I like being right. And I also learned quite a bit from Dylan’s blog on the Front Porch Republic. (Daniel McCarthy has also done some good work critiquing these guys.)
I’ll be sure to needle Patrick Deenen about his “big government localism” when he comes to speak at the HL Mencken Club next weekend. As for “The ‘One Salvation’ of Ludwig von Mises”... The Front Porch Republic fact-checking department might want to look into John Médaille’s assertions about Tom Woods’s corporate funding and his friendship with Michael Novak and the gang at AIE. The story of Murray Rothbard’s conversion to Catholicism is also something I did not encounter in any of the major biographies…
I became extremely skeptical of the whole “crunchy” second wave of social conservatism after I read that Alan Carlson had made a “conservative” case for the New Deal, a meme picked up by Ross Douthat, among others, and after I heard Carlson speak at Yale last year at an ISI sponsored event. He used terms like the (state-directed) “re-distribution of property” and proposed government programs to increase home ownership among the lower and middle classes that sounded like wispy, Russell Kirk-y versions of the ones that created the housing debacle. I’m sure Deneen, Carlson, and I share a similar abiding respect for the Old America of strong, closely knit, and independent families, upright social and economic dealings, and a certain crusty skepticism I associate with my maternal grandfather. Unlike these two, however, I think getting the bureaucrats involved is the worst possible way of reviving this lost world.
Also, Deneen and Carlson seem to be fellow travelers with those “pragmatic” and “moderate” conservatives and neocons who feel that it’s probably impossible and undesirable to shrink government, and thus we should work on reforms that promote a “conservative” (or in this case, “localist”) welfare state. I have a very different take. With 12 trillion in debt and 50-100 trillion of unfunded entitlement liabilities, I think it’s near certain that in the coming decade the American welfare state will collapse in a big hyperinflationary Götterdämmerrung. It would seem more “pragmatic” to start developing alternative, independent institutions outside the state that can endure, and not just work to be yet another Beltway rent-seeker.
In other news, George Hawley of “post right” picked up on my post about this horrible Edmund Burke Institute in Washington, DC, and made an observation worth repeating:
When Big Government liberals tell conservatives they need to be more like Burke, they mean conservatives should be gracious losers – this is hardly an accurate description of Burke himself, but I digress. In their mind, a “Burkean” Right is one that provides only minor speed bumps on America’s road to a centrally-planned utopia; to them, the ideal conservative is an erudite gentleman who pontificates for a few minutes, and then gets out of the way. They prefer conservatives like George Will, who bristle at any perceived “populism” on the Right, and they despise figures who would channel conservative anger into an effective political movement that actually threatens the present state of affairs.
This is very much the impression I got reading Sam Tannenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism
There’s something about reading Sam Tannenhaus that makes me want to defend Rush Limbaugh…
Of course, from another angle Sam Tannenhaus is himself a Burkean conservative—and we should treat him as such—in that he is an active defender of America’s ruling class and left-liberal establishment, of its education system, civic values, and public religion
Email Subscription
Fill out the form below to be notified when takimag.com is updated.
In Praise of Richard Spencer
I like being right. And I also learned quite a bit from Dylan’s blog on the Front Porch Republic. (Daniel McCarthy has also done some good work critiquing these guys.) I’ll … [Read More]
Posted by Richard Spencer on October 24, 2009
The Usual Suspects