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.

Although my schedule is cluttered with loads of professional and family matters, including a trip to Israel in the very near future, I feel obliged to respond to the surly comments about me posted by Larry Auster and Ron Lewenberg. For starters, I don’t in any way regret my criticism of the Zionist Right during and after World War Two. My assessment of this truly loathsome movement seems entirely justified, and pace Ron Lewenberg, it does not indicate any “intellectual laziness on my part. Despite the fact that Menachem Begin was in a different faction of the Zionist Revisionist Right from his lifelong friend and later ally in the Herut Party Yitzchak Shamir, both used the same arms to launch the Great Revolt against the British and Palestinian Arabs in 1944. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and Lehi factions of the Zionist Right also joined together in committing terrorist acts against the British and collaborated in the murder of the Swedish mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Both were also involved in ethnic cleansing against Arab populations in the north of Israel.

Although I’ve no bone to pick with the current Kadimah coalition leadership, despite the family connections of some of its members to erstwhile terrorists, the uncivil side of the Israeli Right does rear its nasty head every now and then. In a continuing display of anachronistic antifascism, Begin, Shamir and their followers have vented their hate on anything associated with the postwar German government, and they have extended theses hate demonstrations to those delivering lectures in German in Israeli universities and to those performing German operas on Israeli territory. Shamir famously denounced Pope John Paul II as someone who “sucked in anti-Semitism with his mother’s milk” because of a disagreement with him on a foreign policy issue. And Likudnik deputies walked out or heckled the German Chancellor when she spoke last year before the Knesset, offering a self-mortifying apology for the Holocaust on behalf of her country. Her inexcusable offenses were that she addressed the Israeli parliament in German and was herself of German origin.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Begin, Shamir, and their followers, have often displayed the same bad manners as one might have encountered among Black Panthers or the IRA. It is possible to make this observation without wishing the Jewish state ill. Note that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the very well-educated and pro-European founder of the Zionist Right, worried deeply about the generation of leaders who would come after him. As the Israeli historian Amos Perlmutter points out, Jabotinsky was “appalled” by the idea of Begin, whom he considered maudlin, grotesque “shtetl Jew” ever taking over the leadership of his movement. Jabotinsky was of course proved right.

It is also nonsense to suggest that by failing to support the Israeli assault on Gaza with rapturous enthusiasm, I have allied myself with the Left. Allow me to note two inconvenient facts. One, I am strongly on the Israeli side in the current assault on Hamas military sites, although not in the same bloodthirsty fashion as Lewenberg Auster, and the ranters at the New York Post.  There is no reason to rejoice about shedding human blood, even when it seems necessary for the survival of one’s people or co-ethnics. I would also have supported the war against Hitler, albeit without the terror bombing and demand for unconditional surrender which seem to have been for Churchill and FDR the happiest side of the conflict.

Two, I’ve a revelation for Larry and Ron that they may discover sooner or later even without my help. Zionists and anti-Zionists can both be found outside of Israel largely on the left. My critics may have failed to notice on which side of the political spectrum Jewish Zionist groups have placed themselves in predominantly Christian (or post-Christian) countries. They are on exactly the same side of the political spectrum as Abe Foxman, Rahm Emanuel, Steven Spielberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Elie Wiesel. All of these celebrities and many other ones are intensely pro-Israel and, not surprisingly for me, on the political left. Like Larry, I’m delighted that Nick Griffin and the British National party are (more or less) cheering for the Israeli side, or at least for the anti-Muslim side, in the conflict in Gaza. But the Israelis would have more friends on the right if the Central Committee for Jews in Germany and its counterparts in France and Italy were not so firmly and predictably allied to the social and even pro-immigrationist left. Needless to say, it doesn’t count as a counterargument to what I’ve said that American movement conservatives and GOP officeholders are effusively pro-Israel. We all know from what tainted source their ideas come. Need I remind Larry about who walked in from the left and occupied the conservative movement in the 1980s and then were invited to become the GOP brain-trust? 

Larry would of course predictably respond to all this that most Zionists, including neoconservatives, are faux because they aren’t “serious” about exterminating Arabs and keeping Muslims out of the Western world. But these “unserious” Zionist partisans and the “unserious” Israeli Right are the closest things Larry has to allies. And you can add to this bunch much of the German Left, which since the fall of East Germany have turned their affections to Israel and to American-led human rights crusades. Any politically savvy American who looks at the German leftist website Hagalil or at the German leftist newspaper Tageszeitung gets the impression of deja vu. Both look as if they were written by Victor Davis Hansen and Ralph Peters and then translated into German.

Finally it is ridiculous for Larry to tell me that he was not suggesting that I cut my ties to this website and its patron. His references to both have become so vitriolic that it is hard for me to draw any other conclusion. Several times he has indicated to me that I was consorting with vicious anti-Semites through my association with Taki’s Top Drawer. Larry may have told me in passing that he is not trying to force my hand, but my assumption about his not wanting me to write for this website seems entirely reasonable, given the spleen he has unleashed against it.

But I do wish that Larry would stop referring to those who do not share his opinions as anti-Semites. The neoconservatives and their liberal allies are already playing that game quite nicely on their own, and there’s no way that Larry can break into their monopoly, no matter how hard he tries. Moreover, his stated white nationalist stands do not play well among those who are currently using what Murray Rothbard used to call the “branding iron of anti-Semitism.” Larry would do better to cease his war against this website and to turn his ammunition against more appropriate targets. What about those European Jewish organizations that combine their Zionism with support for continued Muslim immigration into Europe? These are the anti-Christian lunatics who are helping to bring the Muslim scourge into the heart of Europe, and unlike Taki, these nuisances run around accusing those who don’t agree with their Zionist politics of guess what?

An enterprising member of our literary- academic establishment will soon be writing a book about how Lincoln invaded the South in a desperate attempt to prevent Hitler’s accession to power. Apparently the CSA was teeming with Nazi precursors, as Arthur Schlesinger once observed in The Vital Center, and now a book that will be highly praised in the national press will make the same point through several hundred pages. There may also be a bestseller this year (if one does not already exist) showing how Bach’s Magnificat encapsulated the plan for Hitler’s Final Solution, which was also cleverly hidden in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and, most egregiously, in Frau von Bismarck’s night pot.

Sarah Palin’s popularity among Republicans will continue to soar, and especially after she insists on firebombing Teheran in punishment for Iran’s failure to enact anti-discrimination laws for women. Sarah will also give a speech, calling for a League of Democracies that would embrace the entire solar system, and which would go beyond the now outmoded notion of “global democracy.” Her son-in-law’s mother will be caught in flagrante delicto, distributing drugs to the governor’s family (I suspect that’s already happened). The drug-imbibing first lady-in-law of Alaska will then be given a suspended sentence on the condition that she enters a rehab center on the North Pole.

The media will continue to slime Bush with the hope of diverting attention from the ineptitude of his successor in getting the economy back on track. But GOP loyalists have no need to worry! Ob will continue to be pounded (as he was earlier this week in the New York Post) for being reluctant to go to war with Islamo-fascist Iran. Perhaps by the end of this year, however, the new president will start acting like a Republican. 

The only permissible political positions will continue to be leftist ones, namely the opinions of left-liberals and neocons. The usual types will continue to pollute our civic discourse, unless something truly apocalyptic occurs. I can’t imagine what that would be, but if Rupert Murdoch goes bankrupt, American political thinking might become more hygienic. And oh yes, Muslim Fundamentalists will continue to pour into European cities, while European governments continue to yammer about racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. The response of our “conservative” media will likely continue to be “Let them all in but please teach them about human rights and the Holocaust!”  What did the ancients say about quis vult perdere, prius dementat?

This website will continue to be a voice crying out in a leftist wilderness. But we may soon be able to trade in our slingshots for medium-range missiles. Hope springs eternal even for grizzled paleo warriors.

I would offer further predictions if I could think of any more, but at my age the past look a lot more eventful than the future.   

Last week Michael Flynn, editor of the IPS website, posted a long review of Steve Sniegoski’s until now largely ignored investigation of the role of neocon journalists and foreign policy advisors in greasing the skids for the American invasion of Iraq. I myself wrote the long introduction to this work in which I stressed its dispassionate tone and mountains of damning evidence. A somewhat improbable characterization for describing this book, The Transparent Cabal, is that it is full of “relentless, partisan rhetoric.” Nonetheless, that is exactly what Flynn says about it.

It is in fact hard for me to see how this work, which the liberal-neocon network has predictably ignored, is anything other than a clinical exercise in fact-gathering and, as Flynn himself observes, in the integration of staggering amounts of material. It shows about as much emotionality as a nineteenth-century German dissertation on the mating habits of Old World tussock moths. In his review, Flynn frequently agrees with the conclusions drawn from Steve’s research; and he is struck by the “conscientious” way in which Steve pursues his topic page after page. To the extent that even a generally positive reviewer is patronizing toward his work, even while underlining its considerable strength, one may assume that Flynn has noticed where the author is coming from, namely right field.
He considers it “tedious” that Steve “checks off all the boxes about the leftist origins of many early neoconservatives,” and he seems vexed that he leaves out “a fuller assessment of how racists have exploited the Jewish backgrounds of many neoconservatives to stoke anti-Semitism.” By this standard, one should not criticize Stalin’s tyranny because Lazar Kaganovich and other henchmen of the Soviet mass murderer were Jewish. Significantly, Steve goes out of his way to stress the discrepancies between the neocons and the conventional leftist politics of most American Jews. He repeatedly tells us that Jews in the US opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they stood on this and other issues with the Democratic Left. 

The reason Steve’s book has enjoyed so little resonance has nothing to do with the fact that he dared to criticize part of the Israeli Right. Lots of liberal journalists have done exactly this, and they review each other’s denunciations with gushing admiration. Steve’s problem is that he has reached critical conclusions from the wrong side of the political spectrum; and his scholarship is therefore unworthy of discussion.

But since he also raises some valid points, an isolated leftist blogger has reviewed his work in detail and with restrained praise, even while warning us counterfactually that the book is full of rage. All of this reminds me of another story that I recently heard concerning my own person. A colleague of mine who was invited to a conference on Weimar Germany at the University of Wisconsin (to which I was specifically not invited) elicited a noteworthy response from another participant when my friend told him that I might have been interested in attending. The other participant, who was an antifascist leftist of the garden-variety sort, looked at my friend a bit uncomfortably and then responded: “Professor Gottfried has some interesting things to say. I’d like to debate him, and in fact I would do so, if he ever invites me to his campus.” My response, in addition to a string of unprintable expletives, is that I would debate this jerk on his home turf, if he had the guts to bring me there. Furthermore, since he’s working as a full professor at an illustrious academic address, our discussion would have more impact on his campus than among the Amish farmers of Central Pennsylvania.

But getting back to Steve and his fate, clearly his book might still have a chance for success if he announced on page one that he’s a homosexual and a feminist and that he objected to the way the Israeli government victimized others with special lifestyles needs. Once having given such sparkling credentials, Steve would be able to get on to all the usual talk shows—and even on to the Murdoch TV channel, as a debating partner for some neocon hack. What make his scholarship unmentionable are its source—and perhaps his rightwing word processor.

Note there are things in his work that one could properly criticize. Steve is a bit too laid back in describing truly outrageous behavior. One comes away from reading his tome with the impression that it’s perfectly normal for neocons to run the country with their natural slaves. If they screw up, then it is not their guys but GOP morons who catch hell, while the neocons can set up shop in the other party with new bacterial hosts. From Steve’s lugubrious perspective, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And he may have a point here.

Recently while in New York for Taki’s lively Christmas party, I chanced upon an Australian couple in my hotel, who swooned in ecstasy at the sight of a woolen cap that I had just bought and decided to wear. It had blazoned over the front the words “President Obama: We Did It.” The wife explained that everyone on their continent adored our president-elect, and when I asked why, she responded “because he’ll get rid of the neocons.” Whereupon I noted that it would take nothing short of a global nuclear conflagration to achieve that happy result. Actually I’m not sure that even that would work after wading through Steve’s book.

Although it is certainly not my wont to boast about my kin, I’m herewith deviating from my customary behavior to mention my family’s recent accomplishments. My two sons, Joseph and Jonathan, have been successful corporate lawyers, and the older one, Joseph, is also a physician, who majored in German literature at Harvard. But it is not these two male cognitive prodigies but my older daughters, Barbara and Beth, who have inherited my passion for words. Beth has co-written a book that has sold well for Penguin Press on TV entertainment, Ten Secrets I Learned from the Apprentice, and as far as I know, she is now working on other explorations of the cesspool that is popular culture. Meanwhile Barbara has produced children’s fiction and books on economics and mathematics aimed at the young. Most recently she has published a text on money for Heinemann Press; and she has also been the economic advisor to World Almanac, a weighty tome in which her own prose can be found. She has done this while dutifully tending to her three children, one of whom has special needs.

But that does not exhaust the recent publishing feats of those who bear or once bore my family name. My younger brother Dennis, who is a physician in Litchfield County Connecticut, has just brought out with Paragon Press a highly accessible work about soaring medical costs, Too Much Medicine: A Doctor’s Prescription for Better and More Affordable Medicine. Like all of my talented relatives, Dennis writes with flair and precision on highly technical subjects; and his work carries a blurb from someone who would not likely greet me on the street, Sean Hannity’s talking associate Alan Colmes.  (No, my brother does not share Colmes’s or Hannity’s politics!)

Unlike my kid brother, who continues to be hung up on the impact of “cultural values,” I am a convinced hereditarian in the matter of human achievements. And it brings me great joy to know that I share the genes of these people whom I’ve described. I’m also sure they’ll soon be doing other things that I’ll feel impelled to mention, and I’ll do so at the risk of sounding once again like a braggart. But I’ll accept that risk for good reason. My family not only has lots of smarts but also works hard to develop natural endowments. 

Unlike my respondents, I do not recoil from the fact that the CP appeals largely to Bible-believing Christians. The faith of such people as well as respect for the text of the Constitution went into creating what used to be the American Right—and before that, the American mainstream. Personally I feel a lot more comfortable around such types than I do around the advocates of individual autonomy in the Libertarian Party or around the Dispensationalists, who have provided the neocons with their (now expendable) foot-soldiers. Although the CP in its present form may not suit all of our tastes, it does offer the beginnings of a real Party of the Right.
Anent Richard’s sarcastic reaction to Bill Kristol’s latest example of marching in lockstep with the Left, one thing that came to mind is how tepid the responses on the bogus right were to Kristol’s commentary. Those whose livelihoods depend on the neocons (which includes by now almost the entire conservative movement) are in no state to get really pissed off. They have to tone down their censures by delivering lectures on Hayek or by subtilizing about Kristol’s thinly veiled overtures to the Obama camp. One has to be a fool or a knave not to notice what is going on. Kristol’s hymn to a large welfare state is certainly not the only example of the “conservative movement’s” search for allies on the left. And those who take their largess from the Kristol camp will have to put the least objectionable face on a situation that is likely to become even more outrageous as the changing of the guard goes forth

For those who may wonder where the incessant neocon grovelling to Barack Obama is headed (David Brooks believes that the president-elect’s “start nearly justifies the hype”), the answer may be provided by the global democratic activist (except in East Jerusalem where he has tried to expel Palestinians) Natan Sharansky. According to Sharansky, the president-elect will be even better than Bush in pushing a global democratic foreign policy.

Mat Roberts may be overly cynical when he accuses NRO’s star intellectual Victor Davis Hanson of being dishonest in his recent description of what he and his pals are doing at work: “There is no party-line take on unfolding events. The mishmash of libertarians, social conservatives, blue-dog Democrats, independents, paleoconservatives, neocons, traditionalists, atheists, and doctrinaire Republicans who contribute to NRO ensures a wide variety of views, to say the least.” According to Mr. Roberts, the NRO website features nothing more interesting than doctrinaire Republicans and neocons. But my young friend may be wrong. If he casts his net more widely, he should be able to find on the same website the atheist Christopher Hitchens and the Trotskyist Steve Schwartz denouncing Islamo-fascism. I’m sure Roberts can also locate there Democrats singing the virtues of Joe Lieberman as a maven on Middle Eastern affairs.

Perhaps the message of Hanson, a neocon expert on the foul deeds of Kaiser Wilhelm and Robert E. Lee is a harbinger of pleasant things to come. It is after all a dirty little secret, which my book on conservatism dares to reveal, that NR has been throwing people off the bus, and occasionally under the wheel, since its inception. This trend became more pronounced when the present neocon potentates took over the magazine, and as one of the earliest expellees who is still above ground, I assume that what Hanson is talking about is a new policy of inclusiveness that his publication and website are about to initiate.

It certainly does not describe NR’s history, any more than it would that of Pravda or Der Völkische Beobachter. Tolerance is not one of those words that come to mind when I think about “who contributes to NRO,” except in the sense of teaching pseudo-rightists to fawn on the pro-Israeli Left. But on the basis of my generous interpretation of what is now happening, I am waiting for the editors of NRO to ask me to write for their newly diverse product, for the first time since I was quietly given the heave in 1991. I’m sure that they’re itching to have me and others whom they once helped to marginalize join them in a true mishmash of widely divergent opinions. What did Mao say between cultural revolutions about “letting a thousand flowers bloom”? Presumably the same line can be made to work for party-line publications trying to raise funds.

Allow me to express my utter amazement at the way my friends on the right here and in Europe change their tune, as soon as one broaches the topic of letting Turkey into the EU. Those who had been going on about the depravity and despotism into which Western Europe had sunk, suddenly start making it appear as if they’re living in a modern democratic paradise. Apparently the problems in Europe such as censorship, managerial despotism, and the bureaucratic destruction of social normality, national identity, and gender distinctions, are not as bad as I had thought. They pale by comparison to the authoritarian nationalist government that Ataturk had mischievously erected in the 1920s. In any case Europeans are now free of those horrible gender inequalities that had beset them in the eighteenth century, when they still reproduced. And I may be overdoing it when I complain about dumping loudmouths in the can for not teaching PC history, given the alternative, which is intellectual freedom. By the way, for those who haven’t noticed, in today’s Europe one can incur social and professional ruin for doing a lot less than explicitly denying the authorized account of the Holocaust.

I’ve also learned that the drug-using, sexually kinky, nation-hating inhabitants of European countries, who are (perhaps wisely) refusing to procreate, are descended from those who had built an earlier Western civilization. If that is so, should we congratulate our contemporaries on their undemocratic ancestors, before noticing the ethnocidal path they’re taking? And why should we be angrier at the Ottoman Turks for their conquest of Constantinople in 1453 than we are at the present grave-diggers of European civilization, ensconced in the EU’s human rights agencies. European traditionalists (I would think) have far more reason to detest the EU than to rage against Mohammed II or Suleiman the Magnificent.
For those who may have missed my conclusion, I am all in favor of keeping Turkey out of the EU, insofar as I’ve no desire to see a sick Europe further overwhelmed by the diversity it has recklessly fostered. But I don’t buy the view that Turkey is politically or morally more contemptible than the decadent Europe it would like to join. It is after all Turkey that is seeking to dump its riffraff on those who crave it; and even if Turkey does not get its way here, the Europeans might still find other ways to finish themselves off.

There is one last point that I made obliquely to Derek Turner in a short blog yesterday and which needs to be expanded. It doesn’t pay to imitate the platitudes of the other side about the wonders of contemporary democracy in order to achieve a particular end. That was the tactic pursued by the American conservative movement, or at least that part of it that did not go opportunistically crawling after the neocons in the 1980s, when sincere anti-Communists allowed themselves to be snookered into offering Cold War liberal reasons exclusively for opposing Soviet tyranny. Thereafter the only allowable reasons for opposing the Communists became predictable leftist ones, until the point was reached when WFB’s Firing Line began featuring homosexuals who had gripes against the homophobic Fidel Castro. The worst thing that we on the right can do is to offer our enemies’ arguments for anything we oppose. Let’s find our own reasons, which are consistent with what we believe.