I was listening to a youtube clip of (I think) Mike Enoch and Dr Narcan of The Right Stuff, a bit too carny for my tastes but there was an amusing moment where they discussed some paleocon/civic nationalist type, someone like Tucker Carlson, who was still clinging to the hope of rational discourse with the Left; one of the two said something like: “someone should just put a gun to the Left’s head, I understand he can’t do it, because he’s a conservative. He should ask me, I’m a fascist, I’ll do it.”

I still find such honesty a little shocking, regardless of my degree of agreement or disagreement (but then I live in Germany, a country where you can go to prison for speculating that maybe only 5.5 million were in the hall of cost). When I saw this photo of Roger Scruton, I thought, This is a man who wouldn’t put a gun to anyone’s head.

He can and often is forceful and critical, doesn’t strike me as conflict avoidant or easily rattled, but like most people he was formed by the era of his youth – he is an early-stage boomer (born 1944) who grew up in a time of low immigration, relative social cohesion, and so he has a gentle, open character, a very English tolerance for individual difference, also note his rumpled attire and face. It’s a nature largely incomprehensible to the German/French elites, who tend to the totalitarian & perfectionist & utopian. That disordered right trouser leg is why e.g. Germans think the English are eccentric; when Germans try for spezzatura or eccentricity it just comes across as, well, trying. The whole point of the old English style – a largely bygone characteristic – is to rub up against the grain of obdurate life, and spoil your perfection. It is the culture of the Common Law we had before the EU, of genuine (not enforced & alien) diversity within a genetic group, of a million unplanned & fortuitous events, of accident and humanity, exemplified in Scruton’s right trouser leg, in the legendary origin of The Order of the Garter:

Various legends account for the origin of the Order. The most popular involves the Countess of Salisbury, whose garter is said to have slipped from her leg while she was dancing at a court ball at Calais. When the surrounding  courtiers sniggered, the king picked it up and returned it to her, exclaiming, “Honi soit qui mal y pense!” (“Shame on him who thinks ill of it!”), the phrase that has become the motto of the Order.

Reminiscent also, as Wikipedia notes, of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, one of the quintessential, strange poems of the old, now largely destroyed England. That one of the highest orders in the land seems to have originated in one of these

slipping down a woman’s leg and then being adopted as a mark of status by the various toffs (who at that point were also trained in combat and tended to be routinely murderous) is typically English; at least England as it was before it was systematically destroyed by globohomo and mass immigration.

Perhaps in some distant, post-Race-War future, a new and better order of knighthood will emerge, in which one’s right trouser leg is slightly rolled up; the right, not the left, to distinguish one from the Masons.