Crusader Mindset
David V. Stewart and Brian Neimeier have been writing really good pieces lately on the failures of all American political schools of thought that are caught in the typical left/right, Democrat/Republican paradigm. This paradigm doesn’t work because, as both men have shown, they are just two different flavors of liberalism: American conservatism, what passes for “right-wing” political thought in the United States, is nothing more than market-worshipping hedonism under the guise of “freedom” (to do what?) and the idea that if something makes money, it’s positive, and screw any idea of the “greater good.” These people often also call themselves Christians, which is weird, but anyway.
The American left takes these ideas and gussies them up with moral arguments based on an explicitly anti-Christian secular ethos that still sometimes retains a patina of Christinaity to have a little moral gloss that can fool those recalcitrant to go along with their insane ideas. The American left has the same conception of “freedom” as the American right; it’s just the high-cal version with real ingredients being served up now instead of the one made with oil-based substitutes that’ll be on the conservatives’ menu five years from now. Being good materialists, the left is just as avaricious as the right–they just have the decency to at least lie about it. Because unlike with the American right, the American left is on a moral crusade. It’s a religion.
This brings us to an important point, yet another example of why the American right always loses: Unless you have a moral reason for why a thing is good or a thing is bad, your arguments will always fail in the face of a movement that does.
You can make all the economic arguments you want for why thing A is good and thing B is bad, but that reduces the American citizenry to just numbers on a spreadsheet. “On balance, doing this makes the GDP move up a fraction of a percent, and while its effects on society and civic culture are disastrous, the ‘greater good’ isn’t our concern.” “We just can’t do this thing that’ll help people! It’s against the free market and our conservative principles!”
That’s never as effective as “Doing this is good, and opposing it is evil. We are good, and they are evil because of this.”
Christianity used to be the countervailing opposition to the progressive religion. It was replaced–with the consent of the nominal American opposition!–with economics. To fight Moloch, Jesus was jettisoned and the American right drafted Mammon. It’s no wonder they always lose. And you know what? They deserve to.
I must clarify that the historical and widely accepted teachings of Jesus as understood by the Church for the first thousand years of church history, and still maintained by the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, was jettisoned for some weird money-hungry prosperity gospel ahistorical and quite frankly heretics type of Christ who supposedly wants us to be rich and fight wars to free people over there while our own freedoms, including the freedom to worship, are curtailed and His name continually blasphemed over here, but I digress.
Just as bad, if I may digress further, is the leftist version of a weird, pan-region Christ who just, like, taught to be a good person, man, and was just a great moral teacher, bro.
Fight fire with fire. Fight faith with faith. We’re not voting our way out of this, and we’re not reasoning our way out of this either. Feelings don’t care about your facts.
Why is something good or bad? Because God said so. That’s it, ends of story, full stop. That has to be the answer. This will galvanize people more than “Because an accountant said corporate tax cuts will trickle down to help the poor. Now pass my weed.”
Don’t like it? Don’t want “church and state intertwined”? Well guess what–you already have it. It’s just not the type of church you’re expecting. You know, the one that can build a lasting civilization instead of destroying it.
Nobody enjoys living in a declining, atomized economic zone with a steadily declining standard of living. People want to be a part of something more than their job or a sports team. People want to think their lives matter, that they’re doing good, and that they’re on the side of the angels.
Progressivism offers this. American conservatism does not.
The best thing about adopting a crusader mindset is that it will focus your attention more on the demons in your personal life than those on the national stage. The big battles will come later. Start small. Improve yourself and your family and your community. Do it for the glory of something bigger than your investment portfolio. You don’t bring any of that with you into the great beyond. He who dies with the most toys still dies.
To paraphrase Mr. Neimeier: get yer ass to church. And if you still can’t bring yourself to believe all the supernatural stuff–which is too bad because all that stuff is a necessary precondition for victory, and boy oh boy to the people on the other side believe in it whether they are aware or not–at least keep quiet and LARP like you do.
This is a crusade. Evil is real. But so is good. Deus Vult.
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