December 18, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Dr. PAUL GOTTFRIED reviews
THE LAND WE LOVE: THE SOUTH AND ITS
HERITAGE
Friends,
There is
no individual—no true man of wisdom and learning—that I admire more than Dr.
Paul E. Gottfried, Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities at
Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Author of approximately twenty books and
literally hundreds of articles and essays, published not only here in the
United States but in ten foreign countries, his fame as the world’s most
distinguished thinker and writer representing traditional conservativism is
well-established (see, for example, the entry on him and his work in the
Wikipedia; or a listing of his works online).
Over the
years—our friendship now is nearly thirty years old—he has been a friend and a
mentor, and, for me, he has been one of a trio of marvelously fertile and
inspiring thinkers who have shaped my thinking in so many ways. The other two
are the late Russell Kirk (for whom I was assistant in 1971-1972) who founded
back in the 1950s what became American Conservatism (which has now been so
perverted), and the much-lamented Mel Bradford, perhaps the greatest historian
and man of letters that the South produced in the twentieth century.
When I
completed my book, The Land We Love: The
South and Its Heritage, a 308 page anthology of my essays about the South,
its history, and the recent attacks on it, Paul graciously consented to do a
cover comment, and, now, he has authored a review that treats the book in some
detail for the Abbeville Institute. And as usual, he writes with acute understanding and his accustomed
elegance.
I pass
that review on to you. The Land We Love
is available via Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and directly from the
publisher, The Scuppernong Press.
The Land We Love
Paul Gottfried on Dec
18, 2018
I must confess that I feel a bit awkward
about reviewing Dr. Boyd Cathey’s outstanding anthology, The Land We
Love: The South and its Heritage. I am, as the reader may notice,
mentioned in the preface, along with Clyde Wilson, as one of the author’s two
most significant guides in preparing these essays. And despite the fact that
unlike Clyde I didn’t write the foreword, I do appear with this eminent
Southern historian on the back cover, as one of several bloggers praising the many
fine qualities of Dr. Cathey’s work.
Notwithstanding my obvious conflict of
interests, I did volunteer to review the book because it illustrates an
observation that I’ve been making for the last forty years, namely, the most
provocative writers for the onetime American conservative movement have been
generally Southerners. Moreover, what’s rendered them worth reading is that
their perspective is unlike the one that has prevailed elsewhere in the US.
Southern conservatives wrote and still do, if this book is any indication, with
a tragic sense born of defeat, an ingrained sense of place, and an appreciation
for older, European conservative traditions.
The Southerners to whom I’m referring
were and, remain even now despite their reduced numbers, the most relentlessly
principled conservatives of my acquaintance. They conspicuously refused to bend
their knee when the neoconservatives took over the establishment Right in the
1980s. Like Clyde and Boyd, they paid for their defiance by being marginalized
by what Clyde mockingly described in 1986 as the “interlopers.” But
significantly the true Southerners whom the movement’s hired hands expelled,
never changed their stripes and still show contentiousness as well as a deep
sense of honor. Anyone who surveys the titles of Boyd’s essays, e.g., “A New
Reconstruction: The Renewed Assault on Southern Heritage,” “How the
Neoconservatives Destroyed Southern Conservatism,” “How You Stand on the War
Between the States: A Window into your View of the Western Christian Heritage,”
and “Merchants of Hate: Morris Dees, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the
Attack on the Southern Heritage,” knows that the author has come to fight. He
does so in essay after essay, attacking the SPLC as “merchants of hate,”
exposing its longtime head Morris Dees as a corrupt profiteer playing on
usually baseless fears about “extremism,” and assailing the various detractors
of the Southern cause.
Although the anthology under review
covers other worthwhile themes, there are two topics on which I’d like to
focus. One, the author recognizes genuine conservatism, the presence of which
he points out in his subjects. Presbyterian theologian and political theorist
Robert Lewis Dabney, Southern literary scholar M.E. Bradford, the Agrarians, US
Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis
are all cited as representing a well-defined conservative worldview. A
sense of place, reverence for one’s ancestors, deep reservations about an
expanding commercial society because of the cultural change that follows in its
wake, resistance to administrative centralization and an unbending principle of
honor are all conservative characteristics stressed in this anthology.
A worldview enriched by these elements
seems so imprinted in the conservatives under discussion that they could not
have acted in any way that contradicted who they were. Thus Lee felt compelled
to resign his commission in the Union Army and to defend his beloved state
against invasion by the federal forces. He was first a son of Virginia, born to
its first family, and then only a citizen of a larger political entity.
Dr. Cathey cites Jefferson Davis, addressing the Mississippi legislature in
1881 and telling its members that despite “all that my country was to suffer, all
that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again.” Despite all
the suffering that Southern secession brought his region and him personally,
Davis did not regret his struggle for Southern independence, because he thought
it was a just (and constitutional) course.
Dr. Cathey has observed a conceptual
parallel between those Spanish aristocrats and legitimists he has studied (and
indeed written a dissertation on) and Robert Lewis Dabney, the stern Virginia
Calvinist who ended his life in Texas. Like the great historian of the American
South, Eugene G. Genovese, Dr. Cathey views Dabney as the full-package for
those who are looking for a prototypical man of the traditional Right. Dabney
was a defender of fixed gender distinctions and viewed the idea that women
should vote as being laughable, perverse or possibly both. Dabney regarded
universal suffrage as a monstrous conceit: although all members of a political
society “bear an equitable relation to each other, they have very different
natural rights and duties.”
Further: “just government is not founded
on the consent of the individuals governed, but on the ordinance of God, and
hence a share in the ruling franchise is not a natural right at all, but a
privilege to be bestowed according to a wise discretion on a limited class
having qualifications to use it for the good of the whole.” Dabney also vocally
opposed the introduction of free public education in Virginia in the 1870s. He
considered such an enterprise to be an attempt by the state to supersede the
authority of parents and the family. If the proposed reform took place, Dabney
feared, the government of Virginia would be engaging in a “leveling action”
“countervailing the legislation of nature.” In such a measure Dabney discerned
the early stages of what would later be called “social engineering.”
Dr. Cathey never states (nor would I)
that a conservative worldview provides the only path to understanding social or
political relations. What he does indicate repeatedly in his essays is that
advocates of gay marriage, feminism, and massive government interference in the
family are most definitely not “conservative,” even if they happen to be
involved in the questionable media operation that goes by that name. He also
revives the debate that the late M.E. Bradford, “arguably the finest historian
and philosopher produced by the South” had with the Lincoln admirer Harry V.
Jaffa on the pages of Modern Age in the 1970s. Bradford
fiercely resisted Jaffa’s notion of America as a propositional nation founded
on the overarching principle that “all men are created equal.”
Unlike Jaffa, who celebrated Lincoln’s
crusade against slavery in the American South as a vindication of what was
supposedly our foundational belief in universal equality, Bradford defended the
social and cultural particularities of his region, and above all its right not
to be invaded and reconstructed. Behind this debate, in my view as well as in
Dr. Cathey’s, was Bradford’s defense and Jaffa’s rejection of the “inherited
traditions” of Southern society and the strict constitutional republicanism on
which the South’s relation to the federal union was based. Equally relevant was
Bradford’s obvious contempt “for the abstraction equality” and for the
imperative to which it led among our political and journalistic elites to
“impose our democracy and equality on the rest of the world.”
Dr. Cathey is right to perceive here a
foreshadowing of the contention that later erupted between paleoconservatives
and neoconservatives over a wide variety of questions. Although the followers
of Jaffa, known as the West Coast Straussians (and named for Jaffa’s teacher
Leo Strauss) are not necessarily the same as neoconservatives (Jaffaites tend
to be much brainier), most of their ideas about the US as a propositional
nation bottomed on the ideal of equality became neocon agitprop. The two
groups, which Dr. Cathey treats as almost interchangeable, write for the same
journals and attend the same conferences. Hillsdale College, which is run by a
West Coast Straussian president Larry Arnn, rolls out the carpet for
neoconservative but never paleoconservative speakers. In 2016 Boyd Cathey and I
both had our names removed from a declaration of support for candidate Trump
then running for president. It was a Jaffaite website that took this step.
Needless to say, neoconservative names abounded on that declaration from which
our names were removed. The reason for our shaming may have to do with the
sides that were taken over the controversy between Bradford and Jaffa in the 1970s.
The Jaffaites likely never forgave those who contemptuously dismissed the
sacred doctrines of their teacher and who rallied almost instinctively to
Bradford.
Two, Dr. Cathey devotes several
commentaries to one especially dismal aspect of current white Southern
political behavior, namely, the unwillingness of most Southerners, even the
ones who are descended from gallant Confederate warriors, to rise to the
defense of their ancestral monuments and memorials. Right now our author is
deep into a legal struggle to keep the statue known as Silent Sam from being
removed from the University of North Carolina campus. Dr. Cathey continues to
be amazed at the reluctance of Republican politicians (who claim intermittently
to be “conservative”) to keep Confederate monuments from being dismantled. He
quotes a commentary of
mine that
was posted on Daily Caller, contrasting the indignant response of Italian
Americans to the efforts of the cultural Left to remove a statue of Columbus in
Manhattan to the appalling indifference of many, perhaps most Southerners to
the removal and defacing of their ancestral monuments. Note that many
Southerners have a true ancestral connection to what they’ve turned their backs
on. Like Dr. Cathey who mentions in his dedications two great-grandfathers and
one great-great-grandfather who fought for Southern Independence, these
self-hating Southerners have heroic ancestors whom they can celebrate. Instead
they work to denude the South of its heritage or sit on their hands while
others do the desecrating.
We should finally note that Italian
Americans have much less of a familial stake in preserving Columbus’s monuments
and reputation than Southerners have in the heritage they’re now denying. The
figure whom Italian Americans (most of whom are descended from immigrants from
Southern Italy or Sicily) are honoring, has only a very distant relationship to
them. He was a Genoese, probably of Sephardic descent, who sailed to Central
America under a Spanish flag. Columbus for his celebrants is a symbol of their
ethnic identity and group pride, but perhaps not much more. Lee, Jackson, and
Forrest should mean much more to Southerners who have lived in their region for
at least several generations. These were the commanders under whom their
ancestors fought for regional independence, while Jefferson Davis was the
honorable president under whom these ancestors served.
About
Paul Gottfried
The
internationally-famed political theorist and historian, Dr. Paul Gottfried, is the
president of the H.L. Mencken Club, a prolific author of around twenty books
(published in ten languages) and a social critic, and emeritus professor of
humanities at Elizabethtown College.
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