ZGram - 1/9/2002 - "America in Peril: The Paul Revere Series" (Raimondo: The Big Change - Part I)

irimland@zundelsite.org irimland@zundelsite.org
Wed, 9 Jan 2002 17:27:05 -0800


Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

January 9, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:


*********** America in Peril - The Paul Revere Series*********

Was it Jefferson who said:  "Let the people know the truth - and the
Republic will be safe"?  Few today believe that the Republic is still safe.
There must be a scarcity of truth!

The Zundelsite presents the "Paul Revere Series" by gleaning exceptionally
articulated articles, commentary etc. from the Internet - out of concern
for America and in support of its sacred traditions.  We will select
carefully.  We will comment as we see fit.  We see the Paul Revere Series
as a public service, a celebration of what has made America largely unique
in the annals of history.

We believe, as we did from the start when the Zundelsite was first
conceived and compiled - and when it subsequently came under the fiercest
cyber censorship fire that any website has so far endured - that
well-reasoned discourse and well-argued disagreements, even
political-ideological differences, as long as they remain peaceful, should
be given a voice and exposure to thoughtful reflection.

The essay below is one of a number of essays by various voices across the
entire political, social, cultural and ideological spectrum we want to
share with our Zundelsite readers world-wide - particularly American
readers.  It is hoped that this series will contribute to a better
understanding of the issues facing America and the world as the present
crisis widens.  As it will!

We want to make it perfectly clear that the Zundelsite does not necessarily
subscribe to or endorse the news expressed, in whole or in part, by each
and every source,  be they individual authors, groups, symposia summaries
or even press releases of upcoming events and/or commentary on past events.


 We hold America's Attorney General Ashcroft and President Bush to their
promise that American civil and human rights and freedoms, including
freedom of speech, will not be curtailed because of the present emergency.
Fortitude and optimism are the pillars of our strength.

Ingrid Rimland, Ed.D.

=====

 Justin Raimondo, a true intellectual whiz-kid on the cyber block, weighs
in with a comprehensive, yet passionate piece of analysis, which in more
normal, less politicized times would grace the pages of the once truly
conservative National Review, or even the op ed pages of some conservative
newspaper like the Chicago Tribune of two, three generations ago.

In today's co-opted, stale, politically correct mass media, seldom are the
Raimondos of America allowed a voice.

 In sparse prose, Raimondo lays bare the threads and threat of America's
liberal-socialist juggernaut now bulldozing into rubble and dust two
hundred years of American tradiitons of Liberty and Freedom - all the while
cloaking itself in jingoistic rhetoric and cackling about "human rights".


Enjoy a fine mind that still thinks!

[START]

 January 7, 2002

 THE BIG CHANGE (Part I)

 POST-9/11: LEFT AND RIGHT MERGE INTO A PERMANENT WAR PARTY

 As a post-9/11 bromide, "everything's changed" has become a journalistic
mantra, a theme with endless variations endlessly repeated, and it is easy
to become thoroughly sick of it, and suspicious at the same time. For, if
"everything's changed," then perhaps we don't need the Bill of Rights
anymore, as a virtually unanimous Congress agreed in passing the Orwellian
"USA PATRIOT Act" - without bothering to read the text. Perhaps, then, we
can chuck out the 200-year-old legacy of our old Republic and usher in a
new, streamlined American Empire, impervious to challenge and invulnerable
to attack from within as well as from without. Oh yes indeedy, everything's
changed, alright - including the possibility of a change for the better.

  WHY CHANGE IS EVIL

 As a conservative libertarian (or is that libertarian conservative?), I am
suspicious if not downright opposed to any and all change, which seems, all
too often, a manifestation of pure evil. This is not so much a matter of
temperament (although I'll admit that some of this can be explained by the
aging process) as it is a matter of ideology. After all, the Republic has
been degenerating for nearly two centuries, now, and there is no reason to
expect the process of decay to be reversed any time soon, if ever. So any
change, by definition, seems a loss. But the really big change, post-9/11 -
the real turning of a corner, so to speak - is that any real reversal of
course has, for the foreseeable future, been effectively blocked.

 CROSSING THE RUBICON

 I am haunted by the words of Garet Garrett, who, writing in 1950 or so,
had a vision of an American Empire so clear that to read his classic Rise
of Empire (1952) today is to be struck dumb by his prescience:

 "We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If
you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between
day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted
sign to say: 'You now are entering Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road
and the voice of history was saying: 'Whether you know it or not, the act
of crossing may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that
reads: 'No U-turns.'"

 FROM A REPUBLIC TO AN EMPIRE

 Writing at the beginning of the Cold War, Garrett saw the drive to Empire
as fatally undermining the Founders' republican project. Just as the New
Deal and the world war had brought about a "revolution within the form,"
and subverted the idea of limited constitutional government, so the Cold
War would accelerate and, finally, complete the transition from a
republican to an imperial form of unlimited governmental hegemony, both at
home and abroad.

 Garrett was a pessimist, but his despair is shot through with silver
threads of a bright promise, the hope that "the positions in the lost
terrain could be regained," one by one, and the old Republic restored.
Garrett saw that the "mortal enmity" between "constitutional,
representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the
other hand," had never been truly resolved, because "never has the choice
been put to a vote of the people."

 THE INEVITABILITY OF EMPIRE

 Yet the decision of the elites to intervene on a global basis has already
been made and is, according to them, "irrevocable." America, wrote Garrett:

 "Has been committed to the course of Empire by executive government, one
step at a time, with slogans, concealments, equivocations, a propaganda of
fear, and in every crisis an appeal for unity, lest we present to the world
the aspect of a divided nation, until at last it may be proclaimed that
events have made the decision and it is irrevocable."

 The sleek modernity of Garrett's prose is underscored by the realization
that those words could well have been written today, or tomorrow. "United
we stand," or so the slogan goes: all criticism, however mild, is the work
of "fifth columnists," and "you're either with us, or with the terrorists,"
as the President of the United States bluntly put it. The signal act of
destruction, which stunned us all on 9/11, is what, they claim, makes our
transition to Empire not only irrevocable but, also, not even subject to
debate.

 THE MARCH OF HISTORY

 If the globalists are right, wrote Garrett, and America's advance to
Empire is inevitable, then "a piece of writing like this would be an
exercise in pessimistic vanity." But for all his nostalgic keening for a
golden past and the lyrical sense of yearning that permeates his style,
Garrett didn't really believe he was on the wrong side of history. The
policy of perpetual war and permanent inflation, all financed by the
pyramid scheme economics of Keynesian socialism, would cause a catastrophic
crisis, and out of this crisis new leadership would emerge. This was the
belief, not often expressed, of the Old Right critics of the New Deal and
Roosevelt's drive to war: even in the twilight of their movement, old
America Firsters like Garrett retained some slim hope that they would win.

 GARRETT'S HOPE

 "Who says it is impossible?" Garrett asked. "The President says it; the
State Department says it; all globalists and one-worlders are saying it."
But the Old Right, of which Garrett's was the most lyrical voice, was not
yet ready to surrender: We can retake all that "lost terrain," he wrote,
and yet save the Republic. In the half-century since Garrett penned his
polemic - and especially in the barely four months since the attacks - what
has changed is that this possibility is rapidly being foreclosed.

 WHAT'S THAT SIGN UP AHEAD?

 For now, it seems, there is a painted sign up ahead, clearly commanding us
not to execute a U-turn. And we can, indeed, now mark a single stroke
between day and night, clearly establishing the precise time when
"everything changed": a few minutes before nine in the morning, on
September 11, 2001. In one moment we were a Republic, and in the next, an
Empire, albeit one besieged.

 IN THE FURNACE OF WAR

 In the heat of the firestorm, old ideological distinctions melted down: in
the furnace of war, Left and Right melded one into the other, with
conservatives embracing the anti-libertarian instincts of their liberal
counterparts, and liberals suddenly enamored of war. What Daniel Bell
prematurely called "the end of ideology," in a famous book of the same
title, has come to pass.

 THE END OF IDEOLOGY?

 Bell's book argued that left and right had pretty much come to agree on
the inevitability of the Welfare-Warfare State, and the supremacy of Big
Government as a permanent feature of American politics. However, The End of
Ideology was, unfortunately, published just before the tumultuous 1960s and
the Vietnam War got off the ground, thus instantly invalidating its thesis
that every problem has been solved, in its essence, by the palliative
effects of social democracy, and that there's nothing really to argue about
but for the niggling details of how to administer the welfare state.

 THE END OF HISTORY?

 Francis Fukuyama took up the cry, again, in the 1990s, after the fall of
the Berlin Wall: in his famous essay, "The End of History," he repeated
Bell's thesis, dressed up in Hegelian drag, and proclaimed the triumph of
Empire in the form of a coming "world homogenous state," i.e. the United
States of the World - headquartered, naturally, in Washington, D.C. In this
New Rome of the new millennium, the Senators would quarrel over the
niggling details of how to administer a global Imperium. But there would be
no debate over whether this was possible or even desirable - since all
fundamental political problems had already been solved, and it was settled,
once and for all, that some form of social democracy is "the final form of
human government."

 THE END OF THE DEBATE

 Now, post-9/11, we have "the end of argument" over the issue of war and
peace, and, indeed, all questions of foreign policy. An endless policy of
war has been forced upon us, or so it is claimed, and every foreign policy
stance must be justified by one and only one standard of value: how does it
advance the cause of our "war on terrorism?" Both left and right have
eagerly embraced this formula, and, in accordance with the new
"unity"-mongering that has gripped the nation in the past few months, they
have both reached pretty much identical conclusions: military intervention
is good in and of itself, and Big Government is, at least for the moment,
necessary if not always desirable.

 ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY

 On the right, one major herald of this new merger-mania is Michael Barone,
of US News, who posits that the "national greatness" and "leave us alone"
wings of the GOP have finally been reconciled to happy harmony by this war.
Pre-9/11, he says, these two strands of the Republican coalition had worked
in uneasy alliance, coming out in open conflict during the GOP presidential
primaries, when a plethora of candidates each claimed the mantle of
Reaganism, and none were quite up to the task. Barone writes:

 "As recently as the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, many Republicans were
still looking backward at their transformational leader Ronald Reagan.
Candidates Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes both claimed their campaigns should be
taken seriously because they best represented Reagan's ideals. The
religious right and the economic right assessed candidates like George W.
Bush and John McCain on how well they fit what these groups considered the
relevant Reagan model. It was assumed that candidates who failed the litmus
tests Reagan met - on tax cuts and abortion - could not be nominated."

 Ah, but no more. According to Barone, Bush II has combined the "national
greatness" McCainism of the Weekly Standard with the "leave us alone"
quasi-libertarianism of conservatives, like Grover Norquist, who are mainly
concerned with economic issues and, more generally, with protecting
individuals from the intrusive instincts of government bureaucrats and
their armed enforcers. But the great problem of the "leave us alone" crowd,
says Barone, is that their message "lacks inspiration." He is probably
right that a people who elected William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency
are not likely to be inspired by the same purity of vision that led the
Founders to lay down their lives for liberty. Yet he clearly does not
regard this as a disaster.

 SWEET INSPIRATION

 Barone epitomizes the post-9/11 conservative movement in his willingness
to jettison the old conservative domestic agenda in the name of a global
crusade without limitations on either its ends or its means. "Absent
credible threats of government intrusion," he writes, "the leave-us-alone
coalition can lose enthusiasm and cohesion."

 Barone may not have noticed that the government is now empowered to read
our email, track our internet surfing habits, and listen in on our phone
conversations without a proper warrant or oversight, or that it can lock
people up without charges and without having to answer to anybody: but,
then again, conservatives of his "neo" ilk never had much enthusiasm for
liberty, which they always found somewhat boring. So it is no wonder that
Barone finds none of this a "credible threat." He is, he confesses, more
easily inspired by "great national projects at home and abroad," and looks
to Theodore Roosevelt as the symbol of this kind of rhetorical bluster.
"The trouble is that, before September 11, no great national projects were
apparent," avers Barone, but all that's solved rather neatly now:

 "Since September 11, George W. Bush has exemplified both national
greatness and leave-us-alone conservatism. The war against terrorism is his
national greatness project, undertaken with appropriate seriousness and
steeliness. Yet he has refused to back down from the previously passed tax
cuts. During his father's administration, spokesmen for various forces in
the Republican Party vied for public attention and political leverage.
Today's George Bush overshadows all of them."

 BREAKDOWN OF THE GOP COALITION

 According to the arbiters of the new Republican dispensation in the realm
of foreign policy, "national greatness," i.e. Empire, is triumphant, while
"leave us alone" still rules the GOP's domestic agenda, at least when it
comes to economic issues. But this division of labor is already beginning
to break down, as, increasingly, the momentum is given to the Democrats -
and their liberal Republican enablers - to extend the power and reach of
Big Government in the name of the "national emergency."

 THE COMING TAX HIKE

 We saw this with the federalization of airport security, and the same is
true of the tax-cut issue. After all, how are we going to finance the "war
on terrorism," rebuild Afghanistan, invade Iraq, and "save" Social Security
in the face of an economic downturn that, like the "war on terrorism,"
seems to have no end in sight? Politically, the trend is going against the
tax-cutting Republicans, who may be unable to withstand the rising tide of
red ink and Democratic rhetoric without giving in to a tax hike - and many
more in the future.

 THE 'BIG MO'

 The "big mo," as George W. Bush's dad put it, is also going against those
principled conservatives, including Phyllis Schlafly and Norquist, who went
on the record against the ludicrously misnamed "USA PATRIOT Act," and
lobbied hard, albeit largely unsuccessfully, to rid the various
"anti-terrorist" measures of their more ominous clauses. The tide has
turned in favor of the more authoritarian "neo"-conservatives, not only
Barone and the Weekly Standard crowd but also such freelancers as
gay-marriage advocate and British expatriate Andrew Sullivan, who
alternates between denouncing war critics as "traitors" and pushing for the
expulsion of all Christian fundamentalists from the Republican coalition -
on the grounds that they are brothers in spirit to the Taliban.

 CONSERVATISM: AN OBITUARY

 As an addendum to his theory of Republican realignment, Barone sounds the
death knell of the real conservative movement:

 "Another kind of Republicanism literally disappeared during the campaign:
the isolationist, protectionist, and nativist Republicanism of pre-World
War II conservatives, revived by author and former Nixon and Reagan
speechwriter Patrick Buchanan. This kind of Republicanism could not claim
the Reagan imprimatur: Reagan, as a Democrat in the 1940s and as a
Republican in the 1980s, rejected isolationism, protectionism, and
nativism. The destruction of Buchanan as a force in the Republican party
was, to a considerable extent, the work of radio talk show host Rush
Limbaugh. Limbaugh, whose program appeals to much of what Buchanan must
have regarded as his core constituency, articulately and patiently attacked
Buchanan's stands on issues for months. Buchanan left the Republican Party
after his poor showing in the August 1999 Ames, Iowa, straw poll, leaving
no significant successor."

 Barone frames the above paragraph as a parenthetical aside, but one gets
the feeling that this is the real point of his little essay. Yet this cry
of "Victory!" by the liberal internationalist wing of the Republican party
seems premature, at best. For surely what Barone calls Buchanan's
"nativism" - i.e. his opposition to increased levels of immigration - has
been vastly empowered by the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. The whole
multicultural myth that George W. Bush embraced so fulsomely during his
campaign - the speaking in Spanish, the exhibitionistic political
correctness of the lineup at the GOP convention, the meetings with Vincente
Fox and a post-election Bush proposal that we rapidly increase immigration
levels along with some vague talk of a North America without borders - is
fatally undermined by the circumstances of this war.

 WHY THEY HATE BUCHANAN

 The brand of conservatism represented by Buchanan is totally unacceptable
to the "modern" Right because of its alleged "isolationism." What Barone
and his fellow neocons mean by this is Buchanan's principled opposition to
the whole gamut of post-Cold War interventions, from the Gulf war against
Iraq to the "police action" in Haiti to Bosnia and Kosovo and now, perhaps,
to Iraq II. The fall of the Soviet empire and the growth of a
counterculture empowered by Big Government convinced a whole section of the
Right that the main danger to liberty is not in Baghdad but right here at
home.

 The bloviating Limbaugh, whose dumbed-down version of ostensible
"conservatism" is like a fun-house reflection of the real thing, had much
less to do with Buchanan's lack of success at the polls than the perceived
closeness of the election. At any rate, Limbaugh and his neoconservative
masters smeared Buchanan mercilessly, without ever coming to grips with his
anti-interventionist arguments, so forcefully and elegantly expressed in
his book, A Republic, Not an Empire.

 ROOSEVELTIAN REVIVAL

 A few of the more hardcore rightists even challenged the legitimacy of the
American state in a famous symposium, published in First Things magazine,
dedicated to the proposition that the federal colossus had to be
overthrown. For this they were vilified by their neoconservative allies,
who berated them for "extremism" and dubbed them "theocrats" for taking
their idea of morality and the subordination of the state to the demands of
personal conscience to its logical conclusion.

 Today, they might also be dismissed as "fundamentalists" and quite
possibly traitors: certainly, such conservatives are, today, considered
completely beyond the pale. It is not for nothing that the Democrats are
picking up on this theme in linking the Republicans with the religious
right and labeling them the "American Taliban." The center of ideological
gravity has moved decisively to the left of center, and what we are seeing
is the overthrow of the old Reaganite paradigm - which held that government
is part of the problem, and not the solution. We are going back to the old
not Rooseveltian paradigm of "national greatness" through government
action: the only difference being that, this time, it's Teddy, and not
Franklin, whose legacy is being revived.

 Don't think liberals fail to sense their opportunity, and they are moving
inexorably to claim it. In my next column, we'll see how the development of
big government conservatism has a parallel in the rapid growth of warrior
liberalism - the brazenly hypocritical creed of the Clintonian leftists,
such as Salon editor David Talbot, who details his conversion to the new
militarism in "The Making of a Hawk." Read it - and gag. And be sure to log
in Wednesday and see how I expose this peacenik-turned-"humanitarian"
warmonger for the craven sell-out that he is....

 [END]

  =====

 Tomorrow:  Part II

 =====

Thought for the Day:

"It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty."

(John C. Calhoun)