Courage Cannot Be Outsourced (2024)

Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do About It
Stephen Baskerville
Arktos, 2024

Since the early months of 2020, what Stephen Baskerville fittingly describes as “a junta of amateurish, semi-adolescent ideologues” has been able to seize control of America while millions opposed to them were “forced to sit by, virtually helpless.” In rapid succession we witnessed a manufactured epidemic accompanied by demands for compliance with absurd response measures, orchestrated rioting in America’s larger cities, government-led censorship of the internet, the elimination of electoral safeguards and a stolen election, mass incarceration of citizens who protested, staged trials of opposition politicians and their supporters, the abolition of the nation’s border controls, and a reckless response to the Ukrainian crisis that risks plunging us into nuclear war. It is the closest thing to a revolution this country has witnessed since the radical phase of reconstruction.

Some good accounts of these events have already been written, but Baskerville claims his new book is the first to try to explain why they occurred—or more precisely, why they were not prevented. For the motives of those who carried out the coup are less important than the inability of wiser men to stop them.

The author begins from what he calls the Iron Law of Washington: People who are paid to solve problems acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they are paid to solve. In other words, ineffectiveness is a consequence of the perverse incentives created by professionalization: “We are now experiencing the culmination of the long tragedy of Americans delegating and abdicating their civic responsibilities to a professional political class.”

Most efforts to influence policy are now the business of “public interest” lobbying firms staffed mainly by attorneys. The resulting mindset is typified by conservative columnist Rod Dreher; after bemoaning the decline of religious freedom, he exhorts his readers: “We have to fight!” But how does he suggest we do this? “If you aren’t donating to the Becket Fund and/or the Alliance Defending Freedom, please consider it.” Citizenship now means writing a check to a bunch of lawyers.

Public interest lobbies go back a century or more, but their numbers and influence have greatly increased since the 1960s: Baskerville calls them the “institutional legacy” of that era.

What started out as rag-tag groups of blue-jeaned activists inhabiting dilapidated offices in the Dupont Circle and Adams-Morgan sections of Washington have grown into slick, multi-million-dollar enterprises that operate globally and terrify governments. Many are bankrolled by billionaires like George Soros and the plutocrats of Davos. For all their pretense of representing the “public interest,” the lobbying firms do not “empower” the citizens. Citizens are precisely what they eclipse and even muzzle. Like courtroom lawyers advising their clients, the message of the lawyer-lobbyists to the citizenry is “Be quiet and let me do the talking.”

Such pressure groups prefer to pursue their goals through litigation and regulation rather than legislation. This is because the judiciary and the civil service bureaucracy are the most undemocratic and unaccountable sectors of the government, and they know their objectives do not enjoy broad popular support. Accordingly, the rise of the professional lobbies has been accompanied on the government side by an increase in the importance of these sectors. Hardly any of what Americans now call government involves the president executing laws passed by congress, as we used to be taught in school. And everyone involved in the new system—the lobbies and NGOs, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy—are naturally drawn to radical ideology because it furnishes them with “an endless supply of grievances that rationalize their power.”

Such opposition as this system faces comes largely from mirror-image lobbying organizations set up by professional “conservatives.” Whatever the virtues of individual operatives within such institutions—and Baskerville notes his respect for the skill and effectiveness of many he has known—such counter-lobbies unavoidably develop organizational interests distinct from their political mission. Their administrators are less interested in defeating the left than in fundraising to construct “fiefdoms and power centers of their own.” They put on lavish events featuring conservative celebrities to impress the public and increase donations. Over time, such ostensibly oppositional organizations come to “control the terms by which opposition to the Left is permitted to operate, a role indispensable to the Left’s success.” This includes taboos against the discussion of racial differences and Jewish influence, of course, but much else besides.

The method of institutional conservatism consists in responding to each new outrage from the left as it hits the news cycle. It is easier to fundraise off stories about some dude demanding to compete in women’s swimming than to confront serious, decades-old problems like no fault divorce or feminist institutional power. This reduces politics to “a pas de deux in which the Left leads and the Right follows.” Since the left is skilled at continually adapting itself to changing circ*mstances, this piecemeal oppositional strategy becomes “a Sisyphean task that cannot lead to anything but defeat.” The only lesson professional conservatism draws from its many defeats, however, is that people must give them more money. If all else fails, new organizations with fresh faces and slightly revised mission statements may be established. But what if professionalization and institutional interests themselves are the problem?

Genuine Civic Engagement and the Role of Churches

“A truly effective opposition,” writes Baskerville, “can only come from what the right-wing firms have displaced: citizens, householders with families and property, millions of them, all exerting face-to-face pressure.” Some people like this still exist: scores of parents have recently confronted school boards over the sexual indoctrination of their children, and the overreaction of the authorities in many districts is the best proof of their effectiveness. Yet these brave souls are dangerously exposed, at risk of retaliation such as “de-banking” or even the confiscation of their children. They require organizational backing they will never get from risk-averse professional conservative institutions.

Historically, churches have provided such backing:

Ever since the settlement of New England, churches made themselves the principal vehicles for citizen participation and checks on government. The proliferation of churches as voices of political dissent was the driving force behind both the English Revolution of the 17^th century and the resulting exodus to America.

Later on it was churches that “agitated for the American Revolution, led the abolition of slavery, furnished the organizational structure for the early working-class and trade union movements, opposed World War I and Vietnam,” and on and on. They performed three functions crucial to converting individual dissent into effective public opposition:

Churches shaped and articulated citizens’ voices into some coherence, so that people had more than individual, changeable opinions; they had fixed principles and shared beliefs. Churches allowed citizens to combine their voices, enabling them to be more effectively heard. Finally, the churches demanded that we act when government officials were too weak or corrupt, even when action might cost us something.

Importantly, their mission included the moral betterment of the citizen himself:

They inculcated virtues necessary for effective citizenship and for which today’s lobbying firms have no substitute: self-discipline, self-sacrifice, sobriety, delayed gratification, a work ethic, perseverance, fidelity, a fierce commitment to family integrity and sexual morality, courage. Today’s pressure groups, even the most “Christian,” would never dream of trying to elevate their membership morally.

What such groups have succeeded in doing is neutering the civic effectiveness of the churches:

Why should churches today take a stand on issues like the family and sexual morality—or for that matter the destruction of public health, injustices in the courts, the bloodbath in Ukraine, or anything else? Why should they alert us when government officials abuse their power, and compel us to do our civic duty even when it involves hardship, sacrifice, and danger? Nowadays we have the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Center for Law and Justice, and other groups of paid advocates to do it all for us—and without incurring the slightest hardship, sacrifice, or danger.

But when such advocacy groups fail to offer the necessary resistance, as they conspicuously have when faced with the Biden junta, no one else steps into the breach.

A significant symptom of the neutering of the church’s civic effectiveness is the growing emphasis of Christian advocacy organizations upon “religious freedom.” The author notes, e.g., that the website of the Family Research Council contains far more on this subject than on families. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical origins of such freedom. A scholar of Puritan political thought, Baskerville points out that (contrary to popular myth) New England’s founders did not come to North America in search of religious freedom, something in which they did not believe: “but they did advocate other things vociferously, and religious freedom was an unintended result.” Their successful civic advocacy carved out a domain that the public authority was eventually forced to concede was outside its purview.

Since today’s churches have given up advocating much of anything besides the ruling ideology, the government has resumed its encroachments. Why should anyone be surprised? It is the nature of government to seek to expand its power, while pushing back against this used to be the church’s business. “For conservatives and churches to complain that their ‘religious freedom’ is being infringed,” writes Baskerville, “is like an army complaining that someone is shooting at them.” If churches in their role as the traditional and proper guardians of marriage, e.g., had bothered to fight back against the police-state machinery created to enforce unilateral divorce, they would not be forced to defend their “religious freedom” today.

Where It All Started: Welfare

If we want to study the growth of unaccountable judicial and bureaucratic power over our lives, we must look back to where it all began: in the welfare system created as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program of the 1960s. Set up originally to deal with poverty, it led to government agents “forcibly controlling the private lives of millions of non-criminal citizens, . . . the most radical innovation in the role of the state in modern history.”

Before the rise of welfare,

private charity had been operated by churches and volunteer women driven by a sense of Christian calling and supported financially by their husbands. These women did not merely relieve poverty materially; they also inculcated and enforced Christian sexual morality that could eradicate poverty by refusing to condone single motherhood.

But the system inaugurated in the 1960s operated by the “man in the house” rule whereby benefits were limited to fatherless families. This, of course, provided an incentive for creating more such families. The dangers were widely understood at the time. In his 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out that the Black illegitimacy rate was already 25 percent and warned: “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relation to male authority . . . asks for and gets chaos.” The Republican platform of 1968 denounced welfare benefits to unmarried mothers because they “erode self-respect and discourage family unity and responsibility.” Even the new system’s champions defended it only as a temporary measure. All parties “agreed that the poor should not remain poor, that government handouts were inherently demeaning, and that poor people should eventually, by whatever means, lead lives of economic self-sufficiency.”

Welfare failed spectacularly at overcoming poverty—it spread poverty and made it permanent—but over time a new justification for the system was developed. Feminists began noticing that while single mothers might be poor, they enjoyed greater sexual freedom than women in intact families. As one feminist study put it: “Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.” They began celebrating single motherhood as a positive good, and talk about overcoming poverty gradually dissipated.

The system proved even more “empowering” for the largely female functionaries who administered it: they gained all sorts of quasi-police powers to deal with the chaos created by fatherlessness, unconstrained by the constitutional restraints on ordinary policemen. This was a lot more fun than just handing out money! Clinton’s welfare reform act of 1996 was little more than a wish-list for this new feminist gendarmerie.

This feminist reform of welfare was accompanied by one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American public: the demonization of men separated from their children by the incentive structure of welfare itself (and soon by “no fault” divorce as well) as “deadbeat dads” who had supposedly abandoned them. The genius of this tactic was that it won the enthusiastic support of conservatives eager to pose as the champions of women and children. Within the conservative establishment today, there is no toleration for anyone who breaths a word against “heroic single mothers.” Instead, we are told we must get ever-tougher on the criminals such mothers inevitably raise, as well as their hapless fathers. Republican politicians mumble meaningless platitudes about family values even as their salaries are financed by the plundering of fathers forcibly kept from their children. It is the Iron Law of Washington in action.

Welfare is thus far more than a matter of tax money being wasted on lazy spongers: the system produces truants, drop-outs, drug addicts, prostitutes, rioters, and criminals who require further spending on law enforcement and incarceration. Indeed, most domestic spending is now devoted to combatting the problems created by the welfare system. It is a state within the state, “with its own revenue collection, law enforcement, and penal apparatus.”

Politically, the welfare system—both administrators and recipients—now function as a patronage machine for the Democratic Party, collecting salaries and benefits in exchange for political support. Yet Republican party strategists have only just begun to see that “unmarried women are the backbone of the Democratic Party” following their poor performance in the midterm elections of 2022.

The Role of Blacks

Black Americans had the misfortune of being the first group “helped” by the Great Society reforms, and they make up a disproportionate share of the antisocial hordes those reforms have produced. A proper understanding of this dynamic may require racial realists to go against certain of their acquired mental habits. While Blacks have always been overrepresented in America’s prisons, recent levels are unprecedented. As political scientist Marie Gottschalk has written: “In the 1920s, fewer than one in three prisoners were black. By the late 1980s, for the first time in US history the majority of prisoners were black.” Today a young Black man has about a 75 percent chance of ending up incarcerated. Clearly, something besides genetics and evolutionary history is needed to explain current rates of Black social pathology and incarceration. That something is family destruction wrought by the welfare system.

Baskerville notes that “young black men today are far less likely to be incarcerated for violent crime than for unpaid child support.” A significant fraction of those arrested for drug dealing may simply be trying to keep up with child support payments, since other opportunities for such men to earn good money are few, and the penalties for selling drugs are less harsh than those for falling behind on child support. Liberal elites have effectively re-enslaved the Black man, using his women as their instrument:

The same state apparat that degrades the black male by usurping his role as provider and protector simultaneously liberates his female counterpart, subsidizing her infidelity (“independence”). She benefits from all the social programs that encourage her to exploit that freedom to the full: TANF and EITC (exclusively for women); affirmative action (she fills two quotas); housing projects and food stamps (for single mothers); plus those now pushed by the Biden administration [“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”]. Though these programs are rationalized and enacted by exploiting the violent deaths of black men like George Floyd, they do not benefit black men in any way. They enable black women to proliferate single motherhood, emasculate black men, and drag black children into poverty and self-destructiveness.

To top it off, the women can then build careers as petty functionaries in the apparat. These young women can be seen on the Washington Metro in dreadlocks, carrying thick textbooks with titles like Administration of Criminal Justice which train them to lock up the men they should be marrying. Some grow up to be Kamala Harrises, Lori Lightfoots, and Muriel Bowsers: models of feminine “empowerment” who preside over entire cities and now a nation descending into chaos, driven by the systematic, willful destruction of black men.

Feminists hold up Black women as models for the rest of the sisterhood; as early as 1992 we find Stephanie Coontz clucking: “African-American working women have made the largest income gains relative to men of any ethnic group.”

Baskerville notes that the emasculation of Black men has long been a central, though neglected, theme of African American literature, including the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. The cynical deflection of Black anger onto phantoms like “structural racism” and “white supremacy” does not mean it lacks all justification. Black men’s “early subjugation by the welfare matriarchy and the criminal injustice apparat is the experience of growing numbers of white and other middle-class men today.”

Revolt of the Fatherless

Fatherless children, even before they grow into adult criminals, are typically marked by self-destructive anger, “rag[ing] out of control because they never had any parental authority to keep them under control and teach them how to channel their emerging discontents with the world’s imperfections into constructive dissent and productive habits of life.” Fathers are, indeed, a special target of their anger: “adolescent children of welfare and divorce almost universally hate their fathers with an animus that is visceral and irrational.”

Baskerville cites psychologist Howard Schwarz as one who can illuminate the emotional dynamic involved in such rage without recourse to Freudian “hocus-pocus.”

When we begin our life, a loving mother accepts unconditionally our spontaneous impulses. Over time, the outside world, strikingly indifferent to our desires and unimpressed by our importance, makes its presence known to us. Within the family, this outside world is represented by the father, who has a relationship with the mother that does not revolve around us. At first, we experience this as a violation and try to reject it.

But in a healthy family environment we are forced to recognize that we will have to understand the father’s relation to mother on its own terms. Fathers earn mothers’ love by achieving something mothers value. The boys come to see that if they can become like his father—by learning about and dealing with the outside world—they can regain something akin to their mother’s love which his father appears to have.

This only works, however, if his mother loves and appreciates his father. “The most striking characteristic of our time,” notes Schwartz, “is that the mother resents the father.” Under this condition,

the way for the child to become again the object of mother’s love is by joining her in her hatred of the father and wish to destroy him. Father has not earned mother’s love, but stolen it. His claims of accomplishment have been all subterfuge and lies. The father replaces unconditional love and acceptance with rules and limits, and is therefore the archetypal oppressor. Liberation is defined by his destruction and rebellion against his rules. Getting rid of him, we will be free of the demands and expectations placed upon us. We will be able to do what we want, act on our whim, in perfect safety, to the accompaniment of mother’s love.

The realm of psychodynamics does not admit of precision. It is not possible to prove Schwartz’s interpretation correct, but it does appear to fit the observed consequences of welfare-induced fatherlessness which, in Baskerville’s words, “turns fathers and their authority into objects of contempt, derision, and invective, and children into narcissistic and nihilistic rebels.”

When this pattern becomes sufficiently widespread, it has political consequences. It provides Baskerville with a plausible explanation of the BLM rioting of 2020 which contributed so greatly to the Biden coup.

As the children of the matriarchy grow up—and as they are joined by better-educated counterparts from middle class divorce—they eventually become more than just criminals, addicts, and prostitutes. They start to acquire political consciousness and organization. The mindless, self-destructive rage of the ghetto becomes focused outwardly in a revolt against America. This is the “hidden history” of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Too many people accept at face value BLM’s claims to be a racial movement representing Blacks: in fact, it is the “brainchild of radicalized women, and the people it ‘empowers’ are not low-income black citizens but affluent sexual militants” aiming (in their own words) to “dismantle patriarchal practice . . . disrupt the nuclear family structure [and] collectively care for . . . children,” all in order to create a world “free from environments in which men are centered.” This is, of course, the perfect formula for exacerbating the ills from which Black welfare recipients are already suffering.

Much of the disorder in today’s America is a natural consequence of fatherlessness:

Multiple generations of children of divorce have now grown up hating their fathers and all traditional authority and instead see government officials as their providers and protectors. Many feel betrayed, fear love, and have no conception of how to form enduring, sacrificial relationships with the opposite sex or their own offspring. Raised on the proceeds of their father’s servitude, the children of welfare and divorce feel entitled to the fruits of expanding state power and feel no compunction about enslaving productive taxpayers in two-parent families to provide themselves with benefits and jobs and fund open-ended expansion of state power. When the Biden administration proposes hiring tens of thousands of tax agents to shake down solvent households, many of today’s youth view this not as government plunder but as a legitimate revenue stream.

And so the chaos perpetuates itself.

Judicial Corruption

If the welfare system marked the beginning of unaccountable governmental power over the lives of Americans, the corruption of our judiciary was another essential step on the road to the Biden coup.

A surprisingly large number of Americans first became aware of how corrupt our courts have become when they witnessed the politically motivated prosecutions of Donald Trump and his associates. Numerous commentators warned us that “if they can do this to Trump, they can do it to any of us.” But as Baskerville notes, this is putting the matter backwards: “they” could only do such things to Trump because they had long since been getting away with doing them to defenseless Americans.

Many Americans were shocked, e.g., when a judge issued a “protective order” preventing the former President from discussing his trial, making public the evidence in his favor, or even proclaiming his innocence. Outrageous, yes—but already endured by countless Americans without Trump’s ability to arouse public interest and sympathy. As the author says, “‘protective orders,’ declaring defendants guilty and punishing or gagging them, come straight out of family court,” where they are used to silence Americans who try to publicize the system’s injustices. Courts are now “devising mechanisms to inflict criminal punishments on journalists and scholars who criticize government officials.” But neither mainstream nor “conservative” media can be bothered to report on this.

Another form of corruption is the plea-bargaining system. American prosecutors today win 98 percent of their cases, 95 percent of them without any trial. This is a direct result of plea-bargaining, in which charges are multiplied against defendants until they agree to plead guilty to something, anything, rather than spend the rest of their lives in jail. January 6 protester Jacob Chansely, e.g., received a four-year sentence as a result of a plea bargain. Even when public video surveillance footage from the Capitol building proved his innocence, he was not released from prison because (as his attorney explained) the plea agreement “waived all his appeal rights” and a reconsideration of the sentence was “procedurally barred.” As the author acidly notes: “Americans might like to inquire what kind of justice system requires them to ‘waive’ their constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair trial and then ‘bars’ officials from releasing them despite evidence of their innocence.”

But as with the Trump prosecutions, only Chansley’s relative prominence distinguishes him from thousands of

poor, uneducated, mostly minority men . . . coerced into plea bargains they cannot possibly understand, made in a matter of seconds during “mass plea hearings” [that] many call “assembly-line justice.” They can then spend decades in prison. Trials are so rare that demanding one only serves to annoy judges and prosecutors.

Or again: Republicans were upset to see Trump advisor Roger Stone subjected to a pre-dawn no-knock raid and arrest in front of pre-notified camera crews. But, as Baskerville points out, “they did not complain when this technique was pioneered by child-support enforcement, so now they join its targets.”

In February 2023, conservatives were indignant to see the foreman of a Georgia grand jury making the rounds of the talk shows to express her enthusiasm for issuing indictments against Donald Trump and his supporters. But this obvious impropriety conceals the larger reality that grand juries have ceased to perform their intended function of protecting the innocent from frivolous and politically motivated prosecution: they “have become perfunctory and are firmly under the thumbs of the same prosecutors whose abuses of power [they] exist to control.” As a result, prosecutors no longer start from a crime and look for the man who committed it, but start from the man and look for a crime to charge him with, as was clearly done in Trump’s case.

Mens rea, the principle that a crime requires criminal intent, has now been eliminated. New, vaguely defined crimes are legislated not merely by civil servants, but by judges, prosecutors and even enforcement agents. Not only the political prosecution of Donald Trump but “the entire coup of the last four years would never have happened if the conservative political class had paid as much attention to the judicial persecution of ordinary American as they now pay to their own interests.”

The welfare system, especially its child-support mechanism, also functions as the system’s incubator for rogue prosecutors and (increasingly) politicians. The process is “so formulaic and demands so little intelligence that even Kamala Harris can do it.” Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a great champion of “family values,” also got his start in this moral cesspit, and such men “will never reform the system that elevated them to power.”

In Baskerville’s view, the corruption of our courts originated in lobbyists’ pursuit of political goals through the judiciary. This pressured courts into to make increasingly political decisions. “Conservative” lobbies adopted the left’s techniques, acquiring a vested influence in perpetuating the procedures they formally opposed. Their weak strategy of trying to appoint “originalists” was no match for the underlying trend in which they participated.

A second major source of corruption is institutionalized feminism:

From the beginning, the most authoritarian pressure group in American politics has consistently been women’s rights activists. [No one] has done more to politicize criminal justice, expand the penal apparatus, and increase the prison population.

In the 1970s, e.g., under feminist pressure, nearly every state made it easier to convict men accused of sexual assault or a vaguely defined “domestic violence.” Feminist Marie Gottschalk acknowledges: “it is striking what an uncritical stance women reformers took toward the state. . . . They have played central roles in pushing for enhanced policing powers.” This should have been a predictable consequence of the female tendency to value security over freedom. America has the largest prison system in the world today and, as the author remarks, the criminalization of our male population “coincides precisely with the rise of organized feminism.”

The Emasculation of America

Contemporary America seems vulnerable to outbreaks of mass hysteria, emotional outbursts leading to irrational behavior. As its etymology makes clear, hysteria is a typically feminine disorder, although it can affect men as well. The Covid response is a recent example. In the worlds of one critic, it provides “a dramatic illustration of the ease with which terrified and self-righteous women could be mobilized through irrational safetyism and scapegoating.”

Janice Fiamengo, a critic of feminism, writes:

it was feminist politicians who pushed hardest for lockdowns, because women said it was what they wanted. And they wanted it in the holy name of safety. From the feminist point of view, Covid mania was the definition of caring. Who screamed loudest about masking, hand-sanitizing, distancing, keeping children out of school, staying in one’s bubble, switching the world to Zoom, keeping out the potentially-contaminated at Christmas? Who waited in line most patiently for Covid tests and clamored for vaccines to be offered to children? Who was most adamant about the need to shame, isolate, exclude and penalize the unvaccinated? Feminist women.

Baskerville suggests that the equally hysterical opposition to Donald Trump—”the visceral hatred of him by the politically effeminate of both parties”—has been elicited mostly by his unapologetic masculinity (which also explains his appeal to many of his supporters).

For the first time in history, “women now dominate journalism, education, academics, civil-service posts, unions, critical sectors of law and business” as well as such traditional centers of male leadership as “churches, police, and [the] military.” “The future is female,” gloats author Hanna Rosin in her book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. All of us, including men, are apparently supposed to celebrate this as an obvious blessing free of any possible downside.

Effeminacy pervades even organizations ostensibly dedicated to the defense of tradition. Baskerville notes the disgust of prominent conservative women at the male cowardice they were forced to contend with: “Mrs. Thatcher’s contempt for diffident men in her own party is well known. In private, [Phyllis] Schlafly often described Republican men as ‘cowards.’ Neither considered male submission normal.” Today, conservative men bring feminists forward to denounce the participation of transvestites in women’s sports, “taking sides in the sexual Left’s intramural squabbles” rather than fighting the feminist ideology which led to such outrages in the first place. These men see deference to women

as some kind of twisted chivalry. But it demands no courage. On the contrary, the dainty knights of professional conservatism profit handsomely and advance effortlessly by stabbing other men in the back while ingratiating themselves with radical women. In the universities and military they often fill the places vacated by their victims.

The Biden junta need have no fear such men might step forward to do battle with barbarians prepared to steal elections, burn down cities, or sexually mutilate our children.

No Fault Divorce with Mother Custody: Linchpin of the System

The welter of problems facing America today can make it seem difficult to know where to start fighting back. But the issues of the day are never of equal importance. Drag queen story hour, e.g., makes for eye-catching headlines, but is one of the more superficial symptoms of our sexual dysfunction. Rational prioritization of our efforts demands a focus on less flashy but deeper and more consequential matters. A clue can be found in the conservative truism that the family rather than the individual is the fundamental building block of society. Much of America’s decline—not all of it, but a lot—can be traced back to family destruction, and this destruction has been brought about specifically by the removal of fathers.

Motherhood is a fact of nature. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes understood, mother custody over children is the original and primitive arrangement, prevailing in what he called “the state of mere nature.”

Where there are no matrimonial laws, it cannot be known who is the father, unless it be declared by the mother. And therefore the right of dominion over the child dependeth on her will and is consequently hers.

By contrast, writes Baskerville:

Fatherhood forms the foundation of civilization—not simply “the family,” but specifically married fatherhood. … It is fatherhood that must be constructed socially, and it is fatherhood in turn that constructs the social order. Marriage forms the basis of civilization because it establishes paternal authority.

And this patriarchal arrangement is still a novelty in evolutionary terms: an innovation only a few thousand years old. We should not be surprised to find some women impatient to rid themselves of its burdens.

Feminism is this impatience: its central demand, far more important than “equal pay for equal work” or any of its other slogans, is the reestablishment of woman’s unlimited control over reproduction. In effect, it is a revolt against civilization, a demand for a return to Hobbes’s “state of nature.” In the words of scholar Daniel Amneus: “Women’s sexual disloyalty creates matriarchy and ghettos. Civilized society must be a man’s world, since the woman’s world is the ghetto.”

Within Christendom, historically, a woman who wished to leave her husband was forced to abandon her children as well. Not many did. The switch to presumptive mother custody began in Victorian Britain, a society even more given to a sentimental view of women and motherhood than our own. The first breach was the Custody of Infants Act of 1839 with its “tender years” doctrine, granting presumptive custody of children under seven years to divorced mothers. This was extended to the age of sixteen in 1873. So today’s revolt of the fatherless has deeper roots than we might like to acknowledge.

But the collapse really began with the introduction of “no fault” divorce, a euphemism for unilateral divorce in the absence of wrongdoing, and without the divorcing spouse incurring responsibility for consequences to the other spouse or children. Not accidentally, “no fault” was originally devised by the National Association of Women Lawyers in the 1940s, although its formal implementation only began in the late 1960s. Since mothers now know they can keep their children while forcibly extracting support from the men they have abandoned, such divorces are virtually always initiated by women in marriages that involve children.

Critics understandably tend to focus on the no fault revolution’s devastation of families (similar to what happens under welfare), but its effects on the judiciary have perhaps been greater. The state’s involvement in traditional marriage can mostly be limited to registering the fact, but divorce requires broad enforcement measures to remove fathers from the home and regulate the subsequent division of property. Without enforcement, a father could simply ignore a court’s bill of divorcement and return home to his children. By now, divorce enforcement has grown luxuriously, and courts have the power to

summon legally innocent citizens, assume control over the most intimate corners of their private lives, and inflict on them devastating measures—in effect, punishments—for conduct that is perfectly legal: dissolve their marriages; evict them from their homes, seize control of their children; raid their bank accounts; attach their wages; forcibly extract fees for people they never hired for “services” they never requested; summarily confine them to psychiatric facilities; seize their passports, driving permits, and professional licenses; and jail them indefinitely without trial or even record.

The beneficiary and emblematic figure of the new system is the adulteress who can commandeer state power to transform her marriage into a weapon of sexual domination. Sustained by “child support” (which need not be used to support her children), she can pursue adulterous relations ad libitum. A feminist who systematically interviewed divorcées reports that they “spoke about how revolutionary this arrangement felt.” They had no need to plan for the future, pursuing their adulterous liaisons “day by day . . . with mutual pleasure [the] only goal.” Such are the women we are destroying fathers and children to benefit.

To cite Daniel Amneus again: “The linchpin in the feminist program is mother custody following divorce. Pull that pin . . . and the feminist structure collapses.” No professional conservative institution has ever lifted a finger to do so. “The debilitating effects of fatherlessness are recited by conservative moralists ad nauseam,” notes Baskerville, but “not a single one ever offers any solution other than vaguely invoking ‘family values’ and ‘religious faith.’”

What we get instead are government programs that pretend to do something about fatherlessness while exacerbating the problem. The first was the Clinton administration’s “Responsible Fatherhood” initiative. This included a bit of funding for feminist psychotherapy to encourage men to act more like women (“relationship skills,” “child behavior management,” and the like). But that was window dressing for the sole substantive measure: deputizing nonprofit groups as bounty hunters to collect more child support.

“Responsible Fatherhood” was followed by the Bush administration’s “Healthy Marriages” program, whose great innovation was drawing “faith based” organizations into the hunt for child support money, thereby giving them a financial stake in family destruction. “Ever wonder why those Christian groups that advertise their ‘family values’ as ‘defenders of marriage’ never make the slightest effort to reform our easy and predatory divorce laws?” asks Baskerville; “It is because they are on the government payroll.”

The Way Out: The Marriage Strike

The failure of both government and institutional conservatism is all the more maddening when, as the author points out, “the solution is so clear and straightforward and free of any financial cost. You just stop the welfare agencies and courts from tearing children away from their parents.”

You stop paying mothers to have children out of wedlock. You refuse to grant wives release from their freely assumed marriage vows on grounds of boredom or having found someone they like better than their husbands. In short, you learn once again how to say “no” to women (regaining their respect in the process). Every society since the dawn of civilization has required its women, like its men, to practice sexual self-control. What makes this so difficult for twenty-first century America?

Since professional conservatism has become a collaborator with the forces destroying our civilization, as Baskerville amply demonstrates, only a restoration of traditional citizenship can make for effective opposition. “Citizens are unpaid amateurs whose commitment is sacrificial of their time, money and more. Citizens alone have an interest in finding solutions, so they can get on with the business of private life.” But his description of the traditional citizen reveals some further difficulties our age must face:

The only proven, fully functional and effective citizen—anywhere in the history of stable and free societies—is the married male head of a family. He is the citizen in a union with a woman both covenantal and contractual—that is, sworn by an oath and sanctioned by law. He is motivated by the well-being of children recognized to be his. He acts in combination with other citizens, preferably who also exist in their own covenantal association with one another through what they recognize as a sacred association of worship and service. If truly complete, he also owns property and bears arms in defense of his home and homeland.

Part of our predicament is precisely that men like this cannot legally exist anymore, while their “sacred associations” have gone over to the enemy (many feminized churches now pressure male congregants to marry the single mothers in their pews rather than condemning single motherhood).

An unexpected substitute more suitable to our age has, however, arisen: the bachelor.

As men discover the terms of marriage and divorce, they have embarked on one of the most remarkable actions of our time: an impromptu boycott or “strike” of marriage, refusing to marry, start families, or even associate with women altogether.

Twenty-two years ago there appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer, like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, an editorial entitled “Have Anti-Father Family Court Policies Led to a Men’s Marriage Strike?” Since then, America’s men have been subjected to a swelling chorus of abuse for their decreasing willingness to marry. Nearly all participants blame them alone for the situation. They “refuse to grow up” (Kay Hymowitz); they are “cowardly and unmanly” (Nathaniel Blake); or “selfish and self-indulgent . . . a total joke” (Pastor Mark Driscoll).

Republican Senator Josh Hawley has recently gotten in on the act. Baskerville notes: “As state attorney general, Hawley’s job was to maximize Missouri’s revenue from child-support collections.” But now he wishes to convince us that the real problem facing us is young men’s refusal to “step up . . . get married, have families, and be responsible husbands and fathers.” Has he ever bothered to ask any of the men he helped plunder what they think might explain the strange reluctance of today’s young men to marry?

Of course, in spite of a total media blackout, word eventually gets out about what happens to innocent men in divorce court. Many young men know because they saw it happen to their own fathers.

No amount of nagging by sanctimonious apostles of marriage will persuade men to commit their lives to a fraudulent contract that offers them no protection against the confiscation of their children and can send them straight to jail. Especially ironic in all this is to see advocates of limited government lambasting private citizens for undertaking spontaneous action against oppressive government. It exemplifies the leadership’s determination to lose every battle. With private citizens already undertaking collective action against the radical Left, the Right responds by vilifying the citizens, trying to smother their initiative, and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The marriage strike must be directed toward a clear and simple political goal, viz., pulling the lynchpin of the matriarchal system:

The state must be compelled to re-establish real marriage by once again enforcing it as a legal contract. The state must be forced to repeal the indefensible oxymoron of “no-fault” justice and reimpose a presumption of father custody over children. This could be achieved legislatively, though also with perfect legitimacy judicially, given the obvious inconsistency of the no-fault system with the Common Law and US Constitution.

Many of the benefits of restoring marriage are obvious: a steep reduction in crime once children regain the guidance of fathers, motivation for young men to improve themselves, study, work, serve in arms and invest rather than living in idleness, elimination of any need for family courts or the social workers and bureaucrats who “administer” the private lives of Americans in broken families, and elimination of the tax burden of funding them.

But the full list of indirect consequences of family breakdown includes a large part of what ails today’s America. The restoration of marriage would eliminate welfare as a magnet for immigration; deprive organized radicalism (Antifa, BLM) of its primary constituency; diminish the influence of feminism, hom*osexualism, transgenderism and the rest of radical sexual ideology; nearly eliminate child abuse, most of which takes place in the homes of single mothers or in foster care; alleviate homelessness, which in large part involves men plundered and incarcerated by family courts; deprive Islam of its appeal as a protest against the weak and effeminate post-Christian West; and quite possibly restore the military as an organization of citizens-in-arms and a “bastion of masculinity” as opposed to the “magnet for single mothers seeking benefits” it has become today.

Churches as the consecrators of marriages have an important role to play in the coming struggle. As the author notes, they were “traditionally the first outsiders to intervene in troubled families, and they had a concrete interest in healing them, without involving state officials, and no incentive to prolong the matter.” Besides regaining this role, churches should be

required by their parishioners to scrutinize any state intervention in marriages they have consecrated. This includes demanding standing as parties to all government proceedings that adjudicate such marriages. Churches that fail in these responsibilities will be stigmatized as false churches and abandoned.

The church will also be able to resume the task of poor relief following the abolition of the present government welfare system, once again discouraging single motherhood.

All this is not going to be easy. “Renouncing women, marriage and families is not a healthy or wholesome life” for most men, as the author notes. “It is a denial of manhood itself, the essence of which is to love, procreate and lead. Unless done from compelling religious convictions, it denies a man life’s greatest joys.” But such a renunciation is already occurring as a simple matter of individual self-protection. It will gain in moral stature and effectiveness once the realization spreads that restoring marriage and male headship of the family is the primary prerequisite for restoring Western civilization, just as their original establishment was an essential step in the first development of civilization out of barbarism several millennia ago.