Stephen Cox teaches conservatives about Isabel Paterson.
(Though it’s a gentle introduction; Cox spares them the Paterson who attacked the corporate elite, condemned the U.S. for perverting science to “fry Japanese babies in atomic radiation,” and told Ayn Rand that garden-variety collectivist ideas came from liberals and really godawful collectivist ideas from conservatives.)
Paterson was right! The last 8 years proves it ( :
Is this all part of the Republican “lets pretend we’re small government now that we are out of government again”?
Well, Stephen Cox really is a libertarian, not a conservative (despite being not quite sound on certain questions such as immigration), and his biography of Paterson is excellent. I reckon he’s trying to lure conservatives to Paterson while they think they’re in a free-market mood.
Did you ever write that essay where you were to convince a theoretical Paterson of anarchism?
No — though my stuff on anarchism as constitutionalism is in the neighbourhood.
That sounds interesting… could we have a link?
Voici.
Merci.
In a similar vein, the current issue of National Review has an article by Jonah Goldberg about Albert Jay Nock, which is actually pretty good and mostly fair, but it does have the effect of portraying the modern Buckleyite conservative movement as being willing to act to get to Nock’s ideals, as opposed to Nock’s superfluous-man pessimism about the possibility of seeing them achieved.