A Paleo Epitaph
In October 2004, my longtime friend Sam Francis responded to a recent commentary by Franklin Foer in the New York Times about the paleoconservatives as a rising antiwar opposition to the neoconservatives. Foer, a New Republic editor, believed that a defeat for Bush in the fall 2004 election might lead to a repudiation of his neoconservative advisors, and the return of the Old Right to favor. Sam and I had our doubts. In a letter printed in the Times, I noted that the imbalance of forces between the two sides was so overwhelming that no matter what occurred in the election, the paleos would not likely gain influence. Sam offered this interpretation: “A Bush victory would more likely mean their [the paleocons’] obliteration since neo-conservative domination would be locked in. But even if Bush loses, it’s dubious very many Republicans would leap on the paleo bandwagon.” For Sam, this represented a glaring historical contradiction: despite the “bad press” the paleos received, he was convinced, “more rank and file conservatives agree with them than with the neocons.” If they therefore “could learn to play more effectively, they could deal themselves a better hand in the future, even if it’s outside the Republican Party.”
With due regard for my now dead comrade, I don’t think the biggest problem for the paleos has been their inability to play cards effectively. Their lack of resources in the face of a truly grim opposition is so great that I’ve no idea what arrangement of cards would work for them in the foreseeable future. Their aging, embittered leaders have spent so long fighting in the trenches that they’ve taken to turning on each other. The unending tirade against Protestants that some Catholic paleos now engage in is both silly and counterproductive. We are living in a predominantly Protestant country whose institutions (before they became corrupted) were tied to a recognizably Calvinist society. (For the record, Calvinists held a majority among Southerners and Yankees alike.) Rhapsodizing about the glories of the Catholic Middle Ages played well in early 19th-century France and the Rhineland, but by now such lyrical outbursts (together with expressed revulsion for the Reformation) are a bit out of place. What American traditionalists need to defend is a badly denatured liberal Protestant polity that is going quickly to seed. I’ve no idea how appeals to Mary Queen of Scots and Pius IX will save our political society, or the even more badly deteriorated Catholic regions of Western and Southern Europe.
Note this is not a commentary on European counterrevolutionary thought and certainly not on the totality of medieval philosophy. I am only speaking about the degree to which some paleos have descended into a caricature of what Peter and Brigitte Berger wrote about them in Commentary in 1987, in a description that, incidentally, was not true at the time it was written. According to the Bergers, the rightwing opponents of the neoconservatives were neo-medieval Catholic Romantics who had nothing positive to say about the modern world. Because of age and frustration, the paleoconservatives might be moving toward actually deserving this stereotype.
There was a time, however, roughly between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, when the paleos looked like an insurgent force. In 1992, they found in Pat Buchanan a powerful presidential contender, and one who listened to their advice. The paleoconservatives and the paleolibertarians had patched up old disputes and come together in the John Randolph Club, a group whose meetings in Washington drew journalistic dignitaries, including but by no means limited to Buchanan. Although National Review by the early 1990s had thrown in its fortunes with the Commentary crowd, Buckley himself did continue to keep lines open to the other camp. NR observers and the then-unknown David Frum came to Randolph Club meetings. A speech delivered by Murray Rothbard at one such gathering on Jan. 18, 1992, has become legendary. In it he famously envisioned the “repealing the twentieth century”:
With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state.
We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.
Rothbard’s bold rhetoric gained considerable attention throughout the country.
So did a remark by a leftist reporter Daniel Lazare in 1989, that “despite their backward-looking ideas, the traditionalists have all the vigor of youth, while the neocons after eight years of Reaganism and less than one year of Bush, are beginning to show their age.” This was also the impression that John Judis had given in his essays on the “Conservative Wars,” which had been published in The New Republic three years earlier. Based on the research I had done for the second edition of The Conservative Movement, Pat Buchanan contemptuously observed in 1991, “neoconservatives are merely the fleas on the conservative dog,” and assumed that they were a problem that would soon be removed. Such an opinion did not seem out of the ordinary.
Although I thought Pat was overly optimistic, it seemed to me then that the paleos had wind in their sail. That was my conclusion in the second edition of TCM, although anyone who consulted the chapters on neocon funding would have learned that our enemies had at their disposal more than a hundred times the annual funding we did. They also had their columnists plastered all over the liberal press; and they had their followers running commercial presses and ensconced in elite universities. Neocons were obviously part of the liberal establishment, while we would soon be what we then called our opponents, “interlopers on the right.”
It was an unpalatable journeyman, then writing for National Review, William McGurn, who stressed the real disparity between the opposing sides in his condescending remarks about Murray’s speech at the Randolph Club. According to McGurn, the neocon panic, which came particularly from the president of Heritage, was unnecessary. The paleos would go nowhere “once their presidential candidate had left.” Their spokesmen had flair, and they took reactionary positions that attracted notice, particularly on immigration, but they had few of the available resources of their adversaries.
A comparison that comes to mind here is between, on the one side, Holland and Sweden and, on the other, France and England as world powers around 1650. Although the two smaller powers looked impressive in the early modern period because of some particular, temporary advantage, such as an efficient commercial navy or a well-trained infantry force, the differences between these regional powers and the more populous and wealthier European countries would eventually become decisive. The ultimately weaker side could be made to look more powerful than its opponent, but only for a brief period of time. In a similar way, the paleos once briefly looked more threatening to the ascending neocons than they really were—and that illusion could be sustained from the end of the Reagan administration through the first term of the elder George Bush.
The weaknesses of the paleo side eventually came to show: excruciatingly limited funding, exclusion from the national media, vilification as “racists” and “anti-Semites,” and finally, strife within their own ranks. In retrospect, this was all predictable, although for me it was hard to grasp how totally the fall came when it did. An example of the disparity to which I’m referring is the differing fates that affected two recent books on American conservatism, one published by me, the other by David Frum. While my book has sold no more than 700 copies in English (although apparently it is doing better in Romanian translation), Frum’s work has sold about 100 times as many. It has also been widely reviewed in the national press, and has been slobbered over by liberal as well as neocon columnists, and most shamelessly by that predictable neocon sycophant E.J. Dionne in the (quasi-neocon) Washington Post. My own book has been hardly reviewed at all and the only ads for it I have seen are the ones I have paid for.
My publisher, Palgrave-Macmillan, suggests that there is little interest in my book among journalists, despite the noteworthy fact that it is simultaneously coming out in several foreign languages, including Russian. My ideas are clearly not acceptable to our national press, which has no interest in disseminating my “alternative interpretation” of what has happened on the American right since the 1950s. (Apparently convenient lies work better!) But my book is only an isolated example of a much larger problem for our side, namely the imbalance of resources that allows the liberals and neocons to blackout an entire political persuasion and the view of reality provided by those identified with it. Presumably if we had at our disposal the equivalent of FOX News, the Wall Street Journal, and about half the editorial space in the national press, our views would receive the same attention as those of David Frum.
Whatever the problems facing our side, however, it does not seem likely that the neoconservatives and their enablers will control “the American Right” forever. Like the paleos, but in a much more dramatic and successful way, the neocons are products of changing historical conditions, and as Carl Schmitt once wisely observed, “An historical truth is true only once.” There is no reason to assume that those particular circumstances that aided the neoconservatives in their rise to total control over the establishment Right will continue to prevail indefinitely. That rise depended on time-bound conditions: the domination of the media by sympathetic patrons (many of whom were the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants), the conclusion of a bizarre alliance between elements of this media elite and Dispensationalist Christians, the descent of the Republican Party, and the postwar conservative movement into intellectual vacuity, and the fusion of the Right with Marxist and/or Jacobin revolutionary ideology. Therefore it is foolish to believe that the present power configuration will remain in place without change.
Even less likely is that the paleoconservatives will continue to play the role of the outnumbered, ridiculed opposition to the neocon-liberal establishment. This present Right opposition came into play when the neoconservative took over the conservative movement in the 1980s. Its achievement was to have gone on fighting against a formidable, world historical opponent, but it has not been able to make any headway in this confrontation. And even more certainly than its enemies, who are still drunk with the arrogance of power, the paleos will not be around forever.
Even now an alternative is coming into existence as a counterforce to neoconservative dominance. It consists mostly of younger (thirty-something) writers and political activists; and although they are still glaringly under-funded, this rising generation is building bridges on the right. Their contacts are with disenchanted, onetime allies of the “conservative movement” and with those who would gladly jump ship if there were professional alternatives to serving neocon masters. The Evil Empire is spongier than it looks, and if its younger opponents had more serious resources, this empire would be under siege, no matter how loudly the liberal press rallied to its neocon talking partners. Daniel Lazare was right when he noticed twenty years ago the limited shelf-life of neoconservative ideology. Despite all of their resources, the neocons have had nothing of interest to say for at least three decades. On FOX, when the bleached blonds aren’t on display, one is presented nonstop with the aging faces and tired voices of this neocon elite. In a less controlled society with more open discussion, these apparitions would have faded long ago.
The Ron Paul campaign was useful as a meeting point for a post-paleo right that drew in younger activists. Paul’s platform combined libertarian and traditionalist stands in a way that understandably upset the Republican regulars, that is, those who have presented us with the most decrepit exemplar of neocon ideology that one could have found for a presidential race. For these regulars and their neoconservative advisors, Ron Paul stood squarely against the policies of such unlikely “conservative” giants as Wilson, FDR, and Truman. This negative judgment is of course correct: Paul and his campaigners were harking back to the true American Right, identified with Taft Republicanism. And though Paul did not do as well as we had hoped, the contributions to his campaign and the millions of votes he picked up in elections suggest the beginnings of a new coalition on the right. It will no longer be a paleo coalition, but it will attract younger rightwing activists who wish to be rid of the present neocon hegemony and who are willing to cooperate in an alliance that can bring this about. On a practical level, we white-haired paleos can do nothing more to advance our cause. We have done so much fighting that we have become radioactive even from the standpoint of those who sympathize with us. Our opportunities to express our views have become limited by the pugnacity we have shown in the past. Only younger warriors can carry on our fight.
This post-paleo right will follow the paleos in breaking from the “conservative movement” as it now exists or as it has been reconstituted since the 1980s. It will seek to return to the constitutional liberal traditions of the anti-New Deal coalition. Decentralization, restriction on immigration as a source of social disorder and as an excuse for the expansion of the government’s social engineering, and the total rejection of a global democratic foreign policy will likely be the pillars of the new political alignment. Most importantly, its advocates will have no “patriotic” illusions about our managerial regime. Unlike Bill Kristol and George Will, they will see the current American managerial state as a monstrous contrivance that must be dismantled. Judging by its direction, this youthful Right will be more libertarian than traditionalist. While no one would claim that this orientation has not influenced many paleoconservatives, among their successors it will become the focal point of their rebellious politics.
This younger generation exhibits nothing but contempt for the idea that one can make the regime better or more virtuous by trimming some of its excesses. Nor do they indulge those delusional or cynical “idealists” who exhort us to bring “democratic” values or institutions to non-Western societies. One can already recognize the mark of this younger generation in the call for punishing the Republicans by supporting Barack Obama in the presidential race. This identifiably Leninist tactic, summed up by the maxim “the worst is the better,” may seem alien to most paleos; but it is the natural response of a younger, less inhibited generation of rightists to an intolerable political situation. Moreover, this new generation sees itself not as the latest phase of the post-World War II conservative movement but as a throwback to the interwar anti-New Deal Right. It has become contemptuous of the conservatism that arose in the 1950s under the auspices of National Review, because all it knows of this movement is the iron control of the neoconservative ruling class. Unlike the older generation, these younger rightists nurture no fond memories about the way things were before the 1980s or possibly before the1970s. To underline my point: in no way do these activists identify with the movement that is the subject of my recent, neglected book. According to Jeffrey Hart, writing in The American Conservative, William F. Buckley before his death came to the conclusion that the movement he had founded was already ending. For the post-paleo Right, that movement has not yet even begun.
Paul Gottfried is a professor of the humanities at Elizabethtown College. He is the author, most recently, of Conservative in America: Making Sense of the American Right.
Comments
The American conservative movement is virtually rudderless. Neocon is now a dirty word, and the movement will be forever tainted for lying America into the disastrous Iraq war. The Empire still believes in the neocons, but it too is a wounded, dying bull that just doesn’t know it’s on its last legs. SOMETHING is going to step into this vacuum, and quite frankly the only movement that I can see that is both intelligent, principled and filled with a lot of pent-up energy is the paleocon-libertarian. Sure, the Obama-ites are having their moment, but let’s face it, they’re not adults, and the heady fumes that currently fuel them will burn out not long after Obama takes office because he really offers nothing new-- just more of the same sickening, sleazy left-liberalism that the Clintons embrace, only with a hip person-of-color edge. I like Obama, but there’s really nothing there, whereas the palecon-libertarians run deep with ideas, values, opinions and solutions. It’s only a matter of time. And there’s really nobody else of substance.
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I would hope that a number of these younger people who want to nail the Republicans will support Bob Barr. I think that would accomplish the same effect.
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Indeed. While I see no reason to think that the post-paleo project will end better than the paleo one, we have, at least, a worthwhile political project to which we can look forward. At best we will contribute to a significant weakening of managerial tyranny; at worst we will deligitimize ourselves even moreso than had the paleos. In the middle is the possibility that our activity will have no effect in either direction. Paul is correct, however, to call our attention to changing historical contingencies, albeit with caution. Stay tuned, sportsfans.
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Dr. Gottfried is telling on one point of particular interest to me: the rise of Catholic bashing of Protestant allies. As I tell me friend “The Shoemaker” while he’s putting on new heels for me, beating up on Luther won’t slow the tide of Marxist, New Age or Islamist advance, at home or abroad. If we can’t be allies, then at least be co-belligerents, and if we must train our guns on each other, let’s do so after we win. Better to do so than to end up like Brutus and Cassuis, feuding in the face of Caesar’s advance.
As the late WFB noted, despair is a mortal sin. We know who rules the universe. Our best bet is to do what our opponents have done so successfully - “Think Globally, Ace Locally” within our own
little platoons. (My contribution is assigning “THE Roots of American Order” as a term
paper topic choice in an American gov’t class.) Even if we (but not our cause, ultimately) lose, we can at least to do in the company of friends, and with a smile.
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“On a practical level, we white-haired paleos can do nothing more to advance our cause...”
Which is what? That’s the problem. Where’s the conservatism in your “cause,” which seems to be entirely obsessed with bashing your perceived enemies, all of whom you label neocons? You have NO practical agenda. You offer no principled critiques. It’s war, war, war - and you’re against it. Bravo. You have the high ground to yourselves. Now you support Obama. See ya in oblivion.
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“the rightwing opponents of the neoconservatives were neo-medieval Catholic Romantics who had nothing positive to say about the modern world.”
Not true. I love it’s advances in dentistry and micro-brewing and believe many Romanist reactionarries feel likewise.
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I like Obama, but there’s really nothing there...
Ed. Obama is a flim flam shim-shamming racist socialist.
What is there to like?
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I agree that the entry of Bob Barr into the presidential race may dampen the Leninist
desperation of the thirty-something rightists,who are considering Obama the
icebreaker for a counterrevolution. As for the view that the non-neocon Right offers
little else but belligerence, that is the fate of all movements that
are trying to break into a political class from which they have been relentlessly
kept out. Once ones forces one’s way through the door, it will be possible to discuss
other ‘positive agendas’ with one’s hostile debating partners.
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As Paul has astutely written in his recent book, what passes for US conservatism today is rootless, a factor which explains its slow death. Looking at the two dozen portraits on the front cover of George Nash’s postwar history of US conservatism, a reader could be forgiven for making gloomy prognostications about the future of the Right: half of these rightists were either repentant former communists or emigres from Europe, and a third of the total were Catholic traditionalists. As Sam Francis once pointed out, it was hard to imagine a band of thinkers less likely to command mass loyalties in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. My best advice to my fellow paleos is to avoid building castles in the air (as the “Red Tories” of my native Canada do, yearning for the restoration of dead ruling classes)and defend what is left of our individual freedoms against the managerial state.
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Mr. Gottfried is cleary right about what’s going on inside paleoconservatism itself
and it’s something I’ve written about
(http://beatingthepowersthatbe.blogspot.com/2006_12_0)1_archive.html) as well. It’s
simply the passing of the torch from one generation to another which happens in all
forms of humanity, paleocons being no different.
But why does this mean then, that paleoconservatism itself is dead? Is it because younger
paleos will not care about the classics or medival Europe or Southern agrarianism
and will simply engage themselves in politics to no end after being involved in the Ron
Paul campaign?
I would hope not because of the aforementioned experience of a youngster like me within that campaign shows
clearly that politics without cultural renewal is a dead end road. We can laud the
accomplishments of the Paul campaign, which were considerable, but the bottom line also
is he lost and lost badly judged by any proper political standards. And he lost because
the culture that exists that he has to operate in is completly hostile to him. The only
way Rep. Paul or someone like him in the future can win over large amounts of voters is
if there is a cultural sea changes where the underlying values of what Paul’s positions on
the issues become the values of the country at large.
One can work within the system and perhaps take over a political party, even a major one
like the GOP (the religious right had a good deal of influence in the GOP from the early
1990s until 2006). Unless the culture changes politically victories are hollow and
ultimatley the culture winds up changing you. The Jonathan Edwards-like religious right of thee
early 1980s gave way to compassionate conservatism of Bush II and now is the Mike
Huckabee/Rick Warren “Purpose Driven Life” menagerie. Likewise, the David Frum of Dead
Right days of 1994 (hard budget cutting) now sounds like Tom Dewey in his latest book.
To me, the whole term “paleo” has evolved to encompass not just conservatism but
libertarianism (Lew Rockwell/Murray Rothbard/Justin Raimondo) and even liberalism (Bill
Kauffman/Alexander Cockburn/Ralph Nader/Eric Margolis) for that matter. Paleoism must be
a way of logical thinking, tradition and belief and love of patria. It must never become
an knee-jerk ideology the way conservatism has become (as described by Austin Bramwell)
otherwise we’ll be no better than they and become pathetic copies (Takimag becoming the
paleo version of The Corner) The main sin of the Trotskyites is to transform
conservatism into a reflection of their ideological selves, something they bequethed
to their sons and new generation of flacks.
The struggle for paleos of all persuasions, is to cure the bloodstream of thought
and culture of the poisons of Orwellian-described ideology.
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It is a little startling to read from a man whose scholarship, intelligence and erudition is beyond question that medieval Catholicism (read: “Christendom") has nothing to teach our modern world. I cannot think of an area where is doesn’t have something constructive to teach, be it manners, economics, art, music, philosophy and, of course, faith, among many other aspects of human life.
A time that gave us Aquinas, Dante and Louis IX has nothing to say to our age?
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I believe my criticism of anti-Protestant Catholic paleos specifically excluded holding a
positive attitude toward the heritage of the Middle Ages as an integral part of our
civilization. I am clearly in favor of such an attitude. What I am less receptive to is the
use of the American Right as a vehicle for carrying on the wars of the European
Counterreformation. Such a project would likely destroy whatever chance there is of offering
even token resistance against the liberal-neoconservative political elite.
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Ed. Obama is a flim flam shim-shamming racist socialist.
What is there to like?
Posted by I am not Spartacus on Apr 07, 2008.
The Israel lobby hates him. The military industrial big biz Zionist alliance has grave doubts about him. The enemy of my enemies...Gottfried put it best, “icebreaker for a counterrevolution.” As indicated above, I have no illusions Obama has substance, but because he is perceived as different, his popularity means there is a huge appetite and potential out there something other than the same old Bush-Cheney-Clinton status-quo. I think Americans are getting ready to move off the plantation.
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“What American traditionalists need to defend is a badly denatured liberal Protestant polity that is going quickly to seed.”
Impossible. A design-flaw at inception was the lack of a deeper, more active Christian anthropolgy informing our Fathers. Our Constitution failed to explicitly acknowledge it’s own patrimony, leaving it vulnerable as modernity slouched to it’s logical conclusion. We’ll carry the best aspects of the past with us, mindful to aim higher than simply re-building another commercial, Protestant state.
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Paul,
I am dense this morning, so would ask that you give us some names to look for (without, of course, neceassrily implying agreement in all respects with them). Tom Woods, for example?
Thanks,
Woody
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What I am less receptive to is the
use of the American Right as a vehicle for carrying on the wars of the European
Counterreformation. Such a project would likely destroy whatever chance there is of offering
even token resistance against the liberal-neoconservative political elite.”
Mr. Gottfried I would agree with you whole heartily on this point but could you offer examples
of where this is taking place? I know there have been some Catholic writers in paleo
journals who have offered crticism of the Reformation but where is such discussion dominating
the debate or is excluding persons for writing for such paleo outlets? I look at Takimag, CHT or
Chronicles and see Catholics, Protestantss, Jews, Orthodox even the non-religious writing about
issues and current events irrespective of religion.
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Hmm, not one mention of the Iraq War in the whole article. Isn’t it plausible that once there’s some kind of American withdrawal from Iraq, the “post-paleo”, Ron Paulish movement will evaporate as fast as the New Left did after the Vietnam War?
The idea that there’s a classical liberal, Taft Republican, anti-New Deal base out there seems like wishful thinking. The neocons are right: people like big government. Most can no longer imagine life without it. Support for people like Ron Paul is largely based on the Iraq War. How many people supported him because of his policy on the gold standard?
On issues like immigration and globalization, Sam Francis was right: the elites can calm angry outbursts with a few token gestures. If it comes down to it, everybody can give lip service to immigration reform etc., even the Wall Street Journal. Because of the nature of the core issues--except for the war--the “post-paleo” movement will be especially prone to being co-opted.
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What an excellent and sobering article by Dr. Gottfried!
The neocons have been extremely successful because they focus
on selling the core parts of their agenda and don’t bother with details.
The paleos of course have much better ideas, but no focus or ability
to present their agenda to the voters. They assume that their superior
ideas and great wisdom will make people come to them for advice.
Paleoconservatism is a great idea, but a political programme it is not.
Confusing and apparently irrelevant, you could not assemble a platform
with less appeal to voters of today, if you tried. And if you actually
seek political responsibility you must connect with voters (no, loudly
complaining about the stupidity of the public is not really it).
Dr. Gottfried ponders where the young conservatives will go. I can only
say that nothing, and absolutely nothing, will turn young people away
from paleo websites faster than the racism and anti-Semitism
surfacing ever so often. They will never return.
The neocons are today discredited and proven wrong. Communism was
discredited and proven wrong some 90 years ago, and is still
around. The neocons will resupply during the next Dem administration,
after which they will be back, with fresh faces and money, and have
another ride. The paleos will be pretty much where they are today.
This did turn out a bit harsh, sorry about that, a frustrating subject.
The real question for you paleos out there might be; Do you actually
want to have a movement, or are you happier with the club you already have?
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They cynicism and nay-saying here, while understandable given past paleocon failures, is uncalled for. Remember three things: 1) Right now, there is no conservative representation. The Bushies/Neocons have, like the Dems, essentially forsaken all conservative principles (including Christianity) and basically decided to use government largesse to buy loyalties and elections. So we have two parties fighting it out for the parasitically-minded constituencies.
2) Big government/Big business is in a fatal struggle with Christianity. Which means that not only are conservatives going unrepresented, but so are Christians. This goes to Gottfried’s point of the debilitating internecine struggle between committed Christian Catholics and committed Christian Protestants, which should be forsaken to unite all under the Christian-ethos banner.
3) America is now a multi-racial, multi-cultural country of competing tribes. Only Christianity can unite the different races; government never will.
Am I calling for paleocon-libertarians to play the Christian card? Damn right I am. Now this will bring out the usual big business/big government/Neocon/Neolib catcalls of “anti-Semitism,” “intolerance,” “Medievalism,” “Church-state intrusion,” etc etc, but so what? The political dynamic in this country today isn’t your father’s Buick. The country is falling apart, people are getting scarred and desperate and looking for a return to original principles. The federal government and its various fascist/welfare constituencies are responsible for the decline of America, and many people sense this. Western (Christian) civilization has endured because it has brought stability and order from chaos, something the self-worshipping federal government can never hope to do. Paleocons have always had the Christian card; they’ve just lacked the balls to play it. That must change; that will change.
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I have no illusions Obama has substance, but because he is perceived as different, his popularity means there is a huge appetite and potential out there something other than the same old Bush-Cheney-Clinton status-quo. I think Americans are getting ready to move off the plantation.
Ed. You may be right about Obama’s perceived “difference.”. However, I fear his popularity is due to his idea the State is the answer to all of our problems - from racism to home foreclosures to health care to national debt.
He is an idolatrous devil whose golden tongue is worshiped by those Fathered and (S)Mothered by the idolatrous State which loathes its mortal enemy - Divine Revelation and the Church established by Christ.
Look at how few of the young are regular church-goers vs how numerous are those young adults who turn out for Obama’s Mega-Church political rallies.
I’ll bet there is not Obama supporter in one thousand young men who go to an Indult or SSPX Mass or an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, or an Orthodox Synagogue or a Reformed Calvinist Church Service.
Those who are regular members of such places walk around with their eyes wide-open.
Long ago, Mr. Sobran pointed out that just because our tyrants don’t have funny haircuts or wear uniforms is no reason for us not to consider them tyrants.
The flim flaming shim shaming socialist with the golden tongue (a secular St. John Chrysostom, I guess) may be enticing Americans to move off their political plantations but they are walking directly into the Socialist System; a maximum socialised security system as it were.
My Family Motto is:It is always darkest before the storm. I see no reason to abandon it now.
Voting for Obama is evil. And evil may never be done that good may come of it.
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Sean, as an evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant I think Dr. Gottfried is correct. The hostility to evangelicals among some paleos is palpable. Follow the debates here and at Chronicles, for example. Some of the criticism of Protestantism as it is currently manifested is justified, but Protestants aren’t going to take kindly to the idea that it has all been down hill since the Reformation (the Reformation being the primordial rebellion) since we believe the Reformation was in fact a restoration. Evangelicals are hopelessly liberal minded in many ways, but their commitment to Biblical moral absolutes is one main reason why America has better resisted moral decline and is less clearly post-Christian than Europe. No “fundamentalist” reaction and resistance to modernism arose in Europe, and Dabney was hardly a crypto-modernist. So we can’t all be hopelessly liberal.
I have a great deal of respect for those people and institutions that make up what is currently identified as paleoconservatism. But my youngish (born 1968) by paleo standards perspective is that the movement talks to itself too much. There just aren’t enough paleos. We need a counter-revolutionary coalition. A counter-revolution that includes paleos but also includes paleolibertarians, hard religious rightists, Reconstructionists, disaffected Republicans, etc. There will never be a substantial counter-revolution that does not include evangelicals. It is a matter of math. What we need to do is convince them to shed their liberal mindedness so that they think on all matters the same way they think about morals. (I hope that makes sense.) The cause is not helped by calling them names.
Bringing various aspects of this counter-revolutionary coalition together is part of what we are trying to do at Conservative Heritage Times (CHT). http://www.conservativetimes.org But it is not easy because you quickly get pigeon holed.
I do worry that the current generation is more libertarian than traditionalist, but don’t know what to do about it.
For those who want concrete political advice right now, I would start by contacting your state and the national Constitution Party and telling them not to nominate neoconservative Alan Keyes. If the CP goes neo, us traditionalist will have nowhere to cast a principled protest vote. (Bob Barr is an appealing alternative as long as he is still solid on life and immigration.)
And as for names of someone who is able to appeal to and hold this coalition together (besides Paul of course), I am very impressed with Chuck Baldwin. As a Baptist preacher he is no libertarian, but Paul supporters love him.
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IANS, I don’t share your fear and loathing of Obama. I believe he is a Christian—granted, a misguided one who believes government can step in for Christianity—but then he is hardly unusual in that sense. American Christians need to drop this delusion, just as they need to drop the delusion that money worship is reconcilable with Christianity. But their failure to do so doesn’t necessarily make them evil. It just makes them deeply ignorant. Now, if Obama didn’t have a Church-going background and was forsaking Christianity the way the Marxists did—well, then I’d be worried. But right now, he is under fierce attack for his association with a fiery Christian preacher.
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Voting for Obama is the lesser evil but he is still an abortion lover, big government, protax,afirmative action backer,pro illegal alien,ass kisser of the Israeli Lobby, and spread America all over the world kind of guy.The only things he has going for him is that he stole Ron Paul’s lines on Iraq,not hard when 90% of democrats are against the war.The Israel Lobby hates him only because his father and stepfather were muslims.
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I believe he is a Christian...</I.
AFAIK, he is agnostic (at best) vis a vis Creation and life after death.
<I> Now, if Obama didn’t have a Church-going background and was forsaking Christianity the way the Marxists did—well, then I’d be worried.
His Church is suffused with Black Liberation Theology (and that’s not your Mother’s BLT) which is Marixism married to racism. BLT hates Whitey and while the Media knows the reality of Pastor Wright’s abominable church, it will cover for Obama because the Collectivists in the MSM recognise the time of his coming. Barack is, potentially, The Engineer best qualified (since FDR) to bring the Socialist Train safely to station in Washington.
But right now, he is under fierce attack for his association with a fiery Christian preacher.
Pastor Wright is a racist riven with hatred and his ideas about what constitute Christianity are so insane they are, frankly, satanic.
And it was this Church and this Pastor that Barack sought out and joined because it spoke to his heart.
If a white conservative politician belonged to a Church that taught White Liberation Theology and had a crazy Pastor who clearly hated Blacks and America and Jews then there would be hell to pay for that white politician because he would be held accountable for his actions.
Barack has been allowed to escape the consequences of his actions because the MSM is racist and they do not hold blacks to the same standards as they do civilised whites.
When blacks act like Pastor White and Barack, they are granted a dispensation by the political priests in the MSM because, as the descendants of slaves, they can hardly be expected to act civilised.
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“Pastor Wright is a racist riven with hatred and his ideas about what constitute Christianity are so insane they are, frankly, satanic.”
Sounds to me like he’s not much different in loathsomeness than Bush’s Christian Zionist spiritual guides.
“If a white conservative politician belonged to a Church that taught White Liberation Theology and had a crazy Pastor who clearly hated Blacks and America and Jews then there would be hell to pay for that white politician because he would be held accountable for his actions.”
Unless he was a white conservative politician spiritually guided by Muslim/Arab-hating and America-hating Christian Zionist pastors like John Hagee who support racialist Jewish nationalism and wars of Armageddon in the Holy Land. Then he too would be given a pass for his bigotry.
Look, a lot of people are offended by Wright, and a lot of people are offended by Hagee and other crazed Christian Zionist religious leaders. If the sum total of Obama amounts to the views of Wright, then the same can be said of Bush, McCain and Hagee. I think of support for Obama as part of the historical dialectic, which despite being co-opted by Marx, is not without merit in diagnosing historical patterns. The election of Bush did not result in End Times, nor will the election of Obama. But the two sides will most certainly beat the living s**t out of each other, which is how the Founders designed it. And the paleocon-libertarians shall inherit the earth. Now what’s wrong with that?
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“Isn’t it plausible that once there’s some kind of American withdrawal from Iraq, the “post-paleo”, Ron Paulish movement will evaporate as fast as the New Left did after the Vietnam War?”
Answers: 1) No, there are numerous issues unifying the Liberty movement. Not the least of which istrue fiscal conservatism. Even without the war, our fiscal and monetary policies are bankrupting the nation. 2) When are we ever going to withdraw from Iraq??? Under Neo-cons or liberals, even if we somehow get out of Iraq, they will quickly find another interventionist pet project with disastrous consequences.
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To get resources you need a quality product and sales work. There are government and private grants of all kinds. There are business opportunities from understanding the economy and society.
Learn calculus, statistics, economics, etc. Learn the numbers at BLS, census, etc. You can get money if you do your homework. If you don’t know math, statistics, economics, or data sources and haven’t even talked about others writing about them, then why should anyone put money into you?
Show your math, models, data, writing, etc. are better and then complain you don’t get funding. Raimondo does his homework and is able to keep antiwar.com afloat. He has created a product with quality. Ron Paul got a lot of donations.
Vdare and Steve Sailer know the numbers and put out quality work. You can learn calculus and statistics and economics just clicking on Wikipedia articles and searching calculus homework or statistics homework and reading the problems. There are so many learning resources and data resources on the internet that no one has a good explanation for not learning the numbers and how to analyze them using math and statistics.
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This analysis ignores the big elephant in the room: 9/11. While I don’t think the Paleos every really had a shot at dominating the conservative movement, the 9/11 terror attacks give the reins to the Neocons. Who wants to hear about non-interventionism, and minding our own business, when two symbols of American power are destroyed?
Neocons, like Communists, have ideas that simply cannot work in the world. Ultimately, we don’t need to oppose the Neos politically because eventually their failures will catch up with them.
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Red, my view of the Reformation as a Catholic is what’s done is done. I’m not going to waste my
time re-fighting the Thirty Years War. We’ve had this discussion at Conservative Heritage Times and I
still believe you’re mistaking a style (evangelicalism) with a set of beliefs (fundementalism)
which is more in-line with paleoism in general than you’re average mega-church. However, I don’t
wish sectarianism to be a breakwater for what I agree with you should be a larger grouping beyond just
paleocons. If others wish to engage in such innanities, it’s their loss and as Mr. Gottfried said
they’re being crowded out and superseeded anyway.
As for thinking that once the U.S. ionvolvement in Iraq ends that such a movement would
dissipate I would remaind you we were together on Somalia, on Haiti and Liberia and Bosnia,
Kosovo and now Iraq all throughout the 90s and the aughts. What we oppose is not just the war in
Iraq per say but the entire direction and scope of U.S. foreign policy. We don’t just oppose a
war together, we agree on change together.
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@Red Phillips,
“There will never be a substantial counter-revolution...”
Which revolution are we countering? The one that begin with the Jacobins, or earlier in the 16th Century? Perhaps the one that occurred at The Fall?
A big problem for the Right is the view that Christendom and the Enlightenment are of the same continuum, despite the radically different notions each holds regarding man’s relationship to God. Until we make and agree on the root causes for our crisis, we will be fighting a rear-guard action worthy of McHale’s Navy.
The Managerial State will continue to grow in omnipotence as society seeks salvation political means. Libertarians should realize that suppressed religious yearning doesn’t vanish, it merely mutates into a desire for an earthly paradise.
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“Which revolution are we countering?”
The liberal Enlightenment in whole or in part.
“A big problem for the Right is the view that Christendom and the Enlightenment are of the same continuum”
I certainly don’t make that mistake. That is what I meant by evangelicals being liberal minded on issues other than Biblical morality.
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Actually, while I will likely support a Barr candidacy (though his Fair Tax advocacy is troubling), he is in no way the sort of person to be the representative of any post-paleo movement. If post-paleoism in no way relates “movement conservatism” of years past as Mr. Gottfried suggests, then Barr is actually a poor choice. A former Republican Congressman most well known for the Defense of Marriage Act and leading the Clinton impeachment charge is in no way the transcendent figure such a movement needs...if in fact post-paleoism is what we are looking at.
I am not so sure of this, and see Barr as the bridge between a younger generation of Paulites and an older generation of traditionalists. Barr actually has potential to bring in MORE voters than Paul because of this, but he is also less likely to spark a new movement for the same reasons.
Dylan
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Of course Paleoconservatism is dead, it died when the Fox News Channel was created in 1996. At the birth of Fox News Joe Sixpack finally said, “Hey, I’ve finally got a Republican TV network, cool.”
Now Joe Sixpack has never been known for his precise intellectual judgement so he accepted Fox as the only Conservatism.
Who and where are these Paleocons in the non-internet world? I certainly never meet any. The White common man is either a CNN/MSNBC Liberal or a Fox News Neoconservative, that’s it.
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Re Brian’s comment that the “Liberty movement” is based on much more than the Iraq War: to continue with my analogy (and that’s all it is), the same was true of the New Left in the 1960s. The issues of poverty, “racism”, unaccountable government, etc. didn’t go away. Nevertheless, the movement vanished overnight with the end of the Vietnam War. War is a special case because you can’t co-opt an anti-war movement with token gestures and half-measures.
On “when are we ever going to withdraw from Iraq”, etc.: I think there will be less overt US intervention for a while, after American fighting in Iraq is over (and it will end, a few years after it’s perceived as unwinnable). Americans won’t support further actions the way they supported the invasion of Iraq. At the risk of pushing the analogy way too far, you might even call it a Vietnam syndrome.
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Paul:
Great commentary! Ideological and political movements emerge in response to changes in the real world whose costs become unbearbale as elites and people search for ideas that could explain the changes taking place and that could become a basis for action. My guess is that as long as the current political-economic system in the West will be successful in terms of co-opting the elites and the public, the winning “ideas” will be propaganda and marketing gimmicks like neo-conservatism.
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The way I see it we will never leave Iraq or the Middle East if either McCain or Hillary wins and Obama will only move some troops to the margin and leave us still heavily involved.The economic collapse can change all that,Hitler only got 2% of the vote in 1928.Reagan was a has been in 1976.Hoover won a landslide in 1928 as well.Who knows where it will end?
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If you will study the backgrounds of the men who wrote the Constitution, you will find that all their families originated in an area covering a very small part of the globe, perhaps as small as only a few hundred square miles. The Constitution didn’t create the men; men created the Constitution. Without such men in leadership, without the presence of a homogeneous society of above average intelligence, a truly conservative form of government is unachievable and inconceivable. So whenever someone goes on about his desire to restore (or to ‘conserve’ what may remain of) this country’s original, Constitutional Republic-- yet will not dare to honestly address the issue of race (lest he be ‘racist’) he reminds me of a man who would dearly love to drive his car, but is out of gas.
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Paul, Could you please inform me as to the “leaders” of this new young 30-something cohort of traditional right wingers that supported the Paul campaign. Could you point me in the direction of some of their most well-known polemics? Blogs? Articles? Websites? The Paul campaign was young , but it was not necessarily conservative, though Paul was. I attended a couple of his rallies and was struck by how none-conservative many of the attendee’s were. Yes they hated the war, but they were mostly the degenerate gen-x and underperforming yuppie types. They
didn’t care about massive big government, traditional morality, or ending entitlement programs, and repealing the new deal. They just seemed to love watching Ron stick it to Giuliani and the other corporate warmongers on stage.
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Suffering from insomnia this evening, so I log onto Taki’s Mag - which I’m really beginning to enjoy… and find myself wading through a steaming pile of anti-semitic bigotry.
Its the middle of the bleedin’ night! Shouldn’t you all be out defacing synogogues or knocking over gravestones, or something?
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“Which revolution are we countering?”
“The liberal Enlightenment in whole or in part.”
Good, but you can understand, why some of us view the Reformation as a disaster. Private judgement gave birth to Locke’s fictional individual
living in a fantasy state void of familial, communal or tribal ties, attachments and loyalties.
Our civilization has to adopt and be shaped by a true narrative before we can dream of many of the changes proposed here.
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Kevin, I understand why you believe the Reformation was a disaster, and I am well aware of the problems with Locke. But Protestants don’t see the Reformation as destruction/rebellion. They see it as a restoration. The point is that Protestantism is not inherently, irredeemably liberal.
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If you search on
econometrics homework data
you get lots of hits.
http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=econometrics+homework+data&btnG=Google+Search
Data, stat packages, and homework solutions are all free on-line. You can learn by doing.
If you sit around saying Steve Sailer and Ed Rubenstein articles at Vdare that use data are too hard to read, then don’t ask why someone doesn’t give you money.
No man is a data island, the bell tolls for thy laziness and wilful ignorance. You can get started in the Wiki article on limit to learn calculus. Also try the Wiki article on econometrics. If you need algebra, search on algebra homework solutions.
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Red,
The problem; the Reformation’s offspring is the Liberal tradition. So, the task is to identify those aspects of that tradition we wish to preserve, while not wasting our time preventing it from fulfilling it’s death wish. Unfortunately, I sense a consensus has yet to be reached here, largely because attempts to analyze root causes are either dismissed as a romantic re-fighting of long lost battles (which sadly can be the case), or many conservatives view modernity as synonymous with the essence of Western civilization.
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Old Atlantic. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, BOLS, is SLOB backwards.
Don’t tell me Bureaucrats are without humor.
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I think of support for Obama as part of the historical dialectic, which despite being co-opted by Marx, is not without merit in diagnosing historical patterns. The election of Bush did not result in End Times, nor will the election of Obama. But the two sides will most certainly beat the living s**t out of each other, which is how the Founders designed it. And the paleocon-libertarians shall inherit the earth. Now what’s wrong with that?
I think it an unachievable result based upon an irrational idea.
Bush has vastly increased the powers of the Presidency. Obama, a much more charismatic and intelligent politician, will both increase (faster and bigger - a Steve Austin Socilaist, if you will) the size of govt while concretising all of the previous advances in that direction accomplished by Bush and Cheney.
The Dems will increase the size of their plurality in both House and Senate and the Republicans will be feckless, when they are not whiny, in their opposition.
And a young Barack will be reelected.
A vote for Obama is a vote in favor of increasing the rapidity of the move towards tyrannical socialism.
I do not understand how that predictable result can be considered a win for those who cherish a civilised liberty.
The direction the country is moving is left. It is a very STRONG move left. We are becoming more and more socialised. And the more the country becomes socialised the more I read and hear that when theycountry REALLY moves left it will benefit conservatives.
Raider Fan could not stand to be in the same Stadium with other Raider Fans who told him that every time the Denver Donks scored a touchdown that was a win for the Raiders.
When the socialist are being elected liberty is losing. And no magical thinking can make that reality disappear.
The idea that voting for a Marxist racist will benefit civilised liberty is an idea so insane that only an intellectual could believe it.
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Paleoconservatism, marked by a sense of rootedness in the autonomy of traditional institutions, has garnered much less support and resource in America (or what still stands as America) than neoconservatism because of its opposition to both imperialism and economic collectivism. I as a paleolibertarian disagree with paleocon protectionism as a contradictory seam appearing in their worldview, but believe that a new anti-statist counter-revolutionary coalition will inevitably arise. Strategically we cannot put our faith in Washington, although there are statesmen amongst us like Ron Paul and Murray Sabrin. The intellectuals who will edify a coalition, I cannot surmise.
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Joshua, Ron does have much conservative support from the Mises Institute and paleolibertarians. Rockwell, Grigg, Thronton, Woods, DiLorenzo, Raimondo-I could list indefintely for hours.
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Tristan. I understand Ron Paul garnered much supported from established paleo’s, both libertarian and conservative ones. My point was that his coalition of young supporters was in no way a traditional conservative one. It was centered on an anti-war ideology that was unsustainable on the long run. I wanted to know who the younger cohorts intellectual core and polemics were? I know the establishment supported him, my point was his candidacy was gerrymandered to this age and time, and will not be a lasting and permanent coalition of youngsters who will carry the torch of constitutionalism.
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I suppose I am partly responsible for the mediocre sales figures since—aside from a recent biography of Charles Maurras—I have yet to read a book published this century. Then, while I was on Amazon reading the reviews, I noticed the 1943 edition of Burnham’s “The Machiavellians” was available, so I nabbed that instead.
The attachment to the Middle Ages is hardly “Romantic”, just the opposite in fact. It is classical and intellectual, not emotional; I have discovered a marvelous proof of this which is impossible to fit in this little box.
Conservatism is failing because it no longer has a worldview, despite Kirk’s attempt to define one. A focus on isolated issues with alliances of convenience is not a viable strategy.
Thus we look to the past, not nostalgically, not wistfully, not to advocate a return to it, but as guidance for the future ... what they call in the Nouvelle Droite “archeofuturism”.
It is the nature of democracy to devolve into formlessness and chaos. Only then will change occur. But will it be Catholic, Pagan, or some form of leftist tyranny?
( http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=35 )
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Joshua writes, “It was centered on an anti-war ideology that was unsustainable on the long run”
Paul’s antiwar stand was important, but what resonated most loudly with students with his overall message of economic sanity and limited government. Go back and watch or listen to some of his campus talks. The reception he earned was about more than just the war.
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It is difficult to understand why Protestants are taken aback that they have come under criticism by conservative Catholics. It is not just the Reformation, whose true affect is the eventual de-christianization of all lands where its fruits dominated, but that they seemed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in so many mutual endeavors by allowing themselves to be distracted by a military crusade they cast in apocalyptic terms against an amorphous foreign enemy. There was real work to be done at home and their obsession with eschatology allowed them to be disarmed. They, in large numbers, seemed to switch allies and purpose and became the secular leviathan’s greatest and most loyal supporters without giving any thought to the incongruity.
This criticism may not be valid for all movement Protestants, especially for present company, but it is true for enough that it seems doubtful that any lasting good can come from alliance with those whose pro-strong central governmental instincts are so defining.
Couple that with the increasing frequency we are hearing “Whore of Babylon” rhetoric from the Apocalypse Now Protestants and the apparent essential failures of the republican experiment in government is it any wonder that Catholics are left to explore pre-reformation European history for ideas for what the world should be?
A new Dark Ages are seeming more and more to be our lot and we know what worked the first time.
Regarding Ron Paul, he hardly made the Iraq War the centerpiece of his campaign. How effectively the totality of his message reached the younger crowd is yet to be seen but his core support seems to be, from my experience, in the middle-age folks who still remember the issues that animated the Republican party 10 or more years ago.
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“It is difficult to understand why Protestants are taken aback that they have come under criticism by conservative Catholics.”
Before any indignant Protestants jump in here, I might point out that currently “conservative Catholic” = Michael Novak, while the alternative Catholic representatives would include folks such as Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi.
A quick survey of the hostility Mark Shea has received from his readership, for his critiques of the war, indicates that we should not throw stones through our glass walls.
And as I suspect Dr. Gottfried & others have noticed, orthodox Catholic bishops who may be solid on many issues tend to follow the Left/Republicans on the matter of immigration—akin to a judge granting amnesty to a house-burglar simply because the burglar happens to be a co-religionist of the judge, whereas his victim is not.
“it seems doubtful that any lasting good can come from alliance with those whose pro-strong central governmental instincts are so defining.”
Again—I do not get the impression that that many Catholics know or care about Church teachings on subsidiarity, much less are avid students of Distributism.
Consider the Acton Institute, a largely Catholic organization.
As to the rank-and-file parishoner, they are (in the words of Thomas Fleming) “more loyal to George Bush than to any Pope.”
I think if there is to be any “coalition”, it must A) Keep keenly aware of the importance of the tremendous divide between Protestants & Catholics, and B) Focus on those things which we affirmatively agree upon—natural law, emulation of Christ, the primacy of the family, etc.—rather than upon some common enemy, or shared hatred of secularism.
Coalitions founded on shared hatred are a big part of how we got into this mess to begin with. Marxists exploited the fact that everybody was anti-Hitler to come to power, while neocons exploited the fact that everybody was anti-Soviet to come to power. Perhaps if we are going to have any sort of alliance, we should found it on the question of “what can we agree upon that we are *for*?” vice “what can we agree upon that we are against?”
I would strongly concur with this assessment:
“A new Dark Ages are seeming more and more to be our lot and we know what worked the first time.”
This is an alternative vision of the future which Dr. Gottfried has not recognized in his otherwise very comprehensive and intriguing article.
Many “paleos” (myself included) would argue that the System has today become so fundamentally restructured as to make any reform short of revolution or collapse impossible.
My own opinion is that energy expended on national politics is mostly (though not entirely) wasted.
We’d be better served by taking cues from the monastics, by concentrating on putting down strong roots in local culture and local political communities, which might weather the coming storm and lead to a reflowering many generations hence.
I do think there are different approaches which may be complementary, though, and of course I cannot predict Providence.
Which is why I qualified my statement about energy expended on national politics.
Should the US break up into an assortment of republics like the Soviet Union, perhaps we might have reason to be glad that figures such as Ron Paul have attained such national prominence.
Somebody will have to pick up the pieces when the Party is over, and maybe the national politics game could be a sort of training ground.
As for redeeming the current System or reviving the Constitution—IMO it would take the sociological equivalent of a miracle.
Whether Left or Right, the American people don’t want a constitution, they don’t want limited government, they don’t want liberty, and they don’t want to live in a culture bounded by Christianity—Catholic or Protestant.
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“The idea that voting for a Marxist racist will benefit civilised liberty is an idea so insane that only an intellectual could believe it.” LOL--Great line.
But here’s the reality: Either Hillary, McCain or Obama is going to be the next president. War is the most powerful fuel for statism, socialism, quasi fascism, as Bush has proven. So of those three, the least likely to start world war 3 is the lesser of three evils. Beyond that, there’s no money left for Obama to enact any grandiose socialist schemes; at best he will be able to maintain the level of federal spending attained by Bush, and likely it will be spent in America instead of Iraq or elsewhere; McCain and probably Hillary would spend it on a war with Iran. For those reasons only, I settle for Obama over Hillary and McCain. Of those three, which would you pick and why?
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“Either Hillary, McCain or Obama is going to be the next president… Of those three, which would you pick and why?”
Ed you are correct that it will be one of those three, but otherwise I reject your premise. It will be one of those three regardless of how you cast your vote or how any of us here cast our votes. So why lie down with the dogs? Vote rightist third party and send a message. By your logic, if it was Hillary vs. McCain and Hillary was leading by 20% we would all be supposed to vote for her because McCain can’t win.
Hopefully Chuck Baldwin or Judge Moore or another acceptable paleo will be the Constitution Party nominee and non-libertarian paleos will have someone to vote for. (Although I agree with G.S. that I don’t have much hope for national politics.)
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While my book has sold no more than 700 copies in English (although apparently it is doing better in Romanian translation), Frum’s work has sold about 100 times as many.
Well, one reason for its low sales figures may be that it isn’t priced to sell. Both the $39.00 list price and the $34.00 Amazon discount price are pretty steep. Frum’s book, on the other hand, lists for $24.95 and is available from Amazon for $16.47. If Palgrave were sincerely interested in moving the book, I’d think they could put a price on it that someone other than a few academic libraries would be willing to pay. I’d bet the Romanian publisher is pricing more realistically.
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Of those three, which would you pick and why?
I will not vote for any of them.
Because so many of my fellow conservatives have spent their time attacking France, I am going to the polls to stage a silent protest by writing in Blaise Pascal for President.
Then I am going to go home and write another check to
http://www.clearcreekmonks.org/
and then I will spend some time with The Bride. I’ll drink some great Cabernet and she’ll drink Champagne and I will be content knowing my actions that day were the absolute best thing I could have done for my Country.
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Obama is a Christian?? Gee, the repeated and eventually successful effort to torpedo the Born Again Infants Protection Act in Illinois must have been an aberration. S what’s wrong a willing complicity in the murder of newborn children? or the dismemberment of children in the process of being born, or for that matter the scaling, burning, crushing, and decapitating of infants?
After all, with a Marxist mother, an apostate Muslim father, a racist charlatan of a pastor, an Ivy League heritage of entitlement, victimization, resentment, and militant secularism, a donor base in the fetid corruption of Chicago politics, himself a proud proponent of “mariage in drag,” and state confiscation of earned property . . . maybe he is the second coming, slouching toward DC (apologies to Yeats).
If this is your best option, DONT VOTE.
God help us.
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I stopped voting in 1992. All politicians are lying criminals.
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“Obama is a Christian?? Gee, the repeated and eventually successful effort to torpedo the Born Again Infants Protection Act in Illinois must have been an aberration. S what’s wrong a willing complicity in the murder of newborn children? or the dismemberment of children in the process of being born, or for that matter the scaling, burning, crushing, and decapitating of infants?”
All those events and more took place per “Christian” Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and are continuing there to this day, with the avid support of Bush “Christians”—millions of them. I would imagine there are a few Bush Christians piously passing judgment on Obama’s Christianity on this board today. But, yes, Obama deserves quotation marks around any description of him as a “Christian” as well. In fact, all “Christians” who support the two party state and its lackeys are supporting the biggest enemy of Christianity in the world: the state itself. But again, if you are worried about preserving human life, you have a moral obligation, even as a transitional step, to help see to it that, of the 3 candidates of which one will emerge as president, the one most likely to end the butchery in Iraq and least likely to start WWIII emerges as the winner. And the invocation of the possibility of WWIII really isn’t a rhetorical device; it is real. Hillary and McCain are both crazy and stupid enough to trigger it, at which point in time pious Christians will wish they had voted for the Devil himself if it only could have been averted. Christ himself is on record as having fled from an unnecessary fight. There can be nobility in getting the hell out of Dodge. If ending abortion in America is your thing, good luck with that in the midst of WWIII, or in the FDR era-like state-worship that will grow up around it and in its wake. That’s just what Christianity needs: another generation of brain-dead FDR state worshippers.
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Gottfried nailed it. As a 37 year old libertarian, I have to say he got my viewpoint right almost to a T.
Don’t be too worried about domestic book sales. This is destined to be the post-American century. It’s the Estonians and Romanians who will show the world the future, just like when Japan adopted Demming’s TQM when everyone in The Home of the Free ignored it.
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Red Phillips wrote:
>We need a counter-revolutionary coalition. A counter-revolution that includes paleos but also includes paleolibertarians, hard religious rightists, Reconstructionists, disaffected Republicans, etc.
Red, the “disaffected Republicans” numerically dwarf all the other groups combined: in the political short-term, none of the rest of us matter.
It’s not possible to “social engineer” history and plan the political future. The disaffected Republicans will do as they wish, and as the Zeitgeist moves them, and there is not much we can do about that.
We can only do our little bit to spread ideas that we believe are true: with a little bit of luck, and over the long term, the truth will out. But the only truly useful thing we can do today is take small actions to spread the truth that, in the end, will help our children or grandchildren. In the end, the world is ruled by ideas, but it typically takes a full human lifetime (seventy years or so) for ideas to triumph:
Adam Smith’ “Wealth of Nations” – 1776; repeal of the Corn Laws – 1846
Communist Manifesto – 1848, Bolshevik Revolution – 1917; etc.
And it can take much longer – look at how long it took to Christianize the Roman Empire!
Red, also wrote:
>I do worry that the current generation is more libertarian than traditionalist, but don’t know what to do about it.
Well, since I am a hard-core Rothbardian libertarian, I sincerely hope there is nothing you can do about it! But you may find some of us libertarians a bit more congenial than you think. To use your own example, I am pretty happy to be politically allied with Chuck Baldwin, although I do not agree with him on every single issue. In fact, I’d be inclined to label Chuck a “libertarian,” although not of exactly the same stripe as myself. Baptists can be libertarians, you know: one of the first (and greatest) libertarians in American history was the Baptist preacher Roger Williams.
Many of us libertarians are indeed atheists, but atheism is neither logically nor pragmatically a requirement for being a libertarian. Look over at the Lew Rockwell site: lots of paleo-libertarians are traditional Christians.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Ed wrote:
> Am I calling for paleocon-libertarians to play the Christian card? Damn right I am.
Ed, it’s not possible. Anyone who truly believes that Christianity is true has an obligation to spread the Gospel that comes from a Higher Authority than mere politics or culture. And those of us who think Christianity is not true would be both hypocritical, and ultimately unsuccessful, if we cynically tried to use religion to advance our political goals.
Furthermore, from a ruthlessly pragmatic political perspective, Christianity in America today is a weak reed on which to lean: adherence to Christianity slipped from 86 % to 77 % from 1990 to 2001 according to the massive CUNY ARIS surveys (pp. 10-11 in http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris.pdf ). As an atheist, I am happy with that; you are not. But it is a reality, in terms of political strategy.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Ed,
There is a deeper problem also with your suggestion to “play the Christian card” to advance political goals.
Modern science is profoundly, and probably inextricably, intertwined with modern life and culture. And, as a physicist myself (Ph.D. from Stanford), let me assure you that the feeling most evangelicals/fundamentalists have that modern science is inimical to Christianity is indeed true. If the scientific results that are almost universally accepted among scientists (e.g., the Big Bang, evolution) are true, than some versions of Christianity (e.g., those that adhere to “young-Earth creationism”) are simply and unequivocally false.
Other forms of Christianity (e.g., the form of Catholicism endorsed in recent decades by the Vatican) are not so directly disproven by science. But the core beliefs of any form of traditional Christianity – the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, the various miracles, etc. – are so alien to modern science that it is very difficult to find any top scientist who is a traditional Christian: I myself cannot think of a single one (I do know of a few third or fourth-rank scientists who are traditional Christians).
To take an example of current research on the subject, Professor Elaine Howard Ecklund recently found that two-thirds of the professors in the natural sciences at elite American universities did not have a belief in God (see, http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2006/03/accusations_of_misinformation).
This confirms the Larson-Witham study of a decade ago that found, in the words of the NY Times science reporter, “But when the researchers next targeted members of the National Academy of Sciences, an elite coterie if ever there was one, belief in a personal God was 7 percent, the flip of the American public at large…”
You yourself may think that this antipathy is an indictment of science and that science should alter itself so as to accommodate itself to Christina beliefs. But, again, looking at this solely as a matter of pragmatic politics, this is not going to happen: we scientists will not alter science as it now exists to make it more compatible with Christianity.
The role of science in modern life is too central for it to be possible to fully re-Christianize American culture and life, given the inherent antipathy between science and Christianity.
The warfare between science and religion will continue for a long time and religion will continue to be intertwined with politics. But to think that you can re-Christianize America in the near term in order to advance your political goals is simply an illusion. No competent political strategist would endorse that plan.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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“Anyone who truly believes that Christianity is true has an obligation to spread the Gospel that comes from a Higher Authority than mere politics or culture.”
Christianity isn’t just a religion; it can also be practiced as a philosophy, in which case there is no requirement to proselytize. Believing in Christ as a wise and true philosopher also makes one a Christian, and not necessarily at odds with science.
“Christianity in America today is a weak reed on which to lean: adherence to Christianity slipped from 86 % to 77 %”
I’m sure in the officially atheist Soviet Union, it had slipped a lot lower than that, because the State was at war with Christianity. The US Government and left-liberalism is also at war with Christianity in America (and the West) and has been for quite some time, so the fact that it is still at 77% is remarkable. That number will rise again when the federal government’s war against Christianity is forced into submission, as it has risen in contemporary Russia under Christian Putin.
“As an atheist, I am happy with that; you are not. But it is a reality, in terms of political strategy.”
Your “reality” as political strategy was also asserted in the Soviet Union, which also claimed to be a scientifically based society. It was an unmitigated disaster that murdered millions.
“The role of science in modern life is too central for it to be possible to fully re-Christianize American culture and life, given the inherent antipathy between science and Christianity.”
I’m glad you concede that America was once a Christian country, which is one of the things that made it so great. The less Christian it has become, the lower it has fallen socially, culturally, politically, morally, ethically, economically etc, etc. Scientific failures are sure to follow these declines, as they did in the Soviet Union, and rise again once the Christian ethos is restored. Personally, I don’t care of someone declares them self a religious Christian or not, but I think is important for all to be exposed to Christianity as philosophy, which is undeniably the basis for Western civilization—the civilization that historically laid the foundation for the highest scientific achievements. If there’s so much “antipathy” between science and Christianity, how could this have been so?
One would think more scientists would comprehend this on an intellectual level. I think left-liberal politics have infested social science today to the extent that many social scientists are now sub-consciously pursuing a political agenda in their work and opinion, which skews the results to comport to the left-liberal political agenda, which demonstrates that scientists are not nearly as pure, objective or intellectual as they imagine themselves to be. The new “heretics” are those who violate politically correct taboos; politicized scientists helped to create that anti-intellectual state of affairs.
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Ed,
You wrote:
>Believing in Christ as a wise and true philosopher also makes one a Christian, and not necessarily at odds with science.
In that sense of the word “Christian,” I suppose that I, and many other atheists, are “Christians.” Have you read Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”? The book is generally considered an extremely harsh attack on Christianity. But Dawkins expresses his deep admiration for many of the cultural achievements of Christianity and also insists that any educated Westerner must have a deep familiarity with the Bible.
Of course, he’s right: the Bible’s cultural and historical significance is so profound that anyone ignorant of it cannot grasp the history and culture of Western civilization. And could anyone fail to grasp the beauty of Chartres Cathedral or the wonder of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” simply because those were created for religious purposes?
You also wrote:
>I think left-liberal politics have infested social science today to the extent that many social scientists are now sub-consciously pursuing a political agenda in their work and opinion, which skews the results to comport to the left-liberal political agenda, which demonstrates that scientists are not nearly as pure, objective or intellectual as they imagine themselves to be.
Indeed. I was taking for granted that “social science” is not really science – I’ve never known any natural scientist who considered social science to count as real science.
The late Australian philosopher David Stove has some interesting essays in his “The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies” explaining how nineteenth-century Western philosophy (Hegel onward) was basically a bizarrely distorted and warped form of Christianity. Chesterton had a point when he declared that many people, when they ceased to believe in Christianity, then became believers not in nothing but rather in anything.
Credulity is a fault of the irreligious as well as the religious.
I actually think that, in some ways, outspoken atheists may find it easier to recognize the virtues of Christianity than many liberal Christians. For example, I learned of the movie of the “Chronicles of Narnia” on an atheist bulletin board some time before it came out in the theaters. Someone mentioned that Lewis of course intended it as a Christian allegory. Everyone chimed in that we knew that, but it was still a great book for kids, and we looked forward to the movie.
The truth is that the antipathy for Christian culture is part of a larger and broader dumbing down in our society that results in most Americans being utterly ignorant of the high culture of the West in general. I am married into a family of Chinese immigrants, most of whom are not Christians, and I see much more interest among my Chinese in-laws (and most of the other Asian immigrants whom I know) in the high culture of the West, including that which is obviously Christian, than among most Americans.
Yes, I agree with you that this is horrifying – the West is committing cultural suicide. But how can it be reversed? I’m homeschooling my kids – they’re learning about the Bible, they’re learning classical Greek (as well as Chinese), they know about the Christian origins of the idea of natural rights, etc. But how can we reverse the decline of the culture in general? Is that the only way to escape from the current political morass?
It seems, Ed, that you and I largely agree on diagnosing the disease. But how do we find a cure?
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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My solution? Education vouchers financed by local taxing authorities, which can be redeemed at religious schools and institutions, including group homes for children with unfit parents; a cultural war against nihilistic capitalism and debaucherous left-liberalism; a restoration of cultural Christianity to its rightful place of honor and leadership in the West, which may necessitate the subordination of often hostile belief systems including organized Judaism and Islam, left-liberalism, materialism, Marxist atheism and government-worshipping socialism. In other words, the majority of the public square should be reclaimed by the majoritarian belief system, and the hostile minorities and elites attempting to subvert, undermine and destroy it by leveraging government resources should be stripped of their power to do so by stripping the federal government of many of its powers.
I’m not calling for a theocracy, merely the neutralization of those forces that are artificially suppressing the West’s organic Christianity. The rest will follow, as it has in Russia.
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Paul,
You wrote:
>On a practical level, we white-haired paleos can do nothing more to advance our cause.
Well, actually, simply by telling the truth and focusing attention on reality, as you do in this column, you can do a fair amount to “advance the cause”!
I’m closer in age to you than to most thirty-somethings, but, because, I have young kids, I actually have a fair amount of interaction with thirty-somethings and, given my own interests, I use the opportunities I have to probe their political and social views.
My experience largely validates your conclusions. I see a very strong “libertarian” streak, of a fairly naïve and unintellectual sort of course. For example, I was recently talking with a thirty-something mom who brought up the issue of abortion and who turned out to be quite intensely “pro-life.” However, she volunteered that despite her very strong feelings on this and her being a committed evangelical Christian, she did not trust the government to handle the abortion issue by legally outlawing abortion. Similarly, I have talked with numerous “conservatives” who are intensely opposed to the war in Iraq, even though few of them have ever heard of “paleo-conservatism.”
As you suggest, none of these people could care less about intellectual debates among Catholic medievalists vs. historical Calvinists. However, what I am seeing very strongly is a “neo-traditionalism” that largely amounts to a pragmatic re-discovery that “traditional values” are in fact necessary for individuals and families to achieve happiness. A society in which parents fail to take responsibility for raising their kids, in which kids fail to respect their parents, and in which parents fail to be faithful and stay married to each other is going to be a society overwhelmed with unhappiness. A lot of young adults have seen what “liberal” social values mean in practice, and have come to realize that they do not work. Both my wife and I, and others of our acquaintances, find that people sometimes assume we must be evangelicals because we seem to have “evangelical values”: in fact, the people I am thinking of range from atheists to deists in their religious beliefs.
Being married into a family of Chines immigrants, I see that “traditional Christian values” are not that dissimilar from “traditional Buddhist/Confucian values,” etc. It is in fact contemporary “liberal/permissive” values that are a departure from the human norm. There are compelling reasons, having to do with evolutionary psychology, the development of human society, etc., as to why this is the case.
I think the biggest failing of paelo-cons has been their pessimism and their sense of fighting a rear-guard action to save “Western civilization.” The West is dying, as all civilizations ultimately die. But, in my observation, much of the rest of the world is absolutely frantic to acquire the fruits of the West – not only our science, technology, and industrial skills, but also our music, our political ideas, etc. My wife’s cousin’s daughter, an immigrant born in Communist China, is fascinated by classical Greece. My kids are taking (classical) piano lessons; most of their fellow students are children of Asian immigrants, and, indeed, it is a bit of a joke among Asian immigrants that of course all of their kids study classical Western music.
The West is dying and America is in the early stages of collapsing as a hegemonic power. But young Americans are pragmatically rediscovering natural law and are turning away in disgust from the monsters who have taken over our political system. And the fruits of Western civilization are being grasped by eager people all over the planet.
The World Civilization of 2200 AD will be very different from the world of 1900 AD. But, with a small amount of luck, that new world civilization will largely be dominated by the best values of the West. Bach and Locke and Newton (and Aquinas and Socrates and Euclid) will live when no one can remember who Fanon or Castro (or Perle or Kristol or Podhoretz) ever were.
Paleos have cause for cheer – in a very real sense, I think, the world is ultimately going to belong to us.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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