November 06, 2007

Being always ready to note my oversights as a columnist but not the kind of alleged faults that I felt obliged to respond to earlier today, I would like to express my regrets for failing to point out certain facts on this website. Contrary to my statement that Heather McDonald, a columnist for a neoconservative website, had discussed reactions to racial tensions in Jena, Louisiana with a candor that I generally don”€™t find on paleocon websites, I should stress that VDARE, which identifies itself as part of the Old Right, goes into the same forbidden area of public discourse. As the man in charge, Peter Brimelow, reminded me, his website takes on the liberal establishment with admirable regularity; and Steve Sailer, who assists Peter, devoted an entirely spirited analysis to the very subject of Heather’s “€œscathing”€ polemic. VDARE has likewise examined the indelicate question of testable racial differences in intelligence, and it has carried out this task judiciously and without the slightest trace of malice.

I should also note that my comments about the American bourgeois liberal tradition in my rejoinder to John Ross failed to mention the obvious exception of the antebellum South. Its dominant class, the landowning planters, and their social structure and values, were definitely pre-modern, and its relations to the rest of the American republic generated conflict, which led to the bloodbath of the American Civil War. The price of this victory for the industrial bourgeoisie turned out to be rather high in the long run. For the Union victory in the long haul resulted in a process of political centralization that would bring to power the managerial class, which is the subject of my book, After Liberalism.  This new class would become the dominant one in a post-bourgeois society, in which the anti-slavery, Protestant industrialist and bankers who had profited from the “€œpreservation of the Union”€ would fall to a successor order.  

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