No Way Out
James Kalb describes why political action can't get us out.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Somewhat irrelevant comment, but the people on Alternative Right have taken the strange stand of adopting their opponent's language.
ReplyDeleteThe word "right wing" really doesn't mean anything, but is widely used by certain groups to paint a broad brush stroke across their disparate, unrelated opponents, from religious traditionalists to pro-NAFTA wonks to supporters of interventionist wars.
If you were one or the other of those things, you wouldn't necessarilly relegate your views to that of people with entirely different agendas. A pro-NAFTA wonk would call himself pro-NAFTA, not necessarilly "right wing" in the same sense as Pat Buchanan.
In the French National Assembly, they only concocted the word "left wing" to refer to the Jacobins who sat at the left side of the house. Everybody, who was scared of them, sat a little further away. Being scared of Jacobins does not mean being of another monolithic agenda. It just means you are scared of the Jacobins! Given the craziness of Jacobins, that could mean just about anybody.
It's like entire generations have grown up hearing their far more nuanced views being reduced to a part of a broader group, and hence those people can now only think of things in terms of their opponent's categorizations.
I have been told that the web site on which this article appears has become something of a White Nationalist site. That's too bad. In any case, that is not the position of the article to which I linked nor of its author.
ReplyDelete