Robert Locke on the Jared Taylor problem; and is Taylor a “Whig”?
Robert Locke writes:
I think the whole essence of the problem just revealed itself. Jared Taylor writes:
“AR has deliberately avoided taking positions on questions about which racially-conscious whites are likely to disagree.”
This is a coherent position, and I can understand why Taylor would take it.
But it reveals him to be a complete airhead, politically. Any serious political strategist understands that there are some internal disputes you can (and should, to keep people on board) paper over, and some that threaten your overall strategic direction, which must be resolved in favor of one choice or the other.
If the Jews really are what Nazis say they are, then the right strategy for whites is TOTALLY at odds with what the right strategy is if they are not. Therefore, the Nazi view must either be accepted or rejected. It cannot be ignored, and there is no way to split the difference.
This utter lack of thinking about elemental strategy coheres perfectly with AmRen’s long history of endless intellectual noodling and practical uselessness.
Responding to the above, VFR reader N. asks, “Is Jared Taylor a Whig?”:
Recall the political landscape of the United States in 1850 or so; the Democratic party, due in large part to its strong Southern roots, would not and indeed could not oppose chattel slavery. The Whig party, with its Northern roots, was torn over the issue, and could neither support it nor fully condemn it. In time, those Whigs who strongly opposed slavery decamped and formed the Republican party, leaving the Whigs to dwindle into historical obscurity.
Jared Taylor cannot seem to get his mind around the fact that either the Nazis are wrong, or they are right, and attempting to fence- straddle the issue dooms him to the worst of both worlds: the anti-Semites won’t trust him (but will continue to try to hijack AR), while the mere presence of the anti-Semites tars him with their evil. This seems to suggest that the future of AmRen will mirror that of the fate of the Whigs, and for essentially the same reason; you can’t “split the difference” with evil.
LA replies:
It’s a good analogy, but only up to a point. It wasn’t a matter of mere time passing and irreconcilable internal conflicts building up within the Whig party that led to the breakup of the Whig party, it was a matter of the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened up the new territories to slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty and thus made the expansion of slavery the number one issue in the country. The Whig party, which had supported compromises to keep slavery contained in the South, and generally downplayed the moral aspect of slavery in the interests of national unity, could not handle the stark conflict raised by Kansas Nebraska, and so the Whigs instantly went their separate ways. The Republican party was formed in 1854, the same year as the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act. Up until 1854, the Whigs had been doing rather well; they had won the 1840 and 1848 presidential elections, and Whig giants such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had engineered the huge Compromise of 1850 (signed by Whig president Millard Fillmore), the purpose of which was to keep the slavery issue on the back burner. It was a Democratic president, Franklin Pierce, who signed the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 which opened up the territories to slavery and destroyed the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850.
So you’re being a bit unfair to the Whigs by comparing them to Jared Taylor. The Whigs did not persist, after the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, to act as though mutually irreconcilable things were reconcilable, as Taylor does vis à vis Nazis and Jews; rather, the Whig party simply went out of existence as its various members looked for parties that would be either pro or con the expansion of slavery.
Ultimately, then, the Whigs were the opposite of Taylor. They kept seeking to manage the slavery issue for the sake of national unity as long as it was feasible; but as soon as the slavery issue became a conflict between mutually incompatible principles, the Whigs moved to or formed other parties to articulate their respective positions on that issue. Also, the Whigs’ compromise position was not merely relativistic. It involved a firm line: the exclusion of slavery from new northern territories.
In fact, the historical figure that Taylor really resembles is not the Whigs but Stephen A. Douglas, the Democrat who wrote the Kansas Nebraska Act. As Lincoln pointed out in his 1858 debates with Douglas, and as Douglas himself underscored, Douglas professed to be entirely neutral about whether slavery was right or wrong, about whether slavery should be allowed to expand into the whole Union, and about whether a slave system in one northern territory could exist alongside a free system in other northern territories, just as Taylor professes to be entirely neutral about whether the Nazi demonization of Jews is right or wrong, and invites Nazis and Jews to co-exist at his conferences. And of course it was Douglas’s policy that led to murderous civil war in Kansas. The old Whig policy, supported by Lincoln, of containing slavery in the South with a view to its ultimate extinction, had preserved national unity, as in the 1850 Compromise; the Douglas policy, of saying that slavery and non-slavery were morally equal and that each territory should carry on a debate as to whether to have slavery or not, produced moral and social conflict that led to the secession of the South and the War between the States. Ironically, though the South had eagerly supported Douglas’s popular sovereignty position in 1854, seeing it as a way to expand slavery into the territories, by 1860 they felt it was too wishy-washy; they did not want merely the right to have an election over whether to have slavery in each territory; they wanted slavery to be an automatic right, everywhere in the Union. So when Douglas was nominated by the Democrats for president in 1860, the Southern Democrats seceded from the Democratic party and formed their own party, assuring the election of the Republican candidate, Lincoln, which in turn led the deep South to secede.
The lesson: Douglas’s relativistic position of explicitly avoiding any moral/political judgment on the expansion of slavery, far from quieting the slavery issue and strengthening national unity, made the issue far more contentious than ever before, and led the country directly to Civil War. Similarly, Taylor’s relativistic position of explicitly avoiding any moral/political judgment on anti-Semitism, far from quieting the issue and assuring unity within the American Renaissance circle, makes the issue far more contentious than before, and seems likely to lead to an outcome in which both sides will be equally disenchanted with him—just as both sides of the slavery issue ended up equally disenchanted with Douglas and his logically unsustainable, “in-between” position.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 25, 2006 11:12 AM | Send