The Magazine

Inside the Beltway, the fact that Turkey is no longer an "ally" of the United States in any meaningful sense is still strenuously denied. We were reminded of the true score on March 9, however, when Saudi King Abdullah presented Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the Wahhabist kingdom's most prestigious prize for his "services to Islam." Erdogan earned the King Faisal Prize for having "rendered outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the Palestinian cause," said Abd Allah al-Uthaimin of the prize-awarding group.

Services to the Ummah

Turkey under Erdogan's neo-Islamist AKP has rendered a host of other services to "the Islamic nation." In August 2008 Ankara welcomed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a formal state visit, and last year it announced that it would not join any sanctions aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the same spirit the AKP government repeatedly played host to Sudan's President Omer Hassan al-Bashir -- a nasty piece of jihadist work if there ever was one -- who stands accused of genocide against non-Muslims. Erdogan has barred Israel from annual military exercises on Turkey's soil, but his government signed a military pact with Syria last October and is conducting joint military exercise with the regime of Bashir al-Assad. Turkey's strident apologia of Hamas is more vehement than anything coming out of Cairo or Amman. (Talking of terrorists, Erdogan has stated, repeatedly, "I do not want to see the word 'Islam' or 'Islamist' in connection with the word 'terrorism'!")

On the whole, Glenn Beck is unique on the mainstream right. He is perhaps the only member of this clique to treat Bush with the contempt he reserves for Obama. And no one on the mainstream right has done what Beck has to illuminate the catalysts to America's insolvency: monetary policy and state profligacy. Still, as a recovering neoconservative, Glenn often loses his way.

Beck frequently confuses genuine forces for liberty (Ron and Rand Paul, Peter Schiff) with snake-oil merchants (the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Republikeynsians of the Wall Street Journal). Although Beck had a breakthrough at CPAC – declaring fleetingly that "We don't need to export democracy; the best example to the world is to lead by example" – he persists in identifying patriotism with a blind support for the two wars we have going, and appears partial to opening up a third front in the Middle East.

Glenn also vastly overestimates the virtues of the "American People," and underestimates the forces (state-managed mass immigration) that are dissolving what remains of that people and busily electing another. (Glenn: Once the country is 50 percent Third World, you might as well be talking to the hand.)

And the other day, the Fox News host insinuated that Geert Wilders, an influential Dutch parliamentarian working against the spread of Islam in his country, is a man of the fascist, far-right.

In Kingsley Amis's novel Stanley and the Women, the protagonist's son begins to exhibit strange, unpredictable, violent behavior. Stanley, the protagonist, consults a psychiatrist, who gives him some waffle about "affective disorders" and the like. Frustrated, Stanley goes for a second opinion to an old friend, a doctor who has seen everything and is old enough not to give a damn about keeping up with fashionable jargon. After examining the young man this oldster delivers his diagnosis: "Your son is mad."

Presumably that doctor was not a heavy user of the DSM. That is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authoritative text approved by the American Psychiatric Association for telling us when we need the attentions of APA members, and for what. This month, the APA announced proposed changes to the next issue of the DSM, due to come off the presses in 2013. This will be the fifth version of the DSM, the previous four having come out in 1952, 1968, 1980 (partially revised 1987), and 1994 (partially revised 2000).

You can read up outlines of the diagnostic categories and proposed changes on the DSM-5 website. I was surprised at how many categories there are -- nearly 300 in the DSM-IV. (The APA seems to have switched from Roman to Arabic numerals.) Some of them sound terrifying: Intermittent Explosive Disorder, for example -- "Several discrete episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in serious assaultive acts or destruction of property."

Robert A. Taft is generally seen by the Old and Alternative Rights as the last major national political figure, narrowly defined, that shared many of our principles. Evidence of the Senator's popularity can be seen in the existence of The Robert A. Taft Club and the fact that The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft by Russell Kirk, first published in 1967, has been re-released in 2010. Going back and reading the work, however, makes me wonder whether we're not seeing Taft and the Old Right through nostalgia colored glasses.

Robert A. Taft didn't enter national politics until his 50s. His father, former president William Howard Taft, implied on more than one occasion that he wished his son had more ambition. It wasn't until 1938 that Taft the son, motivated by the desire to make sure Roosevelt's New Deal didn't destroy the American way of life, left the politics of his native Ohio and joined the U.S. Senate. He would remain there until his death in 1953. Principles was Russell Kirk's interpretation of the Senator's political philosophy based on the latter's public statements, articles and one book, the A Foreign Policy for Americans (1951).

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.

In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.

As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

It's been repeated so many times and it appears to be true. That is, conservatives take longer to internalize and promote the politically correct dictates that liberals concoct. In other words, liberals invent some platitude or piece of dogma that becomes standardized in the public mind. Conservatives initially fight the new mandate, but then, before you know it, they have joined the liberal bandwagon. They then set about denouncing others for a lack of enlightenment, as they help to disseminate the very terminology or social trend they once sensibly scorned and ridiculed.

Think of just about any exaggerated and over-abused expression. We all know how the "racist" tag has been done to death. Conservatives used to denounce libs for making a fetish of this term. Not any longer. Conservatives now can hardly wait to punish an opponent with the "racist" smear, just as heartily as a die-hard Democrat. The word is now as much a part of the conservative lexicon as are the smears "un-American" and "unpatriotic." In fact, many of these so-called independent thinkers on the right appear to equate a person who harbors sentiments that "exclude" others as un-American. "Inclusion" is the order of the day – because liberals taught them so. Now that Sarah Palin is on the scene, conservatives are warming to the task of smearing opponents as "sexist." Yet another victory for their liberal mentors.

If a "racist" is someone who prefers the company of members of his own ethnic group as opposed to others, why isn't this an individual choice that a true conservative would endorse? Apparently it is not, for such a person, no matter how benignly he expresses his preference, is generally attacked by conservatives just as belligerently as liberals. After all, doesn't he understand that rejection of others might result in "hurt" feelings? And isn't it "feelings" that count over individual rights?

The March issue of The American Conservative features Ron Unz's long essay, "His-Panic: The Myth of Hispanic Criminality." His surprising conclusion, contrary to most of the technical literature, is that Hispanics in the U.S. do not commit crimes at higher rates than white Americans.

Unz's article is laudable for its straightforward, dispassionate discussion of a sensitive issue. His methodology, however, is problematic, and his conclusion is wrong. A proper analysis of the data indicates that Hispanics have a substantially higher crime rate than whites.

The key statistic here is the Hispanic incarceration rate divided by the white incarceration rate. Let's call this number HDW for short. So hypothetically, if four out of every 100 Hispanics are in prison, and two out of every 100 whites are in prison, then the HDW is two, meaning Hispanics are incarcerated at twice the white rate.

At first glance, the national HDW seems to be rather damaging to Unz's case. Table 13 in the 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report, featured prominently in Unz's article, makes the HDW calculation straightforward. When we include prisoners of both genders and all ages in federal, state, and local confinement, HDW is 2.62.

As I've been rereading Professor Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's three-volume Oxford History of the American People from 1964, I've been thinking about the old Protestant Establishment.

Morison (1887-1976) was himself a leading member of the Protestant Establishment (liberal Boston Brahmin wing). His extraordinary career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian (for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, for which he had organized a research expedition by sailing ship from Spain to the New World) turned middle-aged fighting naval officer exemplifies how an old-fashioned Establishment that self-confidently viewed itself as holding its country in trust for its posterity felt it ought to behave.

Of course, you aren’t supposed to think like that anymore. Hence, the top people now treat America like a short-term transaction rather than a long-term investment.

I grew up in Manhattan in the 1940s and early 1950s, and save a scattering of Puerto Ricans, few Hispanics were to be found. Then, after almost four decades of being a Midwesterner, I returned to Manhattan in 2004. I immediately saw Mexicans, El Salvadorians, and similar Spanish-speaking immigrant workers everywhere. Spanish was the lingua franca in restaurants, nursing homes, building maintenance, and construction, among others. Employed blacks were visible, too, but as far as I could tell, nearly all were recent immigrants from the Caribbean. Outside of occasional retail clerks (almost entirely female) and messengers, the native black working population had, despite contrary census data, seemingly vanished, at least as far as I could observe first hand. Even once historic “black jobs” like cleaning lady and nanny seemingly now lacked a substantial native-born black presence.

What explains this employment transformation and, critically, where have all these blacks gone?

Julius Evola (1898-1974) was an important Italian intellectual, though he despised this term intensely. As poet and painter, he was the major Italian representative of Dadaism (1916-1922). Later he became the leading Italian exponent of Integral Traditionalism or Perennialism, the intellectually challenging esotericism of René Guénon (1886-1951). Evola enjoyed an international reputation for books on eastern religious traditions that won the respect of scholars such as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. His 1943 book on early Buddhism, The Doctrine of Awakening, was translated in 1951. It was more than a generation before a second translation appeared, in 1983, when Ienner Traditions published 1958’s The Metaphysics of Sex, reprinted as Eros and the Mysteries of Love in 1992, the same year it published his 1949 book on Tantra, The Yoga of Power. The marketing appeal of books about sex is obvious, but these works are serious studies, not sex manuals. In 1995 Inner Traditions reprinted The Doctrine of Awakening and began publishing translations of his other books, including Revolt against the Modern World, his fullest account of the World of Tradition, which he opposed to the degenerate modern world.

In Europe, Evola is also known as a brilliant and incisive right-wing thinker. His books, New Age and political, were translated into French under the aegis of Alain de Benoist, leader of the French Nouvelle Droite. His books and articles have appeared in German since the 1930s. Translations into English continue to appear. Italian New Age publisher Edizioni Mediterranee keeps his books in print and has republished some with good texts and new introductions. Evola never belonged to a political party or held a political or academic post, but 25 years after his death his books are available in Italian, French, German, and English.