I recently responded to an Ad Fontes essay by John Ehrett. I corrected his presentation of the Schmittian political framework. Read it here at American Reformer.

Two of the noteworthy recent episodes are my conversation with Michael Millerman on Aleksandr Dugin, and also my conversation with William Watkins on John Taylor of Caroline.

The RSS feed is here (will be fully updated this weekend)

The YouTube videos of the above mentioned two are below:

Happy Robert E. Lee Day!

Today is the twenty-ninth and final day of my month long heritage history posts in which I offer a few somewhat arbitrary reflections on important figures from our past. The entire point of this series was to counter-signal the ethos and spirit of the Regime’s mobilization of history to serve as a humiliation of our traditions and undermine our cultural inheritance.

I can think of no greater symbol of defiance against this spirit than concluding in celebration of Robert E Lee. A descendent of George Washington and heir of the American experience of Virginia, Lee embodies so many of the ideals necessary in our age of dissolution.

There are many things to say about Lee: he was a gentleman who had a keen sense of his own noblesse oblige; he was a Christian man who made constant reference to his role in a Christian society; he was a man who exemplified the classical ethics of ordered loves, always prioritizing the interests of his family and his people over any other more general obligations. He represents the now-dissipated obligations of Southern Honor codes, the dual duty of both forgiveness and resolve, and the ancient paradox of giving of oneself to find true happiness.

Robert E. Lee of course was a man not of unrestrained passion, but of Aristotelian moderation; his decision to arise and defend the well-being and integrity of his Southern people came not out of ideological disposition, but duty to hearth and home in a moment of crisis between two loves. He loved the United States in the sense that there was a common experience between two factions that had long been held in a complex of uneasy tension. He had given of himself for the stability of the United States during the Mexican-American war, and continued in service to his country throughout the 1850s.

The news of a civil war was painful to Lee. Having long sought a commanding position in the United States Army, it came to pass that his first opportunity would be in the context of a crisis between this army and the people of Virginia (among other Souther states, of course). He was not after secession, preferring instead to defend the Old Republic as it was constituted in the first decades of its life. When asked by Lincoln to be the Union Army’s commander-in chief though, he could not bring himself to accept.

He stated in his rejection:

“If the Union is dissolved and the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people and save in defense will draw my sword on none.”

His wife later wrote:

“My husband has wept tears of blood over this terrible war, but as a man of honour, and a Virginian, he must follow the destiny of his state.”

This to me is the thing that strikes me most about Robert E Lee: his people and their well-being always meant more to him than any ideological crusade, any grand experiment, and certainly anything that could be conceived as a propositional nationhood. People—real people, in the social-corporate sense—have a more fundamental claim on his duties than all other endeavors. He could not be paid to betray his heritage.

At the moment when both North and South needed him—when he by nature and experience would have preferred to serve both—his sense of duty fell toward the ageless guidance on Ordered Loves: those closest to you are owed your most fundamental affections. And in retrospect, though having experienced a painful defeat, Lee never regretted his decision: to lose for one’s people is more preferable than to win in opposition to those people.

Over the course of the next century, Lee would become a symbol of unity. There were still—understandably—Lost Causers who remained bitter; but Lee taught us that we as humans must accept the experiences of History and make the best of it. More venomous enemies would eventually come to America and this would require recalculation as to the Friend-Enemy distinction. In a world where the despisers of American and Western civilization seek to tear down the very memory of Robert E Lee, we whose roots are in both North and South and West must raise it back up. He must be the symbol of our unity against the occupied Regime.

Few things symbolize our present moment more forcefully than the act of tearing down Robert E Lee’s statues. This act is an outflow of a deeply spiritual problem that has permeated its way into every aspect of our social context. We are at war with those who would seek to sever us from our very historical being. There’s an element of the medieval doctrine of “Participation” in our connection to our heritage, and the Regime that seeks to sever us from our past is actually seeking our spiritual death; for we are connected to our heritage in our very souls.

I think Dwight Eisenhower summarized his legacy so wonderfully when he noted:

“Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.”

We are all Robert E Lee. And the tearing down of his memory is an act of socio-cultural homicide. We must defend him, for in defending him we are defending ourselves, and those who are yet to be born.

It’s been an honor fighting for our identity together with you all.

Happy Heritage History Month.

Happy Johann Bach Day!

It is day twenty-eight of heritage history month and while I’ve done some literary figures, I’d be remiss to not have someone representing our musical inheritance— music is a catalyst for the culture spirit of strength and beauty, or it is a catalyst for the wretched, the chaotic. Everyone is sharing that video of the deranged sorority girls, but few have recognized that the music they are dancing to is the channel through which the spirits of revolution have entered our society.

Plato once declared that “musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” It is no coincidence that the political transformations that took place after the 1960s were coordinated, by the deep state, with occultic musical themes. It is for reasons such as these that we on a journey of historical rediscovery should consider our heritage of sacred music and classical arrangements.

There are a lot of composers I could have chosen for today, and I considered the leaders of the Romantic movement, such as Mozart and Beethoven, but in the end I had to choose a master of both. Johann Bach was a German participant of the Baroque period of European music and was perhaps the final figure in the classical age of music. In many ways, he synthesized the main features of musical classicalism and was in this way a master of the inherited traditions in European musical development. Unlike the Romantics like Mozart or Beethoven, Bach shied away from excessive innovation.

Bach was largely a church composer, writing Latin church music, while incorporating in important Lutheran hymns for the benefit primarily of the churches in Leipzig. Bach’s music carried with it a keen sense of the divinity of music; its purpose was to reflect the majesty of God. Beauty therefore was objective and music, like all arts, were not primarily intended to please the individual but rather to inspire his soul to arise to meet God. Beauty in music was a mechanism for the soul and it was the responsibility of the composer to foster this pathway to Heaven.

Whereas the Romantic era saw the influence of composers who would write for performance and sought to please the individual souls, Bach had much more of a church-oriented mind, focused on the corporate quality of the gathered society. In this way, critics of his day, while of course recognizing his genius, would hold that he was old-fashioned, disinterested in the bourgeoning styles of musical experimentation.

It’s important to note about Bach too that while he wrote as a German, for the context of German ecclesiastical culture, Bach fully absorbed the sort of pan-Europeanism that was essential to the particular character of early modern Europe. He drew extensively from the Latin world, and especially composers of the high tradition such as Vivaldi. In this way, Bach was a participant in the greater European civilization, reaching out to grasp the best of Europe, and then contextualizing it for his own cultural substratum.

European civilization, like other civilizations, has developed for itself a musical accompaniment to chaperone its cycle of life. This has been true since the development of medieval Sacred Music, it was true during the very end of the Classical period in Bach, and it remains true today.

Music is not morally neutral; it carries the spirit of a people along with it; it is not downstream of culture, but more often shapes it and leads it. Sometimes, in the case of Bach, music uplifts its world. And other times music tears it down. The great contributions of Bach and others like him must be preserved as we undergo an era of culture Night.

Happy Queen Elizabeth Day!

For day twenty-seven of heritage history month, we celebrate the role of Queen Elizabeth I in the development of our Anglo-American past. This another one of those pivotal figures that would frustrate my RomCath (and Puritan!) friends, yet we must emphasize the importance of the Elizabethan moment in the making of our world.

Elizabeth ascended to the monarchy in the tense heat of a calamitous Tudor political crisis. Her father Henry VIII of course had been the catalyst, employed by God despite his sins, of English separation from the religious jurisdiction of Rome. After Henry came his son Edward VI, who controversially selected as his successor Lady Jane Grey in discordance with the rules of Succession, in order to stave off a Roman Catholic reversal of Protestant gains.

In a swift series of well-coordinated moves over only 9 days, Edward’s half-sister Mary Tudor captured and executed Queen Jane. A Roman Catholic reversal was implemented. Mary’s reign would only has five years and, having no child of her own, died with no means of preventing the ascension of her half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant.

Elizabeth oversaw in England a time of relative peace through strength and cultural robustness. The Elizabethan half-century was a golden age of English culture, commerce, and religious debate. Elizabeth ruled as a moderate overseeing and largely deescalating religious tensions among both Roman Catholic and Puritan factions who sought, respectively, further implementation of their own visions.

It was during Elizabeth’s reign that Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser would compose their masterpieces, and Shakespeare developed an imaginative vision of English life that would last centuries. Elizabeth would stand down Spanish expansionism into English territory and oversee the maritime achievements of adventurers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. She would give life force to the character and identity of the Church of England, supporting continental Reformers living in the precarious context of Romish consolidation.

Queen Elizabeth developed a persona of immense dedication to the well-being of her English people, recognizing her own self as the embodiment of their will and identity. Acknowledging the explosion of unrest that could ensue by her marriage and pursuit of a biological heir, she refrained from marriage totally. It was an act of her dedication to the stability of the realm. By not getting married, she kept her political opposition at bay, further securing the impenetrability of her government.

In a tumultuous world such as Tudor England, with cultural and political explosions preceding her reign and taking place across Europe, it is a testament to her wisdom (and that of her advisors) that she absorbed and therefore stifled immense political intensity that may have ripped apart the fragile British situation. Not only was she able to harmonize the civil and ecclesiastical politics of Tudor England, but she was able to arrange the conditions for the blossoming of English customs and social norms.

[At a time] when wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries round about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to thy afflicted Church. The love of my people hath appeared firm, and the devices of my enemies frustrate.

Happy John Dickinson Day!

It is day twenty-six of Heritage History Month and we will focus on a lesser known Founding Father who had a peculiar take on the entire enterprise of separation from Britain, and who dealt uneasily with the developing institutions and documents of the United States’ early years.

Dickinson was a participant in the politics of both Delaware and Pennsylvania, though he was raised in Delaware, he would become President first of Delaware, and then of Pennsylvania, back to back. One of the wealthiest landowners in the American colonies, Dickinson had also acquired a deep understanding of history and theory largely of his own initiative and lifelong study. It was this knowledge of history and the Western tradition that would leave him in turmoil over the meaning and consequences of Revolution against Britain.

Dickinson had a lifelong concern with the preservation of the inherited and established liberties of Americans as heirs of British tradition over against the innovative and abstract rights of the radicals, both in America and in France. Dickinson was concerned that a clean separation from Britain would eventually give way to an integrated spirit of constant revolution that, while beginning with separation from the King, would end in separation from the British way of life. The inherited liberties cherished by these Americans may disappear on the suicide path toward abstract liberties.

Dickinson therefore sought to engage in political relations with Britain that would allow many of the American concerns to be met, without complete independence. The problem with independence, for Dickinson, was one of real politik: there were radical agitators in the American midst that would take the reins of complete independence and continue for a long push against tradition and organic hierarchy.

His frustration at the King was that his actions and behavior was fueling radicalism in the American political culture. His great fear was that a revolution would produce an internal transformation toward democratic ends, culminating in mob rule. Dickinson therefore shied away from signing the Declaration of Independence and left his Congressional post to become a brigadier general in the Pennsylvania militia so that he would not be present at the moment of its adoption.

However, once that move had been made and America was politically independent, Dickinson would not retire and dream of lost causes; he would instead be an active participant in addressing the real world problems of his countrymen and the political order that needed to be worked out. He loved his American experience, as rendered to him through his ancestry and rootedness in the North part of the Union. He was dedicated to leaving his world better than when he had entered it.

Dickinson had an uneasy relationship with both sides of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate. On the one hand, he had more aristocratic and traditionalist impulses that made him cynical about some of the radical objectives of the anti-federalists. But on the other hand, he agreed with the anti-federalists that there were aspects of the Federalist mentality that would construct an artificial political order, with an artificial aristocracy placed into power by fiat and administrative connections. This is a quite typical fear of an established landowner.

It is for these reasons that Mel Bradford would refer to Dickinson as “the American Burke,” who was “the faithful steward of the old regime.” Bradford’s description of Dickinson serve as a great summary:

“He had a devotion to an American variant of English constitutionalism, rooted in Saxon antiquity and enthroned as sovereign in 1688. Neither wealth nor enlightenment was, in his view, a primary reason for strengthening the Union. Instead, the reasons were the preservation of an inherited way of life and the liberty needed to practice it.”

Happy TS Eliot Day!

It is day twenty-five of Heritage History month and today we celebrate the reflections of TS Eliot, a cultural critic, poet, and man of letters who spent much of his literary life reflecting on the goodness of culture, in light of its present decline.

Eliot lived a life in search of pathways of Retvrn. Born and raised in St. Louis Missouri to a dedicated Unitarian family, Eliot would eventually betray both his Unitarian and American roots, renounce his US citizenship, and become a British subject and convert to Anglicanism. This to him was core to his overall search for a historically rooted world that repudiated the spirit of change and cultural collapse that was represented by twentieth-century America.

Eliot is known for both his poetry and his essays in social criticism. His most famous poems include “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” His best known essays include “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture” and “Christianity and Culture.” Though if you want an introduction to Eliot, I would heartily recommend Russell Kirk’s “Eliot and his Age.”

Much of his poetry acts as a platform for him to reflect on the collapse Western culture in light of the ravages of World War I (Eliot was viscously against the Treaty of Versailles) and the culture dangers of the Industrial Revolution. Eliot had a dark view of man and the present age; though wrapped in promises of Progress, Eliot refused to buy in to what he considered a cheap sort of optimism.

Eliot believed, and expressed through his essays in Criticism, that liberalism could not be sustained. The view that every individual was to set his own path in life, to determine his or destiny, and set his own values, was a path to cultural collapse. He recognized the possibility that such a social impulse could temporarily produce material abundance, but that it would concomitantly sever society from Culture. And in separating society from culture, both society and culture would disappear. Western man would forget the religious impulse that once ground him, that chastened him, and he would convince himself that man could actually be irreligious. But all this was a lie, in the eyes of Eliot.

He once noted:

“The tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women – of all classes – detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.”

The problem, however, that made our epoch especially difficult, was that it had wrapped its new social impulses in the language and dress of Christianity; such Christianity was mobilized on behalf of a sociological impulse that was undermining Christian tradition. A Christianity without tradition, for Eliot, was actually just Jacobinism. In order for Modern Man to deal seriously with his predicament, he needed the very thing he hated the most: a rejection of his own hubris, drunken optimism, and a sense of piety about the world and man’s own limits therein.

My favorite set of lines from Eliot is a reflection on modern man’s collapse, wrapped as it is the the language of progress. It comes from “The Rock.”

“O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.”

Happy Edmund Burke Day!

It is Day Twenty-Four of Heritage History Month and we are going to look today to the great critic of the French Revolution and the coming of the “Empire of Light and Reason” that would characterize rationalistic modernism. Burke himself cannot be said to embody the full spirit of the Tory traditionalists (he was a Whig), but his understanding of the cataclysmic effects of revolting against the past were profound.

One of the things that I am going to focus on in a coming series of essays is what I call the Sanction of History; history is the vehicle by which Providence manifests our nexus of rights and duties, and this is a major theme of Burke’s Reflections. Man without historical context, without the particularity that shapes him and precedes him, is a dangerous abstract. Burke anticipated the twentieth century’s deracinated mankind; now a cultish belief about individual man that permeates western thinking.

Edmund Burke was intensely opposed to the tendency of political rationalists to reconstruct society in pursuit of claims of justice. While people like Thomas Paine and other agitators of political revolution in America and Western Europe were emphasizing that societies birthed in injustice must be leveled and built anew, Burke would warn that such an attitude toward political affairs would produce the destruction, but never the reconstruction. What history had afforded us, as inheritors of Western Civilization, was a blessing that need to be cherished and protected.

Burke then would have a strong historicist bent that has caused some debate among scholars about his commitment to (a transcendent) natural law vs his implied cynicism about such a concept. I will express my views on this soon enough, but the fact remains that Burke is not of the same genus as those who find political laws as transcending the social order. Alfred Cobban and Francis Canavan have argued well that Burke’s use of Locke’s language, was cultural rather than philosophical.

Burke was of the most moving and stirring writers in the early modern age. And I will end with this profound reflection of the meaning of the French Revolution in what he took to be the close of Western Civilization. Here was an eerie lament at the age to come, the age which we now endure:

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely tom off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Happy William Shakespeare Day!

We are now less than a week away from completion and are on day twenty-three of Heritage History month. Today, we will celebrate the person and contributions of Shakespeare as a literary figure who looms large behind our Anglo-American deep sentiments toward our own culture. Literature is one of these areas of culture studies that people can often miss because they don’t realize how key a role literature plays in culture-making. The idea of a culture without any literary soil is a highly deficient culture, if it can’t even be called a true culture.

I debated whether to place John Milton or Shakespeare in this role, for the former’s impact on our understanding of the meta-narrative of Heaven and Earth obviously penetrates our moral imagination in deep ways, but Milton stands on Shakespeare’s shoulders and depends upon his contributions. Shakespeare of course wrote in the marvelous Elizabethan era of England, an era of immense development in English High Culture.

Shakespeare’s rendition of classic figures in Western Civilization, such as King Richard and Caesar, are often the very first things Anglo peoples have absorbed about them, and are nestled the deepest into our collective psyche. But more than just the transmission of historical “fact,” Shakespeare’s employment of history in the presentation of drama infuses into culture a type of historical understanding of the past the builds the present. This is the function of literature as foundational to culture.

Throughout his works, Shakespeare also relays moral lessons. Not the cheap modern type of arbitrary behavioral strictures; but narratives that touch on duty, tragedy, and the frailty of man. Hamlet portrays the story of a man who must take up his inherited duties to the social order, and Shylock offers cultural warning of the influence of moneylenders. Richard Weaver famously used Macbeth’s three witches as a foil to present Modern Man’s decision to engage in cultural descent.

Shakespeare’s use of language helped to standardize the spelling of English, and he contributed a vast number of phrases, words, and sayings that are now deeply part of our everyday life. “Wild goose chase,” “in a pickle,” “for goodness’ sake,” be-all, end-all,” melted into thin air,” and “neither rhyme nor reason” are all from Shakespeare, and there are plenty more.

This will have to do on Shakespeare for now, but I’ll leave you with this, from the Julius Caesar play:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

Happy St Augustine Day!

It is day twenty-two of Heritage History Month and we will remember one of the great intellectual forebears of Western Civilization. It’s difficult to summarize how profound the contributions of St Augustine were for the development of the West after the fall of Rome—his influence permeated the major streams of intellectual though, political momentum, and ecclesiastical dynamics. He set a masterful framework into play in Christianizing the theme of the unfolding of historical drama.

Born of a Pagan father (who converted to the Christian faith on his deathbed) and a Christian mother who were citizens of Rome, Augustine was well educated and poised for the life of a philosopher and teacher. Dabbling in various other religious movements of his time, his spiritual collapse into Christianity was expressed in one of the triumphs of Christian literature: St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine’s City of God set a tone for Christendom in reflecting on the dynamics of history as the struggle between two worlds, each with their own destinations, each bound up in a temporary tension on the stage of history. As Christianity was blamed for the collapse of Rome by its dishonor toward the gods, Augustine turned the blame back onto the moral and spiritual destitution of a degenerated people.

Augustine was prolific writer full of inward reflection, pastoral insight, philosophical profundities, and masterpieces of meta-narrative. Augustine recognized the function of Greek and Roman philosophers in the preparation for the Christian moment on the scene of world history. Heavily influenced by Plato, yet with his own Christian formulation infused into the system, Augustine would cast a vision of the world picture that promoted unity under the eternal Mind of the Logos. For Augustine, knowledge is participation in the Mind of God; is only in God that we see truly.

Augustine is one of the most important figures claimed by all major branches of post-Nicene Christianity from Rome to Eastern Orthodox to varying Protestant traditions; he therefore weighs heavily in the theology, political theory, ethics, and historiography of Christendom at large. He was a master of the doctrines of grace, especially with juxtaposed reference to the sovereignty of God over both the human soul and the experiences of Nations.

"Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved thee. For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made. Thou wast with me, but I was not with thee. These things kept me far from thee; even though they were not at all unless they were in thee. Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open my deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness."

Happy Pat Buchanan Day!

It is day twenty-one of Heritage History Month and we are going to focus on the one person in this series who is still alive. Buchanan represents the last major political contender within conservatism who understood the nature of, and was prepared to categorically oppose, the Neoconservative hegemony within the Conservative movement.

Buchanan is one of the few figures who rejects the view of America as a propositional nation, and spent his years urging people to recognize us as a place and a people, not a body of ideas that anyone the world round could simply adopt to become an American. Thus, our political “values” cannot be exported around the world because our values are actually caught up with who we are, and the experiences we have gone through as a people.

Buchanan therefore adopted the non-interventionist foreign policy impulse to concern ourselves with what was good for our people and identity, rather than the government-sponsored militaristic and financial promotion of abstract political ideals. In doing so, he drew the ire of the War Party in Washington and the fake conservatives that sat as one faction of this more general American Regime. It was he who resurrected the phrase from the 1930s: America First!

Buchanan saw in the government-sponsored “free trade” deals of the 80s and 90s a giant mechanism of cultural decline. By exporting jobs overseas and restructuring American economic order, our nation would experience a flux of cheap consumer goods at the expense of social stability, the continuity of culture, and the character of our communities.

Additionally, he warned decades ago that America’s moral fabric was coming undone in our obsession of licentious conceptions of individual rights, that distorted the American tradition of liberty into a weapon of cultural degradation. Buchanan was considered a loon for warning about the Homosexual Agenda, and now we are fighting against sustained pedophilic activities and demonic transhumanists who operate under the guise of mere sexual deviants.

Buchanan was unable in 1992 to defeat the Establishment choice in George Bush for the GOP nomination. In accepting his defeat and subsequently endorsing Bush to oppose Clinton, he gave one of his most important speeches, known now as the Culture War speech. Buchanan, deeply aware as a Catholic that holistic culture wars are fundamental to the transformation of the soul of a nation, predicted the consequences of ignoring this Culture War. Buchanan recognized before so many others the culture of death that would arise in America’s repudiation of the catholic Faith she had inherited in either its Roman or Protestant forms.

Buchanan was one of the biggest political commentators to call into question things like the goodness of World War II, increased secularization, mass immigration, homosexual unions, the Israel Lobby in America, and the cultural genocide of Southern heritage (he is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans). 

He also was keenly aware of the corruption of America’s elites and endorsed Sam Francis’ call for a “Revolution from the Middle,” finding the residues of Heritage America nestled deep in the Heartland. He issued a clarion call to these heartlanders to rise and awake, a call they may only now be heeding.

Before there was Trump, there was Buchanan. Long live the spirit of Pitchfork Pat.

Happy Christopher Columbus Day!

It’s not actually Columbus Day, we already have one of those. But as I dedicated February to considering key figures in the development of the American heritage, it would be ridiculous to not include Christopher Columbus.

Columbus of course is a key object of the Left’s deconstruction campaign, the effort to reconstruct our heroes into villains and therefore challenge the moral legitimacy of those that laid the foundation of our modern self-identity. But impulses like this are precisely why I am engaging in a Heritage History Month in the first place— to reassert the heroic character of our forebears and pay homage to those who prepared the way.

Hailing from the Republic of Genoa in northern Italy, Columbus proved himself to be a tireless explorer with unceasing ambition. Raised in the humble home of a shop owner, Columbus would take up apprenticeships and work related to the activities of merchants and trading. Keen on the political economy of trades routes and import/exports, Columbus’ background made him aware of the value of economic expansion.

Thus, the context of the mid fifteenth century crisis of the Silk Road closure (due to the fall of Constantinople) was fundamental in making of Columbus’ motivations and political strategies. He understood the value of trade and new ways to the East that could earn for him a royal sponsorship/investment.

Columbus demonstrated a particular relentlessness in his determination to reach his destination of the East, via the Atlantic. A leader that was able to push his men to the brink, he had a sense of destiny that inspired his journey into the unknown as he faced numerous catastrophes from natural disasters, to unpredictable savages, to shipwrecks, to the frustrations of political dealings.

Columbus of course had material objectives in play— both personal and political. But he also had a keen sense of the civilizational stakes; he operated on behalf of the integrity and strength of Christendom; to permeate worlds yet to be reached by the Christian religion, Columbus understood, was to take part in a divine drama. The Christian religion was tied up closely, for Columbus, in the destiny of European expansion.

We operate now in a century of civilizational unraveling. The mythos of Columbus, so vital for our self-understanding, is under sustained assault. We can push back against this by asserting his heroism, and refusing to take part in the ritual apologies expected of us as inheritors of his great deeds.

Happy John Tyler Day!

On this nineteenth day of Heritage History month, it happens to be Presidents Day and I decided to go ahead and write on my favorite US president. I won’t make the full case here for Tyler as the greatest, but certainly one can see in Tyler a presidential character who represents a world we have lost.

Tyler of course became president when William Harrison died, just over a month into his term. As Tyler was the first VP to take the reigns upon the death of the President, it was unclear exactly what this would mean: should he assume the duties and be the Acting President, or be sworn into the office and take up the presidential title? While some wanted otherwise (John Quincy Adams never referred to him as the legitimate President), Tyler ignored the critics and was sworn in.

Tyler represents probably the most constitutionally purist President in a world where that was both politically possible, and socio-politically wise. Tyler was an uncompromising believer in the restraints of his own office, and Congress’ as well. He stood firm against various forms of economic nationalization, especially as it concerned the creation of a central bank. Tyler spent his presidency saying “no” to one of the nineteenth century’s most ruthless political characters in the person of Henry Clay, brainstormer of the “American System” and architect of economic and structural centralization.

Clay was so ruthless in the machinations of political dynamics that at one point, trying to put intense pressure on Tyler to comply with his economic program, he literally accomplished the mass resignation of Tyler’s entire cabinet. Tyler responded by simply stacking the entire administration with His Guys. Based.

In addition to refusing to participate in various schemes of economic centralization, he also held a traditional non-intervention view of foreign policy. As such he was able to slash the budget by shrinking the expenditures on the maintenance of American soldiers and refusing to be engaged in prolonged military adventures where it did not concern actual American interests. He was a realist on foreign policy though, and applied the Monroe Doctrine to the kingdom of Hawaii, warning Britain to keep its hands off, as doing otherwise would be interpreted as a threat to American security.

Finally, Tyler, a southerner, was a defender of his homeland in a context where tensions were heightening. He supported Calhoun’s nullification doctrines against Jackson in the Nullification crisis and always recognized that the Union was a product of the voluntary participation of sovereign states. He saw the American system in an originalist sense where the states formed a general government to achieve certain purposes which could only be sustained if the federal government adhered to these purposes. His commitment to the well-being of his region as a priority even to the well being of the union was a clear reflection of the anti-federalist spirit in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Tyler should be remembered for his fierce commitment to the restraints of his own office and for constantly thwarting schemes of Progressive transformation. I don’t think Tyler is the man we need at the moment—his world has already been conquered—but we should see Tyler as a counter signal to the disastrous twentieth century.

I want to once again emphasize my fealty to classical two kingdoms theology and reassert my view that it is the foundation of historical Protestant political theology. The entire thrust of the Big Eva criticism of the New Christian Right so often fails to understand both our commitment to this doctrine, and paradoxically, their own confusion of God's two kingdoms when they attempt to use gospel categories in order to push back against our Natural obligations.

Here is John Calvin on 2K Theology from the Institutes:

“The former [the spiritual government] has its seat within the soul, the latter [the temporal government] only regulates the external conduct. We may call the one the spiritual, the other the civil kingdom.

Now, these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other.

For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside."

And here is from his commentary on 1 Corinthians:

"Christ's spiritual kingdom has nothing to do with the body and has nothing to do with the outward relationships of mankind, but has solely to do with the mind."

I should re-emphasize for those new to this debate that Classical Two Kingdoms theology is not to be confused with modern 2K theology.

Happy Daniel Boone Day!

Day Eighteen of Heritage History month has us back on the American frontier and in celebration of America’s folk heroes. Daniel Boone embodies the spirit of America’s original impulse for discovery, adventure, and taming the frontier. Being that he embodies the spirit of the frontiersman in early American history, Boone often functions as a folklore figure who absorbs so many tales and stories of the heroic nature of early American expansion.

Boone had a spirit more for escapades and experiences than he did for book learning. This is an under appreciated aspect of pre-twentieth century masculinity. While we often stress the importance of literacy and formal education, we forget the dangers of a culture full only of head knowledge, and no spirit of conquest. According to folklore tradition, when a schoolteacher confronted Boone’s father about his disinterest in the classroom, he was told: “Let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting.” Based.

This isn’t to say that Boone had no role for reading; his biographer John Faragher relates that Boone often did take reading material with him on expeditions; his favorites being Gulliver’s Travels and the Bible.

Boone’s primary area of exploration and trail-blazing was Kentucky, then the very edge of the civilized American continent. He was a skilled hunter and a man of keen sense of the wild; he was also someone able to interact productively with the Indians he met along the way. Boone had a sense of respect for the Indians; not in a dreamy Leftist sense, but rather in the sense that clashing civilizations can look at the enemy with honor and opportunity. As such he was able to make peace with some, become an ambassador to others, and deal with the realities of their often irrational savagery when in one experience his own son was captured, tortured, and killed.

Boone did lend his services to the American Revolution, participating as a fighter in key battles against the British. After the war however, he was characteristically uninterested in the creation and development of America’s political institutions, preferring instead to do what he was born to do: explore, hunt, discover, and settle the West.

Boone did try, from time to time, to participate in the land-deals managed by the government. Many of his land claims proved to be unproductive and his debts were unable to be met. In a spirit of detachment over the banalities of legal problems, Boone simply ignored the bankruptcy process that developed over his lands. Finally, a warrant was issued for his arrest as he simply didn’t show up to a court case. The sheriff never found him; as he was the master of the wilderness.

It’s hard to summarize Boone’s other accomplishments as trailblazer, captain of militias, friend and foe of Indians, father of 10, and conquerer of lands. Boone is an American hero and we should remember him in an era of mass boredom, emasculation, and technological passivity.

Happy Richard Weaver Day!

Day seventeen of Heritage History Month, and we are celebrating the great social rhetorician and historian of Southern thought, Richard Weaver.

Weaver holds a foundational place in the development of my own understanding of the world and social theory; his Ideas book on the decline of the West was the catalyst that brought me out of my libertarian slumber and forced me to understand the world in a way at odds with the individualist-nominalist framework. Some on the right (such as Paul Gottfried) doubt the well-told tale of the collapse of classical philosophy as the ultimate cause of civilizational dissolution. But there is, in my mind, important significance to it.

In any case, since this isn’t about me and should be about Weaver, his Ideas book is an elegant defense for the pre-modern mind, defending the traditional West in an age hysteric over Progress. Such an understanding of history motivated him as well to look inward and contemplate the character and nature of his own American tradition in the Old South. His landmark study “The Southern Tradition at Bay” (recently, finally, republished) is a stirring praise of the South as an outpost—perhaps the last—of Western Civilization in a world fallen prey to rationalism, industrialism, and materialism.

For Weaver, the Antebellum South had four characteristics that made it a more traditional Western society as opposed to the burgeoning modern one that would conquer the Western world: “a feudal theory of society, a code of chivalry, the ancient concept of the gentleman, and a noncreedal faith". Southern society was built around the traditional view of family roots, generational continuity, and the property (land) on which a people’s memories are made and instilled.

Weaver’s expertise was in the area of rhetoric, writing essays and books on the ethics of rhetoric in light of the classical western tradition. He reflects on the role of rhetoric, how it persuades, and the consequences of its abuse. One of the more fascinating aspects of his rhetorical insights are his comments on Abraham Lincoln. Socio-politically critical of Lincoln for his destruction of the Federal system and the Southern way of life, he also praised Lincoln in the context of his speech-giving and approach to political rhetoric. On the flip side, while perhaps more dispositionally at home with Burkean politics, he is critical of Burke’s rhetorical historicism.

Richard Weaver was an advocate of the Platonic political tradition: rooted in ideals, dismissive of egalitarianism, and a defender of High Order. In a world of cultural anarchy and market-based production of cultural artifacts, Weaver was a counter-force that sought to remind the West that there was an underlying order of things that culture must reflect and be pious toward; the abandonment of the natural Order of Things was a recipe for despair and nihilism. Modern man, on his long trajectory of emancipation and individual autonomy, will find at the end of his long journey not tendencies toward utopia, but the emptying ravages of spiritual death.

Happy Charlemagne Day!

It is now day sixteen of Heritage history month and we remember one of the most important rulers in European history. After the fall of the Roman Empire, its Western territories broke apart into its constituent tribes and kingdoms, which existed in this form for three hundred years. The Germanic tribe of the Franks had already been Christianized by the time of Charlemagne, as king Clovis I converted in 508, bringing his people into the catholic faith.

Francia became the fastest growing kingdom of dark age Gaul, yet it was characterized by instability, war, and political upheaval. By the time of Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel, the Carolingian family controlled the Frankish territories. Charlemagne and his brother Carloman I inherited the kingdom; upon Carloman’s death, Charlemagne took control of the entire kingdom, eventually annexing the Lombard kingdom as well.

In 799, Pope Leo III was attacked in Rome by political enemies seeking to convict him of certain crimes and torturing him. He fled to seek help from Charlemagne, then the most powerful ruler in the West. Charlemagne mediated the conflict and brought it to resolution, restoring Pope Leo’s position in Rome. At Christmas mass in 800, Pope Leo coronated Charlemagne emperor of the West, giving him political prerogative over vast amounts of territory.

In this way, whether the Pope had the political authority to do so or not, Charlemagne united Western lands and became the Father of Europe. Charlemagne is important because he contributed greatly to the idea of the Europeans as a people with a shared civilization. It was never meant, of course, to deny to them their more central identities in their respective nationalities, but there was something about their historical experience that would add a layer of unity; they were brought into relation to each other in a way unique compared to their relations with those outside Europe.

The dynamic between state and the papacy was also set up for a thousand years of historical drama, a constant ebb and flow of conflict and harmony that set up a theater for the outworking of Christianity into the Western world. Charlemagne continued to regularize standards of learning, political structures, and economic institutions that would serve as a foundation for medieval Europe. Many of the ruling European family dynasties for over a thousand years can trace their roots back to Charlemagne.

Happy Robin Hood Day!

It is day fifteen of Heritage History month and we are halfway though! Today we are once again celebrating our heroes of legend; heroes that shape our cultural instincts and reflect the elements of the inner spirit of Western man. Robin Hood, of course, is a heroic figure of the late twelfth century England. He represents the blossoming age in English history right before what can call Merry England.

Robin Hood was an outlaw, unable to live within the constraints of what he considered to be the illegitimate authority of King John and his lackey the Sheriff of Nottingham. Really, as with so many heroic legends in our history, he was a proxy dissident for common Englanders who stood loyal to John’s brother Richard, the rightful king who was absent during his involvement in the Crusades.

Robin Hood also plays the role of a good leader, earning the loyalty and honor of his merry men, a band of outlaws that continues to grow over the course of his various adventures. In one ballad, the king notices that “His men are more at his bidding, than my men be at mine!” This is reflected all throughout the ballads and tales—they follow him into conflict, stand off when the moments are not right, trust his judgement, and look to him as the one with superior shrewdness.

Robin Hood was a menace for the Sheriff, constantly embarrassing him, undermining his tyrannical instincts, and acting as a counter to his power-hungry exploits. Robin was not an opponent of law and order in the abstract, as can be seen in his loyalty toward King Richard, but recognized that there are some regimes not worth living under submissively. Wikipedia expresses this well when it notes: “He appears not so much as a revolt against societal standards as an embodiment of them, being generous, pious, and courteous, opposed to stingy, worldly, and churlish foes.”

In this way, Robin Hood gets to the heart of so many of us: we are loyal to the rightful political orders in our history, we love our countrymen, and we stand for the well-being of the realm. But at the same time, we’d rather be forest rebels and structural outlaws than legitimize a power that exercises itself against our rightful way of love. It’s not just that Robin Hood was “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor,” but he was a hero because he was taking back from the political cronies what legitimately belonged to the victims of the corrupt regime.

Happy Robert Taft Day!

For the fourteenth day of Heritage History month, I wanted someone who exemplified the spirit and ethos of the American Old Right. Studying the Old Right is an interesting experience, if you allow yourself to really get into it, because you quickly realize how far the United States has come culturally since the beginning of the twentieth century. It reminds you how liberal the GOP is, even though you’ve been gaslit into thinking they are a culturally Conservative Party.

The Old Right was a coalition of anti-New Deal Democrats and Republicans who basically stood against what we in retrospect can now call the Managerial Revolution. They were businessmen, political figures, retired military men, writers, and religious leaders. They saw FDR war agitation as an outflow of his overall quest for a system transformation.

Robert Taft embodies their overall instinct and represents the height of their influence in Washington. Hailing from the noteworthy Taft family, Robert was an Ohio Congressman and then Senator who made his mark by opposing the New Deal and its various attempted expansions. Taft not only pushed back on the New Deal, he also opposed entry into WWII on the basis that America did not have a dog in the European fight and that our blood and treasure was not worth expending in a foreign ideological crusade.

Additionally, he stood against the creation of NATO and any other binding agreement which bound America to foreign problems. Taft wasn’t just a nobody with good policy opinions, he was a coalition leader who eventually became the Senate Majority Leader.

The closest he got to the Presidency was in 1952 when he narrowly —some would say suspiciously—lost the republican nomination to Eisenhower, who went on to defeat Harry Truman. Eisenhower ran because he strongly opposed Taft’s non-interventionist instincts and his opposition to NATO. One of Taft’s campaign managers was the committed pro-gold and hardcore Old Right congressman Howard Buffet, father of the much less honorable, crony capitalist Warren Buffett.

Taft represented in ever sense the political world that pre-existed both the postwar consensus and the managerial revolution of the 1930s. He thought the bombing of Nagasaki was a war crime and profoundly anti-conservative—he rightly saw it as a tool of Progressive imperialism. He also thought the Nuremberg Trial was absurd, a repudiation of Anglo-Saxon historical legal standards by initiating a victor’s justice under ex post facto laws (which is where you try someone on laws that were written after the crime was committed, in order to declare them guilty of the crime).

Finally, Taft warned that the imperial endeavors of the United States during the Cold War would produce a type of tyranny that would devour the constitution and the Old Republic he was called upon to represent and defend.

Happy John Calhoun Day!

For day thirteen of Heritage History month, we celebrate the eminent Southern statesman and political theorist John C Calhoun. It’s frankly impossible to summarize Calhoun’s intellectual achievements in a four paragraph Twitter thread, but Calhoun is very likely the greatest exponent of a realist political theory that America ever produced. He anticipated Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction by warning about the “wrath of the patient adversary.”

A century before James Burnham wrote on the realities of Machiavellian politics, Calhoun declared that “Power can only be resisted by power -- and tendency by tendency.” That is to say, the success of maintaining one’s liberties and way of life does not come about by “changing hearts and minds” or by the free market but rather by wielding an appropriate amount of power to counter and confront the power-block that seeks to disrupt your way of life. In this way, Calhoun would have scoffed at the idea that the Constitution itself could stop tyranny; without the prerogative possessed by true centers of power, there was nothing that could actually resist political enemies.

Calhoun was a Conservative in the old, Burkean sense; that is, he adamantly rejected the universalist bent of the Natural Rights theorists and those who saw society as being the product of individual consent or believed in transcendent political values that bound all human beings in the same way. Rather, much like myself, Calhoun is a historicist who justified political elements like rights or laws on the basis of historical development and the importance of custom and continuity. Society, Calhoun argued, preceded the individual and shaped him and afforded him the rights and duties that he finds himself in possession of.

This means that Calhoun was a particularist: every community has its own way of doing things, its own laws, its own scale of political priorities and governing structure, its own economic needs and framework of production. He viscously opposed centralization trends in the nineteenth century that would have seen his homeland in the South become an outpost of Northern industrial interests.

Calhoun, more than many other Southerners at the time, had a political mind that was able to see decades ahead. He understood with remarkable foresight that the structural elements of nineteenth century politics were headed for a type of stand-off that would culminate in Civil War. He therefore urged his contemporaries to think more seriously about the realities of power and the dynamic between majorities and minorities in the framework of collective-democratic contests (at that time, the idea of democracy as a collection of mass individual voters was a foreign concept).

Calhoun was not only a prophet of civil war, but one of the few that had the solutions necessary to prevent it. He advocated the very things that Americans now most need: nullification, state-level dissent, and the ability of localities to exercise their power to challenge a centralized government gone rogue. Americans would do well to remember Calhoun’s declaration:

“I never use the word nation in speaking of the United States. I always use the word Union or Confederacy. We are not a nation but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign States.”