Winning the Demographic War and the Culture War

There is no better outcome that the Democrats could have hoped for than the demographic despair that has overtaken some sections of the conservative movement. While the Republican establishment prepares to accept Obama as the new FDR, the grass roots feels alienated and willing to write off the whole country.

Demographics is a serious issue, but it's not a done deal either. Countries are not static. America was created because a large number of Europeans moved to a place that had formerly been populated by the descendants of Siberian refugees crossing over the Bering Strait. I have often said that demographics kind is destiny, but it's a mathematical destiny. Change the numbers and you change the destiny.

Taking back America demographically is a matter of having enough children within a cultural structure that passes down the values of adults to the children, while focusing on limiting immigration as much as possible. This isn't an impossible task.

The Amish population doubles every 20 years and they retain the majority of their children within their communities despite the obvious appeals of the outside world. There are 250,000 Amish in the United States and Canada now. By 2040 there will be over a million of them.

Utah has the highest fertility rate in the country and 9 out of 10 children are born to married couples. The Mormon Church is slowing down its expansion, and is having some retention and birth rate issues, perhaps due to its liberalization and growing investment in overseas missionary work, but its numbers are still a reminder of what is possible.

Demographics can be deceptive, because what we are really talking about are the economic and cultural factors that dissuade large family sizes and that alienate children from the values of their ancestors. What we are really talking about is a clash between progressives and traditionalists.

As an Orthodox Jew, I represent a group that is at the front lines of the clash. In the last century and a half, Jewish progressives have done everything possible to destroy Jewish religion, values and even nationhood. For half that time they were enormously successful, wreaking havoc across entire communities, using state power to force parents into their own schools, and building a literary and cultural infrastructure aimed at ridiculing and destroying traditional values.

They are still at it today, and their tactics and propaganda are as bad as they ever were, but they also losing. While the progressives embrace the culture of abortion and gay rights, the traditionalists have children. Within a decade, a majority of New York Jews will be traditionalist and the impact of that is already being felt in elections. The progressives have ramped up their usual hate campaigns against Orthodox Jews, which is why you see so many negative stories in the media, but the demographics of their progressive culture doom them to extinction.

This same outcome would have taken place nationally in the clash between American traditionalists and progressives, if not for the ace in the hole of immigration. And yet immigration is only half the picture. The bigger half of the picture is culture.

Would the Amish be who they are if in between plow breaks they were watching Reality TV and getting lessons on liberal values? Instead the Amish segregated themselves from the culture and have thrived because of it. And that can be done without completely abandoning technology as a whole.

Orthodox Jews built a cultural infrastructure to convey their values to our children while cutting them off, as much as possible, from the cultural programming of progressives. The largest expense of Orthodox Jewish parents and the community as a whole is on the infrastructure of private schools that teach traditional values to their children. An Orthodox Jewish community is defined by its schools and its best and brightest go into Chinuch or Education.

But schools aren't enough. Orthodox Jews raise their children on their own books and their own music. Everything that children are exposed to from the youngest ages is supposed to come from within their own culture to such an extent that when Oprah visited a Chassidic family they had no idea who she was, or who Mickey Mouse and Beyonce were. Obviously this isn't universal and the degree of exposure varies, but retention rates and birth rates are highest among those with the lowest levels of progressive cultural exposure.

Modern Orthodox Jews, a group of which I am, obviously, a member, have the highest levels of cultural exposure, the lowest birth rates and the highest susceptibility to progressive views. The Modern Orthodox approach was viable in 1950s America where the outside culture was healthy, but I have come to question its survival value in an era where the culture is decaying and hostile to any form of traditional family values. Chassidic Jews, with the lowest rates of cultural exposure also have the highest birth rates and, unlike Modern Orthodox Jews, I have yet to meet a single liberal Chassid.

So is cultural secession the solution? For traditional Jews it might be, but for traditionalists as a whole, who have the demographic reach to turn the national numbers around, it can be a temporary solution until the numbers and the political power that goes with them are theirs. As with Orthodox Jews, there is a Christian culture industry, but it isn't enough to have positive messages as an alternative, it's equally important to cut out as many negative messages as possible.

Above all else, education is the future. Traditionalists who fail to understand this will allow the educational system and the entertainment industry to transform their children into progressives. Progressives know that control of the educational system means control of the future. Without the educational system and immigration, progressives are doomed to be cafe radicals. With them, they can count the generations until they control everything.

The progressives have few children of their own. Your children are their children. If they can corrupt your children, then they have a future. If they cannot, then they will go off and die in a corner. The progressives have three strengths, class warfare, cultural programming and immigration. America had prosperity that negated class warfare, but it neglected to safeguard its culture from the left and did not consider the consequences of Third World immigration. With their political and culture power, the left destroyed prosperity and now with all three cards in their hand, the progressives are rising high.

But too many conservatives have despaired because they have fallen prey to the myth of a perfect America that once was and can never be again. But America was never perfect, like every person, it was a work in progress. It was a struggle between ideas and ideologies and that struggle did not end because the progressives have worked and plotted to get this far. Defeating them is a matter of exploiting their weaknesses and firming up our strengths.

Most of the Republican Party remains unwilling to acknowledge that this is a cultural war. And it is. Culture is one of the things that the left is good at. It's an easy and profitable way for the left to pursue its ends. And it's fun. But it only works with captive audiences.

The left's cultural infrastructure is wired to feed its programming to an audience that sits there waiting to receive it and is willing to even pay top dollar for the privilege. Like every Iago, it has no idea what to do if Othello not only doesn't pay for the privilege of going to its schools and movies, but actively tunes it out and forms a community that makes its own entertainment and education.

Forget physical secession for the moment and think cultural secession. Physical secession, even if it were achieved, would do little good without putting cultural secession first. And if you cannot manage cultural secession, then how will you ever achieve physical secession?

Cultural secession means cutting away the educational and entertainment culture of the left out of your home. It means creating your own alternative education and entertainment and grouping in communities that act as a support structure for traditional values. Is it easy? No. It involves sacrifice. But groups such as the Amish and Orthodox Jews have done it and have thrived doing it.

Some wars are settled by guns, but cultural wars are settled by the schoolbook and the movie. They are settled by the family.

The progressive agenda is to destroy the family, to undermine it, ridicule it, economically disadvantage it and burden it until it falls apart and is replaced by the Big Brother of the State. The traditional agenda is to maintain the family and pass along traditional values across the generations. That is what this cultural war is really about; whether the family or the state will the defining unit of human experience.

The progressives are out to break the family, to slice it up in a thousand ways from the ghetto to the Castro. Everything they do is aimed at eliminating any rival to the state. The traditionalist goal has to be to form communities that are capable of preserving the family despite the power of the state. This is not easy and will become harder as time goes on. But it is what has to be done to reclaim the country.

Raising children within a traditional community is a revolutionary activity. It is an act of cultural and demographic defiance against the progressive state. The traditional community is becoming the new underground of progressive countries. It is the place where parents pass on subversive ideas to their children and teach them to pass on those same subversive ideas to their children.

Progressives want every child to grow up to be a slave of the state, thinking the same empty thoughts, laughing at the same things and trotting tamely along to the slaughterhouse. What they fear most is a future where the majority of children do not worship the state, do not accept their premises or parrot their propaganda. What they fear most is a demographic revolution.

Can American traditionalists quadruple their numbers in 40 years the way that the Amish will? Doing that will require taking lessons from the Amish, from Orthodox Jews and from other traditionalist groups that have found ways to build tight knit communities that protect their values and preserve their children. Building those structures is the hardest part. But once the structures are there, then the future is yours.

This will require a national conversation, which I don't think will happen, as proponents of this view will be savaged as racists, white supremacists, and worse. Hope I'm wrong.

Once again, Dan does a great job.

There is, however a group which he only mentions briefly, that can be a force in the Culture War. Much like the Chassidic Jews, the Devout Evangelical Christians have a subculture with its own schools, music, literature, and Conservative World-View. Unfortunately, the Progressives have gotten wind of this, and have attempted to invade the Evangelical World with “Inspirational” books and music, Flattery for ministry (Such as the “Dove Awards”, and other enticements), Televangelists that distort the gospel message for monetary gain or popularity, and False teachers of the Social Gospel and “Self-Help” Philosophies like Rick Warren and Norman Vincent Peale. It is very hard to be “IN the World, but not OF the World”. The Amish and the Chassidic Jews are very wise to be separate, but it is a constant battle.

Thank you, expat, for sharing these wonderful articles! :-)

This is a GREAT article. We have cut off the cable and are sending our kids to a wonderful Catholic school but I see I could probably do more to insulate them. I just don’t want to screw up and create another “Catholic” monster like Madonna or Gaga!

Wish I could have more kids but I’m 40 with serious back problems. :(

>>This will require a national conversation, which I don’t think will happen, as proponents of this view will be savaged as racists, white supremacists, and worse

You left out child abusers and in fact I believe the biggest danger to this strategy will be increasing pressure to ban home schooling. It’ll be easy enough to do without even passing any laws - just sign on to a future UN directive or whatever they call them, that considers it a violation of a ‘child’s right to an education’. But for the rest of labels, - getting called a racist and all that - best to just get over that because it is a fact of life now no matter what you say or do.

This isn't an impossible task.

This problem could be solved in 20 minutes with the push of a button: from an arctic submarine land one nuclear warhead on NYC and a second on LA. The socialists self-organize themselves into high density city targets. Take these two cities out and the Democrat socialists could never win again. It would also be the end to the 1800s invention of the Democrat factory high-rise big city. At this point America can only be saved by radiation therapy to its cancer sites. Short of that, it's pretty much stage 4.

Instead of going Galt consider moving to an emerging economy that appreciates investors and producers instead of looting them. It's a happier life to be helping to build a small government free country than to be riding down the formerly greatest country on Earth.

I recognized a kindred spirit in Robert Pirsig back in the 1970s. He wrote the book ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE. He saw that our society was being split into two camps. One was more oriented towards art and the other oriented towards science (I’m generalizing). The art-centered people he characterized as Platonic thinkers. The science people he characterized as Aristotelian thinkers. Look them up. Takes too long to explain. He struggles to find his way in the world alternating back and forth between these two ways of thinking. I grew up a musician in an age of great scientific discovery. I saw the beauty of both. Pirsig wrote a little known second book, LILA. He attempted to understand morality. I found the book fascinating. Both books allow you to see genius at work. Pirsig’s son was murdered and his own marriage ended in divorce. Life threw some real grenades into the life of a gentle, introspective man. Pirsig never really found the answers he sought. Maybe he has, but just hasn’t written another book. I think that Pirsig may have inadvertently discovered the answer he sought. One of the main events in Pirsig’s books is his encounter with electroshock therapy. Pirsig claims that it worked for him, but not in the expected way. It hurt him so much that he changed his behavior to keep from being hurt by it again. It didn’t alter his mind. It just hurt him so much that he changed. Well, this is another long way to say that it’s easy to be a holy (wise) man on a mountain. It’s much harder to be a holy (wise) man in the midst of unholy (unwise) people.

“The Amish population doubles every 20 years and they retain the majority of their children within their communities despite the obvious appeals of the outside world. There are 250,000 Amish in the United States and Canada now. By 2040 there will be over a million of them.”

Google ‘Amish and birth control.’

Freegards

A bacteria or virus from Africa might do the city job best. When Gaia’s had enough she can take out all city slicker socialists in a few months. NYC always gets these diseases first. No Reagan could ever be elected again with America’s current city population. It’s not the leftist demographic migrates to cities in huge numbers. The problem is that high rise cities manufacture damaged leftists from any demographic pool. Humans were never meant to live like insects.

>>His second book, LILA, is hard to find, but worth reading. There is something of a Robert Pirsig cult. He’s brilliant and entertaining, but he doesn’t really provide the answers to the big questions.

With all due respect to the Bible, Torah, Talmud, and Vedas, I don’t believe those answers are in any book.

For traditional Jews it might be, but for traditionalists as a whole, who have the demographic reach to turn the national numbers around, it can be a temporary solution until the numbers and the political power that goes with them are theirs. As with Orthodox Jews, there is a Christian culture industry, but it isn't enough to have positive messages as an alternative, it's equally important to cut out as many negative messages as possible.

What if Orthodox Jews helped set up systems for traditional Christians... we are the people who have - for centuries - brought pagans to the Hebrew God... partners on many levels...

How many families for go the evening meal or the sunday dinner with the family in favor of eating without conversation in front of the TV.

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