RadixJournal - The Politics of Angst

00:00:00.000 So, Paul Gottfried, thanks for joining me.

00:00:02.560 Oh, thank you for having me on.

00:00:04.740 Well, Paul, what do you think happened in Virginia this past Tuesday?

00:00:09.920 Well, I think that the Republican establishment obviously underestimated the vulnerability of their whip, their house whip, Cantor,

00:00:26.560 who seems to have made some very, very big mistakes in terms of failing to understand the reaction against amnesty in the United States,

00:00:42.640 particularly in the wake of what President Obama has done to encourage illegals to come into the United States,

00:00:49.600 and a free-market, quasi-libertarian opponent.

00:01:00.100 David Brett was able to win the primary and will be running for Congress as the Republican candidate from Cantor's district.

00:01:10.780 And I think that although Brett would like to see this race as being about who supports free enterprise and capitalism,

00:01:22.000 the pivotal issue was immigration.

00:01:25.140 It was the fact that he took a strong anti-immigrant, or at least a strong position against the amnesty bill,

00:01:31.560 that I think won him the race, despite the fact that he spent less than $200,000, which was chicken fee,

00:01:41.040 in comparison to the $5 million that was made available to Cantor.

00:01:45.400 No, I think that in itself was pretty amazing, the fact that he did this.

00:01:50.160 And then also, I think it was also interesting just how polling seems to have been brought into question.

00:01:59.040 It seemed like Cantor was quite confident that victory was in his grasp.

00:02:08.080 And he was 30 percentage points ahead.

00:02:10.520 Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a similar situation where polls were that wrong.

00:02:16.160 I think that's, again, a remarkable thing.

00:02:18.760 And I don't even know exactly quite what to make of it.

00:02:22.760 I mean, I would say—go ahead.

00:02:25.120 Yeah, I would know what to make of it.

00:02:26.460 I think polling is very often ordered by politicians, and the pollsters work for them.

00:02:32.620 And if these were Republican establishment pollsters that Cantor was using,

00:02:37.840 it is not at all surprising that he had him out in the lead, in a comfortable lead, winning by 30 points.

00:02:44.240 Well, yeah, yes and no.

00:02:46.260 I mean, surely they don't want to give someone bad information.

00:02:49.320 I mean, then no one would want to hire them again.

00:02:52.780 I mean, I think in terms of doing internal polling, I think the politicians do want to know the truth.

00:03:00.140 Well, I really have two minds about this.

00:03:02.620 I mean, Karl Rove screwed up the polling in the presidential race, and he still pretty much is able to run the Republican establishment.

00:03:09.340 And everything that he says is—

00:03:12.540 But he seemed to be denying—well, yeah, that's true.

00:03:16.140 Although he has—I think his reputation has really gone down.

00:03:19.120 But remember, he and—what's his name?

00:03:22.180 Dick Morris were almost in denial mode for a series of months.

00:03:27.480 I think they were denying the polling more than they were believing some crazy other poll.

00:03:34.380 They seemed to just be denying reality.

00:03:36.940 I don't—we don't have to go back to that, to two years ago or one and a half years ago.

00:03:41.900 But I did find it amazing when you would look at people who were serious demographers and how it was so clear that Obama was going to win.

00:03:53.780 And then if you looked at the Drudge Report or Fox News, it was really like you were in an alternative universe.

00:04:01.360 Yes, it was.

00:04:02.100 It was kind of amazing.

00:04:03.360 You're still in an alternative universe because I've discovered the only reason that Brad won was that Democrats came out on Moss to vote for him.

00:04:12.780 Well, according to George Will, the people really didn't care about immigration.

00:04:16.520 The big issue was that Cantu did not visit his district often enough.

00:04:20.520 Right.

00:04:20.720 Well, I think that is total nonsense.

00:04:22.640 I mean, we're in an alternative universe of these kind of liberal Republicans like George Will.

00:04:26.900 But the one thing I would say, though, is that this seems to fit a familiar pattern.

00:04:33.560 And that is that—I mean, let me set this up for a little bit.

00:04:36.700 I think Brad is clearly an intelligent guy and someone who at least wants to think about these issues after reading some of his writings on—brief snippets from some of his writings on theology and economics.

00:04:54.600 I can't say that I can't say that I agree with anything from his worldview, but nevertheless, he clearly has at least wants to think about these things, which sets him apart from many politicians, probably most all of them.

00:05:08.620 But that being said, there seems to be this familiar pattern where there's a wave of very negative social mood.

00:05:18.040 And I'm thinking about, say, the midterms of 2010 and particularly following after the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009.

00:05:29.160 And then, you know, it just kept getting worse.

00:05:31.400 You had the Tea Party.

00:05:32.320 So you have all these people who are—it's basically just total negative energy.

00:05:37.580 And I don't—I'm not putting a value judgment on whether that's good or bad.

00:05:42.240 I'm just saying it's about hating the establishment or the existing politicians and wanting to throw them out.

00:05:49.380 And so a lot of these people, like Brad, again, I don't really—I think he's a smart guy in comparison to the rest of them.

00:05:57.860 But, you know, I don't think he's really a brilliant operative.

00:06:00.960 I think he just—he just had a surfboard and he just rode this wave of negative energy.

00:06:06.100 I don't think he did anything in particular.

00:06:09.300 If he had run in 2004 or 2008, he probably would have lost by 30 points to Cantor and no one would be talking about it.

00:06:16.420 But there's just this wave of negative mood.

00:06:19.140 Well, but I think he also took one position on immigration that was useful.

00:06:24.160 Right.

00:06:24.260 Because he tapped into the negative mood.

00:06:26.220 Yeah, but the rest sort of sounds like the kind of stuff that libertarians talk about.

00:06:33.040 You know, we might have seen Cato publishing some of these statements.

00:06:37.100 However, most of those libertarians want, like, open borders.

00:06:40.200 They're in favor of massive immigration to keep the labor supply here, you know, and people should be able to do a transferable labor and be able to cross borders, etc.

00:06:49.860 No, no, no. Paul, you don't understand.

00:06:50.900 If we bring in 25 million unskilled workers, that will only benefit American workers.

00:06:58.060 You just don't understand.

00:06:59.260 Because you don't—yeah.

00:07:00.740 Arithmetic doesn't imply—doesn't apply to this matter.

00:07:04.140 No, I'm being sarcastic.

00:07:05.760 Yeah, but I think the point is that he was smart to take the anti-immigration position because that is what distinguishes him from other libertarians who probably would, you know, would have simply failed miserably in running against Cantor.

00:07:23.740 Right.

00:07:24.680 I mean, people did not vote for his libertarian economics.

00:07:27.320 Yeah, but what I'm getting at here is that we seem to see this familiar pattern where you have all this negative mood, people are mad, and they'll vote for someone because they kind of—they get a sense.

00:07:39.020 Ah, he's against amnesty, whatever.

00:07:41.520 But they basically elect these fairly, you know, high-minded libertarian types who I don't think will really do much of anything to change what's bothering them.

00:07:54.580 Like, I think they have a sense.

00:07:56.440 I think a lot of white people—this district is fairly well off. 0.76

00:08:01.960 I mean, if you think about Republicans voting in the 7th District, this district includes Richmond and Culpeper and some places like that.

00:08:09.760 These are pretty—you know, people who are voting in a Republican primary, I would guess middle-class to upper-middle-class white people.

00:08:16.960 And they see—you know, they have a sense of angst.

00:08:21.220 They have a sense that they're losing it.

00:08:22.880 And then they vote for someone. 0.99

00:08:25.280 Ah, let's throw the bums out. 1.00

00:08:26.560 Let's vote for this guy. 0.98

00:08:27.820 But then this guy is this kind of libertarian, somewhat goofy, though high-minded, you know, professor.

00:08:36.680 And he won't do anything to help them.

00:08:39.300 And then the process begins again in six years.

00:08:42.260 So it's just—it's a kind of predictable wave that happens.

00:08:46.520 But I disagree with the view of this as sort of like, you know, pushing up the rock of Sisyphus.

00:08:52.280 I think what you see here is a growing mass of people who are associated with the same kind of reaction that we see in France among those who voted for the Front National or the people who voted in Hungary for the Jobbik Party.

00:09:10.460 Although in Hungary, you're dealing with a much—still a much more conservative country than you have in Western Europe or the United States.

00:09:15.980 But probably some of the people who voted for UKIP were like that.

00:09:19.860 And their presence and their protest will not go away, even if Brad turns out to be, you know, another Paul Ryan in disguise or something sort of equally innocuous, because the protest is there.

00:09:37.260 And the things people protesting against have not really been addressed.

00:09:42.120 The system cannot address them, in fact, because the system is based on open borders, globalism, and multicultural ideology together with corporate capitalism.

00:09:52.700 And that system is not going to satisfy the 20 or 25 percent of the population that remains irreconcilably on the right.

00:10:00.860 And that's where the votes came from that put Brad over the top.

00:10:05.720 I mean, you're perfectly right, I mean, in the sense that, you know, he might just be some goofy professor who will turn out to be exactly like the other guys who are sitting in Congress.

00:10:16.140 But the protest won't go away.

00:10:18.480 And the fact that the Republicans—

00:10:20.860 Excuse me?

00:10:22.980 But the protest can and will be controlled.

00:10:26.360 I think unless it changes, it can be controlled endlessly.

00:10:31.040 Because if all you do is articulate your discontent, your angst, in terms of some kind of no amnesty and vague free market ideology, we've seen this before, and we'll see it again a thousand times.

00:10:48.240 It will just keep going.

00:10:49.400 But it may not come with the free market ideology the next time around.

00:10:54.220 It may come with a violently anti-capitalist message.

00:10:57.500 As these people discover that multinational corporations are one of the chief culprits for the problems that concern them,

00:11:06.080 and the large corporations are socially on the left, they favor multiculturalism, they favor open borders, and so on.

00:11:14.920 As in the case of France, where the Front National has become very critical of capitalism.

00:11:19.620 Oh, yeah.

00:11:20.800 The same thing is imaginable in the United States.

00:11:23.380 So that the libertarianism may drop out of the picture eventually.

00:11:28.280 It might, but I think at least now, and maybe not even for people who are my age and younger and maybe a little bit older as well.

00:11:37.540 But I think more for people who are your age and the baby boomer generation, you know, they've gone through this massive wave of good times, certainly since 1980.

00:11:50.180 And it really was, you know, really since the end of the Second World War.

00:11:55.940 And so for them, you know, the free market, that just means like a bigger house or a second vacation home or another car.

00:12:04.620 But I think maybe for people my age and people who are younger, I'm around 35, that we almost don't have that American dream at all.

00:12:16.360 And it's a lot bleaker and a lot, it's a lot more obvious that globalism can bite back.

00:12:25.100 It's not always good for everyone that, you know, it might actually eliminate the kind of jobs that people want and give them, you know, jobs folding T-shirts in the gap.

00:12:37.760 But, but I don't know. I mean, this is my, my prediction is that BRAT, within two years, let's say within four years, BRAT will vote for comprehensive immigration reform.

00:12:49.980 It just won't be called amnesty.

00:12:52.260 And it, but it will be some weird, it will come from the Republicans, and it will be some weird, you know, free market-y, conservative kind of thing.

00:13:03.420 But it won't be this Chuck Schumer and his amnesty proposal, which is easy for them to oppose.

00:13:10.780 It will be some conservative, quote-unquote, version.

00:13:13.540 And they'll support it, because they almost, they in a way kind of paint themselves into a corner.

00:13:18.780 Because when they talk about amnesty, amnesty, it's about like rewarding a lawbreaker.

00:13:23.520 But that's really not the real issue.

00:13:26.000 I mean, the real issue is that you have just a wide open legal immigration, and that it's a demographic and racial displacement.

00:13:34.380 I mean, that's the real thing.

00:13:35.580 So just talking about amnesty, amnesty, you're kind of, it's a euphemism, and in a way you kind of paint yourself into the corner of saying like, okay, no amnesty, never, that would be terrible.

00:13:46.180 But we'll have, you know, we're going to double legal immigration, because all legal immigration must be great.

00:13:51.660 So I just think this is what's going to happen.

00:13:53.920 I just feel like, I mean, I'm sorry, maybe I'm more, I'm more pessimistic than Paul Godfrey.

00:13:58.440 But I just kind of see this happening.

00:14:01.400 I agree both are bad, but I would say that amnesty is particularly bad, because it doesn't just mean amnesty.

00:14:10.420 As my son, who lives in London, pointed out to me yesterday, all those kids who are being put on the border and becoming a cross, 1.00

00:14:19.560 these are the anticipatory signs of amnesty, because they know what amnesty means,

00:14:26.240 is you can come into this country illegally to let you in and give you all kinds of social rights.

00:14:32.160 And the 14th Amendment has now been interpreted as being universal, not just limited to American citizens.

00:14:38.460 That's what came as a result of this California decision that stopped the application of Proposition 187 about 10 years ago.

00:14:51.340 So, I mean, I think the amnesty is also very, very bad.

00:14:55.080 I agree with you, ultimately we have to deal with legal immigration as well, but I think amnesty has implications going beyond this.

00:15:02.060 It is clear to me that you are right, the Republican Party is committed to amnesty and further immigration, 0.93

00:15:10.420 largely because of its dependence on multinational corporations.

00:15:14.720 Even now, they have replaced Cantor with Kevin McCarthy, a representative from California,

00:15:22.140 who is much more openly and emphatically committed to the amnesty than was Cantor.

00:15:27.700 Cantor was, they went after Cantor because he equivocated.

00:15:30.960 This guy is openly in favor of the amnesty.

00:15:33.440 So, obviously, the leadership is not afraid that anything is going to happen,

00:15:38.780 and they believe they can control people like Brat.

00:15:41.340 And they may be able to, because I think the Republican Party cannot be reformed.

00:15:45.700 As you know, that's my view.

00:15:48.160 Because of the people who control the party, whether it's the Rupert Murdoch neoconservative media empire,

00:15:54.920 the multinational corporations, or the defense industry,

00:16:00.020 the Republican Party is incapable of becoming an effective vehicle for the right.

00:16:06.380 And we would need another party that could perform that function.

00:16:10.760 It's not going to come out of the Republican Party.

00:16:13.160 And I don't even think those people who put Brat over the top,

00:16:16.900 at least many of them, were in fact not regular Republicans.

00:16:21.120 They were just people on the right, who may or may not be registered.

00:16:26.900 Well, they were Republicans.

00:16:27.820 I'm a registered Republican at the moment.

00:16:29.000 I was not in the past.

00:16:30.280 I just voted in the primary.

00:16:32.220 You know, I think that clearly the people who voted for Brat were Republicans.

00:16:36.080 I mean, I think actually it is an open primary, which gives it more,

00:16:40.620 there's more space for others.

00:16:43.080 Like, there is this conspiracy theory that I don't think was very significant

00:16:48.880 about Democrats voting for Brat just to screw Cantor or something.

00:16:53.200 It's been pushed hard by the Republican establishment.

00:16:55.480 Yeah, I doubt that that played a significant role.

00:16:59.980 But it is more open.

00:17:01.140 That being said, I mean, remember, most people don't even follow this stuff.

00:17:06.540 If you're voting in a primary, I think you're a pretty committed Republican.

00:17:11.560 You know, I mean, these are the types.

00:17:13.000 These are the same types, people who are in the Tea Party and so on and so forth.

00:17:16.480 I mean, they're, I think, you know, sometimes it's obvious what this is.

00:17:20.620 It's about people mad at immigration, Tea Party types, older white Americans

00:17:27.460 who have this angst, and a justified angst, in my opinion.

00:17:33.160 But you're also told things, I mean, Megyn Kelly, who's the voice of the Murdoch Empire,

00:17:39.800 made a comment two days ago that, I don't know why people turn against Cantor.

00:17:43.140 He voted, I don't know, 80% or 90% of the time with the conservatives.

00:17:48.160 Well, I hear that all the time.

00:17:49.760 The question is, what is it to vote with the conservatives?

00:17:53.120 It means voting for the defense industry.

00:17:56.440 It means supporting their crazy foreign policy, neoconservative foreign policy.

00:18:02.460 It means voting in a certain way that favors large corporations.

00:18:06.140 How do you vote on social issues?

00:18:10.060 I'm sort of curious.

00:18:11.140 How does he stand on immigration?

00:18:14.580 Because, I mean, to me, what defines you as a conservative are primarily social issues.

00:18:19.560 Foreign policy, much of what they consider to be conservatism, I consider to be Jacobin,

00:18:24.920 the Jacobin left or something, or the Olsonianism.

00:18:27.820 So, you know, I really don't buy the argument that because...

00:18:31.740 Well, the Jacobins had a good foreign policy.

00:18:34.020 Oh, you're right.

00:18:35.080 It was the Girondins who were the bad ones.

00:18:37.080 Right.

00:18:37.360 We shouldn't slander Jacobins.

00:18:41.260 Yeah.

00:18:42.380 No, I'm sorry.

00:18:43.960 I don't mean to compare neoconservatives to Jacobins.

00:18:46.520 It's the Girondins.

00:18:48.260 Right.

00:18:48.660 We've cleared war on everybody to spread democracy.

00:18:50.920 Yeah.

00:18:53.260 Yeah.

00:18:54.420 But speaking of this Jacobin foreign policy and all of that kind of stuff, why don't we

00:19:00.360 talk just a little bit about what's going on in Iraq at the moment?

00:19:06.160 And I don't think we need to focus too much on details because those are ongoing.

00:19:13.780 And I'm sure by the time I even get around to publishing this podcast in the next 24 hours,

00:19:20.000 things might have changed.

00:19:22.340 There might be new developments.

00:19:23.360 It's an ongoing situation.

00:19:24.900 But I think generally speaking, we're seeing something like the fall of Saigon at the tail

00:19:30.980 end of the Vietnam War, where this war that, you know, began with Kennedy and a lot of

00:19:38.780 pomp, and then it became extremely controversial.

00:19:42.880 It was connected with the Cold War.

00:19:44.360 It ended in these pathetic scenes of helicopters, you know, leaving the American embassy.

00:19:51.880 And I think something like that is going to happen in Iraq at some point.

00:19:56.180 And obviously, there are also these things that we don't understand that we go into.

00:20:00.860 I think one thing we clearly didn't understand when we went into Iraq was the Sunni-Shia rivalry.

00:20:08.320 And, you know, Saddam was a bastion of the Sunni Ba'ath Party, which is a kind of almost

00:20:15.820 the Prussians of the Middle East, a kind of quasi-fascistic Christian party, actually,

00:20:21.660 of Sunni Arabs that were dominant.

00:20:24.080 And what has happened at the end of it is not that we've spread democracy or ended terror,

00:20:29.400 but we've actually seen a new Shia dominance, where Iran, our supposed other deadly enemy, 0.64

00:20:36.940 is actually one of the few people supporting the regime that America established, which

00:20:44.300 is just this irony that I don't even know where to begin.

00:20:48.300 But let's not talk so much about the foreign policy aspects.

00:20:52.680 Let's talk a little bit about, in a way, the domestic aspects about this.

00:20:59.160 And we've touched on this before.

00:21:01.720 I mean, I can remember when I first got into all this stuff.

00:21:07.100 And by that, I mean just reading serious political writers, thinking of myself as kind of on the

00:21:14.260 alternative right, so to speak, or thereabouts.

00:21:17.000 It was probably, you know, after graduating from college and maybe just a little bit later,

00:21:23.280 so in the beginning of the 2000s, right at the heart of the debate over the Iraq War.

00:21:28.960 And at that point, it really seemed like the paleoconservative movement or the alternative

00:21:36.420 right was defined by foreign policy.

00:21:38.680 It was defined by being skeptical, to say the least, of George W. Bush and all this kind

00:21:44.260 of stuff.

00:21:44.700 And that really was what defined us, at least for a number of years.

00:21:49.980 And I think in some ways now we're at the end of it all.

00:21:53.400 And this foreign policy, I think clearly the American global hegemony is weakening.

00:22:00.000 We might have a, what is it, a force, a centrifugal force pulling back into the center.

00:22:07.300 We are not as a decisive global factor, actor.

00:22:11.060 We are not the indispensable nation of global affairs.

00:22:13.680 And so I'm kind of curious where this leaves us.

00:22:19.480 Sorry, that was a very long-winded way of asking a question.

00:22:22.000 But what do you think about all this, Paul, in the sense of, to put it in a nutshell, the

00:22:26.460 fact that the paleocons or the alt-right or whatever you want to call it was really defined

00:22:32.560 by foreign policy over the last 15 years.

00:22:36.600 Well, I think that the paleoconservatives not only criticized the Iraqi war, but they also went

00:22:55.980 after the neo-Wilsonian assumptions on which it was based, they were absolutely correct in what they said, but they had absolutely no influence that I can see on the political debate.

00:23:08.120 The media, both liberal and neoconservative media, excluded them from discussion, so they didn't matter.

00:23:15.320 Even if they were right, they were not listened to because they were considered to be the far-right.

00:23:22.440 They were not the part of the right with which the left wanted to engage in dialogue with.

00:23:28.340 And, of course, the neoconservatives did everything they could to destroy the credibility,

00:23:32.720 the economic well-being or whatever of the paleoconservatives who were not reconciled to neoconservative domination of the right.

00:23:43.920 So they had no influence.

00:23:45.440 They were right, but they had no influence.

00:23:48.480 It's just like, you know, someone like George Kennan was right about many things and probably had no influence on them,

00:23:54.320 but far more than the paleoconservatives did.

00:23:56.500 But now the paleoconservatives have no influence, and they're not saying anything particularly relevant,

00:24:05.800 with the exception of Pat Buchanan, who is one of the few paleoconservatives who does get listened to,

00:24:13.900 but not entirely by paleoconservatives.

00:24:16.480 I think a lot of younger people listen to Buchanan as well.

00:24:19.560 But I don't think the paleoconservatives, as a group within the conservative movement, have any influence anymore.

00:24:29.760 I think the average paleoconservative is probably approaching 80.

00:24:34.300 Younger paleoconservatives seem to be terrified of being accused of racism.

00:24:39.600 And as we know, this has, you know, led to self-described paleoconservatives expelling other paleoconservatives for organizations

00:24:50.120 because they hang out with people who read books on sociobiology.

00:24:55.700 And so I think there is this fear, which I see at least among some paleoconservatives,

00:25:02.760 which also even calls into question their being principled at this point.

00:25:07.920 But I don't think they have very much influence left.

00:25:12.600 I think they will survive probably about another 10 years.

00:25:16.060 Then they will become a very, very small footnote in the history of conservatism.

00:25:20.620 Yeah. Well, you know, I was thinking about this.

00:25:22.900 I remember when I first started working at the American Conservative magazine.

00:25:29.000 I think I might have told this story to you before.

00:25:31.380 And we were, it was in 2007, and I was there with Scott McConnell and Keira Hopkins.

00:25:37.340 And we were watching this Republican debate, a presidential debate that was happening very early.

00:25:43.980 So you had all these, you know, McCain and Ron Paul was there and some other people who have become forgettable,

00:25:51.560 Giuliani and so on and so forth.

00:25:52.960 And with the exception of Paul, of course, they were all doing this hyper pro-war stuff.

00:25:59.880 And Scott McConnell said, you know, I guess a little bit morbidly and jokingly that,

00:26:08.220 wow, we have really had no influence whatsoever on the Republican Party.

00:26:12.340 And I think that was true.

00:26:14.940 But it's almost like, I think, and that's true, but at least they fought the fight.

00:26:19.260 I mean, if you think about, you know, Amcon really going after the neocons, being explicit about it,

00:26:26.340 I thought that was quite brave.

00:26:28.320 But if you look at it now, where they've ended up, now that foreign policy is no longer a decisive issue,

00:26:35.360 and I think they did not affect the decline of the empire whatsoever, but it is declining.

00:26:40.620 So some other factors affected it.

00:26:42.500 Well, but they've also moved noticeably to the far left.

00:26:45.940 Well, that's what I mean.

00:26:47.120 I wouldn't even call it the far left.

00:26:48.720 I mean, I would say, like, Rod Dreher, I can't imagine anyone reading him who is not...

00:26:53.800 Well, he's kind of insipid leftish.

00:26:55.760 Yeah, I don't...

00:26:56.620 But no one would read him who's not some kind of suburban housewife.

00:27:01.480 I mean, it's totally meaningless nonsense for women, where he writes about his, like, little sister roofie.

00:27:08.280 Try Noah Milman.

00:27:09.180 Try Noah Milman.

00:27:10.080 Well, Noah Milman is just some kind of Jewish leftist from New York. 0.53

00:27:12.920 I mean, pretty predictable.

00:27:15.500 But, yeah, but even the rest of them are just...

00:27:18.340 It's just this kind of, like, non-decisive, non-offensive, vague conservatism that really, again, it doesn't affect anything, really.

00:27:30.820 It's just kind of like, oh, look, I'm not going to offend anyone.

00:27:34.000 What is conservative about them?

00:27:37.180 I mean, I can't find anything conservative.

00:27:38.420 Well, they're conservative in the most basic sense of the word, in the sense that they're just kind of perpetuating the status quo, and they don't, again, they don't challenge anything.

00:27:48.160 I mean, you know, they're, in a way, they're deeply conservative, in the worst possible sense of the word.

00:27:55.520 Well, they're conservative in the sense that they accept the leftist state as quo and defend it.

00:28:00.940 Yeah.

00:28:01.820 Basically.

00:28:02.440 In Berkean language or something.

00:28:03.340 In Berkean slash Catholic slash Rothbardian language.

00:28:07.240 They defend modern America, or apologize for it, at least, yeah.

00:28:14.020 But they don't even claim, they don't claim to be paleoconservative anymore.

00:28:17.340 No.

00:28:17.440 And a lot of the paleoconservatives, I've noticed, are just extreme Catholics. 0.77

00:28:23.000 Yeah.

00:28:23.200 Or Catholic converts, or something like that.

00:28:26.460 They were not, when I wrote about the paleoconservatives, I mean, I coined the term, when I wrote about them back in the 1980s, they were not what they are now.

00:28:34.880 Right.

00:28:35.460 Oh, no.

00:28:35.840 Yeah, I mean, you even found people among them who were interested in IQ questions and sociobiology.

00:28:42.120 I mean, Tom Fleming was a zealot, you know, of sociobiology.

00:28:48.780 Now, of course, he's an extreme Catholic convert or something.

00:28:51.880 Well, I would say the Sam Francis element seems to have, you know, it departed with Sam, sadly, who died around 10 years ago.

00:29:02.640 Mm-hmm.

00:29:03.480 And that is very sad.

00:29:05.840 Yeah.

00:29:07.040 No, I just think they're wandering all over the place because they're old, they have no effect on anything, nobody listens to them anymore.

00:29:14.180 Or, I think there will be a right, but it will have nothing to do with paleoconservatism.

00:29:19.400 Mm-hmm.

00:29:20.000 And I say this as somebody who is, for better or worse, who coined the term, who writes about them.

00:29:29.000 I think they've had no effect, or very little effect, and a right will survive, but will not be a paleoconservative right.

00:29:40.560 Interesting.

00:29:40.960 What do you think will be some of the defining features of the new right?

00:29:45.220 What I think will be the defining feature is the willingness to make friend-enemy distinctions, use Kohlschmidt's term, and probably a sense of ethnicity, broadly understood.

00:30:00.820 Like, you know, defending Western men or something like that, against invasion, it probably will have some kind of racial overtone or undertone.

00:30:10.740 I think it's unavoidable at this point.

00:30:12.600 It is unavoidable, because that's the way we live in.

00:30:15.460 It is unavoidable, because the whole left is organized as an anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western, anti-bourgeois, of course, you're anti-bourgeois as well, but the left is certainly an anti-bourgeois kind of coalition.

00:30:28.440 So, I mean, obviously, what they've organized themselves against will react by being racial.

00:30:35.460 There's no way out of this.

00:30:36.940 Yeah.

00:30:37.660 Yeah.

00:30:38.180 Well, like all other anti-bourgeois...

00:30:39.520 It could also be masculinist or something.

00:30:42.000 Or favor male virility or something like that.

00:30:45.340 It will look much more like fascism, I would argue, than like paleoconservatism.

00:30:52.700 Neoconservatism will have nothing to do with it.

00:30:54.960 Neoconservatism is a movement that came out of the Jewish left.

00:30:57.540 Well, you know, this is an interesting thing.

00:31:00.080 Obviously, I resonate with everything you're saying, but this is an interesting thing that I maybe hadn't thought of, which is that paleo and neoconservatives, they're in a way kind of twins.

00:31:11.220 And they're both going down together.

00:31:15.840 Because, again, I guess it depends on how you define the neoconservatives, but I define them strictly as this generation of Jewish intellectuals, and a lot of them have married one another.

00:31:30.940 It's actually quite remarkable, who certainly came from the Trotskyist left and began voting for Reagan and then developed a very aggressive foreign policy and would often define it in terms of either supporting Zionism or spreading freedom or whatever.

00:31:53.340 But, you know, I would define it as those.

00:31:56.200 That is also going away.

00:31:57.780 Because, you know, whatever you want to think of as Obama, as he's a leftist or what have you, you can see he doesn't have his heart in any of this foreign policy stuff.

00:32:08.840 Like Bush did.

00:32:10.180 No, he didn't.

00:32:10.500 You know, he just doesn't believe in it.

00:32:12.180 He doesn't really want to do it.

00:32:13.140 But I think the Syria situation was amazing, where he was just passed the buck to Congress, and it was kind of like, well, I don't want to do this, but maybe you guys can go evade Syria. 0.92

00:32:22.100 And then he just forgot.

00:32:23.420 It was all forgotten a month later.

00:32:25.580 I thought it was remarkable.

00:32:26.620 And, you know, so I think in a way, both the paleos and the neos are kind of dying together.

00:32:35.480 I wish what you were saying is true.

00:32:37.480 I think the neocons will be hanging on for a very long time because of their power structure.

00:32:42.520 Yeah.

00:32:42.740 They have the money.

00:32:43.520 They have the media connections.

00:32:45.620 The corporate capitalists lavish them with gifts.

00:32:48.760 They might die from being overweight and from being so sybaritic because of all the money and the perks that they have.

00:32:57.120 I do think that there is no market for what their foreign policy doesn't exist in the United States.

00:33:04.800 However, they have all this power.

00:33:07.180 And what I think they may do is keep quiet, if it's possible for them to do this, keep quiet about foreign policy.

00:33:15.160 They get one of their nondescript candidates, elected president, and it's someone like Ryan or Jeff Bush or somebody like that.

00:33:24.720 But, you know, they'll then surround that person with their friends, and they probably will push us into more neoconservative wars.

00:33:34.200 Eventually, they probably will lose influence.

00:33:36.400 I think the problem is they do not in any way represent a real right.

00:33:40.960 They're part of the left, which has allied itself with corporate capitalists.

00:33:47.580 They have nothing to do with the right.

00:33:50.180 And by the way, I'm not praising the right.

00:33:52.340 I'm simply describing the right.

00:33:53.980 When I talk about, you know, an ethnic right, one that does not favor the status quo, one that reacts against the left in a massive, violent fashion, 0.92

00:34:07.300 I mean, I'm not praising these people, but this is the right.

00:34:12.240 And at some point, it is going to emerge here and in Europe.

00:34:17.360 And, you know, I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow.

00:34:20.640 But I think people can just be pushed around so far.

00:34:23.640 And there is going to be a reaction to what's taken place.

00:34:27.300 And I think that in its own small way, this has begun in Virginia.

00:34:36.060 I think the people who voted for Brad, they may have voted.

00:34:38.500 I agree with you.

00:34:39.180 For somebody who's innocuous, who may end up voting with the Republican Party,

00:34:42.500 but they are very, very fed up with immigration.

00:34:44.520 And they may soon get fed up with the privileges given to blacks as a victim group, 0.93

00:34:50.580 the gay movement, the feminists, all the rest of this politically correct victimology may come to bother people,

00:34:59.080 particularly if the economy goes south, as I think it will.

00:35:04.080 I can't see a right-wing movement, a real right-wing movement developing here,

00:35:10.180 as it has in Hungary, as it's developed in France and other places.

00:35:14.520 And, you know, we have at least the same percentage of people here who are on the right.

00:35:19.940 And I think this is probably going to happen.

00:35:22.580 This will certainly not be neoconservative-controlled, and it also will not be paleoconservative.

00:35:30.500 Well, something to keep our eyes on.

00:35:33.500 Paul, let's just put a bookmark in the conversation, but I'm sure we'll do it again in the foreseeable future.

00:35:40.000 So thank you for being on the program.

00:35:42.580 Okay, thank you for having me.

00:35:44.520 Thank you.

RadixJournal - June 15, 2014

The Politics of Angst

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