A criticism of Lind’s and Weyrich’s hackneyed “next conservatism” reveals itself as hackneyed anti-Semitic white nationalism

Harry Horse sent me an article, “The Next Conservatism?”, by Michael O’Meara, about the late Paul Weyrich’s and William Lind’s new book, The Next Conservatism, and asked my opinion about it. I read the article and wrote back to him:

What a strange article. I like the fact that he shows the inadequacy of Lind’s and Weyrich’s naming the problem as “Cultural Marxism.” I’ve always felt that “Cultural Marxism” was a hackneyed phrase that failed to convey much that was useful and did not adequately describe the belief system that is destroying our culture. But then O’Meara’s own explanation of what is wrong with Lind and Weyrich’s idea, and what is wrong with America, is itself so longwinded and tendentious that it offers nothing useful. He says, correctly, that it’s not some foreign import of Cultural Marxism that has undone us, but our own institutions and beliefs. Fine, I agree. But then on one hand he says it’s liberalism that has undone us, on the other hand he says that it is capitalism that has undone us, and he fails to untangle these two statements, except that it turns out that his main focus is on capitalism as the problem. It is the capitalist culture that has destroyed America, destroyed the white race. Then he also blows it by denying any remaining value to American political and cultural traditions and saying that the only thing of value left in America is the white race itself, the white gene pool, a view that cancels out any kind of conservatism other than racial conservatism. Further, after decrying Lind’s and Weyrich’s supposed “vulgar anti-Semitism” of blaming all our problems on a few Jews in the Frankfurt School, and after saying that our problems are due to our own development as a culture and an economy, not to some external force, in the last sentence of the article he defines the conflict as “ethnostate championed by white nationalists” versus “the Judeo-corporate forces of the Obama Nation.”

So, he reduces America to nothing but whiteness (sans Jews), and he reduces the threat to America to nothing but Jews plus capitalism. After all that complicated argumentation showing that Lind and Weyrich are reductive and supposedly quasi anti-Semitic, O’Meara reveals himself as an anti-Semitic, anti-free market reductionist, a White National Socialist.

When writing the above, I had only read O’Meara’s article in the e-mail. After I finished writing it, I clicked on the link in the article’s title and was taken to the original article online: it is at The Occidental Quarterly.

Harry Horse replies:

Exactly. Thank you for taking the time to put into words what I was unable to articulate. I was left scratching my head after reading the article—not clear at all what is the alternative to Lind and Weyrich (the latter, you may recall, was having some issues, as his corporeal flame was flickering out), which always was an oversimplification.

Nevertheless, you will see conservatives who are taking the next step in their journey to freedom from liberalism, get hung up in the Marcuse/Frankfurt issue. Unfortunately, some ultimately come to resolution here by pursuing antisemitism.

I’ve been trying to dig up something on the author, (anyone who “gets it” gets my interest) but there is very little on him and I haven’t been much more successful when reading his older articles. I wanted him to clarify!

If he knowingly reduces the situation to what you’ve articulated, we shall have yet another unhelpful, and disappointing author.

LA replies:

I only realized after I had read the article in the email and written back to you, that the article is published at The Occidental Quarterly, which is an anti-Semitic website that includes Kevin MacDonald.

I can’t overstate the intellectual “coming down” experience I had when, after reading all his fancy argumentation, I came to his closing phrase, “submission to the Judeo-corporate forces of the Obama Nation.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 13, 2009 11:33 AM | Send