Fighting for truth in an age of progressive heresy

How progressive sloganeering created a generation of moral illiterates

We live in a culture that no longer needs “conserving.” Conservatives fall short when they reflexively hold on to the present, for the defenestration of the past is what needs to first be addressed.

A quick solution is for this culture’s cheap slogans to be burned into ash and summon out of the embers a phoenix of the “permanent things” which will outlive fashions, outwit ideologues, and anchor our civilization against chaos.

Walk through a typical neighborhood in “Blue America” and one recognizes the problem. Sanctimonious yard signs that declare, “In this house we believe…” followed by a progressive mantra of platitudes.

These signs are not invitations for dialogue. They serve as tribal tattoos for the spiritually bankrupt.

Let’s dissect this theatre of conformity.

“Black lives matter” reduces centuries of complex racial history to a social media hashtag. “Women’s rights are human rights” flattens the profound mystery of femininity into sterile egalitarianism. “No human is illegal” denies the sovereignty of nations while pretending to champion universal brotherhood.

These aren’t beliefs. Rather, they are bumper sticker slogans for people who would rather signal virtue than cultivate it.

The cost of dissent can be expensive. If one were to post a satirical countersign mocking these slogans in such a neighborhood, your windows would be smashed in by vandals within days of sticking the yard-sign in the ground. All the while, the “tolerant” crowd bathes in silence.

One can find this diagram in the typical progressive’s playbook: preach inclusion while practicing exclusion.

They will quote Martin Luther King, Jr. about justice rolling down like waters, but disregard his warning that “shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

Russell Kirk understood what these sign-posting zealots never will: Tradition isn’t nostalgia, it is oxygen.

Kirk’s six conservative canons of conservative thought begin with belief in a transcendent order, or natural law, the radical idea that truth exists beyond polling data and the consensus in the faculty lounge at lunchtime.

The permanent things important to Kirk—fortitude, justice, duty, et cetera—are not products of human invention, but discoveries of divine law. Kirk calls them the norms of human nature.

Consider Sophocles, slapping down “wokeness” with Antigone’s defiance: “I was born to join in love, not hate.”

Ironically, progressives hate this. Their yard signs are ideological fast food—prepackaged, nutritionally void, and designed for mass consumption. There exists the thrill of moral superiority without the work of moral reasoning.

“Science is real” becomes the catechism for scientism, ignoring the reality that their beloved “science” indeed confirms two sexes and that their beloved lockdowns shattered minds while saving few lives.

“Love is love” twists eros into anarchic sentimentality, forgetting Dante’s warning that disordered love breeds hell itself.

The tension between preserving what is true and pruning what is rotten is traditional conservatism’s beating heart. The permanent things aren’t museum pieces but living truths. There should be a respect for natural law, an acknowledgement of human limits, and a reverence for the dead who whisper wisdom through time.

Compare that depth to the Harris-Walz and Hillary 2016 campaign signs still cluttering driveways like political tombstones. The worship of these corpses indicates that progressivism has no future, but only maintains past grudges.

Their so-called resistance is performative despair. It is a cult of grievance that will never be able to build, only to destroy. The progressive lectures about “kindness” run concurrently with the doxing of dissenters. You’ll hear them preach about “community” while atomizing society into identity fragments.

Here’s one thing they miss, though: The permanent things satisfy hungers that no slogan can.

When a father teaches his son to shave using his grandfather’s razor, that’s tradition bridging generations. When the parish faithful gathers for Mass, kneeling as one body to ancient prayers, that is transcendent order in action.

While our elites peddle chaos as progress, moments like these defy such elitism.

Furthermore, mention natural law at a Silicon Valley dinner party, and watch progressives clutch their pearls like Mein Kampf had just been quoted. Suggest that, perhaps, a child needs both a mother and a father, then one should prepare for an HR investigation.

This is not tolerance. It is totalitarianism with a rainbow flag.

The solution isn’t better slogans. It is deeper truths. Today’s conservatives should channel the populist fury of old and marry it with the philosophical rigor of Kirk.

“Black lives matter” should be countered not with “All lives matter,” but rather “All souls matter eternally.”

When you hear “No human is illegal,” the retort might be “Every nation needs borders.”

This is not reactionary rhetoric. It is restoration. It is a return to first principles in a world that has been unmoored from them.

All of this demands courage, however.

Courage to display that satirical sign despite the vandals. Courage to truly dissent although conformity might feel safer. Courage to reject the lie that tradition and progress are at loggerheads with one another.

G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors.”

The permanent things await. Will we conserve them, or will we keep crouching in the shadows of yard-sign orthodoxy?