I guess where I’m coming from is that this very sentiment is a product of having the place and time to favor of such contemplation. For many peoples, particularly in smaller communities outside the auspices of the Mega-State, one sees and interacts directly with the enemy, such as what seems to be taking place in Sudan and Palestine presently. It is not simply a matter of scapegoating, but of a real, identifiable enemy. It has to do with direct unmitigated dispossession through violence. Again, we have to clarify to some extent what we mean by ‘dispossession.’ I also tend to think that latching onto “the nearest and most convenient” scapegoats is far easier within the Mega-State, where men dissolve into “humanity” than in smaller communities where men are forced by necessity to interact with one another, though I say this fully aware the tendency to scapegoat will never disappear from the interactions between men.

I am curious as to what standards we are to use in becoming “certain that [our] anger is justly and correctly directed.” As far as I can tell there are a multitude of values presently alive in our world. How are we to be “certain?” What constitutes just and “correctly directed” anger?

What exactly is meant by “righteous anger?” People usually seem just plain angry when they are dispossessed and their ways of life radically disrupted and/or destroyed. Whether or not it is “righteous” seems of secondary importance, if important at all to them and is, at best, a matter of contemplation either from outside the event of dispossession or subsequent to it. Even then, contemplation is rarely, if ever, removed from the event.

Localist movements, at this place and time in the US, have somewhat more free time to assess whether or not their brands of localism are “righteous” and “morally just.” However, I have no reason to believe our circumstances, and hence, our perspectives, are universally shared or applicable. I don’t see dispossession as ultimately being a matter of contemplating abstractions, such as the intricacies of morality, but consist of the consequences of force and violence perpetrated by one or more parties onto another.

If we have time to contemplate “dispossession,” are we really dispossessed? In other words, what are the parameters of dispossession? Again, I think many of the world’s angry victims of dispossession would make a good case that we are not dispossessed if we have time for such contemplation. I’m not saying they are necessarily correct, only that the parameters of dispossession are ambiguous.

“We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked … We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”

What I actually said was that dispossession puts one in a morally precarious position wherein one becomes vulnerable to potentially derailing motives. This does not forestall the possibility of righteous anger, it just suggests caution, careful assessment, and proper grounding.

“Racism” is largely nothing but the Christian charge of “heretic” in modern drag, as “multiculturalism” is nothing but the Christian ideal of being a “brother’s keeper” in the same drag. So-called “multiculturalism” as well as other forms of State sanctioned monist quests, are simply the logical conclusion of incoherent, and often contradictory, Christian appeals to transcendent universalism.

I’m certain I will catch flak for my view, but, I can’t but disagree with many on this forum that Christianity has much to offer various localisms, given its universalist, monist, transcendent agenda combined with its missionary practices. In my opinion, it has ultimately done more to slay differences and cultures than any other ideal, whether in its actual form as one of the true denominations, or in its thinly disguised appearance as “(Post)Modernism.” This brings me to some problems I have with Mr. Stegall’s post.

Stegall writes: “There is a problem with localism, but it is not the Jews, it is dispossession. That is, the root cause of localist fervor of all sorts, at least in its form of political and social breakout, is the fact that people are being or have been dispossessed—the things they love have been forcefully taken from them. This is a morally precarious place to be.It creates all kinds of unstable and potentially derailing motivations—anger, alienation, illegitimacy of authority, desperation, nostalgia, resignation to servitude, victimization, etc. How a particular localist movement handles the problem of dispossession will be crucial to its character and ultimate success or failure. ”

Herein lies the assumption that we can transcend our embodied, and em-placed, circumstances. “Dispossession” is taken to be an ideal, a principle, a “first cause” of what Stegall links to what he sees as unsavory motivations. What is forgotten here, it seems, is that we do not transcend our embodiment and such dispossession is never simply a principle but an action meted out by one group of men to another. In other words, actual dispossession is not an abstraction or a principle, but has the face of “them-who-did-this-to-us.” Anger, alienation, etc., may be “lazy and pathetic” only if artificially severed from the “love” Stegall himself eulogizes. This severance, however, is not how we tend to experience, and express, our embodied lives as there are others who act. We are always a mixture, an interweaving, of a multitude of things, including motivations, that simply cannot be taken in isolation. “Love” is often times interwoven with the very same “motivations” Stegall denigrates. For example, one can hate the rapist and/or murderer of the child we love so dearly. People most often express such an interweaving of motivations.

As to charges of “racism,” we often forget that this term is largely based in a similar type of subjective, self-serving, hermeneutic that justified Christian accusations of “heresy” in days of yore. These accusations were nearly always motivated by such “unsavory” urges as the ones already mentioned, as well as greed, power-lust, and the urge to dispossess others of their wealth and land. Charges of “racism” today are largely undefined, based in incoherent, and often times contradictory, ideological emotionalism which seeks to eradicate any other perspective. As such, it is based in the urges to dispossess and victimize those who dissent or diverge in the slightest. Given that we are embodied, and em-placed beings, we will always hold differing perspectives, and there will always exist divergence and dissent. The will to eradicate is inherently self-destructive.

The charge of “racism” seems most often shouted by those who hold the “derailing motivations” themselves (i.e. so-called “minorities”) or those wealthy enough who could afford a State-sanctioned “education,” (those inspired by neo-Christian ideals of “collective guilt”), who seem most often live in neighborhoods segregated by class, rather than strictly along ethnic lines, and will be only slightly effected if at all by the changes they seek to impose on those less fortunate. Us working class folk are left to compete for the morsels from the latter’s table, while they dictate to us how the game will be played through rules such as “affirmative action” by which we are to flagellate ourselves with guilt for either being “privileged” or “ignorant/uneducated.” Which is it?

Simply because I don’t wholly embrace others, it doesn’t follow that I hate them, or wish to eradicate them. Far from it. They help in defining what and who I am. Rather, I think those who hold to monist theories and theologies have proven themselves far more incapable of accepting different ways of life than myself and, unfortunately, they tend to be the types with enough free time to theorize and powerful enough to impose their theories, through conversion and coercion, upon those eking out the small parameters of their “place,” “limits,” and “liberty(?).”

You know Pittsburgh. It was mentioned time and again in “I’ll Take My Stand” as a wretched force of dehumanization. People leaving their farms for mines and mills! What of the barn dance and the cow milking?! Obviously, Pittsburgh was the home of the poor, pathetic victims of industrialization. In other words, it was the home of the dispossesed. It was,in fact, the poster community for such lamentable souls.

Of course, we are all now nostalgic for that same Pittsburgh. The place where guys could graduate from high school and make $28 an hour in the mills and support a family of nine on a high school education. The home (famous or infamous) of the 13-week vacation.

Relatedly, I propose reading Tom Wolfe’s astounding 1965 Esquire article, “Junior Johnson is the Last American Hero.” It details how NASCAR was SIMULTANEOUSLY an amberfication of Southern Culture and a SMASHING of same.

That is, this whole dispossesion thing seems useful but deeply flawed in the context of real world examples. Look at Steeler Nation, in which scads of non-union, non-blue-collar people masquerade as steel workers. A city of professors and doctors that masquerades as factory workers every Sunday. These are people who have BECOME their dispossesion.

So does that suck? Or should residents of Pittsburgh be nostalgic for “their” history as Seneca Indians instead? Or their history as miners? Glass workers?

You point is precisely the right one, if perhaps not applied perfectly (I used to live in Chicago and racial politics are still sadly important in that town). The point of Madison’s “extended republic” is that the tyrannous majorities will be unable, for various reasons, to bring their schemes of oppression into reality. In the extended republic there is tremendous diversity (Madison mostly means economic diversity, not the hippy-dippy-hug-a-bunny diversity of our time), which means there is no majority (at least not a discrete and permananet one) to oppress a minority.

It should go without saying that Madison’s extended commercial republic has its own problems.