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I like this sentiment and I'm going to use it to comment more broadly on what I see as an aggravating tension between Tradition and Traditionalism. I'm use those two words so I can play off the "all -isms are bad" meme.
Tradition is a set of beliefs, values, and, importantly, ongoing or repeated behaviors that are inherited from the past with the goal to preserve the present and pass on to the future.
Traditionalism is vibe based gesturing at "how it used to be" with the implication that "it" used to be better. There's going to be some kind of attempt at vaguely repeating the behavior of the past - often incomplete - and a lot of rhetoric about the past. There will be close to zero deeply held beliefs and values under the surface. As Rob Henderson might say, it's mostly about signalling. These are the RETVRN people. I mentioned a young woman like this in previous post.
I think these are your "neotraditionalism" people (all -isms are bad!). And I agree with you that these very "neo-trads" would never vote for some of the ideas you have laid out. Why? Because it would be bad for them, personally, as individuals. And thus I trace this back to the rise of hyperindividualism (isms! isms! isms!).
I'm not advocating for actual collectivism the way Mamdani did in his inaugural speech today. I'm advocating for the idea that there was a society before that gave us what we have to day and our job is to sustain it and then pass it on. That's the chain of real capital-T Tradition that did sustain so many different human societies up until about the 20th century. The proto-causes are still up for debate; was it the industrial revolution? global financialization of capitalism? the "trauma" of WW1/2? I can't weigh in with authority here, but I can point to one thing that I think is key:
The Baby Boomers broke that chain of real capital-T Tradition. In both directions. They looked at their parents with their going to church and waiting for matrimony and not smokin the wacky-tobaccy and said "Peace and Love, Man!" before inventing the pill, porn, no-fault divorce, equality, feminism, and affirmative action. Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
Gen-X kind of got caught in the crossfire, but when you could work at a coffee shop in Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and date a quirky mid in the 1990s, it was kind of ... whatever, cool, I guess.
Millienials woke up to the grift and Gen-Z seems to have been born nihilistic. They know the boomers looted the store and then stuck everyone else with the bill. They, rightfully, are enraged by this but only a small fraction has eaten the bitter medicine and realized "ah, shit, we're going to have to fix this ... and it's going to be hard for a while." Instead, 90% + of Mil-Z-enials are somewhere between "Government provided everything, tax the rich" and "Fuck it, Imma get mine. Let's hit some crypto scams, bruh" Both of these are anti-social and, of course, non Traditional. I agree heartily with you that only a hyper minority of mostly religious or strongly philosophically disciplined / metaphysically driven people in these two generations are seriously committing to "we can rebuild, and our kids will benefit."
How this all plays out is that we're going to see a slow motion culling of the population where we can afford it most - young men. We know this because it has already happened. I don't even need to quote the stats anymore. Opioid epidemic, 6 - 8 million prime age males out of the workforce, incels, no friends etc. A great way to sidestep demographic gravity is to led some deadweight drop. That's bleak and I know it. It's also what's happening.
The next necessary ingredient is peeling back the feminist lie of fulfillment in a career alone. This is already starting. When TradWife tiktoks trend for a while and then we get backlask like "is having a boyfriend cringe?" articles, it means the ideas are now circulating and its just a matter of time before some percentage of women decides "fuck a job, I want babies." It doesn't have to be that great a number, it just has to be present outside of the semi-sequestered religious communities (Amish, FLDS, etc.)
The thing that keeps me up at night is how long all of this could take. Returning to my original framing, the people who buy into Traditionalism aren't actually willing to do what needs doing to fix things because it will probably mean accepting a slightly materially less comfortable quality of life for some time and an absolutely lower social quality of life as well (i.e. getting branded as a kind of weirdo). But they will gesture vaguely to things like "encouraging earlier marriage" and "keeping a family together." But will they endorse women not going to college? Will they endorse no-fault divorce? Of course not. And I wonder how long this will draw the pain out, especially when the other side (progressives) are offering sprinting into oblivion. The Traditionalism-ists don't need to really dig deep to retain political and social sway when their opponents are literally recommending self-castration, baby murder, and neo-surfdom.
As I've said before in this thread and as Amadan said below, I don't want to control women (or men) from a State perspective. If a woman wants to get three PhDs and never marry, that's on her - just as it would be on a man. But, right now, we're actively subsidizing those decisions socially, culturally, and even financially whereas were suppressing capital-T tradition socially and culturally. This isn't "boo hoo unfair!" this is drawing out the agony for society.
This tugs at a thread that I wanted to bring up in response to @DoktorGlas and @Botond173's earlier posts on fertility and gender-dynamics but was struggling to find a way to do so without it being immediately dismissed as being uncharitable, or drawing broad generalizations about the outgroup.
I think there is a very real sense in which the post-modern liberal ethos of emancipation, self actualization, and the maximization of one's earthly/material material conditions and status is simply incompatible with forming healthy relationships and families. Having a family means accepting that you are no longer the main character in your own story and that is bridge that a lot of people today are hesitant to cross, a painful truth that many recoil from.
As I mentioned in one of those earlier threads, our first child was not planned, and if you had asked me at the time if I was ready I would have said "no", but in hindsight if my partner and I had waited till we we ready, we may never have had children at all, never mind enough children to justify multiple car seats. Both my partner and I have had friends and family who asked us why we didn't just get an abortion? What they were really asking is "Why would you (a presumably rational and intelligent person) willingly accept an inferior quality of life?". I never really had a good answer to that question, at least not one I could articulate, beyond "I choose to". But I feel like there is the outline of an answer in your last two paragraphs.
The future belongs to those who show up. So if you want to have a future, be one of the people who shows up.
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I'm a little confused by this section. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, a full decade before the first boomers were born. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, when the oldest boomers would have been around 19.
Yes it's true. The theft started with the greatest generation stealing from the youth to pay for their retirement, in their defense at the time there were a lot of old folks finding themselves out on the street. However this was a relatively small burden for the boomers because they were splitting the bill so many ways. The Silent and greatest generation made out like bandits. The real problem is the Boomers are so numerous that millennials are struggling to life several times the relative weight.
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