The Old Cause by Joseph Stromberg

Good stuff here from December 1999 I came across when following links about Felix Morley -- paleoconservative, born four years after my grandfather.

Makes me want to delve into my old copy of "Freedom and Federalism".

Already in World War I, Morley had noted the way in which modern war centralizes power in the state and promotes socialism, whatever the flag under which it sailed...

Morley... saw attempts to justify the atomic bombing of Japan – in our day ritually defended by "conservatives" every August like clockwork – as "the miserable farce put on by those who try to reconcile mass murder of 'enemy children' with lip service to the doctrine that God created all men in his image." The atomic bomb was appropriate to a totalitarian order with no fixed moral standards...

A year later, Morley stated that "the so-called isolationists were essentially right. They knew that American can run its own affairs reasonably well. They knew that in pontifically declaiming on the world stage we would be likely to prove ourselves blundering fools." Our system rested on "foregoing the path of empire, on developing those private ventures in which the American genius is brilliant…."

It was a bitter thing to realize that "during the past few years, [America] has led the world in smashing the fabric of civilization"; we had dismantled German factories but also "the whole structure of American ideals."

In a speech before the Conservative Society of Yale Law School in November 1954, Morley developed several themes. For the American constitution to function properly, we must shrink back from an activist foreign policy, which necessarily strengthened executive power...

My point is that the vanishing bourgeois elite justified its existence precisely by producing people like Felix Morley who understood the old republic, the constitution, peace, and free markets, as well as their opposites, empire, lawless rule, war, and generalized statism. Of course it was other members of that same elite who pursued the Open Door and set us on the path of empire. If Morley's analyses hold true, it was these clever fellows who began, however unintentionally, the unraveling or deconstruction of authentic American life. Their descendants pursue the good work intentionally. You can't have everything. Yet one shudders at the prospect of being ruled, even for a week, by the sort of "elite" which current US "education" might produce...

Through it all, Morley – an educated man who knew how to educate others – could see the centrality of real education. He once shocked the dean of a journalism school by recommending that the students study mathematics and the classics: "The Dean came hotfoot to Washington to see if I were crazy…. He talked a lot about… 'relevance' in education and didn't like it when I said that what he meant was vocational training, which will never maintain a threatened culture."...

Still writing in his eighties, he noted that "[t]here has been a direct and causal connection between the increasing exaltation of the state and the increasing demoralization of society."

The Old Cause by Joseph Stromberg