There are two points to be made. One, when Bush goes all-out to legalize illegal aliens, the mainstream right will support him or keep silent. This means Limbaugh, Hannity, & Company. Two, eventually the Democrats will win the White House again. Have you noticed that “Gay Marriage” is already or soon will be, a standard position?

Furthermore, the demographic changes can give the Left a lock on the Presidency.

I am afraid that Mr. Auster has provided an excellent summary of our dilemma. There are,however, some slight signs that the “mainstream right” and even some neocons are beginning to be scared by the results of immigration. John McLaughlin, on his Sunday morning TV show, did mention the issue — albeit as one of the most underreported ones.

A dilemma implies two choices, either of which have at least some negative consequences.

The immigration situation is not a dilemma. The time for immigration reform has come and gone. The dam has broken and those who might yet have an outside chance to make minor repairs to it (the President, Congress), will not. By the time a critical mass of Americans are scared by personal experience of U.S. immigration policy—enough to overcome the media and political correctness—it will be too late.

We face an “America” that will be unrecognizable. The Trojan Horse is already inside the gates and everyone is asleep.

There is a chance that if Clark or Gephardt will win the nomination they will move to the middle for general election. That might put fear of God into Bush, admittedly a small possibility.

To Mr. Thompson,

It’s an interesting question, which different people might answer differently, when immigration passed from being a problem or a dilemma to being something much worse. I’ve been writing about immigration since the late 1980s, and I don’t think I’ve ever called it a problem or a dilemma. I’ve called it a disaster and a catastrophe.

Unfortunately, the only way conservatives can fight this is through independent expenditures attacking liberal policies.
We can also vote for a Third-party conservative candidate in those states Bush will lose. The worst thing we could do is to stay at home.
I only hope that conservatives are sophisticated enough to do this.

Ramesh Ponnuru had an article at NRO last July making points similar to what I’m saying here. Also like myself (and unlike most Lucianne.com posters, for example), he is not happy at the prospect of a major American party going insane.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru070203.asp

Mr. Auster is right about President Bush’s instincts. I have become convinced that the president is, in his heart of hearts, a big government liberal, eager to impose state solutions on human problems. That state solutions never solve human problems is beyond his ken. Those of us who once kidded ourselves that GW Bush might have a conservative core have no excuse: we already had the example of his father to (fail to) learn from.

David is also right to point out the essential docility of mainstream “conservatives.”

For both those reasons, true conservatives need to hope (not work for, that would be asking too much of us) that the Democrats oust President Bush this year. The more devastating Bush’s defeat, the more Leftist the victor (victrix, if Sen. Clinton enters stage Left), the better. The only way to wean mainstream conservatives from the Republican Party and their fond, fading memories of Ronald Reagan is for the Republicans to be broken and exposed as a spent force. Mainstream conservatives will accept any Republican betrayal, for fear of the Democrats, as long as Republicans are winners. To break that habit, Republicans need to lose, and lose big.

Another thing for traditionalists to ask ourselves is, however bad a Leftist Democrat administration might be, how much worse in practical effect would it be than the undeclared Leftism of the Bush administration as applied to the social and cultural issues we care most about? With rare exceptions like Paul and Tancredo, what use are Republican Congressmen? Hastert and Frist are useless. Sen. Hatch is Sen. Kennedy’s best friend, and currently the noisy proponent of the nightmarish DREAM Act, while his fellow Utahn in the House, Cannon, is as aggressive a booster of illegal aliens as any hispanic Democrat. And what of New York’s Gov. Pataki, whom Mr. Auster has skewered elsewhere? Good riddance to them all. HRS

As always, the incomparable Auster has everything exactly right. Few things can be as utterly jejune as this stupid factional glee that so many “conservatve” Republicans are exhibiting over the increasing Democrat lunacy.

After all, who cares about the Republican party and its fortunes? At best, it’s nothing more than an instrument.

I think we have been pushed to the point where we must think as the Marxists used to think, “the worse, the better.” I am now hoping President Bush will lose in November, because although Islamism threatens to murder many thousands of Americans, the throwing open of our borders, for which President Bush is manifestly such an enthusiast, is certain to destroy the entire nation. Only a complete Republican upheaval or third-party mass movement can stop that now, and either possibility would be entirely quashed by a Bush landslide in ‘04.

That the media would uniformly attribute his defeat to popular detestation of the so-called War on Terror and never mention immigration would be extremely annoying but perhaps not terribly relevant.

A native Noo Yawkah, I now dwell in exile in Southern California, where the white middle and working-class (that portion of it which has not been forced to move to even-more-hideous Vegas) are seething over the unchecked Mexican invasion, actually fostered and subsidized by the “authorities.”

Perhaps the White House is willing to trade millions of votes from working-stiff “wallpaper white males” in order to please the slave-labor barons and Democrat mandarins; in this case, they will not be alarmed to hear that neither myself nor my wallpaper white-male in-laws intend to vote for President Bush in November, though we all supported the war in Iraq.

It’s the immigration, stupid.

To Mr. Sutherland,

On domestic issues, a Democratic administration might not be catastrophic as compared with Bush. On foreign policy and national security, there is more than ample reason to believe it would be. I have no intention of voting for Bush. But I admit I may have to do some serious soul searching on that point come election time, if it looked as though there were any chance that a traitorous nitwit like Dean might become president in the midst of a war. My inclination is that I will still withhold my vote from Bush, on the basis that the possibility of some temporary setbacks in the war on Islamic terror may be a price we have to pay in order to stop the Republican party from taking the country irretrievably to the left.

And thanks to Shrewsbury. :-)

I’m inclined to agree with Mssrs. Sutherland and Shrewsbury on the matter of not checking the ballot for Bush in November. Bush is a Tranzi who has no loyalty of any kind to his own people - or his professed faith. He absolutely deserves to go down in flames. Even so, Richard Poe has raised the propect that a Democratic victory - especially with Hillary at the helm - will almost certainly result in a dictatorship before the end of four year term of office. Poe’s resoning is that at least Bush wouldn’t send the jackboots to kick his door down and haul him off to the gulag, which would buy time to build a genuine conservative movement. What are your opinions of this argument, fellow VFR posters? A happy and blessed New Year to all, BTW!

I would like to make clear that when I used the word dilemma, I meant the problem of chosing between two prospects as horrible as the continuation of Bush in office and his replacement by a Democrat, who, especially if he is Dean, may well be even worse — if only in the short run. I think we should not kid ourselves about the damage a Democratic President could do — Clinton, for all his faults, was by no means the worst character that party can produce. I cannot agree with Howard Sutherland that Bush is some sort of liberal; that ascribes an ideological commitment to him of which he is simply incapable. Rather, he is ye compleat Country Club Republican. He does not favor immigration, for example, because he likes Hispanics, or feels guilty, but because it profits some business interests and he does not give a damn about the working class and middle-class native Americans it will hurt. (He may also envisage it as helping the founding of a family dynasty.)

I too agree that the immigration problem is a catastrophe, not a dilemma.

I think Alan Levine has got it just about exactly right in all particulars in his post of 6:15 PM — very nice summary, Mr. Levine. Reading threads like this, and being reminded by Carl of Richard Poe’s misgivings regarding any strategy of *not* voting for Bush, and yet seeing all the great good sense and rightness of posts like Mr. Sutherland’s, Shrewsbury’s, and others, above and elsewhere, I feel like the Terminator character in “Terminator III” (like Mr. LeFevre I’m not a movie-goer but my teenagers rented the video this week-end, and I saw most of it) when he was re-programmed to kill the good guy but just couldn’t do it, and as a result his brain circuits finally froze and he couldn’t do anything at all.

In spite of Thrasy’s nice mini-analysis of the question, here:

http://thrasymachus.typepad.com/thras/2004/01/guest_workers.html ,

I could not actually vote for any Dem for president. For me it’ll be either not voting for president at all, or voting for Howard Phillips again (whom I voted for in 2000). A Bush second term and the election of a Dem candidate are BOTH absolutely nightmarish scenarios that are too horrible to contemplate.

I won’t be voting for any Republican or Democrat presidential candidate come November because I now believe both parties are too corrupt and anti-American to support. Who will get my vote, I do not know.

I think Richard Poe’s concerns are overblown - for now, although I confess that the thought of a Leftist Democratic administration enforcing the USA Patriot Act gives me pause. Then again, the Bush administration enforcing it gives me pause.

I cannot agree with Mr. Levine about President Bush. Bush is a liberal, as his father was before him. He is a thoughtless, reflexive liberal, more indoctrinated than he realizes by his years at such cesspools as Yale and Harvard, but a liberal none the less. Whenever he acts on instinct, the action is that of a liberal. By the way, Thomas Fleming (I know he is not always appreciated in this forum, but humor me) has come up with a more honest name for neoconservatives. In the current Chronicles, he dubs them neoleftists. I think that is a more accurate description of where they come from and how they act. When one looks at whom Bush selects to advise him, a combination of neoleftists, big business associates and affirmative action trophies, how can one conclude that he is anything other than an establishment liberal, drawl and protestations of Protestantism notwithstanding?

On balance, a Democratic administration might be somewhat worse than a second Bush II administration. For me, that is less important than the need to end the Republican Party’s ability to count on the support of conservative Americans as its office holders drag the country to the Left. The only hope of doing that (at least as long as the Democratic Party is on the scene to play the openly liberal bogeyman) is for the Republicans to lose, and lose big. Forgive my saying that twice.

That is why, much as I detest what the Democratic Party stands for and most Democrat office holders, I hope for President Bush’s defeat in November. One could also add that, as a relentlessly mediocre president, he has not earned a second term. HRS

Mr. Auster writes: “My inclination is that I will still withhold my vote from Bush, on the basis that the possibility of some temporary setbacks in the war on Islamic terror may be a price we have to pay in order to stop the Republican party from taking the country irretrievably to the left.”

********

Thanks to Bush, Muslim terrorists have been repeatedly invited to the White House. One of them was even allowed to participate in the 9-11 “prayer service” that Bush headlined. Meanwhile, Grover Norquist has established a direct pipeline to the White House for sympathers of Islamic terror. George Bush himself has at times carried a Koran in his pocket, while mouthing his “religion of peace” idiocy. Mexico, where Osama bin Laden became immensely popular in the aftermath of 9-11, continues to aid in the importation of its citizens AND “unidentified” Arabs/Muslims across the US border illegally—and Bush, as a result, is going to reward Mexico and its illegals. And, just most recently, George Bush has become the first American president to be directly responsible for the establishment of an Islamic “Republic”—in Afghanistan. Much more of this “success” in the war against Islamic terror and we’ll all be hefting our backsides, pointing towards Mecca, and building a mosque adjacent to the White House.

I suspect we are engaging in a profitless argument, but I would like to ask Howard Sutherland one question? Why, if Bush is really a liberal, why do all the self-designated liberals seem to hate him? Now, even I would agree that on occasion he makes liberal-sounding noises; yet on other occasions, he makes conservative-sounding ones. But that is the way of unprincipled politicians. By the way, I do not agree with the idea that neocons are leftists, or even liberals. Anyone seeing the real left at work in academia will not confuse the two, and, while the neocons - or at least the older ones — certainly originated as liberals, they have long since taken on certain peculiarities of their own. One of which, of course, is ingratitude and hostility toward paleoconservatives.

Mr. Levine,

There is a spectrum of liberalism. Leftist academics (many of them actually Marxists) are closer to its left edge than President Bush. They and other Leftists hate Bush because, from their vantage point, he looks right-wing and, of course, because he is a Republican. They assume the Republican Party is right-wing, and hate it too. Would that it were. They also hate his identification with Christianity.

Bush and neoleftists (I like that term, so I’m going to stick with it for a while) are to the right of Marxists and most Democrats, but one can be well to their right, and still be to the left of what used to be the center.

As others here have explained, thanks to the Hegelian mambo, the American political spectrum is in a continuous redshift to the Left. There is no Right, as traditionally understood, in mainstream American politics today. By any reasonable accounting of his actions and policies as Governor of Texas and President of the United States, GW Bush is a liberal. Neoleftists (or Neo-Jacobins, if you prefer Claes Ryn’s formulation) are liberals. Don’t be fooled just because Bush didn’t object to executing convicts and neoleftists like it when other men in American uniforms blow things up - neither is an inherently conservative trait. HRS

Of course, people can use what words they want, but in my opinion Thomas Fleming’s recent coinage for neoconservatives, “neo-leftists,” is less accurate and less useful than Mark Richardson’s terminology, in which he calls today’s mainstream conservatives “right-liberals” and today’s liberals “left-liberals.” For one thing, the distinction between “left-liberal” and “right-liberal” explains the hostility that left-liberals have for the neoconservatives, who are right-liberals. But “neo-leftist” makes the neoconservatives sound as though they are further to the left than liberals, which makes no sense.

The key idea is that there is a liberal spectrum, ranging from right-liberals to the far left. The right-liberals still believe in elements of an older liberalism that includes things such as patriotism, national defense, property, individual rights. The left-liberals believe basically in an internationalist, group-rights, regulated state. But all liberals, both the left kind and the right kind, inevitably keep moving further and further leftward.

I think this describes modern conservatism better than “neo-leftism” does.

I’ve made a further remark about “right-liberal” versus “neo-leftist” at a new thread:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002063.html

Mr. Levine’s question about the hatred of leftists towards Bush and the neocons set off a memory bell from my Russian history classes from long ago. As I remember, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (the hard left) hated the liberal reformers far more than the old Czarist right wing. The liberals, who were really right-liberals in that situation, sought change via incremental democratic reforms. This was completely unacceptable to the hard left, who saw this as defusing the revolution that would be needed to establish the socialist utopia. Hence, it was the reformers and moderates who were usually targeted for assasination instead of the right. Of course, Lenin and Co. ultimately took advantage of the chaos created by Russia’s disaster on the Eastern front in WWI by hijacking a popular uprising resulting from economic collapse.

Right-liberal works almost as well as neoleftist, with one caveat. While it performs the useful service of getting “conservative” out of the label for people who are no such thing, it leaves “right” in. Neoconservatives/neoleftists/neo-Jacobins/right-liberals, whatever one calls them, are not right of anything except the left-liberals to their left. Just because our society has forgotten where the political or ideological center is, that doesn’t mean we have to; we’re traditionalists, after all.

Mr. Auster cites a commitment to patriotism and national defense as something that distinguishes right-liberals from left-liberals. True to a degree, but the patriotism and national defense that right-liberals embrace are perversions of the real things. The patriotism of neoconservatives and, and far as I can tell, President Bush, is not an attachment to the real America, its land, people and history, but to an abstract proposition about government. Pursuing neocon patriotism means purging the United States of most of the things that gave the country its American character. Bush believes the United States is best defended by having American soldiers picked off one by one in foreign countries thousands of miles away across the sea while throwing open America’s borders and coffers to illegal invaders from Mexico.

Right-liberals are coming to terms with group rights (witness Bush’s embrace of the Supreme Court’s ratification of race prejudice in university admissions, and what is his pandering proposal for a Mexican amnesty if not one of the largest group rights proffers ever?), as they already have with massive federal regulation (it wasn’t only Gore going on about “prescription drugs for seniors” in 2000, and now Bush has signed that federal boondoggle into law). Neoconservative opposition to international organizations is purely tactical. The minute organizations like the UN and EU start supporting causes neocons favor, neocons will all be enthusiastic internationalists.

I no longer see how we are better off under the rule of right-liberals than we would be under that of left-liberals. It pains me to say so, but America is going to Hell just as fast, nay faster, under President Bush and a Republican Congress as it was under the sociopathic President Clinton and a split Congress.

There are still differences between left-liberals and right-liberals, but they are diminishing as right-liberals keep sliding left. Both are implacable enemies of any traditional order. HRS

I of course agree with Mr. Sutherland’s description of neoconservative patriotism, having made the same point many times myself. :-) But I think the unusual nature of neoconservative patriotism is captured very well by the term “right-liberal.” That is, it is “right” insofar as it celebrates the nation; but it is liberal insofar as the nation it is celebrating is not (for the most part) a substance, but a project to advance a universalizing idea. Meanwhile, the left does not celebrate or defend the nation in any form, even in the midst of war.

I’ll be voting for Pat Buchanan or Howard Sutherland. These are the only two guys I’ve stumbled across who are making any sense. It is really amazing how far removed both parties are from the needs and interests of the citizenry (you know, the legal ones). No offense to Mr. Auster of course - I just wouldn’t want to distract him from hosting this site. :-)

With an incumbent running for re-election this year, I’ll wait until 2008. :-)

Seriously, sometimes it seems that running for president is the only way that one can present a vision for the country before a national audience.

It is evident that Mr. Sutherland, and also Mr. Auster, are using liberal in a far broader sense than I was! I cannot say that Mr. Sutherland is wrong, for it is obvious that the political spectrum has shifted so far that liberal hardly has the meaning it did forty years ago, much less the one it had in the nineteenth century. However, it seems to me that it is also clear that Bush is not on the same spectrum as those who now call themselves liberals or leftists. At least, the latter cannot recognize this. This is not a defense of the man — my contempt for him at least approaches that of Howard Sutherland — but an observation.