The Road to Splitsville

The Newsletter for Subscribers to The Split

FORWARD INTO THE PAST

One of the cool things about being a white, Christian male in the U.S. today is, you not only get to occupy the most privileged stratum of them all in American society, you also get to feel sorry for yourself and complain that you’re being threatened, canceled, and replaced. You get to sell your shampoo manufacturing business for tens of millions of dollars, and then pursue a full-time hobby of issuing pretentiously-written pronouncements of how America is falling apart at the seams, doomed to collapse into a chaos of battling fiefs headed by rival “warlords.”

Or something like that. In any case, you get to proclaim that “America is in a state of crisis. Decadence and corruption abound, from the streets of West Hollywood to the boardrooms of Wall Street, and in many unnamed and unknown places in between.” You, because you’re a white Christian millionaire man, get to not have to answer the question, “If those places are unknown, how do you know that decadence and corruption abound in them?”

That quote, about America, is from the public “Mission Statement” of an outfit called the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR, pr. “sacker”). Like the fraternal lodges of old (the Masons, the Moose, etc.), SACR consists of a network of local, incorporated chapters, all under the authority of a central leadership. Like those organizations, its membership is strictly male. Unlike those other organizations, however, its membership is strictly white, strictly “trinitarian Christian,” and strictly rich. It’s also mainly secret, or it tried to be, until The Guardian and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo did some digging and came up with some names.

One such name is that of Charles Haywood, the oppressed, threatened victim who sold his shampoo biz for big bucks and helped found the organization. What interests us here, as we schlep down The Road to Splitsville, is the remark Haywood made in a podcast in October of 2022. As Josh Kovensky of TPM reports, Haywood and other Claremont College-associated reactionaries were discussing “caesarism — the idea that a strongman is needed to solve America’s problems. After referring to an unspecified ‘secret event’ that brought the group together, Haywood said that he ‘wholeheartedly’ endorsed ‘national divorce’ as a solution to the country’s problems.”

Only on the faux-patriotic far political right can you call for America to return to the days of the late 19^th century and label that “renewal.” (As Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show recently, if you want to be a monarchist or a fascist, that’s your right. But don’t call yourself a “patriot.”) But you know how these people talk. As Raymond Chandler said, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” A glance at SACR’s website yields enough fancy-schmancy/Mad Lib Wither America? speak to give even Ayn Rand indigestion:

            We seek a civilizational renaissance.

We foresee a nation building great projects of civic and cultural renaissance. A society with strong leadership committed to family and culture. A society that nurtures, rather than rejects, virtue. A society that seeks the good and the beautiful, and abjures ideology.

We are raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens, who will reclaim a humane vision of society while rebuilding the frontier-conquering spirit of America. A new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future.

Whatever they mean by the good and the beautiful, it’s worth asking: Does any of this matter? Is SACR now, or can it become, a powerful, righteous, clean-limbed, flared-nostril, effective organization capable of striding manfully into the moral cesspool of contemporary America, kicking ass and taking names and making things right for white men in the name of Jesus? Or is it just a bunch of rich moralizers getting together once a month to escape the wife and kids, knock back a beer or three, and have ideas:

[Boise, ID] SACR members attempted to craft a “Statement on Marriage” in which local church leaders would proclaim an “intentional effort to celebrate the benefits of family life” because the “culture is hostile to Christian marriage.” To do that, the group would “promote marriage publicly through a pro-marriage sticker” to be spread around the Boise region. 

That’s their great project of civic and cultural renaissance? A sticker to be spread around the Boise region?

Still, whatever “Maximum Leader” Haywood and his frontier-conquering men take over, and however they do it, we can all agree who will end up where. They—the rich white guys, making Christianity the law of the land but abjuring ideology—will be in the driver’s seat. The rest of us—Jews; Latinos; Asians; Muslims; Hindus; non-Trinitarian Christians; atheists; agnostics; etc. (including all women)—will be lucky to find ourselves in the back seat, and will most likely end up in the trunk.