#paleoconservative

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.

John Derbyshire, "Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism" (2009).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

By today's standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today's U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.

Joseph Sobran.

Michael Joseph Sobran Jr. (/ˈsoʊbræn/; February 23, 1946 – September 30, 2010) was an American journalist, formerly with National Review magazine and a syndicated columnist. Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation".  

Throughout much of his career, Sobran identified as a paleoconservative like his colleagues Samuel T. Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Peter Gemma. He supported strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In 2002, Sobran announced his philosophical and political shift to libertarianism (paleolibertarian anarcho-capitalism) and cited inspiration by theorists Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He referred to himself as a "theo-anarchist.”

In the 2008 presidential election, Sobran endorsed Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Our share of the global economy is much shrunken from Reagan’s time. Our deficit is approaching $1 trillion. Our debt is surging toward 100 percent of GDP. Entitlements are consuming our national wealth. We are committed to containing the two other greatest powers, Russia and China. We are tied down militarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, with the War Party beating the drums for another and larger war — with Iran. And we are sanctioning adversaries and allies for not following our leadership of the West and the world. In looking at America’s global commitments, greatly expanded since our Cold War victory, one word come to mind: unsustainable.

Pat Buchanan. (Born 1938).

From: http://buchanan.org/blog/has-russia-given-up-on-the-west-130125

[the-funtime-autocrat]

By means of such plebiscitary, egalitarian, and libertarian intrusions, the managerial state breaks down the intermediary and differentiating institutions of the bourgeois order and homogenizes and subjugates their component members, rationalizing their extension into these institutions through cosmopolitan ideological formulas that condemn bourgeois heterogeneity as artificial and repressive as well as through meliorist or utopian formulas.

Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The conflict between the new elites and the older elites they challenge occurs not only within the organizations themselves, but also in all the political, economic, and social and cultural activities that mass organizations undertake, and the conflict is not restricted to a struggle for formal political and economical power but involves a contest for social and cultural power as well. The persistence of traditional institutions and systems of beliefs constrains and impedes the continuing growth of mass organizations and their operations, and it is imperative for the emerging elites to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society that sustains the older elites and the systems of beliefs, or ideologies, on which their rule is based.

Samuel T. Francis, “Leviathan and Its Enemies.”

[the-funtime-autocrat]

We have transformed our colleges from places of higher learning into places for the technical training of poorly prepared young men and women who need a degree to get a job in a college-crazy society.

Eugene Genovese (1930-2012).

Eugene Dominic Genovese (May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012)[1] was an American historian of the American South and American slavery.[2][3] He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power,[2] class and relations between planters and slaves in the South.[3] His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize.[4] He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

[spellingmistakescostlives]

Alex Jones is slowly turning into Joad Cressbeckler.

[aliceunderscores]

“[Obama’s] administration has twisted the meaning of existing authorizations of force to justify this illegal warfare, and his officials have even denied that the U.S. was engaged in hostilities in Libya when our planes were bombing that country’s government. The U.S. is now once again bombing targets in Libya with no debate or authorization in response to the problems that the previous unauthorized Libyan intervention helped to create. Congress has scarcely ever been less involved in the decisions about where and when the U.S. goes to war overseas. That is the gift that Obama gives to his successors, none of whom is likely to be any more scrupulous about Congressional war powers than Obama has been.”

I fell into a pattern of reading very extremely opposed news, so I spent today catching up some classical conservatives. I fundamentally disagree with some of Daniel Larison’s conclusions, but he is intelligent and measured and–I fear–prophetic. As progressives and liberals rush to demonized trump as an aberration, an extreme evil, a disjunction, it is important to remember how Obama set precedent for and normalized extralegal use of force.

I also appreciate Larson’s attention. to Yemen and foreign policy, which many of my demographic peers prefer to ignore.