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.