One of the relatively sharper Cornerites, Andy McCarthy, has challenged Podhoretz on declaring Tom Tancredo to be on the “LaRouche” looney fringe for pointing out the erosion of American sovereignty that would follow from the creation of the so-called North American Community or North American Union.  There is, of course, nothing fringe about Tancredo’s outrage at this idea, as his outrage is shared widely.  There is also nothing fringe about the outrage over the associated North American highway that is being planned in open mockery of attempts to secure the border.   

The names being bandied about are suggestive of the obvious parallel, namely that of the morphing of the old EEC, the European Exchange Community, into the ever-more tightly politically bound EC and then EU with the ultimate goal of a unified federal government of Europe governed under the European constitution (which, when European voters had a chance to consider it, was greeted with horror and rejection everywhere).  The British, God bless them, continued to kid themselves for decades with the nonsense that the arrangements were all purely economic and never infringed on basic sovereign rights.  Except that all of the European federalists knew full well that the EC/EU was a political project with the goal of reducing sovereign nation-states to the statuss of constituent members of a larger political federation.  The Europhile Tories in Britain continued under these delusions or actively deceived their fellow Tories for a very long time, until the constitution proved to be one intrusion too far and generated tremendous public opposition, forcing Blair to effectively give up on it.  Its failure has so far scuttled the final, worst phase of integration, but the example of post-Maastricht Europe and the insufferable tyranny of Brussels in the current EU are great, flashing warning signs to all of us who face a similar fraud dressed up in the guise of free trade.  That someone like Podhoretz declares denunciations of this fraud to be the product of a lunatic fringe rather confirms that Tancredo is on the right track.