2008 October

It may be something of a surprise that, as a long time conservative, I now support Barack Obama. In 1968, I was a speechwriter first for Ronald Reagan, when Governor of California, then, as Richard Nixon became the presidential nominee, a speechwriter for Nixon, working at his home office at 450 Park Avenue. I became a senior editor at National Review in 1969, a position I held until recently.

There are common sense conservatives who are prudential, who try to match means with ends, and who calculate the probabilities of gains and risks. But there are philosophical (analytical) conservatives, the most useful being Edmund Burke, whose “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) understood the great dangers in trying to change society through abstract (republican) theory. My first book that dealt with these matters was “English Political writers: From Locke to Burke” (Knopf, 1963).

One thing I know is that both Nixon and Reagan would have agreed with Obama’s speech against the Iraq War… But all the organs of the conservative movement followed Bush over the cliff”as did John McCain.

Republican President George W. Bush has not been a conservative at all, either in domestic policy or in foreign policy. He invaded Iraq on the basis of abstract theory, the very thing
Burke warned against. Bush aimed to turn Iraq into a democracy, “a beacon of liberty in the Middle East,” as he explained in a radio address in April 2006.

I do not recall any “conservative” publication mentioning those now memorable words “Sunni,” “Shia,” or “Kurds.” Burke would have been appalled at the blindness to history and to social facts that characterized the writing of those so-called conservatives.

Obama did understand. In his now famous 2002 speech, while he was still a state senator in Illinois, he said: “I know that a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, of undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without international support will fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I’m not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

Burke would have agreed entirely, and admired the cogency of so few words. And one thing I know is that both Nixon and Reagan would have agreed. Both were prudential and successful conservatives. But all the organs of the conservative movement followed Bush over the cliff”as did John McCain.

Obama was the true conservative, the Burkean. Like the French radicals of 1790, Bush wanted to democratize Iraq, turn it, as he said in a speech at Whitehall, into a “beacon of liberty in the Middle East.” Now, Robespierre and the other radicals were criticized by Burke for wanting to turn France into a republic. Not a bad idea, but they tried to do it all at once, and according to republican theory.

Maxmillien Robespierre himself would have been horrified by the notion of democratizing Mesopotamia. That may”possibly”happen. But it will take a long time, an Enlightenment, and the muting of sectarian hatreds.

Social Security has long been considered one of the most successful New Deal programs, working well now for 70 years. Yet in 2005, the Bush plan to establish private accounts that could be invested in the Stock Market got nowhere. McCain, too, has embraced this idea. In 2008 it looks ridiculous. The Stock Market! Again, this is a radical proposal, not a conservative one.

Ever since Roe vs. Wade, abortion has been a salient controversy in our politics. But the availability of abortion is linked to the long advancement of women’s equality. Again, we are dealing with social change, and this requires understanding social change, a Burkean imperative that Obama understands.

On my Dartmouth campus, half the undergraduates are women. They do not want to have their plans derailed by an unwanted pregnancy. In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the Court ruled that the availability of abortion “enables women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the country.”

Though there is a tragic aspect to abortion, as Obama recognizes, women’s equality means that women have control of their reproductive capability. Men don’t worry about that. The fact is that 83 percent of elective abortions occur during the first trimester, and decline rapidly after that.

Both Obama and McCain support federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, Obama more urgently. The conservative movement publications, following Bush, have been fiercely opposed. Such opposition required a belief that a cluster of cells (the embryo) the size of the period at the end of this sentence is as important (more important?) than a seriously ill human being.

I myself cannot fathom such a mentality.

In fact, embryonic stem cell research is being energetically pursued in the following nations: Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, China cooperating with the EU. Privately funded and state funded laboratories are moving ahead vigorously.

Recently, Harvard announced a program that will be part of a multi-billion dollar science center to be established south of the Charles River, and will be able to supply sem cells to other laboratories. I call that Pro-Life.

This analysis could be extended, but it seems clear to me that Obama is the conservative in the 2008 election.

This article is being published simultaneously in The Daily Beast.

In writing my endorsement of Ralph Nader, I passed rather quickly over the question of the right-wing splinter parties, namely the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party, so as not to get bogged down in an extended discussion. I see, however, from the reaction to my piece, that the bog is unavoidable.

The question I quite consciously avoided is the one that leaps out at the careful reader: why not cast a ballot for either of these two parties? Why give your vote to a “leftist,” like Nader, who’s just a commie wearing faux-populist colors?

To answer the last question first: Nader has an interesting history, one that belies the “leftist” label. His first published piece, as I pointed out in a piece for The American Conservative last time around, appeared in The Freeman, that venerable old mainstay of the libertarian media, now enjoying a renaissance under the able editorship of Sheldon Richman. The article denonced a public housing project being built near his home in Connecticut, and descried the distant authority of the federal government for overriding the clear wishes of the locals. Nader a leftist? It’s true that he finds his constituency on the left, and his campaign is directed at and supported by the few lefties who haven’t been swept up in the Obama-lanche, but he is personally very far from that. Now that the ostensible “free enterprisers” of the GOP are hailing the bailout, he’s taken up the cause of small business, which is “the only free enterprise left in America,” as he puts it.

Too true. I wonder if Bob Barr realizes that. Somehow, I doubt it. As for Chuck Baldwin and the Constitution Party ….

I have to admit to not being all that familiar with Senor Baldwin’s campaign: he certainly looks like a presidential candidate, although I can’t say I think that anyone who calls himself Chuck is going to be seriously considered for the office of President. I’m sure he’s ideologically sound: after all, he has Ron Paul’s endorsement, and, as far as I’m concerned, that settles that. However, the issue is not Baldwin, but the Constitution Party as an organization, which, from the perspective of a serious activist, has grave problems as the vehicle for a paleo-rightist insurgency.

In the preamble to the party platform, we find this:

“The Constitution Party gratefully acknowledges the blessing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of these United States. We hereby appeal to Him for mercy, aid, comfort, guidance and the protection of His Providence as we work to restore and preserve these United States.

“This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

“The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.

“The Constitution of these United States provides that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.’ The Constitution Party supports the original intent of this language. Therefore, the Constitution Party calls on all those who love liberty and value their inherent rights to join with us in the pursuit of these goals and in the restoration of these founding principles.”

I’m not sure what they mean by “original intent” in this context, and they don’t say, though one suspects it’s some arcane rationalization for the internal politics of the party itself, which has been in a prolonged faction fight over the question of whether they’ll nominate a non-Christian for public office. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the party has a rule forbidding anyone who has not accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior from running for office under its banner.

Now there is nothing wrong with a political party that explicitly upholds Christian principles, although it necessarily limits the party’s constituency, and—in America—effectively blocks it from mounting an effective national campaign. However, limiting candidates—and even membership—to persons of a particular faith is an exercise in sectarianism all too familiar to those of us on the right who have supported independent political action.

The Constitution Party was founded by Howard Phillips, leader of the Conservative Caucus, who converted to Christian Reconstructionism and led his followers out of the GOP: he had served in the Nixon administration as a director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and walked out when Tricky Dicky broke his campaign promise to veto welfare appropriations. A great many Constitution Party members are Christian Reconstructions, who have their own unique interpretation of the Bible, and insist on the application of “biblical law” by government. Others are ordinary “born again” Christians of various denominations, who are active in the anti-abortion movement. In any case, religion has become so much a central part of the organization’s identity and mission that there is a huge internal debate over whether Mormons are really Christians. The party, in short, has become a battlefield for rival factions of Christianity—which points precisely to the inherent flaw in the party’s strategic vision.

Political activism takes time, and effort: both are in short supply, and any serious political activist is going to want returns on his or her investtment. They aren’t likely to join parties with self-limiting constituencies, and certainly they won’t join the Constitution Party if they happen to be Jews, agnostics, Christian Scientists, Swedenbogians, or out-and-out atheists

Ron Paul’s endorsement of Baldwin was a response to Bob Barr’s arrogance, which is by now legend, and yet it underscores an important point: there is no real difference between libertarians and Christian constitutionalists, as the CPers like to call themselves, at least not politically. Paul ran as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in the 1988 election: Baldwin himself says that Paul is the better candidate, and that he’d step aside if only Ron would take the helm. The Good Doctor demurs, however, and there is a leadership vacuum, one that Barr, who appears to be a bit of a megalomaniac, did not have the temperament or the stature to fill. Announcing that he would show up at a joint press conference with all the third party candidates, Barr was a no-show—a display of rudeness that was pretty much consistently applied by his campaign in its relations with Paul and the Campaign for Liberty. By endorsing Baldwin, Paul, the bridge between the libertarians and the constitutionalists, effectively split these two wings of the populist right, disabling the movement from launching an effective national campaign.

The problem of unity on the “far” right has been an ongoing one, for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. In any case, Nader stands outside—and above—all that. More importantly, he seems to understand that the enemy we’re facing isn’t just “socialism,” but a particular form of it: plutocratic socalism. That’s what the bank bailout—the biggest swindle of all time, as well as the biggest step we’ve taken toward a socialist economic system since the imposition of the income tax—is all about.

New York

America’s diminished intellectualism has made this interminable election period as boring as a Nat Rothschild Corfu party for respectable folk. Part of the problem is that presidential candidates try ‘to reach out to younger voters’, hardly an admirable goal as demographic researchers have gone the way of TV programmers, targeting young morons whose Facebooks comprise 90 per cent of their education. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have all been forced to make appearances on vile and vulgar TV shows — proof that taking the high ground is as much of a vote-getter as George Osborne’s chances of being invited back to Nat’s Corfu lair. It all started with Bill Clinton — who else? — when the Draft Dodger blew ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ through his saxophone on a cheap, late-night American show. The likelihood of reversing this trend is nil, but stranger things have happened. For example, Taverna Agni could be next year’s venue for the Tory party conference, or even for Labour’s. (Mind you, now that Nat’s Atticus fund has gone the way of Deripaska, maybe George will next do the honours in a rented cabana near Blackpool.)

Do any of you remember the time when politicians were careful about whom they hung out with? Even better, do any of you remember when MPs would communicate with each other — Tories, that is — by conversing in Greek or Latin? Then a eunuch sacked the great Enoch Powell from the front benches and the rot set in. I was once introduced to Enoch by Greville Howard, now Lord Howard, and he addressed me in ancient Greek. I didn’t dare answer in kind, although I understood him perfectly, my classical Greek being rather shaky. The study of those two languages, with their illuminations on morality and philosophy, reached a nadir during the greedy Eighties and Nineties, when students said to hell with the ancients, let’s all become investment bankers and high-tech millionaires. The good news is that the present mess might see their return. Just imagine, 20 years down the road, Nat Rothschild hosting a Corfu party with Amo Latinam as the theme. (Keep imagining because it ain’t gonna happen.) Still, avaritia mala est, and the classics are staging a small comeback right here in the Big Bagel. Enrolment is rising because some young people are seeing the light, Corfu or not Corfu, that being the question.

The bad news is that people are cutting down on charity, especially those who help animals. The men in suits who have so mismanaged the world are doing their best to do little furry things in. Not to mention old, beautifully grimy neighbourhoods. Last week I found myself protesting against yet another outrage, that taking place on West 28th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, where Tin Pan Alley was born. Tin Pan Alley’s golden age was back in the Twenties and Thirties, where titans of song such as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin got their start. But the stretch earned its nickname at the turn of the century, when music companies moved in and the tinkling of pianos could be heard blocks away, 24 hours a day. It was a beautiful kind of clangour, now no longer heard, but the crumbling façades of those historic buildings are still there, unchanged, and one can look up and imagine the melodies.

The tunes back then were lyrical, the words were literate and passionate, and the rhymes were pure. Now a luxury apartment tower is planned to replace a scene that evokes everything that was wonderful about old Noo Yawk, reddish-brown, five-storey houses where talented people worked and created some of the sweetest sounds this side of New Orleans. They were obviously poor, talented, mostly Jewish, and spoke with accents which wouldn’t admit them even to strip clubs. Yet their music was divine, it reminds me of my youth, and that is all that matters. It is very sad and I for one will do anything I can to stop some greedy pig from obliterating a real New York landmark — Tin Pan Alley, for Chrissake, not exactly like tearing down a McDonald’s. We need another luxury tower in lower midtown as much as the island of Corfu needs another Russian oligarch anchoring his disgusting superyacht off its green and lovely shoreline.

But enough of this whining. My brother-in-law, Brian Culhane, married to Princess Victoria Schoenburg, is the winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, as prestigious an award as there is without the name of Salman Rushdie being involved. At a reading down in Greenwich Village, I listened as Brian read out his poem about my father-in-law, Peter Schoenburg, and despite my age — my God, how quickly the tears come after 60 — I kept my composure and had a very good time. William Carlos Williams wrote this about poetry: ‘It is difficult to get the news from poems, /yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.’

Poetry, an art I cannot understand or define, but certainly can feel, makes our daily existence mean more to us. Once upon a time, it was the highest branch of literature, but now it has dwindled into a mere craft. Yet it’s wonderful because it has not gone professional, and poets have not sold out like many writers have. Bravo, Brian, and especially as you chose to become a poet when others of your age group preferred the bank route. Again, Corfu or not Corfu, that is the question.

If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.

Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage-earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage-earners, who pay no income tax, are sent federal checks.

If this is not the socialist redistribution of wealth, what is it?

A steeply graduated income tax has always been the preferred weapon of the left for bringing about socialist equality. Indeed, in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx was himself among the first to call for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”

The Obama tax plan is pure Robin Hood class warfare: Use the tax power of the state to rob the successful and reward the faithful. Only in Sherwood Forest it was assumed the Sheriff of Nottingham and his crowd had garnered their wealth by other than honest labor.

“Spread the wealth,” Barack admonished Joe the Plumber.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” said old Karl in 1875. When Barbara West of WFTV in Orlando, Fla., put the Marx quote to Biden, however, Joe recoiled in spluttering disbelief.

West: “You may recognize this famous quote: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?”

Biden: “Are you joking? Is this a joke?”

Biden’s better defense, however, might have be the “Tu quoque!” retort: “You, too!”—the time-honored counter-charge of hypocrisy.

Indeed, how do Republicans who call Obama a socialist explain their support for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and the Earned Income Tax Credit? What are these if not government-mandated transfers of wealth to the middle and working class, and the indigent and working poor?

Since August, the Bush-Paulson team has seized our biggest S&L, Washington Mutual, and largest insurance company, AIG. It has nationalized Fannie and Freddie, pumped scores of billions into our banks, bailed out GM, Ford and Chrysler, and paid the $29 billion dowry for Bear Stearns to enter its shotgun marriage with JPMorgan Chase.

And with federal, state and local taxes taking a third of gross domestic product, and government regulating businesses with wage-and-hour laws, civil rights laws, environmental laws, and occupational health and safety laws, what are we living under, if not a mixed socialist-capitalist system?

Norman Thomas is said to have quit running for president on the Socialist ticket after six campaigns because the Democratic Party had stolen all his ideas and written them into its platforms.

Did Ike repeal the New Deal? Did Richard Nixon roll back the Great Society? Nope. He funded the Great Society. Did Ronald Reagan cut federal spending? Nope, defense spending soared. Bill Clinton slashed defense, but George Bush II set social spending records with No Child Left Behind and prescription drug benefits for the elderly under Medicare. Surpluses vanished, deficits returned, the national debt almost doubled.

Is the old republic then dead and gone, in the irretrievable past? Are we engaged in an argument settled before we were born?

In his 1938 essay “The Revolution Was,” Garet Garrett wrote:

“There are those who think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of the Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Nevertheless, there is a difference not just of degree but of kind between unemployment compensation for jobless workers, welfare for destitute families, and confiscating the income of taxpayers who earned it—to hand out to chronic tax consumers who did not.

This last is the socialism Winston Churchill called “the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.” And it is this suggestion of socialist ideology in Obama’s words that has produced the belated pause by a nation that seemed to be moving into his camp. What did Barack say in 2001?

He spoke of the inadequacy of the courts as institutions to bring about “redistributive change” in society, of the “tragedy” of the civil rights movement in losing sight of the “political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Normal people don’t talk like that. Socialists do.

This is ideology speaking. This is the redistributionist drivel one hears from cosseted college radicals and the “Marxist professors” Obama says in his memoir he sought out at the university. It is the language of social parasites like William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Father Pfleger.

Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. For it seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend. One need not be Ayn Rand to see that Barack has picked up from past associates utopian notions that have ever produced nightmare states.

I”ve argued in The American Conservative that, because most states are not in contention, the only rational use of the ballot is to send a message by casting single-issue vote for the Third Party presidential candidate who represents that issue. The most important issue in facing America is the imminent abolition of the historic American nation by out-of-control mass immigration, both legal and illegal. Mass immigration is a disease of the heart; the war, the economy etc., are diseases of the skin. So that means voting for the Constitution Party’s Chuck Baldwin, who is by far the best on immigration and much else besides.

However, the great state of Connecticut, where I live, has managed to keep off its ballot both the Constitution party, for which I (along with Editorandpublisher T. Theodoracopulos) voted in 2004, and the Libertarian Party, which I would turn to because Bob Barr was good on immigration when a Republican Congressman and because his platform is still better than those of the major parties. (Which shows how awful they are).

And since I wrote my TAC piece, I have discovered that Connecticut also makes it effectively impossible to write in a candidate so that it will be counted (as opposed to being just a spoiled ballot.)

In fact, the only Third Party presidential candidate on the Connecticut ballot is Ralph Nader. I think Nader is a crackpot and a thug and, with my beautiful and brilliant co-author Leslie Spencer, wrote two exposes of him when I was at Forbes magazine. (You can read them here and here). Nader didn”t like it at all and, when I was later introduced to him by a foolhardy fan”he had refused to be interviewed”greeted me with curious threatening growl, like an angry tomcat.

But he’s still better on immigration than Obama and McCain. (For example, in the Third Party presidential debate, he said he”d secure the border against illegals, listing “infectious diseases” as a justification”a sophisticated point, because most people don”t realize that screening for disease was very effective in the 1880-1925 Ellis Island era, with a significant proportion of would-be immigrants being sent back.

Plus, of course, he’s against this pointless war. (Now if Bush had invaded Mexico…)

Though I”m not the only member of the Takitribe to endorse Nader, I”m the one doing it resentfully.

Obama and McCain are both appalling on immigration. But McCain is worse, because he might be able to get through an amnesty, whereas without bipartisan support, I don”t think Obama will dare.

UPDATE: Since writing this article, Peter has discovered that Chuck Baldwin is, indeed, an official write-in candidate in Connecticut. And thus the question of whether conservatives should “resentfully” support Ralph Nader in the nutmeg state is now moot. Peter would like to reaffirm his support for Chuck Baldwin. [RS]

No conservative or libertarian can possibly contemplate voting for either of the “major” party candidates, this time around, on several grounds, the most conspicuous being their intractable and almost instinctive predilection for deploying the all-too-visible hand of government as the end-all and be-all of “solutions” to our problems, foreign as well as domestic.

As far as the frontrunner, Barack Obama, is concerned, his vow to “redistribute the wealth” disqualifies him from consideration, although this hasn”t stopped the fabled “Obamacons” from inventing the wildest, most extravagant evasions in order to rationalize their capitulation to fashion. Here is Andrew Sullivan, reigning monarch of the Obamacons, with his own quite typical apologia:

Conservatism is not an ideology. It’s a disposition. And sometimes it takes what [Michael] Oakeshott called “trimming” to keep the ship afloat. Moderation matters. In some ways, I see Obama as a return to moderation in American politics. And it’s conservatives who have become ideologues who cannot accept it.

Moderation in defense of liberty is no vice “ hardly a philosophy to inspire us to go to the barricades, but, then again, going to the barricades would itself be immoderate, and we can”t have that. By defining conservatism as a “disposition,” Sullivan rather neatly segues into redefining it as his disposition, which is”as always”to go with the crowd, and, in this case, fall head over heels in love with the redistributionist messiah.

This isn”t conservatism, it’s narcissism”but to Old Musclglutes, no such distinction exists. Everywhere he looks, he sees his reflection: his disdain for radicalism limns his own evolution from full-throated Jacobinism, in the heady days when neocon-generated war hysteria stalked the land, to Bush critic and war skeptic. It’s no coincidence”as the Marxists used to say”that these changing moods reflect the fickle gyrations of the general public: to say that Sullivan is a weathervane would be doing a great disservice to those ancient and useful devices, which herald the approach of coming storms.

Every movement has renegades [.pdf file], but the Bushian apostates are a particularly loathesome bunch. The whole sorry parade”from Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman to reformed neocon Francis Fukuyama“has all the dignity and gravitas of a stampede to get out of a crowded theater after someone has yelled “Fire!”

What must be particularly galling to loyal party hacks is that these are the very people, in many cases, who set the fire in the first place: Adelman, for example, spent the better part of the previous decade agitating for a US invasion of Iraq. It hasn”t exactly been the “cakewalk” he and his fellow war-birds predicted. Yet he has the chutzpah to stand there and deny any responsibility, laying all the blame conveniently elsewhere.

It’s almost enough to make one sympathize with the McCain campaign”but not quite. For the simple fact of the matter is that John McCain is not psychologically stable enough to have his finger on the nuclear trigger. As Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi put it:

“The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

A McCain presidency would involve us in any number of wars, not only in the Middle East”we”d stay in Iraq, indefinitely, and take on Iran and Syria to boot”but also in Russia’s “near abroad,” including, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Belarus, and any number of Central Asian “stans.

On the domestic front, McCain is right on, as we used to say, in telling it like it is and calling out the Dear Leader as a socialist, albeit not of the old-fashioned Marxist sort. (He’s closer to Tony Blair than Kim Il Sung, although his cult of personality is the hottest since Stalin’s time).

There’s just one proper answer to this McCainiac volley, however, and that is: Look who’s talking!

McCain not only supported the bank bailout, he issued a joint statement with Obama endorsing it”thus missing the one opportunity he had to really embrace a genuine populism and paint the Democratic nominee as the candidate of the elites. McCain could have won the election if he opposed the bailout—but that, of course, was and is impossible, since he represents a different wing of the same corporate interests.

The de facto nationalization of the banks is a giant step taken toward socialism, although it is a unique variant that I would call socialism-for-the-rich, or social corporatism. Before the world went mad and ostensible “conservatives” began making arguments for Big Government, the idea of a Republican presidential candidate defending such a measure would have been inconceivable. Today, however, in a world where everything is inverted “ including traditional political affiliations as well as cultural values—the only differences between the Democratic and Republican varieties of this ideological consensus are to be found in the fine print, with a magnifying glass.

The same is true in the foreign policy realm, where the only differences between the two “major” party candidates are stylistic. In the social-democratic equivalent of John Galt’s speech, we heard the Dear Leader inveighing against “Russian aggression“ and vowing that he”d never let Iran get hold of the same nukes Israel has had for half a century. That the first phase of Obama’s war dance would feature a perhaps prolonged bout of “negotiations””i.e. a series of hard-and-fast demands laid out by the US government, amounting to sky-writing “Surrender Dorothy!” over Tehran”should fool exactly no one. Yet millions are fooled”and won”t wake up until it’s too late to do anything about it.

No principled advocate of liberty can even consider the candidates of the two “major” parties: both are thoroughly reprehensible, and would take the country even farther down the wrong path”toward economic dislocation and war. Which leaves us with”what? Or, rather, whom?

I was an early and vocal supporter of Ron Paul, and yet he stopped campaigning precisely when he should have started”or, at any rate, re-started. His refusal to go all the way, and launch a third party bid has got to be one of the grandest missed opportunities of all time. To have predicted the banking meltdown, so loudly and insistently, and then have it occur just as the presidential campaign reached a crescendo”Paul could easily have garnered 10 percent of the vote, at a minimum, elbowing aside McCain as the authentic defender of what is left of our economic liberty.

As it is, the Paulian movement foundered, and became entangled in a sectarian battle with the Libertarian nominee, Bob Barr, over matters too inconsequential to detail. Instead of uniting the freedom movement, in his post-primary mode Paul and his organization, the Campaign for Liberty, divided his followers by endorsing the obscure Chuck Baldwin, the candidate of the idiosyncratic Constitution Party”some of whose top officials and activists were key Paul campaign advisors.

Barr’s arrogance and ultra-sectarian attitude did nothing to help the situation, but there was no need for Paul to take such an unnecessary revenge. The smallness of the whole sorry affair is what makes it so pathetic”and it’s a tragedy that the Paul movement had to end this way, at least in this phase of its development. Since none of these candidates and parties conducted themselves with anything approaching wisdom, neither deserves the votes of serious conservative and libertarian activists”because we deserve better.

And there is better: Ralph Nader.

On the defining issue of the campaign “ and the age “ Nader is spot on: the bailout of the banks, he avers, “was clearly socialism bailing out capitalism.” Not that this version of capitalism has anything to do with authentically free enterprise: “This is the collapse of corporate capitalist ideology,” says Nader. “I emphasize corporate, because the only capitalism left now is small business. They”re the only ones who are free to go bankrupt.”

On foreign policy, Nader is the only consistent anti-interventionist in the race, or, at least, the only one who makes this an important part of his campaign. Unlike McCain and Obama, who both revel in baiting the Russian bear, Nader asks: “Why don”t we leave the Russians alone?” Why, he asks, are we provoking Moscow into another cold war? Obama, the candidate of the supposedly “antiwar” wing of the Democratic party, is pledged to usher Georgia as well as Ukraine into NATO “ which the Russians view as an aggressive act. Both want anti-missile “defense” shields in place in Eastern and Central Europe “ only Nader seems to understand that this is just a scam for enriching the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Nader is the Eugene Debs of our times: he is brave, intractably committed to principle, and disdainful of the limousine liberals and their “conservative” counterparts who grimace in maidenly horror at the sight and sounds of such truth-telling populism. Most importantly, Ralph Nader knows who are the real enemies of the American people, and what is the source of their power. He, alone, is serious about breaking that power. While I may disagree with some of his more socialistic proposals, and probably wouldn”t last very long at a Nader-for-President meeting before getting into it with his commie followers, I don”t know of anyone in American political life, at the moment, who has more genuine good old fashioned integrity. I also can”t think of anyone who annoys the limousine liberals and Obama-oids more”and since these folks are our future rulers, or so it seems, that is reason enough to cheer his campaign and his continued presence in public life.

Karen De Coster’s article on “The Standard of Living Bubble” leaves open, inevitably, the question of foreign equivalents to the hoggish economic meltdown that Miss De Coster describes. Still unsolved, for instance, is the mystery of why Australia, so far, has managed (unlike, by the looks of it, France) to avoid the worst of the real estate bubble.

Why should this bizarre outcome be? It is not, after all, as if Australians possess a greater intrinsic virtue than Americans, or that they are any less addicted to spurious “wealth” via plastic cards and deficit financing. Australia’s welfare system is, by every conceivable criterion, far more Scandinavian and cocoon-like than the U.S.A.’s (as well as more centralized; the notion of different rates of welfare payment according to different states is unknown to Australia’s populace). Few with any knowledge of Australia would find it lacking in the entitlement culture. The concept of “owning” one’s own home is as deeply embedded in the Australian psyche as in the American. Always was, even before 1950s prosperity. Moreover, interest rates in the two countries are broadly comparable, and have been ever since the mid-1990s (in late-1980s Australia they went through the roof).

So why have the grotesque scenes of American foreclosure and repossession not been replicated in Australia? When the local news reports carried American stories of ousted homeowners wrecking their premises before the lenders could regain them, the response from Australians was of absolute disbelief. Such things, at present at least, are unimaginable here, except in the case of the occasional drug addict or Aboriginal layabout.

Yet facts are stubborn things. No Australian bank, whether any of the big four (ANZ, Westpac, National Australia Bank, and the Commonwealth) or any of the smaller players, has collapsed. Perhaps more tellingly still, the $700 billion American bailout excited disgust across the Australian political spectrum, to the extent that Australian politics has a spectrum.
The only explanation that comes readily to hand for the disparity between Australia’s situation and America’s is that, in spite of everything, our Third World ethnics are still somewhat less gruesome than your Third World ethnics. American Renaissance writer Thomas Jackson went so far as to say, last January, the following:

Australia has an immigration policy that is like ours stood on its head. The United States is filling up with unlettered Hispanics, who make every social problem worse, whether it is crime, school failure, illegitimacy, youth gangs, obesity, or drug-taking. Australia is importing hundreds of thousands of smart, hard-working people who are streaming into the nation’s best universities and working their way to the top.

This of course brings its own problems, notably the way in which the hard-working are almost as querulous about white “racism” as are the unlettered, and no more proficient at speaking any language identifiable as English. But it might make for less economic friction in the short term. Even “The Camp of the Saints” might be bearable if it could be marketed as The Ritz-Carlton of the Saints. Of course the unlettered have a way of turning the Ritz-Carlton into a camp anyway; and a camp, moreover, wholly unadorned by such courtesies as are famously encapsulated in a certain Ogden Nash poem.

Incidentally, if you”re a Takimag reader hoping to avoid the American economic Armageddon by settling in Australia, fuhgeddaboutit. Over the last decade for reasons explained here, both the current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his predecessor John Howard have been”in best Brechtian style“eagerly abolishing the people and appointing a new people.

If, on the other hand, you are a Sudanese rapist illiterate in your native tongue, with half a dozen equally illiterate spouses all under the age of consent, then the solution to your Weltschmerz is clear. Consult your nearest Australian consulate now.

Being an assortment of presidential endorsements, wild speculations, and cris de coeur by contributors to Taki’s Magazine

How I Became a Resentful Naderite
By Peter Brimelow

I”ve argued in The American Conservative that, because most states are not in contention, the only rational use of the ballot is to send a message by casting single-issue vote for the Third Party presidential candidate who represents that issue. The most important issue in facing America is the imminent abolition of the historic American nation by out-of-control mass immigration, both legal and illegal. Mass immigration is a disease of the heart; the war, the economy etc., are diseases of the skin. So that means voting for the Constitution Party’s Chuck Baldwin, who is by far the best on immigration and much else besides.

Symbolic Chuck
By Paul Gottfried

Despite my desire to see John McCain and his brand of neocon-Republicanism soundly defeated, I can”t stand the idea of awarding my vote to his leftist, black-nationalist adversary Barack Obama. I”ll therefore do in this presidential race what I”ve done in every other presidential contest since 1988 (when I allowed myself to be talked into voting for George I), that is, cast my ballot for neither national party. In all likelihood I”ll vote for Chuck Baldwin and not Bob Barr, since Barr is already saddled with the Albatross program of the Libertarian Party, including its immigration expansionism and openness to gay marriage. Baldwin, by contrast is running on a traditional American rightwing platform (yes I am on the right), taking a position against “abortion rights” and the invasion from across our Southern border. I am also in agreement with the Baldwin-Ron Paul approach to terrorism. Instead of invading entire countries and then trying to bring their bombed-out territories and populations into some hallucinatory League of Democracies, Baldwin and Paul have called for having Congress pass, in the manner of Thomas Jefferson dealing with the Barbary Pirates, letters of marque and reprisal. These would be aimed at allowing the president to take punitive action against individual terrorists who threaten us with harm or else have committed violent acts against us, without requiring wholesale invasion of one country by another.
CONTINUE READING…

Backing Baldwin
By Jack Hunter

I have two tests that any candidate must pass in order to win my vote: Is he commitment to a traditional foreign policy and is he serious about stopping illegal immigration? Chuck Baldwin passes with flying colors.

Burkean for Barack
By Jeffrey Hart

In 1968, I was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, then-Governor of California, when he thought he might get the Republican nomination. When Richard Nixon was nominated, I joined the Nixon speechwriter team in New York City. I have been a senior editor at National Review since 1969, but was fired last month.

I support Barack Obama because he is conservative in comparison to the Republican Party as it is.
CONTINUE READING…

Naderism in Defense of LIberty is No Vice
By Justin Raimondo

No conservative or libertarian can possibly contemplate voting for either of the “major” party candidates, this time around, one several grounds, the most conspicuous being their intractable and almost instinctive predilection for deploying the all-too-visible hand of government as the end-all and be-all of “solutions” to our problems, foreign as well as domestic.

Conservatism is not an ideology. It’s a disposition. And sometimes it takes what {Michael] Oakeshott called “trimming” to keep the ship afloat. Moderation matters. In some ways, I see Obama as a return to moderation in American politics. And it’s conservatives who have become ideologues who cannot accept it.

What Is To Be Done?
By Justin Raimondo

To answer the last question first: Nader has an interesting history, one that belies the “leftist” label. His first published piece, as I pointed out in a piece for The American Conservative last time around, appeared in The Freeman, that venerable old mainstay of the libertarian media, now enjoying a renaissance under the able editorship of Sheldon Richman. The article denonced a public housing project being built near his home in Connecticut, and descried the distant authority of the federal government for overriding the clear wishes of the locals. Nader a leftist? It’s true that he finds his constituency on the left, and his campaign is directed at and supported by the few lefties who haven”t been swept up in the Obama-lanche, but he is personally very far from that. Now that the ostensible “free enterprisers” of the GOP are hailing the bailout, he’s taken up the cause of small business, which is “the only free enterprise left in America,” as he puts it.

Too true. I wonder if Bob Barr realizes that. Somehow, I doubt it.
CONTINUE READING…

In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right
By Richard Spencer

“Democracy,” says Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” There’s probably no better summation of the 2008 election. After an interminable campaign, Americans are urged to go exercise their little slices of the Popular Will and decide who shall be the The Decider for the next four years.

Shall it be the Man of Hope, who wants to spread a little wealth down to the “disposed peoples” and a little up to his supporter base at Goldman Sachs? Or shall it be “100 years in Iraq” Mac, a man John Zmirak once likened to Erich Ludendorff, which seems to me awfully unfair”to Ludendorff. For despite his many failings, the Generalquartiermeister would never have done anything as lunatic as surround himself with advisors like Elliott Abrams, Randy Scheunemann, and Robert Kagan, all of whom are itching to open up third and forth fronts in our global boondoggle.

Get ready for some Democracy, America, it’s best to just lie back and try to enjoy it.
CONTINUE READING…

Nicholas II for Tsar
By John Zmirak

On February 25, 1917, Russian soldiers serving Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg faced a choice. On November 4, 2008, Americans voters will stand in the same position. They must choose between a crooked, bumbling oligarchy prone to starting futile wars”and a ravening, reckless mob. While it’s mostly made up of citizens rightly enraged, the mob is led (or will soon be led) by vicious ideologues who promise to persecute Christianity. (Be patient, I will explain.)

There is no third living option, no better Tsar ready to reign. That option was tried, has failed. If the soldiers fight to save the Tsar, they preserve a regime that sent their brothers to die without meaning, without rifles”in a faraway land, for lies. They will save the elite that let the monk Rasputin set national policy, which bankrupted and bled their Fatherland. Surely, the new men grabbing for power must be better. How could they be worse?
CONTINUE READING

Shall it be the Man of Hope, who wants to spread a little wealth down to the “disposed peoples“ and a little up to his supporter base at Goldman Sachs? Or shall it be “100 years in Iraq” Mac, a man John Zmirak once likened to Erich Ludendorff, which seems to me awfully unfair”to Ludendorff. For despite his many failings, the Generalquartiermeister would never have done anything as lunatic as surround himself with advisors like Elliott Abrams, Randy Scheunemann, and Robert Kagan, all of whom are itching to open up third and forth fronts in our global boondoggle.

Get ready for some Democracy, America, it’s best to just lie back and try to enjoy it.

Though we”ve been talking about the election for almost two years now, the outcome never should have been in doubt. It’s likely most any reasonable Democrats could win in 2008. The “06 midterms were a decisive referendum on what Americans thought about foreign policy, and most any candidate, even someone as soporific as John Kerry, could take the White House simply by sounding the call, “Come Home, America”with Honor.” All the Hope and Change bullshit spouted by the half-Kenyan community organizer was ultimately unnecessary (and an added risk.)

And yet”inevitably, it seems”Obama, the opposition candidate, has made a “move to the center,” as the punditocracy calls it, which doesn”t mean a move towards moderation or pragmatism, mind you, but a firming up of the Washington establishment position on foreign-policy (and much else)”which the American people probably thought they had made damn clear they didn”t much like.

Thus when those Diebold voting machines are fired up next Tuesday, they will offer the following “choice” (dum-de-dum):

“¢ Candidate A wants a slow drawndown of forces in Iraq, with an implied long-term military presence, plus an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. While, on the other hand, Candidate B wants … well, he wants pretty much the same thing, though he”d withdraw from Iraq a bit more swiftly. (Obama’s plan is to redeploy soldiers from one war to another without changing general troop levels in the region and without bringing anyone home. Or as he calls it “change.”)

“¢ Candidate A wants “comprehensive immigration reform” with a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. While, on the other hand, Candidate B … well, their positions are identical on this one, too.

“¢ Candidate A supports Secretary “Hank” and “Helicopter Ben”’s socialization of the banking industry. While, on the other hand, Candidate B … well, you get the picture.

Then there’s Iran and Russia, where the only difference between the candidates’s view is the degree of vehemence with which they denounce the bad guys. (And the ways in which Obama actually does distinguish himself from McCain don”t exactly recommend him to conservatives””redistributive justice,” anyone?)

We in the alternative Right”(post-)paleos, traditionalists, varieties of Crunchyness, right-libertarians, evocons, and general curmudgeons”have good cause to throw up our hands and drop out”everything seems so terribly wrong and getting progressively wronger. And it’s telling that when we have entered the endorsement fray, particularly when we”ve made arguments for Obama, we haven”t offered endorsements per se so much as calculated scenarios in which, we argue, our vote for Obama isn”t really a vote for Obama. Thus Obama should win because he”ll get us out of Iraq (unlikely), and real conservatism can”t be revived until the war is over; or Obama should win because the GOP must be punished for nominating McCain; or Obama should win so the conservative movement will decouple itself with the Big Government GOP; etc. etc. etc.

Some of these scenarios might actually play out (indeed, I hope they do.) But it’s just as likely, if not more so, that the conservative movement and GOP will forgo painful soul-searching and rethinking and congeal again around all the same stuff they”ve been pushing for the past eight years. This would actually seem a natural posture for them to take, as they’ll be going into opposition against liberalism triumphant in Washington and all those snooty urban white people (e.g. my neighbors) who”ll be riding high after their virtuous election of the multiculti Messiah.

It’s best we leave “Obama conservatism“ behind and vote for change we actually believe in.

Chuck Baldwin will most certainly not win next Tuesday, he’s not even on the ballot in all states. He’s the only candidate, however, who’s starting point is the Constitution, and who’s seriously talking about individual and economic liberty, a foreign policy for America, and reducing both legal and illegal immigration (you know, all that extremist, unpatriotic stuff we write about at Takimag.) On top of it all, Baldwin has a sharp mind and is a gentleman.

Unlike some, I have no qualms whatsoever “wasting my vote” on a third party. The only thing I do regret is that Baldwin, for a variety of reasons, hasn”t generated anything like the movement that surrounded Ron Paul this past year”with its money bombs, big rallies, and a netroots in the hundreds of thousands (and it was these unpaid, unaffiliated geeks who were doing all the innovative campaigning.)

Which brings me to a larger point. A vote for Baldwin is nice, but the only thing we could possibly hope for next Tuesday night would be for him to break 1% in some states, if that’s even possible, or maybe get his name up on one of those piecharts during election coverage. A far more consequential action would be to do things like donate 50 bucks to Youth for Western Civilization, Ron’s Paul Campaign for Liberty, the Mencken Club (full disclosure: I”m on the board), and other fledgling groups of the alternative Right, or help the development of publications and websites like Takimag, TAC, VDARE, and Chronicles.

We live in interesting times. Indeed, with the combination of general disapproval of government and an economic meltdown our leaders has been hapelessly incapable of fixing, we would seem to be entering the kind of revolutionary climate conspirators of all sorts only dream of. Bring on the crisis of the regime! And if we”re ever given the opportunity to take back the GOP (which seems far more practicable than building up Baldwin’s Constitution Party), or even given the opportunity to take back the country, we would need to already have an established grassroots base and a core intellectual leadership in place. Let’s get started on all this now.

The mob is shoving through the snowy square, chanting and screaming, blood already on its hands. The officers”fat men who”ve never missed a meal or seen the front”are rushing up and down the line, urging soldiers to follow orders. Their moustaches are immaculately groomed, but they quiver. For the first time in their military careers, these men really are afraid. The mob is 1,000 feet away. Now 500 feet, and charging. You hear the order: “FIRE!” What do you do?

This cheerful scene is what faces American voters next week. I needn”t remind most readers how badly the Tsarist party has governed. Or point out that the new heirs to the throne are clustered with Rasputins. If we turn back the insurgents at the gate, the old guard will chuckle and muddle right along, slowly wrecking the country.

What happens if the radicals win? If we join the mob, or support a hapless pretender (in some third party) and fire into the air?

I”ll tell you one thing, just one, that will happen, if Barak Obama is elected with a large Congressional majority“with perhaps enough votes in the Senate to quash a filibuster. And that one thing should be enough.

Senator Obama has promised to sign the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act,” which would repeal every restriction on abortion in every American state, right up through the ninth month. But then, we knew that about Barack, the whole infanticide thing.

There’s more. The FOC Act raises abortion to (in its own words) a “fundamental right.” According to legal analysts at the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the act’s language is so sweeping that it will snuff out any state’s “conscience” clause”the laws allowing hospitals, doctors, and nurses not to take part in abortions. To do so would amount to illegal discrimination, denying a citizen her fundamental right. Christian hospitals could no more decline to perform abortions than they can currently refuse to operate on black people.

So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, or nurse either to abandon their faith, or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.

History tells us that steps such as this aren”t where religious persecutions end. It’s where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighboring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the “fundamental right” of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgments and have to close?

It can happen here. It is about to happen here.

Unless we obey our worthless officers, and fire on the mob. With all that in mind, I”m endorsing Tsar Nicholas II”er, John McCain”this November 4.