by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

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When John McCain needed an appealing running-mate who could charm independents while reassuring non-neo conservatives, he looked far beyond the swamp on the Potomac. He looked as far afield as was possible on the North American continent — to Alaska governor Sarah Palin, 44 years old, mother of five, antiabortion, and pro-moose hunting. This was going outside the Beltway in more than just the geographic sense. Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan in 1996, and earlier this year she had kind words for Ron Paul. "He’s a good guy," she told MTV News, "He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, u2018Right on, so am I.’" Or so she was.

Whatever independence from the Republican machine Governor Palin may once have had ended as soon as she accepted John McCain’s offer. That should have been obvious to all during her announcement speech on Friday, in which, in true McCain style, she whipped up a crowd of howling patrioteers with talk of 9/11, Iraq, and the surly Russian bear, while simultaneously pandering to feminists by promising to smash a glass ceiling. We’ll be hearing a lot more of the same in weeks to come.

Some limited-government conservatives (no, really — there are a handful) and even a few libertarians have let their hopes and their hormones do their thinking for them. One of my friends believes that deep down Palin must — simply must — be a Buchananite; she definitely cannot be a neocon. But where’s the evidence? She’s antiabortion, and Buchanan in 1996 was the standard-bearer of the antiabortion conservatives. Her support for him then tells us nothing about where she stands on other Buchananite issues (such as immigration), and her words since joining the McCain ticket make plain where she stands on matters of war and foreign policy — her pumps are planted firmly next to McCain, the man who wants to "bomb bomb bomb" Iran, keep troops in Iraq beyond any of our lifetimes, and bait Russia into a new cold war. As for Ron Paul, he will not even endorse McCain. If Palin felt any degree of sympathy with the Ron Paul revolution, she would not be working to elect the man who is the antithesis of almost everything Dr. Paul believes in.

Yet suppose Palin really were a deep-cover crypto-paleo and that, given the chance, she would govern differently than the man at the top of her ticket. What are the odds that she would ever have that opportunity? After four years on the inside of the McCain administration, Palin will not be identified with "reform." She won’t be a fresh face anymore. She’ll have had four years of constant pressure from within the administration to conform to McCain and the neocons. And if she someone managed not to lose her soul — an Olympiad in the Beltway, especially in the executive branch, takes a toll on anyone’s character — what prospect would she have of succeeding McCain? None, because she will be tainted in public eye by the wars and crimes of the McCain administration.

Don’t count on McCain being a one-termer, by the way, regardless of his age. This is a man who for decades has dreamed of nothing else but being president. Why would he step aside after just four years? The last man to do that (after five years, actually) was Lyndon Johnson, who faced certain defeat if he had run again. Before him, Calvin Coolidge was the last president not to seek a second term. McCain is no Coolidge.

Palin, on the other hand, is reminiscent of somebody else. Another attractive, inexperienced but politically untainted newcomer who excited his party’s base and seemed to represent something other than politics as usual — post-partisanship, if you will — to independent voters, or at least to the hype-minded press. Traditional conservatives are ga-ga for Palin for much the same reasons that antiwar liberals thought they were in love with Barack Obama. The affair will end the same way: sincere Leftists discovered that Obama isn’t really antiwar at all (though next to McCain, he looks like Gandhi) and independents are finding out that he’s not so different from any other liberal Democrat. Palin is not a new kind of Republican. She’s a McCain Republican — the number 2 McCain Republican in the country.

Yes, she’s anti-abortion. But McCain is anti-abortion, too. She supports the 2nd Amendment, on Republican terms at least. But so does McCain. Both of them rail against earmarks, which — like the tax-reform frauds of yesteryear — is a ploy to distract antistatists from what ought to be their goals: slashing taxes (not just restructuring them) and gutting federal spending (not just taking the power to allocate the money away from Congress and handing it to the president). Does anyone want to guess where Palin will come down on FISA and the Patriot Act? Palin puts a prettier face on the same old, tired Bush-McCain agenda. This is not a new kind of politics.

But then, politics is never new — it is always organized expropriation justified with a nimbus of sanctimony. Save the children! The poor! Africans! Poor African Children! In practice, of course, it always means taking money out of your pocket to bomb somebody in a faraway country that has never posed a threat to you.

The one novelty to the Palin phenomenon is this: she takes the American Idolization of politics to a new level. We may become the first empire in history to select our rulers in a literal beauty contest. From Miss Wasilla 1984 to Miss America today — and Miss World tomorrow. Vote for the sexiest emperor or empress.

Well, if you must vote, other things being equal, cast your ballot for the most repellent politician available. Let’s have more stumpy, squinty, sausage-fingered Denny Hasterts and Bella Abzugs. Inner beauty and outer beauty don’t always accord, but let’s do our best to see to it that they do in politics. There shouldn’t be anything glamorous about the class that inflates away our currency and stirs up hornets’ nests around the world. It probably is no coincidence that the more presentable our blow-dried pols have become the more complacent the public has grown.

Which is why Sarah Palin may actually be worse than her superannuated running-mate. No one has shown any substantial policy differences between the two of them. But whereas McCain is cranky, stale, and cadaverous, Palin puts a sweet seductive smile on executive aggrandizement and perpetual war. She’s a spoonful of sugar to mask the bitter taste of strychnine. But, make no mistake, that’s what a John McCain presidency will be — lethal poison for what’s left of our republic.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is associate editor of The American Conservative and former Internet Communications Coordinator for Ron Paul 2008. His blog is the Tory Anarchist.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

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A friend of mine who is involved in youth politics asked me to put together a curriculum for Ron Paul libertarians, a four-year course of study that will take students from the basics of free-market economics and the Constitution into the deeper waters where theory, history, and policy meet. Here’s the tentative curriculum I’ve come up with:

Year 1

• Ron Paul — The Revolution: A Manifesto
• Barry Goldwater — The Conscience of a Conservative
• Tom Paine — “Common Sense,” “The Crisis”
• The Federalist (selections)
• The Anti-Federalist Papers (selections)
• The Constitution of the United States of America
• Douglas Hyde — Dedication and Leadership
• Henry Hazlitt — Economics in One Lesson
• Murray Rothbard — What Has Government Done to Our Money?

I’m fairly confident in this first-year syllabus. Arguably I ought to add Thomas Woods’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Kevin R.C. Gutzman’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, but I wanted to restrict myself mostly to primary sources. The Federalist, Anti-Federalist, and Paine selections, plus the Constitution itself, will give students a basic feel for what was at stake in the Revolutionary War and the struggle over ratification. Hazlitt’s book is a terrific economic primer. Hyde’s very short book is an activist’s handbook. The Paul and Goldwater books both establish the essential character of the movement. And Rothbard’s brief book is a good introduction to Dr. Paul’s thinking on monetary policy.

This isn’t as much reading as it might look like, since most of these texts aren’t long.

Year 2

• Faustino Ballv — Essentials of Economics
• Frdric Bastiat — The Law
• Israel Kirzner — Ludwig von Mises
• Andrew Bacevich — American Empire
• Ron Paul — A Foreign Policy of Freedom
• Justin Raimondo — Reclaiming the American Right

The Law is basic enough that it could be included in Year 1, but I actually think it’s better to have some grounding in economics before reading The Law. The Ballv and Kirzner books will serve as the student’s introduction to specifically Austrian economics. Bacevich’s book is still, to my mind, the best general introduction to what’s wrong with American foreign policy that’s on the market. And since Bacevich is a conservative Catholic and former Army colonel, it’s not easy to dismiss him as an anti-American leftist. His book provides scholarly support for the views expressed in Ron Paul’s collection. Justin Raimondo’s book, meanwhile, ties things together, showing how the Right was drawn into supporting an interventionist foreign policy and the beginnings of the Old Right’s comeback in the early 1990s.

Year 3

• Friedrich Hayek — The Road to Serfdom
• Murray Rothbard — America’s Great Depression
• Albert Jay Nock — Our Enemy, the State
• Chalmers Johnson — Blowback
• Ludwig von Mises — Liberalism

Now we’re getting into deceptively deep waters. Hayek and Rothbard make a good unit, since both show the relationship of economic crisis and the growth of state power. Rothbard’s book provides answers to the usual Keynesian and left-liberal arguments that we need the Federal Reserve to stave off another depression, while Hayek spells out where state economic interventionism leads. Liberalism is a relatively easy-going introduction to Mises and sets out the positive case for classical liberalism. Johnson’s Blowback picks up the foreign-policy thread from the last year’s syllabus, showing how foreign-policy interventionism gives rise to terrorism, or “blowback” in the CIA’s term. Nock’s short but deceptively dense book presents a general case against state action. On reflection, this course fits together better than I originally thought it did.

Year 4

• Murray Rothbard — Man, Economy, and State
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe — Democracy: The God That Failed
• Michael Scheuer — Imperial Hubris
• Robert Pape — Dying to Win

Now we’re into some very long texts. I originally had Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action listed in place of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, but I decided that the latter would be somewhat easier going on the students, and it’s a fine summation of Austrian economics in its own right. Hoppe’s book builds upon Rothbard and applies his thoughts to controversial policy questions such as immigration. Scheuer and Pape complete the student’s basic training in foreign policy, presenting some hard realities about war, nation-building, occupation, and terrorism.

I welcome everyone’s feedback on this list. As I say, it’s a rough draft, and I’d like to fine-tune it. There are many other libertarian and conservative books that I’d like to include, but these seem like the best fit for what my friend has in mind. I may have overlooked something important, however, so feel free to make other suggestions.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is associate editor of The American Conservative and former Internet Communications Coordinator for Ron Paul 2008. His blog is the Tory Anarchist.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

Historian of the conservative movement George H. Nash probably did not intend his remarks at the Heritage Foundation on June 17 to underscore the Right’s flight from its libertarian origins, but what he had to say nonetheless made that point. A Hoover Institution resident scholar and biographer of Herbert Hoover himself, Nash is still best known for his seminal 1976 work The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the first full-bore historical survey of the postwar Right in its more theoretical modes. Before Nash, historians of the Right either looked for signs of psychopathology and sociological maladjustment in their subject or else — or as well — focused on conservatism as a political phenomenon rather than as a body of thought.

Twenty years after The Conservative Intellectual Movement first saw print, Nash revised the work to take into account developments which, truth be told, go a long way toward rendering the old narrative obsolete — the emergence of neoconservatives and the populist New Right, including the Religious Right, in the 1970s and ’80s. In the decade since the second edition of The Conservative Intellectual Movement, it has become more obvious that the Right has not simply acquired two new components in addition to its old coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Communists. Instead, the new constituents represent a largely distinct movement in their own right, one that has displaced the old conservatism as surely as a new kind of liberalism displaced an older kind early in the last century.

Nash may not see it that way; his talk, entitled "The Uneasy Future of American Conservatism," centered on the perils of movement success and temptation to sectarianism. A genteel scholar, his remarks had an occasional touch of irony to them without indulging in any overt polemics. Conservatism, said Nash, finds itself "middle-aged and feeling prosperous" but haunted by a "note of unease." Its political successes have gone unmatched by "changes in the way we live." So some have begun to ask, "Is the sun about to set on the conservative empire?"

Before answering that, Nash outlined what is now the official narrative of the conservative movement, as told definitively in his book. "American conservatism is not, and never has been, univocal," he said. It began with the libertarian individualists of the late ’40s, particularly émigré economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek and, at a more popular level, novelist Ayn Rand. The first chapter of Nash’s book is called "The Revolt of the Libertarians." At Heritage he called them "the first of the dissidents."

"Concurrently and independently" there arose the traditionalists (at the time, they were called the New Conservatives), men like Russell Kirk who were "appalled by totalitarianism and total war" as well as by the rise of mass culture and New Deal liberalism. Filling out the ranks of postwar intellectual conservatism was a third group, the anti-Communists, including many ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers and early National Review editors Frank Meyer and James Burnham. (As well as National Review’s long-forgotten co-founder, Willi Schlamm.)

Nash’s book is the story of how these three disparate groups came together and the arguments that threatened to tear them apart — and did tear them apart, in the end. The conservative intellectual movement was only ever a loose coalition, with few institutions behind it, and its main currents did indeed flow in different directions. But from 1945 to the early ’60s, a modus vivendi, if not a philosophical consensus, prevailed. Anti-Communism predominated — it was the ideology of National Review, the movement’s main organ — and what came to be called "fusionism," a balance of libertarianism and traditionalism that ultimately satisfied neither libertarians nor traditionalists, went some way toward bridging the factions — for a time. The last chapters of Nash’s book in its original form looked at the state of the intellectual movement by the late 1960s and early 1970s. They bore the ominous titles "Things Fall Apart" and "Can the Vital Center Hold?"

It was around that time that the neoconservatives first appeared on the Right — too late for Nash to deal with them at any great length in his book. He gave them and their significance rather cursory treatment in his Heritage talk as well, summarizing with Irving Kristol’s remark that neoconservatives were liberals who had been mugged by reality. The Religious Right, which came along later still (and is discussed briefly in the epilogue to the 1996 edition of The Conservative Intellectual Movement) also received fleeting mention. Both sorts of newcomer have been sources of tension for the Right. "An angry group of traditionalists," said Nash, who is evidently not fond of them, finds the neoconservatives "secular, Wilsonian internationalist, and welfare statist," while other parts of the movement criticize the Religious Right as "insufficiently anti-statist." Nash acknowledged that there has indeed been a decline of anti-statism on the Right: "I think that the anti-statist impulse is not as strong as it was 25 years ago," he said.

But Nash doesn’t see that as the chief source of the "unease" cited in the title of his talk. Early on, the Right considered itself as a Remnant (a metaphor borrowed by libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock from the Prophet Isaiah). Now, said Nash, there’s a "conservative conglomerate," yet "even as conservatives escaped the wilderness for the promised land inside the Beltway" the culture has taken a turn away from what conservatives desire. Moreover, political and institutional success has brought its own discontents as well: professional specialization, "the emergence of niche markets," "attenuation of movement consciousness" — all things that erode a sense of unity. There is now "no gatekeeper, as National Review was in its early days," no "commanding ecumenical figure" like William F. Buckley. Conservatives have come to be categorized into ever smaller sub-groups: neocons, theocons (which Nash simply called religious conservatives; primarily, they are the First Things coterie), Leocons (i.e., Straussians), Crunchy Cons, and even "minicons" (which Nash defined as conservatives under the age of 25. There seems to be some confusion over this term — others have used the term to denote not young conservatives but second-generation neoconservatives and their peers.)

And that’s just the beginning of the right-wing sectarianism. Without communism to define itself against, the Right has sought other slogans and formulae around which to coalesce: a "leave us alone coalition" (Grover Norquist’s term), "big-government conservatism," "compassionate conservatism." But what has been most successful as "the functional equivalent of the Cold War," according to Nash, are other metaphors of war — particularly the Culture War. "The contest for our culture may be the great unanswered question," one that has given conservatives "a new sense of embattlement and identity."

Nash said that he sees little reason to think that the conservative movement, whatever its internal frictions, is going to collapse. "Each wing of the movement has become thoroughly institutionalized," and after listing a few institutions, he suggested, "these are not the manifestations of a dying conservative army." He concluded with an exhortation to his audience — some 130 interns, college students, and other young people — to eschew the temptation to fragment.

But fragmentation has already taken place, albeit not in the way that Nash had in mind. In his Heritage remarks, the historian pointed not to 9/11, 2001, but 11/9, 1989 as the pivotal date in conservative intellectual history since the first edition of his book. 11/9 was the day the Berlin Wall fell, and with it fell the anti-Communism that had staved off the fracturing of the conservative movement. Only it didn’t stave off the fracturing — for really the pivotal moment in recent (relatively speaking) conservative history was not in 1989 or 2001 but sometime in 1968 or 1969. The events of 1989 and 2001 did not spawn new factions on the Right; the paleoconservatives were not a new faction at all and had been dissenting from the official Right for years before the Berlin Wall came down. After 1989, anti-Communism may have been moot, but anti-Communists quickly found new enemies to substitute for the Russians, beginning (and still continuing) with Iraq. 9/11 changed the conservative movement even less.

By contrast, the Vietnam era and the rise of the New Left led directly to the splintering of the conservative intellectual movement that Nash described. Thoroughgoing libertarians like Murray Rothbard, who in the early ’60s could still find some limited common cause with the mainstream Right, looked to the New Left for more compatible allies. And at least one traditionalist text, Robert Nisbet’s Community and Power (otherwise known as The Quest For Community) found a readership among the young radicals and "became something of a cult book for the New Left." But the greatest political realignment to come out of these years would only become apparent in retrospect: the revolt against the New Left gave birth both to neoconservatism and the Religious Right.

Two of the three elements of the conservative intellectual movement that Nash described in his book — the libertarians and traditionalists — had been shaped by their opposition not only to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt but also total war. Although traditionalists and libertarians are often seen as diametric opposites, in fact the two had in common (or at least, significant representatives of each side had in common) an antipathy to the modern welfare / warfare state. The anti-Communists, on the other hand, were by definition committed to the warfare state and could be found on any side of the question of domestic welfarism. Frank Meyer was relatively anti-statist in his domestic views; James Burnham, on the other hand, was a big-government Rockefeller Republican by inclination.

Anti-Communism dominated the institutional expression of the conservative movement in National Review, but on the margins there had been a bedrock of anti-statism among the leading traditionalists and, of course, the libertarians. The newer conservative movements that arose after the New Left, on the other hand, were not rebelling against militarism, as the traditionalists and libertarians had been, nor against the New Deal — they were cast instead in opposition to the culture of the New Left. (Certainly government policies, particularly those dictated by the Supreme Court — busing and nationally legalized abortion above all — were crucial in the rise of the ’70s—’80s New Right. But it seems to me the hatred of the New Left is too often underestimated as a motivation.) The neoconservatives had been Cold War liberals until the Vietnam era, when their disgust at the antiwar movement and black radicalism lead them to seek a united front with the Cold Warriors of the Right. The Religious Right is usually seen as a reaction against Roe v. Wade and Carter-era regulations of Christian schools and broadcasting. But one can see deeper cultural trends behind those particular spurs to mobilization which shaped the Religious Right psyche before the movement itself coalesced. Plainly enough, the Religious Right is at least in part a reaction against the free-love ethos and incipient paganism of the Vietnam-era Left.

Not only were the new right-wing movements not shaped primarily by opposition to government and war, but the movement they were reacting against was in fact the most libertarian and Jeffersonian manifestation of the Left in half a century or more. The New Left could be violent and antinomian. But it was also antiwar, "anti-American" (which included both anti-government and countercultural strains), and localist. Unsurprisingly, the backlash movements are pro-war and "pro-American" (in a nationalistic sense tending toward the identification of America and its government with all things right and true, including Christianity). By the end of the 1960s, the radical libertarians had already split off from the conservative movement, depleting it of much of its anti-statist character and leaving the militaristic anti-Communists more in control than ever. The addition of the actively statist neoconservatives and Christian Right to the rump of traditionalists and anti-Communists essentially reconstituted the movement.

A decade ago, Irving Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservatives, called attention to this reorientation in American conservatism. In an essay entitled "America’s u2018Exceptional Conservatism,’" he wrote, "it is fair to say that an antisocialist, anti-Communist, antistatist perspective dominated the thinking and politically active part of American conservatism from the end of World War II to the Goldwater campaign of 1964." But that changed, as Kristol explains:

What happened, I would say, were two things. First in time, though certainly not in order of political significance, was the emergence of an intellectual trend that later came to be called u2018neoconservatism.’ This current of thought, in which I was deeply involved, differed in one crucial respect from its conservative predecessors: Its chosen enemy was contemporary liberalism, not socialism or statism…. The second and most spectacular thing that happened was the emergence of religious conservatives, especially Protestant evangelical conservatives, as a force to be reckoned with. … And it is important to emphasize that, insofar as they are antistatist, as most are, it is not only on economic grounds, or even on Jeffersonian-individualist grounds. These religious conservatives see, quite clearly and correctly, that statism in America is organically linked with secular liberalism — that many of the programs and activities of the welfare state have a powerful antireligious animus.

What little anti-statism the Religious Right had was purely adventitious, a product of the Leftist cultural character of government intervention in the ’60s and ’70s. It did not spring from principle. George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives have since eroded that marginal anti-statism further: a pro-Christian welfare state, even beyond restrictions on abortion and homosexuality, is perfectly unobjectionable to many on the Religious Right. A representative institution, the Family Research Council, demands the prohibition of flag-burning, bans on internet gambling, and the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars on, mirabile dictu, sex ed — Christian conservatives used to be against sex ed, but when it’s called "abstinence education" they now see their way clear to supporting it.

(Just how ridiculous this can be is illustrated by FRC telling its activists to thank Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for allocating $1 million for abstinence education, even though the FRC press release notes, "the funding would not replace comprehensive sex education but compliment it." In other words, Massachusetts is going to spend an additional million to teach teens not to have sex after spending millions more teaching them how to have sex.)

There were, to be sure, always some people with an agenda like this within the earlier conservative coalition. But in the epilogue to the 1996 edition of The Conservative Intellectual Movement, Nash overstates the case when he writes, "in a very real sense the Religious Right of the 1980s and 1990s was closest in its concerns" to traditionalist conservatism, except that "whereas the traditionalists of the 1940s and 1950s had largely been academics in revolt against secularized mass society, the New Right was a revolt by the u2018masses’ against he secular virus and its aggressive carriers in the nation’s elites."

On the contrary, many of the old traditionalists of the ’40s and ’50s had more in common with the libertarians of their day, at least in the realm of basic attitudes toward the state, than they have with latter-day theocons and Christian conservatives. Robert Nisbet, one of the towering figures of the old traditionalism, let it be known exactly what he thought about the new Religious Right in his 1986 book, Conservatism: Dream and Reality:

Conservatives dislike government on our backs, and Reagan duly echoes this dislike, but he echoes more enthusiastically the Moral Majority’s crusade to put more government on our backs, i.e. a moral-inquisitorial government well-armed with constitutional amendments, laws and decrees. Moral Majoritarians do not like governmental power less because they cherish Christian morality more — a characteristic they share with those Revolution-supporting clerics in France and England to whom Burke gave the label "political theologians" and "theological politicians," not, obviously, liking either.

From the traditional conservative’s point of view, it is fatuous to use the family — as the evangelical crusaders regularly do — as the justification for their tireless crusades to ban abortion categorically, to bring the Department of Justice in on every Baby Doe, to mandate by constitution the imposition of u2018voluntary’ prayers in the public schools, and so on. … the surest way of weakening the family, or any vital social group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family’s historic functions.

Early traditionalists in fact had more in common with their individualist predecessors than is commonly realized. Far from emerging "concurrently and independently" of the libertarians, the most important traditionalist, Russell Kirk, actually came from a Jeffersonian Old Right background. Kirk opposed conscription, voted for Norman Thomas in 1944 on account of his anti-war credentials, and had early on been influenced by Albert Jay Nock — not only Nock’s cultural elitism but also his disdain for statism. As Nash writes in his book:

Kirk’s wartime letters showed the persistence of his libertarian convictions; his correspondence was replete with disgust at conscription, military inefficiency, governmental bureaucracy, u2018paternalism,’ and socialist economics. He denounced liberal u2018globaloney’ and feared that America was doomed to live in a collectivistic economy.

As the war came to a close, Kirk, anxious to return to civilian life, grew increasingly worried that the army, unnecessarily alarmed about Russia, would strive to perpetuate conscription. … [Eventually] he predicted, the New Dealers would deliberately create an enemy abroad; it could only be the Soviet Union.

Even after Kirk began to style himself a Bohemian Tory and turned away from Jefferson — denouncing libertarians as "chirping sectaries" — he maintained many of his old convictions, albeit with new justifications. He continued to oppose conscription.

A third great traditionalist of the early conservative movement, Richard Weaver, was the most explicitly anti-statist of all, defining the true conservative as something close to a libertarian:

I maintain that the conservative in his proper character and role is a defender of liberty. He is such because he takes his stand on the real order of things and because he has a very modest estimate of man’s ability to change that order through the coercive power of the state. He is prepared to tolerate diversity of life and opinion because he knows that not all things are of his making and that it is right within reason to let each follow the law of his own being.

Traditionalists like Weaver did not need a doctrine like "fusionism" to find common ground with the libertarians. (And in fact, as David Gordon has related, when Weaver overheard a discussion between fusionist Frank Meyer and libertarian George Resch over the morality of preventive nuclear war, Weaver agreed with Resch that it was unconscionable.) But times have changed. The traditionalists and libertarians shared a dislike of governmental, and particularly federal, power. The Religious Right and the neoconservatives share a love of active governmental power in the form of moral legislation at home (Irving Kristol once wrote a famous and elegant essay in favor of censorship) and aggression abroad (the Christian Right seems to be unwavering in its support not only for neoconservative wars like the one in Iraq, but even for intervention in places like Darfur; Religious Rightist Sen. Sam Brownback is a leading advocate for the latter).

Later this year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is publishing a new edition of Nash’s Conservative Intellectual Movement with an updated preface. It will be interesting to see how Nash deals with developments on the Right since the last edition ten years ago. But really the old, at least partially anti-statist conservative intellectual movement that endured from ’45 to roughly ’69 is gone. What now goes by the name of conservatism is a new authoritarian movement, whose history has not yet been written.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is literary editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here. His blog is ToryAnarchist.com.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

The ides of March don’t always bring bad news for Caesar. The Roman Gaius Julius might have been assassinated on that day in 44 B.C., but here in the United States some 1,800 years later another conquering general and paladin of executive power later accused of seeking to establish a "military monarchy" was born. And this year, somewhere in hell the shade of Andrew Jackson had more to celebrate more than just his birthday.

As Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard would have it, we are in the midst of a paleo moment — "paleo" as in paleoconservative, that is. Grassroots Republicans have taken to arms against the party’s leadership over illegal immigration, the Dubai ports deal, untrammeled federal spending, and the morass in Iraq. Barnes frets that this could cost the GOP dearly come November. Not that he thinks the Bush administration should amend its course; no, Barnes just fears that paleo-pessimism — "gloomy, negative, defeatist, isolationist, nativist, and protectionist" — will scare away all the Republican-voting Hispanics.

National Review’s Rich Lowry has his own feelings of unease. In the magazine’s March 27 issue he admonishes the fair-weather warmongers he calls "to hell with them" hawks, whose sin is a lack of faith in the prospect of making good democrats out of the Iraqi people or Muslims in general. Lowry calls them "to hell with them" hawks, but there’s a simpler, more elegant term for these Americans who favor an interventionist foreign policy but doubt the wisdom of Wilsonian crusades for democracy: for fifty years now, they’ve been plain-vanilla, no-prefix-needed conservatives.

They are also, as Lowry acknowledges, Jacksonians. This is not a paleo moment, it’s a new Age of Jackson. Citing Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Walter Russell Mead’s division of American foreign-policy thought into four schools — Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian — Lowry places the "to hell with them" hawks firmly in the Jacksonian camp. But he understates just how important this bloc is to the Bush coalition and the extent to which these are the same people who reject Bush’s immigration policies. Fred Barnes is right to be worried. Unfortunately, the rest of us have cause for alarm as well.

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World is the work in which Mead sets out the four strands of American thinking on war and diplomacy. It deserves to be as widely read as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and is a much better book than Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. But Mead’s volume doesn’t have as sexy a title as Huntington’s or Fukuyama’s — and it had the misfortune of being published in October 2001. With 80 percent of the public rallying to President Bush, the divisions examined by Mead might have seemed obsolete. In fact, as subsequent events have shown, Mead’s work was prescient, and his discussion of the Jacksonians accounts better for the course of the Iraq War in the court of public opinion than most later analyses do.

(Mead’s title, by the way, comes from a quip attributed to Bismarck: "God has special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America." For a more memorable hook, perhaps Mead should have called the book Fools, Drunks, and Americans.)

The Jacksonian American, as Mead describes him both in Special Providence and in his 1999 essay "The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy," fits the profile of the conservative Bush voter — and now Bush critic — to a proverbial tee. By their own lights, Jacksonians are populists (and "profoundly suspicious of elites," according to Mead); unselfconsciously patriotic or nationalistic; and deeply religious, with a tendency toward fundamentalism and its emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God. Country music is their quintessential cultural expression.

They admire self-sufficiency, but unlike Jeffersonian libertarians, Jacksonians are not averse to finding a positive role for government as long as it fights on the right side of the cultural divide. "Jacksonians believe that government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being — political, moral, economic — of the folk community," Mead writes. The military is part of that community: "When it comes to Big Government, Jeffersonians worry more about the military than about anything else. But for Jacksonians, spending money on the military is one of the best things governments do."

Moreover, "while Jeffersonians espouse a minimalist realism under which the United States seeks to define its interests as narrowly as possible and defend those interests with an absolute minimum of force, Jacksonians approach foreign policy in a very different spirit — one in which honor, concern for reputation, and faith in military institutions play a much greater role." This honor, Mead notes, "in the Jacksonian imagination is not simply what one feels oneself to be on the inside; it is also a question of the respect and dignity one commands in the world at large."

The trait that most sets Jacksonians apart is their attitude toward war. They are fierce, brave, and, all too often, bloodthirsty. As they see it, "Our diplomacy must be cunning, forceful and no more scrupulous than anybody else’s. At times, we must fight pre-emptive wars. [Mead wrote this in 1999.] There is absolutely nothing wrong with subverting foreign governments or assassinating foreign leaders whose bad intentions are clear. Thus, Jacksonians are more likely to tax political leaders with a failure to employ vigorous measures than to worry about the niceties of international law."

Jacksonians made Bush’s administration — providing both his hawkish national-security voters and his fundamentalist values-voters, as well as much of the country-music loving Republican base — and they can break it. Jacksonians helped turn out of office Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and arguably George H.W. Bush for failing to fight hard enough; in any conflict, Mead warns, "once engaged, politicians cannot safely end the war except on Jacksonian terms." John Moser of Ashland University reiterated the point two years ago — "Having been convinced that the occupation of Iraq was a necessary component of the War on Terror, [Jacksonians] will hold Bush accountable if they feel the war is not being fought in earnest." That’s just what they’re doing.

Jacksonians have little patience with the rules of war; to them, as Mead writes, "the use of limited force is deeply repugnant." Up to a point, their nationalistic zeal and military prowess are of great use to Wilsonians. But Jacksonians want total war — their heroes are men like Curtis LeMay and William Tecumseh Sherman, though the fact that so many Jacksonians are Southerners suppresses their enthusiasm for him somewhat.

Wilsonians fear that too much demonization of the enemy becomes a barrier to democratization. Thus Rich Lowry says of "the contention that Islam is a religion of peace" that "[e]ven if this seems a polite fiction, it is an important one." He upbraids Jacksonian conservatives for wanting "to write off reforming Islam." And if liberal democracy has yet to show any glimmer of taking hold in Middle East, well, "there are no shortcuts, or guarantees of victory."

But Jacksonians believe that there is a guarantee of defeat — failure to fight with all the of nation’s resources, as ruthlessly as necessary. Wilsonians like Lowry cite the post-World War II reconstruction of Germany and Japan as examples of successful nation-building, but the Jacksonians have a comeback to that: before Germany and Japan could be rebuilt, they had to be destroyed — Tokyo and Dresden firebombed, Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuked, hundreds of thousands of civilians incinerated. Mead describes their philosophy:

Jacksonian opinion takes a broad view of the permissible targets in war. Again reflecting a very old cultural heritage, Jacksonians believe that the enemy’s will to fight is a legitimate target of war, even if this involves American forces in attacks on civilian lives, establishments and property.

Probably as a result of frontier warfare, Jacksonian opinion came to believe that it was breaking the spirit of the enemy nation, rather than the fighting power of the enemy’s armies, that was the chief object of warfare. It was not enough to defeat a tribe in battle; one had to u2018pacify’ the tribe, to convince it utterly that resistance was and always would be futile and destructive. For this to happen, the war had to go to the enemy’s home. The villages had to be burned, food supplies destroyed, civilians had to be killed. From the tiniest child to the most revered of the elderly sages, everyone in the enemy nation had to understand that further armed resistance to the will of the American people — whatever that might be — was simply not an option.

The Wilsonian leadership of the conservative movement would rather not admit just how Jacksonian its grassroots really are. So Lowry says that "Sotto voce, conservatives have said among themselves of Islam, after some horrific terror attack, u2018This is a religion of peace?’ And a small group of vocal right-wing experts have knocked Bush for his u2018Islam is peace’ rhetoric from the beginning." On the contrary, there is nothing either sotto voce or small about conservative criticisms of Islam — at least at the popular level. Think of all the loyal readers of Ann Coulter and the anti-Muslim blogosphere.

Neoconservative pundits have sometimes asked paleoconservatives just how it was that supposed ex-Trotskyites came to hijack the Right. The answer is simply that ordinary Middle American conservatives are neither neo (Wilsonian) nor paleo (Jeffersonian or Adamsian), but Jacksonian. Since 9/11, they have found common cause with the Wilsonians in fighting real wars abroad and a different kind of "war on terror" — or a war on civil liberties, anyway — here at home.

But the Wilsonian-Jacksonian axis has always been wobbly. The "to hell with them" hawks have defied National Review before. A measure of their strength among the activists of the Right can be seen in the career of Ann Coulter, whose popularity with attendees at the conservative movement’s annual CPAC gathering has flourished. She’s a rare Jacksonian pundit: after 9/11, she called for unlimited warfare against Arab Muslims, demanding that the U.S. "should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war." NR anathematized her after that column and its follow-up. But the magazine that had earlier purged Old Right Jeffersonians like Murray Rothbard failed this time; at CPAC this year, Coulter’s Muslim-baiting remarks brought down the house. She, much more than Lowry, speaks for the movement’s rank-and-file.

The Dubai ports flap was another clear example of Jacksonian rebellion. National Review and neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer — the man who gave Rich Lowry his start in journalism — called for calm in the early stages of that teapot tempest. But the Republican Congress, sensitive to the Jacksonian disposition of its constituents, preferred hysteria — as evidence, see Rep. Sue Myrick’s astonishingly puerile letter to the president protesting the deal.

And immigration has long been a source of dissension between Hamiltonians and Wilsonians on the one hand — believers, respectively, that immigration should be a question of economic utility or a matter of ideological assent to democratic humbug — and Jacksonians on the other. The latter, as Mead describes them, "are … skeptical, on both cultural and economic grounds, of the benefits of immigration, which is seen as endangering the cohesion of the folk community and introducing new, low-wage competition for jobs." Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo — staunchly supportive of the 2nd Amendment, anti-immigration, pro-war, and prone to the occasional overheated remark that the U.S. might bomb Mecca — is a model Jacksonian.

The Jacksonian character begins with the Scots-Irish, including Jackson himself, whose family came from Ulster. But today one doesn’t need Scots-Irish blood to be a Jacksonian; the Scots-Irish ethos is highly assimilationist. James Webb, in Born Fighting, his history of the Scots-Irish, provides an illustration of this when he relates a suggestion he once made to a former member of the Irish Republican Army (the bracketed remarks are Webb’s own):

Half facetiously, I commented that perhaps [then prime minister] Maggie Thatcher could alleviate the problem in Hong Kong and help resolve the Troubles in Northern Ireland by allowing a hundred thousand Hong Kong Chinese to emigrate to Ulster.

He laughed, then grew deadly serious. u2018You’re wrong, you see, because you underestimate the power of the Celtic culture. We’d absorb them,’ he said. u2018Within ten years we’d have the IRA [Catholic-supporting] Chinese and the Orange [Protestant-supporting] Chinese.’

In matters of immigration and assimilation, Jacksonians differ from Jeffersonians as well as Hamiltonians and Wilsonians. Jeffersonians don’t necessarily want to assimilate anyone else — they tend to be believers in real cultural and geographic diversity, what Russell Kirk, an Adamsian, called "affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence" — but don’t want to be assimilated themselves, either. (Think of Jefferson, who took religious tolerance seriously, but who removed his daughter from a French convent school after she told him she was thinking of becoming a nun. He didn’t hate Catholics, but neither did he want his daughter becoming alienated from him by abandoning his beliefs — or non-beliefs — and joining the Catholic Church.) Something like the discrete patchwork cultures of Switzerland, rather than any sort of homogenized national melting pot, is the Jeffersonian ideal.

Jacksonians, on the other hand, are strong believers in a national culture and community. In the words of Anatol Lieven:

Like Jackson, the numerous descendants of this tradition have had a strong sense that this community is threatened by alien and savage u2018others.’ They have also had a sense that they constitute in some way the authentic American people, or folk; the backbone of the nation, possessing a form of what German nationalists called the gesunder Volkssinn (u2018healthy sense of belonging to the people’), embracing correct national forms of religion, social behavior and patriotism. With time, they have come to accept people first of different ethnicities, then of different races, as members of the American community — but only so long as they conform to American norms and become u2018part of the team.’

And what happens to the non-conformists and outsiders? "The freedom of aliens and deviants, who do not share the folk culture," Lieven writes, "can therefore legitimately be circumscribed by authoritarian and even savage means, as long as this is to defend the community and reflects the will of the sound members of the community." Andrew Jackson’s treatment of the Cherokee — setting in motion the "Trail of Tears" — is emblematic, all the more so because the Cherokee were civilized, Christianized Indians who sought recourse to the Supreme Court rather than taking to arms. But fine distinctions between "good" Indians and "bad" Indians didn’t interest Jackson or the Georgians who expelled the Cherokee from their homelands, in an act of what would today be called ethnic cleansing. (Many latter-day Jacksonians have just as much trouble distinguishing between different kinds of Muslims and Arabs — hence the conflation of Iraq with al-Qaeda and the knee-jerk hostility to Dubai.)

And of course, when the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Cherokee, Jackson’s response — possibly apocryphal — was to say, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." Something like that attitude toward the rule of law still exists among many Jacksonians, who can see their way clear to circumscribing the liberties of suspected terrorists and other enemies. A poll from late 2004 found that 44 percent of Americans "favored at least some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans" and "27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim Americans to register where they live with the federal government." Where civil liberties are concerned, Jacksonians all too often live down to the description Thomas Jefferson gave of his fellow Southerners in a letter to the Marquis de Chastellux of Sept. 2, 1785: "In the South they are … zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others."

Jacksonians are not always so indifferent or hostile to the rights of outsiders, even in times of war, but there remains a sharp distinction between their notions of freedom and those of the Jeffersonians, who tend to believe, according to Mead, that "Liberty is infinitely precious, and almost as infinitely fragile." "When the U.S. government rounded up an undisclosed number of aliens and held them for months without disclosing their names," he writes in the paperback edition of Special Providence, "Jeffersonians saw violations of precisely the values that made the United States worth fighting for."

On the other side of the ledger, "Jeffersonian squeamishness about American power and the use of force strikes Jacksonian sensibilities as weak and muddleheaded, while the Jeffersonian critiques of the motives and morals of American foreign policy seem almost anti-American." Wilsonians effectively exploited this division between Jacksonians and Jeffersonians in the months after 9/11 — David Frum’s "Unpatriotic Conservatives" stands as a good example — even though, as Mead notes, "Jacksonians are smart enough to know that the children of Wilsonian war hawks will generally stay far, far away from the slaughterhouses of our future wars."

Now, with the Iraq War looking more like tar pit every day, is a rapprochement between Jacksonians and Jeffersonians in the offing? They have found common ground before. Both in the 1990s were opposed to the Bush-Clinton New World Order and skeptical of Hamiltonian free (or, really, managed) trade agreements like NAFTA, and now CAFTA. And, more importantly, there are some Jacksonians who have pronounced Jeffersonian tendencies. Mead never intended his categories to be mutually exclusive or scientifically precise.

One Jacksonian with Jeffersonian leanings is James Webb, historian of the American Scots-Irish and a former Reagan administration secretary of the Navy, who is running as an outspokenly antiwar — at least, anti-Iraq War — Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, opposing Republican Sen. George Allen, a Bush stalwart and ’08 presidential prospect. As well as having been against the Iraq War from the start and calling for a reduction of U.S. forces abroad ("…this relocation out of Europe needed to take place. What I worry about is the smaller set of bases going into other countries, and (most importantly) the logic of this Administration that we should be a permanent occupying power in the Middle East"), Webb, in an interview on the Daily Kos blog, sounds a Jeffersonian note in his comments about Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans:

My strong feeling is that we need to keep talking about these abuses, and bring people into the Congress who will stand up to them. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Congress that was willing to subpoena the right officials, and that demanded to see what the administration was really doing, and who, exactly, was being listened to during those NSA sessions?

And he’s likely to please many Jeffersonians and Jacksonians alike with his views on the Second Amendment and the limits of state power: "I support the Second Amendment, for many of the same reasons that I am more u2018liberal’ on social issues. I believe the power of the government should stop at my front door, and that I should have the ability to protect myself and my family."

On the whole, however, despite the Jacksonians of the country turning against the Wilsonian-Hamiltonian leadership of the Republican Party, the constituency for war in this country remains enormous. And whatever happens in 2006, the outlook for 2008 is dire, with the presidential election likely to pit John McCain, a Jacksonian of the worst sort who has said all along that the United States should escalate its prosecution of the Iraq War, against Hillary Clinton, a Democrat eager to prove that a woman can be every inch as manly as Old Hickory himself when it comes to war.

For the Jeffersonian, politics offers no long-term answer. His mission must start, and perhaps end, with education; Jefferson himself believed that only an educated public could preserve its rights. Above all what is needed now is education in the Jeffersonian tradition itself. A year ago I gave a talk to a few students at a conservative organization here in Washington, D.C., in which I commended to them the works of Jefferson and later Jeffersonians. I was surprised to be told by one student afterwards that he had long been told to discount Jefferson for having been a votary of the French Revolution. Well, yes, he was, and he also held slaves. Doctrinaires of the left and right alike have found ample reason to denounce Jefferson. But for all that, he still best represents the ideals of the early republic — and to appreciate that republic, there’s no better course of study than to examine the life and work of the man himself.

(Good places to start: R.B. Bernstein’s short biography Thomas Jefferson; the Viking Portable Library’s Portable Thomas Jefferson, edited by Merrill Peterson; and Albert Jay Nock’s exemplary character study Mr. Jefferson. The University of North Carolina press has also compiled the complete correspondence between Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams in one indispensable volume, the Adams-Jefferson Letters. And one can’t go wrong with the Library of America’s edition of Henry Adams’s classic History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson.)

The sage of Monticello, though, is only the beginning of a tradition. The foreign-policy Jeffersonianism that Mead traces is eclectic indeed, ranging from John Quincy Adams1 (ironically, since Jefferson supported Jackson against Adams in the 1824 presidential election) to such disparate figures as Mark Twain, Charles A. Beard, George Kennan, and Gore Vidal. And it should come as no surprise that, as Mead writes, "the libertarian movement is an expression of Jeffersonian thought." Indeed, "Jeffersonian skepticism about the merits of an active foreign policy has libertarian roots, and more than any of the other schools, Jeffersonians have consistently tried to ensure that the same anti-big-government logic that is so often so powerful in domestic politics be extended to the conduct of the nation’s foreign policy."

For 60 years the U.S. has followed a Hamiltonian-Wilsonian line. The ’90s briefly offered the prospect of retrenchment, but somehow the 9/11 attacks were pinned on Jeffersonians — as if keeping bases in the Muslim holy land, toppling Mossadegh, backing Saddam against Iran, and supporting the Mujahideen so as to keep Afghanistan safe for Sharia were Jeffersonian policies. Grand strategies plotted by Hamiltonians and Wilsonians led to disaster, but the Jacksonian public, and especially its right wing, vented its frustrations elsewhere. Now the Jacksonians are beginning to realize their mistake. If they are not to make the same error again, the Jeffersonian tradition in one form or another will have to be revived. An age of Jackson is no substitute for the Jeffersonian republic.

Note

1. The muted Adamsian tradition, not one discussed in Special Providence, has been largely subsumed by Jeffersonianism. The rapport between John Adams and Jefferson, for all their differences, is plain enough from the correspondence; the two had more in common with each other than either had with Hamilton or Jackson or could have had with Wilson. Moreover, an Adams who has lost his faith in existing institutions can be very difficult to distinguish from a Jefferson who has lost his faith in the people.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is literary editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

Andrew Busch, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, gets at least one thing right in his essay "The Goldwater Myth" in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books: Barry Goldwater was not a libertarian. Certainly Murray Rothbard didn’t consider him one; he recognized the Arizona senator as an archetypal Cold War conservative. Other prominent libertarians warned that Goldwater’s concessions to the welfare state would undermine its more thoroughgoing critics. After all, if even an extremist like Goldwater stopped short of calling for the outright privatization — or abolition — of the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, then those who did could readily be dismissed as outright loons.

Goldwater was no libertarian in ’64, and it was hardly without reason that the book published under his name four years before — penned by Brent Bozell at the behest of Dean Clarence Manion of Notre Dame — was called The Conscience of a Conservative. But Andrew Busch and the Claremont Review of Books don’t stop there. For them, the real Goldwater isn’t enough; they want a Goldwater myth of their own to tie the man and his movement to George W. Bush. So the professor from Claremont McKenna sets out to create one, borrowing from the black arts of Procrustes, Harry Jaffa, and Victor Frankenstein to fabricate a Barry Goldwater that even the Moral Majority could love.

"Strange … that these days many commentators believe that Goldwater’s conservatism was a different species from Reagan’s and, especially, from George W. Bush’s," he writes. "Though admittedly an economic conservative, Goldwater has become an icon of opposition to social conservatism." Busch quotes John McCain, the Goldwater Institute’s Darcy Olsen, and George Will — who suggests a connection between Goldwater and the nightstick liberalism of Rudy Giuliani — to that effect.

At stake in this dust-up over a dead man’s legacy are claims that "the cultural Right has abandoned true conservatism," that "presidents like Reagan and Bush … deviate from Goldwater’s rugged and pure frontier conservatism," and that "Republicans must move back in Goldwater’s direction if they are to reclaim their intellectual credibility." But these are all moot points: Republicans have never had anything like intellectual credibility; Reagan and Bush have nothing to do with the frontier; and the cultural right comes in two very distinct varieties. Serious traditionalists have not abandoned conservatism, though many of them abandoned Bush. Political operators like Ralph Reed, on the other hand, are another story altogether.

There is, however, something more at issue: the good name of the late senator, whose reputation is at least marginally better than that of the average office holder and who, whatever his sins, does not deserve to be tarred with responsibility for George W. Bush and the state of movement conservatism today. And as a simple matter of fact, Goldwater was no cultural conservative in either sense of the term: he was neither a Kirkian traditionalist nor a man who would exploit faith, his or others’, to win elections.1

Busch acknowledges that the later Goldwater was no fan of the Religious Right. He quotes Goldwater’s famous 1981 remark that "every good Christian should kick [Jerry] Falwell in the ass" and notes the senator’s waffling on abortion — though Busch exaggerates the degree to which Goldwater was ever anti-abortion — as well as his support in retirement for letting homosexuals serve in the military. None of this, though, means that Goldwater conservatism is distinct from the ideology of Bush’s values-voters, since "Goldwater’s move away from social conservatism came only in the twilight of his Senate career — and more starkly after he had left the Senate in 1987."

Fair enough, yes? Except that two paragraphs later, Busch writes, "several of the hot-button issues that later mobilized social conservatives en masse were non-issues in 1964, or had barely begun to stir." Busch says this in order to establish that Goldwater could not have been an explicit advocate of a religious-political movement that didn’t exist in his heyday. But of course, the reverse is true as well: he could not very well oppose something that hadn’t yet come to be. Once the Religious Right did develop into a political force in the 1980s and 1990s, Goldwater repudiated whatever support for its issues he may once have had.

But what about the Goldwater of the 1960s? Like most politicians, he knew how to use a rostrum as a pulpit. Busch cites copious examples of Goldwater rhetoric about moral decline and religious faith. Just how reliable an interpreter of such language Busch is, however, can be judged from the use to which he puts the following anecdote:

The campaign also produced, but did not air, a television program called u2018Choice.’ It focused on the u2018moral issue,’ and featured disturbing footage of topless bars, wild beatnik parties, drunken college students, and riots by both whites and blacks. Goldwater declined to use the film in the end, but only, it seems, because he feared that scenes of blacks rioting would introduce unseemly racial overtones into the campaign.

Goldwater did indeed denounce "Choice" as "a racist film." But that was not the only reason he distanced himself from an ad that in fact had little overt racial content. Here’s what Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, who was in the room when the senator was first shown the film, relates about the episode in his autobiography Mostly on the Edge:

I recall also a campaign trip to Philadelphia, one on which my older son accompanied me, that revealed the profound decency of the man [Goldwater]. In the afternoon before the senator’s appearance, there was a briefing to review a television ad that supporters had put together to exploit the ever-present, always popular issue of moral decline in America. It was the sort of slimy self-righteous imagery that has come to dominate American politics today. It showed topless (but appropriately censored) women at a public beach and had the stern voice-over, holier-than-thou condemnation of the country’s slide into moral decay. Before a word could be said, the senator turned to my son — then sixteen years old — and asked his opinion. Young Karl said the ad was silly, had nothing to do with the ideas of the campaign, and was dirty politics to boot. Goldwater agreed. That was it; the ad was pulled, and the campaign stuck to the high ground of principles and substantive issues.

"That dirty movie" was what the senator called it in 1981, when he watched it again at a reunion with members of the Draft Goldwater Committee, according to Goldwater biographer and longtime historian of the conservative movement Lee Edwards. Race-baiting was not the only thing the senator found distasteful about the film.

Goldwater the man can be distinguished from the Goldwater movement, however. If the case cannot be made that the senator himself would be comfortable with the Bush coalition, it need not follow that Goldwater’s voters, volunteers, and admirers would be similarly uneasy. But take a look at the components of 1960s conservatism and consider how they have fared in the four decades since.

There were, first of all, the Cold Warriors, who can be divided into two camps: the anti-Communists, whose raison d’tre disappeared along with the Soviet Union; and the outright militarists, who are now stronger than ever. A few surviving anti-interventionists supported Goldwater, too, and the senator, though a Cold Warrior himself and an Eisenhower delegate in ’52, was not entirely unsympathetic to them. Hess recalls that once, "I read aloud the part of SDS’s founding Port Huron statement dealing with foreign policy. To the senator, and to me, it sounded brilliantly isolationist, in the Taft mold. The senator’s reaction was that it could have been written for Young Americans for Freedom, the foremost right-wing youth group. I explained that it really couldn’t have, because YAF was deeply committed to the expansion of the American empire through military power."

Then there were those voters and activists who were chiefly interested in Goldwater’s stand against forced integration and the Civil Rights Act. Some of these people were outright segregationists and racists; others were states’ rights constitutionalists or libertarians. Ironically, while the GOP has long anathematized racists — and Goldwater in particular did so — the party retains a strong appeal for them. That appeal was first felt in ’64, when the only states to go for Goldwater besides his native Arizona were in the Deep South. Not all of those voters, and reasonably not even a majority of them, were strict constitutionalists. More recently, the Washington Post has noted a study showing that Bush voters tend to have more negative views of blacks than Democrats do. Race-conscious whites are still part of the GOP coalition, whatever the party’s explicit policies.

Goldwater-style opposition to compulsory integration, however, is entirely dead. Goldwater was no racist himself: he integrated the Arizona Air National Guard and abolished segregation in his family’s department stores. But he took states’ rights and property rights seriously, so that as late as 1988 he could tell the New Yorker, "I voted against civil-rights legislation because I thought it was unconstitutional. I still believe that if you have a boarding house and you don’t want to rent to a Jew or a black man or an Irishman, you have that right." That’s a principled, unpopular position — one that no Republican would dream of giving voice to today.

So what about cultural conservatives? In the 1960s there were certainly traditionalists and religious conservatives, if not quite what we now know as the Religious Right — evangelicals and charismatics had not yet been politicized and abortion law had yet to be federalized. Even so, if militarism and racial politics provide two threads of continuity between the Goldwater movement and much of the contemporary right, some manner of cultural conservatism does too. Values-voters went for Goldwater in u201864 and for Bush forty years later.

But just as Goldwater was no traditionalist — Brent Bozell, who was one, told Catholic scholar Patrick Allitt, "Goldwater didn’t know much about conservatism" until he read The Conscience of a Conservative — Bush’s credentials as a latter-day social conservative don’t stand up to examination. Bush, after all, supported federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research — something that the 1960s Goldwater, pro-choice though he was, would not have done, given his (relatively) limited-government philosophy. Some religious conservatives credit Bush for his court picks — but this is a man who put Alberto Gonzales on the Texas Supreme Court and who tried to place Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court of the United States. His top priority in judicial matters, it’s plain to see, is not ending abortion but strengthening executive power.

(The rise of abortion as a matter of conservative dogma, incidentally, goes to show how much conservatism has changed since the 1960s — not merely developed, but moved in a new direction. There were anti-abortion conservatives in the ’60s, to be sure. But the leading conservative spokesmen of the era were functionally pro-choice. That included not only Goldwater, but also Ronald Reagan, who as governor of California liberalized the state’s abortion laws. And who wrote in 1966 "Some Catholics may understand themselves to be pleading as defenders of the rights of unborn children of whatever faith, and the stand is honorable; but not viable; and the means by which the case is pleaded must be suasive rather than coercive"? That was a 40-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr. He and Reagan later had changes of heart.)

Finally, the Goldwater movement included foes, to one extent or another, of the welfare state and the legacy of the New Deal. Some of these were libertarians, others green-eyeshade conservatives. How have they fared with the conservative Republican administration of George W. Bush? One need hardly ask. If you had wanted spending like Bush’s in 1964, you would have voted for Lyndon Johnson, not Goldwater.

Goldwater conservatism, contrary to Busch, was a thing very different from the conservatism (such as it is) of the present administration and its supporters. One can show the historical steps that led from Goldwater to George W. Bush, but that would be an account of ongoing change — deformation, some might say — rather than continuity. What the Goldwater movement did bequeath to the modern Right was a preference for force in foreign policy and devotion to military build-up and the national-security apparatus at home. The rest has been flux.

There were some admirable elements in the Goldwater coalition — serious about cutting government, desirous of strictly limiting federal power — but those elements today are without a home, and no place could be less congenial to them than the Bush White House and Republican Congress. One might almost say the same for Barry Goldwater himself, were he still alive.

Note

1. Unlike more recent presidential aspirants, Goldwater refused to make a spectacle of his faith on the campaign trail. As Karl Hess recalls: There was the matter of going to church. As the presidential campaign got underway, the public relations people began planning all of the conventional coverage of the candidate. One of the hoariest of campaign conventions is the coverage of the candidate attending church.

Senator Goldwater has a deeply held, personal religious faith. He doesn’t talk about it. He doesn’t argue about it. He doesn’t use it to score political points. He just has it. And he does not attend church on any regular basis. So, when asked to go to church so that the photographers could snap him, he simply said no. He didn’t go.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is literary editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

February, by proclamation of President Bush, was officially Black History Month, the Man once more cheating African-Americans by giving them the shortest and coldest month of the year for their own. Unofficially, however, February seems to have been the season for libertarian-conservative debate. In the pages of The American Conservative, for example (and for which I work), Robert Locke and I squared off, his anti-libertarian "Marxism of the Right" contending with my own In Defense of Freedom.

A little earlier, in the wake of the annual CPAC pep rally, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru and New York Post liberventionist Ryan Sager batted around a few moot points within the overall context of their brand of statism. Sager supports the warfare state as much as Ponnuru does, so when Ponnuru asked him to explain how National Review was for "big-government conservatism" Sager uttered not a peep about the biggest non-entitlement item in the federal budget, what’s euphemistically called "defense." Sager paid no notice to the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to invade and reconstruct Iraq, nor to the cost in human life and limbs — American and Iraqi alike — of the Iraq War. Government doesn’t get much bigger than that, Ryan, until you get to Soviet levels.

And then there was the face-to-face conservative/libertarian debate at the February 23 gathering of America’s Future Foundation. AFF bills itself as "America’s next generation of classical liberal leaders" and surprisingly, considering that it’s based here in the Babylon-am-Potomac, the outfit comes within a nautical mile of living up to the boast. There are not too many big-government types in the group, and there are a few — maybe more than a few — committed constitutionalists and anti-statists. The panel for the roundtable discussion on the 23rd pitted my American Conservative colleague W. James Antle III and the Cato Institute’s Jeremy Lott against Reason editor Nick Gillespie and the American Spectator’s Amy Mitchell, formerly of Cato herself but here giving a straight Bushist line. The topic was "Conservatives and Libertarians: Can This Marriage Be Saved?" — Gillespie and Mitchell saying no, Antle and Lott arguing the affirmative. One libertarian and one conservative on each side was the idea, though Lott and Antle were both somewhat libertarian and conservative, and, well, the ghosts of Murray Rothbard and Robert Nisbet might argue that Gillespie and Mitchell were neither one nor the other. But we’ll get to that.

Two days earlier Reason contributing editor Cathy "Perhaps There Are No True Libertarians in Times of Terrorist Attacks" Young had denounced Thomas Woods in the Boston Globe as the "Last of the Confederates." It was an attack not at all dissimilar from the one first made by Adam Cohen in the New York Times and later regurgitated by Max Boot. Seeing a putative libertarian hew to the same party line put me in mind of a question for the night’s panel: with libertarians like Young, who needs neocons?

Turnout for the event was at capacity, some 50 to 75 young (and a few not-so-young) journalists and politicos crowding into the lounge where the panel would take place and spilling out into the hall beyond. Familiar faces were there: Norman Singleton of Ron Paul‘s office, Tim Carney, and others, as well as Don Devine of the American Conservative Union and several Reason contributors, including Ron Bailey and, as Gillespie was later to point out, Ms. Young herself. Gene Healy of Cato served as moderator of the panel. He had Lott speak first, giving the case against a conservative-libertarian divorce.

Lott spoke of fusionism — someone even handed him a copy of Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom at the beginning of his remarks — and emphasized that the Christian Right originally became politically active in the 1970s for defensive reasons, after the Carter administration threatened Christian schools. Politically active Christians are not enemies of liberty, Lott argued:

Religious conservatives may not hold to the canons of libertarianism as laid out by Murray Rothbard or even Charles Murray, but the instincts are there. They understand the virtue of thrift and they don’t want the government to spend like a drunken Democrat either. They want a less oppressive tax burden just as much as we do. And George W. Bush would not be pursuing Social Security privatization if James Dobson and Franklin Graham objected.

If only the Bush social security plan were libertarian! When his turn came, Antle, also speaking for the "pro-marriage" side, put forward the argument that government is no friend to the institutions and customs dear to genuine conservatives — quite the contrary. This seemed to frustrate Amy Mitchell, the "purge the libertarians" minicon of the panel, for whom conservatism seemed to be synonymous with support for the Grand Old Party and Lyndon Baines Bush. Gene Healy’s post-debate summary puts it aptly:

In Jim Antle’s telling, a conservative is someone who champions family, faith and freedom against the forces of centralization, whether red-team or blue. I don’t think I’m being unfair to say that in Amy Mitchell’s account, it’s someone who roots, roots, roots for the red team.

Her remarks did not go down well with the audience. Citing Reason’s pre-election survey of libertarian-ish pundits, she sternly admonished libertarians for being, collectively, a faithless spouse. Many of them didn’t vote for Bush and — the horror! the horror! — some didn’t vote at all. Mitchell was visibly put out by this, much to the merriment of the peanut gallery. She drew laughs with remarks like "You want to vote based on what makes you feel better," and her observation that the U.S. isn’t crashing airliners into civilian buildings in Iraq — no, an audience member observed, instead the U.S. has dropped high explosives on them. No doubt the civilians who became "collateral damage" rest in peace knowing that they were killed for a good cause and unintentionally, too. (But is it unintentional if you know full well your actions will lead to innocent casualties?) Mitchell unwittingly gave Antle one of the best laugh-lines of the night when she invoked the omniscience of government to justify the Iraq Attaq — the president knows things we don’t, she said. To which Antle replied, "I hope I know a whole lot more than him."

Mitchell’s drubbing set one lonely neoconservative among the attendees, Eric Pfeiffer, to pouting on National Review Online the next day:

Most disappointing was the stark absence of conservatives in support of the liberation of Iraq…. the onslaught of hissing and cackles whenever Amy Mitchell made some point defending traditional conservative values or the war made me feel like I was back in Eugene, Oregon, suffering the trust-fund progressive masses.

When the likes of Pfeiffer — who can get big bucks from any of a number of neocon-controlled foundations — pose as populists to engage in a bit of class warfare, one has to wonder whether they even take themselves seriously. Sneer at trust-fund liberals if you want, Eric, but at least they’re not sending other Americans abroad to die for their ideology (not at the moment, anyway). Jonah Goldberg may be too old to die for his beliefs, but what’s your excuse? Then again, why should a valuable blogger take a bullet for his cause when he can send a National Guardsman, working two jobs with a wife and kids and a mortgage, to do it for him?

Enough of that, though, let’s get to the real star of the night’s show. He’s the man Gene Healy calls "the Fonzie of Free Markets," who was keeping it cool in his trademark leather jacket even under the blazing studio lights of McLaughlin One on One. Unsurprisingly, Nick Gillespie was the most laid-back and smoothest of the panelists. What was surprising was his idea of libertarianism, which sent a ripple of horror through most of the young libertarians in the audience and overshadowed his position in the debate itself (he was for divorce, arguing the conservative-libertarian marriage had long been loveless).

According to Gillespie, if libertarianism is about reining in the State, "we’re screwed" — government is always going to grow. So contrary to Friedman and Hayek, to say nothing of Rothbard (literally: Rothbard went unmentioned), libertarianism isn’t about freedom from government intervention, it’s about "pluralism and tolerance," "being able to afford your home," and gay couples checking into love motels without drawing stares of reproach. As Healy later summarized:

Nick Gillespie…argued that a monomaniacal focus on the state left out some important aspects of liberalism. He rejected the notion that libertarianism could be limited to the realm of political philosophy. At one point, he noted that we were dramatically freer than we had been decades ago, because, among other things, in 1970 it was difficult for an unmarried couple to check into a hotel together. Afterwards, I wondered what the hell that had to do with libertarianism, and a friend cracked that I must have skipped the part about hot-pillow joints in Locke’s Second Treatise.

Gillespie elicited about the same degree of incredulity here as any remark from Mitchell did, and not only from the libertarians. Was he really saying that, yes, libertarianism is libertinism — or something very nearly to that effect? An older member of the audience, a former Reagan official now with a conservative activist group, professed himself baffled: "Are you really a libertarian?" he asked Gillespie, noting that libertarianism has always been concerned with means, and here he was proposing ends. But what if freedom turned out not to be the best way to bring about "pluralism and tolerance"? Most people, if left alone by the government, would probably support a traditional, man-woman idea of marriage, the critic noted. But Nick was not dissuaded. For him, evidently, as for Ed Clark, libertarianism is something like "low-tax liberalism."

For good measure, Gillespie also argued that an individual’s views on war and foreign policy are "not an accurate predictor" for libertarianism. "It’s a separate realm," he said. Perhaps aggression is okay in certain "realms."

I like Nick Gillespie. I’ve spoken to him very briefly on a few occasions — a Philadelphia Society meeting here, an American Spectator party there — and always found him plainspoken and even modest, great and rare virtues indeed among the punditariat. And behind his cockamamie remarks is a point that I can agree with: there’s much more to life than politics and, moreover, a measure of humility is needed to realize the proper limits of one’s responsibilities; that’s a kind of tolerance. But then, the Iraq War — which Gillespie opposed at the time but now believes is turning out for the best (scores of thousands of American and Iraqi dead and maimed notwithstanding) — was precisely that and still is: an armed and bloody exercise of the belief that everything everywhere is everyone’s business — and America is everyone.

One wonders what kind of tolerance Gillespie extends to those who don’t share his open-mindedness. He’s no Cathy Young, though. I asked him my question: what’s the difference between the Cathy Young kind of "libertarian" and a David Frum? According to Gillespie, the distinction is that neocons are "ultra-nationalists." True enough; but if people who call themselves individualists or libertarians embrace the national-security state and give unprovoked wars a pass, while attacking an anti-statist like Thomas Woods, as Young has done, the substantial differences between them and the "ultra-nationalists" start to look pretty meager.

As for Woods, Gillespie said he was not sure that he "rises to the level of a libertarian" or indeed to the level of anything other than a "neoconfederate." That was the most disappointing remark of the night: one can see how reasonably laudable intentions can degenerate into low-tax liberalism, but damning a decentralist libertarian because he offends the sensibilities of the New York Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center is pretty low. It certainly isn’t very tolerant or pluralistic.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is assistant editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

"With this American empire that we’re building in Iraq and Afghanistan and maybe next Iran, who knows how it will turn out? Depending on who writes the history books, Bush may become known as u2018George the Great.’"

~ Oliver Stone

There are two things a moviegoer should know about Stone’s "Alexander." First, it’s blinding awful — literally. Ten minutes into it one of my contact lenses fell out, right as a one-eyed Val Kilmer came charging into a snake-handling Angelina Jolie’s boudoir. The less said the better. If you’re thinking of seeing it, don’t. Go see "Seed of Chucky" instead. Jennifer Tilly vs. killer dolls won’t be any campier than Stone’s "Alexander" and Jolie’s take on the conqueror’s mother as Cruella DeVille.

The second thing worth knowing is that "Alexander" is mildly interesting as a document of left-wing Bushism. War, slaughter, and all that goes with world conquest are all right, as long as they secure such goods as improved literacy and the mixing of different races and cultures. This is a perfectly natural companion, by the way, to libertarian Bushism, or liberventionism, which says that a bit of bloodshed is perfectly fine as long as it secures open markets and the free flow of people and goods. There’s a line about that in Stone’s "Alexander," too.

For all that Stone has done to discredit the conspiracy theory — which is saying something — "Alexander" gets the history right, mostly. Olympias, Alexander’s mother, probably wasn’t behind the assassination of his father, Philip II of Macedon, but she might have been. And Alexander himself probably wasn’t poisoned, but it’s not altogether implausible. Where Stone has embellished the story he’s guilty not so much of distortion as bad taste. The two heterosexual scenes in the movie are near-rapes. Alexander gets an Oedipus complex. Olympias becomes a misogynist’s caricature. Gore Vidal might have made something of this, but Oliver Stone can’t.

What a shame, because the left-neocon Stone does have at least a rudimentary grasp on Alexander’s politics, if not his character. The "civilizing" mission of the conqueror was something Alexander’s propagandists played up at the time and perpetuated long after his death. It’s part of his enduring appeal to megalomaniacs of all stripes. By force of arms he changed the political culture, and indeed the culture generally, of the known world, East and West. He did what liberventionists and multicultural imperialists alike long to do. Alexander is any would-be world-shaper’s role model.

Like more recent imperialists, Alexander bent the forces of nationalism and superstition to his benefit. The Temple of Diana at Ephesus burned around the time of Alexander’s birth, ergo his birth was a divine event — and, seen in light of retrospect, the burning of that temple in Asia Minor seemed to presage his conquests. Rumors were put about that Alexander was literally divine, product of a union between his mother and Zeus himself. After conquering Egypt, Alexander accepted the old pharaonic mantle of divinity, and a visit to the oracle of Ammon at the oasis of Siwa confirmed his godly lineage; the oracle was reported to have recognized Alexander as the god’s son. Once he had crushed the Persian Great King — whose title, by the way, was shahanshah, the "King of Kings" — Alexander further consolidated his divine or semidivine status, after the oriental fashion. He went native in other ways, too, marrying a Bactrian princess, for example, but he also emphasized Greek culture and Macedonian military might. He didn’t create the "first universal nation"; instead he used different peoples’ characteristic forms of national pride to his empire-building advantage. Few imperialists since have done half as well.

Actually, more of the credit, if credit is the word for it, belongs to Philip II. He turned Macedon into one of the world’s first garrison states. Before him, Macedon had a kind of barbarian freedom, its various local chiefs enjoying almost total autonomy. Macedon didn’t have much in the way of cities but was a large tribal territory with considerable natural and human resources. Philip organized it militarily and politically. He had nobles send their sons to his court, where they would be both potential hostages and subjects for indoctrination. This was something Philip had learned from his own experience as a young man held hostage at Thebes, the most powerful Greek city-state of the time. Philip learned innovative military tactics there, too, which he brought back to Macedon. Applying city-state organizational principles to a large kingdom created a centralized military power unlike any the West had known.

Philip was already preparing to invade the East when he was assassinated. He was also preparing, or so it seems, to declare himself a god. At the wedding of his daughter he added his own statue to those of the twelve Olympians, but before he could do much more he was killed, leaving the project to Alexander to finish.

This is all in the movie, and all the elements are present for a tense political thriller, even if only as part of a larger narrative. Stone doesn’t do much with it, though the scene still stands out as one of the film’s better.

The wars Philip and Alexander fought did not bring peace. Before them, the Greek world was torn apart by a succession of conflicts following immediately upon the heels of the Peloponnesian War. There were Social Wars between Athens and its allies, Sacred Wars over holy lands and temple treasuries, and other wars of all sorts. Sparta had won the Peloponnesian War but emerged from it so weak that before long another power, Thebes, arose, and soon Athens embarked upon its self-destructive quest for hegemony once more. Philip exploited this chaos before he put an end to it the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. The battle put an end to the independence of the Greek city-states as well, more or less permanently. Athens, which had opposed Philip, was spared — destroying the prize of Greek civilization would not have been a good propaganda move. But when Thebes revolted again after Philip’s death, Alexander annihilated the city, killing 6,000 men and selling the survivors into slavery.

Conquering Greece was just a prelude to war in the East for Philip and Alexander, an exercise in securing Macedon’s flank. The eastern campaign, as always, was fought in the name of freedom — freedom for the Greeks of Asia Minor and maybe in another sense, as Stone suggests, for the Persians and all the other wogs, too. They were slaves to their tyrannical Great King, after all. This was also a pre-emptive war to head off any chance of an attack on the West. If all this sounds familiar, well, it goes to show that Karl Marx wasn’t always wrong. History has no laws, but the human race as a whole never learns much from its mistakes, so history does repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second and farce. And it keeps getting more farcical every time.

Alexander didn’t know when to quit. Having conquered lands that are now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere, he tried for India, too. In Oliver Stone’s telling this was all because Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, didn’t know much about geography, and so the warlord thought he would discover the end of the earth if only he pushed on just a little bit further. Again, there’s a bit of truth here, although Aristotle probably does not deserve much of the blame, and behind Alexander’s endless fighting was something much more than mere cartographic incompetence. The words imperial hubris come to mind, but Stone for some reason puts very little of that into his Alexander, as if the director can’t grasp the concept. No wonder he thinks we might wind up calling our George "the Great" one day.

The conqueror’s dream is to fight the final war, the war that ends all war, and Alexander did extinguish the chronic conflicts between the Greek city-states and the age-old enmity between those states and the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. But after his own death the empire Alexander built rapidly decomposed into new warring states. Instead of cities fighting cities, empires now fought empires. Alexander’s generals carved up the conquered territory into their own fiefdoms, most of which didn’t last long. Stone’s film is narrated by the founder of the longest-lived of the successor empires, Ptolemy (played by Anthony Hopkins who here resembles, as another critic noted, Yoda), whose Egyptian dynasty survived until the death of the famous Cleopatra and her children.

Precedents Alexander set endured. It became customary for the successor kings to affect godhood, a practice eventually picked up by Roman emperors. Alexander became the archetype for would-be conquerors. He influenced more than just the battlefield and palace, however. Culture, too, had to accommodate Alexander’s mythology. The relationship between the warriors Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, which had not been considered sexual for most of antiquity, came to be recontextualized in light of Alexander’s homosexual love for his friend Hephaistion. In this way, too, Alexander knew how to use myth and propaganda to have his way. Amorous relations between peers generally were frowned upon by the standards of classical Greek morality, but by deploying the authority of the most important text in Greek civilization to legitimize his lusts, Alexander could deflect some opprobrium. The Alexandrine take on Achilles and Patroclus still carries considerable force today.

(Here again Stone gets the history right but the character wrong. He doesn’t try to make Alexander more heterosexual than he was. But he has Hephaistion flouncing around in eyeshadow, and he turns the conqueror into Mr. Sensitive. You’d think this was meant as a parody.)

Alexander’s reputation not only flourished in the ancient word — Plutarch, writing in the second century AD, paired his life of Alexander with his account of Julius Caesar — but survived the transition from antiquity to the medieval period as well. He appears in the Koran. He later become one of Christendom’s models of chivalry, the so-called Nine Worthies. More recently, critics and some scholars have compared him to the likes of Hitler. But as Stone’s film shows, even a friend of Fidel Castro can find something to admire in Alexander and his ideology. The Macedonian still occupies the pinnacle of power worship, as he has for nearly 2,500 years.

Sometimes Alexander was just, merciful, and humane, but those attributes were very much secondary to his political guile and prowess on the battlefield; indeed, justice and tolerance were among his weapons. They were tools he used to advance his imperial project. His example provides inspiration to all sorts of would-be conquerors. But it provides an equally useful study for anti-imperialists to see how such a determined and cunning man could reshape not one but two civilizations through military and political force. Most important of all might be the lesson he provides on the folly of empire, though the chances of the right people learning from that lesson must be counted as nugatory. They certainly won’t learn it from Oliver Stone’s terrible film.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is assistant editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

A rough new ideology slouches its way toward Washington to be born. Resembling in its construction Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from the remains of past ideologies, its skeleton is neoconservative, its heart Woodrow Wilson’s, with a compassionate face borrowed from a politicized brand of religion. President Bush spent his first term assembling these spare parts. If he’s granted a second, he may yet galvanize them into a semblance of life.

It has been a while since a new ideology was loosed on the earth but now the hour is at hand, and two British writers, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige of the Economist, have given the thing a name: Bushism. The rhetoric in which it comes clothed has been stolen, in large part, from what used to be called conservatism. But whatever the faults of the old conservatism, what Bush has brought into being is something else. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge say, "Ever since the Goldwater campaign of 1963—1964, conservatism has defined itself as an antigovernment creed…. But Mr. Bush has been different … the massive growth of the state during this presidency … is a deliberate strategy."

Should Bush lose — and, yes, that means John Kerry would win — this brave new worldview might yet be stopped. What a tragedy that would be, for those in the movement formerly known as conservative. The prospect fills National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru with dread. Last week he wrote, "Bush’s defeat next Tuesday would be the most crushing blow that organized conservatism has received since 1964 — or, really, ever." If true, that’s yet another compelling reason for anyone who wants government to be limited to vote against Bush. If the good of the conservative movement now depends on the re-election of a president who stands for the opposite of practically everything Goldwater once stood for — even in foreign policy, it’s hard to imagine Goldwater waging a Wilsonian crusade — then it’s past time that movement was put to sleep, as the veterinarians say.

Bush has done a marvelous job of turning the American Right inside out. To be pro-life now means supporting a president whose policies have killed or maimed thousands of children, born and unborn, in Iraq. He provides federal funding for some stem-cell research, and still they support him. He makes light of Karla Faye Tucker just before he executes her, but, hey, he’s a good Christian. Why judge the vine by its fruit, after all?

On the eve of the millennium, a number of prominent conservative organizers were criticizing in the strongest possible terms an antiterrorist measure called Project Megiddo, which they said would target religious persons, inevitably and especially including Christians. Throughout the Clinton years a number of Republican shills posed as civil libertarians, decrying Janet Reno’s lust for expanded wiretapping powers and sneak-and-peak authority. Now the weight of the official conservative movement is behind the Patriot Act which, with its provisions enabling federal agents to seize library records, seems to have less to do with a War on Terror than a War on Reading.

National Review, of course, like much of the rest of the Bushist movement, can’t get enough of the Patriot Act. These cons demonstrably have no problem with a police state, so long as their guys are the ones running the prison camps, abroad and on American soil alike. And that talk about the rule of law, which was so important for scoring debating points during the Clinton impeachment? Well, the law is whatever a Republican president says it is. Forget about the Constitutionu2014the executive can declare war and suspend habeas corpus at his own discretion.

Remember, the Supreme Court is at stake in this election. Not that it matters for Roe v. Wade: the odds of a second-term Bush nominating a determinedly anti-Roe justice are small, the odds of such a nominee getting confirmed by the Senate are smaller still, and the chance of that leading to an overturn of Roe is infinitesimal. But you can bet that there’ll be a number of cases on the docket in the next four years involving the president’s powers to fight terrorists and library patrons.

On most other issues Bush’s remaking of the American Right is plain to see. Entitlements? Bush has presided over the biggest expansion since the Great Society. Education? Instead of abolishing the Department of Education, Bush has expanded it and accelerated the federalization of K-12. Defense and national security? Bush invaded a country that posed no threat to the United States, and his invasion has led directly to the deaths of over a thousand American servicemen and a spate of videotaped beheadings of Americans and U.S. allies. How many Westerners did Saddam Hussein behead?

The New Democratic Man that Bush is creating comes in varieties other than just conservative, however. A virulent kind of phony libertarianism is flourishing in the environment the president has created as well. The Bushified Right is characterized not only by conservatives like David Frum but also the kind of "libertarians" properly called liberventionists, from Brink Lindsey on down to Max Borders. These people are flourishing and taking root under the patronage of the Bush administration and its toadies outside of government. Their fortunes rise and fall with those of their dear leader. (What kind of conservatives and libertarians will flourish under Kerry? Anti-Kerry ones. Whatever influence a Kerry presidency might exercise in alienating conservatives and libertarians — and other Americans — from executive power would be so much the better.)

At the same time as Bush exacerbates the statism of the Right, he discredits its anti-statists. It used to be I could tell whoever would listen that the so-called religious right was not in fact trying to tell everyone else what to do; these people simply wanted to lead their own lives and raise their own children according to their standards. But under Bush, support for the war and personal devotion to the president, complete with his big-government agenda, seemingly trumps whatever local concerns Christian conservatives have. In this as in so many other ways, Bush has breathed life into the very stereotypes the Left has long purveyed.

The point here is not that the Bush movement, even should it come into its own, will ever destroy America’s better traditions — principled libertarians will not disappear, not all conservatives will embrace the welfare-warfare state, a great many on the religious Right will continue to understand the difference between what is God’s and what is Caesar’s. But added to the woes faced by all of these people will be a new force, competing with the Left but more similar to it than not in its fundamental principles. Bushism, once given the opportunity to take root, won’t easily be weeded out again, even once it does lose its grip on power. Its precursors have already caused enough trouble; once fully formed it will be a blight for decades to come. Bush’s re-election will be the jolt that gives it life; without that, this warmed-over social democracy with apocalyptic overtones hasn’t got much of a chance. As Micklethwait and Wooldrige say, "the triumph of Bushism — or whatever you want to call this unusual brand of conservatism — will depend not so much on its intellectual coherence as on the success of his party building. If the GOP’s political machine puts Mr. Bush back into the White House on Nov. 2, he could be on his way to creating a new kind of big-government Republicanism; and if the machine fails, conservatism will once again be reinvented."

Reinvented it must be, in a direction opposite from that in which Bush is leading the Right. Bushism should be stopped and Bush must go. John Quincy Adams warned America to go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Should Bush win on Tuesday, we’ll have an ugly new monster to deal with right here at home.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is assistant editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

Years ago, Murray Rothbard coined two terms to describe the worst sort of dubious libertarians. The Luftmenschen were people without a visible means of support, while the "modals" were the wild-eyed, ill-groomed types for whom libertarianism was more a lifestyle than a philosophy. This latter kind happened to be the most prevalent — the mode — at any semi-sizeable libertarian gathering. Often enough, Luftmenschen were modals and, predictably, it was a rare modal indeed who earned anything like a steady income.

Today one of these types is endangered, thanks to the triumph of neoconservatism. The Luftmensch is on her way out. Any otherwise unemployable libertarian willing to forget about principle and embrace the military-industrial complex now has a bright future ahead of her at one nominally libertarian Beltway outfit or another. Even the venerable Institute for Humane Studies, founded by F.A. "Baldy" Harper back in 1961, has become an employment agency for junior neocons. Or so it seems to judge from a recent article in TechCentralStation by Max Borders, program director for IHS.

Borders makes herself out to be both libertarian and Hobbesian. That she knows nothing about libertarianism or Hobbes does not dissuade her from this pose any more than a demonstrably limited familiarity with the English language dissuades her from writing. (Am I unkind? She writes pace when she means per, but that’s Latin. The English is graceless, confused, and occasionally flat-out wrong — check out that "alas" in the third paragraph — but maybe she’s just heard one speech too many by George W. Bush.) According to Borders, "spaces untouched by globalization…are like a state-of-nature" and "it behooves us to try to make our enemies more like us…and then let globalization proceed apace."

No libertarian, or anyone else, should much care if Borders wants to be a Hobbesian, but for what it’s worth, Iraq was not in a Hobbesian state of nature. On the contrary, Iraq was a very good illustration of Hobbesian political theory put to practice. A modicum of peace and, before U.S. sanctions, even prosperity was enjoyed by Iraq under the brutal rule of a strong monarch, who kept rival religious and ethnic factions suppressed. What Hobbes would call anarchy came to Iraq when Saddam was overthrown — of course, what Hobbes would call anarchy anybody else would call civil war, a bloody struggle for control over the very sovereignty that Hobbes contended would limit conflict.

Hobbes as a proponent of globalization is hard to imagine. Harder still is figuring out why anybody should make a fetish out of globalization unless it is a peaceful process of advantage to all of its parties. Indeed, since Cobden and Bright a large part of the classical liberal case for globalization has been that free trade brings peace and protectionism war. But for Borders globalization is an end in itself and war a means toward that end. The children of Iraq may be missing their arms and legs — not to mention their parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters — but they’ll be able to eat delicious McDonalds hamburgers. Or maybe Halliburton Hamburgers, since that company seems to have a special advantage within the Iraqi market. In the old days this used to be called imperialism. For Borders, it’s globalization.

The streamlined, new-fangled libertarianism that Borders has adopted contains many provisions that would have startled the best libertarian scholars of the past, most notably Murray Rothbard. The rehabilitation of Hobbes into a guiding light for libertarians is the least of it. Borders has also debunked the natural-law libertarianism that Rothbard favored while similarly dismissing utilitarianism; in place of these, we get "social contract theory" which "splits the difference between libertarianism and conservatism." If you don’t remember signing the social contract, don’t worry, someone else has signed for you — without your permission and without consulting you as to the terms of this agreement. Oh, and this signatory is imaginary, by the way. She only exists in the minds of Rawlsians like Borders. "The social contract," Borders says, "is an idea that people would rationally choose certain constraints on their behavior, constraints which culminate in certain reciprocal rules under which to live." The subjective theory of value that Austrian economics has articulated might suggest that, in fact, different people want different constraints on different behaviors; and just looking around the world as it exists might confirm such a theory to just about anyone’s satisfaction.

Indeed, even Borders has noticed that, which is why certain people just aren’t people in her world. "If you stand outside the covenants of Man" — why the sexist language, Max? — "you are presumed u2018enemy.’" Or as Borders says elsewhere, "there are limits to those on whom we can ascribe rights." Iraqis are not, or were not, part of the covenant (they were in the state of nature), so blowing them up was perfectly fine. They don’t have rights. To judge from some of Borders’s other remarks, nor do persons designated as "enemy combatants." (Borders scoffs at the idea of extending Constitutional protections to those so termed, but that’s a straw man. The basic right to which these prisoners are entitled is that of habeas corpus — they should get a hearing to determine whether they are, in fact, enemy combatants. Just because President Bush calls someone an enemy combatant does not mean that she is one. Borders talks about bringing the "Rule of Law" to Iraq, but there’s precious little evidence to suggest that the Bush administration understands how that concept applies even to the United States.)

Max Borders has stitched together a new libertarianism out of old scraps of Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls, a libertarianism that denies a right not to be killed to people who are not liberal democrats or who do not live in liberal democracies. The ethical bankruptcy of the mind that conceived this nonsense is on display when Borders reveals that the best argument she can see against the war is one that relates to Hayekian notions of spontaneous order — rebuilding Iraq might fail because the attempt is too bureaucratic. No, Max, that’s not the best argument against the war. The best argument against the war is that it is wrong to aggress against another nation and to kill people have done nothing to harm you. If your ethics don’t reach at least that far, you don’t really have any ethics at all.

Borders fears that "there is a reticence among many libertarians to speak out about their bellicosity." Again, this suggests that she isn’t wholly familiar with the English tongue: "bellicosity" means "favoring or inclined to start quarrels or wars." No one in her right mind would want to declare her own bellicosity, any more than she would want to announce her mendacity or stupidity. But then, allowing for subjective preference, maybe I can’t say this about Borders. She is half right, anyway, to say that many libertarians are reluctant to speak out about their love of war. This may in part be for fear of being shunned but in larger part, one suspects, it is for fear of being made to look like a hypocrite and a fool for claiming to be a libertarian while professing such illiberal views.

(The sad fact that all too many young libertarians are indeed bellicose became clear to me a few months ago when a friend who had tried to establish a nationwide libertarian youth organization told me that he quit when he discovered how many of the young libertarian leaders on campuses he contacted were pro-war. I wonder, will the neocons be able to find jobs for them all.)

Much more could be said about this fashionable new libertarianism that Borders offers, but it hardly merits the attention. It would not warrant comment at all were it not for the ammunition that it gives to the critics who have always claimed that libertarianism is an amoral, anything-goes philosophy — and an ideology that will put abstractions before the lives of real human beings, which is what Borders does when she deploys asinine arguments about the threat Saddam Hussein might, one day, somehow, potentially have posed to justify the real death and destruction wrought by the war. "Libertarians" who make that kind of case perhaps should not be taken too seriously, but they should not be left unchecked, either. Libertarians like that are little better than neocons on drugs.

p.s. Readers might wonder why I have used feminine pronouns and modifiers to refer to Borders, who is apparently a man. Well, I didn’t want to be priggish, that’s all.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is assistant editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

History took a detour in the late 1940s and early 1950s, putting American politics on a path that would lead to such non-events as the Clinton-Dole and Bush-Gore match-ups. The Old Right, "isolationist" and individualist, was routed, its ideals marginalized, its leading figures dead or incapacitated. Nock had died in u201845; Robert Taft followed him to the grave in ’53. A stroke ended Mencken’s career in ’49 and another would fell Frank Chodorov in ’61. For the next forty-odd years, Cold War and welfare state defined Left and Right alike. Liberals were a little less enthusiastic about the Cold War, conservatives about the welfare state — but both were part of an overarching consensus.

As the Old Right faded a younger and very different Right took its place, led by a twenty-something Yale graduate named William F. Buckley, Jr. Early on, he, like Nock or Chodorov, styled himself an individualist. But his views parted from theirs on foreign policy and indeed on the scope of State power at home, too. Around young Buckley and the magazine he founded, National Review, the new conservative movement coalesced — and later calcified.

Today Buckley is 78. He has given up public speaking, ended his long-running public television series, and, most recently, divested control of National Review. The movement he leaves behind has the kind of organization and political power that the Old Right never had — and never wanted. But the ex-Leftists and their offspring who now control establishment conservatism fear for the future after Buckley, because they find their authority challenged by a rising generation of antiwar, independently minded non-neoconservatives. Something like the Old Right is making a comeback.

At first glance there’s little cause for optimism in David Kirkpatrick’s recent New York Times profile of several rising stars of post-Buckley conservatism. Readers may find themselves wondering whatever happened to principle, and anti-statist or limited-government principle in particular. David Weigel, one of our Young Turks, writes for Reason magazine — but supports UN-sponsored condom giveaways in the Third World, funded, inevitably, by U.S. taxpayers. Yet Weigel looks like Murray Rothbard next to Eric Cohen, who rides the neocon gravy train to such destinations as the Weekly Standard and the President’s Council on Bioethics. Cohen holds a decidedly progressive view of "conservatism": "The conservative project," he says, "is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home…"

Progress abroad means war, of course, something about which another of Kirkpatrick’s subjects, Sarah Bramwell, seems ambivalent. She’s quoted telling a recent Philadelphia Society meeting, "Many conservatives especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy….I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement." But according to Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Bramwell supports the Iraq War anyway. It’s an old story: movement conservatives have often decried foreign-policy interventionism in the abstract, only to support every particular war waged by a Republican administration.

But hold on — maybe there’s something more going on here. Look at how Kirkpatrick’s article has been denounced by the usual neocon suspects, from Roger Kimball to Jonah Goldberg. They don’t like what they’re hearing about the next generation. Goldberg, for example, professes to be perplexed that Kirkpatrick would so much as suggest that young conservatives harbor any doubts about the wisdom of world empire — "where Kirkpatrick got the notion that young conservatives are especially plagued with doubt about the justification of the war is beyond me," he writes.

Probably Kirkpatrick, a real reporter, got that impression from talking to young conservatives and doing a bit of research. He spoke to me, for one thing, but I didn’t exactly plant the idea in his head — in fact, I downplayed the notion. Most young conservatives are not antiwar or at all critical of Bush. But a surprising number are — especially among the smartest and most promising members of the post-Buckley Right.

Consider the emerging cohort of brilliant — nothing short of that will do — and principled young conservative journalists who have written critically about the Iraq War and related issues. These might be called the young paleos, although that’s more to set them apart from the neocons than to suggest they are a rigid movement in their own right. These writers, ranging in age from the early-20s to early-30s, don’t all agree with one another — not by a nautical mile — but all have roots that stretch back, one way or another, to pre-Rupert Murdoch, and in some cases even pre-Buckley, conservatisms.

There’s Tim Carney, for one, 25-year-old Wunderkind reporter for the Evans-Novak Political Report and a frequent contributor to the magazine for which I work, The American Conservative. He hasn’t been afraid to report hard truths about controversial subjects, noting in the pages of TAC, for example, the disjunction between the Republican Party’s pro-life base and it’s pro-choice top-dollar donors. He doesn’t shrink from criticizing big business when it gets in bed with government, either, a subject he’ll be writing much more about in the future. Carney had the foresight and backbone to oppose the Iraq misadventure from the start.

Daniel Flynn is a few years older than Carney and a few years ahead of him in the publishing game: this October his second book, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas, hits the shelves. The book parses the follies not only of the postmodernist Left and various liberal political causes (animal rights, Alger Hiss) but, bravely, also puts Struassians and neoconservatives under a critical lens. He calls them "the Right’s Deconstructionists" and pillories their "esoteric reading" of intelligence regarding Iraq’s WMDs.

Thomas Woods, assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College and author of The Church Confronts Modernity, is only in his early 30s but has already made a name for himself as both historian and thoughtful traditionalist Catholic. He, and his stand against the Iraq War, are familiar to LRC readers. (And elsewhere, too, such as in The American Conservative and Modern Age, Woods has written about the Progressive roots of the neocon jihad for global democracy.) Next out are his popular Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and a scholarly book on economics and the Catholic Church.

Also familiar to readers of LRC is Marcus Epstein, just 21 and still an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. His journalism here, in print, and at Vdare.com provides only the first glimpse of what he’s likely to accomplish in the future. He’s an especially insightful student of the history of the Old Right (see his "Murray Rothbard on Sen. Joe McCarthy"). And, of course, he’s given apologists for Bush’s war an occasional case of indigestion.

These four are just a few of the most notable journeyman conservatives who’ve stood on principle and defied the neoconservative party-line on war and foreign policy. Add to them such twenty-something libertarian critics of the Iraq-attack as Antiwar.com’s Matthew Barganier and LRC talents like (to name just a few) J.H. Huebert, Bob Murphy, and Bill Barnwell, and you start to get a sense of the strengths arrayed by the young men of the Old Right.

Where are the youthful neocons comparable to these writers — and who reads them? To be sure, there’s no shortage of right-wing social democrats at the undergraduate level in most major universities; certainly there are legions of Bushie-types. But a lot of them outgrow it pretty quickly, especially after being exposed to principled arguments. Some of them find Rothbard and attend Mises University; others read Russell Kirk and, if they actually absorb what he says, find that neocon Jacobinism is about as antithetical to Kirk’s traditionalism as anything can be. Those students who venture beyond talk-radio and the quickie books put out by the usual cast of blabbermouths and pundettes find a conservatism that cannot be easily reconciled with global empire.

Not all the young people who come to such conclusions can afford to say so, however. Kirkpatrick quotes me as saying that the conservative movement needs to get back to the time before it was a movement — back to principle and away from all the sinecures and employment agencies masquerading as think-tanks and Beltway publications. This, of course, is more easily said than done, especially where college or just-out-of-college conservatives are concerned. They have to make a living, after all; and for those who want to fight in the ideological trenches as a career there are not too many alternatives beyond the mainstream movement. You risk your job if you’re a young antiwar conservative and less than enthusiastic about Bush. I’ve heard from such people: they are a silent minority. They don’t abandon their beliefs, and when appropriate they speak out. But, understandably, they don’t try to attract undue attention.

Perhaps that accounts in part for why Jonah Goldberg thinks only "[m]aybe one out of fifty conservative kids I’ve met at YAF or C-PAC conferences or on campuses was even moderately against the war." Not that the pep rallies Goldberg is talking about would be the kind of places you’d expect to find thoughtful criticism. But even then, you might be surprised. Who’s the most popular speaker on the campus-conservative lecture circuit — not the best known or highest paid but, by most accounts, the most electrifying and inspiring?

The answer is Reginald Jones, a hip-hop musician and entertainment guru who was voted best speaker at YAF’s 1999 summer conference. Jones opposed the Iraq venture — he’s a principled opponent of all foreign-policy adventurism, in fact — and is not afraid to say so. His popularity with college conservatives is hard to overestimate: at one CPAC he gave a closed-door talk to one of the major right-wing youth groups and, after excoriating the socialism of the Left, went right on to blast "conservative" warmongering in equally firm terms. Young conservatives were coming up to him in throngs afterwards to hear more; he had to host an informal bull session later that night just to meet the demand. Not a party, not the kind of booze-fest that usually attracts college cons (and students generally), but an impromptu seminar on the foreign-policy follies.

Kirkpatrick’s article rightly suggests that there’s considerable variation to be found among young conservatives on questions of war and foreign policy. He’s right, too, that the young, post-Buckley Right is grappling with questions of definition. For this as well Kirkpatrick has earned the ire of the neos; both Goldberg and Roger Kimball try to quash this subject by saying that it’s really a non-issue: conservatives have always debated such things. Yes, but they have not always debated them in the kind of political climate that exists today, with the Cold War ended and lines of battle clearly drawn between neocons and everybody else. It’s heresy, though, even to think that the end of the Cold War should entail a re-examination of a movement that for thirty-five years had been dominated by Cold Warriors.

And so Kimball fumes about Kirkpatrick’s "subtext" and his alleged insinuating of "a sense of confusion and weariness among conservatives in the post-Soviet era." The trouble with this is that there is no such subtext, it’s right there in the text itself, not only coming from Kirkpatrick’s summary but also in the form of verbatim quotes from William F. Buckley ("The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart") and Sarah Bramwell ("Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism….The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?"). Did Kirkpatrick and "his masters at 29 West 43rd Street" put Buckley and Bramwell up to saying these scurrilous things, or does Kimball set a new standard for what Richard Hofstatder called the paranoid style in American politics? Yes, it’s always liberal media bias, even when conservatives say it.

Kirkpatrick does make a couple of errors, however, and for those of us who are not-neos the real picture is better than it might have seemed. Caleb Stegall of the New Pantagruel website says that he does not, in fact, support government social programs (scroll down, and note, by the way, that they don’t seem to be too hot for the Iraq War — see their challenge to National Review, too). For my part, I’m bemused by Kirkpatrick’s suggestion that I "turned against" President Bush — something that’s hardly possible, since I was never for him in the first place. I certainly did not vote for him in 2000.

As great as is the shame that Bush and his cronies, inside and out of the government, have brought down upon anyone who identifies himself as being in any way conservative or, more generally, on the Right, these are good days to be young and non-Leftist. The distorting pressures of the Cold War have lifted, clarifying the differences between the partisan hacks and seekers after political power on the one hand, and principled men and women on the other. A real opposition to statism in both its welfarist and militarist guises is resurgent and it finds itself in a target-rich environment full of follies to lampoon, lambaste, and expose. Best of all, the market for new institutions and new thinkers to replace those of the last century’s ideological consensus is real and growing, and this demand is one that the young, returning Old Right is uniquely well suited to meet.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is assistant editor for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

Nobody has any reason to like Stephen Glass even before seeing Shattered Glass, the new film based on his exposure as a professional liar. Then again, like most of what Glass wrote at the New Republic in the two and a half years he worked there, maybe that’s not quite true. Someone might conceivably think well of Glass precisely because he did make a mockery out of the New Republic. The Schadenfreude of seeing such an estimable neoconservative publication taken down a peg or two might translate for some into a bit of fondness for the fallen Wunderkind.

But even that goodwill won’t survive a viewing of Shattered Glass, which damns its subject as not just a liar but also an ingratiating twerp. The real Glass might have been a little more likeable, according to David Plotz, who knew him. Or maybe, as Plotz himself wonders, the cinematic depiction of Stephen Glass might be closer to the truth after all. Shattered Glass is certainly a very accurate film in most respects, lightly fictionalized in places — it isn’t a documentary — but truthful nonetheless.

It’s a reasonably good film, too Well-cast, as critics have noted, particularly with Peter Sarsgaard as Charles Lane, the TNR editor who has to confront the proof of Glass’s fraud. Hayden Christensen is Glass; Chloe Sevigny plays a composite character based on other TNR staffers. The story isn’t thrilling, but writer-director Billy Ray has made the most of it and resisted the temptation to embellish too much or try to convince the viewer that there was any real psychological depth to Glass. Some reviewers have faulted the film for failing to psychoanalyze Glass, but Ray was right not to do so. The film is admirably objective. That might make it a bit boring for those who want spectacular heights and depths of emotion from their movies, but adults should enjoy it.

Admittedly, it’s hard to make the case that Shattered Glass is a must-see unless you happen to be a journalist of some kind. Then it’s worth seeing just for the fun-house mirror of sorts it might provide for your own career and circumstances. It’s of interest too to those who are morbidly curious about journalism; my own experiences are pretty far removed from anything in the movie but based on what I’ve seen of other twenty-somethings working at Washington-based political magazines, I’d say the viewer gets an accurate picture of what the life is like. Except that the one or two TNR people I’ve actually met have been much more likeable and considerably less self-important than those represented on the screen.

It was more than just professional curiosity that made me want to see the film, however. The Stephen Glass story is something I’ve been interested in for a while, since 1997 when the New Republic ran "Spring Breakdown," Glass’s account of debauchery among college-age conservatives at that year’s CPAC conference. I was a college-age conservative, but missed all the debauchery — my first CPAC wasn’t until ’98. Nonetheless, from what I’d seen and heard about at other, broadly similar events I was inclined to believe the account Glass gave. He duped National Review, too, if memory serves. It was in the O’Sullivan-era, pre-Frum NR that I first read about the story.

National Review and I were easily fooled because hard partying isn’t unheard of at gatherings of young conservatives, though it seldom takes a form as dramatic as what Glass wanted readers to believe. Open drug use is rare — I’ve never seen any. Bathtubs full of beer on the other hand are unremarkably common — I’ve sponsored a few of those myself. Glass’s tale of Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan supporters behaving badly was always hard to believe, simply because there usually weren’t many young Gramm-scians or Buchananites at all, especially at the parties. College Republicans of my acquaintance usually preferred the Doles and Bushes of the world, since the whole of their ambition was to rise up the ranks of the Republican establishment.

As for the kind of sexual misconduct dreamt up by Glass, that was rather less implausible. It isn’t particular to CPAC, but almost any time you have college students, "conservative" or not, enjoying what they think of as a high time it’s more likely than not that there’s going to be some impropriety. If that sounds surprising, just look at the New York Times Magazine’s account of young Hipublicans and ask yourself what you think they’d do in such a situation. It’s not just minicons who get up to such antics, of course — what most people who haven’t been on a college campus in the last ten years don’t know is that there’s nowadays a lot less political correctness and a lot more experimental lesbianism (to name just one thing). Where campuses are concerned, conservatives are still, as usual, fighting the good fight fifteen years too late.

The things Glass wrote were too neat and too dramatic — too good — to be true, but for the longest time remained grounded in just enough truth to seem possible. Take the Monicondom, for example. In the ’90s it really did seem like you could sell just about anything by making fun of one or both of the Clintons, just as today conservatives will buy just about anything — from a book to a Barbie doll — that presents George W. Bush as some kind of action hero. Along those lines, consider another tall tale from Stephen Glass, the one about the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ. No self-respecting Ralph Reed-type would choose Bush 41 for the next vacancy in the Trinity, but if Glass had written about Reagan or had gazed into his crystal ball and foreseen the coming of Bush 42, he would have been nearly right. What else is one to make the outrage in conservative circles over The Reagans and the relative silence over an ABC mockumentary about the "wife" of Jesus? Frank Gaffney, not notably religious but writing on the WorldNetDaily website, solemnly invokes in another context what he calls the "sacred trust" of preserving Reagan’s memory. For what it’s worth, I rather like Reagan and I don’t like W., but it’s clear that both men have been turned into idols of an imperial cult.

Stephen Glass might have had the makings of a first-class satirist if only he’d had an ounce of integrity. A satirist has to exaggerate the details of what is basically true, after all. But Glass had no discernible principles; he wasn’t even a crusading Leftist. Not long after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and before landing a job at TNR he went to work for the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review. Maybe Glass couldn’t have risen as quickly as he did if he had been an honest satirist; as it is he preferred careerism to honesty. He wanted to be as transparent as his name implied, pretending to show through to the objective facts — that he made up — rather than taking on a little color of his own and admitting that what he was writing was actually his own opinion.

Shattered Glass communicates the waste and madness involved in Glass’s behavior. He comes off in the movie as somewhat unhinged, though certainly morally culpable for his actions. By the end of the film, he’s ruined. But there may be a redemption in store for the real Stephen Glass. As a text epilogue at the end of the film informs viewers, Glass has recently graduated from Georgetown University’s law school. He has applied to the New York bar, which apparently does not automatically disqualify people with a record of professional misconduct as bad as Glass’s. His skills in misdirection, manipulation, and special pleading might sever him very well as a lawyer, but a man as talented as Glass shouldn’t just settle for that. A liar as proficient as Glass could have a bright future ahead of him in the White House one day, where he can tell the American people about drugs he didn’t inhale, women he did not have sex with, and all the Weapons of Mass Destruction he found in Iraq.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a staff writer for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

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by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

Rush Limbaugh need not worry. The allegations of drug abuse that have been leveled against him, even if true, will not end his career. He may get sent to jail and for a time he’ll certainly be discredited as a hypocrite and a fraud, but after all of that he’ll be able to come back and pick up where he left off, possibly more popular than ever. His drug use need not be any more of an obstacle to Rush than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s drug use has been to him. So long as Rush learns from Arnold: whatever it is you’ve done or been accused of — whatever the right or wrong of it — just apologize and emote and the masses will love you for it.

A long time ago Arnold Schwarzenegger was a cocky young man with a circulatory system full of steroids. The steroids built up his ego as well as his body; that’s the real significance behind his remarks about Adolf Hitler. Any mention of Hitler today conjures up only his reputation as history’s premier anti-Semite, but when Arnold allegedly confessed to admiring der Fhrer it wasn’t for killing Jews. It was for lusting after and attaining power, power in the form of the adulation of the masses. Arnold doesn’t use steroids any more, but — to judge from his desire to be governor and his fondness for big-government programs like his after-school initiative — he’s still addicted to power.

What Arnold has had to learn in the course of his campaign is that political power is not to be had by just reaching out and grabbing it. The masses are happy to give their adulation, but to qualify for it a candidate first has to be willing to say “I’m sorry.” So Arnold, who probably isn’t sorry at all that he copped a feel off of some well-endowed women, has taken to apologizing quickly and effectively. Bill Clinton was never too quick about it, but he too knew how to sell an apology for personal follies (his affairs) or national disgraces (slavery). George W. Bush also knows a thing or two about how to make the most out of being a “changed man.” Willfully blind Christians loved W. all the more for having once been a drunk. The ability to make a good apology, more than anything else, is what credentials Arnold Schwarzenegger to become a top-flight politician.

Rush Limbaugh is more accustomed to saying “See I told you so” than “I’m sorry,” but he’ll learn. At first nobody’s going to listen to his protestations of contrition. Just the opposite: his fair-weather friends in what passes for the conservative movement will abandon him and his critics will take the opportunity to gloat over his hypocrisy. Here’s a man who preached zero tolerance for others suddenly expecting a few expressions of regret to take the heat off him. No dice, they’ll say. So, certainly, things will get much worse for Rush before they get any better.

But that’s good — good for his career as spokesman for the respectable Right — because such hardships will build character. At least that’s the myth. The best thing that can happen to him is to go to jail, because then when he gets out he’ll have “done his time” and suddenly be made whole once again. His credibility as a drug warrior will be bolstered; he’ll be able to say that he’s experienced the evils of addiction at firsthand, and that he’s actually grateful for the laws that put him in jail. Instead of being a hypocrite, he’ll have become an expert. He’ll be in a position of honestly being able to say that he’s not advocating that anyone else be treated any different from himself. He went to jail, so other drug abusers should go to jail.

If the charges don’t land Rush in prison the same scenario can still play out, but it won’t be as dramatic and may take much more time. The market for apologies and for stories of personal reformation will still be there. Rush can go out on a speaking tour to high schools and colleges and share his personal story of fame, hard-work and success followed by drug abuse and downfall and then, at last, redemption. If much of Rush’s own audience has deserted him by then, he’ll be able to gain a new one by appearing on Oprah. (Come to think of it, isn’t there something strangely symmetrical about Rush Limbaugh and Oprah Winfrey? They both communicate more with emotions than with thoughts and have earned huge audiences in the process, thereby influencing America much for the worse.)

There is such a thing as genuine repentance, but what’s popular in America today is a simulacrum, a ritual of public confession that actually serves to put the reformed sinner on a higher moral plane than everybody else. Paul Gottfried discusses one manifestation of this phenomenon in his recent book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt. When white politicians like Bill Clinton apologize for racism (or sexism, or whatever the -ism of the month happens to be) it has nothing to do with humility, as would be the Christian ideal. It’s the very opposite, a pride at being more enlightened, more sensitive, more humane and just generally better than those troglodytes who have yet to accept their guilt. This sort of thing is endemic on the Left, but it’s to be found on the Right as well, often in a more explicitly religious form. It’s characteristically American, and Rush Limbaugh will be well positioned to take advantage of it — especially since his disgrace was brought about by drugs, rather than sex. The adulterer Newt Gingrich is nowhere near as popular among American Evangelicals as the recovering alcoholic George W. Bush.

Rush Limbaugh can come out of this scandal more self-righteous than ever and more committed to the war on drugs, and drug-users, too. He should not be given the opportunity to do so. That means denying him his redemption in this particular matter by refusing to acknowledge his fall in the first place. The worst thing that can happen to Rush Limbaugh’s world-view is for sensible people to treat his drug abuse as a matter of indifference or, at most, cause for mild rebuke. He should be treated like an adult, however little he may deserve the privilege, rather than a naughty child caught with his hand in the cookie jar: whatever guilt Rush might feel and whatever the damage his health and his relations with his family should be strictly a private matter for him and for them. If he wants expiation, he shouldn’t be able to get it from the government, by “doing his time,” or from the public by going to them and airing his dirty laundry. If he wants to confess, let him do it to his priest, or through whatever protocols his denomination might require, but let’s not make this something that he can some mass-media psychological leverage out of. Instead let’s see how Rush Limbaugh’s maternalistic attitude toward drug use stands up to a dose of self-responsibility.

Quick personal note:

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that my email address at the top of this article is no longer what it once was. And those of you who subscribe to the American Conservative magazine may have spotted a new name added to its masthead as of the October 6, 2003 issue.

I’ve had a change of career since my last article for LRC — I’m now AmCon’s staff writer. Naturally this is yet another good reason to subscribe to the magazine, as if any more reason were needed to subscribe to a periodical that publishes such writers as Paul Gottfried, Anthony Gankarski, Marcus Epstein, Steven Greenhut, Richard Cummings, Peter Hitchens, Justin Raimondo, Thomas Woods, Steve Sailer, Leon Hadar, and David Gordon, and has regular columns by Pat Buchanan and Taki. My work for the magazine differs somewhat from what I’ve written in the past: it involves more original reporting and tends to reflect the line of the magazine as a whole, rather than my personal opinion on things. Though most of the time, but not always, the two are identical.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a staff writer for the American Conservative. Subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.

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by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy

The best thing that the movement for gay u2018marriage’ has going for it is the ineptitude of its opponents. That most Americans are quite content with old fashioned, man-and-woman marriage was made clear enough in 1996, when President Clinton signed the "Defense of Marriage Act" in the midst of a presidential campaign. Clinton was no friend to monogamy, but he knew how to read the writing on the wall.

Not so most (neo)conservative critics of gay u2018marriage.’ Unwilling or unable to invoke such concepts as natural law or, God forbid, religious truth, they have fallen back on utilitarian objections to extending the status of marriage to homosexual unions. So unconvincing are these utilitarian objections that the whole question of opposing gay u2018marriage’ is thrown into doubt. The public, or at least that part of the public that is semi-literate or better, may well conclude that if this is the best that the u2018nays’ have to offer, the u2018ayes’ should have it.

There are good reasons to be against gay u2018marriage.’ Contrary to what some libertarians seem to think, it would only be an expansion of State power, with the State redefining an institution older than itself, one that it did not create in the first place but only recognized. Returning marriage to religious institutions would be the better idea, as Ryan McMacken has argued. Putting aside the role of the State, those who believe that matrimony is a sacrament, or who through natural law reasoning find fault with homosexuality itself, have their own grounds for rejecting gay u2018marriage.’

There are even plausible utilitarian arguments against gay u2018marriage,’ though they will be no more popular with the political and media elite than theology or natural law reasoning. The simplest and best utilitarian argument is surely just that very few people indeed stand to benefit from gay u2018marriage,’ while large factions of the population — traditional Christians and Muslims, for example — will be outraged. This is a u2018cold’ utilitarian argument. It doesn’t try to be egalitarian and treat unequal kinds of behavior as the same, which is presumably why it isn’t much used in polite discussion.

All of this goes against the prevailing currents among those who argue for and implement public policy, of course: the journalists, academics, lawyers and politicians of 21st century America. But none of the arguments that sail along with the prejudices of this class — which scoffs at u2018natural law’ but accepts on faith u2018human rights’ — can adequately supply a reason for opposing gay u2018marriage.’ The problem that emerges might be called the Stanley Kurtz Question.

Kurtz has been trying mightily to show that gay u2018marriage’ is harmful in a practical sense, that it will in fact undermine traditional marriage by weakening the "ethos of monogamy," which will in turn lead to more heterosexual promiscuity and even, eventually, the legal recognition of "polyamory." There are several basic logical problems with Kurtz’s arguments. Nowhere does he prove — or even attempt to prove — that if married homosexuals are engaging in adulterous affairs that married heterosexuals will be tempted to follow suit. Why would heterosexual couples model their behavior after homosexuals? There’s good reason to think, based on statistics Kurtz himself reports from a study by in his "Beyond Gay Marriage" article, that what provides the "ethos of monogamy" is women. Lesbians in civil unions, according to the University of Vermont study that Kurtz cites, value monogamy more highly than men in heterosexual marriages. This would seem to confirm what has long been known — that men, regardless of sexual orientation, are more promiscuous than women, regardless of orientation. It’s the presence of a woman in heterosexual marriage that accounts for the "ethos of monogamy." The legal recognition of gay u2018marriages’ will do nothing to change this fact. Women, straight or lesbian, will not stop being monogamous just because u2018married’ gay men have difficulty with it.

Even less will gay u2018marriage’ lead to the acceptance of polygamy and "polyamory" — and once again, Kurtz himself provides the evidence. He lays great stress in his "Beyond Gay Marriage" article on the absence of "romantic love" from polygamous relationships. But it is precisely the belief in "romantic love" that animates supporters of gay u2018marriage.’ They claim that it can exist between two individuals of the same sex as surely as it can between two of different sexes. Given the murky nature of "romantic love," it’s hard to say that they’re wrong. If, as Kurtz argues, "romantic love" is absent from polygamous relationships, they will not enjoy even the limited support that gay u2018marriage’ does. There is simply nothing to say that the elite class, let alone the public, will consider polygamous or "polyamorous" relationships as the same thing as one-to-one unions of hetero- or homosexuals.

(There is also the point that people who like to engage in orgies, which is what "polyamory" is, probably do not, for the most part, want to get married and thereafter engage in the same orgies with the same people all the time. As for polygamy, one wife is usually trouble enough for any man.)

Kurtz is correct to attack "family law radicals" in his "Beyond Gay Marriage," but these Left-wing legal revolutionaries are a separate issue from gay u2018marriage’ advocates. The family law radicals are dangerous whether or not there is gay u2018marriage,’ and are in fact a much bigger threat in their own right, using as they do the power of the State to directly subvert parents and families. Kurtz is also correct to lament the erosion of the "ethos of monogamy" that has already taken place, but this is owing not to heterosexuals imitating homosexuals, but rather to the sexual revolution in general — about which Kurtz writes in "The Libertarian Question" that "on balance, I think we as a society have gained much from the weakening of the old sexual taboos." No-fault divorce, increasing promiscuity and out-of-wedlock births, and now the fad for single-motherhood have all exploded without gay u2018marriage.’ These things simply have nothing to do with homosexuality, u2018married’ or otherwise, now or in the future.

One might well suggest that Kurtz’s arguments, as weak as they may be, are nonetheless the best that can be made in the current political and cultural climate. There’s a considerable amount of truth to that — and therein lies a problem. Moral traditionalists have all too often cut themselves off from the basis of their own beliefs in order to appeal to the media, the political class, and the State itself. In the long run this has little hope of success, and indeed in the short run it looks unlikely to stop the movement for gay u2018marriage.’

But whether or not it does, the price that is being paid for fighting on these terms, the abandonment of good argument in favor of politically expedient poor arguments, is surely much too high. It throws religion and philosophy — to say nothing of common sense — out the window in favor of pandering to the political class. For one thing this has the effect of extending the secularism of the U.S. government into discussions of mores and morality. It also contributes to turning politics into a spectacle. If rationalizations like Kurtz’s are acceptable in a matter like gay u2018marriage,’ they soon become accepted in the graver public matters of war and State power, as everyone becomes habituated to putting the demands of political power ahead of those of truth.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

Christopher Caldwell doesn’t like spam. That’s ok — who does? Caldwell, however, thinks that the solution to unsolicited commercial email is to have “lawmakers” — the federal government — do something about it. There’s a problem here, but what’s worse is that Caldwell gives the impression that his real objective here isn’t to eliminate nuisance email, it’s to set a precedent for taxing the internet.

Caldwell suggests as a first step toward eliminating spam the creation of a national “no email” list — a measure that’s been proposed by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Even without knowing the details, which Caldwell does not provide, the involvement of Sen. Schumer in this plan is reason enough for skepticism. And indeed, Caldwell himself doesn’t think a “no email” list goes far enough. After brushing aside the question of how “no email” legislation would be enforced (a pretty important question, one would think), Caldwell turns his attention to a much more controversial measure: taxing email. According to Caldwell, “a do-not-spam list is a first imperative. But it is also a social necessity that the principle of taxing the Internet be established soon.”

This begins to look like a classic bait-and-switch. Winning readers over to the anti-spam cause is easy enough. Getting them to endorse an entirely new kind of tax is wholly another thing; but if the two causes can convincingly, or just emotionally, be joined, then a world of possibilities opens up. And so the move from a mildly statist, dubiously effective anti-spam measure, to an appeal for an email tax and, in implication, an internet sales tax, too. Spam ceases to be the issue.

Or does it? Caldwell says that a tax on email will discourage spam. “A penny-per-email charge would drive most spammers out of business, subject them to jail time for tax evasion if they hid their operations, and cost the average three-letter-a-day Internet user just ten bucks a year. If even that seems to hard on the small user, then an exemption could be made for up to 5,000 e-mails per annum.” There’s one other measure Caldwell has in mind, but for now let’s take a close look at a 1-cent per message tax with the stipulated exemption. How would this affect spammers and how would it affect ordinary people?

The spammers are the professionals here; most other email users are, relative to them, just amateurs. So if there is a technical means to avoid the tax, spammers will be in a better position to take advantage of it than the rest of us will. As it happens there isn’t a technical means to avoid the tax, there are a great many. For example, what’s to stop a spammer from sending 4,999 emails from a dozen different accounts — or a hundred different accounts? The burden of opening new accounts is not very great. There are also ways of disguising the transmission routes that emails take, making it difficult or impossible to trace them to their original source, and there are even computer viruses which can hijack your computer and email account to send out spam.

Ordinary email users would not get the spam-free environment that they want from the email tax. What they would get, in addition to continuing spam, would be several new nuisances as well. In order to provide even the most minimal deterrent to spammers, the email tax would have to apply to persons regardless of what email accounts they used. Necessarily, this means a federal database linking names and physical addresses to email addresses. It’s hard to imagine the federal government doing a very effective job of this, but again, spammers could slip through the system’s cracks a lot more easily than the rest of us. Without any benefit to taxpayers, a new and vast federal database will have been born.

The tax itself, as always with taxes, would also have a destructive effect. What would happen to listservs and other large email discussion lists? Some of them have hundreds or even thousands of subscribers, and since they all receive all of the mail sent to the list, somebody would be liable for enormous taxes. Would this burden fall on the individual sender or would it fall on the list administrator? Perhaps an exemption could be provided for listservs, but in this case a.) the cost of compliance, of registering for the exemption, would itself be damaging and b.) spammers would have a financial incentive to abuse these lists. So far, these lists in my experience have been mercifully free from spam, thanks to filtering software and watchful administrators.

Listservs are just a special case, however. If the tax isn’t attached to individuals, which may well be technically impossible, it would have to fall on internet service providers. This would ultimately mean higher prices for consumers, not because the tax would be shifted forward from ISPs onto us, but because it would be shifted backward from the ISPs to the companies that support the ISPs (ISPs will have to cut costs, thus hurting suppliers), in a process that ultimately gets back to consumers. (Murray Rothbard discusses this phenomenon, the “backward shifting” of taxes in Power and Market.) Even users who do not send more than 5,000 emails a year would be affected by this.

And why exempt the first 5,000 emails anyway? Since the stated purpose of the tax is to discourage spam, a purpose the tax has little hope of fulfilling anyway and even less of accomplishing if the first 5,000 messages are exempt, why allow the exemption? It would mean an “unfair” tax burden on those people who legitimately send more than 5,000 emails a year. Christopher Caldwell, as he makes clear in his article, certainly doesn’t want to be unfair. He should, then, in principle support an email tax on all users. And why limit it to 1-cent? Why not 10-cents? The American people as a whole wouldn’t object. A 10-cent email tax could raise much-needed revenue to keep America safe, provide prescription medicines for our nation’s most vulnerable seniors, and establish a nation-wide “Amber Alert” system to protect our children from child molesters. Show me the Republican legislator who isn’t Ron Paul who could vote against that!

It is a basic law of government: a new tax will not stay at its original level, it will be expanded to apply to more people and the rate will rise. That’s what happened with the income tax, after all. The State has no reason to forgo revenue by keeping tax-rates low.

Caldwell, as I said, wants to be fair. He tells us, “It was always unfair not to tax business on the Internet, of course. There is no reason that Amazon.com should enjoy a pricing advantage (a de facto government subsidy) over a corner bookstore.” But don’t think Caldwell is just a typical left-liberal who wants to raise taxes in the interests of “fairness,” oh no! No, indeed: he writes, “If the postage [i.e., the email tax] were decried as a tax hike, then it could be used to fund one-to-one tax cuts in other areas — like sale taxes for brick-and-mortar retail stores that have labored under such an unfair tax disadvantage for the past half decade.”

The old-fashioned conservative retort to this is that, well, life simply isn’t fair. Don’t impose new taxes on internet commerce just because brick-and-mortar retail already pays sales tax. For one thing it isn’t even an apples-to-apples comparison: a federal email tax would not be equal to the many different sales taxes in various states. Does Caldwell really mean, then, that those sales taxes should also be applied to electronic commerce? He doesn’t say so explicitly, but that has to be what he means, at least if he wants to be “fair.” Of course, even this wouldn’t be “fair” — internet commerce has the disadvantage of having to pay for regular postage already. Amazon has to mail me a book, costing me more than if I were just to buy one at a local shop. Whatever the government may do, there will not be a condition of “fairness” existing between these two kinds of commerce, because they are not the same and not equal.

Still, simple human sympathy might make us want to cheer for the little guy, the brick-and-mortar retailer, against the Amazon Goliath (to mix mythical metaphor for a moment). Unfortunately for Caldwell, the picture he paints isn’t true to life, because e-commerce is a boon to small retailers, perhaps even more than it is to giants like Amazon. Just think of Ebay, where individual sellers can auction their goods, or book stores like Abebooks.com and Alibris.com, or Amazon’s own used book market, all of which allow small retailers, mom-and-pop book stores, to sell to individual buyers. The “little guys” are not at a disadvantage here: they can undercut Amazon’s prices because they sell used books, and in the aggregate they have a stock of goods even larger than Amazon’s, because they provide out of print and rare books.

So who does lose out in internet commerce? State governments that cannot tax the ‘net do. And so do bad bookstores (for example). Mall bookstores like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s cannot compete with either Amazon.com or with independent internet booksellers in terms of either variety or price. It’s the mediocre middle that stands to lose out, not either the very small and quite specialized bookstores or the very ones like Amazon and (both on- and off-line) Borders. Do we really want the government helping bookstores with poor selections and high prices at the expense of those with great selection and lower prices?

Christopher Caldwell’s internet taxation schemes are just bizarre. They stand little chance of helping ordinary people by eliminating spam, and are sure to lead to higher taxes, higher prices, and less goods — while also giving government more money, something a lot of us find quite objectionable enough. Even apart from self-conscious libertarians and small-government conservatives, anybody might look at the federal behemoth and wonder whether this wasteful, irresponsible, voracious and counter-productive institution really needs still more of our money.

Caldwell writes that opposition to his internet tax plan is “ideologically driven.” He’s talking in particular about politicians, but let’s consider things from the layman’s perspective. In my case, most of all I just don’t want to pay more taxes, especially not on the email that I use every day. This coincides with my principles, but even if I had completely different principles I wouldn’t want to pay an email tax, as I dare say most people don’t. It’s quite pragmatic. Considering the real harm and dubious benefits of an email tax, one has to wonder whether it isn’t actually Caldwell who is the ideologue recommending as he does something that goes against common sense and the interests of most people. Unless he’s in the pay of Waldenbooks or the federal government, which I don’t believe is the case, his ill-considered suggestions can only be understood as arising from a statist ideology.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

It’s sometimes lamented by a certain kind of journalist or commentator that we do not live in an heroic age. Policemen, soldiers, teachers, or crippled celebrities might be called heroes for a while but, so the complaint goes, a real appreciation for heroism is absent from our age. Heroes once had permanent cults in their honor; they don’t any more. Not even cops, soldiers or Christopher Reeve.

Those who complain about this perceived lack of heroism in our day should probably read more epic literature — the Iliad or the Aeneid would be obvious places to start. Heroes, for all their excellence, led lives that few of us would envy. The tragic story of Achilles speaks for itself. Odysseus got off fairly lightly, he was just lost at sea for a few years and lost all his ships and crew, most of whom either drowned or were eaten by monsters. Such is the fate of a hero’s companions. Then there was poor Aeneas, the Roman hero. He lost his home and his wife in the sack of Troy. He later lost his father, a woman he loved, and a good many of his followers over the course of his wanderings. All of his storm-tossed misery was ultimately for a purpose, though: fate had predestined Aeneas to found the line that would later found Rome.

What Aeneas lost — just about everything that could be worth having — he lost for the sake of a single thing: imperium sine fine, an "empire without end." His heroic epithet was pius, "dutiful," because whenever the opportunity came his way to do something sensible, like settling down with the nubile queen of a prosperous North African city-state, he would instead follow the path that fate had decreed. He was a dutiful son and soldier, yes, but his first duty was to the empire-to-be.

Aeneas paid a dear price for his devotion and, much to its credit, the Aeneid gives no easy answer to the question of whether the imperium was worth its price. There have long been arguments within classics departments over the possibility that maybe, in some cryptic way, the Aeneid is an anti-war, anti-imperial work. It probably isn’t: the emperor Augustus commissioned the epic himself and when the poet Vergil left instructions that his unfinished epic be burned after his death, Augustus and his cultural adviser, Maecenas, went ahead and published it anyway. It was instantly heralded as a masterpiece and rapidly became a standard text in Roman schools. If there’s a subversive subtext to the Aeneid it evidently didn’t bother the emperor or his ministers, any one of whom would have been in a better position to detect it than the greatest of modern philologists.

But even without being directly critical of Augustus, the Aeneid at the very least shows the high price of war and empire in an artistically honest fashion. There is nothing glamorous or noble about the warfare seen in book II of the Aeneid, the sack of Troy by the Greeks. The murder of the old Trojan king, Priam, by Pyrrhus, son of Achilles and in Vergil’s account a near-psychopath, is as pitiable a scene as is to be found anywhere in literature. And the final scene of the whole epic, in which the hero slaughters an already fallen foe, in an echo of the mad rage of Achilles, should leave any reader unsure of his sympathies. For Turnus, victim of Aeneas’s wrath, was a brave man in his own right, but differed from Aeneas in not having had the favor of the gods.

For all his courage and virtue, Aeneas might seem more like a fool than a hero were it not for the god-given assurance of his — and his heirs’s — success. Imperium sine fine doesn’t sound too preposterous when its coming from the king of the gods. It’s poetic license, of course, but the Aeneid is poetry, and great poetry at that. History, however, is a very different thing. The great historians of antiquity do not offer much comfort to those who would seek to create an empire without end. The Roman historians Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius all lived during the principate and hated what Rome had become. However permanent the imperium abroad might have seemed to them, Rome itself — the republic to which they owed their affection and (albeit after the fact) their loyalty — had proven sadly ephemeral. Tacitus and Suetonius chronicled the strife that comes with empire: standing armies ready to mutiny, domestic repression, the intrigues and abuses of power-hungry rulers, the fraying of the fabric of civilization.

None of it would have surprised the earlier historians, the Greeks, the earliest and greatest of whom, Herodotus and Thucydides, both dedicated their seminal works to exposing the follies of unbounded imperial ambition (that of Xerxes on the one hand, and the Athenians on the other). Herodotus in particular was explicit about the inevitable nemesis, the inevitable downfall, that follows upon hybris, excessive pride and power. As embellished and sometimes inaccurate in detail as Herodotus’s history is, in this central point he is simply relating what has always been history’s surest lesson, valid from before the time of Croesus to the era of Napoleon, to today. There is no imperium sine fine, because worldly power cannot compensate for man’s mortal and venal nature. The accumulation of power just leads to more and more atrocious expressions of that nature, and ultimately to harsher nemesis.

American foreign policy really is guided by a belief in imperium sine fine, a belief that must find its roots, like Aeneas’s empire without end, in a confidence in some kind of divine Providence, because certainly it is not historical. The issue here is a serious one: the US has some 100,000-odd troops in Western Europe, as many again in the Far East, and a few hundred thousand more right now in Central Asia and the Middle East. Just how far-flung do Americans — or more importantly, American policymakers — think US forces can be? How many hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform will it take to maintain the military presence we already have, and how much money will it cost? How much blood? And just as importantly, how long do we really expect it all to last — and how will it end? No doubt there are superficial answers to these questions to be had from "defense intellectuals" (who usually aren’t very intellectual and do nothing at all that relates to "defense"), but the correct answers are those that are provided by history — not only history-to-be, but history as it has been.

But it’s not history that guides US foreign policy; one cannot escape that conclusion. Instead it’s a religious and poetic vision, one given ghoulish form in the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (written in the early 1860′s to urge on the federal armies attacking the South; it ought to be called the "Battle Hymn of the Empire"), with its lines like "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make them free." Even apart from the question of whether a soteriological function should be attributed to any nation, the idea that one can free another by dying is patent nonsense. Iraq has proved a case in point: no sooner was Saddam Hussein out of power than a new kind of tyranny, the anarcho-tyranny of mob rule, erupted. Yet still the idea of "saving" others through military force continues to inspire Americans who ought to know better.

Some of our countrymen may think that America itself can be saved in the same way. Throughout the 1990′s sleazy talk shows would, from time to time, do programs on "boot camps" for wayward youths. Among certain conservatives there’s a belief that militarization will provide just the kind of literal "boot camp" that America’s fat, lazy and decadent youth really need. This belief is every bit as vain as the idea of turning Iraq into a "democracy." History certainly refutes it; as Rome became more militarized, the decadence only increased. Nor does Sparta provide much of a role model; all its austerity failed to stave off internal corruption, or even to save the city itself from being reduced to a third-rate power after it had exhausted itself in wars with Athens and succeeding wars with other city-states.

There is no empire without end. With America at the zenith of its power the nation’s downfall is the last thing on most of its people’s minds, but a nation, no less than an individual, has only so long to live. The man who has faith may know that there is another, longer life ahead but for the nation-state, this is it. Just as death, in this world, comes to the mighty, the wealthy and the good as surely as to the feeble, poor and evil, so too through demographic collapse or foreign conquest or natural disaster every nation is brought low. But not all deaths are equally bad; where nations are concerned, fading away peacefully is surely better than to be hacked to pieces by Goths or Huns or Mongols. The actions that America takes now will influence what end the nation will ultimately have. Which is more likely to have a tranquil end, a world-spanning empire with no conception of its own limits — or of any human limits, for that matter — or a self-limited republic?

One of the characteristics of the human being is that he can look ahead to possible futures when making a decision, and can reconstruct the past. Other animals can learn from their own mistakes; but man can learn from the mistakes of others, even those made by men far away and separated from him by hundreds or thousands of years. If man were immortal, he would never have to learn any lessons at all, and could afford to make as many mistakes as he might like, because there would always be time to make amends. But man isn’t immortal, in the earthly sense, and nation-states certainly are not. To have all of this history, all of this literature, and learn nothing from it would be as damning an indictment against civilization as the savagery of empire itself. Empires have consequences, and there are no "heroes" without terrible human costs.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

A few weeks ago on this very site Jeffrey Tucker wrote what a lot of us have long known to be true but didn’t want to admit: that conservatism’s problems predate the rise of neoconservatism by about two decades, or maybe even more — after all, before there was Bill Buckley and National Review there was Germany’s Bismarck and Britain’s hapless Tories. They were conservatives too, and that’s what they called themselves, unlike America’s traditional anti-statists who generally refused the label. The late Frank Chodorov was known to threaten anyone who called him a conservative with a punch in the nose.

One must not speak ill of the dead, but it is worth saying that not everyone who calls himself a conservative is one, and not everyone who doesn’t isn’t. This isn’t unreasonable: most so-called liberals aren’t liberal, and nowadays there are "libertarians" who don’t give a damn about liberty. Once any political designation has become popular among anti-statists it’s only a matter of time before the other side tries to steal it, and usually succeeds. If it were just the name it wouldn’t matter, but along with the word itself come institutions, misguided individuals, and even whole movements. Once upon a time The Nation magazine really was liberal, in the classical sense, under editors like E.L. Godkin and Oswald Garrison Villard. But the socialists who co-opted the liberal name and implausibly claimed the liberal tradition for their own also took over The Nation. That’s the way it works.

That’s the way it worked with conservatism too, albeit with a twist. National Review, unlike The Nation, was never co-opted. Instead it had been designed from day one as a vehicle though which to redefine the American Right, and to this day that continues to be its mission. That’s why at the same time that a shooting war got under way in Iraq, National Review launched an assault of a different kind closer to home, against the war’s critics on the Right. For months and even years, National Review had ignored the anti-war Right, but with LewRockwell.com’s readership surpassing that of National Review Online and dwarfing that of the print edition of National Review — and with a battalion of other "unapproved" conservatives rising up, from the American Conservative to VDARE — Bill Buckley’s magazine could no longer afford to remain silent. The gang at National Review had to act, or else National Review would not be the "flagship" of the American Right for very much longer.

From the very beginning National Review was an imposture — and even back then a lot of conservatives knew it, as some of the Goldwaterites and pre-Goldwaterites can attest — but as long as the magazine was the only game in town and by far the best known "conservative" outlet it could get away with the fraud. But the Internet made that impossible; now anyone who looks for it can find real conservatism on the web, and given the choice between the real thing and what National Review is selling… well, the numbers speak for themselves.

LewRockwell.com is conservative and National Review isn’t because if conservatism is to mean anything other than mindless defense of the status quo, it has to mean something like this:

…a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not by just his sufferance, and which will be here after he’s gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things.

The words (and the italics) belong to Richard M. Weaver, and are taken from his essay "Conservatism and Libertarianism: The Common Ground," as reproduced in In Defense of Tradition: the Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929—1963. Lest there be any doubt, Weaver specifies in the same essay what some of those "laws, principles and regulations which control human behavior" are: "There is a concept expressed by some economists today in the word u2018praxeology.’ Praxeology, briefly defined, is the science of how things work because of their essential natures."

You won’t find any mention of praxeology at National Review Online, but you most certainly will at LewRockwell.com. Praxeological laws are only one kind of law, however, and only one facet of reality. Unfortunately National Review Online is no better at discussing any other kind of natural law in a systematic fashion. If Weaver’s definition of conservatism is correct or at least within the right ballpark, how can anyone really be a conservative who takes no interest in understanding the "structure of reality" and its "laws, principles and regulations?" Conservatives from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk and beyond have been theory-averse, but not because they did not believe in systematic thought (whether they were systematic thinkers themselves is a different question). It was ideology of which Burke and Kirk were skeptical, ideology meaning to them an artificial rational order that one desires to impose on reality, rather than accepting and understanding reality for itself. Ideology in this sense is the natural law equivalent of Lysenkoism.

LewRockwell.com not only addresses conservative theory better than the putative "flagship" of the Right, however, but also the specific instantiations of the theory in culture, traditions and institutions. An unmistakable characteristic of LRC and of the "paleoconservatives" is an appreciation for specific regions of the United States, especially the South. A film like Gods and Generals is important to the "paleo-Right" not just as a historical curiosity, but as a work that tells us something about an embodied reality, an intersection of principle — in this case the South’s fight for independence — and events. The "paleo" concern with specific cultures, and most especially one’s own culture, is partly emotional but not just emotional — it isn’t nostalgia. It’s both a feeling and an awareness of how the social world in which we live derives from and represents the underlying natural order; how a given place and time specifically express the nature of man and the laws that govern him. As for David Frum and National Review, on the other hand, the closest they ever come to an understanding of place is their talk about the "red" and "blue" zones of the country.

One place that the National Review gang certainly doesn’t understand is America; its character and traditions are alien to them. Ask yourself: who is the more plausible heir of the Spirit of ’76, National Review or LewRockwell.com? The roots of National Review’s pseudo-conservatism extend back no more than fifty years, to National Review’s own founding and the beginning of William F. Buckley’s career as a writer not long before that. The roots of LewRockwell.com’s conservatism, on the other hand, can be found in H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, and beyond them all the way back to the Anti-Federalists and the Founding Fathers. George Washington’s farewell address, with its appeal for free trade and admonitions against interventionism abroad, reads more like something off of this site than something that might be found in the pages of National Review.

So foreign is National Review’s brand of statist "conservatism" to these shores that the magazine has had to import a very large number of its writers from abroad. Hence the spectacle of a Canadian like David Frum, who just got his US citizenship papers from a federal bureaucrat, calling Lew Rockwell and others on the anti-war American Right "unpatriotic." Does he mean that they’re not loyal enough to Canada? Lately National Review-style conservatives have taken to chattering about "transnational progressivism." But what about transnational conservatism? The March 24, 2003, issue of National Review carried the most un-American cover story imaginable: it was called — you couldn’t make this up if you tried — "The Empire of Freedom" and proposed resurrecting the British Empire under the rubric of an "Anglosphere," an empire no doubt to be lead by an elite coterie of transnationalists much like those affiliated with National Review.

National Review’s line on immigration is particularly telling — debate the minutiae, but never question in principle the propriety of repopulating the country in order to change its character. After all, that’s what National Review has done to the American Right. Peter Brimelow is the exception that proves the rule. Born in Lancashire, he became an American citizen and has since fought to preserve the character of the place to which he has given his loyalty. Naturally enough he’s persona non grata at National Review these days, and has had his views denounced by Jonah Goldberg — at the time National Review Online’s editor and designated hatchet man — as "narrow and nasty."

What National Review has been trying to create is not even genuine British conservatism. A high Tory like Peregrine Worsthorne does not want to see his land reduced to the status of a cultural and military satellite of the United States. National Review’s transnational conservatism is actually the worst of both worlds: the paternalism and statism of the British Right wedded to some of the more crass and barbaric tendencies within the American character. The amalgam might be called "managerial philistinism." It’s the antithesis of civilization.

David Frum and his colleagues are so shrill about attacking the patriotism of others because they know they have no patriotism themselves; their loyalty is to an ideology. Real patriotism has to accept a land for what it is, warts and all, and can rest secure in the knowledge that someone like Alexander Cockburn may be a man of the Left, but he’s characteristically a man of the American Left, as are many of those who get denounced by neoconservatives as un-American. Men like Cockburn and Gore Vidal are more American — and because of their relationship to the American character, also more conservative — than David Frum will ever be. To say this is not to play the nationalist or "nativist" — America and the American Right need people like Brimelow and Taki Theodoracopulos who adopt America’s traditions — it’s just to appeal for truth in advertising. National Review ought be called the Transnational Review and should not call its imperialistic ideology "conservatism."

There’s nothing remotely conservative about that ideology, least of all its militarism. Someone who was in a position to know was the sociologist Robert Nisbet, one of the leading lights of the conservative renascence in America in the 1950s and a man who literally wrote the book — or a book at least — on conservatism, Conservatism: Dream and Reality. Nisbet, who unlike the chicken-hawks at National Review actually served in the military and even saw combat in the Pacific Theatre of World War II, had this to say about conservatism and militarism:

"…in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and it Vietnam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed."

National Review tends to be rather coy about the origins of its ideology but someone whose views are practically identical to the gang at NR has been quite explicit — Max Boot, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, who in an extraordinary article entitled "What is a u2018Neocon?’" suggested that he would prefer to be called a "Hard Wilsonian," meaning that he "embrace[s] Woodrow Wilson’s championing of American ideals but reject[s] his reliance of international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives," preferring instead to use direct military force. This ideology, espoused as it is by so many cowards who refuse to do any fighting themselves, cannot really be called "hard," but it is Wilsonian. It certainly isn’t conservative. In fact, it’s frankly revolutionary, as one National Review ideologue gloats. There’s a bit of Napoleon here and more than a bit of Jacobinism; the cause of National Review today is the very cause against which Edmund Burke once stood. Nisbet, a real Burkean, wrote in Conservatism: Dream and Reality that "Reagan’s passion for crusades, military and moral, is scarcely American-conservative. The neoconservative, neo-Wilsonian crusade for "democracy" is both military and moral.

(It’s worth remarking in passing: yes, Nisbet was a conservative who wasn’t afraid to criticize Ronald Reagan. One more sign of the corruption of National Review-style conservatism is its fawning over Reagan and, even more, George W. Bush, a phenomenon which bears some resemblance to the old Cult of Personality surrounding Stalin in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to conclude that President Bush is anything other than a mediocrity unless you look at the world through a lens of ideology. The emperor is wearing no clothes.)

Was there ever a time when National Review was conservative? Certainly conservatives were once published in its pages, especially in the early years when National Review was seeking to establish itself as the voice of the American Right and American conservatives were in desperate need of a journal. But once National Review had counterfeited its credentials it soon began to purge anyone on the Right who disagreed with its line, from the John Birch Society to Murray Rothbard, and later Joseph Sobran. From the beginning, however, National Review was chiefly concerned with foreign policy, and espoused a militarism thoroughly unlike anything that had previously existed on the American Right. Over time the magazine’s positions on other issues have changed, but where war and the warfare State were concerned it remained constant. It has tolerated dissent from its line elsewhere, but when it comes to war National Review likes to excommunicate the perceived heretics; that’s what it did with Murray Rothbard during Vietnam, and it’s what the magazine is trying to do now to anti-war conservatives. Whether or not the magazine was set up by the CIA, it has always put "national security," as defined by the federal government, above the conservative traditions of America. Having slandered most of its rivals on the Right as kooks or anti-Semites, National Review can now afford to be more open about its imperial agenda. But this has come to pass at the very same time that the real Right, the anti-statist conservative and libertarian Right, has re-emerged with new venues, both on the Internet and on newsstands. This is very frightening for National Review and its brand of ersatz conservative; David Frum’s hit-piece was an indication of how much they fear the antiwar, anti-state Right. And so they should, because our tradition is very firmly rooted in this country, and is not about to be supplanted.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

H.L. Mencken was a stylish writer — up to a point — but he clearly never knew what he was talking about. He put Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill under the same rubric as Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, calling them all "transparent quacks" and demagogues. As a critic Mencken had poor taste and worse judgment: he hated jazz and was utterly incapable of appreciating modernism in literature or the visual arts. Worst of all, he was a terrible human being, full of prejudice and ambition. A racist, an anti-Semite, reviler of democracy and a boor – Mencken was all that and more. But, yes, he could write reasonably well.

That’s the Capuchin Mencken, the Mencken of the neoconservatives. Like the organ-grinder’s monkey, this Mencken is a parody of a human being and little more than a sideshow to the fellow cranking out the music, or in this case, cranking out the party line. Mencken is so far removed from that party line, so politically incorrect even to those who think of themselves as opponents of p.c., that his critics (especially those on the putative Right) can hardly take him seriously.

Reviews of Terry Teachout’s recent biography of Mencken, The Skeptic, have been a case in point. My own thoughts on the book can be found in the current issue of the American Conservative (March 24, 2003 — with Pat Buchanan’s important essay "Whose War?" on the cover), so I won’t elaborate upon them here. Instead, however, I’ll call attention to what other reviewers have said, and how they have generally marginalized Mencken in the same way.

A good place to begin is with Russell Baker’s piece from the New York Review of Books. It’s one of the better and more detailed reviews, and one relatively even-handed in its treatment of Mencken. At least it doesn’t make him out to be a monster or a total buffoon. Baker instead simply discounts Mencken’s beliefs and emphasizes the indisputable quality of his style. So, for example, Baker writes, "Though [Mencken's] political pieces sometimes seem repetitious and occasionally silly, much in them is still a pleasure to read for the quality, even the beauty, of the prose." And after quoting a few lines from Mencken, Baker writes:

This paragraph adds nothing to our grasp of political philosophy, but wouldn’t we feel blessed nowadays to have even one solitary journalist capable of subjecting the world’s Bushes and Gores, Cheneys and Liebermans to frankly prejudiced prose as gorgeous as this?

This is fair enough; one would never expect to find the New York Review of Books endorsing political views like Mencken’s anyway, no matter how rigorously or systematically they may have been laid out. Mencken certainly wasn’t systematic and had never intended to be, in any event. A review in the Atlantic by the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley makes that very point: "Mencken’s u2018conservatism’ was more a state of mind than an ideology. It had, and has, little in common with what now passes for conservatism, and diehard ideologues of that persuasion will find small comfort in his claim that he was “constitutionally unable to believe in anything absolutely.” Yardley’s review, in fact, is excellent; he notes that he himself had been planning to write a Mencken at one point, but never got around to it. It’s a shame, because Yardley evidently has both enthusiasm for Mencken — although not uncritical enthusiasm — and an insightful appreciation for his literary and critical accomplishments.

But then there are, as Yardley says, those diehard ideologues now passing for conservatives. Enter Hilton Kramer and his New Criterion essay, "Who Reads Mencken Now?" Kramer’s answer to his own question is: virtually no one. But this, he suggests, is not to be lamented, for Mencken possessed "a philistine outlook" and his work was "thin in intellectual substance and woefully lacking in a sense of history." Kramer elaborates:

What really separates us now from Mencken’s eager acolytes in the 1920s — and, for that matter, from Mencken himself — are precisely the horrors as well as the achievements of the twentieth century that he missed or dismissed or otherwise chose to regard as beneath serious notice. Among them, alas, were the two World Wars, the Leninist revolution and the spread of Communist totalitarianism, Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi conquest of Western Europe, the Holocaust, and virtually all of the principal currents of modern thought in literature, philosophy, and the arts. While he busied himself demolishing the pretensions of yahoo preachers, Rotarians, prohibitionists, and sundry writers and public figures with little claim on the attention of posterity, Mencken remained cheerfully oblivious to the political and cultural earthquakes that were irreversibly altering the very civilization he claimed to represent. That, I believe, is the fundamental reason why Mencken is so little read today.

And lest it seem as though Mencken’s sin was borne of ignorance and perhaps only venial, Kramer concludes by asserting that

He is now too much of a period piece to be revivable. And the really ugly aspects of Mencken’s mentality — the vicious anti-Semitism, the total identification with German superiority and moral authority even in the face of Hitler’s criminality, and his unflagging contempt for democratic institutions in a period when fascism and communism loomed as the leading alternatives — all of this, combined with a cocksure confidence in his own virtue, is finally unforgivable.

Mencken was no supporter of Hitler, and even Kramer doesn’t dare suggest that he was, but his love of German culture and his contempt for mass democracy are bad enough. Unforgivable, in fact.

As it happens, even Hilton Kramer’s own readers were not prepared to accept this. Two letters in response to the article are published on the journal’s website, each refuting the notion that Mencken isn’t much read today (and, implicitly, the notion that he shouldn’t be read). The one letter points to the fairly high ranking of the Mencken Chrestomathy on the Amazon.com sales chart, and asks how well Mencken’s contemporary peers are selling (answer: not nearly as well). The other suggests to Kramer that "Generation X" is reading Mencken, and finds in him a kindred spirit. This second letter, by Scott Locklin, is worth quoting in part:

As far as Mencken’s various political ideas (his alleged "vicious anti-Semitism" is too absurd to bother refuting; c.f. Alfred Knopf’s comments) Mencken was no political proselytizer; that’s one of the things which makes him so refreshing. He was a critic. If he had ideas contrary to modern felicity, so did most of the people who made their livings as actual political rabble-rousers in his day. Nobody seems to fault GBS for his actual fawnings over Mussolini and Stalin (which have no parallel in any of Mencken’s writings). I don’t see how this and similar ethical torts of the intelligentsia of that day could be considered acceptable when Mencken’s mere elitist libertarianism "is . . . unforgivable."

One suspects, of course, that that’s the real point: elitist libertarianism is precisely what Kramer finds unacceptable. Russell Baker can afford simply to pooh-pooh Mencken’s politics but Kramer has to worry about the ideological competition; he has to draw a firm line and declare Mencken completely out-of-bounds. Atheism is one thing, but preaching the virtues of the Germans and disbelief in "democracy" is a real heresy, one well deserving of harsh punishment.

Kramer is the most forceful of Mencken’s critics on the Right, but he’s hardly alone. Others include, surprisingly or not, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., founder and editor of the American Spectator, and a man who has made a career out of aping Mencken’s prose (Tyrell cites approvingly Paul Greenberg’s description of Tyrrell himself as "the closest that 1995 America can come to its own H.L. Mencken"). Tyrrell wrote the cover story for the November/December 2002 American Spectator, a piece called "The Dark Sage: Reconsidering H.L. Mencken." For the most part, Tyrrell is simply dismissive of Mencken as a thinker: "while Mencken was laughing on the outside, almost nothing was going on on the inside"; "when he endeavored to pronounce authoritatively on great events, he usually spoke from ignorance"; "there was actually less to him than met the eye"; "He missed every art movement of his time save American fiction’s realists. He also missed the rise and fall of dictatorships." That last is especially significant; for Tyrrell, Mencken was "as oblivious to the drama of evil’s rise and fall in his lifetime as he was to the irenic force of American democracy."

For Tyrrell no less than for Kramer, it is Mencken’s rejection of democracy that marks him out as a defective thinker, and indeed a defective human being. Tyrrell the imitator of Mencken’s style prefers the democratic socialist politics of Sidney Hook to the Mencken’s libertarianism; as Tyrrell says, "Had Mencken shared Sidney’s belief in democracy he might have made greater contributions to the life of the mind." At issue here is not that Tyrrell simply disagrees with or doesn’t accept Mencken’s beliefs, but that Mencken’s rejection of democracy proves him to be a fool, just as for Kramer Mencken’s politically incorrect attitude toward democracy proves him to be a villain. Mencken’s rejection of democracy is illegitimate.

There are a great many valid criticisms that can be leveled against Mencken the thinker, but the sorts of criticisms that come from Kramer and Tyrrell are ideological rather than intellectual. He was no idiot, and if he was not a systematic or particularly academic thinker, it’s nonetheless worth remembering that he was at root a journalist. As such he was no more dense than his contemporary colleagues, and indeed he outshone more than a few academics, as proven by his pioneering study The American Language. But really Mencken’s intelligence is not in any doubt. It’s his judgment, taste and conscious beliefs that have put him beyond the pale of acceptable opinion today, even — or especially — in "conservative" circles.

If Mencken were alive today, who would publish him? For all the acknowledged power of his style, Mencken’s politics wouldn’t make the grade for the New Criterion or the American Spectator, or presumably any of the other major (neo)conservative publications that toe the same line. The Left would, by and large, have nothing to do with such a man either, and even many libertarians would balk at him (and he, who styled himself a Kaiserliche-Konigliche Tory, would no doubt have had little use for the average "modal" libertarian). It’s hard to imagine Mencken making a monkey out of himself for anybody, but with the political spectrum as constricted and muddied as it is today, what’s left? The American Conservative, for one thing, whose co-editor Taki Theodoracopulos has more than a little of what Mencken had — Taki once wondered in print why the vote of a doctor who saves lives should count for exactly as much as a welfare bum who does nothing. Of course, there is also at least one other place where Mencken would certainly fit right in, someplace rather close to home. There might be rather few people now who can appreciate Mencken for both his style and his thought, but one suspects that Mencken, inveterate foe of the booboisie and the simian masses, would have liked it that way.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

The anti-statist, whether he calls himself libertarian, conservative, individualist, or something else, is facing a dilemma right now. He’s under pressure to pick a side in the run-up to war with Iraq, and the choice isn’t pretty.

To one side of him are anti-war Communists and near-Communists. Across from them are respectable-looking militarists. Normally a sane man who values peace and prosperity would not want anything to do with either camp. But there’s something about being caught between the two that makes him feel compelled to choose a side, when the only side he ought to choose is that of his own conscience.

Consider the two factions vying for the anti-statist’s allegiance, starting with the pro-war group. Its members may look normal enough but their arguments, such as they are, make no sense. No good case has been made for invading Iraq. In rare moments of candor, even the war’s supporters admit that it isn’t necessary. Saddam Hussein may well be violating UN Security Council resolutions and developing whatever he can in the way of "weapons of mass destruction," but that doesn’t mean he poses a threat to the United States, let alone an imminent threat. Saddam Hussein is not suicidal, he is not about to launch a pre-emptive WMD attack against the United States. Nor does he, a secular dictator with Christians serving high in his regime, have good reason to trust al Qaeda with WMDs. No credible evidence has linked Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda, and none has come to light to suggest he plans to attack the US. The planned invasion of Iraq is not a defensive war, it’s aggression. It should be clear why any decent person should oppose it.

Iraq, however, is very far away from where most of us live and work. Not so the anti-war protesters, at least if you live in a major city. The evils of the attack against Iraq are not immediately before our eyes, but those of the anti-war protests are. And what are those evils? A local example may serve to illustrate. The main library of my university, Washington University in St. Louis, is undergoing renovation. A wooden wall has been erected around the building’s perimeter to keep students from wandering onto the construction site. The university administration has made the wall available to students and student groups who would like to paint it as a form of publicity. Anti-war groups have taken advantage of the opportunity. Here are four of the slogans they’ve put up:

• "Do we use cellphones, or do cellphones use us?"

• "Cigarettes are for Capitalistas."

• "America is Nazi Babylon."

• "Hunt the Rich."

Not all anti-war activists, even on the Far Left, are as stupid or downright evil as these graffiti suggest. But quite a few are. Neocons at National Review Online and, interestingly, a couple of writers at The Nation, have been hammering away for months now on the point that many of the anti-war protests have been organized and led by unreconstructed Communists, and that among their rank-and-file are legions of Mumiacs and anti-globalization types. There is enough truth to the exaggerated charges of the anti-antiwar press to do the movement real damage. Sane people, even those with solid anti-war principles, do not want to associate with Communists and loons. What’s worse, I know of one person, a thoroughgoing libertarian and devout Christian, who has been so repulsed by what he’s seen of the anti-war movement that he’s now having second thoughts about his own opposition to the war. I suspect my friend is not alone. And he’s an extreme case, someone who is a self-identified libertarian. Less ideologically committed people — that’s most of middle America — are bound to be even more turned off. It would be easy to criticize my friend for wavering and going on a basically emotional reaction against the anti-war movement, but most people do let their emotions color their reason. Even libertarians cannot always avoid it.

My friend’s problem, and the problem of those like him, is that he finds it hard to be anti-war without being part of the anti-war movement. Since he cannot accept the latter, he moves away from the former. He thinks he only has two choices: to oppose the war alongside the Far Left, or to oppose the Far Left alongside the war’s supporters. This perception on his part is reinforced by rhetoric from both factions, each of which makes claims to the effect that "those who are not with us are against us" or "those who do nothing [i.e., don't join the protests] are as guilty as those who take part in the invasion." Such declarations are intended in part to polarize, to force the individual to choose between the two extremes — misleading extremes, in this case. They are also intended to associate belief with action. If you’re not protesting, you must not be anti-war; or conversely, if you’re not supporting US aggression against a sovereign nation, you must not be against terrorism.

The unstated assumption behind such arguments is the collectivist doctrine that everybody has to pick a team, or indeed that everybody already belongs to a team by default. To stake out an independent position, this doctrine holds, is both untenable and immoral. It’s untenable because the individual, acting alone, cannot possibly be effective. And it’s immoral because the man who believes in something owes it to his cause to be effective. It follows, then, that if he holds any principles at all, he must work with a movement. To go it alone is a waste, and to do it out of principle is "ideological preening." It’s sheer vanity.

This fundamentally collectivist idea, implicitly promoted by the Far Left, the center-Left and so-called conservatives alike, has become part of the background against which Americans (and others) today make decisions. One might say that it has seeped into the "collective subconscious," although I think I would prefer to say that it has seeped into subconscious of many an otherwise sane person. It’s an idea that has to be examined and rejected. No earthly movement has a God-given right to anyone’s loyalty. For a man to be morally obligated to one, he has to have given his allegiance freely.

In concrete terms, that means one should not feel implicated in the idiocies and villainies of the anti-war movement simply because one is anti-war. You’re not a draftee in Ramsey Clark’s army just because you’re not with Bush, and by the same token repudiating Ramsey Clark doesn’t have to mean accepting the attack on Iraq. The individual’s only obligation here is to his own conscience. That doesn’t necessarily make things easy: there’s still the question of what the civilized man can do about the war. It may be that the best thing for him to do is nothing at all; simply minding his own business and refraining from supporting the war. Or it may be that the best thing he can do, according to the dictates of his reason and his conscience, is to join the anti-war protests. But that’s for him to decide; nobody else can tell anyone how best to use his time and talent, and certainly nobody else has any moral claim upon either. To say otherwise is to undercut the entire point of anti-statism. It would be a bitter irony indeed for someone who’s against the war because he’s against collectivism to become a collectivist in order to oppose the war. One does not become a collectivist merely by associating with them — collectivism is not like fleas — one becomes a collectivist by adopting collectivist doctrine. And that, unfortunately, is what otherwise sensible people are doing when they feel compelled to make a choice between absurdities, when all along they ought to follow their own principles.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

If you’re already planning to see Gods and Generals, see it soon. A nearly four-hour historical epic that has so far received middling-to-poor reviews from most sources, this isn’t a movie that’s going to remain in theaters for long. It will have a second life on television, and a third on DVD, but there’s no substitute for seeing it on the big screen. This is an epic, after all: a film called God and Generals deserves to be seen in a larger-than-life medium.

It’s the "prequel" to 1993′s Gettysburg and like the earlier film is written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, with financial support from Ted Turner, who makes a cameo appearance in Gods and Generals (it’s an occasion for half of the audience to nudge the other half and whisper on the sly, "check it out, that’s Ted Turner"). This film depicts events from the beginning of the war through the battles of Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, each of which was a Confederate victory, thanks largely to the film’s protagonist, Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang). This is as much his story as it is the story of the war itself. It’s also a story told mostly from the South’s point of view — one reason why critics hate it so much.

Make no mistake: Gods and Generals is more or less explicitly Christian, Southern, and even libertarian. Jackson is unflinching in the face of enemy fire because of his unshakable trust in God; he feels as safe on the battlefield as he feels in his bed. He prays as intensely as he fights. And what he fights for is his home, his family, and their freedom. The same cause animates Jackson’s colleagues, from Gen. Robert E. Lee (a superbly cast Robert Duvall) to the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson teaches at the beginning of the film. They aren’t fighting for an abstraction, but neither are they fighting for mere real estate; their homes and their principles are inseparably intertwined.

None of this is to say that Maxwell has made a one-sided film, even if it does lean heavily in one direction. In an age when any show of Southern symbols or defense of the Southern cause is equated with racism — or, by neoconservative sources, with treason — the film has to emphasize one side more strongly than the other just to achieve balance. The case for the Union is already familiar to filmgoers; not so the case for the South. Critics have been inclined to dismiss the pro-Union speech made in the film by Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) as tokenism. It isn’t. When Chamberlain asks how anyone can fight for freedom while tolerating the institution of slavery, he’s raising a point that does more damage to the Southern cause than critics have been able to appreciate, because they don’t understand the association of the South with freedom.

Ideology is only part of the reason that Gods and Generals has received middling reviews, however. Equally important is that this is a film that requires an adult attention-span. Not only is it nearly four hours long, but most of its characters wear uniforms and, among the generals, have similar-looking beards. The dialogue is very mannered, even stiff, but with good reason. As Steven Sailer wrote in his UPI review of the film, "…that’s how the educated classes talked in the 1860s. They read more than we do now, but owned less printed material. So, they read classics over and over. Lincoln, for example, was marinated in the King James Bible and Shakespeare. They were adept at high rhetoric and loved orations." Characters in Gods and Generals freely quote poetry and Bible verses from memory, and frequently make allusions to Roman history. The effect is to make Gods and Generals feel like the kind of feature film that would have been made in the 19th century, if there had been feature films in the 19th century.

Most movies, even supposedly serious ones, are intended as escapism. Gods and Generals is not. As a result, it makes little sense to evaluate this movie by the same standards one would apply to Daredevil or Old School or whatever else might be showing at the local multiplex. Gods and Generals is an entertaining film, but it isn’t entertaining the same way as other films. For one thing, it is not a personal, psychologically subjective film that encourages viewers to identify with the characters and their feelings. Instead the film tries to convey a feel for the war itself, both in its brutal battle scenes and in the almost godlike aura that attaches to some of the war’s commanders, particularly Stonewall Jackson. Where it does attempt to humanize its characters, as when Jackson gives a piggy-back ride to a little girl he has befriended, the film tends to go amiss. To convey the sense of a man like Jackson as both a human being and a legend is a very tall order indeed; the film is at its best when focused on the legend.

The film is called Gods and Generals because that was the title of the book by Jeff Shaara on which it is based. But there is only one general here who really has the stature of a god, and that’s Stonewall Jackson. This is apparently the first time he’s been portrayed on film. It’s about time. One suspects that most Americans, outside of Civil War buffs and unreconstructed Southern patriots, have little sense of who or how significant Jackson was. Whatever the historical truth may be, the legend of Stonewall Jackson is of a leader so great he could almost have single-handedly saved the South. There is a mystique about Jackson that, as a classicist, I can only compare to that of Alexander the Great. The two men could not have been more different, certainly not in their personal lives, but with each there is a sense of divine sanction following their battlefield careers, and with each there are lingering questions of what might have been had they not died as soon as they did. Even Napoleon and Caesar seem like much less fated individuals — probably because they lived long enough to display the limits of their abilities.

Gods and Generals does justice to the legend of Stonewall Jackson without overstating its point. In the film, he is still human and he does make mistakes. Stephen Lang’s performance as Jackson is dead-on; he shows us a man so single-minded in his devotion to God that all else is mere detail. It’s for that reason that Jackson can stand unperturbed in a hail of fire — even after he’s been hit by a stray bullet — and that he remains stoic in the face of battlefield carnage. Lang’s performance gives a credible feel for the relationship between piety and martial brilliance that the legendary Jackson exemplified. Gods and Generals would be worth seeing just to see Lang as Stonewall Jackson, and to see Stonewall Jackson done justice on the silver screen.

But there is much else to commend Gods and Generals as well. The scenes of battle are realistic and harrowing, as good as those in Gettysburg. It’s all the more impressive considering the PG13 rating of this movie. Without resorting to buckets of blood, Gods and Generals still gives a believable and moving representation of battle. It also represents how futile and pitiful war can be when your commanders are as incompetent as the Union’s Gen. Burnside (Alex Hyde-White). During the battle of Fredericksburg Burnside sends wave after wave of Union troops against well-fortified Confederates, with appalling casualties. Union soldiers wind up using the bodies of other soldiers as barricades against the bullets. The Yankees gain control of Fredericksburg for a time, which serves as occasion for an orgy of looting. When the Confederates regain control, it’s already too late for some of the townspeople, who have lost everything. Meanwhile the federal troops regroup in the morning and are touted by their commanders, reading a message from President Lincoln himself, as the bravest warriors in all the history of the world. "Buster" Kilrain, an Irish enlisted man in the Union army, has nothing but contempt for such inflated nonsense. What’s the good of being brave, after all, if you’re simply going to be used as cannon fodder?

A particularly important scene that has been overlooked by most reviewers, including those who write for ostensibly conservative periodicals, comes near the beginning of the film, as Thomas Jackson prepares to leave his teaching post at the Virginia Military Institute and lead his former cadets into battle. The father of one of the cadets does not support secession and is preparing to move to Pennsylvania. He meets with Jackson and his son. Jackson agrees to let the youth go with his father, if that’s what he wants. Should he choose to stay and serve with Jackson, the young man will be in it for the duration, unable to leave the army until the war’s end. And that is the choice the cadet makes: to stay and fight with Jackson, rather than accompany his father to Pennsylvania.

The scene is important because it dramatizes the fact that these men had to make choices. They did not choose their loyalties blindly. Some of the fake conservatives who’ve given Gods and Generals its best reviews would prefer to ignore this truth; when they show any sympathy for the South at all, it is only for the soldiers as misguided patriots, men who made a mistake rather than committed a sin or a crime (like treason). But this attitude is demeaning to those who fought for the South. Yes, they were patriots, and for them their fatherland was their state, not the Union. But they were thoughtful patriots, by and large, who knew full well what they were doing and why. The South, to them, was not just a piece of real estate on which ones friends and relatives happened to live; it stood for a way of life and a set of beliefs as well, all irreducibly united. The scene at VMI illustrates that. Even if it meant being separated from his father, the cadet chose to side with the South because the South, in his best estimation, was right. To ignore the element of choice here and reduce the war to mere tribal loyalty is to do as great as disservice to this film — and to the men that it depicts — as those who evaluate it in politically correct terms do.

Nothing bothers politically correct critics more than the role of blacks in this film. There are two major black characters here and both of them are affiliated with the South. In fact, both of them are loyal to the South, despite their hatred of slavery. One of these characters is Martha (a lovely Donzaleigh Abernathy), a domestic slave who stays behind in Fredericksburg while her master’s family flees, in order that she can protect their home from occupation by Union troops. After all, she tells the family, it’s her house too. The other black character is Stonewall Jackson’s freedman cook, Jim Lewis. His family, including cousins, is half-free and half-slave, as he tells his Jackson one night when they pray together while pausing after a march. Jim prays for God to enlighten his countrymen and put an end to slavery. Jackson concurs, and tells Jim that there are some generals who would like to see slaves who volunteer for the army granted their freedom.

Two black characters, both of whom are loyal Southerners. This is more than the Roger Eberts of the world can take. On top of which, the only character shown as explicitly racist is a Northerner, Joshua Chamberlain’s brother Tom (C. Thomas Howell), who refers to black as "darkies" and suggests that the Emancipation Proclamation is likely to lead to rebellion in the Union ranks, as well as stir up the South all the more. Col. Chamberlain upbraids his brother for these views, and this serves as the occasion for Col. Chamberlain’s speech in defense of the Northern cause ("speech" is the right word; again, the dialogue can be very formal in places, and rather didactic too). There is a heavy-handedness to this; sometimes the film is giving a direct exposition of its subject matter, telling rather than showing. This is a failing, but a minor one, and perhaps one that cannot be helped. These are after all points of view — blacks loyal to the South, racist Northerners, and liberty-loving Confederates — that go against the prevailing stereotypes of today. Maxwell has to err on the side of being too obvious, because he’s telling many of his viewers something that they do not want to hear.

It took a lot of courage for Maxwell to make this film and to make it the way he has. It took a lot of courage too on the part of his supporters, including Ted Turner. There is still one more chapter to go in the Maxwell-Shaara Civil War trilogy (Gods and Generals, Gettysburg, and the proposed Last Full Measure). Whether the last movie gets made and show in theaters depends on how well Gods and Generals performs. Right now, it isn’t performing too well. It certainly is a "difficult" movie — difficult for some because it presents a fair picture of the South, and difficult for others because it’s over three hours long and very mannered — and it has its flaws. But it’s a film well worth your support; where it fails, it fails because it’s too ambitious. And where it succeeds, such as in Stephen Lang’s performance as Jackson, in presenting a reasonable view of the Southern cause, and in showing some of the most realistic battle scenes ever seen, it succeeds tremendously well. So see it, and see it soon.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

Michael Novak is probably best known as the author of a work entitled The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Once a leftist, Novak is now a neoconservative; his life’s work has been giving two cheers for capitalism and trying to reconcile social democracy with Christianity. The title of his most famous work should by itself set off alarm bells: does capitalism need a modifier? It does not, and it turns out that "democratic" capitalism is not capitalism any more than "state" capitalism is.

That’s Novak in a nutshell. He writes passionately about religion and wields considerable influence among conservative Christians, especially his (and my) Catholic co-religionists. He is now using that influence to argue the case for an invasion of Iraq, in an essay on National Review Online called "u2018Asymmetric’ Warfare and Just War." His arguments are specious and deserve quick refutation.

Novak says that the original Gulf War in 1991 never ended, it was merely "summarily interrupted, in order to negotiate the terms of surrender." Hostilities may now resume, argues Novak, because Saddam Hussein has violated those terms by refusing to divest himself of weapons of mass destruction. What it means to end a war that was never legally declared in the first place is anyone’s guess, but Novak is correct that Saddam is in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions ordering him to disarm. This may provide a pretext for war, but hardly suffices as a reason. So Novak turns to his next line of argument:

Meanwhile, in a sudden and violent fashion, another war was launched against the United States — and, indeed, against international civilized order — on September 11, 2001. This unsought and sudden war emerged from a new strategic concept, “asymmetrical warfare,” and it threw the behavior of Saddam Hussein into an entirely new light, and enhanced the danger Saddam Hussein poses to the civilized world a hundredfold.

Here Novak has begun to assert rather than argue. The attack against the United States on 9/11 was not launched by Saddam Hussein, a basic point which Novak glosses over. He simply juxtaposes Saddam’s name with the 9/11 event and hopes that the association itself will stick the reader’s mind. This is a propaganda technique.

Citing the Catholic catechism, Novak says that "public authorities" properly have the final decision as to when the criteria for a just war have been met. In the case of Iraq, he suggests that "public authorities" — the United States federal government — may have "highly restricted intelligence" that would provide a casus belli. That may be so, but Catholicism does not teach blind obedience to civil authorities, particularly when those authorities have behaved in as unchristian a fashion as the US often has. No one can evaluate unseen evidence that may or may not exist, we can only base our opinions on what we know and what is logically probable. What does Novak have to say about that? He tell us that

…From the point of view of public authorities who must calculate the risks of action or inaction vis — vis the regime of Saddam Hussein, two points are salient. Saddam Hussein has the means to wreak devastating destruction upon Paris, London, or Chicago, or any cities of his choosing, if only he can find clandestine undetectable “foot soldiers” to deliver small amounts of the sarin gas, botulins, anthrax, and other lethal elements to predetermined targets. Secondly, independent terrorist assault cells have already been highly trained for precisely such tasks, and have trumpeted far and wide their intentions to carry out such destruction willingly, with joy. All that is lacking between these two incendiary elements is a spark of contact.

Given Saddam’s proven record in the use of such weapons, and given his recognized contempt for international law, only an imprudent or even foolhardy statesman could trust that these two forces will stay apart forever. At any time they could combine, in secret, to murder tens of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting citizens.

This is the heart of Novak’s argument. In more direct language, it is that whether or not Saddam Hussein actually has — or even ever would — work with al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization, is irrelevant. It’s the potential itself that justifies war in Novak’s eyes.

This is not consonant with Just War doctrine, which specifies that war must be undertaken for defensive purposes. While an imminent threat — one that has not yet commenced hostilities but is clearly about to do so — justifies a war, a potential threat does not. After all, there is no end to what might be a potential threat. Certainly the nuclear arms reserves of Russia and China are a potential threat, as are those of France, Pakistan, India and North Korea. By the standards of just war, Novak would have to show both that Saddam Hussein actually has allied with al Qaeda and that he has done so with the intention of attacking the United States. That would constitute an immediate threat.

Novak emphasizes that "Were such an attack to come, it would come without imminent threat, without having been signaled by movements of conventional arms, without advance warning of any kind." Even if true, this does not negate or modify just war doctrine. It certainly does not justify war. A surprise attack could come from Russia, too, or from terrorists using stolen "weapons of mass destruction" obtained from the United States itself. As terrible as the prospect is, it does not qualify as grounds for a pre-emptive attack under just war doctrine. To eliminate the criterion that the threat be imminent — or to re-define "imminent" in a loose-construction, as some would like — would undermine the entire purpose of Just War doctrine, which is to avoid and limit warfare wherever possible. It would give sanction to any sort of intervention or attack that "public authorities" could dream up, against any target. If Novak seriously wants to redefine the terms of Just War, he ought to propose some kind of alternative; he ought to state explicitly what he thinks the limits of war and cause for war should be.

In the case of Iraq, his definition would have to omit any need for evidence, because there is none to suggest that Saddam Hussein has given "weapons of mass destruction" to terrorists or is about to any time soon. What kind of paranoid dictator would ever give transnational terrorists a doomsday weapon that could be used against himself? It is true that Saddam has harbored terrorists in the past; he did so with Abu Nidal. Look at how that ended. Abu Nidal was the Osama bin Laden of the 1980′s, a terrorist everyone wanted and no one could catch. When he threw his lot in with Saddam Hussein, however, he finally met an appropriately grisly end. The idea that Saddam’s interests neatly coincide with those of terrorists, whether al Qaeda or Abu Nidal, is not credible. They have good reason to be wary of one another.

There are other holes in Novak’s argument as well. He praises US intelligence when it comes to making the decision whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, but he does not apply the same standard when it comes to evaluating US intelligence’s prospects of detecting an alliance between Saddam Hussein and terrorists bent on using weapons of mass destruction. Why should such a plot be any more undetectable than Saddam Hussein’s other activities revolving around WMDs? Such a risk, that the preparation for an attack would not be noticed until too late, is nothing new — just think of Pearl Harbor. The prospect of surprise attack has always been a feature of war and has never before annulled the propositions of Just War doctrine. Nor should it now.

"Somewhere between 0 and 10, in other words, there already is a probability of Saddam’s deadly weapons falling into al Qaeda’s willing hands," Novak writes, as if to quantify the danger. One wonders whether even Novak himself takes his arguments seriously: there is also a probability between 0 and 10 of Martians invading the earth, and a probability of between 0 and 10 of someone getting hit by an automobile today. Using terms as loosely as Novak does amounts to talking nonsense: there is no quantifiable probability of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction falling into anyone’s hands. What statistician could measure such a thing? Yet by dangling a few numbers in front of his readers’ eyes, Novak hopes to lend an aura of scientific credibility to his argument, presumably. (It may be unfair of me to judge his motives; perhaps my readers can think of a better interpretation.)

On at least one point, however, Novak is correct. He writes:

"Just-war doctrine has at its root the Catholic understanding of original sin, articulated in this context by St. Augustine in Book XIX of The City of God. In this world, Christians will always have to cope with the evil in the human breast that sows division, destruction, and devastation."

But quite how this relates to an attack on Iraq is hard to fathom. Original sin, after all, pertains not only to Saddam Hussein and Iraq but also to George W. Bush and the United States. The place to begin the fight against "the evil in the human breast that sows division, destruction and devastation" is within one’s own soul. This is an important point: neoconservatives and other warmongers reiterate Saddam Hussein’s evil ad nauseam. And he is evil, indubitably; but the Christian understanding of evil is not Manichean — Manichean dualism is perhaps the greatest, most persistent heresy of Christianity — there are not simply "good guys" and "bad guys." We’re all born in sin, even those who come to Christ may fall away again, and even those who practice evil may repent and be saved. The prospects of Saddam Hussein doing that appear to be nil, but that’s not the point. The point is that the Christian must be humble and extremely circumspect about his own noble motives — particularly when those motives supposedly justify the slaughter involved in warfare. As it happens, this self-critical attitudes is also more mature, by any standard, than the sort of juvenile moral triumphalism that characterizes the War Party.

On more mundane points, Novak is simply wrong, and his advice would be more harmful than salutary. For one thing, he says that "No one today denies that international terrorism is a deliberate assault on the very possibility of international order. That public authorities have a duty to confront this terrorism, and to defeat it, is universally recognized." But does a war with Iraq actually stabilize the international order, or upset it? William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, an expert on "Fourth Generation Warfare," provides an answer:

…the real threat we face is the Fourth Generation, non-state players such as al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. They can only benefit from an American war against Iraq — regardless of how it turns out. If we win, the state is further discredited in the Islamic world, and more young men give their allegiance to non-state forces. If Saddam wins, their own governments look even less legitimate, because they failed to stand with him against the hated Crusaders. A recent cartoon showed Osama bin Laden, dressed as Uncle Sam, saying, “I want you to invade Iraq!” Undoubtedly, he does.

War with Iraq, no matter its outcome, will only accelerate the decay of the nation-state. In principle that might not be a bad thing, but in practice the worst possible outcome is one in which the United States is the last nation-state standing, in a world otherwise characterized by decentralized communities. In such a world, terrorists could (and, given the behavior of the United States government, would) strike at us from any direction, and there would be no nation-states left to retaliate against. A nuclear arsenal and conventional military as mighty as those of the U.S. are useless against foes so small and dispersed.

Novak simply doesn’t understand asymmetric warfare. He gets some of the facts right, but doesn’t understand their significance. Here’s an example:

The first reason, then, why public authorities in the United States have urged the United Nations to become serious about Iraq is the war preemptively declared upon the United States on 09/11/01. It was obvious from the beginning that 19 graduate students from middle-class families (mostly in Saudi Arabia) did not perform that deed unaided. They had the support of states (Afghanistan in the first place, but also Yemen, Iran, Sudan, and others) willing to act clandestinely but not openly, as international outlaws."

Again Novak merrily associates Iraq with 9/11, despite all evidence to the contrary. He’s right, of course: the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudis (and also quite a few Egyptians). But he subscribes to an altogether too simple-minded idea of what constitutes asymmetric warfare. Terrorists do not have to operate out of states that are "international outlaws." The 9/11 terrorists received their flight training in the United States. Prior to the attacks, they were based in South Florida. Money to support their operation was wired to them from Frankfurt, Germany. Michael Novak would be more justified in urging that the U.S. invade the Everglades or annex Berlin than launch a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, a country that had no involvement in 9/11 whatsoever.

Novak concludes his piece on a note with which we can all agree: it will be nice if Saddam Hussein disarms completely, submits to the most thorough possible inspections, and all sides agree that war is unnecessary. To his credit, Novak refrains from insisting that Saddam must go into exile, a condition which he surely cannot agree to meet (he knows what happened to Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic when they surrendered power). Still, one can hardly expect that Saddam will comply with the UN Security Council resolutions, when his weapons of mass destruction are the only thing that might deter the United States from attacking him at any time in the future. Even so, war is not the solution to the problem. And we should be grateful for at least one thing: Saddam Hussein, fearful of nuclear reprisal from the United States, does not subscribe to Michael Novak’s ideas of Just War. If he did, Saddam would launch a pre-emptive attack on the U.S. right now, given the imminent threat it poses to his country. That, however, would be suicidal and Saddam is not that crazy. Would that the same could be said for neoconservatives like Michael Novak! Their war on evil is only accelerating the pace of change that will lead to more terrorism against the United States. They love war, and they love to make enemies. Novak is just rather unusual in using the name of Christ to justify it.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

There’s a new weapon of mass destruction, one designed to destroy critical electronic infrastructure. It shorts out everything from office computers to traffic lights to pacemakers, crippling the machines that run a modern economy — not to mention those that run a modern hospital. Although not intended as an anti-personnel device, the side-effects that this weapon has upon human beings caught within its blast radius are devastating: those lucky enough to suffer a direct hit are more or less instantly vaporized. The less fortunate on the periphery of the blast, or those caught by a ricochet, suffer severe burns and damage to the internal organs, including the brain.

The weapon is the "e-bomb," or microwave bomb, and as you may have guessed, this new marvel of terror is brought to us by the same folks who gave the world the atomic bomb and weaponized anthrax. Yes, it’s a creation of the United States federal government and its "defense" contractors. Victorino Matus writes about the e-bomb on the Weekly Standard’s website; Matus cannot quite conceal his enthusiasm, but he does at least mention the humanitarian concerns about the device. Of course, he concludes by reiterating that the purpose of the bomb is actually to spare lives: to destroy electronics without also killing people. This is a humanitarian weapon.

Something here doesn’t add up. Several news sources have reported that the e-bomb may see its first use in the attack on Iraq.That’s understandable as far as it goes; Iraq is not really a stone age country, despite years of sanctions. It may still have enough electronics to make the bomb an effective weapon in the U.S. arsenal (although then again, it may not). But think about this in the long term. The real danger to the United States at present comes from terrorist organizations, not from "rogue states," which are only significant to the extent that they harbor and support terrorists. How do you use an "e-bomb" against al Qaeda? It’s not a weapon of much use against people hiding in caves. Nor is it of any use in stopping a hijacked airplane — it could bring down an aircraft, of course, but so could a conventional missile, and the e-bomb would run the additional risk of shorting out any other electronics nearby, including other planes and systems on the ground. Even its usefulness against Iraq will be very limited. To put it bluntly, an anti-technology weapon is most useful against a target dependent on high technology. That doesn’t mean Iraq, and it certainly doesn’t mean Afghanistan or al Qaeda. It means countries like the United States.

By its very nature, the e-bomb poses more of a danger to the United States and other first world countries than it does to terrorists or rogue states. So why is the US developing this weapon? One explanation would be that the military-industrial bureaucracy is still fighting the last war. The e-bomb might work fine against the aircraft and mechanized infantry divisions of a large nation state such as the Soviet Union. It would be a useful weapon to deploy against cities as well, to scramble communications and handicap the economy. But this kind nation-to-nation warfare is not what America or the world currently faces. Even apart from al Qaeda, most of the fighting in the world today is within, not between, states. Outside of Africa, what warfare there still is between states typically now takes the form of the United States and its allies fighting a single, smaller foe of extremely limited conventional forces (Serbia, Iraq, etc.). In such engagements the e-bomb has limited practical value. It’s a bunker-buster, and one of a highly specialized sort, in an age characterized by fewer and fewer bunkers. It might have applications in Iraq, but it would have had few indeed in Serbia — except, again, as a weapon for use against cities.

On the other hand, the e-bomb would be a very convenient weapon for anyone who wanted to attack America. There are ways to shield, or "harden," electronics against electromagnetic pulses, but microwaves are the most difficult radiation to harden against. No doubt some of the most highly sensitive military technology might be proofed against an e-bomb, but civilians would have little protection. In addition to hospitals and traffic lights, power grids, air traffic control systems, and telecommunications could all be crippled or destroyed. The loss of life and economic damage would be bad enough in Belgrade or Baghdad; in an American city it would be far worse. The microwave bomb really is a weapon of mass destruction, one particularly tuned to the weaknesses of a modern, computer-reliant city.

Will the government’s development of this weapon come back to haunt us? In twenty years’ time we may have President George P. Bush threatening war with Bhutan unless the Bhutanis can prove that they haven’t been developing an e-bomb. Meanwhile our own military-industrial complex will be busily at work creating yet another weapon of mass destruction. It’s happened before and now it’s happening again.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

The abortion game goes something like this. A Republican politician will make noises about what an evil it is to kill the unborn and proposes some sort of incremental improvement — a ban on partial-birth abortions, for example. This reassures the social conservatives in the Republican base, but only a little. What’s more important is that the token pro-life initiative outrages the Left, which then begins to splutter about the end of "reproductive rights." This is what really heartens and motivates the social conservatives. There then follows a rhetorical exchange between the publicists of both camps, each trying to surpass the other in its moral hysteria. In practice this means a lot of talk about Nazis and endless emoting over women and small children.

Both parties benefit from this game because it riles up some very committed voters and campaign volunteers. The trick is to get the other side either to go too far or else not far enough. If Republicans say nothing about abortion, they risk losing momentum. But if they say too much and become too closely identified with the issue, they lose the mushy middle, the sucker-mom voters whose chief concern at the polls is to avoid making a hard decision. Consensus voters, in other words; they have no particular principles one way or the other, and they don’t like to be reminded of that fact by militants of either side.

The Democrats played this game and lost in 2002. In Missouri they tried too hard; in the course of the campaign for the US Senate from Missouri, more of the Jean Carnahan placards I saw had Planned Parenthood logos and slogans on them than not. The pro-abortion zealots made it impossible for anyone with reservations about abortion to vote for Carnahan. They made it impossible as well for anyone who simply wanted to avoid the issue to vote for her. The Republican candidate, James Talent, was outspokenly anti-abortion, but his signs did not advertise his allegiance as prominently as Carnahan’s did. Talent’s base was happy and the consensus voters were not repelled. So he won. And now, with the 30th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, a new round is starting. The Washington Post reports that Karl Rove has already taken what I’ve described above as the first step.

It’s a shell game. As real as the effects of the policy changes wrought by either side are — and things like the abuse of racketeering laws against pro-life protestors and state legislatures limiting the abortion "rights" of minors do accomplish something — the only permanent winner in the battles over abortion is the State. William Anderson described in part how this happens: pro-life conservatives have been duped into surrendering their decentralist and anti-statist principles in the name of a federal crusade against abortion. It’s kept some Christians and conservatives loyal to the Republican Party even as the party expands government in every direction. The ludicrous Left, on the other hand, may talk about getting government out of the bedroom, but it’s all for getting government into everything else. Not that the "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" types really want government out of the bedroom, either. You didn’t see them protesting the California Supreme Court’s recent ruling that stretched the definition of rape to dubious lengths.

Abortion politics is futile because liberal democracy cannot resolve the kinds of questions involved in the dispute. Those questions are pre-political, having to do with what constitutes membership in the human race and with what rights accompany that status in our society. By subjecting the dispute to the "democratic process," both sides concede to the State and to the mass of voters the authority to determine who’s human and who isn’t. The problem with this should be immediately apparent. Not only can one very easily imagine the State and the masses making objectively wrong decisions, but also, given the fickle and arbitrary nature of bureaucrats, the masses, and judges, a decision that’s "right" today can be "wrong" tomorrow. Subjecting these kinds of fundamental questions to the democratic process amounts to denying the existence of truth itself, or at least subordinating truth to power. This happens to be the inverse of what the liberal state was originally supposed to do, to uphold certain pre-existing conventional and metaphysical rights.

Some seven years ago the self-described "theocon" (i.e., Catholic social democrat) magazine First Things took this line of thought seriously in a symposium entitled "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics." The symposium tiptoed close to calling the federal government illegitimate and suggesting civil disobedience as a remedy. Imagine a magazine with Gertrude Himmelfarb on its editorial board saying that! Actually, Himmelfarb quit the First Things editorial board over her disagreement with those sentiments. In her letter of resignation she wrote:

Slavery did not illegitimize the Founding, as some radical historians suggest. Nor did the Vietnam War (an “unjust war,” many claimed) illegitimize the government of that time. By the same token, the appalling errors of the present judiciary (in respect to abortion particularly) do not illegitimize the government today. If abortion is the litmus test of a moral law that cannot be violated by positive law, then all of the Western democracies that legalize abortion-and do so by the legislative rather than judicial process-are illegitimate. (Indeed, the only legitimate governments would be Iraq, Iran, and the like.)

The Editors’ Introduction cites the American Revolution as if we are now in a similarly revolutionary situation-an analogy that, in my opinion (and that, I believe, of the overwhelming majority of Americans), is absurd and irresponsible. It also cites a papal encyclical affirming the supremacy of the moral law. But the pope did not declare Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union illegitimate, despite the genocide and mass murders, which were surely as much violations of the moral law as abortion.

The use of the word “regime” compounds the problem, for it suggests that it is not the legitimacy of a particular institution or branch of government that is at stake but the very nature of our government.

Himmelfarb is a smart person. Her conclusions are wrong but her analysis isn’t. Taking the pro-life argument seriously does indeed call into question the legitimacy not only of a particular administration, but of the State in general. It certainly puts the kibosh on the old liberal idea of the State as an institution that uncontroversially protects given rights. The pro-abortion argument, if it’s not just a smokescreen for feminist statism, leads to a conclusion that’s not altogether different, since why should a genuinely essential right be conditional upon the whims of a handful of judicial appointees, or even the vagaries of the entire electorate? It’s not the kind of question that gets addressed in the usual abortion debate. It’s also not the kind of question that matters in the daily lives of most people, including those of most activists on either side of the abortion battle. So it gets swept under the rug, and the abortion game continues. Since the root issues — the State, its legitimacy, and the nature of man — are never addressed, there’s little for either side to do but shout a little, or a lot, louder and contrive ever more clever ways to justify the unjustifiable. That some real good — reducing abortion — can be achieved through the political process only serves to disguise the fact that the process itself is not about what’s good, it’s about power.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

I never expected my work for LewRockwell.com to get me invited to ritzy parties on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but that’s exactly what happened. I spent this past weekend in New York being feted first by the Fabiani Society and then, at the Big Event, by the Manhattan Institute itself. No, I wasn’t the guest of honor, just the recipient of all the goodwill and charity — to say nothing of refreshments and hors d’oeuvre — that goes with being on the selection committee for the 2003 Norman Podhoretz award, the prestigious "Poddy."

Needless to say, the fact that I was on the committee at all seems to have been something of a misunderstanding. Last August I received a call from a staffer at the Manhattan Institute — let’s call him "Alex" — asking me whether I would be the "student representative" on the panel judging the finalists for the Poddy. "Alex," I said to him, "are you sure you haven’t got the wrong number? I’m not a big fan of any Podhoretzes and I thought that was pretty well known." My name, Daniel McCarthy, is a fairly common one, as any Google search will show. I was convinced this was a case of mistaken identity.

And maybe it was. Alex told me that I had been invited because I was considered something of a budding expert on neoconservatives, and because I had run into one of the Manhattan Institute’s top donors at CPAC, the official conservative pep-rally, the year before and had made a good impression. I didn’t recall any such meeting, but it was possible. My colleagues on the selection committee were to be William Bennett (AVOT, former Drug Czar and Education Secretary), Jessica Gavora (Independent Women’s Forum), John Fund (Wall Street Journal) and John Podhoretz (son of Norman). And I, apparently, was "Daniel McCarthy, University of Washington." Whether this was a typo — Washington University, which I attend, is in St. Louis and is not the same as the University of Washington — or whether in fact they had mixed me up with another Daniel McCarthy wasn’t clear, and I wasn’t going to raise the issue. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a look inside the neocon world with my own two eyes.

The committee deliberated by email between August and November, then met in person on December 20th to make the final decision. We were all sworn to secrecy at that meeting, just after we’d said the pledge and offered up a non-denominational prayer, so I can’t reveal too many details. I can say that Bill Bennett was not there in person: he had appointed some flunky from AVOT to be his proxy. I can also tell you that Jessica Gavora’s presence on the committee in no way biased its considerations, even though she’s married to one of the finalists for the prize (Jonah Goldberg). Goldberg had won the last two years in a row, so no one expected him to win again, especially considering his fall from grace at National Review Online. The other finalists who didn’t win were Max Boot (didn’t have a high enough profile) and David Brooks (too risqu; John Podhoretz wanted only someone completely above board to win the award that bore his family name). So who won?

It won’t come as a surprise. The press releases haven’t gone out yet, but I think I’m safe in telling you who it was that we’d gathered to honor last weekend in Manhattan. The recipient of the 2003 Norman Podhoretz award and official "Neoconservative of the Year" was David Frum.

He wasn’t my first choice — one of the criteria for the Poddy is that the recipient must champion American values. I expressed to the committee some doubt about Frum’s qualifications in that regard, since he’s a Canadian. I pointed out, rather mischievously, that National Review had just run a major article by Jonah Goldberg bashing Canada and threatening to blow up the CN Tower. Should the neocon of the year really be a Canadian? Well, I was told in no uncertain terms that my xenophobia was not appreciated: Frum was the perfect choice, because as an immigrant he embodies the American ideal better than any native American ever could. What’s more, it was darkly hinted that if I had a problem with Canadians I should talk to Conrad Black , or ask Jonah Goldberg why he’s no longer editor of National Review Online. I was only joking in the first place, but this shut me up. I didn’t want to blow my cover, so to speak, by saying anything that might reveal me for a "paleo."

That’s more than enough about me; David Frum is the man of the hour and he’s got a little gold statue of Norman Podhoretz to prove it. Frum is kind of a low-key guy; sometimes he gets confused with David Brooks, or with one of the other Canadian or British expats who write for National Review. He doesn’t attract attention the way Jonah Goldberg does. But make no mistake about it, he’s earned his title. This is the man who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil," in so doing polarizing this country, and the whole world, into neoconservatives on the one hand (including Tony Blair) and "evil doers" on the other. "Moral clarity" is Frum’s middle name.

And why do you think Frum’s now appearing on the back page of the print version of National Review? That’s the prestigious slot formerly held by Florence King (who never won any kind of neoconservative award). Frum is so prolific, such a powerful thinker that he’s marked out his own territory on National Review Online as well, where his blog, David Frum’s Diary, runs. And he’s the author of several critically acclaimed books — his latest, The Right Man, the first insider’s account of the Bush White House, is already making waves. He’s also the author of How We Got Here, the 70′s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better or Worse, and Dead Right, which no less an eminence than Frank Rich of the New York Times declared to be "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement." That a Canadian could write the smartest book from the inside of the American conservative movement only goes to show how special Frum really is. Joseph de Maistre once said that he’d met Frenchmen and he’s met Russians but he’d never met the generic, deracinated man. He’d obviously never met David Frum.

Maistre may never have met Frum, but Frum has met the latter-day likes of Maistre and he’s booted them out of the American conservative movement. Frum is the scourge of the paleos; he’s not fooled by Paul Gottfried or any talk about Murray Rothbard. He knows what paleos are really all about.

Frum is everything that Jonah Goldberg ever wanted to be and more. Even Goldberg’s characteristic comparison of the old, continental Right to the postmodern lunatic Left is prefigured in a more relevant context in Frum’s Dead Right. In chapter six of Dead Right, "Nationalists: Whose Country Is It Anyway?", Frum tells us that Pat Buchanan, Thomas Fleming, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and other paleos "believe what Donna Shalala and David Dinkins and Henry Louis Gates believe: that American really is — or is becoming — a mosaic; that it is — or is coming to be — characterized by a u2018diversity’ that cannot be reduced to a common Americanism of recognizably English origin. Nationalist conservatives accept the truth of everything that America’s most advance liberals propound. They just don’t like it." Such outspokenness has made Frum the target of slings and arrows from the likes of Thomas Fleming and Justin Raimondo, but he remains undaunted.

All that is in the past. The David Frum who bounded onto the stage this weekend to accept his Poddy was a man who knew his time had come. Sadly I didn’t have a notepad with me to take down his speech, but what he had to say was similar enough to what he wrote in Sunday’s New York Times (that Frank Rich connection is obviously helping Frum out), an article called "It’s His Party." Appraising the latest stage of neoconservatism under President Bush, Frum writes "For those of us who believed in the more radical conservatism espoused by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Bush’s softer Republicanism can often be difficult to adjust to." But Frum himself has adapted quite well, and eagerly. Here are a few more choice selections from his Times op-ed. First, on economics:

George Bush’s party is less economically libertarian than the Republican Party of the 1980′s and 1990′s. Mr. Bush’s tax cut, for example, was only one-third as large as Ronald Reagan’s, relative to the size of the United States economy. And while Mr. Reagan’s cut took effect in only three years, Mr. Bush’s won’t be complete for 10….

….Ronald Reagan fought an unending, and ultimately unsuccessful, struggle against the growth of entitlements. Mr. Bush is presiding over the expansion of Medicaid into something that is coming to look more and more like a universal health insurance program. He uncomplainingly signed the biggest farm bill in history, jettisoned school vouchers to win his education bill and let his Social Security reform commission quietly expire.

So much for libertarianism and economic conservatism. Frum next presents his take on Bush’s social policies:

Many Republicans offer the pro-life movement rhetorical tributes. Mr. Bush has brought the concerns of religious conservatives in from the periphery of American politics to its center. His stem-cell policy is the biggest political victory the pro-life movement has had in years. More significantly, he delivered that victory without alienating or frightening those Americans who are not pro-life.

No doubt this is stirring stuff for those who want to believe that George W. Bush is a conservative of some kind but Frum’s facts are not quite in order. Bush didn’t ban embryonic stem-cell research; on the contrary, he approved federal funding for some embryonic stem-cell research. But never mind the facts; that’s not where Frum is coming from. Just look at the thoughts on foreign policy with which he concludes his Times op-ed:

It sometimes seemed to me, as I watched the debate between the administration’s hawks and doves from the inside, that I was witnessing a reprise of the great strategic debates of the Civil War. Back then, official Washington was divided between the realists, who wanted to fight the smallest possible war in order (as they said) to save the Union as it was, and the idealists, who sought the biggest possible victory, even if it meant smashing the old order in the South forever. Today’s realists, like their 19th-century counterparts, are more frightened of change than they are of defeat. At every step, President Bush has opted for the course that offers the hope of a bigger victory – even at the price of a wider war. Surprisingly, the Republican Party has followed. And so the president who once talked of scaling back America’s overseas commitments now finds himself crusading for democracy not only in Iraq, but also for the entire Arab world. Republicans usually like to see themselves as steely realists. Foreign-policy realism is the tradition from which President Bush and his top foreign-policy advisers have come. But under the pressure of war, Mr. Bush has found what the great American presidents have believed: that American principles are as “real” as ships and armies and wealth. It’s not just Mr. Bush’s party that is changing. It is Mr. Bush himself.

Like I said, Frum’s acceptance speech at the Podhoretz awards was along the same lines. I dozed off for a while — Frum can’t quite hold an audience like Goldberg — until a fidgeting John Podhoretz jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow. Poddy Jr told me that one day there’d be an award inspired by him; I told him there already is. Before Mini-Me Podhoretz could figure out what I was getting at, though, Frum had hit his crescendo, the part of his speech corresponding to the foreign policy part of the Times op-ed. Frum was ready for World War IV, as it’s called in Pod-speak, and if he and his chicken-hawk friends don’t actually plan to fight in the war, you can be sure they’ll make up for it with their zeal to foment it. So inspiring was this patriotic peroration that I rose to my feet just before the final applause line, raised my right arm in the appropriate Roman salute and cried out a hearty Nos morituri te salutamus, O Frum! The Neocon of the Year seemed a little shaken up by this.

I don’t think I’ll be asked to judge next year’s Poddy.

P.S. As the reader may have guessed, there isn’t really any such thing as the Norman Podhoretz award; I made it up. Everything about the selection committee and ceremony — wildly untrue, all of it, and intended for satirical purposes only. Sadly, David Frum is for real, and ought to get some kind of booby prize for being the indisputable Neocon of the Year.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

Libertarian in Reverse

by Daniel McCarthy

It may be a bit bold of me to submit my story for Walter Block’s libertarian autobiography series. I’m less distinguished than most of its contributors and I’m more fluent in the idiom of conservatism than that of libertarianism. But the latter really isn’t a problem: there’s little difference between a genuine American conservative and a Rothbardian libertarian. For me, there’s none at all. I’ll offer my story as proof.

As soon as I became politically aware, around the age of 13, I became a conservative. It was plain to see even at that age that the Left was crazy. More importantly, I simply didn’t subscribe to the pieties of late twentieth-century America — didn’t believe in progress, didn’t take it for granted that history always turned out for the better. I was a skeptic, and I was skeptical not of religion but of the vague concepts that nowadays stand in for religion: democracy, equality, diversity, etc.

Conservatism doesn’t mean much when you’re 13 years old. For me, it meant reading National Review, listening to talk radio (I preferred G. Gordon Liddy to Rush Limbaugh), and volunteering on the occasional Republican campaign. These activities introduced me to the Beltway brand of libertarianism. It was unobjectionable, uninspiring stuff — economic conservatism with some mental muscle. But I wasn’t interested in economics, so I wasn’t interested in libertarianism. I knew that libertarians also wanted to legalize drugs and that most, though not all, favored abortion rights, but I didn’t make the mistake of assuming that libertarians had to be libertines. Libertarianism was respectable enough, it just wasn’t for me.

My opinion of libertarianism took a turn for the worse in college, where the first libertarians I met had left a good impression — they were buttoned-down types, intelligent and easygoing — but where I soon encountered libertarians of what Murray Rothbard called the "modal" variety. These were young men — and they’re always male — with a fanatical gleam in their eyes, eager to buttonhole and evangelize, full of all the self-confidence that comes with unblinking dogmatism. They thought they had the answer to every important question in the world, when what they really had was a hormonal imbalance. What they said was not too unlike from what I’d heard before, but their attitude made all the difference. Like many a traditionalist conservative before me, seeing the intemperance in those eyes and hearing it in the pitch of their voices convinced me that libertarianism had to be as bad as Communism. These were Jacobins who would smash anything that stood in the way of creating their utopia.

An idea isn’t wrong just because it’s espoused by a few sociopaths. I knew that, but after this encounter I started to look more critically at libertarianism and at what it might imply. I found in it a lot of -isms that alarm a conservative: utilitarianism and utopianism were instantly objectionable, while rationalism and individualism could, in the wrong hands, be turned into cudgels with which to attack everything from religion to the bourgeois family. Individual libertarian policies may or may not be sensible, and the economic theory must have been largely valid, but the underlying worldview of libertarianism looked to be diabolical.

By the time I came to think such thoughts I had long since abandoned the limp conservatism of the establishment Right. I’d discovered Chronicles and "paleoconservatism," and had been won over by the case for a non-interventionist foreign policy abroad and decentralized government at home. Soon thereafter I discovered Antiwar.com — I was already familiar with Justin Raimondo from his occasional articles in Chronicles. Raimondo and another Antiwar.com writer, Joseph Stromberg, influenced me profoundly: they taught me more about the history of the conservative movement, and in particular the pre-WWII "Old Right," than I’d learned from years within the movement itself. Names like Nock and Mencken, or even Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet, were cited more often on Antiwar.com than they were in National Review. Around this same time the second edition of Robert M. Crunden’s Old Right anthology, The Superfluous Men, was published. Reading it was like discovering some long lost family tree.

Finally, in January, 2000, I found LewRockwell.com and — well, it’s a tired old clich, but it’s true — everything I thought I knew about libertarianism was wrong. Without exaggeration, that was clear the minute I set eyes on LRC. There were strongly Catholic articles, including a link to a CultureWars piece about the suicide of Lissa Roche at Hillsdale College. Hans-Hermann Hoppe had an article laying out a libertarian argument against immigration. There was no utilitarianism and no utopianism. The site had eclectic interests, which set it apart from other libertarian forums (which tended to get stale pretty quickly). It was more conservative than any major "conservative" publication; at the same time, it was still wholly libertarian. LRC was the Old Right reborn.

From LRC I learned about the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Mises himself, and Murray Rothbard. And it was either from LRC, or from researching some of the names and ideas mentioned on the site, that I started to learn about Austrian economics and praxeology. The economics I had found so boring in college and in conservative books had always been Keynesian or neoclassical. Austrian economics made a great deal more sense. Reading up on the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe also gave me an appreciation for extreme rationalism that I had never had before. The anarchism of Hoppe and Rothbard didn’t bother me: "minarchism," the idea that the State exists to protect our rights, had never made any sense. What possible reason could there be for the State, as an institution, to limit its own power? It’s like suggesting that a company would voluntarily limit its own profits. A business exists to make money and the State exists to wield power.

I came to libertarianism in reverse, starting out as a conservative with no strong feelings about libertarianism one way or another, and then actually becoming quite hostile toward it based on what I’d seen. Ayn Rand never has appealed to me, nor has CATO-style managerial minarchism or Virginia Postrel’s techno-utopianism. It’s safe to say that without LRC, the Mises Institute, Antiwar.com and the rest of the Rothbard legacy, I would not ever have become a libertarian, even if I would still believe most of the things that I do. There simply is no substitute — not among libertarians, not among conservatives, not anywhere — for what Rothbard and those who follow in his footsteps have done and are doing.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

Gangs of New York is about as seasonally inappropriate as can be. There’s no peace on earth or goodwill to anyone in Martin Scorsese’s bloody new film about gang warfare in mid-19th century New York City. For that reason it isn’t likely to do well at the box office, although it does provide an invaluable respite for men who’ve had to take the kids to see The Santa Clause 2 more than once or sit through the latest Sandra Bullock / Jennifer Lopez romantic sniffler with the wife or girlfriend. There’s nothing like ultraviolence to cleanse the pallet of any lingering sentimental aftertaste. Gangs is also a film for those of us who can’t tell an ork from a Klingon.

Most importantly though, Gangs of New York dramatizes the contrast between two kinds of organized violence, the ethnic criminal gang and the State. Unlike Scorsese’s earlier Casino and Goodfellas, there’s little glamorization of underworld here; in fact, there are really no sympathetic characters at all, although the lead villain, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Bill "the Butcher" Cutting, does have a malevolent magnetism of sorts. But as bad as the gangs are — murderous, treacherous, racist, and petty — the film quite clearly makes them out to be the lesser evil. Scorsese may mean to make a Hobbesian point here, that the overwhelming violence of the State is what it takes to secure civilization, but whatever interpretation he intends the evidence itself is beyond dispute. The gangs of New York are nothing next to the gang that runs the State.

The film opens and closes with street battles. The first of these is the 1846 Battle of the Five Points between a gang of Irish immigrants, the Dead Rabbits, and the native gangs led by Bill the Butcher. The second is a reprise of that battle fought against the backdrop of the draft riots of 1863. In between we follow the story of Amsterdam Vallon (a lifeless Leonardo DiCaprio), son of the slain leader of the Dead Rabbits, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). Amsterdam wants revenge on Bill the Butcher for killing his father, and is willing to use either guile or force to get it. His mission brings him closer to Bill than he had expected, and also brings him into contact with a girl thief, Jenny Everdeane (eye-pleasing Cameron Diaz), with whom he’s soon sharing a bed. This is less a plot than a series of genre conventions, but the atmospheric setting, not to mention bouts of intense bloodshed, stop it from getting too boring. Day-Lewis is the only stand-out; his Bill Cutting is the most memorable cinema villain in recent history and by himself would make the film worth watching.

Both immigrant and native gangs have a code of honor of sorts. When they fight they agree to terms of combat — when and where the battle will be met, what weapons will be used. They have rules of war which they take seriously. There is even a degree of respect accorded to a fallen foe, if he has proved himself worthy. Bill the Butcher cherishes the memory of Priest Vallon, of whom he says "I killed the last honorable man years ago." Similarly, vanquished enemies are accorded some mercy; we meet the survivors of Priest Vallon’s Dead Rabbits later in the film, and most seem to have been allowed to live in peace, albeit with some significant restrictions (of which I cannot say more without revealing too much of the plot). Yet none of this leavens the brutal nature of the gangs: they murder, steal, and extort for a living and get their jollies from random acts of cruelty. They also have a habit of stabbing one another in the back: they’re not that honorable.

And then we have the government. Young Amsterdam Vallon is amazed to learn that different branches of the government are fighting their own wars against one another. Metropolitan police and fire services clash with municipal police and firemen. "Boss" Tweed (William Broadbent) doesn’t so much keep control of the city as simply keep his own revenues flowing by cutting deals with all sides and betraying allies whenever convenient. While the film generally takes a sympathetic view of Irish immigrants, it is scathing in its portrayal of Tweed manipulating them for their votes, buying them off or negotiating with gangs to coerce immigrants (and natives) into going to the polls and voting the right way. The immigrants are all so much fodder for the Tammany machine, in what’s an exact parallel of the way in which masses of immigrants even today are fodder for the Democratic Party. Unfortunately Scorsese cannot resist pulling his punch in the election day scene, where he seems to suggest that Tammany’s corruption is not really so bad if it at least advances the fortunes of ethnic minorities. That aside, the picture he paints of the "democratic process" is not a flattering one, and given the election scandals of recent years it’s hard to think that the criticism here is merely historical.

But even Tammany is a sideshow compared to Lincoln’s war, waged in the background throughout the film. The hapless new immigrants are not only bribed and coerced into the Tammany machine, they’re also conscripted and sent off to kill and be killed by other Americans. The gang war between the immigrants and natives is only a microcosm of the larger war being fought behind the scenes. But with several important differences. The ethnic gangs don’t have to conscript their fighters, and the federal army doesn’t obey the quaint rules of war that the gangs have. At the climax of the movie the army moves in to quash draft rioters. While the Dead Rabbits and the natives face off with sticks and knives, as they’d agreed to in their join war council, the federal troops come in with rifles and artillery. The carnage surpasses anything seen in the gang fight at the start of the movie. Then the snow on the ground was colored pink by the mayhem; here, at the end, there’s no snow, but the blood runs ankle deep in the bare streets. It’s not a brawl, as we’d seen in the beginning. It’s a massacre.

The very end of the film gets a bit sentimental and, together with sporadic hints earlier, suggests that Scorsese wants to say that all this slaughter was necessary to make America. The U2 theme song for the movie is "The Hands that Built America." In a sense, the characters of this film, the immigrants, natives and unseen warlords in Washington, DC, did build America, but it was a new America, a centralized nation-state, that they built, and they built it on the bones and ashes of the old 1789 Republic. It may be true that the overwhelming force of the federal army put an end to these particular gangs of New York, but in the long run what did we get? There’s no shortage of gang violence in the US today, even with the federal tyranny in place, and in terms of narrowsighted, vindictive battles over honor and power, well, States are even better at those than ethnic mobs are. Just look at the feud between the Bushes and Saddam Hussein.

Gangs of New York is a morally bleak film, with its unsympathetic characters and casual violence, but it’s a serious one, well worth seeing — even apart from Day-Lewis’s performance — for what it shows about the realities of gangs and governments alike. Whatever Scorsese himself may or may not have intended, in showing the bloody reality of this episode in American history, Gangs of New York is, in its moral vision, deeply anti-statist.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

by Daniel McCarthy

Why is it that the shrillest voices demanding the resignation of Trent Lott as Senate majority leader have come from putative conservatives? Tom Daschle and Joseph Lieberman were willing to accept that Lott had simply made a mistake, carried away by the occasion of Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday. They didn’t call for Lott to step down; neither did the far-leftists of the Congressional Black Caucus. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee said that she might settle for "minimally a much larger apology." It was from Charles Krauthammer, various writers at National Review, and Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal that the harshest demands for punishment came. Other quasi-conservative institutions joined in, even if not going quite so far as to insist that Lott quit. The New York Sun, for example, excoriated Lott for the crime of having dared speak to Southern Partisan magazine in 1984.

L’affaire Lott has seen the respectable Right surpass the lunatic Left for political correctness, a fact which is more important in itself than any debate over whether or not Lott is a racist or a liability to the Republican party. One can criticize Lott without feeding into "anti-racist" hysteria, but that’s not what blue-zone conservatives have done. For Krauthammer and Noonan, Robert George and Deroy Murdock, Linda Chavez and Mona Charen, and all the rest, Lott is guilty not of stupidity, but of insensitivity. He hasn’t shown due reverence for diversity, equality and Martin Luther King.

Those of us from the red-zones of this country might wonder whether conservatives are meant to show such reverence. We’ve historically preferred liberty over equality and individualism over racial diversity, and while King was right to oppose coerced segregation, he was still a Marxist, a plagiarist, and an adulterer. As for the civil rights movement, it didn’t just get rid of regional segregation, but set up both national forced integration and, ultimately, affirmative action. No less a conservative icon than Barry Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act because of the threat it posed to federalism and property rights. But now blue-zone conservatives in prominent media positions champion King’s legacy over Goldwater’s.

What gives? The answer is that the distinction between Left and Right is less important than the distinction between "blue" and "red."

It’s groupthink, or as they say of teenagers, "peer pressure." Blue-zone conservatives live and work among leftists in Washington, DC, and its suburbs, and in Manhattan. Leftists are not only their neighbors but also their professional peers, particularly in journalism. The elites of the establishment Left and Right have frequently attended the same prestigious universities as well. Yuppies are yuppies, and right-wing yuppies like their granola just as much as left-wing yuppies do.

It’s as human an instinct as anything can be, to want the respect and approval of your peers. When your peers are politically correct socialists, you’re going to be a politically correct socialist as well, if you don’t want to be a pariah. The fact that you may want marginally lower taxes than they do means that you have to work that much harder to win their respect in those areas where you agree. If Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan are a bit suspect because they don’t seem to love the poor quite as much as everybody else, they have to make up for it by proving that they are twice as anti-racist as the next conscientious denizen of the Beltway or the Upper West Side.

The leaders of the conservative movement have more in common professionally, personally, geographically, and — as a consequence — ideologically with the leaders of the mainstream Left than they do with the grassroots Right, few of whom can have been truly scandalized by Trent Lott’s peccadillo. This situation perpetuates itself because as grassroots conservatives try to move-up in the worlds of politics or journalism — that is, as they climb the ladder of the conservative movement — they have to adjust their views to fit in with their superiors, whose views in turn are shaped by other makers of respectable opinion. Print and broadcast media are at the top of this intellectual food chain; that’s why the Senate majority leader, a nominally powerful man, is in danger of being brought down by the likes of Charles Krauthammer and the gang at National Review.

Lest anyone misunderstand, however, it must be said that "conservative" media are in turn regulated by the mainstream media of which they are a subset; the New York Times and Washington Post are the peers to which, on matters as central to the liberal-democratic faith as race and equality, National Review and company must conform. The mainstream sets the limits of permissible dissent. Hence National Review repudiates its own history of defending states’ rights and adopts a position more like that of the "liberal" media.

It’s because American groupthink is not just geographic that the media play such a large role in it. The New York Times and the pundits of CNN or Fox News Channel provide a common world-view and shared frames of reference to all their readers or viewers, no matter where they may be located. Media sources also create solidarity in that what one reads or watches contributes to one’s social identity: one of the first things that a young man who has decided he’s a conservative does is to start reading National Review and perhaps the Wall Street Journal, simply because they’re supposed to be conservative. He demonstrates his membership in the conservative group by joining in a shared activity, in this case reading National Review. Because this is based more on social psychology than on reason, it’s not necessary that National Review actually be conservative, only that it be identified as conservative. Naturally what one reads or watches does not determine one’s beliefs, but the point is that one tends to choose what to read and watch based on what sort of group one wants to join.

Trent Lott’s fundamental problem is that by birth and by choice he belongs to the wrong groups, and he therefore exhibits the wrong groupthink. He’s not just politically incorrect: as a Southerner he’s also geographically incorrect, and because he attended Ole Miss instead of Yale or Stanford, he’s academically incorrect. In the milieu from which Trent Lott came, in the particular place and time he grew up, supporting segregation was what the group expected of you. Later, after legal segregation was abolished, you were still expected to stand up for the honor of Mississippi and of the South as a whole, and to provide a sympathetic reading of their history. That’s what Lott was doing in his 1984 interview with Southern Partisan, and it’s what he was doing two weeks ago at Strom Thurmond’s birthday celebration. You don’t get to be Senate majority "leader" without being a good groupthinker, and Lott is good, but at Thurmond’s party he choose to think along with the wrong group. Now he’s being brought to heel, and a message is being sent to any Southerner: if you want to get ahead in politics, you’d better think more like Charles Krauthammer and his friends and a whole lot less like the old Strom Thurmond.

The irony here is that many of the same "blue" conservatives attacking Lott style themselves as enemies of political correctness, especially on campuses. It’s a feature of groupthink that they are unaware of the inconsistency here. For the conscientious blue conservative, to be anything other than an egalitarian and a social democrat is unthinkable and impermissible; to be something else, even to deviate as little as Lott, is to become a heretic worthy of putting to the torch. In just the same way, for the far Left it is unthinkable and impermissible not to be a feminist and radical multiculturalist. Neither group is aware that the limits it draws for legitimate thought and speech are extremely narrow and based more on group psychology than on anything like logic or an external principle. The lunatic Left may be a little more aware of the reality of the situation, if anything. But the bottom line is that with the lunatic Left on the one hand, and the respectable Right on the other, the American ideological mainstream offers only groupthink.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

Those are the reasons for war with Iraq, and to the extent that they contain any factual claims, they’re all false. No credible evidence has linked Hussein to 9/11 or any other recent terrorist acts. He may be developing “weapons of mass destruction,” but that can hardly be a casus belli when other regimes in the Middle East already have such things or are better able to develop and deploy them than Iraq. Israel is one state that already possesses weapons of mass destruction, and is more than able to fight its own war if it considers Iraq to be a danger. Hussein’s other neighbors, including Iran, with whom he fought a war in the 1980′s, do not consider him a grave threat, certainly not enough so as to warrant U.S. intervention. As for U.S. success in the field of “nation building,” the record speaks for itself.

None of this will come as news to the readers of LRC. In fact, it should not come as news to any well-informed American, but there’s the rub. According to a Washington Post poll, 57% of American adults favor going to war with Iraq, including deploying ground forces. It is possible that the people polled have reasons other than those cited above for supporting the war, but is it likely? Ignorance by itself cannot account for such large numbers of Americans supporting invading another country; some sort of reason is needed. Understandably enough, most American adults probably are not very interested in the nuances of foreign policy, but something has convinced them that Iraq, of all places, is worth invading. That “something” is propaganda, and it bears a close examination.

Propaganda comes in many, many forms, but thankfully much of the pro-war propaganda has been crude and is thus easily analyzed. For example, there are specimens such as Rod Dreher’s recent National Review Online column “America, Get Angry,” that substitute emotion for thought. Dreher writes: “…we need to be shocked again. We need to be traumatized again. Our national survival depends on it.” He may believe this, but he does not provide anything resembling an argument to support his contention. Not that he needs to, as long as he’s willing to use the crudest but most effective propaganda method of all, repetition. Even an assertion without an argument will come to be believed, over time, if it is repeated often enough and creatively enough.

Anyone who has worked on an advertising campaign in business or politics knows the importance of repetition. It takes a certain number of iterations before your audience will even recognize your product’s name, let alone buy it. The “product” that neoconservative propagandists are selling is war with Iraq. The reasons for the war may not stand up to scrutiny, but the sheer volume of the propaganda is enough to give it psychological force. It helps too that the propaganda is disseminated from multiple sources, and that these sources refer back to one another, and thereby reinforce one another. It may be that no one reads the Weekly Standard, but so long as it exists it is another “source” that can be cited to verify the “truth” of what the neoconservatives are asserting. To the extent that propaganda is consistent between different sources it gives the impression of being logical, even if it has no connection to the outside world. Additionally, every undergraduate knows the benefits that can be had from padding a bibliography with redundant sources, if the professor is inattentive. The more sources that are cited, the more true it all seems, even if what is being argued (or asserted) is nonsense. In this fashion, entire worldviews can be created out of tautologies.

Polls are a specialized kind of tautology. The Washington Post poll cited above is a good example. Polls are treated as news, even though they are based on opinion. Furthermore, they’re based on opinions that are shaped by the questions that pollsters ask and the response options that they provide (since most polling is multiple choice). Pollsters may try to be neutral, but they have to “frame the issue” — that is, they have to decide what questions to ask, and what answers to accept — and that itself is a source of distortion. Propaganda can affect the process at every stage, first by providing the people being polled with false information, then by framing the issue at large (which influences how the pollsters frame it). The poll then finds out that the public holds the same view that the propagandists have put out, and this finding is treated as a meaningful fact. All that’s happened is that the propaganda has gone in a circle. It’s a tautology, and it says nothing about reality: in this case, about whether or not Hussein is a threat to you and me. (Conservatives understood this point very well during the Clinton years, when they argued that Clinton’s approval ratings in the polls had nothing to do with whether or not he was guilty of perjury.)

One more propaganda technique worthy of note is one familiar to anyone who has read George Orwell’s 1984, or his essay “Politics and the English Language.” Change or remove the meaning from language, and you can condition human thought and behavior. A case in point is “war.” “War” has always had a metaphorical application, but lately the distinction between war as a metaphor and war as war has been destroyed. National Review Online is not being metaphorical when it uses the rubric “At War” for a section on its front page. Even the “mainstream” media is full of references to America already being at a state of war. One hears it so often, it’s easy to believe. But is it true? Certainly Congress has not declared a war, as the Constitution specifies. So we’re not constitutionally at war. The U.S. could be unconstitutionally at war, but even this is problematic — with whom is the U.S. at war? There are American forces in Afghanistan, and around the world, and they’re engaged in sporadic fighting, but none of this quite rises to the level of what is usually meant by the word “war.” Of course, it’s easier to go to war with Iraq if you believe that you’re already at war; it’s also easy to think that war is not so bad if this is what it’s like.

A war on terrorism is not a war, because terrorism is an abstraction, a mode of behavior which anyone at any time can engage in. There is not a limited amount of terrorism in the world that can be found and eliminated (I am indebted to Robert Higgs for this observation). Clearly a “war on poverty” and a “war on drugs,” are metaphorical wars, but somehow the “war on terrorism” is treated as something different. It isn’t. As an aside, it’s worth noting that one of the problems with these metaphorical wars is that they not only cannot be won — how do you know when you’ve “won” the war on terror? — but that they cannot be lost either. Real wars, as terrible as they are, can at least be ended by killing everyone on the other side. Fake wars, on the other hand, are just as terrible but have no necessary end, because one man’s definition of defeat might well be another’s victory.

One final propaganda technique must be mentioned in association with the proposed war on Iraq: spectacle. The Soviet Union used to hold lavish military parades to demonstrate its strength, a show of force to frighten enemies and build morale at home. The Romans had bread and circuses and gladiatorial games to keep the masses distracted and mollified. The United States today has televised wars. War itself is a technique of propaganda; war, just like regular propaganda, serves to identify an enemy, supply an impetus to action, encourage participation, boost morale and create psychological solidarity. As a spectacle, nothing is better than a war for unifying the masses behind the State, mobilizing them in service to the State, and making the masses forget their troubles at home.

The only antidotes to propaganda are logic and reality. No amount of Soviet propaganda would have been sufficient to hide the failures of an insane economic and political system. No amount of neoconservative propaganda on Iraq will be enough to stop a war on that country from turning into a quagmire and encouraging more terrorism. Reality has a way of imposing itself on unworldly ideologies. But the war on Iraq can be stopped before that happens, if enough Americans are willing to exercise some critical thought in evaluating the proposed reasons for going to war. Never mind the polls and the talking heads, never mind the conventional wisdom, and don’t just get angry, but ask yourself: does war with Iraq make sense?

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

Freedom for the Greeks was not the same thing as modern freedom, of course. For starters, the Greeks had slaves. Greek freedom was also characterized more by the free city than by the free individual. Benjamin Constant, one of the founding fathers of classical liberalism, gave a famous speech on "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns," in which he found modern liberty, on the whole, more agreeable. There is no need to quarrel with his judgment, although a case can be made for Athenian liberty, at least, even in modern terms. What is more important is to examine Greek liberty for lessons about a kind of freedom that has been largely forgotten today, the freedom that derives from man’s right to form associations and that culminates in the free city.

When Aristotle called man a political animal, he did not have parties and elections in mind. Man is a zoon politikon in the sense that the polis, the "city-state," is the natural culmination of man’s nature; it is his end, as far as social organization goes. Not that all men live in cities. First comes the family, which arises out of biological necessity; next the tribal village in which man may more easily obtain the necessities of life than in the family alone. The city may come into being thereafter, so that man may pursue, in leisure, his highest nature. As Aristotle says in at the beginning of his Politics, “every city is a kind of association, and every association is joined together for the sake of some good.”* And further, one good on account of which cities are established is justice — "for rules of justice are the organizing principle of political (i.e., city-based) association."*

Modern translators of Aristotle tend to render polis as "state." This is misleading, just as thinking of man as a "political" animal in the partisan or statist sense is not quite right. "City-state" is a fair translation for polis, but the basic, dictionary definition of the word is simply "city." You get translations with very different apparent meanings depending on whether you render polis as "state" or "city." Aristotle was no anarchist, but neither was he the statist that English translations make him out to be. Moreover, when Aristotle says that every city is a kind of association, we should bear in mind that this can include free associations. This is historically valid — Athens itself seems to have had its origins in the voluntary association of tribal fishing, farming and shepherd communities who came together for trade, mutual defense, and religious purposes. Or, for a modern example, think of the origins of colonial settlements in North America, which were often established on a voluntary basis and in pursuit of some good, usually a good conceived of in religious terms. Cities and communities need not originate in conquest.

Many Greek cities also began as colonies established for economic or political reasons. Such colonies dotted the Mediterranean coast from modern Turkey (Byzantium, now Istanbul) to modern France (Massilia, now Marseille). Often these colonies were begun by people who, like our own colonial forbears, held different values from those of their native city or country. In these cases, rather than two or more factions fighting for control of the mother city, in order that one might impose its values — its sense of the good — upon the other, the two separated, one group leaving to found a colony, so that each community could pursue whatever it understood to be the good. These separations could take place voluntary or on account of one faction being banished.

For the ancient Greeks freedom meant above all the freedom of the city, its autonomy and independence. Some Greek cities, most notably Athens, went further, extending freedom to the individual as well as the city. But the free individual presupposed the free city, for if your city were ruled by an external power whatever liberties you may personally enjoy would not be secure. To be sure, tyranny could come from within the city as well as from the outside, but foreign rule entailed coercion, while home rule meant less or virtually none. Citizens of free cities usually paid no direct taxes; subject peoples, on the other hand, could be compelled to pay tribute.

Greek liberty, in both theory and practice, was particularistic. Different cities might pursue different ideas of the good and employ different codes of justice. The formation of colonies allowed sub-groups within a city that held different values to find their own way. Compare that with the winner-take-all approach to liberty in America today. On questions like abortion there are irreconcilable differences — different beliefs about what a person’s rights are, who counts as a person, and what constitutes the good. Rather than the two sides separating, each to live according to its values in its own communities, all are forced to abide by the dominant power, the federal government. Separation is the best solution to intractable conflict, but the modern State does not permit such separation. Secession is the ultimate expression of political separation, but there are intermediate forms such as home rule and federalism of the sort that prevailed prior to the Civil War. Today however the federal government does not tolerate free associations governing themselves locally, except in isolated cases such as the Amish.

The Greek experience is not as remote from our reality as we might imagine. Aristotle was not writing prescriptively when he called man a political (city-based) animal. Man still today lives in what Aristotle would have called poleis (cities), for the small, medium and large towns in which most of us live are just that. The Greek city was considerably smaller than modern megalopolises and was usually closer in size to a large town — in some cases even to small town. What makes our world so different is that our cities are not free, they are all subordinate to the overarching power of state and federal government. Some who consider themselves defenders of freedom rejoice in this, since it means that one standard of liberty prevails everywhere, at least within the bounds of the United States. (Note that logically there’s no reason why this liberty shouldn’t be extended beyond American borders — even if it means bombing foreigners into freedom, as the "liberventionists" desire.) But what does it mean when an individual finds himself bound to a system of justice with which he does not agree? When, further, free associations in which he is a member are forbidden from assuming independence and asserting, even on a voluntary basis among their own members, their own code of justice? For whenever the sense of liberty and justice of a "lower" unit is found to be in disagreement with federal or state authorities, it is the more general power that prevails. This despite the fact that surely there is less likelihood of a consensus on liberty and justice emerging from a "community" of 290 million people, as we have in the United States today, than among the small number in a local community or city. What makes some libertarians think that a heterogenous collection of 290 million strangers cares more about the individual and his rights than a local community of his friends, family and neighbors would? Not to mention that the less consensus there is, the more the coercion there must be.

Greek liberty, the freedom of the city that arises out of the freedom of association and separation, is something of a lost tradition today. It is not however a tradition alien to our own, simply one which has been obscured by the rise of the universalistic and highly centralized welfare state. An analogue to the Greek liberty described above is to be found in the American traditions of federalism and secession, and is related to the principles behind the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity and the federalism of the great Protestant thinker Johannes Althusius. The roots are to be found in Jerusalem as well as Athens. Professor Chandras Kukathas of the University of New South Wales has also explored related ideas in his essay "Two Constructions of Libertarianism," in which he compares a universalistic "Union of Liberty" with an heterogeneous "Federation of Liberty" that preserves the freedom of localities (for both better and worse). Recovery of these traditions, and integrating them with modern, individual liberty, is a task to be undertaken seriously by freedom-loving individuals and associations. It is not less the task of those who want to conserve civilization, given that civilization is itself the product of the city-association, which is another lesson the Greeks can impart to us. However dormant the old liberty may be today, we may expect that it is never lost forever, given that man’s nature has not changed since the time of Aristotle. He is still a "political" animal.

*The phrases cited are from section 1252a and 1253a in the Aristotelian corpus. The translations are my own. Several English translations of the Politics are available on-line, include those by Rackham and Jowett.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

These events took place on July 21, 1973. Norway doesn’t have many drive-by shootings, and this wasn’t one. The whole thing was so carefully planned it might look like a terrorist operation, but it wasn’t. The murder of the innocent waiter, Ahmed Bouchikhi, was part of a counter-terrorist operation. The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, had shot Bouchikhi dead in the mistaken belief that he was Ali Hassan Salameh, the mastermind behind the murder of eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games.

The Norwegian police caught six of the Israeli operatives involved in Bouchikhi’s assassination. One was subsequently acquitted. A Norwegian court sentenced the other five to prison terms of between two and six years. None of those five served more than twenty-two months — they received executive pardons. The Mossad agent who had masterminded the operation, Michael Harari, was never caught. Charging the elusive Harari proved difficult, and Norwegian prosecutors waited until 1998 to issue an international warrant for his arrest, only to withdraw it the following year. As the US State Department reports, "[Norwegian] State Attorney Lasse Quigstad said that the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence."

On January 22, 1979 the Mossad used a car bomb to kill the real Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut. As for the pregnant woman whose husband the Mossad had mistakenly murdered six years earlier, the Israeli government finally decided in 1996 to pay her an undisclosed sum as compensation, but refused to admit formal responsibility for the crime. The British newspaper the Guardian quoted the widow, Torill Larsen Bouchikhi: "No one pays out compensation unless they are guilty."

Some readers may sympathize with Mr. Bouchikhi and his widow right away, but there’s a good reason why others might not. People die accidentally all the time, after all, and any system of justice will occasionally make mistakes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs — that might sound callous, but it’s true. On top of which, most Americans are unlikely ever to be in Ahmed Bouchikhi’s shoes, simply because we are not likely to be mistaken for Arabs of any kind. It’s easy to believe that what happened to Bouchikhi could never happen to us (though Arab and Arab-American readers have good reason to think otherwise).

But try considering the Lillehammer incident in the context of the rule of law. Bouchikhi didn’t get a trial before he was executed — nor for that matter did Salameh, whatever the certainty of his guilt. Bouchikhi’s assassins served less than two years in prison before being pardoned. Finally the Israeli state, which was ultimately behind the killing, paid compensation but refused to take moral responsibility. From start to finish, the Israeli state acted in a lawless fashion, dispensing death to innocent and deserving alike, without ever taking responsibility or facing up to the consequences.

We Americans heard a great deal about the "rule of law" in the late 1990′s, as Republicans complained, rightly, of abuses carried out by Janet Reno and Bill Clinton. When liberals scoffed that all Clinton had done was lie about sex, conservatives responded by arguing that he had broken the law and not only that, but by doing so had interfered with a civil lawsuit and denied justice to Paula Jones. All of the players in this drama may have been buffoons, but the issues at stake were serious, and none more serious than the rule of law.

There is a case to be made that Israel acted responsibly in its campaign to assassinate Salameh and his Black September colleagues. Indeed, the Israeli approach certainly obtained better results and cost fewer innocent lives than such US anti-terrorist actions as the bombing of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, anyone might recoil at the idea that an innocent man may be gunned down, in front of his wife, in one of the least violent countries of the world, seemingly at random, all as part of a "war on terror." Because when events like that start to happen, clearly Al Qaeda and Black September are not the only institutions propagating terror. If terror is something that can strike anywhere, killing anyone, then the Israeli operation, however pure its intentions, was terror.

Those who spoke and wrote so much about the rule of law during the Clinton era should ask themselves hard questions about whether Clinton himself was the sole culprit, or whether unconstitutional and lawless behavior is more generally a characteristic of the kind of government we have today, and if the latter, whether having a Republican sitting in the White House really fixes things. If the rule of law goes out the window in this country, what’s to stop a fate like the one suffered by Ahmad Bouchikhi from befalling any of us, regardless of race? Israel suffered few direct consequences as a result of its actions; what consequences could deter our own government from committing similar crimes? The only real check on such government abuses is a citizenry committed to protecting its own liberties, and defending the rule of law in the face of arbitrary power. Few citizens are willing to make that commitment, but perhaps contemplating Ahmed Bouchikhi’s murder will make us all a bit more circumspect about a "war" on terror. Especially when terror, as Bouchikhi and his family discovered, is something that can come from "anti-terrorists" as surely as from "terrorists."

*Except where otherwise specified my sources are CBS News, SpecialOperations.com, and Globalsecurity.org.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

Fortuyn favored immigration restriction and for that the political and media establishment of Europe branded him as “far right.” His name was frequently mentioned alongside those of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Joerg Haider. Aside from their similar views on immigration all that the three of them had in common was charisma, which marked them as populists in contrast to the colorless politicians of the European mainstream.

Fortuyn was also a homosexual, and a flamboyant one at that. He boasted to the press of his exploits with “rent boys” and of his affairs with men of all races, which he cited as proof that he was not a racist. Not the sort of thing one would associate with the “far right” of men like Le Pen, who once said that “…homosexuality and sodomy are to blame for Aids, but the only rule in my party is patriotism. Although I like heterosexuals, because I am heterosexual, I don’t think homosexuals are so bad they should be put in prison.” Yet in the eyes of Europe’s socialists, Fortuyn’s heretical position on immigration was enough to make him and Le Pen bedfellows.

Ironically, Fortuyn’s homosexuality contributed to his desire to restrict immigration. He was incensed by the attitudes of Muslim immigrants toward homosexuals and women. He feared that they were a threat to traditional Dutch tolerance. In one sense then Fortuyn was a conservative, trying to preserve Dutch customs, but the particular customs he had in mind were not the ones usually associated with the political right. He was however for slightly smaller government than most of his rivals; his platform was vaguely Thatcherite, calling for lower taxes and getting tough on crime. But it was immigration that made him “far right.”

From this one might conclude that the Left cares more for immigration than for sexual identity politics, but that would be a mistake. In truth the multiculturalist creed holds that “gay rights” and mass immigration, even of socially conservative Muslims, are not in contradiction. Fortuyn’s sin was to call that tenet into question.

Fortuyn did not believe that Muslims were assimilating to Dutch culture, and therein lies what the Left would consider the root of his error. Contrary to what conservatives and libertarians tend to think, the Left in fact believes wholeheartedly in assimilation — but not assimilation to any nation’s culture, be it that of the Netherlands or of the United States. The assimilation in which the Left believes is to the principles of democratic socialism and multicultural tolerance. To be sure that includes tolerance and even affirmation of homosexuality, but the Left is confident that Muslims will eventually accept that doctrine, after they’ve received “education.” Christianity and the traditional culture of the West, including the free market and the bourgeois family, are the Left’s first and foremost targets for destruction.

Mass immigration is too valuable a means toward achieving that goal to be repudiated. For one thing the more occupied Christians and Western traditionalists are with Muslims, the less time and energy they have to fight socialism. Ideally Christianity and Islam will destroy one another, leaving the field clear for the State. Even without the religious dimension, mass immigration works as a wonderful solvent against the accumulated crust of tradition. And on the most practical level, immigrants make useful new voters to be swayed by handouts or multicultural rhetoric. In the short term Muslim immigration may jeopardize tolerance, but the Left is confident that in the long term it will only help.

Immigration is not more important than lifestyle politics to the Left. On the other hand, the Left considers immigration restriction a much greater threat than mild free-market reforms such as abolishing the sales tax (one of Fortuyn’s proposals). The latter policy will not win you any friends on the Left, but it’s the former that will earn you the epithet of “far right.” If you’re as unlucky as Profesor Pim, it may even get you killed.

Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel McCarthy Archives

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