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Monthly Archives: October 2021

Claremont Institute Takes up the Secession Banner

05 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in American Federalism, Federalism, secession, The Passing Scene

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Claremont Institute, Jim Langcuster, neosecessionism, secessionist

I have to say that after roughly 30 years of preaching the merits some form of secession, full-fledged or lite, as a solution to this nation’s intractable problems, it’s gratifying to see a growing number of Americans, prominent Americans, including those associated with major cultural institutions, picking up the banner.

The group that has weighed in the most and, well, rather improbably, is the Straussian-inspired Clarement Institute in California. Historically speaking, this institution, in keeping with the ideals of its intellectual guiding light, Leo Strauss, has extolled civic nationalism and generally held up the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, as the architect of this civic nationalist vision.

Given that fact, the Clarement Institute undoubtedly will strike many as an unlikely bearer of neo-secessionism. Yet, in one notable respect, it supplies the perfect impetus for this struggle – first and foremost because it is far removed from any neo-Confederate association.

Allow me briefly to share my own experiences with this. Speaking as one who had been plugged into this movement over the last few decades primarily through paleoconservarive and paleolibertarian connections, I have noticed a rather frustrating, if not appalling, tendency to pursue low-hanging fruit rather to cast a wider net.

The League of the South, originally known as the Southern League, essentially a brainchild of paleocons and paleolibs, set out not only with good intentions but also workable ones. The original intention, or so it seemed to me at the time, was simply to reconstruct a constitutional case for modern secession drawing on the talents of a handful of truly eminent, albeit somewhat obscure, paleocon and paleolib writers and academics.

Granted, they were in for a long slog. Even so, they initially gathered some respectful media coverage and even managed to publish a couple of very thoughtful opinion pieces in major newspapers. A couple of more mainstream columnists, notably George F. Will, even offered a respectable comment or two.

Yet, rather predictably, the League wondered off the reservation – that is to say, the reservation of respectable discourse. The League’s founding in the mid-1990’s corresponded roughly with the raging battle over the display of the Confederate battle flag in public venues, notably the Alabama and South Carolina capitol buildings, as well as the incorporation of battle flag motif into the Georgia and Mississippi flags.

At some point early in its founding, the League’s leadership embraced the Southern Heritage activists. In fact, they embraced them so closely that the League quickly became as inextricably linked with the Lost Cause as any descendant group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I had used my small influence within the ranks to argue against this. We were going after low-hanging fruit when the top priority should have been creating a space within which neosecessionism could be discussed as openly and dispassionately as possible and within as wide an arena as possible – a national arena.

Yet, incredibly, the League was drawn into the daily warp and woof of heritage activism, attracting large numbers of people whose preoccupation almost solely was with the battle flag, which became a virtually endless topic of discussion and obsession. The League would pay an egregiously high price for this shortsightedness.

By the late 90’s an effort was made to break out of this impasse through the formation of a Southern Party, an effort that aimed to be disruptive, namely by advocating peaceful secession as the keystone of its platform, one which, in many ways, incidentally, anticipated the nationalist/Republican agenda of the present day.

Yet, this movement quickly succumbed to heritage activism too.

Following the collapse of the Southern party, I effectively exited the Southern movement and conceived my own alternative idea that was dubbed “Home Rule for Dixie,” one that advocated an entirely different approach to Southern identity and secession. I called for nothing less than the abandonment of neo-Confederate dogma entirely.

As I contended, any new expression of Southern identity and secession not only must be built from the ground up but also on new foundations, actually predominantly American ones. As I and a few others in the Southern movement had realized, most contemporary Southerners, while immensely proud of their region as well as being Southern, simply no longer related to the Old Confederacy in any meaningful way. No, for Southerners, any Americans, for that matter, to be won over to the merits of secession, the arguments would have to be marshaled within a distinctly American context and with the firm assurance that American values, including racial tolerance and good will, would be preserved.

This is why I salute the valiant Claremont Institute. It not only has taken up this banner but has resolved to carry on the struggle within a context and employing language that more Americans can understand.

Succumbing to the Socialist Temptation

02 Saturday Oct 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in The Passing Scene

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dissolute youth, East Germany, lethargy, Socialism

I think my parents, particularly my mother, once thought that I was destined to live a dissolute life. After a certain age while attending public school, I became rather ambivalent about pursuing academic excellence. I was content to stay in my bedroom all day long reading and playing board games.

It drove my folks to utter distraction. They insisted I participate in sports, for which I had little talent or interest. As far as academics went, I rarely ever studied and got by with B’s.

I can even remember being called out of class by teachers and asked what accounted for my dogged indifference to school.

“All of us are talking about it after school and we just can’t understand why a reasonably intelligent kid from a good family is so disengaged,” I recall a couple of teachers relating to me.

Something – I really can’t say what – shook me out of my lethargy after high school graduation. It finally occurred to me that I had one shot at life – one attempt to earn a decent living and to give something back to a society that had treated me reasonably well.

I enrolled in my local state university and applied myself. I not only attended class but also took meticulous notes and read all the assigned reading. I began turning in lots of A’s.

I also got engaged in a number of extracurricular activities – notably the college debate team, which turned out to be one the most rewarding and enlightening experiences of my life.

My parents were a bit incredulous. Yet, I really came to enjoy school. And I developed a keen sense of appreciation for the handful of professors who discerned in me a modicum of talent and began offering encouragement.

I became so caught up in school that I stayed an extra year to earn a second B.A. and then enrolled at another state university to complete my master’s degree.

I ended up finishing a 29-year career as a communications professional at a another public research university reporting on research findings and writing things such as opinion columns for faculty and annual organizational reports for state legislators and other stakeholders. I retired early so that I could return to my real passion: deep reading, which I strive to supplement each day with several hours of disciplined writing.

I will never be rich or famous, but I am quite content and, most of all, I derive a great deal of satisfaction reflecting on how my own hard work and persistence got me to this point.

Not conventionally religious, I am a true believer in something that bestselling author and New York Times columnist David Brooks once observed: that the measure of a person’s life is how easily one in the final days or months of life can lie peacefully and contentedly in one’s sick bed and reflect back on one’s legacy.

That advice was seared into my consciousness and not a day passes without my reflecting on how important it is to make every day count – to prepare for the period of life when I will be confronted this reality.

Yet, I am also reminded of how far I have come – how fortunate I was to shake off the ambivalence and lethargy of my youth. And, yet, when I read accounts such as this about the socialist legacy, I am reminded of how little removed many people are from the dissolute inclinations of my youth.

I recall the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe as if it were yesterday. Moreover, I can still vividly recall the accounts of the gray, shabby drabness that characterized most lives in the former Soviet client states of Eastern Europe.

Yet, the most remarkable thing of all is that there are plenty of people in this country who would be perfectly content to live in such a social order, providing it involved less work but provided a measure of the material goods to which they are accustomed.

I know, because I have succumbed to the same temptation a time or two in my own life. This sort of mediocrity appeals to something deeply embedded in the human psyche. And that, I think, is why socialism possesses such resilience, despite all of its shortcomings and its appalling historical legacy.

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