Interview with Michael Warren Davis

Michael Warren Davis is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Why ‘Conservative’ Isn’t Enough (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2021). He is an editor for Sophia Institute Press and lives in New Hampshire with his wife and daughter.

As you mention in your book, you are a convert to Catholicism. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background?

I had a mystical experience with the Eucharist.  If anyone would like to hear more, they can read about it in an article I wrote a few years ago for the Catholic Herald. 

I’d been totally unconvinced by Catholicism, but in that instant I became totally convinced of the Catholic Church.  Even when I was confirmed, I couldn’t fully reckon with all of her teachings.  (Actually, I’m still catching up.  I suppose I always will be.)  But I was, and am, absolutely devoted to the Teacher.

That’s why I cringe whenever I read William F. Buckley’s little nonsense phrase, “Mater si, Magister no.”  And I think it goes a long way towards explaining the failure of “Catholic conservatives,” especially in the United States!

You refer to your ancestors as Swamp Yankees. What is a Swamp Yankee?

A Swamp Yankee is like a WASP, only shorter and poorer.  They’re descended from the original New England colonists, but they never made it big.  [BILL WELD JOKE]  If you go to northern New Hampshire or western Massachusetts, you’ll still find plumbers and landscapers with names like Lowell and Cabot and Lodge.

My first known ancestor is a man called Edmund Moores.  He sailed to Newburyport, Massachusetts, aboard the Confidence in 1637.  I was born in Newburyport 356 years later, give or take a few months.  But my father is a corrections officer and my mother is a nurse.  I didn’t grow up summering in Kennebunkport.

You have praise for the American founding in your book. However, many traditional Catholics look askance at the founding as a “Masonic” revolution. Is the matter more complex?

As it happens, many if not all of my ancestors were loyalists.  It’s always touching how many traditionalist Catholics become devoted to the Empire whenever you bring up the Revolution.  They seem to think that, had we remained in union with the British Crown, America would be a Catholic state by now.  Really, they have a much higher opinion of George III than any Anglican I’ve come across.

We could go into all the profoundly un-Masonic things the Founding Fathers did, like mandating public (Christian) worship and banning Guy Fawkes Night celebrations.  But those don’t seem to have much effect.

Really, all I can think to do is ask these folks to look at England today.  Whose government would you really prefer to live under?  It’s no contest.  And we’re also doing much better than our popish uncles, France and Spain.  If the American Revolution was really a Freemasonic plot, it failed spectacularly.

You present the view in your work (shared by some secular historians as well) that people living in the Middle Ages may have at least sometimes been happier and healthier than we are today. Why is this so?

Serfs had lots of reasons to be happy that we don’t have.  They got a lot more time off during the year than we do—weeks, even months more.  They got to spend more time with their wives and children even when they were at work.  Each family had more land than we do: about twelve acres on average.  All of their furniture was handmade.  All of their food was organic.  Every beer they drank was a microbrew.  They didn’t vote, which means they didn’t have to bother with politics.  In fact, their government was practically non-existent.

Best of all, every aspect of private and public life was ordered by the Church.  That made life better for people on earth.  More importantly, it also meant that more folks went to Heaven.

Obviously, we moderns enjoy advantages that our Medieval ancestors could never have imagined, like antibiotics and Hamburger Helper.  But we’ve lost at least as much as we’ve gained.  The worship of Progress has blinded us to that fact.  We’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

The reactionary is one who insists on retrieving the baby.  That’s all.  We refuse to believe that the only alternative to famine is McDonald’s, or that, if we abolished the Department of Education, Americans would immediately go back to burning witches (though, if you’ve met one of these modern witches, that might not be a bad idea).

We believe that God is the only Master of man’s fate—not this idol called Progress.

Many Catholics live and work in high tech private and public jobs in cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Are there little ways that they can incorporate the simple or “reactionary” life in their day to day lives?

Absolutely.  But I can’t go into too much detail here, because that’s the whole second half of the book!  I worked as a journalist for years, and I got tired of all the talk, talk, talk.  I wanted to go out and tackle the problem with my bare hands.  This is a book for doers.

Some tease reactionaries as “LARPers” or those who are playing a postmodern game of nostalgia for the past. What would be your response to these critics?

I suppose I wouldn’t.  They’re right: reactionaries are LARPers.  We realize that all men have a role to play.  That means we’re called to be husbands, fathers, workers, warriors, scholars, mystics, missionaries, kings, fools, and saints.  It may not seem like much, but it keeps me busy, and I’m sure it does you.

That’s why I say that men don’t have time for television, video games, social media, porn, drugs, and squabbles on the blogosphere.  There’s too much work to be done, too much life to be lived.

Quoting J.R.R. Tolkien you refer to yourself as a “anarchist” who is forced to live outside the system.  How can someone be a reactionary and an anarchist?

As I say in the book, the reactionary is one who lives in open revolt against the modern world.  These days, there’s no way to be a reactionary except to be an anarchist, and any true anarchist must be a reactionary.

To one who hates authority, there’s nothing so dangerous as tradition.  To one who scorns morality, there’s nothing so scandalous as virtue.  To one that relishes disorder, there’s nothing more horrible than a well-ordered life.  That’s why our pornocracy hates us more than it anything in the world except the Catholic Church.  We break the final taboo: we try to be good.

In The Reactionary Mind, you advocate a Fr. Vincent McNabb-style return to the land. There is also a book written in the twentieth century on Thomism and agrarianism. Why do you view that a simpler life is often a more Catholic life?

I don’t say that.  Well, of course, I do—but only because the Church tells me to.  To take a very recent example, Pope Benedict XVI once said, “The rural family needs to regain its rightful place at the heart of the social order.”  More than that, he believed that the family couldn’t be restored unless the old agrarian order was restored along with it.

I think the arguments in the book are more compelling than this Simon-says example, but do want to make one point clear: agrarianism isn’t a disease you contract by reading too much Chesterton and Tolkien.  It’s everywhere in Catholic social teaching, including its most modern iterations.  So, the question isn’t why I agree with Fr. McNabb.  The question is why do you disagree with the Fathers of the Church.

You mention Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option in your work.  Some of criticized Dreher’s book as calling for Christian retreat from political engagement.  Should Catholics be involved in state and national politics?

My publisher called The Reactionary Mind “an ode to the Benedict Option,” which it is.  And the Benedict Option is not actually retreatist.  The “retreat” it advises is a tactical one.  Put it this way:

The Left has finished its “long march through the institutions.”  They have the upper hand in the Culture War.  We can’t keep fighting them head-on.  That’s what I call the Napoleonic Phase of the Culture War, and it’s over now.  Next comes the Guerilla Phase.  And a guerilla war is fought from defensible mountain strongholds. 

The Benedict Option teaches us how to build those strongholds.  My goal in The Reactionary Mind was to help get Christians into shape so we can build BenOp communities and turn the tide once again.

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