Culture

[NDRock]

Been reading up more on Hungary and Poland. I'd love to see Europe embrace their roots like those guys. If I recall, Poland served as a bulwark against the Mongols, and Hungary served as a bulwark against the Ottoman Turks. Nationalism is essential to preserving the culture. Let's go! Deus Vult fam.

Orban's speech at the Freedom March in Budapest is legitimately inspiring. Makes me want to move back to the homeland and do my part to save the few decent people left in Europe.

Have you listened to Dan Carlin’s podcast on the Mongols? Pretty awesome.

 

[Irish YJ]

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Grey, have you ever spent significant time in France, or worked with the French professionally? I spent 5+ years working with them daily. I get the whole Merica thing, but we really pale in comparison. Also if you look at the ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization, or just simple diversity stats, we rank well ahead of France as being a much more diverse culture.

 

[Irish YJ]

You would really sue a school system over this? I’m assuming you’re joking because that is insanity. I guess fighting “crazy” with insanity makes sense.

I have two problems with this situation. 1) Christmas moments are some of the most precious moments a child will have, and a parent will have with their child. A teacher depriving a parent and child of those moments can not be defended. And 2) Teachers and schools are increasingly coming off their mission, which is to teach curriculum. They are not there to influence political or religious believes, and they are sure in the hell not there to impact family celebration.

Until school systems are body slammed about this kind of crap, it will continue to happen, and grow. Reading/writing, match, science, history, music... that's what grade schools are for.

 

[NDRock]

I have two problems with this situation. 1) Christmas moments are some of the most precious moments a child will have, and a parent will have with their child. A teacher depriving a parent and child of those moments can not be defended. And 2) Teachers and schools are increasingly coming off their mission, which is to teach curriculum. They are not there to influence political or religious believes, and they are sure in the hell not there to impact family celebration.

Until school systems are body slammed about this kind of crap, it will continue to happen, and grow. Reading/writing, match, science, history, music... that's what grade schools are for.

Nobody is defending the substitute teacher’s actions. They were not sanctioned by the school. The idea of “suing the ballz off” a school district is pathetic and comes off as having a “victim mentality”. I have two children that are now past the Santa stage and I can say with confidence that our holiday family celebrations had little to do with a fat guy in a red suit. Other than the odd picture at the mall.

 

[Irish YJ]

Nobody is defending the substitute teacher’s actions. They were not sanctioned by the school. The idea of “suing the ballz off” a school district is pathetic and comes off as having a “victim mentality”. I have two children that are now past the Santa stage and I can say with confidence that our holiday family celebrations had little to do with a fat guy in a red suit. Other than the odd picture at the mall.

The school is responsible for the behavior of their employees. Bottom line. When a company's employees screw up, they are held accountable. Just because it's a school district doesn't diminish responsibility.

I can't speak for your kids. I can speak for myself. I grew up in lower middle class family. As a young kid, there was nothing that I looked forward to more than waking up to see what Santa brought. That's how kids think. My mother (who is now in her 70s), who didn't have a lot back then, saved all year to spoil me on that day. She was very poor growing up, and wanted my Christmases to be better than hers. She still reminisces every Christmas about a few specific years and talks about my joy opening up what Santa brought. It wasn't Santa that made her so happy, it was the excitement of her kid. My joy, was as much her joy. Hearing my mother's memories, and her happiness about those times, are special to me. And knowing the sacrifices she made to give me more than she could really afford, mean more than Santa... But, it was through "Santa" that it happened.

If you have not had that experience yourself, through your parents, or through your children, I'm sorry.

 

[Bluto]

I never understood Christians embracing the commercialization of Christ’s Mass. The present day version of Santa Claus being the embodiment of this phenomenon.

 

[Irish YJ]

I never understood Christians embracing the commercialization of Christ’s Mass. The present day version of Santa Claus being the embodiment of this phenomenon.

 

[NDRock]

The school is responsible for the behavior of their employees. Bottom line. When a company's employees screw up, they are held accountable. Just because it's a school district doesn't diminish responsibility.

I can't speak for your kids. I can speak for myself. I grew up in lower middle class family. As a young kid, there was nothing that I looked forward to more than waking up to see what Santa brought. That's how kids think. My mother (who is now in her 70s), who didn't have a lot back then, saved all year to spoil me on that day. She was very poor growing up, and wanted my Christmases to be better than hers. She still reminisces every Christmas about a few specific years and talks about my joy opening up what Santa brought. It wasn't Santa that made her so happy, it was the excitement of her kid. My joy, was as much her joy. Hearing my mother's memories, and her happiness about those times, are special to me. And knowing the sacrifices she made to give me more than she could really afford, mean more than Santa... But, it was through "Santa" that it happened.

If you have not had that experience yourself, through your parents, or through your children, I'm sorry.

That’s a touching story. Luckily I was blessed with great parents and great memories of Christmas. Still think you sound like a snowflake for wanting to sue an organization because somebody told some kids the truth about Santa. What other things would you be willing to spend years in litigation over? Elf on a shelf? The Tooth Fairy? Easter Bunny? I guess I’m just not as sensitive as you.

 

[Irish YJ]

That’s a touching story. Luckily I was blessed with great parents and great memories of Christmas. Still think you sound like a snowflake for wanting to sue an organization because somebody told some kids the truth about Santa. What other things would you be willing to spend years in litigation over? Elf on a shelf? The Tooth Fairy? Easter Bunny? I guess I’m just not as sensitive as you.

I'm actually not sensitive about much. It was prob a lib snowflake sub that spilled the beans on Santa. If I'm tired of anything, it's lib snowflake attack on holidays in general, and their need to overreach within the educational system from pre-k through college... Santa, Thanksgiving, you name it... It's all under fire more than ever. I'm outraged by the continuous liberal outrage...

PS.. wanting a school to teach actual subjects, and STFU about the rest, isn't being sensitive. My tax dollars are for education, not re-education.

 

[Irishize]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/39056/transgender-miss-universe-contestant-now-odds-james-barrett

 

[zelezo vlk]

This piece by Matthew Walther last week I thought was quite good and hits the nail on the head

https://theweek.com/articles/809985/suicide-chimera-american-prosperity

If you are the sort of person who needs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to inform you that Americans are miserable, it's now official. According to the nation's top public health agency, the rate at which we are killing ourselves is higher than it has been in half a century. Fifty years of relentless technological advances, social liberalization, optimization, and GDP growth, five decades that brought about the end of Soviet communism and the birth of a new global order based on free trade and open communication and an infinite array of goods and services and what have we got to show for it? Suicide.



While it's nice to have this official scientific conclusion with the imprimatur of the Department of Health and Human Services, it doesn't go very far in the way of explaining why. We didn't really need the what or the how. You would have to be breathing pretty rarified air not to have noticed the quiet despair so many people are feeling. Just look at the other numbers. Rates of drug overdose are increasing, a trend to which voters have responded by legalizing marijuana in several states. Teenagers, especially girls, are mutilating their bodies with glass and knives with unspeakable regularity. We are having ostensibly serious conversations about giving firearms to teachers in case they ever find themselves in a situation where they must kill one of their students in order to protect the others.

Now, if you put 100,000 names in a hat, 14 of them will be of people who take their own lives. This is about the same rate at which people own iguanas as pets. It is almost impossible for it not to be personal. Eight of my wife's former classmates at one of the best public high schools in one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the wealthiest county in our state have killed themselves.

It will be tempting for some liberals to argue that the drug and suicide epidemic, which is most pronounced in states like West Virginia and in the post-industrial Midwest, is the muted response of white Americans to the prospect of their irrelevance in a rapidly diversifying country. But that's not what I think is happening — and not just because David Duke probably says the same thing. For one thing, the despair that is the underlying cause of these phenomena is universal. The difference is that black and Hispanic communities have more hard-won resilience than whites who have led increasingly atomized, if comparatively more prosperous, existences for half a century now. They live in self-segregated communities in which the only meaningful bonds with their neighbors and even their extended families are those to which they have consented. Their experience has not prepared them for financial uncertainty, violence, atrophying attention spans, and drug taking. For them there really is no such thing as society. They have achieved Auden's terrible dream — not universal love, but being loved alone. Now they are discovering what it means to hate themselves alone as well.

How did this happen? One thing that we must come to recognize is that prosperity in the sense in which it has been defined by economists and politicians for generations now is a chimera. Working the coupon center screen at CVS is not meaningful labor. Unlimited access to cheap consumer goods manufactured by foreign wage-slaves is not leisure. Taking your children to a restaurant and handing them an iPad game is not parenting. Spending four hours a day waiting to see whether a star or a heart or an arrow has appeared next to a picture or a caption you have posted on a computer network is not community. Watching pornography is not human intimacy. Grinding away to achieve a certain test score is not education, nor is signing away half the price of a modest house in order to finance a four-year pajama party. Taking drugs is not a reprieve from the misery of what you do with the rest of your time but the consummation of it.

If we want to be happy again, we don't need fancier phones or even more realistic simulations of murder on our televisions. We don't even need higher wages or better health care, though both of those things would help. We need to live in the world — this world, not the digital simulacrum that we have such a hard time ignoring — with one another. And we need to do it with love, love of husband for wife, parent for child, neighbor for neighbor, and stranger for stranger.

If that sounds mawkish, forgive for not agreeing that the next crowd-funded pot brownie startup with blockchain integration is the lost lane-end into heaven we are all seeking. As usual, Jackie DeShannon was right.

 

[ACamp1900]

That first sentence is pure gold....

 

[Bluto]

Great. Now remove any Christian symbolism and add Coke and Pepsi logos.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Matthew Walther just published an article titled "Why my kids aren't getting toys for Christmas":

We take Christmas very seriously at our house. So seriously that we put up no decorations until late on Dec. 24 and leave everything in place until after Candlemas on Feb. 2. We generally enjoy ourselves over the long holiday. There are always lots of treats, and certain rules — bedtime, how often you are allowed to listen to "Yellow Submarine" or watch Lion King — are relaxed.

But one thing we won't be doing this year in commemoration of the Nativity of Our Lord is buying our children any hideous, poorly designed, instantly disposable toys. You know what I'm talking about: the undifferentiated mass of junk in individual cardboard and plastic boxes you see at any big-box retailer or, more likely, on Amazon. Go to any second-hand store, and you will see where these things end up: pink and yellow plastic heaped up to the ceiling — an impromptu monument to our greed and tastelessness. Also to waste. These are not beloved objects that kids will cherish for years and save for the enjoyment of their own children and grandchildren; they are pre-trash, items of no value or consequence that will be tossed as soon as their tiny owners grow bored of them — or, more likely, as soon as parents decide that they are taking up too much space. Goodness knows how much of this stuff is eventually in landfills or in piles in the middle of the ocean choking fish and poisoning the water.

These toys are also, most of them anyway, condescending to girls. My daughters are not idiots. The older of the two has many favorite colors, and none of them is that especially hideous purple found nowhere in creation except girls' toys which I call "vomit magenta." Toys for boys come in every shape and color imaginable, but marketing hacks have decided that their sisters can only feel comfortable in a world full of bubbly-round plastic dyed with synthetic pigments. Not in our house!

It was not always this way. At my maternal grandparents' house there are toys — houses, cars, figurines, a fake rotary phone, a little turntable that plays indestructible toddler-sized records, wooden letter blocks — that have been enjoyed by three generations of my family. They were purchased by my grandparents for my mother and uncle in the 1970s. Two decades apart my mother and I drove the same mustached figure in the same red truck to the same toy grain elevator and cranked the same lever to bring the tiny orange sack down to the loading area. Now my children spread these things out on the living room floor at least once a week. In the basement there is something even older, a wooden barn carved by my great-great grandfather, an object of astonishing beauty and an artifact of a happier, if seemingly less prosperous, age.

There are also moral reasons for rethinking what you purchase for the tots on your list this year. A report in The Guardian recently showed us what life is like for the workers in China who produce some of these items. For putting together one Disney Little Mermaid "Princess Sing & Sparkle" doll that will be sold at a price of around $45, an employee makes slightly more than a penny. Even by Chinese standards the factories making Disney and Fisher Price merchandise are hellish. (Remember that the next time the House of Mouse tries to shore up its woke credentials by announcing a new line of LGBTQ-themed merchandise.) If you are sick for more than three days, you are fired. Overtime is essentially mandatory and shifts often run to illegal lengths. The largely female workforce is almost perpetually exhausted. So much for all the moronic legends about Santa's elves ...

Before you accuse me of being a grinch, consider why we bother buying things in the first place. If gift-giving is an empty commercial obligation, it's not really motivated by generosity. Think of how much more a child would appreciate half an hour of your time playing hide-and-seek or talking about her favorite animals or pretending that her hands are made out of snakes. The truth about most toys is that they matter far more to those who are handing them out than they do to the little people for whom they are being given. All children deserve presents, but a few well-chosen ones go a long way: I have watched two toddlers entertain themselves for hours sitting on the floor with the same shared Snoopy doll. Goodness knows there are already too many other things competing for their attention. They don't need neon pink tea sets or 57 different cartoon puppy race-car drivers.

 

[ickythump1225]

This is the first year we've had an advent wreath and we're trying to really incorporate advent into our daily lives.

 

[greyhammer90]

The Week's Matthew Walther just published an article titled "Why my kids aren't getting toys for Christmas":

I know you like this guy but he reads like the most pretentious douche on any given subject. In every article he has the temperament of the condescending vegan who comes to a barbeque.

 

[ACamp1900]

I know you like this guy but he reads like the most pretentious douche on any given subject. In every article he has the temperament of the condescending vegan who comes to a barbeque.

 

[Irish YJ]

 

[greyhammer90]

You guys need to talk about food where it belongs. On the uniform thread.

 

[ACamp1900]

I actually watched Fellowship last night for the first time in years... so well made, well acted and such, and it still just does not really grab me in any way beyond that story wise.....

 

[zelezo vlk]

I'm with Walther here. Buying cheap crap that will inevitably be thrown away does not in any way celebrate the Incarnation. "The Spirit of Christmas" is not some mushy warm feeling to which we must succumb once per year, but that is what much of America thinks of it. They give no thought to kneeling in wonder at the Love which led the Word to take upon flesh.

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[greyhammer90]

I'm with Walther here. Buying cheap crap that will inevitably be thrown away does not in any way celebrate the Incarnation. "The Spirit of Christmas" is not some mushy warm feeling to which we must succumb once per year, but that is what much of America thinks of it. They give no thought to kneeling in wonder at the Love which led the Word to take upon flesh.

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My point is that you just said the same thing as his article in 3 sentences and didn't come off as a masturbatory click baiter. "Hey we buy too much disposable crap and christmas is too commercialized" is neither unique, deep, or controversial but his writing style is as punchable as David Shaw's face.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

My point is that you just said the same thing as his article in 3 sentences and didn't come off as a masturbatory click baiter. "Hey we buy too much disposable crap and christmas is too commercialized" is neither unique, deep, or controversial but his writing style is as punchable as David Shaw's face.

He's a polemicist. If you agree with his outlook, he's very entertaining to read. If not, I'm sure he's obnoxious.

I agree that his point isn't particularly novel, but I don't see many of these articles getting written. And his angle about the atrocious conditions most of these toys are manufactured under isn't given nearly enough publicity.

 

[ickythump1225]

Whole thing is worth a read

Last February the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its convention in Washington, D.C. This annual gathering is a kind of right-wing Davos where insiders and wannabes come to see what’s new. The opening speaker, not so new, was Vice President Mike Pence. The next speaker, very new, was a stylish Frenchwoman still in her twenties named Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

Marion, as she is widely called in France, is a granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party, and a niece of Marine Le Pen, its current president. The French first encountered Marion as a child, beaming in her grandfather’s arms in his campaign posters (see illustration on page 46), and she has never disappeared from the public scene. In 2012, at the age of twenty-two, she entered Parliament as the youngest deputy since the French Revolution. But she decided not to run for reelection in 2017, on the pretext that she wanted to spend more time with her family. Instead she’s been making big plans.1

Her performance at CPAC was unusual, and one wonders what the early morning audience made of her. Unlike her hotheaded grandfather and aunt, Marion is always calm and collected, sounds sincere, and is intellectually inclined. In a slight, charming French accent she began by contrasting the independence of the United States with France’s “subjection” to the EU, as a member of which, she claimed, it is unable to set its own economic and foreign policy or to defend its borders against illegal immigration and the presence of an Islamic “counter-society” on its territory.

But then she set out in a surprising direction. Before a Republican audience of private property absolutists and gun rights fanatics she attacked the principle of individualism, proclaiming that the “reign of egoism” was at the bottom of all our social ills. As an example she pointed to a global economy that turns foreign workers into slaves and throws domestic workers out of jobs. She then closed by extolling the virtues of tradition, invoking a maxim often attributed to Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the cult of ashes, it is the transmission of fire.” Needless to say, this was the only reference by a CPAC speaker to a nineteenth-century German composer.

Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts. Ideas are being developed, and transnational networks for disseminating them are being established. Journalists have treated as a mere vanity project Steve Bannon’s efforts to bring European populist parties and thinkers together under the umbrella of what he calls The Movement. But his instincts, as in American politics, are in tune with the times. (Indeed, one month after Marion’s appearance at CPAC, Bannon addressed the annual convention of the National Front.) In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the European Union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to govern. Now is the time to start paying attention to the ideas of what seems to be an evolving right-wing Popular Front. France is a good place to start.

The French left, attached to republican secularism, has never had much feel for Catholic life and is often caught unawares when a line has been crossed. In early 1984 the government of François Mitterrand proposed a law that would have brought Catholic schools under greater government control and pressured their teachers to become public employees. That June nearly a million Catholics marched in Paris in protest, and many more throughout the country. Mitterrand’s prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, was forced to resign, and the proposal was withdrawn. It was an important moment for lay Catholics, who discovered that despite the official secularism of the French state they remained a cultural force, and sometimes could be a political one.

In 1999 the government of Gaullist president Jacques Chirac passed legislation creating a new legal status, dubbed a pacte civil de solidarité (civil solidarity pact, or PACS), for long-term couples who required legal protections regarding inheritance and other end-of-life issues but did not want to get married. Coming not long after the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the PACS was largely conceived to help the gay community but soon became popular with heterosexual couples wanting a more easily dissolved bond. The number of straight couples pacsés annually is now approaching the number of those getting married, and the arrangement for gays and lesbians is uncontroversial.

To build on that success, during his campaign for the French presidency in 2012 the Socialist candidate François Hollande promised to legalize same-sex marriage and open up adoption and additional rights to gay and lesbian couples. Mariage Pour Tous—marriage for everyone—was the slogan. Once in office Hollande moved to fulfill his campaign promise, but he repeated Mitterrand’s mistake by failing to anticipate the strong right-wing reaction against it. Shortly after his inauguration, a network of laypeople drawn heavily from Catholic Pentecostal prayer groups began to form. They called themselves La Manif Pour Tous—the Demonstration for Everyone.


By January 2013, just before Parliament approved gay marriage, La Manif was able to draw over 300,000 people to a demonstration opposing it in Paris, stunning the government and the media. What especially surprised them was the ludic atmosphere of the protest, which was more like a gay pride parade than a pilgrimage to Compostela. There were lots of young people marching, but rather than rainbow banners they waved pink and blue ones representing boys and girls. Slogans on the placards had a May ’68 lilt: François resist, prove you exist. To top it off, the spokeswoman for La Manif was a flamboyantly dressed comedienne and performance artist who goes by the name Frigide Barjot and played in a band called the Dead Pompidous.

Where did these people come from? After all, France is no longer a Catholic country, or so we’re told. While it’s true that fewer and fewer French people baptize their children and attend mass, nearly two thirds still identify as Catholic, and roughly 40 percent of those declare themselves to be “practicing,” whatever that means. More importantly, as a Pew study found last year, those French who do identify as Catholic—especially those who attend Mass regularly—are significantly more right-wing in their political views than those who do not.

This is consistent with trends in Eastern Europe, where Pew found that Orthodox Christian self-identification has actually been rising, along with nationalism, confounding post-1989 expectations. That may indicate that the relationship between religious and political identification is reversing in Europe—that it is no longer religious affiliation that helps determine one’s political views, but one’s political views that help determine whether one self-identifies as religious. The prerequisites for a European Christian nationalist movement may be falling into place, as Hungarian president Viktor Orbán has long been predicting.

Whatever motivated the many thousands of Catholics who participated in the original Manif and similar demonstrations across France, it soon bore political fruit.2 Some of its leaders quickly formed a political action group called Sens Commun, which, though small, nearly helped to elect a president in 2017. Its preferred candidate was François Fillon, a straitlaced former prime minister and practicing conservative Catholic who vocally supported La Manif and had close ties to Sens Commun. He was explicit about his religious views during the primary of his party, the Republicans, at the end of 2016—opposing marriage, adoption, and surrogacy for gay and lesbian couples—and surprised everyone by winning. Fillon came out of the primary with very high poll numbers, and given the Socialists’ deep unpopularity after the Hollande years and the inability of the National Front to gain the support of more than one third of the French electorate, many considered him the front-runner.

But just as Fillon began his national campaign, Le Canard enchaîné, a newspaper that mixes satire with investigative journalism, revealed that his wife had received over half a million euros for no-show jobs over the years, and that he had accepted a number of favors from businessmen, including—Paul Manafort–style—suits costing tens of thousands of euros. For a man running on the slogan “the courage of truth,” it was a disaster. He was indicted, staff abandoned him, but he refused to drop out of the race. This provided an opening for the eventual victor, the centrist Emmanuel Macron. But we should bear in mind that despite the scandal, Fillon won 20 percent of the first-round votes, compared to Macron’s 24 and Marine Le Pen’s 21 percent. Had he not imploded, there is a good chance that he would be president and we would be telling ourselves very different stories about what’s really going on in Europe today.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/20/two-roads-for-the-new-french-right/

 

[zelezo vlk]

Oh yeah, I read that the other day. Almost makes me want to learn French, too bad it's an incomprehensible warble language.

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[Whiskeyjack]

Whole thing is worth a read

Agreed. I posted it in the Politics thread yesterday. My favorite parts:

Whether anything politically significant will come out of this activity is difficult to know, given that intellectual fashions in France change about as quickly as the plat du jour. This past summer I spent some time reading and meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left–right divide. More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders.

The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras. They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, and AGFAM (Apple-Google-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).

That mélange may sound odd to our ears, but it is far more consistent than the positions of contemporary American conservatives. Continental conservatism going back to the nineteenth century has always rested on an organic conception of society. It sees Europe as a single Christian civilization composed of different nations with distinct languages and customs. These nations are composed of families, which are organisms, too, with differing but complementary roles and duties for mothers, fathers, and children. On this view, the fundamental task of society is to transmit knowledge, morality, and culture to future generations, perpetuating the life of the civilizational organism. It is not to serve an agglomeration of autonomous individuals bearing rights.

Most of these young French conservatives’ arguments presume this organic conception. Why do they consider the European Union a danger? Because it rejects the cultural-religious foundation of Europe and tries to found it instead on the economic self-interest of individuals. To make matters worse, they suggest, the EU has encouraged the immigration of people from a different and incompatible civilization (Islam), stretching old bonds even further. Then, rather than fostering self-determination and a healthy diversity among nations, the EU has been conducting a slow coup d’état in the name of economic efficiency and homogenization, centralizing power in Brussels. Finally, in putting pressure on countries to conform to onerous fiscal policies that only benefit the rich, the EU has prevented them from taking care of their most vulnerable citizens and maintaining social solidarity. Now, in their view, the family must fend for itself in an economic world without borders, in a culture that willfully ignores its needs. Unlike their American counterparts, who celebrate the economic forces that most put “the family” they idealize under strain, the young French conservatives apply their organic vision to the economy as well, arguing that it must be subordinate to social needs.

Most surprising for an American reader is the strong environmentalism of these young writers, who entertain the notion that conservatives should, well, conserve. Their best journal is the colorful, well-designed quarterly Limite, which is subtitled “a review of integral ecology” and publishes criticism of neoliberal economics and environmental degradation as severe as anything one finds on the American left. (No climate denial here.) Some writers are no-growth advocates; others are reading Proudhon and pushing for a decentralized economy of local collectives. Others still have left the city and write about their experiences running organic farms, while denouncing agribusiness, genetically modified crops, and suburbanization along the way. They all seem inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ (2015), a comprehensive statement of Catholic social teaching on the environment and economic justice.

Coming out of La Manif, these young conservatives’ views on family and sexuality are traditionalist Catholic. But the arguments they make for them are strictly secular. In making the case for a return to older norms they point to real problems: dropping rates of family formation, delayed child-bearing, rising rates of single parenthood, adolescents steeped in porn and confused about their sexuality, and harried parents and children eating separately while checking their phones. All this, they argue, is the result of our radical individualism, which blinds us to the social need for strong, stable families. What these young Catholics can’t see is that gay couples wanting to wed and have children are looking to create such families and to transmit their values to another generation. There is no more conservative instinct.

Whatever one thinks of these conservative ideas about society and the economy, they form a coherent worldview. The same cannot really be said about the establishment left and right in Europe today. The left opposes the uncontrolled fluidity of the global economy and wants to rein it in on behalf of workers, while it celebrates immigration, multiculturalism, and fluid gender roles that large numbers of workers reject. The establishment right reverses those positions, denouncing the free circulation of people for destabilizing society, while promoting the free circulation of capital, which does exactly that. These French conservatives criticize uncontrolled fluidity in both its neoliberal and cosmopolitan forms.

 

[ickythump1225]

Sorry I don't always follow the political threads or read every post in them lol.

 

[greyhammer90]

He's a polemicist. If you agree with his outlook, he's very entertaining to read. If not, I'm sure he's obnoxious.

I agree that his point isn't particularly novel, but I don't see many of these articles getting written. And his angle about the atrocious conditions most of these toys are manufactured under isn't given nearly enough publicity.

I'd say I agree with him about 65% of the time, but polemicist is the perfect way to describe him since he reminds me of Shapiro.

 

[zelezo vlk]

I'd say I agree with him about 65% of the time, but polemicist is the perfect way to describe him since he reminds me of Shapiro.

You would absolutely hate his response to your post.

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[greyhammer90]

You would absolutely hate his response to your post.

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Alright? I don't mean in ideology to be clear, I mean in tone and snark. Something about it rubs me wrong.