Herr Doktor Gottfried,

You know, as well as anyone else, there just isn’t a “tradition” of conservatism in the United States of America.  The “Taft Republicans” were and still are an extreme fringe of American society, a society that was built upon The Revolution [against Tradition].

The USofA will NEVER be Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, it will never even be Konrad Adenauer led West Germany.  All the USofA can ever hope to be is a fountain of continuous Revolution, and those of us that oppose The Revolution must accept our lack of power within it.

Mr. Gottfried,
You’re absolutely right. The Democrats are answerable to the same forces, interests and lobbies as the Bush Administration and the Republicans, and they are bound and determined to keep the blood-drenched obscenity of the Iraq War bucketing along until hell freezes over - the American people, and their own withered souls, be damned. And the degradation of domestic civil liberties, the “Sovietization” of academia and the media, and the reclassification of Americans from “citizenry” to “peasantry” – all will continue under the Democrats, just as it does under the Republicans. The 2006 election taught us that: Abandon hope all ye who linger here.
Now… seriously… how do we turn this around?

<<...how do we turn this around?>>

Perhaps we should draft Carl A Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus.  Carl Anderson probably has enough connections with the “neo-conservatives” that populate Washington City to be elected or appointed to some high office that can then be catapulted to the presidency.  Even though I have no real faith in his conservatism (from my experience of being a KofC, they fly scarily close to the heresy of Americanism), I do believe he could be more easily influenced by the emerging strong politically and socially conservative faction in the Church, a faction that is in direct confrontation with the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council.

...just an idea I wanted to throw out there.

Paul,
The situation may not be hopeless. Neoconservatives’ political power is based on Christian conservatives’ votes.  To get the neocons out of power, you have to get the Christian voters to realize they should vote somebody else.  This is doable—and not only doable, but easy—because Neoconservatives’ warmongering behavior is totally against Christ’s teaching of humility, loving your enemies, not revenging wrongs and praying for those who persecute you.  Focusing the debate on this contrast produces an argument that should be very effective, because conservative “Christians” will find the criticism impossible to refute.

<<Christian conservatives>>

Herra Konkola,

Unfortunately, here in America, the “Christians” that call themselves, and are called by others, “conservatives” are, in reality, neither.

If you mention “Christ’s teaching of humility, loving your enemies, not revenging wrongs and praying for those who persecute you”, these so-called “conservative Christians” will attack you for distorting their religion.  Their religion is not “Christianity” as is it is known throughout Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist Europe.  Christianity in America is a religion of deformed “self-help”, with little mention of Jesus, the Beatitudes, Resurrection, Salvation, etc.

Are you familiar with John Hagee?  If not, please make yourself intimately familiar with him and his ilk.  It will teach you a lot of what it is to be a so-called “Christian conservative” in America.

**As a side not, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I was discussing with a barmaid the inability to buy alcohol on Sundays at any of our localities here in East Alabama.  She lamented that the “conservatives” would never allow alcohol to be sold on Sundays.  You see, in America, not allowing Sunday alcohol sales is considered “conservative”.  THAT is the kind of [non]-thinking population and country we’re dealing with here.

Hoping to “convert” the “religious right” to sanity in foreign policy is a fantasy. 

They have digested the Koolaid and are hooked on it.

The neocons play them like a violin, tantalizing them with religious warfare like the crusade against “Islamo-Fascism” and the ultimate experience, the coming rapture during which, they will confront many of their neocon benefactors with a choice between two choices the neocons may find, well, bad and badder.

The GOP as presently constituted is better left to absorb the coming election debacle in store for them.  The nation will survive 4 years of Obama or, even Hillary. 

Sad to say but our rights will be eroded at a slower pace under either of the Dems than McCain and the Pubs.

Out of the ashes of defeat paleo/libertarian/conservatism will have its best chance since 1952 for restoration.

Carl Anderson? I have met the Worthy Supreme Knight a number of times and find him and his wife quite nice people people and have heard him speak and read his work but I wouldn’t wish the mess we are in on him. I have also heard some recent Vice Supreme Masters of of Fourth Degree that make John McCain sound sane. But there is a difference between the K of C as a whole and the ramblings of foolish old militarists. The Knights are an admirable Catholic family fraternal insurance organization that does a lot of good today and has done much in the past to battle for the rights of citizens against the tyranny and bigotry of the state. Especially regarding the rights of Catholics to educate our children which goes back even before the Knights to the days of Archbishop John Hughes of New York. Indeed the Knights were founded almost 151 years ago now to protect Catholic families from the state. In those days Catholics couldn’t get life insurance because the only jobs we could get were the most dangerous, especially Policemen and Firemen.

Ester is on the loose, and the bitch
is in heat.

KARI KONKOLA BELIEVES THE CHRISTIAN ZIONIST RIGHT CAN BE REFORMED.  WHAT PLANET ARE YOU LIVING ON!  THE RAPTURISTS ARE NOT RATIONAL AND CANNOT BE PERSUADED BY REASONED DEBATE.  LET US BE FRANK.  A NOT INSIGNIFICANT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY (THE NATURAL CONSTITUENCY OF TRADITIONAL CONSERVATISM) ARE RADICALS.  THEY HAVE PERVERTED CHRISTIANITY INTO A ZIONIST FUNDAMENTALIST MOVEMENT THAT DEMONIZES ARAB/MUSLIMS AS SUBHUMAN AND ADVOCATES ETHNICALLY CLEANSING THE PALESTINIANS (MANY OF WHOM ARE CHRISTIAN) FOR THE BENEFIT OF A GREATER ISRAEL.

It may indeed to difficult to persuade Protestant Republicans that the politics of the “chosen people” (neocon style) has led to disaster, especially since chosenness is part of their faith tradition (since Winthrop), and one reinforced by the vacuous rhetoric of McCain and Obama on America’s “global mission.” Chosenness without God has become more dangerous than anything the Puritans imagined! 

One ray of hope:  The American students whom I teach at a Christian university (in Canada) are beginning to take Ron Paul more seriously (though perhaps too little too late.) If Paul stays in the GOP and continues to challenge neocons on their own ground, he may just turn more young Protestant American rightists from embracing either war party.

I would be happy to know which reputable historian
considers the Tsar to have stood in opposition to the
pogroms. The most that has been said in extenuation
of his role by responsible Russian nationalist
historians like Vernadsky is that Nicholas II did
little to stop the pogroms during his reign. In any
case I was not casting aspersions on this ruler but
only indicating what neoconservatives are likely
to believe about anti-Jewish persecution in
pre-revolutionary Russia. I was also in my last
sentence putting the pogroms in their time period,
which was during the tsarist regime. For the record,
I do not dislike the Russians and in fact wish them
well in their efforts to survive neocon imperialism.

Andrew,
Thanks for your Finnish greeting.  Where did you learn it?

You, dbriz and johnt may be overly pessimistic about Christians’ willingness to listen to arguments.  The pessimism is correct in the sense that secular reasoning does not have much effect, but Christians are very interested in theology-based arguments.  An example of this openness is that a leading conservative Evangelical journal has already published my argument about humility having been one of the most important virtues in modern Western Christianity.

http://www.tiu.edu/divinity/trinityjournal/samplearticles

As to the observation that modern Christians have lost humility, look at my archive here at TakiMag.  The moral of the story here seems to be that religions can change massively, even when they emphatically say--and honestly believe--that they are maintaining their original traditions.

The idea of meeting religion with religion brings to mind a thought:  I know very little about Islam, but to my knowledge they do have humility.  This raises intriguing questions:  1) what does modern Islam understand by humility?  2) How is a humble Moslem expected to behave?  3) How does the humility of Islam differ from the humility of 17th-century England described in the article?  (I expect the two humilities to be very different.) If anybody who knows Islam reads this, please be so kind as to provide us with details.

I accept the reality that the “K” Club + “L” are idiots!!

“All the USofA can ever hope to be is a fountain of continuous Revolution ... “

Once again Andrew Capp 1) insinuates that the true soul of America is Trotskyite Marxism i.e. permanent revolution and 2) jerks the thread topic off into a Catholic identity rant.

Capp and “partner” Sid Cundiff are leftist agitators. Their mission here is to defend Marxism and divide & conquer any emerging cohesive rightwing identity.

They stoke what little Catholic-Protestant friction is present in America the same way an Israel-hater would salt an Israel blog with comments designed to inflame Ashkenazi-Sephardi frictions.

Divide & conquer, divide & conquer, divide & conquer.

Ask yourself, dear reader, if you ever feel anything other than subverted, lectured, chastized, belittled, and led astray after reading the comments of Commissars Capp-Cundiff.

“Next to the supposedly warlike, anti-Semitic Germans, the neocons may hate the Russians more than they do the other continental European peoples. (Perhaps it is memories of tsarist pogroms that fuel this aversion.)”

The Neocons are running out of cultures and peoples they
DON’T hate.

Isn’t that the essence of Neconservatism? The culture
of critique will find an enemy under every stone, and
always has. That seems to be its nature.
No wonder America is so despised since the Neocons
ascended into the mainstream.
And it’s only going to get worse until they’re driven
to the shores of Israel, from where they can howl
gigantic curses at the world.
I don’t know if the problem is the Neocons, or if it is the people who listen to them.

Thanks, Dr. Gottfried, for continuing to
dissect neoconservative behavior.  If nothing else, your words help the remnant know where NOT to place there hope.  I, for one, see no reason whatsoever to put our energies into competing with our enemies for political clout.  But I was reminded by NPR (of all organizations) of two facts about Benjamin Franklin.  First, he had hoped that we would place an image of Moses parting the Red Sea on our great seal.  Secondly, he wished for a caption reading “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”.  There must be a way to escape the oppression we now suffer from our government and culture.  Our founders did, as had the Israelites 4,000 years before.