownership of automobiles and participation in the new urban mass culture. While many urbanites abandoned their former rural, agrarian way of life, they retained some of its values. It was a time of transition. During the 1920s the major historical developments of twentieth-century American life – technological change, urbanization, the development of bureaucratic modes of organization, and the growth of the middle class – accelerated rapidly. Between the end of World War I and the stock market crash of 1929, the shape of modern America emerged; the historical forces driving the rise of the urban nation accelerated. The New Era was the first recognizably modern decade.”

Baked Alaska and Sammy: a Modern love story

Victorian men called on young women. Modern men go on dates. At first, premarital sex was rare but later became more common after the second wave of Modernism in the 1960s which we call the counter-culture. In the 1920s, about 7% of young middle class women had premarital sex.

“Family life changed. Birth control became more effective and more widely practiced during the 1920s. Birthrates and family size dropped sharply. Average family size shrank from six or seven members in 1900 to four or five members by 1930. Divorce rates rose sharply. In 1920 there was one divorce for every eight marriages. In 1929 the ratio of divorces to marriage was 2 to 7. Young people were spending more years in school, lengthening adolescence and postponing the time when they would enter the work force. High school enrollment quadrupled between World War I and 1930. By 1929 one-third of all high school graduates were going to college, more women than men …”

In the 1920s, more young people began going to high school and college. This is one of the most important reasons why a youth culture developed in that decade that rebelled against Victorianism.

“A generational change had a major effect on feminism during the 1920s. New images of femininity emerged. Young women were more interested in individual freedom of expression than they were in political reform or social progress. Some adopted what H.L. Mencken called the “flapper image.” Short skirts and bobbed hair, signals of sexual freedom, spread on college campuses and in offices. Young women rouged their cheeks, smoked cigarettes, swore, drank at parties, danced to the beat of “hot jazz” combos, and necked in the back seats of automobiles. Premarital sex increased and became less scandalous as Victorian inhibitions declined.

There was another important consequence of the sexual revolution of the 1920s. The modern custom of “dating” replaced the old Victorian practice of calling. No longer did young women of marriageable age invite young men to their homes in the presence of chaperones. Automobiles and city life created new possibilities; besides, many modern homes lacked parlors or porches. Young men increasingly invited young women out on dates, to attend a movie, maybe have dinner in a nice restaurant, or just go for a drive along the lake in his flivver.

Dating also shifted the social initiative from women to men. Because it was assumed that a proper young lady did not work and the man did, he paid. Dating was incorporated into the new consumer culture of the 1920s; it became an act of consumption in which the woman sold her company to the highest bidder. Dating also became competitive, placing a premium on the young lady’s physical appearance (her “looks”) and her personality. Physical beauty and personal vivacity became valuable marketable commodities in the dating game. It was important for women to have many dates with many different men, and for men to be seen in fashionable places with attractive women. Women who dated were also expected to neck and pet; men expected these favors in return for having spent money on them …”

At some point, the Modern period will end.

We can anticipate that Modern values will become “traditional values.” Modernists might form militant organizations like the Klan to protect and defend their way of life.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

38 Comments

      • So let me get this straight: Occidental Dissent doesn’t give two squats about what’s happening to Golden Dawn and Yellow Vests because the editor is bored with the news and would prefer to post some boring historical articles about modernism.

        A supposedly populist website that doesn’t give a fly’s ass about what happens to populist movements around the world.

        Am I wrong?

        • Yes, I have always had a wide variety of interests on this blog and height of the 2020 election struck me as the best time to indulge my interest in history because I have no interest in the outcome and I am sure most people here are equally tired of it

        • Gryphon,

          I don’t always care for Hunter’s topics, but guess what? It’s his bloody website. You can start your own and write whatever you want. But whining is easier.

      • Personally, I find this modernism series of your very valuable, Mr. W. It has helped me clarify—mentally organize—thoughts, notions, and understandings with which I have been wrestling for nearly half a century. Some years ago, when you did your series about the Caribbean origins of the plantation South, you introduced me to a subject with which I was completely unfamiliar, a very-important subject, whose details increased my understanding not only of the history of the South but of American history as a whole and, really, of modern world history as a whole.

        With the present series, the situation, as I say, is slightly different, because the subject is one to which I have given at least some attention over the past several decades, but the effect, the benefit I derive from what you’re doing, is just as great.

        In short: I am a great fan of Occidental Dissent and of this present series of yours.

      • “I get bored with the news.”

        Following the news is boring, because following it doesn’t change a thing. Its been statitically proven that only olygarchs get what they want.

        Following sportsball is for grug brains.
        Following the news is for “galaxy brains”.

    • First you demand that free White people vote for the con who turned out to be a traitor-in-chief again.

      Then you constantly link that degenerate Anglin, who is so far up Trumps backside someone from the campaign must paying his legal settlement.

      Now you’re criticizing what the owner of this site writes about? Reading your hysterics over Trump are making question my decision to stay home vs. following Spencer’s advice.

      I do not trust the desperation.

      • I want people to vote period. I’m not a defeatist who encourages others to not vote. Consistently there is an overarching theme to not participate in the “farce”.

        If you don’t want to vote for Trump, then don’t. Just don’t vote for Biden or sit at home, both of those actions directly impact White people negatively.

        You should do yourself a favor and stop listening to the advice of Richard Spencer, he’s a clown. A joke. Spencer doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you. He thinks he knows better than you and we’re all little people who needed to be guided by his ass-gas-inspired clown ideas.

          • gryphon,

            If HW wants to write about his hairdo and ass, he can do that. The fact this blog covers history makes it more unique.

            hw,

            Correct that swing voters have never been conservative Repubs or liberal Dems. Nixon was moderate and even liberal on some issues compared to today’s GOP. Even conservative saint Reagan was center-right compared to today’s GOP. Suburbanites are mostly moderate and independent. Swing too right or left and you lose them and the election as a result. Trump was able to win in 2016 because he won the white suburban middle class and the white working class Dem voters. These two groups will probably stay home this fall.

            USA USA
            Wally Wally
            Trump: the lesser evil in 2020

    • Golden Dawn was banned because it violated the law over and over. You left that part out. They were stupid to try to become a more violent version of the BNP instead of a more respectable and SUCCESSFUL alternative like UKIP or National Rally.

      I’m more libertarian or open minded than OP HW and his side on some issues, but this website is more interesting than many other alternative political blogs because it covers a wider range in more mature language. The historical entries are informative even though I disagree with his position that it’s better to turn back the clock just because there are some changes that his camp may deplore.

      USA USA
      Wally Wally
      Trump Trump

      • UKIP a successful political party? Haha you joking?! Well they aren’t so successful today are they? Son sit down and let me tell you the story about the Farage who cried wolf.

        Ukip was a conservative inc fake controlled op tory party and how they ousted or ostracized there own members for having any radical views whatsoever. Slowly but surely they ended up just like republicucks today with “Labour Party are da real racists” in British politics. GD were violent sure but they had to be to survive with what they were up against

        • UKIP achieved their main purpose. You left out that the National Rally is larger than ever, pops. What has the BNP or Golden Dawn accomplished? In politics, only victories matter in the end.

          USA USA
          Wally Wally
          Trump is the lesser evil of 2020 whether you like it or not!

    • What, specifically, would “posting about” Golden Dawn accomplish?

      They screwed up. They’re the latest in a long line of half-baked hard-right movements that proved incapable of controlling themselves or anything else. Write ’em off and move on. If electoral politics is your thing, get involved in your local party machines – neighborhood organizations, school boards, council hearings on whether to build that new housing development, etc. Make contacts. Become a focal point; a person people think about when they wonder “who can we talk to to help organize some sort of response to this?”

      It’s going to take you at least 20 years of this sort of thing before you see any concrete results. This is why the left wins: because they put in the daily grind over a period of years to obtain and secure the social network power in this system. You definitely will not have a magical far-right party riding in from stage right to save the day, because YOU are the magical far-right party, and you’re spending your time complaining on the internet about what somebody else is saying on the internet.

      Alternatively, you can understand what has happened in present-day society, what the built-in incentives are, why people behave as they do, and what needs to be done in terms of very basic adjustments to those incentives, such that a new generation raised in that new social context will have a totally different outlook from the one we take for granted. Which then opens up the possibility of another cascading transition, where “everybody” looks around and realizes that “everybody” is thinking the same thing, that the old (20th century) ways of doing things are obvious nonsense, and that a certain different style of behavior is much more “natural”. And the result – if things are done right – is a much healthier society.

      Hunter’s approach has at least the possibility of such an outcome. Complaining about Golden Dawn does not.

      • Golden Dawn weren’t faggots hiding behind a keyboard. GD members did real life public activism and countered the far left in the public squares on Greece (i.e.,”intellectual”egghead cowards). They had party members elected to both the Greek government and as MPs in the European Union Parliament. What have the kosherative/libertarian center-right judeo pawns do to defend Greece from the Marxists?

        Sissies that complain about getting their hands dirty mixing it up with ZOG’s golems on the street, and criticize those men that still retain their ancestors intestinal fortitude are beyond contempt.

        Riddle me this; Why did Finland outlaw the Nordic Resistance Movement? What (horror or horrors) violence did they perpetrate? None. But the feminist government in Helsinki still banned them.

        Keep smoking the ‘hopium’ that we can argue and debate our way out of the dystopia we find ourselves in. How has that been going for the last 100 years?

  2. The fundamental opposition of the modern era is between fertility and consumption. You can have high fertility and low consumption or you can have low fertility and high consumption. But you can’t have both. If they’re not willing to sacrifice consumption the evolved races (whites and orientals) will have no future.

    But consumption is addictive. Once you get used to a certain level, it’s nearly impossible to give it up. This is the existential trap into which the people of “developed” (high consumption) countries have fallen. The only way out that I see is a massive economic global crash. The longer it is delayed the bigger the dysgenic effect of low fertility for evolved races and high fertlity for primitive ones.

  3. Biden and Harris should win by a landslide. We’ll have a war with Iran by end 2022 at the latest. And that will be the catalyst that breaks up the American Empire, as public opinion finally swings against the DC/NY/Hollywood elites.

      • We are more likely to see society disintegrating to the point where it focuses the mind on food, shelter and safety and away from frivolous things like feetsball, politics and entertainment. All the interlocking systems of society that deliver food, energy, medicine, transportation etc. are under tremendous strain now from a variety of causes. Lack of maintenance of infrastructure, too much demand for poorly maintained services, 55 years of wogs flooding in and now, corona have crippled the country. The tremendous debt, debt, debt at every level of society is one of the symptoms of this decline and democracy in action, with its necessary short term thinking and self destructive tendencies cannot offer solutions.

        In many ways California is exhibit ‘A’ for this decline. LA went from being one of the Whitest cities in the country in 1950 to a third world shithole now, likewise many other parts of California. It wasn’t White migrants from Dixie, the Midwest or NE committing the crimes, avoiding taxes and clogging the courts either, diversity has wrecked the state.

        Things just no longer work or just barely function in Cal. The electrical grid (which underpins every other system) is failing when stressed making life miserable. Taxes, regulations and prices are outrageous. Wealth is concentrated in few hands, the government is run for their benefit and the benefit of the wogs while middle class Whites are tax donkeys, expected to do jury duty and volunteer to fix the unfixable third world problems that are everywhere. Look for these tendencies to increase, probably drastically after the election regardless of who wins the booby prize.

        Keep up the great work Hunter, ignore the critics. Your site, along with a few others are the go-to sites for the opponents of multiculturalism and its discontents.

        • Excellent comments, 12AX7.

          The conservatard trolls have recently been infesting the comment sections. Their common writing style suggests a small, pathetic group commenting under aliases. Why HW allows rhetorical anchors of their pointless sort to drag his site down is a mystery.

  5. The Victorian way of dating meant the young woman’s parents vetted the young men for suitability. Were they of good character? Would they be good providers for her and her children? The process was aimed at family formation. The modern way of vetting: Teenage hormones make life changing decisions, sex with as many partners as possible which means poliferation of STDs.

    It is no wonder that the birth rate has crashed, rate of marriage crashed, the rate of divorce skyrocketed, and now we have a movement of men who aren’t gay, who’s aim is to get men to not associate with women at all. Their dream is to have robot rubber dolls as sex partners, have their children born from artificial wombs, and for woman kind to go extinct.

  6. This examination of modernism is missing the counter-movement which appeared alongside it from the nineteen twenties onward that endorsed a neo-primitive lifestyle, proposing that persons should begin dropping out of the urbanized rat-race, refuse the corporate bureaucracy and return to a rural lifestyle – extolled by works such as The Air-conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller. This counter-movement led to the late sixties counter-culture rural communes which advocated and tried to practice self-sufficiency and rejected mass-consumerism and the phony identities promulgated by advertisers.

    BTW, most cultural commentators decades ago asserted that High Modernism ended by the beginning of the nineteen seventies and was replaced by the somewhat nebulous post-modernist era. People kept living as moderns yet no longer really believed in its precepts.

    The antifa today and their far-right opponents are largely running around aping the modernist past of the middle twentieth century, dressing up and pretending to be communists and fascists of that era.

  7. “Among other things, Victorians had believed in White identity, the inequality of races and cultures, the separation of the sexes into separate spheres, making sharp distinctions between “civilized” and “savage” cultures and behaviors, an ethic based on religious piety and moral virtues which together produced “character” that was instilled into children in the household, self-denial, thrift, hard work, diligence, persistence, modesty, a rational and orderly universe and moral progress.”

    OK, got it. Victorians = WASP culture/Christendom/MY side.
    Modernism= FOREIGN/JEW culture/Antichrist/THEIR side.

    When do we go to war for the restoration of Christendom?

    I’d start by giving whores like ‘Èva’ (above) a proper slap. Then forced re-education, and manual labor.
    It’s a shame her parents FAILED at raising her to be a godly woman. Apart from that, women ARE whores and b-words. Utterly useless.

  8. Lmfao at That fat democrat white libtard cuck pleading with blm /antifa rioters to not destroy his home lol. “I support your protesting just not on my house please” He’s okay with them destroying other peoples homes just not his I guess

    • Yes, I saw that fat fuck on Twitter and thought the same thing. I have a news flash for those people and it isn’t good. Saying you agree with BLM, putting one of their ridiculous signs on your front lawn and even marching with the no-good bastards won’t protect you; they hate you because you are White, that’s all there is to it.

      Your race is your uniform whether you like it or not. At least BLM, La Raza (The Race in Sp.) and most of the other racial grievance groups are right out front with their anti-White hatreds, they are proud of them. Only White people aren’t allowed to show self respect publicly lest the Government come down on you like a ton of bricks.

      BTW, the police were busy protecting the local government during this escapade. They couldn’t care less about the people hiding in their homes, under attack. If one of the homeowners had protected himself the police would have arrested him then trashed his house with a search warrant.

      The police’s job is to protect their pensions and the government, in that order. Self defense is considered a crime against the government resulting in the full measure of the government’s “justice” being visited upon the unlucky homeowner. A conservative may be a liberal who was mugged but a liberal is a conservative who was arrested, goes the old joke.

      Trump has been clucking about how many police organizations that usually endorse Democrats have now endorsed him. They endorsed Democrats for decades because the Democrats vacuumed up municipal labor unions votes by promising ever more gibs. That is one reason taxes and debts are so high. Those gibs will also be coming to an end as the country goes broke, slowly at first then all at once.

  9. The crazy adventures of Baked Alaska never stop, He’s lucky the paypigs throwing money at him during the streams or else he’d have to get a real job.

    I remember him saying a few years ago that people who don’t work are lazy and shouldn’t get welfare and that UBI is communist socialism lol bitch you stream and stupid people throw money at you for being a clown lol you are no better

  10. The entire concept of “girlfriend” emerged in this same inflection also. The core aspect of “girlfriend” is that it allows women to experience serial monogamy. Every time they become somebody’s “girlfriend”, they get the same rush of emotions and hormones: they’ve just been picked by a MAN! For COMMITMENT! In the culture that prevailed through most of history, a woman would receive a man’s commitment once in her life, and had to make the most of it. But with “girlfriend”, she could get that commitment repeatedly – a physical and hormonal rush that normally would come once in a life, being applied at least a dozen times in a row in a few short years. It’s a drug for women.

    And it leads directly to the modern situation of the cock carousel, which is the same drug, extrapolated to logical endpoints. It leads directly to the modern woman’s complaint, that she’s in her mid/late-30s, single, has wildly inflated expectations of her own attractiveness and suddenly, for NO REASON she can possibly imagine, even the ordinary men she’d discount as being beneath her aren’t paying her the tribute of attention on which she’s drugged herself into dependency. And it also leads directly to modern men’s behavior: the increasing disfunctionality, the refusal to accept social responsibility, the lack of entrepreneurship or ambition, the refusal or inability to “man up”, the tendency to stick to video games & beer for decades past the point where previous generations of men would have become stably married fathers.

    The incentives have changed. Men still want, instinctively, to be fathers and providers. Women, however, want the drug rush of the commitment experience, on repetition, without the consequent necessity of making commitment be essentially a singular experience.

    And men are permitting women to pursue this inevitably self-destructive behavior, without restraining them or the men who enable it.

    This will continue until, one way or another, it stops.

    • lol all I see are incels and old men whining for a past that none of them even experienced. If a time machine took you back to the 19th century all of you would be crying to return because you couldn’t part with your modern conveniences. Immature adult men playing cowboys.

  11. All sex is prostitution. Someone always wants something out of it. In a rare case, it may be the man who gets wants something, but usually not. If not now, something is wanted later.

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