The Tory Anarchist

over at 2Blowhards, with some of the best stuff saved for last. Like this:

2B: Can you tell me some good things about the following words, with which many people have bad associations: Anarchy. Reactionary. Isolationism.
BK: Anarchy is the absence of government coercion. It implies nothing about one’s religious or social views; indeed, the most convincing anarchists have been Christians: Dorothy Day, Tolstoy. I prefer to let people, working voluntarily and in small groups with their neighbors, tend to their own affairs, without the state and its credentialed experts bossing ‘em around.

I call myself a front-porch anarchist (when I’m not calling myself a Jeffersonian, a localist, a decentralist, a small-town populist, an Upstate regionalist). I’ll also happily answer to reactionary radical. That is, I cherish the old principles of ‘76. Liberty. Rural life. Peace. Small-scale community. The flag of the coiled rattlesnake.

An isolationist is simply one who wishes the U.S. government to refrain from military involvement abroad. I never could figure out why this is an epithet. Why are isolationists, who oppose killing foreigners, considered xenophobes, while those who favor killing foreigners are humanitarians?

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