With its November-28 cover story, “My Life as a White Supremacist,” Newsweek has published what amounts to an extended press release from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Featuring a flaming cross on the cover and pictures of brown-clad stormtroopers from the National Socialist Movement on the inside, one expects to read a suspenseful tale of intrigue and deception in the heart of America's vast Neo-Nazi underground—a kind of Turner Diaries in which The System is triumphant. What actually emerges is a story of government incompetence, the usual self-interested hyperventilating about a non-existent revolutionary movement, and the deluded actions of a sad old paleo-American, who sacrificed his life for people who hate him.

The story profiles one John Matthews, a Vietnam veteran and “ardent anticommunist” who had “long run in extremist circles.” Matthews, inspired by John Wayne, fought for his country in Vietnam. He returned to the United States, found that the nation “showed no respect for what he sacrificed,” and learned his comrades were contracting chronic health conditions from exposure to Agent Orange. Matthews become a part of the militia network around one Tom Posey, whom Oliver North and the Reagan Administration used to supply the Nicaraguan contras with weapons. Once he outlived his usefulness, however, Posey was prosecuted by the government. (Oliver North went on to Fox News.) Though he was eventually cleared, an embittered Posey allegedly began talking about stealing weapons and blowing up a nuclear plant to start a revolution. Matthews went straight to the FBI, who recruited him as an informant. He would stay an informant for the next 10 years. 

The author of the piece, R.M. Schneiderman, then takes us on a rather boring adventure, as Matthews meets with various self-important militia leaders who talk about elaborate schemes . . . but don’t seem to do very much. Hilariously, Schneiderman notes Matthews’s handler was a Black named Donald Jarrett, who “wore nice suits and kept his hair closely cropped” (as if he’s assuring us that he wasn’t wearing dreadlocks and a hoodie.) Given that the DEA is looking for ebonics translators, I suppose we should be grateful for that. Without much of a story, Schneiderman resorts to a grab bag of various media clichés about the “far right” and simply mixes them all together. Matthews sat in church pews “with would-be abortion-clinic bombers” (no elaboration). A supposed Vietnam vet shows up to a meeting wearing a green bomber jacket, which, we are solemnly informed, “was popular among skinheads at the time.” The story picks up when this man talks about robbing armored cars . . . but unfortunately it turns out that he, too, is FBI agent. For a report about 10 years in the Nazi underground, there’s not much of an underground and seemingly no Nazis.

There is, however, some semblance of the American Right, and there’s always good money for a reporter who can pathologize it. Schneiderman sneers, “Posey went on about the New World Order, which to extremists like him meant the threat of global takeover by an assortment of international organizations including banks, the United Nations, and other elite institutions.” One sighs with relief that such a view has no basis in truth and is only held by “extremists.” Even so, if only Posey had dressed in all black, instead of camo, and taken a shit on a police car, he could have been recognized as a proto-Occupy protester and be getting an adoring interview on Democracy Now as we speak.

Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the "Conservative Canon" (such as it is) -- how it's has evolved, what's wrong with it, and what it leaves out. Paul and Richard also converse about the upcoming HL Mencken Club conference, which takes place in Baltimore this November. 

More information about the HL Mencken Club and its 2011 conference can be found here.  

AltRight's 2010 debate about the "Conservative Canon" can be read here, here, here, and here.  

Subscribe to AltRight Radio on iTunes here.   

Every year, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe hosts a conference of his Property and Freedom Society at the Hotel Karia Princess in Bodrum, Turkey, which happens to be owned by his wife. Richard was one of the speakers at last year's conference and has written about his experiences there and about Hoppe, his organization, and ideas. Every year Sean Gabb of the U.K.-based Libertarian Alliance diligently films the events of the PFS conference and makes the footage available online. This year was no exception and Sean's video record of the 2011 conference can be viewed here.

I would invite readers of AltRight who are understandably turned off by libertarianism and associate it with globalist, plutocratic, or open borders nonsense to check out the writings of Dr. Hoppe and Dr. Gabb. In the tradition of Nietzsche, Schmitt, or Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Hoppe ranks alonside Alain De Benoist as one of the the fiercest contemporary critics of modern liberal democracy, albeit from a different theoretical premise. I wrote a review of Hoppe's landmark work on the democracy question some years ago which is still available online. Meanwhile, Sean Gabb has emerged as one of the U.K.'s leading critics of Political Correctness and has produced a highly valuable book on the subject which he distributes online for free. It might be said that Sean is for England what Paul Gottfried is for this side of the Atlantic. Suffice to say that Sean Gabb and Hans Hoppe are not your garden-variety U.S.-style libertarians obsessed with conspiracy theories, drugs, and science fiction novels. Indeed, I've always thought that the libertarian movement from outside the United States is of much higher quality than what we Yanks have on our side of the pond, probably due to its smaller size. Quantity often comes at the cost of quality. The Property and Freedom Society and the Libertarian Alliance are the leading lights of non-U.S. based libertarianism and, in my opinion, two of the very best libertarian groups anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, I would particularly recommend this video of Dr. Gottfried's talk at this year's PFS gathering. What I find personally interesting about Professor Gottfried is that while he originates from the traditional conservative, Buckleyite Right and I came from the Chomskyite Left, we have reached a virtually identical analysis and conclusion concerning the state of our civilization and what the most viable solution to the crisis might be. For those who find Gottfried's speech at PFS interesting, I would also like to suggest this talk given last year by my National-Anarchist colleague Welf Herfurth, a native of Germany who was an activist in German far Right politics in the 1980s and who now resides in Australia. Welf has likewise come to a position not dissimilar to that of Paul Gottfried and myself.

In the early 1990s, a then-recent high school graduate named Alex Jones began hosting a cable-access program in Austin, Texas. By 1996, he had become the host of a local talk show called “The Final Edition” on Austin’s KJFK radio station. This was during the height of the 1990s “patriot” movement, which spawned the notorious militia groups of the time, and Jones’ program became a local voice for causes championed by the movement, such as criticizing the federal government’s massacre of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco in 1993 and opposing supposed plots for a “one-world government” being advanced by global elites at the expense of American sovereignty.

Jones’s antigovernment rhetoric alienated the station’s advertisers, and he was fired from KJFK in 1999. Fortunately for him, his program was picked up by the Genesis Communications Network and is now syndicated through over sixty radio and Internet outlets. Alex Jones likewise maintains two websites, Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.com, where he disseminates his ideas and promotes his program. He has built his audience of fans into the millions.

The primary significance of Alex Jones is that he is arguably the most popular of any “alternative grassroots radio host” (his own self-description) that offers an authentic right-wing populism and takes a consistently anti-establishment line regardless of which political party is actually in power. That the most well known supposedly “conservative” talk-radio hosts like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and Ingraham are simply Republican Party shills and propagandists on behalf of the neoconservatives who provide the GOP’s intellectual leadership is easy enough to ascertain. Alex Jones is miles apart from the official “conservative movement” at both the leadership and rank-and-file levels.

Jones regards American political leaders as front men for shadowy international elites who are identified as hated perpetrators of the “New World Order” with electoral contests between the two major parties simply being an elaborately constructed ruse, the purpose of which is to deflect attention from the real overlords of the global order by creating the divisive distraction of partisan politics. Jones repeatedly and emphatically states that he rejects the conventional Left/Right model of the political spectrum and that not only partisan politics but the mainstream “culture wars” are manufactured by the globalists’ minions as part of their strategy to “divide and conquer” Americans and bring about their enslavement at the hands of the NWO.

As many are aware, I’ve successfully predicted five of the last zero total breakdowns of the system. With that record in mind, here are some prognostications for 2011.

By This Time Next Year…

Israel will have bombed someone – An Israeli-led bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities has seemed imminent since “Mission Accomplished” was declared in Iraq in 2003. Unable to convince Obama to lend it unconditional support, and unwilling to wait for a Christian-Zionist to take the Whitehouse in 2013, Israel will attack alone, like a thief in the night.

The Euro will be down; the dollar, up; the Dow Jones and housing, way down; gold, steady or up – It’s hard to look at the United States’ account deficits, and its unfathomable—certainly unpayable—liabilities and not conclude that the dollar will soon become Zimbabwe-ized. And this is inevitable. But it won’t happen in 2011.

The reality is that the world economy has been operating on a dollar-based currency system since 1944 (with semi-gold convertibility until 1971 and fiat “credibility” thereafter.) At some point, the center (i.e. the dollar) will not hold, but until that spectacular day, I expect the valence currencies surrounding the greenback to crack up first.

So, here’s my prediction: along with a loss of faith in the Euro, by next autumn, it will be clear that “QE” has utterly failed; housing will get closer to a full retracement of the gains of the past decade, and the 2008 lows in the Dow and S&P will be broken through. Everyone will be convinced of “deflation” and falling prices.

It will be the ultimate set-up for hyperinflation.

A major vestige of the Buckley-ite movement will have fallen by the wayside—If American “conservatism” is a movement at all, then it exists on the streets with the Tea Party and online with the various group blogs that have cropped up spontaneously since the Tea Party’s rise in 2009. The neoconservatives, on the other hand, are tacking leftward and increasingly viewing the Tea Partiers, and the Religious Right, as idiots who’ve lost their usefulness.

The tweed-clad redoubts of “respectability” that were established by Buckley and his allies over the past 60 years—ISI, National Review, The New Criterion etc.—are caught in the middle and have increasingly lost their purposes. Places like NR are well funded, but many of the others aren’t. One of them will fall apart before the year’s out.

The mainstream Right will be increasingly polarized between Red State nutjobs and urban neocons. Only a Middle East war could bring them back together again.

Sarah Palin will have won the Iowa Straw Poll and will hold a commanding lead in the 2012 Iowa Caucuses—I’m not really going out on a limb here. Does anyone out there think she’s not running?

A major party or politician in Germany will actively pursue the revival of the Deutschmark—The various sovereign debt crises may lead to the breakup of the EU, but not because Greece, or any of marginal Euro countries will splinter off. As long as Brussels dispenses bailouts, the “PIIGs” have every incentive to stay in the Euro zone—to draw closer to Brussels even. If the EU is to break up, it will be because one of the big countries that pays the bills decides it has had enough.

For the past 60 years, competitors have been able to restrict German independence through vague evocations of Hitler. With the Euro disintegrating, the idea of reviving older, harder currencies will be thrust into the mainstream.

All the best in 2011!

In his comments on my discussion of alternate modernities, Paul Gottfried observes that in our present situation there's no educational program, system of alliances, or political and cultural strategy that seems likely to get us out of the hole we're in.

I agree. If we start with what I called the modern "attempt to base social order simply on this-worldly empirical man," we can't get anywhere, because we can't escape the problem of conflicting wills fighting over who gets what. The only way to deal with that problem is by some combination of force and fraud, and any new combination of programs, alliances, and strategies is just going to be one more configuration of force and fraud. Why should our force and fraud work out better than everyone else's? Haven't the possibilities been tried and found wanting?

The problem, it seems, is the basic modern understandings that make our present situation what it is and so condition all the programs, alliances, strategies, and so on that now seem reasonable and practical. Things won't get a whole lot better until those understandings change, and that won't happen because some group of activists and theoreticians puts together a system of understandings that's more to their liking and tries to get them adopted by the dominant forces in society.

In particular, as Paul notes, right-wingers aren't going to create a better world by getting together and aligning themselves with selected religious institutions, "command[ing] the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview," and educating the masses into an outlook more to their liking. Among other problems, religious institutions themselves are affected by the dominant understandings.

But what then? If we don't like the way things are there must be some response--alcohol, skydiving, suicide, whatever--that makes sense even if political maneuvering is not likely to do much for us.

My proposal was to "go back to first things." What defines the political situation is what seems best and most real to the people involved, and if the situation is impossible those things must change. Current understandings have basic problems that (among other things) lead to a view of man as essentially asocial and eventually mean various forms of tyranny as well as "mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled."

It follows that the dissatisfied need first of all to understand the world better, and in a way that enables them to live in a manner more worthy of human nature. That, of course, is a prepolitical issue. It's worth dealing with in itself, since doing so will help ourselves and our families and friends. It's more than just a personal matter, though, since such initiatives can spread and transform social life. At some point some initiative will--it's happened before and will happen again--so why not ours if it's superior?

The present setup has basic contradictions, and won't last forever any more than other social arrangements have. With that in mind, those with an outlook and way of life that is more true and more worth living by should make their pitch and see what catches on and endures. As I commented, "revolutions begin in thought, and the way of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually."

The proposal sounds impossibly conjectural and long-range, but when there is no obvious quick fix you drop day-to-day events as your reference point and do what you can for what could work in principle. If what's needed is a change in basic understandings then that's what you should pursue. Modernity makes effectiveness the measure of thought, but to deal with the world effectively you have to deal on their own terms with issues that precede effectiveness, like what is real and good.

Such an approach might get results soon: things might be better than they seem, late modernity might be a bubble about to burst, the Church (which like everything else has its own characteristic way of functioning) might be about to revert to type, or something nobody has thought of might happen. Or it might take effect slowly or not at all. The same is true of every approach, though, and the basic point is that this approach--unlike others--could work in concept, and is worth pursuing on its own terms even if it does not.

The big question is what a superior way of thought would be. On that point opinions differ and discussion is necessary. In order to deal with man as he actually is and the problems politics actually present we need an outlook that's adequate to the world as we experience it. It seems clear, to me at any rate, that such an outlook requires an understanding of practical rationality not limited to technology and of knowledge not limited to modern natural science.

Otherwise we cannot, among other things, understand people. To understand and deal with life and human beings as we find them, I suggested that "something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good" is necessary. Whether I'm right on that is a matter for discussion. Still, each of us in his manner of life displays what he thinks is most real and most worth living by. We're more likely to make progress on basic issues to the extent we articulate and examine such commitments. Our problems today really are that basic, which is the reason there seems to be no exit from them.

Political modernity is based on rejection of the premodern belief that man participates in some sort of higher nature. As such, it can take several forms. Liberalism is the form that has won, but not the only one that has existed.

If we get rid of the transcendent, we might view man as fundamentally biological or historical, or as self-created in some way. Moderns have therefore tried to base social order on biology, history, or the triumph of the will.

Biology

Modern natural science favors physical explanations, so the most obvious and direct response to modernity is the attempt to base social order on the physical aspects of man's being. The usual physicalist view is that natural selection--in Darwin's terms, "the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life"--explains human nature and behavior. For that reason, physicalists have often viewed racial struggle as fundamental. The physical flourishing of the Aryan race becomes the highest good, at least for Aryans, and similarly for other groups.

A basic problem with the view is that what men find worthwhile in life cannot be reduced to the survival and multiplication of an extended kinship group. For that reason, the latter cannot serve as the guiding principle of social order. That is why people who put nation and race first have ended up emphasizing arbitrary will more than biology, and relying on theatrics, irrationalism, and violence to overcome the intellectual weakness of their position.

History

Secular conservatives, who are moderate modernists, have tried to mitigate the effect of their basic antitranscendental commitments by basing social order on habit and history. They hold the modern view of man, but accept that we do not have an effective technology of social life. For that reason they accept experience as their guide, and with it the necessity of the inherited, informal, and prerational aspects of social order.

The approach has failed. Secular conservatives are proponents of traditional ways and attachments, so they favor particularity and the practices, conditions, and institutions that allow it to maintain itself and function. In present-day America, those include federalism, local autonomy, traditional marriage, restrictions on immigration, limitations on the welfare state, and respect for the right of families and religious and community institutions to run their own affairs.

Conservatives have continually given ground on all those issues. Their weakness has been especially apparent in connection with issues related to "inclusiveness." Apart from illegal immigration and affirmative action, which are sore points for voters, conservative politicians have been willing to swear devotion to an antidiscrimination regime that is at odds with attachment to any tradition except that of liberal progress. Even opposition to affirmative action and illegal immigration has been sporadic and lukewarm, more a matter of opportunistic gestures than a genuine effort to change law and policy.

The failure was preordained. Belief in history doesn't tell you anything helpful when trends are against you. As moderns, secular conservatives accept satisfaction of preferences as the rational guide to action, but as conservatives they need people to act on other principles. Why should people do so when it becomes inconvenient? Continuity and respect for traditional ways may be a good thing in general, but there are exceptions, and why should my case not be an exception?

Political reality is shaped by how the world is understood. Secular conservatives do not seriously dispute fundamental current understandings, and those understandings make any serious opposition to liberalism seem irrational and wrong, the sort of thing that leads to Nazism and whatnot. They've already surrendered in principle, so why expect their resistance to amount to much?

The Triumph of the Will

Abolishing transcendence abolishes the distinction between preference satisfaction and the good, so that satisfaction of preferences becomes the rational purpose of all action. From that perspective, the most rational political response to modernity is the attempt to derive moral and social order from maximum preference satisfaction.

Preferences conflict, however, and they are equally preferences, so whose should prevail? The obvious answer is to prefer one's own, but "looking out for number one" is not, at least without severe limitation, a principle of social order. Since man is social, it does not even work in private life.

Fascism and bolshevism

It is not easy to make arbitrary will a principle of public order. Antiliberal moderns dramatize the paradox and then resolve it by emphasizing the conflicts and then appealing to collective power as their solution: the will of the people, party, or state, embodied in that of the supreme leader, overcomes all others and establishes order. The motive for participation in the effort, and thus the basis for loyalty to the regime, becomes the joy of smashing the opposition, together with comradeship in the struggle to make the willed order prevail.

A problem with the solution is that antiliberal moderns are moderns. As such, it is natural for them to view collectivities as arbitrary constructions. What is special about the proletariat or the German people? Who do they include and why? Why are Stalin and Hitler their perfect representatives? And why should my will and their will be the same? Such questions are unanswerable, so fascists and communists embraced irrationalism and relied quite directly on lies and violence as the basis for their rule.

The result was catastrophe. Antiliberal modernists took as their principle of social order worship of the power of the order itself. In the absence of substantive goods that principle could express itself only through self-assertion against opposition, the more extreme the better. In the end infinite victory in infinite war became the ruling ideal of social life.

A society that places itself on such a basis is not going to last. It will crash and burn like the Nazis, or sink into posturing, hypocrisy, and corruption that eventually becomes terminal, like the Soviets after Stalin.

Liberalism

Liberalism defers and defuses the problem posed by the sovereign will with its claim to maximize the satisfaction of all preferences equally. The will is to be tamed by the equal sovereignty of other wills and the demands of a technically rational system. Arbitrary power and social conflict vanish.

The peacefulness of its ideal has enabled liberalism to outlast communism, fascism, and Nazism. Nonetheless, those other forms of modernity responded to a real problem. By abolishing the idea of participation in higher goods and unities, the modern outlook separates individual goals from social needs. To re-integrate them some ideological myth is needed.

Fascists and communists proceed in a straightforward way by making the People or the State the only reality that matters, so the individual becomes insignificant. If that move is accepted--and those who reject it soon drop out of the conversation--the conflict between individual and collectivity disappears as an issue.

The liberal myth is more subtle. Instead of absorbing the individual into the collectivity, it absorbs the collectivity into the individual. It presents the liberal state as government by and for the people, here to serve them and acting only to promote their freedom and equality. What that state imposes reduces without remainder to individual desire and content-free public rationality. Obedience to its authority is not subservience but only intelligent promotion of what we already want.

Such is the official story. In fact, of course, liberal government is like other government. It is run not by the many but by the few. Those who rule try to make their life easier by accommodating popular concerns, but their guiding principle is less the will of the people than staying in power and running things in accordance with their own interests and understandings.

In fact, the liberal myth is no more true than the collectivist one. No government can favor equal freedom among men and their preferences, since some must lose in the event of conflict. Also, we often choose things other than satisfaction of desire: God, country, and family; adventure, struggle, and comradeship; the good, beautiful, and true. To the extent we prefer such things to getting our own way simply as such, hedonism makes no sense. It "gives us what we want," but we reject the goal as unworthy.

To avoid such problems liberal government has to tell us what to want. We can have what we want, but what we are allowed to want--safe and moderate devotion to career, consumption, and various private indulgences--must suit the regime. That is supposed to be the perfection of freedom, but who believes it? The desires we are allowed to pursue leave out everything we care about most. And the authorities from which we are freed--family, prejudice, religion, particular people and culture--are what enable us to live and act independently of the formal institutions that constitute the liberal regime.

The freedom liberalism grants is the freedom to be dependent on liberalism and do, think, and feel what it wants us to do, think, and feel. Who wants that? And why trust a system in which we all place ourselves under guardianship, supposedly for our own good, to turn out well?

The Moral of the Story

It's clear from what's happened that the attempt to build social order simply on this-worldly empirical man doesn't work. That's true for a variety of reasons. One is that it's part of the general modern effort to understand the world in a way that eliminates mystery and facilitates control, and if you deal with people that way you're going to see them as less than they are and tyrannize over them.

The conclusion is that to get out of the political, social, and intellectual hole we've fallen into we have to go back to first things. For starters, we're going to have to bring back something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good. Otherwise we're not going to be able to deal with man as he is or the problems politics actually presents.

That is not an impossible dream. Revolutions begin in thought, and the scheme of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually. Advanced liberalism means mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled. It seems to me someone can do better.

I’m happy that Jim Kalb has gotten the conversation started about the “conservative canon” in preparation for next year’s HL Mencken Club meeting.

I’ve never felt at home in the American “conservative movement.” Sure, I agree with conservatives that income taxes are too high and Big Government is bad etc. etc. etc. But that’s the easy stuff. I’ve always sensed that, deep down, movement conservatives and I are informed and motivated by drastically different worldviews. No more have I felt this way than when I encounter various movement certified “reading lists.”

The lists of recommendations usually strike me as decent, if deficient and myopically skewed towards writers whose views are consistent with contemporary Christianity and Republican egalitarianism.  (The best of these “to read” list is Chilton Williamson’s Conservative Bookshelf).

The movement’s various Indices Librorum Prohibitorum, on the other hand, have seemed to me deeply philistine.

Paul Gottfried told me that he was actually asked to suggests titles for a “Ten Most Harmful Books” lists put out by Human Events. His editors were expecting him to suggest Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, but Gottfried proffered The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom instead, for the charge of perverting American conservatism. (It didn’t make the cut.)

The responses on this website to my remarks from last month’s Mencken Club meeting impel me to offer this clarification. For those respondents who criticize me for not addressing biodiversity, I should point out the obvious. Unlike a scholar like Henry Harpending, who was one of our speakers, I am not a biologist. It would therefore be presumptuous of me to pontificate about an area of learning in which I am simply not trained. Moreover, I was not delivering a speech at the meeting on the neglect of sociobiology, however interesting a subject that may be. I was asked to speak on the multicultural Left and on how the leftist mindset came to influence the “conservative movement.” Whether or not the authorized conservative movement should discuss genetics or whether or not biodiversity is essential to the recreation of an American Right was not my subject on October 22.

Although it is possible to find isolated passages in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind that sound anti-leftist, such statements are usually throwaways meant to appeal to naïve cultural conservatives. The things that stick out in my mind about Bloom’s book are his defenses of American liberal democracy, as practiced in the modern United States, his support of past crusades for democratic, egalitarian “education” carried on through war, and a call for cleansing our society of the “German connection.” The rest of the work seemed to me the kind of boiler plate one runs into in conservative Catholic and Evangelical diatribes against the Zeitgeist.

Moreover, one doesn’t need to consult Bloom in order to come up with a “conservative” critique of psychedelic drugs and punk rock. In fact there is no more “conservative” reason for citing Bloom as a moral authority on morals and the arts than for bringing up Herbert Marcuse on the one-dimensionality of capitalist society. One could easily find people on the real Right, e.g., James Kalb or Robert Nisbet, who arrived at similar critical conclusions.  Unfortunately for their pocketbooks, none of these authors produced a “conservative classic” that would be celebrated in National Review. This of course speaks volumes for what now passes for a movement conservative authority. But perhaps I’m carping too much. Since National Review, the New York Post, and other neoconservative outlets accept gay everything these days while beating up on Muslims for being insensitive to the “West,” as the citadel of alternative lifestyles, perhaps Bloom in view of his widely remarked on lifestyle may have been perfectly in step with the march of “conservative family values.”

On another, only slightly related matter, Richard may be on to something when he suggests that former president Bush is exhibiting the “despair” of the guilt-ridden white Republican when he goes on and on about how the black rapper Kanye West accused him of “not caring about black people” during and after the Katrina flood. The former president seems to have been shaken-up to a degree that would have been inconceivable for a Jewish liberal if confronted by the same attack. It is easy to think of how Eliot Spitzer or Charles Schumer would have reacted to a comparable insult, namely, by shrugging it off and/or by calling the offending vocalist a horrible anti-Semite. A similar reaction might have been forthcoming if the target had been Bill Clinton, although Clinton would not be able to reach for the Anti-Semite-branding iron in counterattacking.

Bush seems tormented in a way that characterizes those driven by social and racial guilt. It’s as if his moral center had been challenged because blacks not only failed to appreciate his anti-racist goodness but because a culturally enriching black accused him of not being the antiracist Bush strives to be. In any case his reaction to this incident, as explained in his interview with Mat Lauer, was not simply outrage or contempt. It involved a dark night of the soul, as if Bush were afraid of what politically incorrect feelings lurked inside of him. This anguished experience, if Richard is correct about Bush, does not increase my respect for him. It increases my annoyance with those who make a fetish of antiracism -- or their own antiracial sensitivity.

A discussion group I'm associated with (it's The H. L. Mencken Club) is talking about putting on a conference on the "conservative canon"--books that have been, or should be, central to the American Right.

The idea is that many people believe the old booklists have become stale. Time has passed, conditions have changed, and books that seemed just the thing in 1970 no longer hit the spot. They didn't keep us from losing badly, and people don't pay much attention to them anyway, so why not step back and rethink?

In the old days a movement-oriented booklist would have concentrated on postwar writings by men such as Kirk, Nisbet, Weaver, Burnham, and others, most of whom were associated in some way with the old National Review. A more academic list might have included politically moderate skeptics like Hume, hard-headed Founding Fathers like John Adams, and counter-Enlightenment figures like Burke and Maistre, all the way down to the 20th century with its secular theorists of tradition like Hayek and Oakeshott and critics of European ideologies like Voegelin and Strauss.

Many people today would put forward similar lists, maybe supplemented (in the movement case) with neoconservative titles. If new times require something else, though, what should change?