Tradition v. Truth: How to Restore without Going Backwards

Pedro Gonzalez introduced me to Samuel Francis, and from there I read his fantastic book Beautiful Losers.

Francis predicted what I have been witnessing for the last eight years, and what President Donald Trump busted up: “Conservatism” has been corrupted into a libertarian lightweight controlled opposition, abandoning the fundamentals of our nation’s identity, integrity, and idiosyncrasy.

Samuel Francis predicated the rise of “Middle American Radicals” and the populist, America-First pushback against managerial elites and globalist implications. Ron Paul fretted as far back as 2007 about the rising soft fascism in this country, in which conformity would be the rule, and non-government organizations would impose speech codes and other repressive measures against those who did not conform to the will and wishes of the elite. But Francis called out the corporate dominance long before that.

Francis’ most salient observations arise from his essay Beautiful Losers in the same-named book that he published in 1993. He called out the frequent failure of the Conservative movement to win the culture war. He pointed out how Conservatives had incorporated the Gestalt of Liberalism, in which individual liberty is the only salient feature, while culture and constitutional concerns were brushed aside. Francis correctly exposed the “neoconservatives” as the neo-liberals that they really were. Sure, they did not like the rising crime rates and plummeting test sores in the inner cities. Yet they still held onto the multicultural, affirmative-action dogma which created those problems in the first place.

To his incredible credit, Francis called out the tacit alliance of liberals and conservatives to focus on fighting communism and promote individual liberty, which in turn turned into a betrayal of true constitutionalism, Judeo-Christian conservatism, and America-First nationalism.

William F. Buckley articulated conservatism thus:

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Samuel Francis pointed out who the Left and other liberal interests had conveniently found ways to get around the Conservative Crank shouting “Stop!”, all while praising Mr. Stop Sign’s political convictions. Even though conservatives opposed abortion, homosexual marriage, gun control, economic restrictionism, socialism, and Marxist groupthink in the colleges, all the major institutions in our culture, community, and country have given into these forces.

Yes, conservatives need to yell “Stop!” but they also have to actually stop the nefarious elements causing harm when they don’t stop. And Francis called them out on it.

Hence, the mess we find ourselves in today, a mess which President Trump, with his Francis-Buchanan populist instincts began taking the first steps to clean up.

Samuel Francis’ thinking is making a comeback and for good reason.

He also needs to make a comeback to remind us why he disappeared, and why it made sense at the time that he went away.

Samuel Francis predicted the populist backlash to the managerial elites ruining our country.

He was absolutely correct to call out America’s growing investment and involvement in foreign wars. He was critical of the First War in Iraq, and his criticism would have aptly applied to George W. Bush’s second invasion of Iraq in 2003, which he lived to see, but not end.

He was also right to question the cult-like adherence that had cropped up around Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement as a political hegemony. Civil rights has really turned into “civic privilege” handed out by government entities, and in too man cases undermines true natural rights.

But Samuel Francis would later write:

“What we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.”

I find this statement patently offensive. More importantly, though, it’s based on abject falsehood. Dinesh D’Souza exposed these remarks and other thoughts from white-nationalist aligned individuals when he attended white nationalist Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance

What is a “white racial consciousness” anyway? Did the guy not study the Civil War? The United States was 90% white in 1861, and the country descended into a fractious, fearsome civil war, one which cost more American lives than all other American military involvements combined! White nationalists, or white racialists will argue: “That’s what happens when you have people of a different race in your country! It causes nothing but trouble!” However, most of these armchair (or should I say “Booster-Seat”) historians forget that blacks were voting citizens in some of the colonies and the states. They supported the ratification of the United States Constitution, as well.

Getting rid of all the black, Hispanic, and Asian people is not going to solve any problems. Human nature and its propensity to faction is deeply-rooted enough, that no matter how homogenous one makes a community, there can be still emerge bases for strife and conflict.

Such is the genius reflection of our Founders (read The Federalist Papers), and of the United States Constitution which James Madison basically wrote in full.

I see a similar problem with Pat Buchanan, whose populist, America-First pugilism was widely vindicated during the Trump Administration.

Except on a few points.

1.     Pat Buchanan had a relentless anti-Zionist strain in his writings and commentary. Who can forget his abortive remarks on The McLaughlin Group: “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at….”

 To his credit (?), Buchanan doesn’t bitch and moan about Israel anymore.

2.     Buchanan literally asserted in one of his books that the reason for America’s cultural decline is that Catholics no longer recite the Latin Mass. Seriously? In Vatican city, Latin is the official language, and yet the current Pope is the most aggressive, ostentatious Marxist not just in the Holy See, but on the Italian Peninsula.

3.       There is a stunning picture that Gen Z populists love to share: Pat Buchanan wiping an old-fashioned rifle with a portrait of Robert E. Lee looking down on him, like some corrupted form of the Godhead.

On this point, I find particular analysis needed. What is it with these populist nationalist types and their lionizing hagiography of the ante-Bellum South?

Most people are not aware of this, but many of the poor Southern whites opposed the Secession movement. Many of them were too poor to own slaves, nor did they really want to. They were frequently ignored by politicians, who served at the beck and call of plantation interests while ignoring the public interest. From the 1860 secession convention of South Carolina until the final four states felt compelled to secede due to military campaigns in their own backyards, there was a considerably unionist sentiment  through the region. Even slave owners like Sam Houston opposed secession, and Confederate rebels deposed him for standing with the United States.

In one of the most neglected subjects of US History, besides the existence of black and American Indian slaveowners, there was the wide and diverse set of white Southern unionists or anti-Secessionists.

The “Southern” way of life was not just anti-black, but it was anti-white, and most importantly anti-American. Southern slave interests are a mirror image of the rapacious corporate globalists who put profit ahead of the well-being of the people. Slaveowners and plantation owners rushed 11 states into civil war to protect their own narrow corporate interests: owning people for cheap labor and enriching themselves, even though their plantation program ruined the ground, ruined the economy and hurt poor Southern whites as well as blacks. The “War Between the States” was not about honor, it was not about “restrictions on the federal government.” It wasn’t even about states’ rights, although millions of Southerners have been fed a pack of lies for decades telling them to look up to the plantation ancestors and the soldiers who did their corporate bidding.

Nationalist populists like Pat Buchanan and Samuel Francis hate eternal foreign wars and foreign forays, they hate corporate raiders putting GDP ahead of GOD, and they are definitely your “America First” archetype commentators, and yet they praise “Southern culture.”

When they talk about Southern Culture, they are talking about the aristocratic class-oriented, stratified societies which emerged through the plantation system, I would imagine.

These same southern planters and classy aristocrats whom they lionize, who defined much of ante-bellum South, were the very political, managerial class whom Buchanan and Francis railed against in Modern America.

The “Slave Power” was a globalist operation. They often plotted with politicians and other scurrilous elements to conquer other countries and turn them into extensions of their plantation program of greed.

Clearly, these Southern plantation elites were NOT America First, since they had no problem launching a Doomed-To-Fail Secessionist movement, and with that effort organizing and enforcing some of the harshest conscription and commandeering regions in the United States. American citizens witness their wealth and worth wasted away by Confederate generals and soldiers, ordered by puppeteer-politicians to take everything from them for “the cause.”

That same kind of thinking animated much of the discussion over the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush Administration, and even going as far back as World War One, in which another genteel Southern, President Woodrow Wilson, justified America’s entry into the European conflict to “make the world safe for Democracy.”

But the real question is: why do compelling thinkers and commentators like Pat Buchanan and Samuel Francis lionize an element of people in American History who were the antithesis of their political philosophy? Why does their political advocacy for putting America first and foremost while supporting a more isolationist foreign policy also lend itself to a subtle or over white nationalism?

The regressive left and their corporate media acolytes will charge that “America First” or “Domestic Focus on the United States” and “Foreign Policy Isolationism” are inherently racist. In other words, the fall for the same lazy thinking as Francis and Buchanan themselves.

I cannot offer a systematic explanation, but I will hazard one educated guess as to why there are these conflicting advocacies among nationalists and populists: the focus on Tradition as the catch-all answer to everything, rather than looking for a truthful synthesis to the data before them in the historical record.

Human thought tends to aggregate a set of propositions under one label, then wants to answer all the other policy, personnel, and fundamental questions under the same label. If you see yourself as a nationalist and a populist, then you have to support welfare for American citizens only, for example. Yet government subsidy of any kind harms the very people it claims to help (read Charles Murray’s On Losing Ground for more information).

Some nationalist-populist types are pushing for minimum wage increases, government-run healthcare (Medicaid expansions or even single-payer programs) because they want the government to “serve the people.” However, making the people dependent on the government only serves … the government, or the people who are running the government. The lack of thinking on these matters is really disturbing!

This same kind of sloppy thinking induces nationalists and populists to look at old traditions, the “Southern Way of Life,” and decide: “Why can’t we go back to the way things used to be?”

But why would we want to go back to everything the way it used to be? The technological advances of today did not exist then. There is so much research and discover that we have now, that did not exist in the past. Let’s consider a well-known quote from The Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.” (Ecclesiastes 7:10)

Buchanan and Francis seem to think that going back to a time when the nation was “majority white” would be better for the country, since there were fewer problems. They confuse skin color for culture, and they misplace national identity and borders for the common glue which held the United States together. This kind of thinking is sloppy, mistaken, and just plain wrong.

There are many things about the United States of America’s fundamental, credal heritage. The United States is a country based on the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, the Judeo-Christian heritage, and Constitutional Republicanism. Indeed, we need to restore those values, but they are not “white values,” and restoration is not an invitation to go backwards, but rather to move forwards and improve this country.

If we want to stop The Revolution of 1917 or George Orwell’s 1984, we need to restore the Spirit of 1776! Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, and other nationalist-populist types, lost touch with that fundamental verity.

Does Support for Israel Clash with America First?

The Republican Party has become the de facto pro-Israel political party. Should it be that way? Does Israel help American now? If so, how? Does that mean we cannot criticize the country or its government? Should the United States help pay for Israel’s defense? Are critics on the Right … right to be hostile to Israel? Last of all, does it compromise “America First” to support Israel?  Freedom of speech is a godsend, one that forces us to contend and discuss even the most elementary or transparent of issues. Anti-Israel and anti-Semitism sentiment is on the rise (especially among some on the populist Right), and their outrage compels us to revisit American-Israeli relations. Are we too tied up with other countries? Are we violating George Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address to avoid foreign entanglements when we support other countries, including Israel?

Let’s start with the charge “You can’t criticize Israel. You will pay a (political) price if you do!” Much of the corporate media is decidedly pro-Palestinian. The hateful Squad in Congress (including incestuous Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib) routinely criticize Israel and hobnob with terrorists, and nothing happens to them. I submit that yes, you can (and should) criticize Israel, as we should be free to criticize any country. I vigorously denounced the country’s onerous COVID-19 policies, and I do not celebrate their having the second largest PRIDE festival in Tel Aviv. Even Israelis themselves criticize their country! It’s not anti-Semitism to criticize Israel.

How has Israel helped us? They keep Iran in check, for starters. They bombed ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, when most news outlets ignored them. They have helped other allied countries develop their military prowess, too (Singapore, for example) or provide intelligence against international terrorism (Australia).

But what about ongoing foreign aid to Israel? I stand for the most part with US Congressman Thomas Massie, the only Republican to vote against the $90 million funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. Drug cartels and human-trafficking dominate our Southern border, and our political class is paying for the defense of other countries? My problem isn’t with Israel per se, but with our representatives focusing on every other country but our own. Rep. Massie’s stance is not anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, but pro-America. We should expect the same from all our representatives.

I do disagree with Massie’s statement that AIPAC (America Israel Public Affairs Committee) is foreign influence. Americans have the right to lobby their government to spend money for other countries, even though I disagree with them. Unlike Massie, I would have voted to condemn the BDS movement due to its multiple ties to terrorist organizations. It’s one thing to say a country should not exist, but it’s another to work with international terrorist groups who won’t stop with Israel. They want to erase America, too.

But what about some of the professional pundits on the right, and their criticism of Israel? Should we agree with them?

Ann Coulter raged against the 2016 Republican presidential nominees because of their focus on Israel, while ignoring our country’s immigration problems. She doesn’t have a problem with Israel per se, either. In fact, Coulter likes Israel’s border security and wants us to imitate it (so do I). I say we give Israel $3 billion a year to build our wall.

Robert Novak was convinced that Israel deliberately attacked the U.S.S. Liberty during the Six Day War. On June 6^th, 1967 Israeli warplanes fired on an American ship in the Mediterranean Sea during the fractious Six Day War. Israel had warned every other nation to clear out of the Mediterranean, but the Liberty did not get the message in time.

Did Israel attack the ship on purpose to deceive the United States into the conflict via a false flag operation? Some of the surviving veterans say yes, but they also admit that they can’t prove it. After more than U.S. ten commissions on the incident (including a conference as recent as 2004), there is nothing to substantiate the charge. Besides, Israel did not have to seduce the United States into war, since they were already winning on their own. The United States and Israel did endure a twenty-year period of statis over the incident notwithstanding, and Israel paid a large indemnity. For the record, Israeli and Jewish scholars in Israel have not tried to hide discussion on this issue. Robert Novak was entitled to his opinion, but he was wrong.

Then there’s Pat Buchanan. I will never forget his statement on The McLaughlin Group: “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at….” My initial reaction was, Wow, Pat – anti-Semitic much? Today, you hardly hear Buchanan talk about Israel. What happened? President Trump maintained a solid relationship with the country and kept the United States out of foreign wars. Yes, Pat, it can be done: you can be America First and still support Israel.

But is there really a conflict with America First if you support other countries? I supported Brexit, but I don’t think Britain’s interests are more important than America’s. I applaud Marine Le Pen’s populist efforts to break France out of the chokehold of abject secular globalism, but it's not America’s job to help make that happen. Singapore’s pro-family policies should be replicated around the world, but I vigorously oppose the country’s harsh limitations on freedom of speech.

Israel is not a perfect country, but she is special because like the United States, she was forged by people fleeing persecution to establish freedom of security of themselves and their posterity. Yes, you can criticize Israel. No, we shouldn’t have to pay for their defense (we can’t even pay our own bills!). Israel is a force for good, including for the United States. Ultimately, however, our real focus should not be denigrating any one country, anyway, but rather focusing on domestic American interests.

Mr. Buchanan: We Are Not a Democracy—And the World Needs to Learn From Us

Economic nationalist Pat Buchanan opined last week that the United States’ fraught political climate is turning the world against democracy. In his article “How Democracy is Losing the Word”, he argued that our country’s sharply divided political culture, the corporate media’s obsession with Trump, plus authoritarian regimes’ economic successes were making democracy look bad. However, Buchanan’s repeat pessimism is based on a fundamental flaw, one which inadvertently exposes the very political and societal maladies he diagnosed that are generating upheaval in Europe, Canada, and throughout the Western World.

Early in his lamenting jeremiad, Buchanan writes: “And what will a watching world be thinking when it sees the once-great republic preoccupied with breaking yet another president?” But then he writes: “Among the reasons democracy is in discredit and retreat worldwide is that its exemplar and champion, the USA, is beginning to resemble France's Third Republic in its last days before World War II.” So, which is it, Pat? Is the United States a republic or a democracy? One of our Founding Fathers already answered this question: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The difference matters. Sadly, Buchanan’s seeming indifference to this fundamental distinction occurs often—and is too often overlooked.

Before debunking the so-called “crisis of democracy”, is it really true that the autocratic regimes he references are enjoying the peace and prosperity? China’s market economy within a brutal dictatorship is stalling big timev because of President Trump’s successful trade and tariff offensive. China’s militant repression against the Muslim Uighurs is disgusting Chinese and foreign nationals alike. Turkey has become a third-world dystopia, hardly a shining beacon of economic prosperity and national security.

But what else does Buchanan get wrong?

Despite the crises emerging in the corporate press, the United States is a remarkable testimony to good government, in that we are a republic. Counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and separate state government have ensured effective limits to very cultural malaise eating away at Europe. The corrupt media, for all its progressive posturing, could not stop Trump, either.

But why does Buchanan’s mix-up matter? How does his mistake inadvertently explain the reason for the Western Malaise he diagnoses?

First, let’s define the differences, which rest on more than who votes for whom. In a democracy, the rule of law is the rule of the majority, regardless of established norms and institutions.  In spite of the rights and responsibilities championed by Ancient Athens, the majority of Athenians voted for Socrates’ death because they didn’t like his views. The Wiemar Republic, a makeshift democracy assembled after Germany’s fall in World War I, transformed into a fascist tyranny under democratically elected Adolph Hitler.

To avoid these perverse outcomes, the American Framers disparaged democracy, which amounts to two wolves and a lamb voting on what—or rather who—is for dinner. Aristotle, himself a statist-elitist in Ancient Athens, described a republic as “rule by the many for the benefit of all”, in contrast to democracy, “rule by the many for the benefit of the many.” In a republic, the rule of law curbs the rule of the majority. Socrates would have received constitutional protections to disparage directly-elected rulers without fear. In a republic, no one is above the law, including the crowd as well as the individual ruler or the governing class.

The United States’ republican Constitution outlines institutions to channel as well as check and balance popular, aristocratic, and autocratic tendencies. Counter-majoritarian institutions like the US Supreme Court serve as final arbiters for legal disputes. State and local governments rebuff federal power. Enumerated powers and the Bill of Rights describe the boundaries for the government, not the people. These arrangements preserve individual liberty as well as local sovereignty, and both arrangements safeguard the interests of all.If the world is witnessing the demise of “democracy”, we should rejoice.

But will republicanism take its place? Anti-globalist protesters around the world may be rejecting “democracy”, but they need to understand why and agitate for something better. Populism in terms of policy outcomes is noteworthy. However, populism as the means for governing is not. Conservative and progressive nationalists plus the vast majority of the Yellow Jacket protestors understand that corporate interests and globalist activists have twisted democracy to their selfish ends. The answer does not lie in more “Power to the People”, but less power to the state. They must fight for natural law and natural rights, which means a constraint on government power altogether, not more democracy.

Pat Buchanan’s unintended confusion should concern us, since it reflects the underlying problems in the West. Younger generations around the world don’t know the difference between democracy and republicanism. They certainly don’t understand how democracy is inimical to individual and national liberty, while republicanism preserves both. The older (and newer) generation of reporters, liberal and conservative, don’t respect this difference, either, and their views are informing the public discussion as a whole. At the very least, conservative pundits who serve as the only source of good political science should understand this difference. It’s not ethnic nationalism, but republicanism that can Make the West Great Again.

If citizens in countries can’t distinguish between democracy’s failures and republican successes, these worldwide uprisings won’t accomplish lasting improvements. They rightly oppose the consequences of unfettered expansion of the state, and they are demanding that the governments be more responsive to “The People”. However, more government elected by “the people” will not bring about a limited government protecting citizens’ rights and safeguarding the nation from domestic insurrection and foreign invasion.

There is no demise of democracy in the United States, since we are not a democracy. Furthermore, Europe’s answers to open borders, higher taxes, diminished public safety, and cultural ennui sweeping those nations lie in the adoption of America’s republicanism: definition and protection of the natural rights of citizens, installation of principled checks and balances within government, and recognition of the nation-state to establish its borders, language, and culture—with a commitment to protect the Judeo-Christian principles that inspired the United States Constitution.