Category Archives: Classical Liberalism

UPDATE II: National Review Eunuchs (‘Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”)

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media, Race, Reason

The following is from “National Review Eunuchs,” my latest column:

In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:

“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”

Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine. …

… National Review used to be conservatism’s flagship publication. These days its ideology reflects “Modern Republicanism’s” “dime store New Deal” proclivities (Barry Goldwater’s characterization). Launching oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”: that’s the extent of NR’s fight to free minds and markets.

… Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.

A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”

That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?

Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from other similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome. The volume of bad writers safely ensconced in high places, and their voluminous, vapid output strengthened this conviction:

More so than enforcing conformity—ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity. …

… Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.

The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers. (Perhaps NR will recruit Jedediah [sic] Bila in place of Derb?) …

Read the complete column, “National Review Eunuchs.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE I: “Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”

About “those androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome,” mentioned in the column on John Derbyshire’s firing. Here is a typical example. His name is Alexander Nazaryan. he writes for the New York Daily News:

“Please, Lord, tell me that this is a joke. Please, please tell me that a human being did not actually think these things and, worse yet, think to write them down.”

Reading Meghan McCain has just about inoculated me to the above form of writing (for it is not a style in any recognizable way).

It conjures the scene in Mike Judge’s genius of a satire “Idiocracy.” To be precise, the dialogue Joe Bauer, the protagonist, conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character, who discovers Bauer doesn’t have the identifying, state tattoo (listen to it HERE):

Doctor: “And if you could just go ahead and, like, put your tattoo in that shit.”
Joe: “That’s weird. This thing has the same misprint as that magazine. What are the odds of–”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo? Tattoo? Why don’t you have this?”
Joe: “Oh, god!”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo?”
Joe: “Oh, my god.”
Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

[SNIP]

You want to slap this Nazaryan man in the face. “Settle down. Stop it man. Quit the hysterical hyperbole. Stop the overwrought outrage. Calm down and write a simple sentence countering the Derb column.”

UPDATE II: To the ladies, Jeniffer and Scherie: Saddling the state solely for the dysfunction of a segment of the population is a form of determinism. According to this formula, free will and individual agency get short shrift. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians, who are also determinist, saddle the state. “The State made me do it” is how such social determinism can be summed-up.

By the way, according to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, white, middle America is in big trouble too. It isn’t as criminal as black America, but it is shot through with illegitimacy, laziness, unemployment, family and marital disintegration, etc.

The Incredible Dr. Kerwick, The Cannibal & ‘Intellectual Conservative’

Classical Liberalism, Ilana Mercer, Intelligence, Law, Political Philosophy, Race, Reason, South-Africa

After a while, when interviewers and reviewers would request an interview or ask me about “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America,” I’d reply with little enthusiasm:

“What in particular about The Cannibal would you like to cover?”

The replies would invariably be these: “Oh, how relevant it is to the US.” “Diversity, multiculturalism, affirmative action, immigration, quality of life before and after “freedom”; this or the other population index.”

“Since you must have read my book,” I’d retort—initially, in hope—“how about discussing the often frayed thread of natural vs. political rights that runs throughout? Let’s look at the origins of Apartheid? Did you know these were firmly rooted in existential, largely non-racial, considerations? I really like the section about the ‘Colonialism Canard’ in the context of Chapter 5, the ‘Root-Causes Racket.’ Also a favorite of mine is the examination of case studies in current South African jurisprudence as an example of the “indigenization” of what was once a Western system of law. Oh, and my absolute best: the moral questions floated in the sections, “Intra-Racial Reparation” and “Recompense or Reconquista.”

Needless to say, the focus of the reviewer or interviewer was always so foreign to how I understood my book—that I lost interest in speaking about it, or concluded that my points had not been picked up due in some measure to my failures.

Enter Jack Kerwick, Ph.D. (Who never even requested a review copy of The Cannibal.) The fact that Kerwick levitates in level of abstraction and understanding above most might not be a good thing for his career as a popular writer, but I’m enjoying it.

Dr. Kerwick’s “Reflections on Ilana Mercer’s ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa'” appeared in Intellectual Conservative. Once again, Kerwick exposes the tortured tension vis-a-vis natural rights that I experienced and, apparently, Burke did too. As does he commend the absence of biological reductionism, a textual strength that drew derision from racialist quarters (I reject reductionism, in most spheres.)

The neglect with which this book has been treated is as sore as it is tragic. Cannibal is a woefully underappreciated book. A not inconsiderable number of otherwise astute reviewers seemed to have missed its main significance. This work is not primarily about “diversity,” “democracy,” “egalitarianism,” or “collectivism.” And it is certainly not about any conflicts within the Jewish community (Mercer is herself a Jew who remarks upon the role that South African Jews, including her father, played as critics of apartheid, as well as the role that Israel assumed as a stalwart ally of the Old South Africa). Cannibal isn’t even a book about inter-racial conflict.

….Neither, however, does Mercer countenance any reductionist biological accounts of black-white differences … Such an approach is problematic for more than one reason, but especially because it would, ultimately, amount to but one more “root-cause.” …

…Mercer’s thought is distended between universal natural rights and particular cultural traditions, it is true. Yet as is the case with so many works of genius, this tension is as much one of Cannibal’s strengths as it is a weakness, for from it there springs an energy that is notable for its sense of urgency.

… Like Burke before her, Mercer, it is clear, is on a mission. Burke was consumed with the conflagration of the French Revolution that he believed threatened to tear European civilization asunder. Far from obscuring his ethical vision, I believe that much of the passion that informed it stemmed from a conflict in Burke’s consciousness between a recognition of both the universal demands of morality and the partiality that we owe to “the little platoons”—our local attachments—from which we derive our individual identities. This, though, is precisely the same war that rages within Mercer, and as it aided Burke in his contest with the evil of the French radicals, so too does it aid Mercer in her contest with the wickedness of the African National Congress and its supporters.

The complete review, “Reflections on Ilana Mercer’s ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,'” is on Rachel Alexander’s Intellectual Conservative.

UPDATED: ‘Three Blind (NEOCONSERVATIVE) Mice’

Classical Liberalism, John McCain, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

“They have been called everything from the three amigos, the three blind mice and the ‘axis of error’,” RT editorializes. They are “Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham,” who “are just about as close as anyone in the US Senate. They travel together, make joint media appearances and seem to sing the same song in their appeals to the American people. That song often revolves around the need for more war.”

And they’re gunning for Iran and Syria.

The origin of the words to the Three blind mice rhyme are based in English history. The ‘three blind mice’ were three noblemen who adhered to the Protestant faith who were convicted of plotting against the Queen – she did not have them dismembered and blinded as inferred in Three blind mice – but she did have them burnt at the stake!(Here)

The moniker doesn’t work for McMussolini and the other two for many reasons, one of which is that the modern-day ignoble trio will come to no harm for their treason.

UPDATE (March the Eighth): How opportune. In his New American column, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D., has a fabulous primer on the strongmen of neoconservative thinking. Pay attention, in particular, to Jack’s meticulous habit of mind in tracing the sin of abstraction in the thinking examined, whereby “reason and morality are dislodged from the flow of history.”

Kerwick concludes:

“… For neoconservatives, reason consists of universal, abstract moral principles in accordance with which societies everywhere must be organized. For conservatives, in glaring contrast, reason and morality are embodied in culturally and historically-specific traditions.”

READ “An Honest Assessment of Neoconservatism.”

UPDATED: Philosopher Jack Kerwick On the Compelling & Conflicted Cannibal (At Last, An Analytical Review Of My Book)

America, Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Reason, South-Africa

This dazzling review of my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is a credit more to the mind (and moral clarity) of the reviewer than the book under review. In his New-American review, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D. (more about him below), zeroes in with unusual perspicacity on the palpable tensions in the book, without losing sight of the effort as a whole. All in all, he thinks I cleared the hurdle:

Ilana Mercer’s, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, is an unusual book. Yet it is unusual in the best sense of the word.

At once autobiographical and political; philosophical, historical, and practical; controversial and commonsensical, Cannibal succeeds in weaving into a seamless whole a number of distinct modes of thought. This is no mean feat. In fact, its author richly deserves to be congratulated for scoring an achievement of the highest order, for in the hands of less adept thinkers, this ensemble of voices would have fast degenerated into a cacophony. By the grace of Mercer’s pen, in stark contrast, it is transformed into a symphony. …

… Burke had famously said that the only thing that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing. Though Mercer is not a man, sadly, she is in much greater supply of that “manly virtue” that Burke prized than are many — even most — male writers today. Burke unabashedly identified the wickedness of the French Revolutionaries for what it was. Similarly, Mercer courageously, indignantly, exposes the evil that is the African National Congress and its collaborators. In fact, her book may perhaps have been more aptly entitled, Reflections on the Revolution in South Africa. …

…It is tragic that Ilana Mercer was all but compelled to leave the country that for much of her life was her home. Yet South Africa’s loss is America’s gain. As her work makes obvious for all with eyes to see, the richness of Mercer’s intellect is as impressive as the soundness of her character.

THE COMPLETE REVIEW is at The New American.

“Jack Kerwick graduated with a BA in religious studies and philosophy from Wingate University in Wingate, NC in 1998. He received his MA in philosophy from Baylor University in Waco, Tx., the following year, and in 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University. Kerwick specializes in ethics and political philosophy. His doctoral dissertation, ‘Toward a Conservative Liberalism,’ was a defense of the classical conservative tradition, a tradition of thought usually and widely perceived to have been fathered by Edmund Burke. Kerwick drew from Burke for inspiration, but also from David Hume and, perhaps most importantly, the twentieth century British philosopher Michael Oakeshott.” (Source: About.com)

Jack’s blogs is At the Intersection of Faith and Culture at Beliefnet.

Discovering Jack’s work (and friendship) has been a blessing. Unfortunately, Gulliver is surrounded by
pygmies.

UPDATE (March 2): AT LAST, AN ANALYTICAL REVIEW. After reading Dr. Kerwick’s review of Into the Cannibal’s Pot, which has since been published at “American Daily Herald: veritas, libertas, pax et prosperitas, as well as at “The Moral Liberal,” a new fan of Jack’s writing wrote this:

“Upon looking at some of your book’s other reviews, I couldn’t help but think that while some of what has been written is true, the forest was missed for the trees, so to speak.”

Indeed, most reviews of the book are contents-driven, strictly descriptive reviews of what is, flaws and all, essentially an analytical text. Odd that.

As Peter Brimelow noted in his exquisitely sensitive Foreword to “Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture,” “… Yet, somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on such personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas.”