Category Archives: Old Right

Exorcize The Neocon Within! (You Know You Are A Neocon If…)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Race, Reason, Republicans

Wear your amulets to ward off the neocons; they have us surrounded. Old Right, peace-loving classical liberals—to the extent we still exist—are never safe from accusations of appeasement (not wanting to kill innocents abroad), racism (believing in the right of the individual to associate and dissociate at will—once known as the right of private property), and lack of patriotism (wishing to see Rome’s military and marching camps downsized considerably).

Jack Kerwick provides a wonderfully exhaustive list in case you are in need of exorcism. I particularly appreciate the following more subtle points:

You talk tirelessly of individual responsibility even as you affirm political determinism when it comes to black Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims. All of the ills that plague black Americans you chalk up to the poisonous policies of the Democratic Party while all of the problems of which the Muslim world is ridden you attribute to its lack of “democracy.”
Even though Hispanics voted for Barack Obama by over 70 percent in November, and blacks voted for him by over 90 percent, you insist that the only reason for this is that Republicans have failed to “reach out” to these groups. If only their members knew what the Republican Party could do for them (more political determinism), you imply, they would flock to the GOP, for blacks, and particularly Hispanics, are “natural conservatives.”
You make claims regarding the “natural conservatism” of Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants that you would never think to make about Muslims—even though, by many measures, Muslims are far more “conservative” than Hispanics and white Americans alike.

I would add that neocons, led by their fairly stupid eye candy on the idiot’s lantern—S. E. Cupp (“Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine”) and Dana Perino (“the Heidi Klum of the commentariat”) come to mind, or just mediocre minds like that of Andrea Tarantula—all argue from feminism. Their gender based commentary is that of the left, with a difference: They claim that the GOP is the natural home of women—just as it is the party of black and Hispanic homies.

Glass ceilings, 70 cents to a man’s dollar: These are the stock “arguments” made by skimpily clad (usually single and childless) Republican/neoliberal women on TV.

The Republican Party’s operatives seldom challenge the pay inequality folderol. The Daily Caller’s take on gender reflects the mindset of your typical Republican toots; it enforces the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber perspectives we’ve come to expect from the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively. The correspondent protested Nancy Pelosi’s pay equity protest, staged in Washington, D.C. the other day.
In the typical tit-for-tat, rudderless case the Republicans excel at making, this reporter condemned Pelosi—but not for her bogus theory of pay inequality, but for her hypocrisy. To wit: “…a report in the Washington Free Beacon … revealed that women working for Senate Democrats in 2011 had an average salary of $60,877, whereas male staffers made about $6,500 more. Pelosi chose not to condemn the Democratic senators,’ complained the Daily Caller’s cub (female) reporter.
Implicit in this accusation is that the wage discrepancy reported spoke to the widely accepted conspiracy to suppress women’s wages. Had this reporter been capable of argument, this is what she’d say: “We commend you, Mrs. Pelosi, for not practicing the nonsense you preach and, paying your staffers in accordance with their productivity” (a term you can’t honestly apply to the wealth-consuming government worker, but which we will, for the sake of argument). …

Yes, Republican twits and turncoats have even joined the war on older, white men.

‘Slavery Is The Price I Paid For Civilization’

Intellectualism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

The words in this post’s title were spoken by “famed black writer” Zora Neale Hurston. She was “what today we are inclined to call a ‘paleoconservative’ or ‘paleolibertarian,’” who was “born in the early 1890s in the lower South.”

Thanks to Jack Kerwick’s profile of Zora Neale Hurston, timed for Black History Month, we know something about this brilliant (black) member of the Old Right.

Hurston resented the efforts made by black and white intellectual alike to make of black Americans a new proletariat, a victim class perpetually in need of an all-encompassing national government to ease the “lowdown dirty deal” that “nature has somehow given them.” Hurston was adamant that she was “not tragically colored.” She insisted that “no great sorrow” lies “damned up in my soul, lurking behind my eyes,” and she placed a world of distance between herself and “the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it.”
For what contemporary black commentator Larry Elder refers to as the “victicrats” among us, Hurston had zero use. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she remarked. Much to their chagrin, though, “it fails to register depression with me.” Furthermore, she stated bluntly that “slavery is the price I paid for civilization.”
Our increasingly joyless generation is oblivious to another of Hurston’s insights: A sense of humor can bear most, if not all, painful things. Regarding racial discrimination, she noted that while she “sometimes” feels “discriminated against,” she does not get “angry” about it. Rather, the experience “merely astonishes me,” for how, Hurston asks, “can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

… Pearls before swine.

MORE.

UPDATED: Fighting Words From Left-Libertarian Egalitarians (Andrew Napolitano)

IMMIGRATION, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Military, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism

Judge Andrew Napolitano, who exemplifies left-libertarianism on many issues (not least immigration, civil rights law, etc), believes that freighting men with females in combat is a great step toward the ideal of judging individuals based on their merits and not their group.

To left-libertarians liberty is an abstraction. Apply it “properly,” and it will work everywhere and always. Enforced by the state, this egalitarian abstraction has culminated in the idea that women belong alongside men on the battle field. You know, only the right kind of women—the kind that is as physically able, and will not introduce sexual dynamics to what has been the business of brothers-in-arms since time immemorial.

A crucial difference between left libertarians and the Right kind (the paleolibertarian) is that left-libertarianism is egalitarian; its idea of liberty is propositional–a deracinated idea, unmoored from the reality of history, biology, tradition, hierarchy.

The paleolibertarian, on the other hand, grasps “Liberty’s Civilizational Dimension”; he understands that liberty cannot be reduced to the non-aggression axiom, and that it has a cultural and civilizational dimension.

A paleolibertarian gets that, as an arm of the state, the military is already manacled by doctrinaire mediocrity, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action (fem and other), and every postmodern pox imaginable. So now you want to further tweak it in this direction?

As Pat Buchanan puts it in his latest column (“Obama has hijacked the American Revolution”), “The freedom of all Americans to compete academically, athletically, artistically and economically must inevitably result in an inequality of incomes, wealth and rewards. Why? Because all men and women are by nature and nurture unequal.”

But not if liberals and left-libertarians can help it.

UPDATE (Jan. 28): Jack Kerwick writes on some of the Judge’s other left-libertarian positions:

The Judge eviscerated Arizona Governor Jan Brewer when she signed SB 1070 to help Arizonans deal with the ravages of illegal immigration that it had been suffering for years. And he also has never put up any kind of resistance to amnesty. Instead, Napolitano has remarked that if “our rights come from our Creator—as the Declaration of Independence declares,” then “how can they differ because of where our mothers were when we were born?”
With respect to the administration’s decision to lift the ban on women in combat, Napolitano claimed to be “thrilled.” While on a Fox News panel last week, the Judge noted what he perceived to be the irony involved in the fact that it is a “collectivist president” who has decided “that people should be judged as individuals and not as members of groups [.]” Napolitano lavished praise upon the President for relegating to the dustbin of history “the old military prejudices against…women,” ideas rooted, “not in facts,” but “often…in ignorance, bias and prejudice [.]”
This latest development, Napolitano believes, is a victory for liberty and individualism, for “each person in the military will [now] be judged for combat, leadership and command based on their skills and ability—not some group they are a member of based on the consequence of birth” (Emphasis added).

UPDATE II: Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment (& The Killing Continues)

Founding Fathers, Labor, Old Right, Political Economy, Republicans, Russia, Socialism, South-Africa

Excerpted from “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” now on WND:

“During the final presidential debate, Republican contender Mitt Romney got my hackles up (unnecessarily) with the following invocation of apartheid:

‘I would also make sure that [Iran’s] diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world. The same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.’

Why unnecessarily? Romney is unremarkable among Republicans. Pushing revolutionary radicalism on the Old South Africa was the goal not only in high diplomatic circles, but among most Republicans.

With a few exceptions.

As I document in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ ‘For advocating ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, members of his Republican Party issued a coruscating attack on Ronald Reagan.’

Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans. In 1986, the Soviet Union, which had until the 1980s supported a revolutionary takeover of white-ruled South Africa by its ANC protégés, suddenly changed its tune and denounced the idea. Once again, the US and the USSR were on the same side—that of ‘a negotiated settlement between Pretoria and its opponents.’

Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, President Reagan has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’

South Africa was just one more issue on which Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left. Today they are as eager as the next drug-addled supermodel to press flesh with Saint Nelson Mandela and the functionaries who run the dominant-party state of South Africa. That is, run it into the ground. … ”

The complete column is “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE I (Oct. 27): IT’S ALL ABOUT FACTION. As was noted in “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” “…the ANC … is powerless to stop intimidation. In South Africa, the sacked workers are in the habit of killing scabs who want to work.”

Reports RT:

South African police fired stun grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse striking miners who tried to foil a rally of the nation’s largest union. The miners say the union reached an unfavorable deal with Amplants mine without their consent.
­The Anglo American Platinum mine in Rustenburg has announced an agreement to reinstate 12,000 miners fired earlier this month for staging illegal strikes and failing to appear at a disciplinary hearing. The credit for the deal was taken by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
“[Amplants] agreed to reinstate all the dismissed workers on the provision that they return to work by Tuesday,” the NUM announced Saturday, a day after the breakthrough in talks.
But the Amplants workers said they were neither aware of nor happy with the deal.
“We know nothing about it. We were not consulted, we only heard about it on the radio,” Ampants miner Reuben Lerebolo told AFP.

UPDATE II (Oct. 27): The indefatigable Adriana Stuijt (@AdrianaStuijt) tweets out:

“Oxford-educated SA investment company owner Alexander Theo Otten murdered at #Velddrift http://bit.ly/ThZFld”