We Are Not Conservatives

                            By Alex Stark

   

If there is one thing that frustrates me to end, it’s seeing white nationalists/advocates actively supporting conservatism, especially after it has proven just as destructive to our cause as liberalism on ethnic issues and vastly more destructive than liberalism on every other matter.

I find that white advocates generally support conservatism for two reasons. The first reason is that they essentially become single-issue voters because they believe that conservatives will be more hawkish in regard to illegal immigration. While white nationalist conservatives understand that mainstream conservatives still fully support third-world immigration and multiculturalism, they will settle for anyone who will do something about our demographic situation, however insignificant it may be.

This approach baffles me, as anyone who thinks conservatives are substantially better on immigration than liberals is extremely misguided. Did we forget that in 1986, Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants and that his act didn’t even obligate employers to verify the authenticity of workers’ documents?

I think liberals have better reasons for their support of immigration and multiculturalism than conservatives. It strikes me that liberals actually believe that immigrants enrich our country culturally and economically, while conservatives (being good corporate puppets) support immigration as a way to get cheap labor and to weaken unions. I can’t think of a single conservative politician who has done anything to meaningfully combat multiculturalism in any way. Conservatives are truly just cowards afraid to address any of America’s demographic threats and alienating potential voters and afraid of upsetting their corporate overlords, so in the public discourse they generally parrot liberal lines about diversity being our strength and so on.

In a way, I can respect liberals for their belief that a multicultural society is a good thing, even though I profoundly disagree with this view, because they are sincere, while conservatives hide their true reasons for supporting immigration. Just look at Mitt Romney as a perfect example of conservative cowardice on this issue. In recent debates he called Arizona’s SB1070 law a model for the nation. Anyone with eyes can see that he was only trying to cut down his primary opponents by moving to their right to win the support of gullible blue-collar whites. Just weeks ago, Romney confessed at a private fundraiser that winning the support of Latinos is critical and his campaign staff has said that he’s still making up his mind on his positions about immigration reform.

The other reason white nationalists vote conservative is because they sincerely support conservative principles. This deeply rooted conservative ideology amongst many (if not most) white nationalists is, in my opinion, possibly the greatest threat to our movement gaining any traction or being taken seriously. I find that the political ideology espoused by these white nationalist conservatives betrays a profound ignorance when it comes to understanding the political questions of our time.

Conservatism has harrowed our country: its economic policies have been disastrous, it has greatly empowered corporations, it has screwed over countless impoverished European-Americans, it has pursued treasonous foreign policies and wars that our citizens have no stake in, it has fought relentless battles over non-issues like abortion and gay marriage, it has ravaged the environment, it has obstructed meaningful progress in Congress with the abuse of filibusters, it has undermined healthcare reform, and it has threatened to cut successful welfare and entitlement programs. Liberalism has the more compelling case and the greatest intellectual weight — Greg Johnson has admitted before that the left attracts the brightest minds — on almost every issue except the matter we find ourselves discussing here on Counter-Currents.

Let’s look at the records of conservative Republicans across a few of the issues and see whether their goals are really in line with those of white nationalists.

1. In 2011, the Republican-led House voted nearly 200 times to weaken, block, or delay needed measures to update laws that defend our air, water, wildlife, and lands.

2. In 2010, the Republican Supreme Court Justices held in the Citizens United case that corporations can make unlimited political expenditures. The decision also allows tax-exempt incorporated public advocacy groups to spend money on political races without disclosing their donors’ names in their FEC filings. Republicans love to decry Obama for disregarding the constitution, but is there any decision more contradictory to the spirit of the constitution than the Citizens United ruling?

3. Republican-led state legislatures across the United States introduced 2,044 provisions restricting women’s reproductive rights in 2011 and 2012. Their legislation has focused on mandating that women seeking an abortion must have medically unnecessary ultrasounds intended to scare them out of going through with their abortions and the legislation also narrows the time when abortions may be performed and limits insurance coverage of abortion.

4. Republican state legislatures have implemented right-to-work laws that cripple unions. Controlling for all variables, wages in right-to-work states are 3.2 % lower, the rates of employer-sponsored health insurance are 2.6 % lower, and the rates of employer-sponsored pensions are 4.8 % lower compared with non-right-to-work states.

The greatest horrors conservatives have inflicted on this country, as well as the rest of the West, are their neoliberal economic policies. I’ll mention a few relevant points and then wrap up my argument, but I must encourage everyone to read Timothy Noah’s series of articles about income inequality on Slate, as well as Paul Krugman’s NYT columns, and also William Deresiewicz’s recent humorous article about capitalism and psychopathy at the NYT.

In light of the current economic crisis, Hayekian/neoliberal economics should have been discredited as these theories were the driving force behind our pursuit of financial deregulation, while Keynesian economics should have been validated. However, conservative governments across Europe, showing their weak grasp of economics, decided to remain faithful to the principles that resulted in this crisis and have implemented sweeping austerity measures. Conservatives argued that we needed to reduce our deficits, bring down our national debts, undertake structural reforms, and promote growth, however the results haven’t been promising as countries like the UK have slipped into a double-dip recession.

At home, Republicans have rallied around the Paul Ryan budget plan that would have America take the same course as Europe. Republicans show no signs of possessing the faculty of critical thinking that would dictate that their economic policies must be reevaluated when confronted with the reality of Europe’s prolonged recession, but detachment from reality is a conservative hallmark. There is no reason tackle the federal budget deficit or the debt at a time when we’re facing staggering unemployment and underemployment that prevents the lower and middle classes as well as private corporations from spending and consuming regularly. Once the economy has been stimulated and has fully recovered, then it will be an appropriate time to work on reducing our debt.

Realistically, Obama has governed very center-right and all of his failings to improve the economy can be attributed to the way he has caved to Republicans any time they have pushed back against him. Obama’s stimulus was anemic not only because of its small size, but because it was full of tax cuts that Republicans had demanded.

With regards to Eric Holder, many white nationalists hate him because of how he sued Arizona over SB1070, and I agree that that was ridiculous. However, the fact that Eric Holder hasn’t prosecuted Goldman Sachs or any of the other financial institutions that were caught defrauding their clientele is even more serious. Many figures on the left, like Eliot Spitzer, have called for Holder’s resignation, however I am doubtful that Holder will suddenly grow the balls to prosecute Goldman Sachs and I certainly don’t think that a Republican attorney general would have done so either.

I haven’t said much about Mitt Romney yet, but I fail to see how any white nationalist could even contemplate voting for him. He epitomizes everything wrong with conservatism. Here’s a portrait of Mitt Romney to give you a better understanding of what kind of leader he is.

1. I deferred military service to go bicycling in France and while I was there, I lived in a 5-bedroom house with a chef and a housekeeper.

2. I’ve claimed that I lived like a poor person then.

3. I spent the duration of the Vietnam War proselytizing and converting people to my faith rather than serving my country.

4. I worked at Bain Capital where I became the CEO. I turned the company from a venture capital enterprise into a corporate raider.

5. I drove 22 companies into bankruptcy after stripping them of their assets and selling them off.

6. In the case of Ampad, I personally helped Bain reap $100,000,000 after completely destroying a profitable company.

7. I laid off more than 10,000 living, breathing people, solely to line my own pockets.

8. I enjoy firing people.

9. Of the companies I didn’t completely bankrupt, I drove tens of thousands of people with livable wages into accepting minimum wage and told every single one of them that if they didn’t like it they could leave.

10. At the same time I gave the company’s top management huge pay rises.

11. I created countless jobs on foreign shores and the people who worked for me there earned a couple of dollars a day, in appalling conditions and with no safety standards.

12. I retired and my termination agreement still sees me receiving more than 7 million dollars a year and because they are deferred payments, I pay 13 % in taxes on unhidden money, though until it became illegal in 2011, I hid it in tax havens.

13. I had the third lowest job creation rate of any state in America as governor.

14. While I was governor, I used the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan and created Romneycare, which lowered the insurance costs for my electorate by 1/3

15. I was proud when President Obama decided to use the plan, as I thought it would help my chances of becoming President, but when my party vilified it, I abandoned my only life accomplishment.

16. It cost Massachusetts $200,000 when I replaced all of the state’s government computers to hide my record.

17. I think corporations are people but if you look at my history, you’ll find that I don’t think people are people.

18. I have been perpetually running for president.

19. I have made $1/4 billion by destroying thousands of lives.

20. I don’t care about any of those lives, as they can’t contribute to my campaign to lower America’s living standards.

21. I spent $200,000,000 to beat the weakest and most bizarre field ever in Republican politics.

Not only is his record appalling, but so are his policies. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit. Romney’s plan would also cut the top corporate tax rate form 35 percent to 25 percent.

Last but not least, there is the issue of income inequality. Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, has documented a five-decade pattern in which income inequality has grown under Republican presidents and shrunk under Democratic ones.

The most significant challenges America faces today include income inequality, financial deregulation, the decline of the middle class, and the loss of opportunity. When you look at a list of countries ranked by the Gini coefficient, the US has levels of income disparity comparable to China, Russia, and Nigeria. Our economic inequality has long been masked by our high per capita income. Generally, our income is higher than the rest of the Western world. However, America’s higher income generally reflects our lower taxes. And our lower taxes reflect a neglect of social services to our citizens. In the US, the cost of healthcare is nearly double that of any other country, yet we have 50 million-plus with little or no insurance at all. By contrast, other Western countries have higher taxes that are used to support robust social service programs such as healthcare.

Finally, income disparity is not just a material measure. It is also a measure of social cohesion. I fear the US will not be able to escape the same social issues that now plague third world countries. Our own citizens will no longer continue to accept third world levels of income inequality while the elite amass vast and largely untaxed fortunes.

Suicide of the Right

                        By Samuel Francis

        

Republican leaders in 1996, including Bob Dole (center), Jack Kemp (to Dole’s right), and Patrick Buchanan (far right).

After spending several weeks in deep hugger-mugger at the Republican Party platform committee this summer, the leaders of the Right wing of the GOP emerged triumphant. Their deeply beloved and totally useless Human Life Amendment was reaffirmed. The obnoxious statement of “tolerance” for the opinions of those who disagree with the amendment was excised. Language about immigration, fair trade, the Second Amendment, and other issues important to the Right, religious and otherwise, was approved. The Washington Post, reporting on the adoption of the platform the next day, seemed ready to be taken off to a nice quiet place in the country to recuperate from its neurotic angst over the American Right and its victory. “The Republican platform committee today approved a statement of party principles closer in tone and emphasis to the nationalism and domestic conservatism of Patrick J. Buchanan than the party’s presumptive nominee Robert J. Dole,” trembled The Post‘s Thomas Edsall. And, for once, the general staff of the legions of the Right was in agreement. “This is very Buchanan,” beamed Bay Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan’s sister and campaign chairman. “We could not be more pleased. This is much more of a populist, conservative Buchananesque platform than we ever dreamed, to be honest.” Other leaders of the right like Phyllis Schlafly, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed concurred.

Well, since we’re being honest, the truth is that the conservatives got suckered, as some of them began to glimpse in the next few days when speaker after speaker ascended the podium at the Republican convention to avoid, contradict, or simply ignore the platform that had just been adopted. By the time Mr. Dole was officially chosen as the party’s leader, The New York Timesreported, some foes of abortion were mystified. “A lot of pro-life people are saying, ‘What’s going on here?'” whimpered one anti-abortion delegate, Mrs. Elaine Hawkins of San Antonio. “It’s like they’ve squished the issue out of existence. We know it’s there in print, but I don’t hear anybody talking about it.”

Nor was it only abortion that nobody talked about. “I haven’t read the platform and I’m not bound by it anyway,” Mr. Dole proudly announced to the press. The Post‘s David Broder reported the next week that “Dole, Speaker Newt Gingrich and party chairman Haley Barbour were comically eager to affirm that they paid the document so little heed they hadn’t even read it.” As for the central feature of the platform’s immigration plank, a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment or constitutionally valid legislation to end automatic U.S. citizenship for the children of illegal aliens born on American soil, former Rep. Vin Weber, a close adviser to Mr. Dole, let it be known that Mr. Dole simply didn’t support it. The Wall Street Journal‘s Al Hunt gleefully reported the next week that the party’s vice presidential nominee, Jack Kemp, was “horrified by the platform’s call to deny citizenship to children born in America of illegal immigrants.” By the end of the convention it was clear to everyone save those who wrap themselves in illusion that the conservative efforts to craft the party platform meant nothing. Inevitably, the lines of poet John Dryden crept into the mind: “All, all of a piece throughout: Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue.”

But actually something had been brought about. By engaging in the conflict over the meaningless platform, the conservatives allowed Mr. Dole to quell the incipient rebellion from the Right and to unify the party under his leadership. The convention began with Mr. Dole and the party establishment uncertain whether Pat Buchanan would endorse the final ticket or quit the GOP and run with Howard Phillips’ Taxpayers Party and thereby deny any possibility of victory in November to a party establishment that had ignored, insulted, and abused him and his 3 million supporters ever since he announced his candidacy. By the time the platform had been adopted, with considerable input from the Buchananites, that option was no longer possible, even if it had been desirable. By working with the platform committee, by writing a platform with which “we could not be more pleased,” the Buchananites and the Republican Right in general signed their own political death warrants, binding themselves to the party and the ticket, consigning themselves to political irrelevance, and ensuring that any walkout or rebellion they mounted thereafter would be universally regarded as simply one further confirmation of the fanaticism and sourness that their enemies habitually attribute to them.

If there was any doubt of the irrelevance of the Right to its own party, the selection of Mr. Kemp removed it. No other neo-conservative leader in the country commands as much of a political following (which is not to say that he necessarily commands much of a following), and no other major Republican leader is as much in thrall to neo-conservatism as a body of ideas and as an organized faction, as Mr. Kemp. Unable or unwilling to mount a campaign in the primaries, Mr. Kemp stayed out of the contest for the nomination and was widely regarded as politically defunct. His support for affirmative action in the face of the growing Republican and conservative consensus to abolish it; his support for NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, unlimited “free trade” in general; his foreign policy of global democratism; his enthusiastic and fiscally catastrophic attachment to Big Government, as evidenced by his enlargement of the Housing and Urban Development Department in the Bush administration; his bottomless zeal for supporting the full measure of civil rights laws and policies; and his fierce hostility to any suggestion of immigration control in the face of growing popular and intellectual disenchantment with immigration all placed him on the Left of the Republican Party and in bitter opposition to its Buchananite, America First, culture war, nativist, protectionist, populist, and new nationalist Right that actually entered the primaries and seemed for a while to be on the eve of victory. The choice of Mr. Kemp as Bob Dole’s running mate and the resurrection of the representative leader of a political persuasion and faction that has no tangible popular support outside the Beltway was a calculated kick in the groin to the Right by the party’s leadership, a kick to which the right, after its platform triumph, was unable to respond with the only weapon it had left, the threat of secession from the party; and if this ticket wins the race against President Clinton, its victory will almost certainly mean the political extinction of the kind of conservatism the Buchananite Right represents.

If the ticket wins, Mr. Kemp as Vice President will be positioned for his own race for the White House in 2000 and, barring a disaster in the Dole administration, will have the inside track to the nomination. Even if the ticket loses, it is not difficult to anticipate what the neo-conservative and even the liberal line will be — that Mr. Buchanan and the Right stuck the ticket with an “extremist” platform that simply frightened away mainstream voters, that the decrepit Mr. Dole was not supportive of Mr. Kemp’s pollygoggle policy-wonkism and refused to unleash his running mate’s bottomless genius, that Mr. Kemp was the unsung hero of the 1996 ticket and ought to be given another opportunity to crush the narrow-minded Mr. Buchanan and to redefine the American Right in his own generous Lincolnesque image. Win or lose, then, the real victor to emerge from the byzantine backstairs politics of San Diego this summer will be Mr. Kemp and his Beltway cabal, who will proceed to re-define the American Right in their own terms and to back up their re-definition with political power.

For the Buchananite Right, the Christian Right, the Old Right, the Hard Right, the paleo-conservatives, and the paleo-libertarians, that will mean political oblivion, the final disappearance of any serious hope of influencing American politics in a direction away from the gargantuan state and the state’s alliance with both overclass and underclass against the middle class, or in a direction toward dismantling the warfare-welfare state, controlling immigration, reversing the erosion of national sovereignty, withdrawing from the pursuit of a globalist-imperialist foreign policy, and restoring a Eurocentric cultural order. It is one thing to lose an election, but as long as the losers are able to define the opposition, they retain the possibility of eventual victory. It is another thing to lose the opposition itself, to allow not only the victors but the losers themselves to define the terms of debate and the rules of the game. That is what the election, and maybe even the defeat, of the Dole-Kemp ticket this year would mean — that it is not the real Right that defines the opposition and sets the framework of the political discourse but the fake Right the Dole-Kemp ticket represents.

Of course, the rank and file Republican and the average citizen who votes for this ticket against Mr. Clinton cannot be blamed for his choice. Supporting the re-election of an administration led by one of the most repulsive men in American political history, mottled with the gangrene of corruption and sexual license and emitting the stench of tyranny, is not a choice most decent Americans should welcome, regardless of their political beliefs. But the fact is that the re-election of Bill Clinton might just be better for the nation and the only political forces able to salvage it than the victory of Mr. Dole and his running mate. The evils of the Clinton era should not be the trump card by which a rival party, today almost indistinguishable from the Democrats in their basic worldview and policies, is allowed to win a rigged deal.

At least since the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, the real Right in the United States has voted for the Republican ticket on the grounds that it was choosing the lesser of two evils, and every four years we hear the same refrain from the ticket’s apologists — that the country just can’t survive Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, or Bill Clinton. But the truth is that of course it does survive and that the victories of the centrist Republicans who are these villains’ foes never make any difference anyway. Conservatives, having worked themselves into a dither over the iniquity of the Democrats, fall for this argument in every election, and then, within a few years or a few weeks, are amazed to find that the centrist Republican candidates whom they have put in power have betrayed and ignored them once again. The argument that we just have to support the lesser of two evils to avoid destruction is merely a formula by which evil is perpetuated in power and men and measures that are not evil are driven into perpetual exile; if the real Right listens to the formula yet again this year, it may be the last time it will enjoy the opportunity to hear it.

Yet it may be that I exaggerate. Neither Mr. Dole nor Mr. Kemp is able to represent the social forces that are beginning to rally around the real Right that they managed to snooker at their convention this year, and it remains questionable if Mr. Dole’s endless rehearsals of his adventures in a war that ended more than fifty years ago and Mr. Kemp’s childish bubble-chatter about utopias of high technology, unlimited growth, and everybody getting rich will speak to the people whom Whittaker Chambers called “the plain men and women of the nation,” who see their material wealth, their communities, their nation, their people, and their civilization vanishing before their eyes. Even if they are still unwilling to embrace what the real Right offers and even if no such alternative is available to them, they may yet find alternatives in Ross Perot, the Libertarian Party, the Taxpayers Party, and other vehicles that are reasonable facsimiles and which come a lot closer than what the two “major parties” offer.

It may be, then, that what we saw in San Diego this summer and what we are seeing now in the race between Huey, Dewey, and Louie is simply the last gasp of a dying political system that is designed to ensure that no alternative and no challenge to the interests it protects can emerge. Unable to attract a mass political following on their own merits, those interests must advance candidates like Mr. Dole, Mr. Kemp, and Mr. Clinton, who offer the best counterfeits of the real Right they can concoct, and Middle Americans are increasingly biting hard on the currency they peddle to test its real value. It may be that the present two-party domination of national politics is now so exhausted that Middle Americans will soon emerge in their own party with their own agenda and consciousness unencumbered by the trivia and distractions of the major parties. But what ought to have become clear this summer is that that agenda and consciousness cannot be advanced by either the established leadership of the Republican Party or even by the party’s Right wing that allows itself to be swindled for a meaningless platform that the leadership despises.

This article was originally published in Chronicles Magazine in November 1996.

Nationalism, True & False

                         By Samuel Francis

        

William Kristol, guardian of neo-conservatism.

Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation — what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than the other, and depending on their talents, interests, and psychologies, they will habitually rely on one style of domination more than on its complement. In the twentieth century, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have rested their power on the use of force — to the point of what the Germans came to call Schrecklichkeit, or Terror pure and simple — but they did not fail to attend to the arts of manipulation as well. Communist brainwashing and the high science of propaganda that Joseph Goebbels perfected were perhaps as useful to their respective regimes and the ruling classes they served as the Cheka and the Gestapo.

Unlike European totalitarians, their American counterpart in this century has tended to rely on manipulation, which involves not only massive and constant indoctrination through the mass media but also the whole battery of techniques by which the population is managed to think and act the way the managerial ruling class wants it to think and act. Those techniques include the bread and circuses of mass consumerism and the entertainment industry as well as the blunter ideological disciplining delivered every night on television and in most Hollywood films. Of the two styles of power, reliance on manipulation is probably more effective, and certainly more economical than reliance on force. Every shepherd knows it’s more expedient to train a sheep dog to keep the sheep in line than to run after every beast that strays from the fold himself, and every ruler or ruling class understands that the means of force are always finite while the means of manipulation are virtually inexhaustible. You might sooner or later run out of bullets, but there is no bottom to the pit of delusion to which a populace eager to be enslaved will consign itself.

The reliance of the American managerial class on manipulation rather than force explains why dissidents are not simply rounded up and imprisoned or shot as they were in the sister regimes in Europe, as well as why the victory of the new elite in the middle of the century was so peaceful and virtually invisible to all but keen observers like James Burnham, C. Wright Mills, Garrett Garet, and a few others. Instead of being repressed, opponents of the revolution were either ignored and marginalized or in some cases rewarded and thereby digested within the belly of the beast. Even the hare-brained bomb-throwers of the New Left were not for the most part seriously subjected to coercive repression, except perhaps by local and state police agencies that had not yet been “sensitized” by the regime’s federal law enforcement apparatus, but rather were coddled, rebuked, and generally ignored until they grew up. Within a decade of their prediction of the storm of revolution that was about to descend on the ruling class, most of the more grotesque spokesmen of the Weather Underground had become dentists, insurance salesmen, and big-city lawyers, and the intelligence, security, and law enforcement branches of the regime never paid as much attention to the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, or the various Maoists, Guevarists, Trotskyites, and anarchists of the period as they are today paying to perfectly law-abiding and patriotic militias and grassroots activists of the Right.

Today, the regime is paying as much attention to the militant Right as it is for a simple reason — the means of manipulation is beginning to crumble as the official ideology of the regime is discredited and rejected, and as alternative means of communication become available that the ruling class is unable to control. Computers, faxes, the Internet, and other technologies allow dissident groups to flourish and communicate with each other in ways that were not available to dissidents of an earlier day, and all of these technologies are (so far) virtually independent of both the police power and the manipulative reach of the regime. Hence, incidents like Waco, Ruby Ridge, and similar acts of coercive repression become necessary to discipline the opposition, our very own form of Schrecklichkeit, and the emerging federal police state, with the help of semi-private intelligence-gathering arms like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, can be expected to offer at least as thorough use of coercion as the secret police of the European dictators.

Nevertheless, the ruling class is not stupid, and it knows very well that it cannot sit on bayonets forever. Therefore, it is rather clumsily trying to patch together new means of manipulation before the whole society spins out of its control. President Clinton and the “New Democrats” are the left side of this effort, while on the Right what is generally known (at least among paleo-conservatives) as “neo-conservatism” is its right side. Both are essential to preserve the illusion of political and ideological alternatives and the shadow of freedom, but any close examination will show that there is about as much real difference between them as there was between the Dole-Kemp ticket last year and its rival.

The Clintonian effort at keeping the sheep of the Left within the herd seems to have been successful, at least for now, but on the Right there are problems. Unlike the Left, the Right has actually produced a real and politically significant alternative to neo-conservatism in the Buchanan movement and in paleo-conservatism, or what may be called the “Hard Right” in general — ranging from this magazine to groups like the John Randolph Club and a variety of grassroots activists over to the militias and their constituencies. The problem for neo-conservatism is that most Americans on the Right don’t buy what it’s selling, don’t look to it for political or ideological leadership, and won’t swallow the managerial conservatism that it has formulated and made the dominant expression of the Right over the last twenty years or so.

Well, what is to be done? If at first you don’t succeed, try again. In the last few months, the current crop of neo-conservatives has been trying to sprout a new ideological line, one that might reasonably be expected to capture the Populist Right, assimilate it within the digestive tract of the regime, and thereby ensure that it does not eventually produce a movement or a leader that can seriously challenge its power.

The new form into which neo-conservatism is trying to cast itself is “nationalism,” and its guiding spirit is William Kristol of the Weekly Standard. Nationalism, of course, also happens to be the theme of most of the Populist Right, whether it is directed against immigration, which threatens to extinguish the actual people of the nation, or free trade and globalism, which threaten both the economic interests and sovereignty of the nation, or the multiculturalism and multiracialism that neither the mainstream (i.e., dominant) Left and Right now question seriously. Hence, it makes sense that the high priests of the dominant Right would seek to reinvent nationalism and redefine it in terms that will offer no serious challenge to the anti-national forces they really represent.

Mr. Kristol’s main formulation of neo-con nationalism appeared in an article in the Wall Street Journal (September 15), of which he and his colleague at the Weekly Standard, David Brooks, were the co-authors, and Mr. Brooks himself has busily been pounding the pseudo-nationalist drum for some time. In the last few months he has published articles in the Standard praising Teddy Roosevelt as a hero for conservatives and the architecture of the Library of Congress as the expression of what he takes to be high nationalism. One can quibble with either or both, but the kind of nationalism he and Mr. Kristol are trying to sell would have little appeal to Roosevelt, and seems not to have penetrated very far into any library at all.

Their proposed models for the new neo-con nationalism include not only TR but also Hamilton and Henry Clay. “American nationalism,” Kristol and Brooks write, “– the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt — has never been European blood-and-soil nationalism. It’s true that in the absence of a real appeal to national greatness, some conservatives are tempted à la Pat Buchanan, to turn to this European tradition. But this can’t and shouldn’t work in America. Our nationalism is that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called ‘an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.'” It is no accident that these also happen to be among the very figures that Pat Buchanan has cited as exponents of the economic nationalism that has been the norm throughout most of American history.

This pretty much tells us all we need to know about the Kristol-Brooks school of nationalism. It’s a nationalism that takes the main advocates of a centralized state as its heroes but leaves out of its picture of “national greatness” any reference to the real nation — its people (blood), its land (soil), its interests, or its contemporary manifestations (in Buchanan and his following, which happens to be rather larger than that of the Weekly Standard). What is objectively wrong with the Kristol-Brooks version of nationalism is what I argued some years ago was wrong with the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln version of it. Designed essentially to represent the material interests of a particular section (the commercial and industrial Northeast), it always remained merely an instrumental nationalism, designed simply as an instrument or tool to unify the real nation under the dominance of that section and its interests by masking them as “nationalism.” It failed — neither Hamilton nor Clay was able to make it prevail, and Lincoln and his party succeeded only because of the power vacuum generated by the Civil War — because it ignored the interests of the real nation. It is one thing to endorse the economic and trade policies of these leaders, as Buchanan does (and which Kristol and Brookes don’t), but those policies can be and are justified apart from the general vision of the state and nation that Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and Roosevelt I entertained.

The content of the phony nationalism formulated by Kristol and Brooks is enough to tell us how it differs from the kind of organic nationalism that is actually emerging in the Populist Right, the kind they seek to smother in its cradle. “Our pride in settling the frontier, welcoming immigrants and advancing the cause of freedom around the world is related to our dedication to our principles” — the universalist nationalism of Lincoln.

That’s why American nationalism isn’t narrow or parochial. It doesn’t believe in closing our borders or fearing the global economy. It does believe in resisting group rights and multiculturalism and other tendencies that weaken our attachment to our common principles. It embraces a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad. It would use federal power to preserve and enhance our national patrimony — the parks, buildings, and monuments that are the physical manifestations of our common heritage. And it insists that while government should be limited, it should also be energetic.

So, neo-con universalist nationalism is to support continued swallowing of the real nation through mass immigration and continued extinction of the national economic interest through immersion into the “global economy” and to reject multiculturalism, not because it threatens the destruction of the cultural nucleus of the real nation, but because it weakens attachment to “our common principles” — i.e., multiculturalism asserts the particular cultural identities of the groups that espouse it against the universalist principle that informs neo-con nationalism. Like the Hamiltonian instrumental nationalism, it also envisions an “energetic” national state (so does any nationalism that ignores the real nation; since it refuses to affirm the real people or the nation and their real interests, it has no other base of support than the state), at least to become a kind of super-janitor for public buildings and public parks. What is conspicuous by its absence in the Kristol-Brooks vision of nationalism is any reference whatsoever to the Constitution as both the limiting and energizing framework of the national state.

Nor is it an accident that only a few weeks before the Kristol-Brooks discovery of the strong-state nationalism of Hamilton and his heirs, George Will also dropped a column in which he told us, “The challenge is for conservatism to find a place in its pantheon for three great nationalists — Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt.” For Mr. Soulcraft, the invocation of these three as heroes is not surprising, though the occasion and the timing of his column are of interest. The occasion was the Weekly Standard‘s symposium in August on the “Conservative Crack-Up,” and both the Will column and the subsequent Kristol-Brooks piece in the Journal were first shots in the new effort to formulate an ideology for the Right that can manipulate, seize control of, and eventually castrate the radical nationalism of the Populist Right today and at the same time preserve the managerial state constructed in this century by claiming that it is the natural legacy of the pseudo-nationalism of Hamilton, Clay, and the first Roosevelt.

It’s doubtful that the nationalist Right will be deluded by the Kristol-Brooks-Will counterfeit. Populist nationalism, if not quite of the blood-and-soil variety, at least proceeds from a more authentic grasp of the organic life and people of the real nation than theirs, and most of the more serious exponents of the nationalism of the Populist Right have long since come to reject the unmitigated statism and globalism that lie at the heart of the neo-conservative agenda. The Right wing of the managerial class will have to come up with a means of ideological manipulation that is a bit more subtle and a lot more persuasive than either the defunct neo-conservatism of their parents or the stillborn neo-nationalism that the Weekly Standard has invented. Until it does the regime on which the American ruling class rests will continue to crumble.

This article was originally published in Chronicles Magazine in December 1997.

Looking Backward

                         By Samuel Francis

        

James Burnham (1905-1987)

A man from Mars visiting the United States at the beginning of 1997 might have thought that the country was wobbling on the brink of political crisis. He would have learned that the White House was occupied by a gentleman immersed in so many scandals that even supermarket tabloids could not keep track of them and that this same gentleman, having been re-elected without a majority of voters behind him, faced a Congress controlled by an opposition party sworn to working a revolution in government. Surely the Martian would have lost whatever passes for money on the Red Planet by wagering that the President would soon be thrown out of office, if not into jail, and that his opponents would mount a coup d’etat that would deliver the state into their hands.

The Martian would have lost his money because nowhere else in the galaxy could he have experienced any political force as inept, incompetent, and worthless as the Republican Party. Throughout the year Republicans in both houses of Congress lurched and wobbled like a drunken acrobat, ignoring opportunities for weakening the Clinton administration still further and again and again allowing the President to score political points. They allowed major issues like immigration, affirmative action, and activist judges to flop out of their hands and had nothing important to say in criticism of Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy — his locking the nation into a continuing and expanded commitment to NATO, his pursuit of global government in one guise or another, or his support for extending Most Favored Nation Status with China. By the end of June, the Martian would have been pining to leave the planet and take himself off to some other, more politically dynamic vista such as the craters of the Moon.

To be fair, the death of politics in the United States — not only this year but for the last several years, despite the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 — is not entirely the fault of the Grand Old Party itself. There are few real political issues in the United States today because there are few real political divisions within the Ruling Class, of which the leaders of both political parties are members in good standing, and there are few political divisions within the Ruling Class because at last that class has consolidated its power to the point that there is very little left for its members to argue about. Republicans and Democrats may bicker over the budget and quibble over nominations and electoral questions, but on the main architecture of the leviathan state and the functions and services it provides they have no quarrel. That much was evident in the presidential election last year, when both candidates had to puff and wheeze to fabricate something to debate over, but the ensuing tedium of the presidential race was not simply the result of the lackluster personalities involved but rather of a more far-reaching and underlying crystallization of the national power structure that they both represent.

As I have often indicated before, elites are not bad things in themselves, and whether you like them or not, they happen to be inevitable in human society. The relevant issue for people who don’t like a particular elite or ruling class is not how to get rid of it and get along without any social and political hierarchy but rather how to get yourself another elite that is more suited to your preferences — that is, to your social interests. With the emergence of the Populist Right in the last few years and its Middle American following, there is the prospect, remote as it may seem, that an alternative elite is already beginning to form that will eventually be able to challenge and replace the incumbent dominant class.

I have also indicated before that the most accurate analysis of the incumbent ruling class remains James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution, a theory formulated in 1941 and often pulverized by academic sociologists and economists, but a theory also which keeps coming back, in one form or another, to provide — after a dozen other analyses and theories — the most reliable depiction of the realities of power in twentieth century America. Just last year, Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution came back yet again in a new book that revives and restates it.

The book, America’s New Economic Order by neo-Marxist economist Donald Clark Hodges, is dedicated to Burnham, who was Hodges’ teacher at New York University in the 1940s, and, despite certain flawed assumptions and analyses in Professor Hodges’ Marxist formulations, it is of some importance not only as a reminder of the enduring truths that Burnham discovered about American society but also for certain new insights that Mr. Hodges brings to it.

The Burnham theory, crafted just as Burnham was defecting from Trotskyism, held that a new kind of economy and society was evolving in the United States, as well as in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, that was neither capitalist nor socialist. The new society was what he called “managerial,” and it consisted essentially in the seizure of control of the largest corporations by their managers from their stockholders. The argument was that the managers — meaning those professionals equipped with the technical and managerial skills to make the advanced economy that the corporations dominated function — were evolving into a new class that would replace the “capitalists” or stockholders because the capitalists simply did not have the skills to run their own companies.

As an ex-Marxist himself, Burnham then believed that control of the economic power of the corporations was by itself sufficient to determine the structure of a new ruling class, but he also extended the concept of “manager” to state bureaucrats. Like corporate managers, the munchkins of the emerging leviathan state did not hold formal rights of ownership to their offices, but they did have the technical skills to make their offices function. Those who did have a formal “right” to their offices — the citizens who “own” the government and the office-holders they periodically elect to office — in reality exercised no more real control of the state than petty stockholders did over corporate assets and operations. Thus, the managers in the economy joined with their cousins, the managers of the state, to coalesce into a new ruling class. Unlike the old capitalist or bourgeois class, the new class did not depend for its power and position on rights of property and ownership or on classical democratic-republican and constitutional principles, and hence it had no vested interest in preserving or respecting those formalities.

What it did have an interest in was preserving the structures of the advanced economy, the mass state, and the functions they performed, because only so long as the economy and the state depended on the technical skills necessary to their functioning would they also need the managers. The overriding interest of the managerial class, then, was (a) to get rid of the remnants of “bourgeois” society in the form of the limited, neutralist, minimalist state and its slogan of the “rule of law,” as well as the smaller, entrepreneurial forms of business that were not so technical that their owners could not operate them without managerial expertise, and the cultural and social framework in which the bourgeois elites flourished, and (b) to advance and perpetuate the structures — like the corporation and the mass state — that allowed a dominant place for the managers themselves and to construct a new cultural and social framework that would legitimate their dominance of society.

The managerial class, of course, did not gain power all at once, and throughout most of the twentieth century, using the ideology of what came to be known as “liberalism,” it competed on a political and cultural level with its rival, the bourgeois or capitalist class (especially in smaller owner-managed and family firms), which wrapped itself and its interests and values in what came to be known as “conservatism.”

Mr. Hodges’ new book largely accepts this theory, and in doing so he parts company with most of his fellow Marxists, who have never liked Burnham’s analysis. He correctly sees that John Kenneth Galbraith’s “New Industrial State” is mainly a reformulated version of Burnham’s theory and that what Galbraith called the “technostructure” of the corporation is largely identical to what Burnham had called the “managerial class.” Unlike Burnham in his more mature writings, however, Mr. Hodges seems to have remained a fairly conventional economic determinist, and he argues that the corporate managers or technostructure has simply captured the state — not, as Burnham came to see, that the state has evolved its own technostructure that weds or fuses with its corporate siblings.

It is Mr. Hodges’ thesis that what the managerial revolution represents is in fact the triumph of socialism — what he calls “managerial socialism.” Socialism triumphed, in his usage, not because the state expropriated the capitalists or owners but because the managers themselves did so, and the managers’ lack of dependence on property and profit (as opposed to corporate growth) means that they have no fear of the state. On the contrary, they rely on the state for subsidies, fiscal privileges, bailouts, government contracts, and various policy postures that benefit managerial as opposed to entrepreneurial structures.

Mr. Hodges also reviews the intellectual history of managerialism in the United States, tracing it back to Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, which described an emerging public economy similar to what Burnham later predicted, and showing how various theorists of the early twentieth century like Frederick Winslow Taylor, John Dewey, Elton Mayo, Thorstein Veblen, and Simon Patten, among others, shaped the managerial regime that evolved. These writers collectively provided a theoretical framework for the new managerial class that offered instruction on what to do with the mass or non-elite population. That framework envisaged a population stripped of its social and cultural institutions and values and administratively assimilated into the new social patterns imposed by the new class. Patten, for example, “the father of consumerism,” argued that “expanding consumption would compensate the worker for necessary drudgery and keep him on the job.”

It would encourage him to “endure the deprivations of this week in order to secure the gratifications of a coming holiday.” The principal task of education is to integrate him into the life of modern society, “to make him aware of that life, and so to arouse him to participation in it through . . . the amusements and recreations of parks, theatres, ‘Coney Islands,’ [and] department stores.” In the words of Patten’s protege, Rexford Tugwell, “the gains [must] seem to most people . . . to outbalance the losses,” so that they “find relief from otherwise intolerable conditions in higher wages, more leisure, better recreations.”

As Hodges points out, what Patten called “welfare management” “meant a revival of the ancient Roman program, of ‘Bread and Circuses’ . . . By amusing the underlying population, they would contribute to pacifying it,” and “acceptance of both the political and economic systems in America was obtained by fraud rather than by force.”

Mr. Hodges’ book is a useful re-statement of the Burnham thesis and shows that the theory remains valid despite the heap of criticism and even vilification that has been piled upon it. Yet he might have carried it further by discussing how the managerial class dismantles bourgeois and per-managerial culture and social institutions and generates new ones suitable to its own interests.

Because their power and positions depend upon their own acquisition of technical and managerial skills, the managers are unable to emulate ruling classes of the past by creating hereditary structures that can pass their power on to their heirs. Hence, institutions like the family cease to be important to them as power bases, and managerial culture has tended to disintegrate the family structures through both law and social policy as well as through continuous ridicule and delegitimization of it. Nor for that matter do the managers need or want any of the institutions and social identities of pre-managerial civilization in religion, nationality, community, race and ethnicity, or morals. What they demand is centralization and uniformity, which offer blank slates on which their own power and interests can be carved.

But while they cannot pass on their positions and power to their natural heirs, what they can do is perpetuate their power by ensuring that the technical and managerial skills on which their power is based are transmitted. Hence, in place of traditional educational institutions, they create mass universities centered around the scientific and social science curricula that provide training in the skills of the new elite and adapt the educational institutions to the managerial need for the destruction of traditional culture and beliefs. Universities and educational institutions in general, then, under the managerial regime, are not places for acquiring education in the traditional sense but rather factories for the reproduction and perpetuation of the elite itself and its ideological legitimization.

It is possible to quibble with both Burnham’s original formulation of the theory of the managerial revolution and with Mr. Hodges’ reformulation of it, but the theory as a whole explains a great deal about the politics and the cultural history of twentieth century America. Among other things, it helps explain why the American ruling class commits itself to such seemingly suicidal and anti-social behavior as its war on the family, nation, race, and religion (the war is not a sign of decadence but rather of the social needs and interests of an elite that views these social identities as obstacles to its power) and why conservatism has been such a flop (it has ceased to represent a social and political force that can compete effectively with its managerial rivals). Most of all, it helps explain why American politics, in the wake of the managerial consolidation of power in state, economy, and culture and in both political parties, is so sterile, and why neither the “liberal” nor the “conservative” shade of the political spectrum has any serious quarrel or disagreement with the other side. When politics becomes interesting again, it will be a sign that someone or something other than the Ruling Class is beginning to reach for the power that the managers have all but monopolized.

This article was originally published in Chronicles Magazine in September 1997.

Impeachable Offenses

                         By Samuel Francis

       

The current Justices of the Supreme Court – 5 out of 9 of whom were appointed by Republican presidents.

Back in March, Republican Majority Whip Tom DeLay took lunch at The Washington Times and started jabbering about how he and his party were going to impeach what he called “activist judges” who handed down improper rulings. I know something about how those luncheons at the Times work, so I was not as impressed as some people. First, the guest is taken to the Editor-in-Chief’s office and offered a drink or two. Then at table he is kept talking and prevented from swallowing any solid food, all the while being plied with more potables and lots of questions from the reporters present. By the end of the session, the guest — usually an officeholder and often a Congressman or Cabinet member — is lucky if he hasn’t threatened to nuke Massachusetts and defund Arlington Cemetery, but the hapless celebrity finds himself and his remarks plastered all over the front page of the next day’s edition, while his press aides scurry to explain what he really said and what he really meant.

In Mr. DeLay’s case, there was no reason to retract or explain, and indeed his fellow Congresspersons in the Stupid Party found his proposals exhilarating. A day or so later, the news was full of stories about the grandiose designs the Republicans were hatching for taking back the Constitution and decorating the public lampposts with the corpses of judges. “They loved it,” spouted the Majority Whip of his colleagues’ response to his proposals, “they think I’m a god on this one,” and the Texas lawmaker boasted of how he was even then drawing up plans for the mass bloodletting to be submitted to the Grand Inquisitor himself, Speaker Gingrich.

It’s always dangerous when Republicans start thinking about the U.S. Constitution. If history tells us anything, it shows that from the blatantly illegal passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 down to Dwight Eisenhower’s appointment of Earl Warren and William Brennan to the Supreme Court, the Republican Party has been the major enemy of constitutional government. There have indeed been Republicans who knew something about constitutional law — Sen. Robert Taft, for example, as well as Barry Goldwater and my late employer John East — but for the most part, whatever Congressional pressures for preserving the integrity of the Constitution have ever existed have sprouted in Democratic bosoms — notably Southerners like Richard Russell of Georgia, Harry Byrd of Virginia, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, and James Allen of Alabama, to name but a few. Even the immense damage inflicted on the Constitution by the judges and justices appointed by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt could have been corrected had it not been for the insistence of the Republicans who succeeded them on perpetuating their follies by their own appointments to the bench.

The Reagan and Bush eras proved this rule. By the time President Bush left office in 1993, all but two of the nine justices of the Supreme Court had been appointed by Republican presidents, and one would have thought that the collective judicial appointments to the federal bench by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush might have made some difference in the kind of court decisions the Solomons hand down. But the truth is it made no difference at all. The most controversial, divisive, and damaging court decisions in American history — those of the Warren and Burger courts — were the products of mainly Republican appointments, and without their contributions to juridical science, the rest of the country would not have had to endure the effects of forced school desegregation, the legalization of pornography, the destruction of criminal law, and the creation of abortion as a “human right,” to mention only a few.

Recent Republican ventures into constitutionalism have revealed no change to this pattern. Ever since the Republicans won a Congressional majority in 1994, they have unveiled one ill-considered Constitutional amendment after another — the School Prayer Amendment, the Flag Amendment, the Term Limits Amendment, the Human Life Amendment, the Religious Freedom Amendment, and the Balanced Budget Amendment. Almost all of these measures are carelessly drafted, intended more to assuage the pet peeves of their conservative constituencies rather than provide clear guidance as to what lawmakers may or may not do, and none of them speaks to the fundamental flaws that the courts have imported into the Constitution over the last half-century and more. For all the ballyhoo about the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights that Republican gurus have spewed forth in recent years, not a single serious effort has been made to restore real federalism. Not a single serious effort has been made to curb the “imperial presidency” that Taft and Goldwater warned about in the 1950s or that conservative theorists like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Russell Kirk criticized long before Richard Nixon’s experiments in presidential Caesarism excited the envy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Not a single serious effort has been made to reverse the principal Big Lie of twentieth century jurisprudence, the Incorporation Doctrine, under which the courts may strike down virtually any state or local law that displeases them. If there is a single Republican Congressman today who understands these principles and even entertains the notion of restoring them, I am unable to tell who he might be, nor do the “theorists” who discourse of constitutionalism in today’s conservative circles show much grasp of them, either.

The main such theorist, of course, is Robert Bork, who does know a bit about the Constitution and who would like to do something to salvage it. But even Judge Bork flops and flails when it comes to doing the right thing. In his book The Tempting of America, written after the defeat of his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Reagan, he dismisses any notion of reversing the Incorporation Doctrine. “The controversy over the legitimacy of incorporation continues to this day,” he writes, “although as a matter of judicial practice the issue is settled,” and in his more recent book he is equally dismissive of the Second Amendment. “The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm,” he writes erroneously. “The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.” Even if we grant Judge Bork’s military expertise, it does not follow that because the original purpose of an explicit right is obsolete, the right itself no longer exists. The Court ruled in the Miller decision of 1939 that certain weapons, like sawed-off shotguns, were not covered by the Second Amendment because they were not useful in warfare (it was wrong on that too, since sawed-off shotguns have been used in warfare, especially trench warfare), but it has never held that “there is no individual right to own a firearm.” Had it done so, there would be no legal firearms in the country today.

Judge Bork’s remedy for the courts is simply to abolish any glimmer of judicial independence by allowing the Congress to overrule by majority vote any court decision it dislikes. Not only would his proposal not correct constitutional mechanisms, it would effectively exterminate any pretense that the rule of law, independent of the lawmakers, is even what is supposed to govern the country. At least, however, Judge Bork is willing to entertain radical measures, unlike some of his neo-conservative critics. Bill Kristol, a bottomless fount of political malapropisms, has remarked that what’s wrong with Judge Bork is that “he makes it seem that only an extreme measure would do any good.” No, what’s wrong with Judge Bork is that his particular extreme measure would do no good, not that no extreme measure would do any good.

Given the ignorance, opportunism, and cowardice of Congressional Republicans and the uselessness of such mentors as Judge Bork, then, it was hardly surprising that Mr. DeLay’s plans for stringing up the judges soon came to naught. Whatever Mr. Gingrich thought about those plans when his lieutenant submitted them to him, it was left to the Majority Leader of the Senate to disillusion Mr. DeLay that the Republicans were really serious about restoring the Constitution. Only a few days after Mr. DeLay had laid out his grand strategy, Trent Lott let the air out of the impeachment tire. “I don’t think there is going to be a plan to look at [impeachment] as a way to express our opinion on their rulings,” said the Mississippi Senator. Only a judge’s committing a crime would interest him and the Senate in impeaching him, and the DeLay plan died a quick and quiet death.

Mr. Lott was probably right. In the first place, precisely because most Republicans are not serious about constitutionalism, it was always unlikely the party would really proceed with the tribunals Mr. DeLay contemplated. Secondly, impeachment, as anyone who knows a bit about its historical origins and use in British history can tell you, is a dangerous game. Whoever starts it seldom finishes it, and the annals of England are drenched in the blood of ministers who were impeached by the House of Commons simply for their political actions. There is no reason why the Democrats could not use the impeachment sword against those judges and other officeholders they dislike as much as the Republicans can, and my bet is that the Democrats would play the game a bit more skillfully than their rivals. Finally, there is the issue of whether it is really the right thing to do to impeach judges just because of their rulings. Mr. Lott is right that the Constitution does not seem to provide for that, saying only that impeachment shall be for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but it can be argued that that language does allow for the impeachment of officials for non-criminal conduct (if, indeed, that is an accurate description of concerted efforts to subvert the Constitution). In any case, without Mr. Lott’s support and that of the senatorial myrmidons he commands, there would be no purpose in the House impeaching anyone, so the DeLay scheme seems to have died aborning.

Of course, if the Republicans really were serious about restoring the Constitution or controlling a judiciary that has effectively escaped all bonds of law and rationality, they would not have to resort to measures as drastic or as disturbing to Bill Kristol as impeachment or even amendment. Article II, Section Two of the Constitution gives Congress authority to regulate the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and the Court itself has acknowledged this authority in the 1868 ruling Ex Parte McCardle. All the majority of the Congress has to do is enact a law (or several) stating that the Court shall have no jurisdiction in whatever kinds of cases the majority doesn’t want it to have jurisdiction over: abortion, sexual morality, national security, burning the flag, obscenity, or even any case arising from a state or local law. With one stroke, the Congress could wipe out the Incorporation Doctrine and effectively restore the Constitution to life.

That the Republicans do not seriously (or even non-seriously) propose that, rather than tinker with silly amendments that will never pass anyway or mutter idle threats to impeach judges that can’t be fulfilled, ought to tell us something, not only about the Republicans but the nature of law itself. “Law follows power,” wrote Kevin Phillips some years ago, and while he is hardly the only person to make that observation, he puts it as succinctly as it can be put. Human law is a fiction agreed upon, and sometimes a fiction not agreed upon by anyone other than he who makes it, and the laws that govern human communities are always merely reflections of the elites in power and their interests and values. The alteration of the Constitution from a document ruling a decentralized republic of self-governing citizens into one authorizing the construction of a centralized, bureaucratic leviathan is an integral part of what James Burnham called the managerial revolution, the historical process by which law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism is replaced by executive autocracy, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state. The distortion of the Constitution, in other words, is not merely the product of a handful of ignoramuses who have warmed their hindquarters on the benches of the courts but of a complex and protracted displacement of one ruling class by another. Because the revolution in this country happened to take place “within the form,” as Garet Garrett called it, it was necessary to adapt the Constitution and existing political institutions to the needs of the revolution and the new elites that it brought to power, rather than simply junk it and start over.

The new managerial elites in the state, economy, and culture needed the centralization, uniformity, and power that the courts readily gave them and which the old Constitution did not allow them to have, and the Republican Party, at least as much as its rival, was eager and willing to help them out. It should not therefore be too surprising that Republican blather about restoring the old Constitution, the old federalism, and the old republic is not to be taken seriously or that whenever some harmless drudge like Mr. DeLay has one drink too many and starts babbling about getting serious, his superiors in the party at once explain to a patient press and public that they have no intention of doing what he suggests. In the effort to restore life to the old Constitution, as in so many similar efforts, Americans who are serious will have to look beyond the Republican Party and the leviathan that the party has helped create.

This article was originally published in Chronicles Magazine in August 1997.

What Did the Founders Mean By "Liberty"?

                           By C. B. Robertson

          

If there is a singular, inarguable principle that lies at the heart of America, it is liberty. The “Statue of Liberty” is perhaps our most iconic landmark, and the “Liberty Bell” in Philadelphia is one of our oldest national symbols. There are more High Schools called “Liberty High School” than seems reasonable. And of course, it is acknowledged in our founding document, which lists securing the “Blessings of Liberty” as the final intended goal of the new government.

But like many words, “liberty” suffers from a plethora of definitions. It can be either an absence of something—i.e., the state of freedom from oppression, restrictions, or rules—or it can be the presence of something—i.e., the possession of “liberties,” often in the form of rights. The former is inherently subjective, while the latter is highly contextual, making the use of the word “liberty” a slippery business, particularly when it pertains to law and government.

As perhaps could have been expected, the term has been seized by Libertarians and Liberals, who emphasize that liberty means nothing if not freedom for the individual. While intuitive to the modern ear, this understanding is neither the only possible understanding of “liberty,” nor is it what the Founding Fathers meant by the word.

Consider, by way of explanation, one of the most favored quotes among American Patriots. Benjamin Franklin famously said that “[t]hose who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” This assertion is interpreted as an embodiment of the American attitude which puts liberty (presumably of the individual) above safety (presumably of the collective) in nearly absolute terms.

The only problem is that in context, this famous quote means almost the exact opposite.

The quote comes from a letter written in 1755 by Franklin as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly. The letter was addressed to the Governor, whose loyalty seemed torn between the people of Pennsylvania and the proprietary family (the descendants of William Penn), who in fact lived outside of the province but owned a great deal of land there. Recent conflicts with Natives during the French and Indian War required more military supplies and protection along the border regions, which in turn required raising taxes to fund these common defenses. The only problem was that the proposed method of raising these taxes would have taxed the Penn family’s lands. This is what is alluded to earlier in the letter when Franklin writes:

Indeed all Bills for raising Money for Publick Use, are so far of the same Kind; but this differs greatly from every former Bill that has been offered him, and all the Amendments (of any Consequence) which he proposed to the Bill he last refused, are in this Bill admitted, save that for totally exempting the Proprietary Estate.

The famous quote itself is preceded by an explanatory statement of the predicament the Pennsylvanians faced what they had done so far to protect themselves, and the limitations they would face in preceding further without the land-taxes they are requesting:

In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

“Liberty” in this context refers to the freedom of the citizens to govern themselves and to pass laws as a collective. It is the freedom of the group, and not of the individual, which Franklin is appealing to. In fact, it appears that the freedom of the individual—the governor, that is—was the problem, as Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare and the Brookings Institute explains:

What’s more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes–and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier–as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance–and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.

To summarize, the Pennsylvanians sought the “liberty” of self-governance through raising taxes on everyone via the provincial government. This conflicted with the “safety” of the proprietary family and the provincial governor representing the proprietary family’s interests.

Of course, we can reach this conclusion about intended meaning of “liberty” through the Declaration of Independence itself, which cites as its very first complaints how the King of England has “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and has variously prevented the Colonists from being able to govern themselves. It would not be overstating things to say that the colonists were not complaining about an excess of government so much as they were complaining of a lack of effective government. This absence of government, not its oppressive presence, was the impediment to liberty and prosperity which our Founding Father fought a war to do away with.

The Founding Fathers were not libertarian individualists. We know this from the fasces they adorned their buildings with, and we know this from their acknowledgment of differences between groups—something which leftists hold as evidence of racism at the very beginning of American history, but which also applies to distinctions between white groups. Benjamin Franklin himself, incidentally, held reservations about the Germans in particular:

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

But most importantly, we know this from their statements about Liberty in our founding documents. Loving liberty does not require one to be an individualist, as an American or in general. To the contrary, the Founding Fathers understood that organizing around the collective interests of the group, rather than those of the individual, is the best way to achieve the most liberty.

Conservatives are the Real Anti-Whites: Dinesh D'Souza's Death of a Nation

                         By James Dunphy

       

Going to the movie theater is a religious ritual of sorts for me. My soda is my wine, and the dehydrated corn kernels accented with sludge are my wafers. They are a debauched communion. The largely Jewish-controlled entertainment industry is my church, and on this occasion, D’Souza was my minister. I received a typical sermon telling me that Jews died for my sins of ethnic identity. Like a good goy, I gave my offering to the teenager in the ticket booth beforehand, and she provided me with a program. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sing or follow along like I would with a church hymnal. I simply plopped down in the seat to which it directed me. I simply had to be a receptive, dumb audience member.

Okay, enough of that overdrawn analogy.

Neoconservative Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, Death of a Nation, is another crazy, illogical propaganda piece. However, it got me to think a bit, and I hope the following review will get the reader to think as well.

Summary

The film begins with an overview of Trump’s 2016 victory, where we see many Leftists accusing Trump of being a fascist. D’Souza has a new task: to prove that Trump isn’t a fascist and that the Democrats are the real fascists.

For D’Souza, the Democrat Party today is 100% responsible for everything that people in the party did from its inception, including supporting slavery. We might call this permanent institutional culpability. No matter how much the institution’s ideals, practices, and people change, it is always fundamentally the same thing, in D’Souza’s mind. The Republican Lincoln prevented the Democrat Party from enslaving blacks. The Republicans also created the Freedman’s Bureau to help the blacks. While this institution did many things that LBJ’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal also did, it wasn’t bad because, for D’Souza, only the Democrat Party can be bad. When the Democrat Party doles out aid, it is enslaving people and making them dependent on the government. When the Republican Party does it, it’s helping them to escape slavery. This is D’Souza’s crazy logic.

According to D’Souza, the Democrat Party then substituted progressive ideology for slavery so it could control people on a society-wide level rather than only on plantations. D’Souza’s contention that the slaveowners conspired to become progressives is laughable. He cites no evidence for it whatsoever.

Many progressives admired Hitler, a fact which D’Souza emphasizes. The actor who plays Hitler in the film, Pavel Kříž, is a Jew and looks like a Jew, having a leptorrhine nose, a half-circle skin fold on each side of his mouth, and bulging eyes. He and other National Socialist characters angrily shout all their lines and generally behave like thugs. Indeed, the Old Right was very mafia-like in some ways, and D’Souza is all too happy to show us this. He shows footage of antifa violence and claims it’s “just like the Nazis,” as further proof that the two are somehow the same.

Progressives were eugenicists. Eugenics, for D’Souza, is inhumane and evil. He doesn’t give a reasoned explanation for why this is the case, but rather shows us a horror-film caricature of it, conflating it with Mengele’s experiments.

It’s popular in Conservatism, Inc. to ridicule George Soros, a current Leftist supervillain, for having pretended to be a Christian and worked on behalf of the Nazis to assess the value of properties that were confiscated from Jews in Hungary during the Second World War. For D’Souza, this was a shameful act. However, it’s interesting that Soros’ father paid someone to take him in so that he could survive in secret. Jews have no problem with offering bribes and using crypsis when they feel threatened. It also reminds me of how Greg Johnson has quoted the Bible passage where an ancient Hebrew reduces the odds of his family being wiped out by sending some of his kin as hostages to a clan that is threatening to invade so that, if and when the clan attacks, at least some of them will survive. Maybe Soros’ father was following this idea.

D’Souza links fascism with socialism. The young Mussolini indeed believed in socialism, but recognized that workers would never unite across the world in the way Marx believed they would because of their ethnic and national allegiances, so he created the concept of Fascism, which combined nationalism with socialism. D’Souza claims that fascism is bad because of its alleged socialistic inspiration. He also claims that adherence to one’s ethnic identity causes nations to collapse from within. Hence the title, Death of a Nation, which is a play on the title of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which was instrumental in getting the 1924 laws restricting immigration into America passed. Speaking of immigration, he admits that nations can collapse from external forces as well, but glosses over that bit, for obvious reasons.

D’Souza attempts to debunk the notion that Nixon developed a Southern strategy to get the votes of segregationist whites in the South, but I dozed off during that part. (I mean, it was a boring film.) To make up for it, I watched a few videos of D’Souza talking about the subject. He claims that most blacks switched from the party of Lincoln to Roosevelt’s New Deal party for the welfare benefits, but he never explains why Southern whites switched to the Republican Party following the introduction of LBJ’s Great Society. Regardless, to prove that Democrats are the real fascists, he feels he must deal with the issue.

I perked up when the film mentioned the Alt Right. He interviewed Richard Spencer. Spencer tried to answer his questions honestly, but D’Souza was not interested in an honest discussion. It’s clear D’Souza was simply trying to entice soundbites out of Spencer to make him look like a cookie-cutter economic Leftist. This would make it easier for the audience to write him off. He followed this with a clip of Spencer saying he supports national healthcare. D’Souza’s message is thus that Spencer, Hitler, progressives, Democrats of all eras, and modern-day Leftists are all the same because they want to enslave humanity in various ways. The film was brusque in its treatment of the Alt Right but correct in asserting that Trump is not like Spencer and the Alt Right. Indeed, Trump is a civic nationalist, who simply happens to be better from an Alt Right perspective than any of his opponents were.

D’Souza then tries to cast pro-whites as anti-Christian, citing how Hitler allegedly secretly believed that the religion undermined the German people. D’Souza offers we goyim a Christian role model: Sophie Scholl, who distributed pamphlets calling for resistance against the Nazis in the Third Reich, citing Bible verses as support. The Nazis executed her for her dissent. D’Souza’s message is thus that pro-white advocates are out to get Christians in a similar manner.

Apart from this, there is a lot of emotional music in the film and several lyrical performances, one of them by black gospel singer Angela Primm, who sings in a church as the camera cuts to various scenes of iconic American cities and landmarks. Her singing consisted of nothing more than low-IQ clichés, but the Americana scenes were nice.

The overall message was that Democrats are the real fascists, and thus we goyim have nothing to regret in supporting Trump. Indeed, we’re as kosher as can be.

My Take

Let’s analyze D’Souza’s claim that Democrats are still slaveowners. One could see how a modern Catholic apologist like D’Souza would ascribe institutional continuity to Democrats because the Catholic Church, as recently as a century ago, taught that all non-Catholics went to Hell and that even a lot of Catholics were going to Hell. Nowadays, they teach that everyone goes to Heaven. This is a fundamental change, yet the Catholic Church sees itself as being the same institution. D’Souza strains to find similarities between the Democrats of yore and modern ones. I must say that despite all its changes, the Catholic Church has changed less since the early twentieth century than the Democrat Party has since the mid-nineteenth century. Believing in the Catholic Church’s continuity is thus not as much of a stretch as believing in the Democrat Party’s.

Regarding D’Souza’s claim that the Alt Right has a lot in common with twentieth-century fascism, I’m probably the wrong person to consult on the matter. Plenty of Counter-Currents writers can offer great commentary on that. I will say that one thing modern White Nationalists have in common with the progressives of yore is in the notion that society is broken. Just as progressives believed that government needed to intervene to make the world a better place, today White Nationalists believe that governments have a role to play in stopping immigration, as well as the white fertility rate from continuing its frightful decline toward extinction. They also believe that governments can be useful in stopping miscegenation and establishing white homelands. White survival is more important than – to paraphrase Greg Johnson – the freedom and livelihoods of the brown people who will replace us.

Most White Nationalists believe that a nation shouldn’t have dysgenic fertility, or a situation where less intelligent and criminally-inclined people outbreed smart, law-abiding people. To stop this, we can simply engage in positive eugenics where we incentivize smart, stable people to have more kids while not resorting to the sterilization of anyone. But only government can make this happen.

White Nationalists aren’t scary people who want to hurt others, nor do they scream and shout all the time like the Nazis in the film. Stupid people tend to be loud. Thus, African-Americans, 85% of whom have an IQ below the white average of 100, tend to be very loud. Whites aren’t nearly as loud on average, and doubtless the National Socialists weren’t, either.

D’Souza acknowledges that George Soros, a Jew from Hungary, and Tom Steyer, who is a Northeast WASP/Jewish hybrid, fund many Leftist groups. Nevertheless, Jews as a group are beyond reproach for him.

Concerning D’Souza claim that a nation which adheres to a particular ethnic identity collapses from within, this is certainly not true of racially homogeneous nations. It is only a problem in multiethnic ones, where several ethnic groups vie for power. And it’s especially a problem when one group dominates another. South Asians like D’Souza don’t dominate whites. I estimate that there are 6 to 7 million South Asians in the US. South Asians are therefore 2.2% of the American population. They are about 1.8% of US billionaires, or 11 out of 585. Whites are equally likely per capita to be billionaires. They are 60% of the US population but around 58% of all billionaires, or 339 out of 585.

Despite only being as numerous as South Asians, Jews are 35% of all US billionaires, or 204 out of 585, making them 16 times more likely to be billionaires than either South Asians or whites. Lest one think this is merely a quirky phenomenon pertaining to billionaires, according to a surname analysis of zip codes cross-referenced with the income levels of residents, Jews make up a quarter of the 1%, and a tenth of all US millionaires. That’s what D’Souza is arguing for in his film. He’s arguing for maintaining an oligarchy split between Jews and others, but which includes Jews as an incredibly privileged minority. That, for him, is freedom.

D’Souza neglects to mention that Jews were even more privileged in Weimar Germany. One pamphlet claims that in Berlin during the Weimar era, Jews were half of all doctors, lawyers, and medical teachers, a third of chemists, and a quarter of teachers in non-medical schools. They were similarly powerful in business, having made up 58% of those involved with commerce, and far more likely to own companies. Jews seem to inevitably reach a point in any white nation where they share power with whites in an oligarchy. They use this power to undermine and ridicule the culture of whites. When poor whites get tired this, they say to rich whites, “Jews are an alien group occupying positions of power that could be yours,” and then both rich and poor whites team up to expel the Jewish component of the oligarchy. Usually all they do is expel them, but unfortunately, as happened in Nazi Germany, sometimes they are killed. This trend of Jews cozying up to a white elite, wearing out their welcome, and eventually being expelled has been repeated countless times throughout history, dating back to the early medieval period. This is why Jews and whites should always live in separate nations, for the betterment of both.

D’Souza admits that nations also collapse due to external forces. However, he doesn’t admit the glaringly obvious fact that immigrants are causing white America to collapse. Since 2000, the Republican Party has remained 88% white, despite non-whites increasing by 45% during the same period. It is simple math to project that the more non-whites there are, the more the modern Democrat Party will gain power. This is what everybody who’s not selling snake oil believes. This is also why so many whites turned out for Trump. They know they’re on the edge of oblivion, and they want Trump to save them. D’Souza side-steps this question because he knows that non-white immigrants are on the rise, and he hopes that even they can be persuaded to vote Republican. Nevertheless, even non-white Republicans can breed whites out of existence.

D’Souza is not like most non-white immigrants. He is the reverse of Charles Stuart (1758-1828), a white officer in the British East India Company who adopted Hindu culture and earned the nickname “Hindoo Stuart.” Stuart bathed in the Ganges River in Calcutta every morning, amassed a collection of Hindu deities and icons of worship, wore Indian clothes, and praised the ways of Indian women, whom he regarded as more sensible, simple, and elegant than Western women. Most white people who sojourned in India during the British East India Company’s reign did not do as Stuart did, and most non-whites in America will not do as D’Souza has. They will not adopt white religion, political ideology, or societal conventions. They will follow their innate sensibilities, which differ strongly on average from the white average. They will not be “white D’Souza.”

At the beginning of the film, D’Souza admits that he came to America not because of its laws, but because of its people, who according to him are hardworking and individualistic, and yet affirming of their immediate family. I guess they were better than the population of India, where the average IQ is 82 and the population is completely non-white, lazy, and nepotistic.

The country D’Souza likes so much was 80% white when he arrived in 1978. Anthropologist Geert Hofstede devised an individualism index, where he scores Western European nations as the most individualistic. Sociobiologist Kevin MacDonald claims whites emphasize the nuclear family more and their extended family less than other groups, and that this inclination goes back to formative years in the Paleolithic. It’s time for D’Souza to admit that he came to America because of white people.

Regarding Christianity, it’s true that many whites are Christians, but they have more to fear from Jews than they do from White Nationalists. Jews were instrumental in getting prayer taken out of public schools. White Nationalists, meanwhile, are either indifferent to or supportive of it. Jews lobbied to get gay marriage passed and want to force Christians to bake gay wedding cakes. White Nationalists are in fact probably more tolerant of homosexuality than the average Republican, but they don’t seek to celebrate it for its own sake, and instead encourage homosexuals to become supporters of their race rather than fall for the Jewish agenda.

I identify as a Christian. The editors of Counter-Currents tolerate me and my beliefs. In fact, they have a Good Friday Special every year. I’m planning on writing an article for the next one, explaining how Jesus had a white personality in many respects, and how he deviated strongly from the Middle Eastern norm. I could never write that article for another publication, not even any “conservative” one, because the Jews would lobby to have me dismissed from the publication for writing it. So it’s clear that there is a place for Christians in a white movement and a white ethnostate.

America means something to D’Souza. It means something to me as well, but something different: it should be a place where whites can survive and flourish for generations to come. A white ethnostate is my America, wherever it happens to be, and I’m a little more frank about the race I like.