The British Obama

When the Labour Party lost the May 2010 election, I did not exactly share their sadness. This was not because I saw the incoming government as representing fundamental change; rather, this was because the Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already proven so fantastically destructive that it was difficult to imagine anything topping five more years of Labour inferno.

The electoral repulsion of Gordon Brown triggered a leadership contest within this wretched party, an event about which Derek Turner has already written very amusingly for Taki’s Magazine. Absent evidence of complete disarray, crisis, depression, despair, tiffs, quarrels, clashes, faction, division, schism, disunity, schizophrenia, paranoia, catatonia, paralysis, and radical soul-searching, a Labour leadership election is a potent soporific. Who wants to listen to a freak show of fossilized Marxists pontificating about fairness and equality? Life is too short.

But when the electorate holds back from crushing them into oblivion, when the government ends up being a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, the prospect of a Labour comeback cannot be dismissed: their next leader might well end up being our future Prime Minister.

What, then, is Labour offering its supporters? At one end of the spectrum stands the current favourite, David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary. He is followed by a succession of yawns. At the other end is the outsider candidate, Diane Abbott, the MP for the London borough of Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

David Miliband is the son of Ralph Miliband. The elder Miliband, born in Belgium, immigrated to Britain in 1940 to escape the Nazis, and went on to become, during the 1960s and 1970s, “one of Britain’s most celebrated intellectual disciples of Karl Marx.” He was an iconic figure of the Labour Left, “who famously frowned on the concept of ‘private property,’” and “whose writings influenced two generations of Socialist leaders.” Based in the highly fashionable London district of Primrose Hill, “once a popular haunt with radical intellectuals,” which “hosted a strong community of Jewish émigrés,” David is the classic Champagne socialist, a species that sees no contradiction between applying a Robin Hood ethos with other people’s money and indulging a personal lifestyle of Oriental opulence: the 22 April 2007 article in the Daily Mail, "How David Miliband Avoided Inheritance Tax on Marxist Father’s £1.5million House," provides an educational overview of the Milibands’ attitude to property and taxes. (Hint: they are not entirely harmonious with what they prescribe for you and me.)

 

Also (arguably) educational were claims made in the Russian newspaper Tvoi Den in 2007, when David Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, angered Putin’s government through his handling of the Alexander Litvinenko affair.

The newspaper said that in the Twenties the Foreign Secretary's grandfather, Samuel, then Shimon, Miliband, a native of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, had fought under the command of Trotsky ‘eliminating’ white Russians opposed to Communism.

Miliband’s tenure as Foreign Secretary was indeed stellar. Among the various examples of his genius as Britain's top diplomat, we must include his relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who came to afford Miliband the full benefit of his industrial-strength candor: it was reported by the British press on one occasion that during a telephone conversation between the two men, Lavrov asked Miliband, “Who the fuck are you to lecture me?” Miliband experienced a lengthy tirade, it seems, complete with a generous sprinking of four-letter words, in response to comments about Russia’s operations in Georgia. Miliband’s visit to Russia a year later was similarly a resounding diplomatic success.

Thus, we have some indications as to how Britain’s prestige in the world would be elevated under a possible David Miliband premiership later in the decade.

Yet, before we can relax, we need to take a look at the "outsider" contestant: Diane Abbott, the main topic of this article. With bookies assessing her chances of victory at 50/1, an Abbott premiership might seem a distant possibility. But if you dismiss her out of hand you have already forgotten that at one point in the not too distant past there was one Barack Obama, who appeared out of nowhere and transitioned from non-entity to world leader in a matter of months. Not unlike Ms. Abbott, he added colour to an otherwise dreadfully vanilla selection of candidates, and was said to represent fundamental change -– a profound and historical transformation of the political landscape. Ms. Abbott has sustained some criticism in the media, where she has earned accolades such as “the stupidest woman in Britain,” but it is particularly auspicious for the Black MP that her entering the leadership contest afforded immense relief to the lilly-white consciences of her fellow party members: these worthy servants of the people, you see, were very uncomfortable with the (until-then) uniformly fair complexion and monotonous maleness of the contestants. (Hint: this might have resulted in accusations of racism and sexism, and therefore of hypocrisy and Champagne socialism.)

Born of Jamaican parents in 1953, Diane Abbott earned her place in the history books by happening to be Black and female in 1987, when she was elected Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Since then she has remained popular with her constituents, who have re-elected her with comfortable majorities on every election. Her borough is ethnically diverse (25% Black, 41% non-White in 2006) and one of the most economically deprived in the country, occupying the bottom 5% nationwide. Jo Dillon of the Independent on Sunday has described her as “an icon of the Left”.

Her various campaigns, outlined on her website, cover wide range of issues. A common denominator in not a few of them, however, is a strong identification, combined with an acute preoccupation, with the interests and concerns of her racial brethren: both foreign and British-born Blacks (also known here as “West Indians,” or “Afro-Caribbeans”). Witness, for example, Ms. Abbott’s motive for opposing the changes in Air Passenger Duty introduced by the last Labour government:

Government proposals within the Bill are to charge passengers higher Air Passenger Duty the further the distance they fly out of the UK. But rather than being based on the exact destination the passenger is flying to, the Duty will be based on the capital city of the country the passenger is flying to. This means that flying to the Caribbean will always incur a higher Air Passenger Duty than flying to the USA, even though many places in the USA are further away from London than the Caribbean is.

Or her reasons for being active in the civil liberties campaign:

When I first came to Parliament in 1987 I spoke out against Stop and Search laws which infringed on the civil liberties of young Black men. [...]

I am concerned that anti-terror laws brought in since the September 11th attacks will have the same detrimental effect on relations between the police and Muslim communities.

Or her thoughts on the current approach to the fight against crime:

[G]un crime is not just about tough sentencing. Sadly 80 per cent of gun crime in London is 'black on black,' often involving boys in their teens. As a black woman and the mother of a teenage son this is frightening and wholly unacceptable. A fundamental and persistent problem is the continuing educational underachievement of black boys in particular.

Or her efforts in the battle for education:

I have campaigned for many years on educational issues. In particular I have researched, organised and spoken out on the way in which the education system fails children of African and Afro-Caribbean descent. In the mid-nineties I began organising events in Hackney under the title “Hackney Schools and the Black Child”. [...]

Most recently I held debates in the House of Commons on the disproportionately high rate of school exclusions of Black boys and the lack of diversity in London teaching workforce.

Or her objections to, and actions against, the proposed reforms to legal aid:

They are aimed at value for money, but in reality mean that many smaller firms will be run out of business by factory-like law firms that can afford to take on legal aid cases for less money. Black and ethnic minority-run firms are more likely to be new or small firms, and are more likely to be dependent on legal aid work and therefore are hugely threatened by the reforms. Whilst I welcome the Government's wish to get value for money in legal aid spending, it is clear that among other flaws the legal aid reform will decimate black and minority ethnic solicitors.

Many black and ethnic minority legal firms were set up as a reaction to the institutional racism that prevented ethnic minority lawyers from progressing in their careers. [...]

In May I tabled a number of written questions to the Ministry of Justice to try and gage what could be done to halt the reforms. Following this I held a Westminster Hall debate arguing that the reforms were indirectly discriminatory against black and ethnic minority solicitors, firms and clients.

Or her issues with the national DNA database, created by Labour, and currently holding 4.5 million profiles:

In 2007, Lady Scotland confirmed that three-quarters of the young black male population would soon be on the DNA database...They had generally been arrested because they fit the physical description of a suspect -- the suspect being described as a young black man.

My, if Ms. Abbott is as sturdy a bulwark for the race-specific interests and concerns of her White constituents -- 59% in her borough -- as she is for those of her Afro-Caribbean voters, I would imagine that they feel no need at all for a party like the BNP. (Well, if they do, the Left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research has an ingenious solution: more immigration.)

Ms. Abbott’s preoccupation with negritude is, like Obama’s, fully integrated with far Left credentials. After Labour came to power in 1997, a secret conspiracy was hatched at the highest levels of government to make Britain more multicultural. This led to previous legal immigration averages to quintuple, reaching figures in excess of a quarter of a million people per year. Most of these came from impoverished, Third World countries. And among them were 1 million Muslims, who added themselves to the 1.5 million accumulated over the previous centuries. According to a questionnaire published in The Guardian newspaper, however, Ms. Abbott disagrees strongly with the statement “[i]mmigration levels are too high” (in the United Kingdom). This is perhaps not entirely surprising, as the former Labour Home Secretary, David Blunket (who is White), said in 2003 that there was “no obvious limit” to the number of immigrants that could settle in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, being a citizen of the world, Ms. Abbott’s generosity extends well beyond this green and pleasant land. The last Labour government transformed the British economy, tripling the national debt, septupling government borrowing, and turning the Conservative’s 3.3 percent economic expansion of 1997 into a 5.0 percent economic contraction in 2009. It also managed to give away 60% of the nation’s gold reserves at $275 an ounce. Eventually, with Britain facing a downgrade in its credit rating, harsh spending cuts and tax rises had to be implemented, including an increase in Value Added Tax (VAT), which is hoped will bring in an extra £13,000 million a year. Ms. Abbott is pleased, however, because the foreign aid budget, which in the 2008/2009 year spent £5,500 million helping the poor in Africa and South Asia, has been increased to £7,800 million for the 2010/2011 year. In fact, even though half of Britons want less money spent on foreign aid and more spent relieving domestic poverty and improving our under-funded public services, she strongly disagreed with the idea that Britain spends too much money on foreign aid. Ms. Abbott must have failed to notice that the VAT increase -- which disproportionately affects the poor, since it increases prices on nearly all goods and services -- could have been cut to less than half by suspending foreign aid.

And as no far Left politician is complete without punitive tax proposals, Abbott has bold plans of her own. On 16 July the BBC reported

As well as introducing a financial transaction tax and increasing the coalition's bank levy, she said she would create a new “wealth tax."

“I am working on the details of it but it would be a wealth tax directed at assets rather than income,” she said.

In other words, if your house is too large, Abbott will ask you please to move out, sell it, and hand a big chunk of your money to the government. And if you are one of those doomsday eccentrics who hoard gold in case of a currency crisis, she will want you to share your stash with the government. So, if you are intelligent and industrious, if you have prospered in life, Diane Abbott has her eye on you.

Of course, none of this represents an electoral barrier to a committed Marxist supporter: they love these political positions, irrespective of race, age, gender, disability, or sexual orientation -- and they know how to guilt ordinary people into supporting them, or at least not criticizing them. 

There remain, however, a few minor problem areas that would need to go into the memory hole before Diane Abbott is ready to storm into 10 Downing Street.

Firstly, there is the matter of her refusing to pay her own evening taxi fares. Ordinary folk traveling to and from work are expected by their employers to pay for their own transport. But Diane Abbott expects the long-suffering taxpayers to fund hers to the tune of £1,100 per year, even though she already claims £142,000 annually in expenses, and is paid the largest allowable income supplement for living in London.

Secondly, there is the matter of her thinking that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” are unsuitable for working as nurses in the National Health Service, because they “may have never met a Black person before.” Fortunately, however, on this occasion Marc Wadsworth, executive member of the Anti-Racist Alliance, came to the rescue by pointing out that that year’s Miss Finland was Black, of part Nigerian descent. And, all the same, Ms. Abbott still commanded support from fellow Black MPs: Bernie Grant, MP for a neighbouring constituency, said “She is quite right… Scandinavian people don’t know black people -- they probably don’t know how to take their temperature.”

Then there is the matter of her parallel career as a BBC pundit. Instigated by a complaint from a fellow MP, the Committee for Standards and Privileges found in 2004 that Ms. Abbott had failed to declare her earnings (£17,300) from her appearances in the BBC programme This Week in the Register of Members Interests, as per the provisions of the Code of Conduct for Members and paragraph 54 (c) of the Guide to the Rules. Ms. Abbott, who accepted full responsibility, was required to apologize to the House of Commons. Fortunately, however, Ms. Abbott emerged unscathed from the 2009 expenses scandal, where MPs of all stripes were found to have been dipping into the public purse to the tune of many thousands of pounds to fund their lifestyles. Here she has an advantage over her fellow contestant, David Miliband, who was found to have illegitimately claimed £30,000 over five years in repairs, decorations, and furnishings for his private residence (he apologized went found out, but did not return any of the taxpayers' money).

And then there is the question of whether Ms. Abbott will, like Obama, succeed in ushering in a new era of post-racial politics. Statements like the one below, recorded in the Daily Mail, suggest it may be too soon yet to get our hopes up:

I never encountered any overt racism at school, though I do occasionally wonder whether the attempts made to dissuade me from applying for Oxbridge were linked to my colour.

And, finally, there is the matter of her snubbing public education for her son, in favour of a £10,000-per-year selective private school (Note: Marxists are supposedly against private education and selecting students for ability). The matter generated considerable media attention in 2003, not least because our far Left politician had previously savaged Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for also sparing their children from the public school system. It seems she instructed her former husband to keep quiet about her choice, aware that it was “indefensible” and “intellectually incoherent.” Worse still, her explanation (“West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children”) renewed accusations of racism, which for some implied that White mothers loved their children less than Black mothers. Indeed, many found it rather puzzling that Ms. Abbott could take this view yet dread the thought of her child being schooled alongside others raised by West Indian mums, just like her.

We will have to see how this exciting contest unfolds. Will the best man win? Will subterranean racism influence the decision? Is Britain ready to transform its political landscape? For the time being, Ms. Abbott thinks she has fair chance, despite the odds:

I'm not comparing myself to Barack Obama because he’s a once in a life-time figure but two years ago no-one could have imagined a black man as US President. If that was possible in the US, I think people can change their ideas in Britain as well.

"You're Going to Be on Glenn Beck Tonight...."

We've had some back and forths on Glenn Beck, but stories like this give him a soft spot in my heart.

WASHINGTON — A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.

Shirley Sherrod, appointed last July to be the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have.

Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."

The video was posted Monday on the website of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a counterattack on the NAACP, which passed a resolution last week accusing the "tea party" movement of having "racist elements."

But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first black man to occupy the White House practices racism in reverse.

The sensitivity to Sherrod's comments, particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers, was evidenced by the dispatch with which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her to resign.

Both Vilsack and an official at the Obama White House denied Sherrod's assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. The decision, they insisted, was Vilsack's alone.

Vilsack said early today that the USDA will reconsider the ousting of Sherrod and will "conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts."

In Sherrod's account, her firing had been driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle — and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."

Sherrod added, "The administration was not interested in hearing the truth."

What this story shows is that the Obama Administration is absolutely scared to death of anything that can be perceived as anti-white racism.  It's a battle they don't want to fight anywhere or under any circumstances.  And they're also afraid of Glenn Beck.  If he forces the White House to spend an extra two hours each day watching his show and worrying about its image, giving it less time to think of new "civil rights violators" to go after or work on amnesty, he's doing an invaluable service to this country.

Today, after Glenn Beck told the administration that her comments put her right into the Democratic mainstream, the USDA is considering bringing Sherrod back. 

White Lies

Richard Hoste seems to differ from my view that the Right (used, of course, in a very broad sense) could in no way benefit from misrepresenting MLK as a small-government conservative. Richard believes that if we continue to tell blacks the noble lie, which the neoconservatives and Glenn Beck have worked so hard to spread, we may be able to neutralize all the race-hustling black leaders.

There are at least three problems with this argument that come readily to mind. One, the lie is so transparent that until now only movement conservatives have bought it; and in this case we are dealing with people who are so incredibly gullible or so thoroughly bribed that they’ll say anything they’re told to say by those who move their strings. I myself have never met a movement conservative or GOP hack who actually thought that King was a “conservative theologian” or an exponent of Thomistic natural law. Rather I’ve encountered dolts who read NR or Weekly Standard and who have told me “we should say this because that’s what we have to say.” Of course the same humanoids have proclaimed Joe Lieberman to be a conservative “because he’s good on the war.”

Two, nobody, including blacks, could possibly believe the crass lie that Richard wishes to see propagated. There is overwhelming evidence, plus media treatment of King’s life and influence, that would keep anybody with even room temperature intelligence (which may exclude most movement conservatives) from buying the proffered snake oil. Watching Beck go nuts (that is more nuts than he usually seems) because a black celebrity described King as a socialist, I had the definite feeling of being on Mars. Does anyone on this planet with even a grade school education not know that King was a left-leaning socialist, who favored special rights for his race? One can quote until the cows come home that banal line about judging people by “the content of their character.” But this does not change the rest of King’s politics, which are an open book, even for blacks.

Three, the cult of King is intertwined with a political purpose, from which it cannot be dislodged. It is a replacement theology for a now mostly moribund Christianity, which incorporates certain older religious themes but places them in a multicultural context. King is the suffering Redeemer, whose birthday comes a few weeks after the traditional date for celebrating the Christian Redeemer; and his death was expiatory, like that of Christ, although, unlike Christ’s kingdom, that of the black socialist savior is situated in this world. King’s mission began the process of cleansing white America of its original sin of racism. But this redemption did not work all at once when he died. Further sacrifice is demanded of the sinner in the form of the demands that the fallen Redeemer laid upon us, that is, more socialism, more set-asides, more rites of atonement, etc. To try to change this powerful symbolism by reconstructing King into something he clearly was not, perhaps a precursor of Glenn Beck or David Horowitz, is a fool’s errand. King was exactly what he was. That he has become the replacement Deity in a post-Christian public theology may strike some of us as laughable. But that elevation is connected to what he said and did. The cult of MLK reflects a certain reality, while Richard’s counter-narrative builds on nothing more than a neocon lie.

Politics Isn't History

When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

Feds Demand Balkanization

The Federal Government is taking steps to make sure Americans vote sufficiently along racial lines.

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. — Arthur Furano voted early – five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas...

Vote coordinator Martha Lopez said that if turnout is higher than in recent years, when it hovered around 25 percent, the election would be a success – regardless of whether a Hispanic was elected.

"I think we'll make it," she said. "I'm happy to report the people seem very interested."

But Randolph McLaughlin, who represented a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the goal was not merely to encourage more Hispanics to vote but "to create a system whereby the Hispanic community would be able to nominate and elect a candidate of their choice."

That could be a non-Hispanic, he acknowledged, and until exit polling is done, "it won't be known for sure whether the winners were Hispanic-preferred."

Is there nothing too petty for Holder’s Justice Department?  A little town of 30,000 needs to have its election rigged so Hispanics win?

This is a perfect example of why conservatives who approve of mass immigration from the third world aren’t thinking hard enough.  No non-racial issue could ever prompt the feds to look into the voting practices of a small village.  And on no non-racial issue would conservatives be such push overs.  

That means that if the Hispanic population is growing the only way for this not to lead to bigger government is for conservatives to stop being scared of the “racist” charge.  Since at this point this seems like the most unlikely thing in the world we will have see the state usurp more and more power.  

Those able to think for ourselves read stories like this noticing these patterns and assume that others must be coming to the same conclusions.  But your average Joe Sickpack or even movement conservatism isn't very good at putting seemingly unrelated stories about school achievement gaps, voting rights legislation, healthcare disparities, etc. together.  He needs to have things spelled out for him and right now nobody's opposing the multicultural state from a libertarian or classical liberal position, much less a racialist one.  Not Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Michelle Malkin. Not Tea Party radicals who wear wigs and carry assault rifles.  Not the Ron Paul movement (notice Rand Paul denying that his position on private discrimination is anything but hypothetical as if the state is race nuteral today).  The 99% of conservative leaning America that doesn't read Alternative Right, VDare or Steve Sailer has no idea this is going on. 

For these reasons, I don't believe that the Left has come close to maximizing the benefits it could potentially derive from racial politics.

While ads like Rick Barber’s are encouraging, it’s fascinating how people will hint at secession and revolution but not even mention in their litany of complaints against the state the Diversity Jacobinism Washington imposes on us. I predict that liberals will come to rely on racial egalitarianism more and more as an excuse for a powerful, centralized state.  Raise taxes?  White America erupts.  Add a new entitlement program?  They start showing up with guns at rallies telling you that they’re going to take their country back.  Require private businesses to discriminate against whites and all but set up a quota system for election results?  Listen to the crickets chirping! If you find one area of your enemy's defense line completely undefended-or better yet, the enemy refuses to notice when you attack him there-and resistance everywhere else is fanatical the decision of where to send the bulk of your army is a very easy one.

It's Easy Being Greene

Some Sarah Palin-endorsed Republican women did well last night, revealing once again the importance of the Tea Parties. But one shouldn't underestimate the power of Southern black people voting for the Democrat listed alphabetically at the top of the ballot. Exhibit A -- Alvin Greene: 

An unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website shocked South Carolina on Tuesday night by winning the Democratic Senate primary to oppose Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Alvin Greene, who currently lives in his family's home, defeated Vic Rawl, a former judge and state legislator who had a $186,000 campaign warchest and had already planned his next fundraising event. Despite the odds, Greene, who has been unemployed for the past nine months, said that he wasn't surprised by his victory. "I wasn’t surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much. I knew I was on top of my campaign, and just stayed on top of everything, I just—I wasn't surprised that much, just a little. I knew that I worked hard and did," Greene said in an interview.

Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. "It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed," said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.

"It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much," he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren't relevant. "I'm not concentrating on how I was elected—it's history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what's going on, in America."

The oddity of Greene’s candidacy has already prompted speculation from local media about whether he might be a Republican plant. But Greene denies that Republicans or anyone else had approached him about running. "No, no—no one approached me. This is my decision," he said. A 13-year military veteran, he says he had originally gotten the idea in 2008 when he was serving in Korea. "I just saw the country was in bad shape two years ago…the country was declining," he says. "I wanted to make sure we continue to go up on the right track." But when asked whether there was a specific person or circumstance that precipitated his decision to jump into politics, Greene simply replied: "nothing in particular...it's just, uh, nothing in particular." South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated that Greene won because his name appeared first on the ballot, and voters unfamiliar with both candidates chose alphabetically.

Greene has yet to speak to any Democratic officials, either. After filing to run, his campaign went dark. According to this report, he didn’t show up to the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in April and didn't file any of the required paperwork for candidates with the state or Federal Election Commission. When I spoke to him, the state’s Democrats had yet to contact him after his victory was announced.

Greene insists that he's planning to work with state and national officials to ramp up his campaign and raise money "as soon as I can." And he plans on putting his unemployment at the center of his campaign. "I’m currently one of the many unemployed in the state and this country. South Carolina has more unemployed now than at any other time," Greene says. "My campaign slogan: Let's get South Carolina back to work." He adds that he would like to see "one Korea under a democracy."

Who knows, maybe the Democrats could have gotten behind this website-free political unknown, and even supported his one-Korea policy, but these latest allegations are going to be tough to live down.

One fascinating-horrifying aspect of all this that we shouldn't overlook is fact that candidate Greene was some kind of long-term bureacrat in the Army. Can a country rule the world and have a military and political class peppered with Alvin Greenes? I've been thinking for a long time that America's "global military hegemony" is a bubble just waiting to pop. 

You Gotta Love South Carolina

Richard introduced Alternative Right readers the other day to new South Carolina Senate candidate Alvin Greene.  He's been making the interview rounds after refusing his party's request to step aside.  The plant theory is looking more and more certain.

I love the media spin on this.  Blacks will elect an illiterate member of the tribe without knowing anything about him.  Therefore, how dare South Carolina Republicans take advantage of this group that votes on nothing but race! They dare to get blacks to run for office!  For shame. 

The Revenge of the Paleos

With a mention by the New York Times's favorite conservative, Ross Douthat, one might surmise that "paleoconservatism" is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Even Jeb Bush has picked up on the term, as, according to my sources, he recently joked at a New York State Republican convention, in between pronouncing pleasantries en español,

I don't know who the paleocons are, but I think they are the ones with pitchforks who want to take us back to an agrarian economy.

He's right about the pitchforks.

And though I've never suffered from technophobia, I'd much prefer an "agrarian economy" to the post-industrial, Latino service-economy wasteland that Jeb thinks is a sign of America's advancement.

Paleoconservatism -- a hastily assembled, rear-guard action against the neocon ascendancy in the conservative movement -- reached its zenith in the '92 meeting of the John Randolph Club, at which Tom Fleming, Murray Rothbard, and Sam Francis gave command performances. Murray famously announced that the insurgent movement wouldn't just "turn back the clock" -- but break it! With Pat Buchanan, the paleocons could even boast, quite correctly, that they had a presidential candidate of its own.

I've always avoided associating myself with the term, in part for ideological reasons, in part because the movement's time has clearly come and passed, and in part because those now associated with it have gone off in different directions. This said, the conservative wars of the '90s was an important moment in American political history -- and paleoconservatism was (and is) infinitely more interesting and culturally literate than what's on offer at NR, The Weekly Standard, FrumForum, and the rest.

Douthat seems to associate paleoconservatism with the political bloggings of Daniel Larison, which is unfortunate, since Larison is currently staking out a position of being "thoughtful" ... which, as far as I can tell, means publishing long, barely penetrable blog posts dedicated to hair-splitting with various Beltway wonks. Larison also brags of his lack of a coherent ideology, which means that he won't reveal to us what he actually thinks about, say, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which launched the recent "paleocon" dispute. One must surmise, however, that he's very, very "thoughtful" about the issue.

"Paleoconservatism" might be turning into a convenient straw man for the Establishment -- "Eww, look at those reactionary, racist paleos who don't like MLK and want to turn Americans into traditionalist farmers! But this also means that people like Douthat, Frum, and Jeb recognize it as a threat. Being a "paleocon" might, in its current manifestation, begin to represent something like "thinking dangerous, impossible thoughts." And for that, this new paleo-cussword is a hopeful development. Indeed, some of us might want to consider adopting it.

var disqus_url = 'http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/left-right/the-revenge-of-the-paleos/';

The One Successful Panderer

In two articles I could’ve predicted were coming this week Frum Forum worries that Rand Paul will turn minorities away from the Republican Party while Paul Gottfried denounces Republicans for worrying about such a possibility and kissing up to Martin Luther King.

This got me to wondering if pandering to nonwhites on a large scale ever works.  I checked the state by state exit polls of 2008 Senate races to see whether any Republicans were able to capture the all elusive black vote.  Using Senate races is better than presidential election data, where it’s the same person in each state.  Having a wide variety of characters helps us determine whether there’s any candidate or election strategy out there which can cross the racial divide.  Here are the results, going from most to least popular GOP candidates among African-Americans.

Tennessee-Alexander 26%
Kentucky- McConnell 13%
South Carolina-Graham 13% 
New Jersey-Zimmer 13%
Iowa-Reed 10% 
Alabama-Sessions 8%
Texas-Cornyn 8%
Virginia-Gilmore 7%
Mississippi-Cochran 6%
Michigan- Hoogendyk 5%
Georgia-Chambliss 4%
Delaware-O’Donnell 3%
Illinois-Sauerberg 2%
Louisiana-Kennedy 2%
North Carolina-Dole 1%

The first and most obvious question we have to ask is, what did Lamar Alexander do?  His popularity is based on his winning over black women, who were nine percent of the electorate in his state and gave him 30% support.  Black males were only two percent of the Tennessee voting public, and a little algebra tells us that they probably voted around eight percent for Alexander, though CNN apparently didn’t think the sample was big enough to give us any numbers for them.

The New York Times noted Alexander’s success about a week after the 2008 election, telling us that the Senator “had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions.”  He wasn’t shy in letting the voters know it either, as this ad demonstrates.

One local blogger called the message “After You Vote For Barack Obama, Vote Lamar.”  Alexander also secured the endorsement of the black mayor of Memphis.  It’s worth pointing out too that the Republican was a two term governor and incumbent, giving him all the name recognition one could hope for.

So if a Republican can somehow get liberal black Democrats to vouch for him, appoint a lot of blacks to high places, be the most well known state politician and run against a weak opponent he can sometimes get a massive quarter of the African-American vote.  The question is whether they can do that without demoralizing significant parts of the much larger white electorate.

Update: A commentator writes "May I point out that 'Lamar Alexander' sounds very plausibly like a typical black name?"

I hadn't thought of this.  Imagine the typical Memphis voter hearing all these black voices on the radio praising "our boy Lamar" and all he's done for the community.  It's certainly plausible that many of them thought that he might be "one of us," and not just politically.  I must confess that this certainly works against my name recognition theory, but polls tell us that more than half of Americans can't name their Senators.  I suspect governors are better known, but Alexander was in that position a long time ago.

Civil Rights Kowtow

I'm shocked to hear about Rand Paul's recent caving-in to the liberal-neocon establishment. From the evidence it would seem that our minimal-government senatorial candidate from Kentucky regrets he could not have marched with MLK during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Never mind the fact that vocal opposition to King and to both his tactics and rhetoric extended from National Review (when it was still a recognizably conservative publication) to the New York Times, and from WFB to Will Herberg, and Harry Jaffa. We are now supposed to bow down before all the authorized Civil Rights Icons, and this is especially true for Republicans, whose electoral support among blacks since they began their ritualistic groveling has shrunk from about 10 to two percent. With a little more kowtowing, the GOP and Rand Paul may succeed in driving the numbers even lower.

As for Rand Paul's comment that set off the media hysteria, it was bland enough to have been ignored, if GOP magnates and civil rights leaders had not weighed in. Does Congressman (and House Minority Leader) John Boehner honestly believe that Paul's failure to back every jot in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including the enforcement of non-discrimination in accommodations in Title I, would cause a mass defection of his otherwise likely voters to the opposition? Will Paul's share of the black vote now shrink because of his seemingly tactless reservation about one title in the Civil Rights Act? How the hell can the GOP get "government off our backs," if Title I and the agency it requires for its enforcement legitimate constant government incursions into the workplace?

The worst form of government incursion I can think of is the relentless attempt by public administrators to socialize us in accordance with the latest formulations of PC. What Rand Paul suggested during a lucid moment is that we might begin our counteroffensive by reconsidering the government's mandate to re-educate us socially and culturally, a mandate that the Civil Rights Act most definitely provides. Given the purpose that the candidate wished to pursue, it seems that he was offering an exceedingly modest beginning to an almost insuperable task. A more reasonable beginning is to repeal the entire act and all the federal directives imposed afterwards in pursuit of non-discrimination everywhere in our society. The same thing should be attempted at the state level, although the states have more constitutional right on their side when they engage in leftist social engineering.

This brings me back to the point I've made before, about Republican pathologies, from which Rand Paul has apparently not escaped. GOP candidates feel driven to ingratiate themselves with those who despise them. In contrast, Democrats, and particularly liberal Democrats, behave with more dignity. They have no trouble writing off those groups they're not likely to attract. By the way: I'm still waiting for Chuck Schumer to apologize to Bob Jones University for having failed to take biblical Christian moral positions as a senator. I'm also waiting for Hillary to address the Right to Life organization and to promise to devote the remainder of her life to fighting abortion.

Needless to say, none of this will happen, because Democrats do not act like Karl Rove, John Boehner and (I'm ashamed to say) Rand Paul. Democrats know they're on the left, even if they dissemble in some congressional districts, in order to pick up a few votes, before going on to Congress where they'll vote with Obama. But the rhetorical concessions, e.g. on gun right issues, are purely cosmetic, and they do not involve the acts of self-debasement that Republicans typically engage in while trying to conciliate the civil rights lobby. Even more importantly, the Reps get nothing for their crawling. Those they're reaching out to, wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, and those on the traditional right, as opposed to Pavlovian Republican voters, are understandably turned off. It is truly upsetting that someone who seemed a superlative candidate from our perspective should practice the usual Republican boot-licking -- and within days of his primary victory. Perhaps I was expecting too much from him.      

Left Behind

John McCain's acceptance speech for the 2008 Republican nomination contained a curious section that few commentators discussed in much detail. (Peter Brimelow was one of the only one I know of.)

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I'd been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I'd been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn't know how I could face my fellow prisoners. [emphasis added]

McCain claims "they broke me," but in the ellipsis between paragraphs, he leave out what his capitulation entailed and why he felt so "ashamed" around his fellow prisoners...  

There's good reason to believe that the legend of John McCain's stoicism while undergoing torture is not all it's cracked up to be -- and that in claiming to have been "broken," McCain was preparing a plausible denial of responsibility should the Democrats have made public the propaganda broadcasts he allegedly made after being captured by the North Vietnamese.

This personal scandal, in turn, appears to be part of a larger coverup of the U.S. government's abandonment of hundreds of POWs after the pullout of Saigon. (Their stories surfaced in Hollywood action movies, but were ignored or "debunked" by the mainstream media.)

The veteran New York Times war reporter Sidney Shanberg had been working on this story for decades, and Ron Unz, the publisher of the The American Conservative, has just re-published Shanberg's research, along with a related symposium, all which comes on the scene like a bombshell amidst John McCain's senatorial campaign.

I Didn't Choose Freedom, Freedom Chose Me

When people get to my age (48), we are warned about the wrinkles, the hair loss, and the sleep difficulties, not to mention the price of beer-belly-evasion being eternal vigilance. What we aren’t warned about is a more unfortunate condition still: the embarrassing tendency to drone on in public about events which nine out of every ten hearers are too young to have heard of, let alone to remember.

Sir Harold Nicolson, diarist and George V’s biographer, amazed his readers in 1948 -- upon turning 60 -- by announcing that he was old enough to have seen Tsar Nicholas II, “surrounded by his bodyguard of enormous Cossacks, blessing the [River] Neva.” Similarly, I find myself more and more acquiring a mythic antiquity in young people’s eyes, for no better cause than that I have vivid memories of Nixon’s resignation speech and the Berlin Wall’s collapse. These memories, in turn, set me to thinking about my own undergraduate life, which, unfortunately, is best described in the words by which British poet Philip Larkin summed up his own youth: “a forgotten boredom.”

I should love to possess a Damascene conversion in my résumé, the way David Horowitz metamorphosed from Ramparts head-kicker to shrill neocon without the slightest hint of incongruity, let alone of anything so vulgar as contrition. Sorry, no dice.

Like almost everyone else whom I knew as a Sydney University student – this being the early 1980s -- I was singularly apolitical, having only a generalized aversion to Communism and to Reagan alike. Although I harbored a vague longing for Gough Whitlam’s 1972-1975 Prime Ministry of Australia, I would not have lifted a finger to give Whitlam his old job back.

No great causes convulsed Sydney’s student life. Vietnam was history; few saw portents in Afghanistan; and any non-Communist’s defense of East Timorese rights against Indonesian genocide would have been howled down as “racist,” even if details of this genocide had been generally available then, which they were not. A few hard-core Marxists did float around student groups, but they were likelier to be represented among faculty members than among kids. Even Marxists (generally Eurocommunists – remember Eurocommunists? – rather than Stalinists or Trots) clung to some intellectual standards. They never condoned plagiarism, four-letter words, beating opponents up, or more than the bare minimum of staff-student fornication. The occasional feminist crone could be avoided without too much trouble, outside such obvious madhouses as Film Studies.

All of which proved a pity from a vocational standpoint. After all, the poacher-turned-gamekeeper will always seem much more hip than the gamekeeper who has been a tedious old gamekeeper since the year dot.

Now we have established that as a Radical Son I was a non-starter, the question remains: Why was I a non-starter? Physical courage? That’s a joke if ever I heard one. Moral courage? My amount of that would scarcely have filled a teaspoon. Distaste for being In With The In Crowd? I would have no objection to such a destiny had it involved anything that intellectually interested me.

Only the other day, like Buddha sitting under his bo-tree, I suddenly received Enlightenment. Well, as much like Buddha sitting under his bo-tree as is compatible with wearing a business shirt, a neat pair of trousers, and formal shoes, while checking one’s E-mails.

The reason I could never cut it as a youthful Marxist was so plain, it had never occurred to me before. It amounted to this. Most revolutionaries, and in particular most Marxists -- Trotsky is a rare exception -- are atrocious writers. And even at my dopiest I always valued the ability to write above every other skill, except the ability to read. 

If Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Sartre, the wretched Hungarian sex-ed pioneer Georg Lukács, the insufferably pompous twelve-tone-music apologist T. W. Adorno, and the rest of that base crew (with not a skerrick of genuine financial suffering among them) had been half as readable as G. K. Chesterton, or P. G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, I might have been tempted to man the barricades. As it was, whenever I encountered the occasional conclave of true Leninist believers splitting hairs with one another in public about Marxian arcana (“Ah, but comrade, you can’t reconcile that with the Labor Theory of Value!” “Where’s the evidence that you’ve read Bukharin’s critique of Hegelian dialectic, man?”), I would simply bury my nose afresh in Orthodoxy, Scoop, or The Inimitable Jeeves.

And in Orwell, of course. Before reading Orwell I had already worked out (not that it needed more than an IQ of about 30 to do so) that there must be some linkage between linguistic corruption and moral corruption; but it took Orwell -- more especially his great essay “Politics and the English Language” -- to explain it. Having read that, I was pretty much proof against anything that Comrade X and Central Committee Member Y could threaten me with. I did not, therefore, choose freedom; if anything, freedom chose me.

To give concrete instances. Here is one of the best-known passages in “Politics and the English Language”:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. ... Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Here, per contra, is a representative passage from Lukács’s 1923 treatise History and Class Consciousness, which -- pity help us all -- is considered to be the clearest exposition of its author’s Marxian doctrine:

But in the case of the proletariat such a consciousness not only has to overcome these internal (bourgeois) contradictions, but it also conflicts with the course of action to which the economic situation necessarily commits the proletariat (regardless of its own thoughts on the subject). The proletariat must act in a proletarian manner, but its own vulgar Marxist theory blocks its vision of the right course to adopt. The dialectical contradiction between necessary proletarian action and vulgar Marxist (bourgeois) theory becomes more and more acute. As the decisive battle in the class struggle approaches, the power of a true or false theory to accelerate or retard progress grows in proportion. The ‘realm of freedom’, the end of the ‘pre-history of mankind’ means precisely that the power of the objectified, reified relations between men begins to revert to man. The closer this process comes to its goal the more urgent it becomes for the proletariat to understand its own historical mission and the more vigorously and directly proletarian class consciousness will determine each of its actions. For the blind power of the forces at work will only advance ‘automatically’ to their goal of self-annihilation as long as that goal is not within reach. ...

Well, which will you want to peruse?

I shan’t pretend that everything in the need to fight totalitarianism can -- or ever could -- be reduced to purely stylistic factors. All I offer is a variation of what Waugh (in particularly impatient mood) observed of intellectual fraud in general: “It is a matter for thankfulness that the modern … critics are unable or unwilling to compose a pleasurable sentence. It greatly limits the harm they do.”

The Liberalization of Libertarianism

In the aftermath of the Rand Paul civil rights controversy a surprising number of self-identified libertarians have endorsed state-restrictions on freedom of association. In essence, the argument is that historical and contextual circumstances can warrant the broadening of anti-discrimination laws to the private sector. This  is not just  a trivial exception to the general libertarian support of strong property rights but also to the view that the *withholding of a benefit* should not be treated as a harm and punished by the state. As a matter of fact, it seems to be an argument that past “crimes against humanity”  and “group rights” should trump peaceful individual choice.

Libertarians who advocate such restrictions on the freedom of association have argued that libertarianism should not be treated as an a-historical set of dogma’s. That is not an unreasonable argument but it is interesting to note that such claims are made by the same people who display a similar kind of dogmatism on the issue of open borders. It appears that dogmatism is more objectionable when it leads to politically incorrect conclusions.

Perhaps a more plausible explanation for the recent eagerness to embrace  elements of modern liberalism is that libertarianism has become too popular to concern itself with controversial views. There are now many self-identified libertarians who wake up in the morning and go to work advocating smaller government and public policy changes. Some of them even run for office. The current transformation of libertarianism is similar to what happened to classical liberalism in Europe. We are inclined to think that ideology shapes politics but we should not ignore the fact that politics shapes ideology as well. What is urgently needed is a “public choice of political ideology.”

It is also interesting to note that small government libertarians are more vulnerable to the racism charge than anarchists. I am not aware of any claims that anarchists are “racist” because they advocate abolishing all laws, which necessarily will also include laws against racial discrimination. This feature of anarchism might explain why socialist anarchism is all but dead though. After all, it is hard to imagine how a stateless society will produce radical egalitarianism across the globe.

The libertarian critics of Rand Paul are correct that libertarianism should not be conceived as a sterile rationalist ideology. If there is any chance for libertarianism to survive it should be conceived as a form of rational choice firmly rooted in empirical reality. But it does not seem that these are the changes that the reformers of libertarianism have in mind. If Ben O’ Neill’s Independent Review article “The Antidiscrimination Paradigm: Irrational, Unjust, and Tyrannical” is any indication, the practice of discrimination can be reconciled with rational individual decision making.

Rand and Race

The news of Rand Paul's big primary win (in a randslide) was certainly positive, tempered by his unclear foreign policy message. Now that he finds himself in the general election, the media is starting to ask questions about his views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Politico reports on his waffling on the CRA:

Moving from the Republican Primary to the general election means, for Rand Paul, addressing a broader set of issues than the anti-tax, anti-spending focus of his campaign.

And while he's answered this question before, I'm not sure he's going to be able to get away with an evasive response to a question today on whether he would have voted for the Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in public places and in the workplace.

Paul has suggested in the past -- and been attacked for suggesting -- that the federal government has no place regulating private business decisions, even on issues like race and accomodations for the disabled, and was pressed on the question -- three times -- on NPR just now:

"What I've always said is, I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would have -- if I was alive at the time, I think -- had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, ad I see no place in our soc for institutional racism," he said in response to a first question about the act.

"You woul have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater?" asked an interviewer.

"I think it's confusing in a lot of cases in what's actually in the Civil Rights Case (sic)," Paul replied. "A lot of things that were actually in the bill I'm actually in favor of I'm in favor of -- everything with regards to ending institutional racism. So I think there's a lot to be desired in the Civil Rights -- and indeed the truth is, I haven't read all through it, because it was passed 40 years ago and hadn't been a real pressing issue on the campaign on whether I'm going to vote for the Civil Rights Act."

Paul explains his position further on the CRA at the one hour mark of this video interview with the editors of the Louisville Courier-Journal. He says he supports the parts of the bill that fought discrimination in the public arena and on public property, but disagrees with telling private business owners what to do. He then goes on a bit of a rant about his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr., and explains how he gets emotional when watching his speeches.

I have no doubt we will begin to see the media paint Paul as a racist, just as they attempted to do to his father. But the reality is that Rand , despite his positives as a candidate, is riven with many of the modern multi-culti pathologies that infect political discourse. Absent from his views on the CRA is any bit of understanding about the major cultural upheaval that resulted from the Act, and absent from his views on MLK is an understanding of the racial redistribution of wealth King advocated. Instead Paul tries to paint him as some anti-government crusader. In the end, I have no doubt that Rand is telling the truth about his views on the CRA; that it merely clashes with his ideological views on private ownership.

At any rate, Rand's clash with the media on the CRA is a healthy reminder of how hard it will be for a real alt-right candidate to infiltrate the PC state.

Is Rand Paul a GOP Mole?

The title to this piece is a joke, of course, and I am glad that Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican primary. I would have voted for him if I lived in the Blue Grass state. Paul's victory is also indicative of the power of the Tea Party movement, which originated with his father's 2008 presidential campaign but has taken on a life of its own. 

This said, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Rand secured victory, in part, by earning the endorsement of Sarah Palin, as well as that of RedState.com's terror warrior Eric Erickson. Maybe those two know something we don't? In his major TV spots, Rand promised not to close Gitmo, stated (albeit vaguely) that "fighting back" was the proper response to 9/11, and flashed a lot of images of Military-Industrial-Complex fighter planes soaring through the sky. Though I thought this kind of stuff was on the wane, the GWOT, "standing tall against Islam," and even Christian Zionism still remain integral parts of the identity politics of Red-State Christian white people. If he wins the general, Rand won't be riding into Washington on a wave of antiwar sentiment, and it's likely that many of his voters would feel surprised, if not betrayed, if there's a major Senate debate on attacking Iran, and Rand comes out staunchly against.    

Unfortunately, Peter Schiff, who's running for Senate in Connecticut, isn't faring as well as Rand (though interestingly, polls reveal that he'd do much better in a general election, in which he could draw on independents, than in a Republican primary.) Filled with rich SWPL liberals and blue-collar union types, Connecticut lacks a real Red State base, as well as a Ron Paul/Goldwater-ite constituency, which is mostly focused in the South West. In the face of this, Peter should be given kudos for running as exactly the man that he is -- an anti-Washington libertarian who wants to drastically shrink government, end the Federal Reserve, and promote capitalism. There are few people who run for office who actually don't want to manage and control the lives of their constituents. Peter is one.    

As many know, I think it's much more likely that the United States government will hyperinflate its currency and collapse than the Ron Paul movement and/or Tea Party will reform the GOP and reinstitute "limited government." Politics is a distraction for us, and nothing I've seen over the past year has done much to change my mind.  

Elena Kagan: Professor "Hate Crime"

Elena Kagan became Dean of Harvard Law School without issuing much of a paper trail. She has, however, written extensively on the subject of "hate speech." Take these passages, for instance, from her 1993 article in the Chicago Law Review, "The Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography after R.A.V." (Vol. 60, number 3/4, summer - autumn 1993).

Here's her argument boiled down to its essence: Kagan supports the idea of banning speech she doesn't like (particularly if it "perpetuates and promotes [racial and gender] inequality"); however, she realizes that if you do this, it makes you look like you some 1st Amendment-disrespecting tyrannt ("viewpoint discrimination"). She thus suggests labeling speech she doesn't like as "harmful," "fighting words," or as not a "contribution to social deliberation" in order to help usher in a more equitable society through government censorship.

How long before the Feds go after AltRight?

This Essay on the regulation of hate speech and pornography addresses both practicalities and principles. I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation. [...]

The question I pose is whether there are ways to achieve at least some of the goals of the anti-pornography and anti-hate speech movements without encroaching on valuable and ever more firmly settled First Amendment principles. [...]

In R.A.V., the Court struck down a local ordinance construed to prohibit those fighting words, but only those fighting words, based on race, color, creed, religion, or gender.2 Fighting words long have been considered unprotected expression-so valueless and so harmful that government may prohibit them entirely with- out abridging the First Amendment.3 Why, then, was the ordi- nance before the Court constitutionally invalid? The majority rea- soned that the ordinance's fatal flaw lay in its incorporation of a kind of content-based distinction. The ordinance, on its very face, distinguished among fighting words on the basis of their subject matter: only fighting words concerning "race, color, creed, religion or gender" were forbidden.4 More, and much more nefariously in the Court's view, the ordinance in practice discriminated between different viewpoints: it effectively prohibited racist and sexist fighting words, while allowing all others.5 Antipathy to such view- point distinctions, the Court stated, lies at the heart of the guaran- tee of freedom of expression. "The government may not regulate [speech] based on hostility-or favoritism-towards the underlying message expressed"; it may not suppress or handicap "particular ideas. [...]

Those who have criticized the courts for using the viewpoint neutrality principle against efforts to regulate pornography or hate speech usually have offered one of two arguments. First, some have claimed that such efforts comport with the norm of viewpoint neu- trality because they are based on the harm the speech causes, rather than the viewpoint it espouses.17 Second, and more dramati- cally, some have challenged the norm itself as incoherent, worth- less, or dangerous.l8 Both lines of argument have enriched discus- sion of the viewpoint neutrality principle, by challenging the tendency of such discussion to do nothing more than apotheosize. Yet both approaches, in somewhat different ways, slight the rea- sons and values underlying current First Amendment doc- trine-including the decisions in R.A.V. and Hudnut. The claim that pornography and hate-speech regulation is harm-based, rather than viewpoint-based, has an initial appeal, but turns out to raise many hard questions. The claim appeals pre- cisely because it reflects an understanding of the value of a viewpoint neutrality norm and a desire to maintain it: if pornography and hate-speech regulation is harm-based, then we can have both it and a rule against viewpoint discrimination. [...]

The four approaches are, in order: (1) the enactment of new, or the stricter use of existing, bans on conduct; (2) the enactment of certain kinds of viewpoint-neutral speech restrictions; (3) the enhanced use of the constitutionally unprotected category of obscenity; and (4) the creation of carefully supported and limited exceptions to the general rule against viewpoint discrimination. [...]

In accord with this reasoning, communities should be able not only to impose enhanced criminal sanctions on the perpetrators of hate crimes, but also to provide special tort-based or other civil remedies for their victims. [...] Civil actions involve fewer procedural safeguards for the defendant, including a much reduced standard of proof; as important, they may give greater control to the victim of the unlawful conduct than a criminal prosecution ever can do. Communities therefore should consider not merely the enactment of hate crimes laws, but also the provision of some kind of "hate torts" remedies. [...]

But even if this distinction holds, the hard question remains: should the Court accept pornography or hate speech as a low-value category of expression? The currently recognized categories of low value speech seem to share the trait, as Cass Sunstein writes, that they are neither "intended [nor] received as a contribution to social deliberation about some issue." That definition offers several lessons for any regulation, concededly based on viewpoint, either of hate speech or of pornography. In the case of hate speech, such an ordinance should be limited to racist epithets and other harassment: speech that may not count as "speech" because it does not contribute to deliberation and discussion. [...]

I have suggested in this Essay that the regulatory efforts that will achieve the most, given settled law, will be the efforts that may appear, at first glance, to promise the least. They will be directed at conduct, rather than speech. They will be efforts using viewpoint-neutral classifications. They will be efforts taking advantage of the long-established unprotected category of obscenity. Such efforts will not eradicate all pornography or all hate speech from our society, but they can achieve much worth achieving. They, and other new solutions, ought to be debated and tested in a continuing and multi-faceted effort to enhance the rights of minorities and women, while also respecting core principles of the First Amendment.

The Original Social Justice

In his introduction to an edition of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

What proximate test of excellence can be found except correspondence with the actual equilibrium of force in the community -- that is, conformity to the wishes of the dominant power? Of course, such conformity may lead to destruction, and it is desirable that the dominant power should be wise. But wise or not, the proximate test of a good government is that the dominant power has its way.

Whether this passage is notorious or reassuring depends entirely on the perspective of the reader. By no coincidence, the “dominant power” at the time of its writing, 1900, was also the class from which Oliver Wendell Holmes sprung, the Eastern Anglo-Saxon Protestant Establishment.

Contemporary conservatives might have expressed outrage at Sonia Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” comments during her confirmation hearing, but her vague, sentimental promise of social uplift is patently less activist than Holmes’s full-throated call for WASP justice. Not even Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be so bold as to declare that opinions should be assessed on the degree to which they conform to “the necessities of the times, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy...even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men.”

As Holmes acknowledges, ruling classes can be foolish and (self-)destructive. And though there isn't room here to diagnose the cause of WASP dissolution, the truth of it was laid bare today with Barack Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Assuming Kagan’s confirmation, the bastion of the prejudices and aspirations of the American ruling class will be composed of six Catholics*, three Jews, and precisely zero white Protestants.

Perhaps Kagan’s Jewishness isn’t as remarkable as her Kagan-ness. The fact that the former dean of Harvard Law School shares the same surname as the doyen of neoconservaitve foreign policy and architect of the “surge” strategy reveals an extended clan that rivals in power any Anglo family of the past. Elena even eerily looks a lot like Robert.

Conservatives and the Tea Partiers will, no doubt, criticize Kagan on the basis of her opinions on the Constitution and scope of government. They should learn from Oliver Wendell Holmes that when it comes to power, Who? is a far more important question than How much?

Notes:

*The postwar intellectual Right has been peculiarly Roman Catholic in make up, as have been the movement-backed Republican appointments of justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito. It’s safe to say that the Founding Fathers would have been as bewildered by the presence on the court of six Roman Catholics as three Jews.