Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings and The Art of the Possible has joined the conversation on neoconservatism and its future. He's skeptical about my claim that "[t]he neocons are in a decidedly weak position" and risk becoming marginalized in the likely event of a McCain defeat in November. And rightly so; what I should have said is that the neoconservatives are now in a weaker position than at any prior point in the history of their movement, which—to be fair—isn't the equivalent of being on the brink of dissolution. Jim ably outlines the reasons their total demise is not likely, which fall into roughly three groupings:

1. The neoconservatives' ample structural and tactical advantages within the Republican party;
   
2. The woeful disarray of the internal opposition—which seems more interested at the moment in tearing itself to pieces through mutual recriminations and excommunications than in building a coalition to regain control of the GOP;
   
3. The fact that every country has and always will have a nationalist party, and that the neoconservatives have made their beliefs the default American nationalism.

Unless Barack Obama really is the messiah, it stands to reason that regardless of what happens in November, theNot This Time neoconservatives will remain solidly in power in the Republican party for the foreseeable future, and will be poised to return to government in the event of either domestic or foreign misfortune.

To see why that assumption might nevertheless be wrong, let's make some careful discriminations.

First of all, retaining control of a defeated GOP is not equivalent to retaining a position next-in-line to control of government. Suppose that Obama and the Democrats win the presidential election convincingly and reduce the Republican congressional delegation to a rump caucus of the deep south and sun belt. In such a scenario, control of the GOP may be worth nothing or less than nothing.

Two-party systems are less stable than a cursory glance at their history suggests; the reason the same two parties have competed for control of the government for the last 150 years is because a series of distinct and incompatible institutions have succeeded each other in using the names "Democrats" and "Republicans." The Liberal Party of Britain, which under Gladstone was the party of the Empire and of the sun never setting, held a strong national majority just before WWI. The Liberals then committed Britain to a war that destroyed its empire, at the conclusion of which they were virtually wiped out and relegated to a small handful of seats in Parliament, persisting tenuously and irrelevantly in a kind of unlife for decades until they were absorbed by a splinter faction of Labour. So there is precedent for major parties, even major imperialist parties, to go belly up through democratic means. This is not to suggest that the Republican party itself is in danger of going out of business, but rather that it could be reduced to an ineffectual minority for the indefinite future (the demographic dynamics, in addition to everything else, look really bad for them), in which time there would potentially be space for some other party to become the Second Party. Moreover, if the Republican defeat makes the GOP sufficiently small, it could put the neocons on roughly even terms with factions antagonistic to them, and inspire allied factions (the anti-tax crowd, the Evangelicals, etc.) to break their tactical alignment with the neocons, since the downside of the social conservatives, Chamber of Commerce Bolsheviks, and the rest not caring enough about foreign policy to intervene in any way in what the neocons do, is that they have no incentive to maintain any cooperation once they no longer profit from doing so.

Second, let's explore what is meant by 'neoconservatism' and who the 'neocons' are. It's a tricky task, trickier than it has any right to be, not least because neoconservatives rarely use the term, and even then use it more frequently to insinuate that their opponents are conspiratorial anti-semites than to say anything informative about it, and also because neoconservatism is consciously constructed by its adherents to resist straightforward definition. So it's much easier to get a handle on what it is by defining it recursively, to borrow a concept from math.

Try this: Begin with the paradigmatic examples of contemporary neoconservatives— you're looking for surnames like "Kristol," "Kagan," and "Podhoretz" here; take the rank and file scriveners of the movement, like some of the writers at National Review, a larger proportion of Weekly Standard contributors, and virtually everyone who writes for Commentary; and finally use induction to fill in the cluster of beliefs that links the movement's archetypes to its ordinary membership. The first thing to notice is that the cluster of core neoconservative beliefs are quite few in number and consist largely in negations of various liberal norms, e.g.:

• war is only justified under atypical and extreme circumstances when all other options are demonstrably non-viable;
  
• diplomacy is the first tool of foreign policy with adversarial states and is a deliberative process with no predetermined outcome;
  
• rules of ethical conduct are universal and exceptions to them only arise in exceptional circumstances, not out of some individual or country's pretensions to an exceptional identity;
  
• resources are scarce (not uniquely liberal but still an important proposition that neoconservatism, as practiced by neoconservatives, effectively denies).

Those few beliefs, however, trade on thick, idiosyncratic concepts like "national will," which are imported from the philosophical canon but warped in transit and don't actually correspond to anything within it.

Minimal reflection on these points should demonstrate the absurdity of Robert Kagan's identification of neoconservatism with the whole of the internationalist tradition, in turn identified as the entire history of non-isolationist thought on foreign affairs. (Compare: Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes were both capitalists.) Because neoconservatism comprises negations of basic liberal norms, it fundamentally is not compatible with liberal internationalism. Yet neither is it immediately identifiable with just any sort of expansionist illiberal nationalism, because the thickness and idiosyncrasies of its concepts make it a poor fit—ultimately, an impossible fit, because it's a cosmopolitan belief system (albeit in a perverse way), and thus eschews various concepts of blood and soil that belong, in American political history, to the paleo tradition.

In other words, neoconservatism is a very small, idiosyncratic movement; and it is entirely a movement of intellectuals. There is no neoconservative constituency within the body of a democratic polity (nor can there be—as the Converse studies show, "mass publics" cannot, in practice, comprehend ideology at anything approaching the level of sophistication a genuine commitment to neoconservatism requires). This is quite unlike ideologies such as communism, libertarianism, populism, welfare liberalism, social conservatism, even single-issue dogmatic opposition to taxes; i.e., ideologies composed first and foremost of publicly accessible beliefs with immediate mass appeal. Indeed, the neoconservative universe is so small that it excludes individuals who at least at one time were prominently identified with the movement, like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Francis Fukuyama. (What happened? The meaning of 'neoconservatism,' recursively defined by the beliefs of the neoconservatives, changed.)

Even within the movement, there is a detectable two-tiered hierarchy, a division between its theorists and its missionaries (which is true of any ideology). Hence someone like Kagan, Lawrence Kaplan, or even Paul Wolfowitz—informed, reflective thinkers, however one evaluates their thinking—is a different sort of neocon from the crew that blogs for Commentary, whose political philosophy, from what I can glean through my RSS feed, consists entirely in using and misusing words they don't know, alongside occasional sops to evolution denialism and global warming denialism, in the service of making their marginal contribution to destabilizing the globe and instigating wars. Which is to say that the true extension of robust neoconservative thought (i.e., excluding conceptually-confused, true-only-if-Gettierized propaganda) is even smaller than simple recursion suggests.

Neoconservatism is not unique for being an exclusively elite movement with limited membership. The same is true of foreign policy realism, a venerable technocratic system of belief, and there are any number of further examples (at least one for every specialized technical doctrine regarding a policy question or family of policy questions). It's hardly insidious in and of itself that neoconservatism, like realism but unlike communism and social conservatism, is strictly an intellectual movement—which is nothing but an instance of some of the Converse findings. Rather, it's just a fact that neoconservatism cannot, under any practically relevant circumstances, be a mass ideology. (What does distinguish it from other non-mass belief systems is the unusual extent to which, thanks to the Straussian influence, its adherents consciously revel in its public inaccessibility.) So the only way for it to be a successful movement on a large scale is by playing certain functional roles in a genuine mass ideology.

That's how neoconservatism provides the content of contemporary American nationalism. Its rejection of liberal norms, its belligerence, and especially its exceptionalism make it a suitable candidate for performing the function of giving nationalism a concrete platform to adhere to. But it's not the only suitable candidate for that role, and not even necessarily the most natural candidate, since it is at root a cosmopolitan ideology (though David Gelernter is working on fixing that). Hence Jim's point that there will always be nationalism wherever there's a nation is well-taken, but doesn't prejudice things in favor of neoconservatism retaining its dominant position. True blood and soil volkism can play the same role without importing anything from neoconservatism, though the result of that wouldn't exactly be an improvement on present circumstances.

On the other hand, various strains of paleoconservatism—which is much closer to being a mass ideology than neo-ism— especially the 'postmodern conservatism' James Poulos has been cultivating, reject elements of liberalism and provide grounds for national (or regional, or local) exceptionalism that are not bloodthirsty in either intent or effect. Likewise, the reformist conservatism of, say, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam among others (Ramesh Ponnuru comes to mind as well), provides a motivation for grand unifying national projects and for fostering a spirit of special national purpose that has nothing to do with war. Which is to say that there are an array of candidate alternatives to neoconservatism for playing the role neoconservatism presently plays in American nationalism; and if any of them were to supersede neoconservatism as the intellectual movement that fills in the content of ineradicable non-liberal mass ideologies, the world would be a better, less violent place. Not necessarily because any of these alternatives is overwhelmingly compelling (none ultimately compelling to me; I'm a non-conservative cheering them along from the sidelines), but because making the world a better place relative to what neoconservatism has done is a fairly low bar to clear.

All of which is, I hope, an informative way of saying that Jim is right about point 1) that neocons are in a much stronger position structurally, tactically, and temperamentally than their GOP opponents and point 2) that the Republican factions opposed to the neocons are horrendously incompetent at the basic tasks of political organizing and too invested in internecine wars of purity, yet simultaneously too compromised by associations that the public, fairly or not, judges to be electoral non-starters, to mount a credible challenge to the neocons at this moment. Jim's point 3), however—that neoconservatism = American nationalism = the Republican party view writ large—comes apart on close scrutiny of what neoconservatism is. If it's just a catch-all for any illiberal, aggressive, exceptionalist theory of international relations, then it is indeed firmly ensconced not only in the Republican party but in America as a whole; but the perpetuation of neoconservatism so understood is therefore compatible with the fall and marginalization of the actual power players and centers of neoconservatism.

Alternatively, if neoconservatism is the ideology describable by recursion on the beliefs (sincere beliefs, that is, not doublethink or Straussian exoteric deceit) of Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, John Bolton, Norman Podhoretz, Joe Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., then all that prejudices our politics in favor of neoconservatism are the movement's comparative strengths, and the comparative weaknesses of internal opposition to it within the GOP. But the neocons' strengths and their Republican opponents' weaknesses are contingent qualities. The balance of power could easily tilt the other way under different circumstances. That fact provides a rationale, the only rationale I can think of at this late date, for continuing to identify as a Republican and participate in the party's internal debates, namely helping some congenial wing of the paleocons or the burgeoning reformists (I suspect that libertarian desertion of the party is too far advanced at this point for the libertarians to play a meaningful role in such disputes anymore) take control of the party's foreign policy apparatus from the neoconservatives. That would be, as my people say, תיקון עולם.

For these same reasons, ultimately, I don't share Jim's pessimism. Nationalism may be ineradicable without the eradication of the state, but that doesn't mean it's static and impossible to influence. In particular, it doesn't always have to be what it is now; in fact, it's palpably less confident, aggressive, and smothering (though perhaps by the same token more desperate) than it was even four years ago. As Ezra Klein perceptively noted a while back, the shift in the musical backdrop for this election compared to the last one is a telling analogue to the clearer air this year.

In their attempt to maintain a grip on power, the neoconservatives will of course, as Jim writes, deploy a Dolchstoßlegende; but the move isn't guaranteed to work, and in this case, the odds may well be against it, because the targets of the backstabbing allegation wouldn't just be sinister unnamed internal aliens, but the vast majority of Americans. Likewise, Jim lists the neocons' energetic commitment to foreign policy, which far outstrips that of any other GOP factions, as one of their key strengths. Not only that, but the narrowness of their agenda—their sublime indifference, at least in outward expression, to the outcome of key disputes in the party over domestic and social policy (they'd just go with the winning side in the end)—allowed them to leverage a dominant position in the party's foreign policy apparatus. What happens, though, if a monomanical dedication to a narrow foreign policy agenda becomes a political weakness?

In other words, what if—what if?—a new administration ends the war; abruptly puts a stop to its predecessor's crude and badly misplaced Hegelian language of world-historical conflicts (and also its predecessor's war crimes); quietly wages the police campaign that should have begun years ago to put al Qaeda out of business, while delivering free trade, investment in energy development, and international markets to Iran in exchange for liberalizing reforms in the society and curtailment of nuclear research; restores comprehensive arms control and establishes a comprehensive non-proliferation framework; and devotes the bulk of its attention to economic, environmental, good government, and energy supply reforms? What if that new administration comes to power by exclaiming—again and again and again and again—the need to "end the mindset that got us into war"?

What if that new administration comes to power on the strength of a resounding victory over the most prominent and vociferous exponent of neoconservatism in American political life? Without the the leader of the free world and his ministers sternly and ominously preaching Apocalypse from the West Wing every day, without the TV issuing color-coded directives about when to become terrified, with the nation's attention finally turned away from fighting World War ℵ₀, who will be there to listen to or care about the lie that Glorious Triumph was ordained to happen 6 months after t (where t=whatever time it is now)? Who will listen or care, apart from anti-warriors on both the right and left who won't have forgotten what the weasels did to our Constitution, to 4000 of our people, and hundreds of thousands of another country's people?

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but the neocons can be defeated and marginalized, either by internal opponents within the GOP taking control, or else, if they can't be dislodged from their perch in the party, then by marginalizing the party itself. (What would a marginalized neoconservative movement look like? That it would be riven by internecine fighting is a near given, but beyond that the example of the realists is instructive. Like the neocons, the realists had no actual constituency; once the neocons superseded them as the party's technocratic elite, the realists were reduced to a small cohort of living fossils, many of whom are happy to align themselves with the neocons for a whiff of power. The moral is that there is no total redemption, and that crowd in particular is as resilient as zombies. Given enough time, they may rehabilitate themselves. But any period in which they are irrelevant and ignored is reason to cheer.)

The circumstances on the ground after a McCain defeat, especially a convincing McCain defeat, will be unlike anything the neoconservative movement has experienced. The trajectory of their prominence and influence has been uniformly upwards from the foundation of their movement, but not until this administration became a war presidency—not even under Ronald Reagan, whose greatest triumphs were knowing when to cut losses in Lebanon, and peacefully winding down the Cold War through a combination of diplomacy and spending, for which, recall, the neocons thanked him with a little Dolchstoßlegende (of course)—did they get to wield true power and put their theory into practice. We all know the rest.

Had they been less adroit in forming coalitions and accumulating power, had the realists been more alert to the threat to their position, had the neocons not been so fluent in adopting the language of humanitarian interventionism to sweet-talk the liberal hawks who ultimately eviscerated the opposition to the war preemptively (though that's another story); had they, in short, been less successful as a party-building movement, they might never have gotten to hold the reins of power. Now, thanks to their own catastrophic success, to borrow a phrase, we can clean up their toxic influence on our democracy. Maybe we won't succeed, but for the first time in a long time, we can succeed, not just at putting the crooks out of business, but at bankrupting the ideology that fueled the crimes. Yes, we can.

Is the traditional conception of politics as contest between the economically statist, socially progressive left, and the market-friendly, socially retrograde right, just pining for the fjords, or is it stone dead?

Consider this: Jesse Larner wrote a thoughtful critical appreciation of Friedrich Hayek in the Winter issue of Dissent, pointing out several historical and theoretical lacunae in Hayek's thought but crediting Hayek's critique of planned economies as decisive. It's notable not only for being a beautifully written piece, but also for where it's coming from: a left-wing writer in a prominent left-wing magazine (albeit one that's always been regarded as "the right wing of the left"). When the premier journal of democratic socialism agrees that the viability of systems of central planning is over, it's over. But on the other hand, Larner perceptively notes what might come as a shock to some of Hayek's most ardent fans, namely that he "recognizes such a thing as the social interest and will even endorse some limited redistributionalism --- he goes so far as to suggest that the state ensure a minimum standard of living." Which suggest the potential for a reconciliation between classical and contemporary liberalism.

Coming at the same question from the opposite direction, Cato's Will WilkinsonThe Elections Of 1896 And 1996: Notice the switch? observes by reference to Friedman and (James, not Pat) Buchanan as well as Hayek that liberal-libertarian "fusionism" is really "just seeing our way back to a pre-existing economically literate political liberalism." Socialism and communism are dead, and with them the tactical rational for libertarians and classical liberals to make common cause with the right. "The question these days," Wilkinson argues, "is whether the U.S. will have the good sense to adopt more rational market-based old-age pension policies, like Sweden or Australia, or lower corporate tax rates to a level more in line with the rest of the wealthy world...Slightly higher personal tax rates and slightly more redistribution is a possibility, but a slide into socialism just isn’t on the table."

So that's what a pair of out of touch eggheads think; what about real people? There are two texts to consult here: Christopher Caldwell's classic 1998 Atlantic Monthly piece, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," surveyed a vast range of socioeconomic data and tracked the correlation between the shift to a post-industrial economy marked by massive suburbanization to the revival of the national Democratic party in the 1990s. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis' ill-timed but increasingly prescient The Emerging Democratic Majority filled in the political side of that story. Whereas the Roosevelt coalition was smashed when Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan pried away its southern and sun-belt wings, the Reagan majority is moribund due in part to the migration of Yankee Republicans to the Democrats, but at least as much in virtue of the Democrats adding scores of new voters to the electorate, thanks to the expansion of the McGovern coalition and an even larger expansion of the Latino population.

That's where the Larner and Wilkinson pieces come back into the picture. Each of them approaching the prospect from opposite starting points argues that achieving a liberal-libertarian equilibrium is not only possible but desirable. The data Caldwell, Texeira, and Judis marshal suggests that if the fulcrum of the coming realignment is a shift in the country's substructure, the lever can be a shift from persistent Roosevelt-era concepts of left vs. right and liberal vs. conservative, towards a new ideological division to match the new political economy: liberalism (broadly construed) vs. populism.

Look at two of the most emotionally salient issues in our politics, trade and immigration --- which in addition to being emotionally salient, are two sides of the same coin --- to see how it might work. Currently both parties contain populist wings furious in their opposition to trade (Democratic populists) and immigration (Republican populists); yet the emerging, if silent majority (to borrow a phrase) is friendly to both. Moreover, the core of support for populism in the south and Appalachia neatly overlaps the power center of the GOP. Whereas the Democrats have solidified their bases, nearly completely conquered traditional Republican strongholds like New England and California, and made strong inroads into "new" southern states like Virginia and North Carolina through the expansion of the wine-track liberal vote congenial to markets and primarily concerned with environmental and foreign policy and by winning over the proverbial "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" suburban moderates who used to tilt Republican. Their next battlegrounds are the southwest and Rocky Mountain states, which they can flip through the same phenomena plus the huge expansion of a Latino electorate invested in liberal immigration policy.

In other words, the Rawls-Hayek fusion Wilkinson speaks of doesn't just make philosophical sense. It's also a promising strategy for the Democrats to build a national majority they haven't enjoyed in more than half a century. Conversely, by rejecting liberalism in favor of full-throated populism, the GOP is on the verge of fulfilling Caldwell's predictions, and reducing itself as a rump Anglo party trapped in the deep south and Appalachia.

Over at TNR, Jamie Kirchick (who also contributes to Jewcy) has a brutal piece on U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the libertarian antiwar candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination. Paul has raised a stunning amount of money from Americans with very different politics -- liberals and conservatives alike -- but Kirchick believes that Paul has hidden his true beliefs from the public, and presents evidence that Paul has a long history of bigotry and conspiracy-mongering. The Paul campaign claims that the congressman did not write the newsletters that Kirchick quotes.

(In all fairness, "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" would make good names for New York City.)

 Related: Ron Paul's Jewish Problem

Dinesh D'Souza has a blog hosted by AOL. Who knew? Lots of people apparently, since he gets not five or six, or one or two dozen, but hundreds of comments on every post. (If Nick Gillespie hadn't pointed it out, I at least wouldn't have known.)

I find D'Souza an infuriating figure, because he is, on the one hand, an extremely formidable debater with a far more comprehensive understanding of the philosophical tradition than most pundits, and on the other hand, enthusiastically prepared to trade in ugly and half-baked arguments in order to advance an agenda. For an example of the former, check out the debate with Christopher Hitchens on D'Souza's website; I'd say D'Souza gets the better of the affair though I basically agree with Hitchens on all the issues. For an example of the latter, see here. Or check out D'Souza's latest blog post, in which he cuts through the arguments of libertarians and gets at their core motivations:

Many libertarians are basically conservatives who are either gay or druggies or people who generally find the conservative moral agenda too restrictive. So they flee from the conservative to the libertarian camp where much wider parameters of personal behavior are embraced. To the sensible idea of political and economic freedom many libertarians add the more controversial principle of moral freedom, the freedom to live however you want as long as you don't harm others.

This from somebody who insists that non-believers need to make an effort to get inside the Christian worldview and understand it in its own term, before they criticize it. What makes D'Souza's caricature particularly galling is its sheer laziness; he could have been disabused of his misperceptions by talking to actual libertarians, the vast majority of whom, shockingly, are neither gay nor junkies. As for finding "the conservative moral agenda too restrictive," there are two ways to interpret this. (1) Libertarians think the conservative moral agenda is wrong. And that's true; libertarians do think this, and have arguments for their position. (2) Libertarians live in ways that violate conservative moral precepts. Perhaps, but not more so than any other group, like, for example, conservatives.

D'Souza is at his absolute most infuriating, however when his philosophical training augments rather than restrains his tendency toward cheap point-scoring.

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Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet.

Not here. Take the stultifying provincialism of left politics, amplify it with the Circle Jerk culture of the blogosphere, and you have something of a Jewcy nightmare: a hothouse of unchallenged ideology and lazy self-congratulation that looks like everything Jewcy was born to combat. Neither the Jewish community nor the left need help making themselves sclerotic, conformist, or irrelevant. The promise of the internet, for us, is its capacity to smash those tendencies, rather than reinforce them.

This isn't just about this specific issue: about Brendan O'Neill, the RCP, Living Marxist, or the Oxford Union debate. It's about what breadth of views can be accommodated in Jewcy, and who gets to contribute. We agree that there are borders to the pale, and some people are beyond those borders. But we're also aware of all the barriers that stand in the way of productive communication between people with well-entrenched and opposing positions: a reluctance or flat-out unwillingness to process evidence contradictory to one’s own point of view, an application of nearly impossible standards of evidence for opposing points but a knee-jerk acceptance of supporting points, a presumption of one's own intellectual bravery and integrity and an assumption that the opposition is weak or foolish or venal or lazy, et cetera. These, too, are things we want to overcome, rather than reinforce.

So defining Jewcy's boundaries will be an ongoing process. We'll discuss them. But we won't define them by pronouncing takfir on anyone who joined an organization with which Jewcy itself would not wish to partner.

Meanwhile, Kvetcher, nee David Kelsey, has taken Jewcy to task for our handling of the Oxford Union kerfuffle.

Jewcy chose a symbol of November 9th Society to represent the debate, even though the November 9th Society is a hardline neo-Nazi party that is quite critical of the British National Party for being mere "conservatives on steroids." That Jewcy chose their logo (replete with swastika, of course) to represent Nick Griffin is as risible as it is shrill.

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Patrick Ruffini has a post at Hugh Hewitt's site about the import of Ron Paul's candidacy for the Republican party, but more broadly about the terms of the marriage between libertarians and conservatives, and how it can be reconciled. (Link via Andrew Sullivan.)

Now, one point the Paul phenomenon proves is that Republicans excise libertarians from their coalition at their own electoral peril --- even losing 5% of their support would tip the balance in an essentially 50/50 electorate --- so it's clear enough why a Republican partisan should want to figure out some way to accomodate libertarian sentiment in their party. What Ruffini fails to provide, however, is any scintilla of a reason for libertarians to welcome reconciliation with conservatives; I say that the marriage is an abusive one and that libertarians should run to the nearest battered wives' shelter as fast as their legs can carry them.

(Incidentally, while ideological labels have a steadily diminishing utility, Ruffini, I think is confused about what libertarianism is. It is not a general instinct to be against welfare programs for the needy, but a thought-through set of principles regarding the relationship between individuals and collective institutions, which really is incompatible, as Andrew notes, with favoring unchecked government authority to spy on citizens.)

To understand why libertarians shouldn't be party to a coalition with conservatives, it's helpful to get a hold of the intellectual history of libertarian-conservative cooperation, which is of relatively recent vintage. The motivation for this cooperation falls under the general umbrella of fusionism, an ideology-cum-political strategy invented by Frank S. Meyer, an editor at National Review, during the early years of the Cold War. The idea was that the threat posed by Soviet expansionism was sufficiently great to warrant a union of the various strands of anti-communist politics, of which libertarianism and traditional conservatism were the most prominent --- a kind of right-wing popular front. To paper over obvious points of conflict within the coalition, Meyer and others presented an ideology in which social conservatism was upheld as a model for society to follow without resort to (federal) government coercion, combined with standard economic conservatism.

More below the fold.

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Here's the thing: as a radical libertarian, I somewhat favored Paul as a candidate, though since I'm a libertarian socialist, he is not my ideal choice. But to me, his willingness to accept money from neo-Nazis elicits echoes of Europe’s re-embracement of right-wing extremism, the attendant resurrection of ethnic nationalism, and the growing success of far-right parties, many of which have taken over large swaths of European parliaments. This should be a cause of great concern to those of us in the antifascist community.

They say such things could never happen in America, but guess what: Here it is.

Now, I want him out of the running, and frankly, out of the Capitol. Those who pander to white nationalists and neo-Nazis have no place serving in the United States government, which exists to serve the most ethnically and culturally diverse nation on Earth, which counts among its citizens Jews and Zionists alike.

Maybe it's because I'm steeped in Russian revolutionaries lately, but every time I see the name Michael Badnarik I think of Michael Bakunin:

efore Paul became an antiwar hero, his support consisted largely of libertarian activists--people like Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's 2004 presidential nominee. Badnarik refuses to get a driver's license (even though, he conceded to me, "I have my car operational") and warns against anyone who might try to force a smallpox or anthrax vaccination on him. ("You bring the syringe, I'll bring my .45, and we'll see who makes a bigger hole.") Badnarik recounts rallying support for Paul at a recent conference of the Free State Project, a group of libertarians who have relocated to New Hampshire in the hope of concentrating their power and more or less taking over the state government. "I asked how many people would drive without a license and not pay income taxes, and three-quarters raised their hands," Badnarik recalls. "I'm choking up. I've got my heart in my throat. And I said, 'We need to do something--and Ron Paul's campaign is the shining star. We need to contribute the full two thousand dollars now. Tell all your friends.'"

Here's the guy behind the Too-Hot-for-the-White-House phenomenon of Sen. Ron Paul. If you were watching the last Republican debate, you might have got the mistaken impression that Rudy Giuliani, a sort of pop-gun playing at pezzanovante, scored his best shot in response to Paul's claim that 9/11 happened because the U.S. bombed Iraq: "That's an extraordinary statement. And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that." Like taking candy from a baby, unless of course you're a brooding laissez-faire ultra who puts as much stock in wars of choice as you do in the U.S. Postal Service.

According to Michael Crowley at TNR (author of the above excerpt), Ron Paul, coming off that exchange, discovered his base among the new millennium's Buchananite right. Pat himself will tell you that Paul speaks "intolerable truths" about the root causes of Islamic terrorism, at least as it elects for its target American citizens at home and abroad. Closer to the quite tolerable truth would be to say that Paul speaks frustrated sophistries about those root causes: If only we'd leave the Middle East alone, runs the argument, the Middle East would leave us alone, too. (My Russian revolutionary kick again: Trotsky once remarked, "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.)

Castles in the sky have a way of crashing down on your head if you're not careful, and history is simply not on the side of isolationists, who make it a point of pride -- or haven't you noticed? -- of actually wanting to be ignorant of what goes on in the rest of the world.

The United States has been ranged against the forces of Islamic reaction since there has been a United States. You can read Michael Oren's brilliant history of this centuries-old confrontation, Faith, Power, and Fantasy, or any biography of Thomas Jefferson that does not scant on his executive assembly of an American navy to force the Barbary pirates of North Africa to stop kidnapping seafaring American civilians and holding them, at ransom, in state of slavery. John Adams reports being shocked at the answer he received from the Tripoli ambassador to London when he asked him how he justified these unprovoked and criminal acts of human theft and extortion:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Another tolerable truth, closer to our own time: The Salafist journal to which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi contributed in his semi-literate way before becoming the main jihadist menace in Iraq was called The Impenetrable Edifice (speaking of well-built airborne castles). Its premier issue ran a lead editorial that called not for the removal of U.S. air force bases in Saudi Arabia; nor an end to the sanctions on the Saddam Hussein regime; nor Palestinian statehood; nor a Muslim-favored resolution to the conflict over Kashmir. It called for the liberation of the West from its own godless depravity. How does a so-called "protectionist" aim to protect against that, as president?

It's no surprise that Paul has touched an expose nerve of the body politic at a time when the U.S. is mired in a flagging war in Mesopotamia, and when the imminence of another terrorist attack on our own soil leaves us only surprised that one hasn't happened yet.

It's good that Paul is around, particularly as a spokesman for the antiwar right, to worry that nerve to the discomfort of his more electable competitors for high office. But let's not pretend his foreign policy rhetoric reflects anything different than his no-government ideology: faith in the impossible.