Politics Rote Responses to Fuentes Will Not Suffice To refute the “yes” is one thing, to refute the “no” another. (Photo by: Touring Club Italiano/Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) In order to “come to grips” with the podcaster Nick Fuentes, Daniel Mahoney in his latest article for the American Mind rightly calls for “sober evaluation from a critical distance,” but his own response is at best insufficient. A robust rejoinder to Fuentes demands more than reified appeals to Churchill. Mahoney simply does not seem to take his opponent seriously. His familiarity with Fuentes seems limited to decontextualized soundbites.  He is hoodwinked by Fuentes’s trolling and youthful antics, attributing to him a somewhat paradoxical weakness for both Hitler and Stalin (and harping on the latter’s atrocities, as if Fuentes is somehow unaware of them). He ignores how Fuentes’s and the lifestyle influencer Andrew Tate’s visions contrast and incorrectly conflates Fuentes’s brand of Catholicism and the “new pagan Right.” He seems not to realize that Burkean platitudes are unpersuasive under our antiracist constitution, or that unironic pleas to “authentic Americans” and “true conservatives” appear preposterous to young men who have seen the wholesale cheapening of American identity and reckon there is little left of America to conserve. Mahoney approaches subjects like neoconservatism and the Russo–Ukrainian war with insight and nuance, but the refusal to take seriously the more substantive and timely issues raised by Fuentes—and, similarly, the tendency of others to discount Fuentes’s ideology as mere rebellion—will only further alienate the marginalized and disaffected young men who follow him. Leo Strauss described in German Nihilism how the opponents of the young German nihilists, those adolescents who mounted a moral protest against liberal democracy and the prospect of a universal and homogenous state, committed a “grave mistake.” They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities. As a consequence, the very refutations confirmed the nihilists in their belief; all these refutations seemed to beg the question; most of the refutations seemed to consist of pueris decantata, of repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart. Those young men had come to doubt seriously, and not merely methodically or methodologically, the principles of modern civilisation; the great authorities of that civilisation did no longer impress them; it was evident that only such opponents would have been listened to who knew that doubt from their own experience, who through years of hard and independent thinking had overcome it. An effective refutation of Fuentes would not simply exalt Churchill, but distinguish between his transhistorical magnanimity and his historical and all-too-human shortcomings. It would not imply that National Socialism posed a threat to “Western civilization” without explaining how it posed a threat. It would not appear to minimize Israeli ethnonationalism or to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, no matter how “militant, obsessive, and emotionally charged” the latter might be. It would not mistake Fuentes’s moral protest for mere rebellion, and it certainly would not from its position of relative comfort dismiss his daring as only “skin deep.” An effective refutation would address the substantial questions raised directly and indirectly by Fuentes’s polemics. How do diversity and particularity differ? Are Roman Catholicism and particularity consonant? What about Roman Catholicism and the American way of life? Are moral actions justifiable as such, or should they be judged in light of their consequences? Is meritocracy possible under multiculturalism, or is ethnic nepotism intrinsic to human nature? Under what circumstances, if any, is it just to champion the national or ethnic identity of one political community but not another? Is it possible to be both a dual citizen and a good citizen? Is Israel, viewed in a certain light, postliberal? Does Israel feature prominently in both right- and left-wing discourse because it so brightly illuminates the contradictions within postwar liberalism? Have the deracinated youths of the West fashioned a chalice out of Israel into which they pour their struggles with identity, belonging, and meaning? We must confront these and other questions unflinchingly if we are to reach disaffected young men. Mahoney is correct that they have “grown up in a culture afflicted by many false pieties,” but he is wrong to attribute all false pieties to the left. Many originated within conservatism and are promulgated to this day by conservatives. It is no wonder that Fuentes and his followers—the rootless progeny of an immoderate “age of the adolescence”—have come to question all received opinions. What they need are “old-fashioned teachers . . . undogmatic enough to understand the aspirations of their pupils”—teachers who can “explain to them in articulate language the positive, and not merely destructive, meaning of their aspirations.” Only then might they be receptive to an education in moderation and the other virtues. None of this is to deny the odious stench of ressentiment that pervades Fuentes’s speech, his dubious personal motivations, or his aspirations for power. But kneejerk recitations of liberal orthodoxy and the synonymous charge of “willful and systematic distortion of empirical realities” will not accomplish much, given the depth and severity of the problem. They may in fact compound the problem. But, unlike the interwar Germans, we still count among us a few teachers of the old breed. Now is their time. The post Rote Responses to Fuentes Will Not Suffice appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics It Has Always Been About Foreign Policy Movement conservatism’s excommunications have always centered on one set of issues. When Murray Rothbard passed away in January of 1995, William F. Buckley Jr. obituarized him in National Review, excommunicating the libertarian and his followers one final time. “Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God,” he remarked acidly.  Rothbard’s sins according to Buckley? He cites Rothbard’s disdain for a joke Buckley made about privatizing lighthouses, and also a scrupulosity that brought him to denounce such beloved figures as “Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and — yes — Newt Gingrich.” Mea culpa! Mea culpa! How dare we critique the great Milton Friedman or Newt Gingrich? But among other denunciations is Buckley’s account of Rothbard rushing out to applaud Nikita Khrushchev on one of his visits to President Dwight Eisenhower, insinuating one last time that Rothbard was in bed with or insufficiently hostile to the communists. Rothbard remembered this differently; he hoped for peace talks between the two world leaders, and was shocked by the militant opposition National Review had to meeting the “butcher of Ukraine.” There’s more than meets the eye to the differences between Buckley and Rothbard, particularly the memory of this episode. Rothbard alleged that the modus operandi of fusionism and especially National Review was to excommunicate the non-interventionist right from the mainstream of American conservatism. Little has changed. It appears that today’s attempted Buckleyite and neoconservative excommunications are less because of bigotry or conspiracism, but more because of foreign policy.  National Review quickly went to bat against the non-interventionists of the Cold War from its founding.  John T. Flynn had been one of the most popular writers opposed to Franklin Roosevelt and leader of the New York chapter of the America First Committee. He had begun as a progressive and turned rightward. He began to denounce communism and socialism in the United States, but he did not fall into lockstep with the post-war Cold Warrior consensus.  Rothbard recounts in his The Betrayal of the American Right that Flynn submitted an article to Buckley, criticizing the militarism of the Cold War as a continuation of the corrupt New Deal system and Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Buckley sent the article back, telling the veteran Old Rightist that he did not comprehend the danger of the Soviet Union adequately; he included a $100 check. Flynn sent the money back. National Review also soon began to enforce an orthodoxy about American-Israeli relations. In an article in the November 1956 edition, defending America against the accusation that segregation would reflect on the nation internationally, Guy Ponce de Leon included a line that caught the eye of the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss: “Even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to create the first racist state in history.” Strauss sent NR Editor Willmoore Kendall a letter defending the Jewish state as an exemplar of conservative principles, despite its politics at the time being dominated by Labor Zionists. National Review never allowed severe criticism of the state of Israel to grace its pages again. (James Burnham would argue at times that Middle East policy should not be oriented around it, but nobody was able to tell Burnham off.) National Review was a publication not dedicated to the Cold War’s liberal containment, but rather by confrontation and rollback. Often forgotten are James Burnham’s arguments for limited nuclear warfare against Russia. Sam Tanenhaus in his authorized biography of Buckley documents National Review’s faux Pentagon Papers in order to counter anti-Vietnam War sentiment. Buckley and National Review had cooked up their own version of the Pentagon Papers in an attempt to undercut the loss of morale around the war, as well as to suggest the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. But, of course, the excommunication of the John Birch Society is cited as the shining moment of Buckley’s career. There, we are told, conservatism excised the antisemites and the conspiracy cranks. Never mind that Ludwig von Mises was on the Editorial Board of the Society’s publication, American Opinion, and would defend Welch to Buckley.  The reality is much more revealing of Buckley’s priorities. In 1962, anticipating Barry Goldwater’s eventual presidential run, Buckley, William Rusher (then National Review’s publisher), and Russell Kirk helped the senator from Arizona plan how to handle the popularity of the JBS. They feared that some of Welch’s more outlandish claims—that Eisenhower was a conscious communist agent, for example—and the group’s crusade against Earl Warren’s Supreme Court would rub off poorly on Goldwater. They decided upon a denouncement of Welch and a subsequent letter by Goldwater distancing him from the Society’s leader while not accusing the average Bircher of being a kook. Buckley declared victory (although Goldwater in the end did not). But the number of Birchers would continue to grow, even drawing in Buckley’s own mother. Soon they provoked Buckley once more. By 1965, Welch and the Birchers were claiming that the Vietnam War was a communist plot to distract from an internal subversion by communists in the federal government. While this was a stretch, to say the least, the dissent on the Vietnam issue was unacceptable to Buckley. Aided this time by the former (or “former”) CIA man and senior editor Burnham, Buckley dedicated an issue of National Review to the Bircher question.  Frank Meyer in his column declared that the conspiratorial mind of Welch was “why the patriotic and anti-Communist followers of the Birch Society are now, in the Vietnam crisis, being lined up by its leadership directly in opposition to the interests of the United States and to the struggle against Communism.” Burnham himself, who had held off from the first round of attacks against the John Birch Society, dedicated his column––Third World War––to attacking Welch for his position on Vietnam. The mastermind behind National Review’s foreign policy had never been a fan of Goldwater, always being more of a Rockefeller Republican. But the John Birch Society’s new stand against the Vietnam War (“Get US out!” their publications and billboards cried) bothered Burnham: “Its stand on Vietnam confirms, not for the first time, that any American who seriously wants to contribute to his country’s security and well-being and to oppose Communism will have to stay clear of the JBS.” The issue also featured letters from Goldwater, Sen. John Tower, and Russell Kirk denouncing the Society. National Review’s dedication to the Vietnam War led it to expel the John Birch Society once and for all. Buckley would denounce even his own disciples, like Gary Wills, for opposition to the Vietnam War.  The magazine’s interventionist line was not limited to Vietnam. Later, the Manhattan Twelve—the alliance of Buckley, Burnham, Meyer, and other fusionist hawks—revoked National Review’s support for President Nixon. Their contention was that Nixon had opened talks with Communist China and was thus insufficiently hawkish. (Nixon’s failed price controls would come after the Manhattan Twelve issued their documents.) Skepticism of American involvement with Israel met similar punishment. Buckley’s rambling monograph In Search of Antisemitism would give ground for the media and neoconservatives to attack Pat Buchanan for his criticism of the Israel lobby in the United States. Even if one holds that Buckley did not intend to excommunicate Buchanan, he certainly laid the groundwork for the neoconservatives to finish the job. National Review’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” condemned those members of the right who were skeptical of the American war in Iraq. At every turn, the fusionist excommunications have been primarily over the issue of foreign policy. Everything else takes the back seat. Buckley declared in 1952 that “we have to accept Big Government for the duration [of the Cold War]—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” For a man who styled himself a conservative, a libertarian, and an individualist at different moments of his life, he seemed more than willing to sacrifice members of his movement on the altar of confronting the Soviet Union.  Today the story repeats itself. At every turn, the excommunications always demand we excommunicate those who maintain opposition to foreign wars (today, most often Israel’s wars). Dave Smith, the libertarian comedian, is cast out because of his lack of credentials to speak about foreign policy––unlike Douglas Murray, with his bachelors in English and his guided IDF tours. Tucker Carlson, the most vocal and popular of restrainer voices, “platforms” evil people—never mind that he pushes back on them, he doesn’t do it adequately––and so has become an “antisemite.” Some have begun to turn on J.D. Vance for his anti-interventionist views, playing games of guilt by association for his friendship with Carlson to try to get rid of the vice president.  The great excommunicators are out once more to defend the establishment’s hawkish foreign policy. They may pretend it is over bigotry, but every excommunication always focuses upon those who express skepticism of war. It has always been about foreign policy. The post It Has Always Been About Foreign Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Shabana Mahmood’s Desperate UK Immigration Gambit Labour’s leftist pieties are finally buckling under the weight of public opinion on mass migration. Britain’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, may seem like the unlikely face for a harsh crackdown on migration. She is herself a second-generation migrant—a Muslim of Pakistani descent. She once called for a general amnesty for all illegal migrants working in Britain. Yet last week, she unveiled a package of measures she described—quite reasonably—as the “most substantial reform to the UK’s asylum system in a generation.” Her critics on the left immediately accused her of channeling Donald Trump, Tommy Robinson, and even Adolf Hitler. Mahmood deserves credit for recognizing two things. First, that the UK’s asylum system—supposedly designed to help those fleeing war and persecution—has simply become a funnel for illegal immigration, facilitating the mass arrival of small boats over the English Channel. This is a system that is so dysfunctional as to be actively dangerous, failing to keep out serious criminals, let alone sort the genuinely deserving from those gaming the system for access to the labor market. Second, that the British public will not put up with this any longer. From the multibillion-pound cost to the taxpayer of housing thousands of arrivals to the now frequent, highly publicized attacks by asylum seekers on members of the public, the consequences of allowing unchecked illegal migration have pushed the British people to breaking point.  Illegal immigration has led to mass protests outside asylum hotels. It has led to national flags (both the St. George’s Cross of England and the Union Flag of the United Kingdom) springing up in towns, cities, and villages across the country. It is an issue no political party intent on its own survival can afford to ignore. Mahmood’s plans aim to reduce the pull factors drawing illegal migrants to Britain. These include tightening the criteria for gaining asylum, reducing the number of appeals for failed asylum claims, making refugee status temporary rather than permanent, threatening visa bans on countries that refuse to repatriate their own citizens, and forcing asylum seekers to pay for the cost of processing their claims and housing them.  A cynic might say that Mahmood and the Labour government have simply been panicked by the polls. If an election were held tomorrow, Keir Starmer’s party would face a total electoral wipeout. The prime minister’s personal approval ratings are even lower than disgraced Prince Andrew’s. And the failure to get a grip on migration—consistently shown in polls to be the number one issue facing the country—is one of the major factors behind Labour’s woes. (One dimwitted Labour MP accused the home secretary of trying to “appease” the voters with her hardline messaging, as if fulfilling the electorate’s demands were not the very purpose of democracy.) Yet there is every reason to believe Mahmood is sincere in her desire to get a grip on this issue. She has argued, convincingly, that the broken asylum system is driving racial division, and restoring control over the borders is not capitulating to bigotry, but necessary to keep it in check. “The pace and scale of change has destabilized communities,” she says. This rebounds against all people of color, who are suddenly made to feel like they don’t belong, that their place in Britain is somehow illegitimate. Mahmood has been on a journey towards a faction within the British Labour Party known as “Blue Labour” (blue being the color of the UK Conservative Party). This is a faction that mixes social conservatism and patriotism with a more socialistic or social-democratic view of economics. Its enemies are the woke left and the libertarian right. It has no truck with trans rights or no-borders utopianism.  What Mahmood has left unsaid—even if some of her reforms undoubtedly touch on this—is that the public are furious about the two-tier treatment towards new migrants. There is a widespread sense that the welfare of asylum seekers is prioritized over that of British citizens. Indeed, this was even made explicit in a recent court case over a now notorious asylum hotel in Epping, Essex, on the outskirts of London. After an Ethiopian residing in the hotel, who had arrived on a small boat just days before, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and an adult woman who tried to rescue her, months of protests ensued locally. When the local authorities tried to shut the hotel down, Mahmood’s predecessor, Yvette Cooper, fought back. In court, Home Office lawyers argued that the British state’s legal duty to prevent asylum seekers becoming destitute trumped any and all concerns voiced by the Epping residents.  There is also widespread anger that the criteria for gaining asylum are overly generous and, in any case, rejection rarely leads to enforced removals. Migrants—including criminals slated for deportation—have gained asylum on the most spurious and illogical grounds imaginable. An Afghan flasher successfully argued that his “sexually disinhibited behaviour” would put him at risk in his own country. An Albanian gangster avoided deportation because his son would not like the taste of “foreign chicken nuggets.” Being transgender, being an alcoholic, and being a paedophile have all in recent years been successfully cited as reasons for bestowing refugee status on illegal migrants. Not that it matters especially whether asylum is granted or not. Migrants are rarely removed from the UK, even when their claims are rejected in court, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Emad al-Swealmeen, a Jordanian posing as a Syrian, was twice denied asylum but managed to remain in the UK long enough to try to blow up the maternity ward at Liverpool Women’s Hospital in a (mercifully unsuccessful) suicide bombing. The Afghan illegal immigrant Abdul Ezedi was granted asylum on his third attempt, even after racking up several sexual assault convictions. He then went on to throw a corrosive substance on a female refugee and her children before killing himself in London’s River Thames. Seemingly every week brings a new horror story with a small-boat migrant or asylum seeker at the centre: a child raped in Nuneaton, Warwickshire; a restaurant owner stabbed to death in a bank in Derby in the East Midlands; a woman who worked in an asylum hotel, stalked and murdered by a Sudanese resident. The Home Office’s policy of dispersing migrant accommodation around the country means that the kind of violent depravity that might once have been limited to criminal gangs in big cities is no longer a rare sight in deep England.  So can Mahmood stop the boats and restore Britain’s sovereignty over its borders? There is one main reason to be doubtful: Her party’s (and her leader’s) ironclad commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights, the source of many of the most absurd asylum decisions, is likely to blunt the impact of any reforms.  Nevertheless, it is telling—and not before time—that the British government feels it can no longer duck the issue of mass illegal migration and hide behind the vapid virtue-signalling of the left, who insist the “real” problem is the super-rich on their yachts (who are, in any case, mainly leaving the UK), rather than unchecked arrivals on small boats. Migration is the single largest issue in the UK because it is where the voters most keenly feel their powerlessness.  Their views and life experiences cannot be reconciled with the “no borders” pronouncements of their supposed betters. Shabana Mahmood’s migration controls may be too late to save this struggling Labour government, but they may help the voters feel they have a voice in British politics once again. The post Shabana Mahmood’s Desperate UK Immigration Gambit appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Being Thankful Also After Thanksgiving