Tactically Useful

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes: 

Among the multitudes singing hosannas for Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy four years ago were a surprisingly large number of conservative intellectuals, christened by the press “Obamacons.” They included not just the usual dyspeptic libertarians who always threaten to bolt the Republican Party, but also men who had been at the heart of the conservative movement. There was Bruce Bartlett, a shaper of Reagan’s supply-side economics, who wrote about the Obamacon phenomenon for The New Republic. Count also Jeffrey Hart, speechwriter for Reagan and Nixon and for 39 years a senior editor at National Review, from 1969 until the magazine severed ties with him over his Obama endorsement.

They were joined by the blogger and Michael Oakeshott disciple Andrew Sullivan, foreign-policy thinker Andrew Bacevich, and a founding editor of this magazine, Scott McConnell. There was also a host of libertarians, quarrelsome and calm alike. The trend was so pronounced that in October 2008, Christopher Buckley (son of National Review’s William F.) began a column, “Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.” He was promptly expunged from the magazine his father founded.

The very idea of Obamacons may seem odd now, a transient symptom of a GOP in ill-health after eight years of the widely unsuccessful Bush presidency. But the Obamacons are still around, and some intend to vote for Obama’s re-election. While they are a disparate group, there are threads that bind them: a fear of adventurism in foreign policy, alarm about national insolvency, disgust at the state of movement conservatism, and most especially a longing for political leadership. The word that presses itself into your mind after speaking to them: homeless. They are thinkers with almost no land left to defend but the scrap on which they stand, and uncertain of the territory they’d like to conquer.

Which would explain all the sighing. “How do you view the 2012 election?” I ask. “Well [audible sigh], I always tell people I’m a Goldwater conservative, and we are a pitifully small remnant,” says Kevin Gutzman, co-author with Thomas E. Woods of Who Killed the Constitution? “I would like to have Governor Romney give me a reason to think he is substantially different from Obama.” Another sigh. Gutzman eventually answers that he’ll vote for Romney, unhappily. Same question for Bruce Bartlett: “[Sigh] I think if I were inclined to vote this year—which I’m not—I’d make the same decision that Obama is better. But there is a case for Romney.” Confirming my impression, Bacevich says with characteristic bluntness: “Authentic conservatives are without a home in American politics.”

Although most Obamacons have mixed feelings about Obama now, not one of those I interviewed expressed the regret about choosing the Illinois senator over John McCain in 2008, given what they knew at the time. Foreign policy was the issue they cited over and over again: “Four years ago, I disliked McCain intensely; it seemed like the choice between Obama and someone with policies very like Obama’s except that he would also invade Iran,” says Megan McArdle of the Daily Beast. “I thought the chief issue at the time was getting out of Iraq. I thought it was going to bankrupt the country… . If I had the same choice as I had the last time, I would probably go for Obama again, even if he has been really bad on several issues I care about,” says Gutzman. “McCain had bought entirely into the neoconservative project,” McConnell confirms, “and he seemed eager and joked about starting a war in Iran.”

These intellectuals weren’t alone in their defection from the GOP. Colin Powell, who had served as secretary of state under George W. Bush, provided a high-profile endorsement for Obama. A few of the last scions of the Rockefeller Republican tradition, like Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, and Maryland Congressman Wayne Gilchrist, also voted for Obama.

About 9 percent of Republicans nationwide told exit pollsters that they voted for Obama in 2008—up from the 6 percent who reported casting their ballots for Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004, though the number was not entirely outside the norm. Al Gore attracted an Obama-sized portion of registered Republicans in 2000. But the figures are more striking when ideology rather than partisanship is the criterion: 20 percent of self-identified conservatives voted for Obama in 2008. Kerry captured just 15 percent four years earlier.

Have the Obamacons been disappointed? Yes. Bacevich’s summation speaks for most: “On balance, Obama has been a disappointment but not a disaster.” “I did make a judgment that Obama wasn’t an inspirational figure to me, but I didn’t think he was a left-wing radical either,” McConnell says. “He seemed to be a standard liberal-centrist, which I thought the country could tolerate okay. I haven’t been thrilled with the Obama presidency, but I think that judgment has been vindicated.” “Obviously, Obama has been way worse on civil liberties than I expected,” says McArdle. “I kind of can’t believe I was naïve enough to think that he would actually change anything—or even try to change anything, except for the incredibly stupid symbolic move of Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil, which he chickened out on anyway. But I was. Ooops.”

Bartlett sees a lamentable continuity between Obama and his predecessor: “He continued Bush’s policies without one single solitary change.” Some Obamacons, like Gutzman and Bacevich, see that continuity as reflecting a broader pattern in the political class. “I continue to have the feeling that the people in charge of the federal government are driving us into bankruptcy, and the fast-track is more war,” says Gutzman. Exploring the reasoning of the thinkers most satisfied and most dissatisfied with Obama can be instructive.

Jeffrey Hart is the Obamacon most pleased with his choice, and he is anxious to see the president rewarded with a second term. He did not simply swallow his vote as if it were bad medicine; he argues positively that a true conservative has no choice but to help elect Obama again. “One definition of conservatism would be to conserve what is good and to devise solutions to problems as they arise,” he says. For Hart, Republicans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan secured and extended the achievements of the New Deal and Great Society. But now, he says, “I fear we’ll lose Medicare through the Ryan budget.” Asked how he feels about most self-described conservatives sticking with the GOP, he replies serenely: “They’re wrong.”

McArdle occupies the opposite pole. “Overall, I wildly underestimated Obama’s arrogance and inexperience,” she says. “I don’t think he’s the Antichrist or anything, but his presidency certainly hasn’t contained much to please me on the policy front. On the plus side, we haven’t invaded Iran.” The biggest issue for McArdle is Obama’s healthcare reform. “I think it’s a terrible Rube Goldberg apparatus that is going to have disastrous impacts on the budget.”

McArdle admits she doesn’t like Romney much: “I think he’s a technocrat whose heart is fully captured by the managerial class, very much like Obama, in fact. … I’m not sure [Obamacare] will actually be undone, if he’s elected. The bill is designed to be hard to disassemble—another reason I don’t like it.” Most Obamacons are not as certain as these two, but there are discernible trends. If an Obamacon’s primary concerns are fiscal and economic (Gutzman, McArdle), they are likely to support Romney with sighs and reservations. If their concerns are primarily about foreign policy (McConnell, Bacevich), they are more likely to vote for Obama, with some regret and trepidation. “Second terms are usually worse than the first,” admits McConnell.

To an outside observer, there may seem to be an emerging wing of the Republican Party that could accommodate the Obamacons—the one being built by Ron Paul; his senator son, Rand; and their confreres in the “liberty movement.” Obamacon Andrew Sullivan twice endorsed Ron Paul in the Republican primaries, heaping accolades on his character and lauding his honesty about America’s finances and wars. The Pauls lead a movement that detests Washington’s expansive foreign policy and looks at budgets through the greenest of green eyeshades. It has the advantage of being electorally relevant (in congressional contests, at least) while maintaining credibility with a subset of Tea Partiers and portions of the conservative movement itself.

For Gutzman, who has been deeply embedded in that liberty movement for years, there is little choice. “The fiscal situation is you’re going to have Ron Paul’s foreign policy now or later,” he says. “We’re going to give it away the way the British did, rolling back the empire willingly, or the way the Soviets did, you go bankrupt and Poland is free. I still wish it could be done through the political process, rather than being forced on us.” Yet none of the other Obamacons volunteers Ron Paul or his movement when asked about sources from which political sanity might spring.

“I admire Paul’s anti-interventionist foreign policy perspective greatly,” says Bacevich, “and in that sense his voice is an important one. On the other hand, I’m not a libertarian. When it comes to domestic issues, I found his views, not reprehensible, but not likely to serve as a blueprint for what American politics is going to be about going forward. And I think libertarians, to my mind, tend to be insufficiently sensitive to the evils that the market can propagate. I fully respect capitalism as far and away the most effective way to generate economic growth, I’m just not persuaded that economic growth is the be all and end all of society.”

One gets the sense that though these Obamacons find Paul’s voice prophetic, they have tired of politics as an exercise in doctrine, and they see in the Ron Paul movement the same zeal and dogmatism that ultimately corrupted conservatism. They often cite Edmund Burke as their intellectual pole star, so it is no surprise they hesitate to take up anything like the creedal politics of libertarianism. But their objections to libertarianism may drive deeper. Bacevich’s caution about capitalism is shared by other Obamacons. For Bacevich, the concern is the way the free market erodes social and civic values. Bartlett is convinced that “the working class is getting screwed” and frames his criticisms in terms of American fairness and the depredations of the plutocracy, which he believes has captured the Republican Party.

“When you think of what you want to conserve, you think of the best aspects of your country, and for me it was the 1960s. If you strip away the radical social movements, it was a more equal country, economically equal. Less power to Wall Street and more power to the middle,” McConnell says. “Now we are developing an income structure like Brazil’s.” If these criticisms of capitalism and plutocracy seem underdeveloped, they are. The truth is that these thinkers long for intellectual leadership.

Why not go left? After all, the experience of the Bush era seemed not only to dislodge commitments to the conservative movement, but also to loosen the convictions that went with membership in it. Bartlett is open to the idea, but he finds the prospects dim. “I think one of the things liberals could do for dissident conservatives is what the right did for dissident communists and dissident liberals,” he says. “They nurtured them. Those conservatives understood that these apostates were powerful allies. But the left is too stupid to recognize the opportunity that is there.”

Unbidden, Bartlett, Bacevich, and McConnell all compare themselves and other dissident conservatives to the core group that launched National Review or the first generation of neoconservatives—a coterie on the edge of politics that has the potential to grow at the expense of an intellectually decrepit establishment.

The difference, they acknowledge, is that they lack a leader. “If you consider the career of someone like William F. Buckley, who founded National Review in 1955, when the word ‘conservative’ commanded no respect whatsoever, he seemed to be undertaking a fairly quixotic campaign,” says Bacevich. “It took him, what, 25 years before it yielded significant fruits? … If we take seriously the dictum that ideas have consequences, then we have to be patient.”

“The problem with Burkean conservatives is there are not enough of us and not enough rich ones. There’s a paucity of structures and institutions, but there could be more,” offers McConnell. “One of the things intellectuals love to be is on the cutting edge,” says Bartlett. “We now have to write off the last 30 or 40 years and go back and start from scratch, and do what those guys [Buckley and Irving Kristol] did, although now in essence we are fighting against our own this time.”

Meanwhile, the Obamacons seem satisfied with being uncommitted. “There’s no shame in being a swing constituency,” says McConnell. “It is tactically useful.” 

The only America that anyone much under 100 can remember is the land of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.

In stark contrast to our own Premier League, the National Football League maintains the equal sharing out of ticket and television revenue, and there is still the hard salary cap for players, as well as the very extensive welfare provision. The 2011 Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers, have a not-for-profit model of community ownership which has had to be banned from spreading for fear that it would otherwise prove so popular. The Packers have never moved out of a Midwestern city of only 102,313 people as of the 2000 census. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball more than do their bit, too. In all three cases, displaying the name or logo of a commercial sponsor on the kit would be considered the very height, or depth, of sacrilege.

That is the America which long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. Until very recently, that America led the world in “not seeking for monsters to destroy”. That is the America of those who, on the same day as Obama received their states’ Electoral College votes, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage. Voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. Voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against white men. And voted for Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches, especially, going.

The America of Obama supporters such as Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak and others of like mind. The America of Obama supporters such as Jim Jones, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Christopher Buckley, the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec, and Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. The America of Obama supporters such as the recently deceased Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor and a stalwart of Opus Dei. The attraction of Obama has always been his supporters rather than the man himself. That, and the sheer ghastliness of the alternatives.

Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option or a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. Nor is there coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Obama has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey’s Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur, which latter declined to endorse either him or Hillary Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the “free” trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal.

And what was the alternative? The Clintons? John McCain? The suggestion that McCain was against abortion was laughable. But a man of his experience seemed likely to leave the warmongering to such draft dodgers as Bill Clinton and George Bush. However, he then came out as wanting Robert Kagan as Secretary of State and Randy Scheunemann as National Security Advisor. War against Iran? War against Russia over Georgia? No, Obama was the best of the bunch.

In November 2011, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear was re-elected by a margin of 20 points. In Kentucky. Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Democrats won a special election to retain control of the State Senate. In New Jersey, the land of Chris Christie, they increased their majority in the State Assembly and retained control of the Senate. Voters in the key swing state of Ohio rejected by 61 per cent to 39 a proposal drastically to reduce the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

And in Mississippi, the constitutional recognition of personhood from conception, while opposed by the outgoing Republican Governor, was supported not only by the Republican nominee to succeed him, but also by the Democrat, who is black. Joining the Rust Belt Catholics, the Southern Democrats are on the way back. Only this time, they come in both colours. The Democratic Party is winning back its old Northern base of “white ethnic” Catholics to add to the blacks whom it picked up as they moved North and as Johnson backed Civil Rights, all the while slowly but steadily re-conquering the South on a biracial basis not far short of miraculous.

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, and thus in the strongest position to take advantage, if not for himself then at least for his party by 2016 or 2020, of the initially anti-Romney revival of that Republican tradition of economic and political progressivism and even populism, a phenomenon as important, and hitherto as ignored, as the revival of the Democratic tradition of Christian social and cultural conservatism and even traditionalism.

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, his non-intervention in Indochina, his denunciation of the military-industrial complex, and his still-inspiring advocacy of nuclear power as “atoms for peace” 10 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: civil nuclear power as the ultimate beating of swords in ploughshares. In 1960, John F Kennedy branded Eisenhower and Nixon as soft on the Soviets. But then, in 1954, Eisenhower had written to his brother, Edgar N Eisenhower, that, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H L Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s suspension of the draft, his détente with China and with the USSR, and the ending of the Vietnam War by him and by Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee who went on to sign the Helsinki Accords. Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s declaration that “I am now a Keynesian in economics”, or, as Milton Friedman bitterly put it, “We are all Keynesians now”.

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s belief in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded education) and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely as that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents, who have turned out to have been just as unpleasant in their own way as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime, and who now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we would find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it. He was forced out by the motley crew that had sought to replace Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic nominee in 1968: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists; in the California primary, Kennedy had denounced Eugene McCarthy’s support for public housing as a “catastrophic” proposal to move black people into Orange County.

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of the Nixon and Ford Administrations’ stark contrast to the pioneering monetarism and the Cold War sabre-rattling of the Carter Administration, which was particularly bad for abusing the noble cause of anti-Communism by emphasising Soviet human rights abuses while ignoring Chinese and Romanian ones. Carter, who was not above electorally opportunistic race-baiting, even happily allowed the Chinese-backed Pol Pot to retain control of the Cambodian seat at the UN after Phnom Penh had fallen to the rival forces backed by Vietnam and therefore by the Soviet Union. But Carter, for all his unsung prophetic calls against materialism in general and oil dependence in particular, had had the nerve to brand Ford as soft on Communism for his entirely factual statement that Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland were “not dominated” by the Soviet Union.

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, and his initiation of nuclear arms reduction in Europe, for all the heavy Trotskyist influence over his foreign policy. Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of the condemnation of the Israeli bombing of Iraq in 1981 by Reagan and by almost all members of both Houses of Congress, including many of the most hardline Evangelical conservatives, Cold War hawks or both ever to sit on Capitol Hill. Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of James Baker’s call to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” in order to “foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity”, and of Baker’s negotiation of the voluntary disposal of all nuclear weapons by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of Republican opposition to the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration. And Obama is, at least potentially, the true heir of George W Bush’s declaration that “Russia is no longer our enemy”, together with his removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 11^th September 2001, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil, despite his foreign policy’s having been subject to an even heavier Trotskyist influence than Reagan’s had been, as well as to a far heavier, very closely related ultra-Zionist influence.

With or without Obama himself, that which in 2008 was the Obama Coalition is, at least potentially, another movement in the tradition of the American Anti-Imperialist League that endorsed William Jennings Bryan, and of the America First Committee of Norman Thomas (Presbyterian minister and anti-Communist campaigner to build a Farmer-Labor party, denounced by Trotsky), Sargent Shriver (Peace Corps and Special Olympics founder, McGovern running mate, and pro-life Catholic), and Shriver’s future brother-in-law, John F Kennedy.

America is crying out for such Democratic candidates. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, not least on healthcare and on measures such the Employee Free Choice Act, in every way compatible with the sanctity of each individual human life from conception to natural death: the Human Life Amendment, the Pregnant Women Support Act, the Stupak-Pitts iron-cladding of the ban on the federal funding of abortion (enacted by a Democratic Congress in 1977 and signed into law by Jimmy Carter), opposition to embryonic stem cell “research”, support for the ethical and effective research that is into adult and cord blood stem cells. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with Obama’s definition of marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman, and with traditional family values generally. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with the Second Amendment.

Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with strengthening and enforcing immigration laws. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with only ever deploying the American military to defend American territory or lives. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with withdrawal from any treaty or organisation that undermines American sovereignty or weakens the Constitution. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with making English the only official language of the United States. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with opposing the bailouts. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with fair trade rather than “free” trade. Allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with auditing the Federal Reserve. And allies of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in every way compatible with ending all secret earmarks.

No one will ever vote to abolish their own existing entitlement, and any really existing Middle American objection to big government (an immensely questionable proposition) never extends to big government that benefits Middle America. So righteous popular outrage at enormous taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies in pointless appeasement of faithless Blue Dogs and nonexistent Republican waverers, and that without the pro-life fulsomeness of Stupak-Pitts, needs to be translated into righteous popular demand at least for the public option and then for the single-payer system, and that with the pro-life fulsomeness of Stupak-Pitts. As the National Health Service emerges in the United States while being dismantled in the United Kingdom, some of us might seriously consider emigration.

On the protection of American jobs, there is now a natural alliance between conservatives and the unions. On halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and on making English the only official language of the United States, there is now a natural alliance between conservatives and anyone with a black base. On fair trade agreements, repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, strict campaign finance reform, a crackdown against corporate influence generally and corporate welfare in particular, and tax cuts for the poor and the middle class, there is now a natural alliance between conservatives and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. On decency in the media, there is now a natural alliance between conservatives and those in the tradition of the late C Dolores Tucker and of Father Michael Pfleger.

With the Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus, there is now a natural alliance against the unfair consequences, and therefore the unfair principle, of the “affirmative action” that Colorado voted to end on the same day as it voted for Obama, and against the Ivy League’s and other top universities’ systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, from small towns, and from rural areas. There is now a natural alliance around the fact that the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield. And there is now a natural alliance between readers of Philip Giraldi’s devastating paleoconservative exposés of Israeli espionage against the United States at, by definition, the American taxpayer’s expense, and the victims of that spy network’s agitation against black candidates, as such, for public office.

Democrats need to reach out to those who would otherwise be or have been attracted to Mitt Romney, the prophet and apostle of socialised medicine, who ran for the Senate from the left of Ted Kennedy. To Mike Huckabee, economically one of the most left-wing governors in American history, and against abortion and same-sex “marriage” while in favour of Second Amendment rights. To Rick Perry, a supporter of the sanctity of life (except, alas, for those judicially guilty even if not necessarily morally guilty), of traditional marriage, and unabashedly of the public, civic Christianity that the First Amendment was framed to protect in the states against the Deists at the centre.

To Sarah Palin, with her admirable history as a Buchananite battler for job protection, for war aversion, for immigration control and for family values against the archenemy of all of them, the global “free” market, and with her record of publicly administered natural resources held in common ownership. To Donald Trump, an economic patriot and on record as supporting the Canadian single-payer healthcare system. Or to that pro-life gynaecologist and obstetrician, Ron Paul, with his opposition to bailouts, to wars, and to the erosion of constitutional checks and balances.

However, there would have been no difficulty in defeating Michele Bachmann, since white Catholics have decided every Presidential Election since 1976, whereas Bachmann’s Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod teaches that the Papacy is the Antichrist. But considering the claims that it makes, then, while individual Popes might be and have been charlatans or lunatics, the institution itself is either telling the truth in making those claims, or else it is indeed the Antichrist, and any professing Christian who does not submit to Rome on Rome’s own terms must believe it to be so. Who will call good evil by pointing to the Papacy’s defence and promotion of metaphysical realism, of Biblical historicity, of credal and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, of the sanctity of human life, of Biblical standards of sexual morality, of social justice, and of peace, and by then saying, “Behold, the Antichrist”? That is the question. Quite what Luther would have made of Bachmann’s Christian Zionism is altogether another question. Though not one that we should refrain from asking. She should perhaps be taken to visit both ultraliberal Tel Aviv and the loyally Israeli Islamist citadel of Umm al-Fahm.

Rick Santorum embodies the tendency of a significant section of the Italian-American community to become Republicans because they found their local Democratic parties already run by the Irish; his battle against the Caseys in Pennsylvania encapsulates this old, old feud. They thus participated in, and were influenced by, the developments within the Republican Party. At best, they have become more or less paleoconservative, which in turn brings them within the orbit of critiques, not least Catholic critiques, of capitalism. At worst, they have become Rick Santorum. Rather mirroring the battle for the Republican Party itself in 2012. Once and for all, is it the Party of God, or is it the Party of Mammon? The slow motion coronation of the candidate of big business in all its social liberalism and global military adventurism should settle that. To the surprise of nobody who has ever been paying attention.

American Catholicism divides between liberals who conform to the Church’s Teaching on social justice and on peace but not on many bioethical and on most or all sexual matters, and conservatives, such as Rick Santorum, who conform to the Church’s Teaching on bioethics and on sex but not on social justice or on peace. Neither is any more orthodox than other. Both are de facto schismatic. Many Evangelicals are now so adrift from their own theological moorings that they cannot see the difference between the conservative Catholics and themselves, so that they have supported Santorum, saying all that needs to be said about how “traditional”, as they would and do often describe themselves, the conservatives really are or are not.

Dewey, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, even Reagan in many ways, Bush the Elder, Dole, Bush the Younger as he presented himself in 2000, McCain, and now Romney: for all the noise made by those Americans who are usually, if rather perversely, styled “conservatives”, there have demonstrably never been very many of them even among registered Republicans. With the possible, but far from unarguable, exceptions of 1984 and 2004, the results of every Republican Presidential nomination process since the War prove my point. There are not enough fiscally and internationally hawkish social conservatives to win the Republican Party, or to come anywhere close to doing so, never mind to win the country. And there never have been. The defeat of Rick Santorum proves this point yet again.

But what of Newt Gingrich? He has had more wives than children and more affairs than wives. He wants “a mirror system in space [that] could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for night-time lighting of the highways”. Oh, and “a large array of mirrors that could affect the earth’s climate”, thereby extending the growing season for farmers. And he has Lyndon LaRouche’s signature policy of colonising the Moon and then Mars. Gingrich’s historical theories are about as credible as LaRouche’s, making it no surprise that he was denied tenure, not in the liberal Northeast that he had fled, but in Georgia, and I mean Georgia as it was then. He is financially dependent on Sheldon Adelson, and he called Reagan “Neville Chamberlain” for daring to meet Mikhail Gorbachev.

Like neoconservatism, the Tea Party is strikingly uninterested in abortion or in the definition of marriage. The influence of the Moonies through The Washington Times seems to be giving way to Sharron Angle’s links to Scientology, to Christine O’Donnell’s dabbling in witchcraft, and to Rand Paul’s Aqua Buddha and Ayn Rand, as close as each other to the beliefs, values and culture of Middle America. For all the good that he did when he caused Newt Gingrich and the godfathers of neoconservatism to liken him to Neville Chamberlain, Reagan remains the only President of the United States ever to have been divorced, his Californian no fault divorce law has since been adopted by almost every state, he appointed two diehard social liberals to the United States Supreme Court, and – read this one over until it sinks in – he legalised abortion in California. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”, was Reagan’s favourable quotation from Tom Paine, to which Reagan added, “We still have that power”. As utterly unconservative a sentiment as his beloved, “I know in my heart that Man is good”.

Where are the Democrats who can and will confront Middle America with these realities? Who is preaching for a decision between reading the Bible as if it were the Bible and reading the Constitution as if it were the Qur’an? A Constitution, moreover, written by Deists whose theological position was exemplified by The Jefferson Bible, from which the eponymous author expunged all reference to Christ’s Divinity, Resurrection and miracles. In 1904, The Jefferson Bible was printed by order of Congress, and a copy provided by the Government Printing Office was presented to all new members of Congress from that year until the 1950s.

The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, “of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary”, was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, was ratified unanimously, and specified that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”. Although he attended Episcopalian services with his wife, George Washington did not receive Communion. Thanksgiving was largely invented and very largely popularised as an alternative to Christmas, although I have been rather touchingly informed that its roots were in East Anglian harvest festivals, the idea of Puritan harvest festivals being one of the few things quite as laughable as the idea of the Puritans as believers in religious liberty.

However, the actual phrase “the separation of Church and State” does not occur in the Constitution. Rather, the First Amendment’s reference to religion was designed to stop Congress, full of Deists as it was, from suppressing the Established Churches of several states, although they all disestablished them of their own volition later on precisely because they had fallen so completely under the Founding Fathers’ influence. Obama has missed a trick by not giving white Evangelical Protestants the Supreme Court seat that the Republicans have no more delivered than they have delivered the slightest legal protection to the child in the womb.

As our movement takes shape in America, where are its Tea Parties against the utterly anti-conservative intentions and effects of neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy, and where are its May Day parades against the utterly anti-worker intentions and effects of the uncontrolled mass immigration for which George W Bush should have been impeached? We must wish our own people’s Tea Parties more success than the Tea Party that has already received so much media coverage. It installed the same Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts whom it now seeks to remove. In 2010, it ended up claiming several successful candidates whom it had previously disowned. Marco Rubio won the Senate seat in Florida with fewer votes than his two opponents combined, and Senator Bob Bennett of Utah would have been re-elected against the Tea Partier if he had run as an Independent.

By contrast, the Republican Party’s old Moderate school staged a significant comeback, even returning Lincoln Chafee, who had openly endorsed Obama in 2008 and who was effectively endorsed by him in 2010, as Governor of Rhode Island as an Independent against the official Republican, Tea Party nominee. Since the Republican National Committee is busy imposing open primaries in order to prevent any further Tea Party advances even on that pitiful showing, the Tea Party can look forward to campaigning in 2012 for the Presidency to go to, I say again, the man who gave Massachusetts socialised medicine and who ran for the Senate from the left of Ted Kennedy. But even he is not going to win. So, in 2016, the Tea Party will be out on the stump for David Petraeus, who is currently a serving member of the Obama Administration. Do not believe everything that you see on Fox News.

Meanwhile, in 2010, Kesha Rogers was nominated in the Texas 22nd District. Rogers is a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, with his demented theories about the Royal Family, his lunatic schemes to colonise Mars, and so forth. Mainstream Democrats need to become the party to end the bailouts, restore the Glass-Steagall Act that was repealed by the ghastly Bill Clinton, bring home the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq (and now also from Libya), eschew future such adventures, invest in key infrastructure, uphold the traditional definition of marriage, really fight against drugs, introduce single-payer healthcare, resist climate change hysteria, and defend both classical education and working and middle-class access to it. Or the LaRouche Movement will. Even after the man himself has died; in 2010, Kesha Rogers was 33.

In 2012, and unlike several traditional features of the scene including a former Prime Minister, a LaRouche lieutenant, Jacques Cheminade, won the support of the 500 elected representatives necessary to make it onto the ballot for the first round of the French Presidential Election. That is what happens when no one else promises to separate retail and investment banking, to create proper jobs by means of infrastructure projects that are also good in themselves, and to pull out and keep out of wars of “liberal intervention”. A British LaRouche movement is by definition impossible. But other expressions of comparable lunacy are not. And how long can it be before Cheminade or one of his supporters wins a seat in the European Parliament, there to subject us to his legislative will, which is really the will, even if it is only the last will and testament, of Lyndon LaRouche?

That said, if you believe in “al-Qaeda”, or in “the global terrorist network”, or in “Taliban” distinct from the Pashtun as a whole, or in any connection between Afghanistan and the events of 11^th September 2001, or in any connection between Iraq and those events, or in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or in such weapons as a threat to America or Britain even if they had existed, or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, or in such a programme’s threat to America or Britain even if it existed, then you are exactly as sane as if you were a birther, or an 11^th September 2001 truther, or a LaRouche supporter, or someone waving an Obama-Hitler placard at a Tea Party. Except that none of those people has ever caused a war. Likewise, if you were or are any sort of supporter of Newt Gingrich, the Republican LaRouche, who as President would have started an awful lot of wars.

In 2016, Marcy Kaptur would be good: a pro-life battler and a Progressive Caucus member. A pro-life woman seeking the Democratic nomination has happened before. But never on a full platform of policies. And certainly never from the populist, anti-war Left.