How the Left Won the Cold War

The following address was delivered to the HL Mencken Club's annual meeting in Baltimore, October 22, 2010.

I’m often asked why there is need for an independent or non-aligned Right. Aren’t Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and Rich Lowry covering all our bases? Why should we create a movement on the right when FOX and those middle-aged people marching around at Tea Parties with costume-store wigs, are doing our job? Why give ammunition to the Democrats by showing that our side is divided? We should be pulling together so we can pummel Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in next month’s referendum on Obamacare.

Engaging this question fully would require more than a ten-page exposition. Indeed there is no way to address it without being in this instance a Hegelian. It was the great German philosopher Hegel who argued that the true definitions of concepts and movements are necessarily genetic. Such definitions can not be dealt with properly, unless we go back to the origin of what is being defined. A tree is not what it first appears to be, but the history of that object, from the time it was a seedling. So too there is no way to understand where we are at the present time without noticing where we were before. The present state of any institution or movement reflects a dialectical process teeming with strife. It is only when, according to Hegel, conflicting forces can be brought together in a permanent synthesis that the inherent contradictions are resolved. Before that point is reached, the dialectic must go on, as something integral to what is being formed.

My intention is not to belabor you with Hegelian concepts. It is rather to bring up the unfinished dialectic of the right, for understanding why we do not belong to the authorized “conservative movement” and why that movement has become an echo of the Left. Allow me then to start with this generalization. In the second half of the 20th century, the other side, from our perspective, won almost everywhere in the West. But the Left that prevailed was not the gerontocracy and garrison socialism associated with Soviet rule. This Left had little to do with occupation armies in baggy pants, with inefficiently distributed goods and services, and with an arsenal of atomic missiles. The Left that triumphed was a truly radical one, and it celebrated its victories in Western countries that were straining to practice more egalitarian forms of democracy.

Whether the American civil rights movement and its later implications for feminists, gays, transvestites, and illegals, the ascent of antifascism and tiers-mondialisme in France, Italy, Spain and the Lowlands, or the morbid preoccupation of Germans with their undemocratic past and troubling Sonderweg, the post-Communist Left has had a constant task. It seeks to right the wrongs of the past, and specifically those wrongs that are blamed on White Christian, Indo-European civilization.

It may be superfluous to go over here the characteristics of this Left, since most of you are aware of what is being described. I might also recommend my book The Strange Death of European Marxism, which shows how the present Left differs from both Marxism in theory and Communism in practice. This movement is conventionally referred to as cultural Marxism, and it is now at war with anything that is not sufficiently radical in the social sphere. It adherents blame bourgeois society for such evils as “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich. This post-Marxist Left appeals to the guilty conscience of the West for having held down everyone else and for not having fought with enough determination against “fascism.”

Though in Europe this Left defends Communist regimes and typically plays down the crimes of Stalin’s Russia, it is not primarily interested in socialism. It is interested above all in reconstructing society, in integrating Western nation states into global organizations and in opening Western countries to Third World immigration and to popularizing non-Christian or non-Judeo-Christian religions. For those who may have noticed, the EU has become a major instrument for this desired social experiment in Europe.

Where this Left overlaps Christian theology is in its stress on guilt and the need for atonement. But the Christian attitudes have been recycled into a replacement theology, one that develops a cult of revolutionary saints and victims, and one that produces a liturgical calendar centered on politically correct remembrance. In this replacement theology victimizing groups are expected to exhibit unconditional atonement toward those considered historical victims.

This post-Marxist Left began to supplant Communism as the major leftist ideology in the West before the fall of the Soviet Empire. Already in the 1960s, a youth culture rejecting bourgeois standards of conduct and in close alliance with anti-colonial Third World revolutionaries, had taken root in Europe. Energy began to flow in the large Communist parties in France and Italy away from traditional party cadres toward young radicals. This rising elite were concerned with combating discrimination against women and immigrants and the marginalization of gays more than they were with the nationalization of productive forces. Although the emerging order became more apparent after the violent demonstrations of the soixante-huitards in Paris in May 1968 and the organization of Red Brigades in Germany and Italy, signs of a changing guard were present before.

In a perceptive work, Sognando la rivoluzione: La sinstra italiana e le origini dei sessantottanti, the Milanese political historian Danilo Breschi shows how Communist youth organizations and workers’ strikes fell into the hands of what the old cadre called “decadent bourgeois adolescents.” While those who showed up for strikes in the 1960s in Turin, Genoa, Milan, Bologna and other cities in the northern industrial belt were self-proclaimed anti-capitalist radicals, recruited from Catholic Action, Trotskyist factions, and ethnic minorities, for the under-30 demonstrators, the real agenda was more ambitious -- but also more feasible. It was a social-cultural transformation to be engineered from above. Longtime advocates of Marxism, like film-maker P.P. Pasolini and Marx-scholar Lucio Colletti, raged against these usurpers, and they called for ousting them from respectable leftist gatherings. Colletti went so far as to call the police to eject these “decadents” from his office; and Pasolini saw their agitation on the Italian Left with growing apprehension and referred to their statements as a “verbal disease.”

This post-Marxist, anti-bourgeois Left had less sympathy for Communist parties than they do for other socialist groups, and they have gotten on particularly well with the Greens. As the Greens shifted their focus from environmentalism to filling Western countries with the Third World poor and with promoting alternative lifestyles, they became indistinguishable from the post-Marxist Left. By the end of the Cold War, Communism in the West had become obsolete because the cultural Marxist Left had taken its place and because this replacement Left was shaping the left side of the political spectrum in western Europe.

The Communist parties in France, Italy, and Germany continued to function as one of several bastions of Cultural Marxism but not usually as its vital center. A similar process unfolded in the Soviet empire more slowly. Under the noses of Communist officials in East Germany, cultural radicals, and most prominently Stasi informant and now head of the German Party of the Democratic Left, Gregor Gysi, were coming into their own. The DDR’s collapse allowed these radicals to join those in the West who were pushing the same antibourgeois projects, namely, gay and feminist rights, harping on fascist dangers, and turning nation states into branches of a global managerial regime.

One might try to challenge the eventual direction of my argument by insisting this has nothing to do with FOX or Glenn Beck. The conservative movement proclaims itself to be anti-leftist. It mocks the glorification of Islam and upholds Western democratic and feminist ideas; and it defends the sovereignty of the American state against international organizations. A well-paid GOP satirist, Mark Steyn, actually derides Europeans and Canadians nonstop for catering to anti-Western fanatics. I could not therefore be suggesting that our official conservatives represent cultural Marxist or liberal Christian quirks.

In fact I am suggesting precisely this view.

And I would make the further point that what separates our authorized right-center from the post-Marxist Left, in Europe and on the American and Canadian Left, is mostly quantitative. While the Left pushes Political Correctness without buts or ifs, the conservative movement expresses it in a less extreme form. But both groups reflect in varying degrees the same general cultural movement. Like our Left and like the dominant ideology in Western Europe, our 30- and 40-some conservative publicists are immersed in a leftist culture. And the result is something that all of them believe things that adults in the 1950s, including Communist sympathizers, would barely have understood.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Sarah Palin, who is an outspoken advocate of anti-discrimination laws for women, is more radical socially than were French and Italian Communist leaders sixty years ago. While old-fashioned CP members favored a centrally controlled economy and rooted for the Soviet side in the Cold War, unlike Sarah, they were not eager to punish sexists. And they didn’t give a hoot about gays, up until the time Communist parties were under siege from the post-Marxist Left. It is inconceivable that Communists of this era would have followed Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, John Podhoretz, the neocon New York Post and the WSJ in affirming government-enforced “gay rights.” Two historians of the post-World War Two Communist movements in France and Italy, Annie Kriegel and Andrea Ragusa, depict a party leadership that belonged, even in spite of itself, to a bourgeois age. They stress the degree to which Communist parties embodied the social attitudes of the pre-Vatican Two Church.

Acceptable critics of the Islamic invasion of Europe like Steyn and Christopher Caldwell are targeting (and this must be noted) a specifically European experiment in multiculturalism. America’s willingness to take in and naturalize just about anybody does not bother these critics; presumably our big tent can hold lots more than we already have. By declaring ourselves to be a “propositional nation” held together by human rights and the belief in universal democratic equality, we are opening our doors to the world, or at least to those in the world who affirm our universalist creed.

I’ve also learned over the last two decades thanks to movement conservative celebrities: that Martin Luther King was acting specifically as a conservative Christian theologian when he spearheaded the civil rights revolution; that gay marriage, properly understood, may be a conservative “family value;” and that we are duty-bound to convert Muslims to our current notion of women’s rights and gay rights. It is precisely these ideas that make us “Western”; and if we truly value the glories of our civilization, which came into existence during some recent phase of late modernity, we should work to spread everywhere our high ideals. Equally relevant, those who have challenged our human rights beliefs, and most outrageously 19th-century counterrevolutionaries were actually “liberals.” Otherwise these mislabeled conservatives would have embraced the American creed of democratic equality!

A striking example of how deeply leftist thought patterns have affected the Right can be discerned in William F. Buckley responses to the attacks in the liberal/neocon press against the “anti-Semites” Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan. In National Review in December 1991 and March 1992 and in his subsequent In Search of Anti-Semitism, Buckley distinguishes between those who are anti-Semites by conviction and those who are “contextually” anti-Jewish. His key distinction goes back to the Marxist notion of being an “objective reactionary,” meaning someone who challenges the preferences of the Communist Party. Buckley’s argument from context likewise recalls the charge in Europe against those who challenge multiculturalism, as greasing the skids for neo-Nazis.

From this standpoint, it does not matter whether or not one says something that is objectively correct. What counts is not upsetting certain VIPs. In Buckley’s brief, neither the malefactors nor the victims have anything to do with the European Holocaust. The catastrophe is being placed at the doorstep of anyone who allows himself to be intimidated into accepting it. Furthermore, the blame in this instance affects American Christians, who are required to show prescribed sensitivity toward particular American Jews. There are surrogate victims and surrogate victimizers, the first being Buckley’s dinner companions and those journalists who felt outraged, and the second being those who made offending remarks but who had nothing to do with Nazi crimes. Offenders had to be driven off the pages of National Review and out of polite society. They are or were the equivalent of what the Communists used to call “social fascists” and what the European guardians of PC consider “fascistoid.” Such antisocial types are contextually dangerous and therefore must be ostracized lest they do harm.

Note that our two contextual anti-Semites were not abetting violence against Jews, any more than European critics of Muslim immigration or German scholars who question the exclusive blame of their country for every major war are trying to unleash pogroms. They have simply run afoul of certain elite groups, by reopening an inconvenient debate. The conservative movement plays this game by declaring any question it doesn’t want raised forever closed. Such questions now include, among a myriad of other things, objecting in any way to the major congressional legislation of the 1960s. 

What did remain in the conservative movement from the 1950s through the 1980s was anti-Communism. American conservatives throughout this period were in favor of resistance to Communist expansion and generally viewed the Soviets as an evil empire. But the movement’s arguments against the evil empire changed over the decades, from defending Western civilization against a godless foe to standing up for global democratic values against a reactionary homophobic Russian enemy.

And these changing reasons for an anti-Soviet stand tell much about the movement’s leftward drift. This drift became a forced march after the neoconservatives ascended to power, and its consequences help explain why there is an independent Right. We more than others have resisted the post-Marxist Left. We remain at war with the cultural and political forces that reshaped the Left in the 1960s; the conservative movement by contrast has made its peace with those forces -- while emphatically denying what has happened.

The authorized conservative movement has worked to blur this truth. The “victory of the West” in the Cold War is placed into an invented series of conservative triumphs, going from Reagan’s “conservative revolution” in the 1980s through the presidency of Bush II. In the Heritage Foundation’s embellishment, even the Clinton presidency belonged to an “ongoing conservative revolution” that began with Reagan and culminated in Dubya’s democratic crusading. Like Reagan and Bush I and II, Clinton supposedly practiced fiscal conservatism and advanced American concepts of human rights, albeit not as effectively as his Republican rivals. There have also been “good” Europeans who aided this conservative march, including an otherwise run-of-the-mill social leftist Tony Blair, who rallied to the Bush administration. Thatcher and Kohl were two other friends, who supported us during the Cold War. The German chancellor Kohl was obsequious enough, that is, “conservative” enough in the current Pickwickian sense, to make sure that his country’s unification would be a passing stage in his country’s merger with an international body. “Conservative” outside the U.S. means going along with neoconservative policies.

Movement conservatives have also applied the “C” label to things that have nothing to do with any genuine Right. Democratic equality and moderate feminism are two such preferred values that the conservative movement has claimed for itself. Conservative think-tanks have also reinvented self-described leftists as men and women of the Right. The reinventions of King, Joe Lieberman, and Pat Moynihan as “conservative” heroes all exemplify this practice. And such manipulations have their use. The movement can claim to be doing well, even when the Left triumphs.

Conservative publicists have also reconstructed the 1960s, by divorcing its cultural radicalism from its politics. Although nasty hippies, we are told, fouled the air by not brushing their teeth and by smoking pot, the 1960s also produced legislative reforms that would have pleased Edmund Burke. It was the Civil Rights Act that according to Jonah Goldberg bestowed on our country economic freedom -- for the first time. And the Voting Rights Act was another “conservative” landmark, because thereafter the federal government made sure that all citizens would be able to vote. In fact it kept certain parts of the country under perpetual federal surveillance, lest the Black-voting proportion fell below certain expected turnouts. After all, voting for one or both of our two institutionalized parties is a “conservative” practice. And presumably the more people of different pigmentation vote, the more “conservative” we become. And equally important, the Immigration Reform of 1965 filled the U.S. with a “conservative” Catholic electorate, the benefits (or conservatism) of which have still to be ascertained.

In the 1950s and 1960s conservatives held markedly different views. While they held no brief for those who were occupying university buildings or taking drugs, they were at least equally unhappy with that era’s political reforms. Not even in their wildest dreams could most of them have imagined that such far-reaching attempts at remaking our country attitudinally and ethnically would one day be declared conservative. And I would make the obvious point that one doesn’t have to applaud Jim Crow laws (and I for one don’t) in order to recognize that measures that were taken to end “discrimination” have created a permanent governmental straightjacket from which we’re not likely to extricate ourselves. There was nothing “conservative” about the congressional and bureaucratic measures by which that straightjacket was constructed.

But today’s conservative movement is about preserving the 1960s. It has turned that decade’s transformative legislation into the cornerstone of “conservative” politics. And then there was that other questionable triumph for the Right. Supposedly the collapse of the Soviet Empire belonged to a series of conservative victories in the West, associated with Reagan, Thatcher, and their successors. But the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe did not cause the ideological shift that is sometimes ascribed to it. The Soviets left the stage of History after a more radical Left had taken over; and this occurred preeminently in the West, which had never suffered the fate of a Soviet occupation. This replacement Left reshaped Communist organizations long before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and in its milder form, it determined the general political culture in Western countries, including that of a transformed American Right.

One cannot complete the story of why there is an independent Right without also looking at the big picture. We are part of that picture, as much as those who now oppose us. But unlike those movement conservatives who do know the truth, we are not given to manipulating the facts. In the West, there were no conservative victors in the Cold War; such victors, if they existed, were the renascent nations of Eastern Europe. And even these deserving victors may be threatened with moral defeat, if the Left that has triumphed in the West, including this country, continues to gain ground.

We Are the New Counterculture

I haven’t voted in an election in since 1994. I only did so sporadically before that, and have never voted since becoming interested in the kinds of ideas associated with the Alternative Right. Each new crop of office-holders that comes along never fails to remind me of why I think voting is a useless endeavor. I can only imagine the embarrassment I might feel today if I had done something so foolish as to, say, vote for George W. Bush in 2000. Nor have I found the Tea Party crowd to be particularly impressive. I concur with Paul Gottfried that its dominant forces are little more than neoconservative/GOP stooges. Its more radical elements may be mostly sincere opponents of the sociopathocracy, if often misguided. But what is particularly telling about Tuesday’s election is that, as Richard Spencer points out, the candidates with the strongest Tea Party endorsements were also the ones who tended to fare the worst (with Rand Paul being the only significant anomaly). As Richard notes, the GOP of 2010 performed not nearly as well as the GOP of 1994 under virtually identical political conditions, and with the supposed added liability-for-incumbents of a crumbling economy.

This brings us to Richard Hoste’s pessimistic assessment of the Sailer Strategy. I’ve always been skeptical of the Sailer Strategy, because it has seemed to me to underestimate just how pervasive the “values” of political correctness actually are among ordinary white, middle class Americans, particularly younger people, without even figuring other demographic considerations into the equation. James Kirkpatrick accurately describes Jon Stewart’s shenanigans over the past weekend as a “rally of the ruling class.” But one of the reasons why this ruling class remains in power is because, well, a majority of Americans largely agrees with them. A friend of mine remarked that the Stewartites are the contemporary equivalent of Nixon’s “silent majority” gathering to ridicule the contemporary counterculture (the Tea Parties and overlapping forces) and display their loyalty to the establishment. I think the available statistical data shows that the Tea Parties, so-called “movement conservatives,” and others conventionally identified as “the Right” essentially represent dying forces in American politics. I’ve crunched the numbers and outlined my conclusions here. Like it or not, the Tea Parties, etc. are swimming against the tides culturally, demographically, generationally, economically, and ideologically. Attempting to defeat Cultural Marxism/Totalitarian Humanism by electoral methods is simply a losing strategy, at least for the foreseeable future.

We will win eventually, because a society organized on flagrant falsehoods can only endure for so long before the cracks become observable. The left-liberal ruling class will stumble and fall as the contradictions within its coalition become more obvious. As the demographic transformation produced by mass immigration becomes more imminent, those contradictions will rise to the surface. We will achieve victory by emulating our enemies, the Totalitarian Humanists. They began as a counterculture and eventually grew to become the status quo. There is no reason why we cannot do the same, but what will eventually replace Totalitarian Humanism will probably not look anything like the conventional right-wing as presently constituted. After all, how much does Cultural Marxism actually resemble old-fashioned Communism? It is doubtful that a victorious Alternative Right would bear any greater resemblance to “movement conservatism.” We among the Alternative Right are creating a new kind of counterculture that is as different from the conservative movement as the New Left was from their orthodox Marxist ancestors. I predict this counterculture will expand dramatically and exponentially in the years and decades ahead. This is going to be a long war but one that’s worth fighting.

[Addendum: I just checked out Tim Wise's rant at Daily Kos. This part stands out:

And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement -- hell you’ve all but done that now -- thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.

And this:

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

Here, Wise is making the same fatal miscalculation that I have enountered among virtually all left-wing zealots. It is the presumption that the Left's "coalition of official victims" will be permanent and stable. This outlook may well be consistent with the view of many left-wing ideologies that history moves towards some final, glorious, permanent end, but it has nothing to do with the realities of power politics. The Left is presently comprised of a myriad of factions whose only unifying characteristics are a hatred of traditional WASP society and a desire for more goodies courtesy of the state. The more deeply entrenched into institutions the Left becomes, the more its constituent groups will become rivals for political favoritism and resources and the more their conflicting value systems will become self-evident (for instance, gay rights and feminism versus the "homophobia" and "sexism" of many African-Americans or Third World immigrants). Mass immigration along with ongoing economic decline will likely be the impetus for the eventual fracturing of the left-liberal coalition along the lines of race, class, and culture. That's when our moment will come.]

A Genealogy of the Right

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes, the business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” This was certainly true of the people who called themselves conservatives in Chesterton's day, and is even truer today. But it has not always been true.

As a political term, “conservatism” came about during the 18^th century. A conservative then was one who wanted to conserve Europe's waning ancien régime (I use the term in reference not only to pre-revolutionary France, but to all of pre-modern Europe) -- with its absolute monarchy, feudal economy, entrenched aristocracy, and powerful clerisy – against the challenge it faced from rationalists, philosophes, liberals, and radicals. In the end, of course, the conservatives and the ancien régime lost every significant battle, and were often deposed violently by the modernists. (1776, 1789, 1848, 1917.) Conservatism survived as an ideology, but conservatives approached the changes brought about by modernity differently.

The first generation of self-conscious political conservatives fell into two camps. One camp, preeminent in the Anglo-American world and typified by Edmund Burke, justified the ancien régime pragmatically. Burke might critique the French Revolution on the grounds that all radical and revolutionary changes are likely to end in disaster, or he might justify religious and monarchical traditions as “useful lies” conducive to social stability. Another school, represented chiefly by continental European thinkers like Bonald, Müller, and Donoso Cortès, argued against political modernism on moral grounds. For them, the spirit of the French Revolution was not foolish or unrealistic, but actively evil. For instance, they might argue, as Maistre did, that the Jacobin Terror was God's retribution on France for overturning a divinely-mandated social order.

Between the French Revolution and the end of World War I, the chasm between English pragmatists and Continental moralists grew. While the latter still wanted to restore a pre-modern social order, the former, having discovered that their arguments could be used to defend the new order just as effectively as the old, opted for reformism and allied themselves with the classical liberals. Thus, 20^th-century thinkers like Hayek and Oakeshott used Burkean arguments to justify the industrial capitalism and liberal democracy against which the first conservatives had fought. The liberal-Burkean alliance still comprises the mainstream political Right in virtually all of North America and Western Europe. Because the pragmatist party line fit the Zeitgeist while the moralist party line did not, pragmatists had gained complete hegemony by the middle of the 20^th century. The tiny moralist minority was either ignored or denounced as fascistic, bigoted, and reactionary. The “Alternative Right” which Richard Spencer has worked to give a voice on the Internet, if construed broadly, can plausibly be described as an atavistic moralist resurgence against the pragmatist establishment.

Now I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Continental moralist, and as such feel very uncomfortable with the word “conservative.” For one thing, it's virtually synonymous with Burkean pragmatism nowadays. For another, it implies that I want to conserve some existing arrangement. As implied, I don't. The original counterrevolutionaries could say that they wanted to save what remained of Europe's soul, but I can not, for that soul is gone now. It can not be conserved -- only restored.

Joe Sobran and the Wages of "Respectability"

Self-christened advocates of cultural harmony, equality, justice, and ideological soundness have long insisted that in order to prove oneself truly tolerant one must "NEVER tolerate INtolerance."

Of course, this notion of redefining a concept as its very opposite is purposely obfuscatory. What it means, laid bare, is, "WE, your betters, decide which positions are tolerable, and which are beyond the pale. If you offend our sensibilities, we will come down on you hard. So watch your step, little man, because WE call the shots, not you."

This subterfuge is easily uncovered by all enthusiastic flouters of insufferable contemporary norms, a hearty group of heretics whose company no doubt includes most readers of this publication. It's well known by now that taking certain stances is "wrong" and “indefensible,” not because of any self-evident moral law -- as with rape or murder-- but because the opinion-molders and shapers of the age have, in a series of ex cathedra pronouncements, insisted that it be so. Thus, certain types, most notably White race-realists and critics of multiculturalism, are shunned outright as mere bigots, and an earnest attempt is made to cordon off their views from the general public.

What is less known, however, is all of the intricacies and permutations inherent in this injuction never to tolerate "intolerance." After all, it's one thing to blaspheme against the holy Zeitgeist on some matter; it's quite another to genuflect properly and dutifully recite the creed, while at the same time TOLERATING those who dissent from these mandatory dogmas. What are we to think of those who aren't "intolerant" themselves, but who tolerate "intolerance"? What do the opinion-shapers and guardians of proper discourse do with those who, while not thought-criminals themselves, refuse to cast said thought-criminals into the outer darkness?

All of this comes to mind in considering the latter stage of the career of Joe Sobran, the brilliant columnist and fearless thinker who died last Thursday. Sobran enjoyed smooth sailing for years as a writer on William F. Buckley's staff at National Review, before hitting a patch of turbulence at the time of Iraq War I in 1991, when Sobran's opposition to American intervention put him into conflict with his editor and co-workers. As everyone knows by now, an acrimonious period ensued, ending with Buckley obliquely accusing Sobran of anti-Semitism due to the latter's increasingly dim view of Israel's actions and growing contempt for its "amen corner" in the United States. When he parted ways with Buckley and NR, Sobran quite understandably felt stabbed in the back. He would later allege that he was forced out because Buckley was overly beholden to neoconservative Jews (most prominently Norman Podhoretz) who zealously backed Israel and would brook no dissent.

In the last two decades of his life, Sobran's fiercely independent mind took him in an increasingly radical direction. In time, he became a full-throttle anti-state anarchist, though he always remained a stauch social conservative, an orientation fed by his never-wavering Catholic faith. More vexing, for the sake of his reputation as a "respectable" thinker, was the fact that he more often discussed what he came to see as the enormous influence, and largely baleful effect, of Jewish power in the modern world.

Post-World War II Westerners have been trained to construe any less-than glowing portrayal of Jews as an ominous preamble to a likely commission of a large-scale hate crime, and Sobran was already on sensitive ground when he wrote the following in a 1999 column:

In intellectual life, Jews have been brilliantly subversive of the cultures of the natives they have lived amongst. Their tendencies, especially in modern times, have been radical and nihilistic. One thinks of Marx, Freud, and many other shapers of modern thought and authors of reductionist ideologies. ... Jews have generally supported Communism, socialism, liberalism, and secularism: the agenda of major Jewish groups is the de-Christianization of America... Overwhelming Jewish support for legal abortion illustrates that many Jews hate Christian morality more than they revere Jewish tradition itself.

In 2002, Sobran addressed a conference of Mark Weber's Institute for Historical Review, a group which believes that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazi regime has been vastly exaggerated. Distancing himself from advocacy of Weber's claims, Sobran nevertheless praised Weber as a decent person and a conscientious scholar. As for himself, Sobran said he remained a "Holocaust stipulator": he pleaded ignorance as to the actual merits of the case, but generally accepted the traditional, non-revisionist assessment of widespread Nazi genocidal depradations against European Jewry. (He also made clear that he stood strongly against murder of Jews, or anyone else, no matter what the circumstances.)

Sobran, then, never actually took that full, final step into total ignominy (in the hive mind of the collective Zeitgeist) by actually denying the historicity of the Shoah himself. At the same time, though, he was never appalled enough by the notion of revisionism as to sever his friendship with Weber, or to refuse to speak warmly of him, or even to shun addressing his conference of largely like-minded people.

Now that Sobran has passed, many mainstream conservative outlets of a neoconnish orientation, such as First Things, The American Spectator, and (of course) National Review, have written online eulogies that take the angle of an examination of a tragic figure, so bright, witty, and capable, who spun out of control and became a bit of a crank in his later years. Other commentators are not nearly so generous. It seems, then, that even from the nominally "conservative" point of view, the PC-jeremaid against "tolerating intolerance" still holds sway.

It's not enough, it seems, not to be a thought-criminal; you must also not be friendly with anyone deemed a thought-criminal. That person's ideological deviation must be denounced, and he must be publicly shamed.

And if you are sickened by the idea of such show-trial theatrics, this obviously means that you're ONE OF THEM. Your unwilingness to fling your friends under the bus, in fact, demonstrates not your loyalty, but your lack of principle. If you had greater dedication to the cause, presumably, you would have no such scruples.

Though I never knew Joe Sobran personally, I have had the privilege of calling him a "label mate" of sorts. (His columns appeared on Thornwalker, the same domain which publishes The Last Ditch, where I've contributed columns since 2004.) I find his refusal to be a team player with spineless "movement conservatives" quite inspiring, even as I grieve for the lonely road he's had to ride these last few years.

Joe's career has been a testament to courage, nerve, and gumption. He could tolerate not being tolerated just fine indeed. We should all aspire to be like that.

The Inspiration of Joe Sobran

The death of Joe Sobran on September 30, after several years of failing health, could not have come as a total surprise to any of his friends. News about his deteriorating condition and the need for divine intervention was steadily provided by Fran Griffin, his alter ego of many years, his longtime publisher, and, not least of all, his tireless fundraiser. From Fran’s reports throughout September, it was clear that Joe would not survive much longer. The news that he expired painlessly may have been the least disturbing communication from her during this period.

Joe’s death deprives those of us on the independent right and in Anglophone society of a brilliant literary presence. Although widely known as a political controversialist, Joe was also, not incidentally, one of the most impressive English stylists of his and my generation. Most of his columns, like his works on Shakespeare’s real identity and on complicated constitutional questions, were literary gems. And though he would not have presumed to compare his talent to that of his hero G.K. Chesterton, Joe was probably Chesterton’s equal as a master of expository prose. The reason this graduate of Eastern Michigan (and scion of a working-class Ukrainian family) rose rapidly at National Review to become a senior editor within three years, after being hired in 1972, is that William F. Buckley recognized his considerable talent.

And arguably Joe was kept at the magazine even after Norman Podhoretz and his soul-mates condemned him as an anti-Semite in 1993, because Buckley wished to hold on to his best writer. Perhaps trying to bring around his newly acquired neoconservative dinner companions, Buckley defended Joe (and Pat Buchanan) for a time as “contextual” rather than genuine anti-Semites. According to Buckley, it was because of general sensitivity to the historic problem of anti-Semitism and the special place of Israel among American Christians as well as American Jews that the frontal attack on AIPAC and Jewish media power engaged in by Joe aroused such resoundingly negative feelings.

Joe retorted that if his targets were as weak and vulnerable as they claimed, then he would not have had to fear for his job and his future.

In the end he was driven off the pages of National Review, after violating a rule established for him specifically, that he would never again be allowed to write on Jewish subjects. I doubt Joe broke that rule out of disrespect for Buckley, whom he viewed as a second father. Meeting both of them at a conference at Hillsdale in the mid-1970s, I was struck by Joe’s deferential behavior toward his mentor. Even after he lost his post at NR and Buckley had become for the entire world to see the servile instrument of neoconservative power, Joe went on speaking of him with profound respect. In 2008, after Buckley had died, Joe, who by then was badly ailing, expressed relief that he had been able “to patch things up” with the man whom he had esteemed for so many decades.

If he had violated Buckley’s house rule by returning to forbidden subjects, he had done so because he would not allow himself to be intimidated. And though I often disagreed with Joe’s positions, or found them to be overstated, there were two things I would never question. One, the author in question was a person of unimpeachable integrity; and two; he would never have expressed an opinion simply in order to advance his career. By contrast, his enemies had no such virtues, and it was not surprising that Joe’s adversary had made a reputation for himself by writing memoirs appropriately titled Making It. Joe’s enemies stood for the Kingdom of Arrogance, although given how well they have done, one would have to reconsider the truth of the biblical teaching that “Pride goes before the fall.” This certainly has not been the case for those who ruined Joe’s career.

It now seems to me that Joe’s enemies won, at most, a Pyrrhic victory. They had derailed the careers of others, including Sam Francis and myself. They had also smeared Buchanan in their publications and then pummeled him with nasty accusations of anti-Semitism and homophobia during his presidential run in 1992. But Buchanan landed on his feet, and so did I, to the extent that I could fall back on some kind of academic position. Sam too survived after a fashion, even after the neoconservatives, led by immigration expansionist Linda Chavez, got him fired at the Washington Times. Indeed, even that first victim of what Murray Rothbard called “the neoconservative Smearbund,” Southern conservative literary scholar M.E. Bradford, had a professional life after the neocons kept him from becoming Director of the NEH. Mel could and did return to a full professorship at the University of Dallas.

But Joe fell more catastrophically than the other neocon victims, from celebrity to almost total marginalization. In spite of all, he did continue to put out newsletters and even occasionally got invited to give talks, in return for modest compensation. Among those who helped Joe through these difficult times were Fran Griffin, Lew Rockwell, the traditionalist Catholic magazine The Wanderer, and a few other publications that paidhim for his writing. It was often distressing to read Joe’s essays online or in his printed newsletter, knowing that this magnificent writer was going largely unread in his lifetime, while imbeciles and intellectual pygmies were being featured in prestigious and heavily funded neoconservative and liberal publications. Such disproportion between earthly accomplishments and earthly reward is enough to make one believe that all justice lies in the afterlife.

All the same, Joe’s fate did not have the consequence that the neoconservatives intended. Rather than serving as a warning of what might befall those who practice rightwing deviationism or take unauthorized positions, Joe’s outrageous reduction to a pariah generated resistance to the bullies who had gone after him. The steepness of his fall and the pious forbearance with which he treated his enemies had the effect of pouring steel into the spine of the independent Right. Machiavelli taught that it is better to be feared than to be loved but the worst thing is to be despised. Those who persecuted Joe and those who were the beneficiaries of this persecution became loathed by those whom this example of vengeance was supposed to render fearful.

It is also telling that for the younger generation on the independent Right, Joe is a hero, in a way that most paleoconservatives are not. The young admire him for having fought back, not only against the American global democratic empire but against the neoconservative commissars of the present conservative movement. Joe didn’t change the subject when he smelled danger and he didn’t care how many members of the New York nomenklatura he offended by speaking his mind. He suffered grievously for his honesty, while others were making careers by truckling. Whatever his faults, they pale beside his luminous virtues. Requiescat in pace Dei!

Christine O'Donnell, Witchcraft Dabbler

Just when you thought Christine O'Donnell couldn't get any better!

At least Sarah Palin came down on the right side of the Witchcraft Question. 

The Disaster from Delaware

Christine O’Donnell is surely the biggest train wreck the conservative movement has yet produced.

Put aside, for the moment, her Young Earth Creationism and dictates against masturbation (an odd position, by the way, for an unmarried woman of 41.) Put aside the strange financial irregularities that have cropped up throughout her life (she received a BA from Fairliegh Dickinson this past fall after failing to pay tuition for 17 years.) Forget the alleged back taxes (everyone makes mistakes) and her strange accusations of burglary against her Senate opponent Mike Castle. Christine O’Donnell can best be summed up by the 6.9 million dollar “gender discrimination” lawsuit she filed against The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the venerable conservative think-tank and publishing house where she once worked. It seems that this putative “radical conservative” was planning on getting rich via Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

And best of all, she actually lied within her lawsuit -- claiming ISI prevented her from studying for her Masters at Princeton, even though she hadn’t been accepted there nor yet awarded a Bachelors Degree.

Citing "Mental Anguish," Christine O'Donnell Sought $6.9 Million in Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Conservative Group

The Weekly Standard

By John McCormack

September 12, 2010

Court documents obtained Saturday by THE WEEKLY STANDARD reveal surprising new details about the gender discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuit filed by Christine O'Donnell in 2005 against her former employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative non-profit based in Delaware. O'Donnell … sought $6.95 million in damages. In a court complaint, she extensively detailed the "mental anguish" she suffered after allegedly being demoted and fired because of her gender. And, although she didn't have a bachelor's degree until this year, O'Donnell implied she was taking master's degree classes at Princeton University in 2003.

O'Donnell alleged in a July 1, 2005 complaint filed in district court that she had been demoted because ISI's conservative philosophy dictated that women must be subordinate to men. She claimed she was fired when she contacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding her demotion. ISI told the Delaware News Journal that she had been "terminated for operating a for-profit business."

O'Donnell's finances, honesty, and stability have been called into question in light of her false and strange claims. The court complaint raises further questions on all fronts. O'Donnell, who made an annual salary of $65,000 at ISI as director of communications and public affairs, sought up to $6,952,477 million in damages, claiming, among other allegations, that ISI had defamed her and had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. O'Donnell sought:

• Up to $3,952,447 in "Direct Damages, including back pay" and "lifetime lost income and liftetime damage to reputation."
• Up to $500,000 "for emotional distress, humiliation, emotional pain, embarrassment, depression."
• Up to $3.5 million in punitive damages for "willful, legally-malicious and outrageous conduct" by ISI.

O'Donnell claimed that ISI had caused her to suffer "mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, mental and physical pain and anguish"--and that, according to an amended complaint, she had to "seek treatment for her distress."

According to O'Donnell's July 1, 2005 complaint submitted by herself:

Miss O’Donnell was and is profoundly humiliated by this demotion of being asked to perform clerical and administrative tasks, after appearing on national television as a media and public relations expert and spokeswoman, for a man who was hired straight out of college as ISI’s receptionist and clerical assistant, and whom she had been asked to train previously [emphasis in original]. [...]

For at least six months after being fired, Miss O’Donnell suffered enormous pain, cried frequently at the sense of personal loss and failure caused by ISI, and at the sense of injustice, and could not sleep at night, often wide-awake, replaying the whole scene in her mind, until 5:30 am, and has suffered from understandable and resulting depression.

"Miss O'Donnell's mother and sister both noticed and spontaneously told her at the time, prior to litigation, that she was differently [sic], and urged her to seek medical evaluation," according to the complaint.

An amended complaint, filed by a lawyer on behalf of O'Donnell in September 2005, claimed that O'Donnell did, in fact, "seek treatment for her distress."

"Ms. O’Donnell has suffered extreme emotional harm as a result of the actions taken or not taken by ISI, and statements made by and on behalf of ISI, in the form of grief, shame, humiliation, embarrassment, anger, chagrin, disappointment and worry. This harm has caused physical manifestations, and caused Ms. O’Donnell to seek treatment for her distress."

The amended complaint also claimed that in one instance a male colleague made a lewd comment to her. "On one occasion during her employment, a co-worker, Mr. Cain, in connection with Ms. O’Donnell’s efforts and work on the Gala, ordered or stated to Ms. O’Donnell to 'strap it on,' which was a crude and demeaning reference to an artificial male sexual organ used by some females in order to act like a male in sexual acts," the complaint alleged. "To Ms. O’Donnell’s knowledge and belief, Mr. Cain was never disciplined or reprimanded for making this offensive statement."

Curiously, the July 2005 complaint alleges that "ISI violated its promise to allow Miss O'Donnell time to take master's degree classes at Princeton," thus causing a loss of "earning power."

"Moreover, Miss O'Donnell has lost the increased earning power that a Master's degree from Princeton would have created. In the future with proper finances, Miss O'Donnell should probably be able to return and complete that program, however that increased earning power has been disrupted and delayed for at least three years, given college application cycles, and the damage to her reputation, creating a loss of increased earning power estimated at up to $50,000 per year, for three lost years at $150,000."

According to the amended complaint, O'Donnell had considered not taking the ISI job because "she had applied for admission to a Master’s Degree program at Princeton University, to start in the fall of 2003, and was concerned that the ISI position would not fit with her plans."

But, in fact, O'Donnell had not yet received her bachelor's degree at that time and had not been accepted to a master's program at Princeton.

The Delaware News Journal reported on Saturday: "[O'Donnell's] alma mater, Fairleigh Dickinson University, sued her in 1994 for about $4,000 in unpaid tuition. She satisfied the debt in 2003 and received her diploma this month after completing an additional course."

Democracy is rule by the terminally mediocre, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the likes of Christine O’Donnell can win Republican primaries. But let there be no mistake, if this woman is the type of person conservatives are putting forth in their “class war” against the establishment, then let me declare my allegiance to the RINOs.

Another "Revolution"

The opposition party getting swept into power on a wave of voter remorse during the first midterm of a new presidential administration is hardly a novel occurrence. It actually happens like clockwork, like a regular counter-trend within the structural shifts of political alignments.

• 1946 -- Truman administration: The Republicans achieve their first majority since the New Deal.
• 1954 -- Eisenhower: Democrats gained 18 seats and recaptured the House.
• 1970 -- Nixon: Two years before Nixon’s famous re-election landslide, the Democrats increase their hold on the House by 12.
• 1982 -- Reagan: With the economy in recession, the Democrats take 26 House seats.
• 1994 -- Clinton: the Republicans re-take the House in what would later be called a “revolution.”

(The 2002 midterm is the exception that proves the rule, as George W. Bush’s Republican Party increased its power in Washington, though only slightly (three seats); it appears that in that year, 9/11 Mania trumped the Midterm Curse.)

No matter how bad it looked for the GOP after Obama’s ascendancy, a rebound in 2010 could have been safely predicted. And history does not suggest that a victory in November will guarantee the Republicans anything in 2012.

It’s worth remembering this while reading hysteric liberal commentators speak of the new “paranoid politics” of the Tea Parties -- a restless, brooding, resentful White middle-class “backlash” that apparently threatens democracy. My good friend and colleague Peter Brimelow seems to agree with said hysteric liberal commentators -- with the evaluation reversed, of course. In his latest blog,  “The White Giant is Stirring, ” Peter suggests that the White middle class is fed up and ready to remake the political system in its image.

It now looks like the Tea Partiers, with their very conscious contempt for the GOP leadership, are emerging as a sort of Third Party within the Second Party.

This is an interesting formulation. Though even if Karl Rove doesn’t like many of the Tea Party candidates -- Christine O’Donnell most notably -- it is the GOP, and only the GOP, that is directly benefiting from the Tea Party movement.

And in my view, the Tea Partiers aren’t so much remaking the GOP as promoting the Republicans’ farm team and various other conservative-movement backbenchers -- politicians who never thought they’d get a chance in The Show but are now pinch hitting as “anti-Establishment” populists.

As Peter himself admits, these Tea Party candidates have, conspicuously, avoided talking about immigration and the National Question. Moreover, their putative “radical” lines about abolishing the Department of Education and “getting government off the people’s back” amount to the same twaddle conservatives have been mouthing for the past 45 years. Why, exactly, should we to believe that they really mean it this time -- especially since they are in a far worse position to act on their supposed principles than, say, five years ago when the Party had total legislative power in Washington?

And in some ways, the situation is even worse. Christine O’Donnell of Delaware -- whom Karl Rove is correct to label an embarrassing oddball -- and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire are yet two more Sarah Palin-endorsed women -- two more in a series of “Pink Elephants” and “Mama Grizzlies” who are equally annoying, uppity, hokey, and bossy. The “White Giant” Peter applauds is blindly and mindlessly supporting Gov. Youbetcha as she enacts her own Title 9 project within the Republican Party.

Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell was truly over the top, as the two women bear an uncanny resemblance to one another.

So what of the slumbering, stirring White Giant? Things will get worse, much worse, for him in the coming years, and he will, no doubt, get angrier and angrier as he watches his world fade away. But as long as the mass media circumscribe the White Giant’s political imagination, he’ll continue to sing hymns to “Doctor King” at Glenn Beck rallies and loyally vote Republican as a form of social protest.

Buchanan: Arrest the Koran Burner!

When I first read Pat Buchanan's latest column, I thought he was using sarcasm to make a point.  When I read it again, I feared that he was actually being serious. Here are the relevant passages; you decide:   

Bonfire of the Quarans

Creators Syndicate

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Sept. 10, 2010

[...]

Everybody frets and wrings their hands. No one acts.

Yet if, as President Obama and his commanding general both say, the torching of hundreds of Qurans could so enrage the Islamic world as to incite terror-bombings against U.S. troops and imperial our war effort, why does not the commander in chief send U.S. marshals to arrest this provocateur and abort his provocation?

For Jones, who sells t-shirts saying "Islam is of the Devil," may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland's elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

And if Petraeus says letting Jones set this bonfire could imperil U.S. troops, Obama should act to stop it. And if he is so paralyzed by uncertainty as to whether he can do anything -- and, as a result, soldiers die -- what would that tell us about their commander in chief?

Would stopping Jones and confiscating the Qurans violate Jones' First Amendment rights?

Perhaps. And perhaps not. But if Eric Holder cannot find a charge against Davis, or an inherent power of a war president to prevent actions imminently damaging to the war effort, Obama should find some Justice Department attorneys who can.

Let the ACLU make the case that interfering with Davis' bonfire violates his First Amendment rights. Let a U.S. court decide whether Obama has the power to take a decision previous wartime presidents would have taken without hesitation.

And if Obama does not have the power to stop actions like this, imperiling our troops, then we should get out of this war.

This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of the Quran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?

What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.

And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a "long war" in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?

Action creates consensus, Mr. President. People follow when a leader leads.

There are a couple of sentences that still make me think that Pat was being sarcastic; these include, "And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a 'long war' in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?" Pat has been forthright about America's inability to ever win the war for global democracy that Bush, Obama, and the neocons have defined.  

Whatever the case, it's not wise to use sarcasm in a nationally syndicated column that gets sent out to local papers in Middle America.  

Buchanan does make one unequivocally valid point -- that Obama is simply not willing or able to be as harsh and authoritarian as Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and Truman were. But one shouldn't forget that Washington is increasingly identifying "right-wing radicals" as "national security threats" and "domestic terrorists." If Janet Napolitano decided to round up David Duke, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, me, and others listed as "dangerous" by the SPLC, would Pat then praise Washington for its "seriousness"?    

Via email, a friend wrote me of how Buchanan -- along with others conservatives of his generation -- is caught between two incompatible versions of conservatism: 

The column seems like a good example of what happens when one subscribes to two definitions of conservatism that are sometimes in conflict.  In the Cold War, the extent to which one was willing to propose virtually totalitarian measures in the fight against Communism was an indication of one's right-wing bona fides.  But conservatism in the America First context obviously can't encompass wars for global democratic human rights, or whatever the hell it is Americans are supposed to be dying for in the Islamic world.  The competing standards of Cold War and America First conservatism can't be reconciled, but rather than abandon the Cold War criteria and risk seeming like a "liberal" by that standard, PJB affirms both standards and disregards the contradiction. So let's have global democratic wars and New Deal wars and all the rest, as long as the means by which they are prosecuted are sufficiently "conservative" by the standards of, say, National Review circa 1959.

Kill'em All Conservatism

Richard Spencer and Robert Burnham’s Facebook conversation is pretty frightening, but I must say that it pales in comparison to a recent Free Republic thread about Julian Assange.  A commentator recommends the government go after the man’s family and when someone objects he’s shouted down as a liberal commie.

Some other representative suggestions.

His head would look good on a pike.

He truly needs to be carbombed

Surely someone in our DOD can take this pipsqueak out. We have killed better men for less in the past.

I support a CIA covert operation to coat his butt-plug with arsenic. ARSEnic...get it? (too strong? sorry.)

This truly has become deadly serious. He needs to be taken out. No internet bravado here, our government or allies need to act and end this. I don’t know if our various agencies can act on their own, but if they can, I hope they do soon. 

$200 for a bullet between that mother effer's eyes.

All this hatred, and for what?  Ten years ago a couple fanatics killed three thousand Americans.  Every death is a tragedy, but the US has sinned against the Muslim world much more than it’s been sinned against.  Half a million Iraqis died due to US sanctions and then another half million thanks to the war.  Yet if any Muslim in the world talks like these so-called patriotic citizens do it’s proof of the inherent depravity of the religion.

What’s really scary is speculating on what Republicans would advocate if there actually was a terrorist problem-this is, if the murder rate for Muslims ever reached 50% of what it is for Americans blacks or people of the Islamic faith ever managed to kill 1/10th as many people as the US murders overseas.  They already defend the right of the president to murder anyone whom he deems a “terrorist” and hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely.  Thankfully the “war on terror” is a government fabrication, for if it wasn’t and people actually were dying in any large numbers the US would by now make North Korea look like Hong Kong.

What indicates that conservatives are particularly dull is that they seem to understand that everybody in power is against them, but at the same time desire the state to have the prerogative to decide whether they live or die.  It reminds me of when William F. Buckley said he was fine with totalitarianism in America in order to defeat international communism while he rallied against the Godless and degenerate elite, who naturally ended up running the system he advocated. But at least Buckley was facing an enemy that had taken over half the planet and had the potential to destroy it all, not a few isolated anti-social failed engineering students and low IQ Nigerians with firecrackers in their pants.  

I don't know if I quite agree with Richard and Robert who believe that these sentiments represent something healthy that simply should be channeled into another direction.  The way one terrorist attack carried out with box cutters threw the entire nation into the arms of big brother shows how effeminate and cowardly we've become.  The branding of anybody who tried to link US policy to the terrorist attacks as "blaming America first" represents not only a general stupidity, but hostility to intellectual inquiry.  The wars that resulted out of the attacks managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of White Man's Burden imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.  And of course hostilities in the Middle East have facilitated the complete Zionist take over of the Republican Party.   Sure, there's a decent bit of implicit whiteness and anti-ethnomasochism in there, but it's in a very thick neo-con shell which will be very difficult to crack.  

What is it to Accept Tradition?

In an age of checklists, decision trees, and zero tolerance, it's a puzzling notion.

People think it means giving up on reason. Or doing what's been done no matter what. Or accepting an external authority that has nothing to do with the situation we're actually dealing with.

What else could it mean, when each of us has his own thoughts and goals, reason is a matter of studies and statistics, and social authority is either following rules we've agreed to for our own purposes, or getting someone else's demands shoved down our throat?

That's the liberal concept of man as autonomous, knowledge as neutral and expert, and society as contract. Judge Walker (of Proposition 8 fame) evidently had something of the sort in mind when he said that "tradition alone ... cannot form a rational basis for a law."

In fact, accepting tradition is simply acting as a human being. Our actions aren't isolated events. They reflect a system of habits and understandings. To the extent the system is helpful and coherent--and we won't stick by it if it isn't--it's because a lot of people have lived by it for a long time, found it satisfactory, and worked the bugs out. In other words, it's because it's the tradition of some community. Our habits and understandings are our own, but they are not simply our own. We pick them up from other people.

We follow the tradition of our community because tradition and community are basic to being human. They help make us what we are, and we can't function without them. Man is social, and to belong to a community is to understand the world as the community understands it and act in a way that makes sense on that understanding.

All of which sounds OK, but it raises some questions. For starters, why talk about accepting tradition if the acts of every sane human being are going to be mostly traditional anyway? After all, we all have some idea of what things are, what they amount to, and how to deal with them, and it's not as if we just make those ideas up ourselves. On the whole, we have them because that's the way people like us look at things, and because the whole system of understandings we've picked up works and we're attached to it.

The answer, of course, is that anything can become problematic. It's natural for people to eat, but eating can be an issue at times. The problems can be minor, like cutting down on sweets, or major, like anorexia nervosa.

The same applies to tradition. Problems arise because circumstances change and old habits and understandings lose their function. Or they can arise simply because tradition is imperfect. Like individual character, it includes some habits and understandings that are good and some that are not so good. The former are more important, since we couldn't live a human life unless we stood in some sort of social tradition, but the latter usually attract more attention because they cause more problems.

People who live by a tradition normally respond to imperfections and changes that become troublesome by trying to maintain the tradition's substance. They focus on the understandings and practices that seem most important, and change less important ones that seem at odds with the basic goods the tradition points toward. A tradition is not at bottom a collection of rules, all equal to each other, but an understanding of the world and how to live in it. Some parts are more important than others, the tradition is always directed to goods that trump particular practices, and there's always some flexibility in how to reconcile practice and goal.

Religious reformers provide an example. They may complain about popular traditions but do so in the name of older and more authoritative traditions. They appeal from the practices of the Pharisees to the law of Moses and the prophets. Even evangelists appeal to the traditions of those they are addressing. Justin Martyr saw the seeds of the Logos in Greek tradition. Paul didn't tell the Athenians to give up Athenian culture, he quoted their poets and said he was there to tell them about the God their altars pointed toward. And in our own time Benedict annoyed some people by saying that "Christ was the savior for whom [the American Indians] were silently longing."

Such attitudes are justified. People attach themselves to the traditions they like, but in the long run the good is what they find most worthy of devotion. If there really is an objective good that's accessible to us then that's what all tradition points toward. To choose tradition is not to choose habit simply as such but to choose the way we actually arrive at the good, beautiful, and true. We don't know those things by doing a survey or putting something through a spectroscope. We know them when they emerge from the confusion of life in the experience of many people as worthy of enduring attachment.

Sometimes adjustments that work are hard to find. The development of a tradition may bring out basic flaws that eventually become crippling. The thought of classical antiquity had no way to resolve the questions it raised, so it ended in superstition, skepticism, and arbitrary mysticism. Or circumstances may change so radically that a tradition sees no good way to deal with the new realities--you're a Chinese mandarin and you discover that traditional China can't compete with the industrialized world and its gunboats.

If the problems get big enough, the tradition breaks down and things go haywire for a while. Eventually tradition and equilibrium re-establish themselves, but there's no telling how long that will take or how good the results will be. The Greeks and Romans eventually adopted a new system--Christianity--that overcame the problems of classical thought and led to another great civilization. On the other hand, the Chinese went berserk for a while, and may or may not have found their footing again.

The problems among us today are unusually radical. People aren't dissatisfied with this tradition or that, or at a loss how to achieve old goals in new settings. Instead, they want to reject the authority of tradition as such, along with the goods it proposes. They adopt views like liberalism that claim to possess a universal rationality that trumps all tradition, and insist that the only acceptable standard for social life is giving people what they want, as much and as equally as possible. Hence the California Proposition 8 decision that declared legal recognition of marriage unconstitutional.

The current situation results from an ever-greater insistence on a clear but extremely limited understanding of rationality that tells us that knowledge and conduct must be modeled on modern natural science and technology. That understanding works well if you're putting a man on the moon, not so well if you're figuring out how to live and relate to other people. It can't deal with identities, essences, or ultimate ends, so it has no way to make sense of our lives or those of others. The result is that belief and conduct lose their ability to order human life in a satisfying and non-arbitrary way.

That means the current state of affairs isn't going to last, and we'll have to go on to something else. Some would describe the current situation as the collapse of the Western tradition. I think it's better to describe it as the distortion and suppression of that tradition as a whole by part of it that has become too dominant. The scientistic outlook has to be ditched in any event, since it's at odds with the needs of human life. Once that's done the obvious way to proceed is to stick with the remainder--by far the greater part--of the tradition of the West, and try to bring it into a workable form. We can't get by without a tradition, the tradition of the West is the one we have, and there's no superior one to adhere to. So isn't the way forward obvious?

Spirit and Resistance

Traditionalists are often painted as partisans of lost causes. The ideologues of modernity and “progress” thus consign actual rightist movements to history’s dark remnants, all the while leading humanity’s march into a radiant future of equality and liberty.

We have witnessed their future, and all its supposed radiance is but an artifice. Modern civilization offers a plethora of material goods to mask the denial of the one true Good; it creates virtual worlds of distractions and amusements to convince man to forget how he abandoned the one true God.

Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher and premier theorist of the White Russian movement, saw this earlier than most. The Whites were first into battle in the confrontation with one particularly savage program of the Revolution, Soviet Bolshevism. As an unabashedly faithful Christian, monarchist and patriot, Ilyin understood the full gravity of the threat and how to combat it; above all else, he knew victory could only be achieved through the will to spiritual resistance, in a war beginning in our own hearts.

Ilyin’s notions may have seemed fantastic at the time of his speech below, but where is Soviet power today? The immutable principles of faith, loyalty and honor show themselves ultimately triumphant over the destruction wrought by the materialist ideologies of our age. Contemporary Russia’s survival, like that of any nation, cannot be guaranteed, but she also shows signs of hope and rebirth. We in the West would do well to remember that not all lost causes are lost.

***

The Sovereign Meaning of the White Army

Speech delivered by Ivan A. Ilyin in Berlin, November 19^th, 1923 (The 6^th Anniversary of the  Russian Volunteer Army). Translated by Mark Hackard from the text "Rodina i My"; italics are from the original.

One of the most genuine and spiritually significant victories accomplished in the history of man is the triumph of the Russian White Army. If we can take everything from this victory that was laid into it, then Russia will soon be reborn in power and glory and evince still unseen greatness. And this greatness will be a living edification and support for the rebirth of other nations. This is the primary meaning of our “White” existence and suffering.

Strategic naivete, historical ignorance, the inertia of prejudice or reactionary stubbornness are nowhere behind this claim. Our opponents and enemies can be sure that we are fully possessed of sufficient factual knowledge, historical cognition and political realism to understand the elementary and superficial, what they “understand”. But the fates of nations and states have yet a different, deeper dimension open to the religious spirit and closed to the heart without God. And to abide in this dimension allows the discovery of unique meaning behind all strategic, historical and political events…

First, we shall establish that the entire struggle of Russian patriots, both military and civilian, who attempted to prevent Russia’s defeat in the Great War and her complete decomposition in the Revolution, who attempted by armed force to overturn the power of internationalist adventurers, did not reach its direct goal. The war prematurely ended with the opening of the front, and the Revolution flooded into the entire country and sank, both in quality and intensity, to the very bottom. All of Russian culture, all Russian people, and all the land were made to stand face to face with revolutionary possession: with the blasphemy of the godless, the assault of bandits, the shamelessness of the madman, the attempts at murder. All of us had to look into the eyes of Satan, tempting us with his latest seductions and frightening us with his newest terrors.

Behind the entire external appearance of the Revolution- from documentation to execution, from the ration to the tribunal, from round-up to exile and emigration, from torture by hunger, cold, degradation and fear to stolen wealth and pretension to world power - behind all this is concealed the Revolution’s single and central reason, in relation to which all of these phenomena are but changing forms, a shell, the outer shape of things. This reason is given through the words spiritual seduction and religious inquiry.

The secret and deepest meaning of the Revolution is held in the fact that it is most of all a great spiritual seduction; a harsh, cruel test; it burns through souls and tempers them by fiery trial.

This test posed to every Russian soul the same direct question: Who are you? By what do you live? What do you serve? What do you love? Do you love that which you “love”? Where is the center of your life? And are you devoted to it, and are you loyal to it? The hour has struck. There are no more delays and there’s nowhere to hide. And there are not many paths before you- only two: to God or against God. Stand up and reveal yourself. For if you do not do so, you will be made to stand and show who you are: the tempters will find you in the fields and at home, at the mill and at the altar, in your property and in your children, in the spoken word and in silence. They’ll find you and place you in the light- that you announce without ambiguity whether you are with God or against Him.

And if you are against God, then you’ll be left to live. They won’t take everything from you, and they’ll make you serve the His enemies. They’ll feed you, indulge you and reward you; they’ll let you harm others, torment them and take away their property; they’ll give you power, profit and all the appearance of disgraceful esteem.

And if you are for God and choose the path to God, then your property will be seized, and your wife and children will be disinherited. And you will be wearied with deprivations, humiliations, darkness, interrogations and terror; you’ll see how your mother and father, your wife and children slowly, like a candle, melt away in hunger and disease- and you can’t help them. You will see how your obstinacy will not save your Motherland from downfall, souls from corruption, or churches from abuse. You will gnash your teeth in powerlessness and slowly grow feeble. And if you openly resist, then you will be killed in a basement and buried, unrecognized, in some unmarked pit.

Choose and decide…

No one in Russia escaped this trial; this test overtook every man: from the Tsar to the soldier, from the Most Holy Patriarch to the last atheist, from the rich to the destitute. And each was put to an unprecedented test- to stand before the face of God and testify: either by the word, which became equivalent to the deed, or by the deed, which became equivalent to death.

The ordeal was fiery and deep, for what began and took place- and what still takes place- is not based upon party or class, or even the whole people, but is an inquiry of man across the world, a spiritual division, a religious selection, a religious differentiation of humanity. This differentiation is still far from finished, and it has only just begun; Europe, already associated with it, will sooner or later see it roaring through her own depths. The twentieth century has only just begun its business of purification and settling accounts.

In this religious trial, taking the form of a world cataclysm, the victor will be neither the man who seizes power for a time somewhere, nor he who occupies some territory; for power can expose, can compromise and ruin an invader. And the occupation of territory can turn out to be fatal for the occupier. But the one who resists, who has already withstood the storm; that endured the trial and remained loyal; who found within himself love and the force of love for his choice; that found within himself a word equivalent to action, and committed an action equivalent to the resolve to die.

The victor is neither he who temporarily and physically overcame, and perhaps in so doing condemning himself; nor is it the man who became strong on another’s weakness, another’s nothingness and failure, the baseness of the mob and the darkness of the masses. For the true man of strength is strong within himself, by his creation, which opens in him ever newer power from the original charge of life; no, the victor is he who rose against: rose against seduction, not falling to it, and rose against terror, not taking fright.

It is he who in that terrible moment of choosing, that moment of great solitude- when no one will decide for you, and no one will notice when another’s advice is of no help- in that moment of great solitude, when man stands, longing- choosing between a shameful life and an honorable death; when man inquires into his own last darkness and depth- and instinct begs for life, even a shameful one, and the spirit demands loyalty, even in death; so the victor is he who in this moment of solitude before the face of God would not accept the dishonor of life.

And it is possible that death will not come, and that he will keep living, but namely then and therefore his life will not be shameful, and he will be a conqueror…

He triumphs who agrees to lose everything to save something of God’s.

The Lynch Squad

As I was turning on TV earlier in the week (my wife keeps the set permanently on FOX), I heard Glenn Beck complaining about the Black Panthers. Viewers were then shown a picture of a presumed Klansman in a truck carrying a noose. Supposedly this is what the Black Panthers were planning to do, by looking tough in the presence of approaching voters near a polling station in Philadelphia. Beck then began screaming about how we were ceasing to judge people by “the content of their character,” a reference to the government’s failure to take action against the Panthers’ interference with voting procedures. For the next five minutes Beck dwelled on the idea that “Dr. King gave his life to prevent this from happening.” Indeed King, who had spent his life bearing witness to the truth, would be truly upset to see “how we’ve blown his legacy.”

Three observations are in order here. One, there is nothing in what the Panthers were doing that looked as they were planning a lynching. It’s not even clear that the white guy shown earlier was about to engage in the same quaint custom. Two, I couldn’t imagine that the real MLK would have been entirely unhappy with what Beck disapproved of. King favored all kinds of favors and set asides for his race and would undoubtedly have been delighted with a lopsided black voting majority in Philadelphia or anywhere else that brought his soulmates to power.

An isolated phrase from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech admittedly reveals very little about the speaker’s leftist politics, but perhaps Beck could bestir himself to notice what else King said and wrote. Perhaps Beck could even be induced to stop quoting that magic line that he uses in his monologues once he discovers more about King. But then perhaps he shouldn’t. If he keeps on long enough with his drippy routine while inventing new black founding fathers, he may achieve a victory of sorts, by lifting the GOP’s share of the black vote from 2 to 2.1 percent. But I certainly won’t listen to him as he engages in this Herculean task.

Three, I can’t figure out what makes Beck congenial to a rightwing movement, if that is an accurate description of his followers. Most of what he says is incoherent and except for nonstop invectives against the spendthrift government, he has exceedingly strange views for someone on the “far right.” He goes on and on about fascist dangers, lavishes extravagant praise on Martin Luther King, bewails America’s history of racism and gushes over designated minorities. Beck is particularly incensed against those who interfered with Radical Republican Reconstruction, and he has been skewering the late Robert Byrd since his passing for having hindered the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But when I ask self-described conservatives who is their favorite public figure, Beck’s name invariably comes up first.

Obviously those who write for this website, or for VDARE, would never be given enough public exposure to rise to Beck’s prominence. And I would never expect to see a presentation of the Reconstruction era on FOX that didn’t sound like the NAACP venting. But among those who do pass muster with the liberal-neocon ruling class, is a repentant druggie and GOP shill the closest we can get to “rightwing” media balance? If that is the case, then the disgust that John Derbyshire has famously expressed for the “talk-show Right” may be entirely on target. I, for one, find all of this as odious as John does. And I can’t determine why anyone would think that antifascist noisemaking is recognizably rightwing. The game of beating up on Obama while shamelessly fawning on minorities is a Republican, not a rightwing practice.

Warum gibt es keinen Traditionalismus in den USA?

Tradition makes us what we are. The institutions that are dominant today want to make us more manageable as human resources, so they destroy all traditions but those of consumerist careerism. The latter, of course, include pluralism and inclusiveness.

People usually don't like it when things that are close to them are attacked for someone else's benefit. So why doesn't everyone join the traditionalists and overthrow the technocrats?

The situation has a variety of causes. As I've argued, a big one is that the current system of social power is strongly supported by the current system of thought, which says that things don't have natures, traditions don't have authority, and the whole world is basically a resource to be used to achieve the goals of whoever's making the decisions.

Still, that kind of grandiose theory isn't everything, and there are less overarching explanations for what we see around us, One worth mentioning is that public life today is generally secular. That's a problem, because non-confessional traditionalism has no way to determine which version of which tradition is authoritative.

The result is that it loses direction. That's an obvious issue with English conservatism. The break with Rome left it no way to maintain a definite focus so it became mostly a matter of doing the done thing. Leftist demands eventually change what's done, so in the long run the whole approach falls apart. The same problem accounts for the ineffectiveness of the conservatism of polite and educated people in general.

American conservatism is mostly populist, so it avoids the Scylla of gentility, but avoiding Scylla has its own problems. Americans are go-getters, which means that American conservatism favors will over being. To be slightly more concrete, it appeals to independence and individualistic self-assertion, combined with team spirit regarding the role of America in the world. Those tendencies mean American conservatives aren't sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and that's a good thing, but they're not a good basis for an overall political tendency.

Another problem is that the decline of coherent tradition makes people try to come up with substitutes to provide them with a general orientation. A lot of young non-mainstream righties are mostly into libertarianism or something like white nationalism. Save the white race by abolishing the Fed. That's a step forward from hipster liberalism, but it won't restore civilization. Freedom and inheritance matter, but they don't make sense as final standards.

A final problem, that's become very practical when I've actually tried to organize something, is personal conflicts. People who buck the general direction of opinion are sometimes not very clubbable. And those who believe in authority, but don't accept a definite way to determine what's authoritative, eventually become a collection of popes fulminating mutual excommunications.

So I'm pretty pessimistic about any non-confessional traditionalist right. What about the religionists?

I don't know much about paleoprotestants or the Orthodox, so they'll have to speak for themselves. As to Catholic trads, they seem to focus on specifically Catholic things that are often very particular more than grand civilizational considerations. There's more interest in holding on to whatever toehold they have and grousing about Cardinal X or papal pronouncement Y than a global or even localized reconquista.

Such statements are of course unfair to many, and if the nonpolitical is fundamental it should indeed come first. What we need most of all is not a political movement but something more basic. Still, public problems are worth noting, and if there are signs of public hope they're worth mentioning as well. I'm Catholic, and I see signs of hope in Catholicism. Others will have to speak for themselves.

On the day-to-day level there are parishes with a strong trad presence and the parish life reflects that. There are also loose networks of Catholic homeschoolers. Some people choose where to live based on that kind of consideration. There are even networks of trad Catholic intellectuals that get together to talk now and then.

It seems to me those sectors have growth possibilities. After Vatican II the Church decided to make nice with the modern secular world. It hasn't worked, and I think the momentum within the Church is shifting from liberal to conservative and from neo to paleo.

At the most basic level, people need a way to live that makes sense. That's not much on offer these days, and assimilated American Catholicism doesn't fill the gap. So during the coming years, as the secular society continues to unravel, I'd expect somewhat separatist and distinctively traditionalist Catholic communities to continue to grow up around parishes offering the Old Mass, which the current Pope has made possible, and around new schools and colleges that emphasize traditional Catholicism.

That could be a version of the Benedictine option--local communities of religious cranks (to use the current lingo) that are coherent enough, and deal with the human condition well enough, to maintain civilization through a dark age. And if "dark age" turns out to be too apocalyptic, they could still provide a rallying point for forces opposed to current tendencies.

What exists now may not seem like much, but in bad times it's more important to find principles that seem like they work than extrapolate current trends, which won't last anyway. Catholics have a fundamental advantage in their principle of authority, which gives them a usable bottom-line principle of resistance, and their emphasis on concrete local communities like parishes. (Others, of course, may have similar or other advantages, so examples from readers would be welcome.)

Making It

Last week was a bad one for David Weigel, an acquaintance of mine who resigned his position as an online reporter and blogger at the Washington Post (likely at his editors’ urgings) after it was revealed that on a liberal email listserve, “JournoList,” he had written mean things about Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and the conservative movement he was tasked with covering.

Weigel’s attacks on Rush and Drudge were personal: he wrote, clearly in jest, that he wished they’d both die. His take on Glenn Beck must have been red meat on an email list that was created by WaPo’s Ezra Klein and reportedly included such luminaries as Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias, Eric Alterman, and Jeffrey Toobin. Said Weigel,

One extra, obvious point -- Beck’s campaign against [Van] Jones was transparently racial . . . he treated his very white, very angry audience to video after video of Jones giving scorching speeches. At one point Beck just eschewed subtlety and played videos of Jones alongside videos of Jeremiah Wright while he remained on the screen mugging like Harpo Marx.

Perhaps even Klein, Krugman & Co. were embarrassed by Weigel’s Frankfurt-esque comments about Republicans' protecting "white privilege” (if only!).

When a friend told me about this last weekend, I predicted that Weigel would soon get hired by The Nation. I was wrong. Yesterday, he was named a MSNBC contributor.

They say that Washington, DC, is Hollywood for the ugly. This strange fascination with Weigel really hammers that maxim home. When I lived there, I quickly discovered two important things about the small, incestuous band of local journalists and activists residing in the beige high-rise hell of Arlington, VA: First, they are all quite proud of the fact that they’ve located themselves near the center of world power; Second, they are uniquely interested in discussing -- indeed, reporting on -- the minutia of one another’s boring personal lives.

Before the JournoList fiasco hit, Weigel was the subject of another “scandal” that involved, 1) Weigel attending the wedding of two “libertarian,” right-of-center bloggers and journalists, 2) Weigel dancing alone because his girlfriend lives in Alaska (hmm…), 3) Two Washington journalists writing about this, 4) Other Washington journalists caring.

Conservative pundits have latched on to the email scandal as an outing of a liberal partisan. It’s true that most of Weigel’s opinions are universal among DC journalists, but the critics are wrong about Weigel’s orientation, for it was not too long ago that he was flirting with hardcore paleolibertarianism. (He quickly learned that there were much better ways of advancing his career.)

I first met Weigel at a meeting of The Robert Taft Club, a youthful paleo society that Marcus Epstein had founded in 2006 and whose board I joined in 2007. The Taft Club, now sadly dormant, was easily the most hard-hitting right-wing society going. It featured discussions on “race and conservatism” with Jared Taylor, Darwinism and conservatism with John Derbyshire, diplomacy towards Russia with Srdja Trifkovic, and a panel in which participants called for conservatives to dump the GOP. The Club even hosted Ron Paul, who spoke to a packed house in the fall of 2007, just before his candidacy exploded into the mainstream. (I can take credit for organizing that one.)

Marcus was the driving force behind much of the Club’s success ... and its subsequent notoriety. Marcus, who battled alcohol addiction, got into an incident in Georgetown in the summer of 2007 in which he allegedly mentioned the dreaded N-word. A secret service agent was present, and Marcus was charged with a “hate crime.”

Marcus eventually managed to have the charge dismissed; he also got himself sober and gained acceptance to UVA Law school. But in the Spring of 2009, a violent left-wing group discovered the charges, and a hysterical campaigned ensued that eventuated in Marcus leaving his position at The American Cause and UVA withdrawing its admission offer. Marcus could be linked to Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo, and excited liberals activists began to grossly exaggerate his importance. At the scandal's zenith, Marcus was made out as some kind of GOP mastermind who’d let the mask (or rather hood) slip.

In reality, Marcus is a good person who did a stupid thing and paid his dues. He’s not a mover and shaker within the conservative movement, mainly due to the fact that his opinions are actually interesting.

This inflation of Marcus’s power and influence reached ridiculous proportions when smear artist extraordinaire Max Blumenthal tried to link the Taft Club to James O’Keefe, he of the now-famous Acorn and Mary Landrieu stunts. (O’Keefe attended a few of the Taft Club’s events, but is far too mainstream in his views to have ever been a part of its leadership.)

Back to Weigel. When I met him, "Dave" was introduced to me as “one of the boys.” At the time, he worked for the Left-libertarian Reason magazine; however, I was informed by mutual friends that Weigel had mentioned that his views on immigration had been affected by Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation and that he had become a fan of Steve Sailer’s blog. I don’t want to put words into Weigel’s mouth or thoughts into his head, but from all appearances he was conversant, if not necessarily in agreement, with the ideas of the paleo Right, and even HBD. Weigel actually published an article in the October, 2007, issue ofThe American Conservative, in which he described the Taft Club, positively, as hotbed of young, edgy rightists.

No one seems to have brought up this 2007-vintage David Weigel.

At any rate, at some point afterwards, Weigel seemed to have discovered that the Hard Right offered few employment options -- whereas the liberal establishment offered many.  

This epiphany seemed to occur around the time the great brouhaha erupted over opinions -- interesting opinions -- published in Ron Paul’s newsletters during the ‘80s and ‘90s. (If you’re interested in revisiting this scandal, I’d direct you to Justin Raimondo’s two scathingarticles on the “F-Train Mafia,” which I published while I was editing Takimag.) Within days of the appearance of Jamie Kirchick’s “Angry White Man” in The New Republic -- in which Kirchick concluded that the congressman was just a lowdown… well, you guessed it -- Weigel and the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez published a piece at Reason.comthat put Kirchick’s article “in context” by discussing the evil “paleo strategy” of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, who sought to win the American middle class over to libertarianism by appealing to sexism, racism, and gay bigotry.

I was surprised by to see this piece written by a Taft Club attendee … surprised again to see Weigel show up to Marcus Epstein’s 25th birthday party later that spring … and surprised yet again, a year later, to see Weigelreporting on Marcus’s mishaps, this time as a blogger for the liberal Washington Independent. Very few people keep a foot in each of these two camps…

To his credit, Weigel’s coverage of Marcus was relatively fair, and he took the lead in taking Blumenthal to task for his lies. Nonetheless, it was clear that he was more than happy to use his old ties as fodder for a “scoop.” He also managed some outrage when Marcus’s then-boss, Bay Buchanan, defended him in print.

Pace Weigel’s conservative critics, I don’t think his harsh opinions of Rush and the movement much affected his craft. As journalists who reported extensively on the Marcus Epstein Saga go, Weigel was by far the most “fair and balanced.” He is, in fact, one of the few reporters in Washington to take conservatives seriously, and not just treat them as deluded or pathological. What’s telling here is that Weigel was actually filing reports on the misconduct of Marcus Epstein -- and feeding liberal fantasies about a crazed racist in a position of power in the conservative movement.

For a brief period, roughly 2005-2007, many in the DC journalist circuit were speculating about an alliance between the Left-liberal establishment and “good” conservatives, those who were civil libertarians, antiwar, and -- most important of all -- anti-Bush. Barry Goldwater had a revival of sorts: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a glowing afterward to a 2007 reissue of The Conscience of a Conservative. Watergate witness John Dean began appearing regularly on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” as a responsible conservative critic of the GOP establishment. (Dean, too, published on Goldwater.) Ron Paul probably received better press from MSNBC than Reason (the newsletters controversy ending up as more smoke than fire).

The alliance collapsed, however, when liberals began to recognize that Godlwater-ites and “good” conservatives didn’t just oppose George W. Bush but Barack Obama -- and the Civil Rights Act.

The “thoughtful” conservatives and libertarians who were able to sustain contacts with liberals -- Weigel and Bruce Bartlett being excellent examples -- were the ones who transitioned from not just criticizing the Patriot Act but backing Obama, fretting about racism, and even mouthing Keynesian nonsense. Take this item from The Daily Caller’s Weigel exposé,

In the e-mails, Weigel appeared particularly invested in the President’s health care law, expressing undisguised scorn for moderate Democrats who seemed fearful about voting for it.

Weigel is still a contributing editor at Reason, a self-described “magazine of free minds and free markets.” One wonders: if Weigel isn’t against Obamacare, then what kind of “libertarian” is he exactly? Maybe in frequenting the Taft Club, he was undercover all along … gathering material for future appearances on Olbermann.

Hipster Liberalism: Evolved or Designed?

Paul Gottfried's comments on my post on shrinks and hipsters raise several interesting points: is the social outlook found among the modish half-educated young an organic development or an intentional construction? Can we can do something about it and the broader stream of advanced liberalism of which it is part? And if something can be done, what's the key?

On the first point, there's no doubt a bit of a mixture but organic development seems more basic. Today's education is propagandistic but a system of propaganda can grow up organically. There's nothing radically autonomous about liberal theorists and propagandists. They function as part of a system that's evolved historically.

Paul's books have shown that major political traditions--liberalism, leftism, Christian activism--have all sunk into the same politically-correct mush. I've followed up with a book of my own claiming that the degeneration is a result of current understandings of knowledge and reality. If all that's even partly true, how can our situation at bottom be something that's constructed?

In any event, an emphasis on organic development helps avoid conspiracy theories and false optimism. If our present situation were simply a construction it could be dealt with by finding the bad guys who are doing the constructing and getting rid of them. That would be good if true, but our problems are too basic for that.

"Organic development" is another way of saying that a lot of things have grown up that are working together to promote advanced liberalism. That seems to be the case. It's conceivable that the bad guys continually win overwhelmingly because they're demonically powerful and clever, but more likely it's because the wind is blowing their way.

The point of my initial posting was that one notable version of advanced liberalism expresses a psychological type that is produced by the conditions of life today, in particular by the expectations and presuppositions that surround young people as they grow up.

To mention such influences isn't to claim they're the whole story. The (at least short-term) stability of the present situation shows that the hipster psychological type and its conditions and consequences are part of a package in which one part supports the others.

That package includes the people and institutions present-day trends make socially dominant. Those people and institutions naturally favor the trends and understandings that secure their position.

Hence the system of indoctrination that passes for education today. If liberalism makes you law school dean, you'll use your deanship to promote liberalism. And if hipsterdom destroys human ties and makes tradition inconceivable, the managerial state will be perfectly happy to promote hipsterdom.

Indoctrination is certainly part of how things work now, but it wouldn't turn people into self-satisfied true believers unless they were more than ready to accept the message offered. Nor would it be so consistent and pervasive if it didn't express a self-sustaining system of concepts, attitudes, and understandings that makes the message seem self-evidently correct.

On the question of what to do, it's worth noting that the "organic development" guy in the discussion (me) is more inclined to say something can be done than the "intentional construction" one. Even so, I wouldn't carry the point too far. No law, policy initiative, or corps of administrators is going to get us out of the hole we're in. We need a basic shift in outlook and how people carry on their lives.

Something so basic and comprehensive would amount to a religious conversion. If that's so, then "nothing can be done" does sound like a sensible comment. You can't just will a mass religious conversion, especially on the grounds it'll have political benefits.

On the other hand, it seems right to look for what's possible. Basic transformations do come about, and people can do things that further or retard them. So why not try to understand what's going on, what's needed for something better, and what we can to promote it? If political difficulties lead us to notice that some things are more basic than politics, then that's a good thing too and it can tell us something about what we should attend to.

What sort of transformation is needed is a big topic. Here are a few points that seem worth mentioning:

• Ideas have consequences, and the nature of man, the good, the world, moral obligation, and so on affects the public order. For that reason Christianity is prepolitical rather than apolitical as some of the comments suggest.
• In a totalitarian age even nonpolitical religion is political, because it challenges official doctrine by denying the ultimate significance and authority of the regime. That's why commies past and present have wanted to squash Christianity.
• That's also why the purely political is no longer politically serious. We can't challenge the status quo unless we emphasize what precedes politics.
• When you've got big problems that aren't going away, basic principles are more important than current manifestations. The Catholic Church formed the West, and I think it remains essential to the West, but like much else it hasn't been in great shape lately. A basic question is whether that's a matter of fundamental principle or of stupidities and corruptions that won't necessarily last--in other words, whether the essential points are still there that would enable a return to type.
• Another question, assuming (as some suggest) that today's basic understandings and institutional arrangements make radical secularity inevitable, is whether those things can sustain themselves or whether we're living on borrowed time and a basically different understanding of man and the world will be needed for social order to remain functional. If the latter is true (which is my view), then the serious political question is what that understanding will be.

Overcoming Hipster Liberalism

Having read Jim Kalb on hipster liberalism, I find there is much in his essay I agree with and even more that I disagree with. His description of the self-absorbed individual who yaps constantly about equality but has no moral center applies to most academics of my acquaintance. This description also pertains to the college-age students I encounter; and I agree with Jim that these students and their degree-carrying mentors have been insufficiently socialized in any traditional sense. These individuals never manage to grow up, found families and integrate themselves into what Jim and I would regard as normal, or even quasi-normal, human communities. The types of associations to which these free-floating human tissues attach themselves are collections of singles or lifestyle activists who in our media culture are depicted as members of PC-certified communities.

Where I disagree with Jim is in his characterization of such types as merely narcissistic products of a rudderless society. It seems to me that much of what he is criticizing is planned destruction. It is the achievement of the managerial state, public education, and the cultural industry to have produced uprooted, hedonistic individuals, seeking their own ego-enhancement together with greater equality for supposedly oppressed minorities and lifestyle exhibitionists. (The lack of traditional authority is not the same as the absence of control.)

These are not position that individuals arrive at without guidance from above. Most academics and young professionals of my acquaintance couldn’t have an original idea if they tried. They all think exactly as they’ve been programmed for decades. In a traditional society, they would act like everyone else. In our society, they act in a similar way, but harbor the ridiculous illusion they have independent thoughts and are running their own show.

Their strange tendency to weep about the oppression of those groups featured as victims in The Authoritarian Personality while simultaneously showing arrested development in the acceptance of social responsibility is no accident. Our fellow-Americans are programmed to hate bourgeois Christian society and to love themselves, as long as this autoeroticism or self-esteem does not interfere with the obligatory victimology pushed by cultural Marxist teachers and state managers.

Admittedly there are other causes for what Jim describes, misused affluence, diminishing parental management, and the tendency of adolescents to pursue ersatz lives in Internet chat rooms and through Facebook encounters. But these are not sufficient causes for explaining what we’re observing. It is not simply narcissism but a cluster of attitudes that are in play, including a radical reaction against traditional mores together with a high degree of adherence to Political Correctness, especially among American youth between 18 and 32, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

Although I share Jim’s skepticism that white nationalism and other expressions of the irritated Right can solve our dilemmas, I’m not sure that I see many plausible contenders for this honor at the present time. Unlike him, I don’t view the Catholic Church as being able to offer a way out of the temporal storm. In fact judging by the social statements proclaimed by Popes since the pontificate of John XXIII, it would seem that on gender roles, immigration, and the distribution of wealth, Jim’s confession does not seem to represent much of an alternative to garden-variety Protestantism. The only confessions that seem truly medieval in their social teachings are Missouri Synod Lutherans and traditional Calvinists; nonetheless, it would be hard to make a convincing case that all conservatives should convert to these religions in order to save our social fabric. Even if all contributors to this website became old-order Presbyterians or swore allegiance to Luther’s doctrines, it is doubtful that a counterrevolution would be breaking in very soon. And so while our neo-Nietzscheans and others who may strike Jim as a bit far-out are not providing workable social solution, collective solutions at this point may be hard to come by. Paths to individual salvation are of course another matter, but the selection of such a path is not the same as saving our society from its present suicidal course.