Pope Francis and the EU

CWR: Pope Francis, Europe, and the “universe in little pieces” by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
The Pope’s “dream” (as he calls it) for Europe is singularly ill-timed and, worse, ill-conceived.

Chilton Williamson on Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor may have been imperfect, as we all are. As a Catholic, she would have understood that better than most of the woke. On the anniversary of her death, read her. https://t.co/9Pnp8WYbw5

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) August 3, 2020

Chilton Williamson, Jr. on Neil McCaffrey

CWR: Rightly Said: Remembering Neil McCaffrey by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
McCaffrey was a Catholic first of all, and next a conservative. Catholicism and conservativism were always his chief concerns as a man, a publisher, and a writer.

Paleo Realism

AmConMag: What the Machiavellians Can Teach Us About the National Interest by Chilton Williamson Jr.
It was through them that James Burnham learned to renounce ideology and see the world as it actually is.

Inconceivable!

CWR: Notre Dame de la France by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Is it conceivable that the first country to loose ideological revolution on the world could be the same that launches the most intelligent and thoroughgoing intellectual counter-revolution in 230 years?

John Randolph Club Conference 2015

audio recordings for sale

Peter Brimelow: Brimelow In Cleveland: Nation, State, Secession—And An American Reconquest Of America

Items of Interest, 3 October 2012

(via Dr. Helen)

Manly Honor: Part 1 - What is Honor?

CRW interview with Chilton Williamson, Jr - Has Democracy Died? (via Insight Scoop)

Radical simplicity and the middle class by Samuel Alexander (EB)

‘Degrowth is not a liberal agenda: Relocalisation and the limits to low energy cosmopolitanism’ by Stephen Quilley (EB)

2.3 Plato's Revenge: Small as Bio-regional, Communitarian and Jeffersonian

With the recent publication of Plato's Revenge. Politics in the Age of Ecology (2011), Ophuls completed a trilogy on the politics of scarcity. In 1977 he had achieved a certain notoriety among environmentalists by questioning whether ecological integrity could ever be compatible with modern liberal democracy. He pointed out that the entire set of ideas, institutions and practices predicated on abundance would inevitably be replaced by new social and political forms based on scarcity.

In 1997 he extended the critique of modern liberalism, arguing that the paradigm of mass politics inherited from Hobbes and Locke, even without ecological crisis, was bound for self-destruction because it abandons the premise that a successful polity must be rooted in an unspoken but pervasive framework of virtue, itself reproduced in the context of a binding we-identity and community (or what Tönnies [1887]called 'gemeinschaft'). In Plato's Revenge, Ophuls completes the argument by sketching a possible replacement – a new communitarian philosophy and political framework rooted in the ideas of Jefferson and Rousseau, but grounded in evolutionary psychology, anthropology and Jungian psychology.

High-priced fuel syndrome by Gail Tverberg (EB)

Occupy Education: Two reviews by Mark Garavan and Anne B. Ryan (EB)

Robert Bork, Coercing Virtue

The Moral Duty to (Not) Vote by Andrew Haines

The following two (along with the piece that I posted yesterday, Jacques Maritain, the HHS Mandate, and the Failure of American Pluralism) merit some sort of response from a paleo/traditional conservative perspective:
Can there be Statesmen? A MacIntyrean Challenge to Trepanier's Aristotle by Thaddeus J. Kozinski [see David Schindler]
Why Libertarians Are Wrong About Subsidiarity Part I by Richard Gallenstein

Sacra Liturgia 2013

A live chat with the creator of P90X: Join me, Tony Horton, on Thursday Oct. 4 for a LIVE video chat

Interviews with Tony Horton after the jump.

The 23rd Annual Meeting of The John Randolph Club

JRC Chicago: The Failure of Democracy - November 16-18, 2012

Speakers are Thomas Fleming, Chilton Williamson, Taki, E. Christian Kopff, Claude Polin, Peter Brimelow, and Aaron D. Wolf.

Even without illegals, is Arizona sustainable?

American Obesity And The Doomed Desert Civilization Of The Southwest By Chilton Williamson

The New American Mob by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Chronicles

Liberalism as a political movement (it never was a political philosophy, for the very good reason that it fails to approach the level of philosophy at all) never made sense in spite of the fact that the majority of Americans since the War Between the States have been liberals, whether they knew it or not. It took what James Kalb calls advanced liberalism, coming in the last quarter of the 20th century, to bring the American public to a sort of political Great Awakening, in which they find themselves, somewhat groggily, shaking themselves and rubbing their eyes. Or rather, one half of the American public, the other having converted—as it seems, irredeemably—to the advanced-liberal ideology, which is really the old liberalism stretched and distorted and pummeled from its youthful naive falsity into senile surrealism. The arrival of advanced liberalism has divided the United States between the New and the Old America, a division that is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future but is becoming, rather, more fixed and rigid. Liberalism in the era of Obama represents for the Old American culture what Islam does for the culture of Old Europe. “[B]e­tween us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . . ” Liberals blame an unenlightened reactionary mass for the divide, but in truth the fault is theirs, and all theirs. Advanced liberalism demands that people think, believe, and act in ways that it is simply unnatural for human beings to think, believe, and act, and it is unlikely that it will win over a greater proportion of Americans to those ways than it has managed thus far to do. The battle lines have been drawn. America is fated to remain a house divided against herself for many generations, and afterward to share the inevitable fate of all divided houses, which are by nature ungovernable, and hence unlivable.

A century and a half ago the United States wasted the greatest opportunity in American history to divide peacefully into two geographic sections, each left to go its own way. Our ancestors had their chance, and they threw it aside. (Had they not, the fastidious Yankees of our own time would enjoy the inestimable satisfaction of requiring the Neanderthal Confederates to obtain visas before traveling north.) For four terrible years, the United States suffered the War Between the States. That was terrible enough, but that was all it was—a conflict between two discrete opposing unions. Today, she faces the prospect of real civil war, a war among citizens that cannot be settled by the physical separation of the adherents of the two sides, who, to a greater or a lesser degree, are integrated one with the other across an entire continent. The day may yet come when America will rue the chance she long ago refused, to separate what Orestes Brownson called the personal or barbaric democracy of the South from the humanitarian democracy of the North. (He preferred the first kind.) The problem then was a simple one, and so was the solution. Today, it has become an impossible problem, for which there is no imaginable solution. Modern Americans do indeed exhibit a tendency to settle in communities according to their own kind—not just racially and ethnically compatible communities but politically agreeable ones as well. (One thinks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City.) But these demographic self-rearrangements are insufficient to the scope of the difficulty, save on a statewide basis, in which case the resulting blocs of states would be unlikely to enjoy a convenient geographic contiguity. Whatever the solution—if there is a solution—turns out to be, it is clearly impossible that the United States should continue as she is going, trapped in a state of radical instability and wracked by the most profound public dissensions and animosities that inevitably acquire a personal dimension.

The Tea Party, as I have said, is not an agent of political change. It is an expression of a widespread popular demand for a kind of political and social reformation that has yet even to begin to be formulated in a conscious and deliberate way and coupled to a political vehicle devised more or less expressly for itself: a collection of loosely affiliated raiding parties, not an organized army fighting for a determined collective goal. Thus, the need seems to be for the eventual identification of some such goal, and the creation of a political movement capable of achieving it. Unfortunately, the times are probably not ripe for these developments. John Lukacs’s maxim that change within democratic polities always comes slowly may be soon tested. The United States, indeed, has changed radically, and with radical speed, in the past 60 years, and no one can say where she is going (except to likely disaster) and how fast she is going there. For this reason, the Tea Party’s essentially reactive, ad hoc, short-term strategy may be just what is wanted, for now. Perhaps, following this strategy that is in fact no strategy at all, it may help to create a political climate in this country from which some big political thing may arise. The Tea Party, and whatever friends and allies it may succeed in scrounging up for itself, are unlikely to create a true political party and less likely still ever to control the government, while the prospect of their establishing a ruling elite, as Sam Francis hoped his Middle American Radicals might do someday, is a near social and political impossibility. The New Class rules because it is necessary to the New America it has created, and, so long as the New America survives, the New Class has nothing finally to fear from the Tea Party and its sympathizers. This raises the great question whether the New America is actually sustainable, socially, economically, and politically speaking; or whether, as Edward Abbey put it 30 years ago, our only hope might not be catastrophe.

Chilton Williamson, Cannibal Statistics

over at Chronicles (via CHT)...

The United States has no glorious culture, no history comparable with that of Great Britain and the great Western European nations. Rooted in the thin acidic topsoil of the Enlightenment, and at a deeper level in the even thinner and more acid subsoil of Puritanism; deprived of an hereditary aristocracy for which a more or less barbaric plutocracy has necessarily substituted; mentally and socially crippled by bumpkin preachers at the bottom of the religious structure and by otiose transcendentalist divines at its top; retarded by its frontier culture; corrupted by the worship of money, science, and technique and by the false religions of Progress and Democracy—high culture at the European level was never to be a part of America’s destiny. (The English, despite the self-inflicted and incurable wound of the Reformation, at least had the sense to kick the sectarians out at the beginning of the 17th century. Chesterton, on a lecture tour in the United States, quipped, to nobody’s amusement, that Great Britain, too, should have her own Thanksgiving Day, offering up her heartfelt thanks for the God-sent departure of the Puritans from England.) And yet American civilization, despite its undeniable shallowness by comparison with that of Europe, does represent the cultural and intellectual flowering of a unique, vigorous, and interesting people who succeeded for a time in creating a culture well suited to, and highly expressive of, its geographical and material circumstances, as Tocqueville understood. The trouble with America is that she never realized her great potential, and the chief reason that she failed to do so is the irresponsible profligacy of her immigration policy, driven almost entirely at the behest, indeed the demand, of the business and industrial elites who, from the beginning, showed no concern for the future of their country but merely for what they might realize from it in the short term. (How could it have been otherwise? They were wealthy men of business, not aristocrats, whose historical role has been to act as husbandmen for their countries.) Mass culture, together with mass democracy, by themselves ensured the destruction of the traditional American civilization (America’s colonial past, remember, is nearly as long as her history as the United States), but the racial and ethnic fragmentation of society produced by immigration ensured that the old civilization was not long for this world.

There is no more chance, of course, of restoring the old American Republic, either in political spirit or in general culture, than of restoring the Roman Republic. And so there would be no need or excuse for deploring its passage but for one thing: As the history of the West since 1789 shows, a bad situation, no matter how bad, can always be made worse. As socially fragmented as American society has become, and as much as its culture has been degraded by immigration, they will inevitably become more so if mass immigration from the Third World is not soon halted. There are, still, many valuable relicts that deserve to be preserved. But contemporary mainstream culture will not permit this truth to be spoken when the message is expressed in subjective historical, cultural, and moral terms. The demons of multiculturalism simply will not permit such a thing.