Culture

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.

Kevin Rogers has five rules: love God, love others, don’t do dumb things, don’t die, and “Get ye, therefore, over thyself.”

“Roger’s Rules” govern the work of Big Creek Missions, an inter-denominational Christian ministry center in eastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia. Every year, Big Creek Missions hosts hundreds who come to serve the Lord through service projects to communities in Leslie and the surrounding counties, Clay, Harlan, and Perry.

I was 16 the first time I visited Big Creek, on a trip with my high school, Orange Lutheran. As a kid who had only ever known the Southern California beaches and suburbs, I found an entirely different side of America waiting for me in eastern Kentucky, an America rife with poverty, riddled with drugs, and wrung out of opportunity. It was an America no one—especially in Washington or the other power centers of the nation—seemed to want to talk about. Why was that? How did America forget Appalachia and its people? Why was it left behind in the first place?

The trip triggered a fascination with Appalachia, its history, its people, its culture. It caused me to rethink and, over time, fundamentally change my view of politics. What kind of politics can seek the good for the people I met in the hills of eastern Kentucky? It’s not an easy question. My efforts at answering it myself have been downright embarrassing at points, and I still don’t have all the answers. I likely never will.

Between my first trip junior year and my return as a senior, a presidential candidate emerged who talked as if he hadn’t forgotten the people of the American heartland. In a bizarre twist, that candidate was a billionaire—a real estate mogul and a reality TV star from Queens.

Candidate Trump preached protectionism and derided so-called free trade deals that had hollowed out America’s manufacturing base. Immigration both legal and illegal, Trump said, was undermining the ability of working-class Americans to get good jobs and fundamentally changing the nation’s character. He vowed to unleash American industry and extolled the virtues of energy independence. He aimed to end the forever wars in the Middle East that cost America trillions of dollars and thousands of its sons and daughters’ lives. These issues, and the way Trump pilloried the establishment’s approach to them with ruthless delight, became the foundation of Trump’s political movement.

More importantly, Trump declared what Appalachians had already intuited: “The American dream is dead,” especially for people like them. What Trump was saying on the stump was what Appalachians have been saying around the dinner table for decades. By no means were Appalachians condemning their country by saying these things—Appalachians are the most patriotic breed of Americans you’ll ever encounter—they were simply observing reality and had the courage to say it aloud.

Nearly a decade on, a lot has changed. I’m engaged to be married. Trump’s first term has come and gone. A redux could be in the making. The right has coalesced around Trump’s platform and vision. What, if anything, has changed for the forgotten people of Appalachia?

In November, I returned to Big Creek with my sister, now a freshman at Orange Lutheran, to chaperone her first trip to the hills of eastern Kentucky.

Founded in 1878 from portions of Harlan, Clay, and Perry counties, Leslie County’s history reads more like folklore than fact. Records explain how the area’s creeks and streams received their curious names. Cutshin Creek received its name after an unnamed pioneer slipped and cut his shin on one of the sharp rocks while crossing. “Hell Fer Sartin” creek was named by two prospectors. Upon finding the creek, one prospector turned to the other and said, “This is hell.” The other, in the region’s throaty, rhotic Appalachian dialect, croaked, “Yes, hell fer sartin.”

Leslie is named after Preston M. Leslie, the governor of Kentucky from 1871 to 1875. Though he started out as a Confederate-sympathetic Whig and moved to the Democratic Party, Preslie became renowned in the region for driving out the KKK presence and the roving bands that were wreaking havoc in the backcountry in the aftermath of the civil war. Clay, Perry, and Harlan were pockets of some of the strongest Union support in the nation. More men enlisted in the Union Army relative to population in these and the surrounding counties than anywhere else in the nation.

Leslie has never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since its creation in 1878. From 1896 to 1928, no democratic presidential candidate managed to capture more than 10 percent of the vote. The closest a Democrat has ever come to winning Leslie was in 1964 when President Johnson captured 47 percent of the Leslie County vote against Barry Goldwater.

In both 2016 and 2020, Trump received 90 percent of Leslie County’s vote. This was an improvement on the internationalist Republican candidates of the 90s and 2000s—Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain—who each lost at least 25 percent of the vote in Leslie County in their respective bids.

Trump’s message echoed through the hollers of eastern Kentucky. So, too, did the scorn of the former president’s political enemies. One Appalachian I met told me, “I feel like they hate Trump so much because he stands up for us and says what a lot of us think.” They’re out to get Trump, but “they want to go after us, too.” Another chimed in with a chuckle, “They already are.”

In my travels to eastern Kentucky, nearly every person I talked to also told me some iteration of, “Here, we have to look out for one another because no one else will.” The Jacksonian strain of American thought is alive and well in the hills of eastern Kentucky, befitting for a place which started as a backcountry settled by yeoman farmers.

While Appalachia has been the target of substantial government aid on paper, you won’t hear many Appalachians suggest they are much better off than they once were. You also won’t hear many Appalachians credit the government or the NGOs for the improvements that have been made. They credit other members of their community, such as Kevin Rogers of Big Creek Missions, who have started local nonprofits to provide for the oscillating needs of these holler communities.

“I grew up in a house that struggled financially,” Rogers told Orange Lutheran students gathered in the Big Creek gymnasium. The financial constraints Rogers faced at home extended to his church community, where economic insecurity and social instability led to a revolving door of church leaders. “In my church, we didn’t have a lot of money. We had four or five youth pastors in four years.” When he graduated high school, Rogers took over as the church’s youth pastor, “because I got sick and tired of the church running them off,” he explained. “I wanted something deeper for my friends and for my students.”

Shortly after taking the job, Rogers found out that “you can do disaster relief mission trips for really cheap.” In the next three to four years, Rogers and his high schoolers took 17 mission trips to disaster areas. “Because they were looking out for the needs of others, our youth group was growing spiritually. Their hearts were being changed.”

Some time later, the pastor of Roger’s small church approached him and said, “Kevin, my home church is looking for a youth pastor, and I think you should do it, get out of your home church, go do something else.” The pastor’s former church was in a whole other league compared to Kevin’s home church.

“I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do it. Not me—I’m happy here,’” Rogers recounted.

Three months later, Rogers was settling into his new role at the larger church. The youth group Rogers was tasked with leading was four times larger than that of his home church. The students Rogers initially found there seemed to think youth ministry was for their entertainment, not for accomplishing the mission God had given them.

“Their idea of a mission trip was much more elaborate,” Rogers explained. Luxury charter buses would take students and their families to nice hotels. Recreation got in the way of the mission. “From the outside looking in, it appeared that their trips were more of a vacation than a mission trip,” said Rogers. He would do things differently.

The church also held a toy drive around Christmas time. Rogers, joined by members of his youth group and the media team, were tasked with taking the busload of toys northward to a small school in eastern Kentucky called Big Creek Elementary.

“We set up this big production, we had lights, we had a stage, we had sound, all this fancy stuff to share the story of Jesus with these kids,” Rogers recalled. The production was not a classic retelling of the Redeemer’s humble origins. After the show, the church group distributed the toys to the children, but the way they gave the toys out left some of the elementary schoolers in tears.

“We go back to the church and all the students get up there and say how amazing it was, how everybody was changed in Appalachia, and how we changed all these kids’ lives—blah, blah, blah, blah,” Rogers said. “And I’m like, ‘did you not see the kids crying?’”

The time came to plan the church’s summer mission trip. “The student threw ideas at me: ‘Let’s go to Chicago! Let’s go to New York! Let’s go to Virginia Beach! Let’s go back to Orlando!” But Rogers had already made up his mind. “I asked my youth leaders, ‘Y’all love those kids and Big Creek School? Because y’all told me that you love those kids.’ ‘Oh, yeah. We love those kids.’ ‘Are you committed to those kids?’ ‘Oh, yeah. We’re committed to those kids.’ I said, ‘Cool. Because this summer, we’re going on our first mission trip to Big Creek Elementary School.’”

Big Creek was not the vacation destination students in the youth ministry had envisioned. There’s no Six Flags or white sand beaches in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. “I ticked them all off,” Rogers admitted. Just 30 students and adults made the first trek to Big Creek.

For those who went, the trip was transformational. Students told stories about things they’d never seen before—homes with empty pantries where children had no toys to play with while mom and dad were strung out on meth in the bedroom.

The trip lit a fire in the bellies of Rogers’ students to serve Big Creek and the surrounding community. Word of the small but deeply spiritual trip to Big Creek made its way to the leadership of the association of churches. He was asked to lead an association-wide trip to Appalachia. The next summer, 100 students made the trek up to Leslie County. In the span of four years, the trip grew from 30 to 750 stretched across four weeks at Big Creek.

In 2007, Rogers’ pastor sat him down for a serious conversation. “‘Kevin, it’s time,” Rogers remembers the pastor telling him. “All you talk about is Big Creek missions. You need to ask the Lord if you need to be here, or you need to be there.’”

Rogers replied, “I love my students, and the youth group has grown so much spiritually and numerically.” The pastor told him to pray about it. “God said yes. I kept saying no,” Rogers said. That same year, Rogers received a call from the superintendent that oversaw Big Creek Elementary. “‘Kevin, we’re shutting down Big Creek Elementary, these kids are going to be going down to Mountain View Elementary in Hyden.’” Rogers recounted.

Rogers’ heart broke when he initially heard the news. But the superintendent had another proposal—for Rogers to buy Big Creek Elementary and turn it into a full-time mission. Again, Rogers prayed. Again, God said yes and Rogers said no. A few months later, “through a series of amazing things that happened, and a series of challenging things that happened, I knew it’s time to go and do this Big Creek thing.” Since, Rogers said, “we continue to do simple things. We serve people in need, we look in the community, find the greatest needs, and we go and serve.”

Orange Lutheran High School was one of the first major groups to start visiting Big Creek Missions after Rogers took over the school. The first trip Orange Lutheran took to Big Creek was on extremely short notice—Orange Lutheran had to cancel their plans to serve in Mexico over safety concerns. It found Big Creek Missions and gave Rogers a call. A few weeks later, 40 students and a handful of chaperones were on their way to Leslie County. Now, more than a decade on, Orange Lutheran brings about 170 individuals to Big Creek every fall.

Rogers and his small team of staff and volunteers have converted the old classrooms into dorm rooms, each lined with seven to eight handbuilt triple bunk beds. The old gymnasium is now a place for worship and assemblies. The kitchen and cafeteria are mostly left unchanged; the industrial-sized refrigerators and freezers hold meals for anyone in the community in need. The detached warehouse holds all the tools needed to maintain the campus and for Big Creek’s multitude of construction projects within a fifty-mile radius. In the parking lot, school buses have been replaced with Big Creek branded shuttles, flatbeds, and vans.

With a group of Orange Lutheran’s size, Rogers can dispatch teams of six to ten to work on nearly 20 different service projects, most of which fall into three buckets: construction, community, and caretaking.

The group of six students I chaperoned with one other adult were sent around 20 miles east to assist another area nonprofit, Hope in the Hills.

Jack is a short but sturdy man. His full, white head of hair and the hitch in his gait suggest he’s in his sixties. Arriving on site, where we’d be helping Jack repair and remodel the Hope in the Hills warehouse, Jack stuck out a thick, stubby hand. His handshake was firm and friendly, though his hands felt like sandpaper.

As we became acquainted, Jack explained that Hope in the Hills started as a small service group that would collect donations from his local church. Soon enough, Hope in the Hills was collecting more donations than the church could reasonably store. The group had to set out on their own, and Hope in the Hills was born.

Jack said things ran on a shoestring budget—everything, the donations and the man hours, “came from the good of people’s hearts.” Their regular giveaways, several times a month at local parks or other public meeting places, attracted beneficiaries from Leslie, Clay, Harlan, Perry, and beyond. Hope in the Hills’ donors also came from farther and farther away. Jack said they had to get a bigger truck to collect larger donations from the south and west. Hope in the Hills workers scour public marketplaces to haul back free furniture and other goods to give away, too.

Jack is partially retired now, but four decades or so ago, he started out working in the timber industry, which came to Appalachia’s virgin forests starting in the 1880s. The increased demand for timber and technological innovations for the industry made logging more profitable in places it wasn’t before, though loggers would have to use mule teams, rivers, or even splash dams to get logs out of the hollers.

The timber industry Jack started working in was nothing like the Appalachian timber industry of a hundred years prior. Working conditions, while still perilous, were safer and corporate interests had been beaten back relative to the near-feudal conditions that prevailed before.

By the time Jack found employment, the logging industry in Appalachia was dying. Advancements in sustainable practices for the industry meant once-depleted forests in other states were returning. An explosion of trade deals was making lumber easier and cheaper to import than previously. While the U.S. remains the largest producer of timber in the world, it’s the third largest timber importer in the world. Everyone has heard of Chinese steel’s effect on economic opportunity for working-class men; fewer know about Canadian timber’s impact on workers in Hazard, Kentucky.

Eventually, Jack changed career paths. He began working as a trucker, hauling products once made in the United States but now shipped in from overseas. Trucking was one of the few industries that did not necessarily create displacement. A trucker could still live in Leslie County, Kentucky, rather than move north to work in a factory, though he’d spend most of his time on the road and away from family. Compared to the alternatives in the area, trucking paid well and provided good benefits. There was also a fairly low barrier to entry. A commercial driver’s license takes about seven weeks of training to obtain. Trucking remains one of the top jobs in the United States, especially for working-class white men without college degrees.

Working as a truck driver has allowed Jack to enjoy his partial retirement in the hills of eastern Kentucky without ever having to relocate his family as millions of Appalachians have done since World War II. Beyond his work with Hope in the Hills, Jack tends to a small herd of cattle. He lives in a nice, small prefabricated home overlooking the local school and a creek. A detached warehouse, mostly made of reclaimed tin, is where Hope in the Hills keeps most of its donations.

Our task for the week was to repair and remodel the warehouse. The seasons slowly eat away at the wood and metal of Appalachian homes. Sometimes, they’re swallowed whole. A massive flood in July 2022 swept through 14 counties in eastern Kentucky. It claimed the lives of 45 and displaced thousands.

One of the underappreciated reasons Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear was reelected in 2023 was his handling of the flood. Even those I met in deep red Kentucky admitted the governor did a pretty good job in the aftermath. The electoral map bears this out. In deep-red southeastern Kentucky, Beshear greatly overperformed, managing to capture about a third of the vote.

That said, the devastation is still easy to spot. On the drive to Jack’s place, we passed upside-down mobile homes that had been completely washed away. Others were simply twisted piles of metal. The land isn’t the only thing to carry the flood’s scars. Many of the families in Leslie still do, too. Thankfully, Jack’s property was spared, and the goods stored there have been used to help dozens of families in the community get back on their feet in the aftermath.

Nevertheless, some of the roof’s tin sheets had rusted out and the support beams rotted. New siding was also in order. Inside the warehouse, we were tasked with laying down a fresh coat of paint, building shelves, and reorganizing.

Despite his height, Jack was a confident and commanding figure. He was quick to show friendship and respect when extended to him. We became fast friends when I told him my occupation. “Now, I’ll be completely honest, I’m a Republican,” Jack said as we ventured into politics. For the next three days, our political chat was off and on. “I’ll tell you one thing, Bradley,” he said as we stood at the base of a ladder, “there wasn’t any of these terrible school shootin’s when they taught the Bible in schools.”

Jack had a general vision of what he wanted the finished product to look like, but he didn’t go into much detail. Only towards the end of our talk would Jack say, “If you need anything or any guidance, just ask my daughter Heather—she’s the brains of this whole operation.” Jack, even in retirement, had a boss.

Heather’s father wasn’t her only underling, either. As Hope in the Hills survived on donated time from volunteers, Jack had called in backup. These men were the most eclectic and wonderful group of hillbillies in all of Appalachia.

“Have you ever met a French hillbilly?” A voice like a rebel yell called out from the warehouse as I repaired the siding. I was certainly intrigued. I stopped what I was doing to meet this curiosity. As I entered, a man who seemed in his sixties looked upon a group of students, all frozen in position from their various tasks inside the warehouse. “The name is Bur-zhay,” he told the students in a faux French accent through his Appalachian drawl. As I circled around to this mysterious character’s front, I saw he sported a Ford motor company windbreaker over a neon yellow hoodie. Embroidery on the jacket atop the right side of his chest read, “Burgie.”

Over the three days we spent helping the folks at Hope in the Hills, I’m not sure Burgie handled a tool, lifted a paint brush, or shelved a can of soup. But Burgie is retired—he’s earned that right. What Burgie did was make a long day’s work fly by. With the radio out, Burgie’s stories became a neverending variety podcast with zero breaks or advertisements.

Burgie spent most of his career working at a Ford factory manufacturing parts, mostly transmissions. He got the nickname “Bur-zhay” while on a trip to France with Ford. “When I got there, all these French folk were telling me that I had been pronouncin’ my name wrong my whole life!” He laughed.

Burgie was one of the millions of Appalachians who participated in one of the largest internal migrations in American history. The road north became known as the Hillbilly Highway as job opportunities dried up in the coal mines and forests and Appalachians sought work in the industrial Midwest. In the three decades between 1940 and 1970, 3 million Appalachians took to the Hillbilly Highway. Dwight Yoakam’s 1985 tune “Readin’, Writin’, and Route 23” memorialized the migration in song.

The migration transformed Appalachia. The era of the yeoman farmer, which tapped into the region’s precolonial roots, was over. In the 1950s, forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost about 70 percent of their farm population. Harlan County lost 82 percent, Leslie County a mind-boggling 98 percent. Only 20 fulltime farming operations remained in Leslie by the end of the decade.

A bevy of factors led to the decline of manufacturing in Appalachia. Environmental struggles, increased regulatory burdens, mechanization, and some companies’ difficulties paying retirement benefits all played their part. But it all took place against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized market economy, governed by a ballooning number of “free” trade agreements that spanned thousands of pages, which made foreign goods, and more importantly foreign labor, more attractive than Appalachia. Between 1970 and 2001 in Appalachia, the number of apparel workers declined by 66 percent and textile workers by 30 percent. For those who remained, living off the government dole became a way to make ends meet.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was the nail in the coffin for manufacturing and other Appalachian industries. Six years later, Clinton would deliver remarks from Tyner, Kentucky, to bring public attention to Appalchian poverty. “I’m here to make a simple point,” Clinton told the nation. “This is the time to bring more jobs and investment to parts of the country that have not participated in this time of prosperity. Any work that can be done by anybody in America can be done in Appalachia.” The problem for Clinton was that those jobs were no longer being done in America.

Burgie spent decades working in that Ford plant far from the hills of Appalachia he called home. He became involved in the plant’s United Auto Workers (UAW) chapter and eventually ascended to a number of leadership positions. As the years passed, Burgie became increasingly disenchanted with his involvement in the UAW. “I don’t want to get into detail about it,” Burgie told me, as we sat on a bench sipping Diet Cokes. “But the point is it stopped being about the workers and more about the politics, and I just didn’t like that so much.”

I asked him what he thought the future of union work might be. “The unions are wondering why people don’t want to be a part of ’em anymore,” Burgie said. “I’d tell ’em the same thing I tried to tell ’em when I was there: just focus on the workers. Folks have a hard time finding good jobs that can provide for a good retirement without the unions, and I think that’s still true. But there won’t be any unions to help people get these jobs, and no jobs to begin with, if they keep going down this path.”

Burgie admired what certain Republicans, Trump among them, were doing to reach out to union workers. Trump, Burgie told me, was the first politician in a long time to name and shame the macro forces making it hard for working class people to get good jobs—immigration and globalization. “Whatever you think of him,” Burgie added, “it was the right thing to say. That takes some guts. I respect that.”

Joe was also in his sixties but much more prepared to do construction work than Burgie. He wore flannel, a vest, and an old rope cap. Thick, wire-rimmed glasses covered a good portion of his short face and rested heavily on the broad bridge of his nose. Myself, Joe, and Matt, one of the other chaperones, and Johnny, another member of our curious band, spent most of the first day working on the roof and siding. Joe had spent his working years in the timber industry, though he was afraid of heights, as our work on the roof quickly made clear.

As Matt and I huddled to figure out how to remove a particularly stubborn piece of rusted tin, Joe made his way to the spot with a chainsaw, slowly inching his way across the gable roof—none of the rotted beams had been replaced yet. This plan definitely violated rule three and potentially four of Rogers’ Rules, but it was already in motion.

As Joe approached, you could clearly see him shaking. “I think it’ll work.” Johnny said. “Be careful,” he yelled at Joe. “He’s afraid of heights,” Johnny said, turning to Matt and I. As I looked back at Joe, he had made his way over the peak of the gable and was heading down the slope to the corner of the roof. Once there, according to Johnny’s plan, he would fire up the chainsaw and punch down through the metal roof. A few steps onto the downward sloping side, Joe surmised this plan wasn’t as good as it initially sounded. With chainsaw in hand, Joe gingerly made his way down the 14-foot drop to the ground.

New plan: We’d use a smaller, cordless metal saw and approach from the bottom. Two men would be on ladders—one sawman, one scrap collector—and the other two supporting the base of the ladders. Joe, who we now knew was afraid of heights, would remain with me on the ground.

“Was being afraid of heights difficult when you were logging?” I asked Joe. “No,” he said, his voice a whispering gruff. “Climbing trees is no problem when they’re on the ground.”

Matt and Johnny were hard at work near the roof while Joe and I got to know each other on the ground. I could tell Joe wasn’t much of a talker. He kept his eyes fixed on Johnny, who teetered at the top of the ladder to reach where he needed to cut. Joe answered my questions about the area and his work experience with a sentence or less.

After about 30 minutes, Joe warmed up. It really got rolling when I asked about the present problems Appalachians face. Joe, with his coughing drawl, spoke about the difficulties young people face in communities like Leslie County. By the government’s metrics, Appalachia is much less impoverished than it was when he was a young man. In 1965, 219 of the 420 counties that make up Appalachia were considered impoverished. Today, that number is 82.

While less of the region faces poverty, things seem much worse by Joe’s telling. Good-paying jobs are few and far between not just here but in the places Appalachians once fled to. It might be a Detroiter’s first time facing the reality of massive job displacement; for many Appalachians, it’s their second. Meanwhile, price increases for the most essential goods—housing, health care, education, groceries—have outpaced inflation at best and skyrocketed at worst.

To add insult to injury, the health care that workers in the area have received has mostly been in the form of prescription opiates. “The drugs have really done a number on this place,” Joe told me. “It’s devastated whole families.”

The opioid epidemic ravaged the American heartland. It almost appears to have been designed to do just that. Companies lied about the nature of the wonder drugs they created. Some extremely bad actors moved in to take advantage of the profits the drugs offered. Even good doctors wrote prescriptions that ruined lives. The influx of fentanyl from the southern border brought another wave of drug abuse. The pandemic ushered in a deadly round of relapses.

Opioids have sapped Appalachia, particularly Appalachian men, of their vitality when their distressed communities needed it most. When opioid addiction takes a life, that’s sad enough. Here, it crushes whole families, even whole communities. Hopelessness begets more hopelessness.

Eventually, our conversation got sidetracked when Joe asked, “Why do you speak with your lips so much?” I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, then I realized that the rhotic Appalachian drawl comes from the back of your throat. My southern California speech patterns are very tip of the tongue. “I’m not quite sure, but I guess you’re right, Joe,” I replied.

An old blue truck kicked dust up on the gravel road leading up to Jack’s property. A man dressed quite similarly to Joe got out and approached. “What’s going on, Joe,” he asked. Joe explained to the man, whose name was Ronnie, that Johnny and Matt were entering their second hour of wrestling with a rusted out tin roof. Johnny and Matt climbed down to greet Ronnie, and Johnny told Ronnie of the original plan for Joe to use a chainsaw. Ronnie, seeming to know Joe was afraid of heights, stared at Joe with a shocked expression on his face. He was a soft-spoken man, but suffice it to say Ronnie didn’t need to say anything to make clear his disapproval of the original plan.

“Ronnie worked in the mines,” Joe told me. Mining had been one of the topics we covered in our conversation at the base of the ladders. I asked Ronnie what that was like. “Dark,” Ronnie chuckled. Ronnie explained that his office was a crawl space hundreds of feet below ground. Ronnie gestured a rounded box around his chest to his thigh to show the size—a few feet by a few feet. Ronnie, also a retiree, was the most slender of the hillbillies assembled but also the tallest, which I assume must have been a disadvantage underground.

Appalachia once produced two-thirds of the nation’s coal. Coal fields cover 63,000 square miles in the region. In eastern Kentucky alone, there are 80 major seams. Most of the region’s mining is done how Ronnie once mined, deep underground, and a third is surface mining, a more controversial form because of its impact on the environment.

Even in the glory days of mining in Appalachia, it was a cycle of boom and bust. World War I brought a major spike in coal production, only to give way to the Great Depression. During World War II, the Office of War Mobilization encouraged coal production as a patriotic duty. Thousands of workers and small-scale operations took advantage of the government’s demand, but that revival was short-lived.

Mechanization arrived after the war as coal operators sought to cut down on labor costs. Inventions like the continuous miner, which integrated drilling, blasting, and loading into one process, “made it possible for ten men to produce three times the tonnage mined by eighty-six miners loading coal by hand,” Ronald Eller writes in Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. “By 1960 fewer than half of the 475,000 miners in the region at the end of World War II still found work in the deep mines” Eller continues, “and by 1970 the number had declined to 107,000.” Today, coal mining employs just 2 percent of the Appalachian workforce.

Johnny Muncy is Leslie County royalty. He’s not one of the barons who made their fortunes from King Coal nor one of the titans that built holiday homes in the Appalachian hills like the Vanderbilts. He’s not wealthy by any means. But the Muncy name has been associated with the area that is now Leslie County since before its creation.

One of his ancestors, also John Muncy, came to the hills from Burke’s Garden, Virginia. When the Civil War began, John Muncy was too young to fight but convinced commanding officers to let him join the 47th Regiment of the Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. There, Muncy would be among the 77,000 troops that won the pivotal battle of Vicksburg, which secured Union control of the Mississippi river. He’d go on to become a corporal in Company C and serve in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

John Muncy had eleven children from two marriages. One of his sons, John M. Muncy, born 1868, would go on to establish Hyden’s first and only newspaper, named the Thousandsticks, and serve as a county judge and school superintendent. For the final five years of his life, before he passed in 1937, J.M. Muncy was chairman of the Leslie County Republican Party.

As we joked about Burgie’s frenchified nickname, Johnny Muncy said the best hillbilly nickname he’d ever heard belonged to his grandfather. “His name was William Muncy, but everybody always called him Powder Bill.”

William “Powder Bill” Muncy was a logger around the turn of the century. When a logflow jammed in the river, his grandfather was the only one crazy enough to head down to the jam with a stick of dynamite and clear it. “Whenever they had a jam, they always called for Powder Bill, and he always made sure the logs started flowin’ again. Nothin’ bad ever happened to him, though.”

I never tired of talking to any of my new hillbilly friends, but especially Johnny Muncy. Like Jack, Johnny became a trucker. For three decades, he crisscrossed the country hauling whatever needed transporting. “I spent a lot of time away from home, away from my family,” Johnny said. “Those years on the road take a toll. You miss a lot. I needed to be home.”

Later, Johnny and I got to talking politics. He wanted to know if I had any dirt on powerful people in D.C. I told him that, if I did, I would have already written it.

I asked Johnny what issues people here cared about. He didn’t hesitate: “The drugs.” All over the community, you can find people strung out, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, even grandparents. Babies live covered in their own excrement, their parents too high to care or too busy looking for the next score. Johnny and Jack knew of at least two drug-related deaths nearby in the last week. In many cases, addiction here starts with prescription pills—from surgery, a disability, or a relative’s medicine cabinet—then moves on to the hard stuff, much of which is now laced with fentanyl.

The epidemic has touched Johnny’s family: One of his sons has struggled with drug addiction. Though his methods were unconventional, Johnny made sure to get his son clean. “It came to a point where I had to physically lock him in a room to get the drugs out of his system,” Johnny said. “I had a six shooter and said, if you come out of there, I’m goin’ to shoot you, because if you keep goin’ down this path, you’re as good as dead anyways.”

“It was a rough few days,” Johnny said, “but he’s strong, and he pulled through.”

Before Johnny issued that ultimatum, he thought he had done all he could to keep his son on the straight and narrow. He bought him a rifle so they could go hunting together. Johnny’s son sold the rifle for drugs. Then Johnny bought him a new hunting bow. That, too, got sold for drugs. Johnny even bought his son a truck to get to and from work. “He stripped everything he could out of that truck. The radio, everything, even the seats, he stripped out of that car to sell for drugs.”

“Young people used to go to church, now their gods are sex and drugs,” Johnny said. “This rotten culture has corrupted their souls.” These days, on Sunday mornings, you can find Johnny’s son in a church pew. “Now he’s given that up, he’s going back to church,” Johnny said.

The right has only begun to grapple with the lives of men like Jack, Burgie, Joe, Ronnie, and Johnny. How to bring manufacturing jobs back, how to end the opioid crisis—these are topics of roundtable discussions across institutional Washington. There’s little agreement on an agenda, but we had to start somewhere.

The men I met in Appalachia have intuited that a realignment is happening. They’ve been waiting for it for a long time. If the right succeeds in bringing a revival to Appalachia, don’t expect these men to direct their thanks to the Republican Party. Their thanks will go to the men and women like Kevin Rogers who have done the Lord’s work and kept hope alive in the hills.

But don’t expect Rogers to take credit. “God gets the glory for what he has done through somebody as messed up as me,” he says. “I cannot stand up here and say, ‘Well, look at what I’ve done.’ Because I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to God.”

“I don’t know why people keep coming back to Big Creek, but they do. God brings them here. He gets the glory for it from the beginning to the end. Wherever you are, give Him the glory,” Rogers told students in closing. “Thank you all for being a part of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”

The post Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture

Confessions of a Former Fare Hopper

If everyone is behaving badly, things fall apart.

Last week, a 16-year-old boy shot a 14-year-old boy in the head on the Brookland Metro platform, just a few blocks away from where I work. It was about 4:00 p.m. and the station was crowded with kids who had just got out of school. I have been down there many times at that hour, and I can imagine the scene: teenagers jostling, fighting, annoying the other commuters, until things get out of hand and pop pop—someone’s dead.

These things don’t happen too often, but when they do, everyone starts looking for explanations beyond blind chance. It was widely circulated in the hours afterward that the shooter was also a fare hopper. The fact came as no surprise. Fare evasion is a huge problem on the D.C. Metro, especially among the younger set, who, more than older people, generally don’t see it as a very serious offense. But it is a serious offense, fare-hopper hawks respond. An incident such as this most recent shooting proves it: commit small crimes, like jumping a turnstile, and pretty soon you could be committing big ones, like clocking a kid in the head. Little distortions of public order blot and blacken the canvas until it resembles a monstrous work of abstract expressionism.

But I have to wonder if fare hopping always and inevitably leads to worse things. In the case of the shooter, I think the fact that he didn’t pay for the Metro was incidental to his other problems. At any rate, the question has some personal significance for me. Until rather recently, I never paid for public transportation in D.C. or in any other city when I could help it. Of course I do now—these responsibilities seem to accompany marriage and fatherhood—but if I did not, would I really be so dissipated? Or, on the other hand, would I be too warped even to know? After the shooting, I wondered aloud with my sister, who lives near the Brookland Metro station, and revisited my fare-hopping days.

I don’t know when I stopped paying for the Metro. High school, I guess. My rationale at first was that I had no money, and in those days it was easy to get on the train without paying for it. You didn’t even have to jump the turnstile. All you had to do was wait until someone else paid, and then you could walk very quickly behind him before the automatic gates closed. (Or, if your legs were skinny enough, you could squeeze between the gap in the two doors without setting off the alarm.) It was not hard to get away with this trick in the suburban Virginia stations. There, most everyone paid for the Metro, leaving no shortage of people to tail.

When I had my first job, I maintained my excuse. Now I had rent, utilities, and a whole host of other adult expenses to pay for—why should I add the Metro, which I had never paid for anyway? Still, I had a conscience. I understood that it was one thing to dodge fares as some puke kid in high school; it was quite another to do the same thing as a white-collar professional in Rosslyn, Virginia. And so I developed a strange habit of pretending to pay for the Metro: Whenever I walked quickly behind another commuter, I swiped my old Library of Congress reader’s card to give the impression to anyone who might be watching that I too was a paying customer.

Sometimes I consoled myself that one day I would pay for the Metro. But later, always later. After all, I said to myself, what’s the harm in a little vice now and then? Some people swipe sugar cubes at diners; I steal swipes at the train station. I called it a private amusement. Soon, I began to approach all sorts of little things with this kind of Huck Finn logic. I found myself nicking coffee cups, beer glasses, and bread plates from restaurants. I took old street signs, defunct newsstands, unused office furniture. Of course, I never took anything of much value. That would be real theft, or so I told myself.

I could go on in this vein for many more paragraphs, analyzing my motivations and self-justifications in Nicholson Baker–like detail. But I fear that would be tedious, since the outline of this story is already familiar to most people. What had begun as a series of arbitrary adolescent decisions hardened into habit, and habit, as they say, becomes character. I don’t know how corrupt I became—I certainly never evaded taxes or anything of that nature—but when I look back on those years, I detect something flippant, an offhand lack of respect for other people, the law, my home city. I don’t like it. I suppose it could have developed into something more ugly, but it would be almost as bad if I lived the rest of my life in the manner I’ve just described.

The real tragedy of little criminals is that they remain just that: tiny, grubby.

What eventually shook me from this pattern of behavior was no decision that I made on my own, but rather a piece of stunt journalism done by the print editor of this magazine. (Let it never be said that The American Conservative doesn’t get results.) It wasn’t the logic of the thing that convinced me—logic never does—but the tone. For the first time, I saw that there were perhaps thousands of other people in Washington, D.C. who thought the same way that I did, making lame personal exemptions. They sounded so selfish, so much like myself.

No wonder the Metro is such a mess. A functioning system can handle a few rulebreakers, but when everyone is making excuses for themselves, standards everywhere fall.

That said, I don’t think cracking down on fare evasion is going to fix the Metro. I don’t know what will. The system has complex, fundamental problems that have less to do with people not paying for it and more to do with the fact that people don’t ride it at all. And I admit that I fit into both categories. For years I helped degrade the Metro, and then, like seemingly everyone else, I ditched it. The few times that I ride it nowadays, I do pay for it. It’s the least—maybe the only thing—I can do.

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Culture

The Symposiast: Remembering Christopher Hitchens

On his 75th birthday, an acquaintance remembers the inimitable Hitch.

Impossible as it is to believe, Christopher Hitchens, the enfant terrible of Anglo-American politics and letters, would have turned 75 today, almost 13 years since his premature death from esophageal cancer in December 2011.

Yet in many ways Hitchens seems more alive than ever. His name routinely crops up in contemporary debates, notwithstanding how different the political landscape looks in the Age of Donald and Elon. In the years since his passing, he has acquired a new generation of fans in the millions. His coinages (“Islamofascism”) have entered the contemporary cultural lexicon. His debating ripostes are so widely cited that they have acquired names in their own right. (For example: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Known as “Hitchens’s Razor,” it serves as a handy rhetorical implement for dismissing—“shaving off”—opponents’ empty arguments from Authority.)

“Hope you are thriving,” he used to sign off his messages to me and other correspondents.

The ghost of Christopher is thriving.

Composing His Thoughts: The Mozartian Method

I came to know Christopher—it was never “Chris,” an Americanism (so he claimed) that he loathed—during the last dozen years of his life. I first met him briefly in December 1999. We later met at conferences, at his Washington apartment, and at his Palo Alto residence near the campus of Stanford University (where his father-in-law, Edwin Blue, a retired physicist, lived next door). Between our occasional meetings, we emailed (“Hope you are thriving!”), and spoke every few months on the telephone. My first lengthy one-on-one encounter with Christopher was in Washington in April 2002, when he was well known but had not yet emerged as the leading controversialist of the day. We spent most of the day together, starting with a long lunch before a late-afternoon taping for an hour-long PBS special on George Orwell (“The Orwell Century”) in the runup to the Orwell centennial of 2003. Like me, Hitchens was finishing a book (Why Orwell Matters, 2003) about Orwell’s legacy.

Not long thereafter, I visited him in California. Christopher took me on a long, leisurely stroll through his Palo Alto neighborhood. Waving to neighbors, stopping to visit his father-in-law Edwin, and pausing to point out “Condi’s house” (Condoleezza Rice, then-Secretary of State and Stanford’s provost during the 1990s), Christopher was in an ebullient mood.

I steered the conversation to a remark of an editor for whom we had both written. I asked Christopher if his retentive memory was “photographic.”

“I’ve heard you have a ‘Mozartian’ method of composition,” I rattled on, telling him that a magazine editor of ours had recounted to me that “you don’t write down your work.” Hitchens, he had said, “composed” a lengthy essay in his head with no apparent need to write it down. (Mozart wrote his scores for the benefit of others; his tragic early death, claimed his wife, meant that several of what might have been his very greatest works died on his deathbed with him. Contra Amadeus, nobody had the presence of mind—or perhaps the coldness of heart? —to insist in businesslike fashion that he dictate them with his dying breaths.)

“Well, yes, I suppose that’s a fair analogy,” answered Christopher. “Since I was often abroad and on tight deadlines—this is long before the smart-phone era—I developed the habit of phoning up and dictating my essays or dispatches to a sub-editor who would take them down.”

Christopher went on, “If I had someone on the phone, then I knew the story would be filed with the magazine. Faxes and computers are unavailable or unreliable in a lot of remote places.”

“No notes either?” I said. “You’re kidding. You just…dictated it? Straight through? Off the cuff?”

“Don’t misunderstand. I turned over most serious articles for hours, even days before ringing up the office. I always worked hard. But I didn’t need to write it down. It was as if I was reading it on a screen inside my head. It was all quite clear.”

“You just read it off? I heard that you even knew the length as you went along.”

“That’s right. I’d be relaying a 5,000 word-piece to the office, and I’d get to a place and just check in with the sub-editor on the word count. ‘That’s about 4850, right?’ I’d say. He’d answer, ‘4873, to be exact.’ I’d say, ‘All right, let’s wrap up, here’s the last 120 or so.’ And I’d come in at right around the 5,000-word mark.”

The Symposiast as Showman

A visit to Palo Alto in May 2006 stands out in memory. On my arrival, Christopher apologized that he and his wife Carol Blue had just been invited to a small dinner party.

“Hope you won’t mind seeing Bob and Lindy and a few friends tonight. He asked about you.”

The dinner was at the home of the poet-historian Robert Conquest, whom I had also met a few years before. Author of path-breaking books on Stalinism and the Gulag, most notably The Great Terror (1968), he had been a close comrade since the 1960s of “the Hitch” (a term of endearment granted to the inner circle). Recently turned 90, Conquest too—like their mutual friends and mates in mischief, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis—was an ardent admirer of Orwell. (Christopher dedicated Why Orwell Matters to Conquest.)

It was my first experience of seeing Hitchens in a relaxed setting among friends. With no effort and no pretense, throughout an eight-hour supper that stretched until 3 a.m., he held court. That evening’s symposium outdid Plato’s banquet. Hitchens delivered all of the speeches ex tempore, punctuated merely by occasional interjections and exclamations and impromptu grace notes from the eight others of us around the table. I can only report, echoing the Athenian statesman-orator Alcibiades on hearing Socrates’ contribution, that Christopher seemed that night “unrivalled by any man, past or present.”

Unrivalled that night he was.

And unrivalled, I believe, he will remain.

A gift of that order occurs once in a generation—and Christopher Hitchens possessed it.

Yes, it was a command performance, from a self-summons that Christopher issued to himself to rise to an occasion for Bob and his friends. Though of course it all seemed to arise casually, spontaneously, indeed serendipitously—as if we had just glided into it.

Which indeed we had—especially so in my case. By some misty alchemy of midsummer romance, a Palo Alto dining room had become a theater in the round, whereupon our places at the table had materialized into front-row seats. Although Bob, sitting at its head, nominally functioned in that capacity and did serve as a gracious host throughout the evening, nobody could mistake the fact that he had delegated Christopher to assume head-of-table duties—or that Bob beamed with a father’s pride at the theatrics of his intellectual son. Not for a single moment did Bob feel “upstaged” that night. The very notion would have struck him—and the rest of us too—as preposterous. His Gulf Stream of constant chuckles and repeated, happy, old-boyish nods of agreement made clear his warm approval of the show—and of the showmanship of the showman. After all, Bob had invited Christopher—and he and Lindy certainly knew what they were getting. And delighted to get it, too: Christopher Hitchens, singing—or rather, soliloquizing—for his supper.

If you merely watch some short YouTube clips, or even if you listen to a series of hour-long presentations during one of Christopher’s countless debates on the Iraq War or religious faith, you cannot appreciate the magic and majesty of that marathon evening. And remember: YouTube had just come out a few months earlier and Facebook was still in its infancy; this was long before the era of viral videos and ubiquitous iPhones—and before Twitter and X, before Pinterest and Snapchat, fully a decade before Instagram and TikTok. None of us knew it, but that evening we were already in the last flickering twilight moments of intellectual vaudeville. No matter how high the tightrope, Christopher kept his balance as if it were a stroll in the park—and interspersed the walkabout with assorted magical stunts, ventriloquism acts, and other assorted forms of verbal acrobatics.

The discourse that night ranged from Churchill and Thatcher to Nixon and Reagan to Putin and John Paul II, from sectarian squabbles about the revisionist critiques of Old Bolshevik leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin to the current historiography on World War I and the Vietnam War, from the revelations about Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass’s SS background to the comparative merits between Atonement on film and the original novel by “Ian” (McEwan, another shared inner circle friend of Christopher and Bob). Through it all, Hitchens expounded and extemporized with sovereign grace and authority.

As cogent analyses of the above subjects proceeded—to which the rest of us periodically chipped in a token contribution—reason would give way to rhyme as Christopher suddenly took flight. Somehow it was understood that we had arrived at an appropriate juncture for another soliloquy.

The table would fall silent.

Spontaneously and with perfect relevance to the topic, Christopher would reel off a couple of stanzas of Milton’s Paradise Lost; two dozen lines from Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est,” a Shakespearean sonnet immediately followed by a Petrarchan counterpart, an Ogden Nash limerick along with a bawdy one by Bob himself, and more. It was lovely to see a guest or two—chiefly Bob and the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash—call out a title, identifying with delighted recognition the quoted work—and hesitantly chant a few lines summoned from memory. (I was grateful.)

Occasionally, Carol would gently rap hubby on the knuckles.

“Christopher! That’s enough now! Stop showing off!”

To which the rest of us, like a mournful Greek chorus, would protest with guffaws:

“No, Carol! No! Let him show off!!”

As the evening concluded, Danuta Garton Ash—Tim’s Polish-born wife—threw her arms around Christopher and sobbed on his shoulder. Not tears of sadness, but of joy—and wonder. The Polish accent was strong and utterly charming.

“Christopher, Christopher! How? How? How?”

A dazed Hitchens said nothing, as her clasp tightened.

“How did you learn all this?! How does your head hold all these things?! How do you know so much?”

For once, Christopher was speechless. Released from her headlock, and dazed by both the late hour and the happy hours, he smiled and swayed and waved off her effusive display.

Danuta had spoken for us all. Her husband Tim nodded in agreement. He had already had several encounters with Hitchens before. No slouch himself—Tim is Britain’s leading scholar of modern European history, whose exciting dispatches from Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 captivated the West—he averred that the evening was amazing, yes, yet no great surprise to him.

The friends departed; I stood with Christopher as we looked up at the clear night sky. There was a twinkle in his eyes.

Home With the (and Without a) Hitch

It remains to mention how the wondrous symposium of that long evening’s journey into night concluded. As Christopher and I stood in the parking lot, after the Garton Ashes had driven off, I casually remarked that we should fetch Carol, who must still be inside the house. (I had also made a mental note to remonstrate with—or perhaps just reassure—her: Her husband was a matchless showman, yes, but he was no mere showoff.)

Not necessary to summon Carol, he assured me. A friend of hers came by an hour ago and she had slipped out.

Trying not to look too startled, because Christopher was quite under the weather, I offered to drive.

“No need at all,” he replied, ensconcing himself in the driver’s seat. “I can drive this route in my sleep.”

Although I had been repeatedly impressed with how fluent and coherent he had appeared after several drinks both this night and on previous occasions—including two interviews that I conducted with him (one on film, for an educational documentary on Orwell)—this was different. I was not about to get into a car with an inebriated Hitch at the wheel at 4 a.m.

Or so I had thought.

“Don’t make a scene,” he chastised me, as I stood outside and asked for the keys. “It’s only a couple of miles.”

Finally, exhausted, I relented.

Miraculously, we rode slowly through the night, without incident, without even a single headlight coming at us. The car rolled gently up his driveway, clicking to a neat halt just inches from his garage door. Christopher switched off the ignition, opened his door, and swung himself leftward to step out of the car.

He promptly tumbled onto his driveway, and I rushed to the driver’s side and helped him stagger to the front door.

Had we been protected by a medallion of St. Christopher—traditionally the patron saint of travelers (including Irish Catholic motorists, who used to keep “Christopher statues” on the dashboard)—squirreled away in the glove compartment?

I will never know.

No matter. Christopher, as you turn 75, I raise a glass to you!

Hope you are thriving!

The post The Symposiast: Remembering Christopher Hitchens appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture

The Eclipse Was a Moment of Holy Dread

Nobody liked what happened in a field in New Hampshire.

On Monday, the wife and I piled our kids into the Subaru and drove three hours to northern New Hampshire to see the eclipse at 100 percent totality. Aside from all the unwelcome visitors from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it was a very pleasant trip. Passing beneath the White Mountains brought tears to my eyes, as it always does. Growing up in farm country, all I knew were fields and forests. Mountains I only knew from books—in particular my favorite book, Lost Horizon. I tried to imagine what they would look like (“hills, only four hundred stories tall”). Still, I knew that once I saw a real mountain all my fantasies would be put to shame. And so they were.

We’d planned on camping out somewhere in the town of Lancaster, which was directly in the eclipse’s pathway. But even before we met the highway, we saw that hundreds of our fellow looky-loos were simply pulling over on the highway and camping out there. Friends of ours had made reservations to stay in Lancaster the night before; they texted to warn us that traffic was gridlocked when they drove up on Sunday afternoon, a good twenty-four hours before the eclipse even began. A little patch of gravel next to the highway was probably the best we could hope for. So, we snagged the first spot we saw. This was about half an hour before the eclipse began.

We hiked up the road a bit and found a field where folks were setting up folding chairs, flying drones, and fidgeting with their ultra-stylish eclipse glasses. The mood was ebullient. There was a rumor that the Town of Lancaster would be setting off fireworks. Folks were playing music and toying around with drones. Children were playing tag in the field. It was like the tailgate at a Patriots game. Everyone was brought together in that field by a common purpose, and that gave us a sense of camaraderie.

Then, about twenty minutes before 100 percent totality, it became noticeably darker—and colder. I had expected both, but it was a bit like the mountains: Nothing in my imagination prepared me for the real thing.

For those who don’t know, the darkness of an eclipse is nothing like the darkness of nightfall. Partially it’s because it becomes so dark so quickly. But I think it’s also because the sun isn’t setting in the West. The shadows don’t lengthen. It doesn’t give off a few last warm, golden rays before dropping behind the horizon. It just… turns off.

What little light remained was gray, almost sickly. My wife said, “It’s like when you edit a photo and turn ‘saturation’ all the way down.” That’s exactly right. The rational part of my brain knew I wasn’t going blind, but I couldn’t quite drive away that fear. And it quickly became clear that the same fear was creeping over our 3-year-old, Beatrice. She started looking around and rubbing her eyes. A look came over her face, half-sad, half-panicked. She looked at me, silently pleading for me to comfort her, clearly hoping that if she didn’t say that she was scared, it would all go away quickly.

It didn’t—not for her, not for me, and not for anyone else. As the darkness grew, everyone in the field slowly went silent. Hundreds of strangers were gradually overcome by fear and awe. A group of girls to our right started talking about the Rapture. A man to our right whispered to his wife, “It’s the end of the world.”

Some folks had driven three or four hours to witness a 30-second event—and yet, as soon as it began, it was clear that everyone wanted it to be over. Nobody was having fun. All the children stood riveted to the earth in fright or burst into tears. The grown-ups looked around nervously. Obviously, we all half-expected something else to happen. What that something is (the Rapture or the Apocalypse or what) was almost beside the point. It felt like a portent, like it was pointing to something else.

Imagine you’re at a crowded beach reading in the sun or splashing in the waves, and suddenly you hear the blast of a huge trumpet come from somewhere across the sea. Everyone on the beach might have a different theory about what the trumpet means, but everyone would agree that it means something. The trumpet doesn’t want your attention: it wants you to be still and silent, attentive to whatever comes next. This horrible mood of anticipation was thick in the air on Monday at 3:30 p.m. in Lancaster, New Hampshire.

When the eclipse ended and the light returned, I found myself holding my prayer rope and whispering, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” There was a palpable sense of relief, bewilderment, and shame in our field. Everyone packed up, quietly and quickly, and hit the road. There were a few tear-stained cheeks and quite a lot of nervous smiles. Some folks tried to make small talk. I said to my wife, “No one liked it.”

Let me state for the record that I had no particular interest in the eclipse. For me, it was an excuse to take the day off and spend time with my family; I certainly wasn’t expecting article-fodder. My wife was quite excited, as was everyone else gathering on the side of the highway. And I really don’t think a single one of us left that field without a deep, nameless dread in our hearts. But how many of us would tell the local reporter hunting for a human-interest story? How many would post about it on Facebook or Instagram? How many would tell our families? How many would admit it to ourselves?

By the way, I don’t say that in judgment. I spend a lot of time thinking about religion and the “supernatural.” I’ve seen demons; I’ve witnessed miracles. But what I felt watching the eclipse was something else. It was as if Reality itself had cracked open, and we all saw something on the other side.

I’m a proud and Orthodox Christian; I could give my particular theory about the nature of that something. We all had our expectations, and we were all wrong. The question is, what do we do now? Do we bury that feeling and rewrite the memory to seem more cheerful? Or do we go looking for that something whose darkness outshone the sun?

This is one of those moments in life where the mundane world peels away like old wallpaper. We realize that our existence doesn’t work the way we thought it did. The first time you hold your firstborn is one example. The first time you watch someone die is another. I believe we’ll be judged on how we respond to such moments. It’s not so much about finding the right answers. It’s about having the courage to ask the right questions—the ones that are (literally) staring us in the face. Those who seek will find, but how many of us seek?

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Culture

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Eclipse

As in all things, there are right ways and wrong ways to enjoy epochal astronomical events.

For as long as I can remember I have identified fiercely with Sherlock Holmes during that memorable exchange in A Study in Scarlet when Dr. Watson laments the fact that “any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun.” To which Holmes, indifferent or perhaps even perversely amused by Watson’s outrage, replies:

What the deuce is it to me? . . . . You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.

This insouciant dismissal has more or less governed my attitude toward the forthcoming eclipse, of which so much has been made these last few weeks. While I cannot pretend to anything like Holmes’s authority in the areas of blood stains or the varieties of tobacco ash, I do like to think that in addition to the ordinary rudiments of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, I have stuffed my head with all manner of comparatively useless information—the contents of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Pope’s two editions of Shakespeare, the manner in which socialist clergymen decorated Anglo-Catholic parishes of the 1920s, the best recordings of individual symphonies among Karajan’s four interminable Beethoven cycles—and that all of this has served me much better than being able to mouth along with a series of half-remembered abstractions about “the solar system.”

There is something almost repulsive about the fact that the average American teenager has heard of black holes or even (shudders) “dark matter” but cannot tell you the names of the birds and flowers and trees which he sees every day, or would if he ever looked up from his phone. When I hear people asking me my “plans” for the eclipse, I am put in mind of a girl I remember from college who once said, more or less unprompted: “I love space, like, more than my family.”

But I wonder. In ancient times eclipses were treated with extraordinary seriousness. Herodotus tells us that Thales’ prediction of an eclipse brought peace between the Medians and Lydians. In St. Matthew’s Gospel we learn that at the end of time “after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.” Somewhat more recently, the old ’60s counterculture, which, at a hundred unacknowledged points of intersection, shared many of the priorities of today’s social conservatism, was very interested in this sort of thing. If we were half as human as our parents or grandparents we would all be queuing up our quadraphonic recordings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon or even Atom Heart Mother. (Speaking only for myself, I made absolutely sure to go to confession on Saturday afternoon.)

This raises a fascinating question in which I have long been interested—do young people listen to Pink Floyd? As far as I can tell classic rock is for old people, which for all practical purposes, includes those of us in our early to mid 30s. Never mind the eccentrics who argue about how early the matrix numbers on their 1973 pressings have to be for a Rega Planar 6s pumped through Dahlquist DQ-12s to reveal the inestimable depths of “On the Run.” If you have ever even held a CD of the work in question, my guess is that you are probably a weekly bowler with a 150-plus average and a receding hairline.

But this is getting very far afield. What I had hoped to say is that, prescinding from confessional or other prejudices, we can all surely agree on the following “normative” means of observing this special event:

1. Find special music. This may be the aforementioned Pink Floyd or it may be Richard Strauss. (Here the early swashbuckling tone poems will likely be of less avail than the late wintry stuff, especially the Metamorphosen and the Oboe Concerto, the noblest composition of the whole of the last century.) Or maybe neither speaks to you and you choose to observe the occasion by listening to whatever “Vampire Weekend” is. Whatever the music ends up being, make sure you play it as loudly as possible.

2. Make sure you are in the right physical location. I should be reasonable here. One supposes that very few readers of this esteemed publication will find themselves at Rome or Jerusalem, or even Pompeii, for this astronomical event. But at the very least one should not be at a strip mall or inside a casual dining chain. There are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamed of in our philosophy, and far, far more than can be imagined at Potbelly. Find the nearest grove—any clump of trees will do in a pinch—at which you can imagine the presence of dryads and wait there for the obscuring of light.

3. Have the proper disposition. What do I mean by this? In one of his early odes, Holderlin heaped scorn on his contemporaries for their inability to combine classical republicanism with what he considered authentic Greek metaphysics:

Cold hypocrites, of gods you do not dare to speak!
You’re rational! In Helios you don’t believe,
Nor in the Thunderer or the Sea-God;
Dead is our Earth, so what fool would thank her?

If you think of the eclipse in purely materialist terms—as a natural event involving a satellite some 238,900 miles distant from the planet we happen to inhabit and an even more remote body of plasma—you will find yourself missing the point entirely. And that would be a much sadder thing than finding oneself in the position of Holmes, who was “ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.”

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Culture

Diamond Dallas Page Tells America to Breathe

The retired professional wrestler preaches a positive message of person-centered self-improvement.

With his grit and populist charisma, legendary wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, aka DDP, rose to the height of pop culture in 1997–1999 as he brought the wrestling world to the broader public with crossover appearances and matches with Hulk Hogan, the NBA star Karl Malone, and the Tonight Show host Jay Leno. Since then, he has maintained his influence in the culture by successfully reinventing himself as a motivational speaker and health guru through his work in his eponymous yoga program.

However much confidence he has mustered to achieve these successes has not allowed him to lose touch with his servant-leader attitude. He is infectiously down-to-earth yet confident. I recently sat down with him for an in-depth discussion to learn about the secret to his success in business and what America can learn from it.

As so many raised in the latter 20th-century America, Dallas Page was a victim of a broken home. He also suffered from conditions diagnosed as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. Early on he had visions of being a professional athlete but was hit by a car in 7th grade—shattering his knee and his sports plans. Nevertheless, this crisis of people telling him he cannot do something sparked in him a lifelong mindset of resilience and positivity that has influenced millions around the world.

Today, DDP’s main enterprise, DDP Yoga, has worked to bring longevity-increasing exercises, discipline, and mindset training to people not traditionally interested in yoga—particularly men. His videos of people’s transformations and interviews on programs like the Joe Rogan Experience have gone viral to millions of people looking for solutions in our negative culture and toxic dietary landscape. From his wrestling mentor Jake the Snake’s dramatic turnaround from addiction to the late Scott Hall’s journey to sobriety and, more recently, the retired boxer Butterbean’s health transformation, DDP has become a name associated with a never-give-up, positive spirit of healing.

DDP credits Napoleon Hill, the early 20th century positive thinking and hard work advocate, as an influence in his personal philosophy. Hill, the author of the popular book Think and Grow Rich, had a big impact on another WWE Hall of Famer: The former president Donald Trump, who credits the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale, a student of Hill’s philosophy, with shaping his own worldview.

DDP has no interest in national politics. “Who owns the government? Big business. We don’t have government anymore, bro,” he said.

Keeping with his populist perspective, he continued, “People say, ‘Your vote matters.’ No, it doesn’t.” When it comes to voting, he says he is the first guy to vote in local elections where change can happen. As for the 2024 presidential election: “They both suck…but Trump did do some pretty cool things.”

Surveying the irreparability of politics, DDP quickly pivots back to the mind. “You can think you’re in control but, constantly, each one of us is hit with one adversity after the other, most of which we cannot control. The only thing we have control over is our mind.”

Whatever one thinks of concepts like “the power of positivity” or figures like Hill and Peale, there is no denying that there is something quintessentially American about the message DDP preaches. His American dream story of overcoming poverty with hard work and beating serial health and career setbacks with discipline and visualization harkens back to an earlier time in America wherein the culture celebrated underdogs overcoming challenges. This is in sharp contrast to today’s dominant culture of victimism in which people are encouraged to wallow in trauma and identify as oppressed in order to gain social status.

Asked how America can get rid of its victim mentality in the workplace and the culture, DDP says, “The first thing you need to do is learn how to breathe…. When you own your breath, it’s like having a superpower. When you start to really own your discipline—those are two superpowers I have.” Rather than indulgence, he says, “Discipline is the truest form of self-love.”

Whether you are in a car accident, giving birth, or reading an emotionally manipulative piece of propaganda from the news media, DDP says it’s the same physiological response. “If you start to get anxiety, I will guarantee you you are not breathing,” he predicts. “When you’re deep breathing, you are literally sending neural hormones to inhibit the stress producing hormones which triggers a relaxation response in the body.”

Asked what his state of the union speech would be to the American people, DDP rejects grand impositions of policies and brings it back to the person. He calls the public to take sovereignty over their minds and bodies: exercise, eat real foods (he eats organic and avoids seed oils), and practice daily deep breathing. It is reminiscent of President Kennedy’s calls for fitness.

Amid the chaos of foreign affairs, border invasions, inflation, crime, and social distrust, it is easy to want a hero to come save us from it all. That desire is the seductive recurrence of politics, especially presidential elections. However, DDP’s message cuts against that delusion. For years, he called himself the “people’s champion”; the message he is championing now at nearly 68 while standing on one foot with his other held above his shoulder is this: no one is coming to save you. Take your thoughts captive. Your emotions, including pride and fear, are not you. These too shall pass. Eat real foods and see your emotions improve. Stay out of debt. Exercise, even if you are trapped in bed or a chair, even if you are severely ill or obese. Breathe deeply when bombarded by a media owned by hostile interests. Find a way to serve others and watch how much more abundant life becomes in the process.

So many negative thoughts invade our minds daily when we challenge ourselves. When DDP approached the podium of the WWE Hall of Fame as an inductee surrounded by his daughters, he thought, “The only voice I will allow to come in: This is going to be the greatest thing I’ve done in professional wrestling.”

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Culture

The Tailspin of American Boys and Men

American males are turning off, and tuning and dropping out.

Many boys and men are struggling to flourish in their roles as sons, students, employees, and fathers, and to achieve the sense of purpose that comes from being rooted within marriages, communities, churches, and country.

Much of the literature on the boy crisis contains impressive, even essential social science work that clearly demonstrates that boys and men are falling behind. My recent essay, “Men Without Meaning: The Harmful Effects of Expressive Individualism,” is an attempt to distill this literature and explore how expressive individualism—the notion that the inner self is the true self and is radically autonomous—plays a central role in the boy crisis.

The ascendance of expressive individualism, which can be traced to the Sexual Revolution, is partially responsible for the breakdown of marriage and has gained a foothold in religious institutions. Among others, it combines the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who divorced sex from gender; psychologist Sigmund Freud, who elevated human sexuality as central to identity; and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is innocent and corrupted by society.

Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray’s The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It is the go-to text for understanding the dad deprivation that is the primary cause of the boy crisis. It lays out how a dad’s presence can positively impact a child’s scholastic achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, and development of trust and empathy. Likewise, it shows that the absence of a father’s presence increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, commit suicide, use drugs, become homeless, end up in poverty, develop hypertension, and be exposed to or commit bullying and violent crime, including rape.

Fathers, like mothers, contribute in unique and indispensable ways to the raising of children. One example is through play, which helps children develop, learn the limits of their bodies, and properly channel aggression. According to, “Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship: Mechanisms and Developmental Outcomes”: “Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men, primarily through physical play.”

Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers.

Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.

Expressive individualism has also changed the way we think about marriage, making it more fragile. Marriage is no longer geared towards the character formation of each spouse and to providing a loving environment for the raising of children, but rather is now primarily viewed as a means to achieving emotional satisfaction and personal improvement. Rather than both husband and wife sacrificing for the good of the marriage, each spouse aims separately to achieve his and her personal subjective idea of “self-actualization.”

As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, articulates in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, marriages based on expressive individualism involve:

Growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs…[M]arriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.

Over twenty years ago, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers drew attention to the fact that boys were falling behind in school. Some of the precipitating causes were newer, such as zero tolerance policies, the decline of free play and recess, and the rise of a self-esteem centered safety culture. Others reach back much further. Our education system, in many ways, is not designed for boys. Simultaneous shifts in our economy have lengthened the time spent in school and raised the stakes of getting an education.

On average, the energy level of boys makes it difficult for them to sit still for long periods. They can be unorganized and frustrate their teachers, who factor behavior into grading. Perhaps some teachers, mired in expressive individualism, expect girls and boys to behave the same, as “boys on average receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors.” In truth, as senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute Richard Reeves writes: “The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.”

The progressive style of education, relying on Rousseau’s romantic vision and promulgated by reformers like John Dewey and others, contends that theoretically children should direct their own educational trajectory. This has been particularly harmful to boys. Approximately since the 1970s, as Sommers writes, children have been treated as their “own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.”

Changes in education were greeted with changes in the economy itself. Precipitated by free trade and automation, America is now a global knowledge economy. Overall, those most negatively impacted have been men without much education. According to “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men”: “Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent, while real hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis details how over seven million men ages 25-55 have checked out of the workforce. Such men often receive disability payments or are living with a relative who serves as a source of income.

These disengaged men are spending a great deal of time in front of screens that promote disembodied expressive individualism. This includes an average of 5.5 hours of movies and TV per day, not to mention the rise of exceedingly popular online pornography. Some estimate that Gen Z boys are being exposed to porn at the average age of nine. Studies indicate that pornography rewires the brain, causing boys and men to desire more and more novel content rather than a relationship with a real woman. Male employment is often tied to family structure, and marriage rates for low-income men have declined, demonstrating the unique causes and reinforcing mechanisms of the boy crisis.

The devastating impact of the opioid epidemic is another factor. Some estimate that it could account for 43 percent of the decline in male labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. During that time, the number of overdoses quadrupled, and men made up almost 70 percent of such deaths. The incarceration rate has also risen, and years behind bars reduce the likelihood of finding employment.

These phenomena are not equally distributed across the country, and some have hypothesized that increased deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, overdose, etc.) “among less-educated middle-age Americans might be rooted in ‘a long-term process of decline, or of cumulative deprivation, rooted in the steady deterioration in job opportunities for people with low education.’” The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide.

All this has left many men without purpose and hope. The boy crisis both reflects and contributes to the broader crisis of America and the West, in no small measure driven by the expressive individualism that has left men and women disconnected from relationships, human nature, and objective truth. America and the West are running on the fumes of our heritage, no longer able to articulate our principles or the gratitude we owe the past.

For much of history, human beings have been most willing to give the last measure of their devotion for what truly provides identity: God, family, and country. Each of these encompasses the individual, pulling him out of himself and toward a life of sacrifice, responsibility, and devotion. Expressive individualism is a stark deviation from the traditional understanding that freedom and virtue are intertwined. As articulated in the classic work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life:

influenced by modern psychological ideals, to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community.

Solutions to the boy crisis must counteract such messaging and ideas, putting forth a substantive view of marriage, revitalizing religious institutions, and honoring fatherhood and male mentorship as fundamental sources of meaning. They will reestablish a proper understanding of the human person and the ties between happiness and virtue. Sadly, there are no silver bullet solutions to these issues. The devastation is far-reaching and multitudinous, and the work we have to do matches the price we have paid.

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Culture

Do Large Families Hold the Key to Reversing Birth Rates?

In her new book Hannah’s Children, economist Catherine Pakaluk says yes.

We are no longer a nation that thinks much about posterity. Which is why the words of “Hannah,” the pseudonym for a Jewish mother of seven whose story animates Catherine Pakaluk’s new book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, are so striking: “Children are this key to infinity,” she says. The decision to have a child is not about personal fulfillment, nor is it a sacrifice that comes with a lot of pity points. It is a choice to participate in the eternal story of one’s family line.

This is not the modern American approach to childbearing. But with birth rates plummeting well below the 2.1 required to replace our native population, Pakaluk, an economics professor at the Catholic University of America and a mother of eight children herself, wants to know if we can learn something by looking at the women who do still choose to have children, and lots of them.

The reasons for the “birth dearth” are extensive as they are well known, and Pakaluk is not shy to name them. A combination of the marketization of the household economy, in which women now compete with men in public for jobs and prestige rather than collaborating with them in private, as well as the birth control Pill and it’s attendant new normal of fertility “switched off,” make women who choose to have two or more children an anomaly. Pakaluk explains the birth dearth in economic terms as “a decrease in the demand for children, followed by an increase in the opportunity cost of having children.” Social Security and Medicare mean the benefits of children in later life are largely unnecessary; public funds will pay someone to do every job your son or grandson might have once done. Meanwhile, the status costs to women make having children much more expensive than previously.

Most agree that the factors pulling women away from childbearing are strong. But there is much disagreement over how, and indeed whether, these incentives may be reversed. Pakaluk argues the answer may be found in studying the cohort at the opposite end of the spectrum: mothers of five or more children, particularly those who chose that large number, rather than arriving there by accident. Hannah’s Children is a synthesis of Pakaluk’s study of exactly that cohort. Interviewing 55 women from diverse regions of the United States, income levels, and career paths, she attempts to understand qualitatively the drive which leads some mothers to have large families despite numerous economic and social incentives otherwise.

What she finds is exactly what you might expect. While they are unusual, Pakaluk’s women are not irrational. Each describes making her choice to have subsequent children by weighing costs and benefits, just like any other woman. What is different about these women is that their view of costs and benefits is far broader than the average American female of childbearing age. Where most women considering children weigh loss of prestige and salary against sleepless nights and spit up, the large-family mothers weigh the same losses against a child’s eternal value, the priceless joy of watching each new person develop, the opportunity for the mother to grow in spiritual maturity, and a sense that identity is found not in preserving the self, but in laying it down for others. The calculus for having children is entirely different for these women.

For most, this difference is due to religion, mostly Christianity, Judaism, and Mormonism. But Pakaluk is keen to note the difference between irrational choices and super-rational ones: To be motivated by religion is not to reject reason, but to account for purposes outside its scope.

These super-rational motivations make high fertility rates impossible to replicate through government subsidies, in Pakaluk’s estimation. As her own study shows, the grit and determination required to overcome the social and economic pressures against high fertility can only come from a determination which far outweighs budgeting spreadsheets, five-year plans, and even, Pakaluk acknowledges, the entire trajectory of female education as it currently exists in the United States. (“Can we incentivize moving away from careers and interests we’ve prepared women to fulfill from their earliest school days?”) Pakaluk describes motherhood of large families as a “path of profound self-denial lasting at least two decades,” and concludes, reasonably, “That such a costly choice could be induced directly though any external benefit seems fantastical.” You cannot turn a one-child mom into a seven-child mom through simple subsidies, as China is quickly discovering.

The state cannot save the American family, she concludes, and instead should give religion a freer reign to try: “Without religious formation that fosters biblical values, low birth rate trends will not be reversed.” True. But why not both religion and subsidy?

It is here that the argument from women with five or more children becomes less useful. The women defying the birth dearth are women of extraordinary determination, almost all motivated by their deeply held religious beliefs. They are remarkable outliers, and no less so even to a reader like me, who has known several of the same in my personal life. This makes their stories captivating to behold, as Pakaluk masterfully weaves together narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions from that analysis. But it also makes them something very different from the majority of mothers in the United States today.

The best selling personal finance book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki attempted a similar feat to Pakaluk’s. Kiyosaki contrasted the lives and choices of the upper crust of earners, the “Rich Dad,” with those of the typical middle-class or lower income earner, or “Poor Dad.” Kiyosaki argues that to become a Rich Dad, men need to mimic certain Rich Dad behaviors. The idea is enticing—Kiyosaki’s book is a bestseller in numerous languages—but how many Americans have become wealthy by the same measures is another question. It seems probable that those who do are the same who would have succeeded regardless. The same question may be posed for the birth dearth: The women with whom Pakaluk’s book resonates are likely also predisposed to have large families.

At the statistical level, it doesn’t much matter what the outliers do. As demographer Lyman Stone has pointed out, the number of these women having large families is so small that even were it to double, the total fertility rate of the United States would hardly budge. A much more effective needle to move would be from two children to three children. This is a sizable cohort: When doubled, it would put the United States total fertility just under replacement rates, a massive improvement from our current 1.64 total fertility rate. Notably, for several of Pakaluk’s interview subjects, the jump from two children to three children was the hardest; somewhere after three, the fixed opportunity costs for having children seemed to give way to smaller, more variable costs. This is because a variation on one’s former lifestyle may be maintained with two kids in a way it cannot with three or four; once the illusions of retaining status and editorial control have been stripped away, another child is no great change. It would stand to reason, then, that getting two child mothers to become three child mothers, a goal much more within the reach of a subsidy, would go much further for national birth rates. It might even spur some three-child parents into four-child parents in the process.

Despite her pessimism toward pronatalist policy measures, however, Pakaluk herself hints at a different, insightful solution to low birth rates in her discussion of why children are no longer economically valuable. “Modern old-age programs that do not tie benefits to childbearing suppress the economic value of children to the household,” Pakaluk writes. Here is a solution within a problem, and Pakaluk sees it. Though she does not elaborate, one can imagine Social Security payments stair stepped according to family size, with married parents to large families at the top, as just one possibility. To use the arm of the state to reinforce the natural connection between children and security in old age, rather than severing natural family relations as our policy has for decades, would strike a blow not just to low birth rates, but to the politicized household and atomization, too.

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If you have not seen the bloodcurdling video from Trinity College, Cambridge, you should. Everyone should, as it is rare to have a clear glimpse of who the real enemies within our civilization are. An animal in a GBP1000 Mulberry Cara backpack sprayed and then slashed a 1914 painting of Lord Arthur Balfour by the Anglo-Hungarian artist Philip Alexius de Laszlo. Balfour was the author of the Balfour declaration, which established a national home for the Jewish people in what was then all referred to as Palestine. The “protest,” if one can call it that, was organized by a certain Palestinian Action. The painting is permanently destroyed. There have been no arrests so far.

I have written before about how iconoclasm and vandalism makes me murderously furious in a way I cannot explain rationally, like the Ancient Mariner with clasped hands unable to express himself. I am a quasi-misanthrope by disposition, and I would save one timeless artwork over a thousand lives by choice. But this goes against pure questions of aesthetics and attitudes. This is a crime against patrimony, and by definition, a crime against civilization itself. Timeless paintings and statues are gifts to society for posterity. Everyone has a right to them, and it is in no single individual’s authority or duty to damage, much less destroy them and thereby act for everyone else.

It is also a crime against the most conservative virtue of all, order. And finally, it is a glimpse of who has decided to be within the confines of civility and who hasn’t. If you’re not civil, by definition, you’re not civilized. The strict hierarchy is important and has been diluted in the last hundred years. I despise all iconoclasts regardless of their pricey bags or social status. But it is notable that usually both patricians and the plebs are more deferential to patrimony. This, a cancerous movement that started in 2020 and spread across the Anglosphere, is a typically middle-class disease. And there is only one way to treat a cancerous growth: amputation.

Nothing but counter-force will stop or reverse this. Humans are, at their core, animals, responding to positive or negative incentives. Order, therefore, is fragile, without constant enforcing mechanisms. And when the state is too weak to enforce order, it creates conditions for private violence, or revolutionary chaos and dictatorial ordering. A common liberal framing of disorder is to point out at the material aspect of the norm destroyed—it’s just a statue toppled or it’s just some groceries looted. This is at best flawed, and at worst complicit. If these behaviors aren’t tackled, then we will have no treasure left for the public. Humanity will be relegated to the stone age.

One cannot reason with feral animals. Animalistic behavior helps no cause. It is pure hatred and envy towards something objectively superior. Inhuman behavior also should not be able to wear the cloak of human rights.

As Balfour himself once wrote in The Foundations of Belief,

We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish.

It is not illegitimate for elected authorities to restore order through state violence against a vocal and disruptive minority if the majority of the people agrees to that, in principle. But the British state, its guardians, the political parties, the elected representatives, the patrician class, the jurors, justices of peace, the constabulary, and the law enforcement have shown themselves cowering and weak.

This is a revolutionary condition. If one side can use force to dominate and shape the public choices and directions of a former great power, other groups and people too. If the mechanisms of the state can crack down on one side, and turn a blind eye to the other, then the state itself is partisan and complicit in anything that comes after, from counter-violence to color revolutions. It has been abundantly clear that the responsibility for disorder lies with the British police, the politicians, and the justices. No one else is responsible. If they are unable to reverse the rot, perhaps counter-violence and vigilantism will be more effective. It is, after all, not difficult to identify individuals who destroy art.

The post Inside the United Kingdom Disaster appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture

France’s Abortion Move Is Characteristic—and a Warning to the U.S.

The conflict between democracy and competing sets of morality is a story for our times.

On International Women’s Day, it is the tradition of modern women to grumble about men. Permit me to join them: My grievance is with the majority male French Parliament, which on Monday voted overwhelmingly to enshrine a right to abortion in the French constitution.

France’s move is mostly symbolic: The country prides itself on being ahead of the curve of liberal democracy, meaning the legal freedom to kill the unborn is unlikely to be curtailed in French law regardless of what the constitution says. But after the United States Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, France’s President Emmanuel Macron promised to provide constitutional protection for infanticide too. The French parliament kept that promise Monday afternoon, making it the first nation to create a right to abortion in its foundational document. The streets of Paris ran purple with women and men celebrating their freedom to kill.

The streets of Paris, of course, are used to this kind of scene. It has not been many years since 1789 that they have not been filled with some manner of demonstration in the name of liberation: To list even the names of these frequent protests would be an essay in itself. The French people’s demand for freedom, stretching back to the Revolution era cry for liberte, has resulted in a lot of dead brothers, born and unborn.

For those Americans watching, this is not just political theater. France moved to make abortion sovereign this week precisely because the United States Supreme Court has said that it is not, at least not according to the U.S. Constitution as currently written. This is the contagious nature of rebellions which so concerned the American founders. Considering their own revolt would inspire the events leading to the Reign of Terror in France, which in turn spurred the 13-year bloodbath in Saint-Domingue, as Haitian slaves overthrew their French colonial masters, it was a reasonable concern.

But perhaps it is the particular nature of France to be cataclysmic. It is there that the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment have their origin and most poignant picture, and many of the same ideals are responsible for our current inverted mores on the question of infanticide. Revolutionary France saw the “rights of men” through the lens of immediacy—the rights of these men, often paid for with the lives of others—in a sense the American colonists, with their concern for posterity, did not. Similarly, the rights of women today have been underwritten by the blood sacrifice of the unborn. Of all the nations to make abortion a constitutional right first, it is not surprising that it was France.

While the Enlightenment heavily influenced our own nation’s founding, at least one French observer noticed the early Americans’ character was a happy antidote to many of democracy’s ills. As late as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville described men and women still interacting under what Scott Yenor recently termed a “ soft patriarchy,” either out of habit or preference, despite several decades under a democratic regime. Revolutionary France, meanwhile, downgraded the penalty for abortion and granted women immunity for the crime almost immediately—a small but significant shift at a time when the punishment for abortion was still commonly death. A simple comparison of the American and French Revolutions illustrates the wide difference between the two peoples in the 18th century, which persisted at least into the 19th.

That difference has shrunk substantially in the last century. Our soft patriarchy has given way to a near total gynocracy, as the modern American republic attempts to realize the French ideal of interchangeable men and women. Essential to this change, of course, is the removal of the burden of childbearing, which naturally falls asymmetrically on women.

Also essential is the use of democratic tactics to do so. Outsourcing law from the legislator, who in theory spends his day contemplating the best forms of government, to a popular vote, where voters might think for a few hours at most before deciding, will almost always have the effect of creating worse legislation. There are few differences between legislators and voters today anyhow, but that just proves the point: The age-old anxiety that the tendency of democracy is away from thoughtful and intelligent discourse and toward demagoguery.

Under this interpretation, the American abortion mob has ruled through ballot measures. Since June 2022, six states have voted to amend their constitutions regarding abortion. In every case, from California to Ohio, the side of the proposal favoring decreased regulation of abortion won. Seeing these victories, another 13 states, including Republican bastions like Florida and South Dakota, will attempt to do the same before the year is out. The same results now seem practically guaranteed in every state where the constitution may be amended by ballot proposal. As Ohio showed, attempting to revoke direct democracy after an abortion proposal has made it onto the ballot just makes you lose harder. The slope is, in fact, slippery.

Only a handful of states like Tennessee, which grants the privilege of constitutional amendment only to elected representatives, are immune to such challenges going forward. That is, only those states in which republican elements are favored over direct democracy may stop the bleeding.

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