WWLD? Asks AEI about the coming war with Iraq, comparing the task of creating an open society there with the challenges faced by Lincoln in preparing for a postbellum Confederacy. The key, they say, lies in sustained American intervention to protect the Iraqis while they develop a stable society: a "successful reconstruction depends upon the strong arm of American power."

Lincoln also appears in The Public Interest, where Jay Winik argues that the problem with the modern military is too much military control: the “undisciplined” and “erratic” civilians often do better than the trained professionals when handling the ramifications of international conflict.

The Sea of Extremity: Arab democratization has failed where other Muslim nations have succeeded, Shlomo Avineri says in an article for leftist Dissent magazine."American policies and Israel's behavior (or even its existence) are not the roots of the rage that led to September 11: The root is the failure of Arab ... societies to come to terms with modernity, economic development, democracy, and liberalism." But as long as Western thinkers and policymakers force their Arab counterparts to grapple with the thought of "Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mill" as well as medievalists like "Aquinas, Avicenna, and Maimonides," there's hope for the region. Ideas, one hopes, will have consequences ....

On the other side of the divide, The New Criterion reviews Roger Scruton's The West and the Rest, which argues, pace Avineri, that exporting Western values is the worst possible mistake: “[T]o transfer those values ... is to invite the very confrontation that we seek to avoid.”

 
"Jesus and the Confederate Flag": I'm a few days late on this story, but left-leaning blogger Atrios provides context to a Washington Post article on Confederate clothing bans in schools. Tip to parents: having your lawsuit filed by the notorious Kirk Lyons -- a modern-day Francis Parker Yockey who has been approvingly profiled by neo-Nazi website StormFront, amongst others -- is not a good way to convince others your cause is racially-benign.

 
Copywrongs: Continuing the burgeoning alliance between conservatives and otherwise apolitical technologists, Phyllis Schlafly's most recent column takes "copyright extremists" to task for trying to "control the flow of information."

 
A Victory Over Memory: In a recent column, Ann Coulter asserts, without a blink or a blush, that "Republicans made Southern Democrats drop the race nonsense when they entered the Republican Party." This remarkable statement is contradicted by forty years of history; following Nixon's failed attempt in 1960 to bridge Rockefeller Republicans and Southern segregationists (literally speaking in a black area of New York in one day, then segregationist South Carolina the next), the GOP took Goldwater's advice to "go hunting where the ducks are," which is to say, the white South.

Neither Nixon nor Goldwater can be comfortably categorized as racist; both men were NAACP members, and Goldwater worked with the Urban League to desegregate post-war Phoenix. But they were above everything else politicians, and Goldwater was in 1960 considerably exercised over what he saw as fruitless efforts by Rockefeller to capture Northern votes for Nixon, while those same efforts undermined a nascent Southern Strategy.

It was also during this time that the Republican stalwarts in the business community, already alarmed by Nixon's suggestions that the Connally Reservation governing World Court jurisdiction over America be repealed, began butting heads with a newly activist federal government determined to dismantle segregation. The Republicans were against Jim Crow and supportive of desegregation efforts, but they had come out in favor of state laws to fix the problem, or at most voluntary desegregation efforts led and coordinated by the federal government. The GOP's desire to minimize federal freedom to act tactically coincided with the South's desire to keep its most recent "peculiar institution" intact.

The quid pro quo was straightforward: the GOP got large blocs of Southern votes and a number of seasoned political leaders; the South gained influence within a political party whose electorate wanted, for different reasons, to keep the feds out of racial segregation issues. Though Nixon campaigned in 1960 as a civil rights advocate who championed desegregation "North, East, West, and South," by the time he became President, it was his own party that had divided up its tactics North and East, West and South.

For thirty years, the GOP has maintained its Faustian deal with unreconstructed racists; first, it tolerated them, but then it was led by them. The Lott incident has been used by many neoconservatives as a necessary blast of cleansing air, a way for the party to confront and repudiate the devils who have stayed behind as the South has moved on. The current Administration, in particular, having acknowledged that the "party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln," has worked to clean house, of which the Lott removal is only the most recent manifestation.

But for someone like Coulter, there's no need for self-examination; segregation was wrong, the Party is never wrong, therefore the Party could not have supported segregation. Or, to put it another way:

Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.

 
The Season of Sputniki: Once again, Horowitz has made an interesting alliance with those who cannot but consider him an enemy to their own deeply held beliefs. Though not as terrible a move as his use of an article from the racist American Renaissance, Horowitz has begun publishing excerpts from a book by Srdja Trifkovic, an editor for Chronicles magazine. It seems that Horowitz still cannot separate policy and principle when it comes to his allies.

Chronicles is one of the more intelligent of the paleoconservative outlets, more erudite than the Buchananite wing, and not as brutally racist or anti-Semitic as AmRen. Nonetheless, it stands as far to the right of most conservatives as Pacifica radio is to the left; a recent issue of the magazine traced the decline of Western civilization to the Renaissance and its antecedents. Most conservatives believe that society has been off the rails for many years, but few would be willing to begin with Ockham's proto-nominalism and the rise of Florentine humanism.

What truly distinguishes Chronicles from its paleocon brethren is its willingness to attack other conservatives, especially the neoconservatives whose "globalist-hegemonist world outlook" leaves Chron writers warning of the resurrection of a Washington-led, post-nationalist "New World Order." Since most of the conservatives for whom Chronicles reserves its ire are the neoconservative friends and allies of Horowitz, one would think that David would be wary of falling into bed with the paleocons again. Yet ....

Trifkovic's thesis is simple: Islam is evil. Attempts to engage in a dialog with Muslims of any stripe is folly that will end only with the "liquidation of the traditional nationhoods of the West." Although this accords well with some of FrontPage's previous articles (one particularly bizarre example can be found here), Trifkovic goes further -- the problem is not merely that Islam is a faith "immune to critical pondering of its assumptions," the problem is that Christians have forsaken their faith and "readily sacrifice the doctrine of Grace, Incarnation, and Trinity on the altar of and [sic] open-ended inter-faith dialogue" between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The problem with Islam, in other words, is that it isn't Christianity, and the problem with modern Christianity is that it isn't really Christianity either: "[W]here God retreats Allah advances."

I am not one to defend Islam as a paragon of religious tolerance (for a rather turgid discussion of one leftist attempt to do so, see here). But an essentially Enlightened critique of Islam is very different from a Christian conservative one, and that is, as they say, the différence that makes the difference.

Some more differences: according to writers for Chronicles, Lincoln was a "Jacobin" who "seduce[d] his people into a needless war" through a "policy of blood and iron" designed, in the words of another writer, "to transform the United States from a constitutional republic into a continental empire." Civil law is, inter alia, "about responsibly fulfilling one’s duties to God." Conservative goals should be "a long-term moratorium on all immigration ... the withdrawal of the federal government from involvement in all racial issues, and ... the repeal of all federal laws and court decisions (including the civil-rights laws of the 1960’s and the rulings of the Warren Court) that authorize such involvement." The revanchist bigotry of Japanese immigration policies, where zainichi Koreans whose grandparents were born and raised in Japan are still denied citizenship and voting rights, "should be lauded and copied" by America; "obvious[ly]" Japan is the "last remaining place in the civilized world where the truth about race relations, immigration, and barbarization of the host societies is still allowed to be told." In America, by contrast, we are besieged by "racially motivated attacks on all Southern, American, and Christian symbols" in the former Confederacy.

If those views don't worry Horowitz, then he should look to Chronicles' criticisms of "the founders of NR, the Goldwaterites, and the Reaganites," to whom they amusingly ascribe "prettified faces, effete chattering, and disproportionately big bowties." (So much for my Neiman-Marcus wardrobe.) Neocons are "[a]gnostic, deracinated neurotics seeking 'benevolent global hegemony' [who] cannot maintain true loyalty to any particular people or nation." Their desire for a war with Iraq will touch off a "cataclysmic war of civilizations that can only benefit those who desire the destruction of the remnants of our race and culture." Trifkovic even brings out the hoary Chomskyite argument that "the threat to America exists because of the policy of global hegemony" pursued by the Bush administration, which is no more than "pursuit of Global Power for its own sake."

Chronicles (though not Trifkovic) has also dabbled, though far less than its Buchananite brethren, in coded anti-Semitism. In 2000, following Gore's choice of Sen. Joe Lieberman as a running mate, the magazine wondered why, "in light of the vital importance of the Middle East to American interests, [the] media have chosen not to report Arab reactions" to the choice, which included a quote from Syria's al-Ba'ath that a President Gore would be "the target of Jewish extremists who will not hesitate to do anything to put a Jew in the White House." (Of course, the paleocon comfort level with Arab nationalists has dropped precipitously since September 11.)

I don't think it's tenable to argue that Horowitz shares many views with the paleocons; at heart, he's a neocon with (in my opinion, deplorable) radicalist tendencies. But he's eager to consummate marriages of convenience with anyone who shares a policy goal with him, regardless of their political philosophies. Perhaps to Horowitz, this is simply polemical realpolitik, a hardheaded attempt to expand his influence. But he would do better to examine his own past, and the relationship he held with his former Soviet allies. Once again, Horowitz has become a Useful Idiot.