I have been waiting for years for a politician, who clearly states that he (or she) is looking for the votes of the responsible hard working American. That he does not seek the support of those, who are looking for a handout or special favors from their government. That he has compassion, but no compassion for those who feel they are entitled to their neighbors money and property, and that it is not up to him to provide them with the necessities of life. That any “public” help for those in need is help that has been given voluntarily by their productive neighbors, not by some benevolent “Fuehrer” in the White House.
Paul Gottfried is dead on with his assessment of the Democratic party hacks as the ones that are simply promising to rob the productive Americans and to share the loot with the parasites that vote for them. The Republican politicians of late (Ron Paul excepted) are drifting to that same MO, having recognized that the republic and responsible government are dead, so it is time to grab for themselves and their buddies whatever they can, before the whole system comes crashing down.
The only solution is one the founders built in when the American republic was started:
Severely limit the money and favors the federal government can hand out and limit the voting rights to those that have proven to be responsible citizens, i.e. those that are productive and can exist without the help of government.
Simply enforce the principle that nobody votes, who receives benefits out of the public treasury.

Don’t you understand that the republic is dead, that we have not been able, as Franklin put it, to “keep it,” and that the best we can hope for, now, from government, is benevolent despotism and a willingness to keep the peace? That’s why the Democrats, and NOT the Republicans, should rule in America: they understand the “good governance” of an efficient bureaucracy. And, if you really want to blame something for the end of democratic republicanism in Amerika, don’t blame the so-called “welfare state” (of which we have precious little, compared to the social democracies of Europe--which still ARE, in some sense, real democracies); instead, blame the “military industrial complex,” warned against by the last Republican President who actually WAS a “conservative"--Dwight Eisenhower.

The problem that the esteemed Paul Gottfried alludes to is a cultural problem---not a political problem.  It is the lack of virtue. There is no training of boys into manhood. Standing up for principles requires manliness and sadly, there is no manliness in today’s culture. 

What is the symbol of liberty?  of the American and French Reovlutions?  It’s a woman!  The symbol of modern liberty is feminine. We don’t live in a masculine culture.  Self-government requires masculinity--first.

It was the Doric Greeks, (the Spartans) that invented self-government and it went along with many years of male training in Virtue. Wiffle-waffling of practically all our politicos is sign of the effeminancy inherent in our culture. Furthermore, effeminancy and democracy go hand in hand.

Need to end female suffrage. Women don’t belong in the military, don’t belong in the voting booth and the Reps will never recognize that--and so they will always be loosers from the get-go.

Professor Gottfried might be interested to know that when I attempted to read this comment of his on a public-access computer, the net-nanny software forbade me to do so, on the grounds that its contents might be offensive to young people. Only now, on a different computer, have I been able to read it. If it had consisted of hard porn, I’m sure the software would have granted complete approval. As Orwell once wrote:

“Where’s the pink who would’ve thought it odd o’ me
To write ten thousand books in praise of sodomy?”

Well, the problem can be stated this way.

The Democrats do not hide their Platform because
they think that most people agree with it.

The Republicans try to hide it because they fear
that most people disagree with it.

Since the name of the game is getting elected you
can see why they do it.

The question is why people have developed this
strong dislike to Republican positions when just a
few years ago “liberal” was a curse word.

So, back to the drawing board....

Wheeler, ever the Benitoesque, is actually right – half right.  One group in our culture tries to downplay masculinity and celebrate hugging and nurturing males.  The result is the reaction – hyper-masculinity, the exaggeration of masculinity to its gross distortion.  Seen any gangster rap?  And the “white” version in the Stormfronters and Aryan Nation?  Piercings and tattoos?

So also among homosexuals and lesbians, 1/2 of whom exaggerate a male role, 1/2 exaggerate a female.

It’s all happened before.  The kitsch sentimentalism of the 19th C., with its kitsch view of femininity, with the kitschy treatment of the Sacred Heart (actually a profound devotion), and David Strauß’s kitschy view of Our Lord, – all this produced the reaction, adumbrated by Nietzsche and his American “Scots Irish” follower, T. Roosevelt, and coming full bloom in a Catholic country: the Italian Futurists, the Arditi, the squadristi, and Mussolini’s Fascism (and by the “F” word I mean only his movement).  We know the rest. 

Sparta was a disaster.  Those who fantasize about it such as Rousseau have forgotten the reality.  When males marry first at 40, when femininity even for women is debased, when boys are put in barracks at 10, etc. the population collapses.  By Pausanias’ time, Sparta was a one horse village. More importantly, hyper-males make bad soldiers.  Hypermale scumbucket sadists like to hurt people, but they don’t like to be hurt. But an army that is unwilling to suffer and die is an army that will quickly break and run (Martin van Creveld).  Epaminondas knew well that men might fight, suffer, and die for their god, king, country, mom, and all four, but not for macho-maledom.

Back to the Romans!  The archetype is Aeneas.  And how is he portrayed?  With his old crippled father on his broad shoulder, his little boy led by his strong hand.  The right male role isn’t Fascist killer or fornicator, but father.

To turn to Paul Gottfried’s fine blog, I’ve said it before: The Whigs do indeed have a program.  They’ve had one since 1688, and it hasn’t changed.  They’ve just never told anyone much about it, because no one else wants it.  Instead they’ve told lies which they they themselves don’t believe in: Locke’s consent of property holders, “glorious” revolutions, bills of rights, free soil, anti-slavery, “civil wars”, “freedom”, etc.  Their real program:

1. a massive centralized state, with provincial and local political orders as just franchises of that central state
2. control of the currency by the central state by a statist bank issuing fiat money (Bank of England, Bank of the US, the National Banking System, the Federal Reserve)
3. corporate welfare (East India Company, “internal improvements”, tariffs, wars for Haliburton)
4. imperial expansion (Battle of the Boyne, Act of Union, the British Empire, control of the seas, Lincoln’s War, Annexation of Hawaii, The Spanish American War, etc.)
5. opposition to the Catholic Church.

Let’s have a new party that rejects all 5 point, a Jeffersonian/Real Conservative/Christian Democrat coalition – one purged of faux “conservatives”: racialists, nationalists, Fascists on one hand, and of Hamiltonians (“neoconservatives”) on the other.

It occurred to me that what we are witnessing in this country is a political aristocracy with families of carrer politicians a la the Bushs, Clintons, Romneys, Cuomos, etc.  Here in Romney we have yet another guy who is governor of one state and his father is governor of another.  We have Hillary who is the former first lady from Arkansas and current senator from New York.  At least the Cuomos have kept it in New York for the time being.

Paul,
I am a “conveniently Protestant” “simple-minded”
“religious Right” “country club WASP”
who happens to want more
than “a few non-liberal Judges” from the
Republican Party.
That’s why I’m voting for Ron Paul (who happens
to be a Republican.)
And you know what?
I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it.

As Professor Gottfried has documented elsewhere, masochistic guilt counts for deep theology in modern Christendom.  It also may well confirm the worst suspicions of Nietzsche, Spengler, and Raspail on the slavish tendencies of a faith whose lazy and ignorant adherents can no longer defend their own civilization against factions who expect moral consistency and repentance only from Christians.

Mr. Cundiff, what you just wrote is brilliant!

Sid wrote: ”Sparta was a disaster”

Sid couldn’t be more wrong!  Socrates, who is really the mental foundation of Western Culture, the founder of true philosophy, the Father of Ethics, (Maritain, Intro to Philosophy), was an admirer of Sparta.  His favorite form of government was Doric Crete and Doric Sparta!  Plato was the same way.  His “Republic” is a mirror of the Spartan Republic.

Sparta a failure? It lasted for over 600 years! That is a failure? Not Athens that was constantly convulsed with revolution one after another?

I dare say Sid, that you have No clue.

Here is My paper on the Spartan Republic:

http://www.sparta.markoulakispublications.org.uk/index.php?id=105

And then here is a coming paper called “Doric Crete and Sparta, the home of Greek Philosophy”:

http://www.sparta.markoulakispublications.org.uk/index.php?s=forthcoming

Where our very own Paul Gottfried was able to write a short review of the article! Sparta a failure?!  You’re funny Sid.

The War Nerd’s comment on Sparta, which I think applies here:

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8516&IBLOCK_ID=35

Sid, your constant attempts to rid this and other blogs of wrong think is, I suspect, precisely the type of “public displays of the ‘politics of guilt,’” that Dr. Gottfried is decrying.

You don’t get it. The same PC attitude that makes any consideration of the particularism of race off limits is exactly the same PC attitude that thinks Huckabee’s appeal to Christianity is out of bounds. The society the PC thought police (left and right) are seeking is a society without particulars. Without the particulars of Christianity and without the particulars of race. I really don’t understand how a bright guy like you can be so blind to this.

Great column Dr. Gottfried. I have observed this PC pandering compulsion of the Republicans for years, and I am equally repulsed by it. Noonan really has gone over to the dark side.

No sooner had Sparta won her greatest triumph, her total victory in the Peloponnesian Wars, than she was defeated, utterly, by Epaminondas and left a backwater.  Her day in the sun was sort anyway. Wheeler needs a history lesson.

Red, those who hold up Sparta as a model to support there own barrack room state and jackboot order (Rousseau, the Jacobins, the Bonapartists, the Stalinists, assorted Nationalists, the Fascists) are hiding the truth. Let the truth be known.

“Red, those who hold up Sparta as a model to support there own barrack room state and jackboot order (Rousseau, the Jacobins, the Bonapartists, the Stalinists, assorted Nationalists, the Fascists) are hiding the truth. Let the truth be known.”

Sid, that response had absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote?

Call it the politics of guilt, call it a failure
of moral fiber, what it comes down to is that
the Democrats are selling hot dogs, and do not
need to pretend that they are anything else, since
everyone loves hot dogs, while the Republicans are
stuck selling boiled cauliflower on a stick, and trying
to come up with fancy names for it, since they suspect
that people do not like to eat boiled cauliflower.

As to why the Democratic brand sells, as against the
supposed virtues of self-reliacne sold by the
Conservatives, one must not forget tht people act on
what is their perceived self-interest, and now their
self-interest tells them that the self-reliace being
sold masks the fact of being in relationship with very
unequal power balances (they are at the mercy of their
employers outsourcing their jobs and they can do nothing
to stop them, unless it is working for much lower wages).

In that situation, they might consider that self-reliance
does not pay, and that governmetn “nannying” is a
reasonable price to pay to stop their empoverishment.

Maybe they are calculating it wrong, but you cannot
correct other people’s math errors by preaching them
about virtue.

Great Article Sir!.............Political Correctness and guilt go hand in hand like an airborne disease that spreads from eunic to eunic.

Sid, Reading classical literature, the highest praise was given to the Spartans. Everywhere, the Spartans were looked up to.  This is what Polybius said: “The result of this combination has been that the Lacedaemonians retained their freedom for the longest period of any people.” 12 and “...for securing unity among the citizens, for safeguarding the Laconian territory and preserving the liberty of Sparta inviolate, the legislation and provisions of Lycurgus were so excellent that I am forced to regard his wisdom as something superhuman.” His writings had a great influence upon Cicero, Charles de Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers of the United States.

And what Sid? Cicero visited Sparta as a young man enthused like many Romans of her Virtues and Glories.

Plutarch has a section called “Spartan Sayings”. There is NO section of “Athenian sayings”; No section of “Theban Sayings”.  Plutarch also has the highest praise of Sparta. When Classical writers write of Sparta it is always “Noble Sparta” or the Noble Spartans.

Xenophon, Socrates, Plato were all admirers of Sparta----What does that telly you?  Who are you Sid?  Greater than Socrates, Plato?  NO.

They ran the first public School system. It was about imparting, among many other things, character training--training in Virtue---which you and other moderns don’t have a clue in! The Doric Greeks of Crete and Laconia are the basis of Western Culture; not Athens. The Romans imitated the Spartans---not the Athenians.  Plutarch records that the Romans imitated many things of the Spartans!  The Sabines were a Doric Colony that created many Roman institutions including the establishment of a Republic (which is a Doric Greek Invention!).

One thing that the Spartans did very well The Training of Boys to Men not The Christian ideal of training boys to be pussies and weanies like much in modern Catholic Culture.

I agree the problem is cultural, which creates the political dysfunction…the Republicans are no worse then the Democrats…each party is worse then the other.  I agree with Michael Lind that what dominates today’s political system is “Identity” politics..

Growing out of the various “liberation” movements of the 60’s, we have the “People of Color” the sexual revolution, the gay sexual revolution, feminism, and ironically the sexual/cultural views of Hugh Hefner/Playboy Magazine, and ironically, the mirror image on the other side of the gender gap, Helen Gurley Brown and her Cosmopolitan Magazine. The moral relativism that made human sexual intimacy into a form of consumerism, the worship of the material over the spiritual, and a return to paganism.

Conseqently, the Democrat Party is the party of “Identity” politics, of Blacks, and destitute Latino immigrants, gays and feminists, unmarried women with children, white well-to-do urban sophisticates who think they are too smart to believe in all that old religion stuff, and and last but not least, various government worker’s unions---the NEA and the Educational cartel being the largest of all.

The problem with the Democrats is that absent the WASP majority to unite them in opposition, we discover that all these little “identity” groups don’t get along, and often their antipathy is intense enough t6 become real hate. Blacks resent gays claiming that gay marriage is a “civil rights issue”, Latinos resent Blacks getting all the “affirmative action” government and corporate jobs, feminists don’t like Black and Latino machismo, gay men don’t get along with lesbian women, Blacks are as offended by the Jewish arrogance and aggression as anyone else, Asians and Indians don’t like paying taxes for welfare for black unmarried mothers…the list of divisions within their coalition is endless.

So the White Christian Majority has no “choice” but to go with the Republicans who talk like social populists but govern like plutocrats…

In many ways, this division is artificial, and benefit’s the REAL masters of America’s destiny, the bankers and the moneychangers.

In reply to “Joe Populist” [sic]:

Paul Gottfried’s The Strange Death of Marxism is right on the money, and I just give the argument a slightly different twist.  Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and later Gramsci the Frankfurter Schoollmen would have despised “identity politics”.  Imagine Horkheimer, Adorno, or Marcuse supporting a grouping based on ethnic identity, or (even more risible) “race”, or (the most absurd) “sexual identity”!  All these Marxists, albeit in different ways, opposed an economic system which they thought was key in someone’s identity.

Truth be told, “identity politics” is simply the nationalism of the “Left”.  In fact, there’s really little difference between that nationalism and that of the “Right”.  Al Sharpton, La Raza, Radical Feminists, homosexual “rights” activists, the Council of Conservative Citizens, front men for The Black Hand, radical Orangemen, the IRA, and the various racialists that make themselves known on this blog are all, so to speak, brothers under the skin. 

Which means, once again, that the Left/Right paradigm is just plain false. Politics resembles more a Chinese Checkers Board or a Jackson Pollock abstract.

John Lukacs gets it right again.  Nationalism is the real devil.  That it caused two World Wars ought to be reason enough to oppose it. And nationalism isn’t patriotism.

I’m left to wonder also, What is the essential difference between Sparta admirers and Gangsta Rappers?

Strike “radical Orangemen”. Paisley’s making peace.

Sid Condiff sed: “Truth be told, “identity politics” is simply the nationalism of the “Left”.  In fact, there’s really little difference between that nationalism and that of the “Right”.  Al Sharpton, La Raza, Radical Feminists, homosexuals…

Not really.  It is an attempt to break apart America’s cohesiveness…feminism /gay lifestyles destroys the extended family…which destroys the community, and ultimately the nation-state.

Stalin used national identity to save his despotic state, just as today’s Wall Street bankers and the CEO classes use “freedom” and “patriotism” today to rally Americans to a false war to prop up the system of finance capitalism (FED/IMF/World Bank) whose goal is to take away the economic security of the many to give the few that already have the most, a little more. 

So you see Sid, modern “Libertarian” (or Laissez Faire Capitalism/Finance Capitalism) and Communism are mirror images of each other…..

“Noonan really has gone over to the dark side.”

Ms. Noonan, overmedicated bliss bunny that she is, has probably never been able to discern the line beyond which the dark side lies.  That she has been held up as an example of conservative thought is truly hilarious if one thinks about it.

Cmon Paul, you seem to have fallen back into the politicians triangulation game.

The Democratic/Republican parties are two like factions subservient to one economic/military powerhouse.

Wow!  And wow again!  A pungent analysis from a first-rate intellect.
Paul-Gottfried ‘08.

Re Joe Populist [sic]:

“Race” and ethnic identity destroy family also, by claiming (1) to be the family writ large (they aren’t), that (2) their leaders are “fathers” (they certainly arent’) and (3) thus subordinating the family to them. 

In pre-political societies, we have:

1. the family, which is a grandfather and his children and grandchildren, living under the same roof

2. the clan (organized in a village) under a clan leader or an assembly of household heads.

the curia, a collection of villages, usually under a chief or sub-chief

4. the tribe, just large enough to avoid the incest taboo, but no larger, say at most 3000 people.

The polis so subordinates 2-4 that they eventually lose much meaning.

@Sid

I tend to agree with your comments on Leftist/ Rightist clans. I don’t see a difference between Sharpton, CoCC, La Raza or CAIR either---it’s a dead-end. IMHO, minority politics is a sign of tribalism; in multicultural societies, that doesn’t sound very wise to me.

However to get back to your point, aren’t all political parties more or less economically oriented---therefore part of the problem? Libertarians are as just as obsessed with economics as communist used to be---indeed, they are the mirror image of them. They just differ on the role of the state and capitalism: good vs. bad.

Maybe genuine conservative populists like Pat Buchanan
are really different from mainstream politicians, because they want to put the
welfare of the nation first.

But you don’t like that sort of nationalism either---nor do I, although I admire Pat deeply. WWI was caused by nationalism and Europe never really recovered from it. It would be great if Western nations could reinvent the “Right”, purged from idiots and warmongers.

Bravo to Ma-Cia-No!

1. IMHO, minority politics is a sign of tribalism; in multicultural societies, that doesn’t sound very wise to me.
Yep!

2. aren’t all political parties more or less economically oriented---therefore part of the problem? Yep! Yep!

3. WWI was caused by nationalism Yep! Yep! Yep!

4. It would be great if Western nations could reinvent the “Right”, purged from idiots [i.e. nationalists and racialists] and warmongers. Yep in the highest.  One thing we ought to be about on this site is just such a purging, and at the same time the formulation of Real Conservatism so purged.  The challenge for Real Conservatives in the New Venetian Age is to provide people roots and yet enable them to live and prosper in a polysectarian and polyethnic world.

Welcome, Ma-Cia-No.  Writeback often!

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