This is a popular book in our little corner of the web, and I took some time earlier this summer to get through it. Foseti wrote about it back in 2008.

You can pick it up for less than a buck in eBook at Amazon or for free from Archive.org.

What’s remarkable about it is that it will probably contradict a fair amount of what you already think that you know about the American revolution, while also bringing to your attention some of the context of English politics during the revolution which you probably would be unaware of unless you happen to be a specialist in this period. In particular, the exact counts of relative force levels between the colonists and the British surprised me. Fisher strongly alludes to the conclusion that the Americans couldn’t have won the war had General Howe actually prosecuted it to the fullest.

Fisher also provides some of the opposing perspective relative to the typical American tale about unfair taxation and duties providing the impetus for the revolution. What was a more significant factor was that the colonists had been flouting British regulation of trade for decades already. What the colonists revolted against was the actual enforcement of those laws. The colonists were eager to have the military protection from the British empire, but far less eager to comply with their obligations to finance it. This coincided with an explosion in popularity of classical liberal thought, most importantly influenced by the popularization of Locke.

American histories tend not to emphasize this. If you knew some details about all the British lollygagging in New York for much of the war, you might have gotten the sense that something was screwy, but seeing the relative force numbers in plain language makes it obvious that the American colonials were, more or less, allowed to win. Another major area of coverage is the social-justice-warrior behavior of the American patriot party. Essentially, the patriots were able to mobilize a highly ideological minority to suppress loyalist opinion and keep moderates on the sidelines:

But the mobs went on with their work in spite of [John] Adams’ protest. All through the Revolution the loyalists were roughly handled, banished, and their property confiscated. Even those who were neutral and living quietly were often ordered out of the country by county committees, because it was found that a prominent family which remained neutral deterred by their silent influence many who otherwise would have joined the rebel cause. Few loyalists dared write about politics in private letters, because all such letters were opened by the patriots. In many of them which have been preserved we find the statement that the writers would like to speak of public affairs but dare not. A mere chance of most innocent expression might bring on severe punishment or mob violence.

These mob techniques are not so different from today’s technologically-enabled mobs, except perhaps the old kind were more eager to use tar and feathers.

This is not, then, a new factor in American life, but instead is a founding tendency which we see periodically re-emerging throughout our history. It also meant the ruination of countless loyalists, who either lived on in poverty or otherwise had to flee back to the home country:

The disastrous effects of the rise of the lower orders of the people into power appeared everywhere, leaving its varied and peculiar characteristics in each community, but New England suffered least of all. In Virginia its work was destructive and complete, for all that made Virginia great, and produced her remarkable men, was her aristocracy of tobacco planters. This aristocracy forced on the Revolution with heroic enthusiasm against the will of the lower classes, little dreaming that they were forcing it on to their own destruction. But in 1780 the result was already so obvious that Chastellux, the French traveler, saw it with the utmost clearness, and in his book he prophesies Virginia’s gradual sinking into the insignificance which we have seen in our time.

When the British began to prosecute the war in earnest after the replacement of Howe in 1778 by General Clinton, it was essentially too late to prevent the entry of the French into the war and the eventual conclusion.

It’s short book, clearly-written, and well worth your time if you’re interested in learning a more balanced view of the American founding.

I’ve been remiss in not covering this short book sooner. “Review Bryce Book” sat on a to-do list, un-administered to, for some months, even though I bought it and read it the day that it came out. This extended essay is certainly worth your time, if only for the extended argument that he makes for a patriarchal social structure, in a more thorough, direct, and concise way than most people are willing to.

Here’s Bryce:

The willingness and ability to put off present consumption in order to invest in higher future production is a necessary component of civilization. What is consumed now cannot be available in the future. It is impossible to set more aside for present consumption and to have more set aside for the future. Worse, a society which consumes the stock of capital necessary to maintain the present levels of production must have lower levels of production in the future. Such is a toxic nihilism that dooms future generations, and many in my generation are seeing now how our parents and grandparents ate out our own future. “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! ‘was their morality. They were nihilists who treated their own genetic legacies as expendable in pursuit of their own pleasures.

And Laliberte later:

Support of a patriarchy is merely the contention that fathers ought to rule, and this because they would plan for the longer-run of society. Patriarchalism compared to feminism has low time-preference

…

Such a conclusion is the inescapable result of women trying to take on male roles and not taking on the noble female roles of wifely duties and motherhood.

And still later (on the conspiracy version of patriarchy vs. the observed history of it):

Whereas feminism explains the virtual entirety of all civilizations as being patriarchal as simple conspiratorial accident, the patriarchalist suggests that patriarchy is a key ingredient apart from which civilization fails.

This leads into the ‘feminist IQ shredder’ argument which you may or may not be familiar with already. To those of you not already familiar with it: feminism tends to discourage the smartest women from having large families, which leads to long term dysgenic impacts on populations. Because intelligence, beauty, and countless other factors have large genetic components, encouraging the childbearing half of the species to form their characters around high-strain education & labor in their most fertile years results in a rapid decrease in the quality of each ensuing generation of children.

Although some more bearing to the left might find this to be another instance of the he-man-woman-haters-club striking again, it’s really more of a call for encouragement  to a more “noble and important” calling.

The work also weaves in a number of Catholic arguments which may or may not be persuasive to you depending on whether or not you’re Catholic and what opinion of the church you happen to hold.

He also takes the time to address libertarianism:

Neoreaction has been called a libertarian heresy. The distinction is cladistic rather than morphological; that is to say, it is a heresy in the sense that it was begun from a libertarian attitude in response to the inadequacies of libertarianism, as explored above, though now it no longer possesses libertarian tenets [ED: Like the NAP.] It is, rather, a deep and principled conservatism wedded to the principles of trenchant and thoroughgoing social analysis.

The prime distinction that Bryce draws here (which I think is correct) is that, unlike libertarians, neoreactionaries don’t see the value in creating a dichotomy between the economy and the rest of society, or the values which lead to good economics and the values which lead to a sound social structure. So, while many libertarians will be happy to say live-and-let-live with regard to social issues, even though in reality that attitude tends to result in distinctly non-libertarian economic and political orders, we aim to think about things from a more cohesive perspective.

There’s more in this than I can cover here without block quoting everything. If you’re worried about a lot of technical language or density, there’s not much of that here. It’s fairly straightforward from what you can see from the table of contents — it covers a lot of ground over the course of its short length.

WHAT IS NEOREACTION?
By Bryce Laliberte
90 pp. Kindle Direct Publishing. $3