Category Archives: Paleoconservatism

Columnist Jack Kerwick Parses Paleolibertarianism

Classical Liberalism, Ilana Mercer, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy

Who is paleolibertarian? Yours truly argues political philosopher Jack Kerwick, in his New American column, “Ilana Mercer and the Paleolibertarian Ideal” :

“It is [first] the conviction … that a world in which men and women are free to order their lives in accordance with their own moral purposes, not those of the governments under which they live, is an ethical ideal worth aspiring toward.”

But that’s not all:

In addition, a paleolibertarian is someone who rejects “the contemporary Western temptation to indulge in abstractions,” and labors tirelessly “to remind us of something that this generation of liberty’s defenders are all too ready to forget: Liberty is as dependent upon historical and cultural contingencies as is any other artifact. And it is just as fragile.”

“The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” concludes Kerwick, is the pursuit of “an ideal of liberty brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.”

The complete column, “Ilana Mercer and the Paleolibertarian Ideal,” is at The New American.

Jack also blogs at Belief.Net.

UPDATE II: The Paleo Problem: Intellectual Dishonesty Or Senility? (A Form Of Logical Fallacy)

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Intellectualism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Reason

Since 2001, I’ve penned a weekly, paleolibertarian column on WND.COM (ranked 1759th globally by Alexa, and 388th in the US).

Before that, the weekly column—expatiating on, as one wag put it, everything from “trade and terrorism to Microsoft [the SEC and antitrust law], Medicare, and Eminem“—was a fixture in Canadian newspapers, starting in 1998.

“The Paleolibertarian Column,” so titled, now features on RT too, the large website of the Russia Today TV network (ranked 947th globally).

The exposure is limited, for sure, but it’s not quite a small “pond life.”

Yet John Derbyshire writes the following in “Hans-Herman [sic] Hoppe–The Last Paleolibertarian” (on VDARE, ranked 128,883th globally, 44,603th locally):

“We haven’t heard much of the paloelibertarians since Lew Rockwell joined La Raza, and even persons knowledgeable about the pond life of dissident conservatism might pause when asked to name a current paleolib.”

Really? Given that there are so few paleolibertarians, I would think that a writer on mathematics and his “knowledgeable” sources ought to be able to count us.

As mentioned, I’ve written hundreds of weekly, paleolibertarian columns since 1998, covering almost every topic under the sun (cataloged here.)

To these hundreds of weekly columns add two books. Hardcore paleolibertarian both. First came “Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture” (2004). Next was “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South” (2011).

Derbyshire’s editor, Peter Brimelow, ameliorates his “omission” somewhat with a hyperlink to a 2008 paragraph giving imprimatur to one of my columns. He writes: “Illana [sic] Mercer … combines libertarianism with an appreciation of the nation and the dangers of immigration in a recent WorldNetDaily column …”

However, Brimelow’s partial qualification fails to mention that all said columns—and not just the one referenced—are the work of a writer, in the words of Prof. Clyde Wilson, “who knows that the market is wonderful, but it is not everything.” (In addition, while some libertarians tend to cover their ears and hum loudly, refusing to address real-life issues or matters of politics and policy, all to preserve their libertarian virginity (or out of a lazy habit of mind), this column applies paleolibertarianism to almost every issue conceivable.)

The omissions aforementioned: Do they amount to a momentary lapse of reason or a pattern of intellectual dishonesty? Who knows? Suffice it to say that VDARE’s title amounts to an assertion that there is but one remaining paleolibertarian, and Derbyshire’s subsumed statements in support of this assertion are as declarative and conclusive.

In any event, VDARE’s practice in this case of ignoring reality does nothing for its credibility (always a touchy subject).

You lose credibility when, in contravention of reality, and from small, atrophying intellectual enclaves—you proclaim on who counts to the paleolibertarian tradition, and by default who doesn’t. As a paleolibertarian who shall not be named once wrote, “Reality is the rational man’s anchor.”

I treasure fond memories from the early 2000s of sitting (and, yes, imbibing) at an Auburn tavern with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the sui generis paleolibertarian discussed by Derbyshire, and with other Mises-Institute paleolibertarian pals. (And I have just received Dr. Hoppe’s latest book from assistant publisher at LFB, Jeff Tucker.)

In the interest of intellectual honesty and full disclosure; and lest I too adopt the habit I am here criticizing—and thus fall into what Hans Hoppe would call a performative contradiction—here is the quorum of paleolibertarians that right away comes to mind, other than this writer:

• WND colleague Vox Day (he is, however, skeptical of free trade per se)
• Facebook Friend Prof. John Hospers (Read his “LIBERTARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST OPEN BORDERS.”)
• Jack Kerwick, a young, new, much-needed arrival—a philosopher, who, I believe, tends more to paleolibertarianism than paleoconservatism in his antipathy for statism.

UPDATE I (9/30):

Other notable paleolibertarians:

• Thomas DiLorenzo. When the left and the “right” dismiss you as a neo-Confederate, and Sons of the South consider you a son of theirs—I’d say you are a thoroughbred palelibertarian. Tom DiLorenzo’s name is synonymous with secession.
• Thomas E. Woods Jr.: Tom is an intellectual machine gun when it comes to States’ Rights, for example. Can there be a more central issue to paleolibertarian sensibilities than the devolution and decentralization of power? The passion for “the Old Republic of property rights, freedom of association, and radical political decentralization,” as Lew Rockwell once wrote, is the soul of the subject; the very thing that animates paleolibertarianism.
• Nebojsa Malic, columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000. Having lost his homeland of Serbia in the Bosnian War, Nebojsa understands liberty’s indispensable framework (to borrow Murray Rothbard’s expression).

UPDATE II (10/3): A FORM OF LOGICAL FALLACY. Does the paleo practice of ignoring reality, highlighted in the current post (“The Paleo Problem: Intellectual Dishonesty Or Senility?”), amount merely to a child covering his ears and humming loudly, in the hope that reality will magically change?

Yes, and worse.

In his Foreword to Nonsense, Robert J. Gula’s handbook of logical fallacies, Hunter Lewis cautions that it is, in “a broader sense” (“broad” being Gula’s genius and sensibility), a logical fallacy to inject information or arguments that are … incomplete, or to omit some important fact, point, or perceptive, … whether intentionally or unintentionally.

UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan And MSNBC’s Pygmy (Like Snakes Crawling Out of Hibernation)

Christianity, Democracy, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa

“Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy” is my latest WND.COM column. Here’s an excerpt:

“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” So decreed MSNBC president Phil Griffin about Patrick J. Buchanan’s grand historical synthesis, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” Mr. Griffin was justifying the banishment from the network of one of the last authentic conservatives in mainstream media.

If I were not already persona non grata within the mainstream, I would be worried.

In an exchange with this writer, Mr. Buchanan had mentioned that his “18,000-word chapter on ethnonationalism and tribalism and the surge of both throughout the Third World—as well as our own declining world—tracks pretty much with what” I had written in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in May of 2011.

Buchanan’s towering text concludes as follows: “We were one nation. We spoke the same language, learned the same history, celebrated the same heroes, observed the same holy days and holidays … were taught the same truths about right and wrong, good and evil, God and country. We were a people then. That America is gone. Many grieve her passing. Many rejoice. But we are not a people anymore.” (Page 424.)

America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.”

South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.

Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their bibles, their guns and their bigotries.

Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa. …

Read the complete column, “Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy,” on WND.COM.

The book discussed, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help this cause.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

UPDATE I (Jan. 13): Prof. Ole Jørgen Anfindsen (his Wiki bio is here) has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on a Norwegian webzine. Prof. Anfindsen blogs at HonestThinking.com. If only I had Norwegian. (Or maybe not .)

UPDATE II: In reply to a reader (snaketrapper) on WND: Had this reader read my book, which references Prof. Hoppe’s “Democracy,” and carries advance praise from him—he might be better informed about this writer’s views and her understanding of the country of her birth, where members of her family, Christian and Jewish, still reside. But, of course, the assorted snakes that have crawled out of hibernation to comment about a book (written by a Jew) that they have in all likelihood not read (or a short column that doesn’t give the right answers to all their questions)—are more interested in asserting uninformed, unfounded, collectivist, irrational biases against the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” than reporting on the issues addressed in the book. I refer this reader to the section in the book titled, “A strategy for Survival.” I will add this: If I have learned anything from writing this book it is this: Anti-Semitism and collectivism are alive and well.

UPDATE II: Diane (Sawyer) in Disneyland (The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism)

Crime, Drug War, Family, Homosexuality, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Military, Paleoconservatism, Race, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Ron Paul

Watching Diane Sawyer struggle to come up with a remotely coherent question to the Republican presidential front-runners in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a reminder of the ABC “news” network’s close ties to the Walt Disney Company. What a gushing imbecile is Sawyer.

Here are some impressions off the top of my head, since, naturally, transcripts are not available from ABC:

Ron Paul was hardly approached on any matter. He ought to have certainly butted in on the proper perspective on marriage, gay or other. Leave it up to the churches and synagogues to decide who to marry. The state has no place solemnizing any marriage, gay or other.

Mitt Romney thinks that state infrastructure projects are different in their economic “stimulative” effects to other state spending. And he says he understands the economy? (He merely understands economics better than Barack.) The funds for both kinds of projects come from the same source: taxes, or deficit spending. I’d like to know how certain state spending generates plenty, and how these smart Republican statists can calibrate these finer points.

Mitt’s Synophobia certainly tracks with that of the atavistic idiot Donald Trump.

Sadly, Sinophobia is sanctioned among American opinion makers. The dislike for China falls within the realm of perfectly respectable economic theory. Accordingly, the Chinese have levered themselves out of poverty not through industry, frugality, and ambition, but by manipulating their money and stealing American intellectual property.

All these asses were apoplectic about Obama’s proposed tokenistic cuts to the sacred military-industrial-complex. By the CATO institute’s assessment, “the Pentagon’s new strategy justifies a minor defense budget cut. The Obama administration wants to grow military spending at a pace slightly less than projected inflation for a decade.”

The US’s military budget is six times that of China. Obama’s proposed “pared-down military” would still leave us with the largest military in the world (and some of the most porous national borders too).

The federalization of marriage and whether Ron Paul would make a third party run: In terms of the debate’s level of abstraction, these topics were all poor Diane could cope with. When matters constitutional were discussed for a little too long, Disney’s Diane protested the flight into abstraction.

This was possibly the worst debate so far.

UPDATE I: CTV ON PAUL’S “LEFTIST RANT.” You won’t find the Paul excerpt below on ABC, which moderated the New Hampshire debate, last night. After all, for ABC, a “leftist rant” is a righteous rant. Canada’s CTV, however, has both excerpted and editorialized about what, in my opinion, was Paul’s misguided, if not unusual, lurch to the Left in calling American cops racists:

Paul also praised civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. when asked about 20-year-old newsletters published under his name containing racist and homophobic themes.
“One of my heroes is Martin Luther King, because he practiced the libertarian policy of peaceful resistance,” Paul said.
He then went on a positively leftist rant about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates.
“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.”

A rightist like myself abjures anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.

Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.

UPDATE II: The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism.

Myron, your list below is hardly an exhaustive list of why the arrest racial differential is what it is. List of priors, perhaps? As for Paul’s contention, last night, that blacks suffer most from wars waged. I was almost sick. More lefty nonsense. Try poor white kids from the South, who are also least likely to get into college even when they whip black applicants and rich whites with their test results.

There is nothing worse than a left liberal man—he’ll sell his mother for the little pat on the head from the lefty establishment. He’ll watch his son near death because of black racism, against which he never warned the poor soft boy, yet he will reach out to his son’s killer.

I am beginning to think that left-liberal men who keep scrutinizing themselves for signs of racism against their black accusers, and accuse others like themselves of the same—actually derive a homo-erotic kick of bowing and scraping to those accusers.

You guys have read my book, and yet you still believe in the myth of white privilege?! There really is no cure for obsequious left-liberalism. I recommend reading The Cannibal again, although that is not punishment, and one should be punished for lapping up left-liberal nonsense.