For a country to succeed, it needs citizens that have some sort of civic pride, not only in its past accomplishments, but for the here and now. Countries not only pride themselves on providing the best of yesterday – they also pride themselves on what they have to offer from today, namely beauty and order as God intended it. That means clean, thriving cities, healthy, physically attractive and God-fearing citizens and of course, aesthetically pleasing cities and towns that make people want to live in them and visit.
America was once like this. From the early republic until the 1960s, the United States took pride in its neoclassical public buildings, cathedral-like schools and most importantly, its people. America meant strong, nuclear families living in well-ordered cities and communities where children could play unsupervised and sadistic lawlessness was restricted to organized crime – which ironically ran neighborhoods much better than the DNC does today.
You don’t have to imagine it – you’re living in it.
The old Penn Station, tragically demolished: pic.twitter.com/FXOZj2zr0l
— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) March 4, 2023
Today, not so much. Detroit is a third-world warzone while cities such as New York, although not nearly as bad, sacrifice their architectural appeal, families, and religious institutions to soulless brutalist architecture and the big-corporate drones who inhabit them. Fat is beautiful, beauty is racist, Dylan Mulvaney is a woman, and the men who made America great are smashed aside to make way for George Floyd and co. Schools look like prisons without the guard tower. (RELATED: ‘Fat Gift To NYC’s Bottom-Feeding Legal Sharks’: Mayor Signs Anti-Weight Discrimination Bill)
Critics and utilitarians no doubt will protest that usefulness trumps beauty every time, adding that the latter doesn’t matter as long as it works. But such an argument ignores the human tendency to be inspired by beauty. Look at Italy. For centuries one generation of geniuses after the next created most of the culture that is cherished around the world, inspired by the feats of the previous generation and their surroundings.
Leftists (or at least those that control them) understand this probably better than anyone else – particularly compared to so-called “conservatives” and Republicans, many of whom are the epitome of America’s culture problem in their obsession with GDP and economic growth at the expense of the nation’s well-being.
In fairy tales and myths, the hero is almost always a man (or more rarely, a woman) who accomplishes the impossible in pursuit of a maiden (which is apparently sexist to libs), the defense of God, country and people, or family/children – all of which are the very embodiment of what we would consider the “good and beautiful.”
Why did we stop Building like that? pic.twitter.com/DrzZsJJZzc
— Architectural Heaven (@architectural24) July 19, 2023
If people are willing to fight for their women, for the beauty of their cities and for their civilization, then degrading society will paralyze people into a state of despair and inaction. This is where the demoralization aspect comes into play. It is no surprise that during the 1960s, brutalist architecture straight out of the USSR became the model for public housing, creating ghettos where despair, dependency and crime rule the day. And shocker of shocks, as our once-thriving cities such as Detroit and New York become cesspits, no one thinks they are worth fighting for anymore.
The same can be said for feminism. Feminism turned women against men. It told women that they had to become the ugliest possible version of men by being bossy, tyrannical, and generally insufferable in order to be liberated. It told women that against all their instincts, they should accept only feminized men. Today, they are also told that being a fat “girlboss” is something to aspire to. Men are told to stop being men, becoming ugly, bastardized versions of women whose logical end is Dylan Mulvaney. In effect, the sexes became the ugliest cartoon version of each other. And society encouraged it.
And here is the problem: no man is going to defend a society that creates such people, its women, or its government. Men will fight and die for their beautiful, virtuous wives, and their children. Ditto for the material aspects of their civilization such as buildings and churches, which at the end of the day are the result of a society that raises productive, educated, and skilled children who are willing and capable of creating architectural marvels like Detroit’s old train station and Chicago’s Polish cathedrals. But no one, and I mean no one, is going to fight – let alone die – for Lizzo or your average smartphone-addicted girlboss. (RELATED: Lizzo Twerks While Playing James Madison’s 200-Year-Old Crystal Flute)
Instead, such men will withdraw from society, find shelter in porn and other escapism, but they won’t fight. They just don’t see the point, and it’s hard to blame them. But a leader with a vision can break this cycle. Even the possibility of children having a better future is enough to motivate people to get off the couch and stand up for the good, true and beautiful.
When people voted for Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” they voted not just for the military or GDP, but for a return to another time when America was beautiful. Being a true visionary, he delivered with his EO mandating neoclassical federal buildings because he understood that America will only be “great again” once people have something beautiful that they feel is worth fighting and striving for. The rest – the economy, the GDP, the military supremacy – comes naturally afterwards.
Otherwise, if “America the Beautiful” becomes “America the Ugly,” no one cares if she ends up dead. And that is exactly what the left wants.
Michele Gama Sosa is an opinion editor for the Daily Caller and a historian by training.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
