John Zmirak Helps you Understand How…

Conservatism became the Thing That Used to be Conservatism. Quick and dirty summary: It lost trust in the incarnational nature of reality and decided to become a thing of abstract ideas rather than actual peoples with real family ties, lands, histories, and cultures. Do that, and you become a wraith.

A very insightful essay that helps me get a much better bearing on the essentially theological blunder that undergirds the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism and, in particular, helps me get a sense of why I’ve had such and eerie sense that it echoes the great crazy All Explaining Theories of Everything that have dominated the Left since forever.

America as a country with a people and a history and a culture: I’m all for it. America as an ideological abstraction: give me a bottle of holy water. Chesterton called America a “nation with the soul of a Church”. But souls are meant to be embodied. Disembodied souls are not “pure ideology”. They are ghosts. And ghosts that seek to walk abroad and not be enfleshed need to be exorcised and laid to rest. I believe in patriotism, not nationalism and emphatically not the export of American Abstractionism.