Below is the text of a speech I gave this past weekend at the annual Pennsylvania State Constitution Party conference: 

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It is with considerable pleasure that I stand here tonight to address this gathering. What distinguishes you from the two federally funded patronage machines, also known as the Democrats and Republicans, is for me quite simple: I usually find myself agreeing with your positions but not very often with theirs. To your credit, you do not stand in fear of the media. You do not crave the affection of those who would never vote for you.  And you defend limited constitutional government and family arrangements that have been integral to all civilized societies up until a few years ago. Unlike the GOP, and certainly at the executive level, you would never try to score electoral points by calling for the amnestying of illegals. This is a tactic that has proved counterproductive for the Republicans, judging by the meager electoral results that it produced for the partisans of Bush and McCain among Latino voters in 2008.

It may be a case of accentuating the obvious to note that the GOP has become an only slightly less predictable source of leftist views than its opposition. That remains true even if some Republican politicians do stand up sometimes for limited government. I would be the last to disparage these exceptional GOP politicians, like the feisty congressmen who opposed Bush II’s immigration bill and the courageous state representative from Berks County, Sam Rohrer, who preceded me on this podium. I am also delighted that the GOP in it current oppositional mode is resisting Obama’s march toward socialism. I applaud this effort even though up until a week ago, the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was proposing his own party’s extensive mortgage bailout plan in lieu of the Democratic one.

Needless to say, I could imagine a very different situation if there were a Republican president, say Bush I, McCain, or Bush II. Whether the plan was for extensive federal control over education, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the quota-favorable Civil Rights Act of 1991, Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly supported their Republican presidents in voting for such measures.

Too often GOP officials speak out of both sides of their mouths, in a clumsy attempt to sound moderate and sensitive. Allow me to indicate my frustration with Republicans who agonize endlessly about their failure to win leftist affections. If the choice is between Arlen Specter and his Democratic opponent, I’d be hard pressed to find a reason to vote for either. Are we supposed to believe that having a Senator with an R label supporting affirmative action, expanded abortion rights, and a widened scope for federal interference in our economic lives represents the Right? In what way is such a Senator preferable to a Democrat voting for the same positions? One has to be a fool or a knave to believe the national media, when we are told that everyone displaying an R label is automatically on the right.

My advice to you is not to move toward any imaginary center. This notion of being in the center is itself a media-creation, and one used to push our national politics toward the left. No matter how urgently the GOP plays this game, it continues to be slimed as racist, sexist, and homophobic. And no matter how much more Wall Street gives to Democrats than Republicans, it is only the Republicans who are attacked as the friends of Big Business. By now the lesson should be clear: parties that intermittently claim to be on the right but cater to the Left, can only lose ground. They typically fall between two stools, upsetting their rightwing constituency while being unable to win votes from the leftist opposition. I for one was not unhappy to see McCain lose after pursuing this very bad strategy.  I only regret that a party like this one could not take advantage of his well deserved defeat.

It is we who should be able gain influence when and if the two institutionalized parties veer to the left at the same time. It is we who must be ready to build on the ruin caused by both parties in varying degrees. Overspending by the federal government, floods of illegals coming across our borders, and the involvement of social engineers and anti-discrimination experts in our daily lives will surely evoke a reaction. But the GOP will not likely stand athwart this disastrous course. That is because its national organization, to the extent it is not of the Left, craves the Left’s acceptance of it as a nice opposition.

Those who think this way have been able to manipulate the GOP base, but this too may be changing. In the last election, much of this base never came to the polls. In every national election since the Reagan landslides in the 1980s, moreover, the white Christian core of the party has become increasingly less visible. At the same time the GOP share of minority votes has either stayed the same or declined. Since the GOP began its latest outreach efforts to minorities about 20 years ago, its share of the black vote has shrunk from 1 in 8 to 1 in 30. It is not from the targets of GOP outreach but from disaligned Republicans and those on the right of every ethnic background that the CP will have to build itself up.

In all likelihood, the GOP will continue to try to reach out frenetically to the Left on immigration, gay rights, and affirmative action. It will also likely continue to push a liberal internationalist foreign policy centered on spreading the latest version of US democracy; with increased intervention in foreign countries in the name of the war on terrorism. The fact that the neoconservatives are working to sell this policy to the Obama administration should be for us welcome news It means that both parties may eventually be following the same imprudent course in international relations while ignoring that part of the Right that is skeptical about foreign adventures.

The CP does not operate in the same manner as the two authorized mega-parties. We are not a big business enterprise engorged with public revenues. Unlike the GOP and the Democrats, we do not have to worry about millions of hangers-on whose services have to be bought with booty extracted from taxpayers.  Such patronage parties can only survive by winning elections in the near term or by losing them by narrow margins, because their continuity depends on doing favors with public money.

We, by contrast, have declared our opposition to what the major parties celebrate, namely welfare state democracy. We do not pretend that a government limited by constitutionally enumerated powers should be reconstructing human relations, banning discrimination from the lives of designated victims or beneficiaries, or micromanaging families through social professionals. Nor does the argument that citizens should be equal before the law apply to those who are here illegally, any more than the belief that all human beings have a right to liberty requires us to rebuild other societies in the image of our political class—or to redistribute income to make everyone feel equally good about himself or herself. In short we do not need the booty that is vital for Demorep survival. It does not matter to us materially or professionally, if we do not win the next election. We are not trying to grab tax monies and jobs in the public sector to pay off cronies and ward-heelers. We are a party of principle, and we can wait until the established powers derail public affairs sufficiently so that we and our principles can be taken seriously by a critical mass of American citizens.

Of the two national parties, the real Right has just cause to hate the GOP far more than the Democrats. For one thing, the traditional right must fight the GOP octopus to gain recognition. The Democratic Left would never vote for us, except in some extraordinary situation, to weaken the GOP in a particular election. The real, continuing hindrance to our progress is the well-heeled Republican machine.

But that is not the only reason for us to despise the GOP even more than the Dems. Unlike the Republicans, Obama’s party stands foursquare for its principles; and we should admire the Democratic Left for believing in something other than winning elections. Their success did not result entirely from their use and occupation of the media and public education. It also had a great deal to do with the willingness of the Democratic Left to defend its positions openly and with pride. This in contrast to the wavering convictions of Republican leaders who cannot bring themselves to take emphatic stands against minority quotas, illegal immigration, and Sarah Palin’s much beloved anti-discrimination guidelines for women. In 2000 when George W. Bush and Al Gore were in a presidential debate and each was asked where he stood on minority preferences and set asides, the Democrat responded by expressing full support for his party’s policy, but the Republican, true to form, mumbled something in garbled syntax about “affirmative recruitment.”

In the last presidential election, Barack Obama openly backed minority quotas, as he had done unflinchingly throughout his career. By contrast, his Republican opponent tried to create a slight but not noticeable distance from the pro-quota position he had occupied since 1998, without allowing himself to move too rapidly in the direction of clarity. McCain then tried to cover his tracks by publicly doing contrition for having failed to rally to the Martin Luther King national holiday in time. Too often even when the Reps do what is proper, they do so accidentally, inconsistently, and with sputtering embarrassment. Somehow it has never dawned on their apologists that what makes Republicans look silly next to Democrats is their evasiveness on controversial social issues and their unwillingness to stand firmly behind rightist positions. Although I disagree with the Democrats on most domestic issues, I applaud the relative frankness of their stands. If Republicans did the same, a party like this one would not be necessary.

A few weeks ago, I watched Mike Huckabee, a former GOP candidate for president and an ordained Southern Baptist minister, interviewing the former Democratic NY governor Mario Cuomo on FOX. Cuomo expressed forthrightly his beliefs that “religion should have no part in our political life,” and he tried to apply this principle to his stand on abortion. Although the former governor claimed to be a devout Catholic, he also insisted he would never inflict his “religious principle about abortion” on those who saw choice as a fundamental human right.

Note I’m not praising this opinions uttered by a former law professor. It is impossible for me to see how one can keep antiseptically apart theological and political positions, given the facts that human conscience shapes political choices, and that political and religious values are inescapably intertwined in public life. It is also doubtful that Cuomo would try to separate things of God from things of Caesar if he liked the politics of a particular religionist. More than once he has praised the religious conscience of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama.

Religion in political affairs is only a problem for Cuomo if someone has the nerve to put forth traditional Judeo-Christian or biblically-based views that clash with his leftist social agenda. It also became obvious from listening to him that his views on some issues are not at all thought through, for example, when he explains: “I oppose abortion as a religious-moral outrage but I won’t interfere with someone else’s right to have one. In fact I’ll support measures to facilitate every woman’s access to this procedure, which I personally consider to be the taking of life.” Only a sociopath or a liar could even approach this degree of moral cynicism or idiocy. And such grotesque views typically emanate from people who would lament a great injustice being committed if we fail to pass new civil rights bills or anti-discrimination laws. Don’t they find it strange that they should be calling for extraordinary steps to uphold the unrestricted right of others to commit what they personally consider to be homicide? 

But the most striking thing about this interview was not Cuomo’s statement of belief but Huckabee’s response. As a respondent, the former governor was characteristically Republican, unctuously thanking Cuomo for engaging in dialogue and for stating how great it is to live in a country where such open discussion could take place. What I would have expected from Huckabee as a minimal response was to have pointed out the fallacy in Cuomo’s statements. I doubt he failed to see them, but as a member of the cravenly party, Huckabee could not bring himself to say what was self-evidently true. He would not suggest that Cuomo sounded foolish. His GOP mentality would not allow him to go that far in appearing “rightwing.” A week before, however, Huckabee had behaved contentiously when he had gone after a more permissible target on his show, namely Ann Coulter. Presumably targets on his right were more appropriate, by media standards, for a would-be Republican presidential candidate than criticizing left liberals who enjoy the esteem of the political class.

One may respond to my criticism by citing such media celebrities as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who flail at Democrats every day. But my response to such a counterargument is that we are dealing in both cases with GOP shills. Such media personalities get Dittoheads up in arms about the abuses of the Democratic Party, in order to have them line up behind Bush, McCain, and Arlen Specter. Misdirected rage is made to serve establishment ends. The beneficiaries of these ritualized rants are the GOP operatives and in Rush’s case Hillary Clinton, when she was a presidential candidate last year. When it looked as if lots of right-wingers might cast sympathy votes for Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin after McCain had sown up the GOP nomination, Rush, who is no friend of the antiwar Right, got his groupies to change party affiliations and to vote for Hillary. His cockamamie reason was that he was creating dissension within the opposition. What Rush was actually doing was trying to keep down the primary vote of the Republican Right while enhancing the presidential prospects of the New York Senator. About the same time the neoconservative press had begun to talk up Hillary’s virtues as a moderate. It was hoped in the Weekly Standard and on FOX news that she would continue the GOP foreign policy as president. Rush was simply acting in unison with those who help determine the content of his daily tirades.

Allow me to offer one final observation: Lots of GOP capital was wasted on a fool’s errand. It was an errand that certain advisors pushed on former president Bush and which became the defining issue for the GOP and for the conservative movement. Anyone who did not believe that American lives and treasure should be squandered on the mission of bringing democracy to Iraq was unceremoniously booted out of the official Right. Candidates like Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin were treated like moral lepers in the neoconservative press for daring to oppose an unwise American military involvement in Iraq. The entire conservative and GOP establishment was organized as a cheering gallery for this ill-conceived, foreign adventure.

To your party’s credit, you did not yield to conformist pressure. You stood your ground by questioning our invasion of Iraq and despite being scorned and marginalized by the antiwar Left as well as by the neoconservative-occupied media, you have emerged as a moral force on the current political scene. This moral capital is something you (or we) should point to with pride as the Constitution Party prepares for its future. We were on the right side of a deeply divisive issue, and we took our position as Americans, and not as partisans of the Democratic or Republican Party.

With all due respect to Razib Khan, whose contributions to this website I usually enjoy, there seems to be a misunderstanding about the intent of my remarks about cultural illiteracy. I was certainly not attacking religionists; nor do I believe that because a “majority” of the population accepts a “creationist slant” on evolution, they are therefore stupid or ignorant. For the record, no one was asked on the Gallup Poll about “creationism.” Moreover, I myself lean strongly toward the intelligent design position; and I have recommended the works of both Michael Behe and Anthony Flew, who make strong cases for that view from different technical perspectives. I would therefore be the last person in the world to make fun of Americans because they accept the existence of a Supreme Being, who is responsible for the Laws of Nature. There is much to be said for that position, and like Aquinas, Kant, and Descartes, I am profoundly impressed by the teleological argument for God’s existence. Razib Khan, unless I mistake his drift, ascribes to me a fideistic or biblical-literalist position I have never held. That said, I would point out that I’m not upset with cultural illiterates because they understand the Bible literally. I was indicating that they never read it.

According to a recent Gallup Poll taken on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, only 32% of those questioned believe in the theory of evolution. 36% of the interviewees still entertain doubts about Darwin’s theory; and the rest of the population has no opinion at all about who evolved from what. The New York Post, from whence I drew this information, urged its readers in an editorial not to worry about the widespread ignorance of Darwin’s accomplishments. The fact that more Americans know about Lincoln, who was also born two hundred years ago, suggests that we’ve put important things first. The civil rights revolution, which Lincoln is imagined to have inspired, is alive and well in Obama’s America, and so Lincoln is more relevant for our times than Darwin.

In point of fact, I’m amazed that 68% of the American public, assuming the poll does reflect national patterns, knows anything about Darwin and his theories concerning the origin and development of life. There is nothing in my experience as an educator (very broadly understood) that would indicate that even 50% of college students would be able to respond knowledgably to the Gallup Poll. Mind you, we’re not asking the public to identify anything as obvious as the hubby of Brittany Spears or the present lover of Ice Cube. The pollsters were asking for their view about something they would have no occasion to learn, unless they had studied and could still remember some biology or had taken a course in modern cultural history. I somehow suspect that most of those who either affirmed or denied Darwin’s theory knew little if anything about what they were being asked. This is not because they are trapped in ancient religious superstition (which intellectuals believe is the case), but because in a mass democratic educational system stressing the moral superiority of the present over the unenlightened past, people are for the most part culturally illiterate.

Why should we think that my students in a Western Civilization course, who know zilch about the Bible and who never heard of Julius Caesar, are better educated about the history of science? Why should we assume that these college customers have studied more about Darwin than Jesus or more about evolutionary theory than the downfall of the Roman Empire? As far as I can tell, they are blissfully ignorant of both, although they have picked up certain names and associations by attending our public institutions for twelve years. My Western Civ. Students, who claimed to be appalled by the Patriot Act, compared the evil George W. Bush to McCarthy and Hitler. But significantly they couldn’t tell me anything about the Patriot Act, and they certainly couldn’t provide many details about the former junior senator from Wisconsin or the German tyrant.

Among the stupidest notions of my invariably parochial, militantly secularist colleagues are the view that our youth should be spared religious or biblical erudition because it fills their minds with non-knowledge, as opposed to scientifically valid theories. It’s as if parts of their brains have been occupied with unprogressive junk; and if only it weren’t there, then these educationally victimized youth would be able to absorb what is scientifically true (for example, multiculturalism). The problem is that ignorant or cognitively deficient students are what they seem to be, whereas students who know about Moses and St. Augustine are also more likely than their classmates to know about Darwin and Newton. Cultural literacy forms a unified whole, in the same way that Georges Clemenceau once stated that “La Gauche, c’est un bloc.”  And no, I don’t believe that 68% of the American population is sufficiently informed about Darwin to be able to answer the pollster’s question with any degree of honesty.  My skepticism results from the fact my college seniors, who are presumably no worse than most, had absolutely no idea about what languages the Bible was written in. Except for natural scientists, the two educational gaps are usually connected. Cultural illiteracy, like the French Left in 1919, constitutes a consistent whole.

Jack Hunter, in responding to my comment, raised some questions that I began to consider from the time I posted my remarks yesterday. There is a perception on the part of blacks that the GOP is the “white man’s party,” and it is impossible for the GOP to gain support among black voters, no matter how abjectly Republican politicians try to reach out to them. Although this reaction is based on a glaring misreading of the history of the two national parties in dealing with the black race, by now the judgment in question is so deeply entrenched that it may be impossible to counteract. Each new attempt by the GOP to beg for black votes looks more ridiculous than the previous one, and, as Steve Sailer shows, such self-abasement typically has no effect on the Republicans’ success in recruiting black support.

Indeed, such groveling merely contributes to the impression that the GOP had been a racialist club up until recently. It is both laughable and counterproductive. Such wasted efforts resemble the GOP’s attempt to win Jewish votes, partly by allowing the brains of party leaders to be taken over by the neoconservatives. Here too the results have been dismal in terms of wooing a Democratic ethnic group into the Republican Party.

What is less clear, however, is that black voters have no ideological but only an ethnic attachment to the Democratic Left. Although blacks may not agree entirely with Barney Frank on social issues, Jack may be underestimating black sympathy for whites who sound like Frank. And this sympathy may exist, even if blacks, when given a chance, vote against their white Democratic leaders on the issue of gay marriage. Like Barney Frank and Barbara Boxer, most blacks feel alienated from a traditional white middle-class American society, and the Democratic Party, and particularly its left wing, seems dedicated to obliterating the type of white Christian culture that blacks rightly or wrongly associate with their exclusion from American society.

Blacks vote for the Democrats in the same way that Muslims in European countries overwhelmingly endorse the European Left. The Left these Muslims support is not so much a socialist as a socially radical one. It is eradicating the remnants of a European culture from which Muslims feel excluded and which if it still existed, would have kept them from settling in large numbers in Europe. To the extent blacks see the GOP as a bulwark of social and moral order, they believe it to be their enemy.

For blacks, the Democrats are a congenial party because it is a party of outsiders. Democrats are viewed as a gathering of disgruntled minorities, as opposed to what Jesse Helms used to refer to as “normal Americans,” who tend to vote Republican. To the extent blacks think this way and act upon such thinking, they are definitely voting ideologically. The same is true for other groups that are voting to neutralize a pre-multicultural American society and culture. This, as Jack knows, is an attitude among self-defined outsiders that our late friend Sam Francis devoted considerable space to explaining.
Note my remarks should not be construed as a defense of the Republican Party, which today barely represents those traditional social beliefs that upset black voters. What I am noting is why blacks hate the GOP, as opposed to what the GOP really stands for. Blacks who hate the GOP do that party too much honor as a party of principle.

With due respect to Jack Hunter, it seems a bit naïve to attribute the joy shown by blacks over Barack Obama’s good fortune exclusively to racial pride. But unlike Mr. Hunter, I am not a Southerner; nor do I have any memories of how blacks used to be treated in a segregated or formerly segregated society. My own memories run back to different experiences, having watched the city I grew up in turn to rubble as a result of black crime and other forms of black dysfunctional behavior, and rampant black political corruption. Perhaps this is why I am enthusing less than my fellow-Takimag contributor over the happiness of blacks in having elected someone with whom they identify ethnically.

My knowledge of black voters in Pennsylvania, moreover, suggests that their massive support for Obama reflects ideology more than racial solidarity. In our state, for example, a black Republican ran for governor and lost the black vote to a white Democrat, Ed Rendell, by about a margin of 9 to 1. If black racial pride were what it is cracked up to be, then blacks would have voted for Lynn Swann, a religiously conservative, very black Republican, with the hope that he might become Pennsylvania’s first black governor. And black voters would have supported the Bush Republican black candidate for governor of Maryland, Michael Steele, against his white Democratic opponent. In Maryland as well as Pennsylvania, blacks could have enjoyed the pleasure of seeing a governor sprung from their race.

Instead they rejected Steele’s candidacy in massive numbers. Some of the leaders of the NAACP in Maryland even went so far as to mock Steel as an “Oreo,” for having dared to run for elected office as a Republican. In Pennsylvania, Maryland, and elsewhere in the USA, the black vote is determined by ideology and party affiliation—and far, far less by race. Even if Obama were white, he would have received, on the basis of the available data from the last four presidential elections, almost as many black votes as he obtained this November. And as a right-of-center black, as opposed to the most leftist Democrat in the U.S. Senate, he would have lost the black vote by the same kind of margin as Swann and Steele. What Mr. Hunter should have said is that blacks are rejoicing that their kind of Democratic leftist black is now in the White House. If he were any other kind of black, his fellow-blacks really wouldn’t have voted for him. Nor would the media be slobbering over our great racial transcender.

A serious difference of views has now surfaced in “movement conservative” circles, and I wish that some authoritative voice of the global democratic church would furnish me with the proper theological formulation. According to yesterday’s New York Post, “Barack Obama and the country itself stands on the shoulder of giants,” and the greatest of these giants is Martin Luther King, whose radiant greatness must be “measured not only in the tangible accomplishments of the civil-rights movement but also in the hopes entrusted in America’s new young president.” Presumably this is what I have to believe in order to work at Murdoch’s NYP or Heritage, Human Events, and any other fixture of the neoconservative empire.

But now there is a theological complication. “Movement conservative” authority Charles Krauthammer, upon returning from Obama’s banquet tendered for neocon cognoscenti, announced on FOX a new “conservative” theology. My question is this: Is Krauthammer correct in what he has said about the godhead? Or is he (and these words do not come trippingly to my lips) a heresiarch? It seems that Obama enjoys a higher ontological importance in Krauthammer’s theology than the two other divine persons who preceded him chronologically, namely, Lincoln and Martin Luther King. In Krauthammer’s statement of dogma, American history “forms an arc going from Lincoln the Emancipator through King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” down to Obama’s inauguration.”
In the Obama epiphany we are led to believe one finds the fulfillment of American spiritual progress from the bad old times onward. Although Krauthammer does concede to Lincoln the honor of being “by far our greatest president,” it might be argued that his order of the objects of worship is not really received truth. He considers what for movement conservatives had been a derivative divinity, namely Obama, as the one who overshadows his precursors. If I interpret all of this accurately, Obama is arriving at a last stage in the perfection of American society, understood as an egalitarian experiment, and so he is accorded a higher rank than the positions bestowed on his co-deities. Was Kraut merely reacting to the sumptuous victuals and oily praise at the dinner George Will was asked to arrange? Perhaps he would have been as theologically lavish, had Lincoln or MLK done the same for him. Or is he trying to alter the permanent things in our American conservative treasure of truths?

There are already much admired public intellectuals who have weighed in on the side of the FOX creed. Last night, for example, I heard Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and some other performer at a pre-inaugural event all express the theological opinion that Obama “is the greatest ever; he’s our hope.” As everyone should know, American conservatism teaches what is truly invariable. What is less certain is that all conservatives who are still in the movement cleave to the same Trinitarian dogma. Perhaps it is time to start throwing more people off the bus lest movement conservatives lapse into grievous error. But first we have to determine the true opinion to be upheld under threat of damnation. Is it the one given in the editorial in the NYP or the one that Krauthammer uttered as a FOX contributor?

To muddy the turbid waters even more, FOX last night ran pictures of MLK with citations from his speeches. These were inserted during the solemn Sean Hannity hour at the rate of about once every thirty seconds. Does this indicate that not everyone on FOX shares the Trinitarian teachings of Charles Krauthammer and Beyoncé? I wish that everything could be made simple again; and that we as conservatives would be free to worship MLK as a deity while thanking Lincoln for having eradicated bigoted Southern slave-owners. Conservative theology is getting so complicated these days that we may soon need a catechism to figure out eternal truths.

Contrary to the impression that may have come from my discussion of Ilana Mercer’s comments about the American Old Right and the European nationalist Right on the question of Israel and Hamas, there are in fact rightist groups in Western Europe which stand emphatically with the Palestinians in Gaza. A breakaway faction of the Front National, Résistants au nouvel ordre mondial, a group that has a widely frequented website, is now joining the pro-Muslim Left in a “manif de solidarité” for the Palestinian people against their Israeli oppressors. I would also be profoundly surprised if the anti-American father of the European New Right, Alain de Benoist, were not where he and his followers have always been on Middle Eastern politics, that is, on the side of the anti-American Palestinians.

The difference that can be seen in the American and European Rights in their relation with Israel is often one of degree rather than of kind. European rightists are less peeved by Jewish anti-Christian and anti-Western organizations than are their American counterparts. The reasons, as I explained yesterday, are the shared Muslim enemy of European nationalists and Israelis and the protracted war between the American Right and the neocons. But there are certainly prominent European rightist and rightist organizations that sound exactly like Taki and Pat Buchanan on the current war in Gaza. 

My friend Ilana Mercer has just posted a provocative essay on VDARE, which I would like to respond to. Ilana asks the timely question why the European Right has produced outspoken defenders of the Israeli government in its confrontation with Hamas, while in the U.S. by contrast the paleos have usually sided with the Palestinians. One should qualify this judgment, by pointing out that for several years until quite recently the Front National in France and the FPO in Austria leaned decidedly toward the Palestinians. Moreover, the support that Nick Griffin and his British National Party have given the Israelis is rather lukewarm and entirely predicated on the recognition that Muslims are a danger to Griffin’s own nation. Griffin goes out of his way to stress the British interest that is at stake and to play down his concern with Israel or any other state in the Middle East.

In Germany, much of the antinational Left is passionately pro-Israeli, on the goofy, antifascist grounds that by rallying to Israel, one could do more harm to a German national identity than by backing the Palestinians. (Germans, for those who may not have noticed, are obsessive masochists.) Meanwhile the nationalist Right in Germany, to the extent one still exists, has remained neutral in the current Middle Eastern conflict. Perhaps this Right, typified by the Junge Freiheit editorial board, is oscillating between being peeved over the anti-German statements coming from Jewish organizations and its predictable distaste for the Muslims now colonizing Europe.

There are also paleos who do not share the anti-Israeli stand that Ilana associates with the real American Right. I could mention my own case and could think of other paleos, beside Ilana, who back Israel, if one gave me enough time. But her general observation is correct. The European Right is generally more inclined toward the Israelis than are the American paleos, and the quotations taken from the Dutch Freedom Party, the Vlaams Belang, and other European rightist parties that Ilana offers could be multiplied tenfold.

One possible reason for this transatlantic split is that the American Right is more sensitive than its European counterpart to the fact that Jews are typically on the left on social and political issues. In Europe Jewish organizations that support Israel have also typically backed Muslim immigration into Europe, and they have added insult to injury by jabbering about “Christian anti-Semitism” when the Muslim immigrants or their offspring start attacking Jews on the streets. In Australia Jewish organizations have been out in front demonstrating and signing petitions with Muslims to bar the anti-immigrationist, anti-Muslim Griffin from speaking down under. Jewish Zionists in the Diaspora have usually believed that while Christians are expected to back Israel to the hilt, Jews should be encouraged to work with Muslims and other non-Christians to secularize the culture and to bring multiculturalism to the host country. The Anti-Defamation League exemplifies these attitudes. To her credit, Ilana makes no attempt to justify this double standard.

But there are two other critical variables that distinguish our situation from the European. Unlike Western and Central Europeans, we’ve not had to face large-scale Muslim immigration, bringing in its wake anti-Christian Muslims and Islamic Fundamentalists. Although there has been an invasion from across our Southern border, that’s a different can of worms. Unlike the Europeans and Israelis, we are not dealing with a large Muslim presence already inside our borders. Moreover, unlike Europeans we are not looking at entire sections of our country being occupied by Muslims. Such things are happening across the ocean, while multicultural governments are abetting this demographic trend and often punishing the indigenous Europeans who call attention to their situation.

Another variable concerns the primary enemies of the European and American Rights. In Western Europe there are neoconservative outposts, and as Richard showed in a recent spoof on Melanie Phillips, there are already English neoconservatives wishing to defend the West as an “abstract construct” or global democratic enterprise, by pledging undying support to the Israeli military. But such types are also less influential in Europe than they are in this country; and they are certainly not the main enemy that the populist, nationalist Right in Europe is confronting. In Europe the Right can take on the multicultural Left directly, without the problem of a second Left standing together with the rest of the Left against a more genuine Right. It has been the neoconservatives’ success in marginalizing the Right that distinguishes our politics from that of Belgium or Switzerland. It also explains the virulent hostility toward Israel that now characterizes elements of the humiliated American Old Right.

Like Ilana, I regret this hostility; and like her, I think it is being targeted at a country that is fighting for its survival and whose geopolitical options have been exaggerated by its critics. Hamas is committed to the eradication of the “Zionist entity” and to expelling or killing its present Jewish population. Although wrongs were committed by all sides during the formation of the Israeli state, including the brutal persecution of Jewish populations in Arab countries as well as the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, we have to live in the present. The Israelis are trying to save their necks against implacable enemies, who from all indications have no desire to negotiate or strike bargains with them. This seems to be the case, despite the fact that those who have done enormous harm to me and my friends say exactly the same thing.
The question is whether I would reason this way about Israel absent certain factors: for example, if I had no Jewish blood, if members of my family had not fled Hitler and gone to Israel, and if my son-in-law were not an Israeli military officer. The answer is probably not. In this other reality I would be focusing during the present conflict on Israel’s most boisterous advocates, including the neocons’ underlings at NR and The Weekly Standard. I would also be noticing all the others who run around sliming any critic of Israel as an anti-Semite or Holocaust-denier. Like Taki and Pat Buchanan, I would be sick of such defamers and their manipulation of the American Right. And such passions might affect my judgment about Israel.

While it may be grossly unfair that the Israelis should be caught in the crossfire, it is also inescapable. The man who is likely to become Israel’s next premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a neoconservative mouthpiece. Netanyahu goes all over Creation making speeches about the need for global democracy and about how governments he and his neoconservative friends don’t like are “undemocratic” and therefore “illegitimate.” The Jerusalem Post, which is the largest English-speaking newspaper in Israel, is neoconservative from cover to cover. The same is true for the French edition that is now available on Israeli newsstands. Although most Israelis wouldn’t know a neoconservative from a Dodo Bird, the image of their country that we have in the U.S. is filtered through neocon interpreters.

Why should American paleoconservatives see Israel’s battle sympathetically? It would be nice if they did, but the fact that they don’t is entirely understandable. As a point of information, the older generation of paleos was not always against Israel. Indeed one of the most outspoken critics of Israel, Pat Buchanan, spent years as a fervent advocate of the Israeli side. It was only when he noticed Zionist journalists dumping on the Catholic Church and trying to implicate it in the Holocaust that Pat moved in the opposite direction. One might ask, “Why should the Israelis suffer for the idiocy of their cheering gallery?” In an ideal world perhaps they would not, but in the world we inhabit countries do get held accountable for those who champion their cause.

Nor does it really matter that some of the advocates of the Palestinians are every bit as repugnant as those on the other side. These are not the people whom the paleos have been fighting for decades on a wide range of issues. Palestinian advocates may be tedious airheads but they don’t impact the lives of paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians in any significant ways. And when the advocates for the Palestinians show pictures of impoverished people huddled together in refugee camps, they are bound to elicit sympathy, no matter who fired the first missile where.

In conclusion, I would underline that I am not writing a refutation of Ilana’s spirited polemic. The questions she provokes are important enough so as to warrant a detailed answer, which is what I’ve attempted to provide.

Although it is not my practice to recycle my newspaper material for this website (any more than it is to brag about my offspring), I am making this exception because of the illustrative value of the person depicted. It is impossible for me to find anyone who exemplifies more perfectly the semi-comatose state of Republican political intelligence than the outgoing Lancaster County Republican chairman. He is the embodiment of everything Sam Francis intended to convey when he described the GOP as “the stupid party.” Dave Dumeyer would have to be invented as an “ideal type” if he didn’t already exist. He and his ilk explain why we on the real right have come to look upon his party with unconcealed disgust.

According to Lancaster newspapers, Dave Dumeyer will be resigning his post as county Republican chairman on January 18, after six and a half years of dedicated service. In meeting with committee members this month, Dumeyer recalled his contributions in trying to “help promote values, provide good government, and do good things for the community.” His only regret, looking back at his career in county government, is that he and his party had failed “to find ways to reach out to the minority community.”

Most of this valedictory is standard stuff, and particularly the by now ritualistic GOP salute to “values.” I suppose that term has something to do with nuclear families and attending church, but is usually vague enough so as not to offend liberal Democrats, who may someday vote Republican, perhaps by accident. Every time I see this term, I am reminded of President Clinton’s wily trick, when he appropriated that term to apply to his own national health care program, with the then magical prefix “family.”

Particularly troubling is Mr. Dunnmeyer’s lament about his party’s not “reaching out to minorities.” What can be inferred from his complaint is one of two things. A- Republicans here and elsewhere have not informed minorities about their existence and what they stand for as a party, because of some enormous communications gap. Perhaps every time the GOP sends out PR brochures, the distributors fail to reach the homes of blacks, Latinos, etc. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Clearly minorities know about the GOP but choose overwhelmingly to vote against it. Indeed blacks refused to vote for a black candidate in the last gubernatorial race because he carried a Republican label—and perhaps because he sounded more like a traditional Republican than Mr. Dumeyer.

Although I gave my vote to this candidate, blacks and Latinos both voted against him in a convincing manner. Moreover, despite the strenuous efforts of President Bush and Senator McCain to appeal to Latinos, most notably on the question of illegal immigrants, and despite their all-to-obvious overtures to blacks, the Hispanic vote went to President-elect Obama by 67 to 30 percent and the black vote by 96 to 3 per cent. Equally dramatic, McCain lost over 80 per cent of the Jewish vote, despite the GOP’s fervent support of Israel and Obama’s onetime link to pro-Palestinian causes.

What one is forced to conclude is that minorities certainly know about the GOP but reject this party as being out of sync with their interests. Although Republicans often move as far to the left as do the Democrats on all kinds of issues, they also appeal (and often with shameless hypocrisy) to their constituents as a small-government party. When it does not get in the way of other things, they also passionately embrace traditional Judeo-Christian concerns. Clearly minorities don’t approve of what Republicans claim or at least are thought to stand for; and so they vote in most cases for the Democrats.

Dumeyer, who knows this unless he’s living on the Moon, is therefore proposing possibility B, namely that the GOP move to outdo the Democrats in those programs that the Democrats have strongly promoted to gain minority support, namely racial quotas, set asides, more profuse apologies about America’s past racist sins, and an even more generous amnesty program for illegal immigrants than the Democrats have come up with. Although Dumeyer may not intend to implement this entire package, undoubtedly he has been thinking about some of its items when he talks about “outreach.”

The problem here is that most of these outreach ideas offend the GOP’s core constituency, which is white Christian and mostly male. In the recent presidential race, McCain won 55 to 43 per cent of the white vote. (The other two percent went mostly to dissenting parties of the Right.) How does Dumeyer intend to get these voters back? In each successive presidential race since the Reagan years, a decreasing percentage of the popular vote is going Republican, although Republican core constituents have not changed much in their core beliefs.

It is foolish for the GOP to chase after the liberal media and the left wing of the Democratic Party on minority issues when its own base continues to shrink. In fact there is no reason to believe that whatever Republicans lose in the trade-off, they would make up by attracting large minority constituencies. Such a strategy may leave them exactly where McCain got stuck in his disastrous presidential bid, somewhere between two stools and without the hope of being able to occupy one or the other.

Americans, we are told, are clustered around a moving center (albeit one that the media has generally managed to push leftward). While going after this center makes some sense, both national parties have constituencies they depend on to win elections. The GOP cannot seduce the other side’s foot soldiers without forfeiting its own. And it may lose its own troops without pulling in the other camp. 

Justin Raimondo is understandably upset by Andrew Sullivan, who has dragged through the mud an “anti-Semite, who dared to disagree with Sullivan’s neoconservative pals. But true to slimy form, Sullivan, the neocon toady par excellence, neglects to mention the name of his opponent. My response is “What else is new?” For decades now the neoconservatives, with ample assistance from their (predominantly Jewish) liberal friends, have been playing the same game, pretending that they’ve no opposition on the right, except for unnamed “anti-Semites” inhabiting a fever swamp. Everyone and his cousin is now playing along, as I noticed during the efforts made by the antiwar press on the left to ignore Justin and other widely read critics of the war in Iraq who were on the right but not neoconservatives. The only paleo critic who ever made it on to the New York Times’s editorial page was Andrew Bacevich, and in Andy’s case, his passionate support of Obama and the difficulty of linking him professionally to others on the Old Right, were definite advantages. It is also hard to find evidence that Bacevich, with whom I often agree on current foreign policy, holds typically paleo views about historical controversies concerning, for example, the Civil War or World War One.

The problem is we can’t stop this process of marginalization and the ongoing defamation unless we can launch a devastating counteroffensive, and that would take megabucks and a sponsor like the vile Rupert Murdoch. Let’s face it! Our enemies have done a brilliant job turning us into non-persons, and they will continue to do so until we can get hold of the kind of weapons they have turned against us. Then we can bomb away while getting personally noticed.