Integral to the implausible claim that Donald Trump has wrested the GOP from “conservatives” is a recent statement by former G.W. Bush speechwriter and Fox-news wise man, Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post that “Trump has followed a consistent strategy of neutralizing traditional Democratic attacks by adopting the Democrats’ positions.” A striking example of this strategy cited by Thiessen is Trump’s foreign policy, which sees him “campaigning from the isolationist Left.” Aside from the inconvenient fact that Trump has announced that as president he’ll “knock the sh-t out of ISIS,” there is absolutely no reason that an intelligent person would identify a retreat from the policies of Thiessen’s former boss exclusively or even primarily with “the isolationist Left.”

Only a Neanderthal cave dweller would not notice that self-identified conservatives have been raging against the neoconservative foreign policy for decades, that is, the policy that Thiessen was paid richly to defend. For starters, there are numerous websites, such as this one, that have defended a more restrained engagement with the world than the one advocated by the last Republican administration and it’s unmistakably neoconservative “advisers.” Moreover, the entire Old Right, most notably Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, has been declaiming against neoconservative warmongers for generations, and before them we had George F. Kennan, Robert A. Taft, libertarians of all kinds, and the later Herbert Hoover, warning us to  avoid foreign entanglement. Yesterday I walked into my local post office in South Central Pennsylvania and listened to die-in-the-wool right-wingers, including two army veterans, screaming against further military commitments. None of my fellow residents at the post office could ever be mistaken for a leftist. In fact, they were ardent Trump-supporters, who were worried “about what’s going on in this country.” And they were most definitely immigration restrictionists, although decency prevents me from repeating their opinions on this subject.

Thiessen’s observation that Trump took the position of the Left because he wished to rethink foreign policy commitments, is either false or flagrantly exaggerated. But the media continue to push this line out of convenience. Supposedly a principal dividing line between Right and Left separates those who accept from those who question W’s foreign policy.  Getting people to buy into this nonsense makes things simple for those who control the public debate. Our major ideological difference we are made to believe should come out in a discussion between The Washington Post and The Weekly Standard    or between Charles Krauthammer and Juan Williams.

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Things would look more complicated if one had to take into account certain messy variables, for example, that millions of self-identified “conservatives” most certainly do not favor a return to W’s global democratic foreign policy and that prominent neoconservatives like Robert Kagan are supporting the social leftist Hillary Clinton. After all, Hillary seems closer in her missionary belligerence to the last Republican administration than she does to Trump. And much of the Republican base voted for Trump even after he accused W and his administration of lying about the reasons that they launched an offensive war in Iraq. If the kind of interventionism that Thiessen favors is truly a pillar of the Republican Right, why didn’t the Republican base turn in utter revulsion against Trump and then vote in the primaries for one of Thiessen’s favorites, say George W. Bush’s younger brother, Jeb, in the numbers that Thiessen would have wanted?

Thiessen and his pals are confusing (in a very deliberate manner) two different concepts, patriotism and their updated version of liberal internationalism. It is one thing to be patriotic, in the sense of cherishing one’s country or one’s region and those persons and things associated with one’s home country. Understandably the patriot seeks to protect what he values from harm. It is an entirely different thing to wish to see American armies sent all over the globe to fight a shifting array of enemies, all of them designated as the most recent incarnations of Nazi Germany.

This internationalism becomes downright nutty when it involves dragging as many countries as we can toward the latest model of American “liberal democracy.” Presumably, we’re in danger of losing our country or our souls unless we pursue this dream, and we’re supposed to do so while “leading from the front.”  And what we are supposed to impose, if necessary by force, cannot be any old Western government, but whatever form of that government we have reached the present moment. As I learned from watching Fox news, a regime that does not allow women to vote or gays to wed is inherently oppressive, which I have to believe was what the American regime was up until quite recently. If at some point our leaders and opinion-makers decide to allow sexual pioneers to marry their dogs and cats, perhaps we’ll then be morally required to confer the same liberty on those countries that we are bringing under our tutelage. I recall talking to a neoconservative professor (when he was still talking to me) at a luncheon party, who explained that the war in Iraq was worth our effort because “at last we gave women there the right to vote.” I replied that perhaps it would have been a good thing if some more progressive country than ours had invaded New York City or Boston in 1890 and forced the city fathers to extend the franchise to women. My interlocutor smiled and changed the conversation. Whereupon I knew this guy was clearly no Straussian. If he had been, he would have scolded me as a moral relativist who didn’t appreciate “our values” sufficiently.

The post Anti-Trumpite on Fox appeared first on LewRockwell.

Integral to the implausible claim that Donald Trump has wrested the GOP from “conservatives” is a recent statement by former G.W. Bush speechwriter and Fox-news wise man, Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post that “Trump has followed a consistent strategy of neutralizing traditional Democratic attacks by adopting the Democrats’ positions.” A striking example of this strategy cited by Thiessen is Trump’s foreign policy, which sees him “campaigning from the isolationist Left.” Aside from the inconvenient fact that Trump has announced that as president he’ll “knock the sh-t out of ISIS,” there is absolutely no reason that an intelligent person would identify a retreat from the policies of Thiessen’s former boss exclusively or even primarily with “the isolationist Left.”

Only a Neanderthal cave dweller would not notice that self-identified conservatives have been raging against the neoconservative foreign policy for decades, that is, the policy that Thiessen was paid richly to defend. For starters, there are numerous websites, such as this one, that have defended a more restrained engagement with the world than the one advocated by the last Republican administration and it’s unmistakably neoconservative “advisers.” Moreover, the entire Old Right, most notably Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, has been declaiming against neoconservative warmongers for generations, and before them we had George F. Kennan, Robert A. Taft, libertarians of all kinds, and the later Herbert Hoover, warning us to  avoid foreign entanglement. Yesterday I walked into my local post office in South Central Pennsylvania and listened to die-in-the-wool right-wingers, including two army veterans, screaming against further military commitments. None of my fellow residents at the post office could ever be mistaken for a leftist. In fact, they were ardent Trump-supporters, who were worried “about what’s going on in this country.” And they were most definitely immigration restrictionists, although decency prevents me from repeating their opinions on this subject.

Thiessen’s observation that Trump took the position of the Left because he wished to rethink foreign policy commitments, is either false or flagrantly exaggerated. But the media continue to push this line out of convenience. Supposedly a principal dividing line between Right and Left separates those who accept from those who question W’s foreign policy.  Getting people to buy into this nonsense makes things simple for those who control the public debate. Our major ideological difference we are made to believe should come out in a discussion between The Washington Post and The Weekly Standard    or between Charles Krauthammer and Juan Williams.

Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?

Things would look more complicated if one had to take into account certain messy variables, for example, that millions of self-identified “conservatives” most certainly do not favor a return to W’s global democratic foreign policy and that prominent neoconservatives like Robert Kagan are supporting the social leftist Hillary Clinton. After all, Hillary seems closer in her missionary belligerence to the last Republican administration than she does to Trump. And much of the Republican base voted for Trump even after he accused W and his administration of lying about the reasons that they launched an offensive war in Iraq. If the kind of interventionism that Thiessen favors is truly a pillar of the Republican Right, why didn’t the Republican base turn in utter revulsion against Trump and then vote in the primaries for one of Thiessen’s favorites, say George W. Bush’s younger brother, Jeb, in the numbers that Thiessen would have wanted?

Thiessen and his pals are confusing (in a very deliberate manner) two different concepts, patriotism and their updated version of liberal internationalism. It is one thing to be patriotic, in the sense of cherishing one’s country or one’s region and those persons and things associated with one’s home country. Understandably the patriot seeks to protect what he values from harm. It is an entirely different thing to wish to see American armies sent all over the globe to fight a shifting array of enemies, all of them designated as the most recent incarnations of Nazi Germany.

This internationalism becomes downright nutty when it involves dragging as many countries as we can toward the latest model of American “liberal democracy.” Presumably, we’re in danger of losing our country or our souls unless we pursue this dream, and we’re supposed to do so while “leading from the front.”  And what we are supposed to impose, if necessary by force, cannot be any old Western government, but whatever form of that government we have reached the present moment. As I learned from watching Fox news, a regime that does not allow women to vote or gays to wed is inherently oppressive, which I have to believe was what the American regime was up until quite recently. If at some point our leaders and opinion-makers decide to allow sexual pioneers to marry their dogs and cats, perhaps we’ll then be morally required to confer the same liberty on those countries that we are bringing under our tutelage. I recall talking to a neoconservative professor (when he was still talking to me) at a luncheon party, who explained that the war in Iraq was worth our effort because “at last we gave women there the right to vote.” I replied that perhaps it would have been a good thing if some more progressive country than ours had invaded New York City or Boston in 1890 and forced the city fathers to extend the franchise to women. My interlocutor smiled and changed the conversation. Whereupon I knew this guy was clearly no Straussian. If he had been, he would have scolded me as a moral relativist who didn’t appreciate “our values” sufficiently.

The post Anti-Trumpite on Fox appeared first on LewRockwell.