Let’s Start Our Journey Together
Join me on The Countermarch.
Hi, I’m Scott P. Richert. You may remember me from such long-running roles as Executive Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Catholicism Expert for About.com (now People, Inc.), Publisher at Our Sunday Visitor, and most recently (and currently) the English-Language Rights Representative for the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Estate.
Today I want to tell you about a new project — this website, The Countermarch. It’s a labor of love, both a culmination of three and a half decades of work in which I’ve written and published nearly two million words and — more importantly — a new home for the next few million.
I left Chronicles in April 2017 because I believed that the principle that had guided our work for four decades — that there are no political solutions to cultural problems — was no longer sufficient to face the challenges of the coming decades. I still believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but in my final years at Chronicles I had come to realize that there are no cultural solutions to cultural problems, either. A nation, even a civilization, can survive a surprisingly long time on a dwindling cultural inheritance, but it cannot long survive the abandonment of the religious roots of its culture.
The Countermarch was born in my last months at The Rockford Institute and continued to grow in the pages of Chronicles until the untimely death of my dear friend and colleague Aaron Wolf in April 2019, which sealed the fate of that magazine (now a shell of its former self, its editors vainly seeking power and influence in Washington, D.C., like every other rudderless conservative organization). Aaron’s death came just weeks after my appointment as publisher at OSV, and I placed The Countermarch on hiatus to focus my efforts on using that new role to strengthen the Catholic Church in the United States and beyond.
That season of my life, I am convinced, has come to an end at just the right moment. Every day I see more and more former colleagues and readers recognizing that, in June 2015 (or in the months thereafter), they bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage. Nolite confidere in principibus: “Put not your trust in princes, in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.” Chasing political solutions to cultural problems, we have arrived at only panem et circenses — and we’re paying through the nose for stale, mass-market white bread and subscriptions to streaming services.
The title The Countermarch is an allusion to the Gramscian left’s “Long March Through the Institutions.” Over the course of many decades, the left succeeded in subjugating nearly all of human life to politics, in large part because they convinced those who should know better that the only way to respond to the left’s politicization of the institutions of culture and religion was to fight them on their chosen battlefield.
But there's more to life than politics; there’s more to politics than Washington, D.C.; there’s more to culture than Hollywood; and there’s more to religion than the absurd and ahistorical belief that the United States is the New Rome, headed up by the reincarnation of the Emperor Constantine.
There is a way forward, an alternative to the modern elevation of politics to the be-all and end-all of human life, and every essay, review, column, and quotation in The Countermarch will offer a glimpse of that alternative. Each week, starting July 6, I will publish at least one new essay and pair it with something from the archives that illustrates the same point from a different angle. You can visit Countermarch.org to read every article, but an even better way to make sure that you don’t miss anything is to subscribe to the Countermarch newsletter.
Fair warning: If you think that the world has never been better, you probably won’t like the newsletter. If you think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that the best we can hope for is the Second Coming or an ecological catastrophe that wipes out all of humanity, you won’t like it, either.
But if you believe that there are still things worth celebrating and fighting for, that ideology always blinds us to the fullness of the truth, and that mankind was meant for more than this (and not only after this life ends), you might just find that The Countermarch is where you belong. Let’s start our journey together today.
