Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Introducing “Juvenal Early,” a new contributor to Barely A Blog. (Myron Pauli, where are you?)

Once upon a time, the epistolary fluff ensconced at The American Conservative was detonated daily by the “pugnacious” Lawrence Auster. When Auster died, a void opened up. The “typically shapeless pieces” coming out of paleoconservative quarters, at once “weird and solipsistic”—Auster’s delicious descriptions—have escaped scrutiny. Going by the pen name “Juvenal Early,” a disillusioned former donor to Chronicles has begun the healing, here on Barely a Blog. Why “healing”? Well, bad writing is plain hurtful. It is healed by a brutal take down.
Enjoy.
ilana

The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem
By Juvenal Early

Annie Holmquist has a by-line at Chronicles Magazine, the long-time stoic voice of paleoconservatism, now flagship of the Charlemagne Institute. I’ve been reading Chronicles for nearly 30 years, have even made donations over that time (so singular and important did I think their work), since back when they were the most important publication backing the first Pat Buchanan Presidential campaign. That was just before the editor (who’d rather remain nameless where Chronicles is concerned these days) began unashamedly labeling his monthly column “Hard Right.” Times have changed. Annie’s there now and whoever holds the purse strings at Charlegmagne clearly wants chipper Annie there, and is banking on the cult of youth over hardened realists; passive and silly over strong, strident voices.

Annie was at it again recently, bless her heart. In an election postmortem on the Chronicles Blog, she wrote:

“I was feeling the oppression of these gray days when a note from a friend landed in my inbox. He made some joke in relation to election voter fraud and suddenly I found myself giggling.”

–“Laughter Will Win Against Totalitarianism.” (11/20/20)

Giggling?

I tried to picture past Chronicles writers and the many subscribers I know giggling over the prospect of Kamala Harris being one senile heartbeat removed from the Oval Office. Oh yeah, that’ll show the bastards! Didn’t someone tell Annie? The Revolution is on the march. Angry old reactionaries like me (who, I’d argue, comprise most of the dwindling Chronicles readership) want red meat, realism. In any case, I wondered who’d be telling us jokes as the “peaceful protesters” approach. Laughing at a knee-capped Antifa is one thing, sure, but this? Typical Annie.

The night before the election, Annie had protested vehemently (vehement for her) about Chronicles’ recent defenestration from Facebook:

“Though we feature articles and concepts that are typically right-of-center, we are not dogmatic and feature a range of ideas and authors. In fact, 60 percent of our audience is Democrat or Independent…”

–“Facebook Throttles Outsider Voices On Election Eve.” (11/2/20)

She might have been describing U.S. News & World Report. Old-time Chronicles people might label themselves a lot of things, e.g., Dissident right, paleocon, cultural warriors, the aforementioned hard right, even Southern Agrarian, but “right of center?” Check the masthead.

Did Rich Lowry take over, when I was sleeping? And what’s with the implied diversity: “range of ideas and authors…60% Democrats or Independent?” Sure, we’re not all registered Republicans, but that’s only because, Trump aside, who’d want to admit he’s a Republican, tepid and pusillanimous as they are. It was like Annie was ceding 90% of the argument to the left. Sure, there are plenty of extremists out there, but not us. Why should Facebook shut us down? We’re safe.

Only the inertia of old age keeps me from cancelling my subscription right now, but I can’t see myself renewing it.

The Dissident Right has a mediocrity problem. It’s an old story. Bosses promote mediocrities who don’t threaten them. Mediocrities entrench. Mediocrity takes over and promotes those who don’t threaten them. It’s a downward spiral. Just a guess. I’m the customer. All I know is I read a lot of bad prose, and then I need to search in increasingly obscure places to find quality writers.

Annie reminds me of a writer at The American Conservative (TAC), Gracy Olmstead. Another soft, passive, inconsequential voice. Conciliatory, or, in a word, boring. Early on, TAC wasn’t bad. Pat Buchanan was a founder. Pat is smart, well-read, genial, but don’t be fooled. Pugnacious Pat won’t give an inch where principle is concerned. He pulls no punches. Pat set the tone for TAC. Hardened, principled writers predominated. Anti-Iraq War conservatives unafraid to be called unpatriotic by the likes of David Frum (“The Frumbag”).

Pat’s gone from TAC now. Enter Gracy.

Contra Pat, Gracy may not even know what a punch is. In an election year piece, she was warning pro-life Christians to unhitch their wagon from the Trump train, lest they finally come a cropper, when the Real Trump emerged. This, in spite of the fact that Trump had recently demonstrated great courage by becoming the first sitting Republican president to address the annual Right to Life March in person. No, you can’t trust him, Gracy warned, stressing Trump’s past peccadilloes. He was a hypocrite. Presaging what was always going to be a brutal, polarizing election, Gracy tut-tutted that we needed to get past all that. She wrote:

“To remain true to one’s conscience…(is) far more important than party allegiance. … This could apply to the unborn, to refugees at the border, or to the victims of our proxy wars… where has the partisan spirit made us blind? “

“How Political Parties Kill Our Commitment to the Good,” (2/18/20)

Not exactly the ally you’d want on the ramparts. Was she saying we should we be bipartisan with the Democrats (truly, the Evil Party now)? “Refugees at the border?” Does this woman take NYT reportage at face value? Well, possibly. She has started writing the occasional piece for the “Old Grey Lady,” joining NYT’s other safe, house conservatives David Brooks and Ross Douthat, those two unbending champions of, oh, the hell with irony at this point.

I noticed that after she’d been at TAC for a while, Gracy seemed to find her niche in a post-Pat section called The New Urbanism, “New Urbs” for short, created in response to the rise of gentrification or at least in the spirit of it: cities are fun, cultural, good for the whole family. Good place for Gracy, who seems like the nurturing type, steeped in the early millennial culture of therapeutic America. A couple of years ago, in an article bemoaning the collapse of our civic institutions, she pulled out all the stops, sparing, it seemed, not a single therapeutic buzzword when positing a fix for “Institutional disillusionment”:

“…hopefully it will… force us to press into the good… communities that nourish our souls. …. foster circles of trust—that can slowly nourish and heal what’s broken.”

-“Our Civic Institutions Are Self-Destructing” 8/28/18

“Communities that nourish our souls?” Sounds like an ad for a great big hot tub full of oatmeal to me. That was two years ago. By now, I hope the New Urbs is recommending bulletproof glass and fire-retardant building materials for the family’s urban fixer-upper. Something BLM-proof.

Do Annie and Gracy represent the new wave of the Right? Soft, passive, mushy, inconsequential bunk! To paraphrase the late Harry Dean Stanton in the 1983 Cult Classic “Repo Man:” Dissident Righter (writer) spends his life getting into confrontations.

Time is short. Barbarians are inside the gate. When it comes to right wing writers, I’ll suggest two rules: Avoid bad, boring (“flaccid”) prose and women who go by diminutives.

Two sob sisters, sure, but don’t bad things come in three’s? I’ve always thought so, thus, I offer TAC blogger Rod Dreher, whose surname looks like “drear” to me. Call him Dreary. You’ve seen him: metrosexual, Mies van der Rohe glasses, soi disant “Crunchy-Con.” He’s got a sweetheart book deal. Dumbs down Dante, astroturfs Solzhenitsyn—seems like his publisher will take any 90,000 connected words pissed out of his laptop and put them between hard covers.

I check Dreary’s blog occasionally. My observations: his favorite peers seem to be Douthat and Brooks; a Never-Trumper, he has a hissy-fit over every POTUS tweet; he still reads the NYT; his racial masochism surpasses even that of Nicholas Kristoff; he thinks being born in a Southern state and saying y’all makes you a real Southerner. I believe the Dissident Right needs real Southerners: Stonewall’s at the barricades. Can’t say what Dreary thinks of the real Stonewall Jackson, but one can guess, given how he once described the greatest Southerner, Robert E. Lee. In an article in defense (sort of) of not tearing down the Lee statue in New Orleans (Dreary is from Louisiana), he wrote:

“I think it a blessing that the Confederacy lost the war. Lee fought for a bad cause. But Lee, for all his sins, was a complex figure, one worthy of honor — again, despite his sins…I would have left the Lee statue alone…”

–The Day They Took Old Dixie Down, 5/19/17

In other words, “I don’t really care if they tear it down or not.” Would he care to elaborate on why Lee’s cause was bad or about all those sins Lee committed? I doubt Dreary would argue the point at a meeting of the Baton Rouge Sons of Confederate Veterans. Better to keep virtue-signaling from the safety of his blog at those antiquated racists. (He deletes unfriendly comments from his blog.)

Maybe the fault lies with TAC, who, since Pat left, hired both Dreary and Gracy, plus a bevy of other lukewarm scribblers, too numerous to mention. TAC, born in opposition to Dubya’s Iraq War, was once at the vanguard of the Dissident Right. Nowadays, they’re outpacing the Overton Window in leftward movement. I say we vote them off the island. But even then, what’s the matter with Chronicles? Whoever said all right-wing organizations eventually move left, knew what he was talking about.

Thus, Annie, Gracy, & Dreary, sob sisters all. Basking in the comfort of their sinecures and book deals. You can’t blame them for taking the money. The fault isn’t with the author; the fault lies with the people who published it, marketed it, and bought it. That’s America; we get what we pay for, or maybe we pay for what they give us. I forget which.

Image courtesy txking

The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed: A Guide To Understanding the Last 4 Years And the Next

America, Conservatism, Donald Trump, Elections, Ilana Mercer, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans

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If you want to understand the last four years, read this book. If, like millions of Americans you feel demoralized by spineless Republican leaders prematurely calling for Trump’s concession even in the midst of a questionable election outcome, then read this book. And perhaps most importantly, if you want a jumpstart on 2021 and knowing why tens of millions of Americans are never going back to quietly accepting the pre-Orange Man political status quo, then read this book.—G. Figurelli

By G. Figurelli

I have a confession to make: I often discover things that end up becoming of interest to me years after they were already of interest among the main public. I’m sometimes late to the party. Unlike my more trendy friends, I didn’t begin watching “Lost” until Season 3 was already out. Ditto with “24,” even accidentally starting Season 3 thinking I was watching Season 1. “Downton Abbey”? Same. I discovered the beauty of craft beer just one year ago, a decade or two after everyone else. Van Halen saved me from disco, but not until 1982, a full four years after the release of their eponymous album that forever changed the world of rock music.

Apparently, it is in that very spirit of personal tardiness that I bought Ilana Mercer’s book The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed. I knew not at the time of my purchase that the book was published before Trump had become president and largely covers events that occurred while Bad Orange Man was yet contending for the Republican nomination. I didn’t notice until after receiving the book and checking the table of contents that I was reading a book that was filled with then-current event essays, that is, from 2015 and 2016. Again, I’m late to the party. But I am oh so glad I finally showed up.

I wouldn’t implore you today to listen to Eddie van Halen’s signature guitar solo Eruption so that you could be trendy and know what is the latest in music. I would instead tell you that unless you listen, you will not and cannot understand the revolution that took place in the 1980s to rock music and particularly guitar. Now I’m not ready yet to put Ilana Mercer the brilliant author in the same rarefied air as Eddie van Halen the genius guitarist, but I hope you see my point. I would not beseech you to buy this 2016 book nearly five years after its publication because the newsworthy items discussed in its pages are current; they’re not. I would say instead: “Buy it because without this book your understanding of the last four years, and perhaps more importantly, the next four years, will suffer if you do not.” In a world where it can seem pointless to bother reading last week’s news commentary, it would seem to doubly absurd to suggest reading commentary from 2015-2016. I flirted with just that despairing thought when the book arrived and I soon discovered my intact and unfortunate trend of being untrendy. Thankfully, however, I was undeterred by another iteration of untimeliness on my part, and it took almost no time to realize I was reading a truly evergreen analysis of the phenomenon of President Donald Trump.

The author’s style and substance is so engaging that I overcame my ordinarily beleaguered attention span (thanks social media!) and consumed its 235 pages in one afternoon. Here is my high level takeaway: The Trump Revolution (1) is a brilliant and cogent reminder of why the American people elected Donald Trump in the first place; (2) contains a treasure-trove of insight into the reasons the Republican establishment is now willing to let Trump fall on his sword, even in the midst of credible claims of a compromised election; and (3) provides a plausible framework for knowing how and why (presumably) incoming president Biden who, when not spraining his ankles playing with his dogs or leading the effort to mobilize trunalimunumaprzure, will face spirited opposition from tens of millions of Trumpian Americans who are plain fed up with the Managerial Duopoly and its existential threat to what remains of American liberty. There is so much more, but those three observations alone should make you buy and read this book.

But in case you’re not yet convinced (or still reading because you really enjoy amateur book reviews), I’ll briefly elaborate. The author begins with an opening statement in which she asserts her affinity for the process of Trump more so than any broad kinship with the policies of Trump. The Donald, who refreshingly refuses to identify “America” with “the U.S. Government,” might just save us the horror of a Hillary Clinton presidency (he did!). Even better than that (pause for a moment to strain the imagination), he is exactly the kind of “utterly different political animal” to expose and perhaps even partially dismantle the “Federal Frankenstein.” It’s not her unalloyed love of Trump’s personality and policy positions that gives Mercer this hope, but rather his love of the American people and his willingness, a la the signers of the Declaration, to “[pledge] to the American people a chunk of his life, his fortune, and sacred honor.” It’s Trump’s process of “creative destruction” taking dead aim at the media-political elite that provides hope for what a Trump presidency could mean for liberty. Looking back, I don’t think Trump has disappointed the author in that regard.

The book’s opening statement is followed by twenty-nine hard-hitting, easy-to-read, brilliantly insightful essays written between June 2015 and April 2016. In other words, those gloriously entertaining ten months of Trump taking a veritable wrecking ball to the RNC and the media, Fox included. The reader will no doubt be edified by the author’s friendly interactions with paleo conservative and libertarian thinkers such as Paul Gottfried, Thomas Woods, Clyde Wilson, Murray Rothbard and others (the author herself is a paleo-libertarian). The reader can also anticipate Mercer’s witty and endearing sarcasm that targets media-political establishment types like Megyn Kelly, John McCain, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Bill Krystol, and more. Did I mention Megyn Kelly? If relishing a wordsmith like Mercer skillfully employing the pen to reduce the “Me-Myself-And-I Megyn Production” (Chapter 16) to something more closely resembling a mere mortal is something you think you could enjoy, then stop now and hit the Buy it Now button. This timeless commentary on the self-important elite is worth the wait for next day delivery.

Again, it’s undoubtedly the case that the twenty-nine chapters at the heart of the book are hard-hitting, easy-reading, and brilliantly insightful. But looking back from our current vantage point of late 2020, with the sun now likely setting on what is at least the most entertaining presidency in American history (#covfefe), I might wish to add “nearly-prophetic” to my list of commendations. Mercer had hoped that Trump’s pragmatic, provincial populism would prove a thorn in the flesh of the Beltway Establishment and a boon to individual liberty, or at least a temporary stay of execution for liberty. However, this hope yet remains mere hope, for liberty has not securely won the day. Thus I say “nearly” prophetic because we possibly stand, as many have warned, at the frightening crossroads of tyranny, civil war, or dissolution of the union. Perhaps the union and liberty can be preserved together – perhaps. But if nothing else, Donald Trump has exposed the imminent political threat to that heretofore relative happy marriage – the deep state and its shadowy allies.

In 2016, as Mercer explains, Donald Trump beat out the engorged field of Republican candidates because he “[smashed] an enmeshed political spoils system to bits: the media complex, the political and party complex, the conservative poseur complex.” After a generation of Bush, McCain, Romney, Ryan, it’s little wonder that Donald Trump the billionaire outsider, with his ironic appeal to middle class heartland America, attracted the fed-up Republican voter longing for something other than Conservative Inc., that semi-disguised machine of progressivism with its only redeeming quality being its tendency to lurch left at a more modest pace than its more hasty Jacobin colleagues. But Donald Trump’s appeal is not just to traditional Republicans, many of whom were, have been, and remain the loudest voices of opposition to his person and program. Donald Trump fills stadiums all over flyover country because, unlike many of his testosterone challenged fellow GOPers, he gets America, that is he gets Americans (at least those who want Frankenstein off our backs). And make no mistake (despite the media’s preferred narrative): the Trump Revolution is not just white, male, and Republican. Donald Trump’s populist nationalism is for those of any color, creed, or assumed political affiliation who simply get the fact that “America” first does equal “government” first.

Discovering Van Halen in 1982 put me four years behind many, but also ahead of so many others who took longer, or worse, never figured it out. Like me, you may be buying this book four years late. But start now, and you’ll be ahead of others who take still longer, and immeasurably beyond those who never quite figure it out. If you want to understand the last four years, read this book. If, like millions of Americans you feel demoralized by spineless Republican leaders prematurely calling for Trump’s concession even in the midst of a questionable election outcome, then read this book. And perhaps most importantly, if you want a jumpstart on 2021 and knowing why tens of millions of Americans are never going back to quietly accepting the pre-Orange Man political status quo, then read this book. Those three reasons should be enough; read it for yourself and you’ll surely discover even more. Better late than never to the party.”

*Amazon Review by G.Figurelli