REQUIEM FOR THE RIGHT

John Attarian

In his first hour as Britain's Secretary of State for War in 1905, Richard Burdon Haldane, a philosopher and lawyer with a gift for cutting to the heart of matters, silenced his assembled generals by asking them something they hadn't thought through: "Yes, this is all very interesting; but what is the Army for?"¹ Like Haldane's generals, American conservatism's factions are talking away, and their pronouncements may be interesting; but evaluating them requires asking, What is conservatism for?

What Conservatism Is—and What It Isn't

Answering that question entails defining conservatism.  My dictionary defines "conserve" as "to keep in a safe or sound state; to preserve."  Preserve what?  Or as Patrick Buchanan famously asked, "What are conservatives trying to conserve?"

Starting from bedrock realities rather than ideological dogmas, the essential thing to be preserved is the existence of the human group in question.  Since it is clear from observable evidence and introspection that people have both physical and spiritual aspects to their lives, I define human beings as embodied souls.  Human survival thus requires preserving a setting conducive to the survival and reproduction of embodied souls.  This is the ultimate purpose of a civilization and culture.  Civilization provides a framework of rules and institutions for the formation of self-controlled human beings capable of purposeful action conducive to the survival of their group.  Culture expresses and fulfills man's spiritual nature and needs.  A sound civilization equips people to live and flourish together for mutual support, fulfillment, and survival; a sound culture creates an existence which is meaningful and beautiful, and therefore worth living in.  Ultimately, then, conservatism is for ensuring the survival of a civilization and culture as a going concern so as to ensure the survival and continuity of a people.

Society and civilization are essentially contrivances for the protection of women and children, since this is crucial for the continuity of a given population.  This necessarily implies that a true conservatism puts a very high premium on the safety and well-being of women and children, from which flows the conservative stress on law and order, strong communities, wholesome culture, and domestic tranquility.

Being all about conserving, a true conservatism also assigns a high priority to preserving national sovereignty, ethnic and racial identity, and demographic continuity.  Indeed, preserving identity is, as Russell Kirk observed, a bedrock imperative:

It seems to be a law governing all life, from the unicellular inanimate forms to the highest human cultures, that every living organism of every genus and species endeavors, above all else, to preserve its identity.  Whatever lives...resists with the whole of its power the endeavors of competing forms of life to assimilate it to their substance and mode.  Every living thing, as part of a species, prefers even death as an individual, to extinction as a distinct species…. We ought not to be surprised that men and nations resist desperately—perhaps unreasoningly—any attempt to assimilate their character to some other body social.  This resistance is the first law of their being, extending below the level of consciousness.²

From this it is clear that in order to regard the survival and preservation of the white race, or the majority status of American whites, as a legitimate conservative value, one need not—and I do not—subscribe to any theory of scientific racism.  The perfectly normal and legitimate desire of all living beings to preserve themselves and their identity, and the love and solidarity that each normal person feels for his family, ethnic group, nation, and race is sufficient and valid grounds.  It is clear also that one need not hate or stigmatize nonwhites in order to have this sentiment, nor need love of one's own kind translate into hatred of others.

Since life is a whole, lived simultaneously in the political, economic, social, spiritual, sexual, ecological, and still other realms, trouble in any one aspect of existence may be dangerous or even fatal.  Preservation therefore entails a comprehensive vigilance, attentiveness, and caretaking, just as one must look after all aspects of one's health, or a householder must maintain everything from the foundation to the walls, windows, plumbing, heating, wiring, and roof.  Certain policy implications flow ineluctably from this.

For example, since profligate government is economically harmful, conservatism seeks to keep public finance solvent and the currency sound.  Since the preservation of a people is integral to conservatism's mission and since culture and civilization are created and lived by peoples, and ineluctably vary as a population's ethnic and racial composition changes (Carthaginian culture disappeared with the Carthaginians), conservatism is legitimately concerned with America's racial composition, and the appropriate policy this implies is to permit little or no nonwhite immigration, and deport illegals, so as to preserve the predominantly European character of our population, culture, and civilization.  Since our spiritual and cultural heritage is largely Christian, conservatism is legitimately concerned with preventing alien faiths, especially Islam, a militant faith historically hostile to Christianity, from gaining a foothold in America.  Also (which does not exhaust our list), since human life depends absolutely upon the environment, conservatism seeks to preserve the natural environment in a condition enabling it to sustain human life long-term.  Neither an individual nor a society can exist without air, water, food, and energy, and if existence becomes impossible then so, obviously, does everything else conservatives seek to conserve.  In a compelling sense, conservatism starts here.  As Kirk wrote, "There is nothing more conservative than conservation."³

From the need for comprehensive awareness it follows that reduction and abstraction are conservatism's mortal enemies.  They risk overlooking, omitting, or even dismissing important aspects of reality and therefore ignoring or slighting potential hazards and values which must not be treated thus if conservatism is to succeed in its conserving mission.

This implies various corollaries about what conservatism is not.  Conservatism is not synonymous with classical liberalism, because it cannot concur in Lord Acton's dictum that "Liberty is man's highest political end."  It endorses placing prudent constraints on liberty, to, e.g., conserve resources and preserve America's primarily European identity.  Whereas classical liberalism would not censor pornography or closely regulate its sale, conservatism would, so as to prevent pornography from poisoning impressionable young minds, and thereby protect women and children from harm.   Civilization does not reduce to commerce and consumption, nor do human beings reduce to consumers and worker insects.  Accordingly, conservatism does not reduce to free-market economics, nor to making the world safe for corporations, entrepreneurs, and large fortunes.  To conservatism, the bedrock purpose of economic activity is to support human survival and reproduction, and an economy's proper function, then, is to ensure the continued existence of a people and its society and civilization.  Unfettered pursuit of money is destructive to conservative values: the society which conservatism seeks to preserve, and the environment on which all depends.  "Economic conservatism" and libertarianism applaud free trade, immigration, and the export of jobs overseas as promoting economic efficiency; a true conservatism opposes them, since they are making it harder for Americans to form and support families on fathers' incomes.

Equally, conservatism does not reduce to making America a Christian or Catholic country.  Unlimited immigration of, say, Latino Catholics or African Protestants would serve that end—but would also destroy the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of America's mores, culture, government, and institutions, risk calamitous racial friction, and inflict environmental ruin from overpopulation.  Nor, for that matter, is conservatism reducible to, or synonymous with, "white nationalism," because conserving a people or civilization entails addressing many concerns besides race, such as public finance, education, defense, and soil and resource conservation.

Since conservatism seeks to preserve and protect, it also follows that reality must be perceived accurately, in order to promptly spot threats to conservative values.  True conservatism is therefore always mindful of realities.  It acknowledges the reality of evil and the reality of limits on the possible.  Conservatism has no place for abstractions from reality, delusions, or "ideals" which on closer inspection turn out to be wishful thinking or flight from unpleasant truths.  As Irving Babbitt said, the imagination should be "disciplined to the facts," and "Above all, no person in a position of political authority can afford to let any 'ideal' come between him and a keen inspection of the facts."⁴

Finally, true conservatism is emphatically not about preserving the status quo.  At any given time, the human propensity for evil, thoughtlessness, and delusion being what it is, a nation or a people is likely to have adopted doctrines, policies, and ways of life which threaten rather than promote its survival.  For example, libertine sexual mores; unaffordable government programs; institutionalized dispossession of whites; a dysfunctional philosophy and system of education; mass immigration; a mode of urban and suburban life which is socially destructive and spendthrift of energy and resources.  True conservatism would not preserve such things, but strive to eradicate them.

If "what conservatism is for" is preserving America and her people, civilization, and society, then American conservatism is an abysmal failure.  America is entering the worst crisis of its history.  Yet some branches of conservatism are exacerbating the unfolding catastrophe and others are ignoring it.

The Looming Civilizational Crack-Up

In virtually every aspect of our national existence, disastrous trends are operating, any one of which can inflict serious and probably lethal damage.  Many have been worsening for decades and are probably irreversible.  Some have been ignored for so long that it may be too late to do anything about them.  That a terrible time of troubles will unfold in the next few decades is over determined.

Our politics are dominated by two toxic ideologies: liberalism and economism.  Liberalism, an ideology of demolishing the inherited civilization of the West and reconstructing it according to the preferences of liberals, on the assumption that there is no such thing as a given human nature or natural order and that reality is infinitely malleable, is being taken to its logical conclusion of forcibly revising basic aspects of reality—gender roles, race, sexual mores and orientation, religion—and individuals' attitudes about them.

True to its roots in the French Revolution, feminism seeks a Jacobin renovation of the social order by obliterating gender distinctions.  Attempts to normalize libertine sexual mores and homosexuality are too familiar to require elaboration.

Just as Lenin advocated using the state, which Frederick Engels defined as a "special repressive force," for "the suppression of the bourgeoisie,"⁵ multiculturalist liberalism is using the "special repressive force" of the state for the suppression of whites, Christians, and their culture and civilization.  American racial policy quickly became an escalating holy war of hate against whites through forced school integration, affirmative action, quotas, and reverse discrimination, while a Stalinist reign of terror uses the epithet "racist" as Stalin used "Trotskyist" and "wrecker," to discredit and silence dissenters and mark them for destruction.  The Soviets erased tsarist elements in Russian culture and renamed St. Petersburg "Leningrad," Tsaritsyn "Stalingrad," and so on; the American government is purging America of white symbols such as the Confederate flag and renaming public schools named after such nefarious slaveholders as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  The Soviets purged Russia of Orthodox expressions and symbols, demolishing churches or turning them into museums; today, everything from manger scenes to the Ten Commandments is being forcibly purged from American public life.

America's other dominant ideology is economism, the worldview which reduces humans to utility-maximizing, appetite-driven economic animals, reduces life to economics, and argues that only economics matters, for both individuals and public life.  Economism maintains that man's proper course in life is to manipulate matter, money, and other people so as to attain affluence and gratify his appetites, which are by assumption insatiable.  One corollary of this is that the pursuit of material appetite gratification is the primary, or even only, source of happiness.  Another is that economic efficiency is a primary value.  Another is that noneconomic concerns, such as national identity, loyalty to kin, place, religion, nation, ethnic group, race, or way of life are irrational, unimportant, and expendable.⁶

Although commonly perceived as hostile, liberalism and economism reinforce each other.  Globalization is constructing an integrated world economy in which the majority of workers and consumers will be women and nonwhites.  As David Rieff pointed out, "In such a world, the notion of the primacy of Western culture will only be an impediment to the chief goal of every company: the maximization of profits."⁷  Moreover, since American education produces millions of graduates marinated in multicultural liberalism, movies, television programs, and advertising with a leftist (e.g., feminist or anti-male) and multicultural flavor will reach a wide audience, simultaneously serving both corporate and liberal goals.

The mainstream ideology conflates liberalism and the free-market variant of economism, endorsing both modern capitalism and an ever more elaborate welfare state.  Affluence and "expanding consumer choice," Paul Gottfried observed, make people willing to swallow liberalism's social reconstruction, while the welfare state not only facilitates liberalism's agenda but pacifies the lower orders while the corporate kleptocracy enriches itself.⁸

Economism's service to that kleptocracy is obvious.  It preaches liberating the kleptocracy from social control, rationalizes its conduct, and makes Americans willing to live with the results—after all, our dynamic, globalized capitalist economy delivers the goods which life is supposedly all about: abundant cheap commodities fabricated in low-wage countries; monster sport-utility vehicles; fast food; effortlessly accessed, lurid, often pornographic entertainments; an ever-expanding array of gadgets (cell phones, computers, big-screen TVs, compact disk players, microwave ovens, etc.) and an unprecedented array of exotic ethnic foods.

Loyal to nothing but itself, the kleptocracy is shortsightedly sacrificing the economy's long-term viability to reduce costs and maximize short-term profits.  Exporting millions of jobs has depressed millions of household incomes and makes it impossible for Americans to buy the goods and services they produce.  Immigration, causing wages to stagnate and displacing American workers at all skill levels, from janitorial labor to computer science, has the same pernicious effects.  Under these circumstances our consumption-driven economy is functioning only through insupportable indebtedness.  Globalization, immigration, and corporate downsizing are creating the worst economic insecurity since the Great Depression.  Tens of millions of Americans have virtually no savings.

Even as Americans' ability to afford our way of life is declining, it is becoming unaffordable, one obvious symptom being exploding health care costs, another being relentless inflation.  Although Americans seldom notice inflation because double-digit inflation has been absent for over twenty years, inflation is an economic cancer.  Annual inflation of three percent seems innocuous, but will destroy half of the dollar's purchasing power if continued for twenty-four years.

Simultaneously, federal finances are collapsing.  The collapse of fiscal discipline has sent federal budget deficits soaring from $157.8 billion in fiscal 2002 to a record $374.2 billion in fiscal 2003, with a $500 billion deficit possible for next year.⁹  Beyond this plunge into red ink looms a crisis of unaffordable old-age entitlements as our population ages.  Social Security and Medicare outlays accounted for an estimated 6.94 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2003; under their "most likely" actuarial assumptions, the programs' actuaries project that the programs' cost will take 8.93 percent of GDP in 2020 and 12.39 percent in 2040, and going still higher later.¹⁰

Thanks partly to capitalism's disruptive and subversive social impacts and to liberalism's social reconstruction project, American society is gradually disintegrating.  The hypermobility promoted by corporations and by Americans' obsession with careers and affluence is dissolving community and family.  Technology and the modern economy have destroyed the traditional family's household economy with well-defined, differentiated gender roles.  The substantial demolition of the industrial, mining, logging, and agricultural sectors has devalued male characteristics of physical strength, endurance, and courage; this, plus the frequent necessity for two incomes, is accelerating the functional interchangeability of men and women.  Feminism, libertine mores, and easy divorce also continue to dissolve the family, with such things as ubiquitous unmarried cohabitation, illegitimacy, and the raising of many children without fathers.  More and more children are neglected, unsocialized, and poisoned by toxic entertainments, poor diets, and libertine sexuality.  The predictable social consequences are grim.

Despite decades of complaints, our incompetent and politicized education system continues to produce illiterates, ill-informed and deluded soft liberals, narrowly trained amoral careerist barbarians, and implacable feminist and multicultural fanatics.

Finally, unnoticed except by scientists, environmentalists, and some well-informed observers, we are destroying the environmental basis of our existence.  Since most conservatives are unaware of this ultimate crisis, extensive exposition here is appropriate.

Salinization of cropland from prolonged irrigation is reducing crop yields on some 30 percent of irrigated land in America.  In California's Imperial Valley, more land is being taken out of use than brought into use thanks to salinization.¹¹

Urban sprawl is rapidly destroying rural land, including the farmland which feeds us.  Development around Atlanta entails bulldozing some 500 acres of raw land weekly; in 1988-1998, 190,000 acres of tree cover in the Atlanta area were lost.¹²  The U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that during the 1990s three million acres of rural land were developed each year.  Development at this rate until 2100 would devour 300 million acres, an area equal to 57 percent of the land east of the Mississippi River.  America currently has about 357 million acres of cropland; developing 300 million acres of it would subtract about 80 percent of it by 2100.¹³  Our inability to feed a soaring population with such a diminished cropland area is obvious.

America's water supply is stressed in many locations.  The Ogallala Aquifer under the High Plains states is being depleted faster than it is being recharged.  So are other aquifers such as those under Tucson and Long Island.  Human diversion of water from the Colorado River is so great that often only a trickle actually reaches the sea.  While America's per-capita use of water is actually declining, population is expected to keep rising; for example, Texas's population is projected to rise from almost 21 million in 2000 to 40 million.  Total water use will rise accordingly.¹⁴

Meanwhile, the cheap oil basis of our way of life will soon disappear.  Everything we do depends on energy, and our reliance on oil is enormous.  About 40 percent of traded energy and 90 percent of transport fuel are obtained from oil.¹⁵  In 1949 the geophysicist M. King Hubbert pointed out that fossil fuels exist in fixed, finite quantities.  Therefore, he argued, the annual extraction of oil "will rise, pass through one or several maxima, and then decline asymptotically to zero."¹⁶  Hubbert predicted in 1956 that oil extraction in the lower 48 United States would peak in 1970; it did.  Most American oil wells now pump just ten barrels or less a day.¹⁷  America imports the lion's share of its oil.

Worldwide oil discovery peaked in 1964; it has declined ever since, despite an explosion of exploratory drilling in the early 1980s.  Today humanity is burning four barrels of oil for every barrel it finds.  Since oil must be found before it can be extracted, worldwide extraction must peak and decline too.  Geologist Colin Campbell, perhaps the world's leading oil depletion expert, has forecast that world oil extraction will peak in 2010.¹⁸  Other well-informed observers, such as investment banker Matthew Simmons, argue that the peak already occurred in 2000.¹⁹

The oil extraction trend supports these forecasts.  One oil-producing country peaked in 1951-1960; four in 1961-1970; 11 in 1971-1980; 11 in 1981-1990; and 18 in 1991-2000 (12 in 1996-2000).²⁰  That ever more producers peak as time passes, and that 45 out of 64 have already peaked, signal that global peak is near.

Similarly, natural gas discovery in America peaked around 1950; extraction peaked in the early 1970s.²¹  Gas wells in Texas, which supply one-third of America's natural gas, are depleting rapidly.  Wells drilled in the 1970s and 1980s produced 16 percent of their gas in the first year of operation; those completed in 1998 were 58 percent depleted in their first year; wells drilled more recently have depleted entirely in just months.²²  Canada supplies 16 percent of our gas consumption (double its share of ten years ago), and is in like straits.  Canadian gas reserves are depleting faster than new reserves are being found.²³

These environmental trends spell the doom of our way of life.  Campbell observes that "no substitute fuel is in sight which comes close to oil and [natural] gas in terms of convenience, efficiency, or cost."  Therefore the coming irreversible decline in annual oil extraction "implies that the economic growth of the past, which was largely driven by an abundant supply of cheap oil-based energy, cannot continue on the same trajectory."²⁴  Indeed, since every economy's dependence on energy is absolute, a shrinking energy supply necessarily spells economic contraction.  Oil supply disruptions and price shocks were major causes of the inflationary recessions of 1974-1975 and 1979-1982; this time the oil shock will be permanent.  An energy-starved America will be incapable of global military hegemony, or buying social peace through democratizing affluence and redistribution.  And just as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid outlays will be exploding, our economy's ability to finance them will collapse: a grim predicament.

Modern agriculture lavishly uses both fossil fuels and natural gas-based nitrogen fertilizers.  Therefore, the combination of oil and gas depletion, water shortages, and cropland degradation will gravely weaken America's ability to feed itself.

Immigration is exacerbating all these problems.  Mostly ill-educated and poor, immigrants are straining government programs such as public education and Medicaid, and health-care facilities such as emergency rooms and maternity wards, which they use without paying for.  They are also competing with black Americans for entry-level jobs; and as skilled Americans are displaced by immigrants, many take lower-paying, lower-skilled jobs which ambitious blacks might have obtained, and thus create a roadblock to black progress.  In both ways, immigration is working to immiserate black Americans, which is not only bad in itself but likely to become a serious source of racial discord.

Immigration is importing Hispanics, Southeast Asians, Indians, Haitians, Somalis, Muslims, and Santeria cultists, to manufacture grievances, agitate, and work our racial spoils system.  Growing nonwhite immigrant populations give multiculturalism and "diversity" a specious legitimacy, as being necessary to reflect the demographic realities of a "pluralistic society."  Moreover, as immigrant populations rise they have a dwindling need and incentive to assimilate to a culture and folkways alien to them, especially because assimilation is not insisted upon.  Terrorists and criminals can enter America with virtual impunity.  Immigration will make addressing major problems, e.g., entitlements and environmental protection, difficult; mostly poor immigrants will be reluctant to dismantle entitlements or curtail economic growth to protect the environment.

Immigration, overwhelmingly nonwhite, is the main driver of our population growth.  About 1.5 million immigrants arrive annually, and immigrant women bear 750,000 babies annually.  Immigrants and their descendants accounted for 47 percent of population growth in 1970-1990, and, according to Steven Camarota, Director of Research of the Center for Immigration Studies, for 69 percent of growth in 1990-2000 and 2000-2002.²⁵  If this continues, whites will become a minority—and, in today's bilious antiwhite climate, a persecuted minority.  Moreover, since environmental ruin and resource depletion are mostly population-driven, immigration is the main culprit in sprawl, the energy crisis, groundwater depletion, and so on.

It is virtually certain that nonwhite immigration will relentlessly increase.  One third of the world's people live in China and India.  Both countries suffer from severe water shortages and are rapidly depleting their aquifers, and China is wrecking its environment with desertification and pollution.²⁶  North African, Middle Eastern, and Southwest Asian countries combine rapid population growth with scarce and in some cases dwindling and nonrenewable water supplies.²⁷  Closer to home, one-fourth of Mexico's population, some 30 million Mexicans, mostly poverty-stricken, lives in Mexico City, the third-largest city on Earth.  Mexico City is ecologically unsustainable, plagued by terrible air pollution, epidemics, and water shortages.  Drainage of the underlying aquifers lowers the city eleven centimeters a year.  Mexican environmentalist Homero Aridjis predicted in 1998 that "at the most it can last ten more years."²⁸  Mexico City will soon become virtually uninhabitable.  All these incipient environmental disasters spell poverty and suffering, perhaps mass starvation—and emigration in search of a better life.  Many environmental refugees will try to come here.  Unless America resolutely seals her borders and interdicts shipping from the Third World, overpopulation and environmental ruin abroad will make Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints a reality.

Our almost unavoidable future, then, is simultaneous fiscal crisis amounting to national bankruptcy; inflationary contraction caused by excessive indebtedness and energy crisis; increasingly rancorous racial politics; and immigration-driven Balkanization and environmental ruin, all visited on a socially fragile, maleducated, deeply indebted people utterly dependent on a complex corporate economy, hideously vulnerable to breakdowns in major systems (as witness the August 2003 blackout), and ill-equipped to cope with multiple calamities.  Recall that responses to the Great Depression included radicalism, agrarian violence, and popularity for demagogues such as Huey Long—and American society was far more cohesive in 1933.  The likely outcome this time will be the political breakup and economic implosion of America, and the unwinding of our society and civilization in crime and chaos.

The ultimate end could be grimmer yet.  Carrying capacity is the maximum population of a species which a given area can sustain indefinitely.  Soil degradation; depletion of groundwater, oil, and gas; and recurring water and power shortages indicate that we are not only populated far beyond America's carrying capacity, but are actually reducing it.  Unchecked population growth driven by immigration will eventually ruin our ecosystem's capacity to support human life.  The ineluctable ultimate consequence is a massive human die-off, right here in America.  There will quite likely be die-offs worldwide.  As Garrett Hardin warned, a general population crash reducing survivors to stark poverty will probably preclude rebuilding our modern, advanced civilization.  "No civilization has ever recovered after ruining its environment." [original italics]²⁹  If this is not a conservative issue, then conservatives have no issues.

Conservatism's Dysfunctional Response

How is conservatism responding to this array of challenges?  The economic conservatives and neoconservatives who dominate American conservatism, such as Michael Novak, Ben Wattenberg, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Dinesh D'Souza, George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jack Kemp, John J. Miller, and William Bennett are abetting the multifaceted civilizational crisis.  Without exception, they are cheerleaders for globalization, free trade, open immigration, economic growth, and the welfare state.  The cultural, social, and civilizational forfeits exacted by this agenda mean nothing to them.  Many have made their peace with multiculturalism.

That mainstream conservatives are in fact liberals is proved by their praise for Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, a paean to globalist utopianism that argued that History, with its struggles and injustices, was over; that modern liberal democracy is humanity's highest political development; that modern capitalism is our economic endpoint; and that historical development is taking the world toward universal embrace of the two in combination.  "Bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant," gushed Charles Krauthammer.  "A bold and brilliant work.  Very, very impressive," echoed Irving Kristol.  Noting Fukuyama's speculation that Utopia might prove unbearably banal and prompt reversion to conflict, George Will was more restrained, but lauded him as "in, and worthy of, a grand tradition."³⁰  True: But the tradition is liberal internationalism.

Even more tellingly, some, such as Wattenberg, Miller, and Will, advocate or celebrate interracial marriage.  Wattenberg deemed the non-Europeanization of America through non-European immigration and intermarriage "heartening news of an almost transcendental quality," and caroled that "From intermarriage and immigration, from inside and out, speedily in some realms and slowly in others, America is becoming a universal nation."  Passionate immigrationist Miller foresaw a tide of miscegenation such that "In the future, everybody will have a Korean grandmother." Accepting the liberal view of race and ethnicity as "extremely fluid, hence dubious, scientific categories," Will cooed that "Rapidly rising rates of intermarriage further the wholesome blurring of the nation."³¹

Wholesome?  By what standard?  Certainly not that of (for once Will's pompous phrase is apt) "conservatism properly understood." One would think that preserving distinct races is at least as much a conservative project as preserving marriage as a heterosexual institution.  Since only white women can have white babies, and since the white birthrate is substantially below nonwhite birthrates, miscegenation ineluctably means turning the white race into an endangered species, perhaps even its eventual biological obliteration.  It also, for that matter, means the eventual obliteration of distinct nonwhite races as well.

Now, a liberal or libertarian might regard race obliteration as a nonissue, or even welcome it as social progress, but a conservative cannot.  Whatever one thinks of interracial marriage and miscegenation, the lauding and promotion of them cannot be called conservative.  Rather, it is unquestionably one of the most momentous, radical, and irreversible social reconstruction projects in human history.  Not even the radically renovating Jacobins and Bolsheviks went this far.  Only people who have hopelessly lost their grip on reality could call intermarriage enthusiasts conservatives.  Just what are these "conservatives" trying to conserve?  The continuity of a people's biological identity is one of the most fundamental continuities there is.  If this rock-bottom continuity does not interest them, what continuity possibly could?

As their position on this matter makes clear, mainstream "conservatives" are rabid liberal utopians.  Their true project is to reconstruct humanity into a Huxleyan Brave New World: one governmental mode (rule by a globalist elite in democratic guise), one economic mode (regulated welfare-state capitalism), one market, one global corporate-fabricated "culture," one creed of economism-cum-multiculturalism, and one race of blended, interchangeable economic ciphers—little busy human ants, producing, consuming, and having tame fun, serving and enriching the globalist elite that manages their lives and manipulates them with biased "news," advertising, and entertainments.

Indeed, perhaps one reason for the obsessive neoconservative "war on terror" is that Islamic fundamentalists have the effrontery to reject modernity and all its works and pomps—its disgusting greed and gluttony, its trashy "culture" and shameful misogynist libertinism, its war on its own civilization at home and its homicidal homogenizing crusades abroad—and to impede construction of the Brave New World.  Besides, Islamic countries control most of what remains of the world's easily accessed oil, without which the global economy won't work.

The record of conservative Christians and paleoconservatives is no better.  Religious conservatives are obsessed with school prayer, the drive to purge Christianity from public life, sexual morality, and abortion—legitimate conservative concerns, to be sure—but on other matters their positions are often anticonservative.  Many sexually conservative Christians, especially Catholics, are also devotees of Martin Luther King and the welfare state.³²  The same Catholic hierarchy which resolutely opposes abortion adamantly favors open immigration.³³  If conservative Christians are aware of environmental and population issues at all, most simply demonize Thomas Robert Malthus, falsify his population theory, cite Julian Simon's counterfactual rubbish that resources are nonfinite, and dismiss the ecological concept of carrying capacity as "inappropriate, even dehumanizing" when applied to humans.³⁴

Paleoconservatives are equally purblind.

The Roots of Conservative Failure

To keep our discussion to manageable length we shall not address causal factors extrinsic to conservatism, such as the extreme, almost anarchical strain of individualism in America, the dysfunctional nature of "the American Dream," which is all about consumption, or the hegemony of liberalism in American Christianity, but shall confine ourselves to problems within American conservatism itself.  One of the worst of them is that for well over a century conservatism has been betraying the civilization it was supposed to preserve for thirty pieces of silver.  Ever since the Civil War, American conservatism has been dominated by free-market economism, and absorbed in defending American capitalism from its enemies and critics: Marxists, agrarian agitators such as William Jennings Bryan, labor unions, Progressives, the New Deal, the Communists, intrusive government regulators, egalitarians, environmentalists, and anybody whose god is not his belly.

The terrible menace in economism is its reductive and abstracting character: reducing life to economics; reducing people to economic animals; abstracting from, ignoring, and dismissing noneconomic aspects of reality; precluding comprehensive awareness.  In yoking itself to economism, mainstream conservatism has embraced an ideology grounded in true conservatism's mortal enemies.

As Wayne Lutton aptly stated, under economic conservatism "men tend to be viewed not as participants in and contributors to a culture, but, generally, as economic growth blobs."³⁵  Thus, mainstream conservatism's enthusiasm for immigration plays up the purported economic contribution of immigrants, and deems their religion, race, mores, and customs, and their social, political, demographic, cultural, and civilizational impacts on America, irrelevant, even unimportant—if it acknowledges them at all.  Likewise, mainstream "conservatives" are oblivious to the environmental ruin ineluctably flowing from modern industrial capitalism and mass immigration.

Largely as a consequence of its preoccupation with defending capitalism, conservatism's dominant concern from 1945-1991 was with fighting the Cold War.  This was especially true of National Review.  The John Birch Society, prominent in postwar conservatism until the mid-1960s, was even more obsessed with Communism.  Even now, conservatism lopsidedly emphasizes foreign policy, as witness its fixation on Iraq.  Largely due to this obsession with foreign affairs, mainstream conservatism essentially surrendered education, social policy, and culture to liberalism, and offered little resistance to the trends which wrought havoc in these aspects of our national life for half a century.

Another child of conservatism's embrace of economism has been conservatism's political dependence on the Republican Party.  Many conservatives have made the election of Republican presidents a primary goal.  Unfortunately the Republicans are not only the devoted servants of the kleptocracy; they have endorsed such socially corrosive Democratic policies and causes as the welfare state, antiwhite racism, feminism, and mass immigration.  On both counts, the Republicans are not equipped to serve a true conservatism.

A second major source of conservatism's failure is its well-known domination after the 1960s by neoconservatives—Cold War liberals who were alarmed by the radical excesses of the 1960s, and chastened by the Great Society's failures.  The neocons want a larger and more activist federal government than traditionalist conservatives did; are liberal on race and immigration; and are devoted to promoting democracy abroad.³⁶

One momentous consequence of the neocon hegemony has been to infect conservative thought and writing with liberalism's abstract ideals: "human rights," "democracy," "equality," and so on.  The effect was to obliterate what little concern postwar conservatism still had for preserving the civilization that had grown up between Mexico and Canada.  This cast long shadows in the conservative approach to immigration.  The historical reality is that America was formed from thirteen colonies of the British Empire, of overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant stock.  For most of her history, conservatives were openly, and properly, concerned with preserving America as a primarily Anglo-Saxon, or at least European, nation; immigration was frequently restricted accordingly.  But mainstream conservatives now embraced the counterfactual redefinition of America as a "creedal" nation "dedicated to a series of propositions."  Under this reductive, abstract dispensation, people are interchangeable ciphers, the stick figures of liberal theorizing, rather than flesh-and-blood beings grounded in specific cultures, and anybody can become an American simply by consenting to "propositions."  If his race, religion, culture, folkways, worldview, and so on are jarringly different from those of the indigenous American population, it doesn't matter. 

As Paul Gottfried has shown, neoconservatism's ruthless takeover bid and virtual domination of conservatism owes much to the funding poured into conservative think tanks and magazines by philanthropies staffed by neocons and liberals such as Michael Joyce of the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation, a self-proclaimed Martin Luther King liberal.³⁷  This enabled both neoconservatism and economism to tighten their grip on conservatism.  It can hardly be accidental that after Richard Mellon Scaife and the Harry and Lynne Bradley, Smith-Richardson, John M. Olin, and Sarah Scaife foundations began pouring money into mainstream conservatism, its think tanks and magazines began shilling with telling uniformity for capital gains tax cuts, deregulation, "privatization" of Social Security, immigration, free trade, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Most Favored Nation status for China, vouchers, and income-based affirmative action; debunking the environmental crisis (which, if it were real, might subject corporations to regulation); and hyping the "new economy" and the Information Age.

This takes us to another root of conservatism's disastrous performance: sheer venality.  Mainstream conservatives have made good livings as intellectual prostitutes and cheerleaders for the kleptocracy which is doing so much to destroy this country.  Some mainstream talking heads may be sincere.  But given the money and prestigious careers involved, it is hard to avoid concluding that many mainstream conservatives, especially younger ones, prove the truth of the saying, "Whose bread I eat, his song I sing."³⁸

Conservatism suffers too from a generational problem.  Today's younger conservatives are recruited from upper-class and upper-middle-class families, and tend therefore to be spoiled, materialistic, with an inflated sense of entitlement to affluence.  They also spring from a generation maleducated, broadly ignorant, impatient of the drudgery required for true learning, mad for fun, and steeped in the superficial, impressionistic media of movies and television, which militate against industry, penetration, and reflectiveness, not to mention a capacity for independent thought.  Their socioeconomic backgrounds predispose young conservatives to become biddable parrots; their mental equipment renders them incapable of becoming much else.

Rampant careerism blights conservatism further.  Some young conservatives, e.g., D'Souza and Miller, worked at conservative campus newspapers, then interned at mainstream conservative magazines and think tanks, where they then obtained permanent employment.  Others such as William Kristol and David Frum came to conservatism via nepotism or journalism.  These facile young men in a hurry never read widely or reflected deeply, mastered any academic disciplines, did any scholarly work, or developed a penetrating view of existence, as did such genuine thinkers as Irving Babbitt, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk.  Judging from their publications, their knowledge and perspective are narrow and shallow, and they are capable of little but regurgitating economite and neoconservative bromides.³⁹

These problems point to a more general cause of conservatism's failure: an appalling vacuity.  Except for such notables as Weaver, Kirk, George Panichas, Peter Stanlis, Forrest McDonald, Thomas Molnar, Paul Gottfried, John Lukacs, George H. Nash, Claes Ryn, Jacob Neusner, and Robert Nisbet, traditional conservatism has included few genuine scholars or thinkers of stature for at least half a century.  Most conservative postwar writing, both books and articles, has been ephemeral journalism focused on current events, passing political issues, or policy.  For all his pretenses to erudition, George Will has produced mostly shallow, newspaper_level commentary that has not stood the test of time.  Half a century after Russell Kirk's great book appeared, "the conservative mind" is virtually an oxymoron.

Its lack of intellectual seriousness has crippled conservatism as a custodian of its civilization.  For all their fulminations against modernity, social and cultural conservatives have made little effort to engage it seriously.  Most of the intellectual counterattack on pornography has come from feminists.  While religious and social conservatives routinely scapegoat the French Enlightenment, it is telling that the greatest critical study of the Enlightenment in the last fifty years was written, not by a conservative, but by a secular humanist, the late Lester G. Crocker.⁴⁰

Likewise, the mainstream right is not only too enthralled by economism, but also too ill-educated, unreflective, and lacking in awareness even to realize that capitalism has problems lethal to our civilization.  Conservatives' defense of capitalism probably flows at least in part from the conservative principle of property.  But the property traditional conservatives upheld was the land owned by aristocrats, other large landowners, and small family farms, and the tangible, productive assets of small businesses.  As Joseph Schumpeter divined, but most conservatives do not, the corporation attenuates the idea of property by abstracting it from its basis in physical reality, "substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls of and the machines in a factory."  Aptly, Schumpeter called this "the Evaporation of Industrial Property."  Robert Nisbet was one of the few conservatives to grasp that whereas real property connected its owner with society and gave him a stake in it and in its future, evaporated property does not, indeed encourages irresponsibility.⁴¹

Moreover, contemporary conservatives apparently do not realize that industrial, corporate capitalism, unlike the decentralized economy of small properties which existed in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America, is not conservative at all, but radical, working a permanent revolution by harnessing technology and innovation to serve greed and expansive egotism, and relentlessly overturning the social order in the process.  British social and cultural conservatives opposed industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century; it was liberals who embraced the Industrial Revolution and free trade.

Nor do modern conservatives appear to grasp that an industrial economy, rapidly turning nonrenewable resources and fossil fuels into waste, is unsustainable in a limited world of finite resources and a finite capacity to absorb waste and pollution.  One would think that conservatives would grasp our dependence on the environment for our very existence if anybody would.  Yet environmentalism has come from the left, and the most perceptive and penetrating discussions of our dependence on oil and the economic, political, and social consequences of declining oil extraction are by men of decidedly leftist politics, Richard Heinberg and Jay Hanson.⁴²  Likewise, the best critic of our unsustainable, car-dependent, soul-deadening, and socially corrosive suburban sprawl is a progressive Democrat, James Howard Kunstler, who rightly laments that we are uglifying our country and creating places not worth caring about, to the point of making America herself not worth caring about.⁴³  "Conservatives," apparently, couldn't care less.  The dollars are rolling; all's well.

These deficiencies in the conservative intellect make it virtually certain that even absent careerism and venality, mainstream conservatism will never emancipate itself from economism.  Which means that conservatism will keep supporting the trade, growth, and immigration policies which are lethal to our civilization and our environment.

Another taproot of conservatism's failure is a dread of liberal disapproval amounting to cowardice.  This may be due partly to an intellectual inferiority complex vis a vis liberals, which is, alas, often justified.  Another likely factor is a belief that liberals, who claim to be the custodians of "our" ideals and to speak for "the better angels of our nature," really do hold the moral high ground.  It never seems to occur to conservatives that liberalism's masochistic creed of self-loathing and self-dismantlement is not an "ideal" for sane people who love life, love the world, love their place in it, and love themselves—or that the continued existence and flourishing of one's own people, nation, civilization, and culture is a legitimate, even noble, ideal well worth fighting for.  (Astonishingly, conservative affirmations of this ideal are virtually nonexistent.)  A third likely cause is that many conservatives are of comfortable backgrounds, and are preoccupied with money, career, and the things money can buy, and that economism's soft devotees and beneficiaries are the last men for a scrap.  Adam Smith warned long ago that commerce "sinks the courage of mankind, and tends to extinguish martial spirit," and that men engrossed in trade and affluence "grow effeminate and dastardly."⁴⁴

Whatever the reason, most conservatives have a fathomless capacity for being intimidated.  Liberals have race-baited them since the sixties, with devastating effect, and conservatives' terror of being called racists is almost palpable.  This disarms them regarding not only affirmative action and other antiwhite racism, but immigration, since virtually all immigrants are nonwhite.  Most conservatives are equally invertebrate about feminism and homosexuality.

A further conservative weakness is a flair for personality cults.  In politics, conservatives repeatedly pinned their hopes on a hero whose election would supposedly realize their dreams.  In 1964, it was Barry Goldwater; in 1980, Ronald Reagan.  Conservatives blinded themselves to grave weaknesses in the anointed which spelled disaster or disappointment: Goldwater's lack of depth and reflectiveness, and Reagan's lack of fortitude springing from a yearning to be liked.  For propagation of ideas and opinions, conservatives continued to look primarily to National Review long after it became clear that William Buckley's top priority had become personal celebrity and that National Review was becoming innocuous and vacuous.

As if this were not enough, perennial intramural bickering and power struggles is another factor rendering conservatism useless as a vehicle for preserving America and its civilization.  Frank Meyer and National Review famously purged individuals and groups who deviated from NR's "party line," such as Peter Viereck, the Ayn Randians, and the John Birchers.⁴⁵  By 1970, Buckley's brand of conservatism was a self-stultified, Cold War-obsessed orthodoxy incapable of resisting the neocon takeover.

Social, cultural, and religious conservatives are just as lacking in comprehensive awareness as mainstream conservatives, thanks no doubt to what Weaver called fragmentation and obsession.  Many of these conservatives were drawn into political controversy out of concern for one issue or a narrow range of issues: the family; sexual immorality; abortion; feminism; and so on.  Passionately concerned about these things, they have little energy or attention to spare for much else.

Although paleoconservatives at least realize that conservatism is about preserving Western civilization, they manifest a pervasive self-indulgence which vitiates their diagnostic and prescriptive efficacy.  One symptom is a weakness for conspiracy theories; another is a fascination with militias and secession—quixotic nonsense given the federal government's surveillance ability and resources.  Still another is a widespread reduction of history to an ethnic grudge match, attempting to elevate Anglophobia to a conservative principle, which it is not.⁴⁶  This Anglophobia is frequently manifest in another paleoconservative preoccupation: revisionist history.  Paleo historical obsessions include Lincoln's Civil War tyrannies, the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, the America First movement, Britain's purported dragging of America into the world wars, and the supposed villainies of Winston Churchill.⁴⁷  Whatever the truth about these matters, they are irrelevant to the mortal danger America is in, and fixating on them is a waste of time.  Yet another symptom is the flair for indulging equally ungermane personal obsessions.  Fleming devoted several issues of Chronicles, which calls itself "a magazine of American culture," to. . .Serbia.  Joseph Sobran squandered much time and energy writing a book purporting to prove that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare.

All this reveals fundamental flaws in paleoconservatism: immaturity, indiscipline, lack of perspective and priorities, inability to distinguish what matters from what does not, a failure to come to grips with reality.  In short, a childishness that makes paleoconservatism self-defeating.  One immigrant enters America every twenty-one seconds; multiculturalism is demolishing our culture and civilization; antiwhite racism is rampant; we are sleepwalking into energy crisis, economic implosion, and irreversible environmental ruin—and there these people sit on their desert island of irrelevance, amid the exfoliating jungle plants of their fantasies, debunking Shakespeare, daydreaming about militias, sneering about people who don't know Latin, and demonizing the Renaissance, Lincoln, "perfidious Albion," and Winston Churchill.⁴⁸  What will engross paleos twenty years from now, when the civilization they purportedly cherish will be disintegrating, if it hasn't already?

Paleoconservatism must be seen, then, as an abortion, not an alternative.  At this point it has little to offer to avert the doom beginning to roll over America.

Conservatism's Likely Fate

As America starts to crack up under the impact of multiple converging crises, reality will punch its mailed fist through the bubble of Americans' collective delusions, e.g., that America is the richest nation on earth, that our way of life will endure forever, that a high standard of living is what life is all about, that humans are economic animals who can be made to behave like civilized people by throwing money at them, that race and gender are illusory social constructs, and that crack-up and collapse can't happen here.  Denial and evasion will no longer be possible.

Under such circumstances, liberalism and economism will be discredited at last, and realism and the primal will to survive will reassert themselves, just as they did in Britain in May 1940, after disaster had finally purged the British of liberal internationalist delusions.  Since social and civilizational survival and realism are the core of true conservatism, this situation, in which conservatism's essence matches the imperative needs of the time, would, one would think, be highly favorable to conservatism.  A true conservatism with a well-articulated worldview and a set of principles and policies to ensure the survival of America as a civilization, and not merely an economy, could very well become the dominant political philosophy and movement.

Unfortunately, mainstream conservatism is not conservative, and paleoconservatives are not only marginalized by the establishment Right, but are foolishly marginalizing themselves further.  It seems unlikely, therefore, that a genuine conservatism capable of grasping the opportunity offered by events will emerge.  Barring unforeseeable developments, American conservatism will go down in history as a failure, a crass and clueless movement that never really understood its mission, nor ever grasped reality.

John Attarian is a scholar and writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a doctorate in economics.  He is the author of Economism and the National Prospect (American Immigration Control Foundation, 2001), Social Security: False Consciousness and Crisis (Transaction Publishers, 2002), and Immigration: Wrong Answer for Social Security (American Immigration Control Press, 2003).

Endnotes