The American Conservative

The new tape by Bin Laden cries out for discussion.  I generally agree with the assessment of Steve Walt, among others, that it is a sign of Bin Laden’s desperation for relevance to be urging us to read Walt/Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter.  It is indeed puzzling that he’s taken so many cues in his recent tapes from the apparent advice of his American courtier Adam Gadahn.

We do well to reflect, however, on how we got here.  Osama bin Laden, very simply, has been the greatest military genius since Napoleon.  No one dare say that it was he – not Reagan, not Gorbachev – who ended the Cold War.  He will not merely be remembered as the slayer of both the Soviet and American empires, but as the one who, in Murray Rothbard’s phrase, broke both the clock of bolshevism and the clock of menshevism and thus repealed the 20th century.

Like Napoleon, however, Bin Laden’s victories will only serve to indispensably empower his greatest enemies – for Napoleon, the European old order, and for Bin Laden, the Shi’ites.  It could be that he knows this, and is desperate to try to regain the momentum by using the same brilliant reverse psychology he used to help get Bush re-elected in 2004 with respect to the turn in America over Israel.  But really, the damage has already been done, and if anything, Bin Laden is a victim of his own success.

All praise is due to Allah for the breaker of the clocks.

If you voted for Buchanan in 2000, then you have voted for a ticket with a black woman on it. Your detractors cannot say that. Unless they voted Communist in the Angela Davis days. Did they?

Civil Rights was passed by an all-white Congress as conservative as any elected in the Sixties was bound to be. It only passed with Republican votes. And the Democratic President who signed it into law was not only white, but very, very Texan. Surely, no one here would wish to return to Jim Crow? After all, you most likely voted for a black Vice-President in 2000.

That alliance is now as vital as it was in the days of the struggle against Jim Crow, and of the struggle alongside white Republicans against the Vietnam War. Today’s causes are protecting blue-collar jobs, controlling immigration, making and keeping English America’s national language, returning to a strong defense capability used strictly for its proper defensive purpose, safeguarding marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman, and ending the triple genocide of the black male in the womb, on the streets and on the battlefields.

And that alliance is nothing new.

I see that the main internet boosters for David Petraeus as GOP savior have lashed out me for speaking ill of the prospect.  Allow me therefore to knock this idol down.

The “surge” was a great tactical success at the expense of strategy.  There are many analogous situations in the history of warfare.  Perhaps the most relevant was the Russian offensive against Austria in the spring of 1916, which led to impressive tactical gains that essentially destroyed the Habsburg military as a serious force in the war, but put such stress on the Russian army that it completely collapsed, and then we got the Revolution.  Also similar were the French offensive later that year whose stresses led to the 1917 mutiny, and the German last rally in the winter of 1918 which led directly to their losing the war.

No, Petraeus is not a neocon, and therein lay the tragedy.  He was a disciple of H.R. McMaster, who wrote the definitive indictment of the New Frontier men and how they got us into Vietnam Dereliction of Duty.  And yet he assented to just such a folly when he agreed to execute Bush’s orders to kick the can down the road to Obama by simply containing the violence, perhaps in great measure thinking that he was doing his patriotic duty to keep Bush pacified for the sake of the army and the country, but in at least equal measure to serve his political ambitions, so readily stoked by my interlocutors.

A truly great man would have said to Bush what Robert E. Lee said upon being offered the chance to command Lincoln’s army, as he described it in shock, to invade his own country – “I can not lead it, I will not lead it.”

I read this on the air this morning and thought it worth passing around. None of this will be earth shattering to most on the Alternative Right, but I thought of it on September 11, 2001 and still think of it every anniversary.

This is Pat Buchanan describing a hypothetical terrorist attack that could take place as a result of U.S. interventionist foreign policy. From page 44 of his 1999 book “A Republic, Not an Empire:”

It is in February of 2005 that the explosion occurs in the port of Seattle. It is a low-yield crude atomic device, but the devastation is incredible. Thousands are dead; thousands more are injured or wounded, many burned horribly. The device was smuggled in the cargo hold of a ship and detonated only hours after the ship had docked. No one knows for certain who put the device there. Iran condemns the act as an inhuman atrocity and an affront to Islam, but notes that America was the first to use such weapons. North Korea is also suspect. But intense speculation focuses on a group associated with the financier of terror Osama Bin Laden, whom U.S. special forces ran down and killed years earlier. Bin Laden’s agents reportedly acquired nuclear weapons from rogue army elements is Russia or Kazakhstan in the 1990’s, or got one from a Pakistan now controlled by allies of the Afghan Taliban.

Daily Kos, among others, is now reporting that Joe Wilson’s South Carolina district is possibly in play next year.   It occurred to me long ago that after his disappointing run for the Senate that Bob Conley could very well get himself elected to the House in his Myrtle Beach-based district.

Of course, Daily Kos will have none of it, having angrily written off Conley in 2008 for things that they were somehow willing to overlook two years earlier in their embrace of Jim Webb.   At one point they even had the temerity to run a poll showing Lindsey Graham’s much-earned weaknesses but lamented the lack of a “real Democrat” who could make a real race of it.  But Conley did exactly as well in his race as did the Democrats in Georgia and Mississippi who were being talked up in the final days.

Conley!  Conley!  Conley!

It never ceases to amaze me how furiously American conservatives react when anyone points out that the Founding Fathers were rationalists and Deists who, like all such, had a particularly ferocious hatred of Catholicism, and whose position is summed up in The Jefferson Bible, from which all reference to Christ’s Divinity, Resurrection and miracles has been expunged. What did people think that they were? Puritans, perhaps. They were not.

They would have been horrified by an America in which the single largest bloc was Catholic. They would have viewed Evangelical Protestantism as quite beneath derision. They would have recognized Mormonism as a perversion of their own and Joseph Smith’s Freemasonry (all that “angel in the whirlwind” business). But most of all, they would have been baffled by the level of church attendance in today’s America. The America that they knew and envisaged, by no means only in their own class, was simply not like that at all. Who ever said it was?

Of course, how could it have been? The great culture-defining immigrations and religious revivals still lay ahead. The real Founding Fathers of any country now recognizable as America are rather less sung figures, and one would have thought rather more endearing ones to the TAC crowd: the Irish, Italian, Polish and other pioneers of Catholic America; and the Scots-Irish, German, Scandinavian and other pioneers of Protestant America in, above all, the South and the West. Why venerate East Coast liberal élite figures instead?

Even now, unbelievers outnumber everyone except Catholics and Baptists. Far from Hispanics’ being the great hope of American Catholicism, Latin America has never been a very Catholic place, with slight if any Mass-going majorities, huge numbers of the unbaptised, rampant syncretism and surviving paganism, and a very heavy dependence on (historically European, these days usually North American) missionary priests. Wishing for the United States to remain an English-speaking country is fully compatible with Catholicism. Indeed, those who are most vocal in that cause are themselves traditional Catholics, as TAC readers will be fully aware.

And the myth of “Christian America” and “secular Europe” has always been precisely that: a myth. It is not in America, but in Britain, that there are bishops sitting as such in the legislature, publicly funded Christian chaplains in the Armed Forces and the public healthcare service, and (at least on paper) Christian religious instruction and collective worship in the taxpayer-maintained schools. It is not in America, but in Germany, that there are church taxes, with numerous public services provided by the churches as the largest employers after the several tiers of government, and with the Kirchentag. It was not in America nationally (although I grant and rejoice that it was in California and in Florida), but in Portugal, that there was a recent reaffirmation that marriage is only ever the union of one man and one woman. Connecticut, in fact, voted for same-sex “marriage” at almost exactly the same time as Portugal voted against it.

It is not in America that there is any Christian sacral monarchy, monarchy being an institution for which no purely secular argument can be created, and there being 11 Christian sacral monarchies in Europe (12 if you count the Vatican), one of which also exercises several interrelated global roles such as make it the contemporary world’s pre-eminent or even only example of the tradition of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Byzantine Emperors, and the Tsars of All The Russia. And so on.

The Founding Fathers consciously wanted rid of those such things which existed in their day, and thus of the underlying mood and spirit that has since given rise to the rest of them: the Biblical view of religion as public truth, explictly shaping public policy. That America is or has been like this anyway is and has been in spite of the Founding Fathers, not because of them, and overwhelmingly a result of later immigration from Europe, which at least in the first generation of settlement was not shaped by their thought. I am not advocating the adoption in America of the sorts of arrangements set out above. But I am certainly advocating – indeed, pleading for – that mood, that spirit. (Just as far more Americans define themselves as atheists or agnostics than Europeans tend to assume, so far fewer Europeans so define themselves than Americans tend to assume. And when it comes to levels of church attendance, try suggesting to even apparently the least observant of European villages that its church should be closed.)

If you want (as you should, and which TAC reader would not?) an economy, society, culture and polity defined by the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ and His Church, rather than by the alternative Masonic re-working of both traditions along Deist lines, then, while you certainly do not need to discard everything that the Founding Fathers ever said, you no less certainly do need to get over them; to adopt a vastly more critical attitude toward them, beginning with an end to the treatment of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as if they were part of the Bible, and the utterances of the Founding Fathers as if they were those of the Prophets or the Apostles. Rather, like all human systems, they sit under God as He has disclosed Himself. They are means, no ends, and must therefore be judged according to how well or how badly they serve enormously greater goods.

This is an integral part of America’s global role; of Manifest Destiny, if you must. It is the secularism rather than the Christianity that American soft power is exporting, ultimately because it is the secularism rather than the Christianity that is held to be fundamental to the Republic. The secularization of Europe in the twentieth century is very largely attributable to this. In most cases it is certainly not because of the formal institutions, although many of those institutions, which simply assumed the Christian character of the wider culture and polity, have been partly or wholly destroyed as part of that process. There is something similar about the movements in, again, Connecticut, to compel Orthodox synagogues to conduct same-sex “marriages”, and to subject Catholic parishes and dioceses to the rule of lay councils. The first is held to be what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, the second to be the sort of government that they ordained. So that’s that, then. Isn’t it?

The good news, so to speak, for America is that, as the European experience shows, regular or occasional churchgoers are far more likley to vote, and far, far, far more likely to end up in national legislatures. But they have to be properly formed and informed in the exercise of their political responsibilitiies. Lazily assuming that the Founding Fathers were a God-fearing lot, or that the Constitution somehow establishes a Christian nation, or whatever, is not a sign of such formation, or of such information, or of such responsibility.

Congressman Joe “Liar” Wilson of South Carolina is obviously right in his objection to illegal immigration. So we can only assume that he was not out there this time last year, campaigning to give the Presidency to John McCain. Never mind to secure the re-election of McCain’s consligliere, Lindsey Grahamnesty. Rather, Wilson must surely have given his all in the cause of that Ron Paul supporter and traditional Catholic, Bob Conley.

As for the speech generally, there are many things we may not know about Barack Obama. One of them now appears to be that, far from having somehow risen without trace, he is in fact a real old pro. He stumbled with his lines a couple of times. But what the hell, he got them all out: the restrictions on the public option, the legal requirement to insure your health as you insure your car, the tactical masterstroke of co-opting McCain’s scheme from last year, the dismissal of the death panels nonsense, no coverage for illegal immigrants (never going to happen, anyway – his own black base was the safeguard against that), no federal funding of abortion (never going to happen, anyway), no repeal of the federal conscience clauses on abortion (never going to happen, anyway).

While it makes no moral sense that so many people draw the line at federal funding of abortion in America (all three conditions must be met, it seems), nevertheless that is what and where they do. Better, I suppose, to draw the line there than to draw no line at all. No Congress or President was ever going to commit electoral suicide by legalizing such funding, banned by a Republican amendment, but a Republican amendment passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter. The same sheer electoral calculation also applies to the federal conscience clauses.

So there we have it. Since there was never any proposal from any quarter for death panels, Obama is going to get his way simply by promising not to sign any Bill that contained certain provisions that no Bill submitted for his signature ever would have contained. His only serious opposition will be from his own left wing. From which he will thus be able to distance himself.

A real old pro.

With the added advantage of not looking like one.

In the economics profession, mainstream opinion on the Federal Reserve System is mostly positive.  However, at the Huffington Post Ryan Grim notes that there may be more than solid research and objective opinion behind that consensus.  It may be because the Fed employs or publishes a large chunk of the country’s monetary economists:

The Fed has been dominating the profession for about three decades. “For the economics profession that came out of the [second world] war, the Federal Reserve was not a very important place as far as they were concerned, and their views on monetary policy were not framed by a working relationship with the Federal Reserve. So I would date it to maybe the mid-1970s,” says University of Texas economics professor — and Fed critic — James Galbraith. “The generation that I grew up under, which included both Milton Friedman on the right and Jim Tobin on the left, were independent of the Fed. They sent students to the Fed and they influenced the Fed, but there wasn’t a culture of consulting, and it wasn’t the same vast network of professional economists working there.”

But by 1993, when former Fed Chairman Greenspan provided the House banking committee with a breakdown of the number of economists on contract or employed by the Fed, he reported that 189 worked for the board itself and another 171 for the various regional banks. Adding in statisticians, support staff and “officers” — who are generally also economists — the total number came to 730. And then there were the contracts. Over a three-year period ending in October 1994, the Fed awarded 305 contracts to 209 professors worth a total of $3 million.

Just how dominant is the Fed today?

The Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors employs 220 PhD economists and a host of researchers and support staff, according to a Fed spokeswoman. The 12 regional banks employ scores more. (HuffPost placed calls to them but was unable to get exact numbers.) The Fed also doles out millions of dollars in contracts to economists for consulting assignments, papers, presentations, workshops, and that plum gig known as a “visiting scholarship.” A Fed spokeswoman says that exact figures for the number of economists contracted with weren’t available. But, she says, the Federal Reserve spent $389.2 million in 2008 on “monetary and economic policy,” money spent on analysis, research, data gathering, and studies on market structure; $433 million is budgeted for 2009….

Robert Auerbach, a former investigator with the House banking committee, spent years looking into the workings of the Fed….

Auerbach found that in 1992, roughly 968 members of the AEA designated “domestic monetary and financial theory and institutions” as their primary field, and 717 designated it as their secondary field. Combining his numbers with the current ones from the AEA and NABE, it’s fair to conclude that there are something like 1,000 to 1,500 monetary economists working across the country. Add up the 220 economist jobs at the Board of Governors along with regional bank hires and contracted economists, and the Fed employs or contracts with easily 500 economists at any given time. Add in those who have previously worked for the Fed — or who hope to one day soon — and you’ve accounted for a very significant majority of the field.

Auerbach concludes that the “problems associated with the Fed’s employing or contracting with large numbers of economists” arise “when these economists testify as witnesses at legislative hearings or as experts at judicial proceedings, and when they publish their research and views on Fed policies, including in Fed publications.”

The article points out that it is not as simple as paying off otherwise unbiased researchers to do pro-Fed research, but since working at the Fed or publishing in journals edited by those who have is necessary to advance in the field, the Fed can effectively shut down any dissent.  Furthermore, they have a phalanx of economists at the ready, perhaps not to defend every action the Fed takes, but certainly to defend its existence as an institution.  These economists have taken on the same role as what Murray Rothbard called “court historians” who wrote the official versions of history in which the government was always right.

Austrian economists are all too familiar with this phenomenon as their anti-Fed arguments have been written off for years as cranky or simply outdated.  Hopefully, the Fed’s ineptitude in creating the housing bubble and what I expect is some substantial inflation in the near future will put a crack in that edifice, which will allow some dissident ideas into academia.  Still, the Fed is holding most of the cards.

An article today on the blog of the British Daily Telegraph, setting out various views that I have previously expressed on here, has had certain people practically foaming at the mouth. I can summarize the position of my critics.

Being “conservative” has, nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to do with national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation), local variation, historical consciousness, family life (founded on the marital union of one man and one woman), the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, or respect for the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilization to the point of natural death.

Therefore, in today’s America, being “conservative” has nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to do with strictly limited and strictly legal immigration, constitutional checks and balances, energy independence, Second Amendment rights and responsibilities, America as an English-speaking country, foreign policy realism, a strong defense capability used sparingly, abortion reduction, or the maintenance of traditional marriage.

It follows that a “conservative” has nothing, absolutely nothing at all, in common with those who voted simultaneously for Obama and for traditional marriage in California and Florida, with those who voted simultaneously for Obama and to ban discrimination against working-class white men in Colorado, with those who voted simultaneously for Obama and against deregulated gambling in Ohio and Missouri, with those who voted for Obama while keeping the black and Catholic churches going from coast to coast, with those who voted for a Ron Paul supporter and traditional Catholic in South Carolina, or with those who have introduced the Pregnant Women Support Act.

Rather, a “conservative” is concerned about nothing, absolutely nothing at all, except “limited government” and that for which it is a superfluous euphemism, low taxation, which can never be low enough, yet is nevertheless somehow supposed to fund never-ending wars all over the world.

That’s right.

Isn’t it?

I am more than a little amused by the new German AIDS-awareness campaign that likens unprotected sex to the Holocaust. As far as I can tell, this demonstrates that the trend in the Western world to equate anything deemed unsavory to the Third Reich has finally reached its apogee.

If we visualize mainstream moral sensibilities as a Euler diagram, with a large circle containing all that is bad, and examine Hitler’s place within that diagram over time, we’ll notice a consistent trend. For at least two generations, the “Hitler” circle within the “Bad” circle has grown steadily in most peoples’ minds, and the two now apparently overlap perfectly. In other words, anything categorized as “Bad” is necessarily also categorized as “Hitler.” The two words are now perfectly synonymous. From this point forward, feel free to equate Adolf with anything at all that offends your moral sentiments.