The American Spectator

“We don’t start the wars,” Kauffman says of small-town Americans. “That’s the job of the big city-winners who don’t need religion or guns — they have Blackberries. But we and our children fight and die in them, disproportionately.”

Kauffman sees rootlessness — he frequently uses the Latinate synonym “deracination” — as both a cause and corollary of American empire. “We should fear and despise the fury of the deracinated — the McCains, the Hillarys, the neocon publicists — people who have hatreds, but what do they love, other than the wielding of power?…The launchers of American wars have tended to be displaced persons, men without homes.”

The internationalist viewpoint is alien to Kauffman. “I can’t comprehend, let alone love, the world,” he says. “I can only love or understand my little piece of it — the street where I live, the dirt under my feet.”

Kauffman acknowledges that most conservatives seem unwilling to consider a return to the noninterventionist stance of the Old Right, citing this year’s Republican presidential debates.

“Ron Paul at these Republican debates would say, ‘Why do we have troops in 130 countries?’ These guys looked at him as if he’d announced he was from Neptune. They’d snicker and they’d snort,” he says. “I wish there was a more robust debate. Even the calling of names would be preferable to the deafening silence we have today.”