Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

No really, what is right-libertarianism?

A frustrating thing about left-libertarians is that they have the same affection for “direct action” as your average Tyranny Response Teamster, but generally not working within political parties, finding things like the tea party distasteful and/or vaguely bigoted. As opposed to, say, shooting back at the police in Ferguson, as someone suggested on Facebook the other day, which is presumably part of the groovy anarcho-revolutionary struggle.

I mention this in the context of the latest exercise in semantic trench warfare (one of many) over at the SFL blog. It seems to me there is a significant contradiction between approvingly quoting the line, “our aim is not to overthrow the state, but to ignore it” and “radical labor activism” and copwatching. At the very least, adopting the left-wing label and tactics evinces a certain solidarity with politics that have never not been about power.

On a conceptual level, if you think you’re going to convince your fellow members of the black bloc to adopt agorism after they seize it, you’re gonna have a bad time. In reality, your comrades are far more likely to get recruited into the Democratic Party, which remains friendly to revolutionary socialism. Leaving the left-libertarian with … what, exactly?

Mr. Gourdie could have saved himself the four paragraphs by just pointing this out, because it shows their lack of seriousness vis-a-vis actually seizing power (not the virtues of right-libertarianism’s “big-tent approach” — you’ll never out-welcome the left), and appended an excerpt of Murray Rothbard’s “Break the Clock” speech:

[T]he Hayekian trickle-down model overlooks a crucial point: that, and I hate to break this to you, intellectuals, academics, and the media are not all motivated by truth alone. As we have seen, the intellectual classes may be part of the solution, but also they are a big part of the problem. For, as we have seen, the intellectuals are part of the ruling class, and their economic interests, as well as their interests in prestige, power and admiration, are wrapped up in the present welfare/warfare-state system.

Therefore, in addition to converting intellectuals to the cause, the proper course for the right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.

Another alternative right-wing strategy is that commonly pursued by many libertarian or conservative think tanks: that of quiet persuasion, not in the groves of academe, but in Washington, D.C., in the corridors of power. This has been called the “Fabian” strategy, with think tanks issuing reports calling for a two percent cut in a tax here, or a tiny drop in a regulation there. The supporters of this strategy often point to the success of the Fabian Society, which, by its detailed empirical researches, gently pushed the British state into a gradual accretion of socialist power.

The flaw here, however, is that what works to increase state power does not work in reverse. For the Fabians were gently nudging the ruling elite precisely in the direction they wanted to travel anyway. Nudging the other way would go strongly against the state’s grain, and the result is far more likely to be the state’s co-opting and Fabianizing the think tankers themselves rather than the other way around. This sort of strategy may, of course, be personally very pleasant for the think tankers, and may be profitable in cushy jobs and contracts from the government. But that is precisely the problem.

It is important to realize that the establishment doesn’t want excitement in politics, it wants the masses to continue to be lulled to sleep. It wants kinder, gentler; it wants the measured, judicious, mushy tone, and content, of a James Reston, a David Broder, or a Washington Week in Review. It doesn’t want a Pat Buchanan, not only for the excitement and hard edge of his content, but also for his similar tone and style.

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Secession lagniappe

Reason has a video on the Honduran ZEDEs out this week, produced by Ross Kenyon and Zach Weissmueller:

Mark Johanson in CNN on micronations:

Many like Cruickshank credit Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother Leicester with popularizing the concept in the mid-1960s when he towed an 8×30-foot bamboo raft to a spot 12 nautical miles off the southwest coast of Jamaica and declared it New Atlantis under the obscure Guano Islands Act of 1856.

He’s written on this subject before. Al Jazeera had a long spot on micronations recently too.

SON on Boko Haram declaring a caliphate.

We’re less than a month from the Scottish referendum. Here’s Alex Massie on this week’s debate:

There are plenty of holes in the SNP’s case but Darling seemed unable – most of the time – last night to point them out. So Salmond won, not just by default but because he made the more persuasive case.

And, of course, he rediscovered the importance of lyricism: “This is our time. It’s our moment. Let us do it now.” A simple but powerful message that asks Scots only to believe in themselves. Since people like the idea of believing in themselves it’s neither a daft nor a fruitless appeal. Hope still matters.

Will it be enough? Well, I would expect the Yes side to enjoy a small bounce in the polls later this week. Perhaps a couple of points improvement. Whether that lasts as long as polling day, however, is a different matter.

That seems to have happened. David Byrne comes out against.

Tony Burman on its reverberations:

Given the many dramatic and unexpected directions in which this century is heading, the ground seems to be moving beneath our feet. Regardless of the result, there are increasing signs that history may ultimately see the Sept. 18 vote in Scotland as the beginning of something transformational.

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Scenes from the Fourth Rome: Send Us Your Photos!

Above is the Robert Taft statue beneath his carillon, whose bells can still be heard hourly from the Capitol. A fine way to kick off what will be a recurring feature on this blog.

Here’s Russell Kirk on Taft:

From the Second World War, as from the First, no increase of liberty and democracy would come: on the contrary, in most of the world a host of squalid oligarchs must be the principal beneficiaries, whatever side might win. For the United States, then, war was preferable to conquest or to economic ruin; but if those calamities were not in prospect, America should remain aloof. The blood of man should be shed only to redeem the blood of man, Taft might of said with Burke: “the rest is vanity; the rest is crime.”

Taft’s prejudice in favor of peace was equaled in strength by his prejudice against empire. Quite as the Romans had acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind, he feared that America might make herself an imperial power with the best of intentions—and the worst of results. He foresaw the grim possibility of American garrisons in distant corners of the world, a vast permanent military establishment, and intolerant “democratism” imposed in the name of the American way of life, neglect of America’s domestic concerns in the pursuit of transoceanic power, squandering of American resources upon amorphous international designs, the decay of liberty at home in proportion as America presumed to govern the world: that is, the “garrison state,” a term he employed more than once. The record of the United States as administrator of territories overseas had not been heartening, and the American constitution made no provision for a widespread and enduring imperial government. Aspiring to redeem the world from all the ills to which flesh is heir, Americans might descend, instead, into a leaden imperial domination and corruption.

It should take no pointing out that all of this has come to pass. And we would like your help, dear readers, especially those of you residing in the DC area, in providing evidence of our lapse into “leaden imperial domination and corruption.”

I’ve long been an admirer of Richard Anderson‘s “Scenes from the Imperial Capital” blog feature, which refers, of course, to Ottawa. And I’ve contributed one lunch to Rod’s View from Your Table series. Then of course there’s the ur-version of this sort of thing over at The Dish. Scenes from the Fourth Rome will be something of a combination of the two types; mostly reader-generated photos, but with a focus on DC.

Anything germane to imperial decadence and decline is fair game; forgotten statues, derelict old homes, drunk interns puking on government buildings, whatever. The sky’s the limit; get creative. Submissions will be screened for quality, but I hope to be able to keep a light touch.

Here are a few ground rules for guidance:

  • Photographs must be reasonably clear and well-composed, with an accompanying description if you wish.
  • Anonymous submissions are allowed, or if you would like a particular site/blog/flickr/instagram credited, we are happy to help promote local photographers.
  • If you do not reside in DC, fear not! We expect to have submissions mostly from here, but Fourth Rome could be construed in multiple ways and we’re happy to consider those from elsewhere.
  • For god’s sake don’t be touristy, but don’t feel the need to stay out of your photos either. For example, there’s probably a lot you could do with a basketball and Edmund Burke’s statue down on Mass Ave.

Send your photos to [email protected], and you may see them published here. Two more after the jump.

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Source

Four American Anti-Imperialisms

A useful taxonomy from the introduction of David Mayers’ excellent Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise To Power:

Four strands of dissent are discernible amid the personalities, competing ideas, and rival interests that shaped debate on foreign affairs from Louisiana to Korea. These strands can be labeled as prophetic, republican, nationalist, and cosmopolitan. They interlaced even as they wove through the deeper fabrics of American society and polity: capitalist economy, technological change, population growth, racial-ethnic-religious diversity, class stratification, party competition, and regional tugging.

The prophetic is the most venerable of the four strands. It was nourished by the religious temper and puritan core of the colonial/early independence period. More precisely, this orientation originated in the outlook of seventeenth-century New England theocrats such as John Winthrop. Themselves dissenters — from Anglican ecclesiolatry — they feared God’s wrath at creatures who strayed from His edicts or purpose. Pronounced still in the nineteenth century, before the popular success of Charles Darwin’s biology, the prophetic strand stemmed from belief in God (often depicted in anthropomorphic terms) who judges nations no less than individual souls. A number of dissenters, mainly reared in Protestant tradition, accepted in earnest this idea once expressed by the religiously unconventional Jefferson. This deist said (referring to slavery): “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” From such anxiety, resolve could follow to put matters right, evident in voices opposed to enlarging the slave zone via the Louisiana acquisition, evicting Native Americans from their lands, or attacking Mexico in 1846. The idea that God reflexively enlisted on America’s side constituted theological error — blasphemy — for the prophetically minded recusant.

The republican strand sprang from the country’s democratic ethos and distrust of empire, inherited from the 1776 rebellion. This strand of dissent has manifested most frequently and vividly. It gained rhetorical power and influence from America’s being a self-conscious republic — fed by the idea, as self-evident, that representative institutions and liberal values were superior to, also incompatible with, overweening power. In this case, the United States should not substitute the sham of imperium for estimable virtues. Possession of immense power was thought to be disorienting, even disabling. Americans must not lose their way in hubris or worship of imperial idols, against which the 1776 generation had properly mutinied. Republican-minded dissenters thus objected to Louisiana empire, the 1848 Mexican cession, the buying of Alaska, Filipino occupation after the Spanish-American war, and subsequent bids for hegemony. This preference did not recommend national introversion and eschewed sulky isolationism; republican dissenters emphasized instead the power of US example — accountable government, domestic tranquility — as a guarantor of Washington’s influence abroad.

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Sacred Harp 82t: ‘Bound For Canaan’

Oh when shall I see Jesus
And reign with Him above,
And from the flowing fountain
Drink everlasting love?

I’m on my way to Canaan, (x3)
To the new Jerusalem.

When shall I be delivered
From this vain world of sin,
And with my blessed Jesus
Drink endless pleasures in?

But now I am a soldier,
My Captain’s gone before;
He’s given me my orders,
And bids me not give o’er.

Trotsky was a rockist

“Boredom is just a slumber one can be roused from”

A piece of mine was published in The American Interest yesterday, in which I play the Tory anarchist music critic, reviewing Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!:

If you’ve ever seen the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train(1989), you’ve witnessed the whole of pop music criticism in microcosm, in the form of two Japanese tourists spending a night in Memphis while on a pilgrimage devoted to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Mitsuko shows her boyfriend the “important discoveries” in her notebook, pictures of the Statue of Liberty and Madonna; like a parody of the stuffy, tenured Americanist and his archetypes, they all look like Elvis. In another scene they share a cigarette and Jun interrupts her musing about the King by declaring Carl Perkins better.

At the risk of vindicating one side or the other by comparison, the dynamic in this lovers’ quarrel is exactly the same in the contemporary version of this debate: the endless conversation between “rockists” and ”poptimists,” between deriders and defenders of commercial pop music. The latter lines up neatly with a modern culture at war with the notion of guilt or shame of any kind, even that incurred by something as small as a love of the lowbrow—a culture that encourages pride in philistinism. The former consists of people who suggest things like, “if you feel so guilty about it, maybe there’s a good reason.” Not for lack of honest critics trying to kill it, this dichotomy refuses to die, and as of April is still the subject of NPR features. As ever, it’s less about any particular artist than a proxy fight over opposing cultural and ideological commitments.

In a certain sense, the opposite of poptimism is what Trotsky called, the “protest against reality.” Elvis is still the model here, though where his various later iterations fall—like Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury, or Chris Isaak, who I’m sure are all in Mitsuko’s scrapbook and are well-covered by Stanley—is, I suppose, a matter of debate. And on down, too; Stanley identifies psychedelic music as the moment pop became about something other than dancing, or acid house, or punk as a class protest. One could make the case that all of them were “protests against reality” to some extent.

The trouble is that protests against reality have never been very difficult to sell, as Adorno and Horkheimer discovered six years after Trotsky wrote that. And today, now that economic conditions have caused the industry itself to register a sort of protest against reality—by advocating intellectual property regimes that would harm privacy and probably just wouldn’t work, among other things—we appear to have run into some serious confusion.

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