Against the Abyss: Tradition, Memory, and the Fight to Hold the Line Against Fascism
Freedom Doesn’t Survive on Its Own
By: Dino Alonso
The Quiet Power of Inheritance
In a world obsessed with innovation, tradition has become a dirty word.
The young are taught to disrupt, and the old are asked to retire their wisdom. Institutions are judged not by the depth of their character but by the speed of their adaptation.
But political freedom has never been born in a vacuum. It requires scaffolding, ritual, memory, and restraint.
Tradition, rightly understood, is not stagnation. It is the soil in which judgment grows.
Our ancestors' whisper reminds us that not everything old is obsolete.
To conserve is not to idolize. It is to take responsibility for the fragile inheritance of civilization.
And that act of preservation is neither passive nor nostalgic. It is defiant.
Continuity and the Moral Fabric of the Political Landscape
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." — George Orwell
When Edmund Burke warned against the French Revolution, he did not cling to the monarchy for comfort. He was protesting the annihilation of continuity.
He saw what happens when we sever ourselves from the wisdom embedded in long-standing forms.
To break continuity is to make ourselves orphans in history.
Hannah Arendt, writing after the collapse of European civilization in the wake of fascism, saw something eerily similar: the loneliness of modern man, stripped of belonging, made vulnerable to mass movements.
This unites them: a belief that freedom without memory is an illusion. That political life must be grounded, or it will be consumed.
Continuity does not mean immobility. It implies motion with reference. Change with a compass. Reform without amnesia.
Civic Engagement: The Antidote to Isolation
Totalitarianism begins with apathy. And apathy begins with the belief that your voice no longer matters.
"Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity." — Naomi Klein
The health of a republic depends not only on laws and elections, but on citizens who show up.
Speak. Witness. Listen. Vote. Disagree. Repair.
These are not just civic virtues; they are existential imperatives.
Arendt understood that action, plural, public, and unpredictable, is the very heartbeat of liberty.
Burke believed that freedom required restraint not from above, but from within the social fabric: the "little platoons" of civil society.
"To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle... of public affections." — Edmund Burke
We must stop mistaking civic participation for performance.
The Republic is not a brand. It is a responsibility.
The Seduction of the New and the Violence of Forgetting
We are told every day to "move on."
The cult of momentum brushes aside yesterday's laws, yesterday's ethics, yesterday's precedents.
But speed is not wisdom. And novelty is not virtue.
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." — George Bernard Shaw
The moral arc does not bend on its own. It requires hands.
Every tradition discarded too easily becomes a gap into which something darker rushes in.
Tyranny loves amnesia.
Because if we cannot remember what justice looked like, we will not recognize its absence.
The Constitutional Mindset
The founders of this nation did not invent freedom. They institutionalized it.
Their genius was not in creating rights out of thin air but in designing a structure that assumed human fallibility.
Checks. Balances. Friction.
That structure only functions when continuity is preserved, not just legally, but culturally.
It is a mindset that institutions are not tools of power, but constraints upon it.
Destroy that mindset, and you don’t get renewal. You get despotism.
The Role of Ritual and the Loss of the Sacred
Public life once had a rhythm.
The inauguration. The town hall. The peaceful transfer of power.
These were not mere performances. They were civic sacraments.
We are now told these rituals are outdated.
We are told reverence is weakness.
We are told outrage is authenticity.
But outrage without reverence becomes a riot. And performance without purpose becomes parody.
There can be no everyday life without common rituals.
There can be no order without a sense of the sacred.
The False Choice Between Change and Preservation
Revolution demands rupture. Statesmanship demands preservation.
The wise do not resist change. But they resist the kind of change that discards the anchors of liberty.
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution." — Hannah Arendt
Burke warned that "rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years."
In her study of revolutions, Arendt found that the absence of enduring institutions turned revolts into nightmares.
We must never again confuse destruction with clarity.
Why This Moment Matters
Today, we face not merely polarization, but disintegration.
The structures that hold democracy together are mocked by the people entrusted with their care.
We are governed not by statesmen, but by performers.
"The true conservative does not take his stand athwart history yelling stop, but rather asks history what must be carried forward—and what must be buried with care." — adapted from Buckley & Santayana
Tradition is dismissed as weakness, continuity as obstruction. Civic duty is an inconvenience.
This is not innovation.
This is decay.
And we must not mistake noise for vitality.
The Moral Dimension of Politics
Every law passed, every institution reformed, every precedent broken has a moral consequence.
Political action is not neutral. It shapes the world we live in.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." — Viktor E. Frankl
When tradition is mocked, continuity dismantled, and civic norms discarded, what remains is not freedom, but power unmoored from responsibility.
Power unmoored becomes a spectacle.
Spectacle becomes violence.
Violence becomes tyranny.
The Coming Eclipse
The current administration operates not as a steward of the republic but as its demolition crew.
Their vision is not guided by tradition, only by transaction.
They do not govern. They perform.
They do not respect precedent. They erase it.
In their hands, civic engagement becomes a loyalty test, continuity becomes betrayal, and tradition becomes an enemy of the state.
They will not reform the republic.
They will cannibalize it.
And when they are done, they will ask us to forget what came before.
We must not.
We must remember.
Because when memory goes, everything else soon follows.
If this piece moved you, send it to one friend or colleague. That's how we grow: one human at a time. Quality first. Frequency second. Friction last.