Comments on: Introduction

By: peter lawler

peter lawler — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:24:00 +0000

I agree with Carl that the Federalists, on balance, were more right than the Anti-Federalists, although we need Tocqueville to appreciate properly some of the human cost of the modern choice. To appreciate the virtues of the South (and how they can benefit us today), I wouldn’t go to Jefferson or Randolph, but to the Percys, Faulkner, and O’Connor–and to some extent Tocqueville. I certainly agree that the Christian Epicurean Jefferson as a hugely incoherent and somewhat self-indulgent writer. Washington–a really, really noble guy–was more with Hamilton than Jefferson precisely because he was a genuine–or always trying to be effective–antislavery man.

By: Carl Scott

Carl Scott — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:38:48 +0000

Oh, here we go…the Southern apologists ride again! Sort of, sort of…
And if we’re a true McWilliams-ite, like Patrick, we can go one better, and become Anti-Federalist apologists. Alas, for the 71 Rhode-Island size republics that might have been!
Well, no thanks…while this California Yankee has been enjoying the South just fine, and he’s even been reading up on the likes of Russell Kirk praising the likes of John Randolph of Virginia, but he still thinks the Federalists were right. True republics of the Anti-Federalist sort were/are unsustainable, and the conspiracy-minded (bound-to-later-produce-secessionism) republicanism of Jefferson, Randolph, and alas, Madison, was delusive and incoherent. It sought to charge Hamilton and co. as monarchists while simultaneously enthroning Virginia…er, ahem…the States. In its confusion it led, contrary to the initial wishes of all three of these republicans, to a die-hard defense of slavery and to a corrosive/essentially anarchic doctrine of nullification, even to the societal triumph of Declaration-denying racialism a la Alexander Stephens. I think a comparison of Jefferson and Randolph in particular reveals incoherence. Both came to lament the changes that occurred in Virginia caused by their own championship of republican values, especially against primogeniture and entail. TJ sought to strengthen the local community, desiring more of the NE township example, and both TJ and Randoph surely championed the idea of natural aristocracy, exercising a beneficent hierarchical role especially at the local level, although they surely thought the natural aristocrats emerged more-often-than-not from the same prominent families, along the classical models.
Washington, Hamilton, Marshall and Lincoln were right, and they were not for unbridled Lockean capitalism or unbridled centralism. They were less confused about the limits of “natural aristocracy” and intuitive Burkeanism in a necessarily democratic/commercial American future than were the likes of Jefferson and Randolph.

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:55:42 +0000

Peter, are you having a slow weekend, anxious to get back to the classroom?
I may be a Luddite, but my Luddism has its limits.
I pull out the guitar and sing Dylan songs; “Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift…” Except globalization has pushed those dayshift jobs to China.
You root for the South during movies depicting the War for Southern Independence because deep in your heart you know the South merely wished to engage its right to withdraw from a voluntary pact made eighty years earlier. The eastern monied interests wished to keep the South in the Union strictly for economic issues and Father Abraham sided with them when he realized how much the South paid toward the punitive tarrifs imposed by Washington City.
Jackson was brilliant, at Chancellorsville his assault on Hooker’s left, just a-hangin’ in the air, was one of the most significant military maneuvers in history; “You may go forward, General Rhodes!” Jackson said.
BTW, I do disagree that “..it’s better that the North won the CW,” for the simple reason that if the South would have been allowed to estabish its own republic, we’d have someplace to flee to…just across the Ohio River.
I don’t think insurgents have to win at all…one merely has to have the desire and will to destroy them..I think Neitzsche-sp-said that.

By: peter lawler

peter lawler — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:01:07 +0000

Excuse the sundry typos on my previous post. I really can’t proof the screen. Isn’t even the Victrola decadent? Don’t you have to pull out the fiddle and make the kids dance jigs or something? Another liberal opinion f mine is that, on balance, it’s much better than the North won the Civil War, although I can’t help in some perverse Percy fashion but root for the South when I see battles on the big screen. I also think the South could have won the war had its leaders been more prudent and less romantic. (And listened to Stonewall Jackson and attacked northern cities.) Insurgents usually win, but most insurgencies aren’t led by slaveholders. But I’m, of course, being picquish to stimulate conversation, which Robert is right to talk up.

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:33:39 +0000

Well, them damn Yankees burnt down Atlanta (calling Dr. Swenckler!!)
I’ll take the “front porch,”a good book, family conversation, and the air and give you air conditioning, T.V., computer, ipod, Sony PSP, and the beloved cell phone, then we’ll discuss whose “way of life fatally flawed.”
I’m putting “Bonnie Blue Flag” back on the Victrola!

By: peter lawler

peter lawler — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:02:43 +0000

Thank God or globalization that sweet tea is on the run with the abomination the meat-and-three restaurant (where it’s impossible to tell the difference between the meat and the semi-gray overcooked vegetables). Even most barbeque ain’t much. Rome, GA now has three Japanese restaurants! Although sweet tea is horrible–a heaping glass of sugar, I would like to say something good about the authentic taste of a real Coca-Cola (Floyd County, GA is the highest per capita consumer of this product in the world), which is under withering assault by Crunchies, Greens, and low carbers liberal and conservative. I refuse to think of Texas as part of the real South or even fit for human habitation (Florida even more so). But our country was surely improved when the center of commerce and culture moves in direction of Richmond and Nashville and Greenville and Jackson and Savannah and Charleston and Charlottesville, VA and Athens, GA and Chapel Hill/Raleigh, and even Atlanta (although a sprawled out mess is still a city of real chruches). That would not have been possible without the techno-liberalizing influences of air conditioning, integration, and even air travel. It’s surely northern paternalism to tell southerners to sit on their porches with Atticus Finch and the kids and be photo ops for the rest of the country. And even the stoic Atticus knew that his way of life was fatally flawed and its remaining days were few.

By: James Poulos

James Poulos — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:07:07 +0000

RAF – the latter, whoops. Alien finger syndrome.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:58:29 +0000

Welcome to the new location, Patrick; I'm looking forward to what you may add to the site. In the meantime... For those who love air conditioning so much--you have to accept that not only did it make the abominations of greater Atlanta and Houston possible, but it made Washington DC comfortable enough for bureaucrats, lobbyists and even Congressmen to want to stay here year ’round. That, more than Supreme Court jurisprudence, is likely the cause of the growth of a permanent centralized government. Wasn't it Gore Vidal who first made this point? In which case, good show! Vidal and a premodern Aristotelian reactionary; that's the kind of postmodern ideological synergy we're looking for here. ...The Bryant Option Is this some reference to Anita, James, or did you mean "The [William Jennings] Bryan Option"? Because I'm all in favor of the latter.

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:29:19 +0000

It strikes me that any project seeking to establish a “postmodern” worldview is required to return to the Greek foundation; that was Voegelin’s position.
Plato, Socrates via Plato, and Aristotle referred to the Good (Agathon) as a form that was (sometimes) above all others, a form that they could only address in allegory and metaphor. In their inquiry these rather brilliant fellows (including the pre-Socratics) were engaging “philosophy” from the perspective of “open existence.” It seems to me that where some are being derailed is in insisting on a “closed existence” inquiry. That there is no “agathon.”
In order to philosophize one must have some hint of the transcendent where the act of the “periagoge”-the souls turning around toward the agathon-illuminates (appercieves) within the psyche its order of being within a cosmos that it had no hand in creating!
In establishing the transcendent as a pole in our existence and the realization that man is “constituted…through his relationship with the divine” are we not properly situated to address the questions of liminality, communitas, the polis, and even technos.
Without this grounding technos will surely be (and has been) utilized for the most horrific of human actions.

By: James Poulos

James Poulos — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:24:38 +0000

As forceful as Sam’s point is, though, an Arendtian judgment as to the irrecoverable brokenness of “the Western tradition” seems better suited to Europe than America. On the other hand, America is in fact the fruit of a pretty sizable — indeed, perhaps Providential — break with that tradition. Or, one might say, America shows in what respects the Western tradition is and isn’t a “package deal”. Americans have never self-destructed as the Europeans did. Even the first modern war, the Civil War, wound up uniting more than dividing. And if Europe’s self-destruction led toward a kind of unity, too, Europe still struggles without a throughline reaching from the precious earnest of its best vision of the good life to the banal politics of the present-day EU. As I suggest in my predictions at the main page, only France has the resources necessary to reconcile Europe with its history and redeem both in a flourishing way.