On Pragmatic Idealism and Its Adherents.

Note: The notion of writing was distant from my mind this morning—until I briefly scanned the Free Republic’s news sidebar for around thirty seconds.

Writing for me is perhaps a partially unique method of therapy. Typing words onto a screen assists my understanding of concepts or ideas better than making a mere study of them. Occasionally, the desire to share my thoughts with others overwhelms me.
Or as, Mencius Moldbug would say, the desire to staple my tiresome screeds to telephone poles overwhelms me.


The composition of news-stories requires neither training nor ability. Opinion pieces require some slight education and talent. Which is why, we must naturally place most journalists in the simplistic wastrel category.
Very few journalists, left or right, are actually aware of what they are doing.
Lenin assuredly did not coin the term “useful idiots.” It was created long before his time, to designate those denizens of the Fourth Estate willing to advance a cause whose ends, they are either ignorant of or apathetic to.
These individuals manufacture public opinion and consensus with the ruthless of the nearsighted Jacobin.
For a century we have viewed the Corporate Media with hostility. But now, on the eve of a great campaign and the threshold of victory, in behooves us now to remember the enemy within.

I refer to the “pragmatic idealist.”

Having been involved in the grassroots campaign for Congressman Ron Paul from day one, I have had ample time to observe the metamorphosis of its bandwagon. It has involved a sizable chasm, as by Isaac Lopez describes in his column.
The spectacle might be more amusing to a cynical bystander.
Long before Ron Paul moved into the top-tier of presidential candidates, we were considered the usual fringe-reactionaries. Ex-Buchanan Brigadiers, replete with pitchfork tattoos, hardcore, uppercase Libertarians, accustomed to defeat and scorn.
But we had a new plan, based on the precinct system, a new slogan, “Get Vocal, Local” and new supporters. Longhaired bikers stood shoulder to shoulder with rural agrarians, elderly members of both the Silent and Moral Majorities and young Localist homeschoolers.
When our activism efforts at neighborhood, precinct and county levels produced results with a decisive straw poll win for Dr. Paul, the local politicians and GOP officials were stunned. They had no choice but to take notice. Americans are respecters of power and we had power. Where the Republicans and Democrats placed their booths in the Ozarks, there was always a third erected for Dr. Paul’s Campaign.
The Early Majority (Pragmatists) have yet to leap the chasm, en mass. They are joining in tens, rather than hundreds and imagining themselves to be visionaries.
But the visionaries were in the vanguard, long before them, willing to receive the reproach offered, and continue forward.
The Late Majority (Conservatives) has yet to fall in, with us. I’d rather they went with Huckabee, however.
Late Majoritarians, or “pragmatic idealists,” are they prefer to refer to themselves as, are detrimental to any movement, because their principle desire is compromise.
A pragmatic idealist is a Tory-oxymoron, an individual willing to surrender the best and noblest aspects of their ideology to the state, in exchange for power and general recognition of that ideology.
Power sans ideology is an example of the balance which nature wields over our modern, technological world of notions and theories. It seems a worthy exchange. To gain ascendance in our world, an ideologue must content himself with the dregs of his beliefs.
While this may preclude any potential Hitler’s from power in the near future, it is hardly conducive to mankind’s preparations to embrace the future, as it emerges.
Consulting history, we would do well to remember whom these “pragmatic idealists,” were, ten and twenty years ago.
A coalition of what Rockwell and Rothbard described as “neo-conservatives and left-libertarians” voiced their unanimous support of NAFTA. Some of these “pragmatic idealists,” were American nationalists. Others might be described as Internationalists, or Globalists.
Regardless of their views on the subject, they broke the cardinal rule which thinkers, theorists and formulators of policy have, in the past, adhered to.
Consider the best interests of one’s constituents or countrymen.
Whether those “pragmatic idealists,” favored a New World Order, or were proponents of an America First policy and genuinely believed that their stripped down version of free trade would aid in the advancement of American interests their policies failed to produce positive outcomes, consequentially resulting in the destruction of Mexican Agriculture and American Industry.
Ironically, those segments of the populations of both Mexico and the United States, which were hardest hit by Nafta, are now the most likely to be actively involved in the Iraqi War II.
Young White and Hispanic males, schooled to mediocrity by the culture, which raised them, and with no prospects for regular employment or bourgeois wages, were essentially forced to join the military to improve their circumstances.
Neo-conservatives, left-libertarians: constructive realists, and “pragmatic idealists,” have twice injured rather than assisted both the American people and the peoples of more than a dozen nations around the Globe, by their inane policies which for some reason always involve selling out the constituents and then receiving a pittance and no conclusive results for their troubles.
Of course, “pragmatic idealists,” are immune to reality and sheltered from the effects of their handiwork.
At this juncture, I’ll admit that neo-conservatives and warmongers today may have a point. Perhaps a bloody conflict is necessary on occasion to purge nations of their simplistic wastrels. The problem is that we are allegedly involved in World War IV, the dreaded confrontation with Islam. And yet, not one simplistic wastrel has been eliminated.
Their works still adorn the pages of the National Review, the Weekly Standard and now Commentary Magazine and it is doubtful that any one of our current crop of journalists left or right will ever accomplish anything of worth, which will somehow benefit their fellow men.

What I most dislike about our current crop of second-generation wastrel’s is their desire to inflict their simplistic views on the masses.
What right have the Powers That Be to foist upon the willing masses such simpletons as John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg?
It offends me that the level of discourse has dropped so precipitously, that I must deal with the likes of Christopher Cook, obese, yapping lapdogs; existing on the largess of the nation they seek to destroy.
Who is Christopher Cook? Why, a “Modern Conservative” or very Late Majoritarian.
Shockingly enough, the words “pragmatic” and “center-right” appear in his introduction to “Modern Conservatism.
Before becoming a Republican Party hack, Mr. Cook was unsuccessfully employed as a simplistic wastrel.
But he is now on to an excellent racket. When the War in Iraq has passed into the annals of the history, neo-conservatism has been thoroughly discredited and the collective memory dims, those Internationalist Followers of Strauss can stage a comeback under the name of “Modern Conservatives.”
Today, I’m not a conservative as I have been in the past. Yet the ideas, which I seek to maintain and proclaim, are not progressive, though they might seem so to a child of the late 20th Century.
Am I a “9/11 Truther?” Not at all. But I am a historian, and the first thing anyone learns from history is that democratic governments have always been corrupt and antagonistic to the interests of their constituents.
So naturally, I am skeptical of the Government’s official explanation of 9/11.
And on a final note:
Mr. Cook would do well to remember that rabid partisans of the total state might find themselves in the halls of power or behind barbed wire, with equal ease.