Sure, we should all give “two (very qualified) cheers” for Irving Kristol (1920-2009), the tireless writer, political eminence grise, and longtime editor at Commentary, Encounter, The Public Interest, and The National Interest, who left this world last Friday.

Kristol was, on many levels, emblematic of a whole generation of American Jewish intellectuals. His journey, recounted in histories and his own “autobiographical” writings, began in the legendary “Alcove 1” at the City College of New York, whose Trotskyist inhabitants engaged in rancorous dialectics with the Stalinists of Alcove 2. This City College dynamic informed Kristol’s first decisive public stand after the war, as Kristol, and the rest of Alcove 1, denounced the “socialist perversion” of Stalin’s USSR and firmly backed NATO as well as a vigorous, interventionist variation on “containment.” And when it came to the prevailing Zeitgeist, post-Trotskyism, or whatever it was exactly that Kristol advocated, was somehow it: Alcove 1’s stalwarts, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Kristol among them, went on to fame and fortune; Alcove 2, which included Julius Rosenberg, was sent to the proverbial dustbin.

“Cold War Liberalism” pretty much sums up Kristol’s political philosophy throughout his entire adult life; the “neoconservative” moniker never indicated an actual conversion or apostasy so much as it served as a reminder that Kristol, and many others from Alcove 1, had begun voting Republican by the early ‘80s. The dissident Left had become the pragmatic center and eventually lionized and demonized as the ultra right-wing—a development that reveals far more about the political trajectory of the American nation than it does about Irving Kristol’s personal travails.  

In his history of “the rise of the neocons,” Jacob Heilbrunn recounts a moment (a happy one, from my perspective) in 1990 when the ultra neocon “Committee for the Free World,” whose leadership included Kristol and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, met and seriously considered that their movement might have just been rendered defunct by the collapse of the Evil Empire. The conference’s mood was reflected by its title, “Does the ‘West’ Still Exist?” (the “West,” of course, being defined by the Pentagon’s latest strategy memo and the tastes and mores of Manhattan’s Upper East Side). The ultimate outcome was much more ironic: the conservative movement and neoconservatism absorbed one another to the point that the two are today practically indistinguishable. The neocons’ “death” marked their greatest triumph, as Norman Podhoretz would observe at the close of the decade.  

This aside, Kristol was one of the only neocons around who always called himself a neocon. And for this, he should be praised (the younger generation usually dismisses the term as either an insult or as anti-Semitic code.) Kristol also did dissident conservatives a great service by explicitly defining neoconservatism as a leftish dogma foisted upon the Right when it was least expecting it; in turn, the neocon ascendancy in the GOP and conservative movement was, in Kristol’s treatment, something on the lines of a high-jacking:        

[T]he historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.

Is neoconservativism conservative or right-wing?  Probably not. Is it American, Yes (and here I think Kristol speaks the truth).    

That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. […]

Kristol’s discussion of neocon governance is also quite revealing, especially when it comes to what we’ve seen of the GOP and movement in and out of power: 

Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. …

People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.

Instead of defining specific functions for government, Kristol instead theorizes much like Goldilocks—the state should be “strong” but not “intrusive,” juuust riiight. It’s no coincidence that contemporary neocons, and their conservative underlings, have been rendered intellectually incapacitated when it comes to opposing the growth of the state. This is a long-running trend, exemplified by Bill Kristol’s call in late September of ’08 for economic genius John McCain to return to Washington and “save the economy” with more bailouts, and, as Grant Havers points out, Irving Kristol’s critique of the “New Class” of sociologists and managers within the Great Society that left the New Deal expansion of government untouched. (Kristol fils, it’s worth noting, backed FDR and LBJ all the way, as he divulged to E.J. Dionne in Commonweal a decade ago.)

And Irving Kristol wasn’t just the godfather of George W. Bush’s “compassion” but of a long-term neocon power strategy. While many conservatives and movement types might have, at one point, genuinely wanted to cut government programs and departments, the neocons only wanted to place other neocons in positions of power. This elect, which understood the “unintended consequences” and valued patriotic (“hard”) military spending over liberal (“soft”) welfare, was well suited to high posts in the Pentagon and the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Robert Nisbet understood this well in 1986 (even though one must ignore his inaccurate labeling of the neocons as the “Far Right”):

The Far Right is less interested in Burkean immunities from government power than it is in putting a maximum of government power in the hands of those who cannot be trusted. It is control of power, rather than diminution of power that ranks high. Thus when Reagan was elected, conservatives hoped for the abolition of such government “monstrosities” as the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and the two National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, all creations of the political Left. The Far Right in the Reagan phenomenon saw it differently, however; they saw it as an opportunity for retaining and enjoying the powers. And the Far Right prevailed.

How the neocons’ strategy would dovetail with GOP politics is obvious (and is treated definitively by Paul Gottfried in his two books on the movement (the latter of which includes the paragraph quoted above.))     

Kristol is also worth remembering for the many pertinent questions his career brings up about culture, propaganda, and state power—and “unintended consequences,” those things the neocons made their careers studying at the Public Interest

As it was revealed in the mid-‘60s, throughout the 25 years following the Second World War, the CIA was engaged in funding a variety of artistic and journalistic movements, all under the strained rationale of fighting the Soviets “on the cultural front.” Perhaps the most unusual of these schemes was the CIA’s sponsorship of abstract art, and Abstract Expressionism in particular, as, somehow, America’s alternative to Soviet art (which at the time was associated with Socialist Realism and not, of course, the abstract and expressionist avant-garde that dominated Bolshevik/Soviet painting and sculpture up until the mid-‘30s.) Nelson Rockefeller, who funneled a great deal of the CIA money through his Foundation, told his clueless comrades in Langley that Abstract Expressionism was “free-enterprise” art—and thus must be funded by the state! (Rockefeller’s side interests in the United Nations and the “No Growth,” population-reduction advocacy Club of Rome—not to mention his back-room dealings with the CIA—might lead one to question his devotion to “free-enterprise.”) 

The CIA’s gift to world journalism was the “anti-Soviet Left”: committed progressives, often times former Communists, who, for whatever reason, turned against Stalin and were likely to support a NATO presence in Western Europe and defend America against gauchiste critics—as Bill Kauffman described them, the kind of people who’d demand that America wage war against The God That Failed. The CIA’s “Council on Cultural Freedom” didn’t fund only hacks; Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Isaiah Berlin all received funds. Also getting laundered moolah was Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, then the editors of the Pax Americana-lauding Encounter magazine.

The episode proves, among other things, that the CIA wasn’t exactly the hotbed of natavist reaction and Anglo-Saxon elitism depicted in films like The Good Shepherd (remember, “[WASPs own] the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”). As Frances Stonor Saunders recounts, “Back at CIA headquarters in Washington, Encounter was regarded proudly as a ‘flagship,’ an effective vehicle for advancing the arguments for a pax Americana.” It even became a calling card for CIA agents.

Arranging a meeting with Ben Sonnenberg, a rich young wanderer who worked for the CIA in the mid-1950s, an agent told him, “I’ll be carrying a copy of Encounter, so you’ll know who I am.” Josselson, the CIA agent who headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, referred to it as “our greatest asset”. In agency-speak an “asset” was “any resource at the disposition of the agency for use in an operational or support role.”

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These polite James Bonds of the liberal Left thought they were funding the minds who’d convert the acolytes of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to “Americanism”; the unintended consequence was crucial early support for those who’d 40 years on be known as the “Far Right” of the Republican Party and who, in alliance with Southern evangelical Christians, would advocate for aggressive wars across the planet.

In looking back on all this, it’d be nifty to say that the neocons are like LSD—invented by CIA (the difference being that Kristol and Co. have proven far more culturally damaging.) But sadly, such an argument would be wrong.

The CIA funding was probably indispensable in the early years; however, the idea that the neocons wouldn’t have risen to dominance within American conservatism on their own is highly dubious

When in the 1980s, Pat Buchanan wrote about how the conservative “dog” must shake off the neoconservative “fleas” (who had concluded they were steering the beast), he was sadly mistaken. Pat underestimated the neocons’ access to funding, their spiritedness in banding together in mutual defense and promotion, and, most of all, the utter spinelessness of movement conservatives.  

Pat also underestimated the uniquely “American” quality of neoconservatism, which Kristol described in his famous essay on his “persuasion.” Neocons were always well suited to flourish in a postwar America that, after subjecting Western and Central Europe to military and dollar hegemony, could prop up a consumer lifestyle as a kind of unalienable right. Personal prosperity became equated (somehow) with America having military bases all over the world. It’s rather easy to see how in such a situation Americans would fall in love with conservatives who told them that they represented the zenith of “freedom,” “democracy,” and general goodness. 

More difficult to articulate, though none the less important, is a certain American Puritan foundation myth (which the neocons have consciously latched onto of late) of the American people as “chosen,” their land as a Second Jerusalem, and their task that of spreading this Good News across the world. The urbane and mostly Jewish neocons’ alliance with evangelical “Christian Zionist” is a grotesque spectacle, to be sure, but it certainly couldn’t have lasted as long as it has without a strong theological foundation. Put simply, Americans might have been tempted to invent the neocons, if the CIA hadn’t done so already.

Irving Kristol conceived of his country’s identity as “ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear,” and argued that the U.S. would thus “inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.” One wonders whether at the end Kristol grasped that his beloved Superpower was quickly going the way of the Evil Empire of old. 

In two successive editorials in the Washington Post, George Will has officially announced that it’s time to bring our national boondoggles to an end and begin pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Said Will of Iraq:

After almost 6 1/2 years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military—overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation—to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is a worse use of the U.S. military than “nation-building,” it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples’ politicians.

The bow-tied sage wrote similar things about Afghanistan, concluding with a token from his great repository of historical allusions:

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor … is squandered.

I guess I’m glad that Will wrote these columns. Perhaps one day we’ll look back on them as marking a turning point when Beltway conservatives (the kinds who like to have policy debates with scholars from the Brookings Institute) finally felt it safe to kinda, sorta oppose the wars. David Frum and some NRchiks are certainly getting antsy…

But what I find most striking about Will’s recent turn is not so much his great courage in opposing the conservative establishment as the fact that his arguments are each based on realities that were quite obvious to all with eyes to see seven years ago: the Afghan geography and population haven’t changed much, and they’re just as indomitable and un-centralizable as they were in 2002 (and 330 BC, for that matter); “nation-building” (which Will also puts in scare quotes) is still folly; and the American military is as bad at “peace keeping” and bomb-dropping “social work” as it ever was etc. etc. etc. Since Will hasn’t offered any new revelations, I only wish he would have told us that he felt this way seven years ago, before we killed all those people and borrowed all that money. Perhaps he’ll get it right next time. And, no doubt, there will be a next time, and Will will be there on his establishment perch ready to opine on the matter.  

(And by the way, those in the antiwar Right who think that after Will’s two columns, conservative movement dignitaries are going to turn on their neocon masters and penitently announce that Pat Buchanan was right all along are dreaming.)

Now, one might counter that Will has stayed consistent. What he really wanted in 2002 was a sharp, quick intrusion to teach the Taliban a hard lesson after they spurned President Bush and his demand that they hand over bin Laden. And in 2003 Will, like the rest of Washington, really believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD, and since we’ve now stabilized the Iraqi government about as much as we possibly can, he’s naturally decided it’s time to go home. This would be an appalling mischaracterization of Will’s positions in 2001 and ‘02, of course (more on that below), but, yes, one could say that. But in the end, such equivocation is mostly meaningless anyway as it amounts to taking another whirl on the “realism”-“idealism” merry-go-round, which conservatives have been riding for years.

Without reliving the last eight years, I’ll sum it up by saying that when Washington is riding high, its propagandists brag about the regime’s noble, transcendent, value-laden warfare (hence the “Freedom Agenda” and Bush’s cringe-inducing Second Inaugural.). And when things go bad, they bunker down, the generals and “realists” are brought out, and people like Robert Gates are tasked with instructing us on the long slog towards victory (hence “al-Qaeda is in Iraq (at least now anyway),” “We’ll fight ‘em over there so we don’t have to fight ‘em over here,” and Condi’s image of a smoking-gun shaped mushroom cloud (or something like that.)) George Will’s op-eds about the need to slowly withdraw represent just another turn on the loop-de-loop. And it’s doubtful he’d be saying anything like this if a Republican president were actively supporting the wars. “Realism” is a mask covering something Washington doesn’t want to discuss—and it’s meaningless to even talk about “realism” until one understands the nature of the ship the “realist” claims to steer according to the changes in the international winds. Put another way, before thinking about a “realist” solution to a world problem (Will’s or anyone else’s), one needs to look at what’s already taken for granted: for example, the fact that Washington has 500,000 soldiers stationed in some 146 countries and that every Washington wonk and telegenic general is fixated on “threats,” most of which are located somewhere in the Middle East. Reduced even further, before one asks how we should “deal” with Afghanistan, one needs to ask, why are we even bothering to think about Afghanistan!?!    

“/>In this regard, Will reveals something about his own naiveté when he evokes the legacy of Otto von Bismarck’s strategic realism in order to convince WaPo readers of the need for a draw-down. Mentioning a nineteenth-century German statesman will summon little more than blank, dumb stares from your average Pentagon bureaucrat. Will’s more likely to get a positive response, depending on whether he’s at the Pentagon or State, by arguing that we’re like Gerard Butler’s character in 300— sooo badass that we can totally leave Iraq and not sweat it—or, alternately, that our exit from Afghanistan might facilitate the advancement of Afghan women in graduate-level education. Those few journalists who have heard of Bismarck learned in their Cultural Studies seminar that he was a dirty, intolerant racist-imperialist-anti-Semite, and a mere hop, skip, and jump away from You Know Who. Horrible people like this Iron Chancellor have nothing to offer us who reside in the Age of American Global Leadership and who work for the advancement of democracy and human rights!

In many ways, they’re right. Bismarck operated within an entity known as a “state,” a term that doesn’t well describe Washington, DC. What went under the heading “Berlin” was a hierarchical formation based on an aristocratic family (and connected ruling class), which had secured a monopoly on violence within a limited territory. No state has ever been completely unitary, of course, though most all possessed a definite sense of ownership, of territory and subjects, as well as the state’s central objectives, namely, maintaining and expanding its power and bequeathing the realm to the leaders’ descendants. 

We live in a different world. The United States is not a state. It’s a massive, powerful, dangerous, sprawling—seemingly boundless—apparatus made up of bureaucracies, militaries, an empire, departments of agitprop and “education,” police forces, departments of taxation and confiscation, an affiliated currency printing press, and much else. Washington is a late example of what Carl Schmitt called the “total state”: a government that knows no limits (has no concept of friend and enemy) and thus involves itself in every nook and cranny of its citizens’ lives—to the point that it become overextended, unsustainable, and, ironically, hapless and weak. Washington is, to be sure, capable of much ruthless evil, but it—luckily one might think—spends a lot of its time with federal marriage counseling and the cornucopia of bizarre social programs the Obama administration is using to “stimulate” the economy.

Without question, those currently in charge in Washington all have a collective interest in keeping the whole thing going; however, to think that there’s any consensus in the capital about a “national interest,” and how—or, indeed, whether—we should pursue it, is far from likely. The U.S. apparatus gets pulled in a variety of different directions by various ethnic lobbies, ideological organizations, internal pressure groups, and wonks who want to get involved with world affairs (monitoring “democracy” and/or aerial bombing) because they can—and think they should.

To hammer the point home, can anyone imagine what might ensue if two countries decided to resolve a major international dispute without the United States’ “help” (and admitted openly that they didn’t much care what that country that owes everyone so much money thought about it.) I envision Mesdames Hillary and Albright barging uninvited into some negotiation chamber with mascara running down their cheeks, crying out with indignation and shame, “Don’t you people understand that we’re in-dis-pen-sable!” Put simply Will shouldn’t expect to get very far appealing to Washington’s sense of “valor.”

The House of Hohenzollern knew what it was and what its interests were. The people Will is talking to in his WaPo op-eds have no earthly idea—or rather they each have heaps of contradictory interests and commitments that they attempt to reconcile with happy-talk of a commitment to democracy and the promotion of the American way of life. Studies of the malign influence of things like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Military Industrial Complex are important, and they explain quite a bit, but such entities are rather like militant and highly profitable wings of a class of wonkish busybodies who can’t even conceive of the idea of the world not being supervised and occasionally “saved” by Americans with Master degrees.

Washington didn’t invade Iraq and Afghanistan in order promote some considered, rationally calculated “national interest,” so why would Will expect it leave under such rationales? Washington never declared victory in Iraq or Afghanistan (even though it easily could have after it smashed its state enemies) for the simply reason that Washington was never fighting Washington’s wars.

In this line, I feel a certain sympathy with neocons when they chastise Will for straying from the path. At Commentary Peter Wehner observes that at one point Will was hitting all the right notes. Take, for instance, this monologue, from This Week in the fall of 2002, when Will was singing the hymn of Global Democracy:

I think the answer is that we believe, with reason, that democracy’s infectious. We’ve seen it. We saw it happen in Eastern Europe. It’s just—people reached a critical mass of mendacity under those regimes of the East block, and it exploded. And I do believe that you will see [in the Middle East] a ripple effect, a happy domino effect, if you will, of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies … Condoleezza Rice is quite right. She says there is an enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy. And there’s an enormous ahistorical error when people say, “Well, we can’t go into war with Iraq until we know what postwar Iraq’s going to look like.” In 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, did we have a clear idea what we were going to do with postwar Germany? With postwar Japan? Of course not. We made it up as we went along, and we did a very good job.

Will also supported “nation-building” before he scare quoted it: 

[Afghanistan is], to put it mildly, a work in progress. The president, I think, admits this. This was part of his education as president, to say that his hostility to nation-building was radically revised when he saw what a failed nation, Afghanistan, a vacuum, gets filled with. Political nature abhors a vacuum, and when it fills up with the Taliban and the leakage of violence to these private groups, essentially, like al Qaeda, then you have to say, “Well, I’ve revised that. We’re going to have to get into the nation-building business.”

Whether George Will has actually learned anything is far from clear. 

I should first admit that it took quite a lot for me to actually go see Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s latest about a special Army unit of Jewish avengers, led by a half-Cherokee Good Ol’ Boy, who rampage through German-occupied France, killing, scalping, and/or branding top Nazis, eventually slaughtering no less than the German Führer. I’m certainly not against counter-factual reverie, or blood splatter, and I don’t hold any reverence for the Nazi regime or feel uncomfortable with the Kill Adolf premise. (Indeed, I’d love to watch a filmic portrayal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or one of Claus von Stauffenberg that didn’t devolve into a shallow action flick à la Valkyrie.) The problem is, when I saw the preview for Basterds, I simply sensed that it wasn’t made for someone like me, that I didn’t have the right disposition to enjoy it.

There I was in the theater watching a clip of “Aldo Raine” (Brad Pitt sporting a cartoonish moustache and Southern accent) telling a Wehrmacht officer, “If you ever want to eat a Sauerkraut sandwich again, take your Wiener schnitzel of a finger and point out on this map what I wanna know.” Raine, of course, wants to know the whereabouts of more “Nazis,” whom he and his boys could brutally torture (though it’s clear by the context that Raine is terrorizing Army officers.) The stoic German honorably refuses, and Brad Pitt summons one of his “basterds” with the line, “Gots a German here who wants to die for country. Oblige him.” A thug in a sweat-stained wife-beater emerges and proceeds to bash the officer’s head in with a Louisville slugger. (This basterd is portrayed by a one Eli Roth, the man behind Hostel, a classic in the genre of “torture porn,” so I’m told. And his character is named “Bear Jew,” an evocation of the gay slang term for the fat, hairy, leather-clad men who’re “on top” in S&M.)  

Obviously, the scene is, at a basic level, puerile gross-out. But my question while watching it, both during the preview and the real thing, was this: With whom, exactly, are we supposed to be sympathizing? As we’ve all been repeatedly told, and as Aldo Raine reiterates at one point, the Germans acted with such inhumanity in their conquest of Europe that they deserve no humanity in return. (These days, if you so much as hint that you might think the firebombing of civilians in Dresden, or the nuking of the Japanese in Hiroshima, was a bit much, eyebrows are raised and it’s only a matter of time before you’re accused dark predilections or else “moral relativism.”) So, I guess when watching a Jew bash the brains out of a Wehrmacht officer, we Americans are all supposed to instinctively cry Yay!, just like when the home team scores a touchdown. But as I saw that repellent torture-porn auteur whale away at a dignified German officer, needless to say my sympathies weren’t where they were supposed to be … or so I thought. But after experiencing Inglourious Basterds, I began to wonder whether the basterds were really supposed to be the Good Guys, and whether Tarantino’s latest is far more equivocal, or rather far more subversive and nihilistic, than most in the MSM have recognized.  

Now, if you brought this up with Tarantino himself, I’m sure he’d say something coy about how his films don’t really mean anything, he’s just former video store clerk, yadayadayada… Don’t believe him. Basterds isn’t just Tarantino’s homage to B-grade WWII shoot-‘em-ups of yesteryear, like The Dirty Dozen (which includes, by the way, a scene of American soldiers murdering a cocktail party of German officers and their innocent wives, A Bridge Too Far (1977), and, of course, the Italian Spaghetti-Western-Front drama, The Inglorious Bastards (1978).

At its core, Basterds addresses that uncomfortable question asked by all serious World War II historians, and many grade-schoolers—Why didn’t they fight back? Why did the Jews allow themselves to be rounded up so easily? Why weren’t there more revolts at Auschwitz? To what degree was there actually Jewish collaboration in the Konzentrationslager? (The persistence of such nagging questions explains the intense interest in events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising, without question an important battle, but one that’s taken on a special aura as one of the very few instances of an organized Jewish assault on the Wehrmacht.)

Tarantino’s response to all this is to make a Lady-doth-Protest-Too-Much-Methinks tale of muscle-bound Jewish badasses shooting up Germans. Profiling Tarantino, Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg couldn’t help but indulge in his own Freudian dream-wish of how the Second World War should have turned out:  

Early in the spring of 1944, when I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland as the leader of a team of Brooklyn-born commandos. We landed in a field not far from the train tracks that fed Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My team laid explosive charges on the tracks, destroying them utterly, and then I moved quickly on foot to the death camp itself, where I found Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, in bed. I shot him in the face, though not before lecturing him on his sins. Before I killed him, he cried like a little Nazi bitch.

Goldberg reports that Roth called Basterds part of the new subgenre of “Kosher porn”… 

Okaaay. But what’s so striking about all this, again, is the depictions of victim and perpetrator. Though the Nazi Top Brass are evil buffoons, the average Germans who appear in the film—and usually end up tortured or hacked to pieces—are, to a man, upright, honest, and handsome. Teen heartthrob Daniel Brühl (famous for his sensitive, cute portrayal of “Alex” in Goodbye Lenin) is given a starring role as Fredrick Zoller, a German propaganda film idol. And it’s made clear by Tarantino that he’s genuinely in love with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewess who runs the movie theater, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent). In turn, the New York Times’s Manhola Dargis could barely put a lid on his unease over just how attractive Christoph Waltz was as an anti-Semitic mastermind of the SS: “Mr. Waltz’s performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment [when his character talks about how Jews are all rats] if you choose.”

The Jewish “basterds,” on the other hand, are all lowlife sadists straight out of the rogue gallery of Pulp Fiction, and they possess about as much moral fiber as the famous “Gimp” of Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece.  

In the German weekly Junge Freiheit, Claus Wolfschlag expresses his repulsion at the “All Germans are Nazis, ergo Kill ‘em All!” premise of the film, as well his contempt at the German media, who’ve treated the premier of Basterds as some Great Public Guilt Festival. (For evidence of this, look no further than the coverage Basterds has been receiving in Der Stern.) Echoing Eli Roth, Wolfschlag calls the film “pornography for anti-Germans.”

Wolfschlag’s point is legitimate, of course; however, it kept hitting me that on a dialectical level, the film’s message might actually be the exact opposite of what it’s purported to be (and what The Producers think it is.) Basterds might offer Jeffrey Goldberg the chance to experience a kosher wet dream—and another opportunity for Germans to scold themselves—but then, as incredible as it may sound, this Bob and Harvey Weinstein-produced film includes some of the most anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews that have ever seen the light of day in America. Both Steve Sailer and Stefan Kafner have suggested that Tarantino, in many ways, puts himself in the position of Joseph Goebbels in his filmmaking. Put another way, if one were to imagine the ultimate anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi propaganda film about how the Second World War was marked by distinguished German officers being terrorized by a band of Jewish maniacs, would it look much different than Inglourious Basterds?

Nor is this kind of double meaning foreign to Tarantino’s earlier work. Much like Masters of the Universe wannabes have been, for years, quoting the Randian wisdom of “Gordon Gekko,” the evil capitalist in Oliver Stone’s anti-capitalist propaganda film, Wall Street, the “Sicilians were spawned by n——-s” scene from True Romance has been an endless source of insults for millions of jerks who love to make fun of their friends of southern Italian descent. That True Romance was written by Tarantino, an Italian-American, and the words were spoken in a scene of gritty realism, only act as layers of irony that allow Tarantino to get away with it all—much like one can present Jews as inhuman scumbags in a movie about the heroic killing of evil Nazis.     

Besides, depicting the Nazis as fascinating and seductive in fantasy revenge stories is nothing new. As Andrew O’Hehir described in Salon not too long ago, the kiosk clerks of postwar Israel always kept some Nazi porn behind the register:

As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early ‘60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as “Stalags,” whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.

When I was talking about Basterds the other day with a good friend, he reminded me of the classic P.J. O’Rourke line, “Nobody has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.” The UN’s blue-helmeted “peace keepers” who monitor elections in Nairobi simply aren’t the stuff that hot S&M fantasies are made of. Blonde SS officers in tight black leather, on the other hand… Basterds isn’t quite Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, which features Nazis cross-dressing and taking part in orgies, but Tarantino is clearly more fascinated with the villains than the “heroes.”  

When he first achieved critical fame, including an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, in the mid-‘90’s with Pulp Fiction, Tarantino seemed much more than just a talented hack with an encyclopedic, nerdy knowledge of the history of cinema and a penchant for retro style and gory spectacle. One might assume that the soul music, the leisure suits, the sideburns, the Jheri curls in his ‘70s-inflicted Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown would seem either “retro-chic” or hopeless dated by ’94 and ’97. In fact, they create an effect that was alternately authentic, disturbing, and surreal. At some level, all of Tarantino’s characters are “gangsters with the souls of video store clerks,” capable of amusing, sometimes tedious, Seinfeld-esque meditations on foot rubs and the French people’s love of mayonnaise on fries. But didn’t Samuel L. Jackson’s lecture to Tim Roth on the nature of power represent something more? Or an attempt at something more?  

Anyway, after Tarantino’s long directorial absence (1997-2003) following the box-office failure of Jackie Brown, his sole effort at non-ultra-violence, he decided to restart his career by indulging in ’70s kitsch qua kitsch and including all the ridiculously acrobatic thrills of the kung-fu drama, old and new. Hence Kill Bill, Uma Thurman’s yellow jumpsuit, and her ability to run up walls while chopping to bits Lucy Liu’s gang of bodyguards.

In this line, Inglourious Basterds is a kind of worst-of-all-possible-Tarantinos amalgam. The ambition (or pretence) of something meaningful is present, of course, with the evocation of the Jewish experience in World War II. However, Tarantino somehow manages to create a heroic Jewish fantasy that ends up making all the Jews look repugnant. He presents the Nazis as attractive, quasi-seductive, but then is never quite brave enough to encourage his audience to actually sympathize with them, and thus break through the “Germans = Evil” narrative of most every American World War II movie. 

Returning to that scene in which the “Bear” cracks the skull of a stoic German general: Whom are we supposed to sympathize with, victim or perpetrator? … In the end, I think it was just about the blood splatter. 

Though it’s been said that a “liberal” is someone willing to argue against his own position in a dispute, a characteristic quality of the contemporary American variety is that he thinks anyone who disagrees with him is either obstructing democracy or else racist and insane (at any rate, he should probably be apprehended by the authorities.) Take, for instance, this from one Steven Pearlstein, the Washington Post’s “business columnist”:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

The public “reaching a consensus” means, of course, everyone agreeing to do exactly what Barack Obama and the WaPo editorial board want. Anyone who could possibly stand in the way of Washington “solving the problems faced by working families” (or some other phraseology) is a spoilsport, if he’s not guided by more sinister motives. Indeed, Americans who form groups for right-wing causes (even rather mild, unfocused ones like the opposition to healthcare reform and the “taxed enough already” TEA Parties) are considered, if not subliminally racist, then blazers-and-khakis corporate stooges (“Astroturf”), paid off by the boys upstairs. This interpretation is put forward by the ALF-CIO’s Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka in his official response to the voicing of any dissent at townhall meetings:

Mob rule is not democracy. People have a democratic right to express themselves and our elected leaders have a right to hear from their constituents—not organized thugs whose sole purpose is to shut down the conversation and attempt to scare our leaders into inaction.

We call on the insurance companies, the lobbyists and the Republican leaders who are cheering them on to halt these ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ tactics. Health care is a crucial issue and everyone—on all sides of the issue—deserves to be heard.

It’s so good to see labor unions speaking out against “organized thugs”! And much as with Pearlstein, everyone’s voice being heard means that some people need to just shut up.

Anyway, Trumka has the whole thing backwards. Those Brooks Brothers-attired executives in the medical industrial complex will soon be as pleased as ammunition manufacturers to see their industries go on the permanent public dole. Even insurance companies, which could expect to be pushed out of the low-end and middle-class markets by the new “public option,” might actually benefit by transforming themselves into high-monthly-premium “luxury care” providers. The worse the public option is, the more they can charge.       

And just as the Beltway Left, as evidenced by Steven Pearlstein and Paul Krugman, is taking up Bush-era tactics and claiming that opponents are metaphoric “terrorists”—if they’re not actually “betraying the planet”—many have also learned well from the previous admin about how to get massive, budget-busting things done in DC.

First, you trump up a problem (2003: Terror/WMD/Saddam!; 2009: Healthcare costs! (which, granted, are outrageously high, though not for the reasons Obama, Krugman, & Co. say they are)). Next, you declare loudly that something just must be done, and you offer your gargantuan program (which you’ve wanted to enact for decades) as the one solution forced upon us all by the terrible predicament we’re in (We must invade Iraq!; We must have universal healthcare coverage!). Thirdly, you lament that the other side “offers no solutions” and is preventing a “consensus,” and you might have to also express chagrin at long-time allies who are reluctant to jump on board (“unpatriotic conservatives”; Blue Dog Democrats). You finally agree to “compromise” and perhaps whittle down some of your more outlandish proposals (Send Colin Powell to the UN; lower the proposed taxes on small businesses.) No matter what, you win in the end because you started the whole process off demanding something really big, forcing people to “compromise” towards your position, so to speak. (For another example of this technique, see the “debate” last January over Obama’s “stimulus” package, which was deemed too costly at $1 trillion and thus reduced to the paltry sum of $700,000,000,000.00.)

Unfortunately, the mainstream Republican opposition isn’t arguing effectively against Obama’s healthcare reform at all (Peter Schiff and the Drs. Paul, père et fils, are exceptions, of course). And in this instance, one of the Beltway Left’s stereotypes of Republicans is actually fairly accurate: they are simply “defending the status quo” (with some overdone warnings against mass euthanasia and “death panels” thrown in for good measure.)

As alluded to above, while prices in other technology-driven industries are falling, healthcare costs have become utterly bizarre: American’s spent $2.3 trillion on medical expenses in 2007, $30,000 per family! And even the most rudimentary health insurance plan (like the one I have) costs around $150 per month. Sad to say, mainstream Republicans are intellectually unequipped to talk about the fact that costs are so high specifically because the federal government is already subsidizing too much medical insurance, thus giving providers few incentives to cut costs. (If your company’s granting you free healthcare (and getting a tax break to do it), then why would you care how many unnecessary procedures and tests you have done, or how much it all might cost? You’re not the one paying for it.) This or else the GOP is afraid of being called wicked, heartless Scrooges for actually saying out loud that it’d be better if there were less medical insurance coverage for routine procedures, more “uninsured American families,” as costs would soon plummet across the board.

As the GOP remains the Stupid (and Cowardly) Party, grassroots conservatives standing up at townhall meetings shouting “NO!” is about as good as it gets.

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]]> Articles by Richard Spencer tag:takimag.com,2009:article/1.9168 2009-06-20T16:57:47Z 1999-11-30T00:00:00Z Richard Spencer richardbspencer@me.com

It will be Twitterized!

Leave it to the neocons, their congressional allies, and much of the “conservative” blogosphere to make Barack Obama look like an elder statesman of Burkean inclinations.

As the newly color-coded “Green Revolution” unfolds on Twitter and other hipster-powered social networks, The Messiah has been rather circumspect in his public statements: saying that he thinks the Iranian people’s “voices should be heard” is as far as he’ll go. Obama wants to wait and see, and no matter what happens, he’ll meet with the Iranian president, whoever he might be, in the coming months. (Joe Biden stated unequivocally, “The decision has been made to talk.”) This policy of Splendid Wishy-Washiness with regard to the election is, without question, wise when an outside power is unstable and no one’s certain where the chips might fall.

The Republicans, of course, have recognized this deficit in obnoxious global-democracy happytalk, and have stepped up to fill the void. This is their moment! Since 9/11, you can always count on them to do Stephen Colbert impressions and put forth various windy resolutions in Congress whenever an international crisis of some sort occurs.    

Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, Va), who’s making a bid to be the next Newt, led the way:

And later,

John McCain declared he’s certain the election, in which evil Ahmadinejad won almost two thirds of the vote, was a “sham” and, more ominously, announced, “I hope that we will act.” (Thankfully “act” only means, at least for the time being, “not talk to evil Ahmadinejad.”)

The blogosphere has been far worse. If Republicans are saying, “We’re all Iranians now!” then the bloggers are writing, “The Iranians are all Americans now!” It’s the Narcissism Revolution, and everything that happens in Tehran is, pretty much, all about us.  

Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the most prominent in this regard. Sully has, of course, partaken in multiple “casual encounters” with various political movements in public blog posts over the past decade. At the beginning of the century, he was “warblogging,” spouting off all kinds of nonsense about “Munich” and—in 2001!—demanding that we consider nuking Iraq before it was too late! By the 2006 midterms, he’d switched to bashing the GOP and had gone quasi-antiwar—how conveeenient. And last year, Sully, much like Brüno, fell in love with Ron Paul, for a bit, and then abandoned him to follow Jesus Christ Superstar and launch a new career as a White House shill. Now on The Daily Dish, Sullivan’s quoting from various revolutionary “tweets” from Tehran—this vicarious Iranian liberal nationalism being his most pathetic political infatuation to date. The Twitter Revolution, according to Sully, will be a “game changer,” as a liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East will set off a domino effect of progressive change that will transform the hearts and minds … Wait, haven’t we heard this before?  

Even some in the Religious Right are falling in love with themselves all over again with this Green Revolution thing. Take this from Catholic author Mark Shea:

As evidence of this rapturous state of affairs, Shea shows us a YouTube video that looks a lot like all those horrible black-and-white “B-list Celebrities ♥ Obama” ditties we were bombarded with last spring. In this dispatch from the barricades, a collection of diverse, attractive Iranians hold up signs above the soft sounds of emo-rock guitar.

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The translation is as follows: Sign 1) Defending civil rights; 2 Counterbalancing poverty/deprivation; 3) Nationalizing oil income; 4) Reducing tension in international affairs; 5) Free access to information; 6) Supporting single mothers; 7) Knock down violence against women; 8) Education for all; 9) Increasing public safety; 10) Ethnic and religious minority rights; 11) Supporting NGOs; 12) Public involvement; 13) We have come for change; 14) Change for Iran.

Shea might like to imagine some long thread of continuity stretching from Augustine to Jefferson to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King. And if these figures differ wildly in their conceptions of political sovereignty and the role and scope of the state, this is secondary to the fact that they all believed deeply in “American Values”—some Fuzzy Navel of natural rights, soft egalitarianism, and “democracy,” with Augustine’s City of God as a rough draft for the 1964 Civil Right Act. Shea might be interested to learn that, with the possible exceptions of numbers 4 and 9, the Fourteen Points in the video are actually derived from a way of thinking that long predates the 2008 election and the rise of Obama—it’s called Leftism, which, by the way, Shea’s Church opposed rather vigorously until the second half of the twentieth century. 

But topping them all is Jonah Goldberg, whose recent piece in NRO indicates that he’s now occupying a realm beyond self-parody: “Do it, President Obama, please. Take the side of democracy.”

My favorite part of the oration is Goldberg’s discussion of the liberals’ tragically losing their way—that is, not bombing and “democraticizing” enough people!  

Perhaps the most revealing part of the blog comes when Goldberg lets slip the fantastical desire lying just behind his words, and one, I imagine, that’s shared by most third-generation neocons—they just want to be loved:

Hate to break it to Jonah, but they don’t like you, they really don’t like you.  

And there’s actually little definitive evidence that the election this past week was actually stolen or that it marked a definitive repudiation of President Bugaboo. Yes, the large turnout, especially among the young, would seem to point to support for a “reform candidate,” and, yes, Ahmadenjehad’s margin of victory is rather incredible; however, as the Washington Post reports, a “nationwide public opinion survey [pdf] of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin—greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.” At the very least, the idea that we’re witnessing some national awakening to liberal democracy is clearly overdone.

And who is this Mr. Democracy, the man all these Persian admirers of Martin Luther King are cheering for? I admit, I’d never heard of Mir-Hossein Mousavi until this week. But according to his wikipedia page, he’s been an editor of the Islamic Republic Party’s official newspaper and a member of the High Council of Cultural Revolution. He served as prime minister of Iran under the Ayatollahs from 1981-89, during the infancy of Iran’s nuclear program. He’s also made no indication whatsoever that he wants to reverse Iran’s development of nuclear power and weapons so as to live in harmony with the peace-loving United States and Israel.

Put another way, if poor Mousavi gets elected, the neocons might decide that they need to bomb Iran anyway!

And even if the Narcissists tell us that Our Man in Tehran is but an unlikely, perhaps unwilling, “repository for the Iranian people’s hopes,” the simpler explanation is that the people in the streets are marching for … Mousavi—a reform-minded, slightly more liberal candidate who’d retain Iran’s independence, nuclear policy, and position towards the Great Satans.  

Tehran certainly is a more modern, secular, multicultural place than one might imagine from watching FOX News—with its urban centers, its non-Muslim, Persian, and Zoroastrian traditions still in effect, and its girls who seductively push us their hajibs to display their bangs. I’ve heard that in parts of the capital, the atmosphere’s almost parisien. But then does any of this mean that Iranians will like America any more than, say, the Parisians?  I think not.        

I expect a rather rude awakening for many a beltway journalist and blogger when some 32-character “tweets” much like the following start coming over the wire:

Aktar213: OMG! Americans think we do this because we love them and their “freedom”
Fereshteh345: LOLROTF!!!
&Atoosa:Sullivan & Goldberg are such tools!!!!!!
  
The Iranians have surely got their own version of dumbed-down, sassy blogspeak, but the sentiments would be much the same. 

Once upon a time, there were The Founders. Though tragically trapped in their slave holding and lack of gender and ethnic diversity, these wise fellows envisioned that on the American continent might arise a new nation that would evolve into exactly what we have today. And in order to make this dream a reality, they emitted a pool of timeless and amorphous “values”—values that have now been actualized as a poor Latina girl from the South Bronx who has been appointed to the Supreme Court.

I’ve often thought that most every journalist in Washington has this kind of PBS version of history swirling around in his head. And this morning, it must have been quite exciting for them all as they heard their fantasy recounted to them in detail by that proverbial Poor-Latina-Girl-From-The-South-Bronx-Who-Made-It-All-The-Way-To-The-Supreme Court—and she even did it with one of those bland, PBS voices you’d expect to hear narrating the latest installment of The American Experience.

To be fair, I was rather surprised to read a hit piece on Sotomayor, in The New Republic no less (!?!), in which she’s described by a former colleague as “not that smart and kind of a bully.” This about someone who graduated Summa Cum Laude! Affirmative Action Admissions can get you into Princeton (just ask the First Lady), but it doesn’t guarantee that you make it to the top of the grading scale (just ask the First Lady). So, I suspect that Sotomayor is at the very least very clever and tenacious.

In the American Left/Right paradigm, conservatives talk about “strict constructionist” vs. “judicial activists” when it comes to SCOTUS nominees. But their overriding concern is Roe, Roe, Roe (with perhaps terrorists detainee decisions now playing a minor role.) And this time ‘round, the abortion issue might be all the more contentious since, as Obama mentioned in his introduction of his nominee, Sotomayor went to Catholic school and, according to her Wiki page, is a practicing Roman Catholic (?). 

But the nomination is, for me at least, even more in-ter-esting in terms of race issues. Not only did Sotomayor make it clear that she’d be representin’ the South Bronx (you go, girl!), she also seems to have internalized many of the PC memes of academic Critical Race Theory:

Though we might want to ponder just what “better” might entail, it’s clear that ol’ Sonia plans to be the “Social Justice Justice,” and if confirmed, she’d be constantly yammering about how she’s the dog-gone only one who could possibly understand the real “context” of this or that case that comes before the court. 

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Furthermore, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that though Sotomayor hasn’t offered any major opinions on abortion in her career, she was actually one of the seven justices who this past month opined against Frank Ricci et al. in the recent “reverse discrimination” case, in which Ricci and 16 other firefighters sued the city of New Haven after it discarded some standardized test scores that didn’t adhere to America’s a priori notion of the proper racial distribution of academic outcomes. Obama has given us a glimpse of his “post-racial America.”

(Sotomayor’s decision on Ricci also reveals one of those funny things about most Ivy League, Perfect Résumé-type people (which Steven Pinker talked about in The Blank Slate and which Steve Sailer has discussed numerous times): The Great Test Takers are all obsessed with “getting in” to the Big Universities, mostly for what it reveals to the world about their SAT and LSAT scores. But when it comes to other people, especially non-White and non-Asian other people, they take it as a matter of doctrine that scores on intelligence tests are completely irrelevant and should be discarded at judicial or legislative whim, and if you talk about them at all, that probably means you’re racist.)  

Will the Religious Right, and other groups who insist that we must always rally behind Republicans because “it’s about the judges,” go after Sotomayor on these “race” issues? My sense is that they will not. But I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.     

For a webzine attempting to carve out an “Alternative Right,” and one dedicated to a fearless assault on PC in all its varieties, the topics of “race” and “white identity” are bound to come up—along with some questions that make most modern-minded Americans squirm in their chairs: Is race real? (Genetically speaking, that is, and not just as a cultural gloss or a wicked construct of bourgeois economic domination). If so, should race play a part in politics, especially with regard to immigration and the culture wars? No one here much likes Al Sharpton, but should us white folks consider rallying behind a paler-skinned version? Is “Western Civilization” all about white people?

It should be obvious to any regular reader of Taki’s Magazine what our answers to the second question (white identity politics, a white Al) are. Takimag is not a “white nationalist” website. And a few of our contributors have argued that discussions of race or whiteness are entirely unhelpful (or even immoral) and should be avoided.

On this last contention, I disagree. In our increasingly globalized world (it’s not just a cliché), race hasn’t been obscured or overcome, as many had hoped, but heightened and magnified—and contemporary white consciousness, if we’re to use this term, is so complicated and bizarre (more on that below) that no serious cultural publication should refrain from discussing it. And for the record, I don’t have any problem with asking Jared Taylor, probably the most prominent “white nationalist” in America, to offer a contribution on the subject. Though I was a bit surprised that after I asked him to write something on “white consciousness: a state of confusion,” he delivered an essay that seems to be warning against the dangers of miscegenation (even though less than five percent of marriages in America are mixed.) Though to be fair, I sense that Taylor’s main objection is not so much to miscegenation itself as to white leaders’ treating it as righteous, transcendent, and necessary, which, I agree, is quite odd. 

But back to the point. Why should we delve into these inconvenient, career-ending topics?

Well, first off, glimpsed in a host of different activities, from Whole Foods shopping to NASCAR, heterogeneous white consciousness is fascinating. Most American whites aren’t like the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie depicted in Stuff White People Like; however, the website does get at the irony and ambivalence, and no small amount of self-deception and self-loathing, that composes contemporary white consciousness. Take for instance these five Stuffs:

• #14 Having Black Friends
• #116 Black Music That Black People Don’t Listen To Anymore
• #107 Self-Aware Hip Hop References
• #7 Diversity (“but only as it relates to restaurants”)
• #8 Barack Obama (“Because white people are afraid that if they don’t like him that they will be called racist.”)

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The faux anthropological tone of SWPL is subversive, and has right-wing implications, in that it reveals the PC charade of so many whites’ public behavior. As Steve Sailer has written on numerous occasions, for elites, PC is a workplace battle royal in which whites (and Asians) compete for status and jobs fighting over who’s more tolerant, diversity-embracing, and generally Obamawonderful. As I’ve learned from some friends who work at large law firms at New York, the entry fee for the game is an abiding respect for diversity and the institution of gay marriage and a intuitive knowledge of when and when not Asians and Jews are considered protected classes and when and when not to mention in a hiring session that a gay applicant might “add to diversity.” (I’ve even noted that megafirms like Kirkland and Ellis have taken to holding outreach hiring fares for potential “GLBT” associates—which, no doubt, have inspired many straight white guys to do a Tootsie routines, camp it up a bit and hope to land a super job as a diversity hire.) And as Sailer points out in his Takimag essay, the elites that take part in all this are aware that it’s blue collars whites and those bereft of perfect résumés and 1400 SAT scores who are actually getting screwed over by affirmative action, and not them.

Some play the game cynically; some simply don’t think about it; some actively believe in it all and think that embracing diversity is an act of great virtue. What’s most important is that whites have instituted the PC regime on themselves (and rigorously enforce and maintain it). No alien power or coalition of disgruntled minorities have forced whites to act is such stupid ways and believe such stupid things; it’s all been the fault WASPs, Jews, and other shades of blanche. Ending state-enforced PC (anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, quotas etc.) is certainly a laudable goal (and at the moment commands majority support); however, I doubt, this would mark an end to the self-enforced PC that one finds in levels of private organizations. Recognizing this fact is more helpful in understanding contemporary white consciousness than thinking about traditional folkways.

Moreover, while a great many blacks might enjoy the benefits of affirmative action, and might even support Al Sharpton in one of his Public Shamings, very, very few of them genuinely believe in Diversity Dogma quite like whites do. Indeed, most blacks I’ve known are refreshingly heretical when it comes to PC (that is to say, honest-er.)

And it’s also wrong to pretend that PC is simply an elite phenomenon (even if, granted, a great deal of PC legislation has been instituted from above and kept from public view.) Movement conservatives and the paleos have often thought of themselves as waging war on the “Cultural Marxists” in the universities, who are out to destroy Western culture and America’s traditions. And it’s well and good to go after things like the Frankfurt School,  ThugNiggaIntellectual, and the U.C. Department of the History of Consciousness, which have all been destructive. It’s more difficult, and painful, of course, to come to terms with the fact that every major Christian congregation, from the Roman Church to the Southern Baptist Convention to Bob Jones U. (which once forbid interracial dating), has embraced something in the line of the Psychic Unity of Mankind—that is, not so much a respect for “the other” but a saccharine one-world altruism. Pope Benedict, for example, who many tell me is a staunch conservative, has openly advocated, along with something that sounds a lot like socialism, the need for whites to achieve solidarity with all non-whites by letting them all into their countries. (One is reminded of Spengler’s line about “Christian theology [being] the grandmother of Bolshevism.”) And there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that a sizeable majority of believers, including many who identify as “conservative,” don’t generally adhere to the Pope’s worldview, if not all of his policy proscriptions.  

Jared Taylor might want whites to unite as a group, and, perhaps, from a purely utilitarian point of view, it might be in their best interest to do so. However, white consciousness remains (hypocritically) egalitarian—and this “state of confusion” is a product not simply of cultural Marxist brainwashing but Christianity itself. An activist white consciousness is probably not possible, regardless of whether it’s desirable. 

This being said, there remains a pressing need for the people of the West to develop dignified and rational ways of relating to peoples of other races and cultures—and without resorting to the nauseating “anti-racism” and one-world-ism we’ve all been hooked on since the ‘60s. For this, real honesty about ourselves is a good place to start. 

Someone once told to me that at a John Randolph Club meeting back in the ‘90s, a man in the audience asked Sam Francis whether a recent GOP initiative, a big new social program or backdoor amnesty or some such thing, spelled the death of the party. Sam’s retort, “Well, I sure hope so!” The crowd erupted. If the Democrats were Evil, then perhaps there was kind of virtue to the Republican’s status as merely Stupid. But by the end of Sam’s career, he was convinced that the GOP was both and should be dispensed with entirely.        

This anecdote came to mind while I was reading my friend Jim Antle’s latest piece for The American Conservative. Not that it was stupid, or evil, but it did make me think that dedicating our energies towards rescuing the GOP from defeat (or itself or whatever) is a strategy that promises few rewards for the Alternative Right.  

In “Beyond the Paleos,” Jim offers some cautious optimism about the prospects for “a flinty, sober Republicanism, socially conservative but not preachy, pro-defense but not hyper-interventionist, [which] could win in places where the GOP is losing, like New Hampshire and the Interior West.” Antle’s advice is that the GOP adopt some paleo-ish positions on immigration, spending, and defense, while avoiding the cantankerousness and traditions of infighting and grudge-holding of the actual paleoconservatives. This strategy, according to Jim, wouldn’t just “build a conservatism that can win again,” but might allow us in the Alternative Right to actually vote for the GOP without desiring to scrub ourselves down with Lava soap immediately afterwards.    

Would such a scheme work? Perhaps. It’s certainly been tried before. George Bush and Condolezza Rice got a long way in 2000 promising a “humble foreign policy”—almost as if they were cribbing talking points from Srdja Trifkovic—and goodness knows how much Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani helped themselves with the GOP base by promising to get tough on illegal immigration. And then there was Sarah Palin’s channeling of Chilton Williamson as she stood up for “the real America” at the GOP convention (a position Governor Youbetcha found perfectly compatible with the Wall Street bailouts and increased federal funding for children with autism.) And who could forget Newt Gingrich’s radical “rEVOLution” in 1995… Come to think of it, it seems that for quite some time, the GOP has been pursuing a “paleo” strategy on the campaign trail.  In retrospect, all that “force of history” and “expansion of freedom in all the world” nonsense amounted to a rhetorical blip, a discourse that worked well from 2003 to 2005, began to sound flat in 2006, and by 2009 was abandoned almost entirely. And since Obama is now the one spouting globalism, one can expect the GOP to return to the tried-and-true paleoism for at least the next decade. (Someone should probably bring up this classic campaign tactic at a meeting of the GOP “listening tour” coming to a pizza parlor near you.)  

Anyway, instead of focusing on rhetoric, perhaps we should inquire into exactly what we’d get if the Republicans somehow pull themselves together and eke out a Romney-Palin victory in 2012 using the language of faith, family, and small-town values? I can’t tell the future, but I imagine we’d see something on the order of an incoherent and expensive, if slightly less “redemptive,” foreign policy, a moderately smaller and less inflationary “stimulus package,” interest rates at 0.0001 percent—as opposed to the reckless 0—and a new healthcare expansion with lots of “free-market” incentives. Yippee! And, of course, the conservative hardliners would be placated with lots of allusions to the “Culture of Life” (with a ban on preachiness strictly observed, of course). We also might want to look at the last extended period of Republican rule in Washington (2000-2006) to get an idea of what delights we’d have in store. 

Perhaps we should also inquire into whether America’s total screwed-up-ness is best understood on the level of rhetoric. Put another way, in arguing that the paleos might achieve something with a shift in the GOP’s rhetoric, Jim presumes, in a sense, a kind of “primal scene” in which GOP and movement Big Wigs met in a haunt in Arlington, Virginia, and all deferred to a guy who said something like, “Listen dudes, the way to achieve a lasting victory is to promise the American people that we’ll engage in foreign wars without end, expand the government to the point of insolvency, support the Israelis unconditionally, and at one point, get the Fed to print up trillions of dollars and then hand them out indiscriminately to our friends on Wall Street. Now, granted, at some point, we’ll have to follow through with these promises, and this might lead to the downfall of our once-great country, but hell, it’ll be worth it. Winning is everything!” 

Obviously, politics doesn’t work this way—alas, for if it did, we might be able to rescue our country from decline by crafting a super new GOP campaign strategy. Moreover, if we don’t want to just interpret the world, but actually change it, then we need to grasp that what’s wrong with America has some very specific, concrete causes that can’t be countered by increased uses of the words “decentralism,” “realism,” and “prudence” on the campaign trail and at various assemblies of the American Conservative Union.

Over the past few years, scholars like John Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, and Stephen Sniegoski have brought to light the influence the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee enjoys in Washington, regardless—and many times in spite—of the opinions of the Republican and Democrat voters. I actually think that the neocons “believe their own stupid bullshit,” so to speak, about the equation of American power and global democracy yadayadayada; however, there’s no doubt that any potential war with Iran, China, or Russia would take place along monetary, economic, and imperial battle lines. Tehran’s decision to price oil in Euros, Beijing’s dumping of its dollar reserves, or Moscow’s resumption of its hegemony in the caucuses might all spark military conflicts. And though America’s involvement would invariably be explained away using the language of “human rights” and “national security,” the reasons why the state would be at war would have little to do with a politician’s relative “hawkishness” while campaigning. Moreover, in a mass democracy, demography is political destiny, and one need look no further than to the expansion of the underclass through third-world immigration and immiseration—and the empowerment of bureaucratic and corporate elites who seek to be the lower order’s enlightened managers—to understand why government will continue to grow and grow and grow unrelentingly. To think of the expansion of the state only in terms of whether welfare is or is not a winning campaign issue (à la Ross Douthat & Co.) is to miss the point entirely.       

Turning back to the question of campaign rhetoric, I’m not so sure that, as Jim argues, a willingness to prudently compromise—“a successful GOP candidacy along these lines would be more hawkish, more government-friendly, and less directly critical of Bush than I would prefer”—is actually a particularly effective strategy. And conversely, I find there’s a certain virtue to being horribly impractical, stubborn, and a bit craaazy. For years, people thought Ron Paul’s criticism of the Federal Reserve—and, worse, his advocacy of something as barbaric as the gold standard—were what kept him from mainstream legitimacy. Well, Dr. Paul stuck with these positions, and though I doubt we’re going to end the Fed any time soon, his latest “audit the Fed” bill (HR 1207) has 149 co-sponsors to date —including 19 Democrats. This is much more than one could say for any other piece of legislation introduced by a Republican in the age of Obama. Moreover, though the Ron Paul grassroots “Revolution” isn’t perfect, its fund-raising capacity and mass appeal overpowers the collection of moderate prigs David Frum has assembled at “New Majority.” A successful Alternative Right strategy might be to accept no compromise whatsoever on a constellation of key issues—mass immigration, monetary, fiscal, and foreign policies being key—and wait patiently for objective conditions to change in a way that these matters are thrust to the fore. What can’t go on forever won’t, and as we’ve seen with the monetary issue, an opportunity in the form of a major crisis shall come.  

Regardless, the Alternative Right should aim for something bigger than a marginally-less-horrible Republican Party. Indeed, I wonder whether we should actually give a fig about the electoral health of the GOP. As Zarathustra teaches, that which is falling—decaying, weakening, dying—should also be pushed. Let’s hope that one day, with its corruption, failure, and cowardice foaming up about its waist, the GOP will look up to the Ron Paul movement and shout “Save Us!” And the movement will look down and whisper “No.” 

UPDATE: Daniel Larison responded to my article, and I responded to his response, which elicited another response.        

Not too long ago, Christopher Hitchens was busying himself justifying George W. Bush, the neocons, and the Iraq war—er, “liberation”—on avowedly Marxian grounds. (It would seem justifying Dubya, Frumy, and Wolfowitz requires some kind to recourse of Marxism.) And the columnist was rewarded with the warm embrace of the flagship of American conservatism. In the Age of Obama, Hitch has himself been liberated from the burden of Left-neocon triangulation and can now just write about how much he loves Marx. And something seems to be in the air.  For just last week, the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who arrived on the scene in 2007 as a Team America neocon idol, has been spied paging through a dog-eared copy of Das Kapital. (Perhaps now the Maoist French philosopher Alain Badiou might want to rethink his claim that after the election of Sarko, the global human subject ceased to exist.)     

This great dialectical reversal, or return to roots, or outburst of honesty, or whatever is happening, portends a coming bombardment of articles and books on why Karl Marx “matters”—perhaps “now more than ever”—and how the bearded sage has finally been proven right by the collapse of the Lehman Bros. investment bank. From out the woodwork will come legions of professors with endowed chairs in polysci and “literature,” all eager to exact revenge for the “End of History” triumphalism they had to endure for the past 15 years.

Foreign Policy magazine, the organ of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, is out in front of the pack on these matters, and so here we go: 

The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin.

Penning his most famous works in an era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. He was singularly cognizant of what he called the “most revolutionary part” played in human history by the bourgeoisie—those forerunners of today’s Wall Street bankers and corporate executives. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

“Contradictions” inherent in capitalism, eh? The author of the above paragraphs, Canadian tenured radical Leo Panitch, doesn’t exactly explain how our current woes were caused by the immiseration of the working class or a crisis of overproduction, or any of the economic concepts Marx actually wrote about—suffice it to say that he saw it all coming.  

Well… I think Marx is a highly relevant thinker to the present age—but then not because the Labor Theory of Value reveals much of anything about the current crisis. First off, pace Panitch, Marx actually had a great deal of admiration for the bourgeoisie, whom he praised for transforming the means of production (that is, manufacturing and technology, not exactly the financial instruments of today’s Wall Streeters.) Marx dreamed that the world the industrialists made might soon canvas the entire globe, wiping away the last remnants of traditional, pre-modern social orders—and then, just in time, collapse so that a communistic society could arise. It’s a worldview very unlike that of contemporary radicals, or at least the people one meets at WTO and Davos protests, most all of whom view “capitalism” as categorically evil and soul-destroying, and something which, if it’s not stopped right away, might raise ocean levels to the point that authenticity in the Third World is washed away. Contempo Marxism’s milder, more bureaucratic practitioners might only want global capitalism with a human face, not revolution, but they, too, view industrial development as a practice of strictly limited value, and which should be capped and controlled whenever possible.

Marx, on the other hand, is a bright-eyed futurist (his forecasts of collapse not withstanding), and in the few passages in which he describes utopia, it’s a techno Wonderland in which working people are fishermen in the morning, literary critics by mid afternoon, the division of labor rendered unnecessary. Marx has more in common with the Silicon Valley guru who waxes lyrical about the revolutionary possibilities of Twitter than he does with the current “far Left,” which has oddly embraced the ascetic ideal and low-flush toilets. Spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill, who can rightly call himself a Marxist, is one of the few on the Left to have properly understood “austerity chic” and the life-hating animus behind “green,” a worldview in which“Can I recycle my granny?” is a major eco-dilemma.        

And pace Panitch again, the heroic, world-transforming bourgeoisie of Marx’s imagination is not particularly well represented by today’s Wall Street banksters. And in turn, the financial instruments that got them in trouble, “mortgage-backed securities,” “collaterized debt obligations,” etc., are expressions of the absence of capitalism (as Marx and other Classical economists understood it) in America rather than its triumph.

To understand this, one should ask why Wall Street needed to cook up a derivatives market for mortgages to finance the housing boom in the first place. The answer is simply that there wasn’t enough real credit. Capitalism (before it destroys your soul and disenchants the world) is about delaying consumption and investing savings (that is, “capital”) in future production. Put simply, you put your money in the bank, which, in turn, loans it out to someone who plans to make stuff. The problem is that for the past 25 years, Americans’ rate of personal savings has dwindled to zero, finally going negative in 2005. No savings means no capital means no capitalism, and the securitization process was the only way the massive expansion of mortgage credit was possible.

To a large extent, the lack of savings resulted from the fact that prices were inflated upwards at such a clip that wages and salaries couldn’t keep up. But much of this has to do as well with America’s emergence in the twenty-first century as a post-bourgeois social order. The Protestant Work Ethic of delayed gratification had given way to “Your Best Life Now!,” saving was replaced with credit-card binging at the megamall. The middle classes began resorting to house flipping and home-equity loans as sources of income, or as ways of funding their totally awesome lifestyles; the lower orders were, in turn, funneled into the heavily socialized healthcare industry. (Between 2001-2006, healthcare added 1.7 million jobs, the rest of the private sector, zippo; healthcare’s now the only sector besides government that isn’t shrinking). On the whole, Americans were redeployed into industries that were either financed by massive deficit spending on the part of the government (healthcare) or unsustainable government-induced credit expansion (the housing boom). Or if you were really lucky, you got a job in finance.

As Addison Wiggin has documented, the steady growth of GDP over the past decade was purchased by taking on more and more and more debt: “Under Mr. Greenspan’s term, U.S. credit and debt added up to $8.505 trillion. That means it took $4.80 of new debt to create one dollar of GDP. And now, with the burden of U.S. credit and debt up to 9.149 trillion under his successor, Ben Bernanke, it will take more than $5 to create one dollar of GDP.” These diminishing returns should be pretty alarming to our government leaders, as in the past months we’ve added an additional 2 trillion of debt and gotten negative 6 percent GDP growth out the other end. We’re only now facing a full-blown economic crisis, but capitalism collapsed quite some time ago.

What has replaced capitalism in America isn’t quite communism… But that doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects of the American system that wouldn’t positively recommend themselves to Karl Marx. Long, long before the TEA party protestors and the Texas governor were outraged over Barack Obama’s “socialist” tendencies, America had already implemented no less than five of the ten necessary components of a worker’s social order outlined by Marx and Engels in The Manifesto: the progressive income tax, centralization of credit in the banks of the state (Federal Reserve System), agricultural policy, and compulsory public education. And Washington now seems close to checking off Numero Uno on the list—the abolition of real property rights in land and the “application of all rents of land to public purposes”—with its recent intervention in the housing market, breaking contracts that only years before it spurred lenders to make.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, American “liberals” were referring less often to “market failures,” and instead had begun pursuing what Peter Brimelow has called “neo-socialism”: Government wouldn’t so much correct market inefficiencies as harness capitalism in order to expand “diversity” and equality—George W. Bush’s attempt to institute affirmative action in “subprime” mortgage lending being the example par excellence. Neosocialism. Retrosocialism.  At this point, it looks like bureaucrats will get to experiment with a little bit of both.     

It’s only dumb Marxists like Professor Panitch who are oblivious to these developments, and instead prattle on about how the über-capitalist USA might, in its moment of crisis, learn something from its intellectual adversary, Karl Marx. Take, for instance, one of Panitch’s supposedly “radical” Marxist proposal, which was “ironically” put forth by an insider of the current financial system:  

Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions. Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. 

Yet what exactly is “too big to fail”—or the 96-4% “public-private partnerships” Tim Geithner has invited hedge funds to take part in—other than a transformation of the financial industry into a sort of public-spirited social service? This isn’t to say that certain people don’t profit, mightily, by gaming the bailout system. But when Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson sat down former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis last September and essentially ordered him to purchase Merrill Lynch—and commit obvious insurance fraud—the Fed Chairman’s and Secretary of the Treasury’s motives were entirely “patriotic.” Even if the whole thing amounted to welfare for the rich, and even if massive corruption was inevitable, the pair of bankers were attempting, quite genuinely, to “save capitalism” with a new social program. In both an expansion of government and a coup d’état by big finance, Wall Street and Washington highjacked one another. It’s a transformation that’s difficult, if not impossible, to undo.  And I seriously doubt it will be before the United States goes the way of the Soviet Union.        

According to Paul Krugman, the some 700 “Tea Parties” that sprung up in all 50 states yesterday weren’t really about taxes and government spending. They were instead an opportunity for the disposed yahoodom of fly-over country to huddle together and grunt about Barack Obama’s Muslim faith and the wickedness of the theory of evolution, and perhaps consider persecuting a dissenter or two—all of it funded/manipulated by “the usual group of right-wing billionaires.”

The things Krugman associates with the grassroots Right are, of course, easy to mock. But whenever I read articles like this, I find myself wishing that the GOP base actually were just as “crazy” as establishment liberals like Krugman think it is—that at Takimag we’d be spending our time warning heartland conservatives about the dangers of full-out anarcho-capitalism and deconstructing the nuttier anti-Washington conspiracy theories, and not wincing every time we hear a Republican voter mouth “Islamo-fascism.”

The kernel of truth in Krugman’s op-ed is that ever since the collapse of Lehman Bros. this fall, the conservative grassroots has’t been responding to “Islamo-Fascism” talk; indeed, they haven’t seemed much interested in foreign policy at all. For the first time in at least a decade, conservatives appear to be rediscovering their “Don’t Tread on Me,” Old Right tradition. People like Krugman are always diagnosing right-wing tendencies as either sub-rational pathologies, or effects of an opiate fed to them by billionaire industrialists. It’s worth noting, however, that while only two years ago, Krugman & Co. were fretting over conservatives’ embrace of some kind of democracy-spreading clerical fascism, they’re now depicting the grassroots Right as something akin to the 9/11 Truth Movement and the machine gun enthusiasts of Knob Creek. This is a major shift. 

At the Tea Party I attended outside New York City Hall, where the crowd stretched on for some three blocks, Newt Gingrich was the featured speaker. Newt has always been attuned to grassroots discontent, often publishing an instabook or two that jive with the prevailing conservative mood. Newt has also been quite skilled at harnessing populist, anti-government animus and utilizing it for the election of Republicans to high office. After conservatives were split in ’92 by Buchanan’s insurgency in the primaries and Ross Perot’s third-party run in the general, Newt put the movement back together again just two years later—conveniently helping push NAFTA through a Democrat Congress right before the new class was sworn in and swiftly delimiting the ’94 “revolution” with a focus-grouped “Contract with America.” Six years later, the GOP was in power, to be sure, but Newt was gone, government hadn’t retreated an inch, the revolution had fizzled out into a finger-wagging campaign over Bill Clinton’s sex life, and George W. Bush had emerged as the Republican standard bearer promising “compassion.” 

Groups like the Campaign for Liberty, which was out in force yesterday, should take note of this cautionary tale. Nevertheless, it must be surprising—and rather gratifying—for them to think that this time ‘round, it’s groups like the CfL, and the Ron Paul movement as a whole, that Newt & Co. are attempting co-opt. In the two plus hours of speeches I heard yesterday, only once did a speaker, a gruff talk-radio host of some sort, bloviate about the war on terror; and when he did, he was interrupted by a colorful figure straight out of a Ron Paul rally—dressed in boxer shots, wearing sunglasses, and holding up a sign reading “The Banksters Robbed Me Blind”—who was shouting above it all “Abolish the Federal Reserve!” In a crowd of thousands, I saw only two or three blue-blazer-and-kakis Frumbots—and hundreds of normal Americans holding up signs reading “End the Fed,” “If I Wanted to Be a Commie, I’d Stay in China” and “Republicans + Democrats = National-Socialism.” The Department of Homeland Security, the centerpiece of Bush’s post-9/11 government expansion, was mentioned by the speakers only with scorn and distain, particularly after it was revealed this week that Secretary Janet Napolitano will be going after “right-wing radicals” and not just “the terrorists.” The New York Tea party felt a lot like all the big Ron Paul rallies I attended last year, and a very little like the priggish and intolerably boring CPAC.

The Bush-Rove Republicans never reached out to any of these Tea Party people, despite Dubya’s Midland accent and promises of a “humble foreign policy,” and certainly never considered sounding an anti-Washington message. (The prized independents were instead Latinos, the mostly ideologically agnostic evangelicals Christian, and the Clintonite and suburban “soccer moms,” all of whom were wooed with talk of a welfare-statist “compassionate conservatism.” By 2004, the soccer moms had acquired a “security” monicker and were still voting Republican, but by 2006, most had returned to the Democrat fold. The Latinos never really came on board.)

There’s no question that the Republicans would love to co-opt the Tea Party movement to strengthen their prospects in 2010, but my sense last night was that the “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd might be a bit too radical to be neutralized and Republicanized easily. Drudge is reporting that Texas Governor Rick Perry, who until this past week appeared to be a Dubya’s second coming, is saying Kinky Friedman-worthy stuff, like that Texas has right to secede from the Union. The Republican grassroots is becoming less focused on Iraq, Israel, and Putin and beginning to direct its ire towards Washington. With any luck, this Tea party movement might turn out be just as “crazy” as Paul Krugman thinks it is. Let’s hope so.  

Well, Peter was right, and a video a highlight reel of his truth-telling became the YouTube sensation of the financial crisis—spurring the legions of Troy to launch a counterattack on Cassandra.

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Peter in his office, and the resulting interview reveals quite a bit about what lies behind Peter’s famous calls from the past 4-5 years. Specially, he talks about why lenders had to resort to financial instruments like “mortgage-backed securities” in lieu savings, why he opposes protectionism and the auto bailouts but thinks trade deficits really do matter, and how his father, the income tax protester Irwin Schiff, influenced his economic thinking.  

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The editors say they created the ‘zine in response to the financial crisis, which, according to them, occurred, at least in part, due to a deficit of “concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future” in public discourse.  Okaaay. I’m not sure what this blog will end up being, but as signposts go, it’s worth discussing its first article, an anti-Rush Limbaugh screed by editor-at-large Rod Dreher, a man I drank a few beers with the last time I was in Big D.  

As it should be obvious to all, I and the rest of Takimag weren’t too enthusiastic about the recent CPAC and Rush Limbaugh’s assumption (or is it appointment by Rahm Emmanuel?) as the new Chairman of the Conservative Movement/GOP. This being said, a reading of Rod’s critique of Rush makes me want to enlist with the Dittoheads.

Says Rod,

[I]n brief, the gist of what’s wrong with Limbaughism is that it’s right-wing Rousseauism. That is, he believes that man is born free, but is put in chains by the government. He believes in living without limits is the essence of conservatism, which is just … crazy. If traditional-minded conservatives know anything, it’s that human nature is fallen, and there are natural limits that must be respected. Conservatism is a form of humility. I see none of that in Limbaugh and what he stands for.

Where to begin? The whole Rousseau comparison is exceedingly odd; it almost makes one think that all Rod’s knows of the philosopher is the famous opening line of The Social Contract, “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” (Though he might also know that other really famous line—“[W]hoever refuses to obey the General Will shall be compelled to do so … forced to be free”—which Rod might have heard about when in 2002 the Pentagon instituted it as its new motto, replacing the term “General Will” with “The Pentagon.”) Anyway, Rod seems to conceive “right-wing Rousseauism” as a kind of radical individualist-hedonistic-“do what you want, consequences be damned” libertarianism. On his “Crunchy Con” blog, he’s more explicit, associating Limbaughism-Rouseauism with support for entrepreneurism and technological advancement—both of which he doesn’t seem to like very much, calling Rush’s words of praise for American business and innovation “crack” and “uncut Progressivism” (which, for me, evokes an image I’d rather not repeat…). If Rod had read The Social Contract, he might have discovered that Rousseau’s abiding concern is not that government is going to smother anyone’s freedom but that particular and personal interests might not be patriotic and public-spirited enough, and thus might need to be submerged in the General Will. Moreover, Rod might find some elective affinities (pretty obvious from my standpoint) between Rousseau’s primitivism—his sense that we were all better off in the days of yore and that man has been corrupted by civilization (not government)—and Rod’s own “Crunchy” project.

“El Rushbo” has many failings, but advocating hedonism and moral depravity is not one of them (putting aside his forgivable prescription-drug addiction and his unforgivable advocacy of the destructive Iraq war, which Dreher also supported, by the way.) No hedonist, Rush does, however, market himself as a defender of free-market capitalism and minimal government (though many of us wish he’d been a little more of a vocal defender of these things when Bush was jacking up regulations, entitlements, and government employment.) Anyway, these “front-porch Republicans” like to talk a lot about “limits,” and Rod himself emphasized the “natural limits that must be respected.” All this sounds vaguely environmentalist, or religious or something—except Rod juxtaposes “limits” with Rush’s advocacy of the free-market, indicating that the “limits” he’s really interested are those set down for us by the welfare state. On the Crunchy Con blog, he makes this clear, fretting that in talk-radio land, “Any attempt to grapple in a public way with the sins and failings of America, the errors that got us into this ditch, is to be seen as unpatriotic.” 

Thus under the guise of being an “old fashioned” conservative (but certainly not Old Right), Rod joins in the chorus announcing that the current financial collapse was created by unrestrained “capitalism,” or Gordon Gekko-style “greed,” and that we must repent—in part through talking about “human scale” and in part through embracing the welfare state.  And though I know Rod has many criticisms of Obama’s “stimulus” bill, does it not get a tacit nod of approval from him since it’s a means of dealing with the failing of capitalism “in a public way”?

I don’t have the space or time to go into to all the ways that free-market capitalism is not to blame for the financial crisis, but let me just throw out this one.

As I think most everyone would agree, the catalyst that set the economic meltdown in motion was the housing crisis—specifically subprime lending and the pooling of consumer debt into those “mortgage backed securities” and similar financial instruments cooked up on Wall Street. In an actual free market, subprime loans never would have been made; they were only possible with the piles and piles of easy money provided to us by the Fed, as well as those “public spirited,” semi-governmental organizations with the cutesy names: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. (And Dubya, of course, spurred on the whole thing, as he hoped getting people into no-money-down mortgages would expand the Republican base, especially amongst minorities.) Indeed, one might imagine that if we actually had a free market in lending, Rod would always be complaining that those tight bankers never gave poorer Americans a chance to own a front porch of their own, with no money down.

Nevertheless, the whole government-sponsored scheme was dependent upon home values rising indefinitely, and when they began to fall, it all blew up.

What’s important is that after the party was over, Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie haven’t been chastened; to the contrary, they’ve been empowered—they’re going to try to make more and more loans, now backed up by the government and the Fed’s printing press. With the latest TALF program, the Fed itself is getting into the act—no longer just re-capitalizing banks but making credit available for hedge funds, consumers, and car and home buyers. My point in all this is to emphasize that in dramatically expanding the state over the past six months, Obama and Bush have never claimed that greed is over and now we have to focus more on faith, family, and … “limits.” To the contrary, Washington is attempting to re-start debt-financed consumption. Obama’s programs are “socialist,” “Marxist,” and “Left-wing,” as Rush & Co. say they are, but then in the very vulgar American sense that Obama’s trying to use the power of the state to get everyone to go out there and spend, spend, spend—buy that new McMansion or Lexus, take out a student loan, buy more stocks, etc. etc. etc.

I doubt that Rod would support any of this. But then he might want to think seriously about his assumption that accepting the contemporary welfare state—and not, like Rush, believing that it’s something close to slavery—brings one closer to traditionalism and old-fashioned morality. To the contrary, the contemporary state promotes exactly the kind of unsustainable (in the sense of “we can’t actually afford any of it”) consumerism and irresponsible individualism Rod claims to oppose. Something to consider, lest “Front-porch Republicanism” become equivalent to a non-critical “Family-Values Socialism.”     

So cheer up!

Austin’s essay on the distinction between “tragic” and “comic” libertarianism was sparked, I gather, from some email conversations between the two of us in which I’ve been waxing tragic (if not always displaying my devotion to liberty.) I remember nudging Austin to invest in some gold bullion in order to protect his family’s wealth from Ben Bernanke’s money printing and the massive destruction of asset value that us “tragics” see as imminent. Austin countered that while gold might hold its value, he remains a believer in modern portfolio theory (that is, broad diversification and index funds) because he thinks that over the next 40 years, there’ll be major technological and entrepreneurial breakthroughs and widespread wealth creation. Sooner or later, he says, we’ll have a repeat of the second half of the 20th century.

Perhaps. But my response, in turn, was that if in the spring of 1914, a British pundit publicly opined that in 40 years the Pound Sterling would be devalued and lose its worldwide “reserve currency” status, that the Empire would dissolve, and that the United Kingdom as a whole would be significantly poorer, onlookers would probably dismiss him as a crank, or perhaps even question his sanity. And yet, all these things would come to pass. 

If “tragic libertarianism” means an undeceived grasp of the harmful effects of the expansion of the welfare/warfare state and the degeneration of the human capital of our nation, as well as the natural rise and fall of empires and great powers, then it’s most definitely a useful and necessary corrective to groundless “American optimism” (whether of the Reaganite or Obamian variety.) And it’s something we very much need. I often find that it’s close to impossible for Boomers and Gen X/Yers (or whatever we’re called) to even countenance the idea of America not being numero uno. Many like the idea of a coming “multipolar” world, but the prospect that we would not be leading it is considered as implausibile as the Cubbies winning the World Series.  

If you’re a “tragic,” and you’ve thought seriously about a coming Great(er) Depression, then you’ve probably thought seriously about the crime waves and mass riots in the inner cities that might very well result from double-digit unemployment. And you’ve also considered what you might do amidst such chaos.

Luckily, one can banish these dark thoughts by letting one’s fancy light upon a vision of the quasi-tragic farce that might ensue once it begins to dawn on our political elites that they’re no longer Masters of the Universe. One can envision a hysteric and weeping Secretary of State Hillary barging in uninvited on diplomatic negotiations between representatives of two countries who’ve decided to resolve a dispute without the United States’ “help”—and who actually don’t much care what that country that owes everyone so much money thinks anyway. With mascara running down her cheeks, Hillary would cry out with indignation and shame, “Don’t you people remember that we’re fucking in-dis-pen-sable!” In facing up to declining power status, the Obama administration will likely make Communist hardliners of the early ‘90s seem reasonable and level-headed in comparison.  

I’d also add that I think there’s more to the tragic/comic distinction than merely changes in mood over the market’s ups and downs. Indeed, I find that the “tragic” and “comic” monikers actually distinguish two divergent schools of libertarianism, which, in fact, don’t include the same people and are based on radically different world views.

“Comics” at Reason like to reason that society isn’t just “getting better all the time” but since we are sooo consumerist and “diverse”—and just so darn gay—that a full-blown libertarian order is around the corner, if it’s not here already. Politics are a “lagging indicator” after all.

A “tragic” like Ayn Rand is different. The collectivist nightmare depicted in Atlas Shrugged—in which society is ruled by “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog” legislation and the Department of Financial Stability and Recovery (oh wait, is that last one fact or fiction?—does not ultimately derive, for Rand, from some terrible socialist ideology that arises in the future. Instead it’s produced by the reoccurrence of something very old. There are spirits of resentment, slavishness, collectivism, and willed mysticism that are always with us—and which often win out. Rand’s vision is tragic in that individual greatness is always rising and falling, triumphing and being dragged down, dying and being reborn.

We are, as it’s becoming crystal clear to even the most comic amongst us, living in a moment of descent. But never fear: “All things fall and are built again,
/ And those that build them again are gay.”

So cheer up!    

The webzine Culture11 officially closed up shop last week, ending a four month run as the web’s alternative conservative destination. 

Late last summer, I first heard rumors that there was a new well-funded conservative webzine in the works, which at the time was billed as “LibertyWire—the conservative answer to Slate”! The name soon morphed into “The Culture,” settling eventually on the West Berlin Disco-esque moniker “Culture11 .” Steve Forbes and Bill Bennett were underwriting the project, and at the time, I suspected we’d soon be treated to yet another neocon echo chamber. And since the 2nd and 3rd generation neocons who rule the roost on FOX are bereft of all discernible signs of culture, I braced myself for some groan-inducing fare—but which might serve as fodder for The Sniper’s Tower. 

I was quite wrong in my prediction. When Culture11 debuted in September, it offered slightly right-of-center articles, a social-networking “community,” and a buffet of subsite blogs that expanded at such a clip no one could keep up—the gamut ranged from the girls-only “Lady Blog” to “Postmodern Conservative” to “Health Care Crisis” to something called NOSH, a designated area for wacky YouTube videos. (And as of this writing, Bennet is still posting his “morning reports”!)

The top brass at Culture11 had a evangelical character, with David Kuo installed as the “CEO” and Joe Carter, author of the book How to Argue Like Jesus, aide to Mike Huckabee, and proprietor of the blog Evangelical Outpost, as managing editor. The rest of the staff was comprised not of the usual suspects, but the younger generation of DC-based intellectuals; there were even some amongst the staff who, low and behold, might be considered part of the “Alternative Right,” my loose term for the constellation of writers and organizations opposed to Washington’s bi-partisan foreign policy and who generally resist the “lesser of two evils” support for the evil-stupid Republican Party. C11 was trying to be something different, maybe even something similar to the revamped Takimag? And it’s worthwhile looking at exactly what went wrong.  

One place to start is with an anecdote I heard about “CEO” Kuo, which is so ridiculous it must be true. Kuo is, of course, the man who actually believed the Republicans really meant it when it came to all their “faith-based” crap and wanted to end abortion and help the poor and not just turn the ‘vangies into a reliable voting bloc. After this “seduction” was over, he wrote a whole book about how hurt he felt, leading him to become the liberal media’s favorite evangelical for a few weeks. Anyway, a friend pitched an article to Kuo on the culture of self-indulgence, mentioning that he’d discuss the high sales of a certain female sex toy with a funny name. Kuo rejected the pitch, writing the author back that he didn’t think C11 could use a piece on the Lord of the Rings saga … David Kuo, you seen, thought “Dildo” was a Hobbit.  

The episode reveals a lot about Culture11’s sense of “culture.” As was clear from a quick perusal of the site, high-brow criticism was completely absent, but then the site was never as fun as Gawker, PageSix, Vice and the other guilty-pleasure ‘zines that lay bare the horror show of American culture in its full splendor. As Joe Carter described in his post-mortem, the idea instead was to dispense with all those gray-haired conservative journalists and bring in young people who write like Hunter S. Thompson. They were successful in the sense that many contributors were below the legal drinking age, some not yet eligible to vote. And their work was “Thompson-esque” in that they were self-referential and talked about themselves all the time. But the subject matter under examination was never war, drink, and debauch but the PG-13 middlebrow culture of the Cineplex and Megamall. Articles included “Me & American Idol,” “Me and online social networking,” “Me & my first trip to the The Grooming Lounge hair salon chain .” The “culture” C11 explored was the suburban kitsch of the credit bubble of late-‘90s, early 2000s. I don’t know who exactly the audience was supposed to be: undergrads? Republican hipsters? The cool older guy at the Young Life retreat who knows all the chords to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”? All that is certain is that whenever I visited, I felt really old.     

I also always suspected that Bennett and Forbes, who, apparently, had originally planned to fund the venture through 2010, were pretty baffled by what was going on. I’ve always liked and read the “postmodern conservative” stylings of James Poulos, who’s interesting even when wrong, but I can’t imagine Bill Bennett really getting into this stuff. And add to this more layers of incongruity: the evangelical element, some staff members connected to movement publications like National Review and Human Events, a Crunchy Con, NOSH, and the thing emerges as one big incoherent clusterfuck. I’m sure Forbes and Bennett took big hits in the stock market crash (and the proliferation of online gambling has probably lightened the coffers of the Man of Virtue), but I also sense the pair pulled the plug on C11 for reasons other than financial.
  
Worst of all, in my mind at least, Culture11 succeeded in being incoherent without being particularly interesting or provocative. If the editors had all this money and they were willing to go off the leash, then the least they could do was give us something wild and crazy or capable of offending someone. Joe Carter mentioned that C11 was meant to resist politics and economics and focus on “culture” (i.e. self-refential articles on suburban crap). But as it turns out, the C11 staff talked quite a bit about politics and economics: features on how Sarah Palin wasn’t articulate or experienced enough to be the Republican nominee, some polite back-and-forths with Andrew Sullivan (who was given special thanks by an editor upon closing) on gay marriage, and a series of economic articles of a tepid free-market character that read like entries out of Conservapedia.

Put simply, the ‘zine was massively safe. One searches the archives in vain for a serious discussion of mass immigration—a “cultural” issue if there ever was one—or something even mildly hard-hitting on the bankster takeover of Washington. If there was a “paleo/libertarian” element, it was presented in the most harmless, domesticated, warm and cuddly guise—in the person of a “Crunchy” who wants us all to get in touch with the earth and posts zesty new recipes on his blog.

I heard it said that the editors wanted to change the original name, “LibertyWire,” because it sounded too much like a Ron Paul website. Well, a site like the Daily Paul, which has no funding and a staff of one, still thrives as place for the discussions of the concrete issues—monetary policy, stopping the bankster bailouts, ending the American empire—that matter to the grassroots conservatives who want something other than NRO and Townhall.com. C11, on the other hand, was a vehicle for 20-somethings to talk about themselves amongst themselves.          

In closing, a final note about web publishing. C11 went under at the same time that the neocon Pajamas Media will be shrinking its blog presence and ending its “blog advertising network” (I don’t what that was, but it sounds like it was supposed to make money) and focusing instead on video (get ready for some more Joe the Plumber reporting live from the Holy Land!) So it might seem that the conservative webzine market isn’t exactly taking advantage of the fall of print, and maybe even going the way of the dead-trees.     

But then, this need not be so. David Kuo gave a indication of what was wrong, very wrong, about the C11 business plan, when he revealed upon the death of the webzine, “[N]ow 14 people who worked very hard for this company … are looking for new jobs because theirs disappeared.” Fourteen people! I’m all for giving us bohemian journalists employment, but clearly, a staff this size was excessive. (I run Takimag all by my lonesome.) In the end, Culture 11 wasn’t just focused on all the boring non-culture I associated with the late-90s, but had itself become a kind of dot-com company, replete with ill-informed funders, an ill-defined product, massive capital expenditures, and a guru-like CEO who’s in fact naïve and buffoonish. And C11 eventually went the way of Kozmo and eToys.com.    

We can do better.