There is, as you might expect, a lot of dooming and glooming going on right now. Conservatives are a bit shell-shocked: this was not the result we hoped for or expected. There is a sense that this was our last chance and whether you want to assign our defeat to cheating or to failure, the bottom line is a sense of hopelessness: that we’ve shot our bolt and now our nation – our civilization – will die. Well, I’ve got some news for you on that score: our civilization will not die as the aftermath of this failure. So, you can feel better about that.

Now, for the bad news: our civilization is already dead. Been dead for a while. Our country has been dead for just as long.

When Alaric and his Visigoths entered Rome in 410 is wasn’t the end of Rome. It just told everyone what was obvious to the perceptive for a long while: Rome was dead. And, man, was it ever dead. It is estimated that at the time Rome’s population was still about a million people and Alaric’s army probably numbered in the tens of thousands. So, the Romans could have put up a fight but simply chose not to – deciding that, in the end, it was safer to be sacked than to fight for hearth and home. The city which had once defied Hannibal after Cannae simply gave up and that showed that whatever Rome had once been, it was long dead by 410. If you had to pinpoint a time when it died, it would probably be about the time Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all free adult males of the Empire – he did this for tax purposes because certain taxes only applied to Roman citizens. This indicated that Roman citizenship was fundamentally meaningless – and so Rome was meaningless: just a collection of people held together by force of habit and doomed to fall to pieces at the first serious outside pressure.

Sound a bit familiar?

If I had to identify the time when our civilization threw in the towel I would say it was when the French – with our approval – gave up in Algeria. I’ve talked about this before but to really nail it down, let us note that prior to that surrender, the West had fought two world wars – at a cost of about 80 million deaths – to uphold the principle that you can’t shoot your way to power and wealth. The basic sin of Kaiser and Fuhrer was this: a determination to use unlimited force to obtain national ends. Hitler was, of course, vastly worse in degree from the Kaiser but no worse in kind.

Whole forests have been used to print the books trying to explain – or explain away – the causes of WWI but the bottom line is that no matter what else was going on; no matter what stresses and fears were operational in that terrible July of 1914, Germany had absolutely zero cause to go to war against France, Belgium and Luxembourg. None of those nations has offered the slightest threat to Germany. France hadn’t even offered to come to Russia’s aid in her looming war with Germany’s ally, Austria. But Germany attacked, determined that unlimited use of force would be to Germany’s benefit. Britain and, much later, America voluntarily joined in the effort to thwart that idea. And, it worked: Germany was defeated. But didn’t learn her lesson. And so Hitler tried again, this time willing to be even more brutal in the application of unlimited force than the Kaiser ever was. And at very high cost the United States and our allies thwarted this ambition.

And it was a good thing and a fine principle and a principle, moreover, which was not only successful, but morally correct. Whatever had happened before in the long trail of human crimes – all the conquest and colonization and other uses of force to gain wealth and power – the West had now risen above that and set the new standard. The good standard: the assertion that civilization would conduct itself properly. That if there were differences, they would be composed by fair negotiation between the parties and all civilized people would unite against anyone who sought to change the situation by force. It was a human peak and it should have ushered in a Golden Age. But it didn’t.

Pretty much as soon as the guns of WWII fell silent, other people took up the guns and started trying to shoot their way into power and wealth and this great Western Civilization which had just spent so much just to stop that…wavered. It hemmed and hawed. It made, at best, half-hearted efforts against the violent barbarians and tried to accommodate them rather than destroy them.

Oh, lots of reasons were advanced to explain why we couldn’t or shouldn’t destroy these new purveyors of violence, but none of them stood up to any sort of scrutiny. It was all a mere coward’s dodge: a simple unwillingness to fight. And that, to me, was why Algeria was such a pivotal event. Sure, the French could be (and often were) amazing SOBs in how they treated the Algerians. There were genuine grievances to be addressed…but it was also France doing this. It wasn’t Nazis or other brutes – the French were civilized and even when they were doing their worst, voices in France were calling for different ways of doing it. At the end of the day, a free press and a democratic system of governance would ensure that the Algerians got a fair shake. And as proof of this – proof that France was trying – tens of thousands of Algerians volunteered to fight to keep Algeria French. Some estimates are that more Algerians fought for France than for independence. But they and everyone else were tossed aside – and power was transferred not to civilized Algerians who simply wanted fair treatment, but to beasts in human skin who’s main tactics were the torture of Algerians who didn’t support them and the murder of French civilians in their cafes and shopping centers. That France – the very center of Western Civilization – signed off on this showed that the Civilization was, if not dead, in its death throes.

In and among all of this, whispering poison into the soul of the West, were the Marxists. You can call them what you like as they went by many names but the bottom line was that curled at the breast of the West were her own sons and daughters who had taken up the Marxist philosophy and come, in various ways, to despise their own civilization. They harped upon its flaws – real and imagined – and sought to demoralize and disarm the people of the West, claiming that if we could just get rid of it – get rid of civilization – something better could take its place. But all they were and remain are barbarians – people who shook off the West didn’t have another civilization; they just had a new barbarism and one worse than any others. Worse because not only were they hate-filled vandals, but because in pursuit of their ideology they proposed to abolish the two things which lay at the foundation of any decent civilization: the worth of the individual and the primacy of the family. They, in their various ways, wished to reduce the human to a mass of atoms with no faith or loyalty – only appetites to be filled and with the filling determined by a person’s place in an ever changing, but rigidly enforced, social hierarchy.

As we surrendered again and again to the armed barbarians we became, as a people, demoralized: blood was expended as was treasure but no victory was won, no destruction of the wicked. In fact, usually the wicked emerged triumphant and often lauded by those supposedly in charge of sustaining our civilization. The thought crept into the public mind that all effort is pointless, that patriotism is folly, that the family is oppressive and that justice never triumphs. All became a crazed desire for more goods and comfort…a frenzied pursuit of toys and sex combined with public posing about morality.

It took from 1960 to 1970 to accomplish this – since then, what good we have has been mere leftovers from what was built before. And it is getting rather tattered and threadbare, isn’t it? Kinda like it is dead, or at least very near death.

Can it be fixed?

I think so. But not by trying to uphold what is. We’ve got the hollow shell and what occupies the shell is overtly hostile both to the old, dead civilization as well as any attempt to revive civilization. I think a recent poll of British youth indicated that less than 1 in 5 have a positive view of Churchill. The slayer of Nazis is felt to have been an old racist that nobody can possibly like. So, no, we’re not going to just win an election and, presto, party like its 1949. It will take much more than that. It will take a Revolution.

The good news is that as bad as things are, the basic structure of the old system is intact. Especially here in the United States, our written Constitution, often only honored in the breech, still exists. It is a handhold – a lifeline. Something we can refer to and cling to as both a roadmap to what we want and an unanswerable argument in our favor (any application of the Constitution as written works in our favor). We can, that is, via Constitutional means obtain the perfectly legitimate power to impose our views on society (don’t go thinking that you can’t impose morality – all law is an imposition of morality: we’re just arguing of which morality will be imposed). But do to it will take a view-shift: it isn’t just enough to win nor is it enough, victory secured, to tinker about the edges. When we obtain power in whatever form and for however long, we must ruthlessly use that power to advance our cause to the maximum limit. We must crush our opponents and build up our allied. We must play favorites. We must become convinced that Party over Country is really Civilization over Barbarism. We are the only people who can restore civilization: everyone not on our side – witting or not – is on the side of the barbarians. We must become the miracle Army of Caesar showing up as Alaric lays siege to Rome and changes the course of history by sending the barbarians packing.

In this the only people we can count on is ourselves. The broad mass of people must be convinced to back us even when they don’t fully understand what we’re attempting. This will require tactical adjustments. Never a lie! Barbarians lie; civilized people don’t. But it does mean that if securing power requires us to go along with some particular stupid idea, then it is worth it if by so doing we gain the power and then use the power to advance our real goal: a reborn West. A civilization of educated, moral, truthful and hardworking families. A people of self reliance and uncomplaining patience in the face of adversity. A people like our grandfather’s who endured far more hardship and trial than any of us ever have.

It can be done. Mostly because barbarians, as wickedly destructive as they are, remain stupid and cowardly. They’ve only won because we surrendered to them. They will be put to flight by any army of civilized people who are wiling to stand up for themselves. The real question is: will we stand?