Daniel Greenfield on the Importance of Cultural Secession

A must read today is a post on the blog Sultan Knish, written by a conservative and traditional Jew, on how the right can retake the culture and the country.  It won't be easy, but it can be done.  It involves cultural secession before physical secession; it involves winning the demographic war and the cultural war.

Here are some salient quotes to whet your appetites, listed by topic:

1.  Demographics:  Third world immigration has greatly contributed to the growth and success of progressive politics:

Taking back America demographically is a matter of having enough children within a cultural structure that passes down the values of adults to the children, while focusing on limiting immigration as much as possible. This isn't an impossible task.

Greenfield gives the Amish,Orthodox Jews and Mormons as examples of tight-knit communities who are producing the children needed, while simultaneously eliminating the progressive programming for those children that occurs from both public education and Hollywood entertainment.

Many Christian families have begun doing the same, by home-schooling their children and restricting their exposure to progressive indoctrination.

2.   Culture War:  We are losing the culture war to progressive programming from media, academia and entertainment.  Forming tight-knit communities with shared traditional values is essential, as well as finding ways to substitute our own education and entertainment that is stripped of progressive content.  Winning the culture was is essential.  Greenfield writes:

The progressive agenda is to destroy the family, to undermine it, ridicule it, economically disadvantage it and burden it until it falls apart and is replaced by the Big Brother of the State. The traditional agenda is to maintain the family and pass along traditional values across the generations. That is what this cultural war is really about; whether the family or the state will the defining unit of human experience.

3.  Cultural Secession:  

Cultural secession means cutting away the educational and entertainment culture of the left out of your home. It means creating your own alternative education and entertainment and grouping in communities that act as a support structure for traditional values. Is it easy? No. It involves sacrifice. But groups such as the Amish and Orthodox Jews have done it and have thrived doing it.

Daniel Greenfield makes a lot of sense and describes the strategies needed for our cultural and demographic survival.  Read the entire article here.

Lawrence Auster on How We Can Form a New Conservative Society

Foreword:
My friend Lawrence Auster of View From the Right posted the article (reproduced below) on how we can start over again, following the loss of western civilization to the far left.  I like his description of where we are now:  free to start over, without hopelessly trying to inject some conservatism into the runaway leftism of the now dead American Republic.   We can now stop beating a dead horse and look for a new steed on which to ride.

Auster often alludes to a kind of internal secession from liberal society, wherein traditional conservatives form their own internal societies in which traditional American values and culture can be preserved, as islands in a sea of multicultualist, leftwing ideology.  From these societies we can eventually find practical ways to govern ourselves, perhaps through actual secession or by slowly retaking the country, maybe by a "reverse march" through the institutions.  All this would be determined later.

Actually, Auster's scenario has been described before, by the League of the South, who advocated such internal secession over a decade ago.  At the time, I didn't like the idea, as it seemed too passive to me, as I wanted to fight for the country.  Now I must admit that we have lost the country to a socialist/fascist ideology and that this form of passive aggression may be all we have left.

Larry concludes his remarks by denying that Lincoln destroyed the Constitutional order of the United States; I fear that Larry was (like most of us) heavily indoctrinated into the Lincoln myth at an early age.  Lincoln surely destroyed the Constitutional order, or at the very least, dealt it a fatal blow that only now is finally killing off the country envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  

Reader observations and remarks are welcome.

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STARTING OVER AGAIN - by Lawrence Auster

A correspondent told me this evening that he is working on an article about secession in which, among other things, he will present the laws that would be needed in the new, non-liberal, breakaway society (or societies) to avoid the mistakes of the existing society. This is exactly the kind of work that is needed. It is a complement to my proposed article listing all the things about the existing America that we reject.

The trauma of the decisive takeover of this society by the left and the death of the constitutional republic has a large silver lining: we are now free intellectually of liberal America. We no longer have to keep hopelessly trying to inject some conservatism into a society that is overwhelmingly and unchallengeably liberal. Now we are free to start over again,—intellectually at first, and later, we hope, practically. What the task involves is taking the good principles and components of the old America and dispensing with the bad, and introducing new principles and components that can be the basis of a new, viable, non-liberal society.

- end of initial entry -

Ed H. writes:

Does the model of the South as it existed for almost a hundred years post-Reconstruction, pre-Civil Rights, offer anything as to what a post-liberal American political entity might look like? During that time the South was an almost a de facto separate country existing loosely within the USA. Rather than formal secession, independence was maintained by culture, local laws, and indifference to what others might think. There were no external borders, but it was a no-go zone for the federal government. Strict states rights created a unique, powerful, and defiant culture and people, defined by the principles of the 1787 Constitution and yet a place where no one dared use federal laws to distort the local religious or racial identity. We do not need to accept how liberals looked on the New South, i.e. a cauldron of bigotry, we can look at it as a non-liberal, traditionalist, highly cultured, European, white, American Republic. So we do have at least one rough but workable model from our past to go by. And this seems a much more likely and achievable first step.Arizona with its defiance of Eric Holder provides another example of how this could begin to happen today. The federal judiciary would quickly show up, pure defiance with no backing down would be inevitable.

LA replies:

I think there is much to what you are saying.I would also point out that your accurate picture of the post-Reconstruction South puts the lie to the ridiculous, brain-dead paleoconservative notion that America’s constitutional order [was] destroyed by Lincoln.

Is It Time For a New Political Party?

When anyone brings up the subject of a new political party, they are quickly drowned out with hoots and hollers from the "mainstream," who tell us that a third party can't win.  I used to agree with this.  However, I am totally fed up with the Establishment Republicans.  It would be nice to bury Lincoln's party once and for all.

This past week or so, Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, has been removing Tea Party and conservative congressmen from key committees.  I imagine that this is so Boehner and the Establishment GOP can more easily accede to Obama's demands, spend more money and raise taxes.

Starting a new party wouldn't be easy, but what choice do we really have?  A conservative party is what we need.  Why not make the unofficial Tea Party an actual party?

Four States Consider Nullification of Obamacare

The Tenth Amendment Center states that four states are planning to vote on bills that would nullify Obamacare, making the law null and void and unenforceable in those states.  Another ten or so states are mulling over the creation of similar bills.  Nullification, an old American strategy, may yet be the best way to end the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The principle of nullification is not new, and is described in Thomas E. Wood's book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.  The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 concluded that if the federal government should encroach upon the powers reserved to the states, the states have a right to nullify the offending law and refuse to enforce it—after all, a law that violates the Constitution is no law at all. Taken together, these ideas became known as the “Principles of ’98."

It doesn't matter if a federal court, including the Supreme Court, decides differently.  Ultimately, it is the right of the individual states to determine the constitutionality of any federal laws and choose to obey them or not.

This principle has precedent in American history.  Of course, there is the well-known "Nullification Crisis" of 1833, when South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification against the 1828 federal Tariff of Abominations that would have greatly increased the tax on imported goods from Britain, resulting in a significant lowering of British demand for Southern cotton.  President Andrew Jackson was prepared to send federal troops to South Carolina to enforce the tariff, but a compromise ended the crisis.

However, that nullification crisis of 1833 wasn't the first time individual states have nullified federal laws.  The first was by Massachusetts, reacting to federal government's Embargo of 1807.  This embargo was designed to punish Britain and France for depredations of American neutrality rights on the seas, and prohibited any American trade with foreign nations whatsoever.  The U.S. Navy was to enforce the embargo by stopping and searching merchant ships -- a clear violation of the 4th Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.  Further, the embargo badly damaged the New England economy.

A federal district court ruled the embargo constitutional, but Massachusetts did not agree, and passed state laws to nullify the federal embargo.  The nullification held.  The important thing to note is that the federal court's decision was not the last word on the matter.   The Massachusetts House explained:

“Were it true, that the measures of government once passed into an act, the constitutionality of that act is stamped with the deal of infallibility, and is no longer a subject for the deliberation or remonstrance of the citizen, to what monstrous lengths might not an arbitrary and tyrannical administration carry its power…. Were such doctrine sound, what species of oppression might not be inflicted on the prostrate liberties of our country? If such a doctrine were true, our Constitution would be nothing but a name—nay, worse, a fatal instrument to sanctify oppression, and legalize the tyranny which inflicts it.”  (Thomas E. Woods, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.)

The Governor of Connecticut, John Trumbull, agreed with the Massachusetts legislature, stating:

“Whenever our national legislature is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State Legislatures, in great emergencies, devolves the arduous task—it is their right—it becomes their duty, to interpose their protecting shield between the right and liberty of the people, and the assumed power of the General Government.”  (See Woods Jr., Thomas E. (2007-07-10). 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask (p. 30). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.) 

Conclusions:  Nullification of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is both legal and constitutional, and is undoubtedly the most expedient way to dispose of this unconstitutional and oppressive federal law.  However, each state will have to pass its own separate nullification laws.  Which state will be the first to do so?  Once one does, others will quickly follow.