Not every proto-libertarian in the 19th and early 20th centuries welcomed the liberal label. Albert Jay Nock, for one, blasted an editorial written by his friend Oswald Garrison Villard — editor of The Nation — welcoming Nock’s publication, The Freeman, to the club of “liberal” periodicals:

The Freeman is not a liberal paper; it has no lot or part with liberalism; it has no place in the field of liberal journalism and cannot pretend to seek one. That field, indeed, is so competently served by the Nation itself and by the New Republic that it would be a superfluity, not to say an impertinence, for the editors of this paper to think of invading it. The Freeman is a radical paper; its place is in the virgin field, or better, the long-neglected and fallow field, of American radicalism; its special constituency, if it ever has any, will be what it can find in that field. Hence, readers of the Nation, if ever they do this paper the honor of picking it up, must not be misled by Mr. Villard’s quick and characteristic generosity in bestowing upon it a distinction to which it has no right.

Nock explained the philosophical difference:

The liberal believes that the State is essentially social and is all for improving it by political methods so that it may function accordingly to what he believes to be its original intention. Hence, he is interested in politics, takes them seriously, goes at them hopefully, and believes in them as an instrument of social welfare and progress. He is politically minded, with an incurable interest in reform, putting good men in office, independent administrations, and quite frequently in third-party movements. The liberal forces of the country, for instance, rallied quite conspicuously to Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt in the good old days of the Progressive party. The liberal believes in the reality and power of political leadership; thus, again, he eagerly took Mr. Wilson on his hands at the last two elections.

The radical, on the other hand, believes that the State is fundamentally antisocial and is all for improving it off the face of the earth; not by blowing up officeholders, as Mr. [Mitchell] Palmer appears to suppose, but by the historical process of strengthening, consolidating and enlightening economic organization. The radical has no substantial interest in politics, and regards all projects of political reform as visionary.

Nock is not playing Humpty Dumpty here, and even before the progressive turn in American liberalism led figures like Villard from strong anti-statism toward domestic inventionism, there were differences between radicals and liberals, though not necessarily differences of the kind Nock limned. The term “radical” had been sometimes annexed to, sometimes in contention with the terms “liberal” and “Whig” in British politics since the late 18th century. If you look up this sense of “radical” in Wikipedia, you’ll see a great deal about electoral reform and the Chartists. Those were signal issues, but it would be a mistake to think of 18th-century radicalism merely as a movement for democracy. It’s conventionally said that Whigs and radicals together made up the new 19th-century Liberal Party, but strains of radicalism distinct from their liberal surroundings remained.

Moreover, the term “liberalism” came to signify something that anti-statists wouldn’t like rather earlier than many of today’s libertarians think. Already in 1884, Herbert Spencer was warning about liberalism becoming the “New Toryism.” In a note added when the essay was collected, he remarked that while the old Tories were still bad, he could imagine liberals and conservatives (Tories) switching places entirely some time in the future:

A new species of Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species. When saying, as on page 16, that in our days “Conservatives and Liberals vie with one another in multiplying” interferences, I clearly implied the belief that while Liberals have taken to coercive legislation, Conservatives have not abandoned it. Nevertheless, it is true that the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that the “Liberty and Property Defense League,” largely consisting of Conservatives, has taken for its motto “Individualism versus Socialism.” So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot.

But it’s not even the case that Whig and Tory — to the extent they can even be taken as precursors to liberal and conservative, a complicated and controversial question in its own right — were stable terms in the 18th century. Spencer cites Lord Bolingbroke’s characterization of what those terms originally meant:

The power and majesty of the people, an original contract, the authority and independency of Parliament, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposition; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and supposed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.

Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive-obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay and sometimes property too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and inconsistent in the same manner, with the idea of a Whig.

Spencer uses these lines as evidence that this is what old Whigs and Tories really did stand for, though the Tory Bolingbroke’s language is carefully hedged — these are the meanings commonly “associated” with the terms up to Bolingbroke’s time. And Bolingbroke goes on to say that in his day whatever older significance the terms had, they had now been changed:

These associations are broken; these distinct sets of ideas are shuffled out of their order; new combinations force themselves upon us; and it would actually be as absurd to impute to the Tories the principles, which were laid to their charge formerly, as it would be to ascribe to the projector and his faction the name of Whigs, whilst they daily forfeit that character by their actions. The bulk of both parties are really united; united on principles of liberty, in opposition to an obscure remnant of one party, who disown those principles, and a mercenary detachment from the other, who betray them.

The important distinction for Bolingbroke in 1733 is not between old Whigs and Tories, but between what he calls the Court Party and the Country Party — both of which include both Whigs and Tories of different kinds.

We could plunge deep into British history from here. Instead, I’ll make two general points: first, while there is a genealogical connection between Whiggism, liberalism, and libertarianism, the bloodlines are hardly unmixed or without bastards in each generation; and second, there is a recurrent problem when a faction that professes to be the party of liberty, whether it calls itself liberal or conservative or something else, takes control of the state and then comes to be opposed by another faction that claims to speak for liberty. For a time, the new faction can assert itself to be the true Whigs or real liberals, but pretty soon the confusion that results creates a pressure for a change of names. At that point, the new anti-statists might lay claim to an old label, such as conservative, or invent a new one, such as libertarian. Famously, when Friedrich Hayek was confronted by a situation in which “liberal” had been appropriated by social democrats and “conservative” had been taken by Russell Kirk, he tried to recover the “Old Whig” persona, but that didn’t catch on.

Whether attempts to reclaim the word “liberal” will catch on is an open question. As the essays by Spencer and Bolingbroke show, there is always a struggle to conceptualize the history and language of faction.

Hume was at odds with the Whig establishment of his time, which subscribed to the contract theory of government (a form of false philosophy) and “ancient constitutionalism” (a false history). The latter taught that liberty is a unique possession of the English national character due to an unchanged constitution stretching back to the Saxon forests. Hume thought this history nourished a chauvinistic and aggressive English nationalism that threatened liberty, and he wrote The History of England largely to refute it. He showed that there had been at least four distinct constitutions in English history and that each was more the result of unintended consequences and contingencies than of efforts to defend any pre-existing, “ancient” constitution.

Even today, of course, many exponents of American exceptionalism are believers in ye olde English exceptionalism as well — to which George Gilder would add Israeli exceptionalism as well. Hume and Livingston are good antidotes to such nonsense.

As big as CPAC was this year, particularly with Ron Paul’s stunning straw-poll win, for me the biggest event of the weekend was a 40-person conference I attended on Saturday, a gathering of progressives, libertarians, conservatives, and radicals opposed to militarism. Some of the other attendees have already blogged about their impressions (vide Jesse Walker, Michael McPhearson, Sam Smith, David Henderson, and co-organizer Kevin Zeese). For my part, I’ve been sanguine about the prospects for Left-Right cooperation against the warfare state since the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002. Subsequently it’s only become more obvious that the old political-cultural divisions established during the 1960s are now moot. Neither the Cold War nor the culture war tells us much about what needs to be done in a world wracked by terror, hot wars, and teetering financial systems. These crises are not novel in the abstract, but their manifestations today — under conditions of U.S. hegemony and the rise of nonstate actors — are profoundly different from what Americans experienced in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Moreover, the strategic and economic crises confronting the U.S. are not entirely separate beasts. One theme that emerged at the conference from both Left and Right was the recognition that we cannot afford the foreign policy we have. Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives would all like to have that “peace dividend” we were promised after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even if we might put it to different uses. Almost any use would be better than perpetuating our self-destabilizing attempts to manage the globe, from Mesopotamia to the Caucasus to Latin America.

Surprisingly, the shift from the previous Left-Right spectrum to a new continuum has already had practical consequences. Ron Paul and Barack Obama both attest to this, albeit in radically different ways: Paul was sidelined in the old Left-Right fights, as a strict constitutionalist whose interests in monetary policy and noninterventionism seemed out of place in the era of identity politics. Yet suddenly he’s become a timely figure, a hero not only to libertarians and Old Right conservatives, but to a fair number of progressives. Obama also received support from some unexpected quarters, including conservative dissidents like Jeffrey Hart and Christopher Buckley and others not accustomed to voting Democratic (or at all all), though Obama swiftly betrayed whatever hopes his new supporters had for him. The Democrats’ meteoric descent illustrates just how poorly Obama and the congressional majority understood the forces that had elected them.

Ralph Nader, by contrast, who spoke at Saturday’s gathering, has a pretty firm grasp on what’s going on. His talk impressed me on a number of scores. At times, in emphasizing the primacy of Congress in the constitutional system and the importance of localism, he sounded almost like Willmoore Kendall. Even his anti-corporate philosophy is not something conservatives or libertarians ought to dismiss too readily. His objections to corporate personhood are very much in line with Felix Morley’s objections. Morley didn’t want to attack corporations, but he understood that the abuse of the 14th Amendment was giving the federal government and corporations together power to steamroll over the states and individuals. (See Morley’s Freedom and Federalism for more on this.)

Nader’s views on campaign-finance restrictions, on the other hand, I find quite unpalatable. David Henderson has some notes on that here. I don’t think it’s too much of a barrier to cooperation on other issues. (What’s more, there is some very quiet pro-campaign-finance-reform sentiment on the Right, though I’m in the anti camp myself.)

I’m skeptical of what under-funded advocacy groups can achieve in politics, but there are at least a few steps a Left-Right coalition can take toward cracking the ideological ice of contemporary politics. There are significant differences of principle among the journalists, intellectuals, and activists who attended the meeting, but that doesn’t mean cooperation has to be unprincipled. As my headline suggests, I think Carl Oglesby was on to something when he suggested that the Old Right and New Left have (some) common ground. Oglesby’s 1967 thoughts on the topic (from Containment and Change) were included in the conference’s reading packet, and they’re worth quoting at length:

It would be a piece of great good fortune for America and the world if the libertarian right could be reminded that besides the debased Republicanism of the Knowlands and the Judds there is another tradition available to them—their own: the tradition of Congressman Howard Buffett, Senator Taft’s midwestern campaign manager in 1952, who attacked the Truman Doctrine with the words: “Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns…We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.” There is the right of Frank Chodorov, whose response to the domestic Red Menace was abruptly to the point: “The way to get rid of communists in government jobs is to abolish the jobs.” And of Dean Russell, who wrote in 1955: “Those who advocate the ‘temporary loss’ of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty…We are rapidly becoming a caricature of the thing we profess to hate.” Most engaging, there is the right of the tough-minded Garet Garrett, who produced in 1952 a short analysis of the totalitarian impulse of imperialism which the events of the intervening years have reverified over and again. Beginning with the words, “We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire,” Garrett’s pamphlet unerringly names the features of the imperial pathology: dominance of the national executive over Congress, court, and Constitution; subordination of domestic policy to foreign policy; ascendency of the military influence; the creation of political and military satellites; a complex of arrogance and fearfulness toward the “barbarian”; and, most insidiously, casting off the national identity—the republic is free; the empire is history’s hostage.

This style of political thought, rootedly American, is carried forward today by the Negro freedom movement and the student movement against Great Society-Free World imperialism. That these movements are called leftist means nothing. They are of the grain of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic associational action; and it is only through them that the libertarian tradition is activated and kept alive. In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.

Yet their intersection can be missed. Their potentially redemptive union can go unattempted and unmade. On both sides, vision can be cut off by habituated responses to passe’ labels. The New Left can lose itself in the imported left-wing debates of the thirties, wondering what it ought to say about technocracy and Stalin. The libertarian right can remain hypnotically charmed by the authoritarian imperialists whose only ultimate love is the subhuman brownshirted power of the jingo state militant, the state rampant, the iron state possessed of its own clanking glory.

I wrapped up my post on e-books with some happy talk about how what’s good for readers is ultimately good for writers — though I hedged that assurance with some qualifications. All hedging aside, however, is it really true that readers and writers have the same interest? Doesn’t the simple supply-demand relationship between readers and authors become more complex when publishers are introduced? (You could connect this to what I discussed in my earlier post about state and society.)

The Net Books Agreement provides interesting example. It may well have been the case for a time that the best arrangement for readers, writers, and publishers, taken together, was the one that existed under the NBA. That would, in fact, be the conclusion a believer in social harmony and laissez faire (in this sphere, anyway) would have to reach, assuming the NBA was as freely entered into and enforced as its Wikipedia article suggests. By contrast, the Restrictive Practices Court, in striking down the NBA, was acting on a theory of social conflict — that is, that the interests of booksellers and publishers coincided against the interests of the public.

This goes to show, I suppose, how complicated the relationship of procedurally “conservative” and “liberal” views of society to substantially “conservative” and “liberal” policies can be. It does seem perverse, doesn’t it, to call the court’s action here “conservative,” when it broke down a settled social arrangement in the name of free competition? But then, the cause of free competition might not really have been what this was all about, since pressure to get rid of the NBA came, as one publisher’s website says, from “the enormous growth of bookseller retail chains – like Blackwell’s, Dillons, and Waterstones – which have grown to take 30 percent of the U.K. market,” and the effect of scrapping the NBA has been to put independent bookstores out of business. In short, there seem to be fewer, not more, competitors in the market as a result of trashing this supposedly “anti-competitive” agreement.

(The same publisher’s website notes, “the demise of the Net Book Agreement makes the U.K. book market more like that of the U.S., and it can be viewed as yet another step toward globalization” — that is, globalization by judicial fiat, not free trade. The difference in this case may be moot, however: the NBA was collapsing anyway as booksellers and publishers voluntarily walked away from it.)

A thoroughly laissez-faire approach to trade would permit voluntary cartels, which might in some instance, as the example of the NBA suggests, actually lead to more rather than less competition. What exists in practice under the name of liberalism, however, is not laissez faire but a blend of liberal rhetoric, some “conservative” or “socialist” assumptions about state and society, and a variety of half-disguised concrete interests (in this example, those of the big retailers). Conservatives who favor regulating trade, meanwhile, should might think about how readily regulatory power is employed in the service of an ideology of openness and “liberalism.”

There’s a temptation in thinking about these questions to want to rationalize the vocabulary — to abolish any paradoxes or inconsistencies by imposing a strict definition on liberalism (or conservatism, or whatever else). Since these terms are used in a loose way in real life, however, it may be worth preserving the paradox to understand something about how politics — and political economy — works.

If all a Tanenhaus wants is a Right that is a.) a little abashed about how Iraq turned out, but not really repentant, and b.) in favor of a “pro-family” welfare state, then he already has much of what he wants, since Ramesh Ponnuru, David Frum, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, and a host of neoconservatives already affirm a program exactly like that. Hell, Karl Rove belongs in that category, too. These are the most prominent names in “conservative” print media, and fairly influential voices within the Beltway. They would all complain that the grassroots aren’t on board with their “moderate” military welfarism — the grassroots are too brusque, too bumptious, too worked up about Obama’s birth certificate and illegal immigration. But the grassroots Right is in the state it’s in thanks in no small part to the likes of Ponnuru, Frum, Douthat, and Brooks. Since their program of welfare for families doesn’t inspire anyone, their political allies wind up having to whip up enthusiasm for the military side of the program, and have to throw in some red meat about gays, immigrants, and abortion. But the NY-DC axis have no cause to complain, since that’s the only way to sell the public on their insipid welfare-warfare program. He who wills the end must will the means. The only means toward getting the Right to embrace the welfare state is to get the Right hopped up about real wars or culture wars. But that’s precisely what has cost the Right political power over the last four years.

In short, the moderates created the extremists. And now they’re just proposing more of the same. Mencken may have said that no one ever went bankrupt underestimating the intelligence of the American people, but in this case I think the people have a lot more sense than media mod-cons. If they want welfare, they’ll get it from the experts — the liberals.

The birthers are a good illustration. Commenter Delmar Jackson writes in response to Daniel Larison’s post on birthers and nationalism, “I am not a Birther, but I have lost my trust of the media. Can you tell me why it took the National Enquirer to break the story on John Edwarrds cheating on his wife during the primaries?. The mainstram nedia ignored the story while Edwards continued to take votes from Hillary allowing Obama to win.” There’s a valid point here: “responsible” news outlets chose not to report on Edwards’s affair, just as in earlier days they chose not to report Kennedy’s affairs or Franklin Roosevelt’s physical disability (or his affairs, for that matter). The “privilege” politicians receive for their embarrassing personal secrets may extend to Republicans as well — The State newspaper in South Carolina knew about Gov. Mark Sanford’s indiscretions months before his disappearing act prompted them to expose him. These are just a few instances of news the reading public might care about that the media refuses to report. The litany of things that the media does report that aren’t true — see Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cook, for starters; you might add, on a slightly different note, Judith Miller and Mike Wallace — is too long to recite. Skepticism toward the mainstream media is well warranted. As is distrust in public officials, who have been lying to Americans about elections, wars, and the economy for a couple of centuries now.

But skepticism about media and political authorities doesn’t logically entail belief in wildly improbable notions like Barack Obama’s Kenyan nativity. That doesn’t follow logically, but for a lot of right-wingers, it does follow psychologically.

I’m skeptical of claims that all human beings have a more or less equally powerful need for faith. Clearly some people are more superstitious than others. Among religious believers, some are theologically inclined and others are mystically and emotionally inclined. Among nonbelievers, some buy into parascientific New Age mumbo-jumbo or imbue science with a religious aura, and others are more epistemically humble. Some number of people do, however, have a compelling need indeed to believe in improbable things that conform to ideological preferences. The toppling of corrupt authorities doesn’t do anything to decrease the credulous and authoritarian tendencies of this subset — it only unleashes those tendencies to find wilder, more ideologically satisfying objects.

Stalin is an example of the ideological true believer. He was both a committed ideological Marxist and a very paranoid man. He suppressed traditional religion in the Soviet Union. And when empirical science contradicted his ideology– as genetics certainly contradicted the belief in human equality — Stalin promoted the nonscientific but “politically correct” ideas of Trofim Lysenko. The birthers are not Stalinists, but they do subscribe to a kind of right-wing Lysenkoism. The ideology that insists the mainstream media and government cannot be trusted (and it’s true, they very often can’t) also positively affirms the “truth” of preposterous claims that fit the believer’s paranoia. In other words, ideology efficiently turns skepticism into belief. And that’s only putting the problem in epistemological terms. In political terms, it converts skepticism of government power into affirmation of government power — from conspiracy theories about Clinton (there were plenty of those) and Obama to dogmatic support for, say, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. The ideological impulse is primary, however, and its object is secondary. Thus Bush or even Palin could conceivably be subjected to the skeptical phase of the ideology, which would then find a new object for its affirmative phase. If Bush or Palin aren’t sufficiently devoted, the ideological authority will descend upon Alan Keyes or Orly Taitz.

There may be a vicious circle here where distrust of flawed mainstream authorities leads to trust in flawed fringe authorities, which in turn produces more alienation from the mainstream (I’m not just talking about the center-left media and government here, but mainstream as in ordinary, non-ideological people). The way out of this cycle of paranoia would be to burnish some less flawed, more-or-less mainstream authorities — a church? disinterested scholarship? anything could do the trick. But once you’ve sunk deep enough into the belief that you can’t trust anyone who questions an anti-mainstream belief, you can only trust people whom nobody else trusts, getting out of the hole becomes impossible. At that point, your ideology has redefined up as down, so that attempting to climb out means only digging deeper.

Knapp’s questions are rhetorically effective, but they also lead to more interesting considerations. If the “birthers” are not credible simply as zealous defenders of the Constitution — and they’re not — then where does their desperate desire to believe that Obama isn’t a citizen come from?

Partisanship is the obvious answer. Birthers are not a fringe phenomenon among Republicans, if this poll is to be believed. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans either believe that Obama was not born in the U.S. (28 percent) or are “not sure” (30 percent). But the poll doesn’t give a breakdown by ideology, and I’d bet gold ingots to federal reserve notes that self-identified “conservatives” would score higher than the GOP average in both categories of doubt. In fact, the presence of “conservatives” in the independent and Democratic cohorts probably accounts disproportionately for the birther-belief among those groups, too.

Now, that’s a hypothesis, but if it’s true that conservatives, even more than Republicans, are inclined to believe that Obama isn’t a natural born citizen, why might that be? Perhaps because pseudo-conservatives already know, without the need for any birth certificate, that Obama isn’t a true American. For them, being an American is not only about being a legal citizen, but about a subscribing to certain beliefs. Knowing that Obama is a de facto un-American, it might make sense (for a paranoiac) to suspect that he’s not a de jure American either.

For the movement Right, being an American means 1.) that you support U.S. military actions, no matter how questionable their strategic, moral, or constitutional grounds; 2.) you support capitalism — that is, corporate capitalism as it exists in the U.S. (if you don’t endorse this kind of economics, you must be a socialist or Communist); and 3.) you’re suspicious of Mexicans, Muslims, and non-British Europeans, especially the French, who are socialists and military weaklings. There might be a fourth item on the list: you ought to drive the most fuel-inefficient vehicle possible. (A flag-burning, Prius-driving open-borders communist might be wrong about a lot of things, and an awful human being to boot. But none of that makes him any less of an American.)

National Review has denounced the birthers. But if I’m correct about the roots of birtherdom, NR and other con movement mouthpieces are responsible for creating their mentality in the first place. After all, didn’t the magazine lead off its piece denouncing conservative critics of the Iraq War as “unpatriotic conservatives” with a quote from Thomas Fleming in which he praised the cultural superiority of France? The birthers are just practicing a cruder kind of patriotism-questioning. And their unshakable belief in the face of all evidence that Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii is not so different from the neoconservative certainty that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling vast quantities of WMD with which to threaten the United States. Maybe Obama’s birth certificate is in Syria?

Accusing other people of un-Americanism has been a right-wing weapon of choice for a very long time — but don’t forget that the House Un-American Activities Committee got its start as the Communist-inspired brown-baiting McCormack-Dickstein Committee. (As Justin Raimondo recently wrote, “Long before [Joseph] McCarthy, there was [Samuel] Dickstein, who … coerced and abused witnesses dragged before his inquisition and ‘lectured them about their moral shortcomings.’”) The Left has played this game to a much greater extent than is usually recognized. There’s a reason Norman Lear calls his group People for the American Way. By implication, you’re un-American if you oppose them. Obviously, the Left defines un-Americanism a little differently from the Right — for progressives, you’re not a true-blue American if you don’t embrace egalitarianism.

Going back a little further, you can trace both the Left’s and the Right’s mania for 100 percent Americanism to the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. The Ku Klux Klan loved the idea, too. But Obama’s birther critics today don’t dislike him because he’s black. They dislike him because he isn’t an American.

See also: Jesse Walker on birthers, OC Weekly on Orly Taitz, and Philip Jenkins on anti-fascist hysteria.

1.)  All men are endowed by their Creator with a.) the right not be aborted, b.) the right to a pro-American government, and c.) the right to ever increasing prosperity. (Regarding “b” — democratic governments are necessarily pro-American, and pro-American governments are necessarily democratic. Any apparent contradictions will be resolved upon closer examination.)

2.) America stands for these fundamental rights (including the application of 1b to the rest of the world). Although America has made some mistakes in the past, those failings have been substantially rectified and to dwell upon them is anti-American. Evils that can be pinned specifically on Southerners, however, may be discussed without any suspicion of anti-Americanism. For these purposes, the South is a foreign country, like Germany.

3.) The evils that still besmirch the country, such as abortion, are the work of a small, unelected elite — the liberals.

4.) The American people are fundamentally good and intuitively subscribe to the rights outlined in 1. In fact, all people around the world deep down believe in those rights.  Everybody wants to be American.

5.)  But people in other countries are prevented from becoming Americans by their evil, undemocratic governments. Some of these governments, in Europe for example, are run by secular liberals. Other governments, the really evil ones, are run by anti-American dictators whose sole mission in life is to destroy America and the rights that she represents.  These dictators, whatever ideology they claim to profess, are all fascists.

6.) The only other nations that have always embodied the rights enumerated in 1 are Great Britain, which is really the same country as the United States (but a little worse off for being closer to godless Europe), and Israel.  Lately, Georgia and Ukraine have joined the Enlightened nations as well.

7.) Good liberals basically believe in point 1, but they don’t believe strongly enough. This is the sin of moral relativism. Martin Luther King was better than most liberals, but even he didn’t believe in America enough — enough, that is, to support the Vietnam War. (Sometimes, as Bramwell notes, it may be conceded that King wasn’t altogether down with 1c either.)

8.) Bad liberals are really fascists, and unpatriotic conservatives are really bad liberals.

9.) Every time the United States topples an undemocratic government, American values automatically prevail. This natural cause-and-effect sequence can only be thwarted by a failure of will on the part of American leadership (an effect of enervating liberalism) or by subversion from anti-American tyrannies elsewhere.

10.) Elite institutions of higher learning are thoroughly controlled by anti-American liberals and fascists who are indoctrinating our youth. Of course, conservative pundits who matriculated from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc. are unaffected by this.

11.) Taxes and interest rates must always be kept low to ensure ever increasing prosperity. Deficits don’t matter.

Not everyone on the establishment Right agrees with all of these points — a handful dissent from 1a or 1c, for example. Nor would anyone on the establishment Right phrase some of these credenda quite so bluntly. But I think on the whole this is a fair characterization.

Lest anyone jump to conclusions, I’m not affirming the opposite of each of these points, nor am I arguing that the creed is wrong in every particular. But as a worldview, it certainly is buncombe, a potlatch of liberal platitudes and militaristic hubris.

Research has established that the party regular is attached to politics by social as well as ideological incentives (and sometimes also by material incentives) and that such attachment encourages the virtues of the good team member: cooperation, perseverence, loyalty, service, and the will to win. The ideological perspective, in contrast, is hostile to the construction and maintenance of organizational solidarity, for several reasons: first, because persons attached to politics by ideology do not identify themselves with organizations but with a point of view, and their commitment to organizations is therefore weak, instrumental, conditional; second, because persons attracted to politics by ideological incentives tend to hold relatively extreme and intense views and to have relatively comprehensive ideological orientations which encourages them to see particular questions as part of larger wholes. This in turn means that virtually any policy or issue can be perceived as involving “fundamental” questions of conscience which cannot be compromised without a sacrifice of “principle.”

The essay in question is called “Why the New Right Failed” — failed, that is, to nominate Ronald Reagan, John Connally, or George Wallace in 1976. Four years later, of course, the New Right would play an important role in both nominating and electing Reagan. I think Kirkpatrick’s assessment of the ideological vs. the partisan mind is mostly correct, but over the past 20 years the Republicans have figured out a way to span the gap. Rather than having the ideological activist give his loyalty directly to a central organization, which after all cannot possibly faithfully represent every interest of a coalition on every point, the activist only has to be loyal to his particular niche organization, and these can then coalesce with the leadership of other broadly sympathetic ideological groups. This is exactly the approach Paul Weyrich and Grover Norquist followed in organizing the contemporary Republican Right. Rather than trying to build a broad but unorganized electoral coalition, the strategy is to build an organized — hierarchical is maybe just a bit too strong — network of sympathetic groups.

Furthermore, while Kirkpatrick points out that it’s rare in eletoral politics for voters to have a genuine choice between two candidates representing wholly different ideologies, it is possible through propaganda to create the impression that any given electoral contest is between two radically divergent philosophies. The more that nonpolitical — that is, non-state-controlled — issues of identity and culture can be brought into political discourse, the easier it becomes to construct fictional polarities. The differences between Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and to all appearances of what’s to come, Obama (with Clinton II as his secretary of state) are pretty meager. But “culturally,” or propandistically, every four years has been a showdown between freedom-loving American patriots and countercultural McGoverniks, according to the narrative set up by the Republican coalition. The Democratic narrative involves wealthy, out-of-touch, racist Republicans trying to oppress the already oppressed.

There are a couple of layers of irony to all this. The New Right seemingly succeeded after 1976, by nominating and electing Reagan. But the Reagan Revolution and 1994 Republican Revolution in Congress, changed very little. The “success” of the New Right was literally illusory — new myths, new propagandistic images, took hold in the public discourse, camouflaging a the fundamental continuity and identity between the two major parties. (That’s not to say nothing at all of substance changed — both Carter and Reagan represented represented some change from the Truman/Johnson/Kennedy and Nixon mentalities of their parties. But business as usual resumed under the two Bushes, Clinton, and now Obama.)

There’s a campaign afoot to save the eXile, as an online zine if not a print publication, but as I typed this post, the eXile website went down, with Verizon kindly informing me, “Sorry, ‘www.exile.ru’ does not exist or is not available.”

An irony here is that Ames has always been even harder on the servile Western media than on the Russian government. For all their talk about human rights and democracy, the Western media loves nothing more than currying favor in Washington by stoking fear about the Great Russian Bear. And now Kremlin bureaucrats have handed their enemies in the Western press a useful bit of ammunition — though as the Nation notes in its current issue, media here in the Free World have been very slow to notice what’s happening to the eXile, obviously enough because the eXile has been a thorn in the respectable media’s flank.

Long-time eXile contributor Gary Brecher, aka the War Nerd, is also an occasional TAC contributor. I’ll blog about the whole story for TAC tomorrow.