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Entry: Declining "The West" Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/declining_the_west#24734 Post contents: Jerry, You said: I just realized that you are really no different from the liberals you claim to hate.... you both are obsessed with ethnicity, you both want to use government as a tool for telling people how to run their lives, you both want to turn back the clock on technological progress, and you both are haters of the free market. Your charge that liberals and paleconservatives have a mutual obsession with ethnicity does not quite capture what is at work here. The point of contention is not ethnicity, but whether or not we “Western” men have the right to advance and preserve our interests against the competing interests of “non-Western” men. Paleoconservatives believe we do while Liberals contend that there is no such thing as competing interests, and if there is, we do not have a right to defend these interests because we are evil bigots. Probe deeper and you will discover that the real issue of contention for most paleconservatives and liberals is equality. Since liberals perceive all men and all cultures to be equal, any circumstance where inequality exists must be the result of unfair circumstances and the evil behavior of white men. It is the duty of government therefore to correct the circumstances that produced inequality. Paleoconservatives, on the other hand, believe that inequality is both natural and good and that government has no right to forcibly create equality, particularly since this effort will always end in failure and will thus be used to perpetually justify increases in power, size and cost of a leviathan government. But Jerry, I do agree with you that paleoconservatives are not right about everything, particularly their foreign policy tendency towards isolationism. In this I am not alone, one need only read the works of James Burnham to understand the many reasons why the United States must take an active role in foreign affairs. What many paleconservatives fail to acknowledge is that geopolitics have changed tremendously since the time when our forefathers advised us to stay out of the affairs of others. In the age of missiles, terrorists, submarines and airplanes, we are not longer protected by two great oceans. Furthermore, unlike the timeframe of our forefathers, we can no longer rely on a weakened Britain and France to secure the Western world from the tide of non-Western forces. Sent at: 2008 10 07