Tag: conservatism

MILF on a Hot Tin Mic

The Portly Politico2 Comments

America’s favorite Dukakis-hugging moon maiden, box wine auntie, and power crystal aficionado Marianne Williamson experienced an endearing epiphany on a hot mic after a recent Fox News appearance: that the Left is really mean!

After being treated civilly by someone with different political opinions—gasp!—Williamson expressed surprise at how kind Eric Bolling was to her. The bigger realization was that her own side can be terribly cruel, even to its own (of course, conservatives have long recognized the tendency of the Left to eat its own).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Stakes of the Culture War

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A special note:  today’s SubscribeStar Saturday is probably the most important essay I’ve written this year.  I encourage to read it with your subscription of $1/mo. or more.  If you’re unable to pitch in, send me a message and I’ll e-mail you a PDF.

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Over the past couple of weeks, the stakes of the culture war have really hit home for me.  As I wrote last weekend, the “misinformation gap” between regular voters and reality seems overwhelming.

I’ve long held that building individual relationships can change lives, and can undo a great deal of brainwashing, and I have anecdotal proof:  through patient dialogue and loving guidance (and prayer), I helped guide a former student away from progressive extremism and bisexuality (it was a male student, so it’s impossible for him to be truly bisexual, anyway).  He’s now a girl-loving populist and, while he’s not totally on the Trump Train, he’s longer a Bernie Bro.

But that kind of patient, incremental relationship-building, while critical, is too slow for our present crisis.  It’s also incredibly wearying because it’s so labor-intensive, and because of the immensity of the project:  there’s a lot of brainwashing to undo, and most of what needs to be unwashed is quite subtle.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Paul Joseph Watson’s Case for Social Conservatism

The Portly Politico8 Comments

The Portly Politico is striving towards self-sufficiency.  If you would like to support my work, consider subscribing to my SubscribeStar page.  Your subscription of $1/month or more gains you access to exclusive content every Saturday, including annual #MAGAWeek posts.  If you’ve received any value from my scribblings, I would very much appreciate your support.

I’ve written before that social conservatism is the red-headed stepchild of modern conservatism.  Buckleyite fusionism threw a sop to the social conservatives, but largely in the context of the Cold War:  being a devout Christian was a middle-finger to those godless Commies in the Soviet Union, and so social conservatism represented another front in that conflict.

Since the end of the Cold War, when the battle against Marxism became more subtly a cultural one, social conservatives have been ejected in favor of economic conservatives and national security conservatives.  It’s square to insist that Americans should strive to live lives of chaste self-sufficiency and virtue, and self-restraint is bad for the bottom line.  Instead, let’s encourage all manner of degeneracy, so long as it helps GDP.

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Monday Morning Appeal

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This post is a shameless but sincere appeal for support.  If you would like to support my work, consider subscribing to my SubscribeStar page.  Your subscription of $1/month or more gains you access to exclusive content every Saturday, including annual #MAGAWeek posts.  If you’ve received any value from my scribblings, I would very much appreciate your support.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog lately, you know that I’ve been despairing about the state of the world.  I suppose I occasionally go through these phases, and it seems incongruous even to me, as I’ve been trying to lighten up the blog a bit.

Regardless, I’ve been reminded lately how big the gap is between the red-pilled conservatives—the folks that see the world for how it truly is—and the blue-pilled normies, still shuffling about in their state of waking sleep.

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The Boiling Potential of the Right

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire—the gift that keeps on giving—has yet another excellent post examining the state of the Right today.  In particular, photog poses the question:  “How Will the Deplorables Get Organized?”

photog uses the analogy of a sword forged from various “metals”—parts of the coalition of the Right and the non-progressive side of politics.  His argument is that, during the Cold War, some metals were included in this grand alloy that didn’t blend well with the others, but they forged together well enough to make the sword that vanquished Communism.

However, those poorly-blended alloys—which he identifies as the GOP Establishment of Conservatism, Inc.—weakened the sword in a post-Cold War context, making the weapon ineffective.  A new metallurgist—photog doesn’t name who this is, but I suspect he means Trump, or perhaps the Trumpian Right—has discarded those unassimilable lumps, and has brought back in some of the metals that were rejected in the old days (the paleoconservatives, for example).

The new sword is still being forged; right now, it’s all boiling, kinetic potential, but it hasn’t hardened into cold, steely weapon capable of dealing a death blow to progressive lunacy.  The challenge, as photog sees it, is to bring together this energetic, chaotic new coalition into a disciplined, populist-nationalist (my words, not photog’s) movement with coherent aims.

Of course, photog notes it will not be easy.  Here’s a key passage from his post:

I’ve said that it needs to be done but I’m not trying to kid anyone into thinking it will be easy.  When I said that the New Right is like a boiling pot I wasn’t kidding.  Chaos and kinetic energy are the only rules and there is absolutely no consensus between the various groups that make it up.  They range from radical separatists who are busy storing ammo for the shooting war, to Tea Party civic nationalists who can’t figure out why John McCain didn’t get elected in 2008, to religious businessmen who want the government to stop persecuting them for their beliefs, to Rust Belt forgotten men who want to stop the globalists from putting the last nail into their economic coffins.  Herding cats would be a cakewalk in comparison.  But it will need to be done if we hope to avoid being back at the mercy of the Stupid Party.

In short, the task ahead is difficult, but necessary.  Otherwise, cucky GOPe figures will come back into control, and the Republican Party will continue to be controlled opposition.

That’s another key point that photog makes, and with which I strongly agree:  a third party is suicide.  The Trumpian Right has to take control of the Republican Party.  Trump’s brilliance as that he ran a third party campaign inside one of the two major parties.  He has been at least partially successful in turning the Republican Party into a vehicle for his policies, but GOP swells have also reined in the President.

Regardless, it’s crucial that Trump wins in 2020 if we want to see the hardening of this boiling new coalition.  If Trump loses, the clucking scolds of National Review, et. al., will waste no time in saying, “we told you so!”  It may be a generation again before a populist Republican has a shot again at the highest office in the land—we’ll be consigned to thirty years of cucky Bush-cons losing meekly to increasingly insane Democrats.

On the other hand, if Trump wins, we have a golden opportunity to cement the roiling new coalition into something enduring—an FDR-style grand realignment.

2020 is going to be an interesting year.

Lazy Sunday XXII: Reading

The Portly Politico54 Comments

Summer is drawing to a close, and with it free time for reading.  One of my enduring frustrations as a student was the lack of time to read what I enjoyed (even though my English and history courses in high school and college often presented me the opportunity to read many excellent works).

As an adult, the situation has improved only marginally, as work often eats up most of my time, both during the day and at night.  As a blogger and politics junkie, I also tend to read vast quantities of quick news stories and opinion pieces, while neglecting longer-form works that would be more satisfying.

Reading short articles on the Internet is like scarfing down a box of Cheez-Its:  it’s enjoyable in the moment, but it just raises my blood pressure and leaves me unfilled: an unhealthy indulgence in large quantities.  A good book, or even a well-crafted short story, is like a steak dinner:  filling, satisfying, and sustaining.

I’ve released two reading lists, in 2016 and 2019 (the full 2019 list is a SubscribeStar exclusive), but I thought this Sunday I’d feature some recent posts on books, short stories, and pieces I’ve enjoyed:

  • “McClay & Sheaffer on American History” – This piece examines a new American history textbook from Wilfred McClay, who once mailed me a copy of the Italian novel The Leopard after I wrote to him (he’d written about the book for a conservative publication).  My girlfriend’s father actually owns a copy of this book, and I had an opportunity to flip through its glossy pages while in New Jersey.  My post offers up an analysis of the state of American history education.
  • “Summer Reading: The Story of Yankee Whaling” – I was still in the process of reading The Story of Yankee Whaling, a fascinating account of America’s whaling heyday aimed at younger readers, when I wrote this post.  It was a charming—and hugely informative—book, which gave me access to an entire forgotten industry and its role in American history.  The book dealt with its subjects sympathetically and unapologetically; there is no hand-wringing about whether or not it was right to kill whales for their blubbery oil.  Instead, it simply detailed—and what thrilling detail!—the tough lives of whalers, and the gory particulars of their bloody, necessary trade.
  • “Reblog: Conan the Southerner?” – This post dealt with an interesting piece from the Abbeville Institute, a Southern history website with a strong Jeffersonian streak.  The original post details the influence of rural Texas and its mores upon the creation of the Conan the Barbarian character.  Strength, honor, integrity, hard work—these are the hard-won morals of the titular barbarian king, and they are deeply rooted in the Southern tradition.
  • “Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Mother Hive’” – my History of Conservative Thought class read this chilling short story one morning as an icebreaker.  It’s about the insidious infiltration of a dangerous foreign element into a proud but aging beehive.  The infiltrator—a wax-moth—fills the heads of the young bees with abstract claims of a utopian society, all-the-while laying its eggs and creating great strains on the hive.  Fewer healthy bees are born, much less willing to work to support the colony, so more and more work is shouldered by a diminishing number of healthy workers.  It all ends in a fiery blaze, with hope for the future, as a young Princess and her loyal retinue escape to rebuild.  Written in 1908, the story sounds like it describes the modern West today—a terrifying warning that, I fear, we have not heeded.

So, there you have it.  A little extra summertime reading for you before the academic year resumes.  Teachers at my school report back in the morning, and students are in the following week.  Yikes!  Where did the summer go?

Enjoy your Sunday,

TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Friday Night Recommendation: The Abbeville Institute

The Portly Politico10 Comments

The Internet is a vast place, with a niche for everything.  It’s interesting to consider how much import users put into their own little online worlds—they know everything about what makes their little corner of the web tick, or click—but, if you’re outside of that niche, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist.  It’s like planets filled with intelligent life that cannot perceive or know one another, except when one spunky interstellar craft stumbles upon a distant world.

Regardless, this phenomenon certainly exists online, which explains, in part, why some Americans know everything wicked the progressive Left is unleashing upon our world, while others are blissfully unaware of their impending dooms.  One website that is doing yeomen’s work on our side is the Abbeville Institute.

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Unspeakable Horror

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Blogger photog has a piece up at his blog, Orion’s Cold Fire, entitled “What I Took Away from the Weekend Horror Fest,” which sums up the root causes of this weekend’s two terrible shootings: fatherless, isolated young men with few prospects, few role models, and an excess of narrow ideology.

As I wrote way back in January, I don’t typically write about shootings, because I don’t have much to add, and because the discussion always (incorrectly) focuses on controlling guns, not on addressing the real underlying issue.  The United States doesn’t have a gun problem; we have a God problem.  More precisely, we’ve jettisoned any sense of a transcendent moral order in favor relativism and a form of neo-paganism.

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The New Great Awakening

The Portly Politico6 Comments

I just wrapped up the last session of my History of Conservative Thought course.  We spent the last day unpacking the “Introduction” to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (you can read my summary here).  We also discussed tax policy (an unexpected and pleasant pre-class discussion) and spending, and completed the “Debt Fixer” simulation from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Towards the end of class, I also briefly touched upon the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency.  I spoke extemporaneously, and largely touched upon the “forgotten men and women” theme—that is, that legions of voters perceived themselves to be overlooked, ignored, or even denigrated by the political and cultural arrangements of our time, and latched onto Trump’s candidacy as the best vehicle for expressing this sense of alienation.

At the top of my mind was a series of posts from my good e-pal photog, proprietor of the excellent blog Orion’s Cold Fire.  photog has a long post up entitled “The Great Awakening” that details the slowly dawning realization that millions of Americans were bamboozled by their political elites.  I highly encourage you check it out.

That essay comes on the heels of another photog post, one of his “American Greatness Post of the Day” features.  That feature links to a long essay by Matthew Boose, “The Great Excluded and Our Nationalist Future,” which casts our current political and cultural battles as one between the champions of multiculturalism versus the traditional American patriots.  The former believe America is “open to everyone”—except, of course, the benighted conservative Americans of flyover country—while the latter believe there is more to America than a set of abstract principles, and that our borders and traditions mean something.

photog and I both exist in “the thin space between the lumpen masses of the civic nationalists and the bomb-throwing bad-thinkers of the Post America far right,” as he aptly puts it.  We don’t accept the full-blown claims of the far/Alt-Right that America is doomed and our national heritage is irredeemable, nor do we think that one’s race is a determining factor in one’s ability to be a part of the American experiment.

But we also no longer believe that just getting the policy right will solve our problems.  As Weaver diagnosed in Ideas Have Consequences, our problems run deeper, to the level of ideas, but also to the metaphysical.  As Michael Knowles has said multiple times, our essential questions are not truly political, but are theological; that is, they are questions about who we are, what we believe, and what our place in the universe is.

Thus, we have another Great Awakening in American political and cultural life, a period during which we reexamine these fundamental questions.  For too long the radical, progressive Left has dominated how these theological questions are approached and considered.  The time has come for the Right to take its message to the people, and to restore a more traditional, satisfying, and godly sense of man and his place in Creation.

Lazy Sunday XIX: Music

The Portly Politico59 Comments

While I’m all about politics here at The Portly Politico, I also possess the tender heart of a sensitive warrior-poet.  Music is a major part of my personal and professional lives (if you want to learn more, check out my website, or listen to and buy some tracks on my Bandcamp page), so it’s not surprising that I’ve written about it from time to time on this blog.

In that spirit, here are some scribblings about music:

  • “The Bull on the Roof” –  I wrote this piece on my phone while watching my nearly-four-year old niece play.  It was about a charming symphonic composition I heard while driving to visit family.  The titular work is from a French composer, but draws from popular Brazilian music of the early twentieth century.
  • “Ocarina of Time Soundtrack Review” – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a classic entry in the storied video game franchise.  But no LoZ game is complete without a signature soundtrack from famed Nintendo composer Koji Kondo.  This piece is really a review of a review about the game and its legendary soundtrack.
  • “Right-Wing Rockers” – This post was inspired by some reading into the right-wing-ish politics of some major rockers from the classic rock era—and, no, not just Motor City Madman Ted Nugent.  It even includes a recording of an Iggy Pop song about being a conservative!
  • “TBT: Music is for Everyone” – This post dates back to the TPP 2.0 era of 2016.  I posted about President Trump’s amazing entrance to the strains of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” at the Republican National Convention, and a “bitter progressive” snarkily posted in response about how it was ironic that Trump was entering to a song sung by a gay man.  Yeesh.  Trump has never been against same-sex marriage, for one thing; more importantly, you can appreciate music and other forms of art even if you don’t endorse every lifestyle choice of the artist.  That should go without saying, but this is the world we live in now.
  • “TBT: Conservatives and Country Music” – I really like classic rock; I’m not a big fan of country.  This post goes all the way back to the TPP 1.0 era of 2009, so it’s an interesting look at what I thought about these topics a decade ago.  The piece was an early look at the cultural divide to come:  how even genres of music have become implicitly politicized to signal support for or against one ideology or another.  I bemoaned the fact that progressives got rock ‘n’ roll, and we got stuck with country.

Happy Sunday!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments: