Rod Dreher reports on his Weekend At The (implicitly white) Bruderhof, which saw Ross Douthat discussing Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) thesis:
Douthat said there’s tension between that prescription and the description Deneen gives of a late modern civilization that has the power to roll over all resistance. He said that if Deneed is right in the first 9/10 of his book, “then we need a more capacious politics of resistance, not just ‘let a thousand Bruderhofs flower.’”
Huh, I wonder what form this more capacious politics of resistance take? This coming from a guy who is, like Dreher, horrified at the idea of white identitarianism, let alone white nationalism.
Rod himself (of all people, and against his own inner angels) weighs in:
I thought of something Chris Arnade had said to me earlier: that people find meaning in life from three places — race, place, and/or faith. If faith is denied to people, and they don’t feel any particular loyalty to their place for whatever reason, that leaves one thing … and that’s one reason why the future is so scary.
In the mornings, poor Rod must look in the mirror and curse himself for the dreams he had the night before.
Douthat then adds:
“… My concern is that the Republic is just dead. We just an empire. We have a vestigial legislature, and an elected Emperor, and courts that serve as a kind of check on that Emperor. So maybe the path to localism and decentralization is through Empire. Maybe the US should become a kind of Austria-Hungary.”
Douthat then posits 5 ways that our decadent era can end:
1) from outside, via cataclysmic invasion or some rival, nondecadent civilization taking over. Closest we can imagine now is China, or mass immigration from Mideast and North Africa into weakened Europe.
2) A dramatic technological breakthrough that stresses society to breaking point
3) Religious revival or development of a new religion
4) A return of ideology intimated by these online debates. “Weimar Germany was kind of decadent, but the 1930s weren’t stagnant.” Rather, it was a time of great ideological conflict
5) Discovery of a new frontier or new horizon.
Hmm, if only there were some dissident right thinkers entertaining these 5 aspects…
Oh wait, there are.
