Even as the glitter of socialism was enticing innocents, the dead hand of history was making its weight felt to lamentable effect—Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism
It's Now or Never
It has by now become starkly obvious that the leftist attack on the Judeo-Christian West proceeds on three main fronts: Christianity, the family, and borders. The attack is gathering momentum and mounting success, as resistance, at least on the official and communications levels, is distressingly scattered. A brief overview of the logistics of the campaign may be in order, in the interests of simple clarity.
1. The attack on Christianity: The distinction between Church and State has been erased to the disadvantage of the Church, in particular the Christian Confession. Such a legitimate distinction is a long-standing feature of democratic nations. Its provenance dates back at least to the time of Saint Augustine’s The City of God (Book XIX, Chapter 17), in which Augustine posited that the “earthly city” was obligated to provide for the “heavenly city,” that is, to speak devotional truth unhindered by emperor or magistrate. The phrase in its current form derives from Thomas Jefferson, who in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association spoke of the “wall of separation between church and state.” (The origin of the phrase predates Jefferson. As John Barry points out in Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, referred to the “wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world.) In the U.S., the Christian faith is demonstrably under sustained assault. In my own country, they burn churches, don’t they—71 at last count. The state has violated the wall of separation.
In the U.S., freedom of religious observance is rooted in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the American Constitution. In Canada, the concept is embedded in the Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms as Section 2(a), which guarantees “freedom of conscience and religion.” But in the U.S., the First Amendment is regularly breached; in Canada, the Charter has been rendered null and void. A plurality of religions is represented in the U.S. and Canada, but Christianity is the originary ground of both, now seismically disturbed by secular and especially socialist intolerance.
2. The attack on the family: The problem for the Left is that the family is a traditional dynamic that transcends the authority of the political state, not only because it encourages a prior allegiance, but because it allows for inheritance and property rights. This is anathema to the Marxist vision of the centralized, property-owning and all-encompassing state. The Marxist offensive against the monogamous union of a man and a woman is seen as the means by which to destabilize the family, and thus to destroy the democratic state root and branch.
In the Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology, Karl Marx defined marriage as legalized prostitution and a form of female slavery. He was undoubtedly the most instrumental figure in the campaign to demolish the scaffolding of customary society, including marriage, the family and the concept of fatherhood. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Marx’s collaborator and patron Friedrich Engels, has made the Left’s ultraist agenda absolutely clear, referring to “the pairing family and inoculated monogamy” as a community of “leaden ennui” and a modus operandi for the class-and-male-oriented transmission of property. Woke ideology, feminist dogma and the cultural focus on sexual pathologies have taken up the Marxist cudgel to eradicate the traditional family and the legitimacy of parenthood in order to remake the Judeo-Christian West in their own infernal image.
3. The attack on borders: America has its southern border and Canada has its Roxham Road. The U.S. is suffering far more than this country, but when one considers a proportionate census, we are doing our best to catch up. The agreement between Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to stanch the northern flow of migrants and refugees is, realistically speaking, a mere paper concession. The real and ongoing intention is clearly to dilute a cohesive citizenry and render the nation a stranger to itself, easy pickings for subversion.
The Judeo-Christian inheritance sustaining Western civilization is the object of the true—that is, the major and comprehensive—“cancellation,” of which all the other bans and cancellings that clutter the public and information realms are merely individual instances, bits leading to the subsidence of the whole. Once the nation is dispossessed of faith, family and coherent borders, the devastation will be complete.
PJM editor Paula Bolyard puts it bluntly: “These people believe it is their moral duty to change society—to rid it of all social norms and our antiquated and bigoted values…We’re no longer a nation with a shared Judeo-Christian ethic.” She poses the question directly: “Can our culture even be saved at this point?” That is the fundamental issue. As Kim Holmes writes in The Closing of the Liberal Mind, the moral authority of what he calls “Promethean government” is “ubiquitous and compulsory,” becoming thus “the most perfect corrupter of whatever good there is in man.”
If there is a solution to the impending catastrophe, it must be drastic and wholesale. Many will no doubt disagree with me, but this is no time for timidity. It may demand a populist uprising of immense, if not unprecedented, proportions, certainly not seen since the American War of Independence—what Richard Fernandez, citing novelist George Eliot’s term, refers to as “hidden lives” uniting to defend their patrimony. It may entail the secession of those states and provinces where the civilizational imperative remains in force. It may require a determined purge of the neo-communist Left issuing at the federal level by a patriot president or prime minister and an aggressive administration. One way or another, there is no alternative solution.
Failing which, we will be left with nothing much worth defending. Isolated victories here and there in the “culture wars” merely defer the inevitable, a minor consolation. Boycotts and buycotts, parallel economies, occasionally favorable court decisions, sporadic counter-offensives, diplomatic dialogue are all well and good, but they will not stem the swelling tide. They are small or local feel-good triumphs, but ultimately ephemeral.
A significant victory will not be achieved unless we recognize, as even a liberal like Michael Ignatieff in The Lesser Evil admitted, that the defense of the nation demands carnivores, not herbivores, to rally to its cause. Pushback needs to be thoroughgoing. The political landscape as presently constituted must, so to speak, be legislatively razed and salted. The Left must be expunged or reduced to an ineffective rump. It cannot be negotiated or compromised with. A domestic enemy with all the levers and instruments of power in its control is no less lethal than a massive foreign invasion.
This is no time for civility and forbearance. The turmoil is already here and cannot be met with decorum, lamentation or unfounded hope. Speaking historically, we have arrived at a now-or-never moment, and in the present social and political context, never has the upper hand. The people must rise, or imperiled jurisdictions should contemplate the possibility of secession or at least initiate an Article V Convention of States as a preliminary step toward political change, or a legitimate government, should it survive electoral malfeasance, must act with uncompromising conviction. Nothing else will suffice, assuming the will is there. This is it.
