CAIN WINS:
The Nostalgia for Dark Satanic Mills (Aidan Grogan, 5/26/25, Law & Liberty)
The dark, satanic mills were engines of economic progress, but wistful longing for manual labor in factories overlooks how these economic conditions undermined traditional social structures and uprooted men and women from an environment conducive to child-rearing. For whatever growing pains the American heartland must suffer during the transition from manufacturing to services, the emergent “knowledge economy” offers tremendous opportunities to restore the bonds of kith and kin stifled by the industrial and sexual revolutions.
By emphasizing automation, education, and expanded telework, the industrial economy may at last complete a full circle and empower men and women to remain where they are—in the home, the nucleus of pre-industrial economic life. The twenty-first century’s digital economy may ironically enable a true “return to tradition” that conservatives, in particular, should welcome.
But such an epochal transformation necessitates the cultivation of a new post-populist elite—one with a more refined, conservative outlook, a renewed embrace of free markets, and a willingness to set and maintain a high moral standard.