Or so they say. This exchange over at Sarah Hoyt’s is both illuminating and amusing. It even features a rare appearance by Dr. Jerry Pournelle. Anyhow, they’re worrying about Donald Trump and America turning too far to the “right”, by which it appears they mean an America that is genuinely nationalist, cognizant of its own interests, and concerned about its own survival:
accordingtohoyt
I speak enough with millenials in private to see even the left ones “turn” – ya’ll are going to end up like my generation in Portugal. They pushed leftism on us every chance. And we ran right as fast as we could.Foxfier
That’s what worries me. Rand was right about what was wrong, but wrong about what was right. (Mangled Chesterton, there.) There are a lot of other directions besides “right.” Mostly just tired of getting kicked by the people who didn’t manage to stop this from happening because we haven’t magically fixed it before 35.accordingtohoyt
Yeah, a lot of them are becoming like VD. “Everything the leftists say is a lie, so racism, sexism, etc. must have a point.” Head>desk.Joe in PNG
So, in order to avoid the ditch on the “Left” side of the road, they are aiming right straight at the ditch on the “Right” side of the road. Either way, you wind up with a totaled car.overgrownhobbit
VD doesn’t go far enough. Everything the vileprogs advocate needs to be re-examined down to the ground-level assumptions. Stopping part way just leaves one with bits of prog stupid rattling round the mental furnishings and gumming up the philosophy. Like mistaking an is for an ought.Still have hope for the guy. He’s got some sound foundations, and he’s right more often than wrong.
Now, I like Sarah and I think that her heart is in the right place, but I can only conclude that she has either failed to accurately observe the current situation or to think the matter through sufficiently.
What she, and many conservatives, have yet to grasp is that classical liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, free trade, constitutionalism, and a whole host of other 18th century concepts that were largely theoretical as well as being near and dear to our hearts have fundamentally failed.
Technology and events have fundamentally changed the way we must now think about these things; the logical cases that were laid out by the various 18th century Enlightenment thinkers are now subject to the analysis of more than 200 years of readily available data. Let the cult of reason be silent when experience and history gainsay its conclusions.
I’m not reacting to the Left. I’m not a reactionary and I’m not reacting to anything except considerably more information than the likes of Smith, Ricardo, Jefferson, Voltaire, or even Mises, Friedman, and Rothbard ever had.
My thinking has changed dramatically because of what I have witnessed over the last four decades. We are still much the same humanity that we always were, but we live in a radically different world today. It was one thing to posture grandly about free trade and the free movement of peoples back in the 1800s, or even the 1970s, it is another to do so when a nation’s entire industrial base can be dismantled or the population of an entire nations can literally pick up and move across a continent without anyone, anywhere, so much as lifting a finger to stop them.
Contra Sarah, Trump is neither the potential problem nor is he the solution. What he offers is one last chance to get it right. That’s all. He will buy America a little more time to find itself again, to find itself and embrace the strong, self-confidence of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American nationalism that made the USA a world power and turned it into a place to which people around the world wanted to come.
But they are on the verge of killing the golden goose because they are not, and they never will be, the kind of Americans who built America. Read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America. Their ideas about America’s history and America’s founding are little more than romanticized fairy tales. They think they are extending and expanding on the founding concepts when in truth they have perverted them.
Race does matter. Sex does matter. Nationality does matter. Not because the Left lies about these things, but because they are materially and objectively significant. The romantic Right is outdated, ill-informed, and intellectually irrelevant. Here is a hint: if you’re even mentioning the word “mercantilism”, you are arguing against nationalist Frenchmen dead 300 years, not the nationalist Mil-Right of today.