The New Tory Anarchist: www.toryanarchist.com

I’ll keep this WordPress.com site around for good measure, but everything here is now on a new server at www.toryanarchist.com, and that’s where new posts will be showing up. Please redirect links and point your browsers over there.

Switching Servers

I don’t anticipate any downtime for the site, but I’m about to switch servers, so expect the unexpected.

The “Midwestern Libertarian Conservatism” of Russell Kirk

A pleasant surprise came in the mail today with the payment for my University Bookman article on Ralph Adams Cram: a copy of the Heritage Foundation’s July 10, 2007 Heritage Lectures newsletter, which reprints a June 22 talk on Russell Kirk by George H. Nash. Most conservatives — the literate ones, anyway — know of [...]

Switching Labels on the Dog Food

Retiring Virginia Republican Congressman Tom Davis has compared the Republican “brand” to a dog food that ought to be taken off the shelves. GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, writing in NRO, doesn’t seem to realize that the problem with the brand extends beyond the label — there’s something wrong with the product itself.
Catellanos, though, gets a [...]

Good as Goldwater

My review of Pure Goldwater, a volume of Barry Goldwater’s journals (and some other odds and ends), is now up on Reason’s website.
I’m reading Bill Buckley’s posthumous Goldwater memoir, Flying High, right now. Here’s one striking anecdote I hadn’t heard before:
… at this dinner [for the 1950s Freeman], Rand contradicted Mises on some doctrinal point, [...]

Nockians Left and Right

From Victor Navasky’s NYT review of two books by or about William F. Buckley (thanks to Scott Lahti for an early link to the piece):
It is probably no accident, as the old-left journals used to say, that both Buckley and Carey McWilliams, The Nation’s longtime editor, were fans of Albert Jay Nock, who after briefly [...]

The Libertarian Party Debate

I missed most of the live broadcast, but here’s Daniel Larison’s write-up, and here’s Dylan Waco’s take at Left Conservative. I like what I’ve seen and heard of Steve Kubby. I might have to modify what I’ve said elsewhere about being for Barr or bust. A Barr-Kubby ticket might be ideal, especially since Kubby [...]

What’s Right With the Right

One of the things I found dissatisfying about George Packer’s recent “fall of conservatism” piece was its establishment bias. He can’t be accused of talking only to neocons and movement thralls — Pat Buchanan was in the mix alongside Rich Lowry and David Brooks — but Packer only spoke to established names, when the most [...]

In Print and Coming Your Way

Keep an eye out for the June 2 issue of The American Conservative, which went to press today. It includes my article on the battle for Virginia’s Eighth Congressional District, which pits Ron Paul-inspired Republican Amit Singh against Mark Ellmore, a candidate sometimes compared to Mike Huckabee. In Singh’s case, the race puts to the [...]

What If…?

If Al Gore had become president in place of George W. Bush, we would have wound up with Joe Lieberman in Dick Cheney’s stead. Plus ca change…
Don’t say the neocons don’t keep their bases covered.