Category Archives: Political Philosophy

UPDATED: Republicans Desperately Need To … Flip-Flop On Foreign Policy (Entrenched, Un-Rothbardian Meta-Perspective)

Democrats, Elections, Just War, libertarianism, Liberty, Middle East, Military, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans, War

Democrats and Republicans are warring over who won last night’s vice presidential debate. Democrats say Joe Biden; Republicans Paul Ryan.

While I agree with Daniel Pipes’ impressions of Biden’s repulsive demeanor (excerpted below); to the impartial observer, the outcome was clear. This time around, Ryan took the place Barack Obama occupied last week: loser.

Or, rather, relative loser (BHO was an absolute loser).

Ryan, of course, was never as bad a loser as Obama, as he is far more intelligent, studious, and quicker on his feet than the president. But overall—and during most of the bickering—Ryan lost.

Here’s Pipes on “Joe Biden’s smirk”:

Actually it was not just the smirk – it was also the false hilarity, the 82 interruptions of Ryan, the finger pointing, the preening arrogance, and the talking down to the audience – that overshadowed all else in the debate. Not until the last fifteen minutes did Biden talk like a normal human being, and then he became quite effective. Before then, however, his ugly demeanor overwhelmed his words, leaving a powerfully unpleasant impression. In contrast, Ryan spoke earnestly and respectfully, even while getting in a couple of sharp elbow jabs.

Dr. Pipes and I diverge over the nature of the principles mentioned, but Pipes correctly points to the absence of any in the debate, writing that, “With only a few exceptions, both candidates (as was also the case in the presidential debate) stayed aloof from principles, preferring to make the case as to who is the more competent manager. … those endless numbers and the disagreements over small facts meant the discussion verged on the tedious.”

Particularly painful (to longtime observers vested in an Old-Right, non-interventionist foreign policy) was Ryan’s deer-in-the-headlights look under Biden’s relentless barrage of,

“You gonna go to war (Iran)? You’d rather Americans be going in doing the job instead of the [Afghan] trainees? You wanna send our soldiers to the border with Pakistan; let the Afghans step-up. We’re leaving! Let them step-up. The last thing America needs is to get in another ground war in the Middle East …”

I’ll say this much: Poor Paul Ryan knows his Afghan mountain passes.

His boss’s behind Biden saved.

The debate dovetailed with “Desperately Seeking A Flip-Flop On Foreign Policy,” this week’s column, now on RT. It pointed out that “in fact, there is little daylight between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, as far as foreign policy goes.”

UPDATED (Oct 14): ENTRENCHED, UN-ROTHBARDIAN META-PERSPECTIVE. In reply to the Facebook thread, and Myron Pauli’s entrenched meta-perspective.

Myron, you mean you would not wish to hear and see Republicans commit to not launching wars and leaving all foreign bases? What kind of libertarianism is THAT!? Not Murray Rothbard’s. He was a tireless political junky, never one to sit on the fence lazily and feign disinterested piety. Alas, we have this debate every week, Myron. It’s not a debate. You adopt the same meta-perspective on politics; I cut and paste a characterization of your response, and it is this: “… We libertarians must not comment on policy, for it compromises our precious libertarian purity. We must not apply the mind to the issues of the day to enlighten our readers and bring them closer to liberty, for no enlightenment other than the immediate and absolute application and acceptance of the non-aggression axiom can be entertained.

Desperately Seeking A Flip-Flop On Foreign Policy

Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, History, Iran, Middle East, Political Philosophy, Republicans, War

The quote is from the current column, “Desperately Seeking A Flip-Flop On Foreign Policy,” now on WND:

“‘He’s the first Nobel Peace Prize winner with a kill list.’ Excerpted from a PBS documentary, “The Choice 2012,” that is a pithy and apt adage to describe President Barack Obama’s warrior credentials.

Mitt Romney has promised that ‘there would be no daylight between the United States and Israel,’ when in fact there is little of the same between he and Obama, as far as foreign policy goes. If anything, the fact that Obama has resisted Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls to invade Iran plays in the president’s favor.

The sum of rival Romney’s foreign policy is this: Anything Obama can do, I can do deadlier.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Michael McGough points out the same.

Against the wishes of war-weary Americans, Romney has vowed to arm the Syrian rebels. But Obama, discreetly, is already doing in that country what he did “for” Libya: Level it and invite into it an evil even greater than The Dictator he helped oust. …

… From behind familiar parapets, the neoconservatives at the Washington Post are egging Mitt Romney on to heights of depravity which Obama, in their book, has failed to obtain. …

This president is perceived in the Middle East as hawk. Yet the WaPo would like to see him replaced by a vulture militarist.

… Having turned the political flip-flop into an art form, Romney should try to elevate it in the cause of a principle. …”

The complete column, now on WND, is “Desperately Seeking A Flip-Flop On Foreign Policy.” Read it.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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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.