Thread by @roddreher

Guy has a point here, one I wrote about in Live Not By Lies, quoting Czeslaw Milosz: always pay attention to the discourse of the intellectual elites, because you might find yourself living unhappily under their theories. Communism came to Central Europe via the Red Army /more

https://twitter.com/Vermeullarmine/status/1451945959534080005

Derrick Bell's crazy theories came to rule in large part because they built on powerful cultural forces. Once elites accepted these theories, there was not enough resistance left in the broader population. You cdn't resist Communism w/o risking your life. That's not the /more

case with wokeism. So why aren't people resisting? There are several reasons, but one of them, I think, is that CRT is coming in on a broader wave towards cultural leftism in our dechristianized US culture. Ppl might not support CRT, but they are too demoralized to resist. /more

We need to reverse that, and a lot of us are working hard to do so. Nevertheless, we are doing so from a weak position as Christians, given a) the hollowing out of substance within Christian institutions (MTD effect), and b) the collapse of the faith among the young. /more

I can't see the future, obviously, but I do see nothing in the US that gives reason to think that our future lies in a Catholic confessional state, not when Catholics are a minority here, and the dechristianization of Millennials & Gen Z. Besides, it is hard to see why /more

non-Catholics, and Catholics who don't share integralist priors, would want to live under an integralist regime. The Polish government, which I support, is probably the foremost, and maybe the only, example of political Catholicism in the world today, and from my own /more

experiences there, talking to serious, politically engaged young Catholics, the future is dark. Again, this is because the faith is falling apart among the young -- something that all these young Polish Catholics I've interviewed lament, but recognize. So, if you can't /more

achieve political Catholicism in Poland, where can you do so? Absent mass re-conversion to the Catholic faith, the only way to do so is through tyranny. While I have no doubt that some of these integralists would have no problem imposing reactionary Catholic tyranny /more

on the rest of us, the papal Swiss Guards are not the Red Army, and anyway, the current pope is not Pius IX. Any realistic resistance to soft totalitarianism has to be a coalition -- and nobody will join that coalition if they have reason to believe its ultimate goal is /more

the subjugation of non-Catholics to a reactionary Catholic state. It's folly to think otherwise. So, the reason CRT, gay marriage, & gender ideology have been so quickly accepted is, yes, in part because the true believers gained power in the institutions, but ALSO because /more

the century-long cultural revolution of making an idol of the Self succeeded so brilliantly. (See Carl Trueman's great book on this.) You don't need the Red Army when most ppl have already interiorized the ideology -- if not totally, at least enough to render them passive. /end