Taki’s contributor Dylan Hales joins me in a discussion with author Kirkpatrick Sale, director of The Middlebury Institute and contributor to countless publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The American Conservative, Chronicles, Counterpunch and Mother Jones – just to name a few. Sale is the author of the landmark 1980 book Human Scale, most recently After Eden and is a leading figure in contemporary, decentralist political thought.
Length: 22:46
3 Comments
I am to the point that secession sounds very very good!
Another terrific show, boys. This is what I’m talking about. We need the left conservatives, or whatever it is they (you, Dylan) want to call themselves.
I know that a few years ago, before Kirkpatrick Sale started showing up in a lot of alt-right publications, Thomas Woods, in an interview, named him as one leftie from whom he, Woods, had always gotten a fair shake. Or something like that. The man has what I would call intellectual honesty, and he gets beyond the old “which side are you on” dichotomy in a beautiful way. We are able to discover that there is much we have in common with the honest elements on the left. And it all comes down to decentralism. If we can get past the new American tradition of intervention, i.e., a great need to stick our noses into everyones’ affairs until we shame them or force them into being just like us, we can all have our piece of ground, we can all have our peace.
Along these lines, I hope you can some time get James Howard Kunstler on to talk about Peak Oil or the Long Emergency. Peak oil may well be one of those “fantasies” of the Left like Global warming (and btw I used quotation marks because I’m not sure whether they really are fantasies or not), but Kunstler made me think that running out of oil might not necessarily be the worst thing to happen. And maybe it doesn’t even need to get to that point. Perhaps localism is a concept that will be more and more embraced, in the spirit of Lew Rockwell, perhaps more and more people will freely choose it as a market option. It might not be the worst thing that could happen to us, going back to a small-scale agricultural economy.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Really, I’ve been intrigued with this whole idea of left conservatism since I read Norman Mailer’s interview in the American Conservative. It was like a revelation to learn that there was a liberal (or is that word passe now, too?) who was content to let neighborhoods define themselves, even if one neighborhood declared themselves alcohol-free or another one declared itself abortion clinic-free, or another decided to be all gay, etc. We’ve all got to stop thinking we can immanentize the eschaton and let people go their own way or join together as they will. Free association is what it’s all about.
Once again, guys, very good interview. It gives me great cause for hope, especially, early on, where Kirk calls Obama a statist and shows that he sees right through his whole game.
True story:at an environmental conference a few years back in NYC at Saint John The Divine a hispanic activist -domincan variety-bragged that hispanics will one day be a majority in the tri-state area. Leftists Kirkpatrick Sale jumped in and said enthusiastically that the census bureau data shows that it will happen very soon. I was a witness to all of this.
The issue of secession these days can not be detached from the passage of the 1965 immigration reform act. I have no doubt that Kirkpatrick Sale was a supporter of the passage of the 1965 immigration reform and the demographic consequencs of its continuation.
These days out in Silicon Valley there is a very serious problem with asian LEGAL immigrants engaging in technological and military espionage. With Secession of course, this won’t be a issue any more since China will have colonized American territory. In other words china will have effectively colonized American territory. There will be no more need to spy. China will effectively own the place.
The other option to secession is of course to repell the invasion. I prefer a very large ocean between America and china. How bout you Jack and Kirkpatrick?