When I was a kid, my parents explained our two party system as being like two parents. The GOP was the strict father who wanted you to be self-sufficient and the Dems were the nurturing mother who looked after the unfortunate. I bought into that when I was a kid, and rhetorically it kind of soured me on socialism, welfare, etc. Who wants to have mommy take care of him forever? (Women vote lib because they want to be the mommy).
The thing is, “mommy government” is totally evil. And we don’t have male and female styles of governance today, we have two competing mommy governments. It’s ‘single mother’ government. And single moms are bad. Real bad. The #1 predictor of childhood delinquency isn’t poverty or race; it’s whether the kid has a father or not. The Dems, and by extension communists and socialists, are the overbearing mother who overprotects her kids. And in doing so destroys them. The GOP is the ghetto single mother that leaves her kid alone while she goes around slutting it up with whatever high status bastard flashes a wad of cash. Who sometimes comes home and beats her kids.
All democracy ends in single mother government, and all single mother government is evil. (Fascism is like having a very butch lesbian as your mother.) True paternal government is monarchy. Filmer goes into this in Patriarcha. If you want to really educate yourself, read the old masters and not the blog of a young reactionary who has better things to do than wax poetic. But government by father is qualitatively different from any kind of maternal government. Mommy cares about your thoughts and feelings. Daddy doesn’t. Your soul is your own, and his rules are designed to develop your agency and let you live the best life you are capable of. Not coddle you, promise you the world, and tell you that you’re a victim.
If you were raised by a good father, you know what I’m talking about. Maybe he was strict, maybe he was aloof, but when the rubber hit the road you knew that he loved you and had your back. And his love was the love that wanted you to be your own man and felt fulfilled when you achieved your independence. Early republicans used rhetoric implying that the European commons had ‘grown up’ and was ready for self-government. Which turned out to be a massive lie, or if you want to be charitable, misguided optimism. If I had to bet, Locke’s ghost is buying Filmer’s drinks every night. Now, this is a massive oversimplification but if you want the scholarly stuff you can and should crack open Filmer, and Carlyle, and Froude. Any parent and any government can be abusive, but single motherhood is categorically abusive while only a personally evil father is abusive.
I don’t know how old you are but if you’re my age your parents probably got this from Lakoff (who sided pretty strongly with the maternal government).
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Any chance you’ll do a reading list? You already have me reading the Odyssey and Beowulf. I gave up on the “Great Books” program after Mortimer Adler, et al, never questioned their blue pills and civ nationalism, afaik.
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Off the top of my head
Fiction/poetry
The Iliad + The Odyssey
Works and Days
Aeneid
Dream of the Rood
The Wanderer
The Battle of Maldon
Beowulf
Le Mort D’Arthur
The Divine Comedy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales
Don Quixote
Dr. Faustus (Marlowe)
Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, The Tempest
Paradise Lost
In Memoriam (Tennyson)
Dubliners and/or Ulysses, if you can stomach it
The Waste Land
Cantos (Pound)
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
Collected H.P. Lovecraft
The Lord of the Rings
Conan the Barbarian
The Once and Future King
Dune
Wyst: Alastor 1716
Blood Meridian
Be warned that much of the later modernist/postmodernist stuff, especially fantasy and scifi, has little artistic merit but needs to be read to understand the culture and fantasies of reaction against it. I can’t say I recommend William Burroughs, but if you want to know what phags and the Enemy dream about…
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Thank you!
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I went through a huge David Foster Wallace kick when I was younger, did you ever read anything by him?
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