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Because just as the American nation was made with unusual speed, so it is perfectly possible that it could be unmade. On speeded-up film, the great cloud formations boil up so that they dominate the sky. But they also unravel and melt away.

[Time To Rethink Immigration, by Peter Brimelow, first published in National Review, June 22, 1992]

Twenty years after VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow wrote these words, secession has been in the news a lot after Obama’s election—petitions have been filed, op-eds written, and while it hasn’t exactly come to the Fort Sumter point, it’s a sign of serious strains in the American body politic.

Here at VDARE.com, we want to say that We Told You So. Peter Brimelow was talking about

Thanksgiving is a purely American holiday, started in the year 1621 by the Pilgrims, a group of people entirely white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. It has nothing to do with immigration.

But increasingly every year, the cultural establishment tries to make Thanksgiving about immigration.

Last year I wrote about  a typical piece of “liberal hate-America snark “—Paul Krugman  [Email him] in the New York Times celebrating Thanksgiving by calling the Pilgrim Fathers “illegal immigrants.” [Thanksgiving Is Un-American, ,November 23, 2011] See also the New Yorker cover from last year, right.

But the Pilgrims were not immigrants—they were either colonizers or invaders, depending on your point of view.

Of course “colonizers or invaders” might be a good way to describe some modern immigrants.

Here are just three recent “Thanksgiving Is really About Immigration” stories:

Thanksgiving Dinner Is About Immigration 

• How To Talk About Immigration On Thanksgiving, by Jen Hicks, CampusProgress.org, November 21, 2012

Students are being told how to argue in favor of amnesty with their unreconstructed parents and uncles at the dinner table. Includes arguments—provided by Angela Maria Kelley, the Vice President of the Center For American Progress—on how to “to shut down the anti-legalization voice”—at your parent’s dinner table.

Kids, these people are paying for your education—and they know more than you. They would also like you to have some kind of job when you get out of school—not have to have you live at home because some Dream Act kid took your job.

A new, Politically Correct remake of the iconic 1984 movie Red Dawn is being released today (November 21). John Milius, writer-director of the original and a true American Hero, is reportedly very ill with pancreatic cancer at the age of 68, but that hasn’t stopped him denouncing the whole thing in no uncertain terms. This article is dedicated to him.

It wasn’t for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sake that I picked up his autobiography, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story. It was for anecdotes about the man who wrote such famous movie lines as “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (Apocalypse Now), “Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" (Dirty Harry), and who directed Arnold in the iconic Conan the Barbarian.

Arnold has made hundreds of millions from his films, hundreds of millions more from savvy investments in real estate, and become one of the most recognizable people on earth. But Conan stands alone as the movie that made and still defines his career.

I refer, of course, to John Milius, who both directed and wrote Conan. A self-professed “Zen fascist” and a long-time member of the National Rifle Association board, Milius was the true star of Arnold’s book.

In Total Recall, we learn that Milius defended Arnold when he was accused of being a Nazi by producer Dino De Laurentiis:

As an American Indian—the term I prefer--a Comanche from Oklahoma, I am offended by the very concept of a “Native American Heritage Month.” President George H. W. Bush established November as the National American Indian Heritage Month in 1990 (the name has been changed for the usual disgusting PC reasons). I don’t recall being consulted about it.

Of course, I wasn’t consulted either in 1924 when the United States government decided to declare all Indians to be American citizens. That in effect put the federal government in charge, which was why Obama was recently able to force the Cherokee Nation to admit the descendants of their black slaves. Indeed, Indians in general are not consulted about our national identities or destinies within the American society. A few liberal-whipped NGO Indians do not represent American Indians.

In fact, the most recent time Indians were consulted about anything was in 2002, then again in 2004. That was about the use of Indian images as sport team mascots. Two professional surveys revealed that the vast majority of Indians were not offended, or didn’t care.

But it didn’t matter. The National Collegiate Athletic Association decided to exclude any team that used an Indian name or image from national bowl games anyway.

So what do I find objectionable about a “Native American” month?

Plenty. It declassifies American Indians. We are stripped of

In the two weeks since the election, the Main Stream Media has repeatedly congratulated the Democrats on their ingenuity in Electing A New People, and jeered at the Republicans for being white losers. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: as General Patton observed, “Americans love a winner”--even, apparently, when the losers are the Americans themselves.

Well, I have more bad news for what we laughingly call GOP strategists: Republicans face a second long-term demographic threat--the decline of marriage.

We’ve all heard about the Gender Gap, but it’s dwarfed by the Marriage Gap, which gets practically no MSM attention. Just as importing poor, unskilled foreigners boosts the ranks of Democratic voters in the long run, so does the decline of the American marriage.

2012 exit poll data confirms the Marriage Gap in voting remains enormous:

This data comes from the big Reuters-Ipsos online poll of 40,000 voters, which

The Main Stream Media and its sockpuppet Republican strategists drone on about the GOP’s dire need to appeal to Hispanics and VDARE.com writers respond, as I did myself in my last VDARE.com piece, that it is essentially impossible for the Republican Party to win a higher proportion of the Hispanic vote. But while the importance of the Hispanic vote in this election was overhyped, this does not change the reality that the size of the Hispanic electorate will continue to increase. [An Awakened Giant: The Hispanic Electorate is Likely to Double by 2030, Pew Hispanic Center, November 14, 2012]

Many on the real Right have interpreted these two facts to mean that the GOP is now forever doomed not to win the presidency. Thus Patrick J. Buchanan has written:

When the country looks like California demographically, it will look like California politically. Republicans are not whistling past the graveyard. They are right at the entrance.

My response: I do agree that, absent 

Exactly two years ago this week, the Obama administration announced it had issued more than 100 waivers en masse to a select group of companies, unions and other health insurance providers seeking relief from the onerous federal health care law. The Obamacare waiver winner's club now totals 2,000. Where are they now?

Answer: In the same miserable boat as every other unlucky business struggling with the crushing costs and burdens of the mandate.

[The following is based loosely on an address I gave to the Fifth Annual H.L. Mencken Club Conference in Baltimore, MD on November 10^th, 2012. I am told an audio of the full address will be posted on the Club’s website in the fullness of time.] 

[Peter Brimelow adds: I had the job of responding to John’s HLMC presentation, and will post a version when I get the transcript. But, in essence, I don’t really like John’s We Are Doomed stance, not least because I have very young children and therefore can’t surrender. As I concluded an article rallying patriots back in 2006, when it was universally but erroneously assumed that the Bush Amnesty was on the verge of passage, no-one really knows what’s politically possible—or even what’s going to happen next week.] 

Destined since when?

Not to waste my precious time on this earth, while walking my dog I listen to lectures from the Great Courses company. Currently I’m listening to Prof. Pangle of the University of Texas, course title: “The Debate Over the American Constitution.”

Pangle works over all the arguments put forward by the anti-Federalists, then gives you the counter-arguments from the Federalists, then the counters to the counter-arguments, and so on. My U.K. education had very little to say about American history, so all this is illuminating for me.

I have, however, been finding myself very one-sided on those debates from 230 years ago, nodding along in agreement with the anti-Federalist arguments but shaking my head and snarling at the Federalist counter-arguments.

Being pretty new to this material, I have not much confidence in my own judgments. Then last night I was sitting at dinner with Prof. Kenneth McIntyre. I told him about my adventures with Prof. Pangle and the Constitution. Ken expressed vigorous approval. Yes, he said, the anti-Federalists did have the better arguments!

It was very encouraging to have one’s private judgments thus confirmed by a credentialed academic. From now on I shall confidently buttonhole people in the street and urge them to ponder William Butler on impost duties or Melancton Smith on consolidation.

My point here is just that American Conservatism goes all the way back to the beginning of the republic. Many of the things we talk about at gatherings like this are in direct line of descent from the arguments put forward by the anti-Federalists.

Thus, to see the history of Conservatism in this country in terms of “going bad”—as a phenomenon somewhat like a living organism, that was born, flourished, then decayed—displays what cognitive scientists call “recency bias,” the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.

Conservatism is a feature of the human personality found in all times and places. Its stock on the public exchanges may rise or fall with circumstances. But it will never disappear.

A couple of years ago I reviewed a book actually titled The High Tide of American Conservatism. It’s about the 1924 Presidential election, when John W. Davis stood for the Democrats and Calvin Coolidge for the Republicans, two gentlemanly Conservatives. Davis was a Wall Street lawyer, and Calvin Coolidge was Calvin Coolidge.

Two gentlemanly Conservatives contesting the Presidency. Let me just pause for a moment here so that we can all heave a collective sigh.

[Collective sigh...]

Twenty years later the Presidential contest featured a liberal Republican versus Franklin D. Roosevelt. So it goes.

Post-WW2 Conservatism: When did it go bad?

All that was just a cautionary note, to add some perspective. We all know that the Conservative movement mentioned in the topic is the post-WW2 manifestation of public Conservatism, and that Conservatism in this manifestation did go bad. So let’s just adjust the question slightly to make this clear: “Was the post-WW2 Conservative movement destined to go bad?”

There is an obvious argument at hand to show that it was. Post-WW2 Conservatives judged that winning the Cold War was sufficiently important to ditch the core principle of American Conservatism, the principle that goes all the way back to those anti-Federalists: the principle of antipathy to a strong national government.

Then, having let the grizzly bear into the living-room, Conservatives of course could not get him out again.

This argument is quite plausible. Most of the “going bad” mentioned in our title, most of the wrong turns and malign phenomena, do seem to have happened or originated in the 1990s, after the Cold War.

I don’t myself think that the cap of Oakeshottian