It turns out that those who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq were right and were therefore the real patriots.<\/p>\n
It’s extra weird that Frum, a Canadian, is attacking the patriotism of Americans. <\/p>\n
David Frum wrote March 25, 2003<\/a>:<\/p>\n You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos. <\/p>\n The antiwar conservatives aren\u2019t satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first? But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation\u2019s enemies. <\/p>\n Common cause: The websites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, and other anti-Americans of the far Left.<\/p>\n Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world\u2019s most dangerous terrorist organization: \u201cIn truth, Hezbollah is the world\u2019s most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel\u2019s standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. \u2018Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,\u2019 Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization\u2019s secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview.\u201d The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen. <\/p>\n Espousing defeatism: Here is Robert Novak again, this time on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: \u201cThe CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.\u201d And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: \u201cWe remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman\u2019s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don\u2019t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.\u201d <\/p>\n Excuse-making: On September 30, 2002, Pat Buchanan offered this explanation of 9\/11 during a debate on Chris Matthews\u2019s Hardball: \u201c9\/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we\u2019re supporting Israel and all the rest of it.\u201d <\/p>\n Conspiracy-theorizing: Justin Raimondo, an Internet journalist who delivered Pat Buchanan\u2019s nominating speech at the Reform party convention in 2000, alleged in December 2001 that Israel was implicated in the terror attacks of 9\/11: \u201cWhether Israeli intelligence was watching, overseeing, collaborating with or combating the bin Ladenites is an open question. . . . That the Israelis had some significant foreknowledge and involvement in the events preceding 9\/11 seems beyond dispute.\u201d Raimondo has also repeatedly dropped broad hints that he believes the October 2001 anthrax attacks were the work of an American Jewish scientist bent on stampeding the U.S. into war. Yearning for defeat: On January 30, 2002, Eric Margolis, the American-born foreign editor of the Toronto Sun, appealed to the leaders of the Arab world to unite in battle against the U.S. \u201cWhat could Arabs do to prevent a war of aggression against Iraq that increasingly resembles a medieval crusade? Form a united diplomatic front that demands U.N. inspections continue. Stage an oil boycott of the U.S. if Iraq is attacked. Send 250,000 civilians from across the Arab World to form human shields around Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Boycott Britain, Turkey, Kuwait, and the Gulf states that join or abet the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Withdraw all funds on deposit in U.S. and British banks. Accept payment for oil only in Euros, not dollars. Send Arab League troops to Iraq, so that an attack on Iraq is an attack on the entire League. Cancel billions worth of arms contracts with the U.S. and Britain. At least make a token show of male hormones and national pride.\u201d <\/p>\n Raimondo was more explicit still on March 12, 2003. Speaking of the negative consequences he foresaw of even a successful American campaign in Iraq, he wrote: \u201cIt is a high price to pay for \u2018victory\u2019 \u2014 so high that patriots might almost be forgiven if they pine for defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n The writers I quote call themselves \u201cpaleoconservatives,\u201d implying that they are somehow the inheritors of an older, purer conservatism than that upheld by their impostor rivals. But even Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh ceased accommodating Axis aggression after Pearl Harbor. Since 9\/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business. James Burnham famously defined liberalism as \u201cthe ideology of Western suicide.\u201d What are we to make of self-described conservatives who see it as their role to make excuses for suicide bombers?<\/p>\n \u201cWhile paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative thought of the 1950s and \u201960s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Samuel Francis, in The American Conservative<\/em>, December 16, 2002<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I<\/span> happen to have been in the room when \u201cpaleoconservatism\u201d first declared itself as a self-conscious political movement. It was in the spring of 1986, at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society, and Professor Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan read the birth announcement.<\/p>\n The Philadelphia Society is a forum where the various conservative factions met (and meet) to thrash out their differences: libertarians who believed that parks should be sold to private industry, traditionalists who regretted the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, and \u2014 most recently \u2014 neoconservatives who had cast their first Republican ballot in 1980. At first, the neoconservatives were warmly welcomed by the veteran members. But the warmth did not last long, and at a panel discussion that day, Tonsor startled the room by anathematizing the neocons and their works.<\/p>\n True conservatives, Tonsor said, were Roman Catholic at root, or at a minimum Anglo-Catholic. They studied literature, not the social sciences. And while he was very glad to see that some non-religious social scientists were now arriving at conservative conclusions, they should understand that their role in the conservative movement must be a subordinate one. \u201cWe are all delighted,\u201d he said (I am quoting from memory), \u201cto see the town whore come to church \u2014 even to sing in the choir \u2014 but not to lead the service.\u201d<\/p>\n I wish I could say that Tonsor\u2019s outburst was motivated by a deep disagreement over important principles. Certainly principles had their place. But as the paleos themselves tell the story, the quarrel that erupted into view that day in 1986 began as a squabble over jobs and perks in the Reagan administration \u2014 from the perception that, as Francis later put it, neoconservatives had arranged matters so that \u201ctheir team should get the rewards of office and of patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.<\/p>\n Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, \u201cMisfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one\u2019s own faults \u2014 ah! There is the sting of life.\u201d Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford\u2019s friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, \u201cin what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying.\u201d Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class \u201cunprepared or with little thought as to what he would say\u201d and that his students found his classes \u201cunfocused, with often rambling discussions,\u201d he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a \u201cneocon attack.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, \u2018totalitarian.\u2019 But that\u2019s liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Llewellyn H. Rockwell<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n F<\/span>rustrated ambition is not a propitious foundation for an intellectual movement. \u201cJobs for the lads\u201d may be an effective slogan for a trade union, but the paleos needed to develop a more idealistic explanation for their resentments, if they were to have any hope of influencing the main body of the conservative movement. They needed an ideology of their own.<\/p>\n Developing such an ideology was not going to be an easy task. There was no shortage of disaffected right-wingers; but what did Samuel Francis (who had spent the early 1980s investigating subversives for Senator John East) have in common with the economist Murray Rothbard (who had cheered when the Communists captured Saigon)? What connection could there be between the devoutly Catholic Thomas Molnar and the exuberantly pagan Justin Raimondo? It didn\u2019t help that people attracted to the paleoconservative label tended to be the most fractious and quarrelsome folk in the conservative universe.<\/p>\n Yet the job had to be done \u2014 and thanks to a lucky accident, there was a place to do it. In the 1970s, Leopold Tyrmand, an \u00e9migr\u00e9 Polish Jew who had survived the death camps, scraped together some money to found a magazine he hoped would serve as a conservative alternative to The New York Review of Books<\/em>. He called it Chronicles of Culture<\/em>, and based it (for Tyrmand was not a man to do things in the obvious way) in the rusting industrial city of Rockford, Ill. Tyrmand died suddenly in 1985. His successor, Thomas Fleming, shortened the magazine\u2019s name to Chronicles<\/em> and redirected its attention from cultural critique to ideological war.<\/p>\n Fleming was in at least one way a poor choice for the role of paleoconservative ideologist-in-chief. He is the very opposite of a systematic, deliberate thinker: a jumpy, wrathful man so prone to abrupt intellectual reversals that even some of his friends and supporters question his equilibrium. But Fleming proved himself a nervy and imaginative editor. He recruited Samuel Francis as a columnist and collaborator, and Francis was a man nobody could accuse of inconsistency.<\/p>\n Francis advocated a politics of uninhibited racial nationalism \u2014 a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the \u201cEuro-American cultural core\u201d of the American nation. He argued that the time had come for conservatives to jettison their old commitment to limited government: A \u201cnationalist ethic,\u201d he wrote in 1991, \u201cmay often require government action.\u201d<\/p>\n So, Chronicles<\/em> advocated protectionism for American industry and restrictions on nonwhite immigration. It defended minimum-wage laws and attacked corporations that moved operations off-shore. And it championed the Southern Confederacy of the 1860s and the anti-civil rights resistance of the 1960s.<\/p>\n The decisive year for both the magazine and paleoconservatism was 1989. Until then, Chronicles<\/em> had managed to coexist with most of the rest of the conservative community. This coexistence was symbolized by the Rockford Institute, which sponsored not only Chronicles<\/em> but also the Center for Religion and Society in New York, headed by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister who had been involved in both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam protests.<\/p>\n Neuhaus\u2019s experiences as a pastor in the New York slums and his passionate opposition to abortion had led him rightward in the 1980s. But he was disturbed by the racial politics of Chronicles<\/em>, and also by what he termed its \u201cinsensitiv[ity] to the classical language of anti-Semitism.\u201d Neuhaus contemplated severing the connection between his institute and Rockford. Word of his dissatisfaction filtered back to Illinois, and, one day in May, Rockford struck back. An executive from the institute jetted out to New York, fired Neuhaus and his entire staff, ordered them literally out onto the streets, and changed the office locks. The paleos at Rockford exploded in dumbfounded rage when the foundations that had been supporting Neuhaus\u2019s work refused to switch the money over to them instead.<\/p>\n The shuttering of Neuhaus\u2019s offices brought the emerging paleoconservative movement to national attention. The incident was covered by the New York Times<\/em> and commented upon by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. It was, however, events across the Atlantic that gave the shuttering a larger importance.<\/p>\n At the same time that Fleming was sacking Neuhaus, the people of Leopold Tyrmand\u2019s native Poland were engaged in their country\u2019s first free elections since World War II. Solidarity won all but one open seat in the lower house of parliament and 92 of 100 seats in the Polish senate. Over the next six months, the Communist governments of central Europe would collapse.<\/p>\n The conservative movement had come to life in the 1950s to goad the governments of the West to wage the Cold War more energetically and skillfully. When National Review<\/span> declared in its founding editorial that it would stand \u201cathwart history, yelling Stop\u201d the history it had in mind was Marx\u2019s \u201cHistory\u201d \u2014 the \u201cHistory\u201d with a capital H that was supposed to run inevitably toward Communism. By November 1989, that History had indeed stopped \u2014 was rapidly running backward \u2014 and the great question for conservatives was, \u201cWhat now?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow horrible to realize, ten years after the Cold War, that the real evil empire is not some foreign regime, but the U.S. military state. It bombs buses, bridges, factories, churches, and schools, expresses \u2018regret,\u2019 and then continues to do the same. A host of innocents have died from U.S. attacks \u2014 a fact which should make every patriot wince. The propaganda should also make us wonder to what extent the old Communist Threat was trumped up to plunder the American taxpayer.\u201d<\/p>\n Llewellyn H. Rockwell, \u201cThe End Of Buckleyism,\u201d in Spintech<\/em>, June 12, 1999<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n IN August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. Iraq plus Kuwait and prospectively Saudi Arabia would possess the world\u2019s biggest reservoir of oil. With this vast new oil wealth, Saddam could at last acquire the nuclear weapons he coveted \u2014 and thus dominate the entire Middle East. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that the conquest of Kuwait \u201cwill not stand\u201d and assembled a global coalition against Saddam. The paleoconservative repudiation of the Gulf War would be their first major independent ideological adventure.<\/p>\n Three weeks after the invasion, Pat Buchanan declared his opposition to war in one of his regular appearances on The McLaughlin Group<\/em>: \u201cThere are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East \u2014 the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n It would be hard to come up with a more improbable idea than that of George H. W. Bush of Kennebunkport as warmaking servant of the interests of International Jewry. Yet over the next six months, Buchanan and the Chronicles<\/em> writers would repeatedly argue that America was being dragged to war in the Gulf by a neoconservative coterie indifferent to true American interests: the \u201cneoconservatives,\u201d as Buchanan said, \u201cthe ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-Communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent.\u201d<\/p>\n Early in 1990, Buchanan published an article in The National Interest<\/em> (a journal founded, ironically enough, by Irving Kristol, who sometimes seemed to be the only person in America willing to accept the \u201cneoconservative\u201d label), in which Buchanan called for a new foreign policy of \u201cAmerica First.\u201d And \u201cAmerica First\u201d would be the slogan of Buchanan\u2019s presidential run in 1992: more irony, because by 1992 the paleos were frankly disgusted, not merely with the rest of the conservative movement and the Republican party, but with much of America. \u201cLast month,\u201d Buchanan wrote in 1991, \u201cduring a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Fed up as they were with the Second America, however, the paleos felt sure that they spoke for the First America with an integrity the traditional conservatives, let alone the neos, never had. Francis in particular scolded National Review<\/span>\u2019s conservatives for their isolation from America\u2019s \u201cgrassroots.\u201d He chose an interesting means of illustrating his point: \u201cOf the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash\u2019s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945<\/em>, published in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic) Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five later converted to Roman Catholicism).\u201d No wonder then that these fringe characters were able to achieve nothing more impressive than the election of Ronald Reagan and victory in the Cold War.<\/p>\n Now Francis had the helm of an ideological movement of his own. \u201c[A] new American Right,\u201d he wrote in 1991, \u201cmust recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. . . . A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite\u2019s underclass ally, can assert its leadership of Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n Buchanan, inconveniently, was himself a Roman Catholic. But his skills were manifest, and the writers at Chronicles<\/em> convinced themselves that his 37 percent showing in the 1992 New Hampshire Republican primary was the long-awaited breakthrough for their Middle American Revolution. It was a false hope. Bill Clinton won the presidential election of 1992. And Newt Gingrich, impeccably Anglo-Celtic though he was, soon proved himself just another neocon: He even helped Clinton enact NAFTA in 1993. With this final betrayal, the Chronicles<\/em> crowd\u2019s last faint hope for political triumph through Middle America died.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is clear that neither laws nor any sense of fair play will stop this rampant U.S. arrogance. The time may soon come when we will have to call for the return of the spirit of the man who terrified the United States like no one else ever has. Come back Stalin \u2014 (almost) all is forgiven.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 George Szamuely, In \u201cTaki\u2019s Top Drawer,\u201d New York Press<\/i>, July 11, 2001<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n H<\/span>uman beings yearn to identify with something bigger than themselves. That\u2019s why patriotism sways the heart. When patriotism falters, something else takes its place. For a good many of the paleoconservatives, that something was, for a spell, Serbian nationalism.<\/p>\n The Yugoslav civil wars divided conservatives. Some \u2014 William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Perle, John O\u2019Sullivan, and Republican political leaders like Bob Dole \u2014 advocated an early and decisive intervention against Slobodan Milosevic. Others \u2014 Charles Krauthammer, Henry Kissinger, and (to drop a few rungs down the ladder) I \u2014 argued against.<\/p>\n Pat Buchanan, one can say, permitted a dual loyalty to influence him. Although he had denied any vital American interest in either Kuwait\u2019s oilfields or Iraq\u2019s oilfields or its aggression, in l991 he urged that the Sixth Fleet be sent to Dubrovnik to shield the Catholics of Croatia from Serbian attack. \u201cCroatia is not some faraway desert emirate,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt is a \u2018piece of the continent, a part of the main,\u2019 a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the \u2018Antemurale Christianitatis,\u2019 the bulwark of Christianity.\u201d<\/p>\n Chronicles<\/em>, though, along with most of its writers, followed Thomas Fleming into a passionate defense of the Serbian cause. Even if all the war crimes alleged against the Serbs proved true, Fleming argued in 1997, \u201cthey are trivial in comparison with anything done not just by the Germans, but by Americans in recent years.\u201d When the U.S. and NATO finally went to war against Serbia, Fleming identified himself with the enemy side: \u201c[W]e have to be as faithful as the Serbs in preserving our heritage,\u201d he said in a June 1999 speech, \u201cas brave as the Serbs in fighting our enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n To an uncharitable eye, Fleming and his magazine appeared to have succumbed to what George Washington might have condemned as a \u201cpassionate attachment\u201d to a foreign country. The origins of this attachment are mysterious to me \u2014 and they clearly baffled Chronicles<\/em> readers as well. At the time that Milosevic launched his wars, Chronicles had nearly 20,000 paid subscribers. By the time the Kosovo war ended in 1999, the magazine\u2019s circulation had plunged to about 5,000. One guesses that the readers of Chronicles<\/em> were not so much affronted by Fleming\u2019s Serb advocacy as they were simply bored by it. Yet for the Chronicles<\/em> writers, opposing their government in time of war seems to have been a liberating experience. In 1991 Pat Buchanan had accused the neoconservatives of enforcing the \u201climits of permissible dissent.\u201d The paleocons were now defying those limits with ever-increasing gusto and boldness.<\/p>\n \u201cThe civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Samuel Francis, speech at the American Renaissance Conference, May 1994<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n OF all the limits against which the paleoconservatives chafed, the single most irksome was the limit placed by civilized opinion upon overtly racialist speech. Francis\u2019s speech at the 1994 conference of the white-supremacist American Renaissance organization, for example, ultimately cost him his job as a staff columnist at the Washington Times<\/em>. Today he earns his living as editor-in-chief of the Citizens\u2019 Informer<\/em>, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens\u2019 Councils of the segregated South; he moonlights as an editor of The Occidental Quarterly<\/em>, a pseudo-scholarly \u201cjournal of Western thought and opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n Conservatives have had a vexed history with the topic of race. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many conservatives, including the editors of this magazine, questioned and opposed the civil rights movement, sometimes for high-minded constitutional reasons, sometimes not. Race, though, was not in those days central to conservative thinking, if only because, as Francis himself noted, the early conservative movement was so urban and northern. For the paleos, however, race and ethnicity were from the start essential and defining issues \u2014 and so they remain to this day.<\/p>\n Now, in one respect, the paleos have a point: Race and ethnicity are huge and unavoidable issues in modern life, and the liberal orthodoxies on the matter tend to be doctrinaire and hypocritical. But the paleoconservatives took a step beyond debunking when they advanced orthodoxies of their own. Buchanan, for example, gave an impressive speech on immigration at the Nixon Library in California in January 2000: \u201cThe last twenty years of immigration have brought about a redistribution of wealth in America, from less-skilled workers and toward employers. [Harvard economist George] Borjas estimates that one-half of the relative fall in the wages of high-school graduates since the 1980s can be traced directly to mass immigration. . . . Americans today who do poorly in high school are increasingly condemned to a low-wage existence; and mass immigration is a major reason why.\u201d His words were persuasive, even moving, but they would have been far more convincing if they had not been spoken by the same man who had written nine years earlier that he wished only to \u201cget clear\u201d of those high-school graduates who had been born with dark skins.<\/p>\n For some of the paleos, the difficulties of non-white America provoke amused condescension. For others, this America inspires only horror. The United States, Thomas Fleming predicted in 1989, would soon be \u201ca nation no longer stratified by class, but by race as well. Europeans and Orientals will compete, as groups, for the top positions, while the other groups will nurse their resentments on the weekly welfare checks they receive from the other half.\u201d Some of the paleos\u2019 racial animus is expressed via their obsessive \u2014 and even obscene \u2014 denunciations of Martin Luther King. \u201cKing bedded other men\u2019s wives, other wives\u2019 men, underaged girls, and young boys,\u201d raged a columnist in the newsletter Rockwell ran before he started his website. \u201c[M]y guess is that even holes in the ground had to watch out.\u201d<\/p>\n Racial passions run strong among the paleos. And yet, having read many hundreds of thousands of their words in print and on the screen, I come away with a strong impression that while their anti-black and anti-Hispanic feelings are indeed intense, another antipathy is far more intellectually important to them.<\/p>\n White racialists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have to resolve a puzzling paradox. On one hand, they believe in the incorrigible inferiority of darker-skinned people. On the other hand, they perceive darker-skinned people to be gaining the advantage over whites. How to resolve the contradiction? One solution is to posit the existence of a third force, a group that is cunning and capable but, for reasons of its own, implacably hostile to America\u2019s white majority.<\/p>\n \u201cJewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies . . . to weaken the power of their [the Jews’] perceived competitors \u2014 the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n The author of those words, Kevin MacDonald of the California State University at Long Beach, does not quite belong to the paleoconservative club, although he does publish in The Occidental Quarterly<\/em>. Yet MacDonald\u2019s name and ideas do keep turning up in paleo conversation. On March 17, 2003, for example, VDare.com prominently posted on its homepage an anonymous letter celebrating MacDonald\u2019s work and quoting his allegation that the Iraq war \u201cis being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.\u201d More generally, MacDonald said \u2014 and VDare.com repeated \u2014 \u201cthe most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.\u201d<\/p>\n Erstwhile National Review<\/span> editor Joseph Sobran also seems to have been greatly influenced by MacDonald\u2019s writings. After the defeat of his friend Buchanan\u2019s second presidential campaign, Sobran wrote: \u201cThe full story is impossible to tell as long as it\u2019s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls.\u201d Sobran was following MacDonald\u2019s advice: \u201cIt is time to be frank about Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bush administration should not only ignore the advice of such characters as Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Podhoretz but consider placing them under surveillance as possible agents of a foreign power.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Samuel Francis, in Chronicles<\/i>, December 2002<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n W<\/span>ho was the first paleo to blame Israel for 9\/11? It\u2019s a close call, but Robert Novak seems to have won the race. His column of September 13, 2001, written the very day after the terrorist attack, charged that \u201cthe hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel.\u201d Novak lamented that, because of terror, \u201cthe United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n The next day, Scott McConnell quoted Malcolm X on Justin Raimondo\u2019s website: \u201cThe chickens have come home to roost.\u201d Raimondo himself soon began work on a book that alleged that 9\/11 was in the broadest sense an Israeli plot.<\/p>\n \u201cWhose war is this?\u201d Buchanan demanded to know on September 26, 2001: \u201cPowell\u2019s war \u2014 or Perle\u2019s?\u201d \u201cJudging from President Bush\u2019s State of the Union message,\u201d Sobran lamented on January 31, 2002, \u201cwhat began as the War on Terrorism will now be broadened to become a War to Crush Israel\u2019s Enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress,\u201d Robert Novak wrote on December 26, 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon \u201cleaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war.\u201d<\/p>\n The accusations culminated in a March 2003 article by Buchanan in The American Conservative<\/em> that fixed responsibility for the entire Iraq war on a \u201ccabal\u201d of neoconservative office-holders and writers: \u201cWe charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America\u2019s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people\u2019s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.\u201d<\/p>\n Who were these war-mongering \u201cneoconservatives\u201d? At a June 2002 conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the leading Holocaust-denial group, Joe Sobran defined \u201cneoconservatism\u201d as \u201ckosher conservatism.\u201d And in his March cover story, Buchanan seasoned Sobran\u2019s definition with his own flavorful malice. \u201cCui Bono?<\/em> For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.\u201d<\/p>\n The echo in that previous paragraph of the Nazi slogan \u201cEin Volk, ein Reich, ein F\u00fchrer<\/em>\u201d is unlikely to have been unintentional. Yes, it was indeed time to \u201cbe frank about Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n Having quickly decided that the War on Terror was a Jewish war, the paleos equally swiftly concluded that they wanted no part of it. It\u2019s odd: 9\/11 actually vindicated some of the things that the paleos had been arguing, particularly about immigration and national cohesion. But the paleos were in no mood to press their case. Instead, they plunged into apologetics for the enemy and wishful defeatism.<\/p>\n On September 16, 2001, Samuel Francis suggested that America deserved what it got on 9\/11: \u201cSome day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we had started. Let us hear no more about how the \u2018terrorists\u2019 have \u2018declared war on America.\u2019 Any nation that allows a criminal chief executive to use its military power to slaughter civilians in unprovoked and legally unauthorized attacks for his own personal political purposes\u201d \u2014 Francis is referring here both to Operation Desert Fox in 1998 and to the Kosovo war \u2014 \u201ccan expect whatever the \u2018terrorists\u2019 dish out to it.\u201d<\/p>\n It seems incredible, but there is actually more. \u201cIf, as President Bush told us this week, we should make no distinction between those who harbor terrorists and those who commit terrorist acts, neither can any distinction be made between those who tolerate the murderous policies of a criminal in power and the criminal himself.\u201d<\/p>\n The 9\/11 attacks sent Patrick Buchanan plunging into handwringing and pessimism. He wrote on September 28, 2001: \u201cWe are told the first target of America\u2019s wrath will be the Taliban. But if we rain fire and death on the Afghan nation, a proud, brave people we helped liberate from Soviet bondage, we too will slaughter hundreds of innocents. And as they count their dead, the Afghans too will unite in moral outrage; and, as they cannot fight cruise missiles or Stealth bombers, they will attack our diplomats, businessmen, tourists.\u201d<\/p>\n The week after the fall of Kabul, Raimondo acknowledged that though the Afghan war seemed<\/em> to have succeeded, disaster lurked around the corner: \u201cThe real quagmire awaits us. . . . When the history books are written, Operation Enduring Freedom will be hailed as a great success \u2014 provided it doesn\u2019t endure much more than a few weeks longer.\u201d Llewellyn Rockwell would not tolerate a war that lasted even so long as that. By October 2002, he was calling for immediate and unconditional surrender \u2014 by the United States. The right approach to the War on Terror, he wrote, \u201cas to all government programs, is to end it immediately. . . . The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is suppose[d] to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. government has probably killed more people outside its own borders than any other. Or am I overlooking something?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Joseph Sobran, speech to the John Randolph Society, Herndon, VA., January 1992<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And now it is time to be very frank about the paleos. During the Clinton years, many conservatives succumbed to a kind of gloom. With Bill Bennett, they mourned the \u201cdeath of outrage.\u201d America now has non-metaphorical deaths to mourn. There is no shortage of outrage \u2014 and the cultural pessimism of the 1990s has been dispelled. The nation responded to the terrorist attacks with a surge of patriotism and pride, along with a much-needed dose of charity. Suddenly, many conservatives found they could look past the rancor of the Clinton years, past the psychobabble of the New Age gurus, past the politically correct professors, to see an America that remained, in every important way, the America of 1941 and 1917 and 1861 and 1776. As Tennyson could have said: \u201cWhat we were, we are.\u201d<\/p>\n America has social problems; the American family is genuinely troubled. The conservatism of the future must be a social as well as an economic conservatism. But after the heroism and patriotism of 9\/11 it must also be an optimistic conservatism. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.<\/p>\n War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen \u2014 and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It turns out that those who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq were right and were therefore the real patriots. It’s extra weird that Frum, a Canadian, is attacking the patriotism of Americans. David Frum wrote March 25, 2003: You … Continue reading \n
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\nThere is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.<\/p>\n