Rod Dreher: Is a So-Called "American Government" Which Attacks the Very Liberty of Conscience the Nation Was Founded Upon Any Longer Owed Allegiance?

I use quotes around "American government" the same way the media uses them around "religious freedom."

Hot Air has a digest, but the whole article is worth reading.

He discusses the "Benedict Option," though I'm not quite sure what that means. Quoting Alasdair Macantyre, writing about Christian endurance under the Roman thumb:

What they set themselves to achieve instead--often not recognising fully what they were doing--was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict.

That doesn't seem very appetizing to me. I've thought about that a lot, and part of the whole Moron Meetups idea was an idea of opting out of Obama's America to find a better America -- the real America -- apart from it.

However, what is actually sought is freedom. And finding a culture in smaller groups is hardly any protection from an increasingly Self-Willed State which is determined to Rule over you.

You can't Opt Out of Big Government, after all. That's the whole point of Big Government.

If they would permit you an Opt Out, they wouldn't be Big Government at all.

From RD in the sidebar, Tim Carney writes about an unavoidable metaphor that keeps coming up -- the left is now patrolling the already-won battlefield to find survivors and shoot them-- while forever casting itself as the trespassed-upon victim.

I don't know what to say anymore.

posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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