Advertisement
Your Email:
Subject:
Message: Entry: Three Strategies for the Right Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/three_strategies_for_the_right#23151 Post contents: Mr. McCarthy, Thanks for a very intelligent analysis. “Insurgency” seems the best prospect among those you offer and its energy and integrity is evident in Ron Paul’s message, which has emphasized “enemies”...”domestic” rather than “foreign.” Although RP qualified this to refer to ideas, the resonance from Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political is clear. This is good morality as well as good politics: let’s not opportunistically adopt the enemies of our enemies (even for $60,000 a year); let’s not have a few sips of neo-con kool aid as social lubricants (it’s the first sip that gets you drunk); and let’s either tell the truth or quote Wittgenstein on silence. In the aftermath of Super Tuesday RP addressed his followers as “The Remnant” in a reference to Isaiah via Albert Jay Nock. Nock as you know was a thoroughgoing quietist who never engaged in political activity. Perhaps there is some prospect for an insurgent quietism. For myself I have a rule that I take from Solzhenitsyn’s “Live not by Lies”: Get up and leave when you hear one in public discourse and cancel your subscription when the editor of a journal endorses a lie. Eric Voegelin considered Saint Augustine’s commentary of the Psalms the key to political change: They begin to leave who begin to love Many are leaving unbeknownst For the feet of those leaving are the affections of the heart And yet they are leaving Babylon Sent at: 2008 09 07