Though I was unable to attend the H.L. Mencken Club event this year, I am in agreement with Jack Hunter’s latest piece where he argues that the “Alternative Right” serves itself best by focusing its efforts on reducing the size and scope of the managerial state, rather than focusing its energies on a new culture war. From my vantage point, most of the grassroots energy is focused on the issues commonly defined as “libertarian,” and thus Jack’s point about “hunting where the ducks are” is a sound one. Of course, this does not mean that cultural issues should be ignored, but as Jack notes, a successful attack on the welfare/warfare state would yield many positive results for the cultural warriors. Sadly, I am not sure the same could be said in reverse.

Take the most popular cultural issue of the day for the Right—immigration. The reason I use the general term “immigration” and not the more specific “illegal immigration,” is because like most of the major cultural battlefields of the day, the depth of opposition is nuanced and varies from person to person. I’m of the opinion that all immigration is a problem and believe simply focusing on the legal status of those entering the country is needlessly myopic.

Given this point of view, most people would classify me as a “restrictionist.” The only problem is—I don’t agree with the vast majority of proposals peddled by most self-described restrictionists. I oppose a border fence. I oppose a militarized border. I oppose a new “Operation Wetback.” I simply don’t believe any of these policies would put a serious dent in the immigration problem, nor do I believe the consequences of implementing them would be worth the minor successes they might bring.

If I say I want to “End the Fed” or “bring our troops home,” most Americans understand what I mean. If I say I want to end immigration, it isn’t exactly clear what kind of immigration I’m referring to, let alone what specific proposals I’m advocating.  This general lack of clarity about many of the cultural issues of the day is yet another reason why cultural vanguardism is doomed to fail as a political strategy.

Since the sixties, conservatives and critics of the ever-emerging multicultural society have noted that politics follows culture. Some have taken this as evidence that cultural issues must be pushed to the forefront of political campaigns. I take this as evidence that the culture must be changed and politics are largely a fraud. This doesn’t mean we should abandon politics wholesale, but rather that we should do everything we can to reduce the power of the State, so that culture can become a reflection of real communities, instead of a series of multicultural edicts dictated from above by the PC police.

In the meantime encouraging irreverent attitudes toward the managerial regime is as good a strategy as any to ensure that the future is less dominated by egalitarian myths and mantras.

I got a kick out of yesterday’s front page story in the New York Times on the “unexpected” profits of Ford.  In particular this paragraph made me chuckle:

Ford, which earned $997 million in the third quarter and made money in North America for the first time since 2005, has turned itself around largely by cutting costs and introducing cars that consumers want to buy, rather than resorting to deep discounts to lure shoppers into showrooms.

What?!?  Cutting costs?  Making a product consumers want?  This is how business’ are supposed to succeed?  What about asking for handouts from taxpayers?

When Ford chose not to ask for government loans, the company was freed to continue spending on new products like its Fusion and Taurus sedans.

G.M. and Chrysler, by comparison, had to rein in much of their product development programs to conserve cash while they awaited federal aid.

A report by the Government Accountability Office released on Monday said that the federal government was unlikely to recover much of the $81 billion that was invested in G.M. and Chrysler, their suppliers and related financing companies.

Amazing.  It turns out socializing failed companies doesn’t always pay off.  Who’d have thunk it? 

Elizabeth Wright’s excellent piece on the Southern Poverty Law Center gives me a great opportunity to plug one of my all time favorite articles. Published nine years ago by Harpers Magazine, “The Church of Morris Dees” was written by the excellent investigative reporter Ken Silverstein.  Despite his leftist politics, Silverstein’s article has become a strong reference point for right wing critics of the SPLC and has remained online almost entirely due to the efforts of immigration restrictionists and other SPLC-defined “hate groups.”  Those unfamiliar with it should give it a look. 

Regular readers of this magazine may recall a minor internal spat that occurred a few months ago, concerning the then new Front Porch Republic website. I wholly endorsed the project, which was followed immediately by a long piece from Richard that focused on the vague language used to promote the site and the implicit statism of some of its better known contributors. The dispute - if one could call it that - was an amicable one that ended in a podcast debate whereby Richard and I agreed to disagree on certain facets of the FPR program.

Though it pains me to condemn any site that would regularly publish the work of Bill Kauffman, Kirkpatrick Sale and Daniel Larison, two pieces that appeared on the Porch this week have left me wondering whether or not I can seriously disagree with the initial criticisms Richard spoke of months ago.

The first essay that gave me pause was by Patrick Deneen. Entitled “Subsidizing Localism?” the brief posting quotes favorably the musings of another blogger who suggested that “the localism versus globalism debate is about what we should subsidize rather than whether we should subsidize, period.” To the blogger’s comments, Deneen added:

In my view, the problem is not simply that we currently have a powerful centralized government, but that its orientation is toward supporting BIGNESS in the form of private concentration of power (which in turn reinforces its public power). While in theory it would be better to have neither public nor private concentrations of power, at this point in our history it is the public power that is at least theoretically more capable of responding to public demands, even a sustained public demand to restrict these sorts of concentrations of power.

As a person who has summed up his entire political philosophy with the mantra “Bigger is Badder” I can certainly sympathize with Deneen’s reflexive opposition to the corporate state. In fact, one of the more contentious moments in my debate with Richard occurred when I recycled the Jerry Mander inspired, neo-Luddite argument that technology was dangerously undemocratic and inherently trended toward the centralization of power. After audibly guffawing at my populist naiveté, Richard responded by thanking the heavens that technology wasn’t subject to the foolish whims of King Numbers, a counterpoint that was not without merit.

Nonetheless I retain a suspicion of “progress” that extends beyond the liberal managerial state and remain an enemy of obese institutions regardless of whether or not they are public or private. Bigness is my primary rival. Having said that, there is something uniquely dangerous about trusting the public institutions to curtail the Bigness of the private institutions, by way of making the public institutions bigger and stronger than they already are. Setting aside the obvious contradictions, the very notion of expanding the powers of the allegedly more accountable public sphere is the bedrock principle upon which globalism rests.

Whatever one may say about the denizens of the Front Porch, I have always seen them as wholesale opponents of one-worldism and all of if its trappings. Falling back on Chomskyesque arguments about using the power of bureaucrats to rollback the Wal-Martizaton of small town America is a recipe for disaster. If the Front Porchers think that local custom and tradition is getting box-stored-to-death now—imagine how bad it would be under a multicultural regime adorned with the rubber stamp of broad based representative democracy. As Gabriel Kolko noted a half a century ago, the triumph of corporatism was the end result of the Progressive Era. For the most part, Mom and Pop didn’t survive the regulatory state. The therapeutic state would bury them once and for all.

Even worse than Deneen’s misguided endorsement of government subsidized localism (that’s real autonomy there!) is the most recent offering from the fundamentalist Distributist John Medaille. A long time critic of libertarian economics, Medaille has taken the next step in “The One Salvation of Ludwig von Mises” where he seems to argue that Michael Novak, Murray Rothbard (?!?) and Thomas Woods are all insufficiently Catholic because of their advocacy of the irreligious von Mises. Though not stated clearly (nothing in the essay is) the implication seems to be that Novak - a well known neocon symp - is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. The American Enterprise Institute is also invoked as a kindred spirit of Woods and Rothbard and in the comments section below the original piece Medaille states that the Miseans are all “fellow travelers on the road to collectivization.”

I am not a libertarian per se, but the argument that minarchists or anarcho-capitalists are useful idiots for the State strikes me as a remarkably dishonest one. In point of fact, Medaille’s essay - like Deneen’s - seems to be a strange backdoor advocacy of statism, whereby the actual critics of state power are condemned as utopian fools unwittingly doing the devils work, while the sufficiently Catholic/localist crowd grovels for crumbs from a federal leviathan whose power it is happy to use for pet projects. That this sort of duplicity is not uncommon in politics does not make its emergence on a once promising webzine any less troubling. 

The nice folks at Campaign For Liberty have seen fit to reprint my essay from the second issue of Young American Revolution entitled “The New Left Was Right.” Though I admit that most of the conclusions I draw in the piece seem rather tame to me, they will probably be considered fairly controversial (to say the least) by many readers and contributors to this website.  For my part, I think the parallels between the New Left and the Old Right will have to be explored more closely in the future and eventually tapped into on a broad level.  Politics makes strange bedfellows, but sometimes the apparent awkwardness of political alliances is not all that odd once the surface is scratched. 

As if we needed more evidence to indicate the end times are upon us, Sarah Palin’s soon to be released autobiography has shot up to number one with both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  All it took to activate the hive of Palin fanatics was the announcement by HarperCollins that the books release date was being moved up several months.  Conveniently the book will now be ready for the totality of the holiday shopping season and will no doubt maintain momentum into the new year thanks to the inevitable talk radio push.

I have never understood the Palin cult and I understand it even less so now.  She is not a social conservative.  She is not a neocon.  She is not a libertarian.  She is not an immigration restrictionist.  She is not a deficit hawk or a serious proponent of fiscal restraint.  She has no built in constituency, is by all accounts poor with words and has been exposed as a fool more times than I can count.  She is a relatively attractive woman (especially for her age)  but in a more sensible era this would have been a disqualifying political trait for a politician - especially among the many “conservatives” that are her most adoring adherents in the present. 

And yet even if we ignore all of the above and just accept the fact that Palin is a beloved figure to many Americans, I still cannot fathom why anyone want to read a book about her - let alone one written by her.  One can only hope that the throng of folks who rushed to their computer terminals to reserve their copies yesterday are recreational gawkers and gossip hounds who’s subscriptions to US Weekly have lapsed.  Otherwise John Derbyshire may in fact be right to note that We Are Doomed.

Richard’s comments on the “Audit The Fed Conspiracy” are close to my views on the subject albeit with one major caveat - I’m not sure the idea is a good one at all. The idea that auditing the Fed would expose its destructive policies to the public eye resulting in a groundswell of support to tear the whole thing down is interesting in theory. But it puts too much faith in a population that has consistently shown itself incapable and unwilling to do anything about the widespread corruption that permeates our culture. Though I have clumsily described myself an anti-egalitarian populist in the past - and still cling to that contradictory label despite its obvious problems - I admit that I see little reason to believe that the work of even the most independent of accountants is going to have the effect of rallying the troops around the Gold Standard.

If this was my only reservation about the “stealth plan” to take down the banksters, I would probably find myself supporting it anyhow. In the past I have cast votes for political figures who I agreed with on far fewer issues than I do with those who are seeking transparency from the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, I’m also plagued with doubts about the level of independence one would actually get from an Audit of the Fed.

Despite having grown up a hardcore leftist, I have always been an opponent of federal power. A big part of this has been my life long aversion to the various commissions and committees that perpetual do-gooders seem to think will be the solution to every problem. In practice, these commissions nearly always turn out to be watered down affairs, run by career bureaucrats, most of who are riddled with multiple conflicts of interests. In the rare occasions when these “independent” elites do stumble upon a sensible proposal or two in their closing report they are routinely shouted down by the liberal-neocon press and mainstream politicians - or their more sensible policy prescriptions are simply ignored. Obviously the ideal audit of the Fed would not end the same way, but the ideal 9/11 Commission would not have been a total farce that resulted in even more conspiracy theorizing from the unpersuaded public.

In many ways the campaign to Audit The Fed reminds me of the Fair Tax movement. Devotees of both ideas have their hearts in the right place. They see a hopeless broken system and are clinging to the reform idea with the strongest legs. But both ideas attack the symptom and not the problem. Just as the problem with the income tax is not that it is a withholding tax, the problem with the Fed is not that it is too independent. In fact the problem with the income tax and the problem with the Fed is a shared problem - they both exist when they shouldn’t.

Several months back I had lunch with a well-known intellectual and fellow opponent of the Federal government. At the time the Audit The Fed movement was in its infancy and the local Campaign For Liberty chapter had asked each of its members to garner as many petition signatures as possible. Assuming that this somewhat famous name would be a slam-dunk, I passed the petition over the table and he briefly skimmed over it. He then dismissed signing it with never so much as a second thought. “I don’t do petitions and I don’t do politics of this kind.”

I’m not an advocate of dropout culture, but this sort of approach is completely understandable to me. Radicals must take radical positions if they expect radical change. I don’t oppose the Audit The Fed movement, but the “conspiracy” to End The Fed might be better off taking a more direct route.

Lew Rockwell’s brief blog posting on the death of William Safire provides some food for thought:

Bill Safire, the neocon warmonger and welfare-statist who wrote propaganda speeches for Dick Nixon, has died at 79. He was an erudite guy and the NY Times’s first “op-ed” columnist, op-ed meaning “pretending to disasgree with the regime.” But I will always remember his telling me, over the phone in 1981, how much he disliked Ron Paul’s libertarian ideas, especially his opposition to foreign aid and US interventionism in the Middle East.I had made the mistake of including him on a congressional press list that outraged him.

Safire was the godfather of the phony libertarians. An establishmentarian to his core, he was the favorite “conservative” of nearly every bleeding heart liberal I’ve ever met. Of course their were two reasons for their fondness. The first was that Safire wrote for the unimpeachable New York Times. The second was that Safire was a fierce defender of “civil liberties.” 

While there were occasions when Safire took a bold position in defense of individual rights and against the state, he was hardly consistent on such matters. More to the point however is the undeniable fact that Safire was a committed warfare statist and a lifelong defender of the globalist creed. There is nothing “civil” about men of that ilk and even less that is “libertarian” no matter how bastardized the term has become. 

Well, Schiff v. McMahon.

I haven’t the foggiest notion why Vince McMahon’s wife would want to enter the arena of elective politics, but her decision to make this leap may turn this race into a massive circus. 

As the other member of the TakiMag South Carolina contingent I suppose I should say a few words about Glenn Beck and where I stand as an “anti-anti-Glenn Beck” blogger.

Is Glenn Beck perfect?  No.  Is Glenn Beck on “our side?”  Probably not.  Is Glenn Beck better than the vast majority of “conservative” talking heads?  On this point I agree with Jack and say absolutely.

But from where I stand little of this is relevant.  Glenn Beck’s opinions on the issues matter to me very little.  I don’t listen to him on the radio and I don’t watch him on television (at least not with any degree of regularity).  I don’t read his books and I rarely even bother to watch any youtube video featuring one of his rants. 

Still I believe Beck does have value because of the many people who do listen to what he has to say.  Richard is right to criticize Beck’s bizarre support of the financial bailout and I’m very skeptical about the motivations of the so called 9/12 movement.  Nonetheless Beck is the only corporate media figure that has had multiple TakiMag contributors on his show.  He’s the only talk radio blowhard who talks about monetary policy.  He is also the only professional motormouth who has openly apologized for many of his previous stances.

Talk radio - and to a lesser extent cable news - are mediums that are geared toward a captive audience of identity obsessed party line voters.  Most of them are incapable or unwilling to think outside of the traditional Republican vs. Democrat narrative.  While Beck is not a member of the Alt Right, he is certainly not a shameless GOP shill or an easily compartmentalized movement conservative.  The millions of Beck devotees are guaranteed to learn more about forbidden subjects listening to Beck than they will learn from listening to Hannity or reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page.  This doesn’t make him an ally, but it makes him useful - or if Richard prefers a useful idiot.