Trump Trolls, the Alt-Right, Neo-Reactionaries, and Anti-Semitism

New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman tweeted out Robert Kagan's recent essay the other day, and it's like a volcano erupted with the most vile anti-Semitism you've ever seen. I mean, seriously. It was nasty.

So, actually, this nasty stuff is now a thing, the putrid effluence of the far-right fever swamp of neo-reaction and identitarianism. It remains to be seen how generally widespread is the phenomenon. Some folks speculated that a few trolls were running the whole show, opening new accounts as fast as others were suspended, and using lists of prominent conservative Jews on the "Never Trump" bandwagon. I have no idea. Whatever the case, it's nasty and besmirches all the good things Donald Trump's bringing to the political system.

"This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots & salutes but with a television huckster." Robert Kagan https://t.co/9C8rBqyLbR

— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) May 19, 2016

When is Trump going to condemn his backers' anti-Semitic attacks on journalists Jonathan Weisman,Julia Ioffe & more https://t.co/ER6CNQSIQC

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) May 21, 2016

In any case, there's more from Claire Berlinski, at Ricochet, "American Anti-Semitism Breaks My Heart."

And from Jamie Kirchick, at Commentary, "Trump’s Terrifying Online Brigades":

When the journalist Julia Ioffe published a profile of Melania Trump for GQ, she had reason to expect that supporters of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee would be disappointed by its portrayal of Donald Trump’s third wife. “Her journey to marrying The Donald is like a fairy tale, or a too-crazy-to-believe rom-com,” Ioffe revealed. “It’s a story full of naked ambition, stunning beauty, a shockingly Trump-like dad, and even some family secrets.” What Ioffe, who is Jewish, did not expect was a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse and death threats.

On Twitter, the candidate’s anonymous backers superimposed images of Ioffe’s face over those of concentration camp inmates. On her voicemail, they left recordings of Hitler speeches. “This is not a heavily critical article. There is nothing in it that is untrue,” Ioffe told the Guardian. “If this is how Trump supporters swing into action, what happens when the press looks into corrupt dealings, for example, or is critical of his policies?”

It’s a good question. For any journalist or political figure who has been remotely critical of Donald Trump over the past year, Ioffe’s treatment came as no surprise. It was hardly news that his backers would traffic in this sort of filth—all the more so if the critic is Jewish, a woman, gay, or not white. Of course, crudity has always existed in American political life, on a bipartisan basis. But there is something new in the pervasive and relentless nastiness of Trump’s supporters, especially as they represent themselves online. While it’s certainly true that most of Trump’s supporters are neither racists nor anti-Semites, it appears to be the case that all of the racists and anti-Semites in this country (and many beyond) support Trump.

To take but one of countless examples, one of the most active pro-Trump Twitter accounts, with 27,000 followers, goes by the handle @Ricky_Vaughn99. Unlike many of his Internet brothers-in-arms, who utilize the likenesses of obscure interwar European fascists and nationalists as their avatars, this troll features the visage of actor Charlie Sheen from the film Major League. What he lacks in visible nostalgia for the Third Reich, @Ricky_Vaughn99 makes up for in his concern about “#whitegenocide,” interpreted as any sign of nonwhite racial advancement. “The Trump presidency will probably be bad for neocon jews, bad for liberal jews, but good for jews who are believers in the nation-state and American nationalism,” he told Armin Rosen, of Tablet magazine, via Twitter. Contrary to most Americans, @Ricky_Vaughn99 thrills at Trump’s every insult, derogatory comment, and affront. On his Twitter profile, he describes himself as a “free speech activist,” an identifier defiantly adopted as a mark of resistance against an alleged campaign by “SJWs” (social-justice warriors) to circumscribe the freedom of white men.

“Free speech activist” is a curiously prevalent appellation on the medium of Twitter for members of the “alt-right,” short for “alternative right,” a populist movement that has been emboldened and bolstered by the fortunes of the Trump campaign. Existing largely on the Internet, which makes the size of its following difficult to gauge, the alt-right is proudly ethno-nationalist, protectionist, isolationist, and culturally traditionalist. It takes intellectual guidance from publications and websites like American Renaissance, Radix Journal, Occidental Observer, Taki’s Magazine, and, increasingly, the popular news website Breitbart.com.

It was at Breitbart that, in March, an extensive article appeared defending the alt-right. While “establishment” conservative institutions and intellectuals have criticized the alt-right as little more than a bunch of gussied-up white supremacists, authors Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari explained that these arbiters of good conservative taste have the alt-right all wrong. Praising the “youthful energy” and “taboo-defying rhetoric” of alt-right writers and activists, the two Breitbart columnists led readers through a sort of ideological safari, applying their own taxonomy to the various types of personalities who comprise this “dangerously bright” movement.

Their “Guide to the Alt Right” is a prolix defense of juvenile racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and other assorted bigotries as much-needed “provocation” to the enervated conservative movement. One might quickly object that when so much of the alt-right’s rhetoric consists of terms like “peak negro,” “Niggertech,” and “ovenworthy” (the latter meaning “anything that would be substantially improved by immediate incineration”), it becomes difficult to know where the “taboo-defying rhetoric” and intellectual “provocation” end and where the monstrousness begins.

Lest anyone take offense at these and other memes popularized by the dregs of the Internet (such as the cartoon of a hook-nosed Jewish caricature named “Shlomo Shekelburg” who cries, “Remember the 6 trillion, goyim!”) Yiannopoulos and Bokhari reassure their readers that the alt-right is harmless, the cheek of its younger cohort no different than that of the “60’s kids” who “shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll.” Besides, the movement’s “true motivations,” they tell us, are “not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz.” (“Lulz” is the Internet term to define the mocking laughter that arises from purposefully shocking someone else’s sense of decorum.)

Yiannopolous and Bokhari insist that the alt-right “is best defined by what it stands against rather than what it stands for.” This makes it the perfect intellectual base of the Trump campaign. Building walls, banning Muslims, “bombing the shit” out of people—there is nothing aspirational or positive about Trump, other than his vague and windy promise to “Make America Great Again.” In this important sense, Trump is truly an anomalous phenomenon, as he has replaced the perennially optimistic message of the American presidential campaign with something more suitable to Venezuela. Though we all have reason to be annoyed by the cultural resurgence of political correctness, the alt-right remedy is the oratorical inverse of the problem they claim they despise. Social-justice warriors needlessly shut down debate and proscribe certain words and ideas to assuage the feelings of allegedly vulnerable minority groups; the alt-right needlessly flings around racial epithets and Der Stürmer cartoons purely to transgress accepted social codes. And that’s only the most charitable explanation for their behavior, assuming as it does that they don’t “really” mean what they say.

But what about that element of the alt-right that actually does have a political agenda beyond annoying its adversaries? The primary alt-right constituency, according to Yiannopolous and Bokhari, consists of “natural conservatives,” largely white, male, middle-class Americans “who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritizes the interests of their own demographic.” These voters are “conservative” not so much in the American sense as in the European one; they show no interest whatsoever in the GOP’s traditional free-market economic agenda of trade, low taxes, and flexible labor regulations, preferring instead a strongman leader promising trade protectionism, entitlement expansion, and the assertion of white male privilege.

Illiberalism is sweeping the globe. Coming from left or right—and, as evidenced in this country by Trump and socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, often converging in that place where extremes meet—political leaders and movements across the democratic world are advocating economic and ethnic nationalism, the closing of borders, the imposition of trade barriers, the dissolution of multilateral alliances, and accommodation with dictatorships. Our politics are becoming darker, our peoples more susceptible to the promises of demagogues, and the rise of an explicitly anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian right seems more possible in America than ever before...

More.

Note, though, that leftist anti-Semitism is far-and-away more widespread and heavily institutionalized than anything we've seen so far with the Trump trolls. The British Labour Party is currently mainstreaming anti-Semitic hatred on a scale that's shocked the United Kingdom. There's nothing remotely like this in terms of core establishment Jew-hated among folks on the so-called alt-right. Still, it's a terrible development and I expect that Trump himself is going to repudiate it forcefully as his campaign gears up for the GOP convention, especially considering major Jewish figures --- like Sheldon Adelson --- are primed to be significant sources of campaign finance for the Republican ticket, and Adelson's camp is said to be working in the background on Trump's upcoming visit to Israel. So, expect a major smackdown against the Trump trolls at the top levels of the campaign. Let the Democrats and British leftists stew in the bilge of anti-Zionist hatred. Conservatives must repudiate it root and branch.

Obama's Long March

From Ron Radosh, at PJ Media, "It’s the Culture, Stupid: Facing the Long Road Ahead":

If we can turn away from the elections for a moment, and the future of the Republican Party, a more fundamental problem exists. It is nothing less than the nature of the American culture. By the term “culture,” I am not referring to the social issues that usually come up when one talks about culture wars; i.e., abortion, gay rights, religion, etc. Rather, I am talking about the perception and outlook that stand beneath the way our American public define the very nature of civic life in our democratic capitalist society.

That is why I regularly borrow from the Left, as some astute observers of my previous column noted in some comments, the works of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and particularly his theory of cultural hegemony. As I wrote in my concluding paragraph, we have to “wage a war of position on the cultural front and to do all possible to challenge the ascension of a failed intellectual liberal ideology, whether it is in the form of Progressivism, liberalism or socialism.” I’m referring to the kind of work Fred Siegel carries out in a new book he has just finished writing, and which I had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form, on the nature of American liberalism. When it is eventually published, I believe it can have the kind of impact that great works of history like Richard Hofstadter’s books had in the 1940s and ’50s.

Siegel shows that from its very inception, liberalism was a flawed ideology whose adherents substituted its would-be virtues as a way of distancing themselves from most Americans and their workaday lives; an ideology based on a view whose believers saw themselves as superior to most Americans, including those who were merchants, workers, or regular folk, who could not be counted on to comprehend the backwardness of their beliefs.

Continuing on through the post-war decades, Siegel deals with liberalism’s failure to accurately confront the issue of race; its love affair with the New Left and its moral collapse in the face of its anarchism and nihilism; the effects of McGovernism on the political collapse of the Democratic Party, and the resulting politics of “rights-based interest groups” and the new power of public sector unionism, a far different breed than that of the old labor movement of Walter Reuther and George Meany. If we want a different kind of social polity than the one we have now — based on catering to the power of competing interest groups that compose the core strength of the Democratic party — we have to address first the essential question of the kind of social order that liberalism has built.

I’m also referring to the work the intellectuals who edit National Affairs and those who edit The Claremont Review of Books — solid theoretical and analytical work on social policy, education, and law, all of which challenges the intellectual foundations of contemporary liberalism.

If you doubt that this intellectual work is necessary, you might ponder the question of why college-educated Americans are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats or among those even much further to the political Left. An answer appears in this article by Richard Vedder, which appears today in Minding the Campus. Vedder shows that the majority of professors who teach our young people in the humanities are primarily on the Left, as he writes, “62.7 percent of faculty said that they were either ‘far left’ or ‘liberal,’ while only 11.9 percent said they were ‘far right’or ‘conservative.’ The notion that universities are hot beds for left-wing politics has a solid basis in fact. Moreover, the left-right imbalance is growing — a lot. The proportion of those on the left is rising, on the right declining.” The latest research reveals that there are 5.7 professors on the left for each one on the right!

The irony is that this occurs only in the academy, since studies also show that more and more Americans define themselves as basically conservative rather than liberal. So it should come as no surprise that the suburban middle-class and university-educated Americans, having learned their liberalism and leftism at college, vote the way that they do. One study shows that 41 percent of Americans call themselves conservative while only 21 percent call themselves liberal. Thus, as Vedder says, the university faculties are truly “out of sync” with the country at large....

Another realm of mis-education is that of the popular media. This week, I have written about this in an article published in The Weekly Standard, which fortunately the editors have not put behind their firewall. It is titled “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s recycled leftist history of the United States.” Stone’s TV weekly series premiers Nov.12th on the CBS-owned network Showtime, and will eventually be used by leftist professors in their own history courses on our campuses. It is, I show, nothing less than a rehash of old Communist propaganda from the 1950s offered up as both something new and as the true hidden history of our country’s past.

Imagine how many television viewers, many of whom know virtually nothing about how we got to where we are, will learn from this expertly edited documentary how and why the United States is basically an evil nation, on the wrong course, and supported the wrong side in all foreign policy crises throughout its modern history. We cannot disregard the effect this kind of miseducation has on the knowledge of our fellow citizens. Do you wonder why the polls show that most Americans think Barack Obama’s foreign policy the past four years was successful? It is because they are a generation educated from “historians” like the late Howard Zinn, political theorists like the linguist Noam Chomsky, and now from filmmaker Stone and his historian co-author, Peter Kuznick.

Finally, I have a recommendation. For your left-leaning friends and associates, I highly recommend a new e-book written by my friend, the eminent historian Martin J. Sklar. It is called Letters on Obama (from the Left):The Global Revolution and the Obama Counter-Revolution. Sklar is sui generis. He calls himself a Marxist historian and a socialist. Yet the positions he takes — which he argues are those in defense of liberty — are positions regularly associated with conservatives and Republicans. You might consider this naiveté or an oxymoron. But any serious reader should take into consideration the insights he presents and the intellectual case that he musters...

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube, "October Revolution: This Time We Can Make It Work!"

Republicans on the Fringe in Academe

Robert Maranto, an associate professor of political science at Villanova University, has an interesting article on Republicans in the academy at today's Washington Post. Here's the introduction:

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities' role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "God and Man at Yale" -- in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others -- making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I've taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused "a sensation" at his university. "It was as if I had become a child molester," he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because "you don't want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts."

Maranto believes that mention of his Republican leanings during a recruiting dinner with a hiring committee knocked him out of contention for the job. He also provides a nice set of statistics on the paucity of Republicans at research institutions, and he shows how ideological narrow-mindedness is stultifying:

All this is bad for society because academics' ideological blinders make it more difficult to solve domestic problems and to understand foreign challenges. Moreover, a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas, a point made by academic critics across the ideological spectrum from Russell Jacoby on the left to Josiah Bunting III on the right.

It's odd that my university was one of only a handful in Pennsylvania to have held a debate on the Iraq War in 2003. That happened because left-leaning Villanova professors realized that to be fair they needed to expose students to views different from their own, so they invited three relatively conservative faculty members to take part in a discussion of the decision to invade. Though I was then a junior faculty member arguing the unpopular (pro-war) side, I knew that my senior colleagues would not hold it against me.

Yet a conservative friend at another university had an equal and opposite experience. When he told his department chair that he and a liberal colleague planned to publicly debate the decision to invade Iraq, his chair talked him out of it, saying that it could complicate his tenure decision two years down the road. On the one hand, the department chair was doing his job, protecting a junior faculty member from unfair treatment; on the other hand, he shouldn't have had to.

Unfortunately, critics are too often tone deaf about the solutions to academia's problems. Conservative activist David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, a group he supports, advocate an Academic Bill of Rights guaranteeing equality for ideological minorities (typically conservatives) and ensuring that faculty are hired and promoted and students graded solely on the basis of their competence and knowledge, not their ideology or religion. That sounds great in theory, but it could have the unintended consequence of encouraging any student who gets a C to plead ideological bias.

Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life.

Maranto's discussion rings very true in my own circumstances. I became a 9/11 Republican after my own participation on an Iraq panel on March 19, 2003. Since then, I've had open ideological battles with a number of my faculty colleagues. One radical feminist philosopher on my floor turns up her nose and looks askance when passing me in the hallway. This is a woman who I had previously lunched with on faculty professional development days.

I strive for collegiality, but I've staunchly defended the war on campus. We have an International ANSWER cell within my social science division. Labeled the "Campus Progressives," the group sponsors talks by far-left speakers, hosts film screenings of all the hard-left cinematic fare ("An Inconvenient Truth," "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Why We Fight"), and recruits students for revolutionary activism.

Occasionally I find misplaced sociology syllabi in the classrooms on campus, and works like The Power Elite - or others arguing the institutional racism line - form the core readings. They're not balanced by more conservative voices.

I participated in a recent campus forum on the Iraq war. I debated two Marxist professors who argued that President Bush was a "pathological liar" and that the Iraq war was a disastrous failure. I provided point-by-point rebuttals to their every claim, especially noting the dramatic successes of U.S. forces under the new war strategy of General David Petraeus.

Some members in the audience were smiling and shaking their heads in agreement as I confidently deflected the leftist hokum (some of the students had jaws agape when they heard my alternative version of events).

The coverage in my school's campus newspaper wasn't so positive, however, quoting only those lines from the antiwar speakers and dismissing my remarks as uninformed (the paper's a hard-left mouthpiece, and the student reporters have little professional guidance on accuracy, fairnesss, and impartiality). I wrote a post on the experience, here.

I've been encouraged this semester to have the pleasure to teach a number of conservative students. It's heartening to know that some students on campus have more common sense and traditional values than the a few of the professors who are leading them in their classrooms.

I should note, as well, that some of my political science colleagues are conservative, and they serve as faculty leaders in student mentoring programs on campus, myself included.

Keep hope alive!

***********

UPDATE: Well, surprise, surprise, surprise! This entry has hit a nerve with some lefty academics! See Lawyers, Guns and Money: "So Many Anecdotes!"

Regarding my division's philosophy professor who no longer speaks to me, post-Iraq 2003, here's this:

Hard as it may be to believe, there are times when adults - even those who share lunch once in a while - stop hanging out together. And yes, sometimes those personal ruptures occur because one person has exposed himself or herself as an idiot by supporting an ill-conceived war. But unless this "radical feminist" happens to sit on the writer's tenure/review committee; serve as his dean or department chair; or functions in any other way that actually imperils his professional status or future, there's no foul.

I would argue the "idiots" are those who have no clue of the war's justification in international law: Saddam violated the Gulf War truce 1991 and all of its disarmament protocols, including UN resolutions 687 and 689, and the 15 subsequent UN resolutions to enforce them. The last of these, Security Council Resolution 1441, gave Saddam one last chance to disarm, which he botched. The U.S. toppled his regime three months later.

The foul? Backing the Bush/Cheney cabal in Washington!

I've earned the opprobrium of a couple of my campus's most vocifierous Bush-bashers. This feud is common knowlege on my floor and has been the subject administrative review (which I mention as some of the commenters, in their nutty, bashing little innuendo-fest of a thread, are conjuring fantasies of impropriety).

No matter: It looks like "d" at LGM is good at throwing out a few ad hominems in the place of logic. That's an example of the academic style that shortchanges students and narrows the marketplace of ideas on campus - exactly the problem Maranto discussed in his original article (and ignored by the lefty big boys a Lawyers, Guns, and Money).

(P.S. Some of those in the audience "smiling and shaking their heads in agreement " spoke with me after the panel, offering me their congratulations for administering a decisive smackdown. I thanked them, indicating it wasn't difficult.)

**********

UPDATE II: Michael Van Der Galien provides his perspective on the Conservatives in Education debate. Michael deploys his cool-headed reasoning, as usual.

BTW, the link's to Michael's new blog, The PoliGazette. Head on over there and wish Michael good luck!

Neoconservative Moral Nationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy

Political scientist Brian Rathbun offers one of the best recent discussions of neoconservatism in international relations theory.

His article, "Does One Right Make a Realist? Conservatism, Neoconservatism, and Isolationism in the Foreign Policy Ideology of American Elites," dissects the varied orientations in right-wing foreign policy, and argues that neoconservatives are essentially "nationalist surpremacists" in their ideological stress on both power and morals in global affairs.

Specifically, the significance of Rathbun's research is to differentiate the foreign policy persuasions of those on the right regarding the understanding and implications of "realism," which is the paradigm in international politics holding actor agency as egoistic self-interest defined as power (with little stress on humanitarianism as a goal of U.S. global purpose).

The argument is concise and refreshing in its review of theories of international power poltics. Especially good is the clarification of how neoconservatism stands apart from conservative realism or isolationism as a powerful paradigm of good and moral right for America in the world:

Conservatives are realist in the sense that they define the national interest narrowly and materially, treat international politics as amoral, consider force a necessary but not universally appropriate instrument, recognize that a preponderance of power creates as many problems as it solves, and guard sovereignty so as to facilitate rapid adjustment to international realities while recognizing the possible instrumental use of international organizations. Neoconservatives, in contrast, define more grandiose national interests, justified by a belief in American moral authority, often think of force as the primary instrument for realizing international outcomes, advocate the achievement and maintenance of American preponderance, and oppose the involvement of multilateral institutions on principled grounds as illegitimate bodies inherently threatening to American sovereignty. Nor are the neoconservatives idealistic. Their stress on American values emerges from a deep sense of national pride that in its more exuberant form translates into a feeling of moral superiority in international affairs. Neoconservatives refuse to separate the pursuit of American self-interest and those of the greater international good, arguing that serving America’s cause is the world’s cause. They are not idealists or realists, but nationalists. This conceptualization, while it distinguishes between the different rights, also offers an understanding of what unites them. Realism and nationalism both serve as poles on different identity dimensions that separate ‘‘us’’ from ‘‘them,’’ albeit in different ways. In all cases, the right is more egoistic. There are simply multiple ways of being so. The realist dimension concerns how narrowly foreign policy is defined. Realists are not humanitarians. They envision foreign policy as obliging no more than the pursuit of policies benefiting the self. Positions on this dimension capture the degree of distinction made between self and other. The second dimension also involves notions of self and other, but in terms of their rank, rather than their distinctiveness. The right in this dimension, the nationalist or neoconservative variety, pursues a preeminent position vis-a-vis the rest of the world. With this emphasis on position in an international hierarchy comes a tendency to define self-interest more expansively and ambitiously. And a feeling of being entitled to one’s rank serves as a moral justification for egoism. The final dimension concerns the separation of self from other, with the isolationist right seeking to detach itself from the rest of the world.

Here's the heart of Rathbun's argument of neoconservatism's vital ideational power, which he contrasts to the cold "instrumental empathy" of traditional realism:

Neoconservatives find their inspiration in a belief in the greatness of the American nation, which justifies its preeminent rank in the global hierarchy, defined in terms of both military and moral power. Neoconservatism is not a nostalgic patriotism. Irving Kristol, the intellectual father of modern neoconservatism, writes that ‘‘neoconservatism is not merely patriotic—that goes without saying—but also nationalist. Patriotism springs from a love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness.’’ Nationalism provides the greater purpose needed to mobilize societal virtue and prevent the slide into decadence. Kristol and Kagan argue that such a sense of commitment is necessary even to preserve basic vital interests. This is why the movement so embraced Ronald Reagan. The President vanquished the Vietnam syndrome that had sapped America’s self-confidence and crippled the administration of Jimmy Carter in its dealings with Iran and the Soviet Union. In doing so, Reagan drew a strict moral line that neoconservatives respect between virtuous American democracy and an evil totalitarian empire....

Neoconservatism is not a nationalism of the soil as is the case with American isolationism or other nationalisms across the globe. Rather, it is based on the superiority of American ideals and values, a universal nationalism. As a result, even more than others, American nationalism has a strong moral component that distinguishes it sharply from the amorality of realism. Realism is simply pragmatic, while neoconservatism puts great stress on the importance of American ideas and the strength it derives from them. Neoconservatives take what might be considered a constructivist approach to world politics that is sharply distinguished from the realists’ austere materialism. Hence, they are highly engaged in the media battle over the course of American foreign policy.45 The belief in the superiority and universality of American national values leads them to a vigorous promotion, at least rhetorically, of American institutions and ideals, most notably democracy. However, they do so in a unilateral way, in keeping with their nationalism....

The consequence of this moral self-confidence is a tendency to perceive the world as a struggle for power between good and evil. This was the sustaining force of the neoconservative nationalists during the Cold War, who saw the ongoing competition with the Soviet Union as more than just a realist struggle for power or survival. It was a moral crusade as well The sense of moral superiority shared by neoconservatives is most clearly seen in their repeated insistence that there is no distinction between the national interest and that of the international community.

A key point for Rathbun is that neoconservative evangelical moral nationalism is not new. It can be traced back at least a hundred years, to the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Rooseelt (for more on this, see, Robert Kagan, "Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776").

This is an important argument, as the purpose of Rathbun's piece is to sort out the forms of "egoism" in conservative foreign policy and offer a roadmap for electoral choice this November.

Crucially, neoconservative nationalism is not to be confused with "neoliberal internationalism," the popular outward-looking foreign policy persuasion of left-wing elites in the U.S. (a crude example is found in Matthew Yglesias', Heads in the Sand, but see also, Peter Beinart, "Balancing Act: The Other Wilsonianism").

In contrast to liberal internationalism, Rathbun announces, neoconservatism "always begins with the national interest."

That differentiation is key, not just for electoral decisionmaking across variations in conservatism, but for electoral choice between left and right as well.

Leftists, and neoliberal internationalist to a lesser degree, recoil at the deployment of force in the context of power and interest.

It's no surprise that in recent weeks leftists have been vehemently dismissive of the use of force in dealing with international crises in Myanmar and Zimbabwe. But as the Ingrid Betancourt rescue has shown, the deployment of force in the final anaysis represents the true victory of power and morality in world affairs (in other words, "The Bush Doctrine Is Relevant Again").

We can see, then, some of the theoretical bases for both leftist and libertarian isolationist opposition to John McCain presidential campaign.

Just this week the New York Times found Theodore Roosevelt to be John McCain's ideological predecessor, in "McCain’s Conservative Model? Roosevelt (Theodore, That Is)," especially with reference to Roosevelt's assertiveness in foreign policy.

Today's antiwar forces, however, would like less assertiveness and dramatically more humility and restraint. And as anyone familiar with today's trends in political polarization know, such desires generally erupt into the most vicious demonizing attacks against neoconservatives and the neoconservative basis for the Bush administration's foreign policy.

The Basis of Left and Right

At Power Line, "NEW POWER LINE SERIES: THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 1":

The divisions between left and right are fundamental and unbridgeable. A frequent trope of political rhetoric is that everyone agrees about the ends; we merely disagree about the means. Although this is often true at the level of a discrete policy issue (for example, how to broaden access to health care), it is wrong at the deeper level of what might be called the “tectonic plates” that drive the individual political battles. Reducing left-right differences to disagreements only over means has a numbing effect on clear thinking, and is an obstacle to grappling with some of the larger problems that now need reform that goes far beyond the business-as-usual tinkering around the edges, such as entitlement spending. Liberals tend to believe in old-fashioned leveling egalitarianism; conservatives do not. (Much more on this point in due course.) Rather than evade or gloss over fundamental differences, highlighting them is the vital pre-condition to finding any middle ground for possible compromise.

That's one hefty essay, and I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series ---although the main problem right now is that "liberalism" really isn't a left-wing ideology. It's an invention of American progressives to mask their socialist ideological foundations. This guy gets closer to the real American left, but also continues to call them "liberals" when they are not. See "Utopian Folly: Liberalism’s Philosophical Problem."

GOP Unfairly Branded as White Supremist

Christopher Bodenner, writing at the Daily Dish, was impressed with Shelby Steele's recent analysis of Barack Obama's racial politics at the Wall Street Journal - and for good reason. Next to Juan Williams, Steele's the most thoughtful commentator on the pathologies of black victimology in America today.

But what really got me interested was Bodenner's link to an essay by Margaret Kimberley, "Freedom Rider: Shelby Steele Loves White Supremacy."

Kimberley, writing at The Black Commentator, says:

Shelby Steele is a well known black conservative, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a leading right wing think tank. Steele has made a lucrative career for himself by lambasting black people and praising white people. He says that racism is all in the past, that all is right with the world and it is up to black people to admit it and stop complaining.

Recently on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal Steele outdid himself. Steele lamented that white people just aren’t as vicious as they used to be. He believes that the legacy of slavery, segregation and American imperialism left a terrible legacy on white people. Of course, the worst impact was on the oppressed and subjugated, but Steele isn’t very worried about the legacy the past left on them.

Kimberley stretches too far when she goes off on the Iraq war as "racist." Yet, she's clear in making the radical left-wing case for an alleged entrenched, undending white supremacy in the GOP today:

Steele’s confusion is so great that one has to wonder if he even reads the newspaper or watches the news. “There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant”....

Steele’s assertion that there are no advocates of white supremacy is truly difficult to fathom ... If he thinks white supremacists have disappeared he need only look in the mirror. He has achieved the rare feat of being a man of color who cheerleads for an idea that has murdered and otherwise destroyed the lives of millions of people he should identify with. He believes in manifest destiny, imperialism and white skin privilege. Consequently, he exults in shame and hatred of his own people ....

The Wall Street Journal and Steele have had a long running love affair. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the onslaught of federal government inaction that created so much suffering...

The Black Commentator announces it's committed to the "struggle" for "peace" and "social justice," Marxist revolutionary code language, but Kimberley's ideas are common on the left today.

For example, we saw a left-wing backlash in response to Bruce Bartlett's recent article, "The GOP Is the Party of Civil Rights."

Crooked Timber, for instance, attacked Bartlett's necrophilia, that is, his love of "dead" Republicans:

Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.

Lawyers, Guns and Money also attacks Bartlett:

The problems with Bruce Bartlett's pseudo-historical WSJ piece are almost too numerous to contemplate. For starters, it's laughable for him to suggest ... that the varieties of racism [marking] the pre-civil rights era have somehow been "buried"...

The left's outrage with Shelby Steele, as well as with writers like Bruce Bartlett, reflects the nihilist tendency to smear all Republicans as unequivocally racist.

These attacks are unprincipled and outrageous. Republicans (or conservatives) historically stress traditional values, such as equal treatment under the law. They argue that society should be organized around excellence and achievement, not handouts, quotas, and racial recrimination.

Douglas MacKinnon, a longstanding GOP operative, argued last week that the GOP is unfairly branded as racist:

As a Republican with a conservative point of view, I have written more on the greatness of black America, and the need for my party to reach out to that community, than just about anyone I know....

And yet as much as I and other Republicans try to increase the dialogue, correct the record and derail the hateful rhetoric that divides us, others choose to deliberately ignore heartfelt efforts. As one example, last September, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote a column titled “The Ugly Side of the GOP.”

In a somewhat rambling piece that was syndicated all over the nation, Herbert said, “Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is”...

MacKinnon wrote a column in response these claims, and then forwarded it to Herbert. To which MacKinnon notes, "Unfortunately, he chose to ignore my outreach..."

Herbert's non-response is no surprise.

The meme that America is irredeemably racist - and especially that the GOP is the bastion of today's Jim Crow ideology - provides the far left-wing of the Democratic Party a powerful tool of guilt-mongering and racial victimology.

Jesse Jackson blew the mask off this meme, however, with his totally corrupt double-standard on Barack Obama, when he announced that the Illinois Senator should be castrated for allegedly talking down to black Americans about personal responsibility.

Note how Fox News was branded as "racist" for just broadcasting these issues.

As I've noted many times this year, to the extent that we've seen outright racism in election 2008, it's been on the Democratic Party side (see, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race").

If we see genuine white supremacy on the right, it's at the margins, among people associated with Stormfront and extreme right-wing Paulbots, as well as racist vigiliante blogs on the redneck wilderness.

One extremist blogger announced recently that Sherri Shepard of the View should be kicked to the curb, which reflects the kind of white supremist hatred depicted in films such as American History X:

Elisabeth Hasselbeck got baited into a discussion she can not win, not on the air, not in a liberal minded show and not being as sweet as she is. She needed to get up and grab that dumb bitch by her horse hair weave and curb stomp her ass.

It's true that vile views like these can be readily found on the extremist right-wing fringe, but as we've seen in Bartlett and MacKinnon's essays above, mainstream Republicans have repudiated this hatred time and again.

This will continue to be a challenge for the GOP (who are not only slurred by the left as racist, but "pseudo fascist" as well), although the party's eminently better positioned - on the basis of history and basic values of decency and fair play - to lead the country toward the colorblind society that is rightfully America's bounty.

See also, The Next Right, "How John McCain Should Respond To Racism."

Related: Classical Values, "The Fascists Are Still Coming!

Constitutional Conservatism

Peter Berkowitz offers his advice for the divided partisans of today's political right, in his essay, "Constitutional Conservatism":

A constitutional conservatism puts liberty first and teaches the indispensableness of moderation in securing, preserving, and extending its blessings. The American Constitution that it seeks to conserve presupposes natural freedom and equality; draws legitimacy from democratic consent while protecting individual rights from invasion by popular majorities; defines government’s proper responsibilities while providing it with the incentives and tools to perform them effectively; welcomes a diverse array of voluntary associations in part to prevent any one from dominating; assumes the primacy of self-interest but also the capacity to rise above it through the exercise of virtue; reflects and at the same time refines popular will through a complex scheme of representation; and disperses and blends power among three distinct branches of government as well as among federal and state governments to provide checks and balances. The Constitution and the nation that has prospered under it for 220 years demonstrate that conserving and enlarging freedom and democracy in America depend on weaving together rival interests and competing goods ....

The principles are familiar: individual freedom and individual responsibility, limited but energetic government, economic opportunity, and strong national defense. They derive support from Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, as well as from Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and, in his most representative moments, John Stuart Mill — outstanding contributors to the conservative side of the larger liberal tradition. They are embedded in the Constitution and flow out of the political ideas from which it was fashioned. In the 1950s, they animated William F. Buckley Jr.’s critique of higher education in America in God & Man at Yale, an opening salvo in the making of the modern conservative movement. In the 1960s, they were central to Frank Meyer’s celebrated fusion of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism, and they formed the backbone of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency. In the 1980s, they inspired Ronald Reagan’s consolidation of conservatism. In the 1990s, they fueled Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution.” And even though George W. Bush’s tumultuous eight years in the White House have left conservatives in disarray, these principles informed both his conception of compassionate conservatism and his aspiration to make the spread of liberty and democracy a crucial element of American foreign policy.

The article's worth a careful read, here.

I was impressed by how much Barry Goldwater's conservative vision animates Berkowitz's "constitutional conservatism." That vision melds political liberty and traditional morality as a guiding ethical program for society. Beyond this, Berkowitz's piece offers a good review of the conservative canon. He offers two bold statements for movement activists today: One, big government is here to stay, and that the right should stress "limited" goverment rather than "smaller" government as a winning tactic; second, and more controversially, Berkowitz suggests the right should reconcile to the sexual revolution, that, for example, premarital sex and institutionalized divorce are facts of contemporary American life, and conservatives court danger with an obssession toward rolling back the clock in this social arena.

Berkowitz provides a point-by-point manifesto at the conclusion. One point that's interesting is how the article essentially offers an endorsement of neoconservatism without actually mentioning neoconservtism. That is to say, the right can assume as a doctrinal notion that a strong and outward national security policy is the basis for the preservation of liberty and moral order at home. The discussion of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan illusrates that both libertarian politics and moral society depend on robust national security policies and leadership in the international realm.

The debate for conservatives is found then, essentially, outside of a forward, free-trading national security orientation; it is instead the search, on the one hand, for a proposed domestic governance model that can reconcile the rejuvenated demands for small-government activism amid the accession to power of a Democratic Party regime intent on the largest peacetime expansion of the state in American history. Backed by some polling data, the country's progressive left will be tempted to transform Democratic power into a patriarchal state-universalism, with government action, in virtually every sector of American life, sold as a public good necessitated by monumental market failure; there is also the call by Berkowitz, on the other hand, for a conservatism that accedes ground in the culture wars to accomodate a changing society while at the same time not abdicating personal liberty as a priority of a constitutionally decent and ethically vigorous political system.

As a nuanced intellectual argument, I can anticipate some strong reactions to Berkowitz, especially from small-g conservatives. Robert Stacy McCain, for example, has been hammering the commentators on the right who enabled a "national greatness" mindset that accelerated the growth of big government under GOP administrations. On this question I have lined up in agreeement with Berkowitz, although the evidence that government today can be trusted to preserve good government - limited government - in a time of crisis has been notably absent in the trillion dollar bailuot-mania currently the rage today. In this sense, a "rollback agenda" on the right actually might be good politics against a Democratic majority dismissive of any notions of limitations on state power.

And that brings me to the second avenue of Berkowitz's constitutional conservatism, the social sphere of sexual politics and the family. As he notes, "conservatives can and should continue to make the case for the traditional understanding of marriage with children at the center," but he then goes on to say that conservatives "should refrain from using government to enforce the traditional understanding."

This seems self-defeating, for the notion of a absolute social libertarianism in the family sphere provides an opening for the left to advance its secular-progressive agenda, which posits traditional family structures as archiac modes of hierarchy and domination (and in turn offers an alternative "multi-culti" family model that harms both individuals and society).

Despite all of this, Berkowitz makes good use of the various strands of conservative doctrine, and today's right-wing partisans would be wise to start shifting the debate on the Republican future to the realm of ideas and action instead of debating movement rock stars and the politics of "personalist" rivalry.

Proud To Be a Left-Wing Extremist?

Here's the post by Kyle at RightWingWatch, "Is The Right Still "Proud To Be a Right-Wing Extremist?"

Mark at Snooper Report responds, "Is The Left Still 'Proud To Be a Left-Wing Extremist'?" An excerpt:

The Leftinistra are the singularly most ugly, mean-spirited pieces of trash outside your viral Haji yet the Leftinistra support the enemy over their own nation and those that protect their very rights to exist. And yes, the Leftinistra toss the term "neocon" around like they know what a "neocon" is or something. I merely laugh in disdain because their use of the term "neocon" is allegedly a term of derision - tolerance at work I am sure. If they ever learn what a "neocon" is, they would drop it like a hot Pelosi panty.

The Leftinistra labeled the holocaust Museum shooter a right-winger when it has been shown that he was/is nothing of the sort. All we hear no is silence from their sheeple He was one of their own - a hater of Christianity, an anti-Semite (there are no anti-Semites on the right-wing) and a hater of the "neocon". Amazing isn't it? Yet the fools on the left try and blame others for what they themselves partake in on a regular basis and call it good. Why? Because they did the deed and the Leftinistra never do anything wrong. Just ask this buffoon Kyle.

Right Wing Watch? By all means, watch. We are watching back and we are better at it and I wear my Right Wing Extremist Badge with honor and courage. The Leftinistra do not because they are the very cowards they hate. The self-loathing of the Leftinistra is all too obvious.

Perhaps the Left-Wing Extremist Report by the DHS is "right" after all, eh?

I have a question for these cretins on the left-wing. If the right-wing is as you all claim that we are, seeing that there are millions of us and we are all killers, murderers and such, is it wise to back us into a corner and piss us off?

Just sayin'. Think about that.

We can debate issues and beliefs and argue various programs, policies and laws on their constitutionality or not. We are willing but the Leftinistra are not because they would lose every time. Remember, Conservatism wins every time in elections and that is why in tough races, democrats put up conservative candidates against liberal republicans...and win. John McCain lost because he might as well join the DNC because he is in fact one of them at heart, just like his esteemed colleague Arlen Specter and Lindsey Graham. There isn't a conservative bone in their bodies. This is why candidates like Sarah Palin frighten the Leftinistra on the democrat side and the republican side. I am neither.

If I have a label, I am a conservative libertarian constitutionalist. Neocon? Don't make me laugh.

Catch the chatter of those that agree with little boy Kyle at Memeorandum.

Another Leftinistra moonbat spanked.

ADDENDUM: Here's this from the DHS report, "Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber Attacks over the Coming Decade:

Anarchist extremists generally embrace a number of radical philosophical components of anticapitalist, antiglobalization, communist, socialist, and other movements. Anarchist groups seek abolition of social, political, and economic hierarchies, including Western-style governments and large business enterprises, and frequently advocate criminal actions of varying scale and scope to accomplish their goals.

Hmm ... it's not like we have too many of those folks to worry about!

Mark Thompson and the Scientific Falsification of God

It's certainly cliche to suggest that faith in the public square is in retreat. Of course, while polls show that Americans by a huge majority "believe in God or a universal spirit," there's nevertheless an extremely vocal and increasingly influential contingent on the progressive left that is intent not only to deny the potential epistemological basis for religious faith but to excoriate anyone who deigns to make a reasoned case to that effect.

I normally don't get involved in these tussles, but with the vicious neo-Stalinism we've seen on the left in response to California's Proposition 8 and the Warren invocation (and that's just for starters), it's pretty clear that the hordes have swept over the windswept passes of the barbarian steppes and folks of good standing need to stand a post and do battle in defense of eternal goodness and right.

What got me going on this is Mark Thompson's crudely pedestrian essay, "Falsifying the Unfalsifiable," over at the Ordinary Gentlemen.

Readers may recall that Mark is the publisher of Publius Endures. Once a staunch libertarian, Mark has sold out to the Obamessianism that has engulfed the land following "our national holiday from reason that was the Obama presidential inauguration" (to quote myself). In one of the strangest introductions to a blog post I've ever seen, Mark cites Homer Simpson - that's right, that Homer Simpson - as an authority on the ontology of religious faith and evangelical trust, arguing that the Simpson's get right to "the crux of the problem." And to think, Robert Stacy McCain generously called these guys "intellectuals." Go figure?

In any case, here's a key snippet of the point that Mark is trying to elaborate (and elaborate ... frankly, ad nauseum, at least 25 times at the piece):

For the religious person, there is simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist - as long as there is something in the universe that cannot rationally be explained, there is a basis for trusting in the existence of god. For the atheist, there is likewise simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist - as long as a scientific or rational explanation for anything in the universe is theoretically possible, there is a basis to trust in the ability of reason to explain everything, and no basis to trust in the existence of god.

And this is why I think Chris - and E.D. - are absolutely correct in stating that the proper response to the question of the existence of god is “Who Cares?” The existence of god simply cannot be proven or disproven through pure reason, and neither side does themselves any favors when they insist otherwise.

I think Mark wants to say "there is no basis for trusting in the existence of God" in the first paragraph, but if it's not clear in the passage cited, we've got redundancies galore at the post to confirm the point.

And this is why I'm spending time to correct Mark, and, frankly, to reveal him even further as the rank nihilist that he is.

I'm still figuring out where Mark and his gang are coming from, but they certainly aren't conservative, despite the circle-jerk exclamations for Culture 11 found repeatedly at the blog. Think about this in the context of this essay from the Calgary Herald, "At Least Atheists Got Mentioned":

People appear very keen for a lot of things to change on the Obama watch. One of those hopes is that Christianity would revert more to a private choice rather than the state religion it often appeared to be under George W. Bush.

Now before I debunk this slimy palaver, I just came across Troy Anderson denouncing those of faith who respond to such bunk as "Christian apologists."

Really, Christian apologists?

So we've got those on the left hip to the "Age of Obama" who are looking to see Christianity revert to a "private choice" rather than a "state religion"? And those who debate in favor of the existence of God are "Christian apologists"?

Sometimes I doubt this is the same United States of America where I grew up?

When Mark Thompson slops out such intelletually deadening prose as " the lunacy of religion attempting to masquerade as science," I'm frankly at a loss at the metaphysical methodology of the enterprise.

The fact remains, and it has thus been, that there is no epistemological basis for asserting religion as science in the first place. It's a sickly straw man to posit intelligent design as threatening nearly fifty years of post-Engel secularism in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence. If we see science as the scholarly generation of explanatory theory based on logically derived predictions based on observable phenonomen, it makes little sense to suggest religion is "masquerading as science." There is no data with which to subject the claim that "God exists" to falsification. Sure, we can debate the scientific legitimacy of the Gospels, but to find proof for the verity of the divine is nonsense. Perhaps Mark Thompson can clarify the point in a future post, but thus far he's been too busy playing ring around the rosie with Freddie and the rest of this nihilist gang.

The larger question in any case is the problem of Judeo-Christian ethics. When Christopher Hitchens argued early this decade for the morality of regime change Iraq, it's unlikely he was drawing on any other well of fundamental right outside of the Biblical narrative of Mosaic universality.

It is, of course, precisely this Western Judeo-Christian heritage that the progressive left seeks to destroy. Andrew Sullivan is no conservative when he promotes a gay radical licentiousness that knows no moral boundaries. Thus, the solution: just rebrand the model in your own image and label adherents to classic teachings as "Christianists." I mean really, Mark Thompson cites E.D Kain as suggesting "who cares"?

Well, excuse me, but damn! I'd think we all would. The West is best. QED.

I'll have more on this later, so I'll close with Licia Corbella's rebuttal to the privileging of atheism over religion in the public square:

The atheist ethic has killed more people than any religion by a staggering margin. Fascism, Nazism and Communism have murdered many tens of millions of people. Think of the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Nazis, Communist China etc. Mao Zedong's regime alone murdered 70 million countrymen. Stalin, 20 million. Their successors millions more. To this day, Falun Gong and Christians are jailed in China and then killed to harvest their organs.

It's no coincidence the freest, most prosperous nations in the world are virtually all Christian-based, not atheist or even Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. As the Bible says: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

With the exception of Japan, which had its democratic system imposed on it by the U. S. after the Second World War, and Israel, which is Jewish, no non-Christian country is truly free.

Atheists make up a very small minority of the "believers" in our society and yet it is their religion that is constantly being rammed down the throats of the majority.

They better be careful what they wish for. So should all people who love freedom, regardless of what they believe.

Roundup on Progressive Campaign of Workplace Intimidation and Harassment — UPDATED!!

Every once in a while something encourages me to believe that there are still Americans who understand what makes us different from other nations, and who are willing to preserve that difference. Your blog ... is one of those things." -- Maj. Steven Givler.

"Your unconquerable strength is in your ability to express the truth. They despise you for it. Let them!" -- Matt Cassens.

*****

Hell is prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41) -- and for all liars!

But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. Revelation 21:8.

Revelation 25:15 sharpens the focus even more when it describes deceitful persons as "everyone who loves and practices lying." In other words, it is not the person who occasionally lies, for even the best Christian might do that (Abraham, for example); but it is the person who makes lying the love of his life and whose entire life is characterized by deceit. Such a person is so like Satan that he must end up where Satan ends up -- in hell.

*****

The quotes at top are from friends of American Power. They attest to the recurring patterns (and thus appraisals) of my writing: attributes of honesty, decency and patriotism, and the belief that these qualities are most hated by progressives. The quote above at bottom is a passage from The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect and Defeat Him. Together these quotes indicate what's at stake in my blogging at American Power, that is, whether the forces of good and decency will prevail against the dark agents of hate that relentlessly work their way against me and the work I do here.

Some time back, one of my colleagues suggested that no matter what the nature of online disagreements, no matter how intense or vile, taking such disagreements to an opponent's employer is outside the bounds of decency: it is simply un-American. And I would add that when those same workplace complaints involve blatant and patently false allegations amounting to libel, those taking such actions are not only un-American, but genuinely satanic. And I have to apologize to longtime readers who might be getting bored with such blogging, but writing about the progressive left's perpetual campaign of personal destruction, against my economic livelihood, is how I'm able to deal with the issues, keep my sanity, and of course clear my good name. As I noted earlier, there is essentially no lie that's beyond the pale for the radicals. They'll do anything to destroy opponents. And they don't stop. And virtually to the one, the complaints leveled against me have been pure lies. I'm not going to recount them. All of this is of a piece. But since many on the left are coordinating these attacks, the frequency seems to be accelerating. I'll soon know more about the latest round of allegations and lies. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the workplace attacks I've defended against now for almost three years. In each case, there's never been any finding of impropriety or wrongdoing. In fact, the opposite's been true: Accusers have been revealed as the hateful demonic scum that they are. The fact is, people who want to destroy me have recourse to civil litigation if they feel they've been wronged. But because everything I write about the asshole progressives is true, they can't file suit (they have no case), so they go after my employment, with the most diabolical attacks anyone can imagine. My mind reels at reading some of the lies. My only thought is that people who make such claims have no God-given decency. They are in fact sociopaths bent on destruction. They do the devil's work.

Anyway, here's the links:

* "(O)CT(O)PUS = CYBER-BULLY."

* "Libel Blogger David Hillman (Swash Zone) Workplace Harassment Fail."

* "E.D. Kain Alleges Defamation: True/Slant Blogger's Workplace Intimidation Attempts to Shut Down American Power!"

* "E.D. Kain Contacts Department Again: Intimidation Campaign Escalates; Fake 'Apology' Seals Moral Indictment Against True/Slant Blogger!"

* "The Case for Faith."

* "The Secular Religion of Radical Progressivism."

* "Alex Knepper Contacts My College in Campaign of Workplace Harassment."

* "'Isn't it funny the way lefties are, at bottom, puritanical about sex?'"

* "Carl Salonen Libelous Workplace Allegations of Child Pornography and Sexual Harassment at Long Beach City College."

* "The Claims of Grievance-Bearing Identity Groups Will Always Prevail Over Fairness."

* "W. James Casper's Demonic Band of Progressive Totalitarians."

* "'It doesn’t matter if an accusation against a conservative is true or false...'."

RELATED: Demonic hate-blogger and harassment ringleader confirms his clinical obsession with seeing me fired: "Donald Douglas and his Paranoid 'Henchmen' Conspiracy" (the top result).

*****

UPDATE: Tania from Midnight Blue comments via e-mail:

skye820@xxxxx.com to me
show details 10:07 AM

Donald,

Do these sociopaths have an earned income? I suggest you start going after that, although I doubt is will garner you much coin, but turnabout is fair play.

Tania

Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming, Tania. But I haven't ruled it out. Although they're leeches so I doubt there'd be much financial gain to it. Yep, these idiots are ASFLs big time!!

*****

From Lonely Conservative...

... to me
show details 11:31 AM (1 hour ago)

Well, you're right - they are assholes, and evil.

Regards ...

Yeah, they're evil --- and persistent!

*****

And from Amusing Bunni, at the comments to a previous post:

I wanted to comment on your top post about the demonic attacks by the lefties against you.

Liars really are of the devil! These "people" have NO SHAME and don't care about anyone. They LOVE to destroy a person, at work, and get them fired, or worse yet, arrested, or whatever they can do.
They are vile, evil and there's a special crappy circle in hell reserved for them.

I will pray for you that you prevail. These creeps who lie about you are just pawns of satan. The bible says that we fight not against people, but against principalities and such. The devil is scared of you, because you speak the truth. I hope everything turns out alright for you Don.

Pawns of satan! You're right --- these people are the devil's henchmen!

Thanks!

*****

From Norm in New York:

Norman Gersman to me
show details 2:14 PM (2 hours ago)

Dear Donald,

The left has no moral compass. To the left, the end justifies the means. In every one of my area's local election we see that the left has no shame: from stealing every political sign off private property to publishing outright lies in their literature. Therefore, it is no surprise that instead of partaking in argument the left seeks only to destroy, in every way possible, their opponents.

Warm regards...

Thanks Norm!

And from Reliapundit:

Astute Bloggers to me
show details 3:46 PM (38 minutes ago)

Leftists have no principles beyond their desire for power - and to use that power to satisfy their covetousness, envy, and sate their hedonism.

They are moral and cultural and political relativists - EXCEPT when it comes to attacking the people who get in the way of their socialist plans. On the one hand, they have no problem attacking so-called right-wingers as immoral people whose behavior is beyond the pale, while on the other hand defending horrifying practices of other peoples as being acceptable on the basis of culturally relativity.

This is why they practice no-holds-barred politics everywhere - including the blogosphere - and yet decry and attack people they see as political foes.

On the so-called right --- (I say so-called because as Mark Levin correctly points out, people who are called right-wingers today are at the center of traditional American politics and are actually only as "right-wing" as Paine and Jefferson and Madison and Adams) --- we have principles that guide our politics and personal behavior. This makes us fight fair.

What they've done to you is what they've done to opponents for years and years and decades and decades. It's what they did to Palin and what they did to McCarthy. (McCarthyism is now synonymous with witch-hunting even though McCarthy has NOTHING to do with the HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee, and only went after communists in the government and he was largely correct in his targets. Read Coulter's book on the subject.)

I grew up on the hard left - in the lap of the radical chic. I know these people like the back of my hand - and know many of them to this day. Their politics disgusts me. They need to be deprogrammed. It requires relentlessness, courage, and steadfastness to high moral principles.

You have all three. Keep Fighting Baby!

God Bless You and Yours!

God bless you, Reliapundit!!

And from Matt Cassens:

St. Blogustine to me
show details 5:37 PM (1 hour ago)

Don, I've always admired your desire to fight on the front line, but never realized how deeply you fight behind enemy lines (beyond blogging).

There must be some conservative version of the ACLU that go beyond defending religious expression (like ADF and ACLJ) that could come to your defense in an organized and imposing manner to defend your God-given rights to express yourself conservatively.

Have you tried calling into conservative radio talk shows? Laura Ingraham may not have a huge audience, but I'll bet she has great advice or at least knows who you could contact. Hannity has the audience, and your plight may be of interest to his show. Think big and let the world know what you're up against.

Matt

Great comments, Matt.

I'll think about it, especially that going big part!

The Political Psychology of Barack Obama

Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the CUNY Graduate Center, offers an outstanding examination of Barack Obama's political psychology at the new Political Science Quarterly.

Renshon's article is a penetrating, rigorous peace of research, and he's fair in analyzing both Obama and John McCain, laying out the implications of both candidates' psychological profiles for the American presidency during the next fours years. Naturally, I'm interested in Barack Obama, not only because I think he's far outside the mainstream of society, but also because he's such a favorite to win on Tuesday.

The introduction to Renshon's discussion of Obama is startling in its demonstration of the Democratic nominee's unbridled ambition:

To call Barack Obama's political rise meteoric may be the true definition of understatement. Born in 1961 into a racially mixed family, he spent his early life in Indonesia and Hawaii and graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He worked in New York for four years, first for a business consulting firm and then for a public interest research group. He then moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years before entering Harvard Law School in 1988. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review in his first year, and as its president in his second year at the age of 28. He graduated in 1991 and then returned to Chicago where, in 1993, he joined the firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland at the age of 32. In 1994, at the age of 33 his book, Dreams of My Father, was published. In 1996, he won election to the Illinois State Senate and served there from 1996 to 2004, ran for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2002 and lost, then ran successfully for a U.S. Senate seat in 2004. He announced his candidacy for the presidency in February 2007 at the age of 41. The Senator has been on a very fast track indeed.

A little further down in the text, Renshon cites Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama's brother, who in an interview in 1989 relayed that Barack Obama stated early-on, and surprisingly, that he wanted to run for the presidency.

Readers should know that I read Renshon's, High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition, during Bill Clinton's impeachment, and I was really struck then by the single most powerful variable in Clinton's self-destruction: blinding ambition. We cannot know what will happen in an Obama administration, but Renshon's discussion of Obama's drive reminds me not only of Bill Clinton's, but of Richard Nixon's as well.

Renshon provides additional background information on Obama's upbringing and training, etc., but I found his discussion of Obama's temperament rather troubling:

Calm, tempered, cool, deliberative, detached, laid-back, and serious are all terms that have been used to describe Obama by people who have known him at various periods in his life....

Obama's calm external demeanor leads to the question of what he does with the normal passions that animate people. I raise this point not to suggest that buried underneath that calm exterior is a seething cauldron of intense emotions, but to simply ask the question as it has been stated. One hint of an answer is that Obama's seemingly detached equanimity does not mean that he is incapable of tough, even harsh attacks on others. Of Hillary Clinton he said that she “says and does whatever it takes to win the next election.”

Toward Republicans, he has been even harsher. In a 1995 interview speaking of the success of Christian conservatives in building communities he said, “It's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia.” Eight years later, in speaking of Republicans more generally, he said, “What I'm certain about is that people are disenchanted with a highly ideological Republican Party that believes tax cuts are the answer to every problem, and lack of regulation and oversight is always going to generate economic growth, and unilateral intervention around the world is the best approach to foreign policy”....

Another question that arises with regard to Obama's stylistic equanimity is its impact on his decision making and judgment. Obama has repeatedly touted the high quality of his judgment and rests that case on what he sees as his prescient opposition to the war; “on the most important foreign policy issue of a generation, I got it right and others did not.” It is somewhat unclear, however, just how strategically accurate the basis of his opposition was. He argued that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States or its neighbors, but what about a gathering threat? His opposition was premised on the view that Saddam could be contained; others made strong arguments that containment was failing. That argument rests on plausible analysis that either side could marshal, not on the superior judgment of Obama's side of the debate.

Obama also framed his criticism of the war with direct personal attacks on members of the administration and their motives. “I am opposed to the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income—to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.” So is the basis of his good judgment prescient geo-strategic analysis or a progressive's animus toward a conservative agenda?

This passage reveals (1) that much of Obama's explicit message of pragmatism and post-partisanship is mostly a shrewdly calculated political choreography geared to winning the office of the presidency (which doesn't lend much credibility to the "change" mantra we've heard all year). But (2) the latter part of the quote is particularly informative, in that it squares with the record of Obama's positions on the Iraq war: As Peter Wehner has detailed to devastating effect, Obama supported sending more troops when the war was going badly - and while the Bush administration's policy was in disarray - but then opposed the surge of troops in 2007, precisely when the administration had changed course strategically, and when security in Iraq had improved to the point that the American goal of leaving behind a stable and victorious nation came into focus.

Thus, while Barack Obama's cool temperament may indeed serve him well as a political asset, his deliberate style and calm detachment serve to mask a much larger decision-making liability that could put national security at risk.

Renshon continues next with a discussion of Obama's substantive political positions and objective ideological orientation. Obama is something of an ideological chameleon (he's an accomplished flip-flopper on the issues), and while his bedrock positions are found to the far left of the political spectrum, his willingness to compromise his positions for rank political interest elicits the conundrum of not so much "where's the beef?" but what the heck does he stand for?, to borrow from Renshon's formulation.

Probably the most problematic issue for Barack Obama is the Olympus-level expectations he's set and the unlikeliness that he'll be able to meet them.

Renshon explains:

Among the most important and obvious skills that sustain Obama's success and ambition is his ability to deliver speeches that his adherents view as soaring and inspiring. His speech on race relations, for example, was hailed, even exalted. “One for the history books,” “brilliant,” and “unequivocal and healing” are some of the accolades heaped upon it. This praise reflects the extraordinary rhetorical skill and power that Obama can bring to bear.

There can be no doubt about the power of Obama's oratory to inspire his followers. His rhetorical skills have been noted and praised by persons from both sides of the political aisle, although there are some dissents. Some have pointed out that his charisma has the trappings of a “cult of personality.” Others, both on the left and the right, have pointed to the gap between “inspiration and substance.”94 Some have wondered whether eloquence is “overrated”....

Obama has the unique ability to offer doctrinaire liberal positions in a way that avoids the stridency of many recent Democratic candidates....

If elected, Obama will be among the youngest presidents ever to serve in that office. His resume will also be among the thinnest of those who have served. This being the case it is not easy to reconcile the record that does exist, as the most liberal Senator in that chamber in 2007, with the primary rhetorical emphasis of his campaign, which is pragmatic but transformational change. Even those last two terms seem contradictory, but it is in the gap between Obama's messianic rhetoric and his moderate, pragmatic political persona that some real presidential leadership contradictions come plainly into view.

Obama has made wide use of soaring rhetoric often of apocryphal and biblical dimensions. Building to the rhetorical climax in the speech in which he claimed victory in his quest for the Democratic Party's nomination, he said,

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal...

Close your eyes and you can easily imagine Obama as a new world prophet forecasting a spiritual and political awakening. Indeed that is how many of his adherents view him and herein is an enormous problem for him, should he gain the presidency [bold emphasis added].

This is an extremely fascinating passage, because the implications of this discussion not only confirm many of the most common criticisms of "The One" from the blogosphere, but because Obama's expectations are so lofty that the actual job of governing will be tremendously complicated by the impossible rhetoric.

If the Democrats regain and expand their congressional majority - particularly with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate - there will be little in the way of structural impediments to prevent the passage of landmark legislation firmly in the tradition of Great Society liberalism and beyond. Such a development will pacify the Democratic Party's radical base, but it will alienate GOP partisans who will be both marginalized and disabused of Obama's high-minded calls to bipartisanship.

In other words, for personal and political reasons, a sweeping Democratic victory will essentially nullify Obama's two-year campaign of post-partisan transformation. By seeking to transcend national divisions, an Obama presidency would risk alienating core constituencies who feel desperately aggrieved and damaged by eight years of Republican rule. But by repudiating his own claims to be a healer and uniter, Obama will radicalize the other side by confirming the expectations conservatives have had all along for a Democratic candidate baptized in the left's revolution of rights and redistribution of the post-1960s era.