A False and Fictional Future

One of my favorite shows of the past few years has been The Young Pope. For those of y’all that haven’t seen it, the show centers upon the rise of a reactionary American Pope, Lenny Belardo (played by Jude Law), who in accordance to his desire to revive pre-Vatican II Catholicism, takes the Papal name Pius XIII and begins his counter-revolution against the corruption of the Vatican. The show is wonderful (note, it is not for kids), and while not made by traditional Catholics, does work to make Pius XIII sympathetic. His backstory is particularly important as he is the son of hippies who decided that having to take care of a child was a major buzzkill and abandoned him at a Catholic orphanage, solidifying his hatred of the 1960s and all the abandonment of duty that was popularized during that era. For all the show’s strengths, at its core is an idea that has been popular for decades – that the children of revolutionaries, having suffered the brunt of their revolution, would turn to reaction.

The Young Pope is hardly the first television show to deal with this idea, think back to the 1980s with Family Ties, where two former hippies have a child, Alex P. Keaton, who is a die hard Reaganite that frequently quotes Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley and loves tax cuts. It’s an idea that makes sense, if the children of World War II veterans annoyed their fathers by burning their draft cards and growing out their hair, then it stands to reason that their own children would annoy their parents by putting on a suit and praising capitalism. To cite an example in real life, Tucker Carlson’s birth mother abandoned her family duties when he was a child to pursue the “bohemian” lifestyle. Look how he turned out.

The idea that the children of revolutionaries will eventually tire of their revolution and embrace reaction sounds credible, and there are individual cases of this coming to reality, it is also an idea that I am having increased difficulty believing. Yes, Tucker Carlson came to hate the selfishness of his parents (particularly, his mother and stepmother) and turned to not only the Right but has helped break the neoconservative hold on the minds of millions of ordinary conservatives. But, Kurt Cobain was also the child of divorced hippies and far from embracing tradition, his anger at his parents centered on how they gave up on achieving their own revolution. In an even worse example is John Walker Linhd (the American Taliban), who was the child of a lapsed Catholic homosexual father and a Western Buddhist mother.

Unfortunately, one need not look at just the worse case scenarios to find millions of children of revolutionaries that are today cynical burnouts. These are people who live to consume and people who believe in nothing. And, there are millions more that react to their parents by embracing the next phase of the revolution. Yes, The Young Pope is based on a kernel of truth – the Latin Mass is full of young people raised on a weak and cowardly Church of the post-Vatican II era. However, for every Pius XIII, there are at least three who have simply rejected Christianity all together. Relying on those that the revolution harmed the most (and let’s make no mistake, from easy divorce to the loss of identity, the young have been harmed the most by this) to eventually revolt and embrace the old order is a bad strategy for the Right. The young victims of the revolution are looking for something they can believe in and sometimes they find something healthy, but more often than not they find something that leads them going down the same path. In the really bad cases, they find something that puts them in jail for the rest of their lives.

The revolution has been going on for decades and there has been no significant reaction to it on the part of the young. Some of the people who helped to overthrow the old order in the 1960s are now old enough to be grandparents and some have even become great-grandparents. If some kind of youthful rightwing reaction was to come, it would have by now. Have some gone down this path? Sure, but many more have embraced nonsense that even the most radical of the 60s radicals would have laughed at. In reality, the last group of people who have any adult memories of what life was like before the 1960s revolution are dying off rapidly, and as soon as that happens, then it really is a matter of starting from scratch to have any hope of rebuilding the old order.

The best strategy for the Right is not to hope for the tide of youthful rebellion to turn in their favor, but rather it is to rebuild the old order in the same manner that the old order was built in the first place – by having children and teaching them. It’s a strategy that is far more difficult to pull off than at any other time in history, not a tyrant in history interfered with parental rights on our current scale to this extent (this is nothing compared to what is coming) but it is laying down the foundation of something that can work. Not to rebel against the system, but by preparing for its collapse. Difficult? Yes, but it is also far more realistic than hoping an army of Pope Pius XIIIs and Alex P. Keatons swoop in to save the day and make things right.

-By Harmonica

Identity Dixie Guest

O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.