It is the same with the relationship between the sexes: the demand for equality between the sexes, Weaver thought, was part of the decadence of our age. In a word, Weaver’s enemy was modernity. Hence the lessons of America’s premier lost cause: “The mind of the South,” Weaver wrote, is “conspicuous for its resistance to the spiritual disintegration of the modern world.” Is such resistance futile? Never mind. Resistance itself is glorious: strenuous, romantic, precisely because—perhaps one should say “even if”—it’s futile.
