Gordon Timothy J. - Rules for Retrogrades : Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left

W e have never been more miserable. Despite historic peace and material prosperity, surveys show happiness has declined steadily in the United States over the past half-century. A loneliness epidemic has overshadowed not just the United States but the entire Western world, and the problem only stands to get worse, as young people report feeling lonely more often and more intensely than any other age group. Marriage rates have plummeted, as have birth rates, which have now fallen below replacement. Each year abortion claims the lives of a million babies in the United States alone. We can no longer even agree on the definitions of man and woman.

Saul Alinsky must be looking up from the afterlife with pride. Alinskys Rules For Radicals inspired some of the most prominent progressive politicians in recent history, including former president Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with whom the author of those rules exchanged gushing letters. The progressive training manual worked, and the results have been hellfitting, since Alinsky dedicated his book in part to Lucifer, the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.

Can progress breed misery? Chesterton considered progress a useless word, for progress takes for granted an already defined direction: and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. C. S. Lewis similarly observed, We all want progress, but if youre on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. Our civilization is dying: spiritually, culturally, and physically of old age. Each year the problem worsens. The only way forward is back.

In the inaugural issue of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. defined the conservatives mission as standing athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so. Timothy and David Gordon have more ambitious plans. A conservative might stop at standing, but the retrograde must go further. He cannot content himself with halting the inevitable march of a misery-making progress. The retrograde takes a step back, not to relive some dead moment, but to recover something that has been lost.

One mans progressive is another mans retrograde. But the categories, whatever you like to call them, are not merely two sides of the same coin. Revering our cultural inheritance requires humility, the beginning of wisdom; toppling our tradition demands pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Where Saul Alinsky enticed his readers to vice, the Gordon brothers encourage theirs to virtue.

President John F. Kennedy explained the difference half a century ago in the words of the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw. Some see things and say, Why? he explained. But I dream things that never were, and I say, Why not? Kennedys brother Robert adopted the line as a slogan for his own presidential campaign. Their other brother Edward quoted it at Roberts funeral, and generations of progressive politicians have parroted the line ever since. What Kennedy failed to mention is the specific origin of the quotation, which appears in Shaws play Back To Methuselah in the mouth of the Serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is curious how often Satan crops up in the history of progress.

Words such as left and right, forward and backward, progress and regress take a political discussion only so far; eventually the conversation must come to sin and grace because, as Cardinal Manning observed, all human conflict is ultimately theological. The only real directions we can go are up to glory or down to perdition. If we hope to survive, we ought to take a step back and work out which way is which.

Michael J. Knowles
Los Angeles, CA
20 December 2019