Start Here

The idea of The Countermarch began with three speeches I delivered between September 2016 and March 2017, all of which were adapted into installments of The Rockford Files, my long-running column in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Or rather, it began decades earlier, long before I came to Chronicles, when, as a political-theory major, I became convinced that the underlying disorder of the modern age was the deliberate politicization of every area of human life. This Long March Through the Institutions has conditioned nearly all of us to approach the most basic institutions of civilization, including our families and our faith, through the narrow lens of politics. Yet, as we used to say at Chronicles, “There are no political solutions to cultural problems.” Any restoration of the way we were meant to live must come from some other source.

Thus The Countermarch, a deliberate attempt to restore sanity to human life by returning politics to its proper, narrow sphere and encouraging each of us to take responsibility for the things we can control. We don’t have to fix everything; we cannot fix everything. All we can do — all we are called to do — is to love God, and to love our neighbor, wherever that may take us. One step at a time.

The Three Speeches

Like most of my writing, those three speeches were responding to the particular circumstances of the time in which I wrote and delivered them. And, like nearly all of my writing, they used those particular circumstances to illustrate a more universal truth. There is nothing new under the sun; yet a central truth revealed by the Incarnation is that we encounter the Truth through history, and not through abstraction.

The particular circumstances of the period from September 2016 to March 2017 may be somewhat different from the circumstances in which you are reading this, though, perhaps, not as different as ten years might normally make. But to the extent that those circumstances have changed, the underlying points are clearer than ever. If you want to understand what The Countermarch is all about, these speeches — presented here in their published form — are the place to start. Click on the headlines below to read the full text of each.

Our Corner of the Vineyard

Modern political structures are inherently destructive to organic community and moral order because they are rooted in Rousseauian nationalism, which reduces persons to isolated individuals. Cultural renewal cannot be achieved through national politics but requires a return to the principle of subsidiarity, in which authority flows outward from the family and local community rather than downward from the state.

Taking Back the Culture

There are no political solutions to cultural problems. True restoration requires reclaiming the institutions of everyday life — family, church, and local community — from the all-encompassing reach of the revolutionary state.

Power to the People!

Republicanism, federalism, decentralism, distributism, agrarianism, subsidiarity — the fundamental insight of these political theories is that the only way to confine politics to its proper sphere so that true culture and morality can flourish is to prevent the inordinate concentration of power.