Category Archives: Paleoconservatism

Occasionally Neoconservatives Annoy The Left A Little

Conservatism, Education, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

Jason Riley, of the War Street Journal Editorial Report, was joined by the rest of crew, on Fox News, to swank about being invited and disinvited to speak across the nation’s left-liberal campuses. The rest, Bret Stephens, Mary Kissel, Mary O’Grady, all expressed disinvitation envy.

Following Allan Bloom’s  impressive Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), neoconservatives have been quite good at addressing multicultural political correctness in the modern academy, the replacement of the Western canon with bogus disciplines—political constructs, really—devoted to relativism, anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-elitism studies. They were good at pointing out that “current works promoting multiculturalism written by women and minorities had replaced the classics of Western civilization written by the DWEMs, Dead White European Males,” to quote Phyllis Schlafly, in “Advice To College Students: Don’t Major in English.”

On freedom of speech, neocon establishment circuit speakers limp along as well (although you won’t hear them introduce the deciding variable: private property. Where? On whose property do you wish to speak?)

For the rest, neocons seldom  challenge students on matters racial (except to blame Democrats and left-liberals for the plight of blacks), on foreign policy (some liberals actually like American military interventionism as much as the neocons), on Islam (OK, except for a few bad Abduls) or on immigration (a net positive).

Jason Riley should try never having been invited in the first place to speak to those campus “conservatives.”

I guess he could argue the marginalized Old Right is just not as smart as he and his neocon buddies. Paul Gottfried’s learned scholarship on American conservatism exposes the neocons as not very smart at all.

Donald Trump has certainly run rings around them.

Political Philosophy Is Not Like Sexual Orientation

Ilana Mercer, Labor, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy

Here’s my one reply to comments at The Unz Review about “The Curious Case of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian”:

Political philosophy is not like sexual orientation: You don’t just come out to the world, call yourself a thinker, and expect to be get embraced. You shouldn’t get away with that, although some try and succeed.

You do the bloody hard work, day-in, day-out. You write, you think; you get panned or praised; and you get up and do it again the next day.

You can’t just come out every day and proclaim, ‘I’m a perfect paleolibertarian, I believe everything Murray Rothbard said. Look at me, ain’t I neat, unlike Mercer,” not having written a coherent systematic sentence in your life.

And by systematic I mean, don’t just parrot the greats! The work involves, yes, applying the political philosophy as you see it to the political reality, doing it in fresh, new ways, without fear or favor.

You can’t sit on the fence, lazily, proclaiming your purity; forever suspended between what “is” and what “ought to be,” and revel in your immaculate conception (while throwing stones at me, as so many in this community have done).

In a word, you can’t be lazy, smug; an intellectual nullity that tears the hard-working down (love split infinitives).

As to The Mercer Image posted at The Unz Review: The editor organizes the page and the images on it; not the writer/myself. The Unz Review is a tightly edited website.

Why would anyone familiar with the ways of the press, print or pixels, imagine I posted a picture of myself at The Unz Review. Ridiculous!

The point of the essay is simple. My work over 2 decades (voluminous) speaks for itself. Good or bad.

It is systematic; it is paleolibertarian. Any scholar of substance would locate it squarely in the paleolibertarian tradition. Such a scholar might also distinguish a salient thing that sets this thought apart from some of those surveyed in the volume under discussion. As I wrote in defense of John Derb:

I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain—could it be his weakness?—for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.

As for Israel: Why not ask the Ron Paul 2007 campaign why it commissioned a brief think piece from me and adhered to its tenets pretty well throughout the campaign—until someone likely told Paul that Mercer was un-kosher, and until someone instructed the campaign to quit calling on Mercer?

“Unshackling Israel,” mentioned in “Is Ron Paul Good For Israel?,” was commissioned by the Paul camp and repeated on the Paul campaign trail to good effect.

[SNIP]

The article under discussion: “The Curious Case of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian.”

UPDATED: People Tend To Look Dumb When They Manipulate/Deny Reality

Ethics, libertarianism, Objectivism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

“Intelligent Dasein” at Unz Review on “The Curious Case of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian”:

Intelligent Dasein says:
• Website
April 17, 2016 at 1:00 am GMT • 200 Words

Not only that, but I’ve just checked Wikipedia’s page on paleolibertarianism, and Ilana Mercer’s name doesn’t appear there once, as of this writing. On the other hand, her own Wikipedia page is quite detailed and prominently identifies her as a paleolibertarian thinker. Curious.

I would think that anyone interested in this subject would be anxious to mention Ms. Mercer, …

I’m a paleoconservative myself, a Catholic Traditionalist, and therefore I don’t eschew Throne-and-Altar statism, as I gather paleolibertarians probably would. However, in the few months I’ve been reading Ms. Mercer, I’ve been duly impressed with both her arguments and writing style. An unforgivable omission indeed.

And yes, about and against statism: Myself “I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain—could it be his weakness?—for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.”

UPDATE (4/17): My comment, posted in reply, under Comments at The Unz Review:

Political philosophy is not like sexual orientation: You don’t just come out to the world, call yourself a thinker, and expect to be get embraced. You shouldn’t get away with that, although some try.

You do the bloody hard work, day-in, day-out. You write, you think; you get pelted or praised; and you get up and do it again the next day.

You can’t just come out every day and proclaim, ‘I’m a perfect paleolibertarian, I believe everything Rothbard said. Look at me, ain’t I neat, unlike Mercer,” not having written a coherent systematic sentence in your life.

And by systematic I mean, don’t just parrot the greats! The work involves, yes, applying philosophy as you see it to the political reality, doing it in fresh, new ways.

You can’t sit on the fence, lazily, proclaiming your purity; forever suspended between what “is” and what “out to be,” and revel in your immaculate conception (while throwing stones at me, as so many in this community have done).

In a word, you can’t be lazy, smug; an intellectual nullity that tears the hard-working down (love split infinitives).

As to The Mercer Image: The editor organizes the page and the images on it; not the writer/myself.

Why would anyone familiar with the ways of the press, print or pixels, imagine I posted a picture of myself at Unz Review. Ridiculous!

The point of the essay is simple. My work over 2 decades (voluminous) speaks for itself. Good or bad.

It is systematic; it is paleolibertarian. Any scholar of substance would locate it squarely in the paleolibertarian tradition. Such a scholar might also distinguish a salient thing that sets this thought apart from some of those surveyed in the volume under discussion. As I wrote in defense of John Derb:

“I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain—could it be his weakness?—for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.”

As for Israel: Why not ask the Ron Paul 2007 campaign why it commissioned a think piece from me and adhered to its tenets pretty well throughout the campaign—until someone likely told Paul Mercer was unkosher, and until someone instructed the campaign to quit calling on Mercer?

“Unshackling Israel,” mentioned in “Is Ron Paul Good For Israel?,” was commissioned by the Paul camp and repeated on the Paul campaign trail to good effect.

The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Ethics, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

“The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The reader should know that I cringe as I write this first-person account.

Why the disclaimer?

Opinion differs about how often to use the first person pronoun in various genres of writing. Certainly its overuse in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is count the number of times he deploys the Imperial “I” on the page.

Abuse “I” when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story. The second is my excuse here.

Righting two wrongs I must.

Clichés about victors writing history aside—it has become apparent to me how easy it is to write individuals out of their place in history, however meager that place and past are.

Since history is another term for reality chronicled, it is ineluctably tied to truth. It’s crucial to tell history like it is.

The stage has been set. Onto it steps a young academic, George Hawley, who’s taken on the first assiduous investigation of an exceedingly small set of individuals: “Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism.”

There is, however, lacuna in Dr. Hawley’s work. By his own admission, Hawley has failed to mention one veteran writer who falls squarely in the even-rarer paleolibertarian subset.

She has been writing voluminously in that tradition, week-in, week-out, for close on two decades (since 1999), and is the author of two unmistakably paleolibertarian books, one of which is “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” (Oh Buddha! The Imperial “I” has now given way to third-person writing. Mea culpa, gentle reader.)

Undergirding these, and the forthcoming “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” is paleolibertarianism.

Plainly put, I (ouch) believe that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. That’s me. That’s my work.

Another academic, author and Townhall columnist Jack Kerwick, contends the omission of one ILANA Mercer from the first academic’s book covering the dissident Right is a glaring one.

” … There are three reasons why it is imperative that Mercer be included in any discussion of paleolibertarianism,” avers Kerwick: …

… Read the rest. “The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian” is now on WND.