Hard Sayings, Part I

There is a group of teachings of Jesus that are often characterized as the Hard Sayings, words that are shocking or offensive. The title comes from chapter six in John's Gospel, where Jesus makes the jaw-droppingly and very anti-kosher and un-Jewish statement that, "unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you shall not have life in you." In response, many disciples leave saying, "This is a hard saying. Who can bear to listen to it?"

I have developed my own set of hard sayings. Even I find it hard to listen to myself write them.

My lifelong political liberalism began to fray in the late 1990's. I kept running into phenomena, realities, which were at odds with what I was told I was supposed to see. I briefly danced with libertarianism, since it gave me an exit from liberalism without forcing me into the repulsive camp of the conservatives. September 11th put an end to that ideological safe-house. And so for most of the last dozen+ years, I have been frankly among the Right. (Details here and here.)

That was bad enough for a gay man living in San Francisco's Castro. Now I find myself most in sympathy with The New Right, a traditionalist and reactionary trend that decent Conservatives find Too Much and Beyond the Pale. Largely because of its attitude toward race. It has been referred to as The Dark Enlightenment.

Progressives love to cast Conservatives as "racists", (the modern version of "witchcraft"). They are not. Conservatives are pretty much on board with the egalitarian trance that infects almost all Western thought and attitude. They merely quibble about tactics and strategy, not about fundamentals.

They all worship a version of Martin Luther King, endlessly quoting his "content of our character line" and ignoring the rest of his opus, whose unfolding disasters we now live with, and under. And they are always on the look for the next Great Black Hope, a conservative Black leader who will protect them from the "racist" clubbing of the Left...which has become, in fact, the Mainstream. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. Then Herman Cain. Now Dr Ben Carson.

It is unseemly and pathetic.

This leads to the New Right dismissal of Conservatives as simply the Liberals of a previous generation, fated by their own principles ever to be beaten by their Lefty opponents. If you ask yourself what battles, either political or cultural, Conservatives have both won and maintained in the last half-century, the list is...well, what's on that list?

The Left has brilliantly embedded its ideas into the really powerful engines of human motivation: tribe and race, gender and sex, quests for status, power and money, all wrapped up in a bright shiny ethical package. The Right blathers on about abstractions like "freedom" and "individuality" and, alas, "the Constitution." The Left is a religion, with all the crusading and dogmatic zeal which only faith gives. The Right is a philosophers' club.

The New Right is a weird place. Very small. Very sectarian. Overheated. Transgressive. But that is to be expected. After all, these thinkers are standing in front of a juggernaut intent on their demise. What they have in common is a root and branch rejection of egalitarianism, the value that underlies all of contemporary Western values and which, in their opinion, is the cancer eating away at the civilization our ancestors created.

Our White ancestors.

And there's the rub. Stating the obvious, that Western civilization is White civilization, is now the ultimate taboo, unless, of course, that equivalence is part of a bill of attainder and indictment. Whites may only be mentioned in critique and for purposes of guilt and self-erasure, never never in self-assertion, pride or, worst of all, preference.

The rules are that People of Color (and their White and Whitish running dogs, back-stabbing White females perhaps the worst of them) may make war on (male) Whites but that Whites are absolutely forbidden to notice, much less resist. Burnham had it down: it is the ideology of Western suicide, dressing up self-destruction as the summit of moral achievement. Rule by victims, victim minorities above all --the more dysfunctional the better--, is the goal. And virtually achieved in a single revolutionary lifetime.

The New Right are White men who have shockingly embedded their anti-equality ideas into the same reality-based engines of motivation as the Left: first among them, racial and ethnic identity, the power of the tribe. That is the final and unforgivable sin, the reductio ad Hitlerum. "White supremacy." Progressives easily demonize and loathe them. Decent Conservatives flee in panic, fearing contamination. I sympathize. They have tough stuff to say.

It may very well be too late for us. Europeans --both in the homeland and here in North America and elsewhere-- may be doomed to extinction, like the Romans. But the virtue I find in the New Right, which is chock full of Hard Sayings, is the ring of truth.

If any of my readers think I am on the wrong track, please show me how and why.
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