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Old July 31st, 2012 #1
Alex Linder
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Default William F. Buckley and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bogus Bio)

[This thread will be copied into strategy when complete.]

This thread is for book notes on:

Buckley: William F. Buckley and the Rise of American Conservatism, by Carl T. Bogus (2011)

Bogus is a lefty law professors. He writes well. The main interest here is in how Buckley built a movement. What lessons his history holds for White Nationalism.

Last edited by Alex Linder; August 31st, 2012 at 04:57 AM.
 
Old August 31st, 2012 #2
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[Any bolding in these extensive quotations will be mine. My comments will be in blue.]


"Buckley was not a political philosopher with original ideas. He more or less inherited his ideas from his father and took them for granted. he took a disparate collection of ideas -- some of which were contradictory or disdained even by leading conservatives of the day -- melded them together, and personally represented this new ideology so appealingly that many people became Buckley-style conservatives because they passionately admired William F. Buckley. Yet Buckley was no pied piper. He did not place himself, alone, at the head of a column of followers. He selected otehr leaders and promoted them and their ideas. He encouraged wide -- but not unlimited -- discussion and debate. When he believed that other conservative leaders offered ideas that threatened his core vision, he deftly marginalized them or decisively excommunicated them. In all of these ways and more, Buckley created a movement." (p. ix)

Notice: importance of personality to creating a movement, and also definition. Who's in, who's out. Be clear, be strong, be appealing. WN takes the big tent approach and for that reason never turns into a powerful force. It remains grinning and incoherent.

"It was in 1955 that Buckley founded National Review, and by 1968 -- a year of enormous political and social turmoil in America -- he had largely completed the process of defining conservatism and fashioning a robust movement to advance it." (p. x)


"[...] an MIT political scientist told Time that Buckley was 'an exceedingly witty, attractive and rather insidious spokesman for a point of view for which I have few sympathies." Again, notice focus on the use of personal qualities to render a political position more attractive.

[...]

"Buckley was far more clever than thoughtful. ... Buckley was then working on a book to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses... Buckley intended this to be his grand work of political philosophy, in which he would elaborate his breed of conservatism. Buckley ultimately was to produce fifty-seven books,, yet he never was able to finish that one."
(p. 2)

"Buckley founded National Review with the goal of reaching 'a relatively select group of people, the opinion makers, mostly, and future opinion makers." He hoped this would become a 'small, but crucial group' of about 150,000 people." (p. 4)

"Reagan became one of the magazine's earliest subscribers. Because he hated to fly, Reagan's contract with GE stipulated he could travel by train. This gave him plenty of time with Buckley, National Review, and otehr conservative writers assigned by Boulware. Reagan emerged from his seven-year stint with GE as a conservative. National Review ideas and rhetoric shaped Reagan's basic message, developed in what friends called The Speech, the talk that Reagan gave to countless community groups, constantly refining it until it was pitch-perfect." (p. 5)

"Karl Rove was about fifteen when he discovered National Review at the Sparks, Nevada, library. Talk about the middle of nowhere... "I eagerly awaited its arrival each week, devouring articles using words i didn't know (such as denouement) but whose meaning I could often guess," Rove said in his autobiography. "I couldn't get my hands on Buckley's books quickly enough." (p. 6)

It was the same for me too, and for millions of others. I would skip the school lunchroom and go to the high school library and read NR, looking out at the sunlight shining off the snowy Wasatch peaks in Salt Lake City. It was thrilling to be pulled up into Buckley's world: a place with many genuinely erudite writers, many of them using words I had never come across before. That's where I conceived the desire to know more words than anyone on earth. I later changed my goal, but the example of Buckley and his writers showed me there was a whole world out there - of intellectual conservatism - that I absolutely loved, and found no correspondence to in the world I lived in. It was Buckley who made me, as a teen, want to become an opinion columnist.

"As the only significantly avowedly conservative journal of opinion for a long time after 1955, National Review was far more indispensable to the Right than any sigle liberal journal was to the Left . . . If National Review (or something like it) had not been founded, there would probably have been no cohesive intellectual force on the Right in the 1960s and 1970s." [quote from historian of American conservatism George Nash] (pp. 6-7)

"By every measure available to us," [political scientist Herbert] McClosky wrote in the American Political Science Review in 1952, "conservative beliefs are found most frequently among the uninformed, the poorly educated, and so far as we can determine, the less intelligent." (p. 8)

"McClosky also gave his subjects psychological tests and found that conservatives were more submissive, alienated, bewildered, suspicious, hostile, rigid, and pessimistic, and had far lower self-confidence and higher levels of guilt than liberals -- differences that remained after controlling for education and social status." (p. 8)

Does his description fit people on this forum? Notice the part about guilt. I think he's write. White guilt as an explanation applies to a very small minority of illiberals only. Illiberals generally have more of a criminal light-heartedness or confidence about them. When White rightists see guilt in them, it's either projection or lack of direct experience with illiberals.

Again, notice the importance of personality.

"By becoming its most prominent adherent, Buckley gave conservatism a new image. Buckley was well educated, accomplished, wealthy, handsome, self assured, cosmopolitan, witty, and apparently erudite. (p. 9)

"Buckley seemed to have six careers -- magazine editor, newspaper columnist, writer of nonfiction books and articles, novelist, host of a weekly television show, and public speaker -- any one of which would have been a full-time occupation for most mortals. He is surely one of the most prolific writers in American history, leaving behind fifty-seven books, four thousand newspaper columns, and four hundred articles and book reviews..." (p. 9)

"His language was sprinkled with the most wonderful, arcane words -- words such as gallimaufry, rodomontade, belletristic -- that sent even professors scurrying for dictionaries. He used these words precisely and naturally, just as much in private letters as in published writings. Veteran publishers thought usign such words ill advised. ... 'The word 'usufructs' has no place in any popular magazine...' 'I am sorry you don't like words like 'usufruct.' I think one of the most precious possessions of the English speaking world is a large and very subtle vocabulary. I believe everyone should make a modest effort to pass on to the next generation as beautiful and flexible a language as he inherited. That responsibility the editors of National Review undertake, in a moderate way, to assume. (p. 10) We should too.

"Bill turned out to be right: National Review readers liked being talked up to. It made them feel part of a highbrow community." (p. 10) Where else do you get people talking up to you? Only in boring academic journals, and it's less talking up than using ridiculous and unintelligible jargon. Buckley, like Mencken, used unusual words. Also like Mencken he used them with delight and precise. That-all is what people like. Learn new words. Learn new ways to use old words. Become more educated. Men like me and Karl Rove learned a lot more from reading National Review than we did in our government high schools.

Last edited by Alex Linder; August 31st, 2012 at 05:25 AM.
 
Old August 31st, 2012 #3
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"Buckley became so respected that he was also able to read individuals and groups out of the conservative movement. In 1955, it was difficult to draw distinctions between reputable and disrepuable conservatives, to demarke the boundaries of responsible conservatism, to discern when debate was healthy and when it was dangerously divisive. ... Buckley would be told time and again that conservatives must hang together or they would all hang separately. But Buckley understood that if conservatives were to shed the image of being wacky, dysfunctional, and anti-intellectual, they had to sepaate themselves from the kooks." (p. 12)

Buckley chose the wrong kooks to separate from. He abandoned his own White Nationalist position, as we shall see, and embraced the illiberals he had claimed at the start it was his mission to thwart.

"Conservatism today is a three-legged stool. It is based upon libertarianism, religious conservatism, and neoconservatism." (p. 21)

Bogus argues that Buckley was a libertarian, an individualist, because of his father, who was a great business success in revolution-torn Mexico. He thus sided with the libertarian jew ex-commie Frank Meyer against the Burkean religious conservative Russell Kirk. Same thing on foreign policy too: Buckley rejected the cautious Burkean view for the bold instigation of the jewish warmongering neocon set.

Bogus, after his introduction, sets the scene: conservatism before Buckley; conservatism as National Review began operations in 1955. Who were the key players? What were their attitudes?

Robert Taft was perhaps the top conservative of the pre-Buckley scene.

"Following a 1943 visit to Puerto Rico where he saw desperate poverty, Taft studied the causes of poverty, concluded that poverty and poor educational systems were intertwined, and became a staunch advocate of federal aid to education." (p. 30) Back then federal education to K-12 was next to non-existent - it really started up under LBJ in the 1960s.

Taft was an elitist. But he was a meriotocratic elitist, not an aristocratic elitist, and he was not a racist. ... 'I see no reason to think that inequality of intellect or ability is based on racial origin,' he said. He spoke out against poll taxes, and argued that blacks were entitled to greater representation in city councils and legislatures. (p. 30)

That's before Buckley. Conservatives were race-fantasists before Buckley, at least the guy at the top was.

"Much has been written about the family dinner table, at which the [ten Buckley Sr] children supposedly were expected to present their views about current events and defend them under rigorous questioning from their father." (p. 39) Bogus says this grilling was exaggerated, but it is clear that there was a good deal of discussion. It bred at least one champion debater, you white fathers will notice. Jews are given to this sort of thing too. It's a winning practice.

"[Buckley Sr] set up a homeschool in a small building immediately behidn the main house at Great Elm, and he sent around a circular to three hundred families in the Sharon area inviting them to consider sending their children to his homeschool in order to avoid the blight of Liberalism and Communism they will encounter in almost all elementary schools.'" (p. 65) Again, White father cares for his children's intellectual needs. He gives them context and self respect that a government school will falsify or destroy.

"Will purchased curricula from the Calvert School, a venerable homeschooling organization in Baltimore. The children used Calvert materials for academic subjects, which they studied in the mornings. In the afternoon, they received additional instruction in a wide assortment of sports and hobbies, ranging from golf and ballroom dancing to birdwatching and carpentry. The most important extracurricular was music. Great Elm had an organ and five pianos, and the Buckley children were required to practice piano forty-five minutes epr day.

The children regularly visisted the private Hotchkiss Library on the Sharon Green, less than a mile away from Great Elm. The library had a well-stocked children's room and a wonderful librarian named Mary Mackay, who got to know each of the children's individual tastes and alerted them to new arrivals that she thought they would enjoy. Bill Buckley's last public appearance, in the fall of 2008, was at a fund-raising event for Hotchkiss Library, at which he, four of his siblings, and his son Christoph read from their books." (p. 66)

That's how the elite do it. Word to the wise, eh? Investment in children intellectually and socially; lifelong dedication to worthy institutions - trust and gratitude on all sides.

Last edited by Alex Linder; August 31st, 2012 at 06:00 AM.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #4
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Speaking about influences on Buckley.

"[
Albert_Jay_Nock Albert_Jay_Nock
] Nock was so great an elitist that he opposed universal literacy. Most people, he argued, lacked the capacity to comprehend anything of value, and the main function of universal literacy was to extend the reach of advertising." (p. 69)

Similar to the complaint, cited by one old-time Southern conservative, that universal public schooling would do nothing but increase the market for trash literature.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #5
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"Bill Buckley burst onto the national stage the following year as author of God and Man at Yale. ... It is brilliantly written... Buckley's distinctive literary sytle was already fully mature. His writing is like a sharp sword in a velvet scabbard. He attacks opposing ideas and -- even more so their advocates -- ad hominem. His specialty is ridicule. But the cutting force is sheathed in a tone of discursive formality, and his argument appears to proceed carefully step-by-step. Buckley always sounds thoughtful and learned. (p. 80)

Consider that most WN Ph.D.s fear to use ridicule and ad hominems, yet imagine they know something about real-world politics. Buckley made the movement, largely by force of his own personality, and he specialized in ridicule and ad hominems. Hmm.....

"Yale would not tolerate a racist or anti-Semite on its faculty, he argued, and its immediate past president stated that Yale would not 'knowingly hire a Communist.' Thus, Buckley argued, academic freedom was a myth... ... Buckley writes that he himself came to Yale believing that 'a rigid adherence to Christian principles' was good for the individual, and that free enterprise and limited government were good for the nation.' ... 'I firmly believe,' he would declare, 'that most professors are to some extent indoctrinators, and that those who are not to any exten indoctrinators, should be.' (p. 81)

So the guts of his charge against Yale was that it was not inculcating belief in Christianity and free market.

"God and Man at Yale was published by the Henry Regnery Company. Regnery Publishing today describes itself as 'the nation's leading conservative publisher' and boasts that it has 'published most of the great thinkers and writers of the conservative movement' over its sixty year history. In 1951, however, the Henry Regnery Company was three years old. All of the few books it ahd published lost money, ad the company was hanging by a thread." (p. 82)

So Regnery was saved and made By GMY, and GMY put Buckley on the map. The important facts here are that: the original Regnery was of German descent, from Chicago. He got into publishing because he didn't like anti-Germanism during the Second World War. Moving forward to today and where we find racialism, notice that the Regnery Foundation, which is set up by a later Regnery out of racial concerns, founded and funded the Charles Martel Society, which is the group that publishes The Occidental Quarterly, and which gave Kevin MacDonald a $10,000 award. So you see the connections. To the extent there is foundational support for academic 'white nationalism,' it comes from Regnery money. Our upper end is tied in with a name/publishing company that has published not just conservative stuff, but most of the top warmongering neocons, like Ann Coulter. Whether Regnery is good for racialism or threatens to coopt it back into safe, anodyne professional conservatism - you will have to judge for yourself as we move along.

Frank D. Ashburn, headmaster of the Brooks School and a trustee of Yale University, wrote a piece for the Saturday Review of Literature that rivaled Bundy's for hyperbolic vehemence. God and Man at Yale, Ashburn said, 'has the glow and apeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.' Henry Regnery also felt the sting of establishment anger. The University of Chicago had awarded Regnery a contract to publish its prestigious Great Books series; now, because the Regnery name had been besmirched by publishing God and Man at Yale, the University of Chicago canceled the contract." (p. 85)

Even back then, in the mid-fifties, the first recourse was to call anyone on the right you disagreed with a racist.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 1st, 2012 at 07:02 AM.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #6
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"William F. Buckley Jr. did not want to be recalled for Korea. His college adviser, Professor Willmoore Kendall, suggested that Buckley join the Central Intelligence Agency -- a draft-avoidance route that was popular with Yale grads. Buckley agree, and Kendall arranged for him to be interviewed by the CIA's covert branch. As it happens, the person who interviewed Buckley in a CIA safe house in Washington, D.C., was James Burnham, who was then clandestinely working wih the CIA and would later become Buckley's second-in-command at National Review. Buckley was accepted and spent three months training in covert work during the summer of 1951. After his training, Buckley was assigned to Mexico City..." (p. 89)

Burnham and his Managerial Revolution which described of the technical managerial class, the technocrat, was perhaps the primary intellectual influence on Sam Frances, aka, Fat Bastard, Fat Sam, Canny Sammy, and Sammy the Spork. The guy who tried to have it both ways. The progenitor of the spork right: alt-right. Better known as the Shtick Right.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #7
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"[Witness, by ex-communist Whittaker Chambers] became one of the half-dozen books that most influenced the development of modern American conservatism. It is so powerfully written, in fact, that some people, such as the [late] journalist Robert D. Novak, credit it for converting them to conservatism." (p. 97)

I used to work for Evans & Novak. Everything is connected!

"Buckley was one of the people on whom Witness left a mark. 'I was shaken by that book,' he remarked. 'I wasn't shaken into a position I hadn't already occupied, but if possible I felt more passionate abotu the responsibilities of people who dissented against a particular trend in Western history."

"The book's central thesis...is that the world was facing a single, unified struggle btween the forces of good and evil. Witness is akin to a non-fiction version of Lord of the Rings. (p. 97)

Chambers was a gloomster who thought that he was joining the losing side when he cut with the commies.

. . .

[Buckley and his cousin Brent Bozell argued in McCarthy and His Enemies (Regnery, 1954):] 'McCarthy's record is nevertheless not only much better than his critics allege but, given his metier, extremely good.' (p. 101)
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #8
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"What makes Buckley's recruiting of [Russell] Kirk [author of #1 conservative post-war book The Conservative Mind (Regnery, 1953)] for National Review interesting -- indeed brilliant -- is that Kirk championed a form of conservatism that Buckley quite distinctly did not favor. Buckley was himself a libertarian, even if he had not yet so described himself. He was also what we today call a neoconservative and a religious conservative. Kirk's Burkeanism was incompatible with all three philosophies. ... ...in fact Buckley's and Kirk's visions were irreconcilable.

"If Kirk had not joined the magazine, he would likely have been an opponent. In many ways, he would have been a formidable adversary. He was erudite, thoughtful, and an excellent writer. He moved readers: His regular column for National Review probably generated more letters a than any other. By bringing Kirk within the National Review family, Buckley turned a potential adversary into an ally. Buckley's decision was more likely intuitive than deliberately Machiavellian, but either way, it was a brilliant move.

"Buckley saw conservatism as synonymous with both individualism and libertarianism. ... Kirk rejected individualism root and branch. 'Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit,' he wrote. This is a bedrock difference (p. 111)

"First and foremost, Burkeans and traditional conservatives honor the traditions of their culture and nation. (I use those terms synonymously.) In this, they draw upon the philosophy that Edmund Burke articulated in Reflections on the Revolution in France. The central theme of Burke's great work might be summarized this way: Civilization depends upon the rule of law. The rule of law is constructed from more than a constitution and statutes; it is interwoven into the very fabric of society. That fabric is comprised of institutions, which have evolved over time and are the products of our ancestors' accumulated wisdom and experience. All institutions are imperfect and in need of constant care, improvement and perhaps even reform. But we cannot precipitously sweep them aside and replace them with what at the moment seems better without ripping the social fabric into shreds and destroying the rule of law. Our brightest minds cannot design entirely new institutions superior to the old. Mortals are unequal to that task. Wisdom is the product of experience -- not abstract theory -- and the wisdom embedded in institutions and law is not always evident to us. Even more importantly, newly created institutions will lack authority. We grant institutions authority, in significant part, because they were bequeathed to us by our ancestors. We honor them because of their history and traditions. In addition, institutions have particular classes of people who are devoted to them, as the best lawyers are devoted to the law, clerics to the church, scholars to their disciplines and universities. These people see themselves as taking part in a sacred, intergenerational covenant. They are responsible to preserve what their predecessors painstakingly fashioned, to ensure their institutions serve society in the present day, and to preserve and improve them for future generations. Indeed society itself is an intergenerational covenant. 'Society,' Burke wrote, 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.'

"Burkeans and traditional conservatives are, in a sense, societal Darwinists (as opposed to social Darwinists) who believe our institutions -- governmental and private -- have evolved over time to serve us well. Things that have not served society well have been discarded; things that worked well have been retained and refined. Because our lives are too short to allow the individual to acquire great knowledge, we must stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and work with contemporaries to assemble a collective wisdom. All of this is summed up by the aphorism The individual is foolish but the species is wise.

"Although Burkeans do not favor change for change's sake alone, they are not opposed to all change. They recognize that change is necessary because societies must adapt to new circumstances. paradoxically, therefore preservation requires change. But because we cannot always be sure why things have come to be as they are, we cannot always predict the consequences of change, and change should be made cautiously. As Burke put it, 'We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.' Kirk added that 'conservatism is never more admirable than when it accepts changes it disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation.' (p. 112-113)

Well, there's your loser attitude right there. How has 'general conciliation' worked out on the racial question?

"Burke, however, did not merely accept change as something that was necessary for preservation. He did not believe that he lived in a perfect world, and he recognized improvements were possible. He was a reformer; indeed, at times he advocated radical reform. In 1792, for example, Burke proposed a detailed program to eliminate slavery in the British West Indies, even though it had become an integral part of the plantation system and abolition would require severe shocks to the economic and social systems. Still, he sought, as carefully as possible, to anticipate problems. His forty-two-point program would have immediately and dramatically improved the lot of the slaves, prepared them for emancipation, and then emancipated them. It included elaborate programs for housing, social services, and education. Burke thought not only about how individual former slaves could become economically self-sufficient, but also about how they could build strong families and communities. Every community, for example, needs leaders, and Burke would have sent the brightest black children (or at least the brightest boys) to London for first-rate college educations. He considered the needs of the former slave owners as well. Burke's proposal was not adopted, but it is a fine example of the Burkean method nonetheless: a readiness to undertake reform, even radical reform, to reduce suffering and improve society, combined with an effort to foresee and ameliorate the deleterious effects of those changes." (p. 113)

You can say that. You can also say Burke wasn't taking his own advice. He is famous for saying he doesn't think the individual should rely on his own private stock of wisdom, but that's for the other guys. He has perfect faith in his own ability to rewrite society from the ground up, which is just what he proposes re British West Indies. We can thus see, even in the father of modern conservatism, the seeds of the conservative's traditional inability to resist the left on race in any effective political way.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 1st, 2012 at 08:03 AM.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #9
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Quote:
Kirk added that 'conservatism is never more admirable than when it accepts changes it disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation.' (p. 112-113)

Quote:
Originally Posted by AL
Well, there's your loser attitude right there. How has 'general conciliation' worked out on the racial question?
I was imbued with this attitude--expressed in a similar formulation, plus family examples. I knew it was wrong the first time I heard it (6 yrs old or so?), though I didn't then know why. It's a feminine 'get along' view: fine for irrelevancies, but suicidal concerning anything that matters.

It's down there with 'all things in moderation,' another braindead moralism that makes me want to reach for a flamethrower.

---------

I'm surprised (but shouldn't be) that Russell Kirk would have printed that, spun as a virtue. 'Paleo-Conservatives' are Patton's 'men who lost and laughed about it.' They are completely fucking worthless. I give them not one hoot in hell.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #10
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"Russell Kirk argued in The Conservative Mind that the following passage contained Burke's most important contribution to political philosophy: Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to all which society, with all its combinations and skill and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things." ...

"It is the community's responsibility -- and on its behalf, government's responsibility -- to provide some equality in opportunity. But there is no entitlement to equality in outcomes. People, after all, are entitled to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. How much assistance may the needy reasonably demand? How much should people be required to contribute to the welfare of others? Burke was a pragmatist. He eschewed abstract principles; he believed in applying judgment to particular circumstances. 'How far economic and political leveling should be carried is a question to be determined by recourse to prudence,' Kirk writes, describing Burke's thinking.

"This departs widely from the rugged individualism and hard-edged libertarianism that Bill Buckley inherited from his father. Libertarians are individualists while Burkeans are communitarians. Libertarians believe individuals should be unshackled to achieve what they can and that society's wealth is the sum total of individual achievement. Communitarians believe that no individual truly achieves alone." ...

"In coming to their views, both Buckley and Kirk were influenced by their backgrounds. While Buckley saw himself standing on the shoulders of his parents, he saw his father's success as the product of self-reliance. In Bill's eyes, his father had made his fortune in a foreign land convulsed by revolution, and had done so purely on his own initiative and abilities. Government was not only of no help -- there had not even been police protection -- but because of corruption it ahd been an active hindrance. Moreover, Bill had been educated at home and private institutions, did not perceive how government or community made a difference in his own life. Russell Kirk's background was different. He was raised in Mecosta, Michigan, a small town that his great-grandfather helped settle in 1879 and where Kirk chose to spend his own life. Mecosta was quite unlike the affluent precincts of Sharon, Connecticut. Mecosta was a relatively impoverished place where everyone knew and helped one another. Russell Kirk's father was a railroad engineer who never attended high school and had his job reduced to half-time and half salary during the Depression. Russell attended public schools. At the urging of his high school principal, he applied for -- and received -- a scholarship to what is now Michigan State University. He earned a master's degree in history at Duke University on a fellowship. After serving in the army during World War II, Kirk -- with veteran's benefits provided by the GI Bill and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies -- pursued further graduate work at St. Andrews University in Scotland, from which he received a doctorate in humane letters in 1952. (pp. 114-115)

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 1st, 2012 at 08:27 AM.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Leonard Rouse View Post
I was imbued with this attitude--expressed in a similar formulation, plus family examples. I knew it was wrong the first time I heard it (6 yrs old or so?), though I didn't then know why. It's a feminine 'get along' view: fine for irrelevancies, but suicidal concerning anything that matters.
I see it more as a man placating women. The problem is the conservatives never draw the line. They give in on everything. They actually make giving in a principle, dare I say an ideology.

Quote:
It's down there with 'all things in moderation,' another braindead moralism that makes me want to reach for a flamethrower.
I don't agree on that. All things in moderation is a recipe for keeping your equanimity and balance in your personal life. It would be a misinterpretation to stretch it to mean you can't go all-out defending your race or attacking your enemy. In many things, moderation vs extremism simply isn't relevant. It's not, as they say, a moderate position to propose leaping a gap in two smaller jumps.

Quote:
I'm surprised (but shouldn't be) that Russell Kirk would have printed that, spun as a virtue. 'Paleo-Conservatives' are Patton's 'men who lost and laughed about it.' They are completely fucking worthless. I give them not one hoot in hell.
Well, I wish he'd gone into it more. I have got a lot from The Conservative Mind. I should go through it on here as I am with Buckley, or discuss it on Radio Istina. It is a book packed with 'fresh departures for thought.'

I maintain that racial realism is in no way at odds with Burke or conservatism but must be its starting point. We know more about niggers today than Burke did, so in line with his advice, we can incorporate that knowledge into our politics.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #12
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Enough for today; still many more notes to go from this 360-pg book. I think it worth laying out some of the facts and political positions as length as too many WN have no grounding in the basics, so at least they can benefit from summaries. Too many WN have never given a moment's consideration to the limits of government effectiveness, like physical females, these mental females accept the fact something exists (federal Department of Education, for example) as proof of its validity.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 1st, 2012 at 11:22 AM.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
I don't agree on that. All things in moderation is a recipe for keeping your equanimity and balance in your personal life. It would be a misinterpretation to stretch it to mean you can't go all-out defending your race or attacking your enemy. In many things, moderation vs extremism simply isn't relevant. It's not, as they say, a moderate position to propose leaping a gap in two smaller jumps.
Which is why the saying is stupid. 'All' with a list of caveats is 'some'. But 'some' demands discernment, and most would rather die than think. Better to have a universal nostrum. Then you can have it mean whatever you want, as here.

In actual usage, the quoted phrase is an excuse for all manner of self-sabotage and community leveling, spun usually as you relate with some mumbling about 'balance'. It's stupidity under the color of sense.

Quote:
Kirk added that 'conservatism is never more admirable than when it accepts changes it disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation.' (p. 112-113)

Quote:
Originally Posted by LR
I'm surprised (but shouldn't be) that Russell Kirk would have printed that, spun as a virtue. 'Paleo-Conservatives' are Patton's 'men who lost and laughed about it.' They are completely fucking worthless. I give them not one hoot in hell.
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Originally Posted by AL
Well, I wish he'd gone into it more.
There's nothing to go into. No deep meaning. No guile. It's an honest, cogent expression of the endemic cowardice of the right, delivered by its greatest modern thinker. And we have their sorry record as confirmation. It's a suicide clause in a library of good sense--otherwise bedrock, vital stuff.

At least Kirk was genuine. Lights like Buckley came along and became. . .Buckley. When you make a virtue of 'go along to get along', that's inevitable.

It isn't all enemy activity that's damned whites, though it may seem that way now that the original battle has been lost. There are some very serious, fundamental ideas that have allowed it and continue to allow it.

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Originally Posted by AL
I have got a lot from The Conservative Mind. I should go through it on here as I am with Buckley, or discuss it on Radio Istina. It is a book packed with 'fresh departures for thought.'
Don't opine it. Do it. That would be invaluable.

Part of the reason would be your insight. Part of the reason would be to keep Kirk in play. It's not 'book of the month' stuff. Most of it is as cogent now as when it was written, and it's an old commentary on older works.

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Originally Posted by AL
I maintain that racial realism is in no way at odds with Burke or conservatism but must be its starting point. We know more about niggers today than Burke did, so in line with his advice, we can incorporate that knowledge into our politics.
Yes.

White thought was formulated in a Whites-only social context. There was no necessity to consider other races within that framework. It's only been 300 years or so that Whites have had widespread, direct contact with other races, and then only a minority of Whites. That has changed in the past generation.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We take Burke, et al, and apply and expand the truths they observed within the current racial context.

Part of the reason jews own the field is because they've had a global world-view, an us & them mentality, all along. White thought was implicitly all us and no them.

Dominant White bedrock thought + us & them reality = winning combination
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #14
Alex Linder
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Which is why the saying is stupid. 'All' with a list of caveats is 'some'. But 'some' demands discernment, and most would rather die than think. Better to have a universal nostrum. Then you can have it mean whatever you want, as here.
I think it works. I think you're being unreasonably picky. If not, then give an example where immoderation is a better idea than moderation. It's not moralizing either, as you called it. It's a rule for living; there are no eternal consequences suggested if you disagree, only natural ones. Very different from the jebus commandments.

Quote:
In actual usage, the quoted phrase is an excuse for all manner of self-sabotage and community leveling, spun usually as you relate with some mumbling about 'balance'. It's stupidity under the color of sense.
No, it's ancient Greek pre-christian wisdom. That some misuse it doesn't mean anything. Although I've never heard anyone misuse. There's hardly any language not abused by the left in any case, that's not a reason to reject terms correctly used.

'All things in moderation' is realistic and consequentialist way of looking at the world. Implied is, if you take things to an extreme (eating, drinking, whatever), you will suffer the consequenes. No deity is invoked, no eternal punishment, nothing supernatural. It's a very White way of looking at things: "Control your behavior or suffer the consequences."
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #15
Alex Linder
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At least Kirk was genuine. Lights like Buckley came along and became. . .Buckley. When you make a virtue of 'go along to get along', that's inevitable.
It is clear Buckley agreed with the warmongering neocons from the start, so he's not unprincipled there. Where he is unprincipled, as we will see, is on race. At the end of his life, as a race-illiberal, he was saying the exact opposite of what he said back in the sixties.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #16
Karl Radl
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"[Witness, by ex-communist Whittaker Chambers] became one of the half-dozen books that most influenced the development of modern American conservatism. It is so powerfully written, in fact, that some people, such as the [late] journalist Robert D. Novak, credit it for converting them to conservatism." (p. 97)
'Witness' is hardly 'well-written' IMO: it is overly long and full of vacuous rubbish about the goings-on in Chambers' personal life. I also find Chambers' style extremely turgid, but that is me personally.

I would argue that Freda Utley, Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz's works had more impact in the formation of the post-war conservative culture in America precisely because those three were before Chambers and more widely read for years before the latter came on the scene with his jewish wife (Esther Shemitz).

The latter two authors and former high-ranking commies in particular, because of their extensive writing about their (suppressed) Christian beliefs that lead them to adopt a form of Christian conservatism as opposed to replacement Christianity in Marxism.

Another two who had a fairly big impact are Isaac Don Levine (Editor of 'Plain Talk') and Arthur Koestler ('The Yogi and the Commissar') both of whom became 'conservative jews'.

Quote:
"Buckley was one of the people on whom Witness left a mark. 'I was shaken by that book,' he remarked. 'I wasn't shaken into a position I hadn't already occupied, but if possible I felt more passionate abotu the responsibilities of people who dissented against a particular trend in Western history."

"The book's central thesis...is that the world was facing a single, unified struggle btween the forces of good and evil. Witness is akin to a non-fiction version of Lord of the Rings. (p. 97)
I find it difficult to believe that 'Witness' left so massive a mark on Buckley for the simple reason that he was a student of Willmoore Kendall's; as I recall from Oliver's notations about him in 'America's Decline', who was a Political Scientist and an author on Greek democratic thought if I recall correctly. This would have meant that Buckley would have come into contact with best-selling accounts of former Commies like Budenz (who had written 2-3 best selling works on the subject before Chambers came out). It begs the question: why Chambers not Budenz, Bentley and/or Utley?

Also Bentley's 'Out of Bondage' (markedly similar to 'Witness' as well as overlapping in its narrative on occasion) had come out the year before (1951). Chambers only corroborated a lot of what Bentley had said outside of the Alger Hiss thing in his official testimony.

I also have to question whether Bogus has actually read 'Witness' as describing it the way he does seems more like having 'read' it through snippets in a reader than the actual work. Also one wonders why he doesn't mention Chambers' follow-up work 'Cold Friday'?

Quote:
Chambers was a gloomster who thought that he was joining the losing side when he cut with the commies.
Chambers was a weird guy: no doubt about that. I think; from what I've read on the 'McCarthy' period and the transcripts [as well as 'Witness' and 'Cold Friday'], that he broke with Soviet intelligence because he was disappointed in the cause he had served. He was one of the 1920-30s recruits who believed they could usher in a 'new world' (as well as 'fight fascism' [the boogeyman of the hour]), but when it didn't appear and instead Communism was behaving like... well... a despotic kingdom with a fetish for Hegel: he slid into Christianity (belief in the 'new world' without there being any material/'scientific' measure) with his wife.

Others went into what Marxists call 'left opposition' or the 'Fourth International' of Trotsky only then to end up; like Daniel James, sliding from Trotskyite thought to a militant form of 'conservative democracy' (i.e. spreading 'democracy' by force). Burnham is a classic example of that as is Walt Rostow.

I'd also add that a lot of people initially talked to Chambers, but then they just withdrew from him and there doesn't seem to be a lot of talk as to why.


Incidentally Alex have you ever read Burnham's 'Suicide of the West' and 'The Machiavellians'? Well-worth reading as; particularly in the latter case, it provides the basis for the lobby-controlled tweedledum tweedledee politics of contemporary America as well as a methodology for interpreting that (use their own weapons against them etc).
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Old September 1st, 2012 #17
Alex Linder
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I'd also add that a lot of people initially talked to Chambers, but then they just withdrew from him and there doesn't seem to be a lot of talk as to why.

Incidentally Alex have you ever read Burnham's 'Suicide of the West' and 'The Machiavellians'? Well-worth reading as; particularly in the latter case, it provides the basis for the lobby-controlled tweedledum tweedledee politics of contemporary America as well as a methodology for interpreting that (use their own weapons against them etc).
Yes, I've read Suicide of the West. I'm not impressed by Burnham like others are. It figures that fat dead dope Canny Sammy took direction from him. As for Chambers, he went from commie flunky to religious mope; I sure wouldn't want to read Witness twice, just makes you want to kick him in the ass: "So kill yourself already, you fag." That was my attitude. Actually, Witness struck me as fitting the descriptions usually accorded Mein Kampf - turgid, like you say. Whereas much of Mein Kampf is quite interesting. I've said 100x, compare Hitler's MK to Orwell's big brother works, and Hitler comes off distinctly more specific and insightful.

My main goal is to highlight how Buckley (or we) went about building a movement.
 
Old September 1st, 2012 #18
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Buckley Sr.'s building of a private "homeschool" for his own and area children was brilliant. Giving White kids a truly well-rounded education, along with the all-important racial consciousness is something doable.
 
Old September 2nd, 2012 #19
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"Their differences were so profound that on one level it is surprising Kirk and Buckley agreed to collaborate. What is perhaps even more surprising is that Kirk became a star in the new conserative constellation. He was one o the most popular contributors to National Review even though his philosophy was out of step with the magazine as a whole. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan both claimed to be influenced by his work even though their libertarianism was incompatible with Kirk's traditional conservatism. Movement conservatives today consider The Conservative Mind one of the half dozen canonical works of their political faith even though it is fundamentally at odds with the other five.* ... *The six works, in chronological order, are: F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944); William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale (1951); Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952); Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (1953); Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative (1960); Milton Friedman, Freedom and Capitalism (1962). (p. 118)

I think Bogus is exaggerating the differences and distance between Kirk and Buckley. It's more a matter of emphasis than anything. But both, fundamentally and temperamentally, were religious; Buckley just had a different personality and accorded more respect to the entrepreneurial type than the reticent academic Kirk. Still, what concerns the White movement is how far you can go in accommodating different political views without dissipating your ideological impetus. Either you're on the same page, or you're not. Without a clear view of what is wrong and how to fix it, a big-tent approach doesn't do anything more than perhaps increase the size of a general milieu. The minute you become serious, you have to define and demand. For Buckley's purposes -- creating a magazine that would attract the opinion makers' minds -- he could hardly avoid having the top academic name on his side inside his tent. It's not that he had anything to fear from Kirk setting up shop as a competing camp, since Kirk was unlikely to do that by reason of his temperament, it's that as a top mind, even if he disagreed profoundly with Buckley and libertarian Mayer on certain things, he would still have a point of view worth hearing, and certainly one that would interest readers. There can be more lattitude with a magazine than with a political party, of course. But ultimately if you're a political group seeking a profound change, you need to have an ideology that is firmly adhered to, and if National Review had ever had plans to develop something in that direction, a split with Kirk might have become necessary. But Buckley chose a path such that before 1970 arrived, his own professor and adviser Willmore Kendall was dismissing National Review as "just another liberal rag" - which quotation does not find its way into this book, which traces Buckley only through 1968, declaring that by this point he had pretty much accomlished his mission in defining and leading a post-war conservatism.
 
Old September 2nd, 2012 #20
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Bogus has Buckley popping up in an era in which the dominant conservatives were Robert Taft, on the political side, and, for academics, Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter. The latter two were Burkeans. The question is how Buckley was able to effectively win the day with his own brand of non-Burkean conservatism.

"Viereck first proposed 'a Burkean new conservatism' in an article in Atlantic Monthly when he was still a student at Harvard in the 1930s, and he continued to press the case in Harper's and other magazines. After the war, he readapted his articles into a book titled Conservatism Revisited. In this thin volume -- published in 1949, six years before Kirk's The Conservative Mind -- Viereck declared that Edmund Burke 'deserves to be the model for modern conservative leadership.' Much of what Viereck said presaged (and surely influenced) what Kirk would say later. "The core and fire-center of conservatism, its emotional elan,' Viereck wrote, 'is a humanist reverence for the dignity of the individual soul.' As did Kirk, Viereck believed that flawed human beings had to rely on the civilizing influence of ancient traditions, the rule of law, 'the public and private submission to ethics,' and, most importantly, religion. 'The churches, Protestant, Catholic, or the closely related Jewish, draw the fangs of the Noble Savage and clip his ignoble claws.,' he wrote. ... He considered Burke's teachings about ordered liberty a fundamental tenet. Without order, cries for liberty were merely 'a disguise for the ambitions of some selfish group,' he wrote." (p. 125)

What we see in this attitude is the very common, and surely genetically based view, that fears uncontrolled, spontaneous individual movement. Lots of bilge about the value of the individual soul, but great distrust of an individual basically doing any kind of business with the world, or, really, moving at all in a way that isn't prescribed for him by the priest or some other authority. Conservatism is fear. You can sense the fearful hostilty the Vierecks and Kirks. That's what they don't trust in Buckley. He's not afraid like they are. It's a very fundamental personality difference. They're all high-IQ people with many intelligent things to say, but fundamentally those who think like Viereck and Kirk are driven by the same basic fear of movement that the base of the conservative pyramid is. As I say, this is surely genetic at root. The political philosophy of conservatism reduces to fear of unauthorized, unprescribed or previously unseen movement. Things should be as they ever were. That's the attitude. If you bundle enough of this type, you can get laws to enforce it. But since this type is basically a sort of reactionary coward, even if it has the numbers, it can't find the force of personality to use them, which is why the illiberal minority always comes to dominate it, given time.

Like Kirk, Viereck was a communitarian who was offended by libertarian romanticizing of the individual pursuit of wealth in an environment of pure laissez-faire. The new conservatism, he said, 'fights on two fronts. It fights the atomistic disunity of unregulated capitalism. It fights the merely bureaucratic, merely mechanical unity of modern socialism.' He surely amazed others who called themselves conservatives by arguing that trade unions were among the most important conservative institutions of the time. ... All of this creates a large chasm between Viereck's new conservatism and Buckley's conservatism. But perhaps the most profound difference was the way the two men viewed liberalism. To Buckley, liberalism was un-American. Buckley's antagonism for liberalism was, in part, something that he inherited from his father and that was intensified by the personal attacks on him following publication of God and Man at Yale. It was also partly something he learned from Whittaker Chambers and the other ex-communists at National Review who saw the entire political left -- from liberalism to communism -- as fundamentally socialist, collectivist, and statist. (pp. 125-6)

Here's a basic schema for mnemonic purposes: the libertarian favors the individual, the conservative favors the group-private, the illiberal favors the group-state. But this is not really that accurate, even though Bogus tacitly presents it that way. The conservative is worried about stability. He doesn't want to see society undermined or degraded by men pursuing profit. But then again, and this is evident even in the pre-'civil rights' conservatives like Taft and, as we are about to see, Rossiter, he will refuse to acknowledge group destructiveness. Blacks are a group. Blacks are a destructive group. Yet here the christ cultist's soul-individualism pops up and renders him blind. Blacks deserve rights! Because they are individuals with all-valuable souls, who should not be mistreated, per Divine command. To say that conservatives favor social coherence and stability over individualism and ideology is flat wrong, if these leading lights of conservatism -- Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck, and Clinton Rossiter -- these fifties conservatives (!) -- are to be taken as real and representative of their Burkean school. And of course Burke himself proposed a radical scheme for liberating the slave negros of some hot Caribbean isle. And that aint the fifties, that's in the 1700s! The kicker is that it's this wildman 'libertarian' Buckley who repeatedly, in the sixties, when it was hot, wrote against 'civil rights.' He said flatly and forthrightly that, numbers be damned, the superior South, the white men, had the right to protect their society because they were civilizationally superior. Buckley backed social coherence and stability. The Burkeans were for a very, as time would show, radical revolution. And one that would prove incredibly destructive, see Detroit, national bankruptcy, decline in manners, morals, education, pretty much anything that can be measured or observed. The conclusion is twofold: 1) it is far too simple to say religious, Burkean conservatives favor groups and social stability over the individual, when in fact they back radical reforms with a foolishness identical to the earnest illiberal's. The religious conservative balks at the businessman but embraces the bush nigger. Which has fucked up society more, you Burkean idiots? 2) although many of these religious conservatives essentially identify conservatism with the religious impulse, this is in point of the facts outlined above, quite wrong. The view that everything with a face is human and has a soul of inestimable value may be a religious view, but it is not a conservative view, it is a radical, a revolutionary, and a factually unfounded view. It is a view that has produced immense misery where it has held sawy. Religion itself is only conservative in one sense. It binds idiots. In other senses, intellectually, it is wild radicalism that makes for all manner of dangerous craziness. Atheism is the only truly conservative position on religion - because atheism alone doesn't go beyond the facts. The facts the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, is so hot for us to pay attention to.
 
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