Category Archives: Neoconservatism

UPDATE II: Egypt In Economic Context (‘A Wave of Global Inflation’)

America, Economy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Inflation, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans

Speaking of boobs (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33995), Dana Perino, the Heidi Klum of the commentariat, wishes Iraq on the Egyptians. Perino, who was once a spokesperson to Bush, a man who was barely able to speak, prattled to a reserved Megyn Kelly on Fox News about the upheaval in Egypt.

Mentioning her boss’ achievements in Iraq made Ms. Mindless glow with pride. She pointed out that the bliss in Baghdad was brought about in response to the democratic urges of the Iraqis—yes, this was murder with majority approval, an American majority (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=363.) Perino also implied that glorious Iraq is a product of a well-thought out philosophy.

Airheads aside, serious analysts—the kind who also live in the region or visit it on occasion—say Iraq “is looking a lot like Lebanon,” violent and balkanized beyond repair. Its few remaining Christians are being systematically exterminated.

Perino gave another shout-out of sorts to Iranian interests. Without being asked, she dredged up the Gaza-strip elections her boss had agitated for and got, back in the day. If you recall, those gave us Hamas.

Another day, another dullard.

Even John Bolton, who’ll take any position in opposition to Obama’s less bellicose foreign policy, seemed to agree with the restraint of the State Department’s response to the riots roiling Egypt.

Contrast Bolton’s unusual retrain with the American Enterprise Institute’s formulaic demand that “President Obama’s administration … assert the U.S. government’s role as the preeminent defender of freedom in the world. … Now is not the time for equivocation.”

Ditto the Weekly Standard. The folks there hanker after a time “when the Bush White House was feeling its oats with victories for the freedom agenda in Iraq and then Lebanon.”

That’s the neoconservative parallel universe for you.

In response to Bush pressure, “Mubarak pushed back with the 2005 parliamentary elections when he awarded the Muslim Brotherhood some 20 percent of the seats—if you want democracy, the Egyptian president seemed to be warning the White House, I’ll stick Osama bin Laden’s friends in parliament.”

Justin Raimondo, at Antiwar.com (for which I once wrote a bi-weekly column), puts “the revolutionary wave now sweeping the world” in the context of catastrophic economic policies and attendant realities. This wave will not spare the US, despite “the myth of ‘American exceptionalism,’ which supposedly anoints us with a special destiny and gives us the right to order the world according to our uniquely acquired position of preeminence.”

Coming to a neighborhood near you?

UPDATE I: You bet. In Egypt, “The government must approve the formation of political parties, effectively assuring its monopoly on political power.” (Via Infoplease.com ) More to the point: “the country’s inefficient state-run industries, its bloated public sector, and its large military investments resulted in inflation, unemployment, a severe trade deficit, and heavy public debt.”

State-caused poverty and the attendant lack of opportunities are likely the catalysts that have sent Egyptians into the streets.

The emphasis, in the US, exclusively on politics and on Egypt’s democracy deficit is myopic. Nevertheless, this focus allows DC’s chattering classes to forget that we too, albeit to a lesser extent, are over-leveraged. Our moocher and looter classes might also riot once they can no longer live out the life to which they are accustomed.

UPDATE II (Jan. 29): “A Wave of Global Inflation” is the tipping point for Egypt. Jerry Bowyer, author of “Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide,” agrees about the role of inflation and the attendant spike in the prices of basic necessities in the crisis in Egypt.

Neoconservative Kingpin Taps Ryan/Rubio

Elections, Foreign Policy, Iran, Neoconservatism, The State, War

William Kristol is touting Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio as a 2012 presidential item.

What are we to take away from this? “They are both strong on national defense,” Kristol repeated twice to Neil Cavuto with that broad Cheshire-Cat grin of his. Could the neoconservative kingpin be licking his chops for war? Is Iran on the chopping block? What else would make a religious proponent of big government and American manifest destiny so smitten?

Cut to 2000, with Kristol and David Brooks making mischief together—or magic, depending on whose side you’re on. The two collaborated on a piece, “The Politics of Creative Destruction,” in which they argued that McCain would revive, rather than repress, the State.

And who could forget Kristol, over on the op-ed pages of his new editorial home, the New York Times (an appointment that speaks to how cozy the left-neocon cabal truly is), excitedly admonishing mutinous anti-McCain conservatives, while reciting gory poetry in honor of McMussolini. Limbaugh he had maligned as suffering from “McCain Derangement Syndrome.”

If Kristol is this excited, it must mean the promise of killing and carnage.

UPDATE VI: Bravo David Frum

Canada, Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, The State

David Frum deserves credit for significantly transforming his position about what I call the global right of return to the USA; mass immigration. Ever the realist, Mr. Frum has abandoned the flippant, immigration free-for-all fetish to which neoconservatives subscribe. Frum now galvanizes the research of economist George Borjas (could VDARE.COM be next?) in his work, and is no longer delinquent about reporting the “small net benefit” mass migration yields in the age of “high and prolonged unemployment” (among other problems).

“What’s the value of immigration?” asks Mr. Frum in his latest CNN column. Here are some excerpts:

“What is immigration for? What are we trying to accomplish?

A century ago, the answer seemed obvious. Factories and mines clamored for workers as an underpopulated continent beckoned settlers.

America in the 21st century, however, does not suffer from a generalized labor shortage. If labor were scarce, you’d expect wages to rise. Instead, wages were stagnating even before the recession hit in 2008. …

… So why import almost a million people a year legally, plus nearly the same illegally? That’s a question that usually goes not only unanswered but unasked.

… the question we need to ask now at this time of high and prolonged unemployment is: Why mass migration at all?

You often hear it said that the U.S. needs to create 150,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth. What’s seldom mentioned is that almost all of America’s net population growth is driven by immigration.” …

…Back in the 1950s and 1960s, immigrants arrived with higher skills and soon gained higher incomes than the native born. That’s how immigration still works in Canada and Australia. Their immigration systems are race-neutral and favor prospective immigrants who arrive with language skills, advanced degrees or capital to invest.”

[SNIP]

David is yet to confront the transformation of America via immigration, where the “the historic American nation —its culture and Christian faith—is… eventually … confined to an ethnic enclave among many. This is the ‘End of Days’ scenario that immigration patriots must contemplate, once they’ve exited the hypobaric chamber that is the current ‘conversation” about immigration.”

UPDATE I (Dec. 31): It is probably advisable to refrain from using the “intellectual” appellation in naming one’s website if one has a problem arguing one’s case logically. To the comment below: From the fact that Christian factions have squabbled—fights within the family—how does it follow that changing the original cultural and religious composition of this country is inconsequential, or not worth contemplating? From the fact that your average Mexican might be more devout than his American counterpart, and that some founding fathers were less religious than the average illegal Mexican alien (no doubt, most Mexicans have a better grasp of Western civilization and its Christian muse than Thomas Jefferson)—it does not follow that a mass influx of said population is inconsequential, not worth slowing down, or should not be debated.

As for the call to think about the US as a propositional nation; an idea rather than real flesh-and-blood communities animated by shared language, history and heroes. Why, that is the call of statism at its purist. For the rootless deracinated people are the most pliable, most miserable, and, thus, easier to control.

UPDATE II (Jan. 1): Larry Auster is less charitable about David Frum’s about-face:

“It’s not true that he’s been consistently opposed to unrestricted immigration. From time to time, he’s made wimpy, ambivalent criticisms of illegal immigration. That’s it. To my knowledge, he has never seriously criticized the overall level and content of U.S. immigration or suggested an alternative policy.
I sum up his pathetic record on the issue in this 2007 entry, where I respond to his bizarre, self-serving claim–made right in the middle of the life-and-death battle over the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill–that he has been a leader and pioneer on immigration reform.
Nota bene: the fact that a person claims to have taken a certain position on an issue, doesn’t mean that he has actually taken it. We are not obligated to accept self-seeking parties’ views of their own great contributions.”

UPDATE III: The Center for Immigration Studies, via Steve Sailer:

“2010 Census: Population Up 27 Million in Just 10 Years

Immigration Drives Huge Increase; Since 1980, Population Up 82 million, Equal to Calif., Texas & N.Y.

WASHINGTON (December 21, 2010) – Most of the media coverage of the 2010 Census will likely focus on the country’s changing racial composition and the redistribution of seats in Congress. But neither of these is the most important finding. Rather, it is the dramatic increase in the size of the U.S. population itself that has profound implications for our nation’s quality of life and environment. Most of the increase has been, and will continue to be, a result of one federal policy: immigration. Projections into the future from the Census Bureau show we are on track to add 130 million more people to the U.S. population in the just the next 40 years, primarily due to future immigration.

So much for attempting to hold national carbon emissions stable.

* Immigration accounted for three-quarters of population growth during the decade. Census Bureau data found 13.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in the last 10 years; there were also about 8.2 million births to immigrant women during the decade.1
* The numerical increase of 27.3 million this decade is exceeded by only two other decades in American history.
* Without a change in immigration policy, the nation is projected to add roughly 30 million new residents each decade for the foreseeable future.
* Assuming the current ratio of population to infrastructure, adding roughly 30 each decade will mean:
building and paying for 8,000 new schools every 10 years;
developing land to accommodate 11.5 million new housing units every 10 years;
constructing enough roads to handle 23.6 million more vehicles every 10 years.

* While our country obviously can ‘fit’ more people, and technology and planning can help manage the situation, forcing such high population growth through immigration policy has profound implications for the environment, traffic, congestion, sprawl, water quality, and the loss of open spaces. …”

MORE.

UPDATE IV (Jan. 2): “Did the Founding Fathers Support Immigration?” Not really. Hamilton understood intuitively what Harvard scholar Robert Putnam took five years to discover scientifically. Hamilton called it “heterogeneity,” Putnam calls it “diversity.” Either way, it makes people miserable. The difference between Putnam and the founders is that the fathers of the nation loved the American people; they did not delegitimize their ancestry and history by calling them eternal immigrants. John Jay conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what their descendants are taught.

UPDATE V (Jan. 3): Thomas Jefferson famously cautioned in “Notes on Virginia” (Q.VIII, 1782. ME 2:118):

[Is] rapid population [growth] by as great importations of foreigners as possible … founded in good policy? … They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.

These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass … If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements …

Writing of immigration to George Flower in 1817, Jefferson worried about “consecrat[ing] a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe [my emphasis] may compel to seek happiness in other climes.” And to J. Lithgow in 1805, “A first question is, whether it is desirable for us to receive at present the dissolute and demoralized handicraftsmen of the old cities of Europe [my emphasis].” Jefferson feared that immigrants under “the maxims of absolute monarchies” – again, he was not talking about the monarchies of Buganda or Ethiopia – may not acclimatize to “the freest principles of the English constitution.”

What would he say about arrivals from Wahhabi-worshiping wastelands whose customs not only preclude “natural right and natural reason,” but include killing their hosts? That would have appalled Jefferson, and again, not because of his limitations, but because of ours; because of how low we have sunk.

[SNIP]

UPDATE VI: “Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others ? intentionally or unintentionally ? falls perfectly within the purview of the ‘night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory,’ in the words of the philosopher Robert Nozick.

But thumping majorities within rarified libertarian, Objectivist, and loony left circles disagree.

When Objectivists eulogized the dazzling Randian Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq., most downplayed her trenchant opposition to the unfettered flow of migrants across the 1,940-mile-long border with Mexico. To that end, the late Dr. Cosman ‘never hesitated to put her own time, money, and neck on the line for her beliefs,’ even volunteering as a patrolwoman with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

The quintessential ‘Renaissance woman,’ Dr. Cosman was an expert aviator, health-care policy analyst, marksman, and musician. …” And immigration patriot.

MORE (with links to Dr. Cosman’s work).

UPDATE IV: A National Reviewnik Thinks He’s "Contrarian"

Debt, Inflation, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans

He’s trillions of dollars and a decade too late, but Kevin D. Williamson of National Review can assure himself he’s “contrarian” for advocating an about face in the Federal Reserve Bank’s fiddling.

Williamson may be reading Austrian economics. By that I mean the reality based thinking of Ludwig von Mises (taught at the Mises Institute); preached by Ron Paul (whom the neoconery mocked during the Bush years), practiced by financier Peter Schiff, written about by Tom Woods in Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse; as well as by Vox Day, and in this writer’s columns and blogs over the past decade.

Being of the establishment, however, Williamson can just put his hands over his ears and tell himself over and over again “I’m contrarian,” and this will be so.

“So here’s a contrarian take,” Williamson assures himself: “The Fed should stop trying to drive down interest rates. It should instead work to raise them. Why? Our economy needs savings and investment. …”

As I said, trillions of dollars and a decades too later … (“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!”)

Your host, writing in “Those Invisible Jobs,” did not anoint herself a “contrarian” for advocating that Fed supremo Ben Bernanke raise interest rates.” Not then, and not in 2000 (“The Central Bank’s Game is the Same, Whoever’s the Name”), and on all those occasions in-between.

Why? Because in the Austrian community, represented by some very prominent people, this is common wisdom.

Bloody annoying…

UPDATE I: I’ll be honest: it’s hard to know from Mr. Williamson’s wishy-washy articles exactly where he stands on matters of political philosophy (or if he is a neoconservative or not). However, this post’s point was pretty clear. It expressed annoyance that someone can call himself contrarian for proposing less quantitative easing. Granted, it’s a prickly post, but Mr. Williamson can understand, surely, why writers like myself get a tad testy? We’ve been marginalized for being right on foreign policy and fiscal matters our entire careers, such as they are. Then, when the rest catch up with us, a decade down the line, they pretend that truth began with them.

If I’ve learned anything about the American Mind it is this: Truth doesn’t exist until someone in the establishment pronounces it, usually a decade or so after it has been in circulation. I guess, better late than never, but why not acknowledge those who went before?

I saw Mr. Williamson go up against one or the other left-liberals on TV, and I remember thinking: much better than Rich. Still, I do not believe there is a sufficient amount of information to conclude that “better than Rich” is a meaningful statement.

Mr. Williamson is young (and presentable). He has plenty of time to correct any mistaken impressions I might have formed, not least of which is his sharing that horrible habit common among the Republican establishment of never admitting to being Johnny-come-latelies on Iraq, Bush, economy, QE, etc.

UPDATE II: Mr. Glisson, first, why don’t you provide hyperlinks and particular quotes in substantiation of your position that Mr. Williamson is never a neoconservative? Second, why misconstrue the point of this writer’s post, encapsulated again in the last two sentences of “UPDATE I”? Moreover, from a parenthetic statement about the neoconservatives’ attitude toward Ron Paul, Mr. Williamson concluded that I had called him a neoconservative. You do the same, for some reason.

Again, Mr. Williamson is better than Rich; way better. I am still unsure as to what kind of badge of honor this really is; or if Mr. Williamson is or is not a neoconservative. Isn’t that a condition of employment at National Review? John Derbyshire is NRO’s only paleoconservative (sort of). I’d love to see John thrust into the spotlight, but they keep him in the basement, so to speak.

UPDATE III (Oct. 17): We thank Kevin D. Williamson for responding to the intrigue he has generated on Barely A Blog. He remains a man of mystery, and that is not half bad. In the age of too much information (and letting it all hang loose), mystery is a good thing. We agree that Mr. Williamson ain’t Rich. Has Rich employed a non-neoconservative in the hope of generating some oscillation in the static National Review? Or because the readership has little patience with that old guard? Who knows? We also understand that a man has to make a living. To do so, he must often walk an ideological tightrope.

Nevertheless, those who went before—and remain permanently frozen out of mainstream—deserve mention. It gets terribly cold out here. Mr. Glisson seems to think I’m some kind of intellectual missionary, spreading the good word, pleased to turn the other cheek just so long as the new guard can adopt the gospel, even if they falsely pretend to be pioneers.

Rubbish. Nonsense on stilts. I’m all about justice. Intellectual justice included.

UPDATE IV (3/5/2016):

“NRO Writer’s ‘UnFollow’ Leads To Musing About The Manners-Morals Connection.”