The following address was delivered to the HL Mencken Club's annual meeting in Baltimore, October 22, 2010.

I’m often asked why there is need for an independent or non-aligned Right. Aren’t Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and Rich Lowry covering all our bases? Why should we create a movement on the right when FOX and those middle-aged people marching around at Tea Parties with costume-store wigs, are doing our job? Why give ammunition to the Democrats by showing that our side is divided? We should be pulling together so we can pummel Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in next month’s referendum on Obamacare.

Engaging this question fully would require more than a ten-page exposition. Indeed there is no way to address it without being in this instance a Hegelian. It was the great German philosopher Hegel who argued that the true definitions of concepts and movements are necessarily genetic. Such definitions can not be dealt with properly, unless we go back to the origin of what is being defined. A tree is not what it first appears to be, but the history of that object, from the time it was a seedling. So too there is no way to understand where we are at the present time without noticing where we were before. The present state of any institution or movement reflects a dialectical process teeming with strife. It is only when, according to Hegel, conflicting forces can be brought together in a permanent synthesis that the inherent contradictions are resolved. Before that point is reached, the dialectic must go on, as something integral to what is being formed.

My intention is not to belabor you with Hegelian concepts. It is rather to bring up the unfinished dialectic of the right, for understanding why we do not belong to the authorized “conservative movement” and why that movement has become an echo of the Left. Allow me then to start with this generalization. In the second half of the 20th century, the other side, from our perspective, won almost everywhere in the West. But the Left that prevailed was not the gerontocracy and garrison socialism associated with Soviet rule. This Left had little to do with occupation armies in baggy pants, with inefficiently distributed goods and services, and with an arsenal of atomic missiles. The Left that triumphed was a truly radical one, and it celebrated its victories in Western countries that were straining to practice more egalitarian forms of democracy.

I haven’t voted in an election in since 1994. I only did so sporadically before that, and have never voted since becoming interested in the kinds of ideas associated with the Alternative Right. Each new crop of office-holders that comes along never fails to remind me of why I think voting is a useless endeavor. I can only imagine the embarrassment I might feel today if I had done something so foolish as to, say, vote for George W. Bush in 2000. Nor have I found the Tea Party crowd to be particularly impressive. I concur with Paul Gottfried that its dominant forces are little more than neoconservative/GOP stooges. Its more radical elements may be mostly sincere opponents of the sociopathocracy, if often misguided. But what is particularly telling about Tuesday’s election is that, as Richard Spencer points out, the candidates with the strongest Tea Party endorsements were also the ones who tended to fare the worst (with Rand Paul being the only significant anomaly). As Richard notes, the GOP of 2010 performed not nearly as well as the GOP of 1994 under virtually identical political conditions, and with the supposed added liability-for-incumbents of a crumbling economy.

This brings us to Richard Hoste’s pessimistic assessment of the Sailer Strategy. I’ve always been skeptical of the Sailer Strategy, because it has seemed to me to underestimate just how pervasive the “values” of political correctness actually are among ordinary white, middle class Americans, particularly younger people, without even figuring other demographic considerations into the equation. James Kirkpatrick accurately describes Jon Stewart’s shenanigans over the past weekend as a “rally of the ruling class.” But one of the reasons why this ruling class remains in power is because, well, a majority of Americans largely agrees with them. A friend of mine remarked that the Stewartites are the contemporary equivalent of Nixon’s “silent majority” gathering to ridicule the contemporary counterculture (the Tea Parties and overlapping forces) and display their loyalty to the establishment. I think the available statistical data shows that the Tea Parties, so-called “movement conservatives,” and others conventionally identified as “the Right” essentially represent dying forces in American politics. I’ve crunched the numbers and outlined my conclusions here. Like it or not, the Tea Parties, etc. are swimming against the tides culturally, demographically, generationally, economically, and ideologically. Attempting to defeat Cultural Marxism/Totalitarian Humanism by electoral methods is simply a losing strategy, at least for the foreseeable future.

We will win eventually, because a society organized on flagrant falsehoods can only endure for so long before the cracks become observable. The left-liberal ruling class will stumble and fall as the contradictions within its coalition become more obvious. As the demographic transformation produced by mass immigration becomes more imminent, those contradictions will rise to the surface. We will achieve victory by emulating our enemies, the Totalitarian Humanists. They began as a counterculture and eventually grew to become the status quo. There is no reason why we cannot do the same, but what will eventually replace Totalitarian Humanism will probably not look anything like the conventional right-wing as presently constituted. After all, how much does Cultural Marxism actually resemble old-fashioned Communism? It is doubtful that a victorious Alternative Right would bear any greater resemblance to “movement conservatism.” We among the Alternative Right are creating a new kind of counterculture that is as different from the conservative movement as the New Left was from their orthodox Marxist ancestors. I predict this counterculture will expand dramatically and exponentially in the years and decades ahead. This is going to be a long war but one that’s worth fighting.

[Addendum: I just checked out Tim Wise's rant at Daily Kos. This part stands out:

And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement -- hell you’ve all but done that now -- thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.

And this:

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

Here, Wise is making the same fatal miscalculation that I have enountered among virtually all left-wing zealots. It is the presumption that the Left's "coalition of official victims" will be permanent and stable. This outlook may well be consistent with the view of many left-wing ideologies that history moves towards some final, glorious, permanent end, but it has nothing to do with the realities of power politics. The Left is presently comprised of a myriad of factions whose only unifying characteristics are a hatred of traditional WASP society and a desire for more goodies courtesy of the state. The more deeply entrenched into institutions the Left becomes, the more its constituent groups will become rivals for political favoritism and resources and the more their conflicting value systems will become self-evident (for instance, gay rights and feminism versus the "homophobia" and "sexism" of many African-Americans or Third World immigrants). Mass immigration along with ongoing economic decline will likely be the impetus for the eventual fracturing of the left-liberal coalition along the lines of race, class, and culture. That's when our moment will come.]

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes, the business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” This was certainly true of the people who called themselves conservatives in Chesterton's day, and is even truer today. But it has not always been true.

As a political term, “conservatism” came about during the 18^th century. A conservative then was one who wanted to conserve Europe's waning ancien régime (I use the term in reference not only to pre-revolutionary France, but to all of pre-modern Europe) -- with its absolute monarchy, feudal economy, entrenched aristocracy, and powerful clerisy – against the challenge it faced from rationalists, philosophes, liberals, and radicals. In the end, of course, the conservatives and the ancien régime lost every significant battle, and were often deposed violently by the modernists. (1776, 1789, 1848, 1917.) Conservatism survived as an ideology, but conservatives approached the changes brought about by modernity differently.

The first generation of self-conscious political conservatives fell into two camps. One camp, preeminent in the Anglo-American world and typified by Edmund Burke, justified the ancien régime pragmatically. Burke might critique the French Revolution on the grounds that all radical and revolutionary changes are likely to end in disaster, or he might justify religious and monarchical traditions as “useful lies” conducive to social stability. Another school, represented chiefly by continental European thinkers like Bonald, Müller, and Donoso Cortès, argued against political modernism on moral grounds. For them, the spirit of the French Revolution was not foolish or unrealistic, but actively evil. For instance, they might argue, as Maistre did, that the Jacobin Terror was God's retribution on France for overturning a divinely-mandated social order.

Between the French Revolution and the end of World War I, the chasm between English pragmatists and Continental moralists grew. While the latter still wanted to restore a pre-modern social order, the former, having discovered that their arguments could be used to defend the new order just as effectively as the old, opted for reformism and allied themselves with the classical liberals. Thus, 20^th-century thinkers like Hayek and Oakeshott used Burkean arguments to justify the industrial capitalism and liberal democracy against which the first conservatives had fought. The liberal-Burkean alliance still comprises the mainstream political Right in virtually all of North America and Western Europe. Because the pragmatist party line fit the Zeitgeist while the moralist party line did not, pragmatists had gained complete hegemony by the middle of the 20^th century. The tiny moralist minority was either ignored or denounced as fascistic, bigoted, and reactionary. The “Alternative Right” which Richard Spencer has worked to give a voice on the Internet, if construed broadly, can plausibly be described as an atavistic moralist resurgence against the pragmatist establishment.

Now I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Continental moralist, and as such feel very uncomfortable with the word “conservative.” For one thing, it's virtually synonymous with Burkean pragmatism nowadays. For another, it implies that I want to conserve some existing arrangement. As implied, I don't. The original counterrevolutionaries could say that they wanted to save what remained of Europe's soul, but I can not, for that soul is gone now. It can not be conserved -- only restored.

Self-christened advocates of cultural harmony, equality, justice, and ideological soundness have long insisted that in order to prove oneself truly tolerant one must "NEVER tolerate INtolerance."

Of course, this notion of redefining a concept as its very opposite is purposely obfuscatory. What it means, laid bare, is, "WE, your betters, decide which positions are tolerable, and which are beyond the pale. If you offend our sensibilities, we will come down on you hard. So watch your step, little man, because WE call the shots, not you."

This subterfuge is easily uncovered by all enthusiastic flouters of insufferable contemporary norms, a hearty group of heretics whose company no doubt includes most readers of this publication. It's well known by now that taking certain stances is "wrong" and “indefensible,” not because of any self-evident moral law -- as with rape or murder-- but because the opinion-molders and shapers of the age have, in a series of ex cathedra pronouncements, insisted that it be so. Thus, certain types, most notably White race-realists and critics of multiculturalism, are shunned outright as mere bigots, and an earnest attempt is made to cordon off their views from the general public.

The death of Joe Sobran on September 30, after several years of failing health, could not have come as a total surprise to any of his friends. News about his deteriorating condition and the need for divine intervention was steadily provided by Fran Griffin, his alter ego of many years, his longtime publisher, and, not least of all, his tireless fundraiser. From Fran’s reports throughout September, it was clear that Joe would not survive much longer. The news that he expired painlessly may have been the least disturbing communication from her during this period.

Joe’s death deprives those of us on the independent right and in Anglophone society of a brilliant literary presence. Although widely known as a political controversialist, Joe was also, not incidentally, one of the most impressive English stylists of his and my generation. Most of his columns, like his works on Shakespeare’s real identity and on complicated constitutional questions, were literary gems. And though he would not have presumed to compare his talent to that of his hero G.K. Chesterton, Joe was probably Chesterton’s equal as a master of expository prose. The reason this graduate of Eastern Michigan (and scion of a working-class Ukrainian family) rose rapidly at National Review to become a senior editor within three years, after being hired in 1972, is that William F. Buckley recognized his considerable talent.

And arguably Joe was kept at the magazine even after Norman Podhoretz and his soul-mates condemned him as an anti-Semite in 1993, because Buckley wished to hold on to his best writer. Perhaps trying to bring around his newly acquired neoconservative dinner companions, Buckley defended Joe (and Pat Buchanan) for a time as “contextual” rather than genuine anti-Semites. According to Buckley, it was because of general sensitivity to the historic problem of anti-Semitism and the special place of Israel among American Christians as well as American Jews that the frontal attack on AIPAC and Jewish media power engaged in by Joe aroused such resoundingly negative feelings.

Commentaries published on this website, most notably by Richard Spencer and Elizabeth Wright, have underlined the problems with the Tea Party movement and its most prominent representatives. These pointed observations about Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, and Christine O’ Donnell have all been true; and if I have more or less defended some of these figures in the past, I’ve done so, while conceding most of the argument made against them. I agree in particular with Elizabeth Wright’s brief against Rand Paul’s stuttering attempt to object to the public accommodations clause in the Civil Rights Act and her withering attack on Glenn Beck’s recent “carnival of repentance” in Washington.

Elizabeth concludes that such soi-disant critics of the Left cannot bring themselves to find fault with any excess in the Civil Rights movement -- and especially not with its far leftist icon Martin Luther King. “Conservatives” are so terrified of being called “racists” or for that matter, sexists or homophobes, that they devote themselves tirelessly to showing they are just as sensitive as the next PC robot. Indeed, they often go well beyond anyone on the left in genuflecting before leftist icons. This was the purpose of the Martin Luther King-adoration rally held by Beck in Washington.

And even more outrageously, such faux conservatives accuse long-dead Democratic presidents, who were well to the right of the current conservative movement, of being more radical than they actually were. It would be no exaggeration to say that Wilson and FDR were far more reactionary than any celebrity in the Tea Party movement. One could only imagine what such antediluvian Democrats would have said if they had heard last year’s “Conservative of the Year,” chosen by Human Events, Dick Cheney, weeping all over the floor about not allowing gays to marry each other. And what would that stern Presbyterian and Southern segregationist Wilson have thought about the cult of King or the attempts by Tea Party leaders Palin and McDonnell to impose feminist codes of behavior on business and educational establishments. Wilson had to be dragged even into supporting the extension of the franchise to women.

The Tea Party sounds so often like the Left because it is for the most part a product of the Left. Its people were educated in public schools, watch mass entertainment, and have absorbed most of the leftist values of the elite class, to whose rule they object only quite selectively. From the demonstrators’ perspective, that elite isn’t patriotic enough in backing America’s crusades for human rights and in looking after the marvelous welfare state we’ve already built. The Tea Party types are understandably upset that their entitlements may be imperiled, if the current administration continues to run up deficits. This is the essence of their anti-government rant. And above all they don’t want more illegals coming into the country who may benefit from the social net and who may be receiving tax-subsidized medical care.

But this, we are assured, has nothing to do with race or culture. In fact the Tea Party claims to be acting on behalf of blacks and legally resident Latinos, in the name of Martin Luther King and all the civil rights saints of the past. It just so happens that almost all these activists are white Christians. Nonetheless, they are also people, as Elizabeth perceptively notices, who would like us to think they’re acting in the name of other ethnic groups, even if those groups don’t much like them. As four “young conservatives” explained to the viewers of the Today show last week, the Right wishes to lower taxes, specifically “to make jobs available to black Americans.” Unfortunately black Americans loathe those reaching out to them, presumably as a gesture of repentance as well as in pursuit of votes.

Those “conservatives” who want a moderate but not excessive welfare state and who act in the name of blacks, Latinos and dead leftist heroes, are fully tuned in to the conservative establishment. According to polls, these folks love FOX-news and avidly read movement conservative publications. Palin, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove, all FOX contributors, are among their favored speakers; and the Tea Party’s likely candidate for president, Sarah Palin, is now surrounded by such predictable neocon advisors as Randy Scheuermann and Bill Kristol. Even with her insipid, ungrammatical phrases about reducing the size of government, Palin already looks like an updated, feminine and feminized version of what the GOP has been running for president for decades, with neocon approval.

Actually one shouldn’t expect anything else from the Tea Party. In the 1980s the conservative movement witnessed a monumental sea change, when the neoconservatives assumed full power and proceeded to kick out dissenters. This development shaped the future of the Right, and its effects are still with us. The neoconservatives not only neutralized any real Right but also managed to infantilize what they took over. An entire generation of serious conservative thinkers were bounced out and replaced by either lackeys or by those who were essentially recycled liberal Democrats. The latter had recoiled from the anti-Zionist stands of the leftwing of the Democratic Party and then were given as a consolation prize carte blanche to swallow up the conservative movement.

Afterwards the establishment Right began to move in the direction of the Left, and it did so while limiting the range of disagreement with its opponents to a few acceptable talking points. The emphasis was on Middle Eastern intervention, disciplining anti-Semitic nations, and spreading “democratic values.” Internally the neocon Herrenklasse had no real interest, except for being able to do favors for corporations that financed them and for the Religious Right, which is fervently Zionist. The notion the neocons bestowed depth on the conservative movement may be the most blatant lie ever told. What they brought was agitprop, of the kind practiced by Soviet bureaucrats, and armies of culturally illiterate adolescents to turn out their party propaganda.

In all fairness, it must be said that the master class tolerated other points of view, for example from Catholic Thomists or Evangelicals, as long as these religiously inspired positions didn’t interfere with what counted for the neocons. Those who called the shots would also occasionally demand from their dependents certain favors, in return for subsidies and publicity, e.g., stressing the compatibility of Christian theology with neocon policies. Freeloading intellectuals could only be tolerated for so long.

This hegemony had two noticeable effects on the current Right, aside from the unchanged role of the neocons as the main power-players. The rightwing activists shown on TV and those they support in elections include badly educated duds, and these are individuals who often don’t sound like anything an historian might recognize as conservative. Their yapping about human rights (supposedly there is now a human right to own a gun) and their outpouring of the politics of guilt, as noted by Elizabeth Wright, are just two of their weird characteristics. About ten years ago I gaped with astonishment when I read a commentary by Jonah Goldberg explaining that the Catholic counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre was really a far leftist. It seems that Maistre questioned the idea of universal human rights und dared to note that human beings were marked by different national and ethnic features. These quirks, according to Goldberg, belong exclusively to the left, like “liberal fascism.” When the intellectual Right can come up with such nonsense and then parley it into a fortune, it is hard to imagine any lower depths of cultural illiteracy to which it could sink.

The “conservative wars” of the 1980s, which involved mostly a mopping up operation, also led to a hard Right that is unrelated to any other American intellectual Right. Those associated with this Right wish to have nothing to do with the failed or decimated Old Right that was smashed decades ago. It has found its home among the thirty-some generation and even more, among younger conservatives who are not part of the DC neocon network. One finds among these militants an almost primitive counterrevolutionary mentality. It is one that has taken form as an impassioned reaction to the Left’s masquerading as the Right, which began with the neoconservatives’ ascendancy to total domination. Although I have my reservations about what I’m describing, it must be seen as a spirited response to a fraud as well as to something that is intellectually and aesthetically vulgar.

Clearly this youthful Right is in no way influenced by Russell Kirk or by other “cultural conservatives” of an earlier generation. Its advocates reject a Right that was co-opted by the neocons and by those who are thought to have failed to resist that fateful takeover. Nor would most of those in the “culturally conservative” camp (Jim Kalb may be the exception here) feel comfortable with the exuberant reactionaries of the rising generation. Many of them sound like neo-pagans because they are convinced that the Western religious tradition has given rise to what they condemn as “the pathology of egalitarianism.” The French New Right, Nietzsche, and Carl Schmitt have all shaped this still inchoate youthful American Right. In their case Europe has cast its shadow on the US, unlike the multicultural Left, which, as I have argued in several books, is our poisonous gift to the Europeans.

The emergence of this anti-egalitarian Right and the infantilization of movement conservatism indicate what can not be undone. The American Right has changed irreversibly because of what occurred during the Reagan years and in the ensuing decade. We shall continue to live with the consequences.

Just when you thought Christine O'Donnell couldn't get any better!

At least Sarah Palin came down on the right side of the Witchcraft Question. 

Christine O’Donnell is surely the biggest train wreck the conservative movement has yet produced.

Put aside, for the moment, her Young Earth Creationism and dictates against masturbation (an odd position, by the way, for an unmarried woman of 41.) Put aside the strange financial irregularities that have cropped up throughout her life (she received a BA from Fairliegh Dickinson this past fall after failing to pay tuition for 17 years.) Forget the alleged back taxes (everyone makes mistakes) and her strange accusations of burglary against her Senate opponent Mike Castle. Christine O’Donnell can best be summed up by the 6.9 million dollar “gender discrimination” lawsuit she filed against The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the venerable conservative think-tank and publishing house where she once worked. It seems that this putative “radical conservative” was planning on getting rich via Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The opposition party getting swept into power on a wave of voter remorse during the first midterm of a new presidential administration is hardly a novel occurrence. It actually happens like clockwork, like a regular counter-trend within the structural shifts of political alignments.

• 1946 -- Truman administration: The Republicans achieve their first majority since the New Deal.
• 1954 -- Eisenhower: Democrats gained 18 seats and recaptured the House.
• 1970 -- Nixon: Two years before Nixon’s famous re-election landslide, the Democrats increase their hold on the House by 12.
• 1982 -- Reagan: With the economy in recession, the Democrats take 26 House seats.
• 1994 -- Clinton: the Republicans re-take the House in what would later be called a “revolution.”

(The 2002 midterm is the exception that proves the rule, as George W. Bush’s Republican Party increased its power in Washington, though only slightly (three seats); it appears that in that year, 9/11 Mania trumped the Midterm Curse.)

No matter how bad it looked for the GOP after Obama’s ascendancy, a rebound in 2010 could have been safely predicted. And history does not suggest that a victory in November will guarantee the Republicans anything in 2012.

When I first read Pat Buchanan's latest column, I thought he was using sarcasm to make a point.  When I read it again, I feared that he was actually being serious. Here are the relevant passages; you decide:   

Bonfire of the Quarans

Creators Syndicate

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Sept. 10, 2010

 

[...]

Everybody frets and wrings their hands. No one acts.

Yet if, as President Obama and his commanding general both say, the torching of hundreds of Qurans could so enrage the Islamic world as to incite terror-bombings against U.S. troops and imperial our war effort, why does not the commander in chief send U.S. marshals to arrest this provocateur and abort his provocation?

For Jones, who sells t-shirts saying "Islam is of the Devil," may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland's elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

And if Petraeus says letting Jones set this bonfire could imperil U.S. troops, Obama should act to stop it. And if he is so paralyzed by uncertainty as to whether he can do anything -- and, as a result, soldiers die -- what would that tell us about their commander in chief?

Would stopping Jones and confiscating the Qurans violate Jones' First Amendment rights?

Perhaps. And perhaps not. But if Eric Holder cannot find a charge against Davis, or an inherent power of a war president to prevent actions imminently damaging to the war effort, Obama should find some Justice Department attorneys who can.

Let the ACLU make the case that interfering with Davis' bonfire violates his First Amendment rights. Let a U.S. court decide whether Obama has the power to take a decision previous wartime presidents would have taken without hesitation.

And if Obama does not have the power to stop actions like this, imperiling our troops, then we should get out of this war.

This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of the Quran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?

What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.

And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a "long war" in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?

Action creates consensus, Mr. President. People follow when a leader leads.

There are a couple of sentences that still make me think that Pat was being sarcastic; these include, "And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a 'long war' in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?" Pat has been forthright about America's inability to ever win the war for global democracy that Bush, Obama, and the neocons have defined.