Huebeck: Integration of Theory and Practice---a Review

This essay is hard to find on the web now. A copy can be found at Original Dissent, where this thread began.

Here are some introductory comments of mine:

Thank you for posting the essay retroactively to my request.

Before I reread it, it might be helpful to recount the circumstances under which it was written, and hence the problem it addresses. I first saw the essay, which was I believe written during the late Clinton administration or very early in W's, in conjunction with the "Center for Cultural Conservatism" at the Free Congress Foundation website. You will notice that all references to it have been expunged and the "policy center" entirely devoted to the theories of William S. Lind now.

http://www.freecongress.org/centers/index.asp

This organization is Paul Weyrich's, a fairly mainstream "Christian Right" lobbying organization as far as I can tell, and not particularly paleo. Weyrich is famous for coining the term "Moral Majority". I believe he eventually became an Orthodox Christian, and his move towards cultural separatism during the latter Clinton years, which was temporary and evaporated when W was elected, may have resulted from a number of factors: (1) exhaustion after eight years of the hostile PC climate that existed under Clinton, (2) observation of the success, on the right, of the homeschooling movement, (3) an orientation towards Hesychasm [which non-OC's would miss], that quiet cultural retirement, stability of place, and "just being what one is, culturally" in an insane, PC world, had a certain personal appeal.

In other words, I believe the essay may be an attempt to generalize the success of the homeschooling movement in resisting Clinton-era PC, into a broader model for poltical activism.

Such speculations aside, Weyrich made a dramatic announcement that the Moral Majority was over and a new phase of separatism about to begin. In conjunction with the fresh paleo/neo split, which took concrete form in 1992 with the Buchanan campaign and the "End of Democracy" series in the neo publication "First Things", separatism was "in the air" in both the neo and paleo camp.

However, Weyrich's effort was not well received -- what good is a separtist lobbyist? -- and he appears to have dropped the whole thing at the beginning of the Bush administration like a hot potato. For a while, it was very difficult to find on the net at all (I have two old links somewhere, which took hours of searching and required both Heubeck's uncommon name *and* text from the essay to turn up). This sucker was deep-sixed big time.

Moving on to the essay, I don't know the exact connection, but I believe the essay was written to summarize a conference held by that policy center and to consolidate the initiation of the political movement Weyrich had in mind, which ended so abortively. I don't believe any *actual action* was taken, because it was slapped down so hard, but I could be wrong.

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The essay is a long one, and as has been pointed out on another thread, most of us here on this board have actual lives besides posting on internet boards, so I will try to lead this discussion, for any who wish to participate -- this Study Group, if you will -- by commenting on the essay seriatim. This post signals discussion, if any, of the first few paragraphs. (I will try to synchronize my post titles with the section under discussion).

I have already said that I encountered the essay a while back -- maybe 2002 or so? It is certainly one of the more attractive attempts I've seen, perhaps the only one, coming out of the FCF. I have already noted that as an actual political movement, rather than an abstract idea to discuss endlessly, it was stillborn. However, before we bury it, we should perhaps provide some sort of critique -- would it have worked, should we try to make it work, and if it failed what went wrong?

Let's start with the problem statement. Heubeck has a plan to solve a problem, and he states up front what the problem is. I am a bit confused as to what problem Heubeck thinks he is solving. One might try to get some insight into the problem, by working backwards from the proposed solution, when he gets to it later on:

Quote:

"Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions."

I am normally a fan of paradoxes, uttered with a mysterious air, but in this case I am simply confused. This seems to be a strange program for a *Traditionalist*. We will need to analyze this -- exactly why must there be a Conservative *Revolution* -- as we go along.

However, his aim is clear: The eventual destruction of *THEIR* institutions. We will, of course, need to understand eventually who THEY are and make sure THEY don't include US, since if they do this is not something we should participate in but warning of an impending attack by the FCF on US. (The unity of Cultural Conservatives, aka Christians, and their separation from non-Christian Americans in actual political fact can be disputed, however).

So what is the problem?

Quote:
However, none of those traditionalist thinkers, or anyone influenced by traditionalist thought, has made any serious attempt to directly put his ideas into practice. The unspoken assumption seems to be that if enough time is spent improving our intellectual sophistication and honing our arguments, our ideas will win more and more converts due simply to their irresistible appeal, and by some mysterious mechanism which no one has ever chosen to explain, our society will slowly but surely learn to cherish traditionalist values.

This way of thinking must be categorically rejected.

Now my answer: there has certainly been endless discussion and castles in the air, but it is by no means clear that that discussion is ours, rather than the dialectic carried on in the instutions that are proposed for destruction (which I assume includes the liberal faculties of universities, if not universities altogether). If Heubeck simply means he is bored by the over-intellectual discussion of his Conservative compatriots, perhaps he has the wrong thread or forum.

Lumping all discussion together avoids the ethnic and racial basis of much discussion. Let's look, for a second, at the history of the "Ivy Tower". Setting aside the pretentions that point back to "medieval universities"--itself sufficient proof they know nothing about it, since a medieval university was a guild for accrediting and controling teachers, not a place of instruction -- or the specific colonial legacy of the Ivy League, most "colleges" were founded post 1820, when about 200 sectarian institutions sprang up in the US. Thus, "academia" only pre-dates what I have called the "War of Ph D Agression" by some 40 years. The first American to make the pilgrimage to Goettigen was elected governor of Massachussetts and gave a triumphant speech on the field of Gettysburg, following the somewhat more famous and more succinct remarks of Mr. Lincoln.

In any event, the presumption that a Traditionalist might make, that universities were ever "ours" and have been taken from us, or that discussion within them is reformable, are simply mistaken on historical grounds. So why the angst?

When we read Mises, on Liberalism, he delivers a similar encomium: If only Goettigen and not Berlin had dominated Germany... You see, our political discussion, as highbrow discussion, is very much a case of "our Germans and German-educated Americans against their Germans and German-educated Americans". This is OK. Germany is a fine country. But an *English* or better an *American* or *Southern* traditionalist -- that is, someone concerned with their roots -- has not root or branch in such procedings.

Again, it is only self-hating persons with a vested interest in un-American, non-Traditional institutions that has such angst that they need to line them up, in their mental fantasies, against the wall of the great Conservative Revolution. For the rest of us Traditionalists, that's OTHER PEOPLE'S PROBLEMS. Why need we bother to destroy them, if they are not ours?