Carl Schmitt accepted a professorship at the University of Berlin in 1928, having left his previous position at the University of Bonn. At this point, he was still only a law professor and legal scholar, and while highly regarded in his fields of endeavor, he was not an actual participant in the affairs of state. In 1929, Schmitt became personally acquainted with an official in the finance ministry named Johannes Popitz, and with General Kurt von Schleicher, an advisor to President Paul von Hindenburg.

Schleicher shared Schmitt’s concerns that the lack of a stable government would lead to civil war or seizure of power by the Nazis or communists. These fears accelerated after the economic catastrophe of 1929 demonstrated once again the ineptness of Germany’s parliamentary system. Schleicher devised a plan for a presidential government comprised of a chancellor and cabinet ministers that combined with the power of the army and the provisions of Article 48 would be able to essentially bypass the incompetent parliament and more effectively address Germany’s severe economic distress and prevent civil disorder or overthrow of the republic by extremists.

Heinrich Bruning of the Catholic Center Party was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg. The Reichstag subsequently rejected Bruning’s proposed economic reforms so Bruning set about to implement them as an emergency measure under Article 48. The Reichstag then exercised its own powers under Article 48 and rescinded Bruning’s decrees, and Bruning then dissolved the parliament on the grounds that the Reichstag had been unable to form a majority government. Such was the prerogative of the executive under the Weimar constitution.

When the Labour Party lost the May 2010 election, I did not exactly share their sadness. This was not because I saw the incoming government as representing fundamental change; rather, this was because the Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already proven so fantastically destructive that it was difficult to imagine anything topping five more years of Labour inferno.

The electoral repulsion of Gordon Brown triggered a leadership contest within this wretched party, an event about which Derek Turner has already written very amusingly for Taki’s Magazine. Absent evidence of complete disarray, crisis, depression, despair, tiffs, quarrels, clashes, faction, division, schism, disunity, schizophrenia, paranoia, catatonia, paralysis, and radical soul-searching, a Labour leadership election is a potent soporific. Who wants to listen to a freak show of fossilized Marxists pontificating about fairness and equality? Life is too short.

But when the electorate holds back from crushing them into oblivion, when the government ends up being a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, the prospect of a Labour comeback cannot be dismissed: their next leader might well end up being our future Prime Minister.

We've had some back and forths on Glenn Beck, but stories like this give him a soft spot in my heart.

WASHINGTON — A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.

Shirley Sherrod, appointed last July to be the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have.

Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."

The video was posted Monday on the website of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a counterattack on the NAACP, which passed a resolution last week accusing the "tea party" movement of having "racist elements."

But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first black man to occupy the White House practices racism in reverse.

The sensitivity to Sherrod's comments, particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers, was evidenced by the dispatch with which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her to resign.

Both Vilsack and an official at the Obama White House denied Sherrod's assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. The decision, they insisted, was Vilsack's alone.

Vilsack said early today that the USDA will reconsider the ousting of Sherrod and will "conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts."

In Sherrod's account, her firing had been driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle — and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."

Sherrod added, "The administration was not interested in hearing the truth."

What this story shows is that the Obama Administration is absolutely scared to death of anything that can be perceived as anti-white racism.  It's a battle they don't want to fight anywhere or under any circumstances.  And they're also afraid of Glenn Beck.  If he forces the White House to spend an extra two hours each day watching his show and worrying about its image, giving it less time to think of new "civil rights violators" to go after or work on amnesty, he's doing an invaluable service to this country.

Today, after Glenn Beck told the administration that her comments put her right into the Democratic mainstream, the USDA is considering bringing Sherrod back. 

Richard Hoste seems to differ from my view that the Right (used, of course, in a very broad sense) could in no way benefit from misrepresenting MLK as a small-government conservative. Richard believes that if we continue to tell blacks the noble lie, which the neoconservatives and Glenn Beck have worked so hard to spread, we may be able to neutralize all the race-hustling black leaders.

There are at least three problems with this argument that come readily to mind. One, the lie is so transparent that until now only movement conservatives have bought it; and in this case we are dealing with people who are so incredibly gullible or so thoroughly bribed that they’ll say anything they’re told to say by those who move their strings. I myself have never met a movement conservative or GOP hack who actually thought that King was a “conservative theologian” or an exponent of Thomistic natural law. Rather I’ve encountered dolts who read NR or Weekly Standard and who have told me “we should say this because that’s what we have to say.” Of course the same humanoids have proclaimed Joe Lieberman to be a conservative “because he’s good on the war.”

Two, nobody, including blacks, could possibly believe the crass lie that Richard wishes to see propagated. There is overwhelming evidence, plus media treatment of King’s life and influence, that would keep anybody with even room temperature intelligence (which may exclude most movement conservatives) from buying the proffered snake oil. Watching Beck go nuts (that is more nuts than he usually seems) because a black celebrity described King as a socialist, I had the definite feeling of being on Mars. Does anyone on this planet with even a grade school education not know that King was a left-leaning socialist, who favored special rights for his race? One can quote until the cows come home that banal line about judging people by “the content of their character.” But this does not change the rest of King’s politics, which are an open book, even for blacks.

Three, the cult of King is intertwined with a political purpose, from which it cannot be dislodged. It is a replacement theology for a now mostly moribund Christianity, which incorporates certain older religious themes but places them in a multicultural context. King is the suffering Redeemer, whose birthday comes a few weeks after the traditional date for celebrating the Christian Redeemer; and his death was expiatory, like that of Christ, although, unlike Christ’s kingdom, that of the black socialist savior is situated in this world. King’s mission began the process of cleansing white America of its original sin of racism. But this redemption did not work all at once when he died. Further sacrifice is demanded of the sinner in the form of the demands that the fallen Redeemer laid upon us, that is, more socialism, more set-asides, more rites of atonement, etc. To try to change this powerful symbolism by reconstructing King into something he clearly was not, perhaps a precursor of Glenn Beck or David Horowitz, is a fool’s errand. King was exactly what he was. That he has become the replacement Deity in a post-Christian public theology may strike some of us as laughable. But that elevation is connected to what he said and did. The cult of MLK reflects a certain reality, while Richard’s counter-narrative builds on nothing more than a neocon lie.

When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

The Federal Government is taking steps to make sure Americans vote sufficiently along racial lines.

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. — Arthur Furano voted early – five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas...

Vote coordinator Martha Lopez said that if turnout is higher than in recent years, when it hovered around 25 percent, the election would be a success – regardless of whether a Hispanic was elected.

"I think we'll make it," she said. "I'm happy to report the people seem very interested."

But Randolph McLaughlin, who represented a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the goal was not merely to encourage more Hispanics to vote but "to create a system whereby the Hispanic community would be able to nominate and elect a candidate of their choice."

That could be a non-Hispanic, he acknowledged, and until exit polling is done, "it won't be known for sure whether the winners were Hispanic-preferred."

Is there nothing too petty for Holder’s Justice Department?  A little town of 30,000 needs to have its election rigged so Hispanics win?

This is a perfect example of why conservatives who approve of mass immigration from the third world aren’t thinking hard enough.  No non-racial issue could ever prompt the feds to look into the voting practices of a small village.  And on no non-racial issue would conservatives be such push overs.  

That means that if the Hispanic population is growing the only way for this not to lead to bigger government is for conservatives to stop being scared of the “racist” charge.  Since at this point this seems like the most unlikely thing in the world we will have see the state usurp more and more power.  

Those able to think for ourselves read stories like this noticing these patterns and assume that others must be coming to the same conclusions.  But your average Joe Sickpack or even movement conservatism isn't very good at putting seemingly unrelated stories about school achievement gaps, voting rights legislation, healthcare disparities, etc. together.  He needs to have things spelled out for him and right now nobody's opposing the multicultural state from a libertarian or classical liberal position, much less a racialist one.  Not Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Michelle Malkin. Not Tea Party radicals who wear wigs and carry assault rifles.  Not the Ron Paul movement (notice Rand Paul denying that his position on private discrimination is anything but hypothetical as if the state is race nuteral today).  The 99% of conservative leaning America that doesn't read Alternative Right, VDare or Steve Sailer has no idea this is going on. 

For these reasons, I don't believe that the Left has come close to maximizing the benefits it could potentially derive from racial politics.

While ads like Rick Barber’s are encouraging, it’s fascinating how people will hint at secession and revolution but not even mention in their litany of complaints against the state the Diversity Jacobinism Washington imposes on us. I predict that liberals will come to rely on racial egalitarianism more and more as an excuse for a powerful, centralized state.  Raise taxes?  White America erupts.  Add a new entitlement program?  They start showing up with guns at rallies telling you that they’re going to take their country back.  Require private businesses to discriminate against whites and all but set up a quota system for election results?  Listen to the crickets chirping! If you find one area of your enemy's defense line completely undefended-or better yet, the enemy refuses to notice when you attack him there-and resistance everywhere else is fanatical the decision of where to send the bulk of your army is a very easy one.

Richard introduced Alternative Right readers the other day to new South Carolina Senate candidate Alvin Greene.  He's been making the interview rounds after refusing his party's request to step aside.  The plant theory is looking more and more certain.

I love the media spin on this.  Blacks will elect an illiterate member of the tribe without knowing anything about him.  Therefore, how dare South Carolina Republicans take advantage of this group that votes on nothing but race! They dare to get blacks to run for office!  For shame. 

Some Sarah Palin-endorsed Republican women did well last night, revealing once again the importance of the Tea Parties. But one shouldn't underestimate the power of Southern black people voting for the Democrat listed alphabetically at the top of the ballot. Exhibit A -- Alvin Greene: 

An unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website shocked South Carolina on Tuesday night by winning the Democratic Senate primary to oppose Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Alvin Greene, who currently lives in his family's home, defeated Vic Rawl, a former judge and state legislator who had a $186,000 campaign warchest and had already planned his next fundraising event. Despite the odds, Greene, who has been unemployed for the past nine months, said that he wasn't surprised by his victory. "I wasn’t surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much. I knew I was on top of my campaign, and just stayed on top of everything, I just—I wasn't surprised that much, just a little. I knew that I worked hard and did," Greene said in an interview.

Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. "It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed," said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.

"It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much," he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren't relevant. "I'm not concentrating on how I was elected—it's history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what's going on, in America."

The oddity of Greene’s candidacy has already prompted speculation from local media about whether he might be a Republican plant. But Greene denies that Republicans or anyone else had approached him about running. "No, no—no one approached me. This is my decision," he said. A 13-year military veteran, he says he had originally gotten the idea in 2008 when he was serving in Korea. "I just saw the country was in bad shape two years ago…the country was declining," he says. "I wanted to make sure we continue to go up on the right track." But when asked whether there was a specific person or circumstance that precipitated his decision to jump into politics, Greene simply replied: "nothing in particular...it's just, uh, nothing in particular." South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated that Greene won because his name appeared first on the ballot, and voters unfamiliar with both candidates chose alphabetically.

Greene has yet to speak to any Democratic officials, either. After filing to run, his campaign went dark. According to this report, he didn’t show up to the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in April and didn't file any of the required paperwork for candidates with the state or Federal Election Commission. When I spoke to him, the state’s Democrats had yet to contact him after his victory was announced.

Greene insists that he's planning to work with state and national officials to ramp up his campaign and raise money "as soon as I can." And he plans on putting his unemployment at the center of his campaign. "I’m currently one of the many unemployed in the state and this country. South Carolina has more unemployed now than at any other time," Greene says. "My campaign slogan: Let's get South Carolina back to work." He adds that he would like to see "one Korea under a democracy."

With a mention by the New York Times's favorite conservative, Ross Douthat, one might surmise that "paleoconservatism" is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Even Jeb Bush has picked up on the term, as, according to my sources, he recently joked at a New York State Republican convention, in between pronouncing pleasantries en español,

I don't know who the paleocons are, but I think they are the ones with pitchforks who want to take us back to an agrarian economy.

He's right about the pitchforks.

And though I've never suffered from technophobia, I'd much prefer an "agrarian economy" to the post-industrial, Latino service-economy wasteland that Jeb thinks is a sign of America's advancement.

Paleoconservatism -- a hastily assembled, rear-guard action against the neocon ascendancy in the conservative movement -- reached its zenith in the '92 meeting of the John Randolph Club, at which Tom Fleming, Murray Rothbard, and Sam Francis gave command performances. Murray famously announced that the insurgent movement wouldn't just "turn back the clock" -- but break it! With Pat Buchanan, the paleocons could even boast, quite correctly, that they had a presidential candidate of its own.

I've always avoided associating myself with the term, in part for ideological reasons, in part because the movement's time has clearly come and passed, and in part because those now associated with it have gone off in different directions. This said, the conservative wars of the '90s was an important moment in American political history -- and paleoconservatism was (and is) infinitely more interesting and culturally literate than what's on offer at NR, The Weekly Standard, FrumForum, and the rest.

Douthat seems to associate paleoconservatism with the political bloggings of Daniel Larison, which is unfortunate, since Larison is currently staking out a position of being "thoughtful" ... which, as far as I can tell, means publishing long, barely penetrable blog posts dedicated to hair-splitting with various Beltway wonks. Larison also brags of his lack of a coherent ideology, which means that he won't reveal to us what he actually thinks about, say, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which launched the recent "paleocon" dispute. One must surmise, however, that he's very, very "thoughtful" about the issue.

"Paleoconservatism" might be turning into a convenient straw man for the Establishment -- "Eww, look at those reactionary, racist paleos who don't like MLK and want to turn Americans into traditionalist farmers! But this also means that people like Douthat, Frum, and Jeb recognize it as a threat. Being a "paleocon" might, in its current manifestation, begin to represent something like "thinking dangerous, impossible thoughts." And for that, this new paleo-cussword is a hopeful development. Indeed, some of us might want to consider adopting it.

In two articles I could’ve predicted were coming this week Frum Forum worries that Rand Paul will turn minorities away from the Republican Party while Paul Gottfried denounces Republicans for worrying about such a possibility and kissing up to Martin Luther King.

This got me to wondering if pandering to nonwhites on a large scale ever works.  I checked the state by state exit polls of 2008 Senate races to see whether any Republicans were able to capture the all elusive black vote.  Using Senate races is better than presidential election data, where it’s the same person in each state.  Having a wide variety of characters helps us determine whether there’s any candidate or election strategy out there which can cross the racial divide.  Here are the results, going from most to least popular GOP candidates among African-Americans.

Tennessee-Alexander 26%
Kentucky- McConnell 13%
South Carolina-Graham 13% 
New Jersey-Zimmer 13%
Iowa-Reed 10% 
Alabama-Sessions 8%
Texas-Cornyn 8%
Virginia-Gilmore 7%
Mississippi-Cochran 6%
Michigan- Hoogendyk 5%
Georgia-Chambliss 4%
Delaware-O’Donnell 3%
Illinois-Sauerberg 2%
Louisiana-Kennedy 2%
North Carolina-Dole 1%

The first and most obvious question we have to ask is, what did Lamar Alexander do?  His popularity is based on his winning over black women, who were nine percent of the electorate in his state and gave him 30% support.  Black males were only two percent of the Tennessee voting public, and a little algebra tells us that they probably voted around eight percent for Alexander, though CNN apparently didn’t think the sample was big enough to give us any numbers for them.

The New York Times noted Alexander’s success about a week after the 2008 election, telling us that the Senator “had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions.”  He wasn’t shy in letting the voters know it either, as this ad demonstrates.

One local blogger called the message “After You Vote For Barack Obama, Vote Lamar.”  Alexander also secured the endorsement of the black mayor of Memphis.  It’s worth pointing out too that the Republican was a two term governor and incumbent, giving him all the name recognition one could hope for.

So if a Republican can somehow get liberal black Democrats to vouch for him, appoint a lot of blacks to high places, be the most well known state politician and run against a weak opponent he can sometimes get a massive quarter of the African-American vote.  The question is whether they can do that without demoralizing significant parts of the much larger white electorate.

Update: A commentator writes "May I point out that 'Lamar Alexander' sounds very plausibly like a typical black name?"

I hadn't thought of this.  Imagine the typical Memphis voter hearing all these black voices on the radio praising "our boy Lamar" and all he's done for the community.  It's certainly plausible that many of them thought that he might be "one of us," and not just politically.  I must confess that this certainly works against my name recognition theory, but polls tell us that more than half of Americans can't name their Senators.  I suspect governors are better known, but Alexander was in that position a long time ago.