Category Archives: Conservatism

Conservatism Or Celebrity Driven Cretinism?

Celebrity, Conservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

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Were American conservatism alive and well in media and on the idiot’s lantern (the teli), Dr. Paul Gottfried (and not the next sexy girl or “girly-boy” with chipmunk voices and talking points) would be its voice:

“… What clearly differentiated the conservative movement of bygone years from what has taken its place was a willingness to express sharp internal disagreement and to defend conflicting positions with passion and high learning. This is not to say that the conservative movement tolerated all dissent. It featured one dogma that no member of the inner circle was allowed to dispute: anti-Communism and as a corollary, a vigorous struggle against the Soviets as the leading Communist adversary. But otherwise there was remarkably open debate, and those who participated in it received no conceivable earthly reward, such as lucrative book contracts, invitations to appear on Fox as an all-star or a column in the Washington Post. Being conservative back then was about standing one’s ground not only against the Left but also against other self-described conservatives; and the warrior took positions entirely out of principle.”

“Today conservative celebrities often seem obsessively concerned about positioning themselves in a way that allows them to advance their careers. This came to mind while I was looking at Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West, a sprawling collection of mainstream political views for which the author picked the title of a very contentious book written by James Burnham, a giant of the post-World War II American Right. I doubt that there’s even a single page in Burnham’s book, first published in 1964, which would not enrage today’s thought police. Burnham spoke critically about human rights rhetoric and argued that the Civil Rights Revolution, which had only begun then, would lead to more, not less, racial discord. As I now read over Burnham’s views of an earlier era, it seems that I’m looking at something that arrived from a different planet.”

“Goldberg and Burnham grew up in very different cultures, which may help explain why Goldberg’s opinions often seem to have come out of left field. He defends government-enforced affirmative action for blacks, even while counterfactually depicting himself as a libertarian. Moreover, Goldberg “thinks” but never shows that accelerated immigration from Third World countries is helping to raise the living standards of American workers. But let me resist the impulse to be overly critical. Goldberg is trying to make it in a conservative movement that is entirely different from the one that Burnham helped shape.”

“In the 1960s there was no conservative media or massive donor base that rewarded conservative journalists with TV appearances and raised them to national celebrity. William F. Buckley was an exception to this rule, but I don’t remember any other self-proclaimed conservative whom one got to see very often on TV. The present conservative movement requires its stars to accept certain consensus positions that all nice people are supposed to hold, e.g., never speaking out against gay marriage or “moderate” feminism. Although the same stars hope to market themselves as “conservatives,” they also feel obliged to engage in virtue-signaling, for example, by attacking white racism and praising the civil rights revolution almost ritualistically. On November 27, Laura Ingraham spent a large part of her evening program on Fox gushing with joy over the forthcoming wedding of Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle. When a black guest asked Laura if she noticed that Meghan was part black, she feigned offense that someone would even bring up that subject. Fox-Insider tried to make it appear that Laura bested her guest by exclaiming “Must we put our racial hangups on the happy couple?” Needless to say, the guest had figured out the real motive for Laura’s weird outburst of joy. …”

… READ THE REST. The complete column, “A Conservatism of Principle” by Paul Gottfried, is on American Thinker.

UPDATE III (12/13/018): A New Kind Of Bi-Partisan Non-thinking

Celebrity, Conservatism, Democrats, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Wikipedia calls Candace Owens an “American conservative commentator, and activist.”

I call Samantha Bee a smarmy, left-liberal—one among many—who purports to do comedy.

Yet the aforementioned Owens calls Bee a “liberal thinker.” (I believe that such a pronouncement was made on Martha MacCallum’s “The Story,” or on another of those interchangeable programs.)

The above is a new kind of non-thinking.

So is the self-explanatory Samantha-Bee contretemps below:

Bee came under fire for calling Ivanka Trump a cunt. “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child,” Bee said as the photo flashed onto the screen, “but let me just say, one mother to another: Do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt! He listens to you!”

The moment faced harsh criticism, both from the White House, which called her statement “vile and vicious,” and from some on the left, who argued that calling women “cunts” reduces them to their genitalia and is a slur that’s meant to teach women that their bodies are disgusting and shameful. (Bee also received praise from others on the left, who argued that cunt is just a word and that the real issue is Donald Trump’s immigration practices.) In the wake of the backlash, Bee tweeted an apology to both Ivanka Trump and her viewers, saying, “I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.”

UPDATE I (6/13):

ON THE OTHER SIDE, THERE IS Chris Cuomo, part of CNN’s thought-police enforcement. Here he goes after Republican Corey Stewart, who’s for the working man, by… calling Stewart a white supremacist and a racist. Is that’s all the filthy libs have?

UPDATE II (12/11/018):

MORE Little League cat fight.  My term for the bickering between two “giants” of conservative thought: Candace and Tomi, aforementioned.

 

UPDATE III (12/13/018): Speechless at the hubris:

Vulgarity And Vanity Come To The Ancient St. George Chapel, At Windsor Castle

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Britain, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

… IN DECEMBER 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated as King of England, basically over his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, something deeply frowned on and disapproved of back then—yet scarcely forty-five years later the heir apparent to the English throne, Prince Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer, a disastrous matrimony that would assist immeasurably in discrediting the House of Windsor, which had already begun a decline many years earlier.

But like most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,” getting “with it,” so to speak, with all current fads, breaking with tradition, basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance in the survival of the nation. And if that means inviting a whole slew of remarkably disreputable Hollywood types, not to mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, into the great halls and chapels that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria Regina, then so be it.

And then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry, a few years back, was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina, and distinguished himself for his left-wing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and prohibitions in the Pauline message!

And he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as admiring Fox commentator/airhead Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American element” to the wedding. [Where, pray tell, does Fox get all these brainless blondes from?]

For thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yeah, cheater King was an expert on conjugal love!), civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.

The Windors, for the most part, set stony-faced, enveloped by the tide of nonsense and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said that the ceremony
“combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh ‘American’ approach.” But what it actually did was point out sharply the truth … about monarchy and monarchs in the modern world:

“They are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.”

Our world is perishing for the lack of heroes, for the lack of those Don Juans of Austria, for those new and courageous Stonewall Jacksons and King John Sobieskis who would stand manfully against the onrushing tide of Modernity and decay in our civilization. The awe and reverence, the understanding that the past is never really “past,” that it is always potentially within us, and that it can inform our steps and continue to inspire us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious legacy, an invaluable gift from our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it, and the blackness of despair and death awaits us.

When the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as the Windsors have done, only Evil—the “rough beast”—smiles.

… READ THE REST. The complete commentary is “That Royal Wedding, Reverend Michael Curry, and the End of England.”

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

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Whodunit? Who “Meddled” With Our American Democracy? (Part 2)

America, Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, Government, Russia, States' Rights

THE NEW COLUMN is “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” With Our American Democracy?” (Part 2). The unabridged version is on WND.com. A slightly abridged version is on Townhall.com:

Not a day goes by when the liberal media don’t telegraph to the world that a “Trumpocracy” is destroying American democracy. Conspicuous by its absence is a pesky fact: Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy.

To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic.

One of the ways in which the republic was destroyed was through the slow sundering of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. The 10th was meant to guarantee constitutional devolution of power.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The de facto demise of the 10th has resulted in “constitutional” consolidation.

Fair enough, but is that enough? A perceptive Townhall.com reader was having none of it.

In response to “Whodunit? Who ‘Meddled’ With Our American Democracy” (Part 1), the reader upbraided this writer:

“Anyone who quotes the 10th Amendment, but not the 14th Amendment that supplanted it cannot be taken seriously.”

In other words, to advance the erosion of the 10th in explaining who did our republic in, without mentioning the 14th: this was an omission on the writer’s part.

The reader is admirably correct about Incorporation-Doctrine centralization.

Not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to concede that the 14th Amendment and the attendant Incorporation Doctrine have obliterated the Constitution’s federal scheme, as expressed in the once-impregnable 10th Amendment.

What does this mean?

You know the drill but are always surprised anew by it. Voters pass a law under which a plurality wishes to live in a locality. Along comes a U.S. district judge and voids the law, citing a violation of the 14th’s Equal Protection Clause.

For example: Voters elect to prohibit local government from sanctioning gay marriage. A U.S. district judge voids voter-approved law for violating the 14th’s Equal Protection Clause.

These periodical contretemps around gay marriage, or the legal duty of private property owners to cater these events, are perfectly proper judicial activism. It flows from the 14th Amendment.

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of a judiciary. Yet not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to cop to this constitutional fait accompli.

The gist of it: Jeffersonian constitutional thought is no longer in the Constitution; its revival unlikely. ….

Into the Cannibal's Pot
Order columnist Ilana Mercer’s polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

 

… READ THE REST:  THE NEW COLUMN is “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” With Our American Democracy?” (Part 2). The unabridged version is on WND.com. A slightly abridged version is on Townhall.com.