The following is the written version of the talk I prepared for an event this past weekend. I read from a few notes rather than through the written speech, so the one actually given was somewhat different from this. Still, I think the message is the same, and you might enjoy this. As it was fresh in my mind, I wanted to release this today, and the next Harry Byrd article will be released on Friday! This was meant to be listened to as a speech. You can listen to it here, for just a few dollars a month:
![[AUDIO] Don’t Despair, Build A Gentry](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WBGn!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F221347751%2Ffbea344e-c70c-4c71-b091-951d7888f455%2Ftranscoded-1792513090.png)
Today, we are here to talk about never despairing. That is good, for despair is a sin.
But it must be admitted, at times, that things can look bleak. This is particularly true when one gazes out upon the bleak, disparate impact-ravaged economic situation for young white men in particular, and then examines the sort of craven and cupidity-driven reaction that the Established sorts, whether in private or public life, have had to that situation. Such is why things are so bitter, and economic populism is increasingly popular. The haute bourgeoisie is always detested for its tendency to act like Smaug in a recliner—just see what Thomas Carlyle said about the plutocrats of his day, and now seemingly the entirety of the Establishment embodies such a mode of living.
Where, it is asked, is the sense of duty? Where is the training in virtue? Why can he with millions to spare never seem to use it for anything worthwhile, politically, culturally, socially, or even personally? It’s that story of Warren Buffett refusing his daughter’s request for financial aid in renovating the kitchen to make life easier for his granddaughter,1 over and over again, played out across our politics, economy, and culture time and time again. There are many counter-examples of course, from incredibly kind and generous family members to a talented boss giving a young man a chance. But reality has a way of being bleaker than those nice stories for many, and this sends many off a cliff of despair, particularly when it interacts with yet more troublesome issues, from mass immigration to rampant crime. Those who refuse to contemplate reality in one slice of life have a way of doing the same time and time again, across every issue. This is particularly true when they are wealthy enough to avoid reality, and thus have no real incentive to re-examine their priors.
Such is disappointing, but it ought not be depressing: this is the cycle of things, and what matters far more than how he who made—or at least accumulated—the money acts is how his heirs act once they inherit it. Assuming it doesn’t all go to some horrid “charity,” which is to say a fund promoting some poisonous form of social subversion worldwide and providing cushy jobs to well-paid bureaucrats as it does so. Coming after multiple generations of expropriatory death taxes and what amounted to an economic revolution under FDR, Truman, and the rest of those pinko sorts, the current wealth Establishment and economic elite entered a world practically anew, with nothing to guide them in how to live as something more than accumulators.
All the folkways, traditions, mindsets, and duties once thought about regarding the intersection of wealth and duty were wiped away in the sea of bitterness that came with the Red tide of the mid-twentieth century. From this come many of the present neuroses and poor behavior for which that wealth elite is known: with rare exceptions, those who came into their fortunes recently tend not to use them well. The mercantile spirit is too strong, the lessons learned through a life of accumulation too different from those required for prudent stewardship of the sort that is honored and respected. But there is nothing new under the sun, and that, in particular, has been seen before.
In fact, this is a lesson told better by Old Virginia than anywhere else.
Who, after all, were the dynasts of the First Families of Virginia? A collection of used car salesmen along the frontier, essentially. William Byrd the First was a goldsmith by birth, and his uncle Stegge–the one who created the fortune–was a rascal so good at wheeling and dealing that he made a fortune trading with the Indians. King Carter made the famous Carter fortune–hundreds of thousands of acres and a thousand slaves–primarily through ripping off the Fairfax Proprietary when he was supposed to be working as its faithful agent. One of the FFV dynasts–I will forbear saying who–was supposed to receive 1000 acres in headright land for the indentured servants he brought over; involved in the government at the time, he added a zero to the end of that, and thus was a great fortune of 10,000 acres born out of stolen public lands.
Richard Lee the First liked to point to his supposed Norman heritage, but was the son of a clothier and brought that mind and background to all he did.
There is a fun story on this: Richard Lee I is famed as one of those true Cavaliers of the Old Dominion, the Fifth Crown, for he sailed off from Virginia to meet with the man later to be known as Charles II after Charles I had been deposed and disposed of by Cromwell’s crowd of Levellers. In the Low Countries, he pledged Virginia’s undying loyalty to the Royalist cause, and Charles bestowed upon the state the Old Dominion title as a reward for its loyalty, considering it the fifth crown alongside Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England. A glorious moment for the Cavalier cause! Or so it is remembered. Perhaps it happened that way. What is for sure true is that Richard insisted upon being paid to take a cargo ship with him on his diplomatic mission, carrying his own tobacco in its hold, which he sold at a profit while meeting with the king, and with those proceeds he brought back a few dozen indentured servants, for which he insisted upon the headrights due him–50 acres a piece. This land was to be the basis of the Lee fortune, and Virginia’s mercantile ruling class soon surrendered to Cromwell’s Navy so as to not risk the tobacco trade. Craven wouldn’t be the right word, but only just.
But then something strange happened. Virginia changed. The planters always cared about their profits, of course, but suddenly they had more to them than that. They, well, cared about their colony and saw it as their duty to govern it well, not just to find ways to loot the treasury.
Virtue, honor, duty, cultivation…the sort of men whose culture and traditions built the Founding Generation were suddenly extant, and so the century after Bacon’s Rebellion was a century of social peace largely characterized by prosperity, and overwhelmingly characterized by gentry leadership of the military and political apparatus in the colony, and its social and cultural development. Their heirs were the ones trusted to lead the Revolution, and they did so quite well. More than anywhere else in the Anglo New World, Virginia became a state that was truly an aristocracy–a state governed by the best men, with those men being the best in every respect of the term. The Old Dominion flourished as a result, and was the leading colony when Revolution came, having successfully built itself to that point.
So, what happened? How was this achieved? Why were the inheritors so different from those from whom they inherited?
For one, the Cavaliers. Unwilling to live in a dour land of Puritanism and Presbyterianism, those dashing Cavaliers in their plumed hats and leather riding boots arrived with a dash in Virginia, and were much respected by the locals. After all, their manner of life was far more attractive than the hardscrabble nature of things in Virginia up to that point, and the intermixture of settler families with Cavalier refugees wrought a change in outlook in Virginia.
Contrary to myth, Virginia was not founded by Cavaliers, nor were there ever enough Cavaliers to really dominate the state. But there were enough to leaven it, and give it a different sort of culture from the “used car salesmen along the frontier” one it had been developing.
This was particularly true of outlook and education, through which the fledgling gentry culture began to form.
Once Cromwell was thrown out and peace of a sort returned to England, even with that Dutchman and his Whig friends coming across the Channel, Virginia and England could have stable relations again. Particularly, the planters could communicate a bit more with those Cavalier families into which they had married, and learn from them the importance of education of a certain sort: a liberal education, which at the time meant being trained in the art of being a flourishing man and steady ruler through the lens of the Classics.
And so the sons of the first families sailed to England to get such an education, typically at Eton, then “Oxbridge,” then the Inns of Court, particularly the Middle Temple. They learned their Plutarch, read their Livy, studied their law, and returned to Virginia with a very different conception of life and what it was all about. They might still have been acquisitive sorts–Thomas Lee and William Byrd II certainly were–but they cared about much more besides. They were well read, refined, and did care about governing well, not just in their immediate self-interest. They had seen what a real gentry was like, in practice, and wanted to act in such a manner. They wanted to be such men, and brought the culture and traditions surrounding wealth, stewardship, and duty that they learned abroad back to their state.
That wasn’t all. As a saying from the 19th century went, “In Kentucky, men are born, but in Virginia, they are foaled.”
That was a good way of putting it, for it adds the racehorse-like element to what they did, and how they were. This was not a class of men as might be imagined from what I just said. They were not overeducated, overpolished, overrefined. They were excellent. Cultivated, yes, but brimming with vitality and power too. The Classical training was the bridle that guided them in the right direction; the vital life force surging within them is what drove them forward.
And from where did this come? Their training on the plantation. They were raised with the goal of inculcating in them the habit of command: that swaggering mixture of imperiousness and true leadership that was to define the planter class in the Golden Age and the Revolutionary period. A sense that not only was leadership theirs by right, but that privilege imposed upon them an immense duty to wear it well, to do honor to their name.
There was much involved in this. Noblesse oblige was the most classically chivalric part, as was the understanding that “leadership” meant not just writing laws, but leading the militia. And so George Washington chomped at the bit to fight in the West, Light Horse Harry became one of the few great American cavalry commanders…as later did JEB Stuart, and even Richard Henry Lee–the man of laws and declarations–rallied the local militia to drive the British raiding parties off the Potomac when they dared attack his dear Stratford and Chantilly.
Further, they were trained from birth to understand that the excellence of a man can be seen in what quality leaf he grows, as that immediately visible mark of a man was a sign of how he exercised Dominion over his lands, from the soil to his dependents. Such required a driving will to put one’s beliefs into practice after ensuring they were the correct beliefs, creating that mixture of study and action for which they were known. It required imperiousness, hence why they had a reputation for being little devils as children rather than the sedate and well-behaved pupils of New England’s dour Puritan meetings. And they were raised with the understanding that violence is a necessary part of life; from hunting to Indian fighting, they were from birth “blooded” and made accustomed to the unpleasant side of Dominion, taught that authority only exists insofar as it can be imposed. Preferably, that need not be the case. But perhaps it must be, and only he who can impose it neither with squeamishness nor lust can properly understand this and apply the lesson of it to the government of a republic.
And led by such a class, what a republic Virginia was turning out to be! No egalitarian republic was this. No, like all great republics, it was a relatively aristocratic one. Voting power was vested in the hands of the responsible–like Rhodesia centuries on, this meant only those who had shown themselves to be successful stewards in their own lives, principally through the ownership of land, were entrusted to steward the future of the polity by voting.
Their choices came from amongst the gentry. Occasionally a new man like Patrick Henry might pop up and be taken in, but on the whole it was the same list of families that proffered candidates for election after election. The Lees, Carters, Corbins, Custises, and so ons. You know the names, for you have read them in every history of the early republic worth its salt. There were perhaps two dozen families that really mattered, and a couple hundred families at most who participated in the running of the government.
But–you might be thinking–Will, what you are describing is just an oligarchy. Brazil has an oligarchy. It is terrible. Why the devil ought we emulate that?
Because that is not all it was. I said earlier that they were an aristocratic republic. That they indeed were, for those at the top chiseled themselves into being the very best sort of men they could be. Thus was Virginia ruled by the best, and in being the best they could lead their colony so well.
It should not be surprising that those so obsessed with Rome they modelled a new nation on it should have followed the classic pattern that made the Roman aristocratic republic work, when it was followed closely, as a general thing. They, like the Romans, built a cursus honorum–a sequential ladder of public offices that builds the most promising men into steadily better leaders with steadily more responsibilities–to do so, to screen the wheat from the chaff in their own class, and preserve the public’s respect for it as a governing class.
The first step on this ladder of office was the plantation. As I discussed earlier, the quality of the leaf a man grew was the first mark of his character–he who indulged in rotten theories and produced a poor crop, he who could not master his workforce, he who simply could not well manage his own affairs–was excluded from public office entirely. He would never be invited into the inner circle, for he had failed that first test of a man: using well the resources he had to establish his financial independence on sound footing, and showing he possessed that most prized of all things, a gift for effective leadership.
If such is what he had, then he was chosen by the older members of his class to lead. At first, the stakes were low, and entirely undemocratic: the Established Church was the only church in Virginia over this period. Anyone not on the fringes worshipped as an Anglican, and the Anglican vestries–a Norman institution brought over with the Conquest–were an undemocratic council governed by the gentlemen of the area. So, a young man who grew good leaf would, when a vacancy opened up, be asked to join the vestry; he was chosen on the basis of his demonstrated talents, not elected.
This was the first test in a number of ways. For one, if he refused to do his duty and join, he would be forever ignored in polite society. A man who did not do his duty was not a man. Further, if he did a poor job, he would not be allowed to rise in the ranks and eventually join the real government of the colony. He had to demonstrate that he could manage the unpaid headache of managing and adjudicating local moral and administrative affairs–bastardy, minor theft, road maintenance, and the like–while still growing good leaf, mind you. This was the Virginia alternative to the town meeting of the Puritan states: it was comparatively undemocratic and inegalitarian, and is how the community was governed.
He who did well in this table stakes role was then given more opportunity to prove himself: the next step up the ladder was being a Justice of the Peace on the county court. These courts were community gathering places, and court day each month was a brilliant spectacle. Disputes over property were adjudicated. Criminals might be in need of punishment, disputes escalating into potential duels in need of settling before they became feuds, the metes and bounds of land decided on…all could come up, at any time, requiring a wide base of knowledge and experience informing capable judgement across a wide variety of subjects involving a similarly wide variety of people. You can see why competence was so highly prized: without it, things would have fallen apart.
In any case, this position was also unpaid, also tedious, and also important. For this was a man’s first experience with the county electorate–the roughly upper half of the male population–and was thus his opportunity to prove himself to them as someone who was fair, learned, competent, and possessed of that habit of command that marked him as a man truly of his class. Whimpering appeals to the mob generally did not go over well in those days, for only responsible men could vote. This was his opportunity to see how the law operated in practice–for he was enforcing that which Williamsburg declared–and was a further test on his time, resources, and competence: he still had to grow good leaf and manage his duties on the vestry, even as he did this.
If he did well, he would be invited to be one of the candidates running for elected office in the House of Burgesses. To win, a man almost always needed this nod from the established power players in the county, and to get it he had to have demonstrated his excellence in those three prior ways mentioned. To win, he generally needed to be reasonably well-liked by voters–some time spent fighting Indians in the militia helped quite a bit, as did having a reputation for being fair on the vestry and county court.
Those who were too haughty were typically rejected by voters, as were those who were too weak in spirit and eager to please. It took a man who could be certain in his convictions, and preferably of popular ones, to win. Being from the right family with lots of tenants and dependents helped as well, as voting was open, and it’s rare a man’s tenants–they qualified for the ballot if they rented a certain amount of land–would vote against him or his primary candidate of choice.
Thus was the wheat again cut from the chaff in this limited democratic process, and were the best chosen to lead their fellows in the Burgesses.
There, in Williamsburg, talent was refined yet further. Though their expenses were paid, it was not a profitable post, and was a major drain on time, though also a major boost to one’s honor and standing. In the role, one first saw the dreary drudgery that went into writing legislation and getting it passed, and those who understood the nature of the process and the importance of doing it well were picked by old-timers to have their talents further refined and developed. If good speakers, they were chosen and encouraged to do that more. If good writers, they were put on more of the committees drafting legislation. And so on.
It is for this reason that Jefferson was sent North with letters of introduction noting his remarkable knack for writing powerfully, though he was a poor speaker, for example; that talent had been noted, cultivated, and made exceptional. The same was true for Richard Henry Lee, for James Madison, for Francis Lightfoot Lee, and for many of the others who brought their particular talents to bear to make the Revolution a success and craft the early republic in their image.
The peak of the cursus honorum, for those of great wealth and standing in the state, was membership on the Governor’s Council. The highest position to which a colonial could aspire, it was essentially a combination of the state Senate and Supreme Court, a select body that stood as the court of last resort and the higher body of the legislature. It was, in many ways, a House of Lords for Virginia, with the newest addition to that circle of aristocrats chosen from amongst the leading families every time a member died, encouraging them to keep competing to accumulate land, honor, and reputation. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t achieve this topping honor!
One can see how this was different from Virginia’s origins: out of new cloth in the new world, a gentry had formed. It modelled itself on the gentry of England, but it was different in a few important ways.
Its economic concerns required much more exacting management, for one: rented land in Virginia was never as profitable as in England, and a man had to grow his own tobacco to build his reputation. Further, it developed organically, but was more regimented. A man had to do these things to be a man. They weren’t the additions to a life at the top, but the preconditions for being considered part of that top, rather than just rich. And it was government, much more than military service, that was deemed appropriate: the gentry of England might spend its youth first touring, then fighting on the Continent, or in the colonies. In Virginia, it spent it farming and governing, putting the classics it studied to life and only fighting Indians or rebels occasionally.
But though different, it did bring to America that which was most important about the Anglo-Norman landed elite: an understanding that the privilege of great wealth carried with it great duties and responsibilities, and that one’s training in life should be oriented towards those responsibilities. From the raising of little devils who were nevertheless sternly instructed in Classical virtue to the education of students taught to be gentlemen rather than mere merchants, their lives were ordered around this understanding even as they were also taught to be attentive to their financial affairs.
What was key was that it was no longer just wealth that ruled, but that mixture of steady and honorable government by the best for the purpose of ensuring that those who were able, whatever their level of inherited wealth, could flourish. That was quite a different thing from the early days of the colony, when it was much more oligarchic than aristocratic.
We hear much about meritocracy now, but this was really it: cross-domain excellence ensuring the perpetuation of a system that allowed the gentry to rule and those men of good character and hard effort to flourish, and perhaps eventually rise to the top…as Peter Jefferson did, much to the benefit of his son, Thomas. This was not the supposed meritocracy of spelling bees and Excel spreadsheets, but of the frontier baron and his yeomen retainers. It was a republic of excellence, an aristocratic republic in the highest and truest sense of the term.
Thus was Virginia able to lead the Revolution, and make the early Republic in its image. It could only do so because of how its men had ensured that they were the best, using the wealth of the first couple of generations to become a true gentry, rather than a mere collection of extractive oligarchs.
But that is all in the past. What about in modern times? We are no longer in a new world of primeval forests, Indian bands, and plantations.
The importance of this has not faded. Just look to Virginia in the middle of last century. It was a poorer state, relatively, than it once had been. No longer did it possess West Virginia; it was wracked by the legacy of a war that reduced its way of life to cinders. Perhaps half a billion dollars in capital was destroyed by the war; 25 million ounces of gold, at $20 per ounce par, as it was then. $105 billion in privately held capital erased, in modern terms, from a population of perhaps a million and a half people.
Some efforts at rebuilding had been tried, and some–namely those instituted by Governor Fitz Lee to bring capital to the state—succeeded. But still, it was a tired and poor state in the early 20th century. One that could have, if differently led, drifted into socialism. Into the web of FDR’s attempts to foist his version of toned-down communism upon America.
That it did not was thanks to Harry Byrd, who brought the Virginia gentry to life once again. Given the opportunity to run a struggling family newspaper by his father, a noted state politician who might have been a great man of his day were he not a drunk, this descendant of the William Byrds of Westover used that opportunity to build a great fortune. He was a newspaper man, an apple orchard baron, and a great holder of equity capital by the time he died…and in family tradition, he used that immense wealth not to live a life of ease but to lead his state and keep it on the path of tradition.
Taking over the state Democratic Party as a young man, he built what is remembered as the Byrd Organization. A state party machine like no other, it was loyal to him personally and existed for nearly half a century.
Using a web of bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, politicos, and men of prominence, it kept a close lid on the politics of the state, controlling almost every position and policy. Harry Byrd used it not to enrich himself, but to keep the state out of FDR’s grasp, successfully resisting much of the New Deal and Fair Deal at the state level while railing against them both from his seat in the Senate. Rejecting the politics of envy, he kept Virginia prosperous–relatively speaking, given the Depression–by making sure it was one in which doing business was easy. Raised by those who taught him how the best of his ancestors and their contemporaries acted, Harry did his duty as a gentleman rather than a grasping oligarch.
Most of all, he led the resistance to the Cultural Revolution. Using a poll tax to trim the electorate down to the successful, much as his ancestors had once done, he ensured that the average Virginia voter was a sober-minded man who generally understood business and the political issues at play, and would vote responsibly. Such men were liable to be hostile to unions, hostile to communism, hostile to FDR, and hostile to all of the rest of the change that targeted Old Virginia. These were men who wanted to keep Virginia the Old Dominion, and trusted him to lead them in doing so.
They trusted him because he was honest and competent, and followed through on his promises. Under his Organization, the state was well-managed. It stayed out of debt, taxes were low, and unions remained non-dominant. It controlled everything, yes, but governed well as it did so. Its competence could be seen along every roadway, in every statement of the state’s financial affairs, in every examination of its economic strength despite the nation’s economic weakness. Further, it did so while keeping things just how its voters liked them. So much as any place could remain a piece of Old America in the days of FDR, Virginia did, and Byrd’s leadership represented the alternative to what FDR represented: it did not take socialism to keep communism away, just wise paternalism, just government, and general competence at effecting steady and responsible development.
That Byrd could do this for decades was for two reasons. One was who he was: a scion of an ancient name, a man whose fortune was mostly his own creation, a competent businessman and honorable politician; he was excellent in all the ways that mattered to the voters of his day, who had their priorities right.
The poll tax is the other element of it: Harry Byrd did not have to be Huey Long because the voter base was different. In Long’s Louisiana, it was redistribution and reform that marked the government’s policies, and Long’s demagogic stump speeches were what led to this; such is to what mass voting, mass democracy, led. In Byrd’s Virginia, an innate conservatism ruled, and Virginia remained Virginia. Change was kept away not by giving in to a different form of it, but by showing those who ought be the ones deciding what was right and how to achieve it.
Eventually, he was defeated. His Organization did not bring in as many youth as it should have, making it gradually more unpopular. But that it could have muddled through, particularly if it looked to the Virginia of the Golden Age to understand the necessity of bringing up new, young leaders. The real problem was that poll taxes were eventually outlawed nationally, and so the Organization could no longer continue on, for the masses could vote and they—primarily the denizens of the DC-connected areas of Northern Virginia—wanted liberalization and change. Thus did the aristocratic republic finally fade, and the Virginia of now crop up.
But the point of this is to never despair, not to wallow in defeat. What can we learn from this tale?
First and foremost, that much can be accomplished when one is led by the best, which means pushing the inheritor generation toward duty and virtue rather than more mere accumulation. The great wealth transfer is happening. Death taxes are high, but not high enough to stop it. The Giving Pledge and like Die with Nothing initiatives are absurdities, but not enough to really blunt it in an appreciable way. For the first time since before FDR, we’ll have a real generation of inheritors.
It’s not too late to make that a trend in our favor. There is a hunger for that about which I speak. Just look to the success of Johann Kurtz’s book at garnering him a hearing amongst a wide swathe of people, from podcasters and tech guys to average Joes with more successful than average businesses.
Look to my friend Alex Petkas and the success of his Classical Society, which aims to train men in this virtue. Look at the dunking that happens, and the millions of impressions, every time some celebrity with a nouveau fortune announces they’ll give it to some frivolous cause rather than their heirs. And if you want to see effectiveness, look to how George and Alex Soros are using the Soros fortune to continue pushing leftism. Dastardly, yes, but indubitably effective. Or look to how the Mellons have used theirs to aid conservatism: Tim Mellon’s support for Trump is well known, and another Mellon helped get Project Veritas going and made it a success, back before the recent unpleasantness. Imagine hundreds of families in every state acting in such a manner, and think of what could be achieved. Such is the very real opportunity.
And how to achieve it? There are a few lessons I think we ought to draw from all this.
The first is the importance of embodying that for which we are pushing. We must embody excellence, particularly in our personal affairs. The forces of Tradition are built atop success, and like the Virginians judging one another by the quality of their leaf or Harry Byrd rising to the top once an apple baron because the successful men of Virginia voted for him, successful conservative counter-revolution does and will require that. So, we must make ourselves represent it. The growing interest in creating a business ecosystem amongst our sphere is helpful here, and should be encouraged, as should be general success.
And this applies aesthetically as well as monetarily. Our enemies have adopted the aesthetic of spiritual despair–slovenliness, androgynous freakishness, the deadly sins in personal form. We can and must do the opposite. Good manners, attractive dress, pleasant conversativeness…those sorts of things that make even radical ideas welcome and appealing are a field that has been left wholly open by the left, and ought be one we embrace and dominate. It is what our ancestors did, after all. Look to the attention of Washington and Lee both in being perfectly correct in matters of manners, speech, and dress, not because they were fops but because they understood how it makes one appear trustworthy at first glance. An impression that must be built upon by good character after, but an important first step nonetheless.
Harry Byrd did this as well. He had a reputation for being the most conservative man in the Senate, and his state the most conservative in the Union. Yet he was taken seriously, rather than being derided as a radical, because he was a charming man to whom others were drawn. He had a reputation for being competent and serious, he was personally charismatic, and even most of those who disagreed with him found he was no lightweight to be tossed aside.
Think what might be achieved with this in mind. Think what supposedly radical policies, what dramatic efforts at counterrevolution might be achieved with this. Perhaps more states could do what Tennessee has done, and use felony disenfranchisement to significantly shape the electorate. Perhaps capital punishment could be dramatically expanded. Perhaps taxes could be cut significantly, and the Dewanye Geld ended. Maybe not. But much is possible when those preaching for even dramatic change are normal-seeming people known for being highly competent, and how have a knack for making such ideas seem attractive through the attractiveness of their own spirits.
Second, I use the term conservative intentionally. With Ragnarok comes chaos, and that is not to our benefit. Gradually cutting out the cancerous rot that is the bad and building in its stead that which is good, however, is. The men about whom I have spoken recognized that. Yes, including those behind the Revolution. Why did the Virginia of 1700 remain, in its basic form, in 1960? How did the age of sail turn to the age of the atom with little change in social relations, government type, or what sort of men ruled? Because by 1700, the inheritors had built a system that was worth preserving, and those who inherited from them maintained it over the ages, adapting where necessary without deviating from its basic principles. Thus, in Harry Byrd’s Virginia, gentility mattered much as it had mattered when William Byrd II declared himself an Ornament of Virginia. A great deal changed in the interim, but not all that much in the Old Dominion.
Much must be reformed. But entropy must not be unleashed, for entropy is a fundamentally left-wing force. Instead, those bastions of tradition–the true church, a virtuous upper class, living in the Classical mold–ought be renewed, reformed, and strengthened. The sort of prudence to which this attitude leads tends to be what attracts those who formed the Byrd coalition–the prosperous, the successful, the able, and those who aspire to be such and eventually will in a world built to cultivate and allow human flourishing, as a conservative society should. This conservatism is what separated Virginia from the fire breathers of the antebellum and demagogues of the Depression, and is why it stayed the same as they heaped ruin and change upon themselves.
Finally, the goal of this is not just to win once. It is to keep winning for generations by creating a true upper class, as the Virginians did when they turned themselves into a gentry, one strike of the chisel at a time. If only worked upon for a singular presidential term, for a single gubernatorial term, for a single cycle of the school board, even the best changes can fade away near immediately. Real change is only brought about through the continual effectuation of it for generations, which is why I argue so frequently for the importance of dynasties.
Look to the Jeffersonians. Look to the Jacksonians. Look, if you can bear it, to FDR and Truman’s two decades in power. Look to Harry Byrd’s four decades in power. Look back to the nearly century-long Golden Age of Virginia. In each case, what was possible was only possible because power was maintained for decades, long enough for ideas to be fully implemented and given time to work. We need that too, particularly if the accumulated detritus of a century of bad policy is to be swept away.
The only way we can do this is by creating a gentry like the Virginians did. In modernity, that means building a political machine that is well integrated with an economic machine. We must look to men like Byrd or his ancestors and get involved at every level, building power at the competence-showing economic level that was once represented by the plantation, social level as represented by the church and vestry, local administration level as represented by the courts, and government level as represented by the Burgesses. Or, in Harry Byrd’s Virginia, all of it was represented by the Organization, which worked at all those levels.
What that means in each man’s case will be unique. Perhaps it’ll mean getting involved in a school board. Perhaps in your local GOP. Maybe even running for office. But one thing is certainly true: unless those efforts are interconnected, unless they are together part of an attempt to build a base of power lasting for decades that can be used, over time, to push back and rebuild that which has been lost, it will all be for naught. That is what “organize” must mean, and what “build” must mean. It does not mean just another group chat, it means recovering the old folkways surrounding duty, honor, and virtue that have been lost, and using them to bring into the fold the generation of inheritors who will have something approaching the resources the gentry of old once did. Think of what could be achieved with such a base of men, and support! Things not achieved by those of a conservative mind in generations!
Through that, I think, we can push back in sustained fashion. It can be done. It has been done before. But we must be the ones to do it. No one else is coming to help or save us, the old paths that have led to it happening naturally have been erased. It is up to us. Now we must go and do it.
Excellent.