Auster offends yet another paleocon by saying that the self-evidently unacceptable is self-evidently unacceptable

Ron L. writes:

Richard Spencer seems a little annoyed at you, calling you the Ayn Rand of paleoconservatives.

Gintas writes:

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Spencer is talking about you, at length.

LA replies:

I can’t pay attention to that now. Much more important things are going on. For the same reason, I had intended a week ago to write about the attacks on me at Mangan’s, but other matters have had much greater priority. It is unfortunate that Richard Spencer chose, of all times, the eve of what will be, if it passes, the most revolutionary, nation-changing leftist act in American history—an event in which most conservatives, though evidently not Spencer, are deeply absorbed—to publish a long article criticizing me for my very brief criticisms of his website.

However, when I do get around to reading Spencer’s article, it will be interesting to see how he accounts for the thing I criticized him for, that in starting a website supposedly presenting a new right-wing vision and agenda for defending the West, he featured a writer named Richard Hoste who morally equated the United States of America with Islamic terrorists. That doesn’t sound like a new conservatism to me—it sounds like the same low-level anti-American garbage we’ve been hearing from sites like Antiwar.com and The American Conservative for many years. And that was why, after having initially said that I wished Spencer success in his new enterprise, I retracted the wish. I did not say that I wished the site to fail, as Dennis Mangan dishonestly stated in a headline at his blog; I simply retracted the wish I had expressed for its success, a wish I could no longer abide now that I had seen the sort of crap Spencer had chosen to publish there

If Spencer really wanted to start a new conservatism with a broad appeal, why did he repeat the same hateful tropes that have so thoroughly discredited the paleocons and Buchananites and disqualified them from any position of intellectual leadership? When he read Hoste’s article prior to publishing it, did it occur to him that there was anything wrong with it? Similarly, when he was editing Taki’s Magazine a year ago, did it occur to him that there was anything objectionable about publishing an article that called Israel “the Bernie Madoff of countries”? Or did he consider such gross anti-Semitism nothing more than the lingua franca of his circle? Inquiring minds would like to know. They would like to know what thought process went on in the mind of an intelligent man who edited and published such statements. However, as I said, more pressing things are going on right now—namely a left-wing coup taking over America—than Richard Spencer’s evidently unbreakable attachment to the worst aspects of paleoconservatism and Buchananism.

LA continues:

Contrary to the view of my character and motives that many paleocon types have expressed, my criticisms of Spencer’s site were not motivated by any desire to put people down or boss people around, or—the absurd and brainless smear made most frequently against me in paleocon quarters—a demand that other people agree with me in all things, but by my profound and bitter feeling of disappointment and even despair at finding out that a person of talent and promise, who I had hoped might contribute a great deal to a more serious conservatism, was instead publishing yet another paleocon site with exactly the same kind of disgusting and unacceptable statements that have so tainted other paleocon sites. I would have much preferred to have had an enthusiastic response to Alternative Right. Alternative Right made that impossible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2010 01:51 AM | Send