Comment on the Belmont Club: » No Secret Place

Belmont Club » No Secret Place

There is an asymmetry between the Secret Clubs of conservative culture and those of the Left. For conservatives of a type the ideal is the Gentleman's Club, redolent of tobacco and whiskey and sure to welcome you with a good fire and deep carpets and dark leather chairs. That is a place not only of comfort but of trust and deep mutual respect. That follows from the conservative view of life that the most moral and the most efficient method for dealing with the world is one of honesty simplicity and reliability for the common as well as individual good. The purpose of power, or the potential for force, is to protect the property that is used to improve and nurture the better aspects of human nature. The ideal activity is agricultural as patient husbandry is considered a proper model for government that seeks to emulate the care that a beneficent but distant Providence has for all of Nature and Man's place in it.

For the Left none of that is true. The paradigm for the Socialist is the Bolshevik Cell or Jacobin Club. Those were places that cultivated deceit, manipulation and the enforced alteration of conditions through conspiracy. The ideal activity is industrial with Nature coerced into submission to a human will.

A Gentleman can have a Scotch after a long week and say "I take comfort in knowing the other team is even more screwed up than the idiots we are working for" and get only a smile and an offer of a lift home. For the Leftist words like that by some Lt Colonel or Major are a tool to destroy a General and bash History into obedience to their or, in their egoistic channeling of Rousseau, the General Will.