Taki’s Magazine editor Richard Spencer and Taki’s contributor Dylan Hales elaborate on recent columns (Richard here and Dylan here) and their views concerning decentralist or localist politics as they relate to the new website Front Porch Republic, featuring writers Bill Kauffman, Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher and others.
Length: 25:56
4 Comments
Jack:
Can takimag Radio and TV become the new media of the alternative right? Answer: it should be. You, Dylan, and Richard hit all the right notes on your Front Porch Segment. And thank you for bringing up the worth of agrarian conservatism vis a vis the Lew Rockwell type libertarianism. God bless, Lew, he does such good work, and he is very important. A mainstay on the web. And yet, his guys like Wal-mart, MLK (or profess to), and don’t want to talk about immigration. We need to keep the VDARE and Chronicles people in the mix. We need to keep the channels open to Wendell Berry and what he signifies in terms of a link to the Nashville Fugitives.
More to the point, can you move to Atlanta and go on 920 AM? I’d quit my job to listen to you.
You guys epitomize what John Derbyshire talked about in the American Conservative talk radio article, in which he said we (alt right) really need our own All Things Considered. I think you guys can be genteel, urbane, and erudite, but you’d also be a helluva lot funnier, and rock seemingly three times as hard. Kind of like comparing the Replacements to the Eagles.
Godspeed.
Mr. Spencer makes a good point that we should do a better job of defining concepts like “place” and “limits.” However, I think Mr. Spencer makes a mistake by reducing our problems to “it’s the bankers, it’s the state.” Well, yes in a way it is. But if we look at the whole of Western Civilization, we’ll see that, as Mr. Weaver says, Ideas Have Consequences.
More specifically, religion, myth, and symbol are the source of culture. We can’t simply blame the bankers or the state for the decline of civilization. Did the bankers cause the Enlightenment? No, the growth of the centralized state and insidious ideologies like democratic globalism are the result, not the cause, of the rejection of historic Christianity.
That is where paleos and agrarians begin. We view the current economic collapse and rising tyranny in the context of the overall decline of Christianity and Western Civilization. Recover the Faith and myths of the West and we may, possibly, restore civilization.
That is what Russell Kirk spent his life writing about. And this is what, in various ways, Chronicles, Wendell Berry, and even Bill Kauffman are doing now.
This is what defines “literary” conservatism and makes it distinct from the materialistic conservatism of Mr. Spencer and Lew Rockwell, however valuable they each may be.
Very thoughtful post, Josh, and it points up one of the big shortcomings of lewrockwell.com in comparison to, say, Chronicles or takimag. Because they are so economically-based (and, make no mistake, I appreciate this contribution they make), they tend to give culture short-shrift, if they give it any shrift at all. They rarely mention fiction unless it’s Ayn Rand or films, unless it’s something like V for Vendetta. I have been to end the Fed rallies that were fun, but to my way of thinking, there were too many people with Guy Fawkes masks there. And worn by people who don’t really appreciate the historical Fawkes–only the movie character in the Fawkes mask.
Those of us who have read Chronicles over the years have learned about people like Berry and Fred Chappell and good literary historians like John Lukacs. We gain an appreciation for the work of someone like Russell Kirk, whereas the libertarians dismiss and trash him because he once referred to them as “chirping sectaries.”
But I think I see what you’re saying about literary conservatism above. It’s sort of the counterforce to cultural marxism, the idea that if you want a better society, you need a bottom up approach. You need to start influencing people to become better than they are. Or something like that.
“”That is where paleos and agrarians begin. We view the current economic collapse and rising tyranny in the context of the overall decline of Christianity and Western Civilization. Recover the Faith and myths of the West and we may, possibly, restore civilization.”"
Great thread and agreed, very well said. This why we must reconnect with race as a core understanding of who we are and it is why race ultimately matters. All of our stories, heroes and laws emit from what we are and race is a part of that. Not in totality but the core of what and who we are is tied directly to race. It’s organic. The Constitution, our culture, institutions & way of life is inextricable from our race. It is the overriding reason multiculturalism is national suicide.