The reactionary containment in the 2024 elections

On September 29, 2024, President Trump posted on X the Catholic prayer of St. Michael the Archangel, next to 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, DC. While social conservatism has been a tactic for Republicans in elections, it is incredibly useful to use in mobilizing Christian groups. 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:

(My) own view is that women have been let down by all three candidates in this election. They were all aimed at white men, middle-class men, the Reagan Democrats, if you will, or also middle-class men on the Republican side.

However, over the past four years there has been a growing reactionary wave against American culture. Traditional and hierarchical organizations such as the Catholic and Orthodox churches have seen a wave of young converts and growing media influence. Catholic YouTube channels like Bishop Barron have grown to nearly two million subscribers, and while it’s true that the percentage of Gen Z Catholics is around 14 percent while Orthodoxy is even lower, young people have started joining traditional sects of these churches. One article from The standard reported on the growing interest in the traditional Latin Mass, with a 34-year-old woman saying she was drawn to the Mass because of an “unfulfilling secular life.” She further says:

With TLM, I think there’s a big kind of traditional aesthetic. I think Gen Z is drinking less and sleeping a lot less these days – they’re much more conservative than millennials. Many of my younger friends in their twenties are married with children.

There has also been a growing influence from male icons like Andrew Tate and what progressives call a “misogynistic manosphere.” Unlike the Republicans in 1992, however, Donald Trump and his team are playing a double game. He has already made it clear that he will veto a federal abortion ban, and his wife Melania has also defended abortion in her memoir, published shortly after Trump’s statement. When comedian Tony Hichcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash” during a rally at Madison Garden, Trump Allies attacked the comedian, claiming it ruined Trump’s movement’s “open arm” message spread during the RNC. What Trump and the regime are trying to do with all of this is create a pro-American movement that will have all the progressive qualities of the Democrats and the aggressive neoconservatism of the Republicans.

The trads will help elect Trump as president, but they will have no real power because their beliefs threaten the regime’s secularism. They know from the Iranian revolution what religious groups can do when they organize themselves.

The revolution fuels Shia Islam

During the street fighting that emerged during the 1979 Iranian revolutions, fighters often chanted slogans reminiscent of the Marxist revolutions, but mixed with Islamic proclamations; some say, “God’s help and victory is at hand”; “death to this deceitful monarchy”; “we do not live under the burden of oppression”; “we sacrifice our lives on the path of freedom”; “worker, peasant, oppressed, suffering”; “armed struggle is the path to freedom.” This mix of ideas is attributed to the work of Iranian revolutionary Ali Shari’ati and French Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre. Shari’ati had met Satre in Paris and after his return to Iran he would become known as the founder of the Iranian revolution. Britannica explains:

Shariʿati’s teachings can be said to have laid the foundation for the Iranian Revolution due to their great influence on the Iranian youth. His teachings attacked the Shah’s tyranny and his policies of Westernization and modernization which, Shariʿati believed, damaged Iranian religion and culture and left the people without their traditional social and religious anchorage. Shariʿati called for a return to true, revolutionary Shiism. He believed that Shia Islam itself was a force for social justice and progress, but also that it had been corrupted in Iran by its institutionalization by political leaders.

The Shari’ati combined Marxist ideas of armed struggle with Shia Islam, which until then had been considered an apolitical group. However, Ayatollah Khomeini had taken this group and organized the various sects of Iranian society to overthrow the Shah, and in the Ayatollah’s first sermon he made this statement:

Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: your intellectuals do not want us to go back 1,400 years. You who want freedom, freedom before everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation towards the oppressor. bottom.

Iran is not the only country in history to overthrow its regime or implement policies against liberal social life. The Nazis did the same when they seized power by banning swing music and destroying the archives of Magnus Hirchfield, who had performed sex change operations in the 1920s. But unlike the Shah’s regime or the Weimar Republic, progressive liberalism is at the core of American political and social thought, and any attack against it is seen as an attack on America itself. This is why the modern American “tradition” or “red-pilled man” movement has been and will continue to be controlled by the regime.

Everything was forever until it was no more

In an article written by David Goron 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 lead to any action. The acting person would like to replace a less satisfactory state of affairs with a more satisfactory one. His mind imagines circumstances that suit him better, and his actions are designed to bring about this desired state. The stimulus that drives someone to act is always a certain degree of discomfort.

The United States has identified with the idea of ​​fun, but as we have seen among America’s younger generations, many are now abandoning this idea and attacking it outright. Currently, the CDC estimates that one in five Americans has an STD, nearly sixty-eight million people; the American Psychological Association estimates that 40 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. All these problems cause real social and psychological damage that will force a person to act.

Right now, these reactionary forces have been contained and placed under the fold of the American flag for the 2024 elections, but if things don’t change both economically and sociologically, these once passive groups could commit the same violence we see in the 2024 elections. Iran. Libertarians, conservatives, and even progressives need to understand that many of the above problems are real and devastating; simply dismissing these people as radicals or fundamentalists will only temporarily conceal the reality.