Even with a Taftian foreign policy and a defensive grand strategy, America will still need forces that can act overseas. Our New Model Defense Department will rely on the Marine Corps to provide them.

Situations where we send in the Marines will resemble President Jefferson’s war with the Barbary pirates. Unless we are directly attacked, we will avoid wars with other states, because their most likely outcome will be the spread of statelessness—watch Libya. Instead we will find ourselves up against Fourth Generation, non-state opponents in situations where government has lost its grip.

Some of these enemies, including pirates, will attack Americans, and we will be forced to respond. Our response will not be to conquer other countries and attempt to turn them into Switzerland. Most often, the Marines will carry out raids, which will last hours or days, occasionally weeks. They will have two purposes: punish those who harbor our attackers and shift the local balance of power against our enemies. To non-state entities, the local balance counts for more than their relationship with the United States. If they know the price of attacking us will be to see their local enemies triumph over them, they may leave us alone. Read more…

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The good people at the Liberty Fund, who brought us the indispensable Online Library of Liberty (among many other useful programs), have launched a new web project this winter: the Library of Law and Liberty, including a blog with discussions of everything from Benedict XVI’s view of how natural law can repair the defects of religious fundamentalism and secular rationalism to “The Tragedy of Nonoriginalism and Substantive Due Process” (playing off of Timothy Sandefur’s Cato Unbound essay). It’s well worth bookmarking. The site joins a growing number of other high-toned classical-liberal online journals, not least Cato Unbound itself and the Pileus blog.

The Liberty Fund is an intellectually capacious organization — publisher not only of much James Buchanan, Hayek, and Mises, but also Richard Weaver and Michael Oakeshott — so I have high hopes the new project will include a healthy contingent of traditionalist conservatives mixing it up with the libertarians and Straussians. (One thing we could really use is an Oakeshottian approach to the law, a field in which dogmas and interests continually disguise themselves as impartial theories of justice and historical investigations.)

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Praise be for Sean Stone, Imam of Abrahamic ecumenism, demiurge of the non-doctrine, and patron saint of religious homogenization:

“I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ’s teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim.”

…

It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.

“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”

[link]

All the while, he told AFP his conversion, “is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism.”

Far be it from me or anyone else to doubt Stone’s sincerity. But I think the story gets at one of the problems with the multicultural ethic that conservatives tend not to emphasize, which is its tendency to totalize religious belief within, to borrow a Dreher phrase, a therapeutic moralistic Deism. In the world of a mass culture scion like Stone, the result is a sort of reverse Orientalism – rather than emphasizing the contrast in order to shore up one’s own cultural camp, differences are sufficiently glossed that he can be a member of all three Abrahamic faiths simultaneously, a notion that would probably offend most religious people, Eastern or Western.

Make no mistake, this is a totalitarian ideology. Yet the critique against it makes strange bedfellows. Neocons prefer a Clash of Civilizations-style interpretation, in which someone like Stone would presumably be a trojan horse for multicultural values and, in turn, Islamic domination or something. I would suggest that this isn’t productive, because raising the banner of the Christian West in the face of perceived existential threats has required the same homogenization and politicization of religion in this country. (For more on this subject, stay tuned for D. G. Hart’s piece in the upcoming issue about America and the shift from the private practice of faith to the public performance of it) Thus a thing like the Defense of Marriage Act is considered insufficiently pious by some social conservatives and, to them, a good Christian is compelled to support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, regardless of one’s 10th Amendment convictions.

Conservative localism offers a better path to a more vibrant, tolerant, and diverse public life. There’s a great interview with David Thomas of Pere Ubu where he gets at some of these issues:

“All these monuments and landmarks of the Cleveland we loved and wrote so passionately about, the other side of the curtain of these things, all ceased to exist. They were “urban renewalized” and all that sort of stuff, but to us they still exist, and to us we still see them. That’s what I mean about living in a ghost town. What happens, and this began to happen in 1980, ’81, ’82, is that the real world and the town that you live in, the geography you live in, begin to diverge. They begin to separate. This is, I think, a very common feeling all over the world. It has to do with culture and the alienation of culture and what happens in a society where things become homogenized by the media and various mechanisms. … Wherever you go in the world, people feel the same thing. The world they live in in reality and the world of their spirit, as it were, or their home, no longer occupy the same space and the same time. This has to do maybe with multiculturalism being forced on everybody. You can look at it any number of ways. Mainly, it’s just the alienation of culture.”

David Thomas has some strange ideas, but they make a lot of sense. I would argue that the single biggest piece of evidence for the alienation of culture is the apathy people hold toward democratic participation now that most of its functions have concentrated in the hands of the federal government though. The irony that he contributes to that universal alienation is probably lost on Sean Stone.

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TAC supporters have likely noted the torrent of editorials and opinion pieces calling for war against Iran.  On February 7^th alone there were nine lead editorials in major newspapers throughout the country calling for the use of force as the best option for dealing with Tehran.  Coordinated?  You bet.  Since that time the flow has continued unabated with no one in the mainstream media making the obvious point that nearly everyone who has actually followed the issue agrees that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and has not made the essentially political and economic decision to actually develop one.

A good example of deliberate distorting of the truth regarding what we actually do know about Iran and its intentions was on display in the Washington Post today in an op-ed piece by Ray Takeyh.  The piece, entitled “Why Iran Thinks It Needs the Bomb” in the print edition, appeared on the first page of the Opinion section but was also banner headlined on the front page of the paper.  Takeyh, who is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is certainly knowledgeable of his subject and was once a reasonable voice on things Iranian but he has pretty much gone over to the neocon view of the Middle East of late.  Some of his analysis of Iran’s internal politics is excellent but he makes several key judgments that are questionable at best and which are not supported by any evidence.  As the article title indicates, he believes that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon and throughout his piece he equates Iran’s highly popular nuclear energy program with a weapons program.  That cannot be demonstrated and, in fact, it is contradicted by the best intelligence available on the issue.  The second assumption he makes is that Iran is an active hegemon that is seeking to export its revolution, which means, putting the two together, that Iran is seeking a weapon of mass destruction that it will use aggressively, leaving military force as the best option to discourage such a development. That is all sheer conjecture and would seem to be belied by the generally pragmatic behavior of the Iranian government, which is more interested in regime preservation than in any attempt to bring the rest of the Middle East in line with its views.

Given the fact that the mainstream media gives no space whatsoever to anyone opposing the prevailing wisdom on Iran, i.e. that it is a threat, the US public is being subjected to a thorough brainwashing to accept starting yet another war.  The parallels to the lead-up to Iraq are eerie – weapons of mass destruction, terrorist groups, and mushroom clouds on the horizon.  If the Ray Takeyhs of the world get their war it will be a catastrophe for the United States and well as for Iran and will do precious little good for Israel, which is aggressively using its lobby to promote the military option.  Next month’s AIPAC conference will no doubt incorporate a virtual feeding frenzy of anti-Iranian rhetoric.

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My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?? A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice,” claimed that my book espouses a “white supremacist ideology.” Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, “The End of White America.”

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America’s leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and transgendered people said that Buchanan’s “extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world.” Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR’s Diane Rehm—that I believe homosexual acts to be “unnatural and immoral.”

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on. “Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite,” said Foxman. Buchanan “bemoans the destruction of white Christian America” and says America’s shrinking Jewish population is due to the “collective decision of Jews themselves.”

Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek’s 2009 cover called “The Decline and Fall of Christian America” and editor Jon Meacham described as “The End of Christian America.” After all, I am a Christian.

And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the “collective decision of Jews themselves”?

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American. Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin’s, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News, and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs, and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism? How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, “The End of White America?” from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America’s white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050. Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject? Read more…

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