The Legacy of "The Closing of the American Mind" There can be no question of the signal importance and influence of The Closing of the American Mind.
Any future historian who proposes to explain the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s will have to contend with the looming presence of Allan Bloom’s grand and gloomy tome—along with the words and works of the other “killer Bs” of the era, William J. Bennett and Saul Bellow—as one of the chief rallying points for the conservative side of that conflict, and particularly the conservative critique of higher education. It should be admitted at once that many of Bloom’s criticisms were not entirely new. By 1987, the declining state of America’s colleges and universities as bastions of cultural conservation and liberal learning had been an object of public concern for a long time. It should also be admitted that Bloom’s book was idiosyncratic in the extreme, a most improbable candidate—as improbable as the man himself—for the major cultural role in which it was cast. No. 21 - Richard Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver was born in western North Carolina in 1910.
In 1932, he graduated with a major in English from the University of Kentucky. He became a socialist. In short time, he left the movement, finding his comrades "dry, insistent people of shallow objectives. " Weaver went to Vanderbilt University as a graduate student in English. In addition to others, he came under the profound influence of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate -- the famed Agrarians -- who had shortly before published the anthology, "I'll Take My Stand.
" Weaver experienced gestalt. With master's degree in hand, he paid his dues as an English instructor at Alabama Polytechnic Institute and Texas A&M University. @Sir_Geechie. Patrick J. Buchanan – Official Website. Austro-Athenian Empire: "Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy. Manhattan Institute. LewRockwell.com. Rejecting the “White Nationalist” Label. IN A discussion about the UCLA student who made a tasteless video about Asian students, Lawrence Auster writes: White nationalists are material-racial reductionists who, like Nazis, treat race as the single all-determining factor of human existence, so that human beings are in effect automata controlled by their race.
I treat race as one very important determining factor in human existence, along with many other factors. And I am not a material reductionist. Material/racial factors can be the controlling factors; for example, if you change a formerly all-white city into a half black city, certain effects will inevitably ensue. At the same time, material/racial factors are not the only factors, especially at the individual level.
. — Comments – Rex writes: Can you point to a specific source in which White Nationalism is clearly defined in this way (i.e. material/racial reductionism)? I definitely identify as a White Nationalist, so I feel I should speak up. Laura writes: Good points. Mr. Mr. Life and Letters: The First Conservative. John Judis, in his 1988 biography of Buckley, mentions that Buckley had written to his publisher, after completing “God and Man at Yale,” to propose a book that would “examine the claims of Peter Viereck . . . to representing the ‘legitimate conservatism.’ ” But when I asked Buckley about the idea, he dismissed it with a flick of his wrist, saying that Viereck represented “a sort of pre-neoconservatism none of us had any use for.”
View from the Right. February 12, 2014 Up until the death of Lawrence Auster on March 29, 2013, thousands of devoted fans came to this website everyday, sometimes two or three times a day.
They came for Mr. Auster’s brilliant political and cultural commentary. World Politics & Current Events News and Discussion. The American Conservative. Many view Jane Austen as a decidedly “feminine” writer.
And it’s true: every woman must read Jane Austen. But there’s a lot to be found in Austen’s work, apart from romance, interesting characters, and good plot development. Austen explored the depths of human nature, its foibles and fancies, and wrote novels that promoted virtue to great effect. Issues & Views - The Blog. Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Taki's Magazine - Home Page. Conservative Columnist Edition" 1,656 words So, you’re a young White male columnist who’s looking to get paid to write about politics?
Your first challenge is deciding what politics you’ll write about. Your first instinct might be to parrot the liberal talking points you were indoctrinated with in college, but all your peers have that first instinct, too. The colleges are pouring out hundreds of thousands of journalism majors who think just like you do while the liberal media outlets are hemorrhaging money and employees due to poor ratings and competition from alternative media outlets. Furthermore, there are more tokens on the left, and the White male spots are reserved by a cabal of cosmopolitan Jews and aging hippies with ponytails. Alternative Right - An Online Magazine of Radical Traditionalism.