Rhetoric Without Restoration Is Retreat

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m almost forty years old and that I’m often talking to people down to half my age. Many young adults don’t remember the world before it became the way it is now. They didn’t grow up in the same cultural atmosphere that I did and they haven’t seen the same shifts that I have seen.

When I talk about movies, comic books, video games or even the way people used to speak and think, I’m not being nostalgic, I’m being historical. I’m describing a world that actually existed at one point in time. As far as mainstream culture is concerned, that world is gone now and the people who never lived in it don’t know what they’re missing. They think the way things are right now is the way they’ve always been.

How Did We Get Here?

For the past fifty years or so, the American Right has largely operated in a reactive posture, often framing its cultural engagement purely as a defensive measure but without restoration. Let’s break this down:

1. Reagan–Bush Era (1981–1992):

• The Right dominated economically but began losing cultural ground.

• The Left gained momentum on race, sex, and environmental issues.

• The Right’s cultural posture was often moralistic but institutionally thin. Think “family values” without parallel media or educational infrastructure.

2. Clinton Years (1993-2000):

• Cultural liberalism surged: multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTQ visibility.

• The Right responded with talk radio and “culture war” narratives, but these were all rhetorical fortresses and not institutional offensives.

• No serious attempts to reclaim academia, arts, or public education.

3. Bush-Obama Transition (2001-2016)

• Post-9/11 nationalism briefly unified cultural sentiment, but the Left regained ground through media, tech, and education.

• The Right’s focus shifted to foreign policy and economic conservatism, leaving cultural domains under-contested.

• Even the Tea Party, while rhetorically fierce, lacked cultural infrastructure. It remained electoral and never achieved any mythic status.

4. Trump Era (2016-2025)

• The Right finally went on the offensive rhetorically through nationalism, anti-woke, antiglobalism.

• But again, no institutional restoration. The Left still dominates universities, entertainment, and corporate HR.

• The Right’s cultural energy is often channeled through spectacle like meme warfare; not through sound doctrine or tradition.

Since the late 20th century, the American Right has not only retreated from cultural formation but it has internalized the Left’s moral framing. Conservatives have been conditioned to believe that asserting cultural authority is inherently fascist. The specter of Hitler, racism, and authoritarianism has been weaponized not just against the Right, but within it. If you are a Right-winger, not only are you impeded by the Left, but you are heavily gatekept by your own allies.

This is not just a result of Leftist propaganda, people have been programmed to lose. This is why you see such widespread paralysis within the Conservative Right. The Right reacts and complains, but never builds on any of its rhetoric. The Right often prioritizes elections over cultural formation. But culture is upstream; it shapes the electorate.

My father has often reminded me that he voted for Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, who openly opposed Social Security and advocated making it voluntary. Yes, at one point in time, being a Republican meant you were against Social Security. Of course this was because the original Republican platform was about resisting federal overreach and securing one’s own individual liberty. This was the GOP as my father remembered it: a party that sought limited government and the pursuit of personal responsibility.

This is how far off the beaten path we are today. The Right has gone from opposing federal entitlements to defending them. From building local sovereignty to begging for institutional legitimacy. We’re stuck defending fragments of our old American traditions while conceding the very terrain on which culture is built. The Left, by contrast, has been allowed to advance through institutional conquest. To this day, it still controls education, media, entertainment, and corporate culture. This is why the field of debate matters very little today. The Left can afford to lose any and all arguments because it has been given free reign to define the mainstream cultural narrative.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

When I was younger I often conflated “liberal” with “Leftist” but the reality is that Liberalism pervades both the Left and Right. True conservatism might as well not exist because its very name begs the question: What are we conserving?

Much of what counts for “culture” nowadays is not generated under the banner of progressivism but liberalism. Progressivism is a symptom. Liberalism is the disease. Liberalism is the only reason progressivism or wokeism has been allowed to subsist. Homosexuality doesn’t persist in culture because progressive ideals are lucrative, it persists because Liberalism instructs us to tolerate it.

This is why libertarianism is to be abhorred. As is often said, libertarians are liberals who hate taxes. Libertarianism champions the principle of shaping society through market choice rather than centralized authority. In theory, this empowers individuals to reward businesses that align with their values. In practice, however, this principle always collapses under the weight of tribal gatekeeping. Without a shared moral or cultural axiom to guide what ought to be supported, the market becomes a battleground of personal taste masquerading as principle. Libertarians frequently invoke “freedom” while simultaneously policing which choices are valid. The result is largely what we see in today’s consumerism: a fragmented landscape where your behavior is interpreted as an ideological purity test.

Since the Enlightenment, liberalism has aimed to neutralize political conflict by promoting secularism, rule of law, and the diffusion of power. This project culminated in a kind of managerial neoliberal order where expert-led institutions arbitrate truth through supposedly objective, universal standards. For a while, this system enabled large-scale cooperation and material prosperity, but it slowly eroded our Christian identity in favor of what Auron MacIntyre calls a “minimum viable morality.”

This is why the COVID-19 lockdown period, or what will be known as “The Great Panic” in the future, is likely the most important event we will behold in our lifetimes. The event marked a tremendous vibe shift as the prevailing liberal order faced an epistemological crisis. What is now an open secret is that our institutions, once proud and trusted, have been shown as squandering their credibility in the pursuit of short-term gain. The public’s trust was eroded as the “experts” were shown to have promoted falsehoods. There is now a widespread skepticism about institutional authority across all domains of life. Christians should be keenly aware of this as it means the culture is ripe to be taught how to live properly again.

The Way Forward

Christian liberty is freedom for the good. This means freedom to live rightly under God’s divine law. Liberalism has twisted this facet into freedom from constraint, celebrating autonomy even when it leads to self-destruction. This is where William T. Cavanaugh’s alcoholic metaphor becomes incisive:

The alcoholic who chooses to drink is ‘free’ in the liberal sense, but he is not free in the Christian sense, because his will is enslaved.

This is the illusion of liberal freedom: it treats choice as inherently good, regardless of the object chosen. But freedom is only real when it aligns with truth and virtue. Liberalism, lacking a telos, cannot distinguish between freedom and bondage.

If you recognize the cultural rot for what it is and have a desire to restore the world to state of normalcy, it is imperative that you resolve the current epistemological crises. That is only possible through Christ. Liberalism, having failed to do so, has collapsed. The assassination of Charlie Kirk also proves this. Be aware that your enemies are not motivated by the rituals of debate, as potent as those rituals may seem. When the languages are confused, they can only be untangled through Pentecost.

This is why figures like Jon Del Arroz and John F. Trent matter in the grand scheme. They are not just resisting, they are creating. Their works are independent and based in Christian thought and tradition. Theirs is a material that does not seek permission from the State or its cultural vassals to operate. They are building worlds outside sanctioned channels. It is for that very reason that they are opposed.

“Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.” — Matthew 24:9 (KJV)

The State and its rhetorical proxies abhor competition. Mainstream culture only tolerates dissenting narratives when they are ironic, self-defeating, or the “safe” kind of edgy. But Christian works have the unique capacity to establish a viable counter-liturgy which threatens the prevailing narratives. Those who oppose Christians often do so unknowingly as rhetorical vassals of the State. They are attuned to institutional norms and shaped by secularized logic. That is why there is so much open hostility to mythologies that have long since shaped Western society. Many people have been trained to reject Christianity as a result of deeply-rooted post-Enlightenment skepticism. Hence why many influencer class types on social media position themselves as gatekeepers of content while hiding behind a façade of “free speech.” It’s all about jurisdiction: who gets to define what is good, the true, and the beautiful? Ultimately, the winners will be those with the capacity to shape a central epistemology.

Witness how mainstream culture continues to slip down the memory hole, its pleasures proving to be fleeting. We are witnessing in real time what it means to gain the whole world and lose your own soul (Matthew 16:26). Instead, we ought to be more like Jon and John.

So go write a book. Write more than one, in fact. Go make your own movie and video games. Who knows, maybe the things you build in the here and now will be recognized in some faraway future. Perhaps, even, long after you’ve died of old age, some book you wrote and published on Amazon will become the myth that drives generations to come.

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” — Matthew 7:24–27 (ESV)

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