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.

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Secession lagniappe

Several more Northern California counties plan secession votes:

Voters in Del Norte and Tehama, with a combined population of about 91,000, will decide June 3 on an advisory measure that asks each county’s board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form a 51st state named Jefferson.

Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already voted to join the movement. Supervisors in Butte County will vote June 10, while local bodies in other northern counties are awaiting the June 3 ballot results before deciding what to do.

A similar but unrelated question on the primary ballot in Siskiyou County asks voters to rename that county the Republic of Jefferson.

“We have 11 counties up here that share one state senator,” compared to 20 for the greater Los Angeles area and 10 for the San Francisco Bay Area, said Aaron Funk of Crescent City, a coastal town in Del Norte County near the Oregon border. “Essentially, we have no representation whatsoever.”

More here.

Frank Bryan, the legendary historian of Vermont town meeting politics, has a new essay in Green Mountain Noise, the Second Vermont Republic’s magazine, about decentralism and human-scale government:

Within the chaos of incompetency lies the great danger to our Republic. A proliferation of unseen, unaccountable and thus uncontrollable nodes of influence have arisen to deal with the complexity of governing a continental enterprise from the center.   The result is what political scientists have traditionally called the “politics of muddling through.” Accordingly, any serious notion of “democratic accountability” has long since vanished.

Those who face the daunting challenge of reinstating a truly democratic America should see this as an opportunity. The tide of history is with us. We are not challenging a healthy, robust and competent democracy. We are challenging a tired democracy and therefore a weak democracy; a splendid achievement in the history collective human behavior that unfortunately has been hobbled by its inability to reign in its natural appetite for aggrandizing authority — even though the cost of this authority was paid in terms of democratic legitimacy. …

In 1789, we created the framework for a continental, federal enterprise, dividing authority between the states and the central government.  More importantly we trumped any chance of coherent central enterprise (one thinks of Canada) by setting our national institutions against one another. …

The structure of our democracy is currently out of whack. Power to the states and within the states, power to the towns and within the towns, power to the individual and within each individual the awareness that it is in the small community alone that true distinctiveness can be accurately perceived, assessed, and rewarded – where authentic individualism is possible.

We live in a democratic moment and place. Let us behave accordingly.

Read the whole thing. These essays in the same issue about Burlington’s drug culture aren’t bad either.

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The alt-con divide

Jason Joseph notices a split between Peter Lawler’s postmodern conservatives and the crowd of lovable modernity-rejecting hobbits at Front Porch Republic. Patrick Deneen, porcher capo, on the divide:

This debate pits the anti-consumerist, CSA-loving, small town-adoring, pro-hand working, suburb-loathing, bourbon-sipping denizens of the “Front Porch Republic” against the McDonald’s loving, Starbucks slurping, dentistry-adoring, Wal-Mart shopping adherents of Postmodern Conservatism.

I think I’m going to have to invite one of our goons to take on one of theirs. Let’s have a knock-down, drag-out, fight-to-the-finish, winner-take-all, one-man-standing, n0-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners debate. You, know – Jets vs. Sharks, and all that. As long as we can have drinks afterwards. Let’s find out once and for all whether there’s a place on the porch for the PoMo Cons, or whether there’s a place for the Front Porchers in post-modernity.

And with a word from Lawler, the battle is joined:

Dr. Patrick Deneen has gotten all uppity and wants some kind of showdown at one of his people’s corrals between the Postmodern Conservatives and the “Front Porch Republicans” (none of whom would be caught dead doing something REALLY conservative like voting REPUBLICAN).

Let me lay down a marker and predict the differences will get more dramatic now that the Postmodern Conservative blog has moved from First Things to NRO.

Lawler has sort of covered this territory before. I like PoMoCon, but they are prone to hipsterish hair-splitting on some of these issues that seems more about social positioning — like Carl Scott’s pre-view of “Copperhead” he wrote without seeing it.

The Mitrailleuse maintains no official position on the porcher-pomo schism, but I’ll tell you who I’d rather read.

Update: The whole 2009 discussion, rounded up.

Update II: Also Russell Arben Fox, June 4:

So I come back, once again, to Norman Mailer’s “left conservative” formulation: to “think in the style of Karl Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” Porcherism can’t be friendly to the present global liberal regime, as much as we may pragmatically work with it, because we see it premised upon the valuation of states and corporations and individuals who build their webs of connection in anything but Burkean, organic ways. The state, the corporation, even the sovereign individual all have their intellectual place in our accounting of the present world, and may be defended in better or worse ways. But absent a real communitarian context–a liveable, sustainable, historical one–they will follow paths that can never truly privilege place, and all too often will instead undermine it. That’s a fairly grand conclusion to come to about an online, ideological debate, I know. But for those few of us who have found an intellectual home in the combination of traditionalism with radicalism, it’s an important one to never forget either.

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Isolationism stops ‘creeping,’ gets up, takes a stroll, has a smoke

It sure is nice to see a major politician smoke again, isn’t it? I mean, in view of the cameras.

Despite an assertively rootless parochialism that may be our chief character trait, your average American Memorial Day celebrant may nonetheless find the distribution of Ukip voters in this week’s election interesting.

John Smith’s hometown in Lincolnshire went for the anti-EU insurgents this week, as did Yorkshire and South Somerset, all points of origin of the colonial Cheseapeake’s oldest, less permanent architectural traditions, like the Virginia frame.

As the sort of person who saves his fortune cookie slips, I find something poetically satisfying about this. Tom Rogan frets that the U.S.’s interest is in the U.K. playing a moderating role as a fully-integrated member of the EU, which is the sort of realpolitik that usually gets you called heartless.

Whatever’s going on in the gash suddenly torn open in progressivism’s teleology, the new nationalism of the 2010s is more isolationist than that of the mid-20th century, as James Traub notes: “As India has grown stronger, it has become more defensive about sovereignty and less prepared to defend the international order.” In an echo of the last broad-based American antiwar movement, Modi has tried to downplay his Hindutva associations with the pan-ethnic national concept of “India First.”

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Hugh Peters, and his spiritual counsel

The Millerite left

We’ve had sauce for the gander, so let’s take on the sound geese, shall we?

Wherein Chauncey DeVega reflects that progressivism hasn’t quite been severed from its protestant roots:

Several years ago, I watched students become unhinged and hysterical in response to Right-wing professional bomb thrower David Horowitz. They cried. They shambled about in a confused state. Some of them were taken to special areas for healing and hugs.

There are religious types who handle snakes, speak in tongues, or have fits of religious ecstasy. As I witnessed it, in the cult of left-leaning political correctness, personal outrage and tear filled histrionics were a sign of being one of “the elect” or “saved” when facing the likes of David Horowitz.

It’s almost as if the sensitive, 21st-century metrosexual and the Pentecostal football captain who only cries in church may have more in common than either would admit. We’ve touched on this subject recently, but in light of Richard Dawkins’ narrative collapse it’s worth revisiting.

Recent events threaten our reigning strain of self-hating protestantism embodied by Dawkins — the one Joseph Bottum’s been tilting at — with a fate something like the Millerites. Modi, the EU elections; we aren’t going where we’re supposed to be going.

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Secession lagniappe

Nationalia depicts a wrinkle in the EU elections this week:

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Open Europe worries about whether the critical reformers are being edged out by the “malcontents bloc.”

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Paolo Bernardini, interviewed about Venetian secession.

Biden affirms Moldovan independence.

*****

In praise of Abe, from across the Sea of Japan.

Sailer writes earlier this week that the Indian election shows that as “strange as it may seem to consumers of the American press, conservative nationalism is the leading political trend of the 2010s.”

The Dalai Lama congratulates Modi.

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Sacred Harp 47b: ‘Idumea’

From the 1982 Holly Springs Sacred Harp Convention, filmed by Lomax and crew, much of which can be found here. The words are by Charles Wesley:

And am I born to die? / To lay this body down!
And must my trembling spirit fly / Into a world unknown?

A land of deepest shade, / Unpierced by human thought;
The dreary regions of the dead, / Where all things are forgot!

Soon as from earth I go, / What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe / Must then my portion be!

Waked by the trumpet sound, / I from my grave shall rise;
And see the Judge with glory crowned, / And see the flaming skies!

There are a lot of versions of this online, including from the “Cold Mountain” soundtrack, which somebody set to clips from Battlestar Galactica to pretty awesome effect. The one from the 2012 Irish convention is the loudest, but I already posted a video from it. Sufjan Stevens did a version on one of his Christmas albums.