Note: The Taki post is up. This week it is a discourse on the proposed replacement for originalism in conservative jurisprudence. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.
Over the last few years, it has become increasingly popular to examine what went wrong with the conservative movement. This was mostly the result of Trump winning the Republican nomination, despite universal opposition from conservatives. At that point it was no longer possible to ignore the collapse of conservatism. Prior to 2016, the movement was the gatekeeper for the party. Trump and the Dirt People kicked open the gates and found nothing worth keeping inside.
One result of this is the sprouting of proposed alternatives like Yoram Hazony’s national conservatism, common good conservativism and integralism. Libertarians, of course, maintain the fantasy that this is their time. There are certainly others working to produce something to fill the void on the Right. All of these proposed alternative start with a basic claim that conservatism failed. None of these new conservatisms bother to think too hard about why Buckley conservatism failed.
This is what makes this post from Paul Gottfried important. He was around when many of the critical turns of the conservative movement were made, so he has a perspective on it that few have today. Most of the main players from the growth phase of Buckley conservatism are gone now. With them went the personal disputes that ended up shaping what became mainstream conservatism in the 1980’s. The one thing the Left has right is that politics is always personal.
Gottfried tries to do three things in the post. One is to bring attention to the recent scholarship on Harry Jaffa, who was a central figure in the debates about the shape and direction of conservatism. Then there is the fact that there was a time when debate was possible within conservatism. Others have noted that there was an interregnum in which sensitive topics like race and immigration could be debated. That window closed in the 1990’s, eventually taking the public square with it.
The main point of Gottfried’s post is to place the blame for this and the collapse of conservatism at the feet of the neoconservatives. Before the neoconservatives gained power, it was possible for Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford to live together. Jaffa was largely responsible for the Lincoln fetish among conservatives. He claimed the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments were a perfecting of the original Constitution by reincorporating the sentiments of the Declaration.
Bradford was a Southerner and a Southern conservative. This not only placed him at odds with Jaffa’s reimagining of the Founding and Civil War, but it put him on the losing side of the internal struggles within conservatism. He was on the Russel Kirk wing of the Right, which was purged by Buckley in the 1980’s. In fact, Bradford was one of the first to be hurled into the void by conservatives. Paul Gottfried blames this urge to purge squarely on the neoconservatives.
There is truth to it, but the desire to excommunicate rivals exists in all movements, so it is hardly unique to the neocons. The question is how were they able to change the rules in order to disqualify the arguments of their opponents? After all, no one was purged for being factually incorrect. The dispute between the paleos and neos was over moral questions and that is where Jaffa comes back into the room. It is Jaffa’s work that gave the neocons the chance to rig morality to their advantage.
The central claim of Harry Jaffa is that the Constitution was an imperfect effort to encode the sentiments of the Declaration into the political framework of the new nation created out of the break from England. The contradictions within the constitutional order eventually led to the Civil War. This allowed for some necessary corrections to advance the nation down the road toward the sentiments in the Declaration. Lincoln becomes the Moses of this new nation forged in liberty.
Of course, this requires a reading of early American history that steps outside of the actual facts and written accounts of the Founders. It also requires a new version of the events leading up to the Civil War. That was all made easy because it proved a path forward for conservatives to embrace egalitarianism. They could finally claim that their opponents on the Left were the real racist because Lincoln was a Republican, freed the slaves and said stuff about all men being equal.
That is not being fair to Jaffa, who deserves a much more through debunking than time permits, but this was his contribution to conservatism. The cult of Lincoln he created for the Right cut them loose from the old conservativism, rooted in the natural order, and provided them with a new moral foundation. The New Right would be about equality and liberty. The New Left, in contrast, would be about equality and justice, thus tying the two together through egalitarianism.
Here is a post on the same site as the Gottfried post, in which the editors reject the new normal of American politics. Everything is good until this. “In reality, race is not the ultimate fact of human identity or the central problem of American life. Different ethnic populations have different general tendencies, but not different natural rights. Everyone is capable of learning to live well in this country, but only if we confidently endorse both our geographical and cultural boundaries.”
The linked post in that quote is worth reading, as it rips the mask from the “new conservatism” and exposes it as the old conservatism. The great fork in the road, the shadow that hangs over human history, is biology. The story of man is not one tale with many chapters, but many stories of many people, all of whom have their own unique understanding of themselves and how they should live. The genuine man of the Right understands this and accepts it. Equality, in short, is inhuman.
When you pick up one end of a stick, you pick up the other. This is the problem that destroyed 20th century conservatism. They were offered a Faustian bargain from the likes of Harry Jaffa. They accepted the egalitarianism of the radicals as their foundation stone and in exchange they were rewarded with riches. Conservatism was once again Northern Conservatism and followed the same path that another Southerner observed about them in the 19th century.
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my question is were pre-Jaffa conservatives any more effective than post-Jaffa conservatives? my sense is that conservatives have never been particularly effective, they just caught a historical break here and there along the way (and took credit for the results).
Southern conservatives had a pretty good century long run after 1876. One could argue that they not only succeeded in actually conserving something, but even took the offensive and rolled back the radical gains from 1865-1876, and not just symbolically, but in a substantive way that endured for a century. Had Mustache Guy and the fallout from his disaster not wrecked the ability of Anglo-American racial realists to maintain that Settlement of 1876 because the new postwar Left was able to morally equate segregation and the racial status quo to the Mustache Guy’s “endosolung”.
Great Taki piece today.
It’s good to see you using that place as a forum for presenting a coherent diagnosis of what went Wrong with the Wright (sorry), and a prescription as to what needs to be in place before it can be fixed.
Take next weekend off as a reward.
Has anyone seen this pernicious piece of propaganda? It’s just laughably wrong, so far wrong that it’s obvious propaganda. I’ve had people bring it up to me and they laugh about it but I can see what this is. One, to claim pit bulls have no nature and two, to claim we are all the great human family with no difference between populations. I’ve got to say the left is better at propaganda that anyone. They never relent.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/dog-breed-personality-characteristics/629707/
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The dissident pitbull narrative is one of the most effective dog-whistles (heh) of the online right. Everyone with a brain can see that pitbulls are innately more violent than other breeds, and the efforts of normies to explain otherwise because of the clear connotations is just hilarious.
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During my working days, I would constantly observe Joggers and Pit Bulls together.
They are both violent and dangerous creatures, to be avoided at all costs. I guess it’s birds of a feather or some such thing.
My goodness. How has Sailer not seen that one?
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Sailer missed that one, but not this one: https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-breed-not-exist/?highlight=dog+breeds
What a coincidence that the Washington Post piece that Sailer links to was published at the exact same time as the Atlantic piece (linked by Whitney above). Both by different authors.
Yep, total coincidence. The possibility that these people belong to the same secret email list where the come up with these ideas is a right-wing conspiracy theory.
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Why is The Atlantic defending pit bulls other than to make your second point? Pit bull owners are the kind of people the average Atlantic reader would want to send to a concentration camp.
A Stonetoss classic: https://ifunny.co/picture/look-so-different-because-of-their-breed-stonetoss-on-way-FCRufFc57
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The Conservatism, Inc. crowd still gets furious when people point out they have conserved nothing. They act like people are dunces for even bringing it up.
I would assume the lines about race biology are included at the behest of some large Claremont donors. At least a few of the people on staff there know better, but these people are still committed to staying respectable.
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Yes the correction you talk about involved the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and destruction of large swaths of the south. Sounds like all (corrections) by the left.
Also, I know it is imprudent to go there and shows me to be the midwit I am, but does all of this destruction by intellectuals and movements have to involve “them” all the time?
The double helix has reached its platinum jubilee or thereabouts. Casting James Watson into the void didn’t have great consequences, as he’s ninety-something years old and he made his main scientific contributions a long time ago. But a lot of angry young white guys who are skilled are being lured East where they don’t have to worry about being castrated by some HR Shaniqua, and are actually praised and well-paid for their work. And assuming the Chinese continue their work (without killing the world’s population in the meantime) proving a link between genes and intelligence and heritable group differences, the reality is going to be impossible to deny soon. Considering the Chinese understand our racial dynamics, they’ll probably even get on the bullhorn to tell the Negroes the bad news: that no amount of affirmative action is going to change their station, in the hopes of feralizing them. Why not? The Chinese already supported BLM in the hopes of rubbing the wound raw, and once info about intelligence being decided in the molecule is out there in the open, black hopelessness and envy (already a problem) will be even more explosive. They won’t just be sucker-punching honkeys because they have more money, or pushing white women off subway platforms because they envy their hair, but will be doing it because they know nature (not systemic racism) has barred their advancement.
Hard to say what conservatives do when handed such a smoking gun, but if the past is any indication, my guess is they put the barrel to their heads and pull the trigger. And honestly, if you can deny knowing what a woman is, you’ll be able to deny evidence revealed in mapped/sequenced molecules. Science can cure diseases, but it can’t win any arguments or converts.
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It seems as though egalitarianism is the root of many, if not all of our societal problems. If conservatism (or whatever replaces it) can’t cross that hurdle confidently and stand up to the inevitable screeching and name calling from the left, I don’t see much hope. The left has completely established the moral framework of our time and putting that genie back in the bottle and/or casting it aside will take great intestinal fortitude that seems to be sorely lacking in our day and age.
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> Different ethnic populations have different general tendencies, but not different natural rights. Everyone is capable of learning to live well in this country, but only if we confidently endorse both our geographical and cultural boundaries
There’s that idea again of rights as something one has for simply existing with no regard for the community one is a part of. This has been the moral basis for American imperialism and white disenfranchisement for the 20th and 21th century.
Notice too how incoherent it is. If a population has different general tendencies, then of course they need their own form of government that works for them. The idea of a form of government that works for all peoples is nonsensical for anyone who gives it more than a moment of thought.
The quiet acknowledgement that race is real though is a good sign. That would not have happened without the online right’s relentless pushing of the window.
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The left-right, Republican-democrat divide in America has always been contrived because both mainstream parties exist within a liberal-enlightenment framework. They are only left or right relative to each other. Stepping back and viewing them in a larger historic or ideological frame and they are both obviously middle to far left. And consistently moving further left together.
Operationally, the American left determines what is to be achieved and the right works out how to do so. Mid 20th century the left decided that radical equality was the goal for society. And instead of opposing that goal, the right argued how best to achieve it. The Lincoln beautification mentioned by Z was part of that project. It was part of the framing of the republicans How arguments – creating a supposed history of Republican success in a bygone era.
Bob Dole created a catch phrase for the dynamic in the 70s – Republicans are the Tax collector of the welfare state. The republicans stopped being the tax collector, but could never escape the role of the lefts’ engineer.
“Republicans are the Tax collector of the welfare state.”
Wasn’t it Reagan who expressed this sentiment?
From a practical perspective how much of the canceling culture comes out of the increased amount of feminized men and usual suspects involved in the debates?
No disrespect to Gotftfried intended.
Masculinity that emphasizes honor can live with disagreements with other men.
Feminization or feminine minded men involved in debates means one side must die or be expelled.
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Buckley Conservatism is just as failed of an ideology as Marxist-Leninism, but even its predecessors and other flavors fell flat and accomplished nothing. How can an ideology based solely on preservation rather than action and accomplishments do otherwise? Globalism’s triumph over nationalism, no matter how short the run, shows how impotent conservatism was and is; even the nation-state could not be conserved.
Dabney nailed this one more than a century ago. Seeking merely to preserve rather than to advance inevitably leads to decay and ceding ground. Infant suffrage indeed.
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One of the reasons the modern conservative lacks principal is because so much money that flows into the GOP comes from the merchant class. It is an unfortunate fact of post-industrial life. The salesman sees the world as a potential customer. Thomas Jefferson said it best…
“Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.“
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The “Emerging Multiethnic Right” article is hilarious and pure Boomer bait. So many subtle lies, but the best part is when the author offers up a remedy to the Left’s efforts to keep non-whites on the reservation via social pressure:
“Americans of every color should have the freedom to think for themselves without threat of social harm. But there’s something you can do right now, exactly where you are, to crack the social pressure: be a friend.”
Be a friend! What a fag.
This guy gets all hot and bothered about how Trump did better with non-whites and latches onto this as a promise to Boomers that all those blacks and browns showing up in their neighborhood aren’t really a problem. Well, first, Trump only got 33% of the non-white vote in 2020 so the improvement doesn’t mean squat. (The author conveniently left that figure out of the article.)
Second, you only need to look at states with large non-white populations to see the future. When California starts voting Republican, let me know.
Boomers were promised that if they went along with the equality thing, non-whites would eventually start acting like whites in dark face. They were tricked, but they can’t bring themselves to believe it because the consequences and guilt would be so horrible.
GenX whites were caught in the transition period. We saw the old world as kids but were never asked if we were okay with the equality thing; it was just pushed on us, though the pure anti-white propaganda wasn’t yet in force.
Young whites no longer have a choice. They’re already a minority. Some embrace the anti-white rhetoric, assuming that it only applies to bad whites or older whites or past generations. (Like white liberals, they eventually learn that no such distinction exists.)
Other younger whites chaff at being told how terrible they are but are lost as to how to push back. The whole of society, including many whites, is aligned against them.
You can see why the equality appeal from the right is so tempting. The alternative isn’t pretty. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your viewpoint), the alternative is reality. And reality has a habit of not going away.