I’m obviously part of the “radical right.”
I’m just a Southern populist and nationalist though. I don’t have these views because I have read Nietzsche, Spengler, Yockey or Evola. I’ve read John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh.
Brion McClanahan is correct about Michael Anton, Harry Jaffa, the West Coast Straussians and Northern conservatism. Once you have made Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the foundation of your worldview, you have committed yourself to a slippery slope. There are no limits on equality or the centralization and consolidation of power. Anton has no response to George Fitzhugh.
“Society requires “reversed action.” All its chords are unstrung; they must be screwed up to greater tensity. Visionary schismatics and speculative philosophers seized upon the reformation, and have been busy ever since in converting what was intended for salutary and moderate reform, into revolution, and conducting revolution into anarchy. …”
“It is now evident that those axioms have outlived their day – for no one, either North or South, has complained of our ferocious assault on them – much less attempted to reply to or refute our arguments and objections. All men begin very clearly to perceive, that the state of revolution is politically and socially abnormal and exceptional, and that the principles that would justify it are true in the particular, false in the general. “A recurrence to fundamental principles,” by an oppressed people, is treason if it fails; the noblest of heroism if it eventuates in successful revolution.” …”
“Yet, I believe that, under the banners of Socialism and more dangerous, because more delusive, Semi-Socialism, society is insensibly, and often unconsciously, marching to the utter abandonment of the most essential institutions – religion, family ties, property, and the restraints of justice. The present profession is, indeed, to stop at the half-way house of No-Government and Free Love; but we are sure that it cannot halt and encamp in such quarters. Society will work out erroneous doctrines to their logical consequences, and detect error only by the experience of mischief.” …”
“But a “frequent occurrence to fundamental principles” is at war with the continued existence of all government, and is a doctrine fit to be sported only by the Isms of the North and the Red Republicans of Europe. With them no principles are considered established and sacred, nor will ever be. When, in time of revolution, society is partially disbanded, disintegrated and dissolved, the doctrine of Human Equality may have a hearing, and may be useful in stimulating rebellion; but it is practically impossible, and directly conflicts with all government, all separate property, and all social existence.”
“We cannot believe what is so entirely different from all our experience and observation, and they have become familiarized and inattentive to the infected social atmosphere they continually inhale. Besides, living in the midst of the isms, their situation is not favorable for calm observation or calm generation.” …”
“Why have you Bloomer’s and Women’s Right’s men, and strong-minded women, and Mormons, and anti-renters, and “vote myself a farm” men, Millerites, and Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians, and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and infidel isms at the North ? Why is there faith in nothing, speculation about everything? Why is this unsettled, half demented state of the human man mind co-extensive in time and space, with free society? Why is Western Europe now starving? and why has it been fighting and starving for seventy years? Why all this, except that free society is a failure ? Slave society needs no defence till some other permanent practicable form of society has been discovered. None such has been discovered. Nobody at the North who reads my book will attempt to reply to it; for all the learned abolitionists had unconsciously discovered and proclaimed the failure of free society long before I did.”
“But political economy is the necessary result of Free Society – it is the only moral code which it can inculcate – and yet all its precepts are at war with morality. But for Christianity, Free Society would be a wilderness of crime; and Christianity has not fair play and a proper field of action, where government has failed to institute the peace-begetting and protective influence of domestic slavery. It is one of the necessary parts of government, without which men becomes enemies instead of brethren. There is no love between equals, and the divine precept, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” is thundered vainly in the ears of men straining for the same object.
The maxim, “every man for himself,” embraces the whole moral code of Free Society; and Miss Bremer, and all the other philanthropists in the world, with their thousand schemes and institutions, will never be able to neutralize the immoral and death dealing tendency of that maxim, and of the antagonism and social war it generates.”
Calhoun is great.
George Fitzhugh is easily the most original American theorist of the 19th century though. The strongest argument against Northern conservatism is its own history.
In just the last ten years, we have watched it devolve into this and yield before a thousand new genders created by insane people on Tumblr which didn’t exist twenty years ago.
Note: Nietzsche and Spengler did fuel my interest in history though.