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Aug. 20, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:25:13
Son of the South
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Hey guys, welcome back to Left, White, and Right.
I am, of course, Gregory Hood, and I am here with Chris Roberts.
Today we will be discussing Emmy Bradford, or Mel Bradford, one of the great paleoconservative intellectuals, arguably the greatest paleoconservative martyr in the conservative squabbles of the late 1970s, early 1980s.
And somebody whose fate, I would argue, is pretty important to understanding what's going on right now.
This is being recorded on August 18th, a couple days after the fall of Kabul and the end of the American intervention in Afghanistan.
Well, don't jinx it, man.
We'll see.
We've been told that this is the end before.
Tomorrow we get drafted and sent right back in.
I think the last thing I read about this was that they're sending in more troops to help the other troops leave, which, uh... And then you have to send more troops after that to help those guys out.
Yeah, you know, maybe that is necessary to save some lives, in which case it's good, and maybe, you know, you're being taken for a ride yet again.
I don't know.
We're gonna wait and see.
I don't believe anything that is ever said about Afghanistan.
This is like a point of...
Does it even exist?
Of policy for me, yeah.
Some would say no.
Yeah.
But we will get into why there's this connection, but let's begin with who he was and what he had to say.
He was a literature professor at the University of Dallas, wrote numerous books, articles, one of the great conservative intellectuals, but the reason most people I think had heard of him was because he was in Ronald Reagan's first term Originally going to be appointed to be the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I believe, and there was a real pushback against certain neoconservatives which ended in him withdrawing his nomination.
Supposedly they even went after his family.
You ended up with William Bennett in there instead, who went on to just give us a bunch
of movement conservative platitudes.
He racked up a lot of gambling debts as well, from what I understand.
Racked up a lot of gambling debts and is best known for saying that the crime rate would
have gone down if we had had more abortion among blacks, which led to a highly amusing
controversy because he was a big pro-life guy and everything else.
And so he had to clarify that and say, well, that's not actually what I was saying.
But I mean, that's at the end of the day, the whole giant struggle to avoid the right
getting called racist still ended with their guy being called racist.
Right, right.
Which sort of proves Bradford's point to get into The weeds here, the real struggle, I mean, his thought is so broad, particularly from a Southern conservative point of view, that just getting into one aspect or another doesn't look great to service.
So, you know, the usual disclaimer, everything he wrote is worth reading, but if you're going to read one thing, not even a book, but just one essay, I would highly suggest the Heresy of Equality, Bradford Replies to Jaffa.
And this was a response to Harry Jaffa's equality as a conservative principle.
Now this is a very important essay because this is when the conservative movement adopted Abraham Lincoln as a central figure and also said that defending equality would be a primary ideological purpose of the American conservative movement.
Bradford of course said this is obviously nonsense and I will give you the in his own words.
Quote, equality as a moral or political imperative pursued as an end in itself, equality with a capital E, is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.
Contrary to most liberals, capital L, new and old, it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity, equal starts in the race of life, quote unquote, and equality of condition, equal results.
For only those who are equal can take equal advantage of a given circumstance.
And there is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in the special and politically untranslatable understanding of the deity.
Not intellectually, or physically, or economically, or even morally.
Not equal.
That's an italics.
Such is, of course, the genuinely self-evident proposition.
Its truth finds verification in our bones and is demonstrated in the unselfconscious acts of our everyday lives.
Vital proof, regardless of our private political persuasion.
This is extremely important and timely now because what is the current debate move to?
The conservative principle is, oh, we just want equality of opportunity.
Nobody's against equality.
How could you be against equality?
We just want equality of opportunity.
Whereas the leftist position is now equity, which is equality of outcome.
Jaffa is saying, well look, you have to go further back.
You can never really have equality of opportunity, because people aren't equal, and they never start in equal circumstances.
And he's right, and the left is the one who's able to weaponize this, which is why you see things... Bradford said that.
Bradford said that.
Bradford said that, yeah.
Who did I just say?
You said Jaffa.
Oh, Jaffa, yeah.
Sorry, I apologize.
Yeah, Jaffa was the one who was saying that equality of opportunity was possible.
And was conservative in some sense.
And that's the mainstream conservative position now.
Bradford was the one denying that this was possible.
This is important because this is another one of those things that, you know, it sounds, okay, why are we even debating about this little nuance?
Well, you see how it plays out.
You see how things get taken to their logical conclusion.
Right now, leftists, this is mainstream, this is open, this is being taught in your schools, this will be policy if absent radical change.
Family privilege is now a thing.
Getting rid of inheritances and taxing them at, you know, of course at first it'll be just for the very rich but eventually it'll be everybody.
Getting rid of that is a thing.
School choice, people say, oh well we need to make sure people can get out of failing school systems and they say no, no, no, no, no.
We need to make sure that everybody goes through the same thing because it's unfair if other people are able to essentially buy their way out of these failing institutions.
That, of course, is always a big debate, and that has some interesting political divides, but the same premise is essentially there.
You can't have people operating from different circumstances because that's a violation against equality of opportunity.
That's what leftists argue, and they're right.
They're absolutely right.
So, if you're going to be coherent, you have to say, well listen, equality of opportunity in and of itself is a problem.
Equality of opportunity in and of itself, not only is not possible, it's not even really a good thing.
And I also want to touch on what he said here, where he said, there is no man equal to any other except perhaps in the special and politically untranslatable understanding of the deity.
This touches back to what we had in, I think, what was it?
Our first episode on James Burnham, where he said, if you have a political claim that essentially has no real meaning in time or space, it really should just be dismissed without consideration.
And that's essentially the entire egalitarian project, where you propose something that doesn't exist, can never exist, has never existed, and then expect all of society to be warped to make it fit your impossible vision.
And the obvious answer is no, and I think Bradford would go a little bit further and say, you're a crazy person and we shouldn't even be talking about this.
Yeah.
And of course this is a major problem when you The mainstream conservative movement at this point is essentially Jaffaites.
I mean, this is how they define themselves.
We're the real liberals.
We're the ones who can defend liberalism from itself.
We're the ones who can defend liberalism from its own contradictions.
And I think this is one of the biggest problems.
We'll get into this with Afghanistan.
You can get into this with a million other things.
There's no real conservative opposition to whatever crazy new project is proposed other than, oh, that's crazy.
Oh, that's extreme.
But if you have sufficient media saying that actually, no, it's a good thing and it's mainstream, public opinion eventually shifts and it becomes mainstream and it becomes something that can be taken seriously.
And at some point you actually have to have an argument against it other than Wow, this is weird and unusual and I've never heard this before.
Yeah.
And conservatives today really can't do that because they've already accepted all the fundamental premises of the other side.
One of the things Bradford talks about in this particular essay is he's talking about the all men are created equal and he references Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln drawing on Euclid supposedly to prove human equality.
This is also for those of you who saw the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln.
There's also a scene that explicitly touches on this where Lincoln starts waxing poetic while everybody looks on in awe about Euclid's theorems of geometry and essentially comes to the thing that, well, because, you know, A is A, therefore humans are equal.
And it's like, well, no, that really doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but it's taken as self-evident and so everybody just moves on and looks up at him because he's a god amongst men.
Bradford kind of touches on this directly.
He says, of course, Along with the political philosophers, they, the egalitarians, have approached of explication as if the Declaration of Independence existed su generis in a platonic empyrean.
A gloss upon what transpired in a real, i.e.
intellectually messy, convention in a real Philadelphia seems not to interest these sages.
What with reason could be expected to occur?
Again, the fundamental problem is we advance premise, The premise isn't based in any real history.
It's not based in any real experience.
It's not based... It's not even really... I mean, they'll say it's based in reason, but it's not even really based in reason.
It's just kind of asserted as an abstract claim and as an absolute truth.
And then we're all expected to abide by it.
And we're now at the point... He was writing this in 1976.
You could still sort of push back against this with saying, well, here's some evidence.
That's why you're wrong.
Now, if you know that evidence, if you have real world evidence to prove that this abstract assertion is wrong, it's actually kind of a moral fault to know these things.
Like, why would you know these things?
You're kind of a bad person for knowing this stuff.
Sue Stahler talks about this all the time, where somebody will make a claim about either an abstract thing or a policy prescription, you know, gun control, crime, vaccination rates among different races, whatever.
And you say, well, actually, this isn't true at all, and here's the actual data.
And it's like, well, why would you know that?
Yeah, why would you look that up?
Yeah, this is kind of what's sometimes referred to as hate facts.
Yes.
Where it's not exactly contested that what you're saying is false, but the fact that you looked into it is viewed as, in and of itself, very suspect.
Actually, I have a friend.
He's a very active identitarian.
He didn't get called in for jury duty and doing kind of like the interview process or something.
Somehow CrimeStats came up and this buddy of mine, who'd read Color of Crime put out by American Renaissance, started talking about the findings in Color of Crime, and whichever court official, it didn't really reply to the facts that he was citing, but said, Why are you familiar with these facts?
Did he actually call them facts?
Yeah!
Why did you go looking into this?
Why do you know about this?
You're like 21 or something.
There's no reason for you to know about these sorts of things.
And my buddy was like, how do you respond to that?
Sailor always has the old animal house thing, right?
Knowledge is good.
And we're at a point now where you actively have to prevent yourself from knowing certain things.
Because even if you find something out accidentally, it might slip out one day and that could have horrible consequences for you.
Although, one of the things we will say about being white advocates is you never have to worry about jury duty.
That's very true.
That's just something we never have to do.
To return to what Bradford is talking about, and again, we see this very loose definition of what it means to be an American.
And again, this has massive practical consequences that we see in our everyday politics.
All men are created equal.
This now becomes the defining statement, not just of political philosophy, but really of what American identity is.
And so to not believe in this, is to, in some sense, not be an American.
So, if you're in America, and your family has been here since before the Revolution, but you say, well, that's not really true.
You're not American, but somebody who has never set foot in America, but hears this phrase and agrees with it, somehow is more American than you are.
And this has also become something of the conservative position.
This is also something that you'll sort of see in the pages of National Review, the proposition nation.
And what is the proposition nation?
The proposition is that all men are created equal and that there's this vague egalitarianism, which falls apart really quickly once you examine it.
But of course, you get around that by making it unseemly to look into why this proposition is wrong.
Bradford, of course, breaks down What the Declaration of Independence was really about and he points out that most of it is a very specific bill of charges against the king saying that there are these specific things that we have as rights under the crown as part of the empire which have been violated.
That there are these specific things that have been done against us, which we sought redress and were ignored, and therefore, we are taking action against them.
And when the Declaration says, I quote Bradford here.
We, in that second sentence, signifies the Colonials as the citizenry of the distinct colonies, not as individuals, but rather in their corporate capacity.
Therefore, the following, quote, all men, unquote, created equal in their right to expect from any government to which they might submit freedom from corporate bondage, genocide, and massive confiscation, are persons prudent together, respectful of the law which makes them one, even though forced to stand henceforth apart.
Equal as one free state is as free as another.
So what he's saying here is that we, as a nation, as a people, have an equal right, you know, among the different nations of the earth, as it says, to protect our corporate rights as a political community.
And that ultimately is what the purpose of the Declaration of Independence was.
It was to say we as a group, not really as a group, but as 13 separate groups, Our political community separate from the British Crown and to ignore what's actually being done in the Declaration of Independence to ignore what the bulk of the Declaration of Independence really is and to take this one phrase which is
Not only untrue, but is taken completely out of context.
And to say this is the American identity.
And furthermore, the foundation of American conservative thought to which all our struggles are dedicated.
Or simply American thought period.
Yeah.
There is no other American tradition.
This is actually one of the strengths of Bradford's scholarship is the absolute insistence on examining context for absolutely everything.
Which has really been lost, I think, in the last couple of decades.
In college, I was in a political science class and we were reading parts of Thomas Hobbes' famous book, Leviathan, and at one point during the class discussion, I said, maybe we should talk about the Civil War that inspired this book.
This book is basically about a very specific war.
You can't just divorce it from that.
It's much like that quote you just read.
Talked about how, you know, the Declaration of Independence was really specific to a time and place.
It was about particular things that were happening right then.
It was, you know, happened in a real place called Philadelphia.
This is basically the point I was making in college about the book Leviathan.
Like, we cannot just act as if this was written In a void, and that this book is going to sort of, in a void, argue with other books which are also in a void.
It's all abstraction.
It's all just word play.
We're jousting.
There was a lot of that in college, of we're going to put Leviathan in a void, and we're going to have it debate against, say, the Communist Manifesto in a void.
And we're not really going to talk about where these books came from, where these thoughts came from.
The English Civil War is pretty horrific.
I mean, that's something you don't really hear about.
Well, I mean, my point was like, you know, Not only can you not understand this book in a void, but you will only misunderstand it if you treat it as if it were in a void.
There's no way of getting this book right if you don't know about its particular origins.
And my professor said, oh, well, listen, this is a political science class.
It's not a history class.
A lot of people here aren't familiar with the Civil War, and we're going to lose a lot of time if we get nitty gritty of that.
So we're really not going to do that.
Expecting college students to even know what the English Civil War is is pretty... But hey, I mean, it's like, listen, if we don't know, all the more reason to talk about it!
I mean, if everybody in that class had already been, you know, familiar with that conflict, well then, yeah, maybe we can skip over it when we're talking about Leviathan.
But at no point during our class discussion was the Civil War ever discussed, except when I said, hey, maybe we should discuss it, and the professor said, no, we're not going to do that.
He probably didn't know what the English Civil War was.
You know, That's, I suppose that's possible.
I mean, this reminds me of something else he penned in, he wrote a book, Original Intentions on the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution.
And this is on page 21.
And this is significant, basically defines his entire approach.
He's talking about the Constitution specifically, but really it's his whole, I mean, approaches everything.
To approach the text of the Framers' Constitution without knowing the history of the Norman Conquest, the War of the Roses, the attainment of the Earl of Stratford, or the Glorious Revolution.
To read it without some introduction to the English Civil War, the 1640s, and the 18th century debate about the nature of rightful authority over free Englishmen.
is to misconceive the purpose embodied in the new American Constitution as it stood in 1791,
especially where the document embodies improvements in its model and prototype
that British statesmen had been proposing for generations, privileges and immunities,
prescriptions of de post facto laws, bills of attainder, star chamber proceedings, and the like.
I mean how many Americans even know what the star chamber is at this point? And so what he's saying
here, and this is how he approaches the Declaration of Independence, and also I guess you could say
more importantly the United States Constitution.
And I'll see you in the next one.
These were things that were being spoken of, not just in a particular context, in terms of a particular time and place, but in a particular legal context.
And so, when we say things like freedom, liberty, Rights.
These aren't free-floating blobs that just kind of mean whatever you want them to mean.
They were very specific things.
And this is really kind of important when the whole premise of your system is that you have a written constitution which is interpreted by specific people to determine what these things actually mean.
And if you're just going to say, well, we don't need to understand the context of these things.
We don't need to understand what specifically these things we're talking about.
These things actually don't mean anything other than what I want them to mean.
You really don't have a constitution at all.
You really don't have any guarantees at all.
I mean, I hate to skip to the end here, but like the last part of that book, and he noted that The evidence to the effect that we should take seriously, even when we are personally inclined to think another way, the alternative is dishonesty and, I'm sorry, let me start from the beginning, a regime of independent freeholders, commercial men, and self-governing communities who had negotiated informally their own version of a civil compact, one they could in good heart defend together without rewriting their common past, and without any hope of reforming one another, such a balance was possible.
A federal balance, as that term signified to them.
So they reassured one another with tiresome iteration, again, over and over and over again.
If you look at the context, if you look at the debates at these times, they're saying, now, when we say this, we don't mean this.
Obviously, we don't mean this.
And all this stuff they say, obviously, we didn't mean this.
That's like what the law is today.
And that's what later Supreme Court justices will say, well, yeah, this is what it means.
Concerning the framers, these essays have, with the same kind of essays that Bradford had written here,
with the same kind of emphasis demonstrated that despite their many
other differences limited government as opposed to anarchic freedom was
uniformly their objective. The evidence to that effect we should
take seriously even when we are personally inclined to think another way
for the alternative is dishonesty and contempt for the law.
And of course I would argue that we're at this point.
I mean, this was sort of the idea of Sam Francis and anarcho-tyranny where when somebody says the law or the idea of the rule of law, it's inadvertently hilarious at this point because we all kind of get that there.
I mean, I mean, the rule of law ended about 20 million illegal immigrants ago.
I mean, to expect that there's any kind of law or any kind of objective standards.
I mean, we're in a world where You know, if you tear down a statue or start a riot or burn down a police station in view of millions of people, probably nothing is going to happen to you.
But if you fill out a form wrong, or if you annoy the wrong person, or if you...
Violate some sort of technicality and you get a politically motivated investigation against you or somebody says you did something 30 years ago.
I mean any of these things can destroy your life overnight and to pretend that there are any real standards or objective measures or protections.
You're kind of kidding yourself at this point.
I mean the thing that really horrified the founders more than anything else was the arbitrary nature of royal power.
But I mean, the arbitrary power that DC has is far more concerning than anything George III once had.
Well that's something brought up in a certain notorious book, is it not?
Yes.
There are numerous.
There are many forbidden texts of lore that we must not mention.
Again, knowledge is bad.
A certain book that will not be named.
To speak its very name is to go mad.
But this is what Bradford is arguing, and he's saying, in its own way though, this idea of a kind of messianic egalitarianism.
There's also something of a tradition of this in English political discourse.
This is why he calls it a heresy, right?
Because a heresy is something that has a grain of truth that comes out of a tradition, but it preaches something that undermines and destroys that entire truth and that entire tradition.
This is why he, you know, uses Oliver Cromwell almost as like a curse.
I mean, this is a very southern conservative viewpoint.
When speaking about the political career of Abraham Lincoln, he notes Lincoln's House Divided speech.
And again, House Divided, a lot of people overlook this, but the House Divided, that metaphor comes when Christ is talking about the devil.
And he says, you know, Lucifer's kingdom would not stand if it was divided.
And so, it's kind of a sly little move there.
I mean, he was basically linking the Southerners with devils and demons.
Now, Bradford, and God is thus, by implication, the security for the quasi-religion of equality.
In a similar fashion, Lincoln finds God as a verification for his rectitude as president in his address to northern moderates.
men who love the old divided house, which we find in the second inaugural.
Here is the beginning of a political religion at the beginning of Lincoln's political career and also at its end.
What he's saying here is that you can't...
You have to look and...
You could argue that Bradford is maybe a little bit too legalistic.
I'm...
You get a little tired when he's getting into, well, the context of this and what they really meant here.
And we say, well, look, I mean, ultimately it all comes down to power.
Words mean whatever you want them to mean.
And you can redefine them if you have the power to do, because most people will ultimately believe what they're told.
But he's aware of that, and he's saying that you can use words in a way to set in motion a process that has its own momentum.
So, you can say something that, on the surface, is actually meant to be sort of an outstretched hand.
Like, no, we need, and we see this with liberals all the time, like, no, this is all about unity, it's about love, it's about moderation.
But then when you actually look at what they're proposing, it's really kind of a prescription for a political total war.
It's something that can only end in eternal crusades.
It's something that can only end with constant revolution, eternal revolution, and the excitation of a political enemy,
and then of course the creation of a new enemy, because the vision is impossible.
And so it just kind of rolls on again and again and again and again, and we never actually get anywhere.
I mean, every new liberal political victory, like there's no point where everyone says,
okay, we won, everyone's equal now.
It just kind of gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
I remember I was still on Facebook when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage
on a national level.
And I remember being just stunned by how basically every liberal friend I had
was posting about how this was absolutely not enough and how we mustn't rest in our laurels
and think that we've just won and that there is in fact so much more to do
in terms of trans rights and anti-discrimination laws.
and...
You know, representation beyond tokenism and all of these things.
There literally wasn't one day of a sense of accomplishment on their part.
It was just immediate.
Like, this is, you know, we're so happy we've gotten this, but man is it not enough.
And of course, I guess one exception would be Andrew Sullivan, who calls himself a Catholic.
And his blasphemous declaration quoting the Savior, no less, of, it is finished.
I remember he said that when gay marriage was decreed.
It is finished.
It's like, I mean, if you're, if you're a serious Christian, like the single most important thing, and you're linking it to that.
And now, of course, you know, he's on Twitter where he's posted, you know, he's reacting with the, can you believe this?
The same stuff that we're all posting about and saying, You know, oh, this has gone too far.
Can you believe this?
How is this happening?
It's like, this is the logical conclusion of everything you propose.
It's not finished.
It doesn't finish.
By its nature, it's never finished.
It just keeps going.
I find Sullivan a lot more interesting than you do, but the weird corners he paints himself into...
...are really bizarre.
It was just a few months ago that he was talking about how he hates critical race theory but does not believe it should be banned.
Right.
Well, I hate suicide, but I think assisted suicide centers should be open and available to the public.
I hate suicide, but we need Futurama's suicide booths available on every sidebar.
I hate self-harm, but we need to legalize heroin.
It's just very strange.
Well, he's somebody who ultimately He may have problems with wokeness, which is such a stupid phrase.
And he does.
And I think, yeah, and, and, and, you know, again, are, are genuine, right?
He's not a grifter or something.
No, but at the end of the day, and this is true, I think of, I mean, not that he's a conservative, he might call himself one.
Um, you know, he references certainly quite a number of conservative thinkers.
So we'll get into in other episodes in his thought, he may call himself a conservative.
I would not regard him as such, but at the end of the day, Whatever his problems with wokeness or the excesses of liberalism, he hates us way more than that, and he would militantly oppose
Any effort to actually turn this stuff back.
Right.
Even to turn it back to just the, you know, my principles are only those any highbred man would have believed in in like 2014 or something like that, to paraphrase Evola.
You know, even if you wanted to just go back to Obama era liberalism, which now, you know, a lot of conservatives sort of retroactively see as like a golden age for race relations.
What it would take just to go back to that.
Even when you still have affirmative action, even when you still have all these things, that by itself would require a right-wing political mobilization so vast and so energetic, and he would oppose every step of it.
And so that's why it's hard for me to take the complaints in good faith, you know?
Like, oh, why can't I stop the revolution at this point?
Because it's a revolution!
They're in good faith, they're just not very useful.
Right, right.
He is a very earnest and...
Dare I even say serious, man.
He just doesn't get it.
Yeah.
But I think maybe part of the reason why I still find him so interesting is just honestness.
I don't know.
There's this sort of goodness to Andrew Sullivan that I can't quite shake, that I just don't find present in Max Boot or Jennifer Rubin or something.
I find these people very hateful and very stupid.
Frankly.
They are very stupid.
Sullivan is thoughtful and he is earnest in a way that's just not true of... Oh, what's that, uh... Brett, what's-his-face?
The new, like, sort of token Republican of the New York Times ombed page?
Is it Weinstein or something like that?
No... Stevenson?
Brett Stevenson?
Is that it?
I don't know.
Anyway, we're getting super sidetracked here, but all of this is getting here nor there.
But, I mean, it's important in the sense that Both of these these people you're talking like both categories the let's call them the honest liberals who believe that they can hold the revolution at a certain point and then of course the people who just reject
the entire conservative project altogether, or who dishonestly claim it and then throw it off like a
skin, you know, once it's no longer useful. Like, I mean, Jennifer Rubin used to call her, she was
the Washington Post's like conservative columnist. And then later was like, oh, actually, I'm not a
conservative anymore. It's like, well, yeah, because it seems to be useful.
Bradford wrote about these people, actually, in an essay that you can find in his book,
The Reactionary Imperative, which I love.
He wrote on being conservative in a post-liberal era.
He was writing in the context of the 1980s and the Ronald Reagan administration, which was the beginning.
I mean, as we were talking about earlier with the NEH thing of him versus Bennett.
It was kind of the beginning of when you see the contours of the neocon.
Right.
And guarding liberalism.
wars. Just all of these opportunists in the Reagan administration are just not doing much
of anything and seem only interested in power. And that's still very much with us.
And guarding liberalism. I mean, if you wanted to look at who was opposed to Bradford getting
this position, you're going to find familiar names. But Hora, it's Crystal. I mean, all
the people who would then go on to lead the country into the Iraq, the second Iraq, the
first Iraq war, the second Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, the crusades for democracy
in the Middle East.
I mean, essentially all of the problems that you can point with the American right, a lot of them fall back to this initial, I mean, what looks like a skirmish, but in retrospect was like a historical turning point.
You could, it might be a bit of a stretch, but you could argue there's a whole alternative history.
Where he gets that, and the American right is redefined in an authentically conservative direction, and we simply do not have problems like 9-11.
We do not have the Iraq War.
Wars, plural.
We do not have Afghanistan.
We've got President Pat Buchanan presiding over a country that never had to deal with mass immigration, and California is still a solidly Republican state.
So here's Bradford.
Here's a Bradford quote on all of this.
Again, this is about the Reagan administration, but it's still so true now.
I mean, it never stopped being true.
Right.
There are, to be sure, certain groups who have recently attached the conservative label to themselves, who enjoy the confusion which I've just described because it allows them to so redefine our position that we can no longer hold it for our own, allows them to steal our identity and put it to uses at variance with its origins, to invert it into something foreign to itself, leaving
those who are still conservatives in the familiar sense of the term with no ground on which
to stand. These interlopers want to get their agenda defined as axiomatic by leaving no useful
space to their right, and they want all the persuasive advantages that come in a post-liberal era
of calling their view conservative, regardless of its essentially statist, pacifist, and coercively
egalitarian implications."
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah.
I've always said that, you know, for a modern conservative, it's somebody who wants a
certain kind of society but isn't willing to do what is necessary to bring it about or to
protect it.
That's right.
But what he's talking about is arguably something even worse.
A bunch of people who want a liberal society but want to do it just by calling themselves conservative.
Or who define the West, and again... Right, your quote about a modern conservative as somebody who sort of sees the light but isn't willing to do anything to reach the light, that's Andrew Sullivan.
The quote I just read from Bradford, that is Jennifer Rubin and David Frum and all of these people.
There is a real meaningful distinction between those two camps.
It can sometimes get glossed over when we look at everything in terms of neocon versus non-neocon, or never-trumper versus not-never-trumper, and that sort of thing, but there are these interesting cleavages among them, and that's why I think it's so much more valuable to read somebody like Sullivan than to read Frum.
Again, with the admission that it's way better to read Bradford or Gottfried than either of these two guys.
Well, yeah, that last category is just shapeshifters who are just sort of saying, okay, I'm calling myself this because I'm deliberately trying to trick people into pursuing something against their own interests.
Well, and they argue these impossible things, like that George W. Bush was basically a good president and that Trump was the worst president, which is just... I can't... I just don't see that argument.
I see no way of arguing it.
And the arguments also change once they...
Sure, I mean they hated Obama for all these reasons and now they love Obama just because Trump came to power.
Yeah, it's always morphing.
And they have a different constituency.
But people like Bradford who are so... Bradford is just such a man of the South.
He's a rock.
He's such a son of the South.
Yeah, he's an absolute rock.
Just completely unmovable.
With that comes a real sense of clarity and moral conviction that is really attractive, and I mean...
Almost humbling.
I mean, sometimes I will kind of read the things he has to say about the South and his own Southern heritage and his ancestral ties to the Confederacy and all these things.
He has this famous quote along the lines of, nobody's really free unless they belong somewhere.
And it does, more than anything, I feel envious when I read about this of Bradford was somebody who felt so totally rooted in a particular area.
And it's something that I think very few people of our generation have felt about anywhere.
Right.
You know, the sense of complete historical belonging.
Being part of a people.
Yeah, and the sense of uninterrupted lineage and the pride that can come with that and the sense of rootedness that comes with that.
I don't know, maybe one of the last intellectuals to really clearly feel that way.
There are still intellectuals that feel that way, but they post under fake names on Twitter.
They're not like in American universities.
Right, yeah.
But also, of course, the people who teach in American universities are not very bright.
Bradford is fascinating.
Just sociologically, in that Bradford was so brilliant, he knew so much about history.
Even though he was a literature professor!
He wrote so much about literature as well, and about legality, the constitution, judicial history, all of these things.
He was just an absolute genius, something of a polymath, really.
And yet he's the opposite of everything we think of when we use the word intellectual.
When we say intellectuals, we generally mean very rootless people, very cosmopolitan people.
Defeat?
Yeah, frankly, unhappy people, generally.
People with mental health issues, people with substance abuse issues.
You know, all of these things, people who are totally scattered-brained, on some level dysfunctional, or, you know, sort of idiot savants, or dysfunctional geniuses.
Yeah, they've passed through as many gender categories as, like, obscure left-wing political categories.
Right, and there's not one iota of that in Bradford.
Bradford was such a man of a time and a place, and he was so unapologetic and so confident about it.
There was none of this kind of posturing that you see In like contemporary traditionalist Catholic circles where it's still to some extent this purchased identity or it's something they can't they sort of discovered when they were 26 and it brought them a lot of meaning and it gave them a lot of faith and listen if if that's you know if that's what your soul requires and that's just intellectually where you arrive hey that's fine that's great but it's still still so different from somebody like Bradford
Who was like a rock from the day of his birth to the day of his death.
Yeah, you know what he was from day one.
And, you know, the pushback in defense of the, in mild defense of the traditionalist Catholics, although I'm sure they don't like me very much.
I mean, there's also because that idea of rootedness was still possible, whereas now It is almost something where you have to, I don't want to say invent, although for a lot of people it really is just invented or LARPing to use the term, it's just something, it's a brand, right?
And that doesn't mean it's not intellectually rigorous or that you're wrong, but it's still different from the rudeness of men like Bradford.
And it's arguably less authentic and it's also You should be angry that you don't have that because it's something, it's not that like, oh, it's a condition.
I am angry that I don't have it.
It's not just like, oh, it's inherent to modernity or, oh, it's something that just sort of happened by accident.
Like, no, it was taken from you.
It was deliberately taken from you and people with names and addresses said like, We are going to do this.
We are going to deliberately make your lives worse by taking away this identity from you.
And then, when you're deracinated and rootless and unhappy, they're gonna say, oh well look, you're deracinated and rootless and unhappy and the solution is all these things that made you deracinated and rootless and unhappy, only turning it up to 11.
Yeah, the solution is to double down on all of this.
That's right.
It's like you have no sense of rootedness, but you can reinvent yourself in a new gender and that will somehow make you happy.
Right.
I mean, they were talking about neoliberal capitalism, but to quote the mid-tier band Rage Against the Machine, there is no other pill to take so swallow the one that made you ill.
But I mean, that's sort of like what Thatcher was talking about with global capitalism, right, Tina?
There is no alternative.
This is how it is with liberal cultural policies.
There is no alternative.
You just have to keep going.
And this sense of rootedness and this sense of an authentic conservative tradition is very important to note.
This is explicitly what today's quote-unquote mainstream conservatism is against because the ultimate example of this would be Kevin Williamson.
Guess what?
Here's your community.
It's been deracinated.
Your identity has been destroyed.
Everything is falling apart.
Should you fight for it?
No.
You should move away and go to San Francisco and work in a cube somewhere, pushing poison on your people, so you can buy more garbage you don't need.
And, like, that's what it is to be a conservative.
And then they wonder, like, why won't anyone defend patriotism?
Why won't anyone defend an identity?
Because it's garbage.
And what you're selling us is garbage.
And you know it's garbage.
I'm sorry you couldn't get to work at the Atlantic, but that doesn't mean you have to push this nonsense on us.
Anyone who aspires to work there really has nothing to tell us anywhere.
But these sorts of things, this idea of equality as a conservative principle.
And thus, you know, making the position untenable.
It's like taking a military position where you can easily be flanked.
Where you have a gaping hole in your defenses and the enemy is just gonna march right on through.
I mean, that's what he's warning about.
And of course...
This is an American Renaissance podcast.
Where is the most spectacular example of this?
It is with race and the closing lines of the Heresy of Equality.
Bradford, and I quote, "...it has been a distinctive trait of American political thought to do its worst as it touches upon the Negro, to break down when unable to make it through the aforementioned impassive objectives.
Class struggle has been the result."
To say nothing of race conflict.
And that failing attaches, by definition, to the Republican identity.
Flying it perhaps forever as a viable conservative instrument.
Republican with a capital R, speaking of the party.
Said another way, the more people derive their political identity from Lincoln's version of equality, written with a capital E, the more they are going to push up against the given and providential frame of things to prove up the magic phrase.
And therefore, the more they will, to repeat one of my favorite images, kick the tar baby.
And we all know how that story ends.
This is the essential problem with conservatives and race that we are still seeing play out now, and we're seeing it especially with the specific thing that he talked about here, the problem of equality of opportunity versus equity.
There's nothing you can do which is going to create equality of opportunity among the races.
You could unleash Every government policy possible, at least with equity, I can imagine a way you could have it for at least a second just by putting a gun to people's heads and making people hand over enough stuff so that everybody's equal for about like one second.
But even that wouldn't last very long.
But equality of opportunity, I mean that by itself is just such a nebulous term and you're just ignoring the fact that people and peoples Yeah.
I mean, and let's say, oh, white supremacists or whatever else.
It's like, okay, but again, if you look at socioeconomic performance in this country, if you look at test scores and everything else, whites are not at the top.
Yeah.
I mean, and to say that, like, oh, well, we need to have some sort of theory for equality of opportunity.
Are we going to argue that, like, whites don't have the same equality of opportunity as, like, Asians in any traditional way?
It gets very silly very fast.
Yeah.
And then you'll have certain people, well actually this and that and the model minority was actually a white supremacist plot somehow to disprove.
It goes into insanity.
I've met liberals who have made that argument to me, that white people had this big meeting and decided Asians were the model minority.
Thereafter, Asians started to do very well.
Right.
It must have been the same meeting where, like, a bunch of capitalists decided that, like, race was a thing.
Oh, to invite race to invite the working class!
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
It was a really important meeting.
A lot of stuff got decided.
What's really funny, of course, is when you... We'll have to get into this later, but especially, like, in Australia and South Africa, specifically the Anglosphere, It's where you have like open communist parties like holding general strikes and putting countries on the brink of revolution because they were like, this is a white man's country and it's like the head of the communist party.
Yeah, that white worker power.
And the capitalists are like, no, no, no, no, no.
We need to bring in all these people because it's equality or something.
I mean, again, this is where, you know, Bradford, basic knowledge of context and where these ideas come from and what these words mean.
It's pretty important to know this stuff.
Well, and I'll say, at the risk of being too polemical, Bradford was really interested in the historical context of all of these things because Bradford was an impeccably studious man who was interested and eager to hit the books and to read more about it all.
And one of the benefits that comes with talking about ideas in a void without any context is that it's much easier.
You have way less homework if you ignore You know, the historical circumstances of when any political text was written, and frankly, I think that's part of the reason why talking about all of these ideas as if they exist in a void is really fashionable.
Right.
Because it's just much, much easier.
I mean, you know, for every... the amount of historical reading you have to do around any given political text is almost guaranteed to be more reading than the text itself, to really get a sense of the context.
But you can just decide that everything's in a void and then boom, you know, you're off to the races.
You can just read all of these philosophy books and determine that you know everything.
Right.
Or you just say, I know nothing and therefore I'm wiser than everyone who came before me.
Yeah, the oldest trick in the book, perhaps.
And this is something where deracination also has a consequence in terms of our academic discourse because there was a time when people who had Any kind of a basic education, but certainly someone who was college educated.
They knew the classics, at the least.
They knew the basics of the Anglo-American political tradition and the constitutional tradition.
And, you know, even if you were a frontiersman, you knew the Bible.
Right.
And so if you told stories from the Bible, or if you made a... I mean, Huey Long or something was going out there making speeches to rural workers and people like that, and he would use some Parable, everybody knew what he was talking about.
Whereas now, you would just get blank stares because nobody knows anything except what Marvel put out last week.
I knew this guy in college who very much wanted to be the next great American novelist.
I believe he's still trying and he's a great guy.
I hope he succeeds.
But one funny thing that would happen when he and I talked about books and literature and stuff is he had not even a passing familiarity with the Bible.
And there were multiple occasions where he'd be like, Dude, that's from the Bible.
That's a book in the Bible.
This is, you know, this is just, you know, the story of Jonah.
Like, you gotta read the story of Jonah if you're gonna read Moby Dick.
Yeah.
You know?
Like, these things are really intimately connected.
I don't care if you don't believe in God or don't believe in Christianity, but, you know, its influence is so enormous that you gotta have at least some passing familiarity.
Same with reading Flannery O'Connor.
You've got to read some biblical stuff if you're really going to try and find the meaning in all that Southern Gothic.
Or like trying to understand what the South is without reading Faulkner or something like that.
You're just not going to do it.
We're maybe belaboring a point here.
But it's important.
If I had to recommend one other particular essay, it would be A Firebell in the Night, The Southern Conservative View.
Again, Bradford was not just a conservative, but he was a Southern conservative.
Some might argue that Southern conservatism is the only authentic American conservatism, the only authentic anti-liberal American tradition.
And this is something that really needs to be pushed back against hard, this idea that, oh, America has no anti-liberal tradition.
Like, no.
Nonsense.
You've got a number of very persuasive and prescient Thinkers who are anti-liberal, and by liberal I mean classical or otherwise, anti-liberal, but they all come from the South.
Very few exceptions.
Maybe, I don't know, Henry Adams or something like that, but even that, probably not.
I would say you really, you know, starting with Calhoun and then going forward, it's all gonna come.
Or even earlier than Calhoun, like John Randolph of Roanoke.
Well yeah, John Randolph of Roanoke.
John Taylor of Caroline, these guys.
It's big stuff.
If y'all really want to get into the weeds on this, I recommend checking out the Abbeville Institute's website.
They've really done their homework on this kind of thing.
It's incredible, honestly.
You can get a real education in this country still, you're just not going to get it by going to university.
You're going to get it by going to these foundations where serious scholarship is still being done.
I want to quote from This particular book about the Southern Conservative View.
Now, again, this is... I am not from the South, as you can probably tell from my accent, but despite being a Virginian for a very long time, the... well, I mean, I guess that's the whole problem, right?
I'm not really a Virginian.
Despite living in Virginia, shall we say.
Well, you lived in Northern Virginia.
I mean, come on, you lived in the Beltway.
Give me a break here.
I went to the same school as Thomas Jefferson.
Cut me a break.
But there's a lot of, he talks about the, and this is basic stuff, you know, the difference between those who settled New England and those who settled the American South and the different models that they were taking on.
If you want to go further back, I think it's Albion Seed, where it talks about the different parts of England that even settled these areas and the important implications that had.
But Bradford rejects the idea that it's the South against the rest of the country.
In opposing liberalism.
He talks about Reconstruction and he talks about certain aspects that came mostly out of New England, but he says, quote, yet the total nation, the entire United States, has characteristically despised and rejected who or whatever aspired to dragoon its way to such beatitudes, about egalitarianism, through the instruments of federal policy.
The only full exception to this rule, I insist, is the, quote, civil rights revolution of the past 20 years.
In connection with the difficult question of the Negro's place within our social compact, an imperative was discovered stronger than any pressed on us before.
They are discovered because the Negro's lot within that compact was so difficult and so slow to improve.
With it, we have made fair to force the issue, even if liberty and its correlatives, law, localism, and personalism, loses much of its authority as a term of honor.
Is diminished especially insofar as it applies to that nondescript but substantial many who captain men and propel the ship of state.
Of course, as Lennon wrote, the only way to make men equal is to treat them unequally.
And Lennon's advice does not function inside our curious native dialectic.
Well, not until recently, I guess.
I mean, what he's saying here is that, and this is important, is that it's not like things like Reconstruction, or guys like Thaddeus Stevens, or people like that, or some of the more radical abolitionists, John Brown, whatever you want to call it.
It's not that these things don't come out of a certain authentic American tradition.
But first of all, they tend to get tied up with kind of religious craziness.
I mean, which I guess you could argue is also true of some of the elements from the parliamentarian side in the English Civil War.
And it also just kind of passes.
And then we all used to go, all right, well, we're never doing that again.
I mean, it was sort of like the terror in the French Revolution, you know, with very few exceptions.
You know, even by like 1800, nobody was like, oh, well, that was a great time when everyone was being guillotined.
We need to We need to just go back to killing people because everything will be fine.
It's seen as what it was.
It's seen as kind of a temporary madness in defense of an ideal that some people might think is good, some people might think is bad, but clearly the means were not something that were justified and that this was a mistake.
And America, historically as a country, knew this.
That has changed, unfortunately.
But of course, I think the reason that has changed is because the population has changed.
I mean, if you import an entirely new population, you're going to import entirely new political traditions.
I mean, the breakdowns between different sects of Islam is going to become a really important issue in American politics because of the immigration trends of the last 20 years.
God, that's depressing.
It's true though.
There was some, I'm not even going to say his name, I don't know his name and I don't care.
Although now I'm falling into the knowledge is bad thing so I probably should look up his name when I write about this.
But there was somebody on MSNBC where he was criticizing the Taliban.
But he had to note by saying that he was of a different sect of Islam, and that was especially why he hated them.
Really?
Yeah, and it was like, oh well as a, you know, this and that, and that's why the, I think he might have used the term like human scum or whatever else, and it's just like, why do we need to know about this?
As if we don't have enough problems, like not only do we have to like police these tribes and their strange folkways in Afghanistan, We have guys on television like lecturing us about the different interpretations of the Quran and somebody in like Virginia or New York or California has to know about this?
Why?
I mean what's the point of self-government if the whole population can be replaced and therefore the whole political tradition, the whole legal tradition, the whole context in which you have to operate gets taken away?
I mean at that point self-government ceases to exist.
The whole point of having a country is that you have a shared context, and you have a shared way you can work through your problems.
And Bradford was saying is for most of American history, it worked pretty well.
There were excesses, but they were recognized by the total nation as such after a few years.
I mean, until recently, everybody pretty much universally regarded Reconstruction as an absolute catastrophe.
Now, of course, the doctrine in universities is that it didn't go far enough and they should have just been shooting people and stealing everybody's property and everything else, clearly prepping the way for what they want to do next.
But this, he's writing in 1973 here, and this is something that, you know, he saw coming and these things, none of these ideas, I mean, we're now speaking in the perspective of 2021, I mean, this is, what, 50 years ago?
And a lot of the measures that he talks about here, I mean, we've been trying this for half a century.
And I don't, I hope I'm not wrong here, but according to the most recent poll, but like, I think race relations, according to this, now this is subjective, but according to those polls, they said it was worse than ever.
And depending on what measure you look at in terms of the income gap or the wealth gap or whatever it is, it hasn't, Improved.
Now, of course, it has improved because you keep importing more poor people.
So, like, yeah, you're gonna have a hard time, like, improving a lot of everyone.
But, you know, it's like trying to... your boat is sinking, so, you know, you've got one guy with a bucket, like, throwing water out, and then you have three other guys with buckets dumping more in.
And you're like, why isn't this working?
Well, it's pretty obvious why it's not working.
But this, again, this is from the perspective of 1973.
And he says, he talks about the excesses of the past.
Let's go through all of them.
In 1820, though the evidence here is mostly in language and only secondarily in the resulting law, we took an initial step away from liberty.
In 1861, 1877, a few more.
And from these examples, from our uneasiness at thee to the millennialist sensibility, he was talking about the dangers of millennials in 1973.
Talk about prescient.
I know, he's using it in a different way.
Greatest of built-in American scandals.
Sorry for not understanding your deadpan.
Sorry to doubt you, Greg.
In the post-World War II era, we arrived at the point of converting at least one feature of millennialism into a positive goal.
To use the late William Faulkner's idiom, we set out to, quote, abolish the Negro we knew, both as presence and problem.
The results began to speak for themselves.
The fresh set of insoluble dilemmas which, with each passing dawning day, cry out for more potent magic than the cures for yesterday's injustice would spawn them into existence in the first place.
I will extrapolate upon a few.
Positive millennialist injunctions, reverse discrimination, racial quotas, assignment of teachers and workers by color, grading by court order, federal involvement with zoning practices, or intervention in the relocation of business firms, etc., intending to ensure equality of condition by mere congregation or by redistribution of wealth among racial groups, attempt something entirely remote from, for instance, ordinary voting rights legislation.
According to the theory behind this amazing set of measures, every cherished right secured by statute in history is brought to question if its free exercise forestalls that abstraction, the quote, integrated society.
Well, there we are.
Everything.
Equity dissolves into entropy and chaos.
Everything is up for grabs.
Property rights, long-standing legal norms, whatever you think is solid in your tradition or where you live or anything else, all that can just be bulldozed.
Wasn't the title of your last essay, Equity is Entropy?
Yeah.
I mean that's essentially what he's warning of and I think at this point this is seen as a feature, not a bug, of those pushing this.
I mean, after a half century of effort, I guess, looking at the polls I've seen, most liberals are more passionate about politics than conservatives are.
Arguably, it's their religion, you can have whatever explanation for this you want.
But you do have to wonder, after a half century of effort, and having made, by their standards, no real progress, I mean, do they question whether they're ever going to get there, or do they just kind of keep doubling down?
I mean, at this point, and maybe I'll get some pushback from others here, but at this point I think the point really is just to hurt white people, and whether it helps others is just sort of secondary.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
I know how partisan that sounds, but...
I mean, like nobody, yeah, I mean they, even just something as simple as where they talk about like, oh, there's going to be a white minority in America and everybody starts cheering.
It's like, all right, well, how is that going to help the people who you claim to care about?
Or they'll talk about like, oh, the poor American Indians, they were reduced to a minority in their own country.
And it's like, well, why is like dumping a bunch of like Afghans on top of them all like going to help them?
I mean, if the problem is that they lack control over their own territory, how does putting even more people on it help the problem?
And the only possible explanation is like, well, it doesn't help the problem, but it hurts white people.
And this is also sort of the thing with Black Lives Matter, where, you know, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.
Well, how much do they matter?
I mean, if we look at what the consequences of these policies have been, a bunch of black people were killed.
A bunch of black neighborhoods were destroyed.
Nobody seems to particularly care.
Maybe instead of asking, do black lives matter?
We should ask, how many black lives are egalitarians willing to sacrifice if it means hurting a few white people?
And the answer seems to be all of them.
And this includes, of course, the leaders of the black community themselves.
I mean, I don't think any of the Huckster preachers or any of the rest have lost like a moment's sleep over what they've unleashed in their After all, I mean, after they fleece their congregations, they go buy houses in white neighborhoods like the founder of BLM did.
But what Bradford is saying is, I mean, we have tools to fight against this, like, right in front of us.
We have arguments to fight against this right in front of us.
They're from our own history.
We don't need to come up with some edgy new thing.
It's all right here.
It's just the American conservative movement, either out of ignorance Or stupidity, or you could argue with certain, you know, these people, these shapeshifters who take the conservative label and put it on and then discard it like a cloak when it's no longer useful, maybe out of malice, basically unilaterally disarmed American conservatives and left them defenseless for the battles to come.
And then they just kind of wonder why they lose over and over and over again.
I mean, what was the main reason so many people voted for Trump in 2016 in the Republican primaries despite the fact that guys like National Review were warning against him?
It was basically because we've been listening to you idiots for 30 years and what have you gotten us?
Well, I think we're coming up at an hour here.
Well, I think we should touch on the practical, you know, the idea of Bradford as martyr and what you were discussing a little earlier about some of the people who he really became a stand-in for.
One of the things that has been, I mean, it's kind of surprising to think about, but the neoconservative and the paleoconservative really both kind of emerged at the same time.
I mean, at least as distinct factions?
Well, really, paleoconservatism, I mean, this is kind of too, excuse me, but paleoconservatism
largely came after neoconservatism as a reaction against it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah.
But yeah, what Greg's mentioning is something he and I were discussing before we started recording, which is there's a way of looking at the history of American conservatism, especially since the 1940s or so, which is, and this is largely Paul Gottfried's view of it, and it certainly informs Greg and I's view of it.
Viewing it as a history of purges, a history of internal policing.
Right.
And Buckley is expressly praised for this, usually.
Yeah, that's right.
Gottfried isn't the only... I mean, Gottfried, when he writes about this, views it as a very negative thing, but centrists and neocons write about it as a very positive thing.
So there is actually kind of a consensus on the fact that it did occur, because Jonah Goldberg and E.J.
Dionne have written about how Buckley was essential in making American conservatism respectable.
And this is all a bit of a rabbit hole, which is why I don't want to spend too much time on it.
But in short, you can look at the 1950s with Buckley and National Review really purging a lot of libertarians, especially the hardcore ones such as Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, along with the John Birchers, who were viewed as basically too provincial.
And insufficiently supportive of the war in Vietnam.
And from there it You move into the beginnings of the neocon versus paleocon wars and pretty quickly you find all of these martyred figures.
Mel Bradford was one of the first people who were cheated from positions of prominence or who reached positions of prominence and were then pushed out or fired or made to resign or what have you.
This happens to Sam Francis, to Joe Sobran, to Peter Brimelow.
It's a long list.
Gottfried helped co-edit an interesting book that goes over most of it called The Purge, which was put out by Richard Spencer's Radix in print in 2015.
Yeah, 2015.
Which I would actually recommend.
You can still find it.
If you really want to dive into the weeds on this.
And then in more modern times, people like John Darbyshire are getting purged from National Review.
Right.
And Bradford is a key martyr in this sort of canon of Dissidents, paleocons, heterodox, right-wingers, kind of whatever you want to call it, sort of all of those things at once and more.
It's something I find, at least for Greg and I's generation, when you start, when you kind of delve into the waters of dissident thought, this becomes an absolute obsession for whatever reason.
It's just kind of part of the journey.
Well, and it also becomes personal.
Yeah, it becomes personal very quickly.
Well, and all of the people it happened to then went on to write about it.
Such as Gottfried.
I mean, it's clear that they still feel it very acutely and very personally.
Yeah, and it's personal in two ways.
One, it's personal in the sense that you get to know, either know personally or via their writing and identifying with them, these people who suffered from the loss of position.
It's also personal in the sense of, like, us, you know, personally.
Like, you would have this job, you would be editing this magazine, you would be doing this thing, were it not for these purges and these safeguards put in place to essentially make sure that nobody who might accomplish something can get anywhere.
And, I mean, I realize that's as self-interested a thing as you can possibly say, but, to which I would respond, well, You know, what has American conservatism done for you lately?
I mean, right now, you have to look at the disaster that's happening in Afghanistan and the rhetoric that's being generated about it and the responses to it, and none of these people have learned anything.
And we also saw this during the Trump thing, which was arguably the revenge of the dispossessed, where basically all those people who had been kicked out For one glorious moment joined forces and just routed these people from their citadels and it was revealed that they had no connection with the people they claimed the lead.
But then what happened?
He didn't, you know, the President Trump did not take control of his administration and these people weaseled away right back in and the same outcome happened.
That always happened.
You got the same betrayals, the same, and I don't even, I don't want to say compromise because compromises are essential in politics, but like deliberate sabotage, deliberate attempts to make sure That certain things didn't happen.
Well, and very foolish choices in personnel.
The old adage of personnel is policy.
This is one of Trump's enormous failures.
And again, Bradford, what I read from, was one of Reagan's failures as well.
But this is why it's so important is because the reaction when Trump got elected, and we all remember it, we all remember all the people, oh, I'm going to go to Canada, I'm going to do this, you know, people screaming and going nuts and threatening to commit suicide and all sorts of craziness.
This was, I am told, I was not alive then, but I am told, the reaction when Reagan was elected was pretty much as hysterical, because he was seen as sort of the right-wing bomb thrower.
And so a lot of these conservative figures who had been with him since the beginning, who had seen them as their guy, and they had been with him for a long time, a lot longer than the dissident right had been with Donald Trump.
They had been with him in the 76th battle at the convention, they had been with him before that, Even in the 60s he was spoken of as the great conservative hope.
And so you had all these people who were expecting, and now we're going to get to wield power.
And Bradford was one of the first to get the appointment.
And then you had this movement rise up and with some pretty brutal tactics going after him personally.
And of course, as always, the so-called conservatives working hand-in-glove with the liberal media, pushing him out.
And then they get kicked out, dispossessed at the very moment of their triumph.
Sam Francis writes a lot about this too.
And so what ends up happening?
You can say what you want about Ronald Reagan, whether he was a good president or a bad president, but this idea of turning back liberalism or this idea of this transformative vision of American society, that didn't happen.
Then you had another opportunity after that when you had Pat Buchanan.
And you had, again, sort of the same group of forces that the old John Randolph Club and all these people who rallied behind him.
And again, you had a concerted push by the American conservative movement to make sure that Buchanan didn't get in.
What did you get?
You got George H.W.
Bush.
Who was sort of the Mike Pence of the Reagan years.
No, I mean, he was he was deliberately selected.
No, I'm laughing because it's on point.
I'm not laughing because it's ridiculous.
He was he was deliberately selected as, you know, the establishment guy to kind of calm people down.
Then, of course, he took over, dominated the staffing and everything else.
And what did he do?
He launched a war that, in retrospect, didn't accomplish anything and made things worse, then lost.
And then we got the Clinton years and demographic transformation.
And you had this priceless opportunity in the 90s, which was lost forever.
No, listen, all of what you said is true, basically.
And I used to have all of these things kind of memorized.
I used to be able to tell you who spoke at every year of the John Randolph Club, and I used to be able to tell you every person who used to write for mainstream conservative magazines and then were eventually pushed out over the course of the 90s into the early aughts to, you know, VDARE and American Renaissance and stuff.
The older I get, not that I'm particularly old, as genuinely old people keep reminding me, the more I question how really valuable it was to spend a lot of time studying, sort of obsessively, all of these fights, all of this positioning, all of this wrangling, all of this sort of You know, kind of cubicle wars that happened.
I mean, they were of consequence.
It is absolutely meaningful that Sam Francis was pushed out of the Washington Times.
Right.
You know, these things did, you know, personnel has consequences, right?
Right.
Not just ideas.
And on some level it is important to know about all of that, but it's really easy to
look into all of this stuff and care about it way too much.
Especially if you've got personal stakes.
It can become a really big distraction where you are just sort of documenting the lives
of the martyrs in a way that is really unproductive.
And a lot of this stuff, you know, happened forever ago and something I brought up brought up to you and something I've argued with Paul Gottfried about is the extent to which the Trump era really kind of permanently ended this neocon versus paleocon divide just because there were so many neocons who hated Trump and then there were other neocons who who loved Trump or were very willing to work There were other neocons who abandoned the GOP entirely because of his presence.
And even the conservative label.
Yeah.
The battle lines really changed with Trump, and viewing everything as neocon versus paleocon is not as useful as it was even as recently as 2014, when it still felt like that divide was really, really present.
Things are really different now.
Again, I'm just not sure it's that useful to learn about the nitty-gritty of all of this.
You can kind of cheat and sort of read the summaries and then move on to something that could be more useful.
Know what happened.
First of all, three points here.
One is Bradford's thought in and of itself is worth knowing and using.
That's the main takeaway.
The second point is knowing about the neoconservative and paleoconservative fight.
That it happened, but I think as you say like knowing that it happened is enough. Yeah, like it happened
but the third thing and I think this is the real thing is that
It's really about access to a mass base and that's what these fights are really over
It wasn't just a fight over this academic post, or a fight over, you know, this position at Heritage or whatever else.
It was the fight, and it was not even just a question of patronage, although patronage is of course very important when it comes to having political loyalty and everything else, but really it was about being able to define what the American right is.
That's why Trump was so important.
That's why they opposed him.
I mean, why do you think it is that liberal reporters and certain people who call themselves conservatives are so freaked out by, I don't know, Tucker Carlson, whereas they don't care about Ben Shapiro?
You know, because like one could potentially lead to something.
I'm not saying Tucker Carlson, as a white advocate, obviously he's not, and you know,
I have no illusions about the guy or anything like that.
But there's a difference between something that could potentially lead to some sort of
victory as opposed to something that is designed to lose.
Which is what the conservatives...
Or something that would be of no consequence if it won, like if George Will became president.
Right.
Yeah, the guys who are allowed to be on Facebook The guys who are allowed to be on Twitter.
I mean, there was an interesting article in the Washington Post today, and they were like, well, why is the Taliban allowed to be on Twitter?
It's because they follow the rules.
And it's like, yeah, and that's why Jared Taylor's banned.
Give me a break.
Like, no, it's because if you have somebody who's effective, they're going to go after those people first.
Like, the people who are allowed to exist are the ones who are designed to lose, and they know their role.
But listen, listen, listen.
Juan, for those of you who wanted us to argue or at least debate more, I think you might actually be getting your wish.
I think that this, that third point you made about kind of this quest for an authentic or a genuine conservatism or a real right or, you know, the true right or what have you, which is the ideological background behind all of these paleocon versus neocon wars, I think that quest to find the most perfect conservatism is basically pointless.
I think it really leads to purity spiraling.
There's also, I mean, I kind of agree with Alain de Benoist and a lot of the French new rightists on this of, well, some conservatism has an uncanny knack for losing.
And I think we kind of mythologize too much this idea that, oh, if things had gone a little differently here or there, then the real right would have won.
I think there's an extent to which we are really kidding ourselves with that.
And what I was saying earlier about how Bradford was completely a man of a particular time and a particular place.
To me, that is authentic conservatism, and there is a real value in reading authentic conservatives who are just absolutely born into it, who are just coursing through their veins.
I think those people have a lot of very interesting things to teach us, but I don't think, I think Just by the very virtue of the fact that Bradford was kind of born into this position of conservatism, that nobody can be really converted to it, that it's sort of something you've kind of got because you were raised in an organic and a real and a self-sustaining culture, or you weren't.
And that quest to kind of bring everybody to Bradford I think is actually something that is sort of doomed to failure.
It's like, you know, you need to have the lineage that Bradford did in order to be Bradford.
And listen, I think that's great, but, and I hold Bradford's works in very high regard, but it's the same thing of like, you know, to make a literary analogy, which Bradford would have liked, you know, Flannery O'Connor was a brilliant writer, probably my favorite writer, certainly my favorite American writer.
But I could never write her stories, no matter how much I studied, no matter how much I trained, no matter how much I read.
Because Flannery O'Connor, like Bradford, was such a product of being a devout Catholic woman in the South during the time she was born and raised.
You're just never going to be able to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop yourself and take all of these classes and memorize every single word that O'Connor ever wrote and then produce a body of work that's as good.
And again, that's not to say that, oh, ergo, O'Connor has nothing to teach us or we shouldn't bother reading O'Connor.
It's just...
All of these people who are products of their time and place, part of respecting them is understanding that limitation.
I think this is a big part of the reason why you and I like James Burnham and his writings on power so much.
More than a quest, I don't like this idea that We are on this journey to find this authentic conservatism, and then once we find it, we will win, because then we will have the truth, and the truth will just light the world.
I don't think that's correct.
I also think it's impossible to achieve, because you and I were simply not born into the worlds that made Bradford and O'Connor, or any number of other people.
What we need instead is a more robust theory of power, and how it operates, and how to get it, and how to hold it.
And there are even some lessons about power in these neocon versus paleocon wars, to be sure, but I hate creating this almost Christian canon of the paleomartyrs, of just this idea of like, all of these men died for the sins of, I don't know, America.
Suffering career death for America.
Right, right, right, right.
And if we just get back to them, and if we just internalize their truths, and then if then we set out with those truths in mind, then like, you know, Vidi Vici, like, it's just... The blood of the purged is the seed of the church, right?
Right, that's just not, that's just not true, and there is a certain amount of LARPing to that.
Again, it's not LARPing for you and I to read Bradford and appreciate its wisdom and learn from that wisdom, but there is this real quality of LARPing In just fetishizing all of these political figures who ended up losing and saying, well, they were martyrs because they were right and the men who martyred them were wrong.
And by some kind of magic intellectual transubstantiation, if we then learn those truths, we will win even though they did not.
It's just not true.
It's just not true.
You're just creating this weird sort of church doctrine over these political fights from decades ago.
And I think there is a real danger in doing that.
And that's why I actually sort of tried to cut off the episode before you were like, oh no, we definitely got to talk about this.
Even though before we started recording I think I was the one who said we should talk about this.
But anyway.
Uh, I mean, this is kind of my, these are my words of caution about just going off of the deep end into this because, you know, more than martyrs, you know, Bradford and Francis and Gottfried were not geniuses because their careers were hampered.
Right.
What makes them great is not the fact that they suffered.
It's sad that they suffered.
It's probably meaningful that they suffered.
Their suffering probably teaches us a lot about America and politics and our culture and all these things.
But these men were brilliant in their own right, which is why it is a shame that they did suffer.
Their suffering does not somehow make them better.
I think sometimes when we talk about a lot of these guys, we accidentally fall into this sort of trance of believing they were better or they were smarter or they were wiser simply because they did suffer and I just... I think that is just... you end up being kind of a dog chasing its own tail when you do that.
Yeah, we don't want to fall into a murder complex or we certainly don't want to fall into the trap of...
We have the truth and therefore we win.
Like it doesn't work that way.
Right, or we have the truth and we will be punished for it and that makes us great.
That's also just no good.
You can believe that when it comes to religion if you think there's going to be a god to avenge you in the hereafter, but it doesn't make much sense in the here and now.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Well, it's like what Bradford was saying, of like, we're all equal only in the theological sense, which has nothing to do with anything else.
So just drop that comparison.
Right, right.
And I think also, this is also why we started with Burnham and Francis, is it's more about developing a science of power and how to win.
And I guess that would be one of the criticisms of Bradford is, you know, he's explaining what the law meant, but it's sort of like what the Constitution really means.
Which again, some of that historical context is valuable and it's useful to have those arguments,
but I really don't want anybody to read Bradford's book on the Constitution, Original Intentions,
and become one of these Constitution fetishists who can just wax at length about what it really means.
And who somehow believes that they're going to defeat liberals in arguments
because they know what the Constitution really means.
And once we teach liberals what the Constitution really means,
well then they will stop being liberals and then they will become like us.
It's just, it just doesn't work.
you're going to win through lawsuits or something like that.
If we mail a copy of Original Intentions to Justice Sotomayor, she'll be like, oh, I've been wrong all this time.
Do you think she even understands this?
We need people like Burnham and Francis and, who knows, maybe Lennon.
You know to sort of move beyond this.
I mean, I think Brad, I mean hubris comes before the fall, but I think Bradford would agree with me on this.
I mean one of his more memorable adages was a better guide than reason.
Yeah.
Which is all about relying on tradition and inheritance and all of these things.
I mean he very much understood the limitations of just arguing stuff in a void.
You know what I mean?
And again, when you make martyrs out of all of these paleos, you end up in this weird place of, there's this sort of hall of Valhalla where all of your favorite political writers live, and you too will join them, and eventually...
You're treading on blasphemy with him.
And eventually they will all, I don't know, cascade from the halls of Ahola back to our world and redeem us all or something.
It's just, it gets weirdly religious and I think that's really bad.
You should just find a real religion and believe in that, you know what I mean?
Well that's also why I guess it's important, I mean, I, speaking for myself, I'm not going to speak for you.
A product of, generated by, come from, you know, the American right.
So I can't help but see things in these terms.
But that said, I mean, if you, if somebody said, are you a conservative?
I mean, I couldn't, I couldn't give a single word, yes.
You know, I mean, I'd say if they were like, give a single word for what you are, I'd just say, Identitarian.
Well, I could give a single word, no, to are you a conservative.
I'm really not a very conservative.
And also, and it's also just, you know, what's worth conserving.
The obvious point.
And obviously white advocates should not be conservatives or liberals, we should be white advocates, we should be identitarians.
Right, well in regards to the answer of what's worth conserving, for Bradford there really was something because he still had this strong sense of place and heritage.
But this is not Mel Bradford's America.
It's not Mel Bradford's South.
It's not Mel Bradford's University of Dallas.
No.
You know, it's just, things are very different.
And I don't, you're not betraying Bradford if you sort of acknowledge that while simultaneously finding wisdom in his writings and finding value in them.
But there's still, you know, there's still just limitations.
I think that's a good place to end it on.
So thanks for joining us guys, and we'll see you next time.
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