Replies

Jack Hunter the “Southern Avenger’ sometimes filled in for Mike Church, The Sothern Avenger site is down now, too.

I suppose Jack Hunter is being Paula Deen’ed. It isn’t as if Hunter went around saying n***** this and n***** that.

He never claimed blacks should still be slaves or that he hated blacks. Well, not to my knowledge.

All of this has to do with Hunter’s position on The Civil War and states rights.

There are some who do not believe that The Civil War was all about slavery and if somebody takes that position, it usually gets them declared racist.

How dare anyone question history or look at it differently than the declared historical meme. You must not stray from accepted group think.

Just bring up secession today and see what happens to you.
******************************

Mike: To the Dude Maker Hotline, a piece posted at the American Conservative magazine yesterday last by Daniel McCarthy, “The Right’s Civil War.”

Jack Hunter has resigned from Sen. Rand Paul’s office, in light of criticisms of his “Southern Avenger” background.

Mike: Then Daniel goes into some of the things about Jack’s resignation. Then he delves into this über deep and very complex and long-running conversation or internecine feud between factions inside the “conservative movement.” One side you have the Harry Jaffaites, descendants of Leo Strauss — I just call them Straussians — and those that believe in the Lincoln version of nationalism and American exceptionalism. Then on the other side, a smaller, crankier minority that are not Lincoln lovers, do not believe in the grandness and wonder of the almighty and ever-expanding centralized state and have been voicing that opinion since the 1950s. So this continues unabated to this day, and now it has embroiled, or ensnared at least, to some degree Senator Rand Paul from the great State of Kentucky. Dan McCarthy has written about it and we thought we should talk about it here on the program. Making another return appearance, editor of the American Conservative Magazine, Daniel McCarthy. Hello, Daniel, how are you?

Daniel McCarthy: Hi, Mike, thanks very much for having me on.

Mike: You’re very, very welcome. Good to hear from you today. Just flesh out a little bit of what “The Right’s Civil War” piece is about. Then we’ll go clause by clause, as they were supposed to go in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, and we’ll see if we can get to the bottom of this.

McCarthy: Well, you’re seeing a number of criticisms are being made in the media of Jack Hunter, which are pretty far off base. People have portrayed him as being some sort of a racist or what they call a neoconfederate. He certainly says a number of things that are very provocative, a number of things a radio host or columnist for a weekly newspaper tends to say in order to stir debate, in order to prompt people to think dramatically about questions that they may never have considered before, such as something like secession. What is the concept really about? You have a number of attacks on Jack Hunter which I think have not really gotten to the intellectual core of what he was trying to do.

My article spells out how there’s been a long tradition on the right, sort of two traditions that have been in conflict, one of them being the one you mentioned by Harry Jaffa in which an argument for centralization is made that references back to Abraham Lincoln and to a number of other things like that. On the other hand you have both libertarians and traditional literary conservatives who have been very critical of centralization today in the 20th or 21st century who often tie their arguments back to history as well, even though sometimes what they’re really talking about are more modern conflicts like the welfare state and not really so much trying to get a purely historical view of what was happening in the 1860s....
http://www.mikechurch.com/transcripts/a-belief-in-secession-and-self-government-and-rand-paul-are-dangerous-to-the-state/