Re: Re: Fidel
On Jan 1, 2007, at 6:39 PM, Michael Pugliese wrote:
Primitivist Luddite, post-leftist paleo-conservative Kirkpatrick Sale, in Pat Buchanan’s magazine
Speaking of which, interesting piece on the intellectual death of
campus conservatism:
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_06/cover.html
GOP and Man at Yale
The intellectual dexterity that once distinguished campus
conservatives has given way to mindless Republican boosterism.
by Daniel McCarthy
James R. Lawrence III doesn’t look like a campus misfit. The North
Carolina State University senior has the kind of clean-cut, buttoned-
down appearance one expects of a major in biomedical engineering, a
field whose academic rigors leave little room for an “Animal House”
or Abbie Hoffman way of life. But Lawrence is more unusual than his
demeanor might suggest. He’s distinctly in the minority of a
minority, as both a campus conservative and one who’s against the
Iraq War.
In the eyes of some of his friends on the Right, that makes Lawrence
really a kind of leftist. When he published an editorial for the
anniversary of Hiroshima criticizing Harry Truman’s use of nuclear
weapons against Japan, one of his colleagues on the campus
conservative paper, The Broadside, suggested he was its “token
liberal.” That isn’t surprising—student conservatives across the
country tend to resent any suggestion that U.S. foreign policy could
be immoral. But it is ironic, considering that one of the classic
texts of postwar conservatism, Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have
Consequences, was written in response to the horrors of the Second
World War, including America’s use of nuclear weapons. “The atomic
bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity,” Weaver wrote to a
friend in 1945.
Lawrence cited Weaver and Human Events founding editor Felix Morley
in his article, but that counted for little. The young men and women
of the Right aren’t reading much Richard Weaver these days—nor much
Robert Nisbet or Russell Kirk, to name two other seminal conservative
thinkers critical of modern warfare. The time when Young Americans
for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize
the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in
shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.” The campus Right
has almost always been more activist than intellectual, just as the
wider movement has been more political than cultural. But where once
students were at least familiar with the names Kirk and Weaver, or
Mises and Nock, today they look to Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter for
guidance. They’re little acquainted with the wisdom of the
contemporary Right’s founding generation, and it shows.
[…]