Buchanan's surefire flop. Home Bound

The New Republic ^ | July 11, 2002 | Franklin Foer

[Torie]

Buchanan's surefire flop. Home Bound by Franklin Foer

Post date 07.11.02 | Issue date 07.22.02

It can't be a good omen for Pat Buchanan. The man who will now carry the pitchfork for his "America First" peasant populism is a European aristocrat. Taki Theodoracopulos (or Taki, as he signs his byline), scion to a Greek shipping fortune, will fund and contribute essays to Buchananism's new house organ, The American Conservative (TAC), a Washington-based biweekly set to launch this September. It is, to say the least, an odd match. While Buchanan venerates the working class, Taki is an unabashed yacht-owning, nightclub-going social snob with homes in the Swiss Alps, London, and Manhattan's Upper East Side. While Buchanan rails against the fraying of God-fearing, law-abiding, traditional American culture, Taki was convicted in 1984 for smuggling cocaine. His most penetrating meditation on American cultural decay was a 1982 essay in The American Spectator titled, "Why American Women are Lousy Lovers."

Still, this unlikely pair is bound by a common goal: to rescue American conservatism from the false gods of internationalism, immigration, free trade, and Zionism. And Buchanan's disastrous 2000 presidential run notwithstanding, as recently as one year ago there was reason to believe such a mission might elicit popular support. After all, in his quest to woo Hispanics, George W. Bush floated a blanket amnesty for Mexican immigrants--an idea that sparked a sharply negative reaction from the conservative grassroots. He called fast-track trade authority a top priority and declared himself "committed to pursuing open trade at every opportunity," despite evidence that the American right was souring on free trade. He reneged on campaign promises to pull U.S. troops from Bosnia and Kosovo. And against conservative orthodoxy, he embraced the spirit of multiculturalism, hardly lifting a finger to undo affirmative action and apparently practicing it himself, packing his Cabinet with minority appointments. In short, the most corporate president in recent history seemed the perfect foil for the anti-corporate conservatism Buchanan had been preaching for years.

And at first glance, September 11 seemed to add fuel to Buchanan's critique. What better evidence for Fortress America than the spectacle of visa-finagling foreigners blowing up lower Manhattan? Buchanan wrote a quickie book, The Death of the West, about the swarthy menace; and across Europe his brand of nativism began harvesting votes in record number. But over time it has become clear that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn't boosted the isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for Israel. The conservative establishment has co-opted post-9/11 fears of Muslim immigration, and Bush has covered his protectionist flank on trade. In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn't have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right.

AC thinks conservative support for the war on terrorism is hollow; indeed it plans to make the issue its raison d'etre. According to Scott McConnell--a former editorial-page editor of the New York Post, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, and TAC's third proprietor--"Garden-variety conservatives pretend that the movement speaks with one voice on foreign policy. But foreign policy represents a significant fissure among conservatives. [TAC] will challenge the orthodoxy." It would be more accurate to say it used to represent a significant fissure among conservatives. In late-'90s debates over the Balkans, for instance, a growing number of congressional Republicans broke from the internationalism of GOP elders like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush and echoed Buchanan's 1999 critique of America's "utopian crusades for global democracy." One year later Tom DeLay delivered a speech at a Washington think tank decrying Clintonite foreign policy as "social work." And Trent Lott took to CNN to accuse the president of neglecting diplomacy, urging him to "give peace a chance" in Kosovo. Even some normally hawkish neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer condemned the Balkan interventions as "a colossal waste--and drain." A poll in late 1999 taken by Mark Penn showed that 57 percent of Republicans considered the United States "too engaged in the world's problems."

Buchanan has continued that line of argument. Then, he argued the United States had no right to interfere in Balkan tribal feuds. Now he writes, "Where does Bush get the right to identify and punish every [terrorist] aggressor? Who believes any president can lift the `dark threat' of aggression and terror from all mankind?" But no one on the right is listening anymore. A "CBS News" poll from last month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of the president's handling of the war. If anything, the conservative critics of Bill Clinton's foreign policy--Krauthammer and DeLay among them--are demanding that Bush intervene more aggressively to root out global terrorism, starting with Yasir Arafat.

The Buchananite critique has fallen flat for three reasons. First, the Clinton administration justified its interventions as humanitarian necessities. In the war on terror, by contrast, Bush hasn't needed to appeal to altruism. He has employed the rhetoric of national interest--fulfilling the Buchananite criteria for intervention. And, in the process, he reestablished the connection between national security and the hawkish internationalism that defined conservatism during the cold war. Second, Bush has preempted charges of Wilsonian internationalism by obsessively guarding against encroachments on national sovereignty--yanking the United States out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, raising objections to the International Criminal Court, and ditching the anti-ballistic missiles treaty. Thirdly, the Buchananites have shot themselves in the foot by blaming September 11 on America's "indiscriminate support for Israel" (McConnell's words in the New York Press last fall) and pining for the days "when America was loved by Arabs" (Taki's words, also in the Press). TAC's supporters have the misfortune to be espousing anti-Zionism at the very moment the conservative rank and file, driven by evangelicals, views Israel as America's kindred spirit in the battle against terrorism and radical Islam. According to the most recent batch of polling, 64 percent of Republicans say they actively sympathize with Israel--as opposed to 38 percent of Democrats. And 83 percent of Republicans applaud Bush's aggressively pro-Ariel Sharon policy on the Middle East.

he rest of the political landscape is equally inhospitable to Buchananism. Trade--an issue on which Beltway conservatives and grassroots conservatives genuinely were out of step--has lost much of its salience now that national security, not economics, dominates foreign policy debates. With Senate Democrats adding the Dayton-Craig labor protections to trade promotion authority, Bush has threatened to veto the legislation altogether, leaving the Buchananites nothing to shout about in the short term. And when the administration has tinkered with trade policy, it has done so in Buchananite ways--raising tariffs on domestic steel, supporting a farm bill loaded with subsidies for U.S. agriculture, and generally proving that Karl Rove is far too in touch with electoral reality to leave Bush vulnerable to protectionist attack.

Bush and the conservative mainstream have also masterfully preempted the anti-immigration backlash Buchanan would like to foment. Although Bush still talks about tolerance for Muslims and even tried to restore food-stamp benefits to legal aliens, he has endorsed a major overhaul of the border patrol, tougher enforcement of student visas, and a fingerprinting system that amounts to racial profiling. Similarly, pro-immigration magazines like The Weekly Standard and National Review have turned racial profiling and a tougher visa system into crusades, leaving Buchanan and his allies little room to accuse the conservative establishment of sacrificing American security for political correctness and cheap labor. When McConnell told me that the American right considers immigration a "verboten issue," he sounded as if he hadn't touched the stack of magazines by his bed for months.

The way the Buchananites see it, they're still battling the neocons--the largely Jewish group of former leftists who migrated right after the Vietnam War. But the neocons are no longer a wing of the conservative movement; they are the conservative movement. Supply-side economics, Israel, welfare reform, vouchers--all the old neocon pet causes have become enshrined in conservative conventional wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz triumphantly declared in The New York Times in 2000, "The time has come to drop the prefix and simply call ourselves conservatives." This presents a huge problem for the Buchananites: There's no constituency on the right--not evangelicals, not gun nuts, not libertarians--who wants to send the neocons back to City College or who even remembers they came from there. It's a fact McConnell seems to acknowledge when he lumps together National Review, FOX NEWS, and George W. Bush as the "neoconservative orthodoxy." There's barely anyone left on the right to embrace TAC.

There is, however, one group that shares the Buchananite docket of suspicions--of Wall Street, capitalism, Zionism, American power: the anti-globalization left. Indeed, Buchanan has fitfully wooed them. He marched in the streets at the 1999 Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization, and he has spoken at labor rallies against free trade. During his 2000 presidential bid, he said he hoped to turn the Reform Party into the "Peace Party." Some of his aidesde-camp have gone further, taking Buchananism to its logical left-wing conclusions. Justin Raimondo, an adviser to Buchanan's 1996 campaign and a historian of the old right, runs Antiwar.com. The site posts screeds against American interventionism that complain about "empire" and "increased military spending." And by lifting the language of the left, he has acquired an audience on the left: The Nation's Alexander Cockburn has published a column on the site, and Salon and alternative newsweeklies plug his work. For his part, Raimondo is unabashed about his ideological transformation. Last month he wrote on his site, "The only voices of dissent are heard, today, on the Left. ... This is where all the vitality, the rebelliousness, the willingness to challenge the rules and strictures of an increasingly narrow and controlled national discourse has resided."

And Raimondo is not the only one trying his hand at far-left/far-right synergy. On the University of California, San Diego, campus, David Duke's supporters have distributed flyers on "Israeli genocide." Lefty Pacifica Radio broadcasts right-wingers who rail against elites, including recordings of the late conspiracy theorist Anthony Sutton. Thomas Fleming, the editor of the paleocon Chronicles, told me, "I agree with environmentalists on chain stores, fast food, and the Americanization of Europe. I don't even bother calling myself a conservative anymore." Over the course of the '90s the anti-globalization critique that started on the right with Buchanan's 1992 and 1996 presidential runs migrated left. And 9/11, which has forever linked opposition to globalization to opposition to the war on terrorism, was the final straw. The Buchananites may not want to admit it, but in the post-9/11 era, as during the cold war, the prominent critiques of American internationalism will come from the left. TAC contributor Sam Francis says he has already privately advised the new magazine "to forget about the social issues" that divide them from their anti-globalization comrades on the left. Announcing the magazine in a New York Press column, Taki wrote: "Our motto for the magazine is that we are traditional conservatives mugged by the neocons." He'd be better off trying something different: closer to, say, "Workers of the world, unite!"

[Torie]

Neocons 1, Buchanan/Raimondo 0.

[Torie]

FYI

[Torie]

FYI

[Miss Marple]

Interesting article. Although I am dubious about anything from The National Review, this seems to be a fairly logical analysis.

[Deb]

I wonder if Pat still has Lenora Fulani on his speed dial.

[Torie]

I think you are mixing up your mags. Be that as it may, The New Republic has more interesting stuff than any other publication on the net bar none, at least for those looking for some analytical depth. This piece is more polemical, but well written and oh, so juicy. It just keeps punching away.

[Miss Marple]

Isn't The New Republic a liberal essay magazine? That was the reason I made that comment. If I am wrong, please explain their general stand on things. Thanks!

[denydenydeny]

Thanks for the great post.

The paleo right is less distinguishable from the America-hating left every day. I'm bookmarking this one.

[Torie]

The mag is neo liberal mostly, but it has writers from liberal to Neocon. Andrew Sullivan was the editor not too long ago. The thing that makes it so good however is that the points of view are well documented, and have depth, at least about half of the time. Greg Easterbrook is my favorite writer when it comes to substance on issues involving science, or sometimes social science, bar none. When it you get tired of reading Kristol and Goldberg and Derbyshire, check it out. My time spend with it tends to make me a more effective advocate for whatever I advocate.

[denydenydeny]

But you called it National Review instead of The New Republic.

[Torie]

Actually this self same issue has some standard liberal fare, including an outrageous hit piece on Bush on corporate corruption, which throughly distorts the record on Harken. (Thanks to Deport and others I actually have a good handle on Harken now as to the actual facts, none of which were fairly presented in the hit piece.)

The mag has also hit Bush hard on the budget, and the games he has played to buttress his tax cut, which in fact are factual in my opinion. I am just enough of right winger however to give Bush a pass on that one, because short term dishonesty equals longer term good. Call me a relativist.

[Dales]

Yes, it is. But if you look at your original comment on this thread, you said "The National Review".

[Dales]

He'd be better off trying something different: closer to, say, "Workers of the world, unite!"

I wonder which it was, that Pat swung to the left and attracted these advisors, or if these advisors wooed Pat to the left. I tend to think it was the former. I knew it was coming when he wrote that Reaganomics and Thatcherism were part of the problem, not the solution.

[Ohioan]

I am not sure why you have posted this. It does not advocate a clear perspective, it simply makes carping sorts of arguments against other conservatives.

There are several major issues, on which I strongly disagree with Pat Buchanan. But he is a legitimate Conservative, and one can argue with him on those issues, and still respect him and--more than just respect him--still welcome working with him on other issues. This need to demand perfect agreement among your allies is one of the reasons, we on the right are always trying to recapture something lost, rather than to continue to defend a proud heritage won for all of us long ago.

What seems to be the main point is that some on the Right are willing to make common cause with some on the Left to fight threats to American Sovereignty. The writer acts as though that is something new. That is hardly the case. The coalition that rallied America against the League of Nations in 1919 was just such a coalition. The bottom line is this: In the effort to preserve the untrammeled sovereignty of the United States, the important thing is winning the battle, not the ideological purity of our allies. Indeed, there was no ideological purity at the beginning in 1776--anything but!!

America is more important than our differences on other issues. And there is nothing in a common cause to preserve America, which in anyway limits our abilities to vociferously debate every other issue under the sun, both with our common enemy as well as with the dissenters in our own ranks.

For a better understanding of the Washington/Jefferson foreign policy, to which Pat Buchanan is basically committed--albeit with some positions that I cannot agree with--see An American Foreign Policy. The beauty of the Washington/Jefferson understanding was that it was based upon a study of thousands of years of human interaction. It worked well from 1793 until 1918, because it was designed for the ages. It would work just as well from 2002 to 2127, if we would simply apply it.

It is neither an isolationist nor a pacifist policy--quite the contrary! It is based upon mutual respect, so long as it is mutual, but a determination as Jefferson put it to "punish the first insult," for all of the reasons that almost all Conservatives today support the War On Terror. I commend it to the thoughtful among us.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[Torie]

I am sorry, but like most neocons I don't agree with Buchanan on anything. I consider him an invariable political opponent, to be resisted at every turn. As the article says, the neocon point of view is currently dominant in the Republican party, at least at the level of those that wield real power. Thus Pat was right to exit from the party, and should remain exited. To consider paleos and neos are folks that can possibly be in the same party, and break bread together, is ludicrous.

[rightofrush]

The paleo right is less distinguishable from the America-hating left every day.

What are you smoking or injecting? Is patriotism and love of the Constitution alien concepts?

We have missles, an airforce, and a navy the preclude the necessity of ever sending our troops abroad. Punishment, not conquest, should be the reponse to any threat abroad.

When Baghdad, Riyahd, and Damacus are memories, their examples will insure our security.

Any other internationalist involvement insures the loss of our troops and the financial gain of the Internationalists.
Our troops should be put on our borders, whose defence is their Constitutional perogative.

[bok]

Buchanan is right on this immigration issue, see South Africa as an example. Politicians are removing the national identity of this nation by pandering and encouraging immigrants to keep their native tongue and ways. When you have nothing to be united for or against this country will become like waring tribal factions.

I thought Neocon was meant as negative term?

[rightofrush]

I am sorry, but like most neocons I don't agree with Buchanan on anything. I consider him an invariable political opponent, to be resisted at every turn.

Your honesty is appreciated, and reinforces this paleo-con's view that neo-cons and the international globalists (redundancy?) are our enemies within.

[NYCVirago]

Justin Raimondo is a "historian"? He's only a historian if that word is now a synomyn for "anti-semitic kook"!

[Torie]

Admitting Hispanics and Asians will cause this nation to become South Africa en route to Zimbabwe is that it? My view is that folks who think that should also think negatively of neocons. I certainly hope they do. It helps to keep down the cognitive dissonance.

[rightofrush]

I thought Neocon was meant as negative term?

It is, sorta like damnyankee.

[rightofrush]

Putting Asians and Hispanics in the same box is to demonstrate naivte. Atzlan has no Asian equivalent.

[Torie]

IC, I didn't realize Pat only wanted to stop just Hispanic immigration, as opposed to all immigration except of White Europeans. I am not sure if that makes him more or less execrable. Maybe neither: maybe still just plain old execrable.

[Truthsayer20]

"Is patriotism and love of the Constitution alien concepts?"

Patriotism? I'm sorry but it's pretty evident that some folks on the right have given up on America. They, like the left-wing America-haters, aren't interested in conventional political change. All they are interested in is undermining our institutions, our president and "understanding" our enemies.

[wheezer]

I am sorry, but like most neocons I don't agree with Buchanan on anything. I consider him an invariable political opponent, to be resisted at every turn.

As a conservative, although I may agree with neocons on some issues, I know from watching them operate that they are not to be trusted.

Watching their boy (John McCain), in action only convinces me that I am correct in my distrust.

[rdavis84]

"please explain their general stand on things."--- Isn't there some sheet you can get from the ones that send your "talking points" to you that explains various publications "stand on things"? If not, somebody will probably have to do that to increase effective defending and attacking of sources.

An admission in the open by a Bush Defender At Any Cost that they don't know these things will thwart your upward mobility in the organization. In the meantime, try clicking the links I've marked plainly, review the sites, and TRY to form your OWN opinion.

Buchanan's surefire flop. Home Bound  
The New Republic | July 11, 2002 | Franklin Foer
^click here^

"Interesting article. Although I am dubious about anything from The National Review, this seems to be a fairly logical analysis.
4 posted on 7/13/02 3:40 PM Central by Miss Marple

Isn't The New Republic a liberal essay magazine? That was the reason I made that comment. If I am wrong, please explain their general stand on things. Thanks!
7 posted on 7/13/02 3:50 PM Central by Miss Marple

National Review Online --- Try clicking this one for a Different site

[Deb]

Raimondo is a "historian" the way Courtney Love is a charm school graduate.

[rightofrush]

Truthsayer: Change your post name.

Torie: Pat excretable? - only to those who use the Constitution to remove the real thing.

[Ohioan]

You identify yourself as a "neocon," a term which appears a bit of an oxymoron, unless you mean only that you are newly converted the the Conservative position. The alternative idea, that there is a new form of Conservatism makes much less sense. Conservatism is about preserving tradition; traditional values, traditional forms; traditional associations, manners, culture, etc.. My point was that we should not let a lack of complete agreement on all of those, prevent our working together with other conservatives, wherever possible. You respond that you are in total disagreement with certain other Conservatives.

It seems to me that you have then merely claimed "Conservatism" as a key to respectability, with no real commitment to the preservation of traditional America. If I do you an injustice, perhaps you will point out where. I believe that Conservatism is a rather "broad tent," and do not want to exclude anybody who is basically on our side, so if you have Conservative principles, I will be happy to work with you to effectuate those principles, even as I will disdain your non-Conservative stands on other issues. I am not trying to expel you from anything.

Your comments on the Republican Party also make me wonder, however, at your Conservatism. The Republican Party since its Conservative rally in 1994 has tended to drift back to the pre-Goldwater "Modern Republicanism," which basically went along with the New Deal concepts, with a "me-to" but a little slower approach. That was not really conservatism, and to the extent that it was more Conservative than Roosevelt or Kennedy and Johnson, it is certainly not "neo" or new in any sense.

Republican Conservatism was represented in the 1940s and early 1950s by Senators Taft and Bricker of Ohio; in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Senator Goldwater; in the 1970s and 1980s by Ronald Reagan. That was not "neo-Conservatism," either, but a revival of traditional American values--the real thing.

Pat Buchanan was part of that Conservative revival. If he has strayed a bit on some issues, he has still served those genuine Conservative values more consistently than have the heirs to those "Modern Republicans," who were really much closer to New Deal "liberals," than the Conservative wings of either party.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[Torie]

McCain has moved from being a neocon on the couple of issues with which he was identified, to being more of a conventional liberal on a host of issues. You really should try to keep up to date. :)

[Torie]

Goldwater didn't have much in common with Taft and Bricker in the sense that he was an internationalist, and they were isolationists. Neocons tend to favor free trade, a robust defense, internationalism, welfare reform, vouchers and a meaningful affording of equal opportunity to the young, a social safety net to the extent that it is not self destructive of the recipients and doesn't bust the economy, and a tax system that is progressive up to the point that supply side considerations make it counter productive. They tend to be rather permissive on social issues up to the point that it threatens the fabric of the commonweal, but strongly believe faith and religion are a good thing, even if not religious themselves. They are strongly opposed to all forms of irrational discrimination, including certain inane and destructive forms of quotas. It really is a rather clearly defined point of view, and defines my views. And I was never a leftie.

[rdavis84]

"They, like the left-wing America-haters, aren't interested in conventional political change."

I suspect you couldn't be trouble to give us about 4-5 examples of good, conservative change in the last 1 1/2 yrs., could you?

Ooops, I forgot, We're at War!

[Torie]

Per SelectSmart.com selector: here are my results:

   
 
Rank
#1 Neoconservative 
Click for more information
 
#2 Centrist 
Click for more information
 
#3 Conservative 
Click for more information
 
#4 Third Way 
Click for more information
 
#5 Liberal 
Click for more information
 
#6 Libertarian 
Click for more information
 
#7 Radical 
Click for more information
 
#8 Left-libertarian 
Click for more information
 
#9 Paleoconservative 
Click for more information
 
#10 Paleo-libertarian 
Click for more information

Can't we all just get along?

[cascademountaineer]

The man who will now carry the pitchfork for his "America First" peasant populism is a European aristocrat. Taki Theodoracopulos

Okay, hold on. While he is the heir to a shipping fortune, (Bill Buckley is also the heir to an oil fortune - what was the point the author was trying to make?) Taki is not an "aristocrat" by any means.

He is essentially (as I understand it) a free market libertarian that has written columns for most of the libertarian rags around. I dont agree with his politics for the same reason I dont agree with alot of the politics of other libertarians - which often come off as ethically bankrupt when dealing with complex issues relating to the larger society in general.

But a Statist or Monarchist he is not. That in itself in the first paragraph is a little misleading. Bankrupt libertine I could understand. But "aristocrat"? I went into this article for an appraisel - good or bad of Buchannons faults or strengths, but that comment made me a little suspicious about this authors motivations right off the bat.

Then, he argued the United States had no right to interfere in Balkan tribal feuds.

Uh huh. Along with half the Republicans in congress...

Buchannon is a controversial character to say the least. And he has ruffled more than his share of feathers and taken some pretty - how should I put it, badly advised stands. I dont have to agree with Buchannon, but by the same token this authors analysis, while lengthy, more or less starts out with the preconceived supposition of "I disagree with Buchannon, well...just because" and then proceeds to work backwords to find a case to build around.

No offense Torie, but this article, while lengthy, comes off as thinly veiled hit piece and not much more.

[Phillip Augustus]

Hmmm, let's see.

A neo-con, in a neo-con magazine takes an amazing leap of faith, and predicts that Pat Buchanan's magazine, which will compete with aforementioned neo-con magazine in the marketplace, is going to flop. Yep! There's a point.

Here's my view: The Weekly Standard is a joke.

By your theory of point-tabulation, Phillip Augustus 1, Weekly Standard 0.

[Phillip Augustus]

Oops! This was a New Republic article, not a Weekly Standard article. But aren't these two neocon trash-rags one and the same, at the end of the day?

[Phillip Augustus]

Stop complimenting Duke by comparing him to a great man like Buchanan. Duke doesn't deserve the glory.

[Phillip Augustus]

You forgot: neo-con are opposed to muslim terrorism when it threatens Israel, and will support Israel first and foremost over anything or anyone. But when muslim terrorism threatens, let's say, Christian Serbia, and when Serbia responds, then the neo-cons demand that the US bomb the hell out of Serbia.

[Phillip Augustus]

Ah, so you are more of a radical than a paleo-conservative, and more of a liberal than a paleo-libertarian. Too bad RINO wasn't an option!

[DugwayDuke]

"Punishment, not conquest, should be the reponse to any threat abroad." and "Our troops should be put on our borders, whose defence is their Constitutional perogative."

These two statements demonstrate the fallacy of the paleo argument. Somehow, we are too believe that it is better to respond to threats by punishment after the fact than preemption before the fact. And, that it is better to fight a war on our own territory than to fight one on the territory of our foes.

[Ohioan]

Goldwater didn't have much in common with Taft and Bricker in the sense that he was an internationalist, and they were isolationists.

Goldwater had a lot in common with Taft and Bricker; although he was slightly to the right of both. To call Taft and Bricker isolationists is to parrot a Leftist lie. They were not. What they did favor was the traditional American foreign policy, see An American Foreign Policy, which was basically the same policy which Goldwater and Reagan promoted.

Much of your other issues are middle-of-the-road positions, with a moderate Conservative bias. But the following, I would suggest, may show a certain confusion:

They tend to be rather permissive on social issues up to the point that it threatens the fabric of the commonweal, but strongly believe faith and religion are a good thing, even if not religious themselves. They are strongly opposed to all forms of irrational discrimination

Traditional Conservatives are often rather permissive on social issues, I will grant--indeed, it is our belief that Government should not be defining social values, which often motivates our taking an interest in politics, when the Left pushes their Social agenda--particulary when it is in the form of an attack on traditional social values, as with the promotion of Leftist values under the guise of "life adjustment" in the public schools; or efforts to misuse the Commerce Clause, to coerce compliance with new politically determined socio/economic norms. But I am not at all sure what you mean by the reference to "discrimination."

Every choice a free man makes involves discrimination. If you mean to oppose irrational actions upon the part of the Government; then that is one thing. But if you are implying a right in the Government to deal with what the Bureaucrats consider irrational choices made by individuals in their own affairs, then that is something vastly different. In Communist Russia or Nazi Germany, the individual lost all right to make choices the State considered irrational. I trust that you are not advocating that sort of thing for America.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[Torie]

I don't wholly disagree with your last sentence (that is why I said it was more polemicism than analysis), although I think it does point out the ideological feuds. It is entertaining polemicism though, and quite well done.

[Miss Marple]

My goodness, you certainly stirred some people up!

I didn't know a familiarity with The New Republic was critical to being a true conservative. :-)

[Torie]

Well, I think public establishments should not discriminate on the basis or race etc. It does impinge individual rights, but at the cost of corroding our social chords, and with great attendant cruelty and humiliation. I am reading about Taft and Bricker in Robert Caro's book on LBJ's senate years. They were isolationists (opposed to the Marshall Plan for example), and simply not my cup of tea at all. Bricker was a big fan of McCarthy.

[Torie]

No, but it assists in being an informed and forarmed one, IMO.

[Miss Marple]

Oops! Now I see the confusion! I used to make that same error when I was in colege. Must be some sort of mental short circuit.

Never mind, as Emily Latella used to say.

[habs4ever]

I can't for the life of me understand why neo-con is a such an epithet to many right wingers? Reagan was the culmination of neo-con thinking, and his embrace of the supply siders was a repudiation of the GOP country club set that had ruled the party since the '30's.The neo-cons brought the brains, the toughness and the better ideas, so that men like Reagan would would thrive.Being a neo-con now is a no more than being a conventional Republican.


It's really about time to drop this hypenation, don't you think?

[Torie]

And here I thought Serbian terrorists were threatening Muslims. Oh well, whatever.