Myths of the Minicons

FrumForum's correspondent Alex Knepper is punching above his weight again ... so to speak ... this time, he's attacking the Mises Institute as the "anti-Semitic" "spawn of Murray Rothbard." The Poly Sci major at American U., who's dispensed with the tedium of research, has put forth a thesis that's quite bold and original -- Lew Rockwell, Thomas Woods Jr., and Ron Paul are "anti-trade." That this article was published speaks to the editorial rigor at David Frum's webzine.  

Kneppert also claims that LewRockwell.com publishes "racist" material...  From my standpoint, he missed the opportunity to bring up the fact that many Austrian School economists are (or were) immigration restrictionists. Indeed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes the strong case, in Democracy: The God That Failed, that restriction flows naturally from a society based on private property and that "free" immigration is actually intellectually incompatible with libertarianism, properly understood.

Anyway, it's not worth anyone's time to refute Alex Kneppert's smear, but, I do think it'd be helpful to explicate a few reigning Myths of the Minicons, which they repeat over and over again at the various movement gatherings I've attended and on websites like FrumForum. (I'm sure this blog will need to be updated many times, as I somehow keep ending up at movement events.) 

Myth #1: The John Birch society, an American spin-off of the Russian Black Hundreds, was a dangerous anti-Semitic and racist death cult that planned to enact a series of violent pogroms and cross-burnings across the American heartland. Thankfully, William F. Buckley (and apparently now F.A. Hayek) swooped in to save the day and chart American conservatism's course towards respectability.

In reality, the Birchers were never anti-Semitic or racist. And they weren't even expelled from the movement due to their wacky theories about Eisenhower and fluoride in the water. Buckley attacked them in 1962 because they were against President Kennedy's "anti-Communist action in Southeast Asia"; that is, they were purged because they didn't support the initial stages of the Vietnam War (a campaign Buckley later said he regretted.) The JBS did oppose the '64 Civil Rights Act -- for good reason -- but then so did Goldwater and Buckley, the latter expressing his support for Southern Segregation in terms that today would be considered "hate speech."

It's worth noting that the contemporary JBS is even more cornball than the movement establishment in trying to prove that it's not racist. At this year's CPAC, the JBS table was back-dropped with a massive color photo of five smiling American children -- two of whom were black and one, Hispanic. A rather strange depiction of American demographics!

Myth #2: NAFTA, GATT, WTO etc. are synonymous with free trade; indeed, these international organization employing hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats make free trade possible, and if you're against them, that means you're just agaist freedom.

This one's held by liberals and movement conservatives alike, for opposite reasons, and can be easily refuted historically (one could ask, for instance, just how tea, coco, and spices reached Europe without bureaucrats championing and regulating "free trade.")

As for the "North American Union" conspiracy ... I'd just look at today's papers. 

Myth #3: The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee -- "America's Pro-Israel Lobby," in its words -- is one of the largest lobbying organizations in the country, supports a righteous cause, and rightfully enjoys the good will of every major presidential candidate and secretary of state. This said, AIPAC has no influence in Washington whatsoever, and if you think it does you're an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist!

If Israel's and America's interests are identical, I wonder why supporters of the Jewish state bothered setting up a lobby?  

P.S. Did anyone see that the U.S. State Department is sending Frum to China to lecture Mandarins on "demographic change and the future of American politics"? When the Chinese see what kind of people are treasured as "public intellectuals" in America, they'll know exactly who's going to wield power in the future... 

The Myth of "Judeo-Christian Values"

Reading Larry Auster's website over the years, I find there is much in his spirited commentaries that I agree with. Larry's attacks on liberals and neoconservatives, his stress on the enormous overlap between these two only minimally different groups, his focus on the immigration issue, and his critical examination of the government's war on traditional social relations and religious morals are invariably of high quality. Larry dares to say things that one would rarely see in mainstream liberal and neoconservative publications, and therefore we on the real right owe him a debt of gratitude for these efforts.

An issue, however, that he and I strongly disagree about is his conception of a Judeo-Christian war against Islam. First, I have never shared Larry's fierce revulsion for all Muslims as bearers of violence and hatred. I have known practicing Muslims for most of my life, and among them I have numbered personal friends. I have also never perceived any signs of violence or malice in dealing with these Muslims. Last Sunday my wife and I were with a young Turkish couple in a Turkish restaurant in Allentown, PA; and I found nothing off-putting about the Muslims I saw coming in to eat Halal food. They looked, acted, and ate like the Orthodox Jews whom I have known, and I felt much safer in their company than I would have felt among the inner-city minorities, who may be Pentecostal Christians. Such non-Muslims, in any case, were doing drug deals outside the restaurant in which we were dining.

Although I agree with Larry about the need for a moratorium on immigration, particularly from Latin America, and although I share his view that decadent, childless Europeans are committing physical and demographic suicide by repopulating their countries with lower-class Muslims, who often incline toward Islamic Fundamentalism, I strongly dissent from his unqualified generalizations about adherents of Islam.

Moreover, I think that there is something other than a sense of emergency that has fueled Larry's call for a Judeo-Christian front against Muslims as a collective enemy. To be very blunt (and I may be in view of the fact that Larry has scolded me more than once as a self-hating Jew), my friend may be addressing a personal problem when he grasps for conceptual straws, as a Jew who converted to Christianity. In order to bridge the poles in his hyphenated existence, he appeals to a desirable but (alas) fictitious unity. To say that Christians and Jews are both being targeted by Islamic Fundamentalists does not mean that they share a close friendship based on common religious convictions.

Larry may wish that such a community of belief in fact existed. And so do the Christian Zionists and the Christian employees of the neoconservatives, who share Larry's rhetorical habit when they refer to "Judeo-Christians." Admittedly one could describe Jesus, Peter, and Paul as Judeo-Christians but they may have been the last Jews who would answer to that description. In the first century total war broke out between two rival Jewish sects, the Pharisees and the Jewish Christians. While the Jews had the upper hand, which they didn't for very long, they went after the Christians, and from the High Middle Ages on, the Church paid back the Jews in a more devastating way, from a greater position of strength.

Significantly, the issues Jews had and still have with Christians are theological and cultural, as well as the result of persecutions inflicted on Jews by some European societies in the past. The central Christian beliefs, that God became man in Christ and atoned on the cross for human sins, are utter blasphemy from a Jewish or Muslim perspective. And the Rabbinic attacks on Jesus that are found in the Talmud are directed against the founder of Christianity as a blasphemer. David Gordon revisits all these facts in detail in a review of George Weigel's Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. But let me add other facts. The Rabbinic attacks against Christian beliefs were not a response to Christian persecution since they were produced in Babylonia, in what was then a predominantly Zoroastrian society. The only Christians whom the authors of the Talmud were likely to have encountered were Monophysites, who rejected the Trinitarian statement formulated at Chalcedon and who were living in Babylonia as a powerless minority.

Second, Muslims have never represented for Jews the religious problem posed by Christianity because the theological and ritual differences between Jews and Muslims are far less significant. As Maimonides pointed out in the 13th century, Jews may pray to Allah because the Muslim and Jewish conceptions of the Deity are the same. The Muslim dietary and ritual laws and the strict separation of the sexes also resemble their Jewish equivalent, although Muslims are less strict than Orthodox Jews in dietary matters. Unlike Orthodox Jews, observant Muslims will eat meat slaughtered by a Jewish ritual slaughterer, but Orthodox Jews will not return the favor by eating Halal meat. While some Jews fled from the Catholic Inquisition by going to Calvinist Holland and Dutch New Amsterdam, far more Jews left for the Ottoman Empire, where they were allowed to live for centuries in peace.

Until the eruption of hostilities between Jews and Muslims over Israel, Jews in the West continued to speak far more favorably about Muslims than they did about Christians. I myself noticed this difference in my youthful contacts with Jewish institutions, which always treated the Muslim world in a far kinder way than the Christian West. My students, who have read the historical writings of Bernard Lewis, noticed the same characteristic in this Jewish author. Whenever he compares the two universal religions, Christianity and Islam, Lewis favors the Muslims at the expense of the Christians. A distinguished Jewish historian already in his 70s, he reflects traditional Jewish attitudes toward the core religious beliefs of the two religions in question.

Until the mid-1980s when the neoconservatives started building an alliance with the Christian Zionists, Commentary featured scathing invectives against the Christian belief system as well as the "crucifixion myth" as the source of the Holocaust. Larry might wish that Jews thought differently about Christian believers since he himself is one, but alas most of them don't. Jewish organizations here and in Europe view Christians as people whose exaggerated guilt over the Holocaust can be channeled into support for the Israeli government. Prominent Jewish groups, such as the World Jewish Congress, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League, show nothing but indifference or hostility to the continued existence of Christian institutions in what used to be Christian countries.

Such behavior is not restricted to countries in which established Christian churches once persecuted Jews. It is equally present in predominantly Protestant countries, which have no significant histories of anti-Semitism. Why do most American Jews loathe the Philo-Semitic Christian Right, a religious force that only a lunatic would mistake for the anti-Jewish Russian Orthodox Church of the 19th century? In surveys about religious intolerance in America, as Norman Podhoretz rightly notes, Jews seem inordinately upset about Evangelical Christians, a group whose ethical positions are the same as those taught by Hebrew Scripture and who adore Israel almost as much as Larry.

My explanation, which Larry may not want to hear, is that Jewish distaste for Christianity is so deep-seated that it can not be written off as a legacy of Christian anti-Semitism. This unfortunate hostility actually seems to grow in intensity or expressiveness as Christians try to reach out to Jews. Christophobia may be weakest among Jews in Muslim countries, who have only minimal dealings with Christians, or among Israelis, who view Christians as a distant ally. But these Jews would not be likely go about celebrating Larry's "Judeo-Christian" values, although they might use and have used Christian Zionists as a link to Republican administrations, when the occasion presents itself.

I must also dissent from Larry's tendency to blame Jewish thinking about Christians on the effects of liberalism. Jews helped create and propagate this particular ideology largely as a protective device against an older Christian civilization. There might well be problems with the liberal ideas that Jews have supported until now, but it is simply wrong to pretend that Jewish liberals act from liberal motives that have nothing to do with their Jewish fears and hostilities. I've never met a Jewish liberal whose leftist politics was not in some way connected to his self-identity as a Jew. Larry might believe (and I wouldn't dispute his judgment) that this typically Jewish ideological stance is inappropriate for Bible-believers or incompatible with long-range Zionist interests. But it is the way that Jews have responded to their anxieties in the Christian West.  And mixed with this anxiety at some level is a sense of marginality grounded in theological difference. Here we come back to Larry's existential problem, which is his need to avoid confronting the Judeo-Muslim rejection of core Christian teachings.

These remarks are not intended to minimize the gravity of certain differences. Needless to say, I'd be delighted if Jews thought differently about the Christian world, which might end their tiresome attachment to what has become the cultural Marxist Left. But expressing this pious wish may be like wishing that elephants could fly. What seems unlikely, however, is that one could bring about an alternative reality by demonizing all Muslims. Indeed it is no longer even possible to be a crusading anti-Muslim, as the two Richards pointout, without having to consort with Christopher Hitchens-secularists, feminists, and pro-gay rights liberals. Larry's holy crusade is certainly not going forth as a Christian, or "Judeo-Christian," enterprise. It has turned into a tacit alliance with the very people he professes to despise.

Up With Anarchy!

In 1980, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate, Ed Clark, declared on ABC's Nightline that his party's political philosophy was, in essence, "low-tax liberalism." This line caused Murray Rothbard, among others, a great deal of vexation and led to the "moderate" and "radical" split within the LP and, ultimately, Rothbard's departure from the Cato Institute for the open air of Auburn, Alabama. (This tale is told well by Justin Raimondo.)

Reading David Boaz's recent declarations in Reason, "low-tax liberalism," or at least the low-tax part, is starting to sound like an attractive doctrine in comparison. It's probably unfair to say that in the minds of contemporary Cato luminaries like David Boaz and Brink Lindsey, "libertarianism" boils down to gay marriage, abortion, anti-racism, and Kerry Howley's right not to be looked down upon for her lifestyle choices... but these seem to be central, indispensable pillars of their philosophy. (Though to be accurate, Boaz and Lindsey want low taxes, too, and they sometimes like war.) 

Boaz's main argument is that 18^th and 19^th-centry America was less "libertarian" than people like Jacob Hornberger (and by extension, the Mises circle) think because blacks were discriminated against; in turn, the state's encroachment on personal and economic liberty and its war-making in recent times isn't so bad due to the notable decline of "intolerance." It's not an exaggeration to say that Boaz doesn't consider any society free if he senses that somewhere, some black person is being discriminated against. 

Over at The American Conservatove, Dan McCarthy makes a good start at dismantling Boaz's essay, but, in my opinion, Dan doesn't go nearly far enough: 

He writes,

Presumably part of the answer to these questions is that Boaz believes rights of minorities can be sufficiently protected, and crime prevented, detected, and punished, without an indefinitely large government - the things he likes about our vast tutelary state can be preserved and made more efficient, and the things he dislikes can be discarded without damaging the framework. I'd say his vision is close to what Ed Clark proudly called "low-tax liberalism."

If that's what Boaz and liberaltarians like Will Wilkinson want, what about people like Jacob Hornberger? They are not indifferent to or unaware of the evils of slavery and bigotry, rather they want to purge the older American model of government, with its emphasis on states' rights and decentralization, of its defects - racial injustice, etc. - just as Boaz wants to purge the present tutelary state of its defects. Hornberger is no more forgetful of the evils of past forms of government than Boaz is unaware of modern government's infringements of liberty. If Hornberger doesn't reiterate those old evils at every opportunity, it's because in the year 2010 everyone recognizes those evils for what they are.

[...] The freedom of the tutelary state is the freedom of a free-range dairy cow: in exchange for care and protection, you pay your taxes and may frolic in the fields as much as you please. It's a timid sort of freedom, but it is freedom of a kind.

An alternative based on the older American tradition, by contrast, need not logically lead to a slave-state; indeed, most of the Founders recognized that slavery was inconsistent with the principles of their system.

Many Founders, including Jefferson, felt that the presence of a vast racial underclass would have dire implications, though one might quibble with Dan over the degree to which they opposed slavery as such, or considered all persons worthy of citizenship. But these are historical and empirical questions, and can be put aside for the real theoretical issue at play -- the difference between "libertarianism" (so-called) and decentralization.

To udnerstand what I mean, conceive, if you will, of a hypothetical situation (though, luckily, one that's starting to seem more and more plausible each day):

The U.S. federal government collapses under financial strain, and its armed forces lack the will and resources to preserve the Union.

From this starting point, one can imagine a whole host of new -- or rather old -- social formations arising in the stead of the defunct federal order.

All but a handful of liberal dead-enders would stop paying their taxes and obeying regulations; and after the initial shocks subsided, most everyone would partake in all sorts of "free trade" of goods and services. Stretches of the country might very well evolve into anarcho-capitalist, individualists orders, with only marriage (or consensual devotion contracts) and familial bonds as non-economic governing authorities. Perhaps.

It's equally, probably more, likely that communities would congeal around rather illiberal, authoritarian precepts, traditions, and kinships. Parts of Brooklyn, for instance, might divide between Latino and Black nationalist blocs in which all other races would be excluded and tribal hierarchies rigidly enforced. The great economist Gary North might get his wish and be able to establish a Protestant independent city state that would make Calvin's Geneva seem like Cancun in comparison. Adulters and homosexuals would be publicly stoned. Some less severe, though no less exclusionary, communities might develop in places like Montana, where it would be tacitly understood that if one couldn't ride a horse and hunt, one just didn't belong. Non-whites and open homosexuals would be looked at funny. Throughout the North American continent, great swaths of land would be fenced off with barbed-wire, and feature socially intolerant signs declaring "No [Blacks/Latinos/Whites/Catholics/Jews/Asians etc.] Allowed!" Bands of thieves, vagrants, and thugs would roam the countryside and godforsaken inner cities, giving rise to a new Samurai class that, though guided by a code of honor, would apprehend and execute criminals without a pretense of a trial. Communities would gratefully compensate these hard and ruthless private contractors for their services. 

In this fantastic, though seemingly likely, scenario, there might even arise an all-male city -- we'll call it "Boaz" -- that would become so liberated that the creative use of narcotics and sharing of paramours wouldn't just be permitted but required. Then again, this state-less pleasure dome might soon prove susceptible to said roving criminal bands and thus need to call upon the Samurais -- or even Gary North's sense of chivalry.   

I'll end the intriguing thought experiment here, for the sake of brevity. My point is that this easily imaginable anarchic world -- in which whole new vistas of personal preferences would arise -- would seem evil, authoritarian, and downright "un-libertarian" to someone like Boaz. And, moreover, it would be "un-libertarian" in a way that our current welfare nation-state -- which has war-making, taxing, and spying powers undreamt of by Joseph Stalin -- is not. 

There is simply no reason to believe that decentralization, or anarchy, leads to greater social "libertarianism." And the historical evidence points in the opposite direction.  

The 18^th- and 19^th centuries -- not exactly ancient history but considered benighted, knuckle-dragging years by Boaz -- actually featured more free, unregulated trade than the 20^th and 21^st. It also had a high degree of monetary unification -- not under a One World (fiat) currency like the Euro but the silver and gold commodity standards. There's little indication than any of this economic integration led to a greater quantity of "libertarianism" in Western society. Europe became less brutal and more technically advanced, to be sure, but it also underwent advances in the subjugation and colonization of undeveloped peoples; national consciousness and Darwinian, eugenic scientific thinking made strides; and hereditary monarchy was re-installed.        

Boaz might want to believe that his beloved postwar "libertarian" order could have arisen in the absence of a strong therapeutic welfare state, but it's quite difficult to make this case. (In turn, Dan McCarthy might want to believe that a society with a minimal Constitutional state would eventually come around to the idea of purging "racial discrimination," but he runs into the same historical problems.)

I've encountered many "libertarians" who express wonderment at the fact that so many liberals and leftists support such good things (in their estimation) as gay marriage, polymorphous sexuality, and the breaking down of social hierarchies, but then turn around and support such bad things as high taxation, regulation, and increasing bureaucratic power. But it's the "libertarians" who are confused and the Establishment liberals like E.J. Dionne, Keith Olbermann, and Matthew Yglesias who are ideologically consistent.    

The Boazian paradise in which abortions are readily available and religious and racial discrimination, frowned upon -- also known as "now" -- would only be possible with a state powerful enough to stamp out any sign of "intolerance" wherever it might raise its ugly head. Since Boaz believes he upholds a universalistic system,  attached to no single people or civilization, one can conclude that the ultimate culmination of "libertarianism" would require a planetary government. 

If only it were just about taxes... 

The Trajectory of the American Right

Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the paleos, the neos, the Old Right, Buckley, and the conquest of the conservative movement by neoconservatives.

Obamacare Is a Civil Right

Richard Lowry may be the most culturally illiterate journalist now plying his trade. In a column from several years ago, he seemed unaware of who fought whom in the Spanish Civil War. And he has now exceeded his previous record for silliness. In his latest syndicated effort, he informs us that "liberals' are guilty of trying to wrap health-care reform in a "victory as transcendent as that of the civil rights movement," a revolution that Lowry considers to be a "rare and marvelous thing."

Lowry waxes sappy as he describes what for him is a divine epiphany. He can barely contain himself extolling the "genius of Martin Luther King," who taught us to love each other. And he ends by contrasting the health-care bill with the Christ-like purity of the civil rights protestors, who were concerned with "freedom and securing the most basic rights -- to vote and to gain equal access to public accommodations." Unlike this "mess cobbled together by an embattled, ideological congressional majority," the civil rights movement and King "were catalyzed by sacrificial love."

Now that Lowry has contributed to the replacement theology of the Left, by comparing the civil rights movement and its leader to the early church and Jesus, perhaps it would be appropriate to indicate why the former civil rights activist John Lewis and other black Democrats are entirely correct to view Obama's presidency and his health-care plan as being connected to the real civil rights movement. How else would blacks use what Lowry considers a "basic right" to vote, except to endorse the people and policies that Lowry finds unacceptable?  Would he expect black voters to be libertarians or think like Lowry's neoconservative patrons about the need to place Middle Eastern wars above domestic concerns?

In February, 2005, Lowry tried to bridge this conceptual gap by comparing Condoleezza Rice's support for the war in Iraq to "the civil rights cause that she supported as a girl in Birmingham, Alabama." Apparently Lowry's parallel had no perceptive effect in turning black voters into neoconservative crusaders for global democracy.  But then Lowry has never noticed the obvious. Blacks live more than any other ethnic group off government-run social programs; and it is hardly an accident that they overwhelmingly support health care and any other redistribution programs that the current administration is considering.

As for the "transcendent" moment in the 1960s, which Lowry evokes like an Old Testament prophet touched by the Divine, what we are really talking about is something that resulted in a prodigious transfer of power. Having lived through the "transcendent" as well-orchestrated civil rights demonstrations and the resulting consolidation of federal power, I'm afraid that I don't share Lowry's adolescent reconstruction of modern American history. Once the sitting at lunch counters and the publicized demonstrations in Southern towns were over, what we got was federal and state intervention to counteract discrimination against blacks and then offenses committed against women, gays, Hispanics, Aleuts, and the transgendered. And as even Lowry must have noticed, the black vote was certainly a key factor in electing the present government, which was another consequence of the civil rights movement. Moreover, black leaders, like Lewis, who enjoy the respect of the black community, have been an integral part of just about every leftwing coalition in my lifetime. Their achievement of what Lowry calls a "basic right" to vote has allowed them to lend muscle to the government's vast programs of behavior modification and income transfer.

For some reason, Lowry stops his account of the "transcendent" moment before getting into its full implications. He is like someone writing an account of the French Revolution who stops with the storming of the Bastille. But in Lowry's mind that upheaval might have ended, like the civil rights movement, one minute after it began. The civil rights movement terminated in Selma; the French Revolution in a Paris prison. It is John Lewis and the other congressional Democrats, not Lowry, who have the true understanding of the civil rights movement. It continues to go on, whenever money is being transferred from one race to another and whenever the therapeutic state and its educators make whites feel guilty about the supposed burden of their history. Orwell maintained that there are some things that are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them. Lowry's ahistorical polemic may go beyond even that degree of stupidity.

Remaking the Right (part II)

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberal? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Continued from Part I

In Commentary's symposium on Norman Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberal? historian Jonathan D. Sarna calls attention to the fact that "outside the United States liberalism is nowhere near so dominant a faith among Jews. In Israel, to take an obvious example, Jewish liberals and Jewish conservatives are fairly evenly matched."

Actually, Israelis who might remotely be described as liberal are a distinct minority -- the old Labor Party founded by Zionist socialists is on its last legs, accounting for only around 10 percent of the Knesset and functioning mainly to provide a fig leaf of respectability for the dominant ethno-nationalist Right.

Identification with the left is not a general characteristic of Jews; it is, however, a definite phenomenon within countries in the Jewish Diaspora, indicating that in searching for an explanation of the attraction of American Jews to the left, one must also look to this Diaspora experience in Europe and other European-derived societies.

Thankfully, Podhoretz does not try to explain the Jewish attraction to the left as resulting from a moral imperative stemming from the very nature of Judaism itself.

Such a self-conception remains strong among many Jewish liberals, including Deborah Lipstadt who opines, "The Torah repeatedly instructs us to care for the 'widow, the orphan, poor, and the stranger.'" Jewish advocates for non-White immigration sometimes use this rationale -- Gideon Aronoff's Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for example:

Drawing strongly on Jewish tradition, we provide services to Jewish immigrants, refugees, and others in need -- without regard for their religion, nationality, or ethnic background. We are guided by our Jewish values and texts. The Torah (Hebrew Bible) tells us 36 times in 36 different ways to help the stranger among us. This, and our core belief that we must "fix the world" (tikkun olam, in Hebrew), are the driving principles behind our work.

But the idea that the Jewish religion makes Jews into altruistic world-healers is an obvious non-starter, and not only because, as Podhoretz notes, the highly religious Orthodox are less prone to liberal attitudes than the rest of the Jewish community. More decisively, even the most out of touch among us are now becoming aware that Israel is an apartheid state dominated by the most extreme religious and ethnocentric factions of the Jewish community. The Palestinians are treated brutally and are dependent on the largesse from the rest of the world.

The morally uplifting Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and pretty much the entire organized Jewish community in the U.S., aid and abet Israel as an aggressive, racialist ethno-state, or at least they turn a blind eye to it. Whatever else one might say about it, the Jewish religion does not make Jews into moral paragons or champions of the oppressed. And it certainly doesn't make Jews into champions of religious and ethnic diversity.

Podhoretz's explanation is that liberalism has become the religion of American Jews -- an irrational set of beliefs resistant to disconfirmation. As he notes, the same was true of the long Jewish love affair with Marxism, and it was certainly true of Jews in traditional societies.

Liberalism is not a "substitute for religion": it is a religion in its own right, complete with its own catechism and its own dogmas ... obdurately resistant to facts that undermine its claims and promises.

The idea that Jewish political ideologies and behavior have religious overtones is attractive. My book

Separation and Its Discontents

has two chapters on rationalization, apologetics, and self-deception among Jews, beginning with a quote from a famous Talmudic scholar describing the ideology behind an example of classic Jewish religious writing: "Things never are what they seem because they cannot be." In traditional societies, Jewish scholars interpreted any and all historical events as conforming to the messianic hope of a return to political power and worldly riches in a restored Israel.

All religious thinking tends to be impossible to refute, while at the same time it promises to explain everything. The interesting thing about Jews, however, is that they have dominated several intellectual movements that masqueraded as "science" while nevertheless having strong religious overtones.

Podhoretz is quite correct that the powerful Jewish attraction to Marxism was fundamentally religious in this sense. I have made

similar comments

, not only about Jewish involvement in Marxism, but also in psychoanalysis and other movements of the intellectual left. These movements were centered around charismatic rabbi-like leaders, and they were constructed in a way that allowed them to explain everything and be impossible to disconfirm. As in all religions, dissenters (heretics) were simply expelled.

Therefore, I have no problem agreeing with Podhoretz that there is a strong streak of religious thinking among Jews -- even among the "secular." In my view, religious thinking has been highly adaptive throughout Jewish history because it resulted in a powerful ideology of the ingroup. No matter what happened, the fundamental rationale for group cohesion would not be threatened. Whether in synagogues during the Middle Ages, in Marxist cells in the 20th century, or at conventions of psychoanalytic societies, true believers make good group members. Nothing can cause them to waver in their allegiance to the group.

But the fact that Jewish identification has always had religious overtones -- even among secular Jews in the 20th century -- does not explain why Jews in the Western Diaspora are liberal -- only that their belief systems are immune from conflict with empirical reality.

Moreover, contra Podhoretz, liberalism seems awfully compatible with Jewish self-interest. In America, both the Democratic and Republican parties are Israeli occupied territory. So it's hard to see that Jews are being "irrational," as Podhoretz claims, in not voting for Republicans. For rational Jews concerned only about Israel, it's pretty much a toss-up.

The clincher is that, as Podhoretz himself notes, citing an academic study, Jews "back Republicans

only

so long as they adopted the liberal position on 'such bellwether issues ... as immigration, abortion, gay rights and the separation of church and state."

In other words, Jews have been opposed to the traditional culture of America and the West and are strong advocates for the displacement of Whites via immigration.

In attempting to understand this, a good place to start is John Murray Cuddihy's classic, 

The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle With Modernity

:

With the advent of Jewish Emancipation, when ghetto walls crumble and the shtetlach begin to dissolve, Jewry -- like some wide-eyed anthropologist -- enters upon a strange world, to explore a strange people observing a strange halakah. They examine this world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity. This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist; they continue unabated into our own time because Jewish Emancipation continues into our own time.

In psychological terms, Jewish identity in the Diaspora is based on psychological mechanisms of between-group competition. A strong sense of Jewish identity has always been accompanied by negative attitudes toward non-Jews -- ranging from the laws of cleanness in traditional Judaism (according to which anything associated with non-Jews was unclean) to the revolutionary hatred of the non-Jewish power structure by Jewish Marxists, to the adoption of values in opposition to the traditional culture of America and the West. These negative perceptions are exacerbated by the lachrymose theory of Jewish history accepted by Podhoretz and the mainstream Jewish community: It is not simply that Christianity is evil, but that Western culture itself is poisonous to Jews.

The implication therefore is that Jews will be much more likely than non-Jews to have negative attitudes toward the traditional culture of America and the West. Importantly, Jewish voters are liberal on all issues, from government power to welfare. But as Podhoretz notes, it is especially on social issues where Jewish liberalism becomes "unmistakable and undeniable." A 1996 poll of Jewish attitudes indicated that

Jews are firmly committed to permissive social codes, sexual codes in particular. The gap between Jews and others in polls regarding non-marital sexual behavior, marijuana, and divorce laws is quite substantial: 58 percent of Jews had liberal responses on these items as opposed to just 31 percent of non-Jews. In like fashion, huge gaps separate Jews from others on abortion (86 percent vs. 44 percent) and control of pornography (71 percent vs. 45 percent).

There are similar differences even when controlling for socio-economic class. Not surprisingly, support for gay marriage and for Roman Polanski are good career moves in Hollywood. 

Moreover, Jews are dead last among all American groups in "confidence in the military," but they favor gun control laws more than any other American group. And Jewish antipathy to the culture of America and other Western Diaspora societies extends to hostility against the formerly dominant White Protestant elite. Podhoretz quotes sociologists Mark Lipsett and Earl Raab, noting that Jews "are more at ease with the kinds of people they find in the Democratic Party -- their fellow ethnics with whom they grew up in America -- than with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants still predominant in the Republican Party."

So it's not just Christianity that keeps Jews away from social conservatism. Latino Catholics, Black Southern Baptists, and Asian Christians are much preferred to the formerly dominant WASPs, who represent the traditional American culture and erstwhile ruling class. It's not really about religion but ethnicity and race.

Nevertheless, it is indeed the case that White Christians are an object of special Jewish hostility. In the Commentary symposium, Michael Medved describes Jewish atavistic phobia about Christianity as the religion of the outgroup: "Jews fear the GOP as the 'Christian party.'" And Jewish hostility towards Christianity unites the most Orthodox and conservative Jews with the most secular and liberal.

It is the hostility of the outsider against the culture of the White majority. As a result, expressions of hostility toward Christianity have a special place of pride in the contemporary culture of the West. A good recent example is Larry David pissing on a picture of Jesus in HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm -- an event which evoked yawns from the rest of the media.

The Moral Status of the Outsider

This status of being an outsider with deep historical grudges has grave moral implications. As Benjamin Ginsberg notes, the social marginality of Eastern European Jews made them useful instruments for the imposition of Soviet rule over reluctant populations, not only in the first genocidal decades after the Bolshevik Revolution when they acted as Stalin's "willing executioners," but also during the post-WWII period in the USSR's satellite states (Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Romania). Throughout Eastern Europe after WWII, because Jews were outsiders and dependent upon Soviet power for their positions and even personal safety, they could be trusted to remain loyal to the Soviet Union.

This has been a pattern throughout Jewish history. Jews as outsiders in traditional societies allied themselves with elites -- often oppressive alien ruling elites engaged in exploiting the people under their control. In the Commentary symposium, Sarna gives a rather tepid version of this, quoting historian Ben Halpern, "They depended for their lives on the authorities, on the persons and groups who exercised legitimate power." Quite correct. Jews were protected by the government, but their outsider status also made them more willing to engage in unpopular activities, such as collecting taxes for rapacious elites with no allegiance to the people they ruled.

The self-conceptualization of Jews as outsiders certainly should not make the European-descended population of America confident about the Jewish role in future governments when they are a minority.

However, the Jews-as-outsider theory does not adequately get at the role of Jews as a nascent elite displacing previously dominant non-Jewish elites. The Jewish identification with the left should also be seen as a strategy designed to increase Jewish power as an elite hostile to the White European majority of America. As I have argued, Jewish intellectual and political movements have been a critically necessary condition for the decline of White America during a period in which Jews have attained elite status.

All of these movements have been aligned with the political left. As Democrats, Jews are an integral part of the emerging non-White coalition while being able to retain their core ethnic commitment to Israel. Indeed, the organized Jewish community has not only been the most important force in ending the European bias of American immigration laws, it has assiduously courted alliances with non-White ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians; and these groups are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party.

Whereas the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly non-White (the last Democratic president to get a majority of the White vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964), 90 percent of the Republican vote comes from Whites. In the recent off-year elections, Democratic candidates for governor received only about a third of the White vote.

America will soon realize that it is at the edge of a racial abyss.

Because the Republican Party remains an important force in American politics, Jews are well advised to retain an influence there as well. Republican Jews retain their core liberalism on all the key issues like immigration and culture by aligning themselves with the "moderate" wing of the Party. Like Podhoretz, Republican Jews are motivated mainly to keep the Republican Party safe for Jews, in their estimation, and to promote pro-Israel forces within the party. In general, Republican Jews have acted to make the GOP as much as possible like the party they left behind and to influence it to eschew nationalistic attitudes, especially self-consciously White or Christian identities.

At the end of the day, Podhoretz's enterprise is an exercise in deception. He erects an image of irrational Jewish liberals who cling to liberalism as a set of religious beliefs completely beyond the reach of logic or empirical data. In fact Jewish liberalism is quite clearly a Diaspora strategy designed to obtain power for Jews at least partly by building coalitions with non-White ethnic groups.

Moreover, he erects an image of principled, rational Jewish conservatives as true conservatives, while in fact they are leftists who have been a prominent force in elbowing out true conservatives within the Republican Party in order to pursue their pro-Israel agenda and make the Republican Party into something they deem safe for Jews.

Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of Jewish political thought.

A Hypocrisy That Can't Win Again

One shouldn't take any satisfaction in the American Enterprise Institute's firing of David Frum, for shortly after Frum got the boot, AEI hired another former Dubya speech writer -- "enhanced interrogation" enthusiast Marc Thiessen. Jonah Goldberg is also now an AEI fixture... (I can't say that I'm well acquainted with Thiessen's work, but there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's shoddy, if not mendacious.)

And one shouldn't conclude that AEI's firing of Frum proved that the institute is serious about opposing socialized medicine. Though I found Frum's argument in his now-famous "Waterloo" piece rather puzzling, he did hit the mark with this comment about think-tank hypocrisy on healthcare:

[W]e do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Indeed. On the fundamental issue of mandating health insurance, the differences between Obamacare and Romneycare are slight. (My friend Jack Hunter has a good video blog on this.)  

Bruce Bartlett has also sounded off on the idea that many "conservative intellectuals" actually liked Obamacare, but decided to bite their tongues  

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

Bartlett argues that the censoring of these scholars marks "the closing of the conservative mind"... which is a pretty Frummy thing to say. If this story is true, it also reveals the degree to which AEI, which was founded by Big Industry in the early '40s to push back against the New Deal, is now honeycombed with welfare-statists and has a rather limp commitment to free enterprise. 

But opposing Obamacare politically was important to the GOP and its movement operatives. For here (and perhaps only here) they were presented with an issue around which all aspects of the GOP-conservative movement could rally: the GOP leadership, the Religious Right, the libertarians, the Tea Partiers, even the neocons and country club types -- they all came together on this one.    

In turn, if John Boehner had decided to make a deal with Obama -- much like he supported Bush's Medicare extension in 2003 -- all hell might have broken loose, including mass defection from the party. (Which, of course, would have been great!) AEI felt it needed to put the kibosh on anyone who put the coalition at risk.           

This is all reminiscent of what David Frum was writing about immigration in 2005, some two years before the grassroots rebellion against George W. Bush and amnesty:   

No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration...There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders..  Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.

As Sam Francis wrote at the time, Frum was deathly afraid of the damage the immigration issue could inflict on the Republican Party, less so of the damage mass immigration might inflict on Americans.

Whatever the case, Frum got it then, and it's been quite surprising to me that he hasn't gotten it this time around, too -- that he was willing to forfeit the base that supported all his favorite candidates and Middle East wars in hopes of making nice with liberals and being called a "contrarian" by Christopher Buckley.  

Whether the GOP will one day actually do something about socialism and mass immigration -- and not just talk about it in hopes of keeping the electoral coalition together -- remains to be seen. 

UPDATE: In a WSJ op-ed, Norman Podhoretz proclaims that he'd "rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party" and "rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama." This is clearly a man who understands how much he benefits by holding the current GOP coalition together. In Podhoretz's mind, Palin "seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership." "Wise leadership" can be roughly translated as "good on Israel." 

UPDATE 2: Bartlett recants, sort of. 

Remaking the Right (part I)

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Norman Podhoretz is something of an anomaly. His entire life has been centered around his Jewishness, but he sees himself as an outsider in the mainstream Jewish community. He shares a great many of the attitudes typical of that community, but draws different conclusions about how to navigate the contemporary American political landscape in a way that's "good for the Jews."

One area where Podhoretz is absolutely mainstream among American Jews is his sense of history. The first half of his recent book, Why Are Jews Liberal? lays out his version of the "lachrymose" theory of Jewish history in Europe and America in which the Diaspora has been one long vale of tears since the beginnings of Christianity. Whether or not this view of history is correct, the important point is that this is how the great majority of Diaspora Jews see themselves and their history. (My view is that many outbreaks of anti-Jewish feelings result from our evolved ingroup/outgroup psychology.)

This lachrymose view has major implications for understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora. It proposes that, beginning with an unfortunate theological belief (that Jews killed God), Jews have been passive, innocent victims of marauding non-Jews.

The lesson that Jews learned from the Middle Ages carries down to today:

[The Jews] emerged from the Middle Ages knowing for a certainty that -- individual exceptions duly noted -- the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity: the churches in which it was embodied -- whether Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant -- and the people who prayed in and were shaped by them. It was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget.

Jews were thus wary and mistrustful (at the very least) of all manifestations of Christianity. But the demise of Christianity as the central intellectual paradigm of Europe didn't improve things for Jews. During the Enlightenment, anti-Jewish ideologies smoothly morphed into non-theological views in which Judaism was a superstitious relic that prevented Jews from shedding their attachment to their people -- in Podhoretz's words, "giving up their sense of themselves as a people whose members were bound together across national boundaries wherever they might live."

The Enlightenment implied that Jews should accept the atomized individualism implied by the modern nation state. As Count Clermont-Tonnere expressed it in addressing the French National Assembly in 1789, "The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals. ... The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country."

In the 19th century, Jews began to be seen by their enemies as an economically successful alien race intent on subverting national cultures wherever they lived. Podhoretz is squarely within the Jewish intellectual mainstream in his attack on the idea that Jews and non-Jews are biologically different and in competition -- "the new racist rationale [that] manifested itself in the portrayal of a war between Aryans and Semites as the central drama of history." For example, Ivan Aksakov, a leader of Slavophiles in Russia, viewed Jews as a competitive threat intent on destroying Christianity:

The Western European Christian world will be faced in the future, in one form or another, with a life-and-death struggle with Jewry, which is striving to replace the universal Christian ideal by another, Semitic ideal, also universal, but negative and anti-Christian.

Even in the United States -- the "golden land" as seen by Jewish immigrants -- there was exclusion and antipathy from "the upper echelons of the WASP patriciate." In America, Jews were excluded by WASP elites, and Christian forms of anti-Semitism (e.g., Father Coughlin) remained strong through the 1930s. Isolationists such as Charles Lindbergh also tended to see Jews as an interest group aiming at getting America involved in war with Germany. (Podhoretz refers to Lindbergh's famous speech as "notorious.")

Jews concluded, as they had ever since the political Left and Right came to be defined, that their enemies were on the right. But the main lesson Podhoretz draws is that over the centuries, Western intellectuals produced a variety of Christian and non-Christian anti-Jewish ideologies, each with the same result: Irrational hatred toward Jews. So it's not just Christianity, but European civilization itself that is the problem for Jews.

And, although Podhoretz doesn't explicitly make this move, it's a very short jump from blaming the culture created and sustained by Europeans to the idea that Europeans as a people or group of peoples are the problem. Ultimately, this implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the issue.

Podhoretz generally underplays the reality that Jews tended to make alliances with elites wherever they lived. The main exception to this is an important one: The situation of Jews in Russia from around 1880 to the Bolshevik Revolution. But even here, Podhoretz fails to note that most Jews were better off than most Russians, and he fails to acknowledge legitimate, often- stated concerns by the authorities to protect the Russian farmers from Jewish domination of the rural economy and to protect the nascent Russian middle classes from Jewish competition. Most importantly, he fails to discuss the very large rate of natural increase among fundamentalist Jews in Eastern Europe in a situation where they had overshot their traditional economic niches. The result was widespread poverty among Jews and attraction to messianic ideologies of Zionism and, most importantly for the history of the West, Marxism.

As Podhoretz notes, Jews, even when wealthy and powerful, had always been attracted to the Left much more than their non-Jewish counterparts. But the result of this Jewish population explosion and widespread Jewish poverty in Eastern Europe was that the tradition of Jewish opposition to national cultures -- well known and commented on at least by the latter part of the 19th century -- was now embedded in an ideology of Marxist revolution -- often combined with Zionism. Podhoretz's background places him firmly within these two most important strands of 20th-century Jewish intellectual life.

These Marxist radicals emigrated in droves to the United States and other Western countries. In a few short decades, this politically radical Jewish sub-culture became not only the dominant political culture among American Jews, it became a major force on the intellectual and political left generally. In this Jewish subculture, being merely a socialist was considered "right wing." The very strong Jewish identity of these Jewish leftists -- Podhoretz among them -- reminds us once again that a strong Jewish identity is and was entirely compatible with an ideology of Marxist universalism.

Podhoretz grew up in this mindset and, by his account, he remained a radical until the late 1960s. His central intellectual question is why Jews remained on the left despite what he sees as changes in what's good for the Jews.

Podhoretz sees being on the left as good for the Jews for most of their history in America. In the early 20th century, the enemies of Jews were the "conservative upholders of the old order" -- WASPs who prattled on about the importance of retaining ethnic homogeneity during the era of WASP ethnic defense that culminated in the 1924 immigration law. F. Prescott Hall, founder of the Immigration Restriction League, wrote, "It must be remembered ... that ... our institutions were established by a homogeneous community, consisting of the best elements of population selected under the circumstances under which they came to the New World." And some of the enemies of the Jews were concerned with Jewish competition -- "the Hebrew conquest of New York," as Henry James phrased it.

Is the Left good for the Jews?

In presenting the case that circumstances have changed so that it is now irrational for Jews to be liberals, Podhoretz has one or two paragraphs on the idea that affirmative action is bad for Jews (not likely), the role of the Left in quelling debate on IQ other issues related to diversity on college campuses, and on alleged anti-Semitism by radical Blacks during the 1960s. Then he devotes 160 pages on the relative failure of the Democratic Party, and the Left generally, to protect the interests of Israel. It's not hard to fathom what his real concerns are.

But despite his labors, the case is unconvincing.

Podhoretz certainly doesn't have any difficulty finding anti-Israel attitudes on the left. For example, he devotes an entire chapter to Gore Vidal's "The Empire Lovers Strike Back" article that appeared in The Nation in 1986 -- "The most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II." Vidal's article included this quote discussing Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter: "Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department."

But whereas there was "complete silence from the left" regarding Vidal's indiscretion, William F. Buckley is praised for not only condemning Vidal but also for expelling Joe Sobran from National Review.

The problem for Podhoretz is that there are also anti-Israel views on the right. Indeed, Podhoretz goes to great lengths to show that Buckley and National Review didn't do enough to condemn Pat Buchanan for his "Amen Corner" column and his culture war speech at the 1992 Republican Convention. And because of failure to condemn Buchanan, there was "great damage to the prospect of a significant move by Jewish voters in a more conservative direction."

So how are Jews to choose between the anti-Israel voices on the left and those on the right? One consideration is that, although there are anti-Israel voices on the left (Podhoretz would label them 'anti-Semitic'), with the exception of Jimmy Carter's activities after his presidency, he doesn't provide any examples from within the Democratic Party (which, after all, is by far the most important institutional embodiment of the Left in the U.S.) Does the fact that Carter allowed certain anti-Israel resolutions to go un-vetoed at the UN and that since his presidency, Podhoretz sees him as "openly and virulently hostile to Israel" constitute reasons why Jews should not support the Democrats today? Indeed, Carter was prevented from speaking at the 2008 Democratic convention by Jewish activists, notably Alan Dershowitz.

What about Bill Clinton? Podhoretz notes that Clinton helped himself by tapping the "strongly pro-Israel" Al Gore (also a Democrat!) as vice-president, but then showed his true colors by appointing Warren Christopher as Secretary of State and Anthony Lake as National Security Advisor. (Both committed the sin of favoring withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.) Podhoretz doesn't seem to think it relevant that in fact Israel was never under serious pressure to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza during the Clinton years.

Although tough talk on settlement expansion characterized the early Obama administration, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has "dramatically changed her tone," praising an offer of Israeli "restraint" on settlement expansion, whatever that means. Now we learn that Mahmoud Abbas has withdrawn his candidacy for president of the Palestinian Authority because he feels betrayed by the Obama administration.

Recently Congress approved by a lopsided margin a resolution calling on the Obama administration to "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' [i.e., the Goldstone Report, a scathing indictment of Israeli actions during the Gaza invasion of 2008-2009] in multilateral fora." Democrats voted for it by a margin of 179 yea to 33 nay, while Republicans voted for it by a margin of 165 yea to 3 nay votes.

Podhoretz is correct that Republicans in Congress are more likely to be slaves to the Israel Lobby -- for reasons to be discussed below. But in any case, there are certainly no signs of a groundswell of anti-Israel sentiment among the Democrats.

On the other hand, examples of anti-Jewish or anti-Israel attitudes on the right are quite close to the Republican Party. Exhibit A is Buchanan himself.  And then there's George H. W. Bush and his "I'm just one lonely little guy" up against "something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill" -- said in the context of attempting to get Israel to freeze settlement activity by delaying a housing loan guarantee to Israel. And then there's Bush's Secretary of State George Schultz who is widely reported to have said, "Fuck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway."

Podhoretz bends over backwards trying to reassure Jews about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel attitudes on the right. For example, he gets into his legal-brief mode when trying to exonerate Pat Robertson on charges of anti-Semitism because of "certain crackpot ideas originating in the eighteenth century about a conspiracy between Jewish bankers and Freemasons to take over the world." One would think that such ideas would make Robertson completely anathema to Jews. But for Podhoretz, Robertson is okay because of his "unwavering support of Israel."

Indeed, Podhoretz is willing to forgive pretty much anything if its accompanied by pro-Israel attitudes. In the same passage, he forgives Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn his views on the role of Jewish revolutionaries in bringing communism to Russia for the same reason. (To Podhoretz's credit, he even acknowledges, "Solzhenitsyn's ideas about Jewish revolutionaries were based on an uncomfortable historical reality.")

Oddly, Podhoretz fails to mention Robertson's claim, 

[T]he part that Jewish intellectuals and media activists have played in the assault on Christianity may very possibly prove to be a grave mistake. ... For centuries, Christians have supported Jews in their dream of a national homeland. But American Jews invested great energy in attacking these very allies. That investment may pay a terrible dividend.

In a 1995 Commentary article, Podhoretz defended Robertson even on this, noting that in fact Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Congress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, or have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. I couldn't agree more.

Oddly, Podhoretz makes no mention of his defense of Robertson on these issues in the book under review -- perhaps because he realizes that this is a bridge too far for the vast majority of Jews. However, he does note, "If you scratch a liberal organization like the American Civil Liberties Union or the United Nations Association, you will find Jewish members and Jewish money sustaining it, and if you scratch a Jewish organization, you will find a liberal agenda." Jews also contribute 50-60 percent of the funding for the Democratic Party.

Without question, Jews fund the left in America.

One wonders if Podhoretz would take such a principled stand on other conservative issues like affirmative action, immigration, or big government -- not caring about ideas deemed by some to be anti-Jewish (e.g., "the Jews control Hollywood") as long as one opposes affirmative action or massive non-White immigration.

The answer would be no.

The good news is that someone like me could be rehabilitated within the Jewish community even though I do believe in the uncomfortable historical reality that Jews control Hollywood and that this influences the content of movies by, among other things, denigrating Christianity. All I would have to do is come out as rabidly pro-Israel.

Ummm, sorry, but I can't go there. Different countries have different interests -- a simple fact that escapes an unregistered lobbyist of a foreign government such as Podhoretz.

Grand New Party

I conclude that Jews reading Podhoretz are unlikely to be convinced that they are better off with the Republicans or by becoming conservatives. Podhoretz is correct that the Republicans are a tad more likely to be slavishly pro-Israel. But he completely ignores another uncomfortable historical reality -- that neoconservative Jews have been very active in purging true conservatives like Buchanan from mainstream Republican politics and that the neocons have remade the Republican Party in their own image. Indeed, as he phrases it (without evaluating the evidence one way or the other), paleocons believe that neocons like Podhoretz are "liberals in disguise who ... succeeded in kidnapping and corrupting the conservative movement."

This brings us to the heart of the issue. Podhoretz's enterprise is fundamentally a fraud.

His issue is not whether American Jews could ever stop being liberal. His issue is whether they could bring themselves to vote for the Republican Party if the Republican Party was better for Israel. It has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism, Big Government or Constitutionalism.

And the best proof of this is that Jewish neoconservatives -- by far the most important group of Jews who (at times) advocate voting for the Republicans -- are not really conservatives at all. Their one and only concern has always been to steer U.S. foreign policy in the direction of Israel. They have consistently advocated liberal positions within the Republican Party and have only adopted conservative positions as "positions of convenience" designed not to imperil their larger pro-Israel agenda. The fact that the overwhelming bulk of Podhoretz's book deals with support for Israel rather than any specifically liberal or conservative issue confirms this.

Exhibit A for this is immigration. Jewish neoconservatives have been staunch supporters of the most destructive force associated with the left since WWII -- massive non-European immigration into America and other Western countries. As neoconservative Ben Wattenberg has famously written, "The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality." Such attitudes typify the entire Jewish political spectrum, from the far Left to the neoconservative Right.

And when it comes to opposing illegal immigration, the neocons jumped on the bandwagon only after it became politically expedient to do so. Bill Kristol, whose comments in the Commentary symposium on Podhoretz's book indicate that he doesn't want to think too deeply about why Jews are on the left (my paraphrase: "Just keep on being Jewish and things will take care of themselves"), is a good example of a neocon who navigates Republican politics to achieve his more basic goal of supporting Israel. As John O'Sullivan noted regarding Kristol's activism on an amnesty bill,

Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq.

Peter Brimelow

says it best

:

Kristol will return to immigration enthusiasm once he has helped persuade Bush to attack Iran.

In a passage that should be required reading for all Republicans, Samuel Francis recounted,

[T]he catalog of neoconservative efforts not merely to debate, criticize, and refute the ideas of traditional conservatism but to denounce, vilify, and harm the careers of those Old Right figures and institutions they have targeted.

There are countless stories of how neoconservatives have succeeded in entering conservative institutions, forcing out or demoting traditional conservatives, and changing the positions and philosophy of such institutions in neoconservative directions.... Writers like M. E. Bradford, Joseph Sobran, Pat Buchanan, and Russell Kirk, and institutions like Chronicles, the Rockford Institute, the Philadelphia Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have been among the most respected and distinguished names in American conservatism. The dedication of their neoconservative enemies to driving them out of the movement they have taken over and demonizing them as marginal and dangerous figures has no legitimate basis in reality. It is clear evidence of the ulterior aspirations of those behind neoconservatism to dominate and subvert American conservatism from its original purposes and agenda and turn it to other purposes...

What neoconservatives really dislike about their "allies" among traditional conservatives is simply the fact that the conservatives are conservatives at all -- that they support "this notion of a Christian civilization," as Midge Decter put it, that they oppose mass immigration, that they criticize Martin Luther King and reject the racial dispossession of White Western culture, that they support or approve of Joe McCarthy, that they entertain doubts or strong disagreement over American foreign policy in the Middle East, that they oppose reckless involvement in foreign wars and foreign entanglements, and that, in company with the Founding Fathers of the United States, they reject the concept of a pure democracy and the belief that the United States is or should evolve toward it.

So Podhoretz is exhorting Jews to defect from liberalism while his wife is deploring "this notion of a Christian civilization." With conservatives like this, who needs liberals?1

Continued in Part II

__________________

Notes:

1 -- Indeed, it would be a good project to find out exactly what Jewish intellectuals think conservatives are. In the Commentary symposium, historian Jonathan D. Sarna labels Louis Marshall a "stalwart conservative." In fact, Marshall (1856-1929) was a Republican, but, like the neocons, he cannot be called a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. Marshall was a director of the NAACP and a champion of minority rights. He was also the point man for the Jewish thrust for unrestricted immigration during the period. At a time when the population of the United States was over 100 million, he stated at a Congressional hearing on the ethnically defensive 1924 immigration law, "[W]e have room in this country for ten times the population we have"; he advocated admission of all of the peoples of the world without quota limit, excluding only those who "were mentally, morally and physically unfit, who are enemies of organized government, and who are apt to become public charges."Obviously, Marshall, a Zionist, did not believe that the American majority had a right to defend their ethnic interests by controlling immigration policy. The neocons would be proud.

Is Obama an Enemy of Israel?

The president wants to extend a ten-month moratorium on new settlements in the West Bank and has voiced opposition to the ones in East Jerusalem. Larry Auster is now sure that Obama's Washington is "an enemy of Israel" and that PM Bibi Netanyahu should declare so openly. Citing Commentary's Noah Pollak and Powerline's "Paul," Auster frets that once the administration's anti-Israel animus comes to a boil, actions like these might soon follow:

1) U.S. support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood, 2) active U.S. opposition to a strike on Iran, up to and including the Brzezinski threat of shooting down Israeli aircraft, 3) Israel's diplomatic isolation in the UN and Europe, and 4) an escalating administration campaign to portray Israeli "intransigence" as a threat to the United States' regional and international security.

In other news, a one-time volunteer to the Israeli Defense Force, Rahm Emmanuel, is still Obama's chief of staff and -- this just in -- former Obama aid Lee "Rossy" Rosenberg, another Chicago boy, has been appointed as the new head of AIPAC. Reports have also surfaced that Israel has captured Joe Biden's heart.   

With "enemies" like these... 

Seriously.  Speculations that Obama might start ordering Israeli planes shot out of the sky, isolating Israel at the UN, or bad mouthing the Jewish state in the press are beyond ridiculous. Moreover, Obama isn't even the most Israeli-critical president in recent memory: George Bush the Elder and James Baker literally threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel due to its settlement policy. American conservatives like Auster and the Powerline people want Obama to be wildly anti-Israel because this fits their preconceived image of him as representing everything they're against. They will be disappointed. And memo to Bibi: "You are not alone!" 

Obama inherited a political climate in which most people don't want to even think about foreign policy, their minds focused on domestic matters and the economy. Knowing this, Obama has striven to thread the needle and please -- or rather, not upset -- both antiwar and pro-war/neo-liberal/neocon forces: he thus drew down troops in Iraq, which was scheduled anyway, and expanded the war in Afghanistan in order to prove that he's tough. My sense is that, at least at this point in time, Obama won't make any bold foreign-policy moves and instead focus all of his political capital on destroying the country from within.

This being said, big wars often come in the wake of economic turmoil -- often when prices for resources spike or when the international balance of power is unstable and ambitious powers want to move up. I expect that we won't just have a "double dip recession" but something much, much worse in order to finally cleanse all the bad debt from the system. I'm reluctant to make long-term predictions, but when this happens, whether it's because Washington wants to distract Americans from the collapse of their standard of living, or make a last, frantic assertion of its "unipolar" authority, Larry and the neocons might get more wars in the Middle East after all.

CORRECTION: I originally wrote that in 1992, President Geroge H. W. Bush threatened to withhold "foreign aid"; in fact, he threatened to withold loan guarantees.

Obamacare

As my past writings on the subject can attest, I think Obamacare is a horrendous, likely ruinous, social program. I can thus summon one and half cheers for the Republican leadership, which despite having backed George W. Bush's unfunded Medicare extension but six years ago, has decided to come out strong against Obamacare, follow the Tea Partiers, and try to "kill the bill."

As a friend wrote to me in an email:

Things can always get worse no matter how much the current system sucks. We should applaud the Republicans here for not trying to reach out and do something "bipartisan." Give me spineless slimeballs over true-believing liberals.

There's truth to that ... but there is also a way in which a political opposition, even a forthright and unwavering one, can do serious intellectual damage to a cause by essentially agreeing with the premises of its adversary and not actually defining what is wrong with the other side.

Boiled down to its essence, the Republican argument against Obamacare goes something like this:

Our current system is the best in the world, a wonder of free-market economics. It might need some tweaking here and there -- and tort reform is a good idea -- but we can't allow Obama to ruin this good thing we've got going by passing his plan, which shall cost too much and might restrict care for seniors. We conservatives will fight to defend Medicare and make sure everyone in American gets fully covered by the health insurance companies.

I don't think my characterization is off by much.

Everyone but true-believing liberals is spooked by Obamacare, but one reason why the "healthcare reform" argument has purchase is that the status quo is, quite simply, frightful:

• Health insurance for a family of four costs somewhere on the order of $15,000 a year.
• A trip to the hospital for a broken leg will be priced in the hundreds of thousands.

And on the macro level,

• Healthcare makes up between 16 and 20 percent of the entire U.S. economy.
• Medicare and Medicaid compose some 30-35 percent of the entire federal budget.

Clearly, something is going horribly wrong.

In this line, I disagree with Larry Auster when he writes that Obamacare, if passed, would be "the most revolutionary, nation-changing leftist act in American history." It wouldn't be. The U.S. government already spends more on healthcare than our "socialist" European cousins, and Obamacare is simply more -- much more -- of the same.

I can't claim to have read a fraction of the thousand-page bill, but I gather that once the "public option" was dropped, there was little chance that the government would start building big, Kafka-esque concrete facilities where everyone would go when sick or injured -- "health centers," which due to affirmative action and worsening demographics might start to resemble L.A.'s infamous Martin Luther King Harbor Hospital. The public option wouldn't have been like the NHS -- more like something out of the SAW film franchise!

Though such a terrifying outcome has been avoided for now, Obamacare, if passed, would essentially expand and intensify the system already in place of price-fixing and heavily subsidized (or even semi-mandated) health insurance.

Attacking Obamacare thus means attacking the current medical system. And with this in mind, here's how I would articulate my opposition to the bill, were I a Republican.

1Healthcare is big business, and as such, the industry can offer some outstanding services, for a price. But normal, middle-class, healthy people are getting a raw deal and paying far too much. The reason for this is that the government is much too involved. Costs have ballooned along with the federal budget; on the other hand, those medical practices that aren't covered by Medicare or the subsidized insurance industry, like Lasik eye surgery and cosmetic surgery, have experienced stable or even falling prices.

2We're broke! We can't afford existing entitlements -- not to mention Obamacare -- without increasing taxes or debasing the currency. We will thus need to drastically curtail benefits. In order to make sure that care can be provided, the government will get out of the marketplace and offer full freedom to medical entrepreneurs.

3Phrases like "universal insurance," "safety net," "full coverage" might sound nice, but in fact, high levels of insurance only make care more expensive and providers more inefficient. People who have federally subsidized insurance through their employer are more likely to make frequent doctor's visits and demand tests and care that they simply don't need. Catastrophic insurance is probably a good idea, but most people function quite well without insurance for routine maintenance on their home, computer, and car, and thus there's no reason why they should need "full coverage" for their body. Paying out of pocket is the surest way to make prices fall!

It seems like such common-sense reforms and cutbacks would be attractive to Republicans, who are always talking about how much they love the free-market and personal responsibility. They won't, of course, because in actuality the Republicans are one of three things:

1Hypocrites/sociopaths who actually don't believe the things they say they do.

2Brainless conservatives who staunchly defend the status quo, whatever that might be.

3"Social gospel" conservatives who actually like socialism (à la Ross Douthat or John Dilulio.)

Since "compassionate conservatives" have gone the way of Dubya, I conclude that the Republican Party is some admixture of socipathic number 1 and spineless number 2. Democrats, on other hand, say they are "progressives" (read: socialists) and actually are, which makes them far more principled and trustworthy in my opinion.

And finally, before this terrible bill gets passed this evening, let me sound a few apocalyptic notes, as I'm wont to do.

Back when Medicare was first rolled out, it cost a measly $3 billion, and it was estimated that it'd reach $10 billion over the next 25 years. In fact, Medicare was costing over $100 billion during that stretch, and now requires over $700 billion in federal funds, taking up a quarter of the entire national budget.

My aforementioned friend believes, Zeno-like, that "things can always get worse no matter how much the current system sucks." But in the world of budgets, credit, and fiat currency, there actually are breaking points: limits to just how much a government can spend, how much debt it can take on, and how much money it can print. Even if Obamacare were to miraculously go down in defeat tonight, I think we will be reaching such a breaking point sooner than most think.

Austercized

Much as has been said of me, I know Larry Auster, he's very intelligent, and I respect him. I read his blog just about every day and find him an engaging presence in person. And I hope he takes the following criticism in the constructive spirit in which it is written.

I often get the sense that Larry has turned himself into a kind of Ayn Rand of the paleo Right. So often, do I see him expelling others from the circle of "conservatism" -- to the point that the only conservatives left are himself and a handful of intimates -- inflating a single issue or difference of opinion into an existential Either/Or, and proclaiming the absolute consistency of his philosophy (while in actuality it's full of the elisions and willed forgetting characteristic of an ideology.)1

His recentcomments on AltRight follow this trend...

I don't write this as a plea for Larry to be more charitable towards me and my website, or for him to let a hundred flowers bloom or anything like that. Rigorous debate, in the Ancient Greek sense of agon, a testing of ideas, is important. And anyone who makes a serious argument should assume that he's right, his opponent's wrong, and his peers should accept his point of view and drop competing ones.  

But it is possible for people to disagree and remain in a working coalition or "big tent." And in his recent blog posts on me and Alternative Right, in which AltRight gets all but condemned, Larry seems to misunderstand altogether what a coalition is. 

Contrary to the charges that AltRight is hopelessly "inconsistent" -- a motley crew of Catholics, atheists, critics of Israel and Jews, et al. all under the banner of "traditionalism" -- what's remarkable is just how much everyone here agrees with one another on real, concrete issues.

Everyone thinks, for instance, that Obamacare is a disastrous addition to an already rotten healthcare system; everyone thinks immigration should not only be curtailed but changed to reflect America's identity as a Western European nation; everyone thinks the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are fool's errands (here we depart from Larry); everyone agrees that the current welfare/warfare state is a monstrosity and inimical to traditional culture; everyone wants to repeal affirmative-action and most anti-discrimination legislation; und so weiter...

So, we have a working coalition. And though I don't think we'll ever command  a majority in these United States (as they are today, at least), there's a sizable contingent of the public that's on board with us. For this reason, and others, I don't think debating policy will actually ever be a crucial component of AltRight. (And since Obama will undoubtedly propose all sorts of new stimulus and welfare packages in the near future that we probably won't have time to address, readers can just assume that we're against them all.)  

Larry is right, of course, that many of us disagree on fundamental --  philosophical and theological -- issues. But agreement in these areas is actually not a prerequisite for a coalition. For a century, the French far Right has been composed of "Nietzscheans" and ultra Catholics, and such an arrangement made up Francisco Franco's ruling regime. One could even argue that we have a stronger coalition than the postwar conservative movement, which is always looking for a Big Enemy (Communism, Terrorism) to unify itself against. So, Larry is making a problem where there need not be one.     

With AlternativeRight.com, I set out to do a number of things. In term of aesthetics, I wanted to create a site that was stylish and cutting edge in terms of user interface -- a first on the right! -- and which integrated longer thoughtful, sometimes scholarly, essays with more timely blogging.

I also wanted to more rigorously pursue the implications of "Human Biodiversity" (HBD). In Paul Gottfried's first book on the conservative movement, he noted that a strong interest in "sociobiology" distinguished the writers of the paleo-libertarian "fusion"; Thomas Fleming was at the forefront of this. (In Modern Times, Paul Johnson listed E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology as marking a new scientific synthesis that reversed the "relativism" discussed in the books opening pages.)

Sadly, HBD/Sociobiology has been all but abandoned by the American Right, dropped by the mainstream because it's "racist" or not properly universalist, and by the paleos as over the past decade they've adopted Romantic, almost Medievalist poses.

So, AltRight is about something new, and it's also an attempt to "bring people together," in the sense of allowing a place for debate between writers who differ from the mainstream in fundamental ways and who share a set of concrete goals.    

The Right is, of course, notorious for engaging in internecine civil war. Certainly the example of paleo-libertarianism from the '90s -- a coalition that disintegrated mostly due to Thomas Fleming's penchant for insulting colleagues and demanding personal loyalty -- makes one think that a non-mainstream Right grouping might be nigh impossible. My hopes have been buoyed, however, by the fact that there were so many independent thinkers who were part of that older coalition, and by my encounter with a younger generation that has little at stake in paleoconservatism and generally identifies with an "alternative."

In the most fundamental of terms, I established this website as a way to squash the egalitarian bug at the core of the contemporary Western world: that deep seated, almost unreachable and indescribable thought pattern that leads, for instance, both mainstream war supporters and detractors to argue for their respective policies on the basis that they would better foster "democracy," women's rights, and the consumptive American way of life around the globe, that leads "conservatives" to oppose the nomination of Judge Sotomayor because she lacks an understanding of equality, and, as Larry has pointed out, defend Anglo-Saxon Protestantism on the basis that it's been the world's most tolerant religion towards ethnic minorities.

For the task of uncovering the root of Western decline, many different people will have valuable things to contribute. (I write this hoping not to sound too much like Mr. Tolerance.)

These declarations out of the way, let's return to Larry's version of conservatism, or what should probably be called "Austerism."

Larry states,

The reason I annoy so many people ... is that I draw definitional lines between what is a legitimate part of conservatism and what is not. I say, for example, that anti-theism, anti-Christianism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and the material reductionism that leads to moral nihilism are both wrong in themselves and not a part of conservatism. But many people on the right today are "big tent types" -- or rather "big website types." They want to include in the discussion anyone who calls himself conservative or right-wing, or, for that matter, anyone who posts a comment. Therefore someone like me who draws lines -- who says that there are certain things that are both wrong in themselves and not a legitimate part of conservatism -- is committing the worst sin.

Note that Larry's exactitude has led him to liken followers of Patrick Buchanan to a "moral swamp" ... but let's leave such hyperbole aside and focus on Larry's litmus-test conservatism in itself.

In a blog appropriately titled "A Litmus Test," Larry names what he believes is an essential component of "conservatism":

In his article today on Geert Wilders, Paul Belien writes:"Wilders regards support for Israel as the litmus test to decide with whom he is willing to cooperate."

In the excellent Wilders manner, this is stated so simply and directly. It gets to the heart of the issue and comprehends other, unspoken issues within it.

Larry doesn't quite equate conservatism with unwavering support for Israel, but he does seem to think that the latter is indispensable to the former.

But what kind of conservatism is this exactly? Does Larry think, for instance, that there were no conservatives throughout history who had, say, mixed feelings about a Jewish state, or who were even a bit anti-Semitic? John Randolph of Roanoke, a nominal Episcopalian of a deist persuasion, apparently wrote that he sympathized with the Muslims during the Crusades. Winston Churchill was an outspoken advocate of Zionism from the beginning, but he supported a Jewish state, quite explicitly, for reason that his neocon admirers would find appalling. Churchill hoped Zionism might "direct the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal" and away from the "world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality." Moreover, while Zionism might now be associated with nationalist hard-liners like Bibi Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, the man who came up with the idea, Theodor Herzl, was an atheist and socialist who once dreamed of mass conversion but eventually decided Jews had no place in European society.         

I am in no way saying that it's illegitimate for an American or European conservative to sympathize with Israel -- for that country's enemies are his as well. But I see no reason why a conservative in America must support Israel, or even have a strong opinion on the subject. And there are a whole host of reasons why an American conservative would want to end Washington's foreign aid and captive foreign policy.  

It's worth dilating on this subject a little longer. On the hard neocon Right, there's a tendency to insert "Judeo-Christian values" in explanations for "why they hate us," whereas softer neocons might say "democracy" and George W. Bush, "our freedom." Thus, Robert Spencer (no relation), in his book Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't (a title that has always affected me in a way opposite to that which the author intended), describes the war on terror as a chance for Americans to "stand up for Judeo-Christian values and defend them against the ideological challenge of Islam." He goes on to say that Osama bin Laden himself recognizes this, evidenced by his expressed hatred of  "Zionists and Crusaders"... 

Such terms indicate to me that Osama mostly hates the "Judeo-Christians" who are in his backyard; moreover, I have no doubt that Osama feels the same way about America as he did about the Soviet Union -- it's not a religious or "ideological" challenge, but a decadent, godless, and threatening place. (He's mostly right.)

Larry has criticized Spencer (the other one) rather severely, for not being unequivocal enough in calling for a halt to Muslimimmigration and for supporting secular humanist types like Hirsi Ali. But he remains on board when the project is "defending Judeo-Christianity."  

But such a "creed" is fantasy. Actual "Judeo-Christianity," which boasted Paul and Jesus Christ as its proponents, didn't survive the first century. The J-C Larry and Spencer speak of -- a vague, non-devotional religion and precursor to universal human rights that will apparently one day engage in an ultimate ideological showdown against global Islam -- never informed the culture of European societies. The whole thing marks a kind of grasping for meaning in a gray, decaying world ... as if "Christendom" could somehow be revived through the U.S. military.

Related to this is another spot of tension for Larry -- my willingness to tolerate "Pagans" and criticism of Christianity. This, too, is apparently un-conservative.

Radical Traditionalism can only mean pre-Christian traditionalism. Spencer, like the thinkers of the European pagan "New Right" before him (who were also anti-American), is trying to go back to and revive pre-Christian Europe. He's trying to revive a tradition that predates our civilization. But if it pre-dates our civilization, it's not our tradition. Which means that Spencer's Radical Traditionalism is no traditionalism at all, but a leap outside our tradition. Which is not to say that what is called paganism is not part of our tradition. But those pagan elements have only come down to us through the medium or our Christian culture. There simply is no "pagan traditionalism" in the West. To the contrary, the West came into existence in the act of replacing paganism.

Given the above, no wonder Spencer treated the irrelevant and absurd David Frum as his foil in his introductory video. Frum wants to create a "conservatism" that is pro-homosexual marriage, pro some form of nationalized health, anti-Rush Limbaugh, and anti-mainstream conservatism, which Frum sees as disgusting demagoguery. Spencer wants to create a "traditionalism" which consists of anti-Christians who hark back to the pagan world and reject 2,000 years of Christian tradition. What do the two men, so utterly different, have in common? Each is trying to create a chimerical "conservative" belief system which is a contradiction in terms and will have almost no followers.

Much of what Larry says here strikes me as an almost progressive case for Christianity, which he supports because it happened to occur after Paganism. (Aren't there whole swaths of Western history that Larry wants to get rid of, like the centuries-old tradition of liberalism?) Moreover, one can make a better case for Paganism on traditionalist grounds. In the longue durée of Western history, worship of the gods characterized the spiritual life of Europeans for forty millennia; Christianity, a foreign import, accounts for two, at the very most.

But even such historical argument should be subordinated to larger sense that the gods have truly never died. A host of things, from the days of the week to the placement of holy days on the solar calendar to the accoutrements of feast days (Christmas trees, mistletoe, Easter rabbits and eggs, etc.) are all of European Pagan origin. And this heritage is not merely a matter of ornament. The closely-knit family unit derives from the traditions of the Germanic tribes, and not the Levantine world of the Bible. Europe's imagination -- its characteristic fantasies of heroes, dragons, dwarves, lions, witches, wardrobes -- is unthinkable without its pre-Christian heritage. Our treasured heroes -- those who face challenges with honor and don't think of themselves as inherently depraved creatures in need of "redemption" -- are derived from archetypes that long predate the institution of Christianity. Indeed, they bear little resemblance to Jesus, the martyrs of the early church, or self-mutilating ascetics like Origen. The "Christianity" that Europeans and Americans know is one that has been deeply "Paganized" and "Europeanized"; as James Russell describes it, Christianity was "converted" by the Germans.

Exploring Paganism thus doesn't in the least mark an attempt to jump outside actual tradition, quite the opposite.  It marks a reconnection with Europe' deepest traditions, and promises far more treasures than the abstract creed professed by American conservatives.

___________

Notes:

1 -- William F. Buckley, too, set the standard for the issuing banishment proclamations from Conservatism proper, though such actions are more understandable in the case of a man who was in charge of a magazine and major resources.

FrumForum's Creationism for the Left

The problem with dealing honestly with race is that if you’re familiar with and talk about the science/common sense on group differences it’ll overshadow everything else you want to say. Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you he’s an environmentalist, creationist, neo-con and child molester. The last descriptive term is the only thing that you’re going to take away.  Everything else becomes irrelevant. So it is with the term “racist.” The term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

With that in mind, take a look at Frum Forum’s Tim Mak’s new article on Alternative Right.  See if you can find anything in there that would be out of place in a report put out by the SPLC.

Took a look at this logic.

It’s tremendously ironic that Alternative Right’s charge against the conservative movement is political correctness, when they themselves hide their sexist and racist ideologies behind the gloss of sweet-sounding, pseudo-intellectual terms.

Because we should call ourselves “racists” and “sexists” in order to be intellectually honest.  I could by the same reasoning accuse Mak’s website of hiding what they believe because they call themselves “Frum Fourm” instead of “Pro-war Cultural Marxists.”

Look, group differences are a scientific fact.  For a website that denounces those who don’t believe in evolution, it’s logically inconsistent but depressingly predictable that those at Frum Forum would deny the natural differences between whites and blacks or men and women.

Mak writes,

The academic-sounding terminology might be impressive if backed up with anything but hysterics.

Anybody who wants to take the time to learn about the “pseudo-intellectual” studies that have been done on group differences and how we know they have a biological basis can read J. Phillipe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Michael Levin, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein on race and Steve Rhoads, Steven Pinker, Geoffrey Miller and Judith Rich Harris on gender. Or they can open up their eyes and look at the disparities in crime, socio-economic status and standardized test scores found always and everywhere.

We would have the luxury of ignoring all this if it wasn’t for our current demographic shift, massive anti-white discrimination in the form of affirmative action or Stalinism at our universities in the name of fighting “hate.”

White Americans have gone from 90 percent of the US population to 70 percent in the last forty-five years. They’re scheduled to become a minority by 2042. We can anticipate that there won’t be a single part of our society or culture unchanged by these population trends. It is those advocating we move ahead with this unprecedented demographic shift who should have the burden of proof on them to show that we’ll be better off.  Anyone who tries to will find calling people names to be much easier.

More on Hispanics and Crime

Thanks to Ron Unz for his thoughtful (and prompt!) response to my critique. He said a handful of things that I would like to explore further, perhaps in a post at the Enterprise Blog. Here I want to correct a small but important error made originally by Ed Rubenstein and repeated by Unz in his response to me. In an otherwise insightful article, Rubenstein said:

"The Census lumps the prison population into a larger category -- people living in 'Group quarters'. But this category includes people in college dorms, nursing homes, and military bases."

This is not true. The Census has a subcategory within "group quarters" called institutionalization. Institutionalization includes only people in correctional facilities, mental hospitals, and nursing homes. It does not include anyone in college dorms or military bases, which are both part of a different subcategory. The point is important because I used institutionalization as a proxy for incarceration in my response to Unz, and he criticized my analysis by citing Rubenstein's inaccurate claim.

Of course, institutionalization is not a perfect measure of incarceration, but it's significantly better than as portrayed by Rubenstein and Unz. As I wrote in a footnote to my article:

"Given the pre-retirement age range I use, nursing homes should not be skewing the data. And if Hispanics disproportionately end up in mental hospitals, then frankly that's something we would want to know about anyway."

Much Ado About Paul

Ron Paul’s victory in the CPAC straw poll triggered renewed discussion of his message, a discussion typically styled as an a la carte acceptance or rejection of his various recommendations and stances. So, for example, Jonah Goldberg will go along with auditing the Fed, kind of, and he isn’t part of the neoconservative cabal, and...

I am dying to know how each individual movement lackey feels about Paul. Really I am. Yet the overall verdict already is in and it’s not necessarily wrong because it’s being expressed by the neocons or the establishment or the GOP hacks or whoever. It’s that Ron Paul doesn’t function well as the leader of one of the two governing parties.

Paul did and does function quite well as a feisty congressman, leveling trenchant attacks on bureaucratic overreach, fiscal and monetary malfunction, late-stage imperial insanity, and basic black-and-white anti-Constitutionalism. He’s at his best when inserting into the Congressional Record his calm, voice-in-the-wind soliloquies. Alas, his avuncular qualities do not translate well into higher-profile affairs where he often looks lost standing next to airbrushed FOX darlings. Perhaps more damagingly, he lacks the PR grace and maneuverability required to remove a certain prefabricated tone from his on-the-spot answers to direct questions. The Constitution is fundamental, the free market is a fine idea to have somewhere in mind, but the two are not acceptable answers to every imaginable social, cultural, and political question.

Maybe Paul cannot entirely be blamed for the balance of the following he has attracted, which I admit has made it more difficult for me to maintain my Paulite enthusiasm. At the last Campaign for Liberty meeting I attended, now almost two years ago, organizers looked on as a greasy thirty-something with coke-bottle glasses, after soliciting his mother’s permission, generously handed me a complimentary Ron Paul bumper sticker and some articles by David Icke identifying Kris Kristofferson and William F. Buckley, Jr. as enlisted members of the world conspiracy of shape-shifting lizard tyrants.

If Paul retains any charm for members of the Alternative Right it is because he alone among national figures would do serious deep-impact damage to the managerial welfare state. He may be out of touch and at times a little befuddled, but he honestly is what he is and likely would see through the elimination of whole national bureaucracies. This is what sustains admiration and qualified loyalty within our little circle. So our house guru reminded me recently.

I’m starting to cultivate the reverse attitude toward Paul’s activity in truth-telling and radical reform. I’m unable to convince myself that the system deserves any outstretched hand at all. Perhaps Paul—perhaps we, by extension—ought to just quiet down and allow events to play themselves out. Perhaps it’s even best that the political class have encouragement, not opposition. Maybe you should be calling your elected representatives, not to issue cautionary warning, but to remind them that social programs, unlimited domestic spending, and open immigration truly are fine expressions of our national ideals, and that doom-saying critics speak merely from pathology and hate.

If the political class wants the rope with which to hang itself, perhaps it should have it.