printWell, at least some in the Moron Media have corrected course and are calling Richard Spencer a “white nationalist,” instead of a white supremacist.
Watching Richard’s performance at Auburn University, renowned scholar of the Right Dr. Paul E. Gottfried shared these impressions:
When I criticize him, I am not making moral judgments, except when I note his futile attempt to keep up with leftist Millennials by siding with gay rights and abortion. What I object to in Richard is his, well, strategic stupidity, not the fact that he has committed the “sin” of being a white nationalist. Since “educated” whites are taught to hate their own race, I can’t see how one can appeal to Millennials and leftist college students by calling for white nationalism. Nor does one win their sympathy by mimicking their positions on feminism and homosexuality while trying to convert them to a racialist ideology. What seems to me the only chance left to the Right to be effective is by mobilizing the “Deplorables” and then turning them against the social-cultural Left. I was delighted to see how the pro-Trump people took it to the Antifascists at Berkeley. And I knew these counter-demonstrators were on the side of the angels when David French at National Review began to rail against them.
My impressions? The young, white men in the audience seemed receptive, even enthusiastic, although Richard may be talking above their heads. What Richard was saying conjured an interview I gave, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism.” My views are decidedly LIBERTARIAN, a slant Richard Spencer rejects:
Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites—no contradiction there—on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare. As a libertarian, I believe that the right to include or exclude; associate with or dissociate from, is inherent in the right of private property. Private property is a civilizing institution. How better to keep the peace than to respect the right of free private-property owners to keep their distance (or not)—to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will? This foundation of civil society is being dismantled for the sake of militant multiculturalism and policed pluralism.
An interesting new book, reviewed by one Barnaby Rogerson, makes the point that the Levant of the 18th century was peaceful and prosperous (and surprisingly libertine), because it was made up of “a grid of self-governing communities.” Integration between disparate communities was not enforced. And surprise, surprise: communities freely chose to live in complete segregation. This freedom fostered “remarkable tolerance” among diverse communities across the cities of the Levant of that time. “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics,” as the reviewer puts it. This freedom of association was the source of strength. These autonomous ethnic communities were free of the top-down, punitive, forced integration that has become the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state that usurped their authority.