Yglesias says: The crux of the matter is that while truly conservative foreign policy thought has a long history of wrongness in the United States it’s rarely genuinely held sway on the big issues. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan all at key moments broke with elements of their conservative base to preserve containment, to initiate détente, to continue with the bilateral … [Read More]

Richard hits on an important point when he writes: This is certainly true, but I think that Luttwak might be giving a bit too much credit to the Obamaniacs (not the undeceived Obamacons, like myself).  They don’t so much confuse the potential reactions of East Africans with Muslims to an Obama presidency as conflate most all Third World people into one … [Read More]

Journalists covering the primaries in January characterized Bill Clinton’s “fairy tale” remark as “injecting” race in to the campaign, as if this was an illicit or improper development. This mistakenly implies that race was not already an aspect of the campaign—how could it not be?—or that it should not be part of the discussion. ~John Hartigan Actually, there’s a much bigger … [Read More]

I thank Dr. Gottfried for his response, and I appreciate the point that he and several commenters have made.  From the reaction to the last post, I see that I must not have been sufficiently clear about what I meant.  National consciousness did exist prior to the rise of nation-states, and indeed was the basis for the cultivation of nationalist feeling … [Read More]

In a very good column on Pope Benedict’s visit and the clashing theologies of the Pope and the President, Scott Richert made an important series of points related to the earlier patriotism/nationalism debate we were having here: “On occasion, here and elsewhere, I have described President Bush as a nationalist, and I’m almost always taken to task immediately by those who … [Read More]

As the Lincoln-basher in residence, I suppose I should say a few things about Grant Havers’ article on the subject.  Mr. Havers states at the beginning of his article: In the conservative house divided, almost everyone agrees that the president was the prophet of democratic imperialism and that his war with the South was a mere dress rehearsal for global crusades … [Read More]

Almost two weeks, Dr. Gottfried wrote a helpful clarification of his earlier article about paleoconservatism, elaborating on some of the points I and others had challenged.  After reading the more recent item, I agree that there is greater detachment from the GOP among the “post-paleos,” though the nostalgia for the old days of Reagan or earlier decades is today not terribly … [Read More]

Speaking of Romantics, Richard’s rejection of the definitions of “the West” offered by Robert Spencer and Jim Pinkerton reminds me of one of the great original Romantics, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and his essay that was one of the more important 19th century exercises in idealizing medieval Europe.  Never published in his lifetime, partly because its overt religiosity and medievalism embarrassed … [Read More]

My original plan for this post was to address the question of what “hubristic patriotism” is, but I will take a detour and address some of Dan’s points from his most recent post.  There is clearly a tension between Dan’s view that any American nationalist will want to preserve the ethnocultural heritage of the Anglo-American and European past and the claim … [Read More]

Dan has written a strong case against the criticisms of nationalism that I and others have leveled in recent weeks, and I have already responded to some of his points elsewhere, but in this post I want to address the criticisms of Orwell’s overly broad definition of nationalism.  Then in the next post I will consider this idea of “hubristic patriotism” … [Read More]