On September 29, 2024, President Trump posted on X the Catholic prayer of St. Michael the Archangel alongside a photo of a St. Michael painting by Italian artist Guido Reni. The next day, Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson said the Lord’s Prayer over a crowd in Washington, D.C. Although social conservatism has been a touch-and-go tactic for Republicans in elections, it’s incredibly useful to use when trying to mobilize Christian groups, but has often scared off women, moderates, and independents. This contributed to the defeat of George Bush Sr. in the 1992 election. The Center for American Women in Politics published the thoughts of many moderate Republicans at the time, saying:
[M]y own view is that women were abandoned by all three of these candidates in this election. They all targeted white men, middle-class men, the Reagan Democrats, if you will, or middle-class men on the Republican side as well.
However, over the last four years, there’s been a growing reactionary surge against strains of American culture identified with “progressive” ideology. Traditional and hierarchical organizations such as the Catholic and Orthodox churches have enjoyed a surge of young converts and growing media influence. Catholic Youtube channels such as Bishop Barron have grown to nearly two million subscribers, and although it is true that the rate of Gen Z Catholics stands at around 14 percent, with Orthodoxy even lower, young people have begun joining traditional sects of these churches. One article by The Standard reported about the growing interest in the Traditional Latin Mass, with one 34-year-old saying how she was attracted to the mass because of an “unfulfilling secular life.” She goes on to say:
With TLM, I think there’s a big kind of trad aesthetic. I think Gen Z are drinking less these days, sleeping around much less — they’re much more conservative than millennials. A lot of my younger friends in their 20s are married with children.
The “trads” will help in electing Trump as president, but they will have no real power because their beliefs are threatening to the secularism of the regime.
Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More
In an article written by David Gordon on the ethics of Ludwig von Mises, Mises is quoted as saying:
We call contentment or satisfaction that state of a human being which does not and cannot result in any action. Acting man is eager to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory. His mind imagines conditions which suit him better, and his action aims at bringing about this desired state. The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness.
The United States has identified itself with the idea of pleasure, but as we have seen among the younger generations of America, many are now leaving and outright attacking this notion. Currently, the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 Americans has an STD, nearly sixty-eight million people; the American Psychological Association estimates that 40-50 percent of marriages end in divorce. All of these problems create real societal and psychological harm that will create an uneasiness to compel a man to act.
At the moment, these reactionary forces have been contained and put under the fold of the American flag for the 2024 election, but if things do not change both economically and sociologically, these once-passive groups could find themselves enacting the same violence as seen in Iran. Libertarians, conservatives, and even progressives must understand that many of the problems mentioned above are real and devastating; to simply dismiss these people as radicals or fundamentalists will merely temporarily hide the reality.
