The North American High Tory Tradition (2016) – A Review

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

But, you might ask, “Why write a book about High Toryism? In a time when liberalism and American republicanism so permeate every inch and corner of life, surely the concept and notion of High Toryism is fading away – is passé?” Such questions only serve to highlight the urgency of Dart’s task. He has recognized, only too clearly, that if we allow the “Moloch” of liberalism to remain unchecked and unquestioned, we will lose an important part of ourselves as Canadians at cultural, political and spiritual levels. Professor Dart has stated the matter succinctly: “In one sense there is a counter to cultural amnesia in my work. I’m putting the historical pieces of the drama back together again.” This statement highlights, in a graphic way, the importance of Dart’s latest book within the cannon of Canadian political thought. Continue reading →

High Toryism Can Make Britain Great Again

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

… For me, as a strong Anglophile, the answer is clear: it is in the tradition of communitarian civic conservatism—High Toryism. In 1931 T. S. Eliot wrote in The Criterion, “The only hope [for Britain] is a Toryism which, though not necessarily distinct for parliamentary purposes, should refuse to identify itself philosophically with that ‘Conservatism’ which has been overrun first by deserters from Whiggism and later by businessmen.” … Continue reading →

Grant Society on The North American High Tory Tradition

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

Review: The North American High Tory Tradition (2016), September 26, 2016. By Daniel Velarde

What can the Tory tradition mean for us today, in the age of multinationals and American hegemony, and half a century after we were taught “the impossibility of Canada in the modern age?” What would a 21st-century Tory philosophy look like, and what would be its historically new role or vocation? “Love,” it was written, “is inseparable from memory, which seeks to preserve what must pass away,” and it is to memory that Ron Dart turns in The North American High Tory Tradition Continue reading →

Neo-Reaction on North American High Toryism

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

Likewise, the growth of the global liberal anti-order has come from America, a child of the English civilization. If broader Western civilization can hope to achieve its Restoration without dividing against itself, then it is to the heart of America itself that the Restoration must reach. And for this it is necessary that we remember the Anglo-Tory faith. If a Restoration in the Anglosphere is possible, then it will be by tapping into currents of thought which preserved and guided us before the rise and reign of liberalism. Continue reading →

A Southern View: Ecology and Tradition

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

Toryism – and which is to be distinguished from modern “conservatism” which has absorbed the spirit of Modernity from economically-driven and hyper-individualistic Classical Liberalism – is a holistic, organic and religious worldview which developed over centuries and offers much to us today … As members of an organic nation with a holistic worldview we Southern nationalists hold deep respect for the wondrous natural world around us. Continue reading →

Book Launch: The North American High Tory Tradition

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

George Grant (1918–1988), the most influential Tory intellectual of the 20th century, warned in “Lament for a Nation” of the collision course for the two different ‘North Americas’ embodied in the Dominion of the North and the Republic to its South. Is the disappearance of the Tory alternative an inevitable fate to our future as ‘North Americans’? In The North American High Tory Tradition, Ron Dart shines light upon the classical lineage, deep wisdom and enduring nature of the High Tory tradition as it has been planted and grown in the soil of North America, and in doing so reveals how Canada may serve as a north star to lead North Americans to a different destiny than that planned for them by the American revolutionaries of 1776. Continue reading →

Barry Spurr on T. S. Eliot and Renewal of the West

Posted on July 30, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

In his most sweeping survey of the rise and fall of civilisations, in The Waste Land, Eliot interprets the decline of the West in the twentieth century in terms of a cyclic sequence of cultural development and concentration, and then decline and destruction, dating from antiquity to modernity … This fragmentation of a civilisation required new voices and modes of expression in literature (as in the other arts) to give embodiment to the new world that was so brutally coming into being. Continue reading →

Why Liberalism and Socialism are Twin Evils

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

Place your country in the hands of bankers and merchants (plutocrats) and those only concerned with putting you on a treadmill for profits will rip the soul out of you and your people. (Just as we’ve always had the poor with us, we have always had capitalism too and this has been an engine of progress in many respects; but now we have vulgar, ruthless ungentlemanly capitalism.) In this respect Marx has a point, but communism, like liberalism, is not the answer. The old ways were balanced, socially and politically, and were the best. Continue reading →

The Reversal of Liberalism and Southern Religion

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

Thomas Jefferson was part of a “transient phase” among “certain Southern educational centers and among elements of the Southern upper class” who were influenced by the French Revolution and came to embrace “much religious skepticism.” This skepticism was “confined while it lasted to small cultivated groups, and it disappeared so completely in the antebellum years that it can be properly ignored in any account of the molding of the Confederate South.” Continue reading →

History, Blood and a Revived Anglosphere

Posted on July 9, 2016 by Mitre and Crown

Blood, history, culture: all these hallmarks of a nation’s conservatism were sacrificed at the altar of David Cameron’s One Europe liberalism. Now Britain is bidding goodbye, adieu, auf wiedersehen, and vaarwel to the European Union and David Cameron … So, if Britain can forgive America her slights, and if Australia can forgive Britain hers … A return to the Anglosphere, for all of us, would mean a cultural and political independence only possible within the framework of true family bonds. Continue reading →