The Thinking Housewife gets patriarchy

One of the best reactionary weblogs out there is The Thinking Housewife.  Check out her recent observations on one of my favorite topics:

Patriarchy is taken to mean the rule of men when what it really refers to is the rule of fathers. In traditional Western society, the father is the earthly representative of divine love and authority. The father is part of something larger in the way the mother never is. Only in him do the personal and cultural find some workable harmony. A matriarchal society such as ours is destined to sink into the swamp. It cannot obey natural law because it is subsumed by the personal.

The first sentence makes an elementary point, but how often have you heard it made?  Think of how many misunderstandings would be cleared up if everyone understood that this is the heart of the institution–the connection between authority and the paternal role.  Then it gets better by linking authority to symbolism, something else I’m always emphasizing.  As I wrote in my defense of patriarchy, the father must represent the outside world and the absolute demands of morality to his children.

The author makes another interesting point:

Fatherhood is all but erased as an institution if it is evil for white men to care about their people and to actively protect the interests of their people. To expect the father to see only personal love as his work is to emasculate him at the very core of his being. He has larger tasks. White men will remain emasculated and feminism will flourish as long as white culture is denied the same rights of self-assertion other cultures possess.

She claims that fatherhood has lost its prestige because our culture has lost its will to perpetuate itself.  (I think it’s a bit unfortunate that she uses a biological descriptor, “white”, to label our culture, but that’s just nitpicking.)  I myself would say that the loss of respect for fathers and the loss of respect for culture/tradition are two aspects of the decline of piety, which is part of liberalism’s project to eliminate the third level of being.