Front Porch Anarchists

Bill Kauffman's got a group blog, Reactionary Radicals, to promote his book Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists. One of the contributors is Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, who is apparently the token transhumanist libertarian Titan colonist in the house.

My favorite post so far is by Dan McCarthy:

I was a junior at Washington University in St. Louis when the November 1998 issue of Chronicles — I was a new subscriber — arrived in my mailbox. “Reactionary Radicals,” the cover proclaimed, beneath a picture of two peasants pulling back the hands of a great clock. (And as the free-market anarchist Murray Rothbard used to say, if we can’t turn back those hands, “We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.”)

Inside was Bill Kauffman’s tribute — now collected in Look Homeward, America — to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, which related the story from Confessions of an Original Sinner of how John Lukacs reacted to Henry Kissinger putting in an appearance at National Review’s 25th anniversary bash. Lukacs asked himself who the real conservative was: the saintly Day, recently deceased, or the ghastly Kissinger? While the rest of the assembled worthies applauded Nixon’s consigliere, Lukacs booed.

After reading that, I knew I would never be fit for service in the conservative mainstream again. And thank God.

Definite runner up, though, is this classic quote from Smedley Butler, included in a Clark Stooksbury post:

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of Racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international house of the Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard went its way unmolested . . . Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

You may remember Bill Kauffman from such articles as "The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right," "My America vs. the Empire," and "Think Locally, Act Locally, Live Locally: Education on the Human Scale," or the books Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette : A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive and America First!: Its History, Culture, and Politics. He's also figures prominently, among assorted personages from the decentralist Left and Old Right, in the Vermont secessionist movement, Second Vermont Republic.