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GK Chesterton and MAGA
Chesterton personifies the paradoxes he loves to pursue in his writing. A member of the Fabian (socialist) party, he is remembered primarily as a bulwark of conservatism. Deeply immersed in early 20th century high British society and culture, he was Catholic rather than Church of England. Writing prose and poetry on the transcendence of family, he never had children.
A populist, he writes a warning to MAGA.
To be sure, Chesterton does not shy away from condemning progressive society. In one memorable anecdote he tells a relativist that in a functioning democracy, the relativist would be burned on a pyre. In his pithy essay "The Return of the Barbarian" (1934), Chesterton states "I do not mean that any of that sort of liberty or laxity or liberal-mindedness has ever had anything to do with civilization." Yet Chesterton writes the essay not as a warning against Liberalism, but to identify the rising Nationalist Socialism of Germany as the true enemy of civilization. Even though the civilization may be decadent, flabby, and decayed, civilization must still fight for civilization. For barbarism is an uncontrollable beast. It contains no introspection, no self-corrective. Chesterton ends the essay in his typical incisive style:
"There are many marks by which anybody of historical imagination can recognize the recurrence: the monstrous and monotonous omnipresence of one symbol, and that a symbol of which nobody knows the meaning; the relish of the tyrant for exaggerating even his own tyranny, and barking so loud that nobody can even suspect that his bark is worse than his bite; the impatient indifference to all the former friends of Germany, among those who are yet making Germany the only test—all these things have a savor of savage and hasty simplification, which may, in many individuals, correspond to an honest indignation or even idealism, but which, when taken altogether, give an uncomfortable impression of wild men who have merely grown weary of the complexity that we call civilization." [Emphasis added].
As a confirmed MAGAt myself, I feel a distinct discomfort reading this warning. There is a cold nihilism and gleeful cruelty in the MAGA intelligentsia. The rank-and-file MAGA populists cower from modern complexity, preferring the comfort of totalizing and simple narratives. If MAGA feels less barbaric than the Brown Shirts it may only be because our civilization doesn’t have the will or vitality to produce real barbarians.
Yet what is else is the solution when faced with Weimar problems? Chesterton lived in the relatively prudish Britain, and did not need to directly confront the debauchery of Weimar Germany. Easy for him to work within his civilization to promote his conceptualization of the common good. What would he have suggested when faced with the ubiquitous celebration of buggery or an importation of an alternative "civilization"?
But, of course, Chesterton (or rather, custom and common sense as channeled by Chesterton) does have the solution. In his essay "On the Instability of the State" he counters the prevailing notions of the Total State by satirizing the ephemerality of modern nations. In contrast, true societal stability is only found in the Family, the bedrock on which all civilization stands. And while the modern assault on the Family threatens to break civilization as assuredly as any barbarian uprising, it is still an institution that takes only two willing companions and the providence of God to initiate. And it is on this rock that the next great civilization will be built. "In the break-up of the modern world, the Family will stand out stark and strong as it did before the beginning of history."
I wish Chesterton and Tolkein and others could actually see the world of today... What would they then think about the plausibility of their ideas?
Yes, they preferred high-IQ trad-Cath noblesse oblige high society to capitalist mass democracy (Tolkien labelled it Americanism), Nazism, Bolshevism...
But it turns out that high-IQ trad-Cath noblesse oblige high society was not on the menu. It is not served by the chef. It is dead in a ditch.
19th century romantic ideals are not actionable in the industrial age, let alone the internet age. They didn't get defeated on the battlefield, it's not a case of 'damn, we were so close to just loving our families and being good wholesome people in a fine society of freedom and justice and all good things but then the Red Chinese invaded and forcibly made us use Tinder, forcibly taught us about the Kardashians, forcibly aborted more children since 1970 than all those who died in the history of warfare, forcibly made The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'. That didn't happen, these old ideals could not manage with modernity.
The operating structure of our society and technology led us here. Wind back to the 19th century and we just get here again, faster if anything. The old system was clearly unstable, that's why it isn't around anymore.
Also I think it's no good to criticize others for 'cowering from modern complexity' while hoping that modernity goes away:
The modern world is going to break up? How? Peak oil? The fertility crash? Dysgenics? Climate change?
The better option is working in modernity, enjoying the good parts while avoiding the bad parts. Yes, I don't want to work in subsistence agriculture for my whole life. No, I don't want to work a pretend job shuffling paper around either.
Modern problems require modern solutions. We have these huge government apparatuses, they need to be made efficient and aligned to national goals. We have these huge industrial-technological companies, they need to be aligned better to public benefit rather than solely private self-interest (they need to do more and better worker training and long term investment for a start, don't take me for a socialist). We have the welfare state, it needs to avoid perverse incentives or dysgenically taxing the productive to shelter and multiply the unproductive. We have the internet, we need to make better use of it so people aren't watching short form video all day. We have AI, it needs to be aligned better, not least it needs to stop weighting white lives as a small fraction of black lives.
We will shortly have mass cloning, genetic manipulation, human-like robots. What then for the Family? Modernity has already pretty clearly wrecked the Family, what if it goes straight for the finishing blow?
Furthermore, I don't think that MAGA are 'nihilists'. They clearly believe that something matters! They might be uncouth or unsophisticated, even harsh or mean. But how else are you supposed to manage these tricky issues, mass migration being one they're most interested in? This is the age of fast travel. That isn't just going to go away. These issues need to be wrestled with rather than merely bemoaned like Chesterton does so eloquently. He seems to be of the 'if everyone would just...' school of thought. Nobody has ever 'just' and they're certainly not going to start now.
PS, I was just looking through various essays and it's funny how decidedly anti-Nazi conservative intellectuals of the 1930s basically sounded like Nazis in the early 1920s. Here he makes snide remarks about the Jewish element influencing the British empire and Jews running the Bolsheviks: https://americanliterature.com/author/gk-chesterton/essay/wells-and-the-world-state
Churchill even complains about Judeo-Bolshevism in his article 'Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People'
I don't think that Chesterton would agree with your thesis that "trad-cath society" was "on the menu" in the 1900 in a way that it is not in the 2026. For example, he wrote in What is Wrong with the World:
That doesn't sound like the kind of person who thinks that his Christian ideal is actually "on the menu" in his own time period. Therefore, I suspect that his proposed solution would be basically the same:
My thesis is that 'trad-cath society' was not on the menu in 1900 and still less so in 2026. Whereas Chesterton seems to be saying 'what we need is more Christianity, more Catholicism' when the clear trend is in the other direction, when Catholicism and Christianity is in an absolutely pathetic state in the Western world. If the brakes have failed, jamming your foot on the brakes harder and harder isn't going to do anything.
I mean just look at the world as it is today, Christian doctrine exists in a wholly different reality to what's actually happening in the world. The amount of pornography, sloth, pride, greed, sodomy, promiscuity, children outside of wedlock, profanity, bestiality, saturday trading, materialism, abortion (on a mega-scale and with state sanction/subsidy in many places) is just staggering. How much usury is there? We have oceans of usury, usury so advanced and sophisticated that they wouldn't even have language to describe how usurious it is.
Catholicism has clearly failed if its doctrine is totally ignored and routinely flouted except where Progressives find utility in wearing it like a skinsuit.
What Chesterton needed to do is examine why his proposed solution, despite over 1000 years of Christianity in many places, despite immense piety and crusading and pretty cathedrals, did not actually succeed in getting and maintaining the society he wants. Time moved against it. It's no longer practical to look thousands of years back into the past for guidance.
Just today we have yet more revelations of 'trad-cath' egirls behaving badly, Sarah Stock and Elijah Schaffer. The whole thing is a performative joke, it cannot be implemented in our modern society at scale.
Same with Tolkein's anti-industrialism. Sounds good, doesn't work. Not a real option.
Tolkien, Chesterton and presumably @PyotrVerkhovensky actually think Christianity is true. You seem to be talking about Christianity as if it is a means to an end. An end which you coincidentally don't state anywhere, leaving you open to accusations of nihilism. The people you are trying to convince that Christianity doesn't work to achieve their goals, have Christianity itself as their goal. I don't think your disagreement is about whether Christianity is currently 'working' or not, but about what end we should be working towards. Chesterton et al. are bemoaning the fact that what they believe to be good is getting further and further out of reach and your reply appears to be "ah, but that good is getting further and further away, therefore it can't be good!". I believe "pornography is morally evil" to be an objectively true statement, just like I believe "1+1=2" is an objectively true statement. Whether modern westerners watch porn and whether they are good at arithmetic or not, does not change anything about those beliefs.
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