Robert Bartley has died at age 66, three days after the above entry was written. It’s being discussed at FreeRepublic.com. Among the many posts from the Freepers, staunch “conservatives” all, the word “borders” (as in “open borders”) does not appear once. Can somebody who has an ID at FreeRepublic remind the good folks there that this conservative hero Bartley sought to erase the United States of America in a borderless capitalist world order?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1037765/posts

The outpouring of adulatory articles about Barley by establishment conservatives since his death testifies to the total grip over their minds of the rationalist, borderless, one-world-economy vision that Bartley promoted. In the name of economic productivity and an abstract idea of freedom, these people are ready, ultimately, to dispense with everything America has been. Yes, in the short term, if America is threatened, they come to her defense. But that’s at least as much because America represents a universal project for democracy and freedom as because America is their _country_. Furthermore, as the Hegelian mambo keeps gliding ever further leftward, the American nation the conservatives supposedly believe in will increasingly merge with the rest of the world in a single free market of free persons.

From his writings, Bartley always impressed me as a soulless, technocratic rationalist without any love for particulars, such as one’s people and culture. This was summed up by his callous statement: “The nation-state is finished.” A man who says “The nation-state is finished,” while formerly calling for open borders, is making it clear that he is not simply predicting that the nation-state is finished. He is DOING HIS UTMOST TO BRING THAT RESULT ABOUT. Yet this is the man who is being lauded by the conservative establishment, without a single mention, let alone a critical word, concerning his ideologically fixated quest for mass immigration and the damage that has done to America. Today’s libertarian, Wall Street Journal type conservatives were once described as “Communists for capitalism.” I think it’s fair to say that Bartley as much as anyone set the tone for that.

This is not to say that the WSJ editorial page under him did not have many worthy articles. Of course if did. But isn’t that par for the course with the modern conservatives? They present an image of “conservatism” and “patriotism” that gets conservative pulses going, but (and this is the essence of neoconservatism), this conservatism is something that has been reduced and transmuted into an ideology that turns out to be antithetical to many of the things true conservatives and patriots believe in.

Peter Brimelow wrote a gentle, sincere, but candid obituary.

http://www.vdare.com/pb/bartley.htm

I didn’t know Bartley personally so I’m not required to be gentle. It was Brimelow’s column that reminded me of Bartley’s saying “The nation-state is finished.”

Yesterday I had a moment of doubt about whether the word “treason” in the title of this entry is too strong. But I don’t think it is. I’m strengthened in that view by this quote from Cicero that I just came across:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

I think this description fits a man who, from a leading position in his society, calls for open borders while also saying that the nation-state is finished, and yet who in such an influential and respected position that all kinds of other influential people regard him as a model and a mentor, and approve all his ideas. In my opinion such a man is a traitor, and of the most deadly kind.

The late Mr. Bartley was himself a good example of the looneyness we are describing. He said, “The nation-state is finished.” He was saying that feelings of national identity were finished among people like him. However, the people whose importation into this country Mr. Bartley demanded, are keeping their own national identity.

While Bob Bartley’s views on immigration and the nation - state were wildly unrealistic, let us not forget the enormous good work he did over the years to advance conservative values in many areas. If many so - called conservatives today fail to live up to our ideals in all respects, let us remember how truly bad things were when New Deal liberalism was thought to occupy the moral high ground, and conservatives were simply stupid people. We have come a long way, and that is due in part to men like Bartley, even though he was off the reservation in some areas.

Thucydides’ question makes me think that it could be asked of me, would I be as hard on Ronald Reagan, who like Bartley advanced good conservative causes while allowing the immigration disaster to continue? My answer is that I would praise Reagan highly, even while finding immigration to be a serious mark against him. But the cases are not the same. Reagan never proposed a constitutional amendment saying “There shall be open borders.” He never said, “The nation-state is finished.” Statements like that—especially in the context of our ongoing immigration disaster and our inability to stop it—are so vile and harmful that they deserve special condemnation.

As for balancing the good with the bad, Bartley is receiving such fulsome praise everywhere else, he doesn’t need more of it from me. I confess to having no generosity of spirit on this one. I feel that a man who said what Bartley said is an enemy, regardless of whatever good he may have done.

Reagan simply had other, grave priorities such as reducing the risk of nuclear combat with the Evil Empire and keeping the economy going. Moreover, he did not have screaming at him the open borders attitude of ever so many nutters. (I knew his amnesty compromise was foolish, but it is easy for me to criticize a man with a plate more full than I could handle in ten lifetimes.)