Author Archives: Jim Langcuster

Our Decaying National Identity

17 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by in Censorship, Imperial Decline, Southern History, The Passing Scene

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A portion of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery

I can’t say that the removal of the Confederate Memorial in Arlingtin National Cemetery was my last straw. For some thirty years, I have grown increasingly ambivalent about the United States, its greedy, morally debased government class, its declining empire and, frankly, the whole concept of being American, playing into the idea of Lincoln’s propositional nationhood as it was initially espoused by him and subsequently has been refined and updated by succeeding presidents and sundry public intellectuals.

In fact, reflecting back across the veil of time, which, as I should stress is exceedingly thick at this juncture in my life, I recall one especially jarring encounter on a chartered bus in June, 1977, en route to West Point after a daylong tour of New York City. We were on the bus with other families whose husbands and fathers, all Reserve Army officers, served as recruiters for the military academy.

During the ride back, a neatly coiffed, very refined young lady approached my mother, an equally attractive and refined lady, apparently on the basis of my mother’s very noticeable Southern drawl. Upon learning that we were Alabamians, she proceeded to heap scorn on Alabama and my mother, apparently simply for her summoning the temerity to live and to raise her sons in such a despicable place.

My mother, who played classical piano, and quoted and wrote reams of poetry and who also held a graduate degree, handled it with her characteristic grace.

For my part, I never forgot it, and it was my first lesson in propositional nationalism – how such a weak form of nationalism necessarily requires a foil and how the South necessarily has supplied this foil.

Perhaps my rambling here is somewhat fraught with irony. As I have pointed out before, the bulk of my forebears were Southern Unionists and even Southern Unionist soldiers, one of whom even had a hand in the burning of Atlanta.

While I readily identify far more as an Alabamian and a Southerner than an American, I am not driven by any burning desire to resurrect the old Confederacy. Yes, I remain a steadfast admirer of the Permanent Confederate Constitution for how it further refined the role of the general government and safeguarded the role of states and even introduced some aspects of the British Westminster Model to the American constitutional system. Yet, despite my strong Southern cultural and political proclivities, I harbor no intention of raising the Stainless Banner above Richmond.

Yet, the fact cannot be denied that this country was rebuilt and a measure of national unity established on the basis of the valor of the Southern fighting man and the post-bellum U.S. Government’s determimation, however initially reluctant, to honor this valor, even as the plutocrats who took the reins after Appomattox succeeded in turning the South into a huge resource-extraction zone as well as capitalizing on Southern martial traditions to build the rudiments of what has become, certainly within the last generation, a corrupt empire.

What we are witnessing today with this monument removal and the widely reported removal and incineration of the Lee Monument is the foreshadowing of a reckoning, which some of the left have likened to the unconditional surrender imposed on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.

This only serves to underscore the degree to which the cultural and political elites who run this regime despise the South and the rest of the red heartland with which this region shares so many cultural and historical affinities.

These are all reasons why I and growing numbers of Southerners and other residents of the vast red heartland have grown increasingly sympathetic to some form of national divorce.

We are governed by a morally-debased corrupt plutocracy that, in employing empty terms such as “our democracy,” simply serve to underscore how the snake oil of propositional nationalism no longer supplies any form of national palliative. What remains of American national identity is squeaking under the strain of wokeness and leftist rot in general, and it behooves us to begin imagining what must follow, which, hopefully will, to one degree or another, harken back to the vision of our Founding Founders.

Texit Inches One Step Closer

08 Friday Dec 2023

Posted by in American Federalism, Federalism, Imperial Decline, secession, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics

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I find this development encouraging. The Texas Nationalist Movement has drawn a step closer in securing a secession vote on the 2024 ballot.

Anyone courageous enough to take a deep dive into U.S. history knows that the U.S. constitutional system was regarded as experimental and that it was intended to function as a modified confederation, albeit one that secured the general government with sufficient revenue to conduct a cluster of all-union responsibilities – hence, the national motto: E. pluribus unum, underscoring that the United States is a community of republics.

The column linked above is especially instructive terms of how the appearance of a secession initiative on the 2024 Texas ballot not only would enhance the likelihood of the mainstreaning of the Texas National Movement but also would foster serious discussion about secession in other red states, as none of these states could look forward to a viable future within American Union without the presence of the red behemoth of Texas.

Barring wholesale red state secession, some form of serious decentralization is vital to the preservation of constitutional liberty as it is historically understood in this country.

As I have stated before in this forum, I agree with the late diplomat George F. Kennan, who argued that a United States governed by a centralized state of managerial elites is an untenable one and that the most ideal arrangement would be one in which the overwhelming bulk of power is consigned to individual “constituent republics,” roughly the size of Texas. Hopefully, a successful Texas secessionist movement will prime this discussion and contribute to the rapid dissolution of corrupt, centralized power.

Tearing off One’s Nose…

23 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by in Imperial Decline, Secularism, The Passing Scene

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I have mentioned before that I reflect a lot on long-deceased relatives who were raised in straitened circumstances, earned college degrees, ascended to the middle class and spent the rest of their lives marveling at and extolling the civilization that made all of this possible.

As a Southerner of British and Irish heritage, I am thoroughly ambivalent about Israel and value it only to the degree that it serves the interests of the West. But I will never understand why more young people who, driven by their hatred for the civilization that has secured so many freedoms and blessings for them, would go to such lengths to abjure it, embracing a faith that in some forms embodies a searing, implacable hatred of the West and all of the civilizational, scientific and technological achievements associated with it.

I am reminded of a saying my parents repeated to me time again and again as they helped me work through one of my occasional inconsolable childhood rages and the self-defeating behavior that invariably followed: “You’re tearing off your nose to spite your face!”

This mad dash to Islam by disillusioned women is interesting within the wider context of religious history. Roughly a century ago, the British Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc perceived a similar appeal with radical Protestantism. All of this underscores how the sheer complexity of Western civilization, despite all of the material and intellectual effects it has created, is, in historical terms, radically new and, needless to say, jarring to the human experience.

Many of you likely were as affected by the classic film “Dances with Wolves” as I was and likely for the same reason: It depicted in a brilliantly disruptive and creative way why quite a few 18th and 19th century whites went “native” and why others chose to return to tribal life after being “rescued” by other whites. There really is something about minimalist lifestyles that appeal to moderns.

Speaking of movie classics, the enduring appeal of “Being There” essentially reflects a similar yearning. We – some of us, at least – find something far removed from the complexity and noise of modern life to be deeply appealing.

Perhaps it is not all that surprising a comparatively lean religion of the book such as Islam and, for that matter, very radical forms of Protestantism arguably generate the same appeal in terms of offering a more approachable form of curating all of this complexity bound up with modern life.

The appeal of minimalism among younger people also is interesting to me and arguably speaks volumes about a deep yearning to restore some mastery over life.

That is the remarkable thing about culture and civilization: It is characterized by nuance and a stunning degree of complexity. None of us ever succeed in mastering it entirely, which should not be at all surprising to any serious student of history.

Even so, speaking as a serious student of history, particularly of religion, I am not convinced that conversion to Islam, at least the radical forms of it, constitutes an adequate solution.

“Until We’re Blue in the Face”

21 Tuesday Nov 2023

Posted by in Geo-Politics, secession, The Passing Scene

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One of the more stark images of the Berlin Wall and of post-war German division.

I never thought 35 years ago that I world evince any sympathy for eastern German identity. Yet, I, as a Southerner, could relate to this account at a basic level. We, somewhat like the eastern Germans vis-a-vis the former West Germans, have always served as the foils of American national identity.

We can prattle on all we want about American identity, but it always has sought to impose something that really is unattainable: a common identity on a continental-sized polity.

The Framers perceived the Federal Union simply as a means of providing mutual support and protection to thirteen separate republics who constituted 13 distinct cultural communities representing populations drawn from very distinct regions of the British Isles and even the German Palatinate. Those templates were set long before the Revolution and persist today – I am happy to acknowledge in increasingly obstreporous forms.

The fact that there are vocal and growing secessionist movements encompassing both ends of the political spectrum – Calexit and Texit – and secessionist sentiment now comprises sizeable pluralities in every region of the country only attests to the fact that Jefferson was right when he argued that this continent likely would be better off comprised of smaller republics sharing a measure of cultural and political affinity.

I have got to concede that I was heartened today reading an article on Scottish nationalism, wherein the writer asserted: “You can call me ‘British’ until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t make “British” a thing.”

The Weathered American Experiment.

04 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in American Federalism, American History, Devolution, Federalism, Imperial Decline, Patriotism, secession, The Passing Scene

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I wrote this tribute to American independence some nine years ago, and reflecting on it today it doesn’t seem to have weathered all that well.

Indeed, with each passing year in the face of an obstinate and utterly corrupt ruling class that stands at the commanding cultural heights and that stares down with withering contempt at the deplorables, the ancestors of whom caused the previous proprietors, the British nobility, a measure of heartache, I wonder how much time remains for the American enteprise, long regared as history’s most conspicuous experiment in self-government.

This hard truth has left me with a resolve to offer what aid I can toward preserving a saving remnant of the the American project – the sprawling American heartland – what I have come to call the “Ruby-Red Republic.”

As the British surrendered at Yorktown, they played “A World Turned Upside Down,” apparently to underscore their disbelief that a ragtag league of states comprised of provincials and peasants could defeat an army of the greatest empire in the world.

Indeed, for a very long time, Britain and the other great empires of the earth did not consider this feuding aggregation of post-colonial states a nation in any real sense. During a hot, sultry summer in Philadelphia, these provincials rather reluctantly convened to forge an agreement to unite their cantankerous states, one that ultimately worked not only to secure unimaginable levels of freedom and material prosperity for citizens but that has also been emulated to one degree or another by nations throughout the world.

Today this union of states holds the fortunes of an entire planet in its hands. To be sure, its immense power and cultural influence invokes jealously, resentment and, in not a few cases, hatred in some quarters of the world. But after almost a quarter of a millennium, it continues to inspire countless millions of people of all races, nationalities and creeds. It remains the world’s indispensable nation. Happy Birthday to the United States of America.

Happy Pride Month!

03 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by in American History, Devolution, Federalism, Localism, Patriotism, secession, Southern History, The Passing Scene

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Displaying my pride flag during American pride month in July to commemorate Secession Day, July 4, and to remind my friends that on that date in 1776 the thirteen former colonies issued a joint declaration affirming the independence of “Free and Independent States.”

We forget that the author of this declaration, Thomas Jefferson, the third president, later expressed serious misgivings that a union of states destined to become a continent-sized country could continue to secure effective self-government among its citizens and even speculated that Americans sooner or would be better off governed by smaller polities, though which continued to share common cultural and republican affinities.

Today, almost a quarter millennium later, academics and public intellectuals on both ends of the political spectrum – and I can name them if you doubt me – have posited some form of peaceful separation, whether in the form of a full-blown parting of the ways or some looser confederative arrangement.

Franky, our present path is unsustainable over the long haul. That is why I personally feel compelled to affirm the Jeffersonian principles of radical decentrism and self-governnance every year on July 4, which the vast majority of Americans have forgotten marked the secession of 13 former colonies from the British Empire.

The Unbridgeable Chasm

19 Monday Jun 2023

Posted by in American Federalism, Federalism, Imperial Decline, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Woodrow Wilson, whose ascent to the American presidency marked the advent of the managerial class.

This column speaks volumes about the deep and increasingly unbridgeable chasm that characterizes cultural and political life in the United States, one that pits our ruling class (i.e., the managerial elite that presumes to run things) against ordinary Americans who chafe under their rule.

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, his presence only has served to expose the deep chasm between the ruling class and ordinary Americans.

To be sure, a number of astute political observers – mostly journalists and columnists but even a few academics – have been warning about the rise of the managerial class for the past century, certainly since the advent of the Woodrow Wilson presidency.

Many perceived even that far back how the Hegelian mindset of these reformers, in the course of enhancing the efficiency of centralized government, would erode the sinews of constitutional governance, particularly as this historically was expressed by Madisonian federalism. Indeed, that, in fact, was one of the expressed intentions of these American Hegelians: to replace this quaint anachronism with a higher standard of governance, which involved governance by a highly educated, credentialed and, consequently, far more enlightened class.

What I find fascinating is how long this elite-imposed social order has soldiered on despite the misgivings of millions of Americans, including the 34th president, Dwight Eisenhower, who devoted much of his presidential farewell address to warn American about its potential harm this class could cause to American liberty, particularly in the singular conditions prosecuting the Cold War in the face of the Soviet menace.

To be sure – and Eisenhower, the former Allied Supreme Commander would be the first to acknowledge this – it’s central coordinating competencies carried the country through World Wars I and II as well as the Cold War. Even so, over the course of time, this imperium has been subject to a measure of second guessing, particularly at the end of the Cold War, as this managerial class arrogated to itself the task of imposing a post-Soviet global economic order which, among other things, required the diminution American manufacturing base to accommodate industrialization in other countries.

This has had the effect, certainly within the last 30 years, of rekindling the spirit of what could be broadly characterized as the Old Right political vision, the older version of American liberalism that viewed the role of the federal government simply as one focused on preserving American national sovereignty and economic prosperity, not on imposing a global imperium.

Meanwhile, the managerial class doubled down on its efforts to build a post-Cold War global order, increasingly more inclined to employ U.S. military resources and disformation and, following the 9/11 attacks, even prescibed forms of torture against presumed captive terrorists. This was augmented by other efforts to “protect the homeland” against both foreign and domestic threats, which have prompted many within this class to call for the circumvention of constitutional rights that previously regarded as sacrosanct.

To paraphrase the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, we are are now engaged in a cold civil war testing which side, conceived in widely disparate views of liberty and governance, ultimately will prevail.

Until recently, I reluctantly would have placed my bets on the managerial class. Within the last couple of years, though, several disruptions, a few entirely unexpected, have led me to wonder if ordinary Americans finally have marshaled a new resolve – the necessary pluck – to oppose this ruling class.

The most heartening development of all was Elon Musk’s acquiring and transferring Twitter into a major medium of free discourse. One occasionally is struck by the impression that this application not only is marshaling and focusing pervasive and implacable national discontent in this the United States but also is helping growing numbers of Twitter users to connect the dots and to cultivate an increasingly refined understanding of the manifold shortcomings of the managerial class, particularly its sense of entitlement, its sweeping corruption and its enduring disdain for ordinary Americans.

American Dumpster-Fire Culture

31 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in American Federalism, Devolution, Federalism, secession, The Passing Scene

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Quite frankly, David Brooks’ recent column on the ways in which American culture appears to be coming apart is why I now identify exclusively as a Southerner and not as an American.

The South, despite its historical baggage, always has incorporated a sense of propriety, connectedness and reciprocity in its culture – that goes for black and white Southerners alike.

Much of what we are dealing with now is bound up in the pathologies of an increasingly deracinated American national culture, which really could be likened to a dumpster fire.

To those, such as the Biden regime and the rest of the left who would characterize such talk as sedition, I readily concede that the South has secured a measure of economic and material progress through its unity with a larger polity – certainly in the aftermath of World War II. And I am thankful for the progress black Southerners have made in the last 50 years, and I readily acknowledge that this could not have been achieved but for landmark civil rights legislation.

On the other hand, I think that many Southerners are entirely unaware of the extent to which Southern history resembles Irish history in many ways – at least, in the way that the Irish have long regarded their association with Britain and how the region long functioned as a kind of economic extraction zone. Moreover, I do resent deeply how we continue to be regarded as the national foils – how everything that is f*cked up naturally has to be Southern. Moreover, I resent the extent to which the South, derided as the problem child of the American Experiment, continues to supply a disproportionate share of the manpower to advance the regime’s foreign policy, much of which, as the debacle in Ukraine so richly illustrates, is entirely ill-conceived and inimical to the interests of rank-and-fill Southerners and other red state citizens.

Someone on a conservative forum to which I belong, apparently quoting someone else, said that the North was responsible for saving the Union in the 19th century, just as the South will be in the 21st. There are many ways to read this. I think that the brilliant classicist and commentator Victor Davis Hanson recently expressed the issue brilliantly. In a recent column he argued that the things that have historically defined America – the commitment to the rule of law, colorblindedness in the application of law and a genuine openness to debate and discourse is increasingly being expressed in the South as opposed to the purportedly more sophisticated cultural enclaves of the Northeast and West Coasts.

My argument for the past 25 or so years has been that the Union serve us only to the degree that it secures our freedoms and material prosperity while insulating us against the encroachment of an all-powerful state. As far as I am concerned the apparatus that functions in D.C. no longer is a government in any real sense but rather a regime. One prime example of this regime’s dysfunction: It insists on preserving the borders of a second world country (i.e., Ukraine) on the periphery of Eastern Europe, though it can’t even summon the will to preserve one of the most basic functions of sovereignty, which is preserving the integrity of U.S. borders.

And now, increasingly, the left and its operatives in the bureaucracy and the major institutions are working to silence any form of dissent. Call me paranoid and antigovement, but this seems as plain to me and millions of other people as the keyboard on which I am typing this response.

In many respects the pathologies of American culture are utterly inimical to to Southern culture as it historically has been understood. Yet, day by day, week by week, this dumpster-fire national culture is infecting to one degree or another the entire country, and, frankly, I don’t want to see my culture brought down by these pathologies.

A Graphic Worth a Thousand Words

21 Friday Jan 2022

Posted by in Federalism, Southern History, The Passing Scene, secession

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Here it is as plain as day for everyone to see. Granted, I believe like everyone else that the left used all sorts of specious means to vandalize the 2020 election, and I don’t think that Biden deserves to be regarded as the elected president of the United States.

Even so, this map underscores why, if the country ultimately breaks apart, the focus of any red-state American Republic will center around the South. Yes, parts of the Middle Atlantic states and the Midwest ultimately will align with a red state movement, but the focus of energy will remain with the South, as it essentially always has.

That is precisely why I and others have argued for years that the struggle essentially is one that has ensued since the earliest days of the Republic and has always centered around the nature of federal power – how it should be expressed.

Moreover, as I have struggled to point out time and again, if these divisions, which seem intractable at this point, lead to breakup, the South will not be re-staging Confederate States 2.0.

What emerges will be widely regarded as an American restorationist movement, not a Confederate one, despite every attempt by the Legacy (Oligarchic Lapdog) Media to depict it as such.

Indeed, this movement initially will be suspended between two stools – the left and its legions of cultural allies and the very small, very marginalized but very vocal collection of Confederate restoratonists. And to be sure, the media will exploit every act of this small faction as proof of Red State America’s “true intentions.”

That is why any broad-based movement must be begun and be led by a few seasoned, substantive political leaders who can stand above the marginalized elements.

Am I implying that this necessarily must begin as something akin to a vanguard movement? Yes, I am indeed. We simply can’t risk the possibility of this movement being hijacked by Confederate restorationists who would be indirectly aided and abetted by the Establishment media and the federal national security complex with the desire to doom it from the start.

In time, the South has the potential to regain its footing as well as a renewed identity, but it will have to be undertaken long after the initial changes of a national divorce are worked out. And it most assuredly must occur far beyond the noise of Confederate restorationism. Most important of all, a new Southern identity must factor in and come to terms with all of the changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, including the Civil Rights movement.

A Masterful Observer of the Post-Soviet Russian Legacy and American Future.

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Conservatism, Devolution, Imperial Decline, secession, The Passing Scene

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Dima Vorobiev

Within the past couple of years I have become an avid Quora follower of the former Moscow State University-educated Soviet propaganda apparatchik Dima Vorobiev.

Granted, Vorobiev is no red-state conservative populist – far from it – but he does serve up candid views of the late Soviet Union, his part in it, and, even more fascinating, how this legacy continues to play out in post-Soviet Russia and throughout the world.

I found this Quora response especially interesting: How Russia and American views of freedom played out within their respective historical and cultural contexts – and despite both civilizations being essentially blessed with a large, relatively unsettled frontiers into which oppressed individuals could flee exploitation or outright tyranny. As things turned out in Russia, tyranny acquired the means of extending its reach deep into its vast eastern frontier, and, consequently, advancement in Russia historically been defined as the success one has in building literal walls to fend off predators.

Yet, it seems that we in the United States increasingly are cultivating similar practices – but why is that all that surprising given that our elites are now in the practice of staying in power by sowing discord among all the other classes, including even assigning a kind of Kulak classification to the beleaguered white American working class?

They do all of this with the assurance that they can retreat to walled enclaves high in the hills and mountaintops of major U.S. cities and with the full assurance that these walls will be augmented by a formidable array of cutting-edge technologies of robots, drones, sensors and other sophisticated gadgets.

This leads many of us to wonder: How much longer before class aspirations in this country come to resemble those in Russia – when a functional civic society no longer is associated with American success and destiny, when unscalable walls become the chief measure of high status?