“The most bracing pieces are sometimes the least defensible.
So it is with Sohrab Ahmari’s fusillade in the religious journal First Things against my National Review colleague David French, which has occasioned a cataract of conservative commentary.
Ahmari’s piece is part of the “post-liberal” ferment among a coterie of mostly Catholic writers on the right. A Catholic convert who has written a widely praised memoir, From Fire, By Water, he argues that conservatives should give up on defending a neutral public square and instead “impose our order and our orthodoxy.” …”
The post-liberal debate was going on in our circles for years before it arrived on the pages of First Things. We have people who have rejected liberalism for various reasons who come from all religious backgrounds: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, atheist and agnostic, pagan, etc. Lowry attempts to portray the debate as a tempest in a Catholic teapot when we were the ones who started skewering David French years ago. The whole Western world is now in the process of rejecting liberalism.
“The animating insight of the “post-liberal” writers and their allies seems to be: We are losing the culture war so badly that the only option left is to impose our values on everyone else. How will they do that? Good question! We’ll get back to you after we are done savaging our allies. …”
Are these people really our allies?
I would say that social conservatives have been milked for generations by the GOP to get the neocon wars and the lolbertarian economic agenda. We’re social conservatives too in spite of being younger and more secular than the First Things crowd. In fact, the only point we have in common with mainstream conservatism is social conservatism and our views on that subject are significantly stronger and less liberal than those of David French whose wife writes Op-Eds in The Washington Post about carrying on a sexual relationship with her family pastor as a teenager.
“Needless to say, America is not a country ripe for the imposition of Catholic traditionalism. Among other things, conservative Catholics aren’t operating from a position of strength. Overall, about 20 percent of the U.S. population is Catholic, and only about 37 percent of Catholics are Republicans. About half aren’t particularly conservative on abortion or gay marriage. …”
The South is the socially conservative, authoritarian region of the United States and its eagerness to back Blompf in 2016 over a dozen other conservative candidates with the correct classical liberal ideology because he was going to build a massive wall and deport illegal aliens illustrates that Lowry is downplaying the fact that the United States now has an authoritarian majority. Lowry spent that election from New York City waiting for Carly Fiorina to rip Trump’s balls off which shows you how clueless and out of touch mainstream conservatism is with its social base in the South.
“We need to realize that America suffers, not just from a swollen state, but from a toxic individualism, people detached from family, church, and community, and thus from larger meaning.5
Finally, we need to hang together and, if we can’t muster decency when fighting our adversaries, at least show some when disagreeing with allies.”
No, we don’t.
If conservatism is classical liberalism and classical liberalism is an ideological poison that inevitably shreds the social fabric over time from both ends of the political spectrum by exacerbating income inequality and undermining the family, then continuing with that ideology and approach is self-defeating for social conservatives. Also, lolbertarian economics and a neocon foreign policy are a political albatross for the Right, as neither of those things have a social base outside of our elites.
Here’s the best analogy.
What YouTube er al are doing is cutting off nationalists from being able to disseminate their pov to the public on popular cutting edge formats.
So the best analogy is this:
Right wingers have the freedom to have a samizdat handwritten illuminated bible to pass around and word of mouth. But they do not have the right to use the most popular formats like the print press.
YouTube made plenty of cash off straight white racist homophobic men for a decade or more, then just pulled the plug when it suited them.
It’s unsportsmanlike.
Hunter,
How you do it, i.e. post so many times per day, is astounding! I visit your blog several times a day and I can’t find the earlier articles because they’ve already scrolled to the bottom.
Now for some interchange….
>>We have people who have rejected liberalism for various reasons who come from all religious backgrounds: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, atheist and agnostic, pagan, etc<<<<
Underneath that statement is what seems to be your own brand of 'indifferentism'. i.e. "it doesn't matter what you believe, whether or not your an atheist or a Christian, as long as your set of beliefs has a 'white' pedigree" (and its not classical liberalism).
Let's pause right there, because maybe I have stuffed a straw man, and I don't want to be unfair to you.
But should my 'feeling' be true, then I would have to challenge you along the lines of why liberalism could be so wrong when it is also a 'white thing', if all 'white beliefs' are good, then classical liberalism has to be good…
Who hated blacks more than the classic liberal Voltaire? if that is what you are into, then Voltaire fits right in with identitarians. (http://www.oodegr.com/english/atheismos/diafwt_ratsism.htm)
Who detested racial mixing more than Abraham Lincoln and the free staters like Wilmot? Who said the freed slaves must 'root hog or die'? Abe's plan was to send all the darkies away and have a white America from sea to shining sea. They are lucky he didn't survive, or they might not have, not here anyway. Sounds to me like most Yankee politicians were in already your camp.
AND What of all the Union's German Communist Generals like Sigel, Willich , Bllenker Schurz?They were pretty white and I know communism didn't come from Africa. It was practiced in many places in the Antebellum North and always by pure white folks. Again, seems like a white thing….
I am misunderstanding you?
“””….AND What of all the Union’s German Communist Generals like Sigel, Willich , Bllenker Schurz?They were pretty white and I know communism didn’t come from Africa. It was practiced in many places in the Antebellum North and always by pure white folks. Again, seems like a white thing….””
I am talking this for years and claiming that going after white genetic liberal is the only thing what keeps tiny poor Eastern European countries white.
In my country, by official data, 55 witches were burned in the Medieval times and there were 0 Jews Niggers Muslims closer than 1000 miles. And 1917 happened before TV or welfare or any other popular claptrap.
White genetic madness is the root cause of all disasters happened to white people throughout history.
Juri – I just wanted to let you know I agree with you that this out group preference is genetic in White mental cases.
“which shows you how clueless and out of touch mainstream conservatism is with its social base in the South.”
They’re operating in the North, in the context of Northern culture and civilisation, and with all of the assumptions that go with it. Furthermore, the North and Mexifornia hold all of the decisive electoral votes. Which looms above all else and which allowed Liberalism to seize hold of America.
Southern Conservatism really doesn’t matter to them in the least. Nor does the Conservatism of South Dakota, or Nebraska.
From a cultural, political, social and economic standpoint, there’s the North, which is conflated with America, and then there’s everybody else.
Care to guess which one matters, and which one doesn’t?
Lowry is so detached from reality that he believes there is a “neutral public square.” All that really means to a weak mind like his is that he is safe to express himself. It suits him perfectly that the thugs who have seized the public square suppress ideas he dislikes. He has not even considered the principles he invokes.
I really couldn’t say which is the more spineless, wretched coward, David French or Rich Lowry. To think there was a time when conservatives included real men like Colonel Lindbergh and General Butler.
Conservatives are so useless (that’s the nicest thing I can say about them) because they ALWAYS respect the left. You never will win when you let your enemy set your agenda.
“America is not a country ripe for the imposition of Catholic traditionalism. ” Two points.
Rich Lowry, who the HELL are YOU to tell us what we can and cannot do, as Christians and as catholics… but not ROMANS>!>?
Secondly, don’t bumptuously assume that Catholic = ROMAN. It does not.
The Orthodox have a ‘catholic’ tradition… as did the Anglicans, up until around 1980.
We could EASILY impose a ‘Catholic traditionalist’ order, without harming any HUMAN. Because to be human means to have a MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS, and those whose ‘consciences have been seared as with a red-hot iron’ are NO MORE HUMAN; but have become as the ‘beast of the field,’ and their opinions (as their lives) don’t matter to God. For He acknowledges their ‘free will’ to ‘un-Adam’ themselves, and respects their choice to become rutting animals, good for the fires of Gehenna.
THAT is why the just doctrine of war made mincemeat out of African savages, Moslem Moors, and witches, abortionists, and Jews, back in the ‘good ol’ days.’
Conservatism, Inc. and the Republican Party have been noting but business lobbies for the last 4 or 5 decades. That’s fine if they would just advertise themselves as such and stop pretending to be a legitimate political party or movement. The problem with the present arrangement is that, given our system, it prevents any real political opposition from coming up. What businessmen want is to penetrate markets, and the way to do that is to appease the cultural gatekeepers. National Review will do what ever the donors that keep them afloat (they only have about 70,000 subscribers, less than many right-winged YouTube channels) tell them to do, and what their donors want them to do is throw the yokels, with all their social issues and talk about freedom, under the bus so they can make deals with those in power. You’re seeing this kowtowing with the rise of “woke” corporations, and THIS is the real conflict for French and his ilk: big business has become the open enemy of conservatism and traditional America. They’ve long sold out the interests of the majority of their constituents for the benefit of big business, but now they can no longer deny that those they are selling out to are openly hostile forces, if not actual enemies. It’s the end days for both establishment conservatism AND liberalism. Interesting times.
“Savaging our ‘allies?!'”
With “allies” like Vichy Conservatives (perfect name for them) like David French, Rick Lowry, and others of their ilk, we don’t need enemies.
The reason why the Left has steamrolled over the Right in the Culture Wars is that they engage in wholesale purges of anyone on the Left who is prepared to compromise their principles in any way.
True Conservatism has proven itself nothing but Faux and Controlled Opposition engaging in nothing more than one version of Failure Theater after another.
Before we gain any traction, whatsoever, we need to savage our Vichy Conservative “Allies” until they admit that they are nothing but a bunch of Neo Cons that have signed on to every aspect of Leftism EXCEPT anything that might remotely benefit the American people like Healthcare for All, or UBI or a College Loan Jubilee but will go after every tax cut while zealously cheerleading every single war imaginable for Israel.
Fuck David French and fuck YOU, RIch Lowry. Now kindly get lost and ally yourself to the other side. You can do much more for us if you go with them.
The Conservatives / Republicans don’t care about Christians, Southerners, and the White Race. The only thing those people care about is Capitalist Pig Economics, Individualism, and the Jew World Order. The future is Nationalism…..the collective working together as White People. Deo Vindice !