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A commenter named Sage McLaughlin in had the following sage words in a discussion thread based on an entry of mine over at Takimag.com:

Even a fully libertarian system, were it possible to implement one, would require force to maintain, since libertarianism itself isn’t what significantly large communities of people have ever wanted for themselves.  So the promise of giving each person whatever he can get for himself is a hollow one, since one of the things people want is to live in a community that reflects their own desires and hierarchy of values, and invests those things with some authority.  Libertarianism says people shouldn’t want that, or at least that they aren’t justified in insisting upon it, which is a normative claim that must be proved philosophically, not empirically.  Either Larry Flynt or I can have the kind of society that we want, but not both, and to concede to him everything he claims about the good of society, while claiming to be neutral on the question, is to decide the issue in the most dishonest possible way.

Here is a typically uninformative article at the New York Times on anti-immigrant rioting in South Africa. As screwed up as South Africa has become since instituting majority rule, it is still many times better off than its neighbors and has attracted large numbers of illegal immigrants, chiefly from nearby Zimbabwe. What’s interesting is that the Times does not want to tell us who is perpetrating the killing, even though South Africa is an internally divided society where the meaning of anti-black violence changes significantly depending upon who is the perpetrator. My suspicions were aroused because the signature crime–lighting people on fire–has an infamous history among the black ANC and its supporters.

I had to look to other sources, but my suspicions were confirmed: this is native black South African violence being perpetrated on black immigrants. Since all of South Africa’s current problems are supposed to be rooted in the “legacy of Apartheid,” the Times felt the need to suppress this fact. It doesn’t fit the liberal script. This is nothing short of journalistic malpractice and an undeniable example of liberal bias. The story gives American readers, used to tales of white Afrikaners oppressing blacks, no context about South Africa’s current troubles. Eliding over black mismanagement of Africa is a common journalistic practice, much like the way the Times tells New York readers about violent criminals on the lam wearing “blue sweatshirts” and “red sneakers,” yet never tells would-be victims what the perpetrators look like because to do so would show when the criminals are minorities, which is a very high proportion of the time (60% black and 28% for Hispanics).

One mark of an ideologue is the tendency to rewrite the past.  Single-issue anti-war paleolibertarians have done so as of late, forgetting their former concern with matters domestic (race, immigration, and the welfare state) and generally revealing their abiding tendency:  an immature obsession with purity and an utter lack of ordinary patriotism.  Arthur Pendleton has the scoop at Vdare.

There is something more than a little bit weird among the small (but vocal) faction at Mises-Antiwar-Rockwell mimicking whoever they happen to be cooperating with at the moment.  In the 90s, it was guys like me.  In the 60s, it was anti-Vietnam activists and the Black Panthers.  Today, it’s schmucks like Noam Chomsky  . . . again.

One confusing development is the identification of any activist foreign policy or non-libertarian domestic policy with neoconservatism, as if pure libertarianism were the true standard of authentic conservatism. This is simply a misnomer. Gaullism is not neoconservatism. Rockefeller Republicans–who are more “libertarian” on issues like gay rights and abortion–is not neoconservatism. Nixonian authoritarian pragmatism is not neoconservatism. And libertarianism is certainly not conservatism. As is evident in the writings of Russell Kirk and older issues of National Review, libertarians have always been uneasy coalition partner with conservatives. The temporary unity of many paleoconservatives and libertarians on the undesireabiliy of the Iraq War should not be mistaken for a melding of the two groups and their views. Even without Bush and the Iraq War, conservatives still believe in ordered liberty, which is to say, an historical and inherited Anglo-American balance of state action and private life. This is traditionally translated as economic libertarianism and social conservatism. That is, while conservatives favor a relatively free economy and a small federal government, no principle tells them that local and state governments cannot engage in everything from traditional control of vice, the provision of public education, prohibitions of drugs, and modest welfare programs for the “deserving poor.”

For a time, particularly the early 1990s, paleoconservatives and libertarians joined forces in opposition to the burgeoning federal welfare state. Prior to this marriage, the Cold War created unity among conservatives of all stripes–including Rockefeller Republicans and neoconservatives–all of whom recognized the need for opposing Soviet Communism. Paleolibertarians existed as a species apart for the most part during this era, with Murray Rothbard infamously saluting Nikita Khruschev during his 1959 visit to the United States. Just as national defense in World War II was not a major point of debate among conservatives after Pearl Harbor, neither too was the need for protecting America, Europe, and various resource-rich corners of the Third World from an explicitly statist and expansionist threat in the form of Soviet Communism. In fact, the alliance with the Soviets against Hitler was itself a point of friction during WWII for many conservatives, otherwise disposed to defer to leaders of state during a national crisis.

The Soviet system also provided a useful symbol with which to contrast the American way of life. Everything from urban renewal, interference with freedom of contract (including the freedom to discriminate), and generous farm subsidies could be legitimately described as a kind of creeping socialism, rooted in the same egalitarian values and technocratic faith that reached its apotheosis in the Soviet Union.

At the end of the Cold War, conservatives were in a state of disunity and ferment intellectually. Neoconservatives demanded a continuation of the Cold War model of interventionist foreign policy and a rejection of the small government conservatism popular in the South and West, while many neo-nationalists, such as Pat Buchanan, demanded a turn inward and a dismantlement of much of the welfare state, while also advocating restrictions on immigration to reduce its largest and (more important) growing constituencies.

If the expanded government power of the Cold War was a necessary evil in the eyes of paleoconservatives, for neoconservatives this constituted America’s finest hour. Neoconservatives, it must be remembered, were liberal defectors from many Democrats’ turn to the New Left at the tail end of the Vietnam War. In the New Left, the neoconservatives saw nihilism, indifference to Soviet expansionism, solidarity with anti-Western (and anti-Israeli) movements for “national liberation,” and alienation from the consensus American position of the Cold War. As liberals with strong ties to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, neoconservatives saw themselves as natural moderates without the taint of racism that characterized the right, which largely opposed the social-engineering utopianism of the civil rights movement, while also avoiding the unpatriotic nihilism of the New Left.

In the early 90s, the burgeoning Welfare State with its invasive focus on the activities of private life and private businesses presented itself as a logical locus of unity among traditional conservatives uneasy with the compromises of the Cold War–compromises that could no longer be justified as necessary and temporary measures to oppose the Soviet Union. This anti-Welfare/Warfare State coalition included the self-described paleolibertarians. As the “emergency” needs of the Cold War ended, paleoconservatives urged a major reduction in America’s foreign policy commitments, just as they had continuously urged an end to the federal government’s involvement in the economy through the “emergency” programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. The divisions between traditionalist paleoconservatives with the neoconservatives–revealed with great drama in the derailment of Mel Bradford’ appointment to head the NEA–became manifest, as the neoconservatives advocated US interventionism for the sake of power, expanding democratic capitalism, protecting Israel, resisting a revanchist Russia, and generally preserving the exceptional US power of the post-war era.

Earlier friction on such varied issues as antidiscrimination laws, the meaning of the Civil War, and the existence and nature of “racism” provided continued fodder for friction. Since liberals, libertarians, and traditionalist conservatives all had various degrees of opposition to the War in Iraq–or developed opposition as WMDs did not materialize and the war’s idealist nature became manifest–pacifist libertarian ideas on foreign policy allowed paleoconservatism in some people’s eyes to be reduced to a single, small government principle. Like any authentic conservatism, paleoconservatism demands different treatments of different situations and peoples. If paleoconservatism is for small government at the federal and international level, it often embraces “republicanism” at the local level, a tradition that extols the idea of a small, self-governing society where the virtue of its members consists in part of the salutary act of considering the good, being an active citizen, and expressing that commitment politically.

Conservatism is defined above all else, in my view, by the instinct to defend a known way of life that is under threat. In the American context, that means the limited government traditions of the Founders, the tone and tenor of civil society provided by the WASP elite, and the rough-hewn unpretentiousness provided by the Scotch-Irish that exists today in America’s scorn for elitism and disdain for dependency. A “conservatism” that decries everything from 1789 onward is not conservatism, but is instead a kind of ideological romanticism. Like any ideology, it does not have to deal with compromise, results, facts, statistics, and lived experience. The past and the present both can be castigated as hopeless compromises. For romantics–including libertarians–the best is yest to come, and if we enact their a priori proposals the perfect society is just over the the next hill, like the Lost City of El Dorado.

Daniel Larison makes a very strong point:  the world does not like the US because of its policies, and the symbolism of an Obama presidency will do little to heal the rifts and unavoidable tensions with the rest of the world:

As I have said before there is scarcely a more disrespectful, condescending attitude towards the rest of the world than the assumption that they can be bought off or won over with something as superficial as a U.S. President with a mixed racial background.  If the Obama fans actually believe their candidate has some legitimate policy changes to introduce, that might be a reason for other nations to respond favorably to him, but on the whole the changes on offer are, like so much else in this campaign, symbolic and aesthetic.  In the end, Obama fans project their own fantasies about “racial reconciliation” into the international sphere, implicitly likening the majority of the world to our minority populations, which is to belittle them a second time.  This relieves them of the obligation to critique seriously U.S. foreign policy, which is the source of some significant part of anti-U.S. animus, since they have already concluded that America’s reputation can be repaired in some measure simply through the election of one man. 

It sure doesn’t help that Obama knows he’s weak on foreign policy and sometimes plays the hawk, like an in-over-his-head manager playing the tyrant to rattle and silence his subordinates.  His appearance and background will do little to help him with counterparts ranging from China to Pakistan to Russia, and his lack of experience and interest in foreign affairs will provide an additional burden if he becomes the President.  George W. Bush is a good example of this problem in action: he could care less about world affairs before he became President, he’s been unduly influenced by idealistic-sounding idiots like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, mucking things up mightily because his ability to think critically about the sometimes conflicting advice he’s getting is severely compromised.

Thomas Sowell reminds us that reality is often comprised of systems in action, where there are no obvious heroes and villains, nor easy entry points for political control.  His reasoning stands in sharp contrast with the sentimentality and demagoging of our politicians on issues such as gas prices:

Some people think that the reason the public misunderstands so many issues is that these issues are too “complex” for most voters. But is that really so?

With all the commotion in the media and in politics about the high price of gasoline, is there really some terribly complex explanation?

Is there anything complex about the fact that with two countries– India and China– having rapid economic growth, and with combined populations 8 times that of the United States, they are creating an increased demand for the world’s oil supply?

The problem is not that supply and demand is such a complex explanation. The problem is that supply and demand is not an emotionally satisfying explanation. For that, you need melodrama, heroes and villains.

It is clear that many people prefer to blame President Bush. Others prefer to blame the oil companies, who have long been the favorite villains of the left.

Politicians understand that. Numerous times they have summoned the heads of oil companies before Congressional committees to be denounced on nationwide television for “greed,” with the politicians calling for a federal investigation to “get to the bottom of this!”

Now that is emotionally satisfying, which is the whole point. By the time yet another federal investigation is completed– and turns up nothing to substantiate the villainy that is supposed to be the reason for high gasoline prices– most people’s attention will have turned to something else.

My question is where are all the environmentalists?  Don’t they realize rising gas prices will lead to smaller, more efficient cars, less gas usage, home-buying decisions based on shorter commutes, and overall positive impacts on our local environment and “carbon footprint” here in the US.  Sure, we’ll have fewer trucks and SUVs, carpool more, and the like. But isn’t that what they always say they want?  Some do, of course.  But environmentalist positions by Democrats are more of a pose. Class warfare apparently trumps environmental concerns in the Democratic Party.

It’s bad enough that the United States criticizes Russia’s elections, the methods it uses against Islamic extremists in Chechnya, and the peaceful sharing of power between Putin and his successor Medvedev, but now certain voices in the government are implying that there’s something wrong with Russia’s celebration of its victory over Nazi Germany by having a military parade. Consider the context: this was the worst, most bloody war in world history, and the Russians bore the brunt of that bloodshed, losing some 23 million people, including 11 million civilians. Further, even with the various horrors of life under the Soviet Union, the Soviet state was powerful and taken seriously on the world scene until 1989. People held down by Soviet reality could take some pride in the nation’s collective power, particularly as private life improved during the Gorbachev era. In the 1990s, under a decade of weak leadership by President Yeltsin, the Russia military went into a state of disrepair, and the Russian state became a laughing stock–a land of prostitutes, fraudsters, selfish oligarchs, military weakness, disappearing pensions, and poverty.

Today life in Russia is good, the military is strong, the economy is improving, and birth-rates are rising. In other words, life is better after Putin’s rule than before, and the nation–full of patriotic people who have always held the military in high esteem–enjoys seeing the military on display, replete with sophisticated weaponry in a state of good repair, operated by troops in a state of discipline and good order.

Interpreting this as “saber-rattling” is a typical misreading of reality by folks schooled in the high theory of foreign policy structural realism. Structural realism takes little account of a nation’s domestic life. It postulates that all states everywhere are aiming for maximum power; it does not matter if a nation is a democracy or dictatorship, nor does it matter that it has ideological and cultural attachments and predispositions. Labeling oversimplified models with fancy names does not make them any more useful; unfortunately, this kind of “crib sheet” thinking is common among Bush’s neoconservative advisers, who studied under the high priests of foreign policy structural realism at the University of Chicago.

There’s a simple truth that too much education can obscure from observers: people like a good parade, particularly when it honors a nation’s military that defeated the Nazis against great odds and after great losses. Americans, who have many criticisms of their own government, have a similarly positive view of the military as the most effective and least self-interested government institution. To look at a parade as an international affairs provocation is a typical misreading of events, though not a surprising one, considering our government’s misunderstanding of the Iraqi people, the nature of the Kosovo terrorist state, and the likely outcome of democracy in the Palestinian Authority.

The prominent display of Soviet symbols does deserve mention. What does it mean? One thing it does not mean is that Soviet-style communism, aggression, and human rights violations are making a comeback. There is no doubt that Putin and Medvedev have rejected Soviet-style control over the economy and the civil society of the Russian people. Private businesses and religious life are enjoying a renaissance. The Russian solution is not the same balancing act of liberty and order as we enjoy in the United States, but neither is that of France, Germany, and the UK, all of whom routinely prosecute conservatives for trumped up charges of “racist” speech. Putin’s positive display of Soviet symbols is part of a broader attempt at national reconciliation.  Putin, to his credit, has embraced the type of solution to national strife employed by de Gaulle after WWII and northern Americans after Reconstruction. That is, he emphasizes those honorable parts of the Soviet past, particularly the strength of its military against the Nazis, while simply setting aside the moral meaning of state control of the economy, the suppression of Russian nationalism, and other evils. This narrative is analogous to the universal recognition of the honor and bravery of the Confederate soldier in America from, say, 1876-1960. In other words, Putin knows that it’s simply too much to ask a man to piss on his father’s grave and for a nation to declare one third or more of its people criminals.  Pride, order, patriotism, and normalcy are paramount, even at the expense of historical accuracy. He’s sought to synthesize the symbols of the pre-revolutionary Russian nation, Soviet military power, and the universal desire for peace and prosperity in the public life and symbology of the new Russia.

Much of modern foreign policy concerns itself with criticizing other nations’ internal affairs, even as diplomats and analysts are steeped in a theory that studiously avoids serious understanding of the character of the world’s peoples and their domestic politics.

Andrew Bacevich–West Pointer,  conservative, father of KIA 1st Lt. Bacevich–criticizes the war in a way that should be persuasive to conservatives, including conservatives like me who initially supported the war for punitive reasons. Namely, it’s now clearly a waste of resources and a strategic error to continue on this course. It’s important not to continue this path, even though leaving Iraq would violate a normally good means to discover good policy: staying would enrage liberals.

Just because many anti-American liberals oppose something, doesn’t make it right. This war, like others, might be wrong for reasons pacifists and unpatriotic globalists don’t appreciate. As Bacevich observes, the war is a strategic failure and will continue to murmur along without any real progress indefinitely:

The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.

What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.

Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.

Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn’t worked. Saddam is long gone, but we’re stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.

I would add that the absolute worst reason to stay in this war is for some emotional notion of national honor and commitment to the troops, impulses that undergird the very unstrategic thinking John McCain and numerous buck sergeants. We don’t go to war to do the conquered a favor. We don’t stay to avenge deaths like some armed camp of Zulus. A nation goes sends its army to war to accomplish foreign policy goals. This same nation can and should withdraw these troops when it’s in our interests to do so, when those goals are out of reach, no longer important, or too costly. It’s not like Iraq is sacred American soil; this is a foreign land, half way around the world, in a very bad neighborhood, populated mostly by uncivilized people whom we do not understand and who do not understand or appreciate our soldiers’ sacrifices.

Sure, we can pig-headedly spend $20 or $30 trillion over another decade, but even if everything turns out for the best, it will be a strategic benefit worth some fraction of that. And then what? We’ll still have al Qaeda to worry about. We’ll still have North Korea. Our borders will be too porous. Our ranks of third world immigrants will remain too numerous. The Middle East will still have large numbers of pissed off young men who are given sanction to vent their anger by their religion.  The deterrent value of staying or leaving is a wash. Iran knows we won’t easily commit to a similar adventure on its territory. Russia and China will still be ascendant in their spheres of influence. Oil will still be scarce and in the hands of unstable autocrats and their resentful subjects.

Vast swaths of people all around the world will not appreciate Iraq as a model, it ends up as stable as Pakistan or Indonesia when all is said and done. Instead of seeing idealistic U.S. sacrifices for democracy, most Arabs and Muslims will perceive a marginally successful bid for power and domination of Iraq’s oil wealth. Most of the worlds peoples will continue to be more passionate about religion, nationalism, ideology, wealth, prosperity, and tribalism than democracy and the rule of law. Not only that, they’ll treat these tangible goods as more desirable than democracy–whether originating from bloody revolutions at home, or imposed from without by an idealistic and ideological United States.

This super-delegate calculator makes it plain why Hillary cannot win.  Essentially, she would need two thirds of the unpledged superdelegates and double digit wins for the remainder of the primaries to pull it off.  I don’t think she’ll quit, though, perhaps through some small hope that a Sirhan Sirhan figure will perepetrate a deus ex machina and sort out this Obama impediment once and for all.

McCain’s mind works as follows: all situations are divided between good and evil. No one is simply mistaken, confused, immature, unwise, or, perhaps, correct in a way that McCain cannot yet perceive.  Though it’s become a bad word, there is such a thing as nuance, and it’s particularly valuable when we’re talking about relations with a large country that we’re not at war with that happens to have thousands of nuclear weapons. McCain seems to think that doubling down on the aggressive policy in the Middle East is good and brave and heroic, so he’s seeking expensive and risky confrontations with China and Russia halfway around the globe, even as he shies away from securing our own frontiers with nearby Mexico.  The latter is prosaic and humdrum, while crusades for democracy in the Caucuses, well, that’s the stuff history is made of.  (Unfortunately, that history will be entitled the Decline and Fall of America.)

McCain has the following in mind:

President George W. Bush said in 2001 that he had looked Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the eye and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Senator John McCain says he looked into Putin’s eyes “and saw three letters: KGB.”

McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight club of industrial powers. He calls for forging a “League of Democracies” to confront Putin and hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev, who takes over tomorrow, on Russian threats against former Soviet republics and rollbacks of domestic freedoms.

The candidate’s approach to Russia signals that he has aligned himself with hard-line foreign-policy advisers who favor democracy promotion above all and rejects advocates of doing business with authoritarian regimes when it suits U.S. interests.

This election should be treated as a referendum on open borders with Mexico and a policy of quasi-war with Russia. As bad as Clinton and Obama are, neither of them is so uncompromisingly single-minded and ideological about these two very stupid passions of John McCain.