Lawrence Auster

Photograph of American author Lawrence Auster.

Lawrence Auster (January 26, 1949 – March 29, 2013) was an American traditionalist conservative blogger and essayist. He was best known within traditionalist conservative circles for his writings on immigration and multiculturalism.

Personal life

Auster grew up in New Jersey. He attended Columbia University for two years, later finishing a B.A. in English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He died in West Chester, Pennsylvania, first staying at the home of a family friend in Pennsylvania and soon after going into hospice care.^[1] He was not, as has been claimed, a lawyer.^[2]

Auster was never married.^[3] He was a cousin of the novelist Paul Auster.^[4]

Born Jewish, Auster converted to Christianity as an adult and became a member of the Episcopal Church, a church he said he preferred "in the historical rather than the present tense", because the Church's ordination of openly gay men means "it has ceased being a Christian church".^[5] Auster died of pancreatic cancer in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 29, 2013. Just prior to his death, he was received into the Catholic Church.^[1]

Writings

Auster was the author of several works on immigration and multiculturalism, most notably The Path to National Suicide, originally published by the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF) in 1990. In Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, Peter Brimelow refers to Path as "perhaps the most remarkable literary product of the Restrictionist underground, a work which I think will one day be seen as a political pamphlet to rank with Tom Paine's Common Sense."^[6] Professor Gabriel Chin has called Auster "the unsung godfather of the restrictionist movement".^[7]

In The Path to National Suicide, Auster asserted there was a need for greater public debate about U.S. immigration policy and the "orthodoxy" that upheld it. He wrote:

The very manner in which the [immigration] issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces.^[8]

Auster’s work appeared in numerous publications, including National Review, FrontPage Magazine, Human Events, WorldNetDaily and The Social Contract.

View from the Right

Auster hosted a daily traditionalist blog, View from the Right (VFR).^[9] He took over the editorship of the blog from writer and independent scholar James Kalb. Auster published his final post on March 24, 2013.

Political views

Auster was a strong conservative who primarily identified as a "traditionalist" who opposed the liberalism of modern Western society. His interests were primarily social policy, particularly the politics of gender, sex, religion, sexuality, culture, patriotism, and identity. He was also a frequent commentator on day-to-day American politics. Auster was not shy about describing himself profoundly alienated from modern America, and he considered most institutions of American society, including both political parties, to be corrupted by liberal philosophy.

Auster wrote, "I have always called myself a racialist, which to me means two things. First, as a general proposition, I think that race matters in all kinds of ways. Second, I care about the white race. It is the source of and is inseparable from everything we are, everything we have, and everything our civilization has achieved."^[10] However, he chose not to self-identify as a white nationalist,^[11] and, as a tactical matter, accepted the conventional definition of racism as having "the connotation of the morally bad, of oppression and hatred."^[12]

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) implied that Auster was a racist because he spoke at an American Renaissance conference, delivering a speech entitled "Multiculturalism and the War Against White America."^[13][14] He was one of ten speakers to address the magazine's first conference in 1994, but did not speak there afterward. He criticized Jared Taylor for tolerating the former Klansman David Duke and Stormfront moderator Jamie Kelso, who attended the conference and asked questions. Auster still supported Taylor's personal views as well as those of the late Samuel T. Francis, another frequent speaker for the conferences. Robert Locke, a friend of Auster and fellow columnist at FrontPage Magazine, defended Auster against the charges of the SPLC.^[15]

Auster was an occasional contributor to FrontPage Magazine until 2007 when the publication cut its ties with Auster over a controversial article he wrote in which he complained that "[e]ach story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern" and that "white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists."^[16][17] Responding to his exclusion from FrontPage Magazine, Auster claimed that editor David Horowitz had "behaved in the most outrageously politically correct manner I’ve ever seen in my life."^[18]

Auster's writing and commentary has been greatly influential among the Anglophone "dissident right." It has even been noticed as far as Australia, where one traditionalist group wrote at his death: "he refused to buckle to the progressive trends of postmodern anti-society; but never fell into the dark and nebulous quagmire of bitterness and hate. May his soul rest in peace and may we follow in his example."^[19] VDARE writer Henry McCulloch wrote that Auster was "at the forefront in seeing and speaking about the dangers America and the rest of the West face from uncontrolled immigration, rampant diversity-worship, Political Correctness, and the encroachments of Islam via immigration and weak Western leadership."^[1]

References

External links

• Auster's blog
• Unofficial web page on the works of Lawrence Auster
• Lawrence Auster's FrontPageMag archive
• Lawrence "Larry" Auster at Find a Grave
• “Remembering Lawrence Auster, After A Year” by Nicholas Stix, March 29, 2014, VDARE.com