Reading Larry Auster's website over the years, I find there is much in his spirited commentaries that I agree with. Larry's attacks on liberals and neoconservatives, his stress on the enormous overlap between these two only minimally different groups, his focus on the immigration issue, and his critical examination of the government's war on traditional social relations and religious morals are invariably of high quality. Larry dares to say things that one would rarely see in mainstream liberal and neoconservative publications, and therefore we on the real right owe him a debt of gratitude for these efforts.

An issue, however, that he and I strongly disagree about is his conception of a Judeo-Christian war against Islam. First, I have never shared Larry's fierce revulsion for all Muslims as bearers of violence and hatred. I have known practicing Muslims for most of my life, and among them I have numbered personal friends. I have also never perceived any signs of violence or malice in dealing with these Muslims. Last Sunday my wife and I were with a young Turkish couple in a Turkish restaurant in Allentown, PA; and I found nothing off-putting about the Muslims I saw coming in to eat Halal food. They looked, acted, and ate like the Orthodox Jews whom I have known, and I felt much safer in their company than I would have felt among the inner-city minorities, who may be Pentecostal Christians. Such non-Muslims, in any case, were doing drug deals outside the restaurant in which we were dining.

In 1980, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate, Ed Clark, declared on ABC's Nightline that his party's political philosophy was, in essence, "low-tax liberalism." This line caused Murray Rothbard, among others, a great deal of vexation and led to the "moderate" and "radical" split within the LP and, ultimately, Rothbard's departure from the Cato Institute for the open air of Auburn, Alabama. (This tale is told well by Justin Raimondo.)

Reading David Boaz's recent declarations in Reason, "low-tax liberalism," or at least the low-tax part, is starting to sound like an attractive doctrine in comparison. It's probably unfair to say that in the minds of contemporary Cato luminaries like David Boaz and Brink Lindsey, "libertarianism" boils down to gay marriage, abortion, anti-racism, and Kerry Howley's right not to be looked down upon for her lifestyle choices... but these seem to be central, indispensable pillars of their philosophy. (Though to be accurate, Boaz and Lindsey want low taxes, too, and they sometimes like war.) 

Boaz's main argument is that 18^th and 19^th-centry America was less "libertarian" than people like Jacob Hornberger (and by extension, the Mises circle) think because blacks were discriminated against; in turn, the state's encroachment on personal and economic liberty and its war-making in recent times isn't so bad due to the notable decline of "intolerance." It's not an exaggeration to say that Boaz doesn't consider any society free if he senses that somewhere, some black person is being discriminated against. 

Richard Lowry may be the most culturally illiterate journalist now plying his trade. In a column from several years ago, he seemed unaware of who fought whom in the Spanish Civil War. And he has now exceeded his previous record for silliness. In his latest syndicated effort, he informs us that "liberals' are guilty of trying to wrap health-care reform in a "victory as transcendent as that of the civil rights movement," a revolution that Lowry considers to be a "rare and marvelous thing."

Lowry waxes sappy as he describes what for him is a divine epiphany. He can barely contain himself extolling the "genius of Martin Luther King," who taught us to love each other. And he ends by contrasting the health-care bill with the Christ-like purity of the civil rights protestors, who were concerned with "freedom and securing the most basic rights -- to vote and to gain equal access to public accommodations." Unlike this "mess cobbled together by an embattled, ideological congressional majority," the civil rights movement and King "were catalyzed by sacrificial love."

Now that Lowry has contributed to the replacement theology of the Left, by comparing the civil rights movement and its leader to the early church and Jesus, perhaps it would be appropriate to indicate why the former civil rights activist John Lewis and other black Democrats are entirely correct to view Obama's presidency and his health-care plan as being connected to the real civil rights movement. How else would blacks use what Lowry considers a "basic right" to vote, except to endorse the people and policies that Lowry finds unacceptable?  Would he expect black voters to be libertarians or think like Lowry's neoconservative patrons about the need to place Middle Eastern wars above domestic concerns?

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberal? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Continued from Part I


In Commentary's symposium on Norman Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberal? historian Jonathan D. Sarna calls attention to the fact that "outside the United States liberalism is nowhere near so dominant a faith among Jews. In Israel, to take an obvious example, Jewish liberals and Jewish conservatives are fairly evenly matched."

Actually, Israelis who might remotely be described as liberal are a distinct minority -- the old Labor Party founded by Zionist socialists is on its last legs, accounting for only around 10 percent of the Knesset and functioning mainly to provide a fig leaf of respectability for the dominant ethno-nationalist Right.

Identification with the left is not a general characteristic of Jews; it is, however, a definite phenomenon within countries in the Jewish Diaspora, indicating that in searching for an explanation of the attraction of American Jews to the left, one must also look to this Diaspora experience in Europe and other European-derived societies.

Thankfully, Podhoretz does not try to explain the Jewish attraction to the left as resulting from a moral imperative stemming from the very nature of Judaism itself.

One shouldn't take any satisfaction in the American Enterprise Institute's firing of David Frum, for shortly after Frum got the boot, AEI hired another former Dubya speech writer -- "enhanced interrogation" enthusiast Marc Thiessen. Jonah Goldberg is also now an AEI fixture... (I can't say that I'm well acquainted with Thiessen's work, but there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's shoddy, if not mendacious.)

And one shouldn't conclude that AEI's firing of Frum proved that the institute is serious about opposing socialized medicine. Though I found Frum's argument in his now-famous "Waterloo" piece rather puzzling, he did hit the mark with this comment about think-tank hypocrisy on healthcare:

[W]e do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Indeed. On the fundamental issue of mandating health insurance, the differences between Obamacare and Romneycare are slight. (My friend Jack Hunter has a good video blog on this.)  

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Norman Podhoretz is something of an anomaly. His entire life has been centered around his Jewishness, but he sees himself as an outsider in the mainstream Jewish community. He shares a great many of the attitudes typical of that community, but draws different conclusions about how to navigate the contemporary American political landscape in a way that's "good for the Jews."

One area where Podhoretz is absolutely mainstream among American Jews is his sense of history. The first half of his recent book, Why Are Jews Liberal? lays out his version of the "lachrymose" theory of Jewish history in Europe and America in which the Diaspora has been one long vale of tears since the beginnings of Christianity. Whether or not this view of history is correct, the important point is that this is how the great majority of Diaspora Jews see themselves and their history. (My view is that many outbreaks of anti-Jewish feelings result from our evolved ingroup/outgroup psychology.)

This lachrymose view has major implications for understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora. It proposes that, beginning with an unfortunate theological belief (that Jews killed God), Jews have been passive, innocent victims of marauding non-Jews.

The president wants to extend a ten-month moratorium on new settlements in the West Bank and has voiced opposition to the ones in East Jerusalem. Larry Auster is now sure that Obama's Washington is "an enemy of Israel" and that PM Bibi Netanyahu should declare so openly. Citing Commentary's Noah Pollak and Powerline's "Paul," Auster frets that once the administration's anti-Israel animus comes to a boil, actions like these might soon follow:

1) U.S. support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood, 2) active U.S. opposition to a strike on Iran, up to and including the Brzezinski threat of shooting down Israeli aircraft, 3) Israel's diplomatic isolation in the UN and Europe, and 4) an escalating administration campaign to portray Israeli "intransigence" as a threat to the United States' regional and international security.

In other news, a one-time volunteer to the Israeli Defense Force, Rahm Emmanuel, is still Obama's chief of staff and -- this just in -- former Obama aid Lee "Rossy" Rosenberg, another Chicago boy, has been appointed as the new head of AIPAC. Reports have also surfaced that Israel has captured Joe Biden's heart.   

With "enemies" like these... 

As my past writings on the subject can attest, I think Obamacare is a horrendous, likely ruinous, social program. I can thus summon one and half cheers for the Republican leadership, which despite having backed George W. Bush's unfunded Medicare extension but six years ago, has decided to come out strong against Obamacare, follow the Tea Partiers, and try to "kill the bill."

As a friend wrote to me in an email:

Things can always get worse no matter how much the current system sucks. We should applaud the Republicans here for not trying to reach out and do something "bipartisan." Give me spineless slimeballs over true-believing liberals.

There's truth to that ... but there is also a way in which a political opposition, even a forthright and unwavering one, can do serious intellectual damage to a cause by essentially agreeing with the premises of its adversary and not actually defining what is wrong with the other side.

Much as has been said of me, I know Larry Auster, he's very intelligent, and I respect him. I read his blog just about every day and find him an engaging presence in person. And I hope he takes the following criticism in the constructive spirit in which it is written.

I often get the sense that Larry has turned himself into a kind of Ayn Rand of the paleo Right. So often, do I see him expelling others from the circle of "conservatism" -- to the point that the only conservatives left are himself and a handful of intimates -- inflating a single issue or difference of opinion into an existential Either/Or, and proclaiming the absolute consistency of his philosophy (while in actuality it's full of the elisions and willed forgetting characteristic of an ideology.)¹

His recent comments on AltRight follow this trend...

The problem with dealing honestly with race is that if you’re familiar with and talk about the science/common sense on group differences it’ll overshadow everything else you want to say. Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you he’s an environmentalist, creationist, neo-con and child molester. The last descriptive term is the only thing that you’re going to take away.  Everything else becomes irrelevant. So it is with the term “racist.” The term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

With that in mind, take a look at Frum Forum’s Tim Mak’s new article on Alternative Right.  See if you can find anything in there that would be out of place in a report put out by the SPLC.