Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Decline of the West

  • Bergoglio the Benighted Aims to End Latin Mass Permission

    There was and is something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble…

  • Trump

    Donald Trump cannot restore us morally or reverse our cultural decline. He is, after all, a product of it. But he can secure the political and economic preconditions for such a restoration. And that is something the Left cannot and will not do. In fact, Trump has already taken great strides in the direction of…

  • Of Hillary and Robespierre

    Richard Fernandez: Perhaps the magnitude of Hillary's 2016 loss is only now becoming apparent. Clinton didn't just lose the White House, she also lost the Democratic center to the radical ornaments.  The diminution of Brooks, Stevens, Kristof, and even Biden are the consequence of that defeat. The radicals who once served the useful purpose of putting fear…

  • Can We Keep Silent in a World Gone Mad?

    An address by Andrew Klavan at Hillsdale College. Long, but good. So good.

  • Christianity has civilized us . . .

    . . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices.  We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether…

  • Trump Against the Multiculturalists

    Excerpts (bolding and some subtitles added) from an outstanding essay by Thomas D. Klingenstein, Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America: What is Multiculturalism? Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with…

  • How Close Are We to Civil War? A Pessimistic View

    The following view is pessimistic, but current events give me no good reason to be optimistic.  A bad moon's rising and trouble's on the way. A house divided cannot stand. Don't say that Trump has divided us. The division was well-entrenched long before he came on the political scene. He merely gave voice to the…

  • Joe Biden: Creep, Clown, Opportunist, and Ignoramus

    As as all of those things, a 'worthy' representative of the contemporary hard-Left Democrat party. Ben Shapiro has his number: More importantly, however, Biden's characterization of "English jurisprudential culture" as "white man's culture" is profoundly disturbing. English jurisprudential culture is rooted in the belief in the rule of law, due process of law, equal rights…

  • Destructive Leftists Pose an Existential Threat

    Peggy Noonan appreciates the threat, but remains a Never-Trumper: Noonan, who's a NeverTrump, must feel the same way about having to state the obvious from such a superb description of the parallel events.  That missing conclusion in her piece is that the only one thing standing between this repulsive neo-Cultural Revolution and us is President Trump, someone she will never be able to bring…

  • Leftists Versus Common Sense

    The Republic is in deep trouble.

  • CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA

    nymag.com   Andrew Sullivan: The Corruption of the Vatican’s Gay Elite Has Been Exposed

  • Into the Late Sensate: Concupiscense Unconstrained

    Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has proven to be remarkably prescient. From Pitirim Sorokin Revisited: Sorokin’s critique of private life begins with the disintegration of the family. “Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears,” he predicted in the final volume of Social and Cultural Dynamics. [rev. ed.…

  • Epitaph for a Dying Culture

    The 'genius' of Donald Trump, if you want to call  it that, is that he is able successfully to bait Democrats  into showing the most deeply-dyed and color-fast of their true colors, colors that are not typically on display but hidden beneath layers of mendacity and obfuscation. They now stand exposed as the destructive hard-leftists…

  • The Cross Won, but the Battle Never Ends

    I ended my European tour in June at Rome where all roads are said to lead.  After hours of prayer and meditation in Santa Maria Maggiore, I spent a long time in the vicinity of the Coliseum where I noticed something I had missed on previous visits: The brutal Romans contributed mightily to civilization, but…

  • Vote. Confirm.

    A powerful statement by Malcolm Pollack, at once both personal and objective. I recommend in particular the penultimate paragraph: We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how…