The (Dying) Empire Strikes Back
And: Protestants & Catholics By The Numbers; Antifa Freikorps; Blaming Postliberalism
Yesterday C.G. Long tweeted an “Open Letter” from two former ISI presidents (including himself), who smeared Patrick Deneen and ISI president Johnny Burtka for supposedly betraying conservatism. Today it’s my turn (with others) to receive the Long lash:
Long, obviously a knothead, has not the faintest clue what Renaud Camus teaches, else he would know exactly why ISI held a panel discussion on his work. Here’s an introduction to Camus written in Compact a while back by Nathan Pinkoski. It’s paywalled, so I’ll have to quote a key part:
The Great Replacement is frequently referred to as a conspiracy theory. Yet Camus makes fun of those who consider mass immigration to be the secret project of a globalist cabal. “I do not believe that, one fine day, 12 or 15 arch-mandarins gathered in a hotel salon or a government office…to enact the Great Replacement,” he writes. Camus also doesn’t think mass immigration is an Islamist conspiracy to destroy European civilization via stealth invasion. There are some Muslim leaders who do think this way, of course. Speaking at the United Nations on April 10, 1974, Algerian President Houari Boumédiène exhorted millions of people to leave the Global South for the North. “They will not go there as friends,” he said. “They will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it by populating it with their sons. It is the wombs of our women who will give us victory.” But Camus argues that the cause of the Great Replacement lies neither with globalist elites nor with Islamist militants. Because mass immigration was endorsed across the political spectrum, and by those with very different economic interests, these origin stories are for Camus unlikely, if not impossible. Rather, he believes, the cause of the Great Replacement is a mass social and cultural transformation on the part of Europeans.
The “indispensable condition” of the Great Replacement is what Camus calls the Great Deculturation. “A people that knows its classics,” he says, “that understands its history and knows its responsibilities, would never allow itself to be thrown into the dustbin of history without an objection.” Such a people, by this logic, would never accept the thesis that populations are fundamentally interchangeable. Yet for decades, Camus laments, European students have been taught not only to forget their past and forget their culture, but to hold their inheritance in contempt. Camus differs from most critics of this problem in that he doesn’t tie this change to the outsize influence of certain postmodern philosophers, but to a fundamental transformation in class and culture.
Culture relies on a particular social class to create, develop, and transmit it. France’s classics were written and transmitted first by the aristocracy, then by the bourgeoisie. But that era has come to an end. Whatever the other faults of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, they respected the old aristocracy and imitated it. They made a show of loving the high arts and frequenting the opera. A bourgeois regime built the Palais Garnier. But now, a new class has emerged that refuses to respect the old. It denounces the highbrow culture of the old class as too elitist, exclusive, and politically incorrect. This new class, in Camus’s account, is the petty bourgeoisie. The replacement of the bourgeoisie by the petty bourgeoisie is what Camus calls “the Little Replacement.” Petty-bourgeois culture is pop culture. Cartoons and detective stories replace literature. Blockbuster films replace cinema. Rock ‘n’ roll and rap replace Bach and Beethoven. Opera has been decimated. The Great Deculturation and the Great Replacement, Camus contends, are consequences of the Little Replacement. “The Great Replacement—the change of people and civilization—would have been utterly impossible without the Little Replacement—the change of culture,” he told me.
If you don’t think this is a critique of a civilization that has failed to conserve the permanent things, I don’t know what to tell you. And if you don’t think that this subject belongs front and center at a conservative institution (ISI) that is trying to confront challenges to the permanent things from the world of today, as opposed to the world of 1985, or of 1776, then you are hopelessly out of touch.
Camus’s point about what he calls “the second career of Adolf Hitler” is an ironic one. His argument is that the left-wing and center-right European establishments permitted migrants to overrun Europe by condemning anybody who questioned even slightly the wisdom of this as Hitler reborn. C.G. Long would know this if he troubled himself to read Enemy Of The Disaster, an English translation of Camus’s political essays, published last year by Vauban Books. But why bother to read, and learn what you’re talking about, when you can just lie about people and their ideas?
I brought up Camus as a “leftwing, gay atheist” (though the French Left cast him out) to draw attention to the irony that it took a man like that to see what all the right-thinking conservatives in politics and the church failed to see: that Europe (and the West) committed suicide, not by conspiracy, but by mindlessly following the sentimental humanitarianism of “diversity” culture, and the economic doctrines of globalism. The Great Replacement decried by Camus has, among other things, made Europe a much more dangerous place for Jews, gays, and women. It would do Long good to read Camus before he slanders him, like the lazy liberal media have done.
I encourage you to watch the presentations that so annoyed C.G. Long. The dying empire of the old-guard conservatives is striking back hard at younger generations who dare to question their empty pieties and dessicated shibboleths. They believe that they can simply point and bitch, and poof, all the real-world problems we postliberals and our associates are trying to deal with — problems created in part by the failures of the old-guard conservatives — will go away.
See, this is why it is so very important for us to build strong barriers against actual racists and anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson made a huge mistake by offering Fuentes entrée into the mainstream Right’s conversation, thus giving the zombies of an outdated conservatism no longer fit for purpose a chance to rise from the grave to strangle creative right-wing thinking. None of these people smeared by Long and others are Jew-haters, Hitler-lovers, or apologists for avant-garde novels and homosexuality. What we are, rather, are intellectuals who are doing our damnedest to conserve what remains of Western civilization and the permanent things.
The Longs of the Right came up short. If they don’t want to see nihilistic race warriors like Nick Fuentes gain ground, they ought to take their heads out of the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, arise from their prostration before a statue of the Gipper, and come to terms with a radically changed world. To paraphrase Burke, “A conservatism without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
As you know, I believe Tucker Carlson ought not have platformed Fuentes, and if he felt he had to, then he should have put hard questions to him. Heritage’s Kevin Roberts should not have inserted the think tank into the controversy. But if you think these blunders mean that the Right should revert to the good old days of George W. Bush-style conservatism, then you are willing to surrender the future to the Left.
Be aware that all of this is about the old-guard Right trying to sabotage J.D. Vance’s presumptive 2028 presidential run. Vance and his supporters have to be more careful about giving these displaced mandarins opportunities. They were the future, once. They no longer are. They hate that, of course, but we’ve got to move on.
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