As the cliché goes, history does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Thirty-five years ago the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed overnight, something that nobody in the West had foreseen. It turned out, contrary to the firm conclusion of all our vaunted intelligence apparatuses, that every one of those regimes was a paper tiger.| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
My aunt, one of my father’s two sisters, died in 2020, at the age of eighty-five. She never married, because when she was young, she convinced herself that what mattered was having a career—in her case, as a virologist. She attended all the best schools: Miss Porter’s; Bryn Mawr; and Harvard Medical School, graduating in| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
History is the story of what resulted from the acts of great men, directly and indirectly, buffeted by fortune. Thus, in the Middle Ages, as in every age, what the common people did in their daily lives never drove history. Nonetheless, their lives can be of interest, both to specialists and generalists. Moreover, studying the| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (René Girard)| theworthyhouse.com
My goal is winning the future, and to win, we must utterly and permanently defeat the Left. In this effort, we can learn many lessons from Spain in the years from 1930 to 1940 (and in the years beyond, but that is a discussion for another day). These lessons are not just about war, or| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Fitzpatrick’s War, a prophetic 2004 work of fiction, which I read on a whim, has, somewhat to my surprise, stuck deeply in my mind. Not only does the book echo events that have happened since its publication, it also bids fair to predict the broad outlines of the immediate future. What is more, Fitzpatrick’s War| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
A society, or part of it, always adopts definite modes of thought, speech, and action. And in time, inevitably, at least in modernity, those modes shift radically. What was once unthinkable suddenly becomes not only thinkable, but is everywhere, and the change is unstoppable, at all levels. This process has little to do with rational| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
For eighty years, Superman’s motto was “Truth, Justice, and the American Way!” In 2020, at the apogee of unchallenged Left power, it changed to “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow!” In the fantasy world of comics, only one clause mutated. But in the real world, all three clauses have been transformed into their opposite. Truth| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Never in history has targeted violence by individuals or small groups, killings and bombings, what the Russians once called “propaganda of the deed,” ever led to the replacement of a governing system, or even triggered significant societal change. Yet for the Left such acts have proved irresistible since the mid-nineteenth century. In keeping with this| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -