I had been a self-described classical liberal through high school and college. I was a big states’ rights proponent (already by some time in middle school I believed the South was justified in seceding from the United States on these grounds) and advocate of individual (‘negative’) rights, and while I often favored more authoritarian policies at the state and local levels, I was virtually indistinguishable from a libertarian when it came to federal matters. I thought the Constitution was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the radical Thomas Jefferson was my favorite founding father, Ron Paul was my favorite contemporary politician, you get the idea. I think the axiomatic quality of libertarianism appealed to my STEM-type brain: just follow these procedures, pretend humans are machines, and… profit!

During that time I did have a few beliefs that were somewhat more traditionalist compared to those of your typical classical liberal: for example, I was always against mass immigration for specifically cultural reasons, I didn’t really have any of the typical illusions regarding racial matters, I thought mass democracy was overrated, and I had always believed the American Revolution to be immoral (my parents raised me right in that regard), in spite of thinking that the system the founders set up in its wake was as close to perfection as you could get in this world. But I didn’t regard these things as incompatible with my classical liberal beliefs.

The first crack in the facade for me was the campaign for ‘gay marriage’ in the New York state legislature, which started in earnest in the spring of 2011. I had just moved very close to New York City and often visited the city, and this made things much more tangible for me. Unlike previous state passages of ‘gay marriage’, this campaign was supported by the state GOP. There seemed to be nothing within my classical liberal belief system that could be used to oppose such a thing, and a suspicion that my classical liberal principles inevitably led to hard modern leftism took root. I mean, this time things were being done by the book: it wasn’t as if the state Supreme Court was imposing its will on the populace, this was the actual elected representatives doing it. Thus, when it came to an actual concrete situation where the ‘conservative’ wing of the legislature was going to legalize something morally reprehensible, I realized that such a ‘neutral’ framework that implied there was no difference between ‘gay marriage’ and real marriage as long as the proper procedures were followed had to be wrong.

But my beliefs were very inchoate at that point. Had you asked me how classical liberalism led to modern leftism, or what should replace classical liberalism, I couldn’t have articulated much in the way of answers.

That was the state of things when I had my Damascus moment, by serendipitous accident. Around this time, I would occasionally google for a philosophy blog I had recently discovered (and which I still recommend). I had noticed that the first google hit was a response to that blog rather than the blog itself. I ignored it the first few times, but at some point my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to click on it, where I was taken to this post. So yes, I discovered Bonald’s Throne and Altar quite by accident (this was only a month or so after I had begun questioning classical liberalism). After reading that post, I saw some of the essays linked to on his sidebar, and I clicked on his “In Defense of Monarchy” essay, wondering how someone in the modern world could defend monarchy. Well, that essay all but convinced me on the spot, and my basic orientation switched almost literally overnight, although there were various classical liberal shibboleths that took some time for me fully to dispel.

The rest is pretty much history. ; ;Those were heady times for me, as one by one my liberal sacred cows fell by the wayside. ; I remember coming across a series Bonald did against journalism (concluding post ;here) and beginning it with some trepidation because freedom of the press was still a major sacred cow for me, but anticipating that by the time I finished the series, it was certain to be yet another sacred cow slaughtered.

From Bonald’s site, I quickly found other traditionalist sites, chief among them View from the Right, which became a daily reading habit for me until its author, Lawrence Auster, died in 2013. I was fortunate enough to have gotten to meet him several times in person and to correspond with him before his untimely demise.

Bonald gave me a positive vision of traditionalism. I still did not have a good grasp of modern liberalism, however, which just seemed like an incoherent morass of contradictions to me (why do modern liberals favor sexual ‘freedom’, but not economic ‘freedom’?). Things fell into place there after I read James Kalb’s Tyranny of Liberalism, which remains by far the most incisive and penetrating critique of liberalism I’ve come across. I had gotten to know Kalb personally through monthly Orthosphere meet-ups that he used to organize in Manhattan. Finally, like one untimely born, Zippy Catholic, which I did not discover until a couple years later, helped deepen my understanding of liberalism. (Sadly, Zippy also died unexpectedly in 2018). These four writers—Bonald, Lawrence Auster, Jim Kalb, and Zippy—I considered the ‘Big Four’ of traditionalist thought in the blogosphere.

Since then, my thought has continued to develop in a traditionalist direction, influenced by these authors and others (including long dead writers as well), and now I’ve finally started writing.