.
After nearly two years of bitter
controversy about the role of
neo-conservatives in
dragging the country into a useless and apparently
endless war in the Middle East, it has finally begun to
dawn on some of the neo-cons` liberal enemies that their
critics on the right have been warning about them for
years. In Sunday`s New York Times Book Review, New
Republic editor Franklin Foer at last discovered the
"paleo-conservatives."
"Long before French protesters
and liberal bloggers had even heard of the
neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in
mortal combat with them," Mr. Foer writes. As one
who carries wounds from such
combats, I can testify that he`s right. In recent
years, the role of neo-con policy makers like Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others in
concocting phony reasons to make war on Iraq has become
notorious — mainly because liberals themselves have
talked about it in their own publications. The liberals
should have listened to what we paleos were saying a
long time ago. [Once
Again, America First, By Franklin Foer, NYT,
October 10, 2004]
Mr. Foer notes that the neo-cons`
response to paleo-conservative criticism "often
accused the paleocons of anti-Semitism." That`s true
too, and today the standard neo-con claim is that the
word "neo-con" is really only a code for "Jew" and the
only people who use it critically are Jew-baiters.
The larger truth is that there has
been a paleo-conservative critique of neo-conservatism
for years, developed, as Mr. Foer notes, in such
magazines as
Chronicles and in the columns and books of such folks as
Pat Buchanan, historian
Paul Gottfried and
yours truly.
The Jewish identity of many
neo-conservatives probably plays an important role in
what they think and why they think it, but for most
paleos the problem with the neo-cons is not that they`re
Jewish but that even today they`re liberals. Maybe
that`s why so many liberals who don`t like the neo-cons
won`t talk about the paleo-cons at all. If they did,
they`d only call attention to their own flaws as well.
Neo-conservative liberalism is not
confined to support for spreading democracy by force, in
the
tradition of
Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt, but also includes their sympathy
for
big government and
mass immigration, among other liberal causes. As for
the paleos, Mr. Foer seems to think their skepticism
toward the
Iraq war is rooted in opposition to
the state. That`s partly true, but there are other
reasons as well.
Paleos do not necessarily oppose
war (or the state). They just oppose this war and this
state — the war because it`s not in the
interest of the nation, is not dictated by our
security needs and serves to deflect and distract us
from more dangerous enemies and threats; the state,
because in the hands of liberals and neo-conservatives
it has become an enemy of the real American nation,
undermining its people and civilization and invading its
freedoms.
Mr. Foer also keeps calling the
paleos "isolationists." That`s true of some but
not all. "Isolationism" was mainly a 1930s slur
word for Americans who opposed intervention in World War
II. Most paleos sympathize with that cause, but few back
then or today were or are against all intervention.
There are times when intervention (including war) is
necessary and just. The
Cold War was one of them. The war with the
Arabic world today isn`t.
Does paleo-conservatism have a
future? Mr. Foer suggests it might. He notes that some
establishment conservatives have finally come around to
saying the Iraq war was a blunder. None is a paleo, and
none will acknowledge that the paleo critics of the war
were right all along. But if the paleos were right about
the war, maybe they`re right about other matters too.
"It`s easy to imagine that a
Bush loss in November, coupled with further failures in
Iraq, could trigger a large-scale revolt against
neoconservative foreign policy within the Republican
Party," Mr. Foer writes. "A Bush victory, on the
other hand, will be interpreted by many Republicans as a
vindication of the current course, and that could spur a
revolt too. If the party tilts farther toward an
activist foreign policy, antiwar conservatives might
begin searching for a new political home."
Actually, quite a few have already
started searching, and they`re well advised to do so. A
Bush victory would more likely mean their obliteration,
since neo-conservative domination would be locked in.
But even if Mr. Bush loses, it`s dubious very many
Republicans would leap on the paleo bandwagon.
The paleocons have suffered from a bad press, some of
it of their own making, but it`s likely that more rank
and file American conservatives agree with them than
with the neo-cons. If the paleos could learn how to play
a little more effectively, they could still deal
themselves a better hand in the future, even if it`s
outside the GOP.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,
America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available
from
Americans For Immigration Control.
Click here
for Sam Francis` website. Click
here to order his monograph,
Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American
Political Future.
