We can certainly refer to such topics in debates over immigration, but longing for an old monocultural America is perhaps best avoided, as we cross our fingers and hope for the best from the future.

Actually the vilest vitriol is posted, if it is AGAINST PJB.

Some of the “other writers” have surprisingly tender egos.

I get that you don’t like the new immigrants, but America did in fact “cater to” the older immigrant groups by allowing/encouraging the use of their ethnic tongues. That’s why hundreds of thousands of German-Americans (including my great-great grandparents) were taught German in schools, that’s why there are literally hundreds of non-English newspapers, some of them nearly a hundred and fifty years old, and why a trip even today to Cicero, Illinois, will show you enough Polish-language store signage to make you rethink your thesis.

I don’t think unlimited immigration is wise, either, but I can’t think of anything sillier than to complain about the desires of people who are here legally to maintain a little bit of continuity with the world they used to know.

Next, you have to learn the local rules. First remember that The American Conservative is a “hangout” for people who oppose war, and generally consider the rank and file conservative to be “vulgar”. Does this set them up to also be a meeting place for people “posing” as conservatives? Of course it does.

When they first began to openly solicit comments, for their blogs, they preferred submissions from lunatic neocons, and thoughtful anti-war and lib contributors. Contradictions of Kara or Kelly were basically not tolerated. If you disagreed with McCarthy, you had to emotionally “hook him”, before you made your points. You couldn’t intelligently or thoughtfully back any of PJB’s articles. And absolutely, you couldn’t answer any of the defamation or insult, by libs, against conservatives.

Much has improved, here at TAC, but the wonderful laws of capitalism remain. If you are going to be useful, you have to understand the local agenda, then attract an audience for their subscribers, and lastly their sponsors (or at least not denigrate the hidden agendas of their financial contributors).

If you can play by the rules, then you might get an opportunity to influence the American landscape. But isn’t that true of anywhere else you go?

But the reward is worth it. When you hear your words and thoughts echo’d, in some small measure, by PJB, or by Hannity, or Rush, then you know two things. That TAC is a worthy soapbox, and in some small measure, that you are making a difference.

You are a typical internet coward, lacking even the modicum of courage it takes to post under your own name. And your serial attacks on Buchanan show that you are not only a coward, but a slanderer as well. Many couples don’t have children because they can’t, not because they won’t. Buchanan was in ROTC until he left for medical reasons. I don’t see how anyone can call living in one’s home town dishonorable, and Washington is Buchanan’s hometown. And the view of the Civil War that most Americans came to hold after Reconstruction was that there were good and honorable men on both sides, and certainly Lee has been widely regarded as a national hero.

I will therefore read your comments several more times, to see if I can find it.

And each time, I will enjoy your humor and insights.

Hope your contribution continues.

@Adam Rurik – Do you submit to them an article every few days? And each time, do you ask yourself, “Is this interesting, and will it help sell subscriptions?” You seem to have good instincts, wish you well.

And in fairness, the conservation of Energy suggests that a Universe that will spawn Birthers or Freepers has to counterbalance somehow.

He’s making a fair point about all the “you, are worse than Hitler” attitude (nobody even says “sir,” now, not even haughtily) – and it almost seemed that the column was a little more reticent than usual: the Right says this, the Left says that. I do hope he doesn’t become too even-handed just for the sake of it.

And, although I do genuinely appreciate points about preservation of a strong cultural foundation (e.g. a national, unifying, multi-ethnic culture rather than multicultural free-for-all) and the national prerogative to control borders, the last time I went to buy a Christmas card at a major supermarket the only religious – i.e. genuinely Christmas – one I could lay my hands on was _en_espagnol_. It’s a little difficult as descendant of ethnic and religious outsiders, to defend a foundationally protestant enlightenment political culture when it insists on either circling the wagons in LaRoucheville, Redneckistan, or pimping itself as Bread-&-Circus-R-us.

I appreciate a lot of the establishment Right only say they like diversity because it runs meat plants and scrubs toilets at bargain basement prices, and offers a moral whitewash for foreign adventurism, and some reading this may gag at even the whiff of accidental alliance with such people.

And it may really get people’s goat to say this, but I have a friend who is a Vietnam Vet who remembers growing up being told the absurdity of ever thinking that a Catholic would be President; in the same era an older relative of mine who applied for a State Department job was told by an actually fairly decent older man in the department, to not waste his time – as a Catholic from an Irish background he was never going to get anywhere. I’m not band-wagoning: just pointing out that the “Christian European” platform is a fairly recent – and inclusive – idea of Republican-leaning idea-men. Even “white” was once a fairly exclusive cultural club that the Irish only gate-crashed by bouncing people off City Hall walls in late nineteenth century America.

I’m not saying immigrants should be mollycoddled and told they can bring their home-country’s entire institutional structure with them (how is Spanish a less oppressively imperialist language than English for example?)

But without an ever-expanding geographical frontier for newcomers and settlers to grab their slice of the Earth, you have to find the frontier somewhere else to maintain the “people of prosperity” without third-world wealth skews. We’ve maxed out on Real-Estate values and Credit Expansion (and outsourcing our costs by war or foreign labour). If you don’t want to insource cheap foreign labour to maintain the Buy’n'Large lifestyle, why is that lifestyle used as the values pin-up poster for the Right – including many of those protesting against the Red Menace of non-usurious healthcare? And if you can’t stop the influx, why is unionisation of them for a decent wage-floor verboten, for example?

Sorry to ramble on, and to horrendously mix metaphors, but it just seems like all of us are being constantly suckered into “values” streetfights with each other, choreographed by one guy behind a curtain and another with no clothes on.

“Tom, It’s like that proverbial clockwork. Each new Buchanan article triggers a spurt of vitriol, much of it from unfamiliar quarters.”

Yes, and what’s funny here that those denouncing this article with the most vitriol don’t seem to understand that by using same they are lending credence to its very thesis.

On the other hand those doing so from either the Left or Right aren’t “pinheads” and there’s no reason to call them such. By their very denial of that thesis it’s obvious they do feel that the country still has a strong, unified core which is heartening.

For my part I can’t decide whether the country is cracking up due to cultural-type matters and has indeed lost its fundamental moorings, or if this is just the natural (and certainly not total) perception of someone who’s just lived half a century now and and what I’m seeing isn’t any fundamental un-mooring but merely inevitable, unexpected change. After all the foolish lure of perceiving Armageddon around every corner is always there.

On the other hand societies and cultures have indeed collapsed so I don’t know how anyone can really answer the question if that’s what we are seeing or if it’s just my failure to have anticipated the changes that our country’s fundamentals were always pointing towards. Maybe the better question then is the one alluded to by Mr. Orlowski above simply asking whether what we have now with all its changes is still worth saving.

One thing I think is interesting and heartening is that we now seem to have a President with about the most Leftist instincts imaginable within the U.S. system today. And yet whatever else you want to call him I don’t think, analytically speaking (nor even polemically really) you could come even near to saying that he’s a revolutionary or a subversive. Instead he’s talking to kids telling them to work hard and that they can succeed, he’s propping up big businesses instead of delighting in seeing them disintegrate (even way too much so in my opinion), and he conspicuously seems to be rejecting absolutely none of society’s fundamental structure or tenets and indeed can appear to be a big believer in same. (Nuts, the guy even seems to have such respect for the U.S. *military* of all institutions that he thinks we can indeed “win” in Afghanistan, not to mention his belief that we should.)

And, beyond that, if the alternative is to hearken back to the kind of the past believed in by Mssr.s Bush and Cheney and McCain, with the U.S. President going around willy-nilly invading other countries like Teddy Roosevelt did to get the Panama Canal, you can count me out. The oldest trick in political leader’s books is to build acclaim on the bodies of the men they sent to needlessly die, and conservatives especially should be wary of such power.

So I dunno, but I sure don’t like the vitriol and think it’s fundamentally immature and even dangerous. Whichever side of the divide one is on at most we are all only a molecule more influential than being pure spectators to the incredibly small slice that we now occupy of history’s long long workings. And intelligent people ought to have the maturity to recognize that, and recognize too that history has made fools if not monsters of almost everyone who felt that they were the sole possessors of truth or wisdom.

Cheers,

Yeah – this place ranks right up their with DailyKos and Huffingtonpost in its encouragement of an ever-expanding government and unlimited overseas adventures. In Bizzaro-world. Then again, Buchanan is a family-values man with no children, calls himself pro-military without every having serves, and decries DC, and yet grew up and settled there his whole life. And he cites Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two men who took up arms against the United States, as American heroes. You cannot make this stuff up.