The Tragedy of Conservatism (draft)

Why the Right always loses.

I have not posted here much recently because I have been working on an extended essay — perhaps a long article or a short book. Here is a draft. Some is abstracted from my recent book, Who Lost America? and some comes from recent Substack posts. I wanted to distill down in one place everything I have written on this theme and hopefully focus attention on this problem, since obviously it is an important one, and no one else seems to be writing on it. As if to validate my point, the conservative establishment simply ignores it.

I would be grateful for comments and feedback on what I have written so far, and I will give credit (by name if permitted) to substantial comments I receive.

I would especially appreciate further references to recent examples instances of “tradcons” scolding men for not marrying. The final chapter of my book includes a detailed discussion of that theme, so I kept it brief here, but I hope to update it by including links to some of their more recent and notorious tirades.

This piece may be too long for Substack, in which case you should be able to find it at this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1urmpesTJWrbnkLgaQsTiwFaHT7QVf7ru/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=112052785523715872702&rtpof=true&sd=true

(This will also provide you with workable footnotes. Some links above turn automatically into embedded images, and the AI “help” could not tell me how to avoid this.)

Please leave comments on this copy.

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The Tragedy of Conservatism

Why the Right Always Loses

Those who dream of breaking the power of the Left and transcending ideological politics are not wholly quixotic; it might conceivably be done.

But the first step is to purge our own sins, starting with our dependence on the Left’s enablers: the professional establishment Right.

Contents

Introduction: The Conservative Conundrum

The Triumph of the Politicos

The Narrative

Exceptions Prove the Rule

The Origins of the Left

Fighting the Previous War

The Newest Ideology

“Marxism”: The Right’s Beloved Bête Noire

Feminization of the Right

Rule of the Eunuchs

Men on Strike

Professional Conservatism Does Not Work

Conclusion: Redeeming and Recapturing the Right Civic Life

Introduction: The Conservative Conundrum

Perceptive political commentators are finally noticing a rather striking and, one might have thought, conspicuous fact about American conservatives: They always lose. In every one of their battles, they are defeated. “The establishment Right’s failures over the last generations have been manifold,” writes one of the few willing to say it out loud:

Since the end of the Cold War, what trajectory-altering successes or victories can the Right cite to demonstrate its worth? … Despite spending billions of dollars supporting its infrastructure…the establishment Right has registered no clear gains and many clear losses. Much of the nation was conquered on its watch.

“You could even argue that it abetted most of it[s defeats],” another suggests. “Where official conservatism’s opposition hasn’t been ineffectual, it’s been collaborationist.”^[1]

These are striking confessions. Professional conservatives are admitting to betraying our trust – and squandering our donations – as seriously as the government they habitually criticize abuses its power and squanders our taxes.

This is hardly accidental. Isn’t it time we start asking why?

Donald Trump’s election, and the bold “revolution” he has already initiated (such as it turns out to be), does not refute this trend. It confirms it. Not only did Trump not rely on the Republican Party leadership or machinery; he had almost zero support from the panoply of professional right-wing pressure groups, think tanks, law firms, and media, many of whom still vehemently oppose him. His triumph is further testimony to their ineffectiveness and irrelevance.

Besides, as if to confirm the point, at the time of this writing, he himself seems to be radically retrenching on many of the boldest promises to his supporters. In other words, he has reverted and adopted the positions of those he defeated, whereupon he may well face defeat himself.

These multiple defeats over decades came despite an enormous store of pent-up frustration and rage against the liberal-Left elite among the population. The Right could have won long ago.

Moreover, the Left could yet return to power. Or the Right could simply continue carrying their water for them, which amounts to the same thing. So we need to understand what is going on. What is the systemic flaw that seems to render professional conservative politics an exercise in futility?

The Triumph of the Politicos

I will argue that this is endemic to conservative politics as presently practiced and that it is inevitable so long as we conceive of politics and the options it offers us in the limited terms offered to us by today’s conservative leaders. What we are seeing here is the culmination of fundamental flaws and misconceptions that have governed modern politics since the radical left first appeared on the political scene. It is now necessary to re-think the entire trajectory of modern politics from the start in order to prevent these errors from destroying our civilization.

Two general, overarching manifestations of this stand out and present our starting point: one involves straightforward material self-interest of conservative elites; the other, which follows from it, involves the intellectual or ideological narrative they spin to justify themselves.

First, when we speak of “conservatives,” we usually mean conscious, self-described, professional conservatives, who label themselves as such and identify with doctrinaire and identifiably conservative positions and who are readily identified as such by others. This includes not only the media and professional class but also the rest of us “ordinary people”; we acquiesce in affording them this status.

Most importantly, their livelihoods are provided by organizations or interests promoting an agenda that they and others depict as the conservative one. This is how I will use the term. These official conservatives effectively define what “conservatism” means for the rest of us.^[2]

These people have no real incentive to win their battles, if winning means defeating the Left, because winning would make them unnecessary. They like to point out that government bureaucrats have an incentive to perpetuate and exacerbate the problems they are paid to solve. But this is equally true of themselves and anyone who is paid to address a problem. While many are conscientious and talented people, they operate at cross-purposes with their own self-interest and under pressure from competing priorities: building the organization, maximizing donations, augmenting their leaders’ status and power along with their own, making money. Winning brings few advantages.

This explains why, by the time of Trump’s election, official Washington – not just the bureaucratic “Deep State” – had long been out of control and perpetrating reckless and authoritarian adventures, both abroad and at home. While most of this was blamed on the ascendency of the Left, the inescapable corollary to the triumph of the Left must always be the failure and defeat of the Right. The absence of effective opposition and outright collusion by the organized Right is what permitted it and explains why it continues to operate far beyond any semblance of control or accountability.

Almost all conservative political activity today consists of little more than hurling anathemas at the Left, with almost zero critical examination of their own flaws and mistakes. This marshalling of polemic in order to deflect criticism from themselves further explains their consistent record of failure.

Imagine a military leader or athletic coach, reviewing a recent defeat with his team, who just lambasted the opposing side for their successes but never critiqued his own team’s performance or told his men how to improve.

They get away with this because conservatism’s professional political operatives are not our leaders so much as our surrogates. They are people to whom we have outsourced our citizenship: We pay (or at least expect) them to assume the responsibilities and perform the tasks of citizenship in our place. The fact that almost all are lawyers should tell us something. Like courtroom attorneys speaking on behalf of their clients, their message to us then becomes, “Be quiet and let me do the talking,” as if we are accused criminals on trial. No wonder that that is precisely what we are all becoming.

The Narrative

Following from this, the ideological-historical narrative in which these political professionals frame their perennial conflict with the Left and draw the lines of battle is simplistic and self-serving. It demonstrates that the Right has misunderstood (perhaps willfully) the ideological alignments that they themselves represent. And because the rest of us take our cue from the professionals who dominate the media, so do most of us.

The boilerplate conservative narrative runs something like this:

With the beginning of modern history (following the end of the Middle Ages), liberalism began to emerge, along with the extreme individualism it extols. All evils flow from this. The task before us now is to generate countless books, articles, studies, videos, podcasts, etc., showing why liberalism (with its more extreme variations like socialism and Marxism) is wrong and bad, and people will wake up and return to – what precisely? Someone’s wish-list of conservative policy measures that will undo the harm caused by liberalism-socialism-Marxism, etc.

This is a construction, a narrative based on selectively marshalled facts. It projects an optical illusion that is designed to lead only to the remedy already desired in advance, which consists mostly of pointless lamenting and bemoaning the ills of modernity, ranting and raving against liberalism and the Left, promoting one’s own agenda as a solution, building organizational empires, garnering donations and salaries, and so forth. All this creates the illusion of active opposition and ensures that no one starts questioning why it does not work.

For one thing, it explains nothing about why the liberal-left arose in the first place and why it has exercised such an iron grip over much of the population, which it perpetuates generation-after- generation to the present day. It therefore cannot provide a definitive understanding of what kind of “conservatism” we must formulate in order to resist it effectively – though formulate it we must, over-and-over.

The result is endless and pointless philosophizing, because no single definition of “conservatism” can possibly exist. Conservatism is inevitably a response to the Left at any given moment, rather than a coherent body of ideas of its own. I do not mean this negatively. The Left has caused enormous mischief in modern history, and resisting it is a worthy endeavor.

It is also not to say that conservatism lacks substance or is purely “reactionary”. On the contrary, its values and principles have substantial moral authority. It comprises a rich body of thought, because it consists of almost all the default beliefs, values, and principles that everyone accepted before the Left arrived on the scene. Only with the appearance of the Left, and as a response to it, did some intellectuals attempt to systematize it all into “conservatism” as some coherent body of beliefs and principles: in effect, a counter-ideology. Politicians began identifying themselves as “conservatives” and started debating what they (and the rest of us who are not on the Left) are supposed to believe.

This has always seemed peculiar to me, how conservative intellectuals feel the need to stake out turf and determine what constitutes valid or “true” or “real” conservatism, and distinguish it from what is not legitimately so – as if we must all dissent from the leftist orthodoxy for the same reasons. Why limit yourself with a political label and turn your principles into a doctrinaire “ism”, a kind of anti-ideology that mirrors your adversaries and that is devoted primarily to the service of politics specifically, when it could remain a rich and versatile assortment of beliefs with broader applicability to which many might contribute?^[3]

The reason, again, is clearly to serve the needs of a professional conservative political elite. Professional conservatives appeared in response to the professional radicals (gentler versions of Lenin’s “professional revolutionaries”). They then insisted on constructing doctrines and dogmas as a counter-ideology, making themselves the Left’s mirror image. In so doing, they adopted the political methods and techniques and modi operandi of their leftist opponents.

Political parties – that unique innovation of the Left – began to appear under conservative labels. Soon after, especially in the Anglophone world, pressure groups (today’s “NGO’s”) followed.

Ostensibly, they do all this in an effort to do battle more effectively with the Left. But of course they are inevitably meeting the Left on its own terms. These professional conservatives quickly develop a vested interest in monopolizing the definition of the conservative creed: determining what opinions are permissible and deciding who is, and who is not, worthy to be admitted to the club.

Throughout modern history, they have fought a rear-guard operation in which they constantly cede territory to the Left in return for being permitted to continue their professional positions and status, further enlarging official Washington and other capitals.

In short, the Right consistently loses because, rather than remaining aloof from the Left’s game of ideological politics, the Right has bought into it and sought to devise a counter-ideology in various forms in an effort to beat the Left at its own game. It cannot work.

At least it cannot work to defeat the Left; it works very well to perpetuate it. The Left consistently makes “progress” not only because of its relentless agitation and agitprop, grievance mongering, and so forth. It also triumphs because its programmatic style of politics ensures that opposition is monopolized by its own alter ego: an equally systematic cadre of paid professional advocates, parties, and organizations whose survival depends on perpetuating the conflicts initiated by the Left.

The two elites thus engage in a delicate pas de deux at our expense. The rest of us either acknowledge its legitimacy and accept the terms it dictates or we are excluded from the dance and consigned to the status of the civic wallflowers.

Exceptions Prove the Rule

The professional Right’s destiny as perennial loser, and its elusive quest to find a definitive identity is ensured by an essential dynamic operating in leftist politics that consistently fools the right-wing political class and which, by its nature, that class has an entrenched interest in not acknowledging. Whenever the Left’s “progress” becomes stalled, when its unworkable program leads to disaster, or when the Right manages to land what seems a knock-out blow (or, to give the Left its due, when the society changes fundamentally, so that new problems and challenges arise) – at this point the Left reinvents itself with new grievances and a new agenda and comes back, often triumphantly. This is because the Right fails (or refuses) to understand the new form of leftism that has arisen and insists on fighting the previous war against the previous enemy, which no longer poses a serious danger. The Right’s own defenses, however fortified by its often formidable financial and institutional power, are then out of date and become Maginot Lines around which the Left easily maneuvers.

The end of the Cold War seemed like one such definitive defeat. We were all ready to settle down to a nice stable world of liberal democracies under American hegemony – à la Fukuyama.^[4] But then the Left jettisoned doctrinaire Marxism and reinvented itself yet again, this time in novel ways that the Right willfully mischaracterizes (to be discussed shortly).^[5] It has worked brilliantly, with the Left rising from the ashes of the Cold War.

This dynamic of leftist self-reinvention and rightist responses consisting of misunderstanding, confusion, inaction, and collaboration perpetuates a pattern that goes back to the origins of modern, ideological politics itself. The Left emerged first, and it has been first ever since.

All this can be seen in clearer perspective if we go back and pose the most fundamental question of all: Why is there a Left?

The Origins of the Left

Most people seem to believe, or simply assume, that a confrontation between the “Left” and “Right” always existed and always will. But both are historically specific and reifiable phenomena whose existence requires an explanation.

Leftist or radical politics has a relatively recent historical origin that can be identified and understood in its own right, and its importance transcends the grievances it voices and agenda it pursues at any given moment. Conservatives have never recognized this, perhaps because it would deflate their claims, as it deflates the Left’s, to uphold principles of “universal” validity.

The conventional wisdom – followed in the standard conservative narrative – simply assumes, without arguing, that the Left began with the French Revolution, because that is when the term originated and it is the earliest form of leftism they find recognizable and with which they have experience doing battle.^[6]

Yet even if true, that does not explain the emergence of a wholly new kind of politics that was unknown in the ancient and medieval worlds and that has never been recognized or studied as such: radical and revolutionary politics.

In any case, the French Revolution was not the world's first revolution. The first revolution was in England, and it took a form that makes everyone today uncomfortable and that no one therefore wants to confront or truly understand. It was the English Puritans who invented the modern revolution.^[7]

This realization unnerves professional politicos of all sympathies, and their immediate reflex is to invoke its most significant feature not as a challenge to understand but as an excuse to simply dismiss it out of hand, as unworthy of further discussion: that the ideology driving it was “religious”.

English conservatives are unaccustomed and temperamentally dismissive of the thought of revolutionary politics in England, let alone the notion that England invented political radicalism.^[8] Americans likewise are uncomfortable at the suggestion that religious radicals founded what became the United States – a blind spot that seriously impedes them from understanding their own origins.^[9] But undeniably, Puritan radicals began populating New England just as their comrades back in Old England were perpetrating the world’s first revolution. Their successors then agitated for the world’s next revolution in America, far surpassing in numbers (and possibly influence) the Enlightenment figures we venerate as our “Founding Fathers”.^[10]

Yet they acknowledge its truth backhandedly. Leftist ideology is often depicted by its detractors as a secular religion, replete with its own dogmas, heresies, and inquisitors.^[11] A historical reality undergirds this characterization and lies behind the Left’s continued missionary zeal. Political radicalism originated in religious radicalism.^[12]

Westerners do not understand radical religion, which is ironic because we invented it. Here a conspiracy of silence now operates between Left and Right, neither of whom wish to confront any of this. The Left is embarrassed by its religious pedigree and wants to forget it, and the Right is reluctant to accept Christianity’s radical past and its role in inventing and fomenting revolutionary politics. (Yet again, they can hardly deny it when they themselves mock the Left for its quasi-religious zealotry.)

In any case, this perspective changes several equations fundamentally. It suggests that the content of leftist ideology in any given instance – and which has changed to the point where it would be unrecognizable to its inventors – may be less important than the style of politics it created. It suggests that the Left exists not because it is necessarily right but because it devised political methods that have other advantages beyond its actual grievances: perhaps those methods achieve its aims more effectively; perhaps it satisfies emotional and psychological needs not served by traditional politics. Different explanations are possible. By the same token, it opens the possibility that some leftists’ concerns have merit, but that the political means they adopt to address them can have consequences that they themselves have not foreseen or intended. Finally, it opens another possibility: If the Left did not always exist, then the day may come when it will exist no more.

Fighting the Previous War

But for present purposes, the main “takeaway” from this exercise in historical rethinking that I want to emphasize is that the Left was not always limited to the liberalism-socialism- communism with which we are familiar today. The Left has reinvented itself many times since it first appeared on the political scene in the sixteenth century: It has mutated from religious to republican, then nationalist, socialist, anarchist, communist, and more. Recently, we have seen the return of religious radicalism with militant Islamism.^[13]

Each time it transforms itself, the Left achieves some success, because existing elites fail to understand the change that has taken place and insist on continuing to do battle with the past. This is why conservatives always seem to be fighting the previous war.

The Newest Ideology

In our own time, the Left has undergone another major self-reinvention and is no longer the classic form defined by liberalism-socialism-communism. Whatever one’s sympathies, it can hardly be denied that the most decisive and far-reaching ideological innovation of our time is the striking shift from social and economic grievances at the vanguard of the radical Left to grievances that are sexual. The dominant, explosive radicalism of our time is sexual radicalism.^[14]

Conservatives do not understand sexual radicalism, and here again the professional conservatives have a vested interest (reinforced by organizational inertia) in refusing to understand this latest transformation. Their record of failure and defeat is especially glaring and unbroken on issues involving sexuality and the family.

Sexual ideology and the dynamics driving sexual politics are admittedly not easy to understand. They frighten and deter professional conservatives, who do not want to retool their operations to confront them effectively. This fear, even more than specific items on their agenda, is what allows sexual radicals not only to confuse the Right but, even more, to emasculate it. In fact, it renders us all impotent to oppose not only sexual radicalism itself, but the Left generally.

“Marxism”: The Right’s Beloved Bête Noire

This denial has become conspicuous. Instead of confronting the sexual Left, and especially the formidable feminists, conservatives today prefer to keep fighting liberalism and communism and above all Marxism. They understand Marxism, and they defeated it once. That is why they reiterate — over and over (and over) again — today’s favorite cliche: that the newest manifestations of radical ideology are nothing but “cultural Marxism”. So many articles, videos, books, podcasts, and gratuitous remarks now insist on this theme, and with such vehemence, that one begins to suspect that “The lady doth protest too much." (And not accidentally, conservative women often lead the protesting.) Why the need to keep harping on a theme that no one is denying?

Because the phrase furnishes the establishment Right with an excuse to, yet again, run away from its battles.^[15] It keeps us all resting safely in our comfort zone. Excoriating the bêtes noires of the past carries no risk, and so we find pundit-after-pundit retracing our woes back to Antonio Gramsci, George Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault, et al., as if the genealogy itself proves something.

We defeated Communism, after all, so if we just continue fighting the Cold War – vilifying Russia and extolling free markets (with a nod to denouncing affirmative action) – this will stop leftists from mutilating children, destroying families and degrading low-income communities through welfare, not to mention launching wars of aggression, silencing dissent, and imprisoning political opponents (some of which techniques conservative leaders seem keen to have available for their own use). Verbally flogging the defeated enemies of yesteryear provides a satisfying excuse to avoid confronting the enemies actively threatening us now.

That feminism has roots in the socialist-Marxist Left that preceded it is undeniable, just as every leftist innovation I listed above emerged out of what preceded it.^[16] But something more insidious is at work here. This refrain has become an obsession for conservatives, and they lose no opportunity to reiterate it, even when no one is denying it. They do this because they are terrified of sexual ideology and do not know how to confront it effectively. They do not understand it and make no effort to understand it. But they know they can be hurt badly by it – especially when they find it among the women in their own ranks.

Feminization of the Right

This fear of women demonstrates that the obsession with “cultural Marxism” also represents something more than conservatives’ perennial inability to accept and confront the Left’s most recent innovations; it also illustrates that the passive response of today’s Right marks its own ongoing feminization. The “cultural Marxism” narrative protects the political class from confronting what most intimidates it: women. As Aaron Renn observes, “They won’t say anything that would get them in trouble with the ladies.” “They’re weak,” says Tucker Carlson of Republican leaders.

They’ve decided, “The other side is ascended. The Left is winning. I’m not gonna push any buttons that might infuriate them.” They’re not lion-hearted.

Tellingly, he adds, “The only ones who will do it are women.”^[17] Historian David Starkey has also taken up this theme. Declaring that “The triumph of feminism is clearly one of the essential elements in the decline of the West in general, and…of Britain in particular,” he dwells increasingly on the absence of “masculine courage” on the Right.^[18]

It is hardly surprising that sexual ideology should have this effect, and any toleration of it will quickly result in feminization, often in subtle forms. Sexual politics by its nature elevates to political supremacy those who can derive power from sex – which is to say women in the first instance, plus men who adopt a pseudo-feminine persona, as the homosexualists and transgenderists understand. While the most influential and intimidating sexual radicals are still the feminists, they have been joined – and more recently even challenged – by politicized homosexuals and crossdressers, who want to share their success and power. Though comparatively unimportant, the cross-dressers are increasingly resented by feminists, who seek conservative assistance (successfully) to maintain their supremacy over these recent rivals.^[19] Yet the cost of courting the feminists is to become feminized oneself. This is what the Right has done. The spectacular success and unrivaled hegemony of feminists over American society today leads others to seek similar empowerment in their shadow – not only the fringe sexual Left, but also the establishment Right.

The professional Right’s habitual, single-minded pursuit of political power, even at the expense of principle, is reinforced by this feminization, which disguises cowardice as chivalry. It renders rightists incapable of expressing and upholding fixed principles of their own by seducing them into attachments with dissident feminists, on whom they rely to fight their battle for them.

So thoroughly has feminization seduced and colonized the professional Right that feminists are now given prominence in ostensibly conservative forums to criticize more extreme sexual radicals in the name, not of simple moral decency, but of women’s rights and feminist ideology. So impotent and frightened are conservative men that they surrender their own independent voices and principles and reduce themselves to taking sides in the sexual Left’s intramural squabbles.

The latest example involves professional conservatives wheeling leftists (invariably female ones in distress) on stage to battle the fringe Left on their behalf, thus allowing the radicals to set the terms of debate. Given an extended platform in the conservative Epoch Times, feminist Naomi Wolf lambasts transgenderists to her left not for their extremism but for their “misogyny”, though she also takes the occasion to scold the rest of us for our “racism,” “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” and the rest. The Epoch Times apparently expects its conservative readers to nod in agreement: “Yes, that is what is wrong with the Left: its misogyny.” Thus does leftist ideology wheedle its way into the strongholds of the Right – and the minds of us all.^[20]

This servility of the Right and readiness to jettison its own principles and replace them with leftist jargon and leftists assumptions now dominates the right-wing media’s approach to sexual politics and overshadows what feeble opposition it may offer to the sexual Left.

That cross-dressing men gain access to feminist bastions like women’s sports elicits enormous indignation, because feminists (rather inconsistent and unprincipled ones, Janice Fiamengo observes) can be brought on stage to denounce it. (Fiamengo points out that it was the feminists who introduced the notion that sex or “gender” is artificial and “socially constructed”, which the transgenderists are simply pushing to its logical conclusion.)^[21] Meanwhile, far more serious, indeed hideous, mutilation of children in the name of that same “transgenderism,” endorsed by the mainstream liberal-left including the Biden administration, is a secondary concern. Denouncing that would threaten feminist ideology by replacing it with simple morality.

The net result is to displace morality with ideology: basic moral principles atrophy and are discarded and eventually forgotten and replaced by fashionable ideological orthodoxy. One need only observe the zeal with which conservative pundits abandon stigmas against quaint, old-fashioned concepts like adultery or fornication and adopt sexualized agitprop jargon, whose full implications they do not understand, when they accuse President Bill Clinton of “sexual harassment” or Muslims of “homophobia.”

This cowardice and opportunism in conservative groups and media is what allows radical ideology to wheedle its way into our collective consciousness, driving out accepted moral principles, herding us into collective mentalities, ratcheting the “mainstream” discourse to ever-greater heights of extremism, and rendering us all impotent to resist and too intimidated even to try.

In this case, moreover, the ideology also feminizes, so that a further effect is to displace masculinity with femininity, turning us all into women. Yet whatever their rhetorical genuflections, when the chips are down, we now see that the feminists will not accept make-believe women as equals into their ranks, whether of the fringe Left or the emasculated Right. The feminized, house-trained Right cannot win at this game and will remain in permanent subservience to the alpha females of feminism, whom they ensure will be the real masters.

Rule of the Eunuchs

But the weaponization of cowardice camouflaged as chivalry does not stop there.

While the establishment Right has many crimes that can be laid at its door, nothing more starkly reveals its habitual perfidy than its determination to crush any spontaneous direct action by citizens themselves – even (and perhaps especially) when it is directed against the Left. Suppressing initiatives undertaken by private citizens obviously cannot be rationalized by any goal connected with opposing the Left. It is explicable only as a reflexive attempt to eliminate rivals and preserve the organizational privilege and power of professional politicos.

The relentless attack on Trump and the larger MAGA movement, including its private supporters, by the establishment Right is the obvious example today and needs no elaboration here. But it is not necessarily the most important. It reflects a deeper level of betrayal.

More subtle, and largely invisible even to the alternative media, but by the same measure more primordial and fundamental to the trajectory of our civilizational order, has been the professional Right’s frenzied attack on a wholly spontaneous citizen revolt against leftist tyranny that has enormous potential to effect far-reaching change, despite being largely apolitical until now. Mostly an impromptu trend so far, it is beginning to take on features of an organized movement. It has caused considerable consternation on the Left but even more among the professional Right, which has targeted it for attack and shown a determined resolve that such unauthorized initiatives by ordinary people will not be tolerated and must be stamped out at all cost.

In a further effort to ingratiate themselves with feminists of not only the Left but also of the Right, professional conservatism has launched, inexplicably for any prospects of success, a frenetic assault on men.

Specifically, it has launched a campaign against men who, quite simply, remain single rather than marry, which they are doing in large numbers. It is a campaign not of advice or admonition but of invective, and at times it is vicious.

This perplexing trend is indeed worthy of attention, and it has also provoked enormous commentary in the popular media, most of which is merely trite. Moreover the trend is also worthy, arguably, of government attention. But understanding what kind of action requires that we step back from the polemics and view what is really going on.

What baffles the mainstream media and renders the establishment Right apoplectic is in fact readily explicable: These men are refusing to accept the most radical legal innovation ever implemented in the western democracies – an innovation so extreme that its only precedents were during the French and Russian revolutions (both of which were forced to repeal it because of the social chaos it caused).^[22] Lurking beneath the dishonest rationalizations were implications so tyrannical that it led to the most repressive government machinery ever erected in the United States and other English-speaking democracies and one that the organized Right has shown singular cowardice in confronting and challenging. I am referring to the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice, as applied to civilization’s most fundamental institution: marriage.

This nihilistic legal experiment was implemented throughout the western world starting in the 1970’s with no discussion or debate, and it has never been subject to any systematic review to evaluate its impact or consequences by any government authority or any professionally credentialed analysts of government policy. Voices of concern were raised at the time and since, some harsh and indeed prophetic, but as this reckless innovation gradually works out its implications to their logical conclusion in ruined lives, legal chaos, social disorder, and skyrocketing government costs, conservative groups (even those ostensibly devoted to defending “the family”) have studiously refused to exert the slightest effort to see that it is even understood or evaluated, let alone limited, modified, or curtailed.

One might have thought that professional political organizations devoted to influencing government policy – interest/pressure groups, think tanks, foundations, media, university-level schools of “public policy” – upon discovering dysfunctional policy innovations carrying unforeseen consequences, would respond by gearing up their operations and undertaking some assessment: identifying problems, analyzing alternatives, developing options for reform to be presented for the consideration of policymakers.

But no. The response of the professional Right – and indeed of everyone involved in the formulation of government policy – has been studiously inert: they do everything imaginable to avoid confronting this as a public policy issue or even discussing it at all, refusing even to entertain the possibility that it may constitute a flawed experiment in government policy. As the consequences become too conspicuous to ignore, they invoke elaborate circumlocutions, replete with psycho-therapeutic mumbo-jumbo, to explain, for example, why the birthrate falls, why young people (especially men) avoid marriage, why men and women increasingly cannot tolerate the company of one another, why hordes of fatherless children continue to proliferate with the destructive personal and social pathologies that are now well known, or to widen our perspective, why the prisons continue exploding.

Though some voices of dissent have been raised – both ordinary citizens and a few professionally qualified students of public policy – these have been ignored and consigned to marginality.^[23]

This novel method of formulating government policy: imposing a wholly new, essentially experimental policy on the citizenry (“ramming it down our throats” is a favorite expression), without discussion or debate (let alone any standard solicitation of public input such as legislative hearings), and forcing them to accept it, while refusing to listen to any objections or entertain any critical or dissenting views – this was unprecedented at the time it was enacted in the 1970s. But it has since been replicated in many other areas of public life. Starting roughly in 2020, it became the norm and the preferred method of formulating government policy in the United States and other western governments, with numerous examples involving medical vaccines, measures to favor certain ethnic or sexual minorities, programs to sexualize schoolchildren, agricultural policies, foreign policy adventures, and more.

But it is worth keeping in mind that it was to control and effectively to dissolve private family life and under feminist pressure that this novel method of formulating policy was first introduced, for it demonstrates the uniquely repressive potential of sexual politics and the clout it confers on sexual radicals and government functionaries, even more than their counterparts elsewhere. In fact, these more recent instances where this modus operandi has subsequently been adopted are highly unlikely without the precedent already furnished by feminism’s weaponization of family policy, driven by its prior reinvention of leftist radicalism itself.

Further, it was with this toehold in the gargantuan but neglected and largely invisible bureaucratic underworld of family law and family policy, that “Deep State” architects began expanding these techniques to transform and corrupt other sectors of the judiciary and from there the machineries of law enforcement, security services, intelligence agencies, and the military. All became instruments for controlling an increasingly feminized and docile population.^[24]

Men on Strike

As they came to realize the implications of the new marriage/divorce laws, men throughout the western world upstaged the do-nothing conservatives and began fighting back, albeit passively and apolitically at first. Without voicing much verbal complaint (at least none to which any media paid the slightest attention), they began refusing to accept the unworkable terms. For more than two decades now, observers have noticed a remarkable and unmistakable trend among men: They are refraining from marrying and starting families. Indeed, some are refusing to associate in any way with women.^[25]

The reasons for this could hardly be more clear: the carte blanche with which the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice empowers divorce courts with dictatorial and unconstitutional weapons to prey upon and destroy innocent people, especially men. And I mean destroy them:^[26] dissolve their marriages without their agreement and without any legally recognized grounds; evict them from their homes; confiscate their children and restrict or sever all association with them; control their movements; raid their bank accounts; confiscate their houses and property; attach their wages; forcibly extract fees for people they never hired for “services” they never requested or received; summarily confine them to psychiatric facilities; seize their professional licenses, driving permits, and passports; jail them indefinitely without trial or record; consign them to lives of homelessness. All this against citizens who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of any legal transgression.

Yet even as they remain utterly silent about these flagrantly unconstitutional abuses of government power, what is truly astonishing is the willingness of right-wing political organizations to engage in near-apoplectic tirades directed at private citizens, whom they scold and excoriate simply for the conduct of their private lives.^[27]

The professional Right and its adjuncts will go to any lengths to ignore, obscure, deny, and more recently vilify what is obviously a simple self-defense response of men. While the policy itself is off-limits to criticism, private individuals minding their own business become the targets of vicious attacks simply for refusing to accept it. The possibility that the policy itself may be flawed is ruled out from the start, so the only remaining possibility is that it must be the citizens who are flawed. Correcting the policy is out of the question (let alone questioning the motives of the advocacy groups that instigated or the policymakers who enacted them); it is the citizens that stand in need of correction.

This mass vilification, not of public figures, but of private citizens is especially virulent (as it were) from conservative quarters where one might least expect it: not in advice or gossip columns, nor in the gazillion feminized publications and frivolous social media devoted to “relationships”. Rather, they emerged in journals of public affairs publishing pieces by think tanks dedicated to analyzing public policy.

One neonconservative think tank, publishing in a glossy neocon magazine – both of which presumably exist to inform and influence public policy, not berate private citizens for the conduct of their personal lives – even acknowledges, “Men can have…their bank accounts drained and their children taken from them.” (They omit to mention turned out of their homes, jailed without trial, released to lives on the streets, and more.) Yet it still calls men’s choice not to marry under such terms “cowardly” and “unmanly”. Rather than summoning some courage of their own to investigate and confront the perverse laws and corrupt divorce machinery as a public policy matter (which one might have thought is the purpose of think tanks and current-affairs journals) and reform unconstitutional laws so that men – and women and children and societies – can have families (not to mention constitutional rights), they too find it easier and safer to scold private individuals.^[28]

Especially ironic in all this is the spectacle of advocates for limited government lambasting private citizens for undertaking spontaneous action against what they regard as oppressive government. It not only exemplifies but explains the conservative leadership’s successful determination to lose every battle. When handed an effective respite from their unbroken, decades-long string of defeats, with private citizens already undertaking impromptu action against the most extreme and diabolical measure the western Left has ever enacted, the Right responds not by trying to harness its energy or offering some advice or leadership or direction to the citizens, but by vilifying them, trying to smother their initiative, and ensuring that the Left’s is allowed to perpetuate its experiment in nihilistic madness.

Professional Conservatism Does Not Work

The advent of sexual radicalism and its success in establishing sexuality in a position of hegemonic dominance over American and western politics has pushed the logic of modern ideological politics to its logical and extreme conclusion. In doing so, it has revealed the basic flaw in conservative politics from the outset.

Aside from what it says about the unrivalled power of sexual and gender politics,^[29] the larger truth that the reign of sexualized government has exposed is that professionalized politics is antithetical to a free society. In the long run, it inevitably eclipses and displaces the citizenry. This is true both as it is initiated by the Left and as imitated by the Right.

For the matter at hand, the lesson is that professionalized conservatism can never serve as an effective opposition to the Left, much less defeat it. It simply creates a political pas de deux, with the Left leading and the Right following, culminating in the eventual triumph of the Left and defeat of the Right.

For the professional Right, the pursuit of power and wealth will always take priority over principle to the point where even winning becomes downgraded and replaced by inertia, weakness, collaboration, collusion, and defeat. For the professionals, all these outcomes are better than losing influence and power.

Professionalized conservatism becomes especially unworkable in the age of sexual politics, when the temptations to collaboration are especially seductive and irresistible. But the long-term logic of professional politics generally, including professional conservatism, may have led us inexorably to this result.

So what does work? Does Trumpism work?

Trumpism did work to a point. Trump succeeded for a time in outflanking and by-passing the right-wing establishment, confronting leftist ideology, and rolling back state power – primarily in domestic policy.^[30]

Trumpism’s limited success is attributable to its combination of the appeal to popular discontent and then placing effective power in the hands of men of independent means, less dependent upon donors and power brokers: Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy. These men, it must be acknowledged, are not always admirable. Their personal lives in particular are often marked by debauchery that is not harmless. The fact that it alienates some people is less important than that it weakens and impedes their moral authority to confront precisely the policy issues involving sexuality that I have identified as the most critical ones today. Their wealth alone confers the leverage to bypass the political establishment, which is now so dysfunctional and rotten that almost any honest alternative they come up with cannot help but be an improvement.

But Trump’s success was brief and limited. As of this writing, he is still in thrall to – or under intense pressure from – donors and advisors from the establishment. This is especially evident in foreign policy – always a temptation to misadventure and the potential bane of any president or prime minister – where Trump has so far been unable to break free of the neoconservative establishment and of donors for his Middle East policies. After initial success in domestic policy, political interests seem to have him stymied there as well.

The momentum begun by Trump and MAGA can be sustained only by going back and correcting more basic mistakes that Trump studiously neglects and that repeatedly facilitate his defeats.^[31]

Conclusion: Redeeming and Recapturing the Right Civic Life

The prospect of breaking leftist political power and transcending ideological politics altogether is not wholly quixotic. It might conceivably be done, but we have not done it yet. The most likely way to accomplish it is not by head-to-head confrontation on the grand battlefields of the world. This is what the establishment Right tries or pretends to do. They control major media where they appear and mouth many of the right things (while omitting some critical ones) about the mischief of the Left. The rest of us agree with what they say and fool ourselves into believing that they are actively doing something constructive to oppose it, so we allow them to set the terms of opposition and we send them money, which only encourages their folly.

We do not need more people hurling more anathemas at the Left, which is all that this amounts to and about all that the establishment Right ever does. If we want to break the Left-Right collusive duopoly we must begin with what is closest to us and what we have the power to change: We must dismantle – or at least ignore, outmaneuver, by-pass, marginalize – the professional establishment Right.

While I promised to refrain from wish lists, I see three things ordinary citizens can do immediately and on their own initiative to break the stranglehold of the professional political class: They amount to: 1) stop supporting and abandon all professional political organizations, including ostensibly conservative ones; 2) redeem, repopulate, reinvigorate, and redirect the only civic organizations that have ever proven effective, which are churches; 3) restore real citizens and citizenship. Each might seem counter-intuitive and contrary to today’s accepted wisdom, but that wisdom has been tried and failed. To elaborate:

1. Avoid giving any support or legitimacy not only to conservative political parties and candidates but to conservative pressure groups, lobbies, law firms, media, foundations, some universities, and the like. And avoid the temptation to create new ones. Remarkable individuals from these groups can be identified and enlisted, but only if they declare and maintain their independence from existing organizations. These groups do nothing but betray our trust, squander our donations, enrich their leaders, lose their battles, and then beg for more money. They are part of the problem and do more harm than good. The moment an organization asks for money, click “delete”.

Amateurs can achieve far more, if they are properly organized and mobilized. Thus:

2. Combine with fellow citizens, join churches, take control of them, and turn them back into the civic organizations that they were throughout most of American history. Make sure that the pastors and priests are not simply orthodox doctrinally, but that they apply their faith practically to everyday challenges and problems (that you bring to their attention). This includes civic engagement and politics, not habitually (and certainly never for separate pay), but when need arises. This will usually mean wresting control from the women in the congregation and especially the pastor’s wife. This will require bold action that is good practice for similar contests elsewhere.

Some will object that today’s churches are hopelessly corrupt and apathetic, which they are. But they are the only civic organizations that have ever worked, because they are based on a tried and tested doctrine that unites and directs people: Christianity. You are not required to believe Christian doctrine literally (though you will eventually discover reasons to do so) to see that it organizes and mobilizes people with a coherent and proven doctrine that yields huge benefits in civic life and elsewhere. The fact that this doctrine is itself apolitical and devoid of specific political content is not a weakness but precisely its strength. It prevents churches from being commandeered by secular political doctrines and individuals’ wish lists.

It is an understatement to say that churches are also deeply rooted in American history: Churches began American history. It was as entire churches that people left England and settled New England. After arrival, those churches themselves became whole towns – the most famous and successful towns in history: their worship services becoming the famous New England town meetings with truly participatory democracy.

Any other organization – political party, interest group, pressure group, “NGO” – must be based on someone’s political opinions, which can lead only to divisions and worse. Reinvigorating churches will not be easy, but it is easier than building wholly new, secular organizations, which will inevitably be founded on someone’s wish list and likely hijacked into someone’s organizational empire. It is precisely a matter of setting aside our own personal wish lists, joining churches in significant numbers, taking control of their governing bodies, marginalizing chattering, headstrong women, and strengthening the spine of the presiding clergy. The alternatives have been tried, and they have miserably failed.

3. Empower the only kind of citizen that has ever proven effective: the married male head of a household. The first step in restoring this citizen – this patriarch – is to make sure that he has iron-clad rights to the care, custody, and companionship of his minor children.^[32] Nothing else is remotely as important. This will break the political power of today’s most formidable impediment to true citizenship: the feminist matriarchy (and homosexualist-transgenderist pseudo-matriarchies) on the Left and quasi-feminist matriarchs on the Right. Leadership positions must go exclusively to citizens who are required to show physical and moral courage in matters like enforcing law-and-order, who serve in combat roles in the armed forces and local militias, and who are morally and legally obligated to sacrifice their own comfort and safety for the protection of their families and the freedom of us all.

I realize that the most formidable demand here, and the one requiring the most moral courage, is the imperative to break the power of scolding, ambitious women, including those who now dominate the Right. It is much easier and safer to lament and bemoan, compile wish lists, blame others, inveigh against globalists and leftists, complain about everyone else’s moral failings and loss of religious faith, and similar exercises in self-righteous posturing and moral superiority, than to admit that we ourselves lack the fortitude and courage necessary to confront the most imposing strongholds of power whose defeat would truly make a difference. This is what the establishment Right does, and it works in conferring on them status and wealth and influence and power. It works because they are simply refining and elevating to the level of a virtue the failings of us all.

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Notes

^[1] Arthur Milikh, ed., Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay (Encounter, 2023), Introduction, vii; Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” ibid., 14. I review this volume in Chronicles, “A Conservative Self-Critique,” January 2024. Many battles they do not lose so much as they forfeit, simply refusing to fight at all. Perhaps the most striking thing about this relatively forthright confession is that in the more than 18 months since this book was published, it has provoked no discussion or debate within organized conservatism.

I will focus here on American conservatism, from which in recent years most western versions have been taking their cue. This is even true of the British, despite their having a better claim to have formulated conservatism as a creed. Similarly harsh assessments of official conservatism now appear in Britain and elsewhere:

You read article after article by conservative commentators and they’re saying that...the entire Conservative government that has existed over these last 13 years has been a total failure, [that] it has achieved nothing that it was supposed to do…that this has been…the most unsuccessful British government since the Second World War…. And…it is Conservatives who are saying it.

Alexander Mercouris, “Rishi Sunak's Time as UK PM is Running Out,” YouTube video, 24 October 2023 [annoying embed omitted].

^[2] This professionalization of politics or “politics as a vocation,” was pioneered by the Left but quickly imitated by the Right. I describe this as the “Iron Law of Washington” in Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It (Arktos, 2024), ch. 1.

^[3] Russell Kirk is credited (doubtless among others) with saying that conservatism is not itself an ideology but the absence thereof. I think this is true, or it should be, and that we would be better off if we could ensure that it remains so. I will argue shortly that all ideology, or at least all ideological innovation, is leftist, though the point of the current discussion is that rightists imitate it, including trying to systematize their beliefs into an ideology of their own.

^[4] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992).

^[5] Briefly here: First it devised the smokescreen of “Woke” ideology, which the Right has accepted at face value. In fact, it went to the heads of some conservatives themselves, who responded with a combination of half-hearted opposition and strategic collaboration, even absorbing bits of it to deploy as weapons to re-establish authoritarian Americanism. Meanwhile, the important ideological innovation, which Woke ideology partially disguised, was more straightforward: They replaced social with sexual politics: liberalism/socialism/communism was supplanted by feminism/homosexualism/transgenderism (as I will show below).

^[6] Edmund Burke’s, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is therefore taken as the first manifesto of conservatism. If my argument is valid, the first conservative would be not Burke but Richard Hooker, whose The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594-97) has long been recognized as a classic of early modern political thought but is less known.

^[7] Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Harvard, 1965); Stephen Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (Routledge, 1993; Wipf & Stock, 2018).

^[8] Outbreaks of religious radicalism preceded the Puritans, though in less developed form. An incipient revolution was rehearsed in 15th century Bohemia, though Hussite radicals drew upon the ideas of the Englishman John Wycliffe. See Stephen Baskerville, “Hussites, Puritans, and the Politics of Religious Revolutions,” Communio Viatorum, vol. 46, no. 2 (2004).

^[9] The few leftists who bother to examine the agenda of their progenitors, the Puritan revolutionaries, are hard pressed to understand and sympathize with it – any more than they do with today’s radical Islamism. Conservatives are hardly more empathetic in coming to grips with what were once called our “Puritan Fathers.”

^[10] An extensive literature has long documented the decisive role of neo-Puritan agitators in the “grassroots” of the American Revolution: Alice Baldwin, “The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Frederick Ungar, 1958); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1966). This dimension has been firmly blocked from entering mainstream and popular understandings. The English example also inspired major features of the French Revolution, including the public trial and execution of a reigning monarch in the name of his own subjects. See John Laughland, A History of Political Trials (Peter Lang, 2008), chs. 1-2, and Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword, Epilogue.

^[11] Historian David Starkey is especially amusing. See his YouTube page, “David Starkey Talks”: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=David+Starkey+talks. Janice Fiamengo singles out feminism as a “religion”.

^[12] Stephen Baskerville, “Religion and Radicalism: The Puritanism in All Revolutions,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 16, no. 1 (2022), surveys the literature. Suggestions that modern secular ideologies emerged from religious movements of late medieval and early modern Europe have been thoroughly documented, though few have bothered to investigate the details and demonstrate precisely how this happened. See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1970). Eric Voegelin famously suggests it in The History of Political Ideas, vol. 6, Revolution and the New Science, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 24, ed. Barry Cooper (University of Missouri Press, 1998), 131-214. Rightists endorse these works for the support they provide in belittling leftist zealotry, but perplexingly, they ignore serious attempts to understand it fully. The outstanding example is Walzer, Revolution, a brilliant book to which I am indebted. But Walzer is the exception that proves the rule. Openly leftist himself, his book is ignored by all leftist scholars. The case is documented in detail in Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword.

^[13] Another instance where Left and Right collude to disapprove, ignore, misunderstand, and from which they both distance themselves, strikingly similar to their backfooted response toward Puritanism. See Baskerville, “Religion and Radicalism.”

^[14] Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017). Some insist on accepting leftist jargon and labeling this transformation as “Woke” ideology. But between sexual ideology and its other manifestations such as racial militancy there is simply no comparison. Next to the sexual innovations and grievances, racial divisions are secondary and even diversionary. To the extent they are serious, they are rooted in the radical sexual dynamic. See my articles and book: “Why the Race Problem Bedevils the Right,” Substack post, 27 July 2024), https://stephenbaskerville.substack.com/p/why-the-race-problem-bedevils-the; “Black Lives Don’t Matter,” New English Review, August 2023, https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/black-lives-dont-matter/; and more extendedly in Who Lost America?, chs 2 and 6. We toss sexual militancy into our grab-bag of grievances against “Woke” ideology, alongside race and the rest of “cultural Marxism”. In other words, we allow the Left to set the agenda and tell us what we should oppose, and we accept their pretense that these things are equal in importance. But sexual ideology reaches infinitely further. That is why the Right produces mountains of indignant polemics – books, articles, videos, podcasts, interviews – against racial ideology and nothing more than a few throwaway lines against sexual ideology. Our fear to confront it both testifies to and compounds its hegemony over us.

^[15] The principle that no danger is so serious that conservative leaders cannot run away from it was expressed with forthright honesty by prominent Catholic editor Phil Lawler, referring to my book, The New Politics of Sex (2017), one of the few attempts to take sexual radicalism seriously: “I had postponed reading it, probably because I had a sense that it would be devastating – which it is. This is the most frightening book I have read in years. Baskerville is relentless in showing how…little judicial protection is available today to those of us who resist the attack. I’ll be writing more on this very important work.” But of course he never did, though the book predicted the tyranny that has since come to pass. Catholic Culture internet site, 3 January 2020, https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/best-books-we-read-in-2019/.

^[16] The phrase appears to have been coined by military strategist William Lind. I have enlarged on these points in “The ‘Marxism’ Narrative Has Gone Too Far,” Chronicles, (September 2024). My quarrel is not with the concept but with the obsession with which conservatives have fixated upon it and ulterior motives it reveals.

^[17] Aaron Renn, “Sen. Josh Hawley Wants You to Man Up,” Substack post, 14 June 2023, [annoying embed omitted]; “Tucker Carlson Explains Why WEAK Men Are Ruining Society”, The Glenn Beck Program, 23 August 2021, [annoying embed omitted].

^[18] "The English Must Reclaim the Courage of St George", YouTube video, 11 May 2025, [annoying embed omitted]; (also, [annoying embed omitted].

^[19] Illustrated by petty bickering over washrooms and women’s sports: Stephen Baskerville, “Do Conservatives Have Principles?”, Substack post, 29 July 2023, https://stephenbaskerville.substack.com/p/do-conservatives-have-principles.

^[20] See Janice Fiamengo, “Voting Like Women Will Not Save Us,” Substack post, 19 November 2022, https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/voting-like-women-will-not-save-us?publication_id=846515&post_id=85613390&isFreemail=true.

^[21] “Anti-Trans Feminists Are Now Reaping the Whirlwind,” Substack post, 26 December 2022, [annoying embed omitted].

^[22] Louis de Bonald understood the implications – and the ideological connection to the larger French Revolution itself – in his classic On Divorce (1801); see also “The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage,” by “a woman resident in Russia,” Atlantic Monthly, 1 July 1926 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/). The American Revolution may have had a similar effect.

^[23] Mark Smith, “Religion, Divorce, and the Missing Culture War in America,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 125, no. 1 (Spring 2010).

^[24] I have argued elsewhere that it was in family policy, initially among the poor, that what is now called the “Deep State” originated. Who Lost America?, ch. 2.

^[25] The essential study is Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters (Encounter, 2014), but others were noticing long before. For references, see Stephen Baskerville, “The Men's Marriage Strike: What the Political Class Has to Lose,” Substack post, 11 November 2023, [annoying embed omitted], and Who Lost America? ch. 6.

^[26] For full details and documentation, see my Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007).

^[27] I have described this in detail in Who Lost America?

^[28] Nathaniel Blake, “Men and Marriage: Risk-Based Aversion to Marriage Isn’t Just Wrong – It’s Unmanly,” World, 25 October 2023, https://wng.org/opinions/men-and-marriage-1698180636.

^[29] I have written about this in The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017).

^[30] This is reminiscent of Thatcherism in the UK during the 1980s, which broke through in precisely these areas, before giving way to the disaster of Blairism, which altered first the Labour Party and then the English/British constitution almost beyond recognition. With both Thatcher and Trump, the first step to defeat the collaborationist Right.

^[31] I have identified a more extensive list in Who Lost America?

^[32] I have described this more extensively in Who Lost America, ch. 6 and the Conclusion.

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If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you can find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

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Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.