An Introduction to A Half-Mad Recluse
What is this blog about?
Politics has always been my favorite topic. While it took me some time to become interested in discussions about certain policy issues, primarily due to inadequate knowledge on specific issues, I have always been fascinated by the political processes and their history. The backroom bargaining to get a bill passed, the reasons why a particular person was chosen for a position, the question of who would be the best leader - all of these questions have long intrigued me. During that time, I also developed a liking for writing about the issues that interest me.
"A Half-Mad Recluse" represents a synthesis of these very elements and serves as a forum for me to engage with issues that interest me. Central to this project will be the exploration of political events, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as policies ranging from technology and military policy to family policy concerns and beyond. In addition, the platform will include analysis of elections but also articles in areas of culture and philosophy. In short, it will be a general platform for all my politically-esque interests.
It may seem strange that as a German I focus on U.S. and U.K. politics, but so many conservative figures from the U.S. and U.K. have influenced my thinking, so naturally I developed a great interest in politics in those countries.
The first book by a conservative I read at age 17 was Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative. Relatively quickly I discovered other Americans like Justice Antonin Scalia, Pat Buchanan, Thomas Sowell, and Russell Kirk, as well as Britons like Roger Scruton and G. K. Chesterton, who expressed many of the sentiments I was beginning to form about politics and life.
Even with contemporary writers, I am often indebted to Americans like Patrick Deneen, Michael Lind, Wendell Berry, and Oren Cass, to name a few. This is also true of British "groups" such as the New Social Covenant Unit initiated by Miriam Cates MP and Danny Kruger MP, the Cornerstone Group/Common Sense Group, and to some extent even Blue Labour.
In search of a name
While searching for a name for this project, I re-read Roger Scruton's influential 2003 article describing why he became conservative. Drawing on his experience in Paris during the May 1968 uprisings and his exposure to the writings of Edmund Burke, among others, he found that "the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality."
In that worthwhile article, he also details the state of academic conservative philosophy in the 1970s. Within this context, he argues that while it was widespread in America through the likes of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and others, in the UK it was more akin to the "preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses".
He who is a conservative in today's world, not obsessed with free-market liberalism and its consequent radical individualism, but committed by the Burkean social contract to preserving what he inherited from our forefathers and seeing the common good as a guiding political principle, will surely be seen not only as "half-mad," but probably even as completely "mad," even by those who are considered political allies. The feeling of being alone with one's views arises in quite a few people, which is why I like the image of the recluse, who may not live a geographically secluded life, but certainly feels politically isolated and secluded.
This project is probably as much an attempt to articulate my opinions on policy positions as it is an attempt to engage with people in order to discuss these ideas, to lose the sense of being politically reclusive.