Last Fumes of a Dead Slave Empire

Go on any dating app and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of Conservative white men who do drugs, engage in casual sex, and no longer belong to any church which makes you wonder what it is exactly they're trying to conserve with their Conservatism besides white nationalism.

The data exists. I don’t have to collect it. I could analyze it if these private companies would be so kind as to lend me that user data, but I’m guessing they won’t. Nevertheless, they have that information. It’s stored on their servers. If I’m wrong, they could very simply falsify my hypothesis.

Liberal pundits who live their day-to-day lives far removed from the lives of us ordinary peasants insist that what we have to do is find a way to work with Conservatives. We who have moral ideals should sacrifice them for the benefit of those who have none. This is the unspoken “common ground” mandate of politics that Liberals love because it sounds good to say and doesn’t actually hold them to any specific course of action. Better for that, since they can rationalize doing absolutely nothing for the sake of holding the middle ground. It is an absolutely wild logic.

But having grown up in a Conservative area, having known plenty of these white guys not by choice but by painful and often abusive proximity, I would loudly advise otherwise.

I know these men. These are the self-indulgent princes of mediocrity, getting high off the last fumes of a dead slave empire. Ask them what higher truths they stand for and they’ll list a bunch of abstractions fed to them as t-shirt slogans and car decals. What Liberals mistake for the “working class” is an idealized amalgamation produced by Ford, Fox, Breitbart, and Barstool to capitalize on the resentment that these princes of nothing feel having to live in a world where nobody cares genuinely about them. They’re as lonely and alienated as everyone else, living in large part without a community beyond their immediate family. But the brands seemingly hold them together. In Ford we trust. One nation, finding it at Lowes.

While I’m continually unnerved by the conflation of the working class with what is honestly a consumer profile, what bothers me most is how Liberals insist nevertheless that this caricature is worthy of compromise.

Compromise is a virtue. It really is. To figure out the highest truth you share in common with another person and make that your common ground is spiritual work. It is, as I understand it, among the hardest aspects of building a church or a ministry. But churches get raised and ministries get larger because at the center of it all is that virtue of compromise, of working with others who share your higher truth to make something more meaningful and lasting than the sum of its parts. There will be conflict. There will be discord. But finding harmony and communion despite that is the miracle of compromise and that only comes from a real, authentic call to shared higher truths.

But if you have to completely abandon your higher truth to find the middle ground, then it’s not compromise, it’s just capitulation. That’s not praiseworthy, that’s cowardice.