Tag: cultural conservatism

The Revival of Traditionalism?

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Milo Yiannopoulos posted a screen shot yesterday of an essay from The Atlantic reading “How the Coronavirus Will Send Us Back to the 1950s” (the piece, by Helen Lewis, is now called “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism“—a silver lining to this pandemic, I suppose).  His caption reads, “HOLY SH[*]T YES PLEASE[.]”

The Lewis piece is the usual feminist hand-wringing about the disparate impact of the coronavirus on women.  Feminists always find a way to make global catastrophes about them, and not about everyone who is truly suffering.  The attitude seems to be, “yes, yes, people will die, but why do I have to make any sacrifices or trade-offs for the people I ostensibly love?”

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High-Tech Agrarianism

The Portly Politico9 Comments

The coronavirus situation—which I am convinced is both quite serious, but also inspiring some huge overreactions—has created a world that feels almost entirely different than it did even a few days ago.  This time last week, I was convinced that the whole thing was way overblown, and that life would largely continue apace, minus some school closures here and there.

By Friday evening I was growing more concerned, as everything began to get closed or cancelled.  I proctored the SAT Saturday morning and even went out of town that evening.  At that point, I thought the risk of my school closing was greater than it had been even two or three days before, but I still figured it was a relatively remote possibility.

Then Governor McMaster announced the closure of all South Carolina public schools (I teach at a private school, but we always follow gubernatorial closures)—and a bunch of other stuff shut down.  I picked up dinner at a Hardee’s in Florence, South Carolina Monday evening after a guitar lesson, and it was surreal—everything was gone from the front, and the cashier had to give me a lid and straw according to their new cleanliness guidelines.

(Let’s take a moment to thank all those service industry folks and long-distance truckers who are continuing to work and risking exposure; they are unsung heroes.  Also, spare a thought to people in those industries that are out-of-work at the moment.  They need our love and charity now more than ever.)

That’s all to say that, in a remarkably short period of time, the United States has undergone a major paradigm shift.  The world of Saturday, 14 March 2020 at 2 PM—when I emerged from the cocoon of extended time SAT testing—was a different than the world of Wednesday, 18 March 2020 at 9 PM (when I’m writing this very belated blog post).

One trend—that I think will be positive if it endures—is the implicit rejection of globalism.  People are suddenly awakening, dramatically, to the manifold downsides of open borders and excessive global economic integration.  Suddenly, localism is back in vogue.

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TBT: The Human Toll of Globalization

The Portly Politico6 Comments

One of the more interesting developments in conservatism since Trump’s rise in 2015-2016 has been a reevaluation of our basic economic policy.  Much of the ideas debated originated, in our modern political era, with Pat Buchanan.  For decades, the assumption among conservatism was that economic efficiency was the highest good, as it lowered costs and eliminated or reduced government overreach.

That was a reasonable set of assumptions when our nation shared a common culture, and when the United States dominated global markets hegemonically.  But the goal of reducing the size of government morphed pathologically into the mad worship of Efficiency above all else.  We sold out social capital—stable families, cohesive communities, robust civil society—for quick cash.

That’s the gist of Z-Man’s post today, “Middle-Man Conservatism.”  Tucker Carlson has similarly touched upon the woeful consequences of worshiping Efficiency-for-its-own-sake.  Sure, Americans possess a pioneering spirit—we’ll move to the oil fields in North Dakota if we have to do so—but we’re still motivated by the same things other humans are:  family, community, belonging.  Gutting our communities to save fifty bucks on a washing machine is a ludicrous trade-off.

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Delusional Crone (Almost) Divorces Husband over Trump

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If you’re ready for your blood pressure to spike before you even eat your cholesterol-thick breakfast, here’s an example of the delusional loonies on the Left:  a California woman (almost) divorced her husband because he voted for Trump.

This story is a bit old, as it dates back to early 2017, but it’s indicative of where our nation is.  It not only demonstrates the intense loyalty of the Left to their progressive dogma, but also how cheaply marriage is held.

The short version is thus:  73-year old Gayle McCormick threatened seriously to divorce her husband of twenty-two years when she found out he voted for Trump (ultimately, they merely separated permanently).

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Nevada Feels the Bern

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Well, the Commies and “natural conservatives” in Nevada have spoken, and it looks like Bernie Sanders is going to sweep the state’s caucuses.  That means he’s currently leading in Democratic delegates heading into South Carolina’s primaries this Saturday.

Joe Biden appears to be in second place, somewhat surprisingly, with l’il Pete Buttigieg in third.  That’s going to make South Carolina a big showdown between Sanders and Biden.  Biden is banking on blacks in South Carolina to buoy his flailing campaign.  Buttigieg will likely flame out (no pun intended) in SC, and the rest of the South, because of those same voters—blacks do not like homosexuality.

All that said, Bernie appears to be in the driver’s seat.  While folks are predicting Trump will mop the floor with the ancient socialist, a Sanders nomination is a very dangerous development.

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Lazy Sunday L: The Best of Lazy Sunday

The Portly Politico23 Comments

It’s finally here—FIFTY WEEKS of Lazy Sunday.  I started this little feature with “APR Pieces” (the feature of last week’s TBT) one year ago, and today marks the fiftieth edition (that’s what the little “L” in the title means, for those not familiar with Roman numerals).

When I took the blog daily in 2019, I realized I needed at least one or two days of easier posts, as churning out seven totally original posts a week is tough (even writing five is challenging sometimes).  Thus, Lazy Sunday and TBT were born.  While TBT is a fun way to look back at past scribblings, Lazy Sunday is useful for grouping disparate posts thematically.

Naturally, Sunday is one of the slowest days for views, and I don’t often put a “read more” tag on Lazy Sunday posts, so they have pretty low views overall (I imagine many subscribers read the posts in their e-mails, then click-through to the linked pieces; my limited data from WordPress suggests as much).  So that’s all to say that the “Best” of Lazy Sunday is still way below my most-viewed posts.

Anyway, that’s enough sausage-making.  Here are some of the most-viewed Lazy Sunday installments:

  1. “Lazy Sunday XIV: Gay Stuff” (36 views):  If ever I lose my job for something I’ve posted, this compilation would likely be “Exhibit A” in the Ministry of Truth and Diversity Reeducation’s case against me for wrongthink.  June is now Pride Month, as every television show and Internet advertisement flamboyantly reminds you.  And yet, they’re the oppressed ones.  When do we get Middle Class Straight White Guy with a Steady Job Pride Month?
  2. “Lazy Sunday IV: Christianity” (33 views):  As much as my readers seem to enjoy reading about outrageous same-sex antics, they also seem to like posts about Christianity and Christian faith.  This one is probably due for a sequel, as I’ve written a lot more about the topic since last March.
  3. “Lazy Sunday XXX: Trump, Part I” (33 views):  Speaking of Christianity, the flawed but awesome vessel God has appointed to defend religious liberty is tied for second place with the “Christianity” post.  GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus got two Lazy Sunday features, so I’ve really got to get a second one on “Christianity” done.
  4. “Lazy Sunday – APR Pieces” (28 views):  The Lazy Sunday that started it all, featuring my pieces for the blogging portion of the online radio station American Patriot Radio.  Note, too, that for the first one I used a dash in the title, rather than a colon.  I’ve maintained the dash for the long list of Lazy Sunday features below, but titles since then use the colon.  Just a formatting note for you grammar and style folks.
  5. “Lazy Sunday V: Progressivism, Part I” (26 views):  One of the frustrating elements of conservatism today is that we’re constantly defining ourselves against progressivism, rather than as our own, truly alternative worldview.  Part of that is because, in the Kirkean understanding of conservatism, it’s not an ideology, and certainly not universal in nature.  Progressivism, being an outgrowth of classical liberalism (as most modern conservatives consider themselves to be), is universal—and totalitarian in its universalism.  Regardless, here are a bunch of posts about the bad guys.
  6. “Lazy Sunday XLVI: Man Time” (26 views):  The most recent Lazy Sunday to make the list, buoyed in part due to traffic from some popular manosphere sites.  It’s ironic that I published this post and my girlfriend dumped me that afternoon.  Well, it just goes to show you that the modern-day Sophists of the red-pill world aren’t always right.

There you have it!  Six beefy Lazy Sundays to reread and re-enjoy.  There are forty-nine other good ones, too!  Show them some love.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Moral Outrage about Moral Outrage

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Teaching is a profession that attracts complainers.  Teaching requires some risk-tasking, but it’s fundamentally a job for folks that want great degrees of stability.  When that stability is disrupted, teachers, being creatures of habit and order, get ornery.

That might explain, in part, the high turnover in the teaching profession.  We live in an increasingly disordered world, even in the classroom.  Part of that disorder is the assumption that children are somehow wiser and more morally pure than their elders.

That’s a notion that goes back at least to the counterculture movement of the 1960s (not to blame, pedantically and predictably, all of our problems on that misguided, suicidal decade):  the youth a moral vanguard, crusading against the long-established order and its absurdities.  The outraged shrieking of a youngling carries with it, the culture suggests, greater weight than the elderly master with decades of experience and accumulated wisdom.

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

The God Pill, Part III

The Portly Politico2 Comments

I’ve written a couple of pieces (here and here) about the so-called “God Pill,” and specifically Roosh V‘s remarkable conversion to (Orthodox, it seems?) Christianity.  Roosh’s conversion, it seems, is quite sincere, and he’s put his money where his belief is by unpublishing many of his books dealing with “game,” the art of seduction.

Roosh wrote an essay about a month ago, “How I Turned To God,” in which he explains the events and influences that led to his conversion.  Roosh was the archetype of the atheist materialist:  an evolution-espousing microbiologist, who then began a successful—if only in the material sense—career as a professional Don Juan.

He literally had sex and wrote about it for a living.  As he writes, “How could a man who was so far from God come to have complete trust in Him practically overnight?”

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Lazy Sunday XLIX: Family

The Portly Politico24 Comments

It’s been another busy weekend for yours portly.  SubscribeStar readers, I have not forgotten about you, even though I’ve failed to deliver on yesterday’s still delayed post.  I will have a post up this evening, after I’ve logged this edition of Lazy Sunday.

I’m actually on a glorious four-day weekend from school, so you’d think I’d have loads of time to get posts done.  In fact, this Sunday has been anything but lazy, with church, four piano lessons, and a jazz band rehearsal now in the books.

This weekend has seen a great deal of time with my family, however, as my youngest nephew celebrated his first birthday yesterday.  Time with family is always rejuvenating, and helps maintain the closest of bonds and the most basic unit of human organization.  Our excessive focus on the individual has, at times, come at the cost of the older, stronger emphasis on the family as the basic unit of society.

To that end—and in the spirit of one-year olds’ birthday celebrations—here are some old posts, all throwbacks to the original TPP Blogger page, about family:

  • “Family Matters” – a lengthy post detailing the decline of the traditional family structure, and arguing for the benefits of family-formation.
  • “Family Matters Follow-Up Part I: Divorce and Marriage; Sex Education” – the “Family Matters” post generated a good bit of discussion on Facebook (back when I had the guts to post these to my personal profile page), especially among the sorts that don’t understand what a generalization is.  So this piece detailed some of the questions, comments, and objections that came up in the wake of the original.
  • “Family Matters Follow-Up Part II: The Welfare State and the Crisis of the Family” – the welfare state has had an extremely deleterious effect on the family, particularly black families, which are barely anything such, with nearly 3/4ths of black children born out-of-wedlock.  Much of that decline is cultural and social in nature, but it also derives from bad government policy and perverse economic incentives.  Even worse, it’s spreading:  over half of children born to women under thirty today are born without a father present.

That’s it for this weekend, folks!  Be sure to hug your parents, grandparents, children, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., and keep outbreeding the childless progressives.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday XLVIII: Culture

The Portly Politico30 Comments

A paradox of blogging is that the more I write, the more difficult (at least some weeks) it is to think up a good theme for Lazy Sunday.  Part of the problem is that the earliest editions often featured very broad categories; thus, the proliferation of “Part II” posts throughout.

Of course, that’s probably a problem for me, the writer.  You’re just looking to scan through a list of hyperlinks while enjoying your pre-church coffee (or—given my tardiness posting of late—your post-church nap).  Such is the nature of the relationship between creator and consumer—thirty minutes put into crafting a blog post equates to about thirty seconds of skimming.  But it’s worth it to have your eyeballs (eww…) for those thirty seconds!

On that note, I’m dedicating this week’s Lazy Sunday to matters of culture.  In compiling this short list of recent pieces, I came to realize that I way overuse the “culture” tag on my blog posts.  In my defense, I do so because I see most issues as cultural (or, even more deeply, theological and philosophical), rather than merely political or economical, in nature.  The major political battles we’re fighting in the West today are, at heart, about culture.

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