Article Archive
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Gay Marriage Sucks!
The recent decision by the California Supreme Court overturning a ban on gay marriage has, once again, thrust this issue into the malestrom of political debate, and, simultaneously, revived the sagging fortunes of groups on both sides. [Read More]
Gipper Anxiety—The Struggle Over What Would Reagan Do
How did it come to pass that the “conservative” position on foreign policy involves proclaiming the virtue of revolutionary upheaval around the world, worrying that the survival at freedom at home depends on the active spread of American-style democracy abroad, and arguing that the standard for determining whether a country is friendly to the United States is not what it does to affect U.S. interests but the extent to which its domestic political institutions conform to Washington’s preferences? The answer, I have been told, has a lot to do with "Reaganism" and the flowering of the foreign policy vision of our 40th president. [Read More]
The New Meal—What We Eat & Who We Are
A few weeks ago I attended a meeting of Kansas secessionists. The participants were rowdy, complaining of economic gigantism squashing them flat and bureaucratic thugs hounding their every move. They were all sick and tired of worker-ant existence in the hive-mind of American groupthink and they wanted out. Despite the quintessentially political nature of the gathering, politics proper never came up. Conservative and liberal meant nothing in that room, and party affiliation even less. All that was left undone was a patriotic march to the local Enormo-Mart to dump the limp and faded out-of-season tomatoes imported from South America into the local pond (which isn’t quite Boston Harbor, but it would have served). And while there was no Declaration, it was clear that these small growers wanted out—out of forced participation in the economic union of cheap mass production, central planning, credit money, and the ignorant consumerism they despised. [Read More]
The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis
Uncovering the roots of the disastrous home mortgage bubble that popped last year will keep economic historians busy for decades. Yet, one factor has so far been largely overlooked: the bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities. More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness. The chickens have finally come home to roost. [Read More]
Patrick Buchanan and the Necessary Book
Neocons think in news cycles, the Vatican in centuries—and Patrick J. Buchanan? In the body of worthy, provocative books he has produced, his thought ranges over decades. Having nobly failed to affect American elections and nudge our policies closer to prudence, it's clear that Buchanan has withdrawn from the dismal business of trying to sober up the Republican party—and decided instead to work at dismantling the historical myths and moral fetishes of the center-left publicists who now dominate the “conservative” movement. His books are clearly written and remarkably persuasive—which explains the hysteria they have occasioned. His genial public persona, the ease with which he can engage the likes of Stephen Colbert and Ali G (remember “I don’t think Saddam was a threat even if he had BLTs”), guarantee him a broad readership. Indeed, his works are bestsellers and hence impossible to dismiss. They make an impact, and threaten to shatter the groupthink so carefully cultivated over the course of the 1990s, when dissenting voices of the Right were systematically purged and persecuted. They are a species of samizdat. [Read More]
The Past Is Another Country--Counter-factual History and the Buchanan Controversy
counter-factual scenarios are very intriguing, history doesn’t flow in some linear fashion that leads from X to Y, and that assumes that if only we had taken this road as opposed to that road, we would have reached our destiny. The benefits of a realist perspective in foreign policy is that is makes it easier for us to develop specific policies based on the consideration of our concrete national interests—preserving the security of the nation-state is a top priority—and the military, economic and other means that are available to us. In that sense, both Churchill and Chamberlain were realists—while differing on the means to achieve the same goals. The overall goals that both Stalin and Hitler set for themselves were based on religion-like ideologies and fantasies that challenged the entire nation-state system of the time. Stalin (very much like Franco, and at an earlier stage, Mussolini) ended-up embracing realist strategies, including the agreement with Hitler and later the alliance with the capitalist West. Hitler’s decision-making and behavior during the war—his decision to abrogate the treaty with Stalin and attack the Soviet Union as well as his declaration of war on the U.S.—raises doubts whether he was a “rational actor” in the same way that Stalin proved to be. My main criticism of the decisions made by President Bush and his aides in the last eight years is that they were based on religion-like ideologies and fantasies and that unlike Stalin, they have never been able to cut their losses and take steps to secure long-term U.S. interests. [Read More]
Libertarianism’s Divergent Roads
The history of libertarianism as a doctrine and an organized political movement is of interest these days on account of all the attention garnered by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas congressman known as “Dr. No,” in his quixotic yet attention-getting and surprisingly successful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Where do these libertarian types come from, and where are they going? Is their bid to restore respect for the Constitution in American political culture a passing phase, or a portent of things to come? Whether Dr. Paul fought a rear-guard action, or in fact launched the first wave of a continuing assault on the Welfare-Warfare Sate remains to be seen, but if the GOP is dragged down to a crushing defeat by the neocons' war and its economic consequences, then the Paulistas might have a fighting chance of taking back the Republican party for the heirs of Robert A. Taft and the Old Right. [Read More]
Who Speaks for Europe? (on the PC defenders of the West)
What Bruce Bawer calls America’s “oppressive Christian fundamentalism” is exactly what keeps America healthy (at least in comparison to the continent). If the situation in Europe continues to deteriorate it will not be long before Bruce Bawer, for his own safety and that of his “partner,” will feel compelled to flee back to his native America. One can only hope that liberalism will not progress to the point where the American nation, like the nations of Europe, loses the will to assert its own identity, the conservative belief in the supremacy of its Christian heritage, the willingness to fight for the preservation of its traditional values. Contrary to what Bawer says, it is not true that “first they came for the gays.” First they came for the Christians, and radical homosexual activists were in the vanguard of the liberal storm troopers who silenced the Christians in Europe. [Read More]
Willing Executioners?--The Holocaust, Germans, and Collective Guilt
In the discussion of the Holocaust, the issue that has been consciously avoided by generations of historians and political scientist has been the degree to which the German people had knowledge of the Holocaust during 1939-45. Hitler’s and Himmler’s guilt is obvious and well documents, but what level of guilt do we attribute to the average German, what guilt do we continue to impose on the children and grand children of those unfortunate Germans who, in a very real sense, were the first victims of Hitler’s terror? [Read More]
Buchanan, Kennan, and the “Good War”
It is not surprising that Pat Buchanan’s new book, exploring the collapse of the British Empire and the connection of that disaster to England’s involvement in two World Wars, should have received a strong endorsement from George F. Kennan, written (it might be surmised) shortly before this luminary’s death at the age of a hundred and one. I bring this up because Pat’s discovery of Kennan indicates a union that was perhaps inevitable. Once their differences over the Cold War had begun to recede, paleoconservatives were bound to rediscover Kennan as a thinker of choice. How many true conservatives would agree with these lines from his American Diplomacy: Today if one were offered the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913—a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists, a vigorous Germany, united and unoccupied, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe—well, there would be objections to it from many quarters, and it wouldn’t make everyone happy, but in many ways it wouldn’t sound so bad, in comparison with our problems today. [Read More]