Absent the restraining force of immemorial commonality, the binding force of social cohesion must be plenary law. In our own time, the social and racial commonality of shared lineage has been aggressively supplanted by the idea of “American Values,” but a careful examination of these “values” shows them rather to be politically pragmatic rather than moral. American Values are promulgated by the official organs or government and its partners in the totalitarian enterprise, applying the science of mass suggestion. One hears sonorous words like Justice and Freedom repeated in the media. These are supposedly exemplars of American Values. But absent some defining notions as to what actions and beliefs constitute these terms in the reality of practice, they are empty of moral significance.

What precisely IS justice? Economic justice is a term used grandiloquently in speeches by figures advancing the appealing idea of fairness. What, however, is economic justice in practice? When we have the temerity to ask, we are told that it involves the elimination of privilege. It is hoped that thusly, we may be led in a circle of self-referential terms, that when pronounced will fill us with the vague associations of goodness and decency, and being satisfied with such associations, we will conclude the search for meaning, having settled the matter based utterly on the sentimental impressions that such terms impart to us. Such a state of suggestibility is referred to as “verbalism” by the traditionalist philosopher René Guénon, who asserts in his monograph The Crisis of the Modern World that this is the basis of all modern democratic politics.

Certainly, when dealing with abstract the terms that are proffered by professional politicians and capitalists, the devil is in the details. When such terms come to be defined, the manufactured consensus that once appeared to resolve the tensions between identity groups begins to dissolve. It is very likely that the “consensus” required to hold together the modern pluralistic demos is manufactured. Beyond the illusory consensus around abstract terms, the stuff of so-called populism, only law, an invasive, plenary, salvational law can form the glue that welds together natural enemies. The scriptures tell us that Light has no commerce with darkness, but in a democracy, it must. The currency of democratic societies is a tense accommodation, a compromise of values that is called “centrism,” but is really nothing more than the demilitarized zone between oppositional moral vectors.

Absent the defining valences of immemorial cultural practice and ethnic-racial resemblance -rite and habit in which ideas inhere and find daily expression- without these nexuses of thought, assent, belief, disbelief, habit, rite, presumption, and resemblance, the overriding value of unity makes of the law an unsleeping despot. And no aloof despot he, but one who takes up residence in every house, who quarters his soldiers in every barn and square of every humble village, to prosecute war against the geometry of the hayricks.

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