Ponies, Politics, and the Eternal Romance

This brings us to the necessity of concluding that the upholders of mere dialectic, whether they appear in this modern form or in another, are among the most subversive enemies of society and culture. They are attacking an ultimate source of cohesion in the interest of a doctrine which can issue only in nullity. It is no service to man to impugn his feeling about the world qua feeling. Feeling is the source of that healthful tension between man and what is – both objectively and subjectively. If man could be brought to believe that all feeling about the world is wrong, there would be nothing for him but collapse.

– Richard Weaver

_____

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

—John 11: 25-26

__________

Once, after I returned from a work-related trip, my oldest daughter, who was only four at the time, burst into tears upon my return, despite the fact that I had brought her what I thought was a nice present. It was quite some time (about two years) before she told me why she had cried. She cried because I had not brought a pony home with me. Now, we lived in the city and had virtually no yard. And I never told her I was going to bring a pony home for her. But she loved ponies, and in her mind daddies were supposed to give their daughters their hearts’ desires. My daughter is grown now, but I’m still not sure if I’ve ever been completely forgiven for my failure to bring home a pony.

The conservative nationalists’ reactions to Trump’s early days in his presidency remind me of my daughter’s reaction to my failure to bring home a pony. Trump is being treated as a great betrayer for breaking promises he never made. He never said he wouldn’t act militarily when he thought it was in the nation’s best interest. He never said he was going to stop all Moslem and Mexican immigration, and he never said he was going to do anything to change the negro worshipping essence of our nation. As regards the Syrian bombing, I’m willing to trust Trump’s instincts over the libertarian reasoning of Rand Paul and his ilk. And regarding the Moslem, Mexican, and negro issues – I would like to see all Moslems, Mexicans, and negroes evicted from this nation and every other European nation, but I can’t blame Trump for breaking his promises to me, because he never promised to evict the Moslems, Mexicans, and negroes from the United States.

I think the neo-pagans’ and the white nationalists’ disappointment in Trump is rooted in their belief in the false Messiah called the democratic process. They have invested all their faith, which is a ‘this world only’ faith, in democracy. And they have done so despite the fact that the great Christian conservatives, such as Burke, Shakespeare, and Anthony Jacob insisted that no European nation could survive as a democracy. Even the pagan Greeks, whom the neos and the conservative nationalists admire so much, did not believe in democracy. The much lauded Athenian democracy was not a modern democracy. Only white, male property owners had the vote. And even that democracy would not have survived the Persian wars if the Spartans, the men from an aristocratic military society, had not defended the pass at Thermopylae while the rest of the Greek city states squabbled.

The neo-pagans and the white nationalists are disgusted with Trump. I have a different view. He has exceeded my expectations. That is because I never looked on him as anything other than a rear guard. He has saved some white lives through executive orders on abortion and immigration, and he is trying, without the support of the Republicans or the Democrats, to build the wall. What more can we expect? Is there anyone in the ranks of the neos or the conservative nationalists who seriously think anybody else can do better than Donald Trump? What Trump has done is nothing compared to what must be done if whites are to survive as a people. But Trump has done everything that can be done within the confines of our modern democratic system. So stop the overblown rhetoric about Trump’s ‘betrayal’ and start thinking about the destruction of democracy. That, not the demonization of Donald Trump, should be the white man’s concern.

The intangible called ‘sentiment’ is at the root of the conflict between the mad-dog liberals, the neo-pagans, the white nationalists, and the Christian Europeans. The mad-dog liberals, the neo-pagans, and the white nationalists think Christian Europe is sentimental mush. Whereas I get all sentimental and teary-eyed over books like Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush and Dickens’ Christmas Carol, the mad-dog liberals get all sentimental about the negro and the other colored races. And the hard-eyed ‘realistic’ thinkers in the ranks of the neo-pagans and the white nationalist – what do they get sentimental about? They get sentimental about democracy, think tanks, and white brain cells. The latter group can fool the Christian European, at least for a time. You assume they must love the antique Europeans because they seem to be opposed to the mad-dog liberals, but then you discover that they, like the mad-dog liberals, think the antique Europeans were full of the wrong type of sentiment – they didn’t have their priorities straight. But is it possible to be a white neo-pagan or a white nationalist while hating the Christian Europeans of old Europe? That is like a literature professor I knew. He claimed to love the works of Dostoyevsky – except for all the “Christian rot.” How can you love Dostoyevsky and hate the “Christian rot”? The essence of Dostoyevsky is his love of Christ, just as the essence of the European people, when seen at their height, was their love of Jesus Christ. How can you sneer at that love and profess to be pro-white?

Very few of us can live on the higher plane of existence for very long; we must come down to the mundane world. But the antique Europeans lived their mundane lives with the vision of that other realm, a spiritual realm, before their eyes. That is the difference between the antique Europeans and the liberals – be they mad-dog liberals, neo-pagan liberals, or white nationalist liberals. All three groups, and the splinter groups connected to them, want the mundane world to be the only world. But what if there is another world? What if the Europeans of sacred memory got it right? Is there something greater than negro worship and the democratic process? Our people, when they were Christians, thought there was.

It will take great men to defeat the liberals and the colored barbarians. And great men do not come from the democratic process. The new right, the white nationalists, call them what you will, are all process-analysis men. They want to make reality and abstract reason into one entity, because they think they can win the battle of abstract reason. But what if reality and abstract reason are not one entity? What if abstract reason is an unreality? All the warring European clans – the mad-dog liberals, the white nationalists, the neo-pagans, the conservatives, etc. — have left the culture of feeling, honor, and romance behind and entered into an abstract world devoid of feeling, honor, and romance. The mad-dog liberals are winning the war of the new age abstractions, because they have embraced a personal God, the colored savage, to preside over their abstract, utopian world. Lacking a personal God, the other unholy, abstract, ‘this world only’ coalitions have been left foundering in the sea of modernity.

Let us recall what Christ said when faced with the death of Lazarus: “Lazarus, come forth.” And then he that was dead did come forth. But some men, completely indifferent to the miracle Christ had performed, “went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done. Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? For this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.” Ponder that. When faced with the possibility that the Messiah had actually come into the world, that there was a Savior who could resurrect the dead, the Pharisees were only concerned with this world only, they were concerned with politics. So it is with all our modern warring tribes of modernity. The antique Europeans were the people who saw life feelingly and passed on their faith in the God who raised Lazarus from the dead and promised us that He would draw us unto Him at the hour of our deaths. How can this be a matter of indifference? How can we dismiss and/or demonize the people who thought their heartfelt faith in the King of Kings was all in all? When I wept at my mother’s grave, I took no consolation in Aquinas’s five proofs for the existence of God. Nor did I take any consolation in the fact that I could pass my mother’s white chromosomes onto my own children, who could pass those white chromosomes onto other whites until great white minds could consolidate their power and rule over a kingdom of disembodied minds. It was only my heart, the heart that wept, that told me my mother was not dead. That hope came to me through a connection to my people, the people who passed on their heartfelt faith in Christ from one generational hearth fire to the next. Extinguish those hearth fires — and that is the goal of all the modern European political and ‘religious’ organizations – and you destroy a man’s hope that the grave is not the ultimate reality.

When our mundane activities are rooted in the eternal verities, those mundane activities become something rare and wonderful, they become the exact opposite of mundane. A women who cooks, cleans, and does a thousand and one household chores by a Christian hearth fire has consecrated her labor to Christ. It is the same with a man’s work. But all labor, all politics, all law, has no significance if it is not connected to Christ. He came into the world, “That I should bear witness unto truth.” That was and is our mission, to bear witness unto His truth, that He was the light of the world. If we look at the life of Shakespeare or Handel or some other great man of Christendom, we will see nothing remarkable if we see only the outer man. But if we look at the inner man, the man we see through his works, we see a miracle of God’s grace. So it is with the antique Europeans — looking at the heart of their culture we see the living God. If we turn our back on their vision and turn to the things of this world only – to science, psychology, and secularized law and politics — then we are of all men most to be pitied, for we have sold our souls to gain the world.

When our politics are no longer severed from the romance of Christian Europe, we will see miracles again. We will see the Cross, and not the crescent, over all of Europe, and we will see men and women with that charity of honor that is the mark of the European. We can’t get to that blessed state by a trick of the intellect. We can’t figure it all out without any reference to our people and their God. But we can love what is worthy of love – the people of the European hearth fire and the Son of God, and we can turn that love into a flame of charity that will destroy Liberaldom. Not very practical? Au contraire, the eternal romance is the only practical response to the devil and his works. It is the one response that never faileth. The old patriotic song, “There’ll Always Be an England,” ends with the line, “There’ll always be an England, And England shall be free, If England means as much to you, As England means to me.” No doubt the modern liberal would view such a song as racist, and the modern neo-pagan would call it sentimental mush. But the song, which also speaks of “the chains nothing can break,” is rooted in Britain’s ancient traditions that stem from a common race and a common faith. We all, we Europeans, must return to those unbreakable chains – forsaking and despising any ideology, or persons, that urge us to break those chains. They are our link to Him and to our loved ones, living and dead.

We mustn’t allow ourselves to be drawn into a false either/or – the liberalism of the mad-dogs or the liberalism of the process analysis men of the right. Our world is the world of feeling. The moderns of both camps always think in terms of political success. They want victories without honor. The man of feeling, the antique European, thinks in terms of honor. He doesn’t say to himself, “How can I form coalitions and appeal to a large aggregate of people in order to win political office?” Oh no, the antique European is concerned with one thing: “What must I do to live up to the code, what must I do to be honorable?” And the answer always comes to him, because his faith is bred in the bone:

Captain Smollett rose from his seat and knocked out the ashes of his pipe in the palm of his left hand.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Every last word, by thunder!” answered John. “Refuse that, and you’ve seen the last of me but musket-balls.”

“Very good,” said the captain. “Now you’ll hear me. If you’ll come up one by one, unarmed, I’ll engage to clap you all in irons and take you home to a fair trial in England. If you won’t, my name is Alexander Smollett, I’ve flown my sovereign’s colours, and I’ll see you all to Davy Jones.

—Treasure Island

That is all that matters: That we uphold the honor code of the European people, which has nothing to do with abstract reason, think tanks, and secularized politics, but has everything to do with the living God, who was born in a stable in Bethlehem. +