Blake Boudreaux is a student at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter @BlakeWBoudreaux
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.
I love rural America. I love southern cotton and East Texas timber and driving in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “The country” is an easy place to romanticize. And it is easy to see why many conservatives advocate “running for the hills,” when we have beautiful rolling hills like the ones in Tennessee.
But “the country” is not representative of America. Our peaceful, political revolution must become comfortable fighting for power in America’s big cities.
Big cities matter because they are the most important parts of any country. They are the centers of power. Look at our American Revolution. It was born in the city. Well-meaning rural conservatives shout “1776!” but the true spirit of ‘76 came from a Philadelphia printing press.
Like it or not, our battle is in America’s cities, and we should like it! Cities allow right-wingers the best opportunity to organize, influence, and grow. Places like Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Boston are full of highly competent people— these are potential allies.
How many urban liberals feel left behind by leftism? How many urban neocons are ready to put away their bowties? We can give them something new!
But if we have abandoned the cities, we will never be able to tell them. They will be lost to Bernie Sanders or Bryan Johnson or some other ideological folly.
Even if they do somehow manage to be persuaded — whether by Twitter, or Aquinas, or divine revelation — we will never know, because we live a hundred miles away from their office, church, and home.
Let’s fill America’s cities with visionary right-wingers so we can organize a multitude and recruit the most promising people. Take, for example, America’s biggest city. Right-wingers that organize in New York have a massive pool of talent to recruit from.
They can trawl a city of eight million people, looking for elite young conservatives to join their ranks. The people they attract might work in powerful, high-paying firms in the city; many others may move to Washington to work for President Trump in the federal government.
So many problems stem from lack of good personnel. Without a strong presence in big cities, right-wingers will never be able to find enough good people to do the things we want.
Not to mention, we have so many people that agree with us! Look at party affiliation maps. The entire country is red — except for three all-important urban dots.
Caesar and his army posed no threat to the Roman establishment when they stayed in Gaul. He did not take power until he brought his people across the Rubicon River into Rome.
So too must we bring our people out of rural America and into the centers of power. We do not have to ideologically occupy a hundred percent, or even fifty-one percent, of the country. We only need to convince or become the top 0.1 percent of people with positions that can make real change. These positions are in the city.
Despite this, many on the right still advocate retreatism. Conservative authors sell hundreds of thousands of copies of books that argue for “heading for the hills.”
If we would only wait for society to collapse, their logic goes, the trads could emerge from their caves and rule the ashes according to the lost wisdom of a Nineteenth Century homestead.
The revolutions in Paris and Petersburg show what happens if we take this route. Immediately after the Jacobins and Bolsheviks took the urban centers of power, they came for the rural churches and farms.
To borrow a phrase from our neoconservative friends: if we do not fight them over there, we will have to fight them over here.
Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, is perhaps the most well-known proponent of this retreatist ideology. In a March 2020 column, he wrote in defense of his philosophy:
The Benedict Option is about living in such a way that when the bad guys show up at your door and command you to blaspheme or apostatize, you can see who they are and what they are really asking, and find the inner strength to bear witness, even unto death.
Dreher has softened his stance recently, after moving to the city of Budapest, coincidentally, but this attitude remains popular on the right. Too many conservatives want to take the easy way out — abandon the cities, abandon the institutions, abandon any type of fight — and they dress it up as virtue.
That is not virtue. That is cowardice. It is easy to talk a big game while we still have a little liberty left.
But what happens after we abandon Boston and Washington and New York and New Haven? When we do not have enough Christian lawyers?
Then the powerful people from the city will come to the farm and take your kids because your homeschool curriculum does not include transgender sex ed.
I have a better plan: let’s fight the bad guys, in the arena of ideas, in the cities before they show up at our little house on the prairie and make martyrs of our children.
Rural America is great. I wish we could all live peacefully there forever, but the big city is the center of power, so that is where we have to go to save America.
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