The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Vox Day Channels Sam Francis’s Ghost

Posted on | November 14, 2016 | 2 Comments

Vox Day argues that “conservatism has not only failed, it was always doomed to eventual failure by virtue of its very nature”:

It was an attitude and a defensive posture, not a coherent ideology or an identity, and it lacked positive objectives, so it never had any hope of resisting the relentless ideological onslaught of the Left.
And the concept of America as a proposition nation is not only historically false, it is logically and empirically untrue.

This is very much in line with what the late Sam Francis argued in his 1997 book Revolution from the Middle. Rather than attempting to summarize either Sam’s argument or Vox Day’s argument, instead I’ll say this: The Democrat Party is about people, the Republican Party is about ideas.

Democrats target specific blocks of voters — black people, Hispanics, homosexuals, labor union members, etc. — and say, “Vote for us and we’ll give you free stuff, and tax the rich to pay for it.” Republicans, by contrast, stand for a few basic ideas, in particular a strong defense, economic liberty and cultural traditionalism. This is what has been called the “three-legged stool” of GOP policy. To explain the weaknesses of the Party of Ideas in its battle with the Party of People would require far more time and space than I’m willing to give it now. One of the GOP’s weaknesses, however, is that the conservative intellectual leadership has a bad tendency toward overthinking stuff, which is where the “proposition nation” nonsense came from. Rather than to defend the interests of the Republican Party’s voter base, which has been fed up with illegal immigration for more than 20 years, the brainiacs like George Will wanted to make an argument on behalf of multicultural diversity without using those words, and thus “proposition nation” was born.

Intellectual abstractions do not win elections. Politics requires an appeal not merely to people’s sentiments, but also to their interests. The American people understand at an instinctive level that we’ve got too damned much immigration, and too damned much welfare, and too damned much government, generally. We cannot afford the government we’ve got — which is $20 trillion in debt — and yet Democrats say we need even more government. Why? Because “free stuff,” that’s why.

The federal government cannot even do its most basic tasks (i.e., protect the nation’s borders) and yet Democrats want to ignore this failure and instead have the government take over the health-care business and give every kid a “free” college education. Who’s gonna pay for all this stuff? Hint: Not José and Juanita who just got smuggled over the border. No, the “rich” are going to pay the taxes, and so if your household income is over a certain limit — maybe $75,000 a year, maybe $100,000 a year — you’re going to get soaked with federal taxes, to pay the salaries of bureaucrats running social welfare programs to “help” the poor. Welfare “helps” poor people the way another fix helps a junkie, but never mind that argument. The point is, the federal government has become an enormous criminal enterprise, defrauding taxpayers in the name of “social justice.” Somehow, liberals have convinced themselves that José and Juanita have a “right” to get free stuff paid for by the American taxpayer, despite the fact that (a) José and Juanita are not Americans, and (b) they’re breaking the law merely by being here. And if you don’t agree with the idea of giving free stuff to foreigners, well, you’re a racist.

Nobody likes to be called a racist, especially not intellectuals with advanced degrees from fancy private universities, and so we have a lot of allegedly “conservative” pundits who have decided they don’t want to defend the interests of the middle-class American taxpayer.

They’re gutless little crapweasels, these pointy-heads with their cleverly worded arguments for the “proposition nation.” And if Donald Trump does anything during his tenure in the White House, I hope he’ll call out these cowardly sell-outs by name, starting with David Brooks. Honestly, I’d make David Brooks persona non grata at the White House — ban that son of bitch, and if he tries to sneak into a press conference, have the Secret Service guys tase him, pepper-spray him and maybe give him a few good kicks to the head, just for good measure. But I digress . . .

We do not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The basic formula of GOP conservatism is sound, but it has not been articulated with sufficient clarity in recent decades because there are too damned many cowardly David Brooks types in the conservative intelligentsia. We will not defeat the Left if we are led by people who turn tail and run the minute some liberal calls them a racist:

Being against Democrat policies is always wrong, according to Democrats and their friends in the media.Their arguments are basically about calling you names — sexist! racist! homophobe! — for disagreeing with them.

You can read the rest of that at The Patriarch Tree.



 

Category: Intellectuals

Comments

2 Responses to “Vox Day Channels Sam Francis’s Ghost”

  1. Hillary Wins NH… Yaaaay!!! | Regular Right Guy
    November 15th, 2016 @ 2:30 pm

    […] Vox Day Channels Sam Francis’s Ghost […]

  2. Fear and Loathing: Three Days, $900, and It’s Morning in Vanuatu Again : The Other McCain
    November 21st, 2016 @ 7:32 am

    […] explanation? Sure, and I’ll be glad to provide it, but first let me share a conversation that took place in the comments of Monday night’s post. Daniel Freeman offered this gloomy […]