J.D. Vance: Comprehensively Pro-Life

And: Farm Life Truth Bombs; Bulwark Republicanism; John Gray; Davos & Gender

Rod Dreher Jan 25

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Hello from the Man Cave in Budapest. I shouldn’t be writing today — I have laundry to do, and other things to write — but there are several things I want to share with you, and I don’t want to wait till Monday. Y’all remember that I gave you this weekend extra when the day comes that I can’t write a regular weekday post.

If you missed Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the March For Life Rally, watch it here. What I found most appealing was Vance’s placing of pro-life activism within the context of family formation. That is, he connected the right to life of the unborn to a broader culture of life in which children are welcomed into intact and thriving families. From the transcript of the speech:

Now the task of our movement is to protect innocent life. It's to defend the unborn and it's also to be pro-family and pro-life in the fullest sense of that word possible. Now, across my own lifetime, I can't tell you the number of friends and other acquaintances I've had who, facing a pregnancy or the prospect of one, react not with joy but with concern. They wonder how can they afford it; what will it mean for their education, their career, their relationship or their family?

And I know how many of you in this crowd have devoted immeasurable time and resources to help answer those questions and to lend a hand to young people facing a moment of desperation. But by and large, our society, our country has not yet stepped up in the way you have; and our government certainly has failed in that important responsibility. We failed a generation not only by permitting a culture of abortion on demand but also by neglecting to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to [live] a happy and meaningful life. A culture of radical individualism took root, one where the responsibilities and joys of family life were seen as obstacles to overcome, not as personal fulfillment or personal blessings. Our society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another, is a core part of living in a society to begin with.

So let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.

And it is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are here at the March for Life.

Now, it should be easier to raise a family, easier to find a good job, easier to build a home to raise that family in, easier to save up and purchase a good stroller, a crib for a nursery. We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.

Amen. Hallelujah. And:

Truth Bombs From Farm Life

Now, here’s a great essay from The Free Press by Larissa Phillips, who gave up Brooklyn life back in 2010 and moved with her husband and kids to a farm upstate. She writes about the things she’s learned about reality there. Excerpt:

Living on a farm demystifies the act of sex, bringing it back from a filtered, scripted, and commercialized display to a common earthly fact that is one part of a larger cycle. It also demystifies, well, sex—as in, the distinction between what’s male and what’s female.

As we were settling into rural life, the existence of this binary was becoming a topic of public debate, with actual scientists arguing against it. I was starting to wonder whether the fact that Americans are increasingly cut off from nature had something to do with this shift. Of course, gender ideology has reached rural areas, including ours, but it’s hard for anyone who’s grown up around unneutered animals to make the argument that binary sex doesn’t exist, as Scientific American did last year. Male animals fight constantly over territory and women. Testosterone is a mighty force. Female animals are less aggressive and less territorial—except when their young are threatened. In 2022, when The New York Times published an essay titled “Maternal Instinct is a Myth That Men Created,” I was busy marveling over the animal mothers on my farm, who exhibit the most astonishing commitment to their offspring.

I’ve seen mother hens keep track of more than a dozen chicks—and wait for number 14, who was struggling to catch up, unseen and unheard. (Can chickens count? How did she know she was missing one?) I’ve seen mother goats sniffing the kids that wander up to them, and irritably butting away the ones that aren’t theirs.

“It’s the same with humans,” I told my own children. “Your own baby smells so delicious, it’s intoxicating. Other people’s babies smell like baby powder and apple juice.”

The more time I have spent with animals, the more they remind me of humans. It’s humbling to recognize that we share deep and powerful instincts with other creatures. But it’s awe-inspiring too. Seeing how sex shapes life, just as death does, makes me feel connected to something bigger than myself.

We ought to all start to understand that the entire country has been gaslighted for a long time by liberal elites. Five years from now (if it takes that long), most people will look back in amusement and horror that we ever believed in things like transing children, advocated for it in schools (poisoning the minds of children against their own natural functions), and mandated protecting it in law. Personally, I saw the transing children issue as a bright red line: if a society and a civilization can accept doing that to children as a good, what won’t it accept? I don’t think we will be free from that evil until it is buried in the grave with a necklace of garlic and a stake through its heart.

The acceleration of the Great Awokening in the Biden years has provoked this backlash. Here’s Nellie Bowles in The FP’s “TGIF” news roundup:

Nellie:

Yes: 55 percent of Americans want all illegal immigrants deported. That is millions of people, many of whom have been here for decades, rounded up in an unprecedented population shift. This used to be considered an extremely radical position.

It turns out that Joe Biden’s immigration policy was so unhinged, it made even normie liberals flip. Joe Biden’s open border policy—and the gaslighting his supporters performed to pretend there was no policy shift—drove America en masse, like a migrant surge, to want extremely hardcore border control. Now everyone is a Texas border cop with some dip under their lip and some barbed wire in the truck.

For as long as I’ve been paying attention to the immigration issue — since I moved to Texas in 2003 — majorities of Americans have wanted a more restricted immigration policy. And nothing serious happened to give them that. Republican presidents, Democratic presidents — nothing. Republican Congresses, Democratic Congresses — nothing.

Don’t blame people for being fed freaking up, and supporting harsh action. Meanwhile, over here in Europe, there was another knife attack in Germany yesterday, by a migrant. It’s getting to be a daily thing. If the German people somehow get over their self-hatred and vote AfD, and start deportations, do not be surprised, my fellow Americans. The US media are not giving you a remotely complete picture of what’s happening over here. It’s curating the Narrative.

Along those lines, the absurd Keir Starmer Zombie Leftist government is responding to the conviction of Axel Rudakubana for the ferocious stabbing of three children by, get this, cracking down on knife sales. The killer was an anti-white racist who was found to have an al-Qaeda training manual and ricin in his possession. Britons tried to report him to police, but nothing happened. Naturally, the problem is … knives. Keep calm and carry on, Britons.

Aris Roussinos says the rising anger and frustration in the UK echoes the rise of Irish nationalism in the early 20th century. Excerpt:

This restive mood was not so different from the mounting perception on the British Right that the Westminster state in its current form is undergoing an existential, and perhaps terminal crisis of legitimacy. Repeatedly failing, through its own ideological obsessions, at the basic function of any state — that is, ensuring the security of the people — Westminster is eroding its popular legitimacy at a frenetic pace. Indeed, given the ongoing and apparently limitless revelations of the British state’s seeming collusion with rape gangs in northern England, and demographic vandalism against the British people through its commitment to mass migration, the Irish nationalist John Mitchel’s 1845 assertion that “The people are beginning to fear that the Irish Government is merely a machinery for their destruction”, would strike a chord in provincial England today. So would Mitchel’s Trumpian observation that the British administration was “altogether powerless; that it is unable, or unwilling to take a single step…for the encouragement of manufactures, or providing fields of industry, and is only active in promoting, by high premiums and bounties, the horrible manufacture of crimes!” The relationship with Irish nationalism is typological, as through its late-stage dysfunction the Westminster state is birthing a classical nationalism of its own against its own rule, dragging the country towards political modernity. In Nairn-Anderson terms, we can say Britain is finally approaching its second bourgeois revolution.

I was talking to a London businessman on the journey back yesterday, and asked him about why the British people are so passive in the face of all this. He said, “We aren’t French. The French take to the streets when they are angry. We just seem to have this innate sense that there’s nothing to be done about it but endure.”

Bulwark Republicanism

The Bulwark is the online publication founded by GOP apostate Bill Kristol. Look:

This Trump second term is not even a week old, but it is already revealing that the pre-Trump GOP was in many respects controlled opposition to the Democrats. They lacked the courage of their lack of conviction. Now things are better.

Twitter yesterday sent me on a search for this 2020 National Review essay by Tanner Greer, in which he argued that the Reformist Conservatism project is dead. It’s well worth reading, to understand the current moment. In this passage, Greer dismissed (correctly) Catholic integralism, but explains why some people care about it:

Through the wonkish lens that Levin and Ponnuru wished more conservatives would adopt, Catholic integralism is pure fancy, a flight through fairyland. Catholic traditionalists are a minority of a minority: They represent only a tiny sliver of American Catholics (who are in turn only a fraction of the American populace writ large). Their vision of the common good cannot be reconciled even with the hopes and desires of Protestant conservatives. There is no constituency for their project, no possible way to marry it to American tradition or current American political practice. American society simply will never be remade along the lines of 19th-century Catholic theology. This is an eschatological fantasy masquerading as a political program — or in Levin and Ponnuru’s politer, more measured terms: “policy thinking short on discipline and mooring.”

But why, then, it is having a moment with the young thinkers of the Right?

Because government policy is not really what they care about. The young conservative is attracted to integralism not because they think its vision of the good is attainable, but because the integralists unapologetically advance a vision of the good. The integralists can tell them why the doctrines of the Great Awokening are malevolent falsehoods. The integralists provide a reason to stand strong against the social pressures of the woke. The integralists know what kind of man men should strive to be, what kind of woman women deserve to be, what purpose their life should be devoted to, and what rules and emotions should govern the relations of one human with another. They do not just endorse a stronger civic society — they have a gloriously specific vision of what worthy civic society actually looks like. They have a vision of human flourishing all their own, equal to and as compelling as the ethics and aesthetics fostered on them by the leftist over-culture.

This is true for all of the various poles of thought that those repelled by the Great Awokening have turned to. Be it the evo-pysch-infused “classical liberalism” of Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web, the meme-based machismo of the Internet alt-right, Thiel-inspired techno-futurism, or the integralist’s Benedict Optioning cousins, these movements all share a key feature. They are oriented toward resisting not leftist politics but leftist culture. The story of next-generation conservatism, in other words, will be the story of a counterculture. Debates over what shape that counterculture should take cannot be resolved by a more “disciplined” policy environment.

Little wonder then that the reformocon vision of the future struggled to take hold! Reformocons argued for the centrality of community without endorsing any concrete vision of communal life. They described the need to build new institutions without committing themselves to any specific institutions. They authored wonkish proposals to strengthen family formation but painted no picture of families worth forming. The visions of the reformocons were colorless and empty. This was by design: Like a coloring book, every community and family could fill out the pre-printed designs with whatever color palette they treasured most. That worked when conservatives had an organic set of treasured traditions, values, and relationships to fill the blanks in with. Now they do not, and the reformocon platform is found wanting.

They are oriented toward resisting not leftist politics but leftist culture. The story of next-generation conservatism, in other words, will be the story of a counterculture.

True. If we don’t resist leftist culture, and do so primarily by offering a realistic positive alternative, then resisting leftist politics will do us no good.

John Gray On Andrew Sullivan’s Podcast

The British philosopher John Gray is always worth reading and listening to. I’m not a big podcast aficionado, but this interview Andrew Sullivan did with him is ace. At one point, Gray and Sullivan talk about the global population crisis. Sully says yes, the cost of forming families and raising children must have something to do with it, but it cannot be the only explanation. After all (he didn’t say, but might have), many generations in the past have been much poorer than people today, with much dimmer life prospects, and facing much more peril from violence and disease — yet people formed families.

After pointing out that this is not just a phenomenon in the West, but a global one, Gray responded:

I think the deep thing that’s happening is the rise of a very radical form of individualism everywhere in the world. … It means making meaning out of your own life in the way that you choose to do. So if you don’t see procreating the next generation out of that, you won’t do it.

He went on to say that people want pleasant living, “the enjoyable, congenial life” more than anything else. Because “children cramp that, people are less and less willing to take on that commitment.”

Gray added that “the revalorization of sexuality” is another part of it. People today, he said, have made a semi-religion out of sex and sexuality. Sullivan made a remarkable observation: that because of the Pill and reproductive technology, “In some ways, straight people become like gay people … and your attitude towards sex changes a bit, because it becomes purely recreational….” This is exactly what some Catholic critics of contraception have said for decades: that the Pill turns straight people into functional homosexuals, in terms of their attitude towards sex. If pregnancy is not a risk factor, and societal stigma has disappeared, then aside from personal moral qualms, what is to restrict you from sleeping with as many people as you wish?

The men moved into talking about gender ideology, and the crackpot idea that maleness and femaleness is chosen. Gray says that contemporary liberals want to deny that sex is a biological given. Gray, on the liberal mindset: “If there’s anything in a human being’s life that’s unchosen, then that’s bad.”

Gotta say that I don’t think this is something that is limited to liberals alone. This is the modern mindset. The transhumanist techno-utopians who are in ascendancy now in part because they have captured Trump believe this. Beware of repackaging this idea in a right-wing form.

Finally, Sullivan talks about how Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity are drawing converts. He says he has a “Houellebecqian” fear that “The religions that will endure are those that are the least compromising.” Well, yes, I think he’s right about that. About Orthodoxy, though, it is not what people may think from the outside. What makes it “uncompromising” is that it is deeply pre-modern. It has not tried to make peace with the modern world, as Catholicism has, especially with the Second Vatican Council. A figure like Pope Francis is unthinkable in Orthodoxy (and if he did arise, thank God the ecclesial structure of Orthodoxy would limit his influence; we have no figure like the pope).

But Orthodoxy is not primarily a religion of the Law, in that religious leaders define doctrine, hand it down, and expect to be obeyed. It is far more subtle than that. Orthodoxy is less a set of propositions and rules to follow, and more a way of life that gets internalized, and that you live out because it is less the Law and more the Tao.

This is really difficult to explain to people on the outside. As I’ve written here before, when I first entered the Orthodox church, I asked a priest for a book that tells me what Orthodoxy teaches, in full, so that I could study it. He replied that those books exist, but that’s not the way to become Orthodox. You become Orthodox over time, by living it out, and absorbing it, allowing it to change you. I didn’t understand. Almost two decades later, I do. Once you take on the Orthodox mindset (phronema), it all makes sense, naturally.

Iain McGilchrist, who is not Orthodox, once told me that of all the forms of Christianity extant, Orthodoxy is the one that most conforms to what he believes is the proper balance between left-brain and right-brain. As an Orthodox Christian reader of McGilchrist’s, I entirely agree. This is why I hope that Catholic and Protestant readers of Living In Wonder will see in the Orthodox things I write about in the book some practical help for rejuvenating their own spiritual life.

Big Business & Gender Ideology

Billboard Chris, the indefatigable anti-transing children campaigner, went to Davos this week. He even made into onto a discussion at a pro-trans panel. Click here to watch:

Note that one of the panelists said she has been talking to CEOs there, and they all promise that they are not going to roll back DEI, despite the criticism. I believe she’s telling the truth. Whether those CEOs were just telling her that to calm her down, or whether they really believe it — only time will tell. I would bet that most of them really believe it, because DEI is held to with religious fervor by that elite class. As I’ve written here before, it is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)

That’s it from the Man Cave today. You kids have fun this weekend. Don’t forget this iconic billboard message from our friends in north Alabama:

It was like this incredible ramping up of emotion and drama and change.”

(It was then that Andreessen took a step back and considered.)

“I don’t understand what’s happening on the left and I don’t understand these purges.”

-Honestly podcast - Bari Weiss and Marc Andreessen

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