This essay is the second in a three-part symposium on the GOPacolypse. Daniel Larison’s contribution can be read here. 

Nov. 4 was a lucky day for Republicans. Barack Obama crushed John McCain by a landslide, but voters hedged their bets on Congress. The sheer weight of turnout for Obama shifted 24 seats in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate to the Democratic column—but the House gains were offset by four GOP pickups and a handful of races in both chambers remain too close to call. This was far from the wipeout it might have been. Voters gave congressional Republicans a reprieve, even as they resoundingly rejected McCain.

Republicans can be trusted to learn all the wrong lessons from this. Indeed, the leaders of the conservative movement, which is little more than the Republican Party in repose, have already decided not to mend their ways. At a post-election powwow held at the home of L. Brent Bozell III, the dons of the movement came together and decided that, in the words of American Spectator reporter Phil Klein, “John McCain wasn’t really a conservative.” What’s more, as one unnamed partygoer told Klein, “We’re no longer going to support Republicans who want to ‘improve’ a bad bill. We’re going to oppose all bad bills.” But what were putative conservatives doing supporting “bad bills” in the first place? And if they were willing to support bad bills under Bush, what makes anyone think they won’t support bad bills again under the next Republican president?

Of course John McCain “wasn’t really a conservative.” But neither was George W. Bush in ’00 or ’04. Neither was Bob Dole in ’96. Neither was George H.W. Bush in ’88 or ’92. The Republican Party has not nominated a conservative for president in over 20 years. Yet the movement has reliably supported the GOP’s nominees anyway. And when given the opportunity to support actual conservatives—Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries of ’92 and ’96 (and the pre-primaries of ’99) or Ron Paul this year—where were these movement leaders? At worst they were shilling for the establishment candidate: a Bush, Dole, or McCain. Others supported the millionaire moderate du jour: Steve Forbes in ’96 or ’00, Mitt Romney this year. A bare handful, if that, sided with Buchanan or Paul. Many of these leaders got their start in the Goldwater days. But how many of them would dare support a Goldwater today?

The Bozell partygoers are right about one thing: the verdict of this election was not a mandate for the Democrats’ agenda or a repudiation of conservatism. But conservatism has been a dead letter within the movement that bears its name for so long that the American people are left with no choice at all in most elections: they may opt for either the competent statism of the Democrat Party or the spectacularly incompetent statism of the Republicans. The decision the public made on Nov. 4, faced with these alternatives, was not an irrational one.

Either way, Americans get an interventionist foreign policy, higher federal spending and an increase in the scope of government (whether in the name of sensitivity and tolerance or academic excellence and patriotism), economic policies made to order for Goldman Sachs, and the continued subordination of private and family life to the dictates of Washington (though again, under different pretexts depending on who holds the whip). But better another Somalia or Haiti than another Iraq; and at least parents know to warn their sons about Barney Frank. How many knew they had to take the same precautions for dealing with Mark Foley or Larry Craig? With the Democrats, what you see is what you get. With the Republicans, what you get is the opposite of what you want to see.

This has led some thoughtful people to conclude that the Democrats are the lesser evil and that whatever hope there may be for conservatism is to be found on the Left. There’s a strong argument to be made—the Left Conservative blog is one site that makes it; others who do include the bloggers of the Libertarian Left—that at least a sizeable minority of leftists have a broadly correct view of what Carl Oglesby called “corporate liberalism,” the ideology of the modern State. And these left-antistatists may have marginally more influence on the mainstream Left than traditionalists and right-libertarians have upon the mainstream Right, for the simple reason that the left-antistatists have not been co-opted by an organized movement.

Needless to say, there are vast differences between the Right and even the most decentralist strains of the Left. Abortion, for example, would seem to be one intractable area of disagreement. Yet the question might be asked: is it really harder to convince a left-winger to become anti-abortion than to convince a right-winger to become antiwar?

Even if that question can be answered in the negative, however, there are many other obstacles that diminish the prospect of a systemic or long-term alliance between conservatives and the Left—very few leftists, for example, will defend what Richard M. Weaver called “the last metaphysical right,” property. To be right about corporate liberalism but wrong about property is no better than the reverse. Yet serious conservatives should certainly think hard about the arguments the left-conservatives and left-libertarians put before them. At the very least, considering these possibilities will help to inoculate conservatives against the belief that they have nowhere to turn but to the Republican Party and its pet movement. Sometimes worse is better, and sometimes “worse” isn’t even worse.

Another possibility to dwell upon is that serious conservatives should not sign up for any movement Left or Right. Austin Bramwell has championed the virtues of an eclectic nonmovement conservatism. One Joseph Schumpeter—even, in Bramwell’s account, one Noam Chomsky—is better than any number of Media Research Centers and Family Research Councils. (What, by the way, could be creepier than some Beltway Republican researching your family?) The trouble with this view is that politics in a representative republic like our own is inevitably a team sport. That’s why parties exist, and that’s why political movements tend to coalesce—and why those movements usually attach themselves to parties. If you want to push through a policy, it helps to have a party, and if you want to shape a party’s thinking, it can help to have a movement, though as we’ve seen with the Beltway cons, a movement becomes counterproductive when it forgets who it is supposed to represent to whom.

This brings us full circle. If the conservative movement has failed, but a movement is politically necessary, what are conservatives to do? Practically speaking, they can drop out of activism altogether, they can look for common cause with the Left, or they can try again with the Right. None of these alternatives is ideal, and all of them should be weighed carefully.

Can a different kind of conservative movement be built? Maybe. Pat Buchanan is one leader on the Right who clearly stands for a foreign policy, economics, and cultural vision very unlike those of the movement. That’s not to say that Buchanan is right in all things—but he does represent something markedly different from the conservative establishment. Buchanan attracted a large following in the Republican contests of 1992 and 1996, even humiliating anointed frontrunner Bob Dole in the ’96 New Hampshire primary. Buchanan didn’t have enough support to win the nomination, and many of the Buchanan brigaders, evidently including Sarah Palin, later became Bush Republicans. But Buchanan proved that a nonestablishment conservatism can garner significant votes in Republican primaries. That’s a promising beginning.

Earlier this year, Ron Paul ran for the Republican nomination on a platform widely at variance with the regnant ideology of the GOP. He too found intense support: about 1.2 million Republicans supported him in the primary season, and by the fourth quarter of 2007 his grassroots fundraising put all the other Republican candidates to shame. Paul’s campaign proved that there is a donor base willing and able to finance insurgent, anti-establishment Republicans.

Money and activists are two of the basic ingredients for a movement. The third is organization. But this has proved to be a problem for insurgent Republicans: they don’t have much infrastructure, certainly nothing that matches that of, say, the religious right, a reliable auxiliary of the GOP establishment. (What happened to the religious right was same thing that happened to the conservative movement: the party tamed them.) Consider just one religious right figure—Pat Robertson, who ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1988 that won far fewer votes than Buchanan or Paul. Robertson had already built a media empire before running for office. And out of his ’88 campaign came the Christian Coalition, an organization that was once considered highly influential within the national Republican Party. (State affiliates and successors to the Christian Coalition still are influential at the local level.) The Christian Coalition was hardly a model of principled political activism, but it was a model—for a brief period in the early 1990s, at least—of effective political activism, playing an important role in electing many of the Republicans who took control of Congress after the 1994 midterm elections.

The Christian Coalition and other religious right groups have a natural advantage over any Buchananite or Paulist organization: churches supply established financial and activist networks—and mass membership—for the religious right. But this doesn’t mean that Buchananites or Paulists cannot build grassroots mass-membership organizations; it’s just a bit harder.  Nor are churches the only pre-existing mass-membership organizations that a budding movement might tap into. The Paul campaign discovered another in the college campuses.

A youth movement is no substitute for a broad-based electoral movement, in part for the obvious reason that students, though numerous, by and large don’t vote (their turnout for Obama notwithstanding). But youth movements supply energy, and youth activists can mature into institutional leaders. The roster of past College Republicans National Committee chairman and executive directors who have gone on to prominence in the conservative movement is extensive—and for the most part shameful. Ralph Reed, the quondam leader of the Christian Coalition when it was at the height of its power, is a paradigmatic example. Reed’s rise to prominence in the conservative movement began in the College Republicans, where he was for a time executive director (under chairman Jack Abramoff) of the College Republicans National Committee. The conservative youth movement succeeded in identifying and placing in a position of influence an effective political activist. Of course, it’s no surprise that someone like Reed, with a background in CR politics, would turn out to be more committed to the Republican Party than to the values of Christian conservatism.

Would Reed have turned out any better if he had risen up through a more principled youth organization? I doubt it, but a philosophically grounded youth movement would identify, recruit, and train other leaders who might do for the Buchanan or Paul movements what Reed did for the Republican establishment. There lies the crucial question: can a youth movement of the insurgent Right be as effective at building institutions as the conservative movement’s youth auxiliary has been, without selling out? It remains to be seen.

The payoff of a youth movement does not lie entirely in the future, when student activists have become professional organizers. Youth were instrumental in propelling the candidacies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in 1960, 1964, 1968 (Reagan’s first run), 1976, and 1980. Indeed, Young Americans for Freedom, the anti-Communist youth group that supplied a somewhat more principled alternative to the Young or College Republicans in the ‘60s and ‘70s, arose out of the 1960 Goldwater campaign. Tellingly, after YAF collapsed in the 1980s, moderate Republicans like the Bushes, Dole, and McCain met with much less resistance within the conservative movement. The students, who were idealistic and had simply had less time to be corrupted by politics, tried to pull the movement to the right. But after the collapse of YAF, they didn’t have an organization through which to focus their energies—until now.

There is a new youth movement taking shape out of the Ron Paul campaign. Over 30,000 college students were involved in Students for Ron Paul, and the Texas congressman’s college lectures—denouncing the Federal Reserve and the Iraq War and calling for a return to strict constitutionalism—electrified campuses from one end of the country to the other, in a way that no other Republican could match. The Paul campaign’s national youth coordinator, Jeff Frazee, is now building a permanent conduit for this youth activism, Young Americans for Liberty. As you can see from its website, the group is still embryonic. But it has an activist base, the beginnings of a financial network, and qualified, principled leadership. YAL should prove to be a headache for the Republican establishment.

But if the GOP is to survive at all, it will have to listen to YAL. The Republican old guard, and by extension the conservative movement, has irretrievably lost the hearts and minds of the nation’s young. As Jeffrey Hart recently observed, “[T]wo thirds of voters under 30 voted for Obama.” Many of those young people, of course, are true Obamaphiles. But many of them are young enough that they have never known any kind of conservatism except what they are told the Bushes, Dole, and McCain exemplify. Given the success of Ron Paul in attracting young people, there is every reason to think that many of them will move to the right, if they are exposed to a thoughtful and principled conservatism. If the Right is going to have any future, it must reconnect with the youth—but the youth aren’t blind, and they see the difference between a Ron Paul and a John McCain.

An effective youth movement is only a start toward recomposing political conservatism. Other organizations of many kinds are needed. The Campaign for Liberty, the official successor to the Paul presidential campaign, aims to provide a mass-membership, organized base for the congressman’s principles. Paul also has the Liberty PAC. These groups have their work cut out for them—they must do what conservatives did after Goldwater’s convention defeat in 1960. They have to build a new movement from the ground up—and do so without falling into the Nixonian traps that compromised all too many conservatives after 1964.

The American public has not embraced the Left, it has repudiated Bush conservatism. If the GOP wants to regain power, rather than merely enduring as a congressional rump of resistance to Obama, it should try offering voters a choice of prudent antistatism rather than colossally corrupt and inept government. The party will not purify itself, however, nor does the conservative establishment have either the will or the power to clean up the party. An outside force, with dedicated activists, a financial base, and principled leadership, must take charge. I see some hopes for such a thing emerging from the Paul campaign and, more generally, from the insurgent Right that supported Paul this year and Buchanan in cycles past. (There is plenty of room for organizational growth on the Buchananite side of the insurgent Right.) These hopes, however, have to be balanced against the record of the conservative movement, which also began as a principled insurgency—and wound up supporting “bad bills” and a succession of Bushes, Doles, and McCains.

Daniel McCarthy is senior editor of The American Conservative.

That’s not to deny the obvious: the United States is a majority white country, has been for all of its existence, and the settlers to whom most of us look back as our mythic (if not biological) forebears were mostly of English stock. The political, religious, and cultural institutions that have shaped the country have come to us primarily through continental Europe and Great Britain. Any American nationalist, but especially a conservative one, is going to want to preserve as much as possible of this institutional and cultural patrimony.

In several places in my essay I refer to “ethnocultural” identities and solidarity.  The word is carefully chosen: over time different ethnicities—not just white and black, but French and German, Welsh and Scottish—have produced different cultures. None of this has occurred in hermetically sealed capsules; both cultures and the peoples who make them tend to intermix, and that is all to the good. Intermixture is not necessarily the same thing as homogenization or assimilation, however. Welshmen and Scots are still distinct nationalities, despite their intercourse over millennia.

Ethnocultural identity is not unproblematic in the Old World, but it is far more complex in the New. Europeans and Africans of many different backgrounds settled continents with a great diversity of peoples already living upon them, and all of this took place quite recently. Europe, too, has had its phases of transmigration and settlement of new peoples, but the Americas have seen relatively more dramatic population transformations in the last 500 years.

For the people of the United States, nationhood takes a particularly unusual form, one highly influenced by the ideological cast of our Pilgrim fathers and Revolutionary forbears. Serious writers on American nationalism and nationhood, on all sides, have taken note of this. John Lukacs, for example, writes:

The traditional ingredients of nationality are common language, common institutions, common culture, sameness of race, consciousness of history, consciousness of territorial limits, ancestral ties, permanence of residence. … In the United States some of these ingredients do not exist, which is why being an American is still something different from being a Frenchman or a Pole. The American idea of nationality has been ideological rather than patriotic, populist rather than traditional, universal as well as distinctly particular in its portents, more superficial but also more generous than nationality in Europe. Nomen est omen: the United States of America, like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is a general and open term; it suggests not a national society but rather something that is, at least implicitly, universal: like ‘Soviet Citizen,’ ‘American citizen’ marks adherence to certain political principles rather than a certain nationality; there is theoretically no limit to what it may include.

Although traditional conservatives (including me) have often made sport of Irving Kristol’s remark about nations “whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today,” there is an element of truth in it. But America as proposition nation is not the whole truth, as even a left-nationalist, Michael Lind, observes: “A nation may be dedicated to a proposition, but it cannot be a proposition—this is the central insight of American nationalism, the doctrine that is the major alternative to multiculturalism and democratic universalism.”

Samuel Huntington also acknowledges the role of ideological “creed” in American nationhood—but he emphasizes that it is tied to a specific cultural heritage:

The Creed was the product of people with a distinct Anglo-Protestant culture. Although other peoples have embraced elements of this creed, the Creed itself is the result… of the English traditions, dissenting Protestantism, and Enlightenment ideas of the eighteenth-century settlers. … The Creed is unlikely to retain its salience if Americans abandon the Anglo-Protestant culture in which it has been rooted. A multicultural America will, in time, become a multicreedal America, with groups with different cultures espousing distinctive political values and principles rooted in their particular cultures.

American nationality is a specific historical compound of cultures, religions, lineages (not only white but also Indian, Hispanic, and black; and among whites not only English, but predominantly so), and geography—just like other nations—but also has an ideological component. Ross Douthat is right to saythat “there’s a sense in which imagining an America governed by an emperor or a military junta is a little like imagining a France whose inhabitants no longer speak French.”

What I have argued is that the element of traditional nationality in American nationhood ought to be strengthened against the hypertrophy of the ideological component of American nationhood. Traditional nationalism seems to me to be a fair term for a movement to strengthen the “nation-among-nations” qualities of the United States—with an emphasis on national sovereignty, national borders, and national security (rather than ideological promotion of freedom and democracy). Some would add “economic nationalism”—protectionism—to the desiderata as well.

America cannot entirely cease to be an ideological nation without ceasing to be America. That’s maybe the tragic, and ultimately fatal, dilemma of American traditionalism. It is by no means clear that a lasting synthesis of radical ideology—and both the American revolutionaries and the Puritan fathers were radical of their times—and traditional nationhood can be achieved. One side of the American character may ultimately destroy the other. Right now, the risk is greatest that the ideological side will destroy the traditional national side.  Sentimental patriotism can take root in either facet of the national character: I fear that too few paleoconservatives appreciate this.  The key to understanding neocon appeals to the American public is that they speak this language of ideological Americanism well. We choose to define only our “Little America” patriotism as real patriotism, and so we fail to understand how the neocons are able to win over so many of our countrymen, and conservatives especially. The neocons themselves may not be American patriots, but their patriotic rhetoric resonates because it is predicated on something real: ideological patriotism in the hearts of ordinary Americans.

In most intellectual circles on the right, as well many in the center and on the left, it is fashionable to damn nationalism. Among conservatives, patriotism is held to be something almost always worthy of praise—though exactly what patriotism might entail has never been settled upon.

As is so often true, the conventional views of the Left and Right, if not entirely unfounded, are limiting and sometimes simply wrong. The United States, at present, suffers from an excess of patriotism and a generally defective sense of nationalism. European countries, too, would benefit from being more nationalistic, though in the Old World the excess is not of patriotism but of a leftist internationalism that has rendered Europeans helpless in the face of Islamic immigration. In the case of U.S. foreign policy, it has not been “jingoistic nationalism,” as many critics like to claim, that has driven our country into an interminable and unjust war in Iraq but a genuine, if misguided, patriotism. The United States should act more like a nation among nations: jealous of her own sovereignty and national borders, respectful of those of other countries.

To say this is not to deny that nationalism can be taken to excess, and historically it often has been in Europe. Nationalism was an active ingredient—though not the only one—in Nazism and Fascism and the bloodletting unleashed in the Balkans after the fall of Communism. But not all nationalism has led to carnage: as Michael Lind and others have noted, the secession of the Baltic states from Russia and the peaceful separation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic were classic expressions of nationalism—the desire of ethnocultural groups for homelands of their own and freedom from foreign government. Benign nationalism is not without precedent—and beither is hubristic patriotism.

Of late, “The American Scene” blog has been discussing nationalism and patriotism at some length, spinning off from a debate in the Cato Institute’s web journal, Cato Unbound. At “The American Scene” and on his personal blog, “Eunomia,” Daniel Larison has been particularly insistent about the distinction between patriotism and nationalism and about the positive value of the former and negative connotations of the latter. The view Larison champions derives in large part from historian John Luckacs and the chapter “About Historical Factors, or the Hierarchy of Powers” from his 1968 book Historical Consciousness. Lukacs, in turn, takes his inspiration from a passage in George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism.” By “nationalism,” Orwell writes,

”I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

There are several problems with Orwell’s essay. For one thing, as he admits at the outset, “nationalism” it not quite the right word for the subject he wishes to address: “There is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject,” he writes, “but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism,’ but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense.” Indeed, Orwell’s “nationalism” is an expansive category for just about anything Eric Blair dislikes: “Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Anti-semitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism.”

One might suggest “ideology” or “partisanship” as a better word for what Orwell chooses to call “nationalism.” But in any case, Orwell’s definitions are tendentious: what we call patriotism is always good (“no wish to force upon other people,” “defensive”) while what we call nationalism sounds inherently bad (“desire for power”). One cannot argue with loaded terms, so let me suggest less value-laden definitions: patriotism is indeed simply love of one’s country. Nationalism is the more specific desire for one’s people to have a sovereign territory of their own. Either sentiment can be defensive; both can be abused and militarized.

Take the case of the U.S. war with Iraq. Larison contends, “The Iraq war was made possible by a propaganda campaign by the government, the exploitation of public fear and anger, the warmongering of nationalists and the twisting of patriotic sentiment into support for a war of aggression by casting the war dishonestly as one of self-defense.” Just about everything there is right—except for the use of the term “nationalists.” For in what sense, other than the purely tendentious, are George W. Bush and his neocon cronies “nationalists”?

President Bush has explicitly attacked beliefs historically associated with American nationalism. Patrick J. Buchanan recently wrote an excellent column on the president’s vendetta against “isolationists,” “nativists,” and “protectionists.” A synonym for the last of those terms is “economic nationalism.” Nativism is a nasty word for the ethnic solidarity at the heart of nationalist sentiment. And historically, American nationalism has often aligned with “isolationism,” or non-interventionism, although that story is rather complicated. For one thing, immigrant groups such as the Germans opposed U.S. entry into both World Wars in part out of nationalist sympathy with their homelands. And whether or not the preference of East Coast elites for intervention in both wars was nationalist—born of ancestral Anglophilia—or transnational in motivation is open to debate. It depends on whether you take American and English nationality to be fungible or not.

(I’m strongly on the side of “not,” our common heritage and language notwithstanding.  America is, and ought to be, America, and England England. I’m not one to tell other countries what their business is, but if I were Scottish, I would want the distinction between Scotland and England to be very clear as well. “Britain” is a political and historical reality—but it is an island of multiple nationalities.)

American anti-imperialism and “isolationism” have often been attached to what can fairly be called nationalism. Sometimes this has added an ugly taint to an admirable ideal: Bill Kauffman’s new book Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism catalogues some of the nationalistic attitudes of American anti-imperialists of the early 1900s, who feared that America’s historic ethnocultutural identity would be adulterated by empire. Kauffman cites a poem by James T. DuBois, anti-imperialist U.S. consul to Switzerland, “in which,” writes Kauffman, “the bemused narrator encounter a series of exotic characters, clad outlandishly or barely at all, and upon asking ‘Where do you hail f’m, pardner?’ is informed ‘Porto Rico, U.S.A.,’ ‘Honeyluler, U.S.A.,’ ‘Santiago, U.S.A.,’ and ‘Manila, U.S.A.’” The narrator replies, “Nex’ you know you’ll ask a feller / Whur he’s frum, he’ll up an ‘ say / With a lordly kind o’ flourish, / ‘All creation, U.S.A.’”

To be sure, anti-interventionism, the desire to restrict immigration, and protectionism do not always go together. But they are allied so frequently that we might suggest that they have a natural affinity with one another and make coherent sense as a species of American nationalism. Bush’s immigration views alone ought to acquit him of the accusation of “nationalism”—what nationalist anywhere has ever favored open borders?

I am not a nationalist, and there is much that I find repellent in nationalist views of ethnicity, culture, and economics. There are larger and smaller loyalties that must trump national sentiment, and nation-states are not properly economic entities—states survive by expropriation, not exchange, after all. But all of that said, and even acknowledging the ideological racism into which American nationalism can degenerate, one can conclude that there is a wholesome component to nationalism on these shores. In its desire to preserve a degree (not an absolute degree, however) of ethnocultural solidarity within defined borders, American nationalism is a healthy thing—more anti-imperial than expansionist.

The United States presently finds itself facing two intractable problems. First is a foreign-policy committing the country to providing defense for most of the developed world—from Japan and Korea to Germany, indeed almost to the very borders of Russia, as well as in the Middle East—and to intervening militarily in theaters ranging from Colombia to Kosovo to Iraq. The cost in lives and treasure is staggering and will sooner or later bankrupt the country. This aggravates the second problem, a federal government whose spending is utterly without brake, and which provides transient tax cuts while borrowing trillions that will have to be repaid one day through tax hikes or inflation. On top of these issues, a third has stirred considerable passion: unchecked illegal immigration, and mass legal immigration, which together in a souring economy exacerbate anxieties over employment and, in a era of rising terrorism, raise fears for national security.

Nationalism attempts to address all three of these concerns. It possesses the right answer to one of them, the right answer for perhaps the wrong reasons to another, and the wrong answer to the third. In foreign policy, the U.S. would be well served to behave more like a traditional nation-state and not an ideological empire: it ought to respect other nations’ sovereignty, including the sovereignty of unfriendly powers like Iraq and Iran, and it should not be providing national defense for countries that are fully capable of protecting themselves. As destructive as German and Japanese nationalisms have been in decades past, it is time that those nations assumed the burden for their own military protection. Neither country has the same imperial will that led to mass-murder in the last century, and even to the extent that a militaristic nationalism may be incipient in Japan, that state is checked by a far more powerful China.

Economic nationalism is a subject for another essay, but in short, welfare in the form of tariffs is every bit as unjust and ultimately impoverishing and debilitating as welfare in the form of direct subsidy to businesses or individuals. As for immigration, the question of who should be admitted to citizenship and who should have access to public institutions—health care and education especially—is properly a question for the people of a country. The American people prefer less immigration in general and much less illegal immigration in particular. The economic arguments against immigration are themselves a form of economic nationalism and faulty, but on whatever the grounds, the citizenry of a republic may properly choose for themselves how much immigration they want. There is no Constitutional or natural right that says anyone and everyone can be an American. No one is denied his due by being denied entry into the country, nor is anyone thereby deprived of his property.

Hyper-nationalism, or the abuse of nationalism, is a real danger, but not one the United States faces at this time. If American nationalists were clamoring to annex Canada for Lebensraum or demanding the ethnic cleansing of Hispanic Americans—or for that matter German-Americans or Slavic Americans—that would indeed be a violation of other nations’ sovereignty or other people’s legal rights, as well as being simply morally wrong. But only a marginal fringe fantasizes about such excessive, malevolent manifestations of nationalism. Middle American desires for limited, legal immigration and for a foreign policy of national defense, not global empire-building, are nationalistic but benign. Just as democracy need not mean giving a majority power to do anything it wishes, nationalism does not have to mean justifying crimes in the name of the nation.

On the flipside, there can indeed be times when heinous actions are justified—that is, rationalized—in the name of patriotism. Bush and his voters are not inflamed by nationalism, which the president has vociferously abjured, but by—among other things—overweening patriotism. If patriotism is simply love of country, it is nonetheless possible, as with love of anything else, to love one’s country too much—to overlook her flaws and excuse her errors. A man may love his wife, and he may love her so much that he would kill to make her happy. The motive for murder would be love, but that would not make it right. Love of country, like love of anything else in this world, can be taken to excess.

The neocons are a special case, and Bush is a politician, so his motives are more complex, and darker, than mere patriotism. But the support of ordinary Americans for the Iraq misadventure is most certainly deriving from patriotic feeling. They love their country; they know it is good. They make the mistake, however, of conflating America with all that is good and nothing that is not. They don’t hate Iraqis or Arabs generally; on the contrary, they wish them well. They want what is good for them. And since “America” and “good” are interchangeable terms, they think it cannot be anything other than good for Iraq to be more like America. The whole world should be more like America. This is still patriotism run amuck.

Orwell claims that patriotism “has no wish to force [a country or its values] upon other people.” But hubristic patriots do not believe they are forcing their country on other people. They believe they are helping other people achieve what they really desire. Everyone wants to be like us, and we can help them along by bombing the bejeezus out of anything—secular dictators, 1500-year-old religions, tribal loyalties, national borders—that stands between them and the American Way. The hubristic patriot believes his country always acts defensively, even if, as in the case of the Iraq War, it acts in defense against a nonexistent threat.

Hubristic patriotism supplied the context in which David Frum, a Canadian transplant, could get away with calling right-wing critics of the Iraq War “unpatriotic conservatives.” Those men of the Right had the temerity to criticize America on any number of points, not just foreign policy—some of them even said nice things about the cultural achievements of the French relative to Americans. The unpatriotic conservatives denied the identification of America with all things good and nothing evil.

Patriotism need not always be taken to such abusive and ridiculous lengths. But in the America of 2003, and among many conservative Americans even today, it was and is. Some of this is a reaction against the genuinely unpatriotic sentiments expressed by the hard Left in the Vietnam era and after. Yet extremism in one direction is no cure for extremism in another—too often, the extremes feed off of one another, as the über-patriotic Right and anti-patriotic Left do—and excessive patriotism is at least as dangerous as defective patriotism. What the United States needs now is less passionate love for our country right or wrong, and more prudent adherence to national interests and national borders. More nationalism, less patriotism.

Europe sadly does not have enough of either at the moment, but nationalism is the quality in greater need. The excessive nationalism of the Nazis discredited national solidarity throughout Western Europe, and particularly in Germany. But unchecked Third World immigration is today a greater danger to peace and liberty in Western Europe than excessive nationalism is. Germany, France, and other countries are reluctant to assert their historic national identities—including their religious and political traditions—against newcomers who have few hesitations about expressing their own ethnocultural identities and the political and social practices associated with them—practices of Sharia, for example, or forced marriage. A dose of nationalism could fortify European liberalism against this onslaught. (I do not suggesting anything illiberal here: only that immigration be restricted and Muslims and other minorities not be exempted from laws that apply to everyone else.)

The Left in America and Europe has largely rejected both patriotism and nationalism in favor of an anti-traditional cosmopolitanism: bringing people together by destroying their historic identities, whether religious or ethnocultural or of whatever other kind. If we were all alike, we would not fight any more—no more shooting wars, culture wars, or bitter political disputes. Unfortunately, these leftists do not seem to consider how much cultural, political, or real warfare must take place in order to make everyone alike.

Cultural and political war to end all wars suits the Left just fine, but contemporary leftists are usually a little queasy about real blood-and-guts warfare, their penchant for humanitarian intervention notwithstanding. Unluckily for the rest of us, this is precisely where America’s neoconservatives are most passionate. The neocons and the Left complement each other fully. The Left wants to wipe out traditional Christianity and historic Western nations through legal and cultural change, but it shies away from open warfare and from applying the same anti-traditionalist stance to non-Western cultures. The neocons want nothing more than to make non-Western cultures more like us, and they will gladly use cruise missiles and Marines to do it. Theirs is a peculiar form of post-national patriotism. It is peculiar ideology created by the intellectual elite, it is one that can make sense to ordinary Americans. If you cannot pray in school, the neocons seem to say, why not take out your frustrations by joining the military and bringing the blessings of liberty to other lands? The neocons appeal to Americans on the wavelength of something they can be proud of: their military traditions. Other traditions fall to desuetude.

Samuel Huntington describes the choice confronting America in Who Are We?:

“Cosmopolitanism and [democratic] imperialism attempt to reduce or to eliminate the social, political, and cultural differences between America and other societies. A national approach would recognize and accept what distinguishes America from those societies. America cannot become the world and still be America. Other peoples cannot become American and still be themselves. America is different, and that difference is defined in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity. The alternative to cosmopolitanism and imperialism is nationalism devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding.

The transformation of the United States from a confederated Republic into a consolidated nation after the War Between the States was a tragedy, and expressions of American nationalism from the Civil War to the Cold War were often risible and typically took root at the expense of earlier local identities. Traditional conservatives romanticize an American patriotism of hearth and home, but such a thing has not existed, not in measurable quantities at least, for at least a century. The place of the old local loyalties has been taken by the national flag and the Pledge of Allegiance, and the one institution to which almost all Americans remain devoted—the military. What small patriotism survives in little platoons—not Army brigades—is to be cherished. But the road back to the humane scale is a long one, and a mild nationalism, as antidote to leftist cosmopolitanism and neocon imperialism, may be a necessary first step. Even secession, a favored cause of radical localists and libertarians, is most likely to come about in the 21st century through nationalism, as Scots and Quebecois independence movements suggest.

Nationalism is no unqualified good, even in small doses. But it is preferable to the immediate alternatives. Patriotism can and ought to be a pure and noble sentiment dedicated only to defense—but in 21st-century America, it has all too often been inflamed into a mad passion.

Daniel McCarthy is Associate Editor at The American Conservative.

Then again, maybe Webb is one of us—what left liberal could say the things Jim Webb has said about the decency, honor, and patriotism of the Confederate war dead? Before Webb arrived in the Senate, there was no doubt where he stood in America’s culture wars. But culture is different from politics, and when Webb decided to run for the U.S. Senate he may not have jettisoned all of his personal principles, but he did embrace a political program not much different from the rest of the Senate Democrats. Webb is a cultural conservative in only the most restrictive sense.

His politics aren’t entirely worthless—he’s against the Iraq War, and he does differ crucially from most Democrats on the right to keep and bear arms—but we cannot expect much from him as a legislator. And it’s on the basis of his politics that paleos should support or oppose his election. But Webb’s cultural conservatism accounts for why some of us like him even more than we can justify supporting him politically.

Culture aside, though, does Webb represent a political trend that paleoconservatives (I’ll continue using the word, despite Paul Gottfried’s epitaph) and libertarians should support? Should we lend our votes and dollars to antiwar candidates of any stripe, even if that means supporting pro-abortion, tax-and-spend, gun-grabbing liberals like Barack Obama? If not, whom do we support—and what is the political reasoning behind our strategy?

On categorical grounds, I’m not going to examine in these brief notes the case for not voting or for supporting third parties. Both of those are honorable, even sensible courses of action, but neither will have any effect on policy-making in Washington. There is more to life, of course, than policy-making in Washington. But what happens in the empire’s capital tends to have serious repercussions even for outright quietists—both in this country and around the world. I’m going to take it for granted that the people reading this post would like to see some policy changes, and would like to see them as soon as possible.

“Paleos”—by which I loosely mean individuals who are antiwar, believe in reasonable immigration restrictions, and have a strong preference for political and economic decentralization—are a tiny minority, negligible in most elections. Ours is not a majority movement, and we commit a democratic fallacy if we believe that it is. (If the majority is always right, and we know that we’re right, we must have a majority behind us, yes? Sadly, no.) Ours is not even a mass movement. A few tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a nation as large as the United States amount to a vanguard, not a mass base. That is not necessarily a bad thing: organized minorities can achieve a great deal. Unfortunately, we are not very well organized. There are only a handful of paleo institutions, most of them academic organizations or publications, and they rarely coordinate their efforts. At times, they seem as determined to anathematize one another as they are to battle the men behind the reigning ideology of the State.

Suppose, though, that paleos were to act as a bloc. How could they affect policy change in the shortest possible time frame?  I see three plausible strategies.

The first strategy is integration with the establishment Right. Work within the system. As a practical matter in 2008, it might have entailed supporting Mitt Romney, a well-funded (albeit mostly by his personal fortune), seemingly viable candidate who was not a hard-bitten neocon—in contrast to McCain and Giuliani.  Fred Thompson, had his campaign taken off, might have been another potential beneficiary of this strategy.  As a small minority, paleos would have the most effect on candidates like these, not as voters but as opinion-mongers and political insiders. Would Romney have listened to paleo voices in 2008? His willingness to campaign on restricting immigration may provide some encouragement.  And his serial tergiversations on abortion, gay rights, and other issues suggest that Romney was nothing if not susceptible to change. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see paleos, even had they worked diligently for his success, having much sway over him.

Integration is not an immediately effective strategy, but it may hold promise for the future. Perhaps given enough time, paleos can work their ways up through the magazines and think-tanks of the establishment Right, to the point where they can have a significant say on some mainstream candidate in 2012 or 2016. Yet I doubt that very much.  It is not unreasonable to think that if, say, National Review had opposed the Iraq War in 2002 or 2003, Bush might at least have paused, and conservative Republicans in Congress might have put up token resistance, if nothing more. And there were, in fact, antiwar voices close to the magazine at that time. Neal Freeman was on its board of directors—a status that it is difficult to imagine any journeyman paleo journalist aspiring to.  Yet Freeman could not even make the magazine seriously consider the peace position, nor could he prevent David Frum’s attack on antiwar conservatives, published the week the war began. As of 2004, Austin Bramwell, also a war skeptic, was one of the five trustees to whom William F. Buckley turned over control of his magazine. But Bramwell could not change the NR‘s direction either. Freeman and Bramwell both resigned.

I know of hopeful young paleo(-ish) journalists who think that one day they will be running institutions like NR.  The historical record suggests otherwise.  And so far, none of these young men have had much luck—any luck whatsoever, as far as I can tell—at getting antiwar articles into print. Even when they write for their institutions’ websites, they must be careful and circumspect.  More than once I have heard them complain that the paleo grassroots are ungrateful for their efforts.  But the grassroots have no way of knowing how sound a young paleo journalist is, if his employer lets him publish nothing overtly critical of Bush’s war, while the articles he writes on Ron Paul or Sam Francis, say, turn out to be quite critical indeed.  All the grassroots can do is judge the evidence before their eyes.

Integration, then, has a history of failure and at present shows little promise, but perhaps I am too pessimistic, and the young paleo writers of today will succeed where board members and trustees of conservative institutions have failed in the past.  Let’s hope so.

If the prospects of moving the Republican mainstream to the right, turning conservative Republicans into paleos, are poor, a radical alternative might be to attempt to push the Democrats to the right instead, turning liberal Democrats into moderates.  (Or improving the ration of moderates to liberals among the Democrats in Congress, at least.)  In very close elections, such as the Virginia Senate race in 2006, a statistical draw, even the relatively small cohort of paleo voters can make a difference. The logic of this course of action is twofold.  In the near term, the Democrats are likely to have more political power than the Republicans, and a change in their political complexion would thus have more effect than a change in that of the minority party. And the Democrats may be closer to paleos’ positions on the Iraq War—and perhaps no farther away on immigration—than John McCain-style Republicans are. It may be easier to push the Democrats in a restrictionist direction than to push the Republicans in an antiwar direction. But that remains to be seen.  There is also the question of whether the Democrats’ tax-and-spend is really any worse than the Republicans’ borrow-and-spend, which inevitably saddles the country with debt and inflation: backdoor taxation. The Grand Old Party’s free-market credentials are so tattered that the Democrats may not be worse economically. The subset of paleos who actively oppose the economic ideology of growth may be especially tempted by the marginally less corporatist party.

A more theoretical and long-term logic to attempting to influence the Democrats rather than the Republicans might run as follows: the Left, from at least the time of Woodrow Wilson until today, has been the motive force in American politics and culture. Imagine American politics as a car with front-wheel drive. The Democrats represent the front wheels, with power behind them.  The Republicans are the rear wheels.  Steering the front wheels will have much more effect on the direction of the vehicle than steering the rear wheels, which would have an effect, but not much of one.

A third consideration in the perverse case for supporting the Left is that it may hasten a reconfiguration of the Right. Reduced to a permanent majority, Republicans and conventional conservatives may radically re-evaluate their beliefs, and perhaps in the course of that re-evaluation they might be influenced by paleos.  This is optimistic, but not beyond the pale of possibility.

The downsides to this second strategy, which might be called the balancing or breaking strategy, are obvious. For one thing, the situations in which paleos can affect the outcome of Democratic races or general elections in which there is a moderate Democrat are few. There is no indication that even Democrats as culturally conservative as Webb are much inclined to listen to—let alone act upon—paleo suggestions.  And the compromise of principle involved in paleos supporting candidates who oppose them on almost every policy issue could be literally damning. 

The third strategy is the one I favor: insurgency.  Either of the other two strategies may work as short-term tactics.  But if paleos are going to affect policy significantly in the long term, they cannot depend on the magnanimity of either the Left or the establishment Right. They—we—must have institutions of our own, however small they may be to begin with. In politics, this does not mean creating third parties, it means organizing outside of a party structure to take over existing vehicles, including the GOP.  Goldwaterites did this during the 1964 campaign—it’s easy to forget that at the time, the GOP was dominated by Rockefeller Republicans. It still stood in the shadow of “modern Republicanism,” which had eclipsed Taft Republicanism.  (Unfortunately, Goldwaterism was no restoration of anti-interventionist Taft Republicanism. It was a new Cold War ideology unto itself.)  Other organized minorities have achieved similar feats.  The Religious Right, through the Christian Coalition and the various organizations of James Dobson and others, took over several state Republican parties in the 1990s and still has considerable influence in Red States. (The national Christian Coalition is a shell of its former self, but state-level organizations are still potent. The Religious Right’s influence has become attenuated as it has assimilated into the Republican Party, effectively switching from insurgency to integration. People who know him say that Ralph Reed, for example, has never known whether he wants to be a Christian first or a Republican.)

This strategy too has its pitfalls.  First, it must be noted that both the Goldwater movement and the Religious Right sooner or later blended in with the Republican establishment and vice versa. Rockefeller Republican George Romney begat “conservative Republican” Mitt Romney. Just how changed was the Republican Party—and were whatever changes did take place always for the better?  If paleos adopt this strategy they may find themselves, sooner than they realize, becoming indistinguishable from the establishment Right. And that’s assuming that the paleo Right has any success in organizing and taking control of the GOP in the first place.

(As difficult as that may be, however, remember this: There are many fewer voters in a primary than in a general election. A concentrated paleo vote is more likely to have an effect within a majority party’s primary than in supporting a marginal third party in the general election. Consider, too, that there are vast numbers of party loyalists, who will vote for just about any nominee of their team.  Winning in primaries automatically gives paleos the support of these unreflective loyalists.)

The Ron Paul movement is adopting something like this third strategy, thanks to Dr. Paul’s decision to remain in the Republican Party and the spontaneous emergence of candidates running as Ron Paul Republicans in a dozen states. To make this strategy work, however, will require endurance and discipline—political trench-work rather than technical glitz and publicity stunts. I see some encouraging signs that political acumen is developing in the Ron Paul ranks. Certainly my own time with the campaign reawakened in my mind principles of grassroots political organization that I had forgotten years before. (I have an article in the April 21 issue of The American Conservative that discusses some of the current and upcoming developments with the Ron Paul revolution.)

I don’t know whether any of these strategies will work. Quietism may well be in order if we cannot effect political change—if we can’t stop the next war or reduce immigration to a legally manageable level and shore up our flagging economy. But the Republic isn’t lost quite yet, so I hope my fellow paleos will give hard thought to what strategy is most likely to pay dividends. We cannot afford to act on whim. For nearly 20 years, the paleo movement (or non-movement) has been getting by on ad hoc measures. We’ve been losing ground all the while. It’s time to think about long term strategy: in politics, a plan will always beat no plan.

Bacevich no longer drinks that particular flavor of Kool-Aid: “only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade,” he writes, “or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of ‘family values.’” Douthat challenges him on both points.

Bacevich has the better of the argument, at least as regards abortion. The GOP has had opportunities to overturn Roe before—at any point when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and White House, Congress could have restricted the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over abortion using the powers invested in the legislative branch by Article III of the Constitution, overturning Roe at a stroke. Perhaps they were right not to do so: the powers of Article III, Section 2 have rarely been used in such a manner, and the precedent could easily have boomeranged against conservatives once the Democrats took Congress. Nevertheless, if the GOP were as adamantly pro-life as pro-lifers are encouraged to believe it is, the Republican Congress could have voided Roe any time between 2003 and 2007.

President Bush’s burning desire to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, even though her views on Roe are a mystery (perhaps not least to herself), also signifies the weakness of the Republican Party’s commitment to ending Roe. In a rare act of resistance, the conservative movement rose up against Bush in late 2005 and forced him to withdraw her nomination and place Samuel Alito on the bench instead. Could we expect the conservative movement to compel McCain to appoint a similarly antiabortion justice—assuming that Alito is as antiabortion as most people think? There are two problems with that scenario: First, McCain is made of sterner stuff than Bush and has shown a much greater willingness to defy the movement. Bush has wrecked conservatism by leading it astray on immigration, foreign policy, and the growth of government, but he has never been as quick to anger movement regulars as McCain has been. Second, and more importantly, McCain would take office with a Democratic Senate, which will make appointing strict-constructionist justices difficult if not impossible.

Douthat reminds us that Roe might have been overturned in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, had it not been for Justice Kennedy’s change of heart on the issue. But that change of heart speaks volumes: Kennedy was, after all, a Reagan appointee, nominated after Reagan’s first two choices, Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg, were rejected by a Democratic Senate. The rosiest scenario under McCain—in which he appoints an apparently conservative justice who can be confirmed by a Democratic Senate—would most probably produce a repeat of the Kennedy debacle. With a Democratic Senate, the Republicans are a long way from overturning Roe, even assuming they really want to do so.

Douthat predicts that “to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time.” This is histrionic. As the first comment posted in response to Douthat’s blog pointed out, the four presumably anti-Roe justices on the court are all young enough that one can expect them to be around in a decade’s time. Scalia is the oldest of the four at 72; liberal Justice John Paul Stevens is still on the court at 87. If Republicans can purge themselves of the taint of the Iraq War and clean up the party by 2012 or 2016, an opportunity to create an anti-Roe majority may arise again. Let McCain fall, and let a revived GOP, restored to some semblance of the principles of Robert A. Taft, retake the Senate and White House in the future. The alternative, electing McCain, perpetuates all the errors of the Bush administration—the errors that cost the GOP the Senate in the first place. McCain can be counted upon to be worse than Bush in every arena, from taxes to foreign policy to immigration. And while Bush at least tried to court conservatives, employing the now-shamed Tim Goeglein to cultivate cordial relations even with paleos, McCain’s personal history suggests he may be openly contemptuous of the Right.

The idea that voting for Obama would mean “giv[ing] up on overturning Roe for … all time,” is absurd, though a better case against dissident conservatives voting for Obama can be constructed by suggesting what Obama might do to promote abortion, including ending the “Mexico City” policy; expanding the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances law, which is aimed at curbing pro-life protesters’ first amendment rights; increasing funding for embryonic stem-cell research; and subsidizing abortions with taxpayer dollars. All of this and worse may be forthcoming from a unitary Democratic government. The Republicans are unreliable on abortion. The Democrats, by contrast, are very reliable indeed, and if anyone mistakes Bill Clinton for having been an abortion moderate, that misapprehension is only made possible because he had to deal with a Republican Congress for most of his eight years in office. It was Clinton and the Democratic Congress that gave us FACE in the first place in 1994, and Clinton also suspended the Mexico City policy.

Douthat halfway concede ones point to Bacevich, acknowledging that “overturning Roe wouldn’t magically restore us to some Ozzie-and-Harriet wonderland,” though he says, “returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life.” Bacevich is not denying any of that, of course, and Douthat simply avoids the tough question implied in Bacevich’s article: what exactly can we expect from overturning Roe, and is whatever hoped-for good is to be achieved enough to justify voting for a candidate—McCain—who will perpetuate one unjust and disastrous war and probably start a few more? Here at Taki’s Magazine, John Zmirak has outlined some of the limits of what will and won’t be achieved by overturning Roe. Some states might ban abortion, others certainly would not, with the result that

“We might well be able to reduce the rates of abortion among the very poorest American women, who couldn’t afford a regional airfare—which would be a very good thing. But little more than that. Come the advent of the next Democratic president, we could expect the use of federal funds and other forms of pressure to squeeze the “unenlightened” states to get in line with those that reflect elite opinion. And the whole thing would start to erode. Of course we would fight, and we might well hold out. We might well be able to keep abortion a regional “privilege”—even as the influx of left-leaning immigrants continued to undermine our majorities in states across the country.”

My own projection differs from John’s in a few specifics. For one thing, I think groups like Planned Parenthood will make sure that even the poorest women can get abortions on demand. The spectacle of scores of minority women being ferried across state lines in Planned Parenthood buses on the way to abort their children would have some educational value, no doubt—progressives would get to see exactly whose parenthoods are being planned, and whose childhoods are being annihilated. But Planned Parenthood has always been determined to see its task through, and I suspect few progressives would find courage to object. States or a hypothetical Republican Congress could try to ban interstate travel for purposes of abortion, but that would lead the whole issue back into the Supreme Court. And one can be sure that liberals will colonize the courts with renewed vigor in an attempt to reinstate a universal right to abortion. The abortion wars will continue.

Jeffrey Rosen’s 2006 Atlantic essay “The Day After Roe” sketches the probable outcomes of reversing Roe state by state—which states are likely to ban abortion, which won’t, and how the fight will affect Congress and the White House. Rosen’s article has dated badly—he wrote it to raise the prospect that overturning Roe could cost Republicans control of Congress and the White House. It didn’t take overturning Roe to do that, of course, the Iraq War accomplished that all by itself. Still, Rosen raises some important issues, such as the predictable effect that a handful of botched illegal abortions will have on public opinion. “In the late 1960s, as Bill Stuntz of Harvard Law School notes,” Rosen writes, “national opinion shifted after sensationalistic articles appeared in Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post exaggerating, by at least a factor of ten, the number of deaths from botched illegal abortions. A year or two after Roe, a similarly galvanizing television image might mobilize women in swing states to take to the streets on behalf of the right to choose.” Professor Stuntz dramatizes the issue for Rosen: “If a young woman who is raped gets pregnant and goes to a downscale abortion provider and dies from the infection, that becomes a huge story.”

Rosen provides figures on how many states would be likely to ban abortion in the first place. “Even without Roe v. Wade, “ he writes, “according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a woman’s right to choose would be secure in about twenty-three states,” due to laws or state court decisions that are already on the books. “And in seven more (Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Wyoming), the political climate is sympathetic to choice, and citizens are likely to demand strong new laws protecting abortion.” Even in those states that might ban abortion, meanwhile, the strongest prohibitions would fail, leaving abortion legal either in early stages of pregnancy or under specific circumstances. The 2006 repeal by referendum of South Dakota’s comprehensive abortion ban bears out Rosen’s point.

None of this means that the pro-life cause is hopeless. Very far from it: as University of Alabama political science professor Michael New has shown, restrictions on abortion that fall short of comprehensive bans still cut the abortion rate. Overturning Roe will give teeth to these restrictions and allow for more, and at least a few states probably will ban late term abortions outright.  Not only will there be fewer abortions—how many fewer is anyone’s guess—but a Supreme Court decision that was wrong from the beginning on constitutional grounds will have been voided, and that too is good in itself. But the blight of abortion will not disappear from the United States, and in all too many places the practice will continue in precisely the same fashion and at the same rate as it already does. This is a painful political reality; to reduce the abortion rate in the U.S. dramatically will take a long time and will require much more than the reversal of Roe. Even if the Republicans at some point have both the will and the opportunity to follow through on their commitment to end Roe, victory in the abortion wars will be a long way off. In the meantime, we should at least stay out of wars in the Middle East and elsewhere—though the question remains whether Obama really would be less belligerent than his rival, and whether President Obama wouldn’t boost the abortion rate, even if President McCain would be unlikely to reduce it.

Of all the candidates for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, only one took the time to address the 35th-annual March for Life on Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. On the day of the march, this candidate, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, received the endorsement of Norma McCorvey, the eponymous “Jane Roe” of 1974, who since the verdict converted to Catholicism and become a pro-life activist. The endorsement was big news, but it received nary a notice from most of the anti-abortion conservative press.

I was working for the Paul campaign at the time and sent National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru, author of the abortion treatise The Party of Death, an e-mail informing him of the story. “Considering your expertise on life issues and your mention of the other Ron Paul news of the day,” I wrote,  “I was wondering whether you might post your thoughts on Norma McCorvey’s endorsement of Dr. Paul today. Dr. Paul also addressed the March for Life—I believe he was the only presidential contender to do so.” Ponnuru had earlier mentioned Ron Paul’s endorsement by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and Dr. Paul’s statement comparing the PATRIOT Act (which Ponnuru supports) to Jim Crow. But he chose not to discuss the McCorvey endorsement or the March for Life speech.

One should not read too much into that, but it is fair to say that pro-life, antiwar conservatives like Ron Paul pose a problem for pro-war, anti-abortion types like Ponnuru. The antiwar, pro-life Right doesn’t fit the narrative that hawks and neocons have built over the past six or seven years. What is that narrative? Essays by Joseph Bottum in First Things and James Hitchcock in the Human Life Review reveal the outline: neocons want to co-opt pro-lifers by convincing them that the bloodshed involved in wars of choice is not inconsistent with an ethic of life that rejects abortion and euthanasia; and the neocons and their hawk allies want to paint antiwar conservatives like Joe Sobran and Paul Likoudis as soft on abortion for supporting antiwar, pro-abortion candidates like Virginia Sen. James Webb. Bottum made the first half of the argument in his 2005 essay “The New Fusionism.” Hitchcock made the latter half a year later in his “Abortion and the ‘Catholic Right.’” (Love those scare quotes—as if there were any uncertainty about whether Joe Sobran is on the Right.)

Ponnuru plays a crucial role in the effort to annex pro-lifers to neoconservatism as well. To his credit, he hasn’t attacked the anti-abortion credentials of paleoconservatives— instead, he vouches for the good faith of pro-abortion neocons like David Frum and backs up Frum’s calumnies against the patriotism of antiwar conservatives.  But the more important contribution Ponnuru makes to the fight for the pro-life movement is to elaborate an abstract, universalist, rights-based foundation for an anti-abortion philosophy. Such a foundation, which bypasses religion and tradition, is more palatable to neoconservatives and the secular Left than are religiously-grounded, traditionalist objections to abortion. Ponnuru’s philosophy also takes us halfway toward a justification for opposing abortion that could also justify wars for democracy—all in the name of human rights. Though as we shall see, the Rights of Man do not lead where Ponnuru would like us to believe they do.

On the face of it, one would think that pro-lifers—who are moved by compassion for innocent human life and in many cases even oppose the taking of not-so-innocent human life—would be against wars of choice such as the one in Iraq. Such wars entail not only the deaths of soldiers on both sides and what is euphemistically called “collateral damage”—dead innocents—but they can also destroy public order and thereby lead to even greater slaughter, which is exactly what has happened in Iraq. American intervention there has set off a slow-motion civil war.

The Catholic Church, one of the strongest and most outspoken pro-life institutions worldwide, has been forthright in condemning the Iraq adventure. Yet pro-life Catholic conservatives would hardly know that from reading Catholic-inflected conservative magazines like First Things or National Review. From those sources, they will only hear the likes of George Weigel and Michael Novak complaining about Vatican bureaucrats who just don’t have the moral clarity to support the invasion and occupation of the Middle East. The pope himself has signaled his thought on the matter clearly enough, but Catholic hawks refuse to relay that signal to their readers—let alone show how it relates to the Church’s teaching on other life matters, such as abortion.

(Catholic neocons often argue, rightly, that while the Church opposes abortion in all instances, war may be either just and licit or unjust and illicit. But this does not speak to the bigger question: was the Iraq War just? Unjust wars must be opposed in all cases just as abortion must be.)

So despite what one might expect from a movement called “pro-life,” and one which includes a very large Catholic contingent, pro-lifers are not necessarily antiwar. To the extent that the pro-life movement overlaps with the conservative movement, pro-lifers may be pro-war. Yet even the hawkish pro-lifer may feel a pang of cognitive dissonance in opposing abortion while endorsing the killing involved in voluntary wars. Enter Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things.

Bottum’s objective in “The New Fusionism” was to dispel that anxiety and establish the compatibility of anti-abortion and pro-war politics. He offered several lines of argument. First, he noted that anti-abortion voters and hawks had found pragmatic common ground in supporting President Bush’s re-election effort in 2004. That much, at least, was true—but then, Franklin Roosevelt once constructed a coalition of Southern supporters of states’ rights and segregation and black and Northern civil-rights activists. Political expedience makes for odd couplings, which do not always become stable alliances.

A deeper, theoretical grounding was needed to tie pro-lifers to neoconservatism, but Bottum was not up to the task. The best he could manage was the assertion that “The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other?” Bottum was begging the question he was supposed to answer. After all, opponents of war also insist that there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics—truths like “it is wrong to wage unjust wars and thereby cause the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocents.” So why should opponents of abortion side with neocons against antiwar conservatives and Pope Benedict XVI?

“Grow toward each other” turns out to be the key phrase in “the New Fusionism,” since Bottum, unable to unite hawks and pro-lifers in principle, resorts in the end to wishful thinking and speculation. He observes that “the people called neoconservative are much more opposed to abortion than they were even ten years ago”—which may be true, although the fact that neocons still cherish pro-abortion politicians like Rudy Giuliani and Joseph Lieberman suggests how limited their anti-abortion credentials really are. Paleos may make an exception to their abortion principles to support Jim Webb, but neocons identify wholeheartedly with Giuliani and Lieberman.

Still, neocons are becoming more anti-abortion, Bottum claimed, and the anti-abortion religious Right has become more interventionist in foreign policy. Bottum proved this point by citing the enthusiasm of Rep. Frank Wolf and Sen. Sam Brownback for humanitarian activism abroad, as well as Evangelical support for Israel. Though that may say little to Bottum’s Catholic coreligionists, he could perhaps hope that politically Protestantized conservative Catholics would follow the lead of Evangelicals in ardently supporting Israel, even in the face of the Vatican’s criticisms of that state’s behavior. “Growing toward each other” turns out to mean that Catholics become more like Evangelicals and Evangelicals become more like neocons, while the neocons genuflect in the direction of anti-abortion politics.

Bottum admitted that his hothouse hybrid of Evangelical interventionism and neocon dithering over abortion didn’t add up to anything resembling traditional conservatism: “The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene.” Those were the truest words in the essay.

The neocons haven’t had much luck with making a positive theoretical case an anti-abortion-neoconservative partnership. But even a weak case like Bottum’s might suffice if the argument against a paleoconservative-anti-abortion alliance were made strongly enough. St. Louis University historian James Hitchcock attempted to make that argument in his Human Life Review article “Abortion and the Catholic ‘Right.’”

Although anti-abortion hawks have long made common cause with Giulianis and Liebermans, Hitchcock denounced paleoconservatives like Joe Sobran and Howard Phillips (who isn’t Catholic) for what he considered to be an insufficient devotion to the pro-life cause. Hitchcock was aggrieved that Sobran and other writers associated with the traditionalist Catholic publications The Wanderer and The Remnant would take an interest in other issues as well as abortion: war, civil liberties, economics, national sovereignty. How this differs from Catholic neocons’ behavior—for they, too, take an interest in such things, albeit usually on the other side of the debate—was never addressed by Hitchcock. In defense of the paleos, one can at least point out that corporate capitalism—what Michael Novak calls “democratic capitalism”—is yet another thing about which Catholic authorities have been critical.

Hitchcock contends that another thing that makes Catholic paleos such as Sobran bad pro-lifers is that they supported candidates like Senator Webb, who are not only pro-abortion themselves but who make it extremely unlikely that Bush will be able to appoint any more anti-abortion justices. “Not once during the [2006] campaign,” Hitchcock writes, “did any writer in The Wanderer explicitly remind readers of the crucial importance of judicial appointments, and some even implied the contrary.”

The judges question and its direct tie to abortion are what kept many antiwar pro-lifers, including Pat Buchanan, on Bush’s side in the 2004 presidential election. Weren’t the paleos who abandoned the GOP in 2006 surrendering to—indeed, aiding and abetting—the party of abortion?

Pro-lifers who are more attached to the Republican Party and its wars than to the cause of ending abortion might well agree with Hitchcock. But he and they are wrong.  Again, their position begs a very important question—namely, the righteousness of the Iraq War. If the Iraq War is unjust, it should rank as high as abortion as an evil to be opposed. Indeed, the proper comparison for an unjust war is not to legalized abortion, which is bad enough, but to forced abortion, since the state not only countenances illicit killing but carries out the act. That doesn’t mean that pro-lifers must vote, as many paleos did, for antiwar, pro-abortion candidates like Webb. But it does complicate the picture considerably, raising the same questions as are raised when pro-lifers are faced with a candidate who is strongly anti-abortion but supports euthanasia. Hitchcock does not consider this. He doesn’t consider at all the justice of the Iraq War, which is just as much a life issue as abortion or euthanasia.

A second point that must be raised against Hitchcock—one ably made by Scott Richert in Taki’s Magazine last year—is that he blames precisely the wrong set of conservatives for costing the Republicans control of Congress and setting back the pro-life cause. The blunt truth is that Joseph Sobran and the other members of the dissident Catholic Right do not command enough votes to swing an election. Or rather, they might have just enough influence to swing an election as close as the one between Webb and George Allen—but even if Allen had won and the Senate were divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats, Democrats and moderate Republicans together would be just as much an impediment to appointing pro-life judges as the Democratic Senate is now.

The blame for the Republican loss of Congress and the damage it inflicted upon the pro-life movement rests not with antiwar paleoconservatives but with Hitchcock’s friends the neocons. (Hitchcock praises The Weekly Standard in his “Catholic Right” essay.) “The pro-life movement was at least temporarily derailed in 2006 by the strong public backlash against the war in Iraq,” he writes.  That’s exactly right: the Iraq War, not Joe Sobran’s support for Jim Webb, cost the Republicans Congress and derailed the pro-life movement. And who gave us the Iraq War?

“For over three decades now,” Hitchcock writes, “the pro-life movement has defined itself as a ‘single issue’ constituency…” Unfortunately, electoral politics is not about single issues, and when pro-lifers support reckless military policies like those of Bush, the predictable result is that when the Republicans go down in ignominy they take the pro-life cause with them—at least for a time. The Hitchcock strategy, ignoring as it does both political reality and the moral teachings of the Church in every area except abortion, is neither principled nor pragmatic. No wonder the pro-life movement is losing ground.

Still, all too many pro-lifers may heed Bottum and Hitchcock rather than Buchanan, Sobran, and the antiwar, anti-abortion Right. Many will swear allegiance to the neocon cause thanks to books like Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death.

In a recent Human Life Review essay of his own, “The Afterparty of Death”[PDF], Ponnuru announces that his 2006 book “was the first mass-market pro-life book in a generation.” It set out to make a comprehensive case for the pro-life cause. “In my book,” he writes, “I sought to explain why pro-lifers believe (and are right to believe) that abortion, euthanasia, embryo-destructive research, and infanticide are unjust, and should be illegal.” The book met with overwhelmingly negative reviews: Ponnuru’s Human Life Review essay is intended as a rebuttal to them. Unsurprisingly, most of the negative reviews came from abortion-rights supporters. Yet among Ponnuru’s critics were thoughtful, even conservative abortion-rights supporters such as John Derbyshire, who might have been open to persuasion by a better book. As it was, Derbyshire scathingly called Ponnuru’s philosophy, “a frigid and pitiless dogma.” He was right to do so: on the basis of Ponnuru’s book, one would think that the pro-life cause was frigid and pitiless.

Over the last 15 years, three forces have acted to cut the abortion rate and increase the number of Americans who consider themselves pro-life. One has been the proliferation of state-level restrictions on abortion. The second has been the spread of ultrasound technology: women who see their gestating children are much less likely to abort them. The third has been the ability of pro-lifers to show the extremism of the other side, as dramatized through the battle over partial-birth abortion. The second and third forces are visceral, not intellectual. They are grounded in everyday human sentiment: a love of children and a horror of violence.

Ramesh Ponnuru fails to understand this. His book presents a cold, rationalistic argument—he contends that, given certain inalienable, abstract natural rights, abortion must logically be prohibited. The principles of democracy and equality, as well as logic, demand it. I quoted Ponnuru’s description of the essence of his argument when I reviewed his book for Chronicles at the beginning of last year:

“These rights—and to have any rights at all must be to have the right not to be killed—cannot depend on particular qualities that some human beings have and others do not. They cannot depend on race, or age, or sex; nor can they depend on stage of development or condition of dependency.” If they do, “the notion that all human beings are created equal becomes a self-evident lie.” Ideological democracy is at stake: Roe, Ponnuru tells us, was not only procedurally undemocratic, but also “it violates the principle of human equality that is the moral basis for democratic self-government, and specifically for American democracy. ... Other countries have grounded freedom and equality in the requirements of social peace; America has grounded them in those of moral truth (‘We hold these truths…’).”

Ponnuru argues an ideological case built on natural rights, with a heavy emphasis on equality and democracy. In other words, he makes a philosophically leftist argument for banning abortion. The argument isn’t wrong because it’s leftist, though. It’s wrong because the theory of natural rights does not lead where Ponnuru thinks it leads, either in theory or in practice.

In theory, as a thoroughgoing believer in natural rights, the libertarian Murray Rothbard, has shown, the “right to life” may well conflict with other rights. Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty:

If we are to treat the fetus as having the same rights as humans, then let us ask: What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite within some other human being’s body? This is the nub of the issue: the absolute right of every person and hence every woman, to the ownership of her own body. What the mother is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body to be ejected from it: If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.

The pro-life bioethicist Wesley Smith, reviewing The Party of Death in The Weekly Standard, raised the same problem: “the real nexus of the debate is whether or under what circumstances society should be able to force a pregnant woman to do with her body that which she does not with to do, namely gestate and give birth.”

Ponnuru’s response in “Afterparty” is to concede that this argument “would work if abortion were a mere eviction from the womb. But the death of the fetus is in nearly every real case the goal of an abortion…” The rights-logic of Ponnuru’s own argument, though, only takes him this far: the fetus should not be actively destroyed, but may be evicted from the womb—which, for fetuses prior to the age of viability, amounts to a death sentence. Ponnuru does not follow his own logic to that conclusion, because that is not the conclusion he wishes to reach. But it is where his argument leads. Murray Rothbard’s philosophical continuator Walter Block has explored this avenue thoroughly, reaching the conclusion that eviction is consistent with natural rights, even if deliberate destruction is not. Whether the fetus can survive eviction is immaterial, according to this line of thinking.

The same rights-logic can be applied to children after they are born as well: they have no “right” to exist in their parents homes and can be evicted at will, again regardless of what will happen to them as a result. Rights frameworks may have their place in philosophy—certainly they have a place in law and tradition. But rights-talk is a poor way to address the relationship between parents and children or fetuses and mothers-to-be.

What is more, Ponnuru never shows that the rights he posits have any existential substance. Most pro-lifers come to their convictions from a religious tradition. Ponnuru believes this will not do as a basis for public policy. The trouble is, public policy and the prudential reasoning that ought to inform it cannot answer ultimate questions, including the question of what human life is and how highly it is to be valued. Yet a secular, rights-based argument is ultimately no more or less partial and sectarian than an overtly religious argument. Whatever he may personally believe, Ponnuru does not provide any evidence or reasoning to show that his rights claims are objective, universal, and logically binding.

So much for theory. The practices of “human rights” turn out to be even worse for pro-lifers. There is, first of all, the practical inability of rights arguments like Ponnuru’s to persuade anyone. If pro-lifers had put their energies into arguing along the lines Ponnuru favors, rather than showing women ultrasound pictures or describing the brutal procedures of partial-birth abortion, there would be a much higher abortion rate today. Conservatives have always known that most people are governed not by abstract reason but by emotions and experience.

Rights are not just a bust in argumentative terms, however. The actual application of Western-style rights to societies that have never had them before leads, more often than not, to more abortion rather than less. Rights-shunning traditional societies tend to frown on abortion—indeed, some of the United States’ most reliable allies in the UN against international family-planning programs are Muslim countries and other Third World states that do not subscribe to Western ideas of rights and equality. And what happens when these traditional societies are transformed by American power? In Iraq, abortion rates soared in the months following the U.S. invasion, as the Daily Telegraph reported in 2003:

In Iraq, a Muslim country, abortion has long been illegal—and socially taboo—except in medical emergencies. But since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s rule turned the established order on its head, Baghdad has witnessed an upsurge in promiscuity—and the emergence of a practice too risky to carry out under the former regime, with its network of spies. Abortion has become readily available.

Abortion followed in the wake of the democratization of Japan, too: the practice was legalized there under American proconsul Douglas MacArthur. If it is generally true, as these examples suggest, that replacing religion and tradition with rights leads to more abortion, pro-lifers have all the better reason to oppose the neocon project of democratizing the world.

The fallacies and missteps of Bottum, Hitchcock, Ponnuru, and all their ideological brethren are legion. Pro-lifers who follow them risk undercutting their own principles and crippling their own cause. By making an alliance with the hawks, pro-lifers will get more war—and more, not less, abortion, both at home and abroad. Luckily, pro-lifers do have an alternative. They can follow the antiwar and anti-abortion path illuminated by such figures as Ron Paul and Benedict XVI. Norma McCorvey made the right choice in 2008. May other pro-lifers do so in the future.

Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative magazine.

The 2008 Republican presidential race has already produced two upsets: the rise of Mike Huckabee from no-hoper to a serious threat to Mitt Romney in Iowa and the spectacular fundraising success of Ron Paul, who raised over $4.2 million on Nov. 5 alone and be the top Republican fundraiser for the fourth quarters of 2007. The potential exists for a bigger surprise yet, for Ron Paul to snatch the nomination from Romney and Giuliani in the name of traditional conservatism—if a significant number of Christian conservatives see through Mike Huckabee’s flimflam.

They have already seen through former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the multimillionaire whose views on abortion and homosexuality have conveniently mutated as he has sought higher office. Romney’s defenders claim that the man who campaigned to the left of Ted Kennedy on social issues in 1994 and adhered to a similar platform in his 2002 gubernatorial race has since seen the light. If so, he couldn’t have timed his conversion better: any sooner, and he would have turned off Massachusetts voters. Any later, and he would have no prayer of getting the presidential nod. (Who needs Giuliani-lite when Giuliani himself is in the race?) National Review reporter David Freddoso has come up with a good question to put to Romney: “Have you ever changed a position on anything so that [it] doesn’t benefit your political ambitions?”

Romney had already spent $20 million seeking the nomination by mid-July, with a heavy emphasis then and since on the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. All that spending bought him only the most skin-deep support in the Hawkeye State, where all recent polls find former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee now beating him. Huckabee, who has earned himself the nickname “Tax-Hike Mike” for his terrible fiscal record in Arkansas, had raised only about $2.2 million for his entire campaign by mid-October and had a paltry $650,000 cash on hand at the beginning of that month, according to ABC News. Unlike Romney, Huckabee hasn’t bought his support, and he isn’t getting his momentum from small-government fiscal conservatives. Huckabee’s traction in Iowa, and increasingly across the nation, is thanks to the enthusiasm he receives from the Republican Party’s religious base. Analyzing a recent McClatchey-MSNBC poll that found Huckabee leading Romney in Iowa by twelve points, reporter David Lightman noted, “Huckabee’s strength rose most from self-described ‘born-again’ Christians, who are expected to deliver about 40 percent of the state’s Republican vote. They preferred Huckabee, a Baptist preacher, by 42-to-8 percent over Romney.”

Evangelicals and religious right voters of other denominations are lighter on the ground in New Hampshire, where Huckabee’s support is correspondingly thinner—he regularly polls in fourth there, behind Romney, Giuliani, and John McCain. In South Carolina, where Christian conservatives are somewhat stronger, polls again show Huckabee overtaking Romney at the head of the pack. Nationwide, Christian conservatives are a bedrock demographic of Republican primary voters, and the “God gap” among religious voters was crucial to George W. Bush’s victory in the 2004 general election. John Green, a Pew Center senior fellow in religion and American politics, provides some compelling data: Evangelical Protestants went for Bush over Kerry by 79 percent to 21 percent. Non-Latino Catholics chose Bush by 57 to 43 percent. (Bad news for Karl Rove, though: Latino Catholics preferred Kerry by a whopping 63 to 37 percent.) “Values voters,” as the Republican religious base came to be called in the last presidential cycle, might well propel Huckabee to the Republican nomination—if they turn out for the primaries, and if they start opening their wallets for the cash-starved former governor—and while they can’t elect Huckabee next November by themselves (Bush only beat Kerry in the 2004 popular vote by 51 to 48 percent, despite his huge margins among frequent churchgoers), they lend his campaign whatever general election chance it might have.

All of this alarms neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer, who detects in Christian conservatives’ reluctance to back the chameleon-like Romney the dread specter of bias against Romney’s Mormon faith. He doesn’t deign to mention Romney’s socially left-wing gubernatorial record and past campaigns, instead asserting that the Romney trails Huckabee “because about 40 percent of the Republican caucus voters in 2000 were self-described ‘Christian conservatives’—twice the number of those in New Hampshire, for example—and, for many of them, Mormonism is a Christian heresy.” Before Mormons or anybody else rushes to embrace Krauthammer as a paragon of religious tolerance, however, one should consider whether the Washington Post columnist doesn’t think that denominational commitments of all kinds are a distraction from the one true faith: the Church of America. Says Krautie, “The God of the Founders, the God on the coinage, the God for whom Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving day is the ineffable, ecumenical, nonsectarian Providence of the American civil religion whose relation to this blessed land is without appeal to any particular testament or ritual.” (Krauthammer isn’t endorsing secularism here: he’s conscripting religious sentiment, stripped of theological content, into the service of Proposition Nationalism. But that’s a subject for another day.)

The real problem with Christian conservatives’ support for Huckabee isn’t the bogeyman of religion intolerance. Rather it’s that Huckabee is not a conservative at all. The former Arkansas governor has tried to rehabilitate his dismal record on taxes by embracing a crackpot talk-radio panacea called (in perfectly Orwellian language) the “Fair Tax.” Huckabee says he’ll abolish the income tax and IRS and institute instead the “fair tax,” which is notionally a national sales tax of 23 percent—but really, as Bruce Bartlett points out, 30 percent: “If a product costs $1 at retail, the FairTax adds 30%, for a total of $1.30. Since the 30-cent tax is 23% of $1.30, FairTax supporters say the rate is 23% rather than 30%.” Want to pay 30 percent more on everything you now buy? Then the “Fair Tax” is for you. The rate is so high because, like every fraudulent tax reform, it’s revenue neutral. For most Americans, it would be a tax hike, since sales taxes are regressive, affecting the middle class and poor more than the wealthy, while our current income tax is progressive, disproportionately hurting the rich. Progressivity is unjust, but why should a middle-income family of four in, say, Arkansas, pay more taxes so that George Soros and Howard Buffet can catch a break? Ask Tax-Hike Mike.

As for abolishing the IRS, it isn’t likely. If a Democratic Congress were even to entertain the idea of a regressive sales tax, it would probably demand that a progressive income tax be kept to share the burden, and this would be a strong political position: a lower sales tax for everyone, in exchange for keeping an income tax on a relatively few wealthy people. But of course, over time both taxes would rise—indeed, tax hikes would be easier than ever with two distinct constituencies (the rich and everybody else) competing to raise taxes on one another in order to offset their own tax cuts. Even if the IRS were downsized, the new sales tax would not be self-enforcing: there’s nothing special about the IRS; tax collectors of all kinds have been despised since antiquity—they were the most hated people among whom Christ traveled—and with good reason. Sales-tax enforcers would crack down on businesses, on individuals who might be buying from “black” (i.e. free, untaxed, unregulated) markets, and would put a great deal of scrutiny on American citizens entering or leaving the country—can’t have anyone buying lower-tax goods from Mexico or Canada or elsewhere, not if we want to be “fair.”

Why does Huckabee support revenue-neutral tax reform at all, rather than a simple tax cut? Because he’s a big spender, that’s why: Huckabee ditches conservative positions not just on government revenues, but government outlays as well. According to the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform, “Governor Huckabee was responsible for a 37% higher sales tax in Arkansas, 16% higher motor fuel taxes, and 103% higher cigarette taxes,” all of which failed to offset Huckabee’s spending increases, since “Under Governor Huckabee’s watch, state spending increased a whopping 65.3% from 1996 to 2004, three times the rate of inflation. … and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion.” Huckabee likes his government super-sized. He also likes it to be more intrusive into the lives of ordinary citizens: Huckabee has said that as president he would sign a federal ban on smoking in public places, and one can take it on faith that that would only be the beginning of Huckabee’s ambitions for federal management of Americans’ health and recreation activities.

One is hard pressed to find any area where Huckabee expresses a commitment prudent, limited government; which is to say, to conservative principle. He’s a NASA space cadet. In foreign policy, he’s not only an interventionist—he wants to remain in Iraq indefinitely, and he’s said he would launch an attack on Iran without so much as a congressional authorization—but he’s poorly informed and by most accounts far out of his depth discussing world affairs. He has opposed immigration enforcement and supported providing taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants and has accused critics of his position of “race-baiting and demagoguery.” As for crime, there’s Huckabee’s very liberal use of his clemency and commutation powers as governor and his troubling relationship to the parole of rapist Wayne Dumond, who went on to murder a woman in Missouri after being released from an Arkansas prison. (I’m in favor of a little more liberalism in the penal system myself—that America has more people in prison than any other nation on earth, both in per capita and in absolute numbers, is a national disgrace. But Huckabee’s record of commuting murders’ sentences is startling even to me.)

Against all that, Huckabee is anti-abortion, opposes gay marriage, and considers homosexuality sinful. The same can’t be said with much confidence about Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, and so far voters have found Huckabee’s folksy manner and guitar-strumming stage persona more enticing than Fred Thompson’s air of bewildered indifference (“Can I have a round of applause?”). He’s a Baptist minister as well, of course, which doesn’t hurt him with Protestant voters. But none of this makes Huckabee a conservative: there are anti-abortion, religiously conservative liberals. In Goldwater’s day, let alone Robert A. Taft’s, when social issues were less of a distinguishing feature of Republicans and Democrats, Huckabee would have belonged on the Democratic side of the aisle. Naïve, big-government, tax-and-spend liberals like Mike Huckabee have not become any more conservative simply because the Democratic Party has become the party of abortion on demand. As Phyllis Schlafly has warned, Huckabee “destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party a shambles. … Yet some of the same evangelicals who sold us on George W. Bush as a ‘compassionate conservative’ are now trying to sell us on Mike Huckabee.”

Fortunately, socially conservative religious voters do not have to settle for Mike Huckabee; there is an alternative to him, Romney, and Giuliani. That alternative is the other second tier candidate who has vaulted into the top echelon, Dr. Ron Paul. The Texas congressman has the fundraising that Huckabee doesn’t; in terms of the money he’s pulling in—Paul is on target to raise $12 to $15 million for the final quarter of 2007—he’s on par with Giuliani and Romney. Where Huckabee is poor on the panoply of traditional conservative issues, Paul is rock solid. Paul, in ten terms in Congress, has never once voted to raise taxes. (And he doesn’t believe in any of that “revenue neutral” hokum.) Paul has always been for border enforcement and denying illegal immigrants taxpayer benefits. And Paul was one of the very few Congressional Republicans to see the folly of the Iraq War, which he voted against, right from the beginning. Paul is steeped in the Old Right, indeed old American tradition of avoiding entanglements and unnecessary wars. Huckabee is known as Tax-Hike Mike. Ron Paul, on the other hand, is “Dr. No” for his refusal to vote for any legislation that cannot be squared with a strict reading of the Constitution.

His social conservative credentials are 24 karat as well: as an ob-gyn, he has personal experience with life in the womb that undergirds his staunch opposition to abortion. His support for a federal ban on partial-birth abortion is, to the best of my knowledge, the only instance of Paul overriding his strict commitment to states’ rights for the sake of another cause. Paul is for overturning Roe v. Wade and sending abortion law back to the states, where it constitutionally belongs. His approach to opposing gay marriage is also federalist—rather than endorsing a constitutional amendment to federalize marriage, Paul would like Congress to restrict the federal courts’ power over defining marriage, which would allow the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to be the unchallenged law of the land. States could still redefine marriage if they chose—but courts could not impose one state’s laws on every other. It’s not the solution that every Christian conservative wants, but it is the one that does least violence to the Constitution.

Paul’s commitment to law—be it divine law, natural law, or civil constitutional law—ought to be one of his most attractive qualities for Christian conservative voters. Paul understands the idea of law as a bond and limit on human desire and activity: alone of the 2008 Republican presidential contenders Paul understands that just laws have their source in something other than human whim. Consider the difference between Ron Paul’s response and Mitt Romney’s answer when each was asked by Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson whether Roe is the law of the land. “It is now,” said Romney, which prompted Mickelson to tell him, “… the Supreme Court doesn’t make law. They can’t make law. There’s only three sources of law and the court’s not one of them.” Ron Paul’s answer: “Well, they call it the law of the land but I want to clarify that by getting rid of it. This is one example of the courts overstepping their bounds tremendously…” Paul then goes on to explain that here, too, a constitutional amendment is not necessary: Congress already has the power to restrict the federal courts’ jurisdiction. So why, asks Mickelson, didn’t the putatively antiabortion Republicans do that when they held the majority in Congress?

Paul: “Well I think it’s insincerity in what they say when they campaign, and they don’t follow through, and they sort of pander to get votes and then they don’t want to rock the vote.”

Mickelson: “So they come out here to the cheap seats and serve up pro-life rhetoric and go back to Washington and go back to doing their thing.”

Paul: “Get the pro-life vote and then go and not offend the people who believe in abortion, and try to ride the rail in the middle of the road, and too often they get away with it. I think I have the reputation for doing what I say, and voting that way, and my voting record shows that.”

Paul has picked up support from several influential Christian conservative writers, including Chuck Baldwin and Laurence Vance. He’s making inroads at the grassroots level as well. But so far, he hasn’t attracted the kind of mass “values voter” following that has been propelling Huckabee’s effort. If support for Huckabee is intended as a political calculation on the part of grassroots Christian conservative, it’s a mistaken one: the underfunded Huckabee might pull off an upset against Romney in Iowa, but he has little hope of beating “Rudy McRomney” for the Republican nomination—or beating Hillary or Barack next November. A tax-and-spend liberal like Huckabee has as little chance of uniting the Right as the untrustworthy Romney and socially liberal Giuliani. Paul, on the other hand, already has the support of libertarians and antiwar moderates. If the Christian grassroots voted according to conservative principle and added their weight to Paul, he would have a very good chance indeed of beating the whole New York / Massachusetts / Chicago slate of candidates in both parties.

But the 2008 contest poses serious tests for Christian conservatives: a test of whether their commitment to conservatism extends beyond social issues, and a test of whether they can resist the folksy charms of a good ol’ boy from Arkansas—many Evangelicals, after all, fell for the last Arkansas governor to run for president in 1992, which was one of the secrets of Bill Clinton’s first victory. If the grassroots don’t resist the siren call of Tax-Hike Mike, they might yet remain anti-abortion, but in every other respect they’ll have ceased to be a religious right and will have become a new, and dangerous, religious left.

This provides some context for the hit pieces against traditionalist and paleo conservatives that have recently sprung up in the print magazine and on TNR’s website. Russell Kirk has been a particular target. First, TNR selected a worthwhile book, The Essential Russell Kirk (full disclosure: I work for its publisher, ISI Books), and gave its reviewer enough space to—potentially—do it justice. TNR deserves some credit here: how many other left-of-center magazines would devote 6,500 words to reviewing an intellectually serious conservative book? But the reviewer, contributing editor and Boston College professor Alan Wolfe, produced an obtuse screed that displayed all the worst qualities of TNR, right down to the East Coast parochialism of poking fun at the imagined discontents of Iowa drugstore patrons. Has Alan Wolfe ever even been to Iowa?

Wolfe’s review elicited responses from Jeffrey Nelson, Daniel Larison, and Paul Gottfried, among others, and now Wolfe has replied to his critics. Helpfully, he has restated the substance of his complaint against Kirk sans his earlier divagations about Kirk’s supposed pornography-viewing habits and other such nonsense. Shorn of material like that, Wolfe’s 6,500-word essay compresses into a single paragraph of eleven points. They add up to a willful refusal to understand what Kirk was saying and why he said it. In essence, Wolfe dislikes Kirk because Kirk was not a liberal and—what may be worse—because Kirk refused to pander to liberal sensibilities in expounding his own point of view. Kirk did not waste any ink apologizing for reading and appreciating Calhoun; nor did he feel the need to explain that in discussing the importance of religion for America, he was not advocating the establishment of a civil religion or state church. Wolfe genuinely seems not to understand where Kirk is coming from. For his benefit, and for the sake of others who may be confused by him, his eleven blunt points are worth addressing in fast fashion.

His first argument is so far from the mark one might think Wolfe is writing in bad faith, but let’s be charitable. His claims that Kirk’s “decision to treat only left-wing ideas as ideological is itself ideological.” The trouble here is that Wolfe’s premise is entirely wrong: Kirk did not treat only left-wing ideas as ideological. Certainly he thought libertarianism was ideological—see “Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries,” which is included in The Essential Russell Kirk. Wolfe himself spends two paragraphs discussing Kirk’s acerbic view of libertarians. And while Kirk didn’t consider libertarians conservatives, Wolfe evidently does—he writes that “conservatives from J.R.R. Tolkien to Ayn Rand were … attracted to fantasy.” If Wolfe really does believe that libertarians are on the right and are conservatives, then he must acknowledge that Kirk did indeed criticize at least one kind of right-wing ideology.

In fact, Kirk did more than that, since he also took aim at neoconservatives, in an essay entitled “The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species” (included in Kirk’s Politics of Prudence collection). He allowed that the better neoconservatives were indeed on the same side as he (“I have wished that certain so-called Neoconservatives … like certain Libertarians for whom I retain a fellow-feeling, would content themselves … with the simple old badge Conservative”), but he cautioned against the group’s tendencies toward ideology—“[Irving Kristol] and various of his colleagues wish to persuade us to adopt an ideology of our own to set against Marxist and other totalist ideologies. Ideology, I venture to remind you, is political fanaticism…”

If Wolfe’s point is merely semantic, that Kirk never allowed that genuine conservatism could be ideological, then he is right but has proved nothing. There is more to an ideology than simply the use of words, and even if Kirk’s application of the terms “conservatism” and “ideology” is tendentious or partial, that does not an ideology make. But Wolfe seems to be trying to convict Kirk of a greater crime than just having a philosophically-charged way with words: he contrasts Kirk unfavorably with Rousseau, who though being a man of the Enlightenment himself criticized the rational excesses of other Enlightenment thinkers. Wolfe’s charge against Kirk is that Kirk doesn’t provide such an “auto-critique” of the Right. But he does: his special use of terms notwithstanding, Kirk was outspoken about the defects he perceived in libertarians and neoconservatives, two groups that Wolfe sees as being on the Right. Wolfe can hardly be accusing Kirk of not being sufficiently critical of Kirkianism, since the Rousseau that Wolfe admires never criticized Rousseauvianism either, even though he took shots other Enlightenment ideologies. Wolfe, not Kirk, is the one who contradicts himself here, by refusing to apply to Kirk the same standards he applies to Rousseau.

For Kirk, ideologies were substitute religions. Wolfe can’t tell the difference between the two. Thus he detects a contradiction between the universalism and infallibility of Catholicism, to which Kirk converted, and Kirk’s critique of the universalistic and infallible claims of ideologies. Wolfe also believes that Kirk’s “reverence for the Constitution cannot be reconciled with the Constitution’s separation of church and state, not, at least, when Kirk simultaneously insists that religion is a necessary prop of social order.” Finally, he complains that Kirk’s “case for religion is never accompanied by an argument on behalf of any particular religion, even though he does offer a discussion of why Judaism and Hellenism are inferior to Christianity.”

Wolfe wouldn’t like Kirk’s response to the first problem he raises, which might be summed up by the old Latin saw quod licet Jovi non licet bovi. God, and an institution directly connected to Him—which is what the Church is to a believing Catholic—does not have the same limitations as mortal man and his institutions. Kirk does indeed recognize a similarity between religion and ideology, but there are several crucial and distinguishing differences, one of those being that ideology denies the need for God. Ideologies are religions of man, which raise him to the level of a divinity, a maker of right and wrong unto himself, individually or collectively. Wolfe may disagree with the contention that if men make their own values, anything, including any atrocity, might be permissible, but there is no contradiction involved in Kirk holding that view and, as a Christian, believing that the Church is categorically different from a government or a business or a the World Bank. (Notably, although Kirk was a Catholic, he never, as far as I am aware, denigrated any other religious tradition as an ideology. He saw a fundamental dissimilarity between anything that points man’s eyes heavenward—whatever the errors of a particular creed might be—and movements and institutions that point man’s eyes toward a mirror.)

Kirk’s non-sectarian Christian political philosophy, far from being the puzzle that Wolfe makes it out to be, is the complement to the other quality that perplexes Wolfe so, Kirk’s respect for the Constitution. Surely even Alan Wolfe—who is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, after all—can understand that a broadly Christian politics and pre-political culture is possible without the establishment of a specific state church, which is all that the Constitution actually prohibits (and even then only on the federal level). A diffusely Christian public life prevailed in America for some 200 years after the ratification of the Constitution, and it did not depend on an “artificial creed” or “generic form of Christianity” as Wolfe supposes. A variety of Christian denominations—sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating—served the civil social order just fine.

If there is a problem here for Kirk’s political philosophy, it is in how to square the American political order with the conservatism of Burke and Coleridge, which did put great weight on the need for a national church. The solution to that problem, in part, is the separation of state and higher education: private universities in the United States can—or could—provide the function of a Coleridgean “clerisy,” which in Great Britain was provided by the established church and the religious public universities. Kirk’s “Reflections of a Gothic Mind,” in The Essential Russell Kirk, doesn’t spell all of this out, but is highly suggestive.

Religious institutions can serve civic ends without being state supported or becoming nationalistic civil religions. Do certain religions, especially some forms of Christianity, serve these civic ends better than others? Wolfe claims that Kirk cannot be in favor of Catholicism (too ideological) or Evangelicalism (too “bibliolatrous,” in Coleridge’s term). But he’s only half-right: Kirk didn’t engage in religious apologetics, but one can see quite clearly where the thrust of his thought leads: he admired most the religious-political views of Anglo-Catholics like Burke, Coleridge, and T.S. Eliot. America’s church-state relationship is different from Britain’s, but it’s safe to say that Kirk’s sympathies lay with Roman Catholics and the more “Catholic” elements in High Church Protestantism.

Wolfe’s next group of complaints centers around slavery and the South. Kirk, you see, admired certain Southern statesmen like John Randolph of Roanoke, who owned slaves. He also admired John C. Calhoun, who was a “radical,” says Wolfe, because “he opted for slavery over country.” And Kirk didn’t believe in abstract human rights, which according to Wolfe, “would have made it difficult for him to find slavery a moral evil even had he bothered to discuss it.”

In fact, Kirk did “bother” to discuss it; he devotes a chapter of his first book, John Randolph of Roanoke, to the institution Randolph called “the Cancer.” Randolph early on detested slavery, and—contrary to Wolfe’s assertion that “the things Randolph wanted to buy and sell included … slaves”—“he never bought or sold slaves, no matter how great his immediate need for money might be,” as Kirk records; indeed, he opposed the slave trade. But Randolph, as Kirk’s study and the work of other scholars makes clear, provides a case study in the conflict between a personal abhorrence of slavery and a belief in the peculiar institution’s embeddedness in the social order: Randolph thought that sudden emancipation would lead to a social or servile war in the South—to a Haiti-like situation. That fear, of course, turned out to be unfounded: instead the U.S. had an even bloodier experience, a national war of unification.

Kirk was no apologist for slavery, and he dealt head-on with the paradoxes in Randolph’s thought. Wolfe however ignores Kirk’s nuance; unlike Kirk, who recognized the flaws in men such as Randolph, Wolfe subscribes to a Manichean worldview, in which the North is simply good and the South utterly evil. But why can’t someone esteem Randolph and the Old Republicans without condoning their view of slavery? Presumably, one is allowed to admire abolitionist sentiment without endorsing John Brown’s terrorism or the atrocities committed by William Tecsumeh Sherman. Then again, maybe Wolfe would approve of those enormities—the ends justifying murderous means.

Calhoun was not the ambiguous figure that Randolph was—he refused to see slavery as an evil at all. But Calhoun was no “radical,” as Wolfe says: he did not want to create a new political order, but rather to preserve his region, his land and people. If doing so meant breaking up the Union, so be it: local loyalties came first. What could be more conservative? As for the contention that one cannot regard slavery as a moral evil without believing in the rights of man—sez who? There are any number of other value systems that provide grounds for condemning slavery: natural law, religious traditions, even a philosophical belief in equality or the brotherhood of man. (The last has been adventitiously linked to rights-talk in the modern world, but the connection is not a necessary one.) It’s true enough that none of these belief systems is necessarily anti-slavery—but then, neither is a belief in the rights of man, if one maintains, as many Enlightenment thinkers did, the slave group is less than fully human.

Wolfe’s final few points touch on the nature of conservatism. Kirk claims that conservatives are prudential; but pragmatists, says Wolfe, tend to be liberals. Kirk was not an outright anti-capitalist, and this, according to Wolfe, “is in tension with his passion for tradition.” And Kirk’s skepticism toward universalism sounds to Wolfe a little like multiculturalism. Finally, he thinks Kirk has misread Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination.

Wolfe profoundly misunderstands what Kirk believed could be accomplished in this world. The “tension” between tradition and capitalism is not something that conservatism proposes to eliminate: Kirkian conservatism depends upon prudence precisely because we do not live in a world in which all forces pull harmoniously in the same direction. No economic system, and likewise no tradition, is ever without its tensions with other sides of life. To propose that such tensions can be extirpated is the dream of utopians, not conservatives. The real question is whether there would have been less “tension” in his thought if Kirk had been a socialist or a rabid anti-capitalist. To answer that question, just think of the social and political upheavals that would be necessary to make the U.S. a non-capitalist county.

Luckily, there is no tension at all in what Wolfe perceives as the paradoxical liberalism of most pragmatists. Here Wolfe makes a mistake that only an academic could make, conflating philosophical pragmatism with practical prudence. The politics of John Dewey and Richard Rorty tells us nothing about prudence as Kirk and Edmund Burke understood the term. In ordinary usage, “pragmatic” can indeed mean “prudent”—but Kirk’s meaning should be clear enough when he says that a conservative, while he may be pragmatic, is not a pragmatist.

Nor, though the conservative values “the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” (as Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind), is he a multiculturalist. Here too Wolfe overlooks an important distinction: multiculturalism, more often than not, is not antithetical to universalism. It is instead of a kind of universalism itself, an overarching narrative about the evils of Christian and European civilization and the virtues of oppressed peoples—no matter how much interpersonal or institutional violence might characterize the culture of the oppressed. To this way of thinking, hoop skirts were absolutely more evil than human sacrifice.

The Kirkian conservative, by contrast, is circumspect about the cross-cultural value judgments he makes. He prefers his own culture, but allows that it does not have a monopoly on the good, that other ways of life may be appropriate to other times and places, and that other civilizations have their own peculiar virtues and vices. This modesty and respect for civilizational diversity is one reason that Kirkian conservatives are staunchly anti-imperialistic. As Kirk wrote in A Program for Conservatives, “cultural form and substance cannot be transported intact from one people to another.”

Wolfe closes his original review by quibbling with Kirk’s characterization of Lionel Trilling’s preface to The Liberal Imagination: “Lionel Trilling, more than thirty years ago, found the liberal imagination nearly bankrupt,” Kirk wrote. Against that claim, Wolfe quotes Trilling’s famous remark in the same book that (“some isolated and some ecclesiastical examples” notwithstanding) conservatives had no ideas but only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” This is no refutation at all, since Trilling’s whole point was that liberals, without the challenge of an intellectually stimulating opposition, had grown flabby and complacent. It may be tempting to say that conservatism must be in as a bad shape now as it was when Trilling wrote, if Wolfe is the kind of liberal opposition it inspires. But that would be a mistake: Trilling was wrong in 1950—there were more intelligent anti-liberals than he cared to know about—and whatever the flaws of conservatives today, they shouldn’t be held responsible for Alan Wolfe’s mind-manacled liberal prejudices.

Daniel McCarthy is a senior editor for ISI Books.