For better or worse, I think Obama is going to pull this thing off.  I wrote in 2004 that the Democrats lost the election for two main reasons: “They were seen as weak on foreign policy, and they were seen as offensively hostile to middle class values at home, specifically on issues like gay marriage, abortion, and the like.”

It’s possible the Democrats can win this time around. Indeed, it’s likely they will do so. They have a candidate with star power who is maintaining a hopeful and vague message that is in tune with the zeitgeist.

The structural factors have changed too. The salience of the perceived threat of terrorism has receded and been overshadowed by the Republican Party’s sins of commission in Iraq. As in the wake of Vietnam, the American people are wary of foreign adventures that take a long time, cost a lot of money, and yield uncertain results. They want something done about terrorism, and would even support the approach of punitive raids and increased spending on domestic security, but transforming the Middle East with a policy of installing democratic regimes is widely perceived as an abject failure. The surge only changes this perception slightly.  Iraq is still a dangerous place with daily bombings and atrocities that speak for themselves. 

The Democrats’ focus on law enforcement, intelligence, and foreign cooperation is more palatable this time because of the inconsequential results of the Iraq War and the Republican Party’s abdication of its traditional role as the hard-headed voice of foreign policy realism.  People are more afraid of a drawn out war with Iran than with an intervention to defang its alleged nuclear programs. 

On social issues, the Democratic Party will have its traditional troubles, but younger voters are more liberal on these issues, there are more post-60s voters than ever, and McCain will do little to mobilize the base. George Bush has almost single-handedly destroyed the traditional Republican coalition with his aggressive foreign policy, his lack of credibility on intelligence matters, his support for extremist open border immigration policies, and his failure to use wedge issues to his advantage to keep Republicans and independent (though socially conservative) voters from giving Democratic candidates serious consideration.

Democrats have problems, but Republicans have more. And those problems are almost all the legacy of Bush’s idiosyncratic and bellicose policies.  These politicies stem not from the logic of unilateralism and realism, but from the neoconservative (mis)diagnosis of the causes and cures for Islamic terrorism, domestic prosperity, and a host of other issues. The final factor in the Republicans’ dim prospects are the problems of McCain himself, whose age and crotchitiness contrasts sharply with the charisma and sales ability of the dynamic Obama. 

One thing we can be sure of:  there will be a totally unique set of policy disasters with Obama if he wins that will make many wonder what they were thinking in giving this guy the keys to the car.

Iraq is the foreign policy equivalent of a money pit.  Success is always just around the corner, if only we give the general contractor another few grand to pay for some supplies, back taxes, or whatever.  Transferring sovereignty, elections, “standing up” Iraq troops, Sunni Awakening, and now the Surge all were championed as signal events that “prove” success is just around the corner. 

On one level, the Surge has been successful in tamping down violence.  On a strategic level, however, it has not led the Iraqis to resolve a number of thorny issues which give a pretext to any Iraqi faction to attack the government and reignite the extreme level of violence witnessed in 2005 and 2006.  Mainstream journalist Steven Chapman asks a question that I don’t believe McCain would have a good answer to:

Despite creeping toward withdrawal himself, McCain continues to lambaste Obama for setting a timetable. But if the current policy is the stunning success depicted by McCain, it should be eminently practical to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis by the middle of 2010. If it is impossible to do that, more than seven years after the occupation began, how can McCain say the existing strategy is working? 

I just re-read this piece from the late Sam Francis on “The Paleo Persuasion.”  It was very informative and helped me consider some first principles related to this idiom of conservative thought. 

For starters, I found it ironic that the flash point of neoconservative and paleoconservative tension was the nomination of Mel Bradford to head the National Endowment of Humanities.  One might have imagined from their present joint opposition to the war in Iraq, paleoconservatives and libertarians would have rejected the very existence of such an appointment out of small government principle.  In reality, conservatives of every stripe were entering the government in droves during the Reagan administration, though many were just party hacks.  Bradford’s personal consideration of the NEH, however, shows that real conservatives are often pragmatic.  In this case, he sought to employ the NEH to remove the stifling politicization from our leading academic and cultural institutions, which are themselves necessary counterweights to the corrosiveness of our mass culture.

Second, I was reminded that paleoconservatism is more concerned with culture and less concerned with public policy than mainstream conservatism, not least because of our skepticism about the federal government’s attempts to regulate and transform every day life.  At the same time, paleoconservatives recognizes the role of government in preventing outside and internal factions from interfering with our life and our integrity as a people.  Recognition of our historical roots leads naturally to the view that we are vulnerable as a people to mass immigration and economic globalization.  This prioritization of the nation and the community over abstract principles favoring free markets or open borders defines the paleoconservative spirit in opposition to the pro-globalization extremists at the Wall Street Journal and the big government extremists over at Commentary. 

Finally, Sam Francis reminds us that paleoconservatism is above all a tone or an idiom, more than it is a laundry list of policy positions.  Paleoconservatives disagree with one another about drug legalization, the moral dimensions of “manifest destiny,” religion, white nationalism, the death penalty, and many other issues.  Historically, even paleoconservatives come in several stripes with regard to foreign policy.  Many, including Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, were ardent cold warriors until the fall of the Soviet Union. Others saw the Cold War, even at the time, as an unnecessary detour.  Most supported and still support our war in Afghanistan. The reasoning and ultimate goals of paleoconservatives is what distinguishes their thoughts on foreign policy from the deductive and utopian principles of globalists and neoconservatives. 

Conservatives, paleoconservative or otherwise, may disagree about the wisdom of intervention in Grenada or whether we pulled out of Vietnam too early or not early enough.  They are not confused, however, about whether another nation’s interests have priority over our own, nor whether we should pursue a policy of imposing revolutionary “democratic capitalism” overseas for humanitarian reasons.  The latter pursuits are rooted in a Jacobin desire to reorder the world’s peoples to conform to a unitary concept of “human rights.”  Paleoconservatives are concerned above all with maintaining our integrity and independence as a people, and this instinct defines their more limited and “selfish” rhetoric on both domestic and foreign affairs.

A fascinating piece from City Journal on the peculiar charisma of Obama, a charisma rooted in transparent platitudes and gobs of feminine empathy

Obama’s charisma is tuned to the mood of the moment. The charisma of American political leaders has typically rested on images of unflinching strength and masculine authority: Teddy Roosevelt in the North Dakota Badlands; Kennedy, the naval hero whose sexual prowess was acknowledged even in his Secret Service code name (“Lancer”); Reagan, the man on horseback whom the Secret Service called “Rawhide.” Obama’s charisma, by contrast, is closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with today’s television talk-show culture, in which admissions of weakness are offered as proof of empathetic qualities. Talk-show culture is occupied with the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good. The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains, Paglia writes in Sexual Personae, to appear an “androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother.”

Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist gifts; no one wants to revive the caudillos of the thirties. Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone.

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The movement of rhetoric from global warming to “climate change” is the most salient evidence that fraud is afoot. I can think of no greater example in recent times of the “big lie” than the nonsense that is “man-made global climate change.” It used to be global warming, but the atmosphere hasn’t warmed in the last ten years so now the preferred nomenclature is “climate change.” If it gets warmer, colder, drier, or wetter, all will be attributed to ill-defined and non-testable theories of man-made climate change.

Last night on National Geographic Channel I watched a moderately interesting show on what would happen if the human race disappeared. In geological terms, the return to a globe without much of a human impact would be pretty swift, ten or twenty thousand years at the most. But most distressing was the description of C02 as if it were some deadly poison and not an “essential trace gas” that forms a tiny portion of the atmosphere. Worse still, there was little mention that this trace gas is something that plants need much the way humans need oxygen.

Hopes for mass extinction and sentimental regard for climate change’s “victims” oscillate among the propagandsists.  Today CNN takes the sentimental route, reporting to its credulous readers that kids in the Third World have stunted growth and other health problems because of “climate change.” Since when are starving kids in the Third World something new?  It’s been this way forever.

Who can forget the unlucky Ethiopian children paraded before cameras by the likes of Suzanne Summers and the “We Are the World” crew back in the 80s? Starvation in the Third World has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with the Third World’s primitive economies, kleptocratic leadership, and lack of public health infrastructure. It’s a tough way to live, and these poor people have my sympathies, but their kids’ ill health has nothing to do with climate change. The First World by contrast handles periodic and cyclical droughts with ease. Just by way of illustration, obesity is a problem with our “poor” people. Think about that.

It’s sad that the mainstream right and the K-Street Libertarians are falling over themselves to condemn Jesse Helms for things he said back in the 50s, because his opposition to the UN in the early 90s was heroic and prescient. His political achievements certainly did more for the cause of limited government than the behemonth infrastructure of federal government-dependent libertarian “think tanks” in DC.  After embracing the failed programs of a “nuclear freeze” and “global economic justice,” the socialist and internationalist left has turned to climate change as the Trojan Horse with which to strangle free markets and (western) national sovereignty. Worse, the natural forces of resistance are weaker and less coherent than ever. Vanity-motivated John McCain and half-educated evangelicals are getting in on the act and assisting with the destruction of their inherited way of life.  A false sense of stewardship and naivite are leading them to abandon caution in the face of their sworn enemies:  internationalists, socialists, and pro-abortion population-control fanatics.

Any change in climate, a naturally dynamic phenomenon, will continue to be marshaled as evidence that massive numbers of human beings must disappear and that our competitive advantages over the Third World must be hobbled by UN intervention. Once the winners and losers become apparent from this scheme, how will the greedy Third Worlders stop themselves?  Global Warming is becoming more and more obvious as a crack-pot idea little different than the “ice age” hysteria of the 70s. It would ordinarily be comic that this hysteria is taking place just as concrete evidence is emerging that global warming—man-made or otherwise—has not even happened during the very period when it was predicted to skyrocket. 

It may take some time, but I have little doubt that the environmentalist rhetoric won’t skip a beat whether the earth warms, cools, or stays the same.  Lord knows there will always be Third World cripples activists can point to as evidence that something is amiss in the environment and, by implication, proof of the evil indifference at the heart of the Western World.

I disagree with the suggestion that we should be evasive about reality in the interest of social peace or because certain facts might be abused.  Suppressing IQ data won’t fool anyone about what their eyes and experiences reinforce every day. People know about group trends; it’s not exactly news, especially to people whose honesty has not been suppressed by higher level education group-think.

What science can’t do, but real conservatives must, is remember that we have certain obligations to one another as countrymen, as Christians, and as beings made in the image of God.  This is true for all of our countrymen of all races. We should not descend into a pagan attempt to eugenecize ourselves into supermen and throw away those deemed inferior or more burdensome.  We should instead seek (or rather remember) to create conditions for the social flourishing of all the races based on reality.  Because of our cultural and racial differences, this means different communities will need different levels of social control, order, educational systems, and the like.  This local variation is perfectly healthy and, so long as done in a spirit of charity, need not be be an expression of nastiness, hate, or mean-spiritededness.

White nationalism, as opposed to historic American patriotism, however, is often uncharitable, ahistorical, and unnecessary. It conceives of blacks as the enemy.  It seeks to recreate America on the basis of a single unifying abstract principle, just as mass immigration seeks to recreate the historical America on the basis of an ahistorical universalist principle that prevents any recognition of our historical biracial, unicultural heritage.

Blacks and whites got along better, spoke the same langauge, sang the same songs, and worshiped the same God in the past, when a broad-minded American patriotism ruled the day. That patriotism did not demand “white power,” but it did not presume to permit “black power” either, whether in the name of justice or self-hate or whatever. It recognized instead the sovereignty of the law and majority rule; in cultural matters, the rights of wealthy, self-respecting, educated whites were recognized as those of a majority and those of the successful elite, the people who rightfully get to set standards for the whole society.  Black leaders followed their lead, setting up social clubs and institutions that worked in parallel with those of whites.  Black and white leaders both demanded the same behavior of the lower classes of both races and pursued the same goals that formed a common culture. 

I do not believe it was wise or just to have imported millions of Africans as slaves.  It is undeniable the races’ relations have often been uneasy, characterized by animosity, jealousy, hate, suspicion, and sometimes rage.  But the current degraded conditions of race relations are uniquely bad.  This is an aberrant time, made worse by a liberalism that depends on the very lies about IQ and the casue of black failure that John would perpetuate in the name of social peace and avoiding hurt feelings. 

I agree with John that we are countrymen, black and white alike. It is a cruel and ideological view that would be indifferent to the effects of public policies like free trade and mass immigration on the fortunes of low IQ native-born Americans, both blacks and white. To me, understanding IQ can make us more charitable and more realistic with one another.

While I do not believe in perpetual guilt-tripping and obeissance to ridiculous race-hustlers like Al Sharpton, my opposition to that does not prevent me from having ordinary Christian feelings of sympathy and fellow feeling with my black countrymen, folks who speak my language, fight our wars, and worship Jesus Christ.  I do not have to forget that black criminals exist in higher percentages or that black culture has become degraded since the Sixties to remember also that it produced Booker T. Washington and Ella Fitzgerald.  I can’t easily forget the L.A. Riots, but I also remember that Reginald Denny was saved by courageous local blacks who saw his beating unfold on TV.

We are in a degraded time, with unnecessary and avoidable friction fomented by race-hustlers.  We should not tolerate them, but we need not suppress truths about differences of the races to do so. Liberalissm depends on various lies about race and the cause of black social problems.  Unraveling these lies is the way to unravel liberalism itself.  As in all things, truth put into action through charity is the way forward.

* This is a re-post of a comment I wrote for John in his thread.

There is something rarefied and useless with the endless post-mortems brought to bear on the alleged injustice of the Iraq War. We must act today based on the circumstances of today. We should concern ourselves with these post-mortems chiefly because they should guide future conduct. It would have been preferable, for instance, if the US never allowed chattel slavery, but having done so, there were other more just choices than destroying states’ rights and half-a-million Americans to be rid of it. This is to say that even in addressing injustice and other mistakes, we must be both just and prudent. A question of transitioning is distinct from a question of ends.

How to preserve US interests today having gotten embroiled in Iraq is the question of the hour, not whether it was wise to do so at first. Clearly it wasn’t. This is the consensus view of the vast majority of Americans. That said, policymakers always run the risk of “fighting the last war,” over-correcting earlier mistakes while discounting unknown or under-appreciated risks that are distinct from the most salient and recent error. Arguably fear of a repetition of the failed Somalia mission prevented military men from pushing more aggressively for a military response to bin Laden and al Qaeda after the Cole and embassy bombings of the late 90s.  This same fear of commitment, the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, led to the pusillanimous response to Soviet aggression in Latin America during the 80s.  Now, having over-reacted to an imaginary WMD threat in Iraq, an over-correction is likely . . . and it would be a major mistake.

This to say that there are foreign policy errors of both action and inaction. It’s always easy to look wise in hindsight. One-note-johnnies always get their day in the sun. It would have been wise to wipe out al Qaeda before 9/11 and, before that, not to be so closely involved with Israel and the Middle East after the Cold War ended. A strong case can be made that the preferred policy of the most vociferous Iraq War critics, that is a poilcy which is critical of most U.S. applications of force in foreign policy, has fueled certain harms too.  This is most apparent on the Korean peninsula, where a nuclear power governed by nut-cases has materialized due to a short-sighted U.S. policy of appeasement.

We are where we are, and we cannot right every wrong that has come down the pike, nor easily correct every mistake made by our predecessors. We must always chart a way forward. In this instance, any withdrawal from Iraq will impact the price of oil, the power and prestige of al Qaeda, the likelihood of others states harboring terrorists or developing WMDs, the power of US deterrence, the perception the US is a paper tiger, the instability in the region, U.S. military morale, along with other, unknown effects. This is to say, withdrawing from Iraq will not be costless for the United States in some very practical ways. Nonetheless, I believe this is a price worth paying, as the costs of staying are higher.  Just as we should not over-correct from a mistake, we should also not allow pride or habit or some mistaken sentimentality keep us going down the wrong-path until inescapable disaster occurs.

A conservative should acknowledge the costs of any foreign policy action along with the costs of any omission and be humble in the face of the various unknowns. Conservative statemen should seek, above all, to conduct decision-making in a prudent and empirical fashion informed by a wide range of historical examples, not just recent events or the events of 1939.

American conservatives have typically been realists in foreign policy, noting that the international order is anarchic, full of hostile forces.  Conservatives should remind us that this terrain is easily misunderstood, particularly by Kantian-style moral reasoning indifferent to the chief objects of a foreign policy: national independence secured through a balance of military power and diplomacy that communicate appropriate deterrence to any threats, along with the cultivation of the capabilty and willingness to deliver an appropriate military response in the case of necessity.  In this formulation, independence means at its core protection from invasion.  But it also requires free sea lanes, the prevention of foreign colonization of the western hemisphere, cooperation against pirates and international criminal organizations, and American access to essential raw materials and markets. This is practical stuff.  The idea that we can deductively reason our way from the Golden Rule to a sound foreign policy is, quite simply, well-wishing rooted in gnostic ideological thinking that fails to account for the role of force and disorder.

* This entry is adapted from a comment I left in this earlier thread begun by Paul Gottfried.

All this rhetoric from Hitchens and others about the Holocaust justifying anything in WWII is a bit counter-factual and rings false.  No one at the time thought in that fashion, though Hitler and the Nazi’s many crimes against European civilians were well known and did encourage widespread callousness regarding the rights of German civilians.  Nonetheless, it’s an “ex post facto” rationalization to suggest the Holocaust motivated much of anything the Allies did, not least because most of the Allies were more concerned with what happened to their own forces and people rather than a bunch of Jews with whom they had little in common in the Western Soviet Union and Poland.

The Blitz is notably absent from Pat Buchanan’s article and so too are Germany’s crimes in Poland, and this is a pity.  Because even if British retaliation would not be allowed under the just war tradition, retaliation as a last resort in a proportional way—even to the point of killing hostages—was allowed under the law of war in force in WWII, and that law of war grew from the just war tradition. In no sense did England, France, or Poland inaugurate the brutal tactics—such as mass murder of civilians—for which the German forces were legendary, particularly on the Eastern Front. Further, British orders aside, German Blitz bombing tactics preceded the massive strategic bombing the Western Allies visited upon Germany.

Arguably, since no authority other than retaliation by combatants can enforce the law of war, the British response to the Blitz bombing by Germany had a certain patina of legal justification under the rubric of “belligerent reprisals.” In this view, the crime of bombing London’s residential areas (exacerbated by night bombing) figured far more prominently than the Holocaust in justifying British bombing of industrial and civilian targets in Germany. 

In fairness to both sides, carpet bombing came to the fore because of the difficulties of sighting and accurately hitting industrial targets with the means employed at the time, i.e., the Norden bomb sight coupled with Europe’s foggy skies.  In other words, “strategic bombing” itself was a bit of an ex post facto justification for the crummy accuracy of the world’s air forces’ bombers at the time, which would otherwise have been aimed directly at factories, air bases, and other legitiamate military targets.

Carpet bombing of civilians is wrong, unnecessary, violative of the just war tradition, and needlessly fails to draw distinctions of combatants and noncombatants.  Even so, even among evils we must make distinctions.  There is a notable difference between violence, even unjustifiable violence,, when it is an instrumental tool aimed at victory versus violence in pursuit of the wholesale slaughter of civilians as an end in itself.  This is what distinguishes American and British actions from those of the Germans, and this is why the moral reasoning is out-of-whack among those who equalize German conduct with American and British conduct—such as the writings of the nearly insane Noam Chomsky.  In fairness to Pat Buchanan, I don’t believe he has done this here or elsewhere. But I do believe he does too little to distinguish the nature of the evil in Nazi conduct from that of the Allies, and, for many of the same reasons, I think he exagerrates the likelihood with which the Germans could have been bought off with a few concessions, such as the annexation of Danzig.

This is not to say the Americans and British conduct of the war was always justifiable; it was not.  But their goals were fundamentally defensive, reasonable, and limited in a way those of the Germans’ were not.  Pat Buchanan’s talk of Danzig corridors and tit-for-tat German retaliation for British excesses understates the Darwinian value system and expansive strategic objectives of the Nazi regime.  This is essential context.  There is little doubt the Germans would not have stopped at Danzig, nor any doubt that their early conduct in Poland would have found repetition in the skies over Britain without British encouragement.  Worldwide empire was conceived, as evidenced in Mein Kampf, as a necessary means of German self-protection from other world power and a fulfillment of Germany destiny to reclaim what Hitler saw as the German race’s historical lands. 

The Western Allies’ responses to German violations of the law of war, while cruel and disproportionate, were in the service of practical end:  Victory.  Our later benevolence as occupiers provides further essential context. American and British behavior even in its conduct of evil contrasts sharply with the Satanic and genocidal goals of the Germans, particularly in the East.  The Western Allies’ actions in war and in peace also contrast sharply with the orgy of revenge and rape and theft undertaken by our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. 

One of the worst things about Bush’s idealist war for democracy is that it has confused his critics into thinking he’s an arch-conservative, and it’s confused conservatives into thinking that we must do the opposite of Bush and treat our foreign enemies the way we treat our countrymen.  Law-based criticisms of the president’s actions are weak; the law of war has long countenanced different and rougher treatment for terrorists, pirates, and other irregular combatants.  In light of this, critics resort to crude moralisms and appeals to the zeitgeist of the Geneva Conventions.  This is a pose, whether coming from the left or the right.  The real engine behind this criticism is a liberal ideal of equality that ultimately says we must treat our enemies in war the same way we treat civilized Americans in peacetime law enforcement.

Real conservatives such as Kirk and Weaver and Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Solzhenitsyn spent much of the last half-century showing how rationalist ideologies are all related in their concern for consistency and equal treatment of human beings not as members of groups but as atomized individuals.  Rationalist philosophies also share in common a disdainful view of traditional distinctions as having no moral authority.  The thread that unites conservative critics of rationalism—an idiom that first finds its voice in Edmund Burke against the French Revolutionary proponents of “liberte”—is that the rationalist-traditionalist distinction is more meaningful and more important than disagreements on the axis of liberty and order. Twentieth Century conservatives, after all, defended Pinochet, Franco, the Catholic Church, the Polish Home Army, and other authoritarian defenders of civilization that had little use for liberalism, nor much in common with Anglo-American notions of our liberty.

Bush and his critics are all operating from liberal premises:  both make no distinction of “us and them,” and both express a punctilious concern for human rights and equality.  These commitments are worn proudly as proof of integrity and consistency, even when our way of life is threatened by the combination of militant Islam, mass immigration, and foreign policy weakness in the face of threats. 

I support a punitive war on our enemies.  And our enemy is al Qaeda, itself a branch of militant Islam, including those in the Arab world who provide this expression of Islam passive and economic support.  I do not want to bring these people democracy and do not think they are fit for it. The Arab and Muslim world is primitive, bellicose, and uncivilized.  Bush wants to help them.  He can’t imagine it any other way.  I want to scare them and, when necessary, kill them. I also want to leave them to stew in their juices because the watchword of my policy (including any detention policy) is always our national interest, not the long-term flourishing of the Arabs as a people.  I believe this because I love my people and our inherited way of life, and I love these things more than I do abstract international treaties.  Thus, I have little concern for the rights of suspected foreign combatants and their cousins. I am willing to sacrifice them, including any innocents caught in the trap, because I weigh the American interest many times more heavily in the scales.  I am prejudiced.  I am prejudiced in favor of Americans, and I am prejudiced in favor of their safety in preference to the safety of foreigners.  This is how war is different.  This is why the Constitution does not apply to foreigners in war.  This is why the law of war has always given nations the right to treat enemies differently when they act like a gang of thieves rather than a uniformed army.  And this is why self-help in the form of reprisals has always been allowed in the law of war.  Look it up.

I want to wage a non-liberal war using non-liberal means.  Bush has not done so.  Consider GITMO.  Why are these trials and appeals so drawn out?  It’s a national scandal.  We should figure out if we’re reasonably sure they’re enemies, exhaust their intelligence value, and then hang the bastards.  Less democracy and more punitive actions.  I want salt in their fields and that sort of thing. Finally, when we’re finished, we should leave them to stew in their pathetically backward society’s juices,  a land devoid of literature and culture replete with honor killings and mindless cruelties.  US forces should not hang around the Middle East unnecessarily, nor get in bed with the enemies of Arabs and Muslims in the region, i.e., Israel.  But for now, it’s time for revenge.  Let’s leave with a bang, and then let’s not look back:  a strategic retreat with charity towards none, if you will.

The false freedom of international treaties and open borders mean that our real freedom to live our inherited way of life is undermined.  We are searched at airports, and our monuments are surrounded with unsightly barriers to deal with suicide bombers, all in the name of “freedom” that supposedly would not exist if we expelled foreigners originating ni the Middle East.  I am not a neoconservative, nor is everyone who wants our enemies smashed.  By contrast, neoconservatives want it all:  democracy for Arabs, open borders, and the like.  They value power not for defensive reasons, but because they see America merely as a tool to make the whole world conform to liberal beliefs.  This is why they love FDR and Lincoln so much:  both put their concern for strangers and liberal high principles above the objective national interest in tranquility and peace. 

Too much is made of Bush’s rough treatment of al Qaeda.  It’s really pretty mild by any historical standard, as has been his aggregation of power.  Bush is simply defending presidential prerogatives, because that’s what presidents do.  It has almost nothing to do with any conservative commitment to constitutional separation of powers or the language of treaties.  Bush is not conservative, but neither are most of his pacifist critics.  It is not the least bit conservative to spout the kind of moral relativist nonsense we saw in the comments to another thread.  These are views that, until recently, we only heard from the anti-war left.  They have a tone of Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda, and other alienated American liberals.

Those who would criticize US tactics against al Qaeda as being too harsh and identical to the enemy’s are morally demented.  They are akin to the liberals who worried so much about South Africa and Chile 20 years ago and nary said a word of criticism about the Soviet Union and its followers.  These kind of double-standards come not from a genuine concern for the problem of justice in foreign affairs, but from an adolescent rebellion against authority and a similarly adolescent alienation from one’s civilization, which the pacifist right takes little pride in. 

As I’ve written elsewhere, the conservative movement has attracted all kinds of strange pacifist fellow travelers of late, who believe in equal rights for Americans and foreigners and do not even support retaliation for 9/11.  I don’t share these views, and no conservative impulse says that I should.  If I worry about the growth of the state and the scale of our foreign adventures—which I do—it is because I am concerned with how it affects Americans.  I do not do it for love of strange foreigners.

I believe our interests trump those of foreigners, and while I don’t think we should go looking for dragons to slay, we shouldn’t pretend that our enemy’s backyard in Kandahar is the same as Des Moines.  Treat them harshly, let the memory of that harsh treatment be known far and wide.  Conservatives should fight ultimately to abandon the liberalism that makes Bush and the neoconservatives want to democratize these people, just as we abandon the liberalism of critics that would have us treat this uncouth enemy as if we’re dealing with civilized European soldiers captured at Ypres.

Paul Gottfried notes that Obama puts stress upon the traditional Democratic Party coalition of white ethnics and poor minorities.  One problem with the excitement many liberal-minded young people feel for Obama—and the confusion they have about his earlier black nationalism—is that they do not take time to consider what Obama’s words mean in light of who he is. 

“Let’s help the poor,” means something very different coming from a well-off WASP or a working-class Irish Catholic than it does from a poor black or poor Hispanic or poor redneck.  In the case of the former, it’s an expression of charity, concern for the poor, and social solidarity.  However misguided welfare policies may be—and they are—such are noble sentiments.  Coming from the poor, however, the sentiment is one of avarice, anger, resentment, and appetite.  Whatever justification it may have, it knows no limits.  It is made more dangerous because it finds moral justification for its limitless desire within the liberal idiom, which maintains broader critique of all society.  Instead of seeing the majority society as a generous benefactor, the inherited society is mislabeled by most liberals—whether the well-meaning kind or the greedy kind—as the source of the poor’s troubles. 

This is why Obama is so dangerous.  His yuppie white supporters think he’s one of them, a generous and educated man of wealth looking out for “our” downtrodden brothers.  But he’s not.  Even wealthy blacks feel alienated from the society, as evidenced most dramatically by Michelle Obama.  Barack Obama is not benefactor; he’s a Spartacus-figure, leading his people—blacks as well as any poor whites and other self-identified victims who want to tag along—to power.  It simply has a very different moral meaning when a black man demands affirmative action or welfare for his loyal constituents than when a patrician white decides to bestow it.  Obama has been prudential to date, but the content of his policies and his life-long association with extremists like Ayers and Wright reveal his real worldview as a resentment-driven quest for revenge and his self-concept as a justifiably angry victim.

His entire campaign depends on mutual misunderstanding.  His white supporters pretend he’s not a black nationalist in spite of a 20 year association with Reverend Wright and his frequent Marxist rhetoric.  His black supporters must pretend that his white supporters do not really understand that “he’s one of us.”  His superficial message of “hope” is really a message of empowered revenge.  Whites forget that Obama is not Franklin Roosevelt, the old money WASP “class traitor,” who acted as a tribune of the people.  Obama’s a biracial, black-identifying, insecure bastard child of a hippy, and, since his early 20s, he’s been cultivating revenge for his chosen tribe against the white society that he (and the tribe) have never felt fully a part of.