Most
traditionalist-minded Southerners are dead-set against voting for Hillary
Clinton for President of the [u]nited States, understanding well enough that
she would let loose more globalist, technocratic, anti-Christian forces within
Dixie and abroad.
Donald
Trump seems to sing a better song to them, one that agrees more with the ideas
they learned from their (Yankeefied) history books and that they hear on
so-called conservative talk radio. Some
of the positions he puts forward do strike a good note, but in the long run his
presidency would probably not be so helpful for the South. Let’s look at some of his talking points to
see why.
One
thing he has begun to say often is that with him as President, America will be
‘one people, under one God, saluting one American flag’.
First,
America
is not ‘one people’. This is the beguiling
myth of Hamilton, Story, Lincoln, and so on.
The true myth is that America
is a union of many distinct regional cultures:
Pacific Northwest, desert Southwest, Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, Old
Midwest/Rustbelt, New England, the South, Alaska,
Hawai’i. These were all settled by particular ethnic
groups: Scandinavians in the upper
Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin,
and Iowa), Germans in the Old Midwest, Quakers
in Pennsylvania,
etc. And among these are major
subcultures like the Cajuns, Mormons, and Mennonites.
To
the extent that Americans are one people is the result of all these regional
cultures being thrown onto the Procrustean bed of Puritan Yankee workaholic
industrialism and having their arms and legs hacked off, and being taught in
every grade level of school that this ‘American dream’ is the best ideal that
man has ever and will ever devise for his life in this world.
Donald
Trump’s vision is nothing but a continuation of this stifling of the true life
of the different regions in the [u.] S. by pressing them further into the mold
of New England: One of the main planks
in his platform is to make America
wealthy again by increasing manufacturing here in the States. Factories will perforce go up hither and
yonder, where men (and presumably women, too) will earn their daily bread.
So,
Americans will have jobs and money and stuff, as much as they could want. But this is not a healthy way for most people
to live (physically, mentally, or spiritually); it does not create conditions
for the flourishing of authentic culture; and it is certainly not in line with
the Southern tradition, where life on or near the soil and the idea of ‘enough’
(to use Wendell Berry’s word) is highly valued.
These
large corporate factories, stores, etc. also bring with them beliefs that are
at odds with the traditional Christian moorings of the South. Is she ready to trade the teachings of the
Holy Scriptures for atheistic Darwinian evolution, abortion, transgender
bathrooms, gay rights, and all the rest of the aggressively humanistic culture
that the Fortune 500 CEOs are busily spreading?
But that is what she will get if Trump’s agenda is implemented.
Which
leads us to the second point in his slogan, ‘under one God’. Whose God is he referring to here? Owing to his talk of inclusiveness with
regard to the ‘LGBTQ’ community, and his obsession with worldly riches, one
must assume that it is akin to the sentimental Jesus, the Transcendental God,
of heretics like Emerson, Oprah Winfrey, and Joel Osteen.
Is
this kind of talk really enough to win over Southern evangelicals? These are the same folks who, before the War,
used to tie into one another fairly heatedly over doctrinal questions about
child baptism and closed communion. But
now they will lay down arms and embrace Trump because of this vague little phrase? From what a great height has Southern religion
fallen!
An
Orthodox writer on God-lore (theology), Vladimir Lossky, has written,
According to a modern Russian theologian, Father
Florensky, there is no other way in which human thought may find perfect
stability save that of accepting the trinitarian antinomy. If we reject the Trinity as the sole ground
of all reality and of all thought, we are committed to a road that leads
nowhere; we end in an aporia, in folly, in the disintegration of our being, in
spiritual death. Between the Trinity and
hell there lies no other choice (The
Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Crestwood, Ny.: SVS Press, pgs.
65-6).
The
South, then, had better get this one right.
Her people need to have a long talk amongst themselves about which way
they should walk in together, about which way is the true way: Pentecostal, Baptist, Presbyterian, Orthodox,
Roman Catholic, Anglican? Creeds are not
just pointless abstractions but have very real effects when put into practice in
the world. So she needs to choose, and
choose rightly, for as Mr Lossky has said, the wrong choice will lead to
undoing.
But
this much is certain: Mr Trump’s god is
not the true God, and no Southerner should bow the knee to it.
As
for one flag, however, we quite agree.
Only, for the South, that it should not be the flag of America, bereft
of Christian symbols, but something like the flag flown by our forefathers,
which bears St Andrew the Apostle’s Cross (though the Masonic five-pointed
stars really need to be changed).
(Source: http://www.usflag.org/confederate.stars.and.bars.html,
accessed 20 Sept. 2016)
So
then, the choice of Trump or Hillary is a false choice. Both will mean decay and death for the
Southern way of life. The better choice
for the South is independence, peaceful secession. She would be better off spiritually without
Supreme Court rulings and executive orders banning prayers and Bible classes
and mandating gay marriages. She could
move closer to the ideal of symphony between Church and goverment that has
existed in Christendom since the days of St Constantine the Great.
Economically,
she could follow a ‘customs union’ model:
But what is
the way out for such non-liberal countries [e.g., traditionalist, agrarian folk
like the South--W.G.] which, due to objective circumstances, are confronted
with effective and aggressive liberal competitors [e.g., progressive,
industrial people like New England--W.G.]? This problem was especially acute
for Germany
in the 19th century, that very country which Friedrich List was called to aid.
His answer was the theory of the “autarchy of large spaces” . . . .
The concept
of the “autarchy of large spaces” implies that non-market states left in the
conditions of harsh competition with market ones should work out a model of
autonomous development which partly reproduces the technological developments
of liberal systems in the severely restrictive framework of a large-scale
“customs union.” In this case, “freedom of trade” is limited to the framework
of a strategic bloc of states integrating their political and
economic-administrative efforts in order to rapidly increase economic dynamics.
In relation to the more developed liberal countries, by contrast, a protective
customs barrier is raised based on the principles of strict protectionism.
Thus, the scope for expanding the newest economic technologies is maximally
widened while, on the other hand, this is supported by consistent political and
economic sovereignty.
Undoubtedly,
such an approach extremely discomforts the liberals of developed market states
as it exposes their strategy, reveals their aggressive undertones, and effectively
counteracts their geopolitical interference and, ultimately, their external
control over those states which the liberals seek to transform into economic
and political colonies.
Source: Alexander Dugin, http://4pt.su/en/content/modernization-without-westernization,
accessed 1 Sept. 2016
In
this type of economic system, the South could develop economically without
destroying her underlying agrarian culture, but, rather, by keeping in step
with it. Southern norms would again
shape her economic life, rather than New England
norms.
There
are a number of contemporary models that could be studied:
The
Commonwealth of Independent States
http://www.cisstat.com/eng/cis.htm
The
BRICS Bank
The
Shanghai
Cooperation Organization
Germany used it in the 19th hundredyear:
The
American constitutional ‘experiment’ of government was an artificial imposition
on the States from the start. It is time
to return to something more natural, to a healthy decentralization and
regionalism that will allow the different cultures present in the American Union to flourish. Southerners, then,
ought not to encourage their neighbors to ‘Vote Trump’, etc., but instead to
leave the Union altogether.
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