At some point I fell out of the conventional political spectrum.  Maybe it was when I talked to the old about the history they’d lived, which was different from what was in the textbooks.  But I think it was actually when I first asked myself two questions.

1.  What kind of people are needed to sustain the kind of society we have?  and
2. What does our society do to preserve or create those kind of people?

The answer to the second was it does jack all. Worse, it degrades those kinds of people. Our society was a spendthrift. It was spending down the social capital whose earnings it relied on. Our society was unsustainable.

But no one who mattered seemed to care.

And the problem was worse than I realized then.

At the demographic level, modernity selects systematically against modern populations. The people it prefers, it consumes.

-from here.

We live lives of ease and luxury. We are history’s gentry. But we are the gentry in a 19th C. novel. We are the heirs, but the current holder of the property is a degenerate drunk who is mortgaging heavily and trashing the estates. We can count ourselves fortunate if its only our inheritance and our family name that is ruined.