UPDATED (8/23/2017): ‘Lincoln’s Marxists’

Barack Obama, Communism, Cultural Marxism, Education, Government, History, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, States' Rights

TAWE (The Ass With Ears, Obama) likes to repeat—in fact he said it yesterday again—a quote he attributes to “Republican Abraham Lincoln”: “The government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves and no more.”

Left-liberals like TAWE should be reaffirmed in their love of Lincoln.

A new book, Lincoln’s Marxists, reviewed in Chronicles Magazine, provides insight into the radical (Marxist) revolutionaries, or Radical Republicans, with whom Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself. Writes Clyde Wilson:

“The early German settlers of America were peaceful and pious farmers, escaping militarism and religious strife. Not so the immigrants of the 1850s, who were militarized advocates of violent social revolution, prototypes of later European communists and fascists. Revolutionaries and socialists on both side of the Atlantic enthusiastically embraced Lincoln’s war as a continuation of the French Revolution and of their own failed revolution of 1848.

This is documented by [Al] Benson and [Walter Donald] Kennedy in full chapter and verse. The Forty-Eighters furnished at least four Union generals, several of whom were intimates of Karl Marx [emphasis added] and Friedrich Engels, and a host of colonels and Republican party activists.

The later-coming Germans may have made possible Lincoln’s election in 1860 by tipping the demographic balance in previously Democratic states.
Marx, who knew even less about America than he did about everything else, described the conflict with the kind of grand abstractions that appeal to people of that ilk, even celebrating the rich corporation lawyer Lincoln as a hero of the working class.

The Forty-Eighters did not dominate Lincoln’s party, but they were a very strong element within it. Nor did they necessarily have a complete picture, but recognized that the Union cause was a step in their Marxist direction—an unappealable centralization of power combined with the violent destruction of reactionary elements.

Since that time, their ideas have triumphed completely. Marx’s description of the war of 1861-65 as a defensive effort against violent reactionaries engaged in a wicked rebellion to spread slavery is now the mainstream p.c. interpretation, in the schools and media, of America’s central event.” (Chronicles, April 2012, p. 27)

UPDATE (8/23): Lovely Lincoln.

UPDATE II: National Review Eunuchs (‘Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”)

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media, Race, Reason

The following is from “National Review Eunuchs,” my latest column:

In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:

“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”

Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine. …

… National Review used to be conservatism’s flagship publication. These days its ideology reflects “Modern Republicanism’s” “dime store New Deal” proclivities (Barry Goldwater’s characterization). Launching oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”: that’s the extent of NR’s fight to free minds and markets.

… Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.

A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”

That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?

Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from other similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome. The volume of bad writers safely ensconced in high places, and their voluminous, vapid output strengthened this conviction:

More so than enforcing conformity—ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity. …

… Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.

The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers. (Perhaps NR will recruit Jedediah [sic] Bila in place of Derb?) …

Read the complete column, “National Review Eunuchs.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE I: “Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”

About “those androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome,” mentioned in the column on John Derbyshire’s firing. Here is a typical example. His name is Alexander Nazaryan. he writes for the New York Daily News:

“Please, Lord, tell me that this is a joke. Please, please tell me that a human being did not actually think these things and, worse yet, think to write them down.”

Reading Meghan McCain has just about inoculated me to the above form of writing (for it is not a style in any recognizable way).

It conjures the scene in Mike Judge’s genius of a satire “Idiocracy.” To be precise, the dialogue Joe Bauer, the protagonist, conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character, who discovers Bauer doesn’t have the identifying, state tattoo (listen to it HERE):

Doctor: “And if you could just go ahead and, like, put your tattoo in that shit.”
Joe: “That’s weird. This thing has the same misprint as that magazine. What are the odds of–”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo? Tattoo? Why don’t you have this?”
Joe: “Oh, god!”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo?”
Joe: “Oh, my god.”
Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

[SNIP]

You want to slap this Nazaryan man in the face. “Settle down. Stop it man. Quit the hysterical hyperbole. Stop the overwrought outrage. Calm down and write a simple sentence countering the Derb column.”

UPDATE II: To the ladies, Jeniffer and Scherie: Saddling the state solely for the dysfunction of a segment of the population is a form of determinism. According to this formula, free will and individual agency get short shrift. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians, who are also determinist, saddle the state. “The State made me do it” is how such social determinism can be summed-up.

By the way, according to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, white, middle America is in big trouble too. It isn’t as criminal as black America, but it is shot through with illegitimacy, laziness, unemployment, family and marital disintegration, etc.

Smacked By A Liberal Girl

Barack Obama, Constitution, Federalism, Healthcare, Justice, Law, The Courts

The Ass had his formidable ears smacked about by Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor, who is not exactly a conservative, “effectively rebutted President Obama’s warning that a ruling against Obamacare would be ‘judicial activism.'” (Washington Examiner)

Recall, President Obama had used the term “judicial activism” “when he described a possible ruling against Obamacare as “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” (Washington Examiner)

O’Connor derided such reasoning today, without mentioning the president. “It seemed to me that it was primarily a lack of understanding by many people about the role of the judicial branch [that motivates charges of judicial activism],” O’Connor said today. “I really thought that we needed to enhance the education of young people about how our government works.”

Since federalism is a chimera—it no longer exists in any meaningful way—the level of decision-making is immaterial to me. In this context, what matters is the decision to strike down ObamaCare. Who cares which branch of the hydra-headed monster makes it, so long as it is made, and, once made, it holds.

Till Debt Do the US Apart

Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy

In “One Nation Under Inflation,” I noted that “America’s debt-to-GDP ratio is larger than the European Union’s.” I was unaware that US debt “is greater than the combined debt of the entire Eurozone and the U.K.”

America’s debt is currently $15.1 trillion, while the Eurozone (which includes France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and others) has a combined debt of $12.7 trillion. (All dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars, and the data refers to closing 2011 numbers.)
The Eurozone is larger than the United States, so America’s debt per capita also exceeds the Eurozone’s. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. has a population of 313 million, whereas the Eurozone has a population in excess of 331 million.

(Weekly Standard)

Nary a mentioned was made of this apparently minor fact on Fox Business, while the Fox Business anchors discussed Christine Lagarde’s demands for more billions in bailouts from the US to the EU. “More firepower” is how the managing director of the International Monetary Fund described her agency’s requirements.

It’s Lagarde’s prerogative to ask for money to increase her bureaucracy’s sphere of influence. It’s the obligation of the ass with ears who leads the USA to turn her down.

So, it’s not Lagarde’s asking that ought to worry; it’s the fact that, according to Fox News, she expressed confidence that the US would do the “right” thing by her.