Joseph Scotchie - Writing on the Southern Front: Authentic Conservatism for Our Times

For traditionalists, the conservative ascendency of the 1980s turned out to be a major disappointment. With the triumph of multiculturalism and political correctness, liberalism seemed to move from strength to strength. Still, a stout number of southern conservative writers plunged forward, and their themes of populism, immigration, and cultural integrity are seeing a contemporary resurgence. Discussing a wide array of authors who worked in a variety of genres, Joseph Scotchie celebrates those unreconstructed champions who fought the culture wars of their times with a special learning and vigor. Also included in this collection are creative artists who kept the flame of literature alive, providing visions of possibilities that only that genre can provide.

Joseph Scotchie is the author or editor of eight books, including The Vision of Richard Weaver, Barbarians in the Saddle, The Paleoconservatives, and Revolt from the Heartland. His work has won awards from the New York State Press Association and the North Carolina Society of Historians. A graduate of both the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the City College of New York, Scotchie has worked for three decades as a journalist in the New York City area.

Published 2018

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In Writing on the Southern Front , Joseph Scotchie confirms in two ways the view of his fellow-Ashevillean Thomas Wolfe that you cant go home again. First, the author of this spacious anthology, who, among other things, celebrates his growing up years in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, cannot return to the Asheville of his youth. He is now living and working, with a family, as a journalist in New York City. But, equally relevant, the city he remembers and the past citizens of which he tries to save from oblivion have changed greatly since his youth and, in many cases, may no longer be recognizable.

Second, the southern traditions that Scotchie nostalgically evokes in this volume belong mostly to the past. Southern Agrarians, Confederate leaders, such as the Ashevillean Zebulon Vance, southern opponents of American involvement in foreign wars, and those figures of the American Old Right whom Scotchie knew are almost all gone. Thus there may be something of the necromancers art in his effort to call attention to figures whom the world of social media has totally ignored. Scotchie, like T. S. Eliot, is trying to shore up against the ruins memories and portraits that can still inspire us. Needless to say, he is not addressing American southerners in particular in these essays, for one could hardly imagine that these folks would resonate to Scotchies portraits more readily than other Americans of their generation. Scotchie has undertaken to salvage a part of the past that he thinks is worth saving, so that a future generation may rediscover it.

Moreover, he never gives the false impression that he is writing about figures whom he reveres as a totally neutral observer. Unlike many of todays journalists, who pretend to be above taking sides when in reality they are deeply partisan, he openly declares his values and sentiments. He sympathizes with the American Right that took form in the twentieth century, and specifically with the culturally conservative Agrarians and their followers, who were active until the end of the past century. Even more significantly, Scotchie does not claim to be on the winning side of history. He recognizes that what he admires about the American Right has absolutely nothing to do with its recent incarnations. Since the neoconservatives and establishment Republicans were allowed to occupy and reshape that movement, it looks less and less like anything that Scotchie (or this writer) would recognize as their political home. As his fans should know, Scotchie has written previous works on the American Old Right, which provide some indication of his general ideological inclinations. Among the most poignant essays in this anthology are those devoted to the now deceased advocate and theorist of right-wing populism Samuel T. Francis, and to one of Scotchies political heroes, Pat Buchanan.

But most of the essays in this anthology suggest the authors other bent, which is literary. In his writings on Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver, and M. E. Bradford, it is obvious that Scotchie delights in elegant literary style and memorable rhetoric. In his discussion of his southern subjects he writes quite gracefully, perhaps more so than when he is describing political movements and political personalities. I speak here as someone who has read Joe Scotchie mostly on the vicissitudes of the American Right. In the section of his anthology devoted to literary figures, he rises to the eloquence of those Agrarian men of letters whom he tries to keep alive for a future generation. By the way, I am delighted that a denizen of Bayside, New York, would exuberantly recount Lytles celebration of farm life in rural Tennessee, which we are told was, according to Lytle, bounteous, harmonious and organic. The same description would fit easily the Amish farming communities in my region of southeastern Pennsylvania.

The most surprising section of this collection for one who, like me, has read Scotchie mostly on political subjects, is A Republic of Letters, which includes tributes to various modern novelists. There we discover, among other things, the authors enthusiasm for the novels and ideals of someone whom he characterizes as the great American urban novelist, Saul Bellow. With the possible exceptions of Francis and Buchanan, it is hard to find anyone whom Scotchie holds in such high regard as this Chicago Jewish writer of epic fiction. Scotchie is impressed that Bellow could turn out streams of brilliantly crafted works for more than fifty years. Indeed, Bellows last novel, Ravelstein , based partly on the life of the renowned professor of political theory Allan Bloom, came out in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five. Scotchies favorite Bellow novel, however, may be his darkest, Mr. Sammlers Planet (1970), which recounts the experiences of Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor who observes both the decaying urban life and the disintegration of his own family as he travels around New York City. Scotchie notes that the author of this and other unforgettable novels befriended a multitude of struggling young writers and spent no less than sixty-five years in the classroom teaching the classics of the Western canon. One of the many merits of this collection is that its author never hides his genuine admiration for his subjects.