In his book By the Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts paints a picture of a not-so-recent American past—the 1980s and 1990s—that was a veritable golden age. He invokes—from a political ad, of all things—a time when “beautiful” and “young” couples got married, when the gender of those same people was always men and women, which those marriages always occurred in churches surrounded by a loving community, when those same beautiful young people always looked upon American life with pride and wonder. The children of that same golden era always looked upon Old Glory with reverence. “Today,” Roberts concludes, “the ad looks like a lost dispatch from a foreign country.” The inference, then, is that America really was once this idea.

　　Roberts, like many prominent conservative voices today, evokes what he sees as a lost golden age, but 150 years earlier a generation of Southern writers had extolled what they believed was their own lost golden era. Everyone, rich and poor, lived in a free and prosperous society. Even poor Southerners “were ‘the happiest and most fortunate people on the face of the globe.’” The strength of the Lost Cause was palpable; it made converts in the aftermath of the Civil War, and in some ways it still does today. The tragic beauty of a pristine and lost civilization is a bewitching proposition. Even more attractive is the idea that this same glorious past can be reclaimed. And yet the South’s greatest literary minds cautioned their readers against consecrating their energies to reclaiming golden ages. By the time William Faulkner came of age, a more realistic and honest assessment of the South’s supposed Golden Era had set in. The South, Faulkner knew, remains the only region of the country to have experienced defeat and conquest, and the death of a civilization. He saw the past not as a golden age to be reclaimed, but as a warning to be heeded.

　　American literature provides significant cultural and regional variation for the development of the political mind of the United States. Southern literature, especially the work of Faulkner, provides a grave Augustinian understanding of the human capacity for self-delusion and self-aggrandizement. Faulkner’s works, while undeniably American, testify to what his devotees term a continued moral and political independence of the American South. That moral and political independence carries with it the weight of racism and slavery, but also the knowledge that even societies that seem confident and strong can be snuffed out by the hard hand of history. The palpable southern sense of loss in Faulkner’s works is not merely a quaint trope. It is a Jeremiad spoken in a southern accent to the rest of the country.

　　Greatness and strength are on the minds of conservative Americans in the twenty-first century. Young men are in the gym, and they’re telling each other about their gains and personal records. Dressing well is back in style. So are good looks. “Looksmaxxing,” or the process of making oneself as physically attractive as possible, through means both virtuous and vicious, is en vogue. These young conservatives are seeking chivalry in our own times.

　　Historian Eugene D. Genovese took an earlier generation’s nineteenth-century ideal of chivalry seriously. Exuberant Southerners, Genovese wrote, drew their northern political opponents’ attention to “such presumed aristocratic virtues as gallantry, classical education, polished manners, a high sense of personal and family honor, and contempt for money-grubbing.”

　　Faulkner took the idea of chivalry seriously as well, but his sense of history led him to cast grave doubts on the substance of chivalric ideas of the past. There was an essentially amoral quality in the idea of chivalry, because it was a romantic ideal. The Mississippi writer told a class at the University of Virginia that the romanticism of chivalry, morally ambiguous romanticism, “had come to be accepted … as the most valid part of chivalry.” If a practitioner of chivalry was “romantic and gallant about it, it didnt matter whether you were moral about it or not. In that sense it—it was obsolescent, and its a good thing it is past, but Im convinced it was based on simple standards of—of good, decent behavior, which would be valid at any time.”

　　The human capacity for self-delusion figures prominently in the Southern literary imagination. Confederate soldiers thinking themselves invincible getting slaughtered in front of Federal rifles; masters convinced enslaved humans were somehow happy in the brutal oppression the latter were subjected to; the supposedly divine hierarchy of Southern society being exposed as General Sherman marched through; all these experiences were etched in the Southern memory in ways they were not in other locales. And so Southerners of Faulkner’s generation had a moral and political independence to a degree the modern South—or any region of the United States in 2026—does not.

　　Faulkner’s sober reckoning of his own region’s past is alien to young conservatives today.

　　That independence allowed Southerners like Faulkner to reflect on a distinct sense of loss and even socio-political guilt unavailable to other literary conservatives. Certainly, other American writers admitted the American republic’s flaws. Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne hinted at the moral darkness of New England. But they do so from a place of moral superiority, aware that while their people might not be good, they are nonetheless right. But who but a Southerner could write, as Faulkner does in Go Down, Moses, of his own people being bad and wrong? “This whole land, the whole South,” one character, Ike McCaslin, tells his cousin, “is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, lie under the curse.” Ike’s outburst comes as he decides to declaim his inheritance; the moral stain is too overwhelming for him to willingly profit from.

　　It is important in 2026, with the rise of the New Right’s emphasis on ancestry, to note that Ike McCaslin has a claim to being the type of Southerner, and American, who can unabashedly claim the title of so-called ”Heritage American.” He is one of Faulkner’s Tall Men, the Scot-Irish coded original settlers of fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The Tall Men are the stolid sort of Americans that comprised Jefferson’s yeomen, the twentieth-century everyman, now rendered so often on social media as “Heritage” Americans. And yet Ike McCaslin, aware as he is of the South’s history, sees his heritage not as a genetic or biological marker or essence that gives him some sort of congenital right to rule. He has no inherited morality. He has, separately, his heritage, and his morality.

　　“Heritage America” is a creation of the neo-Marxist scapegoating of Americans, and especially white Americans, that typified the early twenty-first century. To be a white Christian conservative American was to bear all of America’s sins. Neo-Heritage Americans, however, seem to have decided that the answer to being scapegoated is to reject morality almost entirely in the interest of being strong and right, even if they are not good. Chivalry of a sort is one of the ideologies that seems strong and right, and a particularly masculine sort of strong and right.

　　The reclamation of those things which seem strong and right—like the Confederate South’s military experience—by the new right is therefore unsurprising in that it serves a distinctly political purpose. They seek to emphasize strength and power as the foundation for that which is right, over and against morality as a foundation for that which is right. Sam Francis, a late twentieth-century Republican political operative and godfather of the New Right, wrote: “Politics is not about moral ideals or public policy. Politics is about the acquisition, maintenance, and use of power. Politics was not about right or wrong; it was about strength through Machiavellian power and winning.

　　Faulkner, of course, wrote as a representative of a society that had very manifestly not won. Defeat permeates his work, and with the defeat of the South was the palpable sense that the Southern chivalry was neither strong nor good. Faulkner nonetheless loves his people and place. Quentin Compson’s tortured declarations in Absalom, Absalom! about his Southern homeland—I dont hate it! … I dont! I dont hate it!”—illustrate the grief-torn relationship of a moral man with an often-immoral place and society.

　　Confrontations with grief and loss define Faulkner’s literature, and much of Southern literature. Louis Rubin Jr. noted that alone among peoples of the United States, Southerners had “history” happen to them. That unique history gave the South a moral and political independence that separated them from the standard American narrative of inevitable triumph and pristine societal morality. It also allowed them to imagine the full range of American moral and political possibilities: Americans can be good or bad, just or unjust, poor or prosperous; Heritage America may be wicked or righteous; so too can immigrant America be righteous or wicked.

　　There is no moral quality in any group of Americans that makes them immune to original sin, or to the cycle of decline and fall that captures all the empires, kingdoms, and republics of history. Only a stark confrontation with a history of grief and loss gives Americans any hope of surviving. Awareness of civilization and society’s ability to morally and socially decay might not be the most popular literary aesthetic among Gen Z conservatives. After all, greatness is back on the menu. But even great men die; and exciting political moments pass away.

　　It would be wrong to say that there are never great men, or political or social revivals, or Golden Ages. But it would likewise be wrong to think those same moments can last forever. A flattened, nationalistic socio-literary imagination robs the American republic of the South’s felt experience of grief, even grief incurred through our own sins at times. Faulkner’s sober reckoning of his own region’s past is alien to young conservatives today. They seem willing to experiment with all sorts of political propositions—even discredited and unsuccessful ones—in order to escape being a people grieving lost greatness. Even if the ‘80s and ‘90s were as great as they suppose, throwing political and social caution to the wind in order to reclaim a golden age is a fool’s errand. They’ve never understood what it was like to grieve a lost culture.

　　At the end of Faulkner’s Wild Palms, Harry Wilbourne is offered suicide as a way of escaping the consequences of a monstrous moral action. He declines. “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” In the twenty-first-century United States, the right seems to have a choice between grief that comes with a moral political compass and the nihilistic nothingness of raw power. Conservatives will take the grief.