No Kings? No Clue.
The nation’s seniors badly misdiagnose our problems, and instead of looking squarely in the mirror for the source of society’s ills, they have decided that the Oval Office houses a better scapegoat.
Evelyn Whitehead is a graduate of Ave Maria School of Law and Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is a Fellow of the Good Counselor Project with Napa Legal Institute and Americans United for Life. Most recently, she spent a year in Hungary as a Senior Budapest Fellow studying Christian culture, aesthetics, and international family policy. Read more of her writing here.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.
Recently, a second wave of No Kings protests spread across the nation. Based on the weird dance routines, unhinged leftist meltdowns, and angry sign-waving retirees that the protests produced, the weekend’s antics were a smashing success. The left has successfully alienated normal America.
Regular people want nothing to do with a political program that sponsors repeated melodramatic temper tantrums over a badly lost election. If the protests produce political realignment along those lines, those changes will be all to the good.
Still, there is something extremely sad about the videos that are surfacing on Twitter: first and foremost because they reveal what our nation’s grandparents have decided to do with their retirement. Instead of spending their golden years teaching their grandchildren how to embroider, how to fish, how to pray, or how to bake bread, far too many grandparents, grandmothers especially, are raising their fists at the glowering sky and decrying the impending end of our sacred democracy.
The evidence that they rally to support their claims is thin and does little to conjure up the “educated citizenry” of Thomas Jefferson’s imaginings. Attendees claim that President Trump is a racist, a fascist, and a rude, rude man.
Where do they get this? CNN and the women on The View have been speaking in hushed tones for months about the grave threats facing our nation — evidence enough that democracy is in danger and protests are morally obligatory. Those “facts” are therefore indisputable. The fact that President Trump handily won the popular vote by an extraordinary margin is inconvenient, and therefore is easily ignored.
The nation’s seniors do have one thing right: something is deeply wrong in America. But they have badly misdiagnosed the problem, and instead of looking squarely in the mirror for the source of society’s ills, they have decided that the Oval Office houses a better scapegoat.
One of the measures of a society’s vigor turns on how that society treats its elderly. Communities that care for their aging relatives benefit enormously from their love, wisdom, and insight. Further, the discipline of caring for the elderly helps young people to grow in virtue, in patience, and in holiness.
By contrast, those communities that cast aside their elderly suffer. They lose out on the lessons that elderly people have stored up throughout their lives. They miss the chance to learn about life and death, to grow in gratitude, and to prepare for the end that comes inevitably for us all.
But the obligations that a society owes to its elderly population are not one-sided. Elderly people are responsible for living lives that are honorable so that when they reach the twilight of their life, they have something valuable to impart to the young to whom they still owe a serious duty.
Those who shirk this responsibility and refuse to grow up or refuse to embrace the hardship that comes with living life well end up like hollowed out husks. Their bodies are old but their souls are immature, childish, and weak. Their selfishness creates generational poverty, robbing their children and their children’s children of a treasured inheritance.
Vice President JD Vance famously critiqued the “childless cat ladies“ of the Democratic party, arguing that they had no stake in the future of the country because they decided to raise cats instead of children. Some of that critique is certainly fair, but not all the blame belongs on the shoulders of women who are childless by choice. Much of the fault lies with those women’s parents — all too often, the heroes of the No Kings protests — who failed to teach their daughters (and sons) how beautiful it is to raise children and to nurture a family.
They have no stake in the country’s future either, and now, unsurprisingly, they spend their days imbibing left wing talking points, dying their hair every color of the rainbow, and doing dance routines on major intersections. At best, their behavior is undignified. At worst, it is the dereliction of a sacred duty.
Is it any wonder that the young people of today are rootless, anxious, and in many cases, scared to have children? What kind of legacy have they received? Most importantly, where are their grandparents?
Odds are, their grandfathers are not fixing cars, building furniture, painting houses, and telling their sons and grandsons to man up, love their wives, and go to church on Sunday. Their grandmothers are not reading books, rocking babies, and making Sunday a day of rest and beauty. Those losses have generational repercussions.
Now more than ever, young people desire maturity, responsibility, a return to tradition, and a return to virtue. This desire explains the massive influx toward traditional liturgy, traditional dress, and traditional gender roles; all of which the up-and-coming generation, especially young men, find increasingly so fascinating. These are signs of hope.
Of course, any young person can stand securely on the bedrock of Christian culture and Western civilization, regardless of the failures of parents or grandparents. However, young people deserve forebears who are honorable, self-sacrificial, and decent — people to whom respect is owed, not just because of the commandment but also because their behavior itself commands respect. Only decadent societies ignore the misadventures of their elders. Serious societies treat their public indiscretions like the blaring alarm bells that they are.
Young women lag behind young men in their return to tradition: on every issue, they are much more liberal, from abortion to global warming to gun control. Furthermore, young women today are more liberal than young women used to be.
These sad statistics are directly tied to the demographic breakdown at the rallies over the weekend where, unsurprisingly, most attendees were women. However, in some sense, they are not necessarily to blame. They are following the ideology of their youth and the formation they received to their natural ends: the perpetual unraveling of the whole social order, a project that begins with the destruction of the family.
Starting in the sixties, today’s grandmothers were convinced by the perverse Simone de Beauvoir and her confreres that they belonged anywhere but in the home. In a 1975 interview with Betty Friedan, De Beauvoir said the quiet part of radical feminism out loud, stating that “[i]n my opinion, as long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed.” Radical feminists trained their guns on the family, following another line of de Beauvoir’s thinking from the same interview saying that “[n]o woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. . . . Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
Many families have been sacrificed on the altar of second wave feminism. Scared of the oppression bogeyman that they were taught to fear, many women since the sixties have rejected softness, meekness, mildness, and the rest of the Marian virtues while simultaneously tossing out the practical trappings of domesticity.
Bereft of their teachers, many young women today find themselves unable to hem a skirt, fix a button, plan a home cooked meal, or properly appoint a home. Worse, many young women appear never to have learned the beauty, poise, and grace that flow from a deep appreciation and understanding of what a gift it is to be a woman and a mother.
Those are lessons that mothers and grandmothers must teach their daughters and granddaughters. When they do not, chaos ensues — a reality our country is now living through. We are all poorer for the loss of the true matriarchy that should have been busy keeping the home fires burning for the last sixty years.
Oppression is a tricky word because it’s bandied about with great facility these days, typically as a tool for creating jealousy, bitterness, and division. That strategy has certainly worked on women.
The radical feminist project — killing the “myth of maternity and the maternal instinct”— did not usher in a new age of female liberation. Rather, it created a generation of deeply unhappy women who, upon successfully throwing off the yoke of joyful family life, desperately needed a new oppressor to train their sights upon.
“Fascism” has become just such a fashionable oppressor — a floating signifier for all unwanted hierarchies which must, of course, be smashed. But to be frank, Trump Derangement Syndrome does not look like liberation, nor does the perpetual war on femininity, maternity, beauty, and order that many on the left persistently wage savor of freedom.
Our country is reaping a poor return on the promises made to the young women of the sixties in real time. Instead of a generation of dignified, lovely, graceful, and gracious grandmothers, far too many of the grandmothers of today choose to spend their days militantly protesting in absurd fashion without a grandchild in sight.
America is a young country, and a great deal can be done, especially in America, by applying pressure to one’s bootstraps. That attitude has its drawbacks; namely, it fosters an individualistic attitude that can stymie instinctual respect for one’s elders.
After all, if achieving the American dream is all a matter of individual effort, then the individual must be all that really matters at the end of the day. Age is just a number. Hustle is more valuable than wisdom.
In America, anyone can be a millionaire. Sadly, this constitutional inclination towards individualism has allowed us to undervalue generational holiness.
As our country ages and goes through the normal growing pains associated with articulating a robust identity, it is critical for Americans to recognize that virtue matters— and not just in the here and now.
Virtue is neither a question of taste nor a matter of private importance. Generations to come will thrive or suffer based on the choices made by the men and women who are coming of age today. An “educated” citizenry alone will not stave off destruction. A virtuous citizenry has a much better shot, and more importantly, the children and grandchildren of virtuous people will be themselves inclined towards virtue, decency, honor, and self-respect.
Young people, especially young women, should heed the warning that the No Kings protestors inadvertently leveled about kingship: “Woman, how divine your mission / Here upon our natal sod! / For the hand that rocks the cradle / Is the hand that rules the world.”
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