Dylan Hales

March 12, 2009

Yesterday afternoon Jack Hunter and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to break bread with one of the foremost decentralist thinkers in America today.  For those unfamilar with him, Kirkpatrick Sale has been a long time critic of American Empire in all of its forms.  A committed opponent of the managerial state, Sale is one of the few bright lights in American political life willing to advocate on behalf of secession, and might be the only neo-luddite in America (other than myself) to take a positive view of both Taki and the infamous anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

That such a figure exists today is a testament more to Sale’s own wisdom, than it is to the influence of any singular movement.  Where the conservative movement has plunged off the cliff into a globalist militarism, the organized left is now a mismatch of identity politics, personality cultists and quasi-Marxist “class warriors” who have never had real jobs.  Independent minds like Sale don’t have a home in either establishment, nor do they have homes in the “accepted” counter-establishments. 

In setting up the Middlebury Institute, Sale hopes to promote “separatism, secession, and self-determination.”  Though critics are quick to point to the impracticality of such notions, it is rare to see anyone offer a spirited defense of the disastorous leviathan state we have now.  Why leaving an artificially imposed union would be considered dangerously radical at a point when the Age of American Empire is clearly over is beyond me – and conservatives of all stripes ought to think long and hard about what will come after the inevitable collapse. 

In particular those of us on the “alternative right” could learn a great deal from men like Kirkpatrick Sale.  With so much of the political process tied up in trivialities like the size of tax cuts or earmark reform, a true radical willing to make truly radical departures from the status quo, could be exactly what post-meltdown America needs.