Note also that many concepts we find virtuous - honor, loyalty, honesty, compassion - are essentially irrational.
I;m not sure what you mean by “proportional numbers”, but do you see something icky in wanting to preserve a race?
“Proportional numbers” means percentages. Buchanan is concerned that in Europe and the U.S., whites are no longer as great a majority as they once were, and appear likely to become a minority (though still a plurality) in the near future. He carefully avoids coming out and saying it in so many words, but it’s obvious he would have far less problem with immigration if most of the immigration pressure were coming from Canada (which he has argued the U.S. should annex – and Greenland too).
And, yes, I “see something icky in wanting to preserve a race.” I see something icky in placing any importance on the concept of “race,” and that goes for “black nationalists” too. Don’t you, for Og’s sake?!
I think it’s fine to want to preserve a race. I used to live in Hawaii, and there was a strong sense of urgency to continue the bloodline. I think it’s understandable, and not necessarily a bad thing.
I think what PB is more interested in is preserving our culture. I think it would be hard for you to argue that the impetus from the north is more threatening to what would be the U.S. culture than the impetus from south of our border. Not only are the numbers fewer, but the culture has more overlap. Language playing a very large role in that. I share his desire to want to preserve our culture. I’m always tickled how some people, usually on the left, have all this great respect for any culture around the world, yet are unable to even see any value in their own.
Buchana is the only columnist who actually learns the lessons of history. I like his outlook because he is an isolationist (in the positive sense). Much of the mess we are in could have been avoided, had Bush had any knowledge of history. i don’t belive in “nation-building”, and wars to “save” the poor benighted heathens. As somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have abundantly illustrated, we (the USA) ought to mind our own business. just think of all the lives and treasure wasted on these fruitless wars.
I think Buchanan himself is not a fascist but a traditionalist, BTW – that is, he has a lot more in common, in terms of political views, with Franco than with Hitler – but his paleoconservative-populist movement does have some potential fascist tendencies if it ever really gets off the ground.
And not coincidentally, Buchanan’s father was a huge admirer of Franco (and of Joe McCarthy).
Buchanan’s a polemicist. He’s going to have a tendency to express his views polemically.
Re your final comment, an apter (though fairly trivial) candidate for labeling as a fascist/racist-admirer would be PJB’s co-venturer in The American Conservative, Taki Theodocarpolous.
I’ve read a lot of Buchanan’s article in The American Conservative and found a considerable amount to admire there. He not only opposed the damn fool war from the the beginning, but also is opposed to American militarism in general. He’s willing to pare back military spending and bring our troops home from all the places where they’ve overstayed their welcome. He’s also opposed to globalization because he’s a realist about it. Lastly, he’s been sounding the warning bell about monetary policy, the declining dollar, and the prospect of hyperinflation if the federal government can’t meet its debts.
Even so, he’s had too much flirtation with racists and militia types for me to ever feel comfortable with him. Far better to stick with the DailyKos types who have all his good properties and few of the bad ones.
Those are real dangers, but be careful; get too obsessed with that and you might wind up calling for “hard currency” or something equally crackpot. Even such a usually clear thinker as Robert Heinlein was vulnerable to that. The paleocon-populist tradition Buchanan represents includes a financier-demonizing tradition in American thought going back to populist opposition to the First and Second Banks of the United States, and encompassing contemporary idiot legal arguments about the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve and its notes; and there’s some obvious overlap with antisemitism (we all know what “the international bankers” really means). Paradoxically, the same tradition also includes the Populist Free Silver movement, which aimed to weaken American currency and cause inflation – to the benefit of debtors (farmers) at the expense of creditors (bankers).
Absitively, posolutely, no bout adoubt it.
I always found Buchanan to be similar to Oswald Moseley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, in particular with his seeming belief in autarky.
I hadn’t heard of the Holocaust denial aspects before, I admit, though I am not massively surprised.
What on earth are you talking about? Very few in the press will stand up for the principle that the law should presume the innocence of the accused? Nonsense.
Hm. So he did the wrong thing (asserting Demjanjuk’s innocence) for the wrong reasons (anti-Semitism, perhaps), so he should be admired. Interesting.
A lot of people say what they really think. And they are justifiably reviled for thinking that way. This reminds me of my cousin’s wife’s cousin, who told me a story about a public pool owner who filled his pool with cement rather than integrate. “You gotta admire this principle!” he says to me. Bull. Sheet. As long as we’re already talking about Hitler, please allow me to Godwin: Hitler killed 6 million Jews on principle! Hah! How’d ya like them principle!
Do you mean “autarchy” in the sense of individual liberty to the point of anarchism, or “autarky” in the sense of a nation depending entirely on its own produce without resort to foreign commerce? (Both are bad ideas; North Korea is a good and cautionary example of the latter.)
I mean autarky - the economic independence concept. Autarchy is something I am much more of a fan of than old Pat.
Givn Buchanan’s vocal opposition to globalization and NAFTA, etc., I’d imagine it’s the latter. And, Buchanan (being of an authroitarian bent) would not be likely to see unlimited individual liberty as an inevitable good.
I did not know that about Mosley BTW. Seems a singularly goofy idea for an island nation that built one of history’s greatest navies in principal part to protect the extensive trade that it relied on for hundreds of years. Life under Mosley=turnips for dinner six months out of the year I guess.
You have to remember, the economic unit that Moseley was basing it on wasn’t the current UK. It was the British Empire of the 1930’s, together with all the imbalanced trade that would be possibly by exploitation of people with darker skins than those from the mother land.
Wasn’t it Buchanan who said in the early 1990s that British or other white European immigrants should be favored because they would be more easily assimilated than “Zulus”?
Meh. Wanting to preserve the distinct existence and culture of a micronationality such as Native Hawaiians or Navajo Indians falls under the “mostly harmless” category; it’s not incompatible with a racial melting pot for American society at large. And it is possible for such groups to occasionally marry outsiders without their culture as a whole disappearing. Besides, from what I’ve heard, a plurality, perhaps a majority, of the people in Hawaii are mixed race (Native, Asian, white, a splash of black) nowdays, and (almost) nobody has much of a problem with that.
“Our culture” includes that of African-Americans, for which and for whom Buchanan has never shown much regard, and based on his writings (and between the lines) I think he’d be pleased as punch if they all took ship for elsewhere.
'ere now, you had turnips? We made do with wattles, whelks and lupins, and damned glad to get them, too!
That’s because up thru the 20th century, “US” culture was heavily dominant and non-Western cultures were subject to loads of disrespect. Leftism is all about overturning past inequites (real or perceived), so it’s inevitable that they would over-compenstate like that.
Also, I’m a little bit confused as to exactly what a given American ought to regard as his or her own “culture”, but one’s responsibility is to criticize one’s own culture, not someone else’s unless the latter becomes a physical threat.