In a last ditch effort to stave off its total obsolescence, National Review magazine has undergone a costly cosmetic renovation in an attempt to prove its relevance to a new younger readership before rigor mortis sets in. But this faux make-over belies the pallid and cadaverous entity which lays underneath; sickly, bloodless and emaciated. Fittingly the principal theme of this issue dwells on The Intellectual Emptiness of ‘White Supremacy.’
But the piece which really caught my attention is Progressive Hamiltonians, by Jay Cost. In an ideological chronology attempting to trace the course of opinion of the American left from Jeffersonian and Jacksonian support for popular sovereignty and opposition to centralizing consolidation of the general government away from the decentralized federal republic purportedly established by the Framers, Cost focuses upon Alexander Hamilton as the spokesman on the other side, whose elitist and centralizing views quickly fell by the wayside during the 19th century. He carefully omits any discussion of the Hamiltonian direct descendants, of Henry Clay and the Whig Party, of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, and of Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to resurrect Hamiltonianism during the early years of the Progressive Era. It is as if the detailed scholarly and authoritative history outlined by Murray N. Rothbard in The Progressive Era (.pdf) never existed, like something out of ranks of Soviet fabricators and court historians of the Stalinist days discussing the epic contributions of Leon Trotsky to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War. No, Nyet, Nein, Nicht, Nada.
Cost quickly skims past FDR, the New Deal, and World War II. It is after WWII with Harry Truman when the ideological views of the establishment left began to change. Cost never mentions the National Security Act of 1947 which reorganized the command and control structure of the military under the Joint Chiefs of Staff and establishing the CIA, thus creating the National Security State (today more commonly referred to as the extra-constitutional deep state). One suspects that the reason for this omission is because of this article by the founder and editor of National Review: William F. Buckley, Jr., “A Young Republican View,” Commonweal, January 25, 1952, which would let the proverbial cat out of the bag. Once again, it was Murray N. Rothbard, as with the Progressive Era, who had Buckley’s number.
Buckley, National Review and the phony “conservative movement” they helped create and foster were the real centralizers and destroyers of the American republic. Never forget the Reagan administration efforts concerning extra-constitutional Continuity of Government and that it was under the “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush that the totalitarian theory of the unitary executive was propounded.
1:30 pm on February 18, 2018
