Some conservatives are actually quite good at perpetuating their own lines. If you come from a liberal city, like I do, you might be under the impression that the sort of happy, intact, and numerous families might be next to nonexistent. Especially these days, having more than one vanity child in one of the big cities tends to appear to be a fashion faux pas at the best, and a sign of moral turpitude at the worst.
Just thinking about numbers here, the side that actually focuses on making and raising healthy, happy children will overwhelm the one that focuses on overstimulating a small number of neurotic, unhealthy kids who fail to mature into self-sufficient adults.
For all of their problems in red-state-landia, on the other hand, once you leave those enclaves, it’s actually somewhat common, if less so than it used to be, to find healthy-looking parents with bunches of healthy-looking kids. A sign of success is a room covered in photographs upon photographs of all the various children with the conventional markers of bourgeois happiness, without many traces of the over-educated neuroticism which has become the common language elsewhere.
You just walk into the washing machine room, or whatever, and there are photos posted up of all six kids, at baseball practice, choir, in the graduation cap, all that kitschy stuff that sophisticates like to sneer at. While as a method of interior decoration, it could use some improvement, and one might wonder of the theological implications of making shrines to one’s children, but the phenomenon there symbolized by the photos is worth encouraging.
I should think that any sort of right-leaning cultural thought should focus on making more of the former type of person, and fewer of the inwardly-focused neurotics. This is one of Steve Sailer’s hobbyhorses, but for whatever reason, the mainstream right tends not to emphasize this simple, wholesome message. Partially because America’s political structure is fundamentally ill at ease with the same social and economic dynamics which make families stronger relative to corporate-democratic structures.
It tends to be difficult to maintain a conservative attitude towards family while living in a liberal area, even for work, just because the culture that supports family isn’t present. If it’s socially awkward to get married and have kids, it’s just not going to happen, except during some onset or another of baby rabies. If it’s socially normal to get married and have kids, it tends to happen more often, even among average yokels who own pickup trucks, a good portion of whom have more money than the typical city neurotic, anyway.
It’s not just about ‘affordable family formation.’ It also has to do with shared attitudes towards religion, life, and work.
*This is one of Steve Sailer’s hobbyhorses, but for whatever reason, the mainstream right tends not to emphasize this simple, wholesome message. *
I think it was Bruce Charlton who said that he stopped worrying about the endless argument loops over whether our civilization is in decline. Why? The moon. We made it there in 1969. Now we can’t.
The mainstream right’s pussyfooting around about the desirability of a stable marriage with kids is the same thing for me. If they can’t just state that its a good thing as a matter of course, chances are they’re useless in everything else too.
I wouldn’t blame Conservatives for failing to articulate a pro-family stance, considering that for them it is self-evident, and they’re rather baffled by non-family-oriented libruhs. A fish doesn’t know any pro-water arguments, yet it swims. To oppose the modern norm is to transition from mere Conservative to reactionary. Most natural Conservatives are content with their lives and are not particularly concerned with what those libertine degenerates are doing.
I mean, why would they even want to know? That being said, the prevalence of TV, radio, print, and the web makes it hard for even natural conservative families to hold it together.
“natural conservatives”- a nice phrase. those of us in Outbackistan only sadly laugh, and hold our noses when downwind of the fetid blue swamp. we go on with our lives, ignoring the shrill temper tantrums, their thrusting of their business in our noses, their rabbit squeals from the warren. not sure we are up to harvesting them for organs, etc just as yet, but we are prepped for opportunities to breakaway and defend from any red terror they may think to initiate. unlike those poor kulaks, we shoot back.
That’s not entirely true. I’m sure that they can be passable donors for blood, hair, bone marrow, and organs. There’s a little bit of good in everybody.
It’s remarkable how we lose the ability, the language, and the will to describe something that was so evidently good and wholesome for so long.
When it’s obvious and evident, there is of course no need for ability, language, or will to describe it.
Then degenerates take over, and slowly but surely they enshrine degeneracy in place of the obvious and evident wholesomeness.
By the time anyone awoke from the stupor, it was too late.
Of course that also may give the model for the Restoration. People become so accustomed to degeneracy that it is not radical or interesting or persuasive anymore, and they are shocked – SHOCKED – at this one weird trick that creates stable functioning communities and well-adjusted individuals.
The choke-point on all this is early marriage, especially for the girls. If conservatives want the point of greatest leverage, that would be it.
Certainly more important for women than for men. But then you’d have to roll back feminism and a whole other slate of other *ologies and programs.
As well as bring a change to the culture so that men do not get lynched for this:
http://rt.com/uk/251145-paedophile-hunters-vigilante-online/