Category Archives: Conservatism

‘Hillbilly Elegy’: Why Liberals & Faux Conservatives Converge About This Book

Conservatism, Donald Trump, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Race

“Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” is a culturally compliant account of poor, white America. Its thesis approaches not at all the one advanced (well in advance) in a chapter of “The Trump Revolution”: “Trump’s Invisible Poor Army’s Waiting On The Ropes.”

The politically proper utterances of its eloquent and smart author illustrate that you can write a national bestseller to the resounding approval of left-liberals, libertarians, neoconservatives and other excuse-for-conservatives provided your thesis allows a convergence over agreeable story lines.

This storytelling must sport major lacunae—mainly about the racial and ethnic dispossession of poor whites—to pass muster with all these factions. (Today, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” could be heard relating to the MSNBC gendarme of PC how poor whites still had some white privilege to fall back on, when compared to poor blacks. Into The Cannibal’s Pot demonstrates that it is the EXACT opposite.)

When encountering the perennial nonsense of a self-styled conservative at The American Conservative, I’m reminded of how I miss the ornery but astute Lawrence Auster. The American Conservative was his self-imposed beat; he used to eviscerate its non-thinkers. Oh, I already said that in “Why I Miss Lawrence Auster, RIP,” where I noted how,

Brilliantly did the late Larry Auster dissect the demise of Russel Kirk’s conservatism at The American Conservative (TAC) magazine. Division of labor being part of a natural intellectual order that arises, Auster would have likely left it to me to point out the pimped intellectual principles this AC “writer” evinces in her meandering Mandela entry, in which “Madiba” is contrasted, in a manner, with George Washington. (Compare that AC crap with “Mandela Mum About Systematic Murder Of Whites.” You can’t!)
Auster was at his rhetorical best when deconstructing the “typically shapeless pieces”—or “weird and solipsistic” was another of his wonderful coinages—that this unthinking “conservative” crowd disgorged. About the American Conservative’s pipsqueak writers, Mr. Auster wrote with the studied contempt they deserve.

Here’s an Auster excerpt, which I hope will stay online. Writes the late Larry:

The founding editor of The American Conservative (known here as The Paleostinian Conservative), Scott McConnell, who has twice endorsed Obama for president yet continues to call himself a conservative, has written a typically weird and solipsistic article about me in which, among other things, he cluelessly calls me a European-style pagan fascist like Julius Evola and dismisses my work as a specimen of “radical right-wing disillusion with post-millennial America.” Because McConnell is a thoroughly emotion-driven, negative, and reactive personality, he sees me in the same light. He is incapable of grasping that I am someone who argues for standards based on truth and the good, and evaluates society according to those standards. That is not “disillusionment.” That is moral and intellectual judgment.
Also, Mencius Moldbug has a typically shapeless piece on me in which he pays me extravagant compliments which have precisely zero content. I defy anyone to say what Moldbug’s 2,600 word article means.
I’d like to write full responses to the two, but lack the energy right now. My purpose would not be to pursue the subject of myself, but to illustrate a “conservative” mindset and writing style that have become disturbingly dominant in certain quarters, as people of approximately conservative disposition have become so alienated from contemporary reality that they have given up on making sense of the world themselves, or on seeking a better and truer way. All they desire is to express their sense of superiority to the existing order of things, and they do this by spinning out whatever nonsense they feel like. And if they spin out the nonsense with enough verbal energy and pseudo-conceptual flair, they will find a devoted readership who feel that they share the writer’s superiority. It is very decadent.

Anyhow, the thesis of “Hillbilly Elegy” is sufficiently opaque and politically correct to  skirt the Big Lies and The real Truth.

In case anyone is listening to me, I would recommend a scholarly alternative, not so much for its perspective, but for the richness of the data: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” by Charles Murray.

 

Conservatives Blame White Man’s Welfare State For Black Men’s Hatred

Conservatism, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Welfare

Blacks are rampaging through Milwaukee, chanting their white-hot hatred for whites. But on Fox News, racial hatred of whites is quickly averted as a topic. Instead, Mr. Sean Hannity and the outwardly impressive Sheriff David Clarke resort to the same foolishness always: For the hatred and ongoing violence against whites, documented daily in excruciating detail, year in; year out, by Colin Flaherty—they blame the white man’s Welfare State, going back to Lyndon Johnson. Dumb on so many levels.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.


Hollywood Hates On Whites:

The Omen: Establishmentarian Paul Ryan Beats Rebel Paul Nehlen

Conservatism, Constitution, Donald Trump, Republicans

By caving to GOP pressure and supporting the Other Guy Who Never Built a Thing, Paul Ryan, Donald Trump helped return Ryan to the House.

The opponent, Paul Nehlen, 47 had “hard-line views on immigration. He espoused enthusiasm for Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and said a discussion on deporting some Muslims was in order.” (WaPo)

For Ryan’s critics, the speaker’s victory represented an opportunity lost. Though they have long acknowledged that Nehlen’s insurgency was more quixotic than competitive, they had hoped that he would have come closer than he did Tuesday, believing that a strong finish would perhaps show Republicans nationally that the party’s Trump-aligned bloc was gaining. (WaPo)

The key words in Ryan’s acceptance blather: We want unity (totalitarians don’t brook differences). We’ll restore the lost constitution.

I put the lie to that bit of fiction in the introduction to “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” titled “Welcome to the Post Constitutional Jungle.”

The Constitution is a dead letter. There is no bringing it back from the dead, buried as it is under rooms full of legislation, statute and legal precedent. The Constitution is the box Republicans check when they want to con their constituents.

More of why the Constitution is dead in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed.”

Iran: Conservatives Don’t Get That Obama Lies And Steals For His LEGACY

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Iran

Providing material support for a state sponsor of terrorism, incentivizing hostage-taking, aiding and abetting Hezbollah: These are some of the angles conservatives have come up with in mustering outrage over the revelation that, as WSJ has reported, “The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.”

I support negotiating for the lives of compatriots imperiled by the US government’s policies. (See “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS,” written for antiwar.com, in 2004.)

Obama, however, likely had to bribe the Iranians to release the American prisoners because they harbor no particular good will toward him. He signed the Iran nuclear deal without considering American interests. However, for his legacy to stand, as the president who marked “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” (Obama as quoted in my new book), he has to portray the Iranians as having been swayed by his diplomacy. For his legacy, Obama has to paint a picture of himself a president who managed to restore comity between America and her Arab adversaries. To that end, Obama has lied and stolen to pacify the Iranians behind the scenes and to make them appear genial toward the US.

The same thinking went into Hillary’s refusal to beef up security in Benghazi. This from a 2012 column, “Standing Armies Commandeered by Cowards,” on the subject:

In the fullness of time, I believe, it will transpire that the woman who cracks the whip at Foggy Bottom had decided to leave the U.S. embassy in Libya undefended.The open community center Hillary was running there was meant to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a success. (Recall, Libya was “a war of the womb,” a product of the romantic minds of three women who fantasized about an Arab awakening. This estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids began, as in Greek mythology, with the Gorgon sisters. Medusa’s posse included Samantha Power, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They helped Hillary devise the casus belli for the war.)