The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right
The following address was given to the H.L. Mencken Club’s Annual Meeting; November 21-23, 2008.
If the H.L. Mencken Club can achieve that for which it has been formed, it should have an eventful and for those who disagree with us, profoundly disruptive future. We are part of an attempt to put together an independent intellectual Right, one that exists without movement establishment funding and one that our opponents would be delighted not to have to deal with. Our group is also full of young thinkers and activists, and if there is to be an independent Right, our group will have to become its leaders.
For years I’ve belabored acquaintances with the observation by stating that the paleoconservatives who had spent their lives butting their heads against the American conservative movement, were becoming less and less useful. Note that I do not excuse myself from this judgment entirely, for what I’m describing is my own generation and those with whom I’ve been associated. Paleoconservatives did an enormous service in the 1980s when they kept the neoconservatives from swallowing up entire the intellectual and political Right. They had performed something roughly analogous to what the Christians in Asturias and Old Castile had done in the eighth and ninth centuries, when they had whittled away at Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula. But unlike the rulers of Castile and Aragon, the paleos never succeeded in getting the needed resources to win back lost ground. Unlike the medieval Spanish monarchs, they also didn’t have the space of several centuries in which to realize their goals.
But equally significantly, the curmudgeonly personalities that had allowed the paleos to stand up to those from the Left who had occupied the Right prevented them from carrying their war further. Although spirited and highly intelligent, they were temperamentally unfit for a counterinsurgency. They quarreled to such a degree that they eventually fell out among themselves. Soon they were trying to throw each other out of the shaky lifeboat to which their endangered cause had been confined. Of course considerable disparities in resources and contacts put these partisans into a weaker position than that of their enemies. But their breakdown into rival groups, led by competing heads, commenced early in the conservative wars, and (alas) it has been going on up until the present hour. The founding of our club came out of such a fissiparous event, of the kind that had occurred with some regularity on the Right during the preceding two decades.
Nor is it surprising that the same paleos who broke from the movement often imposed their own litmus tests. Or that their sectarianisms involved highly sectarian opinions over such questions as whether Elizabeth One’s defeat of the Spanish Armada or the later discomfiting of the Stuarts doomed Anglo-American societies to unspeakable moral and political corruption; or (supposedly even more relevant) whether the ethics of Irving Babbitt as selectively filtered through the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce can help save this country from anti-intellectualism or from the disciples of Leo Strauss. Or even more timely, whether being instructed in Babbitt’s view of the Higher Will would have mitigated the misfortune of having the stock market plunge. Although there are other such paleo ruminations that can be cited, I shall be merciful and spare my audience the heavy burden of having to hear about them.
The late Sam Francis used to conjure up an ideal-type essay that sprang from the archaic conservative mentality. It was a fifty-page study by a now deceased University of Georgia professor of English; and it dwelled on how Western society was going to rack and ruin because no one read Flannery O’Connor any more in light of Eric Voegelin’s Order and History. There was, indeed, such an essay, which was not entirely a product of Sam’s fertile imagination and Menckenesque wit. And having read this literary-cultural exercise, I would have to agree that it typified a certain kind of paleo cultural commentary. It is moralizing aspiring to be scholarship. As a European intellectual historian, it seems to me that such tracts at their best strain to resemble something that might have been composed by a French counterrevolutionary two hundred years ago. But these reproductions operate at a higher level of abstraction without showing anything that strikes this reader as being historically relevant.
While not all paleo polemics fit this description, many of them do--or at the very least, bear more than a vague resemblance to what is being caricatured.
And I’ve been struck by how often these jeremiads have been accompanied by either frantic endorsements of third- or fourth-party politicians or else mournful laments about how the barbarians are climbing in through our windows and how we should therefore prepare ourselves for pious deaths. The fact that I myself have sometimes written in this vein need not detract from my critical remark. My observation is arguably true even if I too am an aging paleo.
To put this into perspective: what is now called paleoconservatism did not grow out of resistance to the Reformation or French Revolution. It is the product of recent historical circumstances, and it assumed its current form about thirty years ago as a diffuse reaction to the neoconservative ascendancy. It was never unified philosophically, and its division between libertarians and traditionalists was only one of the many lines of demarcation separating those who began to call themselves “paleos” about 25 years ago. In 1986 I noted in an article for the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review that most paleo thinkers were Protestants or Jews. They were also preoccupied with sociobiology, a discipline or way of thinking that had influenced them deeply. Today the paleo camp looks markedly different as well as much older, and it shows little interest in the cognitive, hereditary preconditions for intellectual and cultural achievements. And the despair about American society among paleos may be pushing some of them toward the liberal immigrationist camp, providing they’re not already there. Others of this group have become so terrified by those on their left that they pretend not to notice the stark fact of human cognitive disparities. This quest for innocuousness sometimes takes the form of seminars on educational problems centering on endless sermons about values and featuring rotating lists of edifying books. Presumably everyone would perform up to speed if he/she could avail himself/herself of the proper cultural tools. The fact that not everyone enjoys the same genetic precondition for learning is irrelevant for this politically motivated experiment in wishful thinking.
More recently we have been confronted by another problem on the right, namely groups that give little evidence of being what they claim to be. As far as I can tell, there is nothing intrinsically rightwing about denying the claims of family and society on the putatively autonomous individual. And the dream of living outside of the state in a society of self-actualizing individuals, opening themselves up to being physically displaced by the entire Third World, if its population chooses to settle on this continent, is not a rightist alternative to anything. It is a failed leftist utopia. It is one thing to deplore the modern welfare state as a vehicle of grotesque social change or for its violations of the U.S. Constitution. It is another matter to believe that all authority structures can be reduced to insurance companies formed to protect the property and lives of anarcho-capitalists. Such a belief goes counter to everything we know about human Nature, and even such an embattled anti-welfare- statist as H.L. Mencken never hoped to destroy all government. He loathed egalitarian democracy but not the traditional social and political authorities in which communal life had developed and which conforms to our intertwined social needs.
Having made these critical observations, I would also stress the possibility for positive change represented by this organization. We have youth and exuberance on our side, and a membership that is largely in its twenties and thirties. We have attracted beside old-timers like me, as I noted in my introductory paragraph, well-educated young professionals, who consider themselves to be on the right, but not of the current conservative movement. These “post-paleos,” to whom I have alluded in Internet commentaries, are out in force here tonight. And they are radical in the sense in which William F. Buckley once defined a true Right, an oppositional force that tries to uncover the root causes of our political and cultural crises and then to address them.
And when I speak about the postpaleos, it goes without saying that I’m referring to a growing communion beyond this organization. It is one that now includes Takimag, VDARE.com, and other websites that are willing to engage sensitive, timely subjects.
A question that has been asked of me and of others in this room is why we don’t try to join the official conservative movement. This movement controls hundreds of million of dollars, TV networks, strings of newspapers and magazines, multitudinous foundations and institutes, and a bevy of real and bleached blonds on FOX-news. This is not even to mention the movement’s influence on the GOP, the leaders of which dutifully recite neoconservative slogans. To whatever extent the GOP still has something that can be described as a “mind,” it is what neoconservative surgeons have implanted.
Why then don’t the post-paleos ask to be admitted to this edifice of power? Even as the beneficiaries of second- or even third-rung posts, our younger members would be better off financially than they are in their present genteel, hand-to-mouth existences. It is easy to imagine that even the secretaries at AEI, Heritage or The Weekly Standard earn more than many of those in this room. Movement conservatives certainly have the wind in their sails; and perhaps most of us have been tempted at one time or another to join them in order to benefit from their considerable wealth.
Allow me to suggest two reasons that most of us have not gone over to the Dark Side. One, that side will not have us; and it has treated us, in contrast to such worthies as black nationalists, radical feminists, and open-borders advocates, as being unfit for admittance into the political conversation. We are not viewed as honorable dissenters but depicted as subhuman infidels or ignored in the same way as one would a senile uncle who occasionally wanders into one’s living room. This imperial ban has been extended even to brilliant social scientists and statisticians who are viewed as excessively intimate with the wrong people, that is, with those who stand outside the camp that the neocons occupy and now share with neo-liberals and the center-left. I suspect that most of us, including those who belong to my children’s generation, would not be trusted even if we feigned admiration for Martin Luther King, Joe Lieberman and Scoop Jackson and even if we called for having open borders with Mexico and for attacking and occupying Iran. Even then a credibility gap would be cited to justify our further marginalization.
But there is another factor, beside necessity, which keeps us where we are. We are convinced that we are right in our historical and cultural observations while those who have quarantined us are wrong. This is indeed my position, and it is one that the officers of this organization fully share. But to move from theory to practice, there are two counsels that I would strenuously urge. First, we must try to do what is possible rather than what lies beyond our limited material resources. What we can hope to achieve in the near term as opposed what we might able to do in the fullness of time is to gain recognition as an intellectual Right-- and one that is critical of the neoconservative-controlled conservative establishment. Although that establishment does permit some internal dissent, and has even provided support for a handful of worthwhile scholars, it is at least as closed as were the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But unlike that now vanished domination, the neocon media empire is not particularly porous, and with the help of the Left, it is more than able to keep out of public view any serious challenge from the right. It is precisely our goal to become such a challenge. And it is my hope that a younger generation will acquire the resources to do so and will know how to deploy them.
Second, if we wish to advance our cause, we must meditate on the successes of our most implacable enemies. The neocons marched nonstop through the institutions and treasuries of the Right and took them over almost without breaking a sweat. And they did so without themselves having to move to the right. In fact they converted the Right to the Left, by equating their mostly leftist politics with reasonable or non-extremist conservatism. They then pushed into near oblivion anyone on the right who resisted their transformations. And as one of their victims, I certainly begrudge them these successes. But as much as I might rage over neocon mendacity and movement conservative gullibility and cowardice, I can also understand the magnitude of the domination achieved. And as painful as it may be for us, we must try to grasp that in Machiavelli’s language, it was not just Fortuna but also virtu that was at work in making possible our enemies’ spectacular achievements. Their opponents failed not only because they were obviously outgunned but also because we were less well organized, less able to network, and less capable of burying internal grievances.
A friend once noted my ambivalence when I describe my enemies. My repugnance for their shallow ideas and grubby personalities has always been mixed with deep admiration for how they stick together like a band of brothers. It is this side of neoconservative history that we must keep in mind and imitate if we intend to climb out of the oblivion into which they have cast us. Our enemies may be vulgar but they are surely not fools. And their indubitable successes have much to teach anyone who hopes to supplant them—ultimately to do to them what they have done to us.
Comments
“It is moralizing aspiring to be scholarship.”
Mr. Gottfried’s sentiments as expressed above seems to fit his own quote. Also, taking
shots are a colleague (Prof Ryn), who defended this author and put his reputation on
the line doing it for him all those many years is utterly distasteful.
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“what is now called paleoconservatism did not grow out of resistance to the Reformation or French Revolution. It is the product of recent historical circumstances, and it assumed its current form about thirty years ago as a diffuse reaction to the neoconservative ascendancy”
it’s like J street. it’s an alternate “lobby” that ends up merely being critical of the actual lobby, that is mainstream conservatism.
“It is one that now includes Takimag, VDARE.com, and other websites that are willing to engage sensitive, timely subjects. “
some of the subjects aren’t really timely or sensitive, they are esoteric and an attempt to bring back the 50’s or the 80’s.
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My critic fails to take into account the campaign of slander that someone who once
came to my defense has waged with some success against me for many months. As for
laying one’s career on the line for someone else, neither he nor I has done this. But
I have certainly rallied to his defense at least as often as he has
done this for me. Moreover, it seems silly to expect me to defend a position that is not
mine and which I think has become irrelevant for the Right, simply because it is
identified with someone whom I’m expected to like.
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The issue on which the “post-paleo” is likely to fail is the same issue on which the paleo failed: racism. If anything, the paleos become modernists, adopting a pure Darwinism to account for some rather difficult historical circumstances. Seeing the commentary in Takimag, the same thing is happening all over again; it is like the arguments of my youth are being replayed; it is a bad rerun that is likely to run in the same channels.
There are good cultural reasons for recognizing the social reality of race, not the least of which is that the blacks, asians, and hispanics are more naturally conservative than most conservatives. There is a “conservative” way to handle these issues, but social Darwinism isn’t it.
From what I see, the movement will go the same way the movement has gone, repeating the same mistakes that caused its displacement by the neo-trotskyites in the first place. It is too easy for our opponents to reduce conservatism to racism, and we do all we can to ease their task in this regard. If we cannot be any more creative in the future than we were in the past, we should expect the same results.
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If MJK wishes to wail about paleo backstabbing, perhaps he should catch up on his gossip and learn who has been pointing the knife at whom.
Accusing Paul of crummy behavior towards Ryn is either a laugh line, or the bad-faith remark of someone who is itching for a parking lot brawl.
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“There are good cultural reasons for recognizing the social reality of race, not the least of which is that the blacks, asians, and hispanics are more naturally conservative than most conservatives.”
Well, if you mean that they stick together and put their race above any religion or ideology, you are correct.
But then, why shouldn’t whites do the same thing?
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If “conservatism” had an ethnic/racial litmus test… who would want to hijack it?
John Medaille, in this case, is correct… I expect to see him savaged shortly.
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The deep and enduring divide between insurgent paleoconservatives and the GOP establishment is attributable to the sensitive subjects of Israel, Jewish influence and race. I suspect that many Republicans privately support the views of Pat Buchanan and other paleoconservatives. However, politicians and pundits lack the courage of their convictions. They believe in their hearts that the neoconservatives have done terrible damage to the country and the party, but they are too cowardly to admit this fact. To oppose the neocons, our policy towards Israel or multicultural-race dogma is a career-destroyer.
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@ Evan - any time, Evan, any time you want!
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The problem with “White Nationalism” is that there are more than a lot of “White people” that don’t like other groups of “White people”. For example, trying to unite White Southerners and White New Englanders is an impossible task, other than through the use of force (see 1861-1865). As an even more extreme example, uniting White Prussians and White Poles takes even more violence (see 1939-1945). Captain Nachos and his ilk are legitimately insane.
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Bernie, despite the efforts of some to make the issue “La Raza,” hispanics are not particularly “racialist”; they are familial. The family is the primary social grouping and extends vertically several generations and horizontally to several degrees of kinship. Family for them is the issue, not race, and so it should be for us.
But if you want to fight the civil rights issue all over again, that’s fine, but I can’t imagine that the results will be any different.
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“...the blacks, asians, and hispanics are more naturally conservative
than most conservatives...”
John, I’m not sure how you can prove such an assertion or how you come to believe such an assertion has any validity...such blanket assertions should at least be supposed and not blithely passed over as if true by the simple fact of its assertion.
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correction: “...the blacks, asians, and hispanics are more naturally conservative
than most conservatives...”
John, I’m not sure how you can prove such an assertion or how you come to believe such an assertion has any validity...such blanket assertions should at least be SUPPORTED and not blithely passed over as if true by the simple fact of its assertion.
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good examples of why paleo conservatism is such garbage on this thread. a bunch of goofs who want us to rally around “whiteness” because it’s the only thing they have ever succesfully done, be white. you might as well be neocon sock puppets here to make sure neoconservatism is never knocked off it’s pedestal by a rival faction.
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I wish that I could have attended these talks in person, but I am geographically challenged (as an inhabitant of the West Coast). Like Paul, I too am impressed with the “band of brothers” unity which neocons have; there is very little equivalence to this among the paleos, at present. While I am hopeful that the young post-paleos can benefit from their lack of attachment to political parties, as the early National Review writers did, I am concerned that they still have a long way to go in separating themselves from the culture at large. At the risk of glorifying the 1950s and early 1960s, the prominent rightists of that time did not have to worry nearly as much about the toxic effects of popular culture as the new Right would today. Given the mass suggestibility of young voters in the Obama era, it is dubious that a new version of Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” would excite this generation. We are in a post-literate culture, which is perhaps identical to a post-conservative one. Post-paleos may have to rely on decidedly anti-conservative media in order to get their message across. If they choose the option of videos over great books and essays, however, then what are they conserving?
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@ Ivan
“uniting White Prussians and White Poles takes even more violence.”
Unless you are speaking of my parents. My mother didn’t remenber any violence at all.
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Mr Rutowicz, notice I didn’t refer to individuals. I referred to the groups, the “races”, if you will.
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Leon Haller: What to do Next? Obviously, the first thing is to rehabilitate the reputation of HL Mencken. After that, it’s all easy!
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Grant Havers: Yes, something of a new Conservative Mind could help, especially if it were called “The Conservative Soul.” We have too many soulless technocrats on the right as it is. Derbyshire, I’m talking at you!
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I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of post-paleos nor yet willing to abandon paleoconservatism.
My impression of what I take to be post paleos is that there are too many who are basically libertarian ideologues and too many who are skeptical or secularist. A truly illiberal right is dying out. And many of the truly illiberal rightists that are left are racial reductionists who are no less ideological than the anti-racism obsessives.
Personally, I proudly still carry the label of paleoconservative.
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Ivan,
Sorry, I was trying to be funny. I have to remember to use the little smiley faces. I guess I shouldn’t give up the day job.
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“burying internal grievances” - this is THE key to political success; always has been.
Also, dropping this god-awful moniker “paleo-conservative” would help. Paleo is another word for non-existent; retrograde; at best nostalgic. It is essentially a negative, and as everyone knows, negatives do not move one to action. Worse, it allows the neo-cons to define everyone else as not them, thus making themselves the norm. I do not know who coined the term but it was a terrible idea.
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Sebastian, I believe the term was coined by the writer of this article and Thomas Fleming. I was initially proposed in jest but stuck. Perhaps Dr. Gottfried could elaborate.
I like it. Too many “conservatives” are not interested in conserving anything. The prefix paleo denotes the past, what we are supposed to be defending.
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What a sad, bloody mess the so-called alternative right has become.
We have White Nationalists, whose numbers could fit in a small rural community hall, calling for a return to Father Knows Best.
We have traditional Catholics calling for some sort of Catholic caliphate spanning the western world.
And we have economic nationalists yelping about stealing other people’s money to prop up failed manufacturers.
And they wonder why they’ve been shut out of political debate.
Meanwhile thieves in Washington and New York steal as much as $8 trillion from their children with nary a peep.
Meanwhile the actual ideas of Liberty and free markets are eroded daily.
Meanwhile millions of innocents are slaughtered annually in the killing factories in cities across the country.
Meanwhile, the top 70 corporations (all planned economies) in the world now all have bigger economies than Cuba, the last remaining planned economy in the western world.
Meanwhile China and India out compete us in every economic area, and are quickly surpassing us in technological creation (witness their outerspace programs)
Here’s a suggestion for paleos or post-paleos if they want to be relevant:
Put the Constitution at the centre of any policy (it’s still popular, despite the abuse it’s been under)
Put the right to life at the centre, and mean it.
End the theft from future generations through government debt and the inflation tax.
Bring envrironmentalism home to where it belongs with Conservatives.
Do all that and maybe some one will listen.
Shouting WHITE MAN at every one is going to send you to the dustbin of history.
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I am certainly no one of significance that I should answer your proposal but here’s my two cents on your following point:
“Conservatism is the defense and preservation of a particular people, and its historic institutions and culture (within boundaries, I would add, of some ultimate metaphysics, which in our case is supplied by Christian natural law).”
I don’t have a problem with what you write here, as far as I understand it. I agree that preserving our race is vital, not as a theological matter, but as a practical matter.
I have no problem acknowledging this if racialists will acknowledge the primacy of the Christian religion for (at least most) Paleo-conservatives. If racialists demand the abandonment of Christianity, then we cannot find common ground.
I apologize in advance if I’ve misunderstood the issues.
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Paleo, Neo, Old Right, etc.: It is enough to make one’s head hurt. I would submit that there has been a political bifurcation nomenclature since the French Revolution, and it revolves around Left and Right. While the Jacobins initiated it, Burke was the definer of that bifurcation.
Neoconservatism was born when the international left turned against Israel and favored the Palestinians. The Neocons needed a movement to “sanctify” their change of allegiances and abrupt about face, and hence their efforts in coopting Burkean Conservatism was blatant. Read the Bartley editorials and Op Ed pieces by Irving Kristol in WSJ in early seventies.
Burke’s view of human existance is exemplified in the Bell Shaped Curve. Biological variation is graphically displayed with similar vastness represented in the fat body of the bell, while the flanges represent the few eccentric extreme. Hence, nature’s burden of proof lies not with tradition, but with change. If nature followed the opposite laws and the curve was inverted, life would be extinguished in a generation. And that is why we can say the God is a Burkean Conservative.
It should be obvious that the Neocons abandoned Burkean insights once they attained power. Power has allowed them to throw away their traditionalist pretentions, and reveal the radicalism at the heart of their being. A Neoconservative is nothing more than a Liberal in Conservative drag.
We should always keep Burke in mind.
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Does anybody find it odd that the White Nationalists are touting a religion founded by Palestinian Jews?
Leon says Conservatism begins with race, but no racial conservative argues that it ends with it.
Oh, I think that’s precisely where it ends. Where, in fact, it did end.
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BTW, there is a certain irony about all of this coming out of the H. L. Mencken Club. Do you know what Mencken’s last article for The American Mercury was? It openly attacked racial segregation. If there was a “race” that Mencken had contempt for, it was the “Anglo-Saxon.”
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Mr. Haller, I’ll give your definition a shot. I believe that paleoconservatism originally primarily meant those elements of conservatism that supported a triad of issues - foreign non-intervention, trade protectionism, and immigration restriction. With opposition to neoconservatism as an overriding theme due to historical circumstances. As well as strong support of traditional values even if not overt identification with the Religious Right. This is what it meant to the average “Beer Hall” conservative. It was essentially synonymous with Buchananism.
Its intellectual proponents always recognized it as something deeper than a set of issues, however. It is the conscious rejection of Enlightenment liberalism, at least in part. How that works out has been the cause of some of the divisions Dr. Gottfried alluded to.
Some of what you say is not objectionable to many paleos. The ideological racial reductionism is what a lot of paleos object to as well as the nationalism (vs. human scale decentralism). Modern nationalism is an ideology as well. Perhaps you are less a racial reductionist than some of the other posters here, but you seriously harm your credibility when you advocate keeping baby killing legal because it differentially kills more black babies. That is not conservatism. That is barbarism.
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“It openly attacked racial segregation.”
Mr. Medialle, if Mencken attacked segregation it is likely because he was an elitist, anti-Southern bigot, not out of principle.
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“I’ve written this before and I’ll write it again: Most conservatives define themselves by what they are not; and in the absence of enemies to denounce, denounce each other.”
“There is an immature tone to most of the comments on this site”
Well, you proved your point Maruska, indeed
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Mr. Phillips: Mencken is an odd role model for a conservative group and was indeed prejudiced against the modern South (though not the antebellum South), but I think a fair reading of the article (which originally appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun, not the American Mercury) does not support your theory. There is a passing jab at “Georgia Crackers,” but there is a passing jab at “New Dealism” as well. The general tone is conservative and humane.
Here it is:
http://www.mencken.org/text/txt001/mencken.h-l.1948.tennis-order.htm
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I don’t know why my last post to Mr. Haller was deleted. I was respectful and mild in tone. All I can assume is that it was inappropriate in some other way or those who regulate this site want me to get lost.
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My fear is a reality, that I am forced into “nationhood” with all of the Whites (and Blacks and Browns, etc.) around me, that don’t share my blood and values.
No, I have no “blood connection”, nor do I share values with a “White” accountant in Duluth, MN.
Mr Haller, why insist that we are “One Nation”? We’re not. My “nation” is my people - and that isn’t you, they aren’t Richard Spencer, they aren’t Captain Nachos, or John McCain (although most of my family voted for him), and they aren’t anonymous “White folks” of places in America I have no intention of ever visiting [again].
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Has there been a falling out between Professors Gottfried and Ryn?
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Interesting choice of article photography. Constantine’s bust from the Capitoline Museum is especially appropriate.
In hoc signo vinces.
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Instead of arguing over prefixes and definitions, I think we should acknowledge is
the fact that the term “paleo” has grown broader over the past 20 years to cut through
different ideologies, parties and cliques. Originally the term “plaeoconservative” was
used to differentiate between the paleo i.e. “old” conservatives and neo i.e.
new conservatives back in the mid-1980s. Since that time the definition paleo has grown
to encompass figures who are not conservatives and yet don’t fit into current definitions
of ideology nor will they adopt party lines just to be influential on the Georgetown
cocktail circuit.
What 2008 has shown is a clear divide between “cosmopolitians” those living in large
urban areas and corridors of power and “provincials” those who choose to live outside
such areas and use the internet to build netowrks of the likeminded across the country.
Actually it’s more complex than that because it has to do more with attitude and outlook
as much as it has to do with location (there are paleos in big cities, there are cosmos
who live in small towns too.)We saw this divide among libertarians concerning the Ron
Paul campaign (Remember the Orange Line Mafia?) and we see it among conservatives towards
Sarah Palin. Heck, the orginal “netroots” began as provinical opponents to the Democrats
(mostly Clintonites) in Washington.
Some of these provincials have gravitated towards paleoism, which has become more than
just a philosphy, but a style, outlook, a way of economy and living, a style of critique and a way of carrying oneself in relation to the broader society. I don’t want to say its non-conformism or belief
in utopias but I think what distinguishes paleos is a sense of place, tradition and history
in our thinking that is often lost in modern society which really has no concept of time
and is constantly foward looking (the myth of progress). Think “Crunchy Cons” as one example, think Murray Rothbard (paleolibertarian), or Prairie Home Companion (paleoliberal) as another.
If the purpose of the Mencken Club is to recognize this broadening into “paleoism”
rather than narrow “paleoconservative” or “paleolibertarian” circles, and the avoidance
of unecessarily divisive historical-religious debate and discussion, then it will serve
a valuable service (although to be fair the John Randolph Club has done this already by
having as members and or speakers like Justin Raimondo, Bill Kauffman and Kirkpatrick
Sale). If it’s just another tree house club because our disagreements over the 30 Years
War turned in quarrels that senselessly ruined long-time friendships and productive
working relationships, then what’s the point?
If there’s one thing young paleos like myself should learn from our elders is that no
debate, no matter the topic, should be so serious as turn ourselves into our own
totalitarians, unable to be in the company of anyone who doesn’t agree with us.
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The Neocons had no scruples to ally with big oil and the weapons industry to finance their bid to power. They fought “war for democracy” and some industries profited from this. Fox News and CNN get the best ratings during war times.
The Neocons have this great access to money because they allied with the organized interests who benefit from their politics.
Where is the Alternative Right going to get media coverage and money to stand up to them?
American Democracy is ruled by money, unless some European systems where you have better political campaign finance systems and different proportional election mechanisms that allow outsiders to establish themselves in a political system.
I can see only one strategy that would work in the USA. The media basis that has been created by internet platforms like these could be focused into a small (internet) TV channel and/or radio station. Without political coverage there can be no success.
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What is interesting in all this sudden “white nationalism” is that the same rhetoric used to be used to exclude large segments of the white race(s). “No Irish Need Apply” appeared on many factory gates; the Irish were depicted in political cartoons with Negroid features and where popularly called “white n*gg*rs”; central and Eastern Europeans were barely considered human and the Italians--don’t even go there!
All of sudden, the WN’s are cozy with all the people they used to hate, all the people their rhetoric was originally designed to suppress.
The WNs may have short memories, but there will be enough people to remind the world of their real history. And their history will not play well with most whites in this country (since most were members of these formally despised groups), much less with the hispanics, Asians, and Blacks.
Believe this: Any Democrat reading this site is rooting for the white nationalists to win the ideological wars in the Republican Party. So long as WN is the issue, Democrats are the clear winners.
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“Cavalli-Sforza’s team compiled extraordinary tables depicting the “genetic distances” separating 2,000 different racial groups from each other. For example, assume the genetic distance between the English and the Danes is equal to 1.0. Then, Cavalli-Sforza has found, the separation between the English and the Italians would be about 2.5 times as large as the English-Danish difference. On this scale, the Iranians would be 9 times more distant genetically from the English than the Danish, and the Japanese 59 times greater. Finally, the gap between the English and the Bantus (the main group of sub-Saharan blacks) is 109 times as large as the distance between the English and the Danish.”
“What is a race? It is essentially a lineage. A racial group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some extent. Thus, race is a fundamental aspect of the human condition because we are all born into families. Burying our heads in the sand and refusing to think clearly about this bedrock fact of life only makes the inevitable problems caused by race harder to overcome.”
http://www.isteve.com/RealityofRace.htm
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Paleo, within my family, I have two cousins, both sisters. One has black hair and dark eyes, and is obviously a genetic Cherokee Indian. The other is a blonde, with blue eyes, obviously genetically “White”.
So, if genetics is family, is the sister that is genetically Cherokee Indian NOT in my family, despite being the daughter of my father’s sister? At our family Christmas Party, should I forcefully remove her from the room? I’m sure to be very popular for that, seeing as my family are proud White folks, and they wouldn’t want any of the inferior races tainting the family…
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WN has yet to even be remotely close to an issue within the GOP (in fact is openly and vigorously condemned as the greatest of all evils imaginable) and yet the Democrats are still the clear winners. Maybe it is because they received 2/3rds of the Hispanic vote and over 95% of the black vote.
If so-called “paleo-conservatism’s” fate lies in minority outreach, then the fat lady has already sung.
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@ Ivan,
1. the cousin is genetically Cherokee Indian, but when living into an area densely populated by europeans will be absorbed into the genetic pool of whites.
2.Indeed, as racial integration increases, the number of social situations in which one is confronted by the presence of members of other races will also increase, compelling us to be friendly and social if they are also behaving in a friendly manner - in order not to create an an atmosphere of social friction!
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@ Ivan,
Yes, there are more than a lot of “White people” that don’t like other groups of “White people”.
Could this be an explanation?
According sir Arthur Keith, “the term “race” came to be applied in two senses: first, to a local or race making group being as it were the loom on which the genetic threads were woven and secondly, to the product of evolution the differentiated people, the woven web. In one sense the term refers to an evolutionary process; in the other to an evolutionary product.”
“The term [race] was originally given to a lineage group. Later it was restricted to distinctive varieties of mankind. “Nation” is the term used to designate the lineal descendants of a local group.”
Race and nation, he says, are near akin: a nation is in reality an incipient race (race in the making).
“Most of my colleagues regard a nation as a political unit, with which anthropologists have no concern; whereas I regard a nation as an “evolutionary unit,” with which anthropologists ought to be greatly concerned. The only live races in Europe today are its nations.”
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The source of the above comment is:
A NEW THEORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION by SIR ARTHUR KEITH; ESSAY XXXII: THE MAKING OF HUMAN RACES
This book is in the public domain and can be downloaded from:
http://www.whitenationalism.com/etext/index.htm
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“With the publication of On Genetic Interests, Frank Salter has made a vitally important contribution to our understanding of the significance of race and ethnicity in human affairs. Dr. Salter, an Australian who has been a researcher since 1991 at the Max Planck Society in Andechs, Germany, offers a perspective that is no less significant than that of Philippe Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, or anyone else whose work throws light on scientific questions long obscured by taboo.”
“Dr. Salter demonstrates through principles of population genetics that racial or ethnic groups are equivalent to large, extended families, and that ethnic loyalties are as legitimate as family loyalties. He then outlines the social and political implications of his position, with particular emphasis on the role of the state and the disastrous consequences of mass immigration.”
The need to identify with others like oneself, and to be with one’s own kind, is a major component of human nature and so ethnic identity is a powerful force in human affairs. Group members have “ties of blood” that make them “special” and different from outsiders. This is why patriotism is almost always seen as a virtue and an extension of family loyalty. It also explains why ethnic remarks so easily become “fighting words.” Culture builds on genetic similarity and is bound together by it. Patriotism is preached in kinship terms. Nations are the “motherland” or the “fatherland.”
http://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Interests-Ethnicity-Humanity-Migration/dp/1412805961/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228363969&sr=1-1
MAP: RACES OF THE WORLD
http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/9633/racesoftheworld2ft9.jpg
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“Patriotism is preached in kinship terms.”
How then to explain the statement below by the catholic traditionalist Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his book “Leftism Revisited”?
PATRIOTISM, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a “diversitarian”; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right.
And here is what he said in “The Principles of the Portland Declaration”:
5."We share with the beasts a craving for sameness and a gregariousness which makes us desire the company of people of our own age, sex, race, creed, political conviction, class and taste. But it is exclusively human to have a thirst for diversity, i.e., to be happy in the company of those who are different from us in every respect, as well as to travel, to enjoy other foods, hear other tunes, see other plants, beasts, and landscapes. The delight in the variations of creation distinguishes man from beast as much as religion or reason.
6.It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian because, defying the divine diversity of the universe, these ideologies want to convert us by force to sameness—sameness being the brother of equality. The leftist vision enjoins uniformity: the nation with one leader, one party, one race, one language, one class, one type of school, one law, one custom, one level of income, and so forth. Since nature provides diversity, this deadening sameness can be achieved only by brute force, by leveling, enforced assimilation, exile, genocide. All forms of totalitarianism, all leftist ideologies, reaching their culmination in the French, Russian, and German Revolutions, have gone that way—with the aid of guillotine, gallows, gas chambers, and Gulag.”
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Additional note on sir Arthur Keith.
Thomas Fleming also opposes white racism because he considers the concept “white race” as an abstraction only. In the same vein as sir Arthur Keith, he says that only concrete entities are important: specific regional groups such as Southerners - but not whites as a collective body.
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