I don’t know if Kirkpatrick was a professing Christian or not, but he analyzes the concept of war with unflinching logic and includes repeated references to the spectre of the Prince of Peace being used to sanctify carnage initiated by greedy and power-hungry men. He also details the economic costs of the war machine in his day. This was seven years before the country was dragged into the great European bloodletting by the insufferable Woodrow Wilson.

Kirkpatrick’s book is interesting but it didn’t sufficiently awaken the consciousness of the working class. Many soon became cannon fodder for the latest-and-greatest destructive “necessity.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/mccarthy5.html

I don’t think that virtually everyone else is “collaborating with the enemies of liberty and justice,” but that to be the kind of “active” political players who “do” things it would have been necessary for paleos to collaborate with those people who are these enemies. Even if I could be persuaded that they are necessary, I am not temperamentally suited to the kinds of compromises that people claim they need to be able to make to “get things done.” If there is a problem with paleoconservatism (and I’m not saying there is), it *might* be that it attracts many of those people who are inclined to resist compromise as a principle in its own right and who view being uncompromising on certain things to be almost as important as the things themselves.

My thanks, daninardmore. I suppose this series of posts this week was a bit more strident and in the “here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” mode because I was more on edge than usual (perhaps having my car towed this week added to my irritability) and more inclined to push back with great force than I might have been had this Koz written his posts at a different time. I wouldn’t have said anything substantively different, but it might have had less of the “we few, we happy few” quality to it.

Certainly, no one blogs (or writes) without being just a bit arrogant and presumptuous. You have to think that someone wants to read what you have to say, and you have to think that you know something or can contribute something, whatever it is, that no one else can in quite the same way. When you begin to get an audience, however small, you feel that you are confirmed in this presumption. When you find your positions vindicated, however grim the vindication, it adds to this sense that you “get” something that other people don’t, which can be dangerous and misleading. It may simply be accidental that you got it right, which is why everyone needs to be grounded in fidelity to eternal verities and work from the collected wisdom of our civilisation’s moral and religious traditions–any one of us, on his own, is simply stabbing randomly in the dark, occasionally hitting his target and often missing. It is only with the guidance of those traditions that he begins to see the right path illumined before him.

Indeed, I agree that Landon was not a good choice, just as Wilke was a meaningless alternative in ‘40. They were the John Kerrys of their time, by which I mean that they were opponents who offered no real substantive differences to the public in terms of what they do about the most pressing questions of the day.