LewRockwell.com and the Annoying Paleos

Whenever someone writes a critical word about LewRockwell.com (LRC), Rockwell will place a banner on the site with the words Bother ‘so and so’: Send a donation to LRC. Who knows if this fundraising ploy raises any revenue, but it does get me to thinking why this obscure group bothers me.

LRC is the mother ship for people who call themselves paleos -- a fancy word that represents a combination of isolationists, Dixiecrats who long for the Old South where everyone knew their place (wink, wink), neoconfederates still smarting over the civil war which ended 137 years ago, Abe Lincoln-haters, and genteel anti-Semites who think Mary gave birth to Jesus in Berlin.

I’ll admit that they do pay attention to economics and understand the free market. Most of them could probably run the corn dogs and elephant ears eateries at a state fair and make a tidy profit.

However, they give real-world conservatives a bad name and that’s the big reason why they bug me. Real conservatives who are in the trenches fighting in elections and working to pass a Reaganesque agenda in state legislatures and Capitol Hill do not subscribe to the kooky notions that paleos shout out like teenagers spraying graffiti at night.

Here is a taste of some of the headlines and subheadings that you will find on LRC:

Warren Buffet Is a Communist

Are Seatbelts Unsafe?
The government's strap embraces you, against your will.

The War Street Journal
It's also the Anti-Capitalist Journal

Bill Bennett and AVOT
They're intergenerational thieves

Warmongering Libertarians

All God's Chil'un Got Agendas
John Bottoms on libertarians who defend Bill Bennett, of all people.

Heil, Abe

Driving Dixie Down
The war against the South continues.

The Nazis Were Socialists

Neocons and Demagogues

Why the Cherokees Were Confederates

The Ridiculous War on Terrorism

No King But Lincoln
The nationalist, neo-Unionist argument is a rope of sand.

The Trouble With the Constitution
It was a nationalist-Federalist trick.

Did Lincoln Do It?
Was the dictator incorrectly charged with plotting a crime?

Phony Lincoln
Joseph Sobran on Harry Jaffa's deification of the Great Tyrant.

The Neocon Trick
How they wrecked the conservative movement.

The Real Churchill
Joseph Sobran agrees with Ralph Raico: "Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle."

Lincoln's Savagery
Joseph Sobran on why the Confederate flag is demonized, and the US has become a rogue nation.

The Shrinking Heart of DixieNext
Next let's change the name of the state to Fedabama.

Lincoln with Fangs

Lincoln’s Culture of Death

The Evil Empire Strikes Back: The Neocons and Us

Taking the Law Into Your Own Hands
It's a great idea, says William L. Anderson, since we can expect anything but justice from the modern state.

In Defense of Bob Jones
George W. Bush should be praised for speaking there.

Giving Vermin a Bad Name
Burton S. Blumert on Bill Bennett.

I Hate Rudy Giuliani
Thank goodness the little dictator's days are numbered, says Burton S. Blumert.

In Search of the Real Abe
He was one slippery character.

The Jefferson Davis Legacy
Joseph Sobran on our last president.

Who Killed the Iceman?
And how he relates to the murderous Abe.

Listen to Lincoln
Pay attention to his words, and to his monstrous deeds, says Joseph Sobran, and not the embalmed cliche he's become.

Hitler Was a Lincolnite

Libertarians Should Love the Confederate Flag

The Spirit of Dixie Lives
Despite Lincolnite lies.

I get a kick out of The Nazis were Socialists headline--as if that is the worst thing you can call those who gave us the Holocaust (and WWII). Paleos hate Abraham Lincoln more. They don’t even think Rush Limbaugh is a true conservative.

These neoconfederates should get out of the house and discover that the Stars and Bars flag is usually displayed on a rusted post in some biker bar surrounded by goofballs extending their middle fingers at life. They are hardly strutting around like southern aristocratic peacocks quoting John Randolph of Roanoke.

These romanticists of the Old South will say silly things like "an estimated 65,000 African Americans assisted the Confederacy cause". Oh really? So 65,000 slaves “assisted” the southern rebels. Uh, ok.

Basically, this collection of oddballs and half-wits are still bitter that William F. Buckley became the standard bearer for conservatism in the 1950s, relegating them to the backyard compost heap of know-nothing thinking. But the event that really turned the paleos into rabid dogs had to do with Buckley’s embrace of the neoconservatives. These are former Democrats interested in a hard-line foreign policy stance and most of them are Jewish. Paleos reserve much of their scorn for Norman Podhoretz, the founding father of neoconservatism and Commentary magazine.

Like most strict ideological groups, paleos are on a night and day quest to find that one nugget of history, that one scapegoat that can explain the ills of the world. They don’t understand the nuances of human history or everyday living. Gene Callahan of LRC writes:

We might say it (Republicans' fight against Big Government) began "faltering" around 1952, with the nomination of Eisenhower as the Republican presidential candidate. Or perhaps it began "faltering" in 1928, when the socialist planner Hoover was made the Republican standard bearer. Or maybe even in 1860, when Republicans put a man who would expand the powers of the Federal government like no other president in history, Abraham Lincoln, forward as their nominee.

This is classic scapegoat thinking. Actually if you keep reading the articles on LRC, you’ll find that the timeline keeps going backward. If not for Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, if not for the Constitutional Convention and the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation in 1787, if not and if not and before you know it, if not for Eve chatting with the serpent.

Paleos think that if only the private sector could rule that an earthly utopia might be achieved. This line of thought is as flawed as the socialist utopias. The paleo vision would give us a dog eat dog dot com world ruled by Al Capone types making us all pay protection money and may the fittest survive. Pick your poison.

Fight terrorists? Forget it. Paleos roll over like submissive dogs. They don’t fight back. Matter of fact LRC wrote that the rest of America would do quite well if Washington was incinerated. (Is his article tongue-in-cheek? The tone of it seems so giddy. Perhaps he was drinking his “privately produced and purchased champagne” as he wrote it. You be the judge).

When it comes to solving real world problems, paleos remind me of the southern aristocrats who boasted in Gone with the Wind, "Why, we could lick them in a month!" But Rhett Butler (re: the real conservative movement for this analogy) has to explain the facts of life to these naïve goobers about the cannon and iron that the North possessed.

If the paleos ideas are so useful, how come they have elected no one to office except for Congressman Ron Paul of Texas? What are their practical solutions to our troubles and woes? What is their strategy for moving legislation to dismantle government through the Congress? They don’t propose any concrete solutions because one, they don’t have any and two, they would be held accountable for implementing them. They need to run for office. However it would help if they started with something lower than vice president, such as Joe Sobran, a celebrated paleo, reactionary utopian, and regular LRC contributor, attempted to do only to drop out after a few weeks on some forgettable fringe ticket.

Some years ago, Buckley fired Sobran, who was then writing for the National Review, when Sobran, many thought, started down the anti-Semitic road in his columns about Israel. He still keeps up the anti-Israel drumbeat today and unfortunately quotes dubious characters such as Mark Weber.

Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review has summed up the situation in one pithy sentence: “The truth is that if we held Israel to the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and we’d be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Weber and his ilk would like you to think that Jews merely died of a bad case of typhus and were not systematically exterminated. First off they were exterminated and second if Jews hadn’t been caged like chickens maybe some would not have died of typhus.

I think Homer Simpson could run rings around these paleos.

The Anti-Defamation League unveils the Institute for Historical Review. Really now Joe, if you’re going to cite passages from the IHR then we hope you drop your columns in support of the Catholic Church and, as you say, Christendom. We’d rather not have you on our team.

Lately many paleos are scared that Bill Bennett and G-man types are trying to shut down LRC. It’s doubtful that a government that can waste huge amounts of time and money is going to waste that much time tracking LRC’s crazy web site.

Oh these paleos, these Old South wannabees, these ideological multilevel marketing shills, and these haters of real conservatives. They will never go away, but then disease and pestilence never do.

It looks to me to be a radical, thoughtless and negative ideology, that just wants the opposite of what exists now, without looking for deeper understanding of what is really possible or desirable. When the password for entering the club is to accept that one's country would better have been broken up into little satrapies, who would bother going inside, especially as the club never seems to have anything else to say?

Absolutely. I call these types "contrarian contrarians." They are indeed contrary for the sake of being contrary. I find this mindset shallow and airy. The only thing consistent about it is contrariness. If the reader follows, yes, it is hard to conceptualize this into anything coherent, let alone concrete.

The Weekly Standard wants to create the foundations of a powerful, but conservative state and bureaucracy. As loathsome as Rockwell is, I have serious doubts about signing on to either of these projects.

Which I find equally as loathesome as a powerful, Leftist state and bureaucracy. This thinking is akin to what the communist apologists used to say about communism's failure(s).

They didn't do it right.

A huge bureaucratic state that is "conservative" is no better than one that is on the other side. In fact, I find this to be an impossiblity if the meaning of the term "conservative" is used.

What will save conservatives will be something that they can unite against and build an opposition to. This has already happened at the popular level. We are in a war. Bush is our President. We rally around him. But among activists and ideologues and kibitzers, the disputes will be pronounced until a Democrat is elected President and gives the right something to rally against again.

This thinking, which does occur, is seriously myopic. If it takes a single rallying point for the Right to point to as a means of unity, then we are nothing but reactionists. Since the nature of the conservative movement is indeed reactionary, there is nothing to do once power is in the hands of the Right because there's nothing to react to other than a state of war. And just as a society whose citizens are dependent upon its government for individual well-being outside of defense is doomed to failure, a society (movement) that can't be galvanized other than to oppose either an internal or external force is doomed to failure as well.

There is, however, a point to rally around for us: THE LEFT. But we can't really fight this fractured into myriad groups. We can't fight it because far too many of us don't understand the nature of politics. The Left's strength is in politics. The Left is a political creation. Outside of real war with real weapons and real blood, it must be politically defeated. We can't defeat it in our current status because too many of us would rather accuse others in the conservative camp as being with the Left as to truly fighting it. Needless to say, but I'm a radical anti-Leftist.

This is my main problem with so-called "paleo-conservatives." The mindset is so static and crystalized. Vision is like blood in movements. If the blood stops moving within a body, the body dies. If vision stops moving within a movement, the movement dies. It's a wonder why this mindset is still around.

Since the most drastic of circumstances must take place before the entire Right can move in the same direction, I posit that conservatism is dead.

You read right. I submit that conservatism is dead. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.

In my radical mind, I think that serious self-criticism must take place within the entire Right. What are our flaws? What are our strengths? Where are we going? What do we want? How do we get from where we are to where we want to be? Are arms necessary? What are the terms of engagement?

These are not some sort of new age ramblings. No, they are serious questions and mysteries that must be addressed soon. If these questions are asked, debated, and theorized, maybe what we can devise is what I call "post-conservatism." I can't come up with a hardline definition of the term, but I can describe "post-conservatism" as "the renewal of the American experiment."

Just my thoughts. Hammer away.

Good luck with your search. I basically approach politics with a good deal of skepticism. When there is some great public issue or danger or crisis I'm interested in politics, but otherwise I'm not one for great ideological combats or projects, so we probably look at things very differently.

But I do think you're right about Rockwell and the paleos. They want a formula that will give them all the answers without having to deal with specifics. They don't want to face the way things are or what it's possible to do, or what it would take to change things. The problem of what we are to do about and for our country doesn't really get serious consideration from Rockwell. It's sad, because the paleos started out with a great deal of concern about the path the country's taken. But now it seems like once they can demonstrate that we don't need a nation, government or foreign policy they don't have to worry about these things any more. We can simply do without such things and walk away from pressing issues. There is a lot of escapism in the Rockwellite ideology.

I think you're also right that a lot of things are going to change. Ironically, the Rockwellites may be right about one thing: nations, even ours, may break up into smaller units. Even without a break-up, power may well be diffused downward to states and localities. But it does seem petty and childish to revile those who tried to build our country and preserve and defend it and prevent it from breaking up into hostile nations, when it was very important to do so.

The Taftites were hard-headed, hard-working, honest, grown-up small town businessmen who had earned some respect in their communities. I don't think you can say that about most of Rockwell's writers.

There's some overlap on the issues between Rockwellites and the old Taft-wing of the Republican party. And you can see that Rothbard wanted to hold back from some of the cultural extremes of other libertarians. Still, I can't help thinking that the Taftites would be really shaken up meeting the Rockwellites.

Taft's supporters, largely Middle Western Republicans with no aversion to high tariffs, would be mortified if they ever read some of the articles posted at LRC about their party, its history and its heroes.

Rothbard and Rockwell moved in their direction by supporting an America First foreign policy and by not taking the usual libertarian line on immigration. But to say that breaking up the country would have been a good thing, and to argue that it should have been done to prevent high tariffs would be to lose their support.

I get the feeling Rothbard was trying to reconcile libertarianism with conservatism, or nationalism or traditionalism. Such ideas have much good in them. They probably can be reconciled to some degree, though not in their purest state. But Rothbard didn't have the right or the best recipe. He couldn't cut back on any of the spices he loved to make a more palatable dish. And all Rockwell can do since is make messes in the kitchen.

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