The American Spectator

Red Phillips| 2.13.09 @ 3:40PM

Linker is a Johnny One Note.

Although I guess paleos should be delighted that he thinks we are a growing internet presence that needs to be grappled with.

Alan Brooks| 2.13.09 @ 4:40PM

paying attention to him, you would think theocons are almost as much of a threat as those assaulting, breaking and entering, shoplifting... and on and on...and on and...

Alan Brooks| 2.13.09 @ 8:56PM

and get this:
Maciel is attacked, but Jesse Jackson is congratulated for fathering an illegitimate. So in protestantism one can break one's vows to spouse; while in Catholicism one is attacked for abandoning the vow of celibacy?

Peter Wills| 2.16.09 @ 3:40AM

I would have thought myself a natural Paleo, but was put off when it came to seem to me that many of them are simply not entirely sane. I now call myself a conservatice without any neo or paleo qualification. My guiding stars include Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Friedrich von Hayek, Ronald Reagan and William Buckley.

Jack James| 2.16.09 @ 12:34PM

If you want to see kooky paleos, check out anything by conspiracy theorist Paul Craig Roberts over at that hate-filled rag CHRONICLES. "Paleos" like him have morphed into liberals without the good manners and are probably bitter that no one on the Right takes their fundamentalist rants seriously.

Red Phillips| 2.16.09 @ 2:18PM

Jack, the idea that when one goes far enough right they become left is pure nonsense. It is neither true on a philosophical or practical level. As people get further from the center they become more likely to be dissatisfied with the status quo and more critical of the powers that be which leads to superficial similarity. But it is just that, superficial.

Now if you define right and left simply by support of knee-jerk interventionism and militarism, then I guess anyone who opposes the War suddenly becomes left, and some simple-minded "conservatives" actually do this. But it is of course a faulty definition.

The authentic conservative position is non-interventionism. This is the foreign policy that best seeks to conserve, which is what conservatives are supposed to do. Crusading around the world in the name of global democratization is not conservative. It is revolutionary Jacobinism. Inflating and fear mongering threats is not conservative as it makes war more likely. War is not conservative. War is destructive. The only time War is conservative is in the case of repelling an actual invasion which isn’t about to happen now or any time in the foreseeable future. Who is going to invade us? Canada?

And to call Chronicles a rag is either ignorant or deliberate mud slinging. Chronicles is a very high brow magazine with very learned writers which would compare favorably to any magazine out there. It is certainly more intelligent than all the boy wonder neocons scribbling away the party line at NR.

And many people on the “right” obviously do take paleos seriously because they are always attacking and attempting to discredit them. If they did not think them serious, they wouldn’t bother.

Peter Wills| 2.16.09 @ 2:33PM

The idea that when one goes far enough right one comes left again is very often perfectly true. Look at the so-called "American conservative." In the presidential campaign it spent 90% of its time attacking McCain, objectively helping Obama, probably the most left-wing president the US has ever had. It even ridiculed McCain for his military heroism. Like the far left it has peddled conspiracy theories suggesting or implying Israel had some involvement with, or prior knowledge of, 9/11. Taki, its bank-roller, has gone on record (in the London Spectator) as sayiong he was sorry Japan lost the Pacific war. Editor Emeritus Patrick Buchanan's bete noir is Churchill and his book "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" appears to blame the British and the Poles for starting World War II (The Poles wouldn't give Hitler their only port and naval base, you see, and the perfidious British supported them) - all stuff it has in common with the nut-job left.

Red Phillips| 2.16.09 @ 3:16PM

Peter, get your facts straight. Taki hasn't been bankrolling AmCon for a long time. When he left AmCon he started up his own website, TakiMag.

AmCon does publish leftist critics of the War and American foreign policy, but that does not make it a left wing publication although some paleocons have expressed concern over this.

You are doing what I suggested was simple-minded above. You are basing your assessment of left and right on isolated policy positions.

Paleocon criticism of McCain was obviously from the right. If you equate fidelity to the GOP regardless of the conservative bona fides of their nominee with left and right, then that is the ultimate in simple mindedness.

Right and left are not hard to define although it admittedly gets nuanced at times and not all differences are easily categorized in a single left right spectrum. Look to the origins of the terms. The right supported the ancient regime, and the left supported revolution. Now please work that out for me. Please explained to me how by going so far in one direction that you suddenly jump all the way in the other. The similarities are superficial. (Or they belong on a dimension that isn’t easily identifiable as left and right. Decentralization vs. centralization for example. Some far leftists are decentralists and would share that in common with the paleo right.)

As I said above, the farther you get from the center the less likely you are to support the current regime. But a far right person would support upending the current regime in favor of some status quo ante. The leftist is pressing for some as yet unrealized gain. To them the status quo and especially the status quo ante is the enemy of progress. For the right-winger progress is the enemy. The circular political spectrum argument just does not hold water.

Peter Wills| 2.16.09 @ 9:22PM

Red Phillips, a couple of simple questions: Who did attacking McCain during the recent election benefit if not the Left?

Who does it benefit if not the left to build up, praise and publicise "Counterpunch," Gore Vidal etc as the American Conservative has done if not the left?

You think the Reagan Republicans, perhaps?

I did not know Taki was no longer bank-rolling it. Still, I can't say it is a significant change.

Peter Willis| 2.16.09 @ 9:28PM

You also say: "The authentic conservative policy is non-interventionism." You might as well say: "The authentic conservatice policy is suicide." Such a poplicy in World War II would have let Hitler consolidate Europe into an impregnable, eventually nuclear-armed, fortress from which to launch attacks on the US. Applied later, it would have given Western Europe to Stalin. It would mean giving the Middle Eastern oil fields to america's (and civilization's) enemies.

Red Phillips| 2.16.09 @ 11:42PM

Peter, how did voting for McAmnesty help the right? It simply proved once again that the mainstream right is in the GOP's back pocket. They can give you a candidate who supports amnesty, has made a career of stabbing you in the back and pandering to the center and the press, has dissed Christians, etc. and you will still support him. Please. Do you have no self respect? Most paleos that I know voted third party. I voted for Chuck Baldwin. I hope you are not going to tell me with a straight face that my vote for a true Constitutionalist like Baldwin was somehow a liberal act.

Also, you can't in one breath criticize revisionist history re. WWII and then trot out WWII as your all purpose justification for interventionism. I'm sure folks like Buchanan would feel less inclined to re-look at WWII if interventionists like you didn't constantly bring it up when you are trying to send American troops all over the World for preventative/pre-emptive wars of aggression. Or are we all just supposed to slavishly embrace the conventional wisdom? No questions asked.

WWII was Europe's war, not ours. Large percentages of the country opposed our involvement. But FDR wanted us to intervene to save England's bacon, but he knew he could not overcome the overwhelming opposition in the country. That is why he deliberately antagonized the Japanese so he could back door us into the War. This is commonly accepted and a matter of historical record. Some neocons ever praise FDR for his cunning in dragging a reluctant nation to war.

Hitler NEVER had any ability to launch attacks directly on the US. To suggest that is pure hysterical fantasy. You are a walking cliché. If we hadn’t done X we would all be speaking German. Yeah right. He couldn’t overtake England which was much closer and smaller. Of course no one can know for sure because it is counter factual, but it is likely that had America not decisively intervened then Germany and the Soviet Union would have fought and weakened each other, and there might never had been a Cold War.

Had we not intervened in WWI (which was most certainly not our War either) and tipped the balance, then there wouldn’t have been such an unjust peace. No treaty of Versailles, no WWII. So perhaps you don’t want to go there with your apologia for interventionism. Our interventionism in WWI facilitated the outbreak of WWII.

Peter Willis| 2.17.09 @ 2:55AM

Red Phillips, If you have any knowledge of politics or political strategy you would know that one probably never agrees with everything one's own side or own candidate does.

But you argue about this earlier. But when the campaign is on, and the other side's candidate of obviously worse, you support your own side whatever your private reservations - or at least you don't attack it. McCain may not have been perfect, but Obama looks like being a great deal worse.

Possibly there was something more stupid than voting for a third party in the recent election, but if so I cannot think of it. If it is true that most "Paleos" did not, if merely shows the so-called Paleo movement, cobbled together by a few cranks, is intellectually nugatory and has nothing to do with true conservatism.

Would Reagan or Buckley or Goldwater have voted for a "third party"? True conservatism is a matter of achieving what you can in a real, imperfect would.

Your version of the historyof the Second World war is the fantasy one: England was just about finished by the end of 1941 - not because it had been invaded, but because it was exhausted and going broke. If the US had not come in as a result of Pearl Harbour, Hitler would have won the war in Europe. He would have built up a position of enormous strength and ultimately attacked America - in any case, to have left his genocidal regime in place, as you apparently advocate, would have been an abomination which would have dishonoured not only America but the whole Earth - another reason I am attracted to conservatism, incidentally, is that true conservatives DO believe in honour, that right and wrong are in the nature of things, and that it is sometimes necessary to fight for ther right. I like to think we conservatives are men and women, not rabbits.

Do, you, incidentally, think that it would have helped America if Japan had been allowed to run wild in the Pacific unopposed? If so, I beg to differ.

You claim that US intervention in World War I caused world War II is a ludicrous inversion of facts. A major cause of World War II was that the US did not intervene enough. It did not join the League of Nations, in which it would have had a much more powerful voice than was the case with the United Nations, as there was no Soviet bloc, and it could have stomped on Hitler as soon as if became obvious that he was a threat to world peace. It might even have ended Communism millions of lives earlier.

I also find in your writing a peculiar reductivism - Noble "Paleos" are isolationist (apparently happy to let Auschwitz and the Gulgag roll on undisturbed, and presumably unknown) while wicked "Neo-Cons" lust to intervene in every corner of the globe for every reason on none. I'm afraid the real world, and the real conservative movement, is a bit more complex than that.