The Westmarch Project
A Charter
What This Is
The Westmarch is a project to recognize, name, and articulate a regional folk emerging in the American High Country, and to recover the myth, memory, and responsibility that make such a people durable.
It is not a political party.
It is not a campaign.
It is not a movement seeking followers.
It is not an institution asking for allegiance.
It is an act of civilizational recognition.
Across history, peoples do not begin as states or organizations. They begin as ways of life, shaped by land, climate, labor, faith, memory, and shared trials. Only later—sometimes much later—do institutions arise to serve them.
The Westmarch Project is concerned with that earlier stage: the moment when a people realizes it exists.
Why This Project Exists
The national myth of the United States has fractured.
This is not a partisan claim. It is a cultural one. You can feel it in daily life: in the exhaustion of the middle class, in the endless cultural conflicts with no resolution, in the loss of shared meaning beneath politics, in the quiet sense that something essential is no longer transmitting between generations.
When a national story no longer binds, people do not become universal. They become fragmented, disoriented, or tribal in unhealthy ways.
Historically, when national myths collapse, regional identities re-emerge. Not as nostalgia, but as survival mechanisms.
This is not a theory. It is how civilizations endure.
The Westmarch Project proceeds from a simple observation:
If a people are to survive a civilizational transition, they must remember who they are and where they stand.
What the Westmarch Is
The Westmarch is not a state and not a secessionist proposal.
It is the name given to a coherent cultural region—the High Country of the Interior West—defined by:
- altitude and climate
- winter, not comfort, as a formative force
- frontier inheritance
- ranching, mining, building, engineering, and aerospace labor
- military service and civil defense communities
- Christian moral memory
- family continuity under pressure
- distance from coastal monoculture
The word march historically refers to a borderland—a place where civilizations are tested, guarded, and renewed. Marches produce people who are resilient, adaptive, and capable of stewardship precisely because life there is not easy.
The Westmarch is such a place.
This project does not claim that the Westmarch is better than other regions. It claims that it is different, and that difference matters.
What This Project Is Not Doing
This project is not:
- advocating redrawn borders
- recruiting members
- issuing policy platforms
- replacing Christianity with myth
- rejecting the United States or its history
The Westmarch Project does not oppose America. It addresses a reality America must eventually reckon with: that plural, strong regional cultures are a prerequisite for any durable republic.
A nation that suppresses regional identity eventually dissolves into monoculture or conflict. A nation that allows regions to form healthily gains resilience.
The Role of Myth (and Why It Matters)
Every civilization lives inside a story, whether it admits it or not.
Myth is not fiction. Myth is compressed truth—the narrative form through which values, memory, and identity are transmitted across generations.
The American story did not end at the Pacific by accident.
The frontier shaped character.
Character built institutions.
Comfort dissolved discipline.
What we are witnessing now is not decline alone, but migration—inward, upward, back toward harder lands where formation still occurs.
The Westmarch myth is not invented. It is recovered.
It is the continuation of the American story, not its rejection:
- from Atlantic crossing
- to continental settlement
- to Pacific arrival
- to cultural softening
- to return inland
- to reforging
- and eventually, outward again—toward the stars
Hard futures require hardened peoples.
Christianity and Moral Memory
The Westmarch Project is unapologetically shaped by Christian moral inheritance.
Not as sectarian enforcement, but as civilizational reality.
Christianity formed the ethical substrate of the High Country: responsibility over entitlement, stewardship over consumption, family before abstraction, sacrifice before comfort, truth before convenience.
The project does not seek to weaponize faith. It acknowledges that without moral memory, no folk endures.
How to Read the Essays
The essays associated with this project fall into three categories:
1. Recognition Essays
These name the crisis, the region, and the people.
2. Orientation Essays
These explain why regional identity arises and how it functions.
3. Field Notes and Parables
Shorter pieces about culture, children, memory, formation, and resistance to monoculture.
Not every essay applies to every reader. They are not meant to persuade everyone. They are meant to clarify reality for those already sensing it.
What Comes Next (and What Doesn’t)
This project does not promise outcomes.
It does not claim inevitability.
It does not demand participation.
It simply does the first necessary work: telling the truth about who a people are, where they stand, and what time it is.
If institutions arise later to support this work, they will do so openly and in service to the folk—not in place of it.
For now, this project exists to say:
A people are forming here.
They have a land, a memory, and a responsibility.
And remembering is the first act of survival.