The Education of a Paleoconservative

[arisbe]

One of you has asked, and perhaps some of you have wondered, just what the hell is this neocon-paleocon thing. Isn't neocon just a word used by anti-Semites to smear everything good, clean, and decent?

I think not. But I do need to make myself clearer. So I have gathered up some of the essays Taki has been kind enough to publish, or at links to them, in an order that makes sense, an order that, I imagine, might do for a book:

http://www.squidoo.com/paleo

Take a look and let me know what you think. If you do now you will miss the ads for hypnotic mind control, lose nine pounds in eleven days, get ripped abs in thirty three.

Of course it's a personal take. Nothing in it about Oakeshott. Or about not only Strauss, but Voegelin, as a neocon. Or when and where the tern neoconservative appeared in print. (In a book, it was in one by Peter Viereck in the middle '50s, referencing a magazine reference by Will Herberg to Reinhold Niebuhr. Good to know, because it all goes back to Reinhold's debate with his brother Richard in the '30s. And Reinhold was, with Rabbi Heschel, I think, the originator of the pernicious myth of Judeo-Christendom, that Christians must withdraw from public view and discourse everything in their faith a Jew might object to, everything, that is, about Jesus as other than a mere prophet of the Social Gospel.)

I fear that there might be more research ahead of me, and this at a time of my life that I am more anxious to communicate what I already know while I am still able. I wonder if it might not be better to stick to autobiography, to give otherwise abstract ideas some kind of human resonance. But my life, viewed from the outside, has not a great deal of biographical interest.

Comments

[fixnwrtr.livejournal.com]

But my life, viewed from the outside, has not a great deal of biographical interest.

I think that depends on your perspective. As someone who is an avid viewer from outside, I've found that the people who consider themselves boring biographically are usually the most interesting.

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

True. But for every reader of Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had hundreds, who would be called intellectuals today.

[fixnwrtr.livejournal.com]

Why is being called an intellectual so important? Is it not possible to learn as much from an unknown Indian as from T. E. Lawrence?

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

Much more, I think. I will return to Nirad C. Chaudhuri, not Lawrence of Arabia. (Maybe the movie. And someday I shall read Doughty's Arabia Deserta, which Yeats, Pound and Tagore read aloud one summer in the English countryside.)

[fixnwrtr.livejournal.com]

After looking up Nirad's book, I'm definitely intrigued and I shall put it on my list.

[(Anonymous)]

"people who consider themselves boring biographically are usually the most interesting."

One need not every even leave the monastary, so to say.

[rawmr.livejournal.com]

well interesting though 'fraid the article lost me early when it compared the movement to Barry Goldwater. Wouldn't even want to begin getting into the dirth of rotting matter buried in that simplistic and deformed romantic's subconscious (something only ronnie could best), let alone liberatarian economics and environmental policy, though of course I see nothing very wrong in general with the latter's love of sex, drugs and rock'n roll, 'cept of course in the sheer gluttony of the movement's leaders, but they have lots of company here from the major parties.

I'm guessing perhaps the only way paleos can escape the odorous legacy of conservatives over the last 100+ years is by switching to the Dems. Plenty of racial tolerence, social equality, and narrowed down foreign policy there, even some economic sanity and fairness.

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

I guess a whole lot of us never left the Dems, even for Reagan.

As for Barry, well, he says he had no idea what conservatism was until he read the book written for him by a fellow far to the right of Franco. (I do not exaggerate, the ghostwriter was a Carlist.)

But better Barry than LBJ. Or Nixon. And I think he would have liked Obama.

[rawmr.livejournal.com]

Sad to say, but Barry would likely have done as good or every president since and including lbj, except everyone's favorite Bill of course.