One of the unmistakable features of modern conservatives is their not-so-veiled hostility toward heritage America. Some attribute this to ethnic hostility, given the infiltration of the Right by neoconservatives. Initially, these people made the journey from communism to anti-communism and were never conservative in temperament. Of course, the royal lifestyles of many conservatives has made them into unpleasant snobs. All of that is true to one degree or another, but it obscures an important point about modern conservatives.
The Official Right has a different interpretation of American history than most normal white people. Blacks, of course, fixate on slavery and segregation, so their view of American history is through hostile eyes. Whites generally accept the conventional narrative. If you ask a normal white American to tell the story of America, he will start with something about how the Puritans came to America to escape religious tyranny. Once the colonist got things going, the King tried to tax the colonists, so there was a revolution.
The Official Right has a different view of American history. They look at the Founding as an imperfect result. First and foremost, they view the tolerance of slavery, and the enshrining of it in the Constitution, as a great sin. Rather than embrace the principle of liberty for all, because all men are created equal, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution created a compromise. While all citizens were free and equal under the law, slavery created a class of people who were not citizens.
In the view of the Straussians, the intellectual movement based on the writing and teaching of Leo Strauss, the Constitution was not just a flawed document, but an immoral one, because it violated that core principle of equality. From this perspective, the Civil War was a purification of the country, removing the origin sin of slavery and forming a new Union, based in equality and universal liberty. For the Official Right, America was reborn in the Civil War and Lincoln was the Moses who ushered in the new republic.
This is why the Official Right has a Lincoln fetish. For example, Rich Lowry, the dull-witted editor of National Review, wrote a Lincoln book. The neocons treat Lincoln as if he is an Old Testament prophet. Jonah Goldberg regularly writes about Lincoln as if he is a god on Mt. Olympus. For the Official Right, Lincoln is the Founding Father. Those guys who wrote the Constitution are not entirely dismissed, but they are secondary figures in the story. For the Official Right, the American story starts with the Gettysburg Address.
A big part of this is due to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who became something of a cult leader for the neoconservatives. His framing of the Civil War as the second founding, allowed the neocons to see themselves as proof of the concept. The original founding excluded them from the narrative, while the second founding not only included them in the story of America, it made them proof of its righteousness. Lincoln’s America was not just for the founding stock. It was for whoever could get control of it.
Of course, the old WASP side of the Official Right was also willing to embrace this notion of the second founding. Since northern conservatism was mostly just a clean up crew that followed Progressivism around, the story of the second founding made their unwillingness to oppose the Left seem noble. Since Reconstruction, the role of what passes for conservatism has been to fill the void after every great spasm of Progressive activism overturned the old order. The Official Right’s job was to make it all work again.
The problem with this telling of history is it assumes a core immorality of the founding stock and the institutions they created. It also locks in the notion that it is the role of Northern reformers to be the guardians of civic morality. The Left need only appeal to the notion of universal equality and liberty and their opponents were disarmed. After all, the party of Lincoln, if it stands for anything, stands for universal equality and liberty. The conservatism of Harry Jaffa is nothing but a complex apologia for Progressivism.
A fun gag is to talk to the grandees of the Official Right about Lincoln’s actual views on race relations. The quickest way to get hurled into the void by angry Buckleyites is to quote Lincoln on the issue. The fact is, Lincoln was a man of his age, when it came to race, despite his zealous opposition to slavery. Like all abolitionists, he did not care about the slaves, he cared about the slave holder. That was the soul he sought to save. The slaves themselves were just props on the stage of the morality play that was abolitionism.
The Official Right can never accept this. One of the criticisms of Harry Jaffa on this score was that he was not a scholar of Lincoln, so much as the chief polemicist for the cult that formed around him. His telling of history left out anything that contradicted his concept of the second founding. This is true not only from an academic perspective, but also from a human one. This telling of history leaves out most of the country. For anyone outside the northern alliance, their ancestors are either villains or non-entities in the narrative.
That’s the source of the low level hostility toward heritage America that has been a feature of the Official Right and that is now its face to the rest of us. Since Gettysburg, the story of America has been the story of northern hegemony. On one side are the reformers and fanatics, always looking for a reason to put the lash to the legacy population. On the other side are the so-called conservatives, who hold most of the same views, but see their role as making the latest fads work, so the overall American project can move forward.
The Lincoln fetish that blossomed among so-called conservatives in the middle of the last century was a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Unable to conjure and sustain a moral opposition to the Left, they embraced Lincoln as their Moses. Their acquiescence to the Left was the result of deeply held principles with roots in the founding, the second founding. They were champions of “a new birth of freedom — that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
This is the great challenge in attempting to overturn the Judeo-Puritan orthodoxy that defines the America ruling class. It requires more than just defeating present day arguments over public policy. It means restoring large chunks of history that have been systematically erased by our zealous overlords. Killing off the cult of Lincoln and the political movement it animates, means telling a better story to the people charged with tearing it down. That inevitably means killing Lincoln as the founder of the nation.
Its worth noting that Confederate apologism is a loser outside the Dissident hugbox. There shouldn’t be any celebration of the antebellum South considering that it created the legitimacy of a cheap labor system that has come back to bite us time after time. And as much as we might not like describing it that way, the South is a dysfunctional multicultural system with two cultures white and black. Sure it works out well when YT is in a supermajority, but look out if the two black socialists are elected Governors this year.
The Confederacy is an interesting case of being legally right but morally wrong — the exact inverse of Lincoln’s Union. Calhoun was right about states’ rights. Stephen Douglas was right about the Northwest Ordinance (it was unconstitutional, though passed before the Constitution itself). Chief Justice Taney was right about Dred Scott — he had no standing to sue. But all of that was in the service of a moral evil. The Constitution — Calhoun version — would work great for a rough frontier society of 18th century freemen without slaves…. too bad that never existed, and never could exist.
It wasn’t so much a cheap labor system as existed in the North with their expendable immigrant work force as it was a non existent work force. The South was a malarial, yellow fever ridden hell hole. Have you been to the deep South anytime between May and October? Imagine it without mosquito control and air conditioning.
This. The Mississippi River delta was for all intents and purposes a jungle. Southern landholder tried to use indentured workers from Ireland and Europe to clear the jungle, but they died like flies from malaria and other tropical disease. Africans had a measure of resistance to tropical disease.
Around 1750 if a white person survived to the age of twenty in New England he could generally expect to live to the age of 65, in the South, 41.
A good book to read on that is Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years. It’s shocking to modern eyes and ears just how many colonists dropped like flies from malaria and fevers once they got south of Pennsylvania.
I welcome a correction on this, but I recall reading years ago that of all the vast casualties of the CW, “only” 83,000 were direct KIAs; everyone else died either of wounds now routinely treatable or from infectious diseases such as malaria, smallpox, diphtheria, or by food-poisoning.
As to life expectancy in the south: vitamin deficiency was a problem; they subsisted on corn and pork, with resultant pellagra.
“Have you been to the deep South anytime between May and October? Imagine it without mosquito control and air conditioning.” Yes I have and I AM that old….. Most homes did not have central air in FLA till the late ’60’s. You adapted. You rose before the sun to get anything outside done; then back out towards twilight as the temps dropped. “Mad Dogs and Englishmen…” rules that. You went to see a movie on Friday or Saturday as that was the only building that had AC. There were other oddities too. The interstate system did not hit the state… Read more »
Thanks for the memories.
Grew up in ’50s South Carolina sans A/C.
Blacks were an easily identified minority obsolete by industrial development that would have seen most of them deported. The Europeans who came to fight for the north did more damage than they likely prevented.
The Puritans weren’t seeking religious freedom and tolerance, they were kicked the hell out for their own crazy assed religious intolerance in much the same way the Mormons were kicked out of everywhere they tried to set up shop.
I wonder why the Corwin Amendment is never brought up in academic discussions concerning the War Between the States?
Because it was too late. It’s an interesting bit of political history, but there were lots of legislative attempts to save the Union. Problem was, nobody actually wanted to save the Union. We’re in a similar boat now, I’m pretty sure. We can elect all the Republicans we want — hell, Trump could make himself dictator — and it still wouldn’t matter. That sense of “enough talk, let’s DO this!” is everywhere, just like it was in 1860…. It’s going to get real bad, real fast.
“It’s going to get real bad, real fast.” -The elite of the South, contained in their own geographical bloc, were ready and willing to lead their masses into war, if necessary. Our elite are united against us. -Our education/media system has made the white masses more “love your neighbor”, “turn the other cheek”, “do good to them that persecute you”, etc. than Christianity ever accomplished. -Our culture is thoroughly materialist/hedonist, Last Man. The last things followers of this culture want is injury or death, for any reason. -While we have many guns, my understanding is that ownership of them is… Read more »
And even the Puritans quarreled among themselves–my family ended up among the founders of the Hartford colony–because as Rev Hooker put it “we came to this new world to found the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, not that of the Winthrops”. They were a quarrelsome bunch. But as to Corwin, it was brought up frequently in my education, but by that point the die was cast and it was simply the last example of the impossibility of reconciling two fundamentally different economic systems in a rapidly evolving economy.
I find the Corwin Amendment interesting in that it was an almost completely Northern effort to codify slavery in the Constitution to prevent a war. It is not taught in schools and if you bring it up to a professor of U.S. History (as I enjoy doing) you get the deer in the headlights reaction.
It IS interesting, but in defense of the professors here — and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but here goes — it’s pretty obscure. Unless you’re a field specialist — meaning, not just US history, but the Civil War era specifically — it’s probably something you read about one time in grad school, then promptly forgot. It’d be like bringing up some Kyoto period custom to a specialist on Modern Japan — he’s probably heard of it way back when, but you’d get deer-in-headlights there too.
I got it as an undergrad-but was something of a “field specialist” and George Frederickson taught that particular specialty. But the amendment itself told you a lot about the relative loyalties in the North outside of hard core abolitionist circles. Even in Indiana–my g-g-grandfather wrote in his memoirs about having to put down “Golden Circle” protests in Indianapolis while his regiment was still on parole status (prior to formal “exchange”) after being captured at Thompson’s Station. Until they intervened slavery sympathizers were running the southern half of the state.
Religious freedom, which is to say freedom for their religion. Indifferentism and secularism (atheism in practice) didn’t have any purchase anywhere in the world at the time and on this front criticizing the puritans strikes me as a bit unfair.
Not to geek out here but I’m a fan of the scifi subgenre alternate history. Has anyone here read the book Underground Airlines?
It’s set in a world where the Corwin Amendment or something similar was ratified. The Civil War was averted but slavery is still legal in 4 southern states in the present day.
Yes, that narrative was bonkers too–The (crypto-Jewish) Puritans were the most intolerant people on the planet.
How far are you willing to go with this line of thinking? Public policy aimed at forcing “universal equality” within any population inevitably leads (over a long enough time span) to homogenization of the species into near identical drones. Fitness selection no longer propels enhanced intelligence, strength, and robustness; but rather compels conformity of thought and mediocrity of physique. The latter is optimized for a hive species ruled by a queen, whereas the former is optimized to survive and thrive in a world of competitive and ever-changing hardships and challenges. There is no real liberty in a hive.
Don’t forget the tired old line that “the Democrats are the REAL racists” that usually supplements the Lincoln worship amongst our True Conservative betters.
Democrats didn’t start the Civil War, fanatical abolitionist terrorists like John Brown (with secret financial support from prominent Republicans like Charles Sumner) did.
Sounds familiar? I’m waiting for the John Brown Moment to happen sooner or later.
In fact the Republican Party was the radical party, formed only six years before Lincoln brought forward the new founding. Blacks voted for them until FDR offered them a new deal.
Who knows, it could be that today’s Mexican marchers may be the cannon fodder you’ve been waiting for.
For a while Our Better Class of People were content to focus their scorn on Southerners. That’s not enough anymore, they hate 80% of us and want us replaced with wretched refuse from the Third World.
They hate us that much.
I agree but what the heck should be done about it? If the Lincoln narrative is out, what exactly IS America??
America, approximately any way, is country with a population that needs to defend itself and Western civilization against incompatible foreign invaders, internal malcontents and rulers Who Know Better Than You and Me what’s good for us.
Our views arent so far apart.
If this is true, then we’ve already ceased to exist.
It used to be a great place to make money. It will probably go on like that for quite a while. Although the “middle” will shrink.
That said, if feminism somehow forces businesses and corporations to hire incompetent women and blacks for high-level positions things could collapse rather quickly.
I’ve held for some time now that our many problems ultimately stem from our most deeply held convictions. “Freedom”, equality, democracy, humanism, etc. These basic values were held in considerably modified, restrained form by our ancestors, back to the Founding Fathers, but they were held nonetheless, and the story of our history is largely the story of their more consistent, thorough application (I’m reminded of Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens’ ‘Cornerstone Speech’, correcting the Founding Fathers on “all men are created equal”). I don’t see how you repudiate/radically redefine/heavily downgrade these values/ideas without de facto repudiating America/Americanism. To be clear, I… Read more »
Of course, all of these views of history are catastrophically wrong. What actually happened was that liberalism had infected the British government and they got soft on their colonies. A bunch of left-wing American revolutionaries exacerbated tensions with England over largely-invented or heavily-exaggerated grievances, but instead of having them all executed immediately spineless George III thought he would try “dialog” and “diplomacy”. And like all left-wing revolutions, once the revolutionaries won, they later subjugated the liberals who let them take power – although this being the 18th century, without flight or modern warfare, it would take another 200 years for… Read more »
“By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence….”
…Joseph Sobran
William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, called the Constitution “a compact with Hell.” He was a big fan of secession, because that meant the virtuous North could invade the South and shoot all the sinners, thus ushering in Utopia. When I’m dictator, voicing any thought that ends with the equivalent of “and then we shall have Utopia” will be a death penalty offense.
“In the first place, I insist that our fathers did not make this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free. I insist that they found the institution of slavery existing here. They did not make it so, but they left it so because they knew of no way to get rid of it at that time.” – Abraham Lincoln
Or what Jefferson called “having the wolf by the ears”
It’s an interesting historical analysis, but I think the neocons have moved the ball even further down the field by now. The new Progressive God is the Statue of Liberty, complete with its dopey poem inviting everybody on the planet here. The neocons have succeeded in recasting ALL White Christian gentile Americans as morally illegitimate usurpers. All Whites are evil Holocaust Nazis who spent their every waking hour whipping slaves and chasing Jews out of country clubs until Barack Obama became president by opening the borders and defeating Russian bots. The REAL Americans are the Dreamers, the Muslims and of… Read more »
Mostly agree. Would say more, but my black helicopter is waiting for me. No rest for the weary when it comes to keeping the people down!
“complete with its dopey poem inviting everybody on the planet here.” Read the entire poem, not just the ‘yearning to be free part’. ——– Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, **and her name Mother of Exiles.** From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. **“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”** cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,… Read more »
Tear down a statue of Lincoln, and it will be Civil War 2…
the sad fact is we can never know if Lincoln’s project might have been completed and faced in another more amenable direction had he lived to complete it. lacking in this presentation is the vast dilemma Lincoln faced, and the greater threat of the entire American project ending on the horns of that dilemma. his quote explains it well: “I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear; the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the… Read more »
My understanding is that he was going to attempt a far clement policy in the South. So, ironically, Booth murdered the South’s best chance at not being reconstructed, and at a time when his death would have achieved nothing.
I’m not sure it really mattered all that much. Once the right to leave the Union was eliminated, the concept of a federal republic was doomed. The winners would impose their will on the rest until the rest could resist. From that point forward, America was a queer sort of empire. One region ruled the rest not for economic benefit, but for spiritual benefit. We went from continental empire to global empire in the 20th century, exporting our morality to the captive people.
Even so, the enemy is still the same, the globalist banking cabal. One election at a time is how we stand up to them. Lincoln and Kennedy were both assassinated for standing up to them, as well as Hussein and Ghaddafi. If Trump is assassinated, it would guarantee a second civil war, with a potentially different outcome, and the cabal doesn’t like taking risks. It is a fight between good and evil.
If you’ve not read it, here’s the transcript of the 2002 debate between Thomas DiLorenzo and Harry Jaffa. Jaffa, in exasperation called DiLorenzo a NAZI, more or less. Pure Jew nonsense. I was there.
Fortunately, Jaffa died three years ago, so no more Jew views of Lincoln from him.
http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?id=9
DiLorenzo is poison to the cucks.
Thanks. I’ll read that at lunch.
I would not say there was no economic benefit. The wealth of the South went North in the knapsacks of Yankee troops. Then for the next 100 years the Yankee trash raped the South economically.
Zman, I don’t disagree that the North economically exploited the South after the war and this was a contributing factor in the Gilded Age that was largely a northern phenomenon. Where I have to take issue with the idea of that continued dominance is that the essentially northeastern WASP establishment unilaterally decided that they were packing up the economic shop and moving to sunnier climes after World War 2. A lot has been written about favorable weather and tax regimes, but there is more to the massive shift in population and wealth that has taken place. There had to have… Read more »
” Booth murdered the South’s best chance at not being reconstructed, and at a time when his death would have achieved nothing.”
Even if you were correct it wouldn’t matter. Lincoln forever destroyed the notion of a Constitutional federal system, empowering big national government. Lincoln deserved to be killed, I am glad he was killed, and I am proud that a son of Virginia killed him. Lincoln is directly responsible for more American deaths than any other President. Dont try to blame Booth for reconstruction.
You are trolling, or really, really drunk.
No, he’s right.
Booth is, and deserves to be, a southern hero. His main flaw was he was too late in carrying out his assignment. Lincoln, a legitimate target in war time, should have been offed no later than 1862.
Lincoln was a mass murderer.
He was corrupt to the core.
He was a central planner and his central planning gave us the transcontinental railroad debacle and scandals.
Contrast the construction of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific with James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway. The former was a cauldron of corporatist corruption and inefficiency whereas the latter was free enterprise in action.
I would argue that the concept of an “American project” is something written into the past by the victors of the Civil War. The city on the hill stuff was purely a Yankee concept. The retelling of the Civil War and Lincoln’s role always assumes there was no other choice but war. Yet, fifty years prior, the New England states were prepared to leave the Union, but the effort failed when the War of 1812 broke out. Again, the history books are written by the winners. I’ll note there are libraries of books studying the great moral dilemma faced by… Read more »
I am not a student of the Civil War or of the Old South, but I have come to assume that there is a history, a narrative, and a set of circumstances that well explains how they lived and why their culture was structured as it was. We casual students will never know any of it, because “to the victor goes the narrative”.
Read this book, Dutch…
https://www.amazon.com/John-C-Calhoun-American-Portrait/dp/0395075629/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1540227480&sr=8-2&keywords=john+c.+calhoun+coit
There are many worthwhile books written by the defeated, for example the great diaries such as ‘Children of Pride’, or ‘The Diaries of Mary Chestnut’, available in modern editions; a history of the conflict itself written immediately after the war, E.A. Pollard’s ‘The Lost Cause’ (1867) is an excellent and detailed survey of the struggle from the point of view of a southern writer in the painful aftermath of defeat. It’s public domain and could well be available at Gutenberg or a similar site. And I’m just glancing at my bookshelf. There must be hundreds of books available written from… Read more »
fair enough, and i don’t want to jack this thead by overstating it, but… like any of the powers involved in the ‘great game’, our new republic always faced, either in public or acknowledged only in the circles of power, that the uS of A was a real threat to the comfortable way the great powers of europe had divided the world. hell, hamilton was treated with suspicion as his position and proposals we seen as a result of his connection with the british money powers. perhaps the civil war 1 was baked in the cake, but we all know… Read more »
The fact that between 50, 000 and 100,000 slaves fought willingly for the Confederacy indicates that a lot of them didn’t want to live under the rule of Northern fanatics…Slavery turned into sharecropping, which was a much harsher regime (and better for the landowners), in which blacks were no longer protected from disaster.
Yes, I saw the condition of sharecroppers in the 50’s and 60’s on my uncle’s farm in Middle Georgia. They weren’t all Black. Their lives weren’t much different than I imagined slaves’ to be. There’ was no overseer with a whip and they could leave, but they lived lives of grinding poverty in shacks with no amenities.
I was a child of those sharecroppers. In the years 1962-1965 I spent my summers as a child picking cotton for 50 cents per 50 pound sack. My hands bled from the razor sharp cottons boles. To this day when I see some overweight, cell phone toting “person” talk about being poor I almost go apoplectic with rage.
“The fact that between 50, 000 and 100,000 slaves fought willingly for the Confederacy…” No, it is NOT a fact. Less than 1,000 actually served in the Confederacy as actual soldiers. Tens of thousands of slaves supported the Confederacy as laborers, servants and teamsters. They built roads, batteries and fortifications; manned munitions factories—essentially they did the Confederacy’s dirty work. One reason for the low number of blacks who fought for the Confederacy is that until the last weeks of the war, the Confederate Congress expressly forbade arming them. Putting muskets in their hands presented a concrete threat. Think next time… Read more »
And Lincoln was a corporate lawyer, GC for the Illinois Central..There are property deeds on file in Chicago with Lincoln’s signatures….
Lincoln’s campaign was funded by the industrialists and bankers of the northern states. Lincoln was a major lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad. Any notion that he would thwart their goals of making the south a colony is wrong.
I recommend reading “The Killer Angels,” the Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, by the late Michael Shaara. Shaara’s novel is meticulously researched and historically accurate, and provides a wider, more insightful perspective on why the armies of the Union and the Confederacy went to war
Not enough room here to go deep on this one, but I’d gladly host a dinner roundtable in NYC with this as the table topic. The conflict that led to the Civil War was (and is) Pogo’s “Schmoo”– no matter what your point of view or opinion the conflict could be morphed to serve your particular purpose. There is a morally absolute abolitionist view, the tariff view, the midwestern farmers who did not wish to compete with slave labor view, the problem of virtually the entire capital stock of the South being tied up in slaves and land (how do… Read more »
A historian back in the 1930s said that the greatest danger to democracy is “huge, organized forms of self-righteousness.” But, that has always been true. C.S. Lewis nailed it: “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Given modern communications — and here I mean everything from “the printing press” forward — guarantees that… Read more »
Amen, bro. Though writing this from the early morning out west, I live the nose-ringer crap every day back in NY. They never, ever, give it a rest.
we have the worst of both now, omnipotent moral busybody robbrt barrons. IE zuck,soros,bezos,tom styer, bloomberg . and on and on.
A battle for civnat’s soul, to what end?
You always like to compare prog’s views in religious terms and these people including civnats aren’t giving up the faith. As you have noted what happens when you quote Lincoln to them, they hurl invectives or double down.
Our culture has been under liberal management for generations, and it is by liberals for liberals, only liberals. No matter how much we defend the Constitution, its a document that didn’t establish a state religion or restore the Jacobite claimant to the throne. It is not in any sense of the phrase traditionalist. We’d need the equivalent of a Khomeini style revolution to achieve many of our goals. Killing Lincoln isn’t enough, you must kill the Constitution and probably even the idea of America itself just as Khomeini killed the idea of the Shahansah that had existed even before Islam.
A big part of discrediting something is to isolate it. You do that by presenting an alternative creation myth for its existence. The Official Right has always had a compelling moral claim on the minds of sensible white people. That needs to change.
The Right in its current form, can at best, create gridlock in a system where at least 90% of cultural power is in the hands of various left-wing figures and organizations. And there always seem to be enough donors to keep the National Review types in business, even if under a new name like “Federalist”. In an international example, the Naspers Corporation, which owns the vast majority of South African media, would have been bankrupted years ago without a “lucky” investment made in a Chinese Google/Amazon equivalent.
You, thezman, is perhaps one of the most astute observers and best explainer of most subjects you touch on. If anybody it will be your pen (keyboard) and burden on your shoulders to create the new “creation myth”. I hope you will.
Exactly right. This column in one of a very few places that speaks the truth and then sticks to it. Without the WBTS, none of the other disasters that have befallen the posterity could have occurred. Putting first things first is critical.
More people need to be exposed to the actual things Lincoln did rather than focus on the single facet the Official Right clings desperately to, and which is the telling of all that period in public schools. Lincoln was a monster who: – would not only have his Generals declare martial law & incarcerate his political opponents (1864) but, – who engaged in ethnic cleansing along the MO/KS border, that generated the retaliation at Lawrence, KS, – and who – after being approached several times by the South during the War of Northern Aggression to settle, even to the concession… Read more »
“For the Official Right, America was reborn in the Civil War and Lincoln was the Moses who ushered in the new republic.” The funny thing though is that we don’t even live in what you could call Lincoln’s second republic. We live in FDR’s third republic, slightly amended by LBJ. That’s whats falling apart today. The past is a whole other country, both figuratively and literally. “Since Gettysburg, the story of America has been the story of northern hegemony.” The story of America is still about northern hegemony. All the elections we have had this century have been between Yankees… Read more »
Actually we’re in the Fourth Republic. The first one was the Articles. Easy to forget about.
My formulation is:
Phase One: Pre-Revolution to the Constitutional Convention
Phase Two: Constitutional Period to the Civil War
Phase Three: Civil War to the New Deal
Phase Four: New Deal to the end of the Cold War
Phase Five: Whatever we’re in now.
Yeah, the Articles of Confederation period did slip my mind. And I tend to put what you call “Phase Four” and “Phase Five” together as one thing though I sometimes do put “Whatever we’re in now” as a separate category if you count 9/11 as a new starting point. My point though is that FDR and LBJ have a lot more to do with the way things are structured now than Lincoln. The structure Lincoln put together isn’t any more real today than the one the actual founding fathers created. Lincoln is nostalgia; he’s also convenient for intellectuals to grow… Read more »
Agreed. FDR and LBJ could be considered the Marius and Sulla of this age. It’s not a perfect analogy, but there are no perfect analogies.
Smart observation about the attractive power of nostalgia and What If…? My sense is a significant fraction of the appeals to history that come up in discussion of current events has this character. Not a bad thing in itself, but it should be acknowledged as a minor genre of delusion.
I’d end Phase 3 and start phase 4 with Woodrow Wilson and WWI. The mechanisms and attitudes pioneered by Wilson made FDR’s excesses easier to put over than they otherwise would have been.
You are badly underestimating Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk, muscular progressives. Wilson was a devious pussy.
Wilson was the consummate Judeo-Puritan.
Wilson only became president due to his being able to “pass” as a Southerner, while functioning as a Wall Street Stooge. Reminds me of Obama. So Sad!!
Related we may have up to 100k Central Americans here in a week OT two. Paid by Soros. Man has never failed in nation wrecking to get cheap flippable assets. Trump can’t do anything no judge will allow it nor will the Deep State Resistance. Personnel is policy and 90% of the military and DOJ people are Peter Striozk and Lisa Page. Already they are acting as conquerors putting swastikas on American flags and burning them for cameras. Gillum in Florida has a wide lead on A. He’s Black. Y’all. B. No borders and no ICE so that stuff is… Read more »
Let’s see how things go down in a couple of weeks. I am not a huge fan of voting (it is often used as an excuse for TPTB to jam things down our throats), but, in this case, it is a great barometer of where we are at. No matter the outcome, we are well down a particular path. Codevilla posted a good narrative of where we are at and why, though there is little new or unknown to most of us in it.
Dutch, please say where Codevilla posted such a good narrative.
I think he’s referring to this:
https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/
That’s the one. Trying to figure out how to copy/paste the address on an iPhone. Thanks, p/‘s-n.
Thanx much!
It looks like the elite’s solution to dealing with us is to use ringers/people who have no choice but to fight for the elite and against us, based just on the color of their skin: It’s the rise of the mulatto elite, as Steve Sailer termed it, and it’s pretty simple. We, as whites, are part of a continuity with our past that we want to also continue into the future (as Jared Taylor said, “I want my grandchildren to look like my grandparents”). Someone who ruled (harshly) over us, like Obama, or tells us what to think (like a… Read more »
Thomas J. DiLorenzo has, for years, written the truth about Lincoln. His two books, The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked, are must reads.
His critics include the likes of Jaffa and Lowry.
BTW, he is a card-carrying paleo-libertarian.
I have DiLorenzo’s book and it is sort of Lincoln truths for dummies in the way it is written and laid out. Good book to pass around.
The founding fathers , most of whom like Lincoln were slave owners, didn’t see the Africans as HUMANS at all. Nether did Mary Todd or Her husband. Abe wanted the Africans shipped back to Africa , because he felt that letting them stay and “Pretend to be white and human” would destroy the nation. The British colonist didn’t even start landing in north America until about 150 years after the Spanish , French , and Dutch. When Father La Salle canoed down the Mississippi at the beginning of the 17th century he found “evidence of vast city’s and towns, with… Read more »
When did the English start Roanoke? When did Desoto land in Trxas?
A claim that Lincoln owned slaves is mentioned here, http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/30327/lincoln-owned-slaves/ , but the mention is oddly perfunctory given that it is also the headline. How he managed to do so, living in Illinois, a free state, requires explanation.
Hollywood Conservatives have a group called “Friends of Abe”.
Yes, I have had a lot of fun quoting Lincoln’s statements about blacks from the Lincoln-Douglas debates…He avowed that they would never be the equals of whites, and advocated shipping them all back to Africa…Lincoln sent secret ambassadors to Central America to see if they would accept blacks–no dice…Lincoln also said that he would accept slavery to keep the country united, with of course the South paying the Morrill Tariff that the war was actually fought over…
Ugh. Just the past day I got lured into a debate with someone to whom it is absolutely essential that the Civil War was entirely the South’s fault and that the Union was in every way justified. At some point I just stop being able to care when the debate goes to whether Fort Sumter was South Carolina claiming its own territory or an “Act of War” against the United States. It’s like banging your head against the wall to get someone to acknowledge that the North was as or more eager than the South to start that war, and… Read more »
All one has to do is look at 5-10 years before the civil war to see abolitionists itching for a fight. Specifically, John Brown and also “Bleeding Kansas”. The battles/guerrila/terrorist war between kansas territory and missouri, over kansas becoming a free state or slave state.
Lincoln as founder of the nation ? I thought it was Martin Luther King.
I think this is a really bad post. It miscasts Lincoln in the same way that the Neocons miscast him. “Like all abolitionists, he did not care about the slaves, he cared about the slave holder. That was the soul he sought to save. The slaves themselves were just props on the stage of the morality play that was abolitionism” Lincoln was a committed if unorthodox Christian. He, like large swathes of the rest of America, opposed slavery on it’s moral grounds. But it’s a lie to state that he did not care for the slaves. His opposition to slavery… Read more »
You are ‘concern-trolling’ a hate-fest. That Lincoln was a real man contending with a real situation in real-time, that a Buchananite (James, not Pat) America would have led to an ‘alt-history’ open to a thousand lines of conjecture – all pointless to those who don’t play video games – means nothing here. Lincoln, tonight anyway, until new blogposts emerge, is the apotheosis of all evil – our Franco, if not our Pol Pot.
Like the Taliban and the Hard Left, we’ve caught the spirit – let’s burn shit down!
Fredrick Douglas met many abolitionists in his day, but he said that Lincoln was the only white man who ever fully treated him as an equal. Question the wisdom of the Civil War, and whether it was worth the lives of 600000 human beings, or whether there was a legal justification for stopping secession. But Lincoln had a real empathy for the slaves as human beings endowed with a basic human dignity.
And sending former slaves back to the horrors of Africa was going to display that empathy? Don’t make me laugh. The great majority of Abolitionist screeds shows plainly that they had a disgust for blacks and just assumed most of them would die off once they were no longer cared for by their masters.
I myself suffer from Lincoln admiration, if that is a blue dot left on my mental map or something more permanent I dont yet know. But what better story should be told if equal rights have to go? And, are Americans ready to break up the country? B/c w/o equality, how could it be kept together? I dont have a clue about the answers to these things.
Do you admire him for his mass murdering ways?
His love of the American system, i.e., corporatism?
His love of the income tax?
His love of suspending the constitution?
HIs love of making war on civilians?
His love of shutting down hundreds of northern newspapers?
His love of incarcerating editors and publishers critical of his war?
His propensity to prevaricate?
Let me answer like this: I hate the institution of slavery, whatever the propensity of blacks and whites to live together is. If unilateral secession is legal or constitutional, the United States would not stand a chance of surviving and it would not be a nation. I have no better answer to the ongoing ‘dominos’ crisis of secession than what Lincoln came up with. I hold that the specific points you raise, whatever their merit, were what he found necessary to do to wage a total war 20 miles outside Washington DC And finally, if the South had not rushed… Read more »
Czar Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 while Lincoln opted for a blood-bath in which 50,000 Southern civilians were killed.
What should he have done, just let the South sail off into independence? That would establish a right to secession. Then the US is not a nation.
The right to secession was already established when the colonies seceded from, and made war against, the British empire.
If it had been a right there wouldnt have been a war w the Brits. You think the South should have been sent away w a ‘so long’. I dont.
After some southern states seceded, they sent delegates to Washington, DC to negotiate the details of their secession. This went on for several months, though Lincoln refused to meet with the Southern delegates. There was no shooting war during this time. Lincoln knew he could not just invade the South because it would make the North the aggressor. Indeed, many in the North believed that Lincoln had no right to invade the South – -despite their disapproval of secession and their hatred of slavery – because the South did not represent a threat to the Northern States and the South… Read more »
If only Libertymike had been elected in 1860!
Yeah, it was Lincoln’s propensity to prevaricate that has always irked me.
Don’t apologize. I admire him too, as do most sober people. He was a thoughtful man thrust into a dangerous situation, set a goal, and achieved it. Some here make him out like he was our version of Idi Amin, but they aren’t to be regarded as adults. They cite books as if there are not 20,000 books about Lincoln, or as if there aren’t multi-volume works of Lincoln’s own writing and oratory. Abe lived and died in another age. His writings show that he was a perceptive, clever and humane man. That he regarded blacks as inferior should be… Read more »
People often blame leaders from a past age for addressing the pressing problems of their age instead of the problems of ours. Suppose Trump reverses white decline, however he might do that. And in 50 years a mighty China with an economy and army 2½ times as large as America’s, threatens the world. Then ppl in that age would blame Trump for not going to war with China when the American superiority over China had its last beams of twilight. They would not congratulate him for making sure there still was a recognizable America. Lincoln dealt w the problems that… Read more »
Blaming Lincoln for our impending disaster is like blaming Disraeli for the degeneracy of modern Britain.
My father used to react to my opinionated and pompous invectives against modernity by staring at me, lighting a cigarette, jotting down some answer in his NYT crossword. clearing his throat, then asking:
OK, I know what you’d have done in 1945 and thank you so much for telling me where we went wrong. If only you had been there, we’d have gotten it right. Meanwhile: What do you intend to do today?
JW Booth was the son of a famous actor who fled England for what would be termed pedophilia today. His dad had mental health issues and the family was highly dysfunctional. JW was an unstable narcissist, possibly a sociopath, late term alcoholic used by the CSA in several failed attempts to disrupt the Union, Alec Baldwin writ large. Linclon’s murder was a political act done for personal reasons that martyred Lincoln in the mind of American’s for 100 years and confirmed the perfidy of ‘The South’, a dammed spot that could not be washed out, an open wound in the… Read more »
A darker, far more immutable spot was Lincoln’s mass murdering ways.
“Alec Baldwin writ large.”
This may be the most amusing and on-target thing I have read all day.
The war between the states occurred because the United States government invaded the lawfully seceded southern states and for no other reason. Lincoln, his entire cabinet and every general officer of the US military committed treason under Article III, Section three of the US constitution.
For those that can’t help using a knee-jerk statement about Fort Sumter, which was lawfully South Carolina property, should buy a copy of this documentary:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Really-Happened-Fort-Sumter/dp/B004089RMK/
As I told a smart but unknowing friend, my dear the Republic died in 1865, end of the great experiment. Welcome to the puritanical retribution.
Oh, yes. They just can’t stop trying to make good boys out of us. The “purification” goes ever onward.
I have for years held Jaffa’s The Crisis of the House Divided in highest esteem. Now … I have doubts. Can you recommend a book that would give me an alternative perspective? Thanks.
Speaking of reframing a Narrative, I saw something on TV that I thought was very disturbing. Did anyone else see this? Went by very fast so I’m not sure I interpreted it right. I was flipping TV channels and I flipped past a black-themed, hip-hop sort of station and it was running a US Army recruitment commercial. There was this very insistent voice saying “we fight to WIN,” and the ad showed an all-black army unit, rifles drawn, moving through an urban-warfare zone, aiming at an unseen target. The cityscape looked disturbingly American. It looked like the Army itself is… Read more »
That’s probably a question answered by others with a stronger interest in the subject. People have told me that this is the best anti-Lincoln diatribe you can read. I have it on my shelf, but I have yet to read it.
Also there is no Judeo Christ.
I think the “Civil” war never stopped, by yankeedom, of the North, it went into a long slow cold class and culture war. It has never truly ended on the leftists/ruling class clouds part. They really despise the Southern dirt people, its a genocidal hate. I grew up in the great North country of NH. There where many trust fund brat decendents of the Tory Loyalists, the “Fabyan” Marxists some could be called, who lived on the old Kings Grants and the war of 1812 and Revolutionary war “bugout” compounds, more like summer mansions sitting on very large averages, from… Read more »
Booth was right!
As a certain Mr. Booth said on a certain occasion, “Sic semper tyrannis.”
I mean, metaphorically, you understand.
He’d picked up the phrase learning a play. So what? If Merle Streep said the same thing at the Oscars, then?
It’s only metaphorical, you understand.
Here’s just a thought; if you remove the ‘Lincoln narrative’, you remove the reason 90% of Americans, whatever their color, believe America exists. What then??? That’s the question I cant answer. America will probably not survive leftie’s insanity if the latter isnt stopped. But will it survive the basic consensus since 1865?? Im not sure and then Pandora’s box is full open.
White ethnostate with provisions for blacks and native Amerindians. It may strike you as harsh, but as you observe, there is no alternative.
Is there even a route to that that doesnt cross a sea of blood?
This is the best way out for our extended family, given that all ways are terrible. If you disagree, explain the better way.
I dont have the answers, that s why Im not going ‘this is all f*cking nuts’. But I think some ppl here are asking for things they wont like if they get them. I like the idea of a 90+% white place. I just dont know how to get there without 30 million casualties. Maybe history will force our hands??
And in this 90% white place, what does one do about the vast number of ignorant, complacent or lunatic whites?? Just asking. I would like a return to 1950 too (though my founding consciouness only dates to 1960). But I believe the cultural madness was already strong in whites by then. How would one winnow them out?
Describe what you mean by ‘our extended family’ and why ‘all ways are terrible’. No one who disagrees can explain anything unless they know – explicitly – WTF you are are talking about.
Make your thinking concrete, and the counter-arguments will flow naturally.
Yes. But it will be expensive. First, Trump buys Venezuela. (Pennies on the peso, of course, because they are below bankrupt.) Then he grants all our brownies Venezuelan citizenship and a guaranteed pension for life. Then he sets up a trust fund from his new extremely wealthy oil company to fund his pensioners. Let the lucky beneficiaries depart!
That’s not a little blue dot nagging your brain, it’s a bloom. I for one don’t hate Lincoln, and admire him in many things. I once thought well enough of myself as well as I was helping a man who badly needed help, which instead killed him. What we intend and what we do are often different things. I think well enough of Lincoln to believe he would be appalled at what he unleashed. If you accept the narrative of 1865 you must accept everything that followed, and is following. The America that Tocqueville and Dickens described in detail in… Read more »
In the view of the Straussians, the intellectual movement based on the writing and teaching of Leo Strauss, the Constitution was not just a flawed document, but an immoral one, because it violated that core principle of equality.
LOLWUT!
One can say many things about Leo Strauss, but accusing him of considering a equality to be a core principle is, ummm, not one of them.
Perhaps you should focus on your reading comprehension a bit.
Reading comprehension comes after actual reading and it’s obvious you have never read a single Straussian in your life, though no doubt you have read a lot about them on blogs. Straussians do not believe that equality if a core principle, full stop. Whatever they might say in condemnation of the U.S. Constitution the claim that is immoral because ‘it violated the core principle of equality’ is not one of them.
If you want to NAXALT the issue, fine, but I’ve been lectured by too many self-proclaimed Straussians on the Gettysburg Address. Plus, I’m not interested in Talmudic thread pulling.
*unsubstanatiated claim*
Your claim is false and you evidently know nothing about the subject
*OMG stop trying to Talmud me*
You guys are a riot.
You should not try so hard to be the stereotype.
You should try harder not to fit the WN stereotype of being a shouty ignoramus. Here’s a tip: find one Straussian who writes or is credibly recorded as saying that equality is a core principle and/or that the constitution is fundamentally illegitimate because it violates the equality. That is called ‘answering an objection in a pertinent manner’ (what you call Talmudic reasoning).
As a protip, you could look up the difference between NAXALT and no-true-scotman, so that when you make inaccurate accusations of logical fallacies, you can at leas make the correct one.
Just give up. You are in way over you head. You made a mistake. Accept it and move on.
Nice try at inverting reality there. You made a mistake, which you can’t even begin to justify because you have never read one word by Leo Strauss nor one word by a Straussian and you remembered something you once read about neocons being Struassians and decided to put in an extra line in your otherwise not -all-that-bad article to make it look more learned.
Of course, you could try proving me wrong. Name one Struassian who believed or believes equality is a core moral principle. If they all do it shouldn’t be hard.
Dude. Stop. I’m not falling for that trick. It’s not working. Stop trying it. Your tricks don’t work on me. I know them all.
That is what the Z-man does. Over at unz.com, he made this comment “In the 16th century, most educated men were puzzled as to why anyone would listen to a turd eating degenerate like Luther. But, educated men in the 19th century were puzzled by Marx. Of course, Luther was also pedophile. Imagine being in a cult founder by a pedophile turn eater.”
I and another commenter asked him for a source, for that is quite the charge. He didn’t respond.
If you’re so dense as to not to get the point, what good is there in explaining it further?
The fact that you are carrying on about this months after the fact is amusing though.
Zman’s probably got the right approach here, but just on the off chance that you’re arguing in good faith, I’ll point out your errors: First, you conflate Zman’s reference to “Straussians” with Strauss himself. It is not necessary for Strauss to have expressed a view that is widely attributed to his followers, which themselves have divided into two distinct, and in some ways opposed, groups – “East Coast” vs “West Coast,” though at this point the geographical distinction is meaningless. Secondly, Zman didn’t say that Strauss held equality as his own core principle. Zman paraphrased the Straussians’ position that equality… Read more »