I wanted to add a final comment as I sent the comments above, but failed to retrieve it in time. It is this:

An ancient being tortured by forced observation of any faction of the self-styled “right” (also in the ” churches” or the family, such as they are today) from the perspective of either the Ancient pagans (at their best) or of either Biblical Testament, might use the Latin vir vs. homo distinction and vocabulary of manly virtue and courage and say with unamused condescension “They’re all a bunch of homos.”

Non-virulent homos. The common thread of all “conservatisms” is the doctrine of non-virulence.

If you get my meaning…

P. Gottfried writes:

(Jaffa) made good on a claim…divulged to boyhood friend…Francis Canavan… Jaffa told the…eminent theologian and Burke-scholar in a moment of candor: “Frank, I’m INVENTING A MYTH and I’LL MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE IT.” I learned of this story while Father Canavan and I were attending a Burke conference… The Jesuit scholar mentioned it not to disparage Jaffa but to express admiration for someone who achieved what he said he would do when they were both much younger.

Whatever J. Campbell says about differences between “myths” and lies, I too am underwhelmed by theologian and Burke scholar Canavan’s apparent “condescending amusement” toward former matey Jaffa’s lifelong mission to bring a “strong delusion” to whatever number of the teeming larvae living off the carcass of the “West” would interrupt their mastication for a drink.

More usefully, C. S. Lewis and his friend Tolkien helped parched modern imaginations see the unity of literal truth and true myths — myths which are symbolically true, the power of which is that of the Parable.

Canavan, as a Burke scholar, might have encountered an obscure quote: “The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” He might have read also the conviction of Dante that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for… those who do nothing…much. As a theologian, Canavan could have bumped into a (throwaway?) line by Jesus: “I would that you were hot or cold, for the lukewarm I will vomit from my mouth.”

One can be entirely sure that the last hundred years of molestations and cover-ups were enabled by the “lukewarm” — “good men” who did nothing, but utter an occasional expression of “condescending amusement,” then back to reading Burke, Dante, Moses, St. Paul, Christ…

My mention of “delusion” above, refers to multiple Old and New Testament passages warning that Divine accommodation is reluctantly made for such as take pleasure in falsehood. What kind of Burke scholar, priest and theologian could fail to go well beyond casual “condescending amusement” of Jaffa’s life-long mission to concoct a false myth and to be “a lying spirit in their ears”…?

And here I get to my main point. Only in the extreme moral vacuum of what was not long ago the non-leftist majority could such perverse schemes as that of Jaffa, or Marx, or sodomy Stalinism, or gyno-Nazism, succeed. The vacuum has been the absence, across the political and religious sprectra, of anything like “virtue,” in the original sense. “virtus” being specifically masculine moral strength and valor, as “vir” in Latin is “man” but distinct from mere “homo” in that a slave is “homo,” but is not expected to have virtue.

As vile as the left is, I find nothing very manly whatsoever in any strain of “conservatism,” and neither the racialist, nor the Jaffa-iste, nor any other formula can conceal the lack of manly “virtus” by recourse to pointing over at threats elsewhere.

I doubt that any of us have observed any remotely useful role models in this regard, though it’s almost impossible for us to acknowledge that. The “men of ideas” in ivory towers and the men of “faith” have failed us grievously. However they might persevere in stoically re-articulating Jaffa, Jefferson, Locke, Burke, Moses, Paul or Christ, they lack valor, virtus. Cleric and Scribe alike are impotent and everyone knows it.

We are left to pretend to one another that “if only” we were a more “conservative” society — either in the mold of leftist radicals like Locke, Paine, Jefferson and Jaffa who cynically mangled Christian concepts into the vocabulary of their false myth and “made people believe it,” OR alternately, “if only” we were far more racially homogenous population…

The coming race war will not make a man, “vir,” of anyone. It will merely loose the animal instincts of the racialists and the Jaffa-istas alike. It takes rather more than a gun and an attitude to make a slave into a man, homo into vir.

Muggeridge has been quoted as saying “We (slaves) don’t believe political lies because they are believable. We believe them because we want to. ”