Author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery https://t.co/tMvMmThJOJ, The Virtue of Nationalism https://t.co/sZ0ehnAGzC | Host @NatConTalk | https://t.co/7d0FkbZG65
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Sep 22, 2023 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
I hate to spend even ten minutes on a lowlife like Avik Roy. But he recently gave a 45-minute interview in which he repeatedly says NatCons seek a "white ethnostate" in America as our "core" goal. I want to make sure everyone understands who and what this guy is.
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Avik Roy's "white ethnostate" interview was posted as a podcast on Law and Liberty along with a transcript of the interview. You can read it here:
For months friends have been asking me: "What's wrong with James Lindsay? Why's he acting so strange?"
I've been saying I don't really know. He refuses to even have a conversation with me.
But I finally have some thoughts to share: A thread on "What's wrong with James?"
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The first thing to understand about where James's head is right now is that he believes "conservative Christianity" is about to be "largely politically nullified" in the United States.
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If you don’t know the Bible well, you cannot understand the forces that created the Western world.
If you don’t know the great thinkers of the common law tradition, you cannot understand the forces that created Britain and America.
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The reason the Bible and the common law tradition have been excluded from the history of ideas and political theory is that they give expression to human particularity—and not *only* to human universals.
But you cannot understand human beings without human particularity.
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Aug 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Bob Kagan dictated this party line in March 2019—in a Wapo essay explaining that NatCons really just want to bring dictatorship to America.
Since then the choirboys keep writing the same ridiculous essay—without so much as adding a new thought to it.
An alliance does not require a “fusion” of interests or identities. It’s a limited collaboration in pursuit of specific common aims.
Alliance between Jews and Christians doesn’t require “fusion.”
Alliance between anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives doesn’t require “fusion.”
The 1960s strategy of “fusion” between anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives was based on the negation of conservatism as an independent movement with a vision and an identity of its own.
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Aug 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Three superb essays defending "Christian nationalism" were published in the last week by young Protestant and Catholic writers in the US.
This is a dramatic breakthrough after years in which many American Christian writers have been equivocal on this subject.
Essays below.
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This is from @William_E_Wolfe at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
Christian friends have been writing to ask me where Jewish law stands on abortion. The simple answer is: Jewish law forbids abortion except where the mother's life is in danger.
True, some *liberal* Jews have a different view. Here's an example:
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Maybe now you can set aside some of that glib contempt for your parents’ generation that I’ve heard so often.
And the self-congratulatory pronouncements about how only people under forty “get it.”
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Feb 9, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
America has one strategic rival right now: China.
America has one major foreign policy aim: To overtake and ultimately to defeat China in a long cold war that the US is presently losing.
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Russia is not a significant threat to the US.
For America, a war with Russia in Ukraine would be a vast diversion of attention and resources in the wrong direction.
The only sure winner of an American war in Ukraine would be China.
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Nov 23, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
We are watching an elite-led cultural revolution, being conducted *from above* by powerful institutions in the name of oppressed minorities.
What did Burke and the Old Whigs believe? They defended tradition, the established church, monarchy, and aristocracy—against liberals (New Whigs) like Richard Price, Charles James Fox, Priestly, Paine and Jefferson, who favored reason, equality and religious disestablishment.
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Oct 31, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
No. Nationalism is derived from biblical political theology. It is based on the Scriptural belief that humans beings and their institutions are diverse and see the world from divergent perspectives.
For this reason, every community and nation must be responsible for its own path to God.
There is no such thing as a human institution that is competent to dictate political doctrine to all mankind—or one that can do so without becoming a tyranny.
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Oct 20, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This is a surprisingly well-researched and balanced NYT essay on the growing rebellion against liberalism among American and European conservatives.
The biggest problem with this analysis is that it tends to see a revived (“post-liberal”) conservatism as a basically Catholic phenomenon.
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Aug 27, 2021 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
The "spirit" is something real in all human beings--what the Bible calls "ruah" and Plato calls "thymos."
It's what allows us to be angry and sad, to want things and to strive for truth and to be loyal and connected to our family and nation and to stand in awe before God.
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But it means little to "be spiritual." Human beings are all, by nature, "spiritual."
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Aug 24, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Here's a longer, rephrased version of what I said before:
Birth rates are collapsing throughout the America and Europe. The numbers are well below replacement almost everywhere.
The reason: Liberalism (or individualism) of course.
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nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/…
It is liberalism (or individualism) that focuses everyone's attention on what *you* feel like doing. On what would be fun for *you*.
It is liberalism that turns us away from broader commitments.
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May 30, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
There was always a problem with the academic study of “classical antiquity,” which was built around the assumption that the West was descended from Greece and Rome—but not from Israel and the Bible. nationalreview.com/news/princeton…
This was an “Enlightenment” theory and it was a nasty one. It was anti-Semitic and anti-Christian too.
Apr 17, 2021 • 48 tweets • 8 min read
Catholic friends have been urging me to read Waldstein on the common good. So I finally did.
I won’t comment on the theology. But as political theory this essay is naive and misguided. As a basis for political conservatism, it’s a non-starter. /1 thejosias.com/2015/02/03/the…
There are a several problems here. But let’s begin at the end:
Waldstein wants to found the political theory of the state on the thesis that the “primary intrinsic common good” of every legitimate state is “peace.”
(Thesis 34)
I’m sure peace is an aspect of the common good. /2
Feb 18, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I don’t accept this new norm, which supposes that when a public figure dies, it’s a signal for everyone who disagreed with him in life to start dancing on his grave.
A decent public culture regards funerals as a time when each of us looks for the positive meaning that can be found in the life of the deceased.
Feb 15, 2021 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
In liberal societies, the custom of giving honor to your parents has mostly been wiped out by equality (and now equity).
Most young people don’t even know they’re being transgressive when they correct their parents, elders, bosses.
If you learn the Mosaic Ten Precepts in school, you at least have to discuss the topic of honoring your father and mother—and what you owe older people and ancestors more generally.
When Bible education was eliminated from the schools, all this became alien terrain.
Feb 3, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
In English tradition, the farthest right represents subservience to the laws and ways of foreigners (Rome), while the messianic revolutionary left represents subservience to the laws and ways of foreigners (Geneva).
Moderate Whigs and Tories represent national independence.
Burke in his day stands for Britain as an independent country. He stands for the traditional British constitution, traditional English laws and freedoms, the monarchy and the English national church.
He also stands for alliance with the Tories to preserve all these things.
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Dec 27, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I have to agree with this point. I can’t figure out what’s supposed to be wrong or frightening about being a “Christian nationalist” (although that graphic does bother me—we Jews don’t place guns, or anything else, on our Bibles). stream.org/why-im-a-chris…
There are bad apples in every bushel. But *on average,* Christian nationalists are going to be a whole lot better to have around, and to be around, than Christian imperialists.
And Christian nationalists are much more likely to know what’s what than atheist nationalists.
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