In reality, things were much different, as the history of Illinois demonstrates.

Article VIII, Section 12, of the first Illinois state constitution (1818) states that “every person in the state has a right to justice, and to a remedy to wrongs committed against his person, property, or reputation.” However, limits were soon placed on this enumerated right. In fact, Article V of this same constitution prohibited “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians” from serving in the state militia. This meant that these people were not allowed to keep or bear arms. In “An Act Concerning Practice,” which was put in force on February 2, 1827, the first of the legal restrictions on citizenship rights for blacks was established. Section 3 states: “A negro, mulatto, or Indian shall not be a witness in any court, or in any case, against a white person. A person having one fourth part negro blood shall be adjudged a mulatto.” This section effectively prevents any of the aforementioned from having recourse in a court of law against the depredations of any white person. (This is reminiscent of the status of Dhimmis under Islamic law.) The second clause of this section did state, however, that negroes and mulattoes are persons.

The constitution of 1818 has a curious attitude toward slavery. Since slavery was not allowed in the Northwest Territories, Illinois should never have had any slaves within its borders. Article VI generally forbids slavery, except as punishment for crimes. Yet Section 2 specifically allows slaves from other states to work in the Shawneetown salt works, though only for a term of one year, after which they were to be freed.

Strife over slavery surfaced early in Illinois. In fact, there was a movement for another constitutional convention as early as 1822, with the idea of making Illinois a slave state. After some chicanery, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a convention. A spirited campaign ensued, and the proposal failed at the polls in 1824. Still, harsh laws concerning blacks continued to be put on the books.

In another law, passed on February 7, 1827, and put into effect on June 1, 1827, blacks and women were denied the right to sit on juries. The English common-law tradition holds that it is important that a person be judged by a jury of his peers if justice is to be served. Under Illinois law, during this time period, a woman could testify in court in most cases, yet she was denied the right to have other women serve on her jury. For blacks, the situation was worse. They could not testify even in their own defense if a white person was involved, and their jury would consist of white men.

By the early 1830’s, Illinois law books already had a section entitled the “Negro Code.” On March 30, 1819, the General Assembly passed “AN ACT respecting Free Negroes, Mulattoes, Servants, and Slaves”—a comprehensive law that governed the conditions under which free blacks, as well as slaves and servants, could come into the state. Illinois was a very poor state in those days, and the government did not want anyone coming into the state who might be a burden on the state’s rudimentary welfare system. Section 3 specifically forbids the bringing of slaves into the state for the purpose of freeing them and having them become public charges. People bringing slaves into the state were required to post a $1,000 bond for each to ensure that they were not to be freed and placed on the public dole.

Under this law, no black or mulatto was allowed to reside in Illinois unless he could produce a court certificate from some jurisdiction in the United States attesting to his free status. This certificate was to be recorded in the county of his residence. Should the free black man have a family, his certificate needed to be endorsed after the birth of each new child by a court clerk. While the burden of keeping these records seems extreme today, it may actually have provided some protection against individuals being seized as fugitive slaves and hauled off to another state. How much protection this certificate would provide is unclear, however, since Section 4 says: “Provided, nevertheless, That nothing in this act contained, shall be construed to bar the lawful claim of any person or persons to any such negro or mulatto.” In other words, there would be little legal recourse for any free black if someone claimed him as a slave and produced some bogus documentation.

Any free black was required to show a certificate of freedom in order to gain employment in Illinois. Those employers who disregarded this requirement were to be fined $1.50 per person, per day.

In fairness to the state of Illinois, this law also prescribed fair treatment of servants. When their terms of indenture were up, they were to be provided with clothes and other necessities. A servant would have to consent before his contract could be transferred to another master. There were provisions for what to do when servants misbehaved and also for masters who failed in their duties. Servants who acquired property during their terms of indenture were allowed to keep it.

On the other hand, there were harsh penalties if slaves or servants were found more than ten miles away from their master’s residence without a pass. Such an infraction could be punished with up to 35 lashes. Servants could be lashed for infractions for which free people were merely fined. The going rate was 20 lashes for each eight dollars of fine. Nobody was supposed to get more than 40 lashes at any one time. And, in Section 23,

be it further enacted, That riots, routs, unlawful assemblies, trespasses, and seditious speeches, by any slave or slaves, servant or servants, shall be punished with stripes, at the discretion of a justice of the peace, not exceeding thirty-nine . . .

This statute authorized any person to apprehend such lawbreakers and to haul them off to the justice of the peace. It was even illegal for three or more slaves or servants to assemble for the purpose of dancing or revelry, whether at night or in the daytime, even on private property. If a master was found to have allowed this law to be violated, he could be fined. And there were incentives for others to turn him in.

The fact that the law makes such references to slavery indicates that, contrary to the constitution of 1818, the “peculiar institution” was alive and well in Illinois. Slaves and servants were obviously not considered full citizens. Even free blacks had severe restrictions on their rights.

In 1829, the “ACT respecting free Negroes and Mulattoes, Servants, and Slaves” was revised. No longer was it sufficient for a free black to provide local authorities a certificate attesting his freedom. Now, he had to post a $1,000 bond as well. The bonding requirement was not imposed on any blacks already resident in Illinois. This bond was forfeited if the individual ever failed to “demean himself, or herself, in strict conformity with the laws of this state” or became a charge to any Illinois county. Any black without a certificate would now be considered a runaway slave. His status would be posted and published, and the sheriff was to take him into custody. While waiting for a master to show up, the sheriff was authorized “to hire them out for the best price he can get.” If no master showed up in a year, the sheriff was to execute a certificate effectively declaring the person to be free. There were provisions for what fees had to be paid to the sheriff should the lawful owner show up. It became a crime for any escaped slave to come to Illinois for the purpose of saving up enough money to buy his freedom. No negro, mulatto, or Indian was allowed to purchase a servant unless that person was the same “complexion” as the master. Finally, it was declared illegal for any negro or mulatto to marry any white person. Section 3 also declares any such marriages null and void, and anyone seeking to be married in violation of this law was to be given 39 lashes and imprisoned for up to one year. Any official who presided at the marriage of different races faced a fine of not less than $200 and would be ineligible for any future office in the state.

By 1845, it was illegal for people of differing races to cohabit. Those who did so were believed to be living in an “open state of adultery and fornication.” Anyone convicted of violating this law was subject to a fine of up to $500 and imprisonment for not more than a year. If this was not a sufficient deterrent, “for the second offense the punishment shall be double, for the third treble, and in the same ratio for each succeeding offense.”

By the 1840’s, the 1818 constitution was becoming an albatross around the neck of the state. Whig internal improvements had put the state government into a severe fiscal crisis. Some social problems were also coming to the fore. The northern part of the state was being heavily settled by immigrants from Northern states. The southern half of Illinois, however, was populated mostly by people from the South. A constitutional convention was called in 1847 to address the changing situation of the state. Mr. Bond, the delegate from Clinton County, and the son of the first governor of the state, offered a resolution on June 24, 1847, that would order the General Assembly to ban the immigration of free blacks into the state. He also wanted to ensure that people could not bring slaves into Illinois only to set them free. While claiming that he did not want to offend any of the other delegates and that nobody cared more about doing justice to “that class of unfortunate individuals, called free negroes” than he did, he was concerned about the property rights of slaveholders. In his part of Illinois, small communities of free blacks were springing up, and these were aiding and abetting the escape of slaves from other states.

This convention clearly showed the cleavage between the northern and southern halves of the state. Generally, the representatives from the northern counties wanted more political rights for blacks than did those of the South. Still, most of the former took care to state that they were not abolitionists. From the records of the debates of the convention, it is obvious that even those who supported blacks having some civil and political rights did not care for them very much. Concerns were aired regarding possible insurrection of blacks, interracial marriage, blacks wooing white daughters, crime, and the like. It was flatly stated by a number of delegates that blacks were not citizens regardless of what such states as Vermont and Massachusetts might think. The delegates did not think that the races could ever live together in a state of equality. Some voices pointed out that the principles of Christian charity required treating blacks fairly, but these same voices also said that they were not in favor of the Underground Railroad and that the best option for free blacks was foreign colonization. (Colonization was also the preference of both Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.) Even the more moderate delegates agreed that there was no question of political equality between blacks and whites, since the people were adamantly against it. Probably the best summary of the political realities of race was given by a Mr. Kinney, the delegate from St. Clair County. He cited what happened when the executors of the estate of statesman John Randolph of Roanoke sought to settle his former slaves in the strongly abolitionist state of Ohio: The locals rose up and drove them off. (In his biography of John Randolph, Russell Kirk corroborates Mr. Kinney on this point.) Mr. Kinney supported the actions of the Ohio abolitionists:

They did not want them, they knew what sort of a population they were, and how worthless and degraded they become, and how troublesome they always were. If we would allow the negroes any kind of equality we must admit them to the social hearth. It was then that equality commenced. We must live with them and permit them to mingle with us in all our social affairs, and, also, if they desired it, must not object to proposals to marry our daughters.

Finally, a compromise was worked out, under which an article in the new constitution would order the General Assembly, at the earliest possible time, to pass a law forbidding the immigration of free blacks into the state and preventing slave owners from bringing their blacks into Illinois for the purpose of freeing them and dumping them. This provision became Article XIV. To allow for the differing views on blacks in the opposite ends of the state, this article was placed as a separate question on the ballot. The voting followed sectional lines, with only a few southern delegates voting against it. After the convention adjourned for the last time, the questions were put to the voters. On March 6, 1848, 60,585 voted in favor of the new constitution, while only 15,903 opposed it. Article XIV passed by a vote of 50,261 to 21,297. That vote also followed sectional lines, being more popular in the southern portion of the state than in the north, but the general opinion seems to have been that blacks were not wanted.

Until after the War Between the States, blacks in Illinois could not vote and did not pay the poll tax; could not marry whites; could not keep or bear arms, serve on juries, or testify in court in a case involving a white. Eventually, they were forbidden even to settle in the state. This denial of rights is an aspect of the history of citizenship in Illinois that has been given short shrift for many years. It is difficult even to find copies of the 1818 and 1848 state constitutions in most libraries. The earliest version of the state constitution that is easily found is that of 1870. Access to the older editions of the Revised Statutes is limited largely by the age and fragility of the remaining copies. Consequently, many people have never heard of the Jim Crow laws that existed in Illinois and many other northern states until their repeal after 1865.

This is unfortunate, because it means that few people have an accurate picture of antebellum racial politics in the North, much less the South. Court historians have been able to keep the truth swept under the rug for nearly a century, but it is finally seeing the light of day.

Steve Berg writes from DeKalb, Illinois.

This article first appeared in the April 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Plight of the Homeless
by Thomas Fleming

Life in the Unreal City.

VIEWS

Finding Eden
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
The paradise of fools and its King.

At Home in the Cosmos
by John Francis Nieto
Dante versus the modern imagination.

NEWS

Taxation for Economic Survival
by David A. Hartman
The Business Transfer Tax.

FICTION

The Wand of Youth
by Anthony Bukoski
A story.

REVIEWS

Mexico Comes of Age
by Allan Wall

Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon: Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy

plus

Samuel Francis on Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture
 of the Modern

Patrick Walsh on Philip Larkin: 
Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Canada: The Forgotten White Ethnics
by Mark Wegierski

Letter From Poland: A Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra
by Greg Kaza

VITAL SIGNS

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Out on a Limb: America's Pledge to Defend Taiwan
by Ted Galen Carpenter

PROPERTY: Robbing Peter, Paying Wal-Mart
by Steven Greenhut

TELEVISION: It’s a Wonderful Racket
by Kevin Michael Grace

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION
by Roger D. McGrath

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
The Motorcycle Diaries,
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

THE MORALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
by Thomas Fleming

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Poland, New Year’s Day, 1982
A Warning to Dissidents and
Vengeance Is Mine, Says the Lord, 1943 by Leo Yankevich   

ON THE COVER

Cover by Saint Luke; inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

The result, as many economists acknowledge, is crippling: a double taxation of savings for investment and excessive marginal rates. But there is an even greater disadvantage to U.S. manufacturing: a one-sided application of free-trade policies. The object of the various free-trade agreements crafted by our government was supposedly the mutual elimination of tariffs. Tariffs were, in fact, eliminated, but all of America’s trading partners replaced them with comparably high border-adjusted value-added taxes (VAT), which give selective advantage to their industries. The result is crippling: a double taxation of savings for investment and excessive marginal rates, redoubled by the additional burden of foreign value-added taxes.

America is virtually alone in the developed world in not providing the advantage of such border-adjusted taxation to her manufacturers. At an average level of 17.7 percent for member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), these taxes are not only levied on goods imported from the United States but abated on goods exported to the United States, constructing barriers to U.S. competitiveness in manufacturing that are insurmountable, especially since, in today’s open world economy, capital, technology and management are free to move anywhere that offers the best opportunities.

The United States has adopted a self-destructive trade policy, in part, because of our entirely laudable commitment to free enterprise and our rejection of mercantilism and colonialism. At least since World War II, American business and political leaders have viewed free trade as the basis for international peace and prosperity. In theory, the “invisible hand” of free markets—if capital, technology, and labor were free to seek their own competitive advantage—would disperse the means and fruits of free enterprise worldwide. To accomplish this economic miracle, protectionism in the form of quotas, red tape, and, most particularly, high tariffs would be progressively reduced and ultimately abandoned.

As the dominant economic and military power, the United States led the movement to dismantle trade barriers, both by setting the example and by supporting a New World Order of international trade regulation (GATT and WTO), economic cooperation (OECD), and customs unions (such as the European Union and NAFTA). According to the OECD, its members have reduced their average tariff rates from 40 percent at the end of World War II to 4 percent today. The United States’ average import duty on goods is currently 1.7 percent.

The decline of tariffs masked a trend, which started in Europe, toward border-adjusted taxation in the form of value-added taxes. These taxes were levied principally on manufactured goods. The alleged purpose was to “level the playing field” by offsetting the expense of government welfare through taxation of spending on consumption. The VAT’s were determined to be “indirect taxation,” which the WTO permits to be rebated on exports and levied on imports. Led by France, who first adopted the VAT in 1968, European Common Market countries added the VAT over the next five years, although Germany and Italy were slower to reach the current VAT rates than were France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Asian countries have since joined the VAT parade. Today, the European Union 15 has an average standard VAT of 19 percent, and the average OECD standard VAT is 17.7 percent. During the 1990’s, Mexico and Canada increased composite rates to 15 percent from 10 percent and 7 percent, respectively, and China adopted a 17 percent VAT in 1994.

The OECD’s summary of its members’ tax trends (“Revenue Statistics 1965-2002”) reveals the truth:

A fast growing revenue source has been general consumption taxes, especially the value added tax (VAT) which is now found in twenty-nine of the thirty OECD countries. In fact, the substantially increased importance of the value added tax has everywhere served to counteract the diminishing share of specific consumption taxes such as excises and custom duties.

The only one of the 30 OECD countries without border adjustments in her federal tax code is, of course, the United States.

As foreign governments have increased the VAT, they have also reduced effective corporate income taxes. In the United States, by contrast, the taxation of resident corporations’ foreign income is causing the flight of corporations’ headquarters to countries that exempt taxation of overseas income.

The time has come to replace the current corporate income tax with a border-adjusted and territorial tax code that really does level the economic playing field. Any effective alternative should also meet the requirements of supply-side tax reform. In other words, such a tax code should be neutral in taxing savings versus taxing consumption; it should reduce marginal rates and assess the tax burden equitably.

There are four principal candidates for supply-side tax reform. Only two of them, unfortunately, meet the criteria of consumption taxation and border adjustability. The most popular plan with conservatives is probably the Hall-Rabuska flat tax, which is a single-rate tax on wages and an equal-rate tax on origin-based corporate cash flow that exempts returns to capital at the personal level. As a “direct tax,” however, the flat tax could not be made border-adjusted according to WTO standards and, therefore, could offer no comparable border-adjusted tax relief for U.S. manufacturers. Although it is promoted as a simple tax, political reality would subject the flat tax to a continuing redefinition of income—and, potentially, to a progressive rate schedule. Since such a plan would inevitably be stigmatized as tax relief for the rich at the expense of the majority of wage-earning taxpayers, its prospects are very dim.

Another less popular plan is the Consumed Income Tax (CIT), which taxes all income once and only at the personal level, after investment savings have been exempted. This, too, qualifies as a “direct tax,” making it ineligible for border adjustment. Although the CIT has the advantage of taxing all income the same and of encouraging investment, it is also susceptible to political tinkering that could reintroduce progressive taxation and higher marginal rates.

Closer to the mark is the Fair Tax, which is a flat-rate retail-sales tax (RST) that replaces all federal taxation, including social-insurance taxes, and gives rebates on the tax on the equivalent of poverty-level income. It is an indirect consumption tax, and, as such, qualifies by WTO standards for border adjustment.

The preferable alternative is the Business Transfer Tax (BTT), a subtraction method value-added tax based on the difference between revenues and purchased goods and services for all enterprises and employers. The BTT would exempt fixed investment and exports, but it would apply to imports, and it would credit an employer for social-insurance taxes paid. Both the RST and the BTT would offer rebates that could be used to remit taxes on “necessities."

The RST and the BTT are both consumption taxes, but there are significant differences because of the different tax bases that underlie the plans. Theoretically, the RST has as its base all personal consumption expenditures; experience with state retail sales taxes, however, shows that it is very difficult politically to impose taxes directly on “necessities.” A large portion of consumption—housing, healthcare, food, legal fees, and even hair care—are exempt from state retail taxes, and the same humanitarian zeal might afflict the RST. Even without exempting necessities, the RST would have a smaller potential base. It would require a higher rate than the BTT, which would provide an incentive for tax evasion. Were an RST to replace all federal taxation (as the Fair Tax proposes), then it would either have a smaller base than the proposed BTT, or it would have to introduce a companion measure that would tax payroll and the consumption expenditures of government and not-for-profits.

This leaves the Business Transfer Tax as the most viable proposal on the table. What are its advantages? Apart from the fact that it can be made border adjustable, the BTT would establish a tax base that includes all commerce and employers, eventually reaching even employment and purchases in the government sector and employment in the ballooning not-for-profit sector. Although aimed at consumption, the BTT, by collecting from employers rather than from consumers, would offer little justification for allowing exemption, but it would also provide equitable rebates to offset spending on necessities. Such rebates would serve as replacement for exemptions, deductions, and credits, and, if the BTT were adopted as a single flat tax, all taxation of income could be eliminated.

How should a Business Transfer Tax be implemented on a revenue-neutral basis, replacing current taxation in order of priority? First, the corporate income tax would be replaced by a 5.5-percent BTT. Next, the BTT would be raised to 10 percent, enabling the personal income tax to be flattened to a 14-percent single rate. Finally, the entire tax code (apart from personal FICA taxes) would be replaced by a 20-percent BTT. If the socialists insisted on maintaining a “progressive” code, a somewhat lower BTT rate could be adopted, supplemented by a modest upper-income tax. This is not recommended, but this is not a perfect world.

Following this plan would mean an equitable, neutral, transparent, and politically feasible supply-side and border-adjusted reform of the federal tax code. It would dramatically reduce our perennial trade deficits on manufactured goods and provide optimal growth for all sectors of the U.S. economy. It would level the playing field for U.S. corporations in general, and manufacturing in particular, and for U.S. blue-collar workers, whose earnings have been increasingly depressed over the past three decades. It would mean a return to a more equitable sharing in the growth and prosperity of the U.S. economy—not only for those in manufacturing but for all sectors of the U.S. economy.

Our representatives in Congress should consider the U.S. taxpayers’ definition of “fair taxation.” A Readers’ Digest poll addressed the question “What is the highest rate of taxes Americans should pay regardless of income level?” A statistically sound sample of Americans answered: 25 percent. The BTT meets this criterion.

Some politicians and experts continue to deny that there is a manufacturing crisis and to oppose a U.S. value-added based tax. This obfuscation of the real reasons for declining blue-collar incomes serves the interests only of the few who currently profit abroad at the expense of all other Americans’ prospects for the future.

David A. Hartman, a retired banker, is chairman of the board of directors of The Rockford Institute.

This article first appeared in the December 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Liberals preach perspective, Epicureans advise indifference to friends and nation, and Buddhists long for Nirvana.  Today, it is principally Christians who insist on a sense of place.  Our universe is filled with special places: This earth, to which God deigned to send His Son; the land of Judea, where He was born; Galilee, which He regarded as home; the cities of the Greeks that gave us our civilization; and Rome, still the urbs aeterna, the seat of an empire of which our world, so full of itself and little else, is the merest afterthought.

When most of us think of place, however, it is not Rome or Bethlehem we have in mind but the place we came from.  But how many of us live in the town, much less the home, in which we grew up?  In American towns like Rockford or Charleston, to name only two of the places in which I have lived, the bright and ambitious are expected to move off to Chicago or Atlanta, or, better still, New York or Los Angeles.  Small towns, even small cities, are for the losers, and Garrison Keillor may continue to bleat, in adenoidal tones, his saccharine tales of Lake Wobegone, but it is from the safe distance of St. Paul, New York, and Scandinavia.

John Crowe Ransom attributed much of America’s cultural and spiritual malaise to the refusal to settle down, and it is true that many of the great American heroes have been drifters: Christopher Columbus, Capt. John Smith, Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, to say nothing of Charles Lindbergh and Alan Shepherd, who are known principally for their dramatic exits from America.  Americans, as we learned in school so long ago, were hardy adventurers who packed a Bible, a spare shirt, and two chickens and headed off, in search of adventure, to the New World.

This theme, however, has been overplayed.  Outside of fairy tales and Arthurian romances, few men are foolish enough to go on quests.  Most of our ancestors were near the end of their ropes—in a few cases, this was literally true—and they were looking for cheap land and the opportunity to make a fresh start.  Once they arrived, they quickly put down roots.  Although some hardy Celts pushed off to the Appalachian frontier, most settlers who had good land held on to it.  We like to think of America as a youthful country, but, by the time of the Revolution, Englishmen had been living in Virginia for nearly 170 years, and many leaders of the rebellion—Washington and Jefferson, the Adamses, the Rutledges and Laurenses—were deeply rooted in the soil of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Carolina.

The exceptions, perhaps, prove the rule: The displaced Yankee rake Ben Franklin and that tax-collector without a country Tom Paine.  Both of them were afflicted with the Enlightenment fantasies of objective rationalism that have done so much to undermine the sense of place and loyalty our ancestors brought with them from Old Europe.  Men of the late 18th century, following the philosophers, were learning to liberate themselves from prejudice and superstition, as they called tradition and religion, and to see the universe not as the Creation of a God Who made the world and saw that it was good but as a vast mechanical system in which the place of man was very small, and the place of the individual man infinitesimal.

Enthusiasts for the French Revolution were no longer interested in improving a single nation.  Democracy in one nation was reactionary.  The true radicals, like Paine and his friend Anacharsis Clootz, had to be citizens of the world.  Clootz, proclaiming the “nullity of nations,” headed the foreign delegation to the French National Assembly.  As an Hébertiste, he suffered the penalty his party would have inflicted on much of France.  His buddy Paine narrowly escaped the same fate and died in America, one of his many homelands.  His demise in Greenwich Village seems to have cursed the place to this day and made it the natural home of bad painters and worse writers.  Paine was buried in unconsecrated ground on his own farm, but his archnemesis William Cobbett, in a fit of uncharacteristic and inappropriate generosity, had the corpse dug up and brought to England for burial in a patriotic monument he intended to construct.  Since Britain refused to rescind the order of outlawry passed upon a disloyal subject, the bones of the wandering tax man had to pass into the hands of a receiver.  Sic semper omnibus rerum novarum molitoribus!

Even Tom Paine grew tired of his life as perpetual revolutionary and represented himself as a respectable American man of property.  There are even stories that he repented of his atheism on his deathbed.  What did he have to lose?  Young men are thrilled to discover that their parents and ancestors are wrong on all the essentials, but, as the blood cools and they no longer think themselves immortal, they begin to hear the sad old music, reminding them how briefly they walk upon the earth, how faint are the footprints they leave.  “Why ask after my ancestry?” is Glaucus’ famous reply to Diomedes in the Iliad.  “Like leaves blowing in the winter wind are the generations of men.”

Glaucus, wise beyond his young years, is not taking time in the midst of a battle to inform his Greek enemy of the obvious fact that generations are born and pass away.  Our situation is more humiliating than that.  This entire generation passes away, scattered by the winds of time, until, in three generations, no one is left to remember what we looked like or what our voices sounded like.  In another generation, we cease even to be a family anecdote.  Our place in the scheme of things, if looked at from a sufficiently enlightened perspective, is nowhere.

Glaucus, however, was not enlightened.  Although Homer’s Achaeans had a gloomy view of the afterlife, they did celebrate the deeds of their ancestors and worshipped the gods of their native places.  Despite the melancholy tone of Glaucus’ question, he does remember six generations back to the grandfather of his namesake, who was his own great-grandfather.  Like the Romans and many Christians today, Greeks paid tribute to their dead ancestors in religious ceremonies that served to consecrate the house.  Until the philosophers taught educated Greeks to think in universal terms, the citizen of a polis was rooted in the sacred soil of Attica or Boeotia and, if he was attentive, knew the names of the gods and daimones of every hill and spring.

Early Romans were, if anything, more reverent, and it would be the work of a lifetime to memorize the names of every little god who presided over the first plowing, the second plowing, the sowing, weeding, harvesting, storing—to say nothing of the malicious spirits who inflicted the plants with mold or rust or weevils.  A medieval European peasant had almost as many neighborhood saints and martyrs as a Greek or Roman peasant, and these mysterious and friendly powers, commemorated in rustic shrines and local festivals and in carved stone and stained glass within the church, made the landscape bristle with energy and meaning.  Now the festivals are put on for the tourists who visit the church in busloads, and, where the glass has not been broken, its stories are forgotten.

Every civilized society goes through a phase of “enlightenment,” and some, if they are lucky, survive it.  The sophists of the fifth century B.C. taught their students that man is the measure of all things, that values are conventional and not rooted in nature, that we know nothing of the gods, that might makes right.  Socrates, although a genuinely irritating man in many respects, saw the problem being created by atheism and moral relativism, but neither he nor his best student Plato understood the danger inherent in their own tendency to treat political and social life in abstract and universal terms.  Plato’s Republic might just as well have been called Utopia.  Aristotle, fortunately, has provided the permanent corrective to the Socratic moral heresies, but it was not the students of Aristotle who dominated the later Greek approach to politics but the Epicureans, who taught men to feign interest but cultivate indifference to their local community, and the Stoics, who preached the doctrine of world citizenship.  Although both schools were to have pernicious effects during the Enlightenment, the Romans converted Stoicism into a pragmatic, albeit austere, creed of duty.  The emperor Marcus—who divided himself into, on the one hand, universal man and, on the other, a particular Roman born into a certain family—is a long way from the Phoenician confidence man who founded the school.

Good character and good intentions can partially convert a philosophical sow’s ear into a silk purse.  Look how Jefferson sidestepped his own nonsensical theory of natural rights when it was a question of defending Virginia.  The Enlightenment that infected Jefferson, like the sophistic movement in fifth-century Greece, entailed a rejection of the particular and local in favor of the universal, of the sacred and mysterious in favor of the secular and rational.  Demystification, like so many other bright ideas, sounds better in the morning than it does in the dead of night.  If my poor human life cannot be given meaning by tradition and ritual, then I shall carve out my own destiny, like Robespierre or Napoleon or Mussolini, and, if nations will not obey me, there is the heroic road taken by the fictional Raskolnikov or the all-too-real serial killers who have cut such a swathe through our post-Christian world.

Most Americans, hell-bent on success, do not dream of conquering nations or murdering our neighbors.  Our vast ambitions are defined by bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger blondes.  In John Huston’s Key Largo, when Rocco the gangster (Edward G. Robinson) is asked what he wants, he does not know how to answer until Humphrey Bogart tells him, “I know what you want.  You want more.”  More is the creed of a lost people.  “He who dies with the most toys wins,” reads a sign I used to see in expensive tackle shops.  Like children piling up stuffed animals on the bed, we think our toys can shield us from the great emptiness we really believe in, and, even if we go to church, it is neither a great cathedral built to the greater glory of God nor a humble chapel where the faithful pray.  No, our churches must have big-screen TV’s and youth choirs waving their arms as they bellow loud commercial music that might be used to advertise the bogus beer we drink.  Some of us demand song-and-dance numbers more appropriate to the midway of a county fair, and we expect to be told our Christian duty by wavy-haired, tooth-capped preacherboys who could fill in for one of the Chippendales—anything to distract us from the thought that we are going to die alone, and no matter how pretty the plot we have chosen in the “memorial garden,” our corpse is one plant that is not going to come up again in the spring.  In thinking that pagan thought, we have already made our existence Hell, but we have not even the pagan comfort of thinking that our flimsy afterlife will be consoled, once or twice a year, by ritual prayer and feeding administered by descendants who are both pious and a little bit afraid.

I am saying nothing that has not been said before by the Agrarians, and by Pound and Eliot.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Dante’s vision of Hell has become Eliot’s London.  Eliot was going mad as he wrote The Waste Land.  He found some sanity in joining the Church of England and in becoming a kind of English patriot, as the local references in the Four Quartets suggest.

For many of us who have spent our lives moving and traveling, it is too late to put down deep roots in the soil of California—or of Illinois, on whose people and identity Edgar Lee Masters long ago pronounced the eulogy.  We can do our best, however, to love the places in which we find ourselves or to move to places we can learn to love, knowing that all such particular and partial loves are preparation for the full love we shall only know when we finally make our way home to where we belong.

This article first appeared in the December 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Where’s Joe McCarthy When You Need Him?
by Thomas Fleming

The misadventures of Douglas Feith.

VIEWS

A Third Way?
by Tom Piatak
When stupid and evil are the same.

Toward Real Conservatism
by Edward A. Olsen
Just say no to the neocons.

NEWS

Walking the Neocon Plank
by Timothy P. Carney
Total victory.

The Rise and Fall of the Texas Republican Party
by Tom Pauken
The Rove machine.

What Manufacturing Crisis?
by David A. Hartman
America for sale.

REVIEWS

Ditching the Cadaver
by Samuel Francis

Patrick J. Buchanan: Where the Right Went Wrong: 
How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution 
and Hijacked the Bush Presidency

plus

Bill Kauffman on Dominic Sandbrook’s Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar
 American Liberalism

Clark Stooksbury on Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Hugo Bedau and Paul Cassell’s Debating the Death Penalty

Tobias J. Lanz on Philippe Beneton’s Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity
 as Confinement

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From England: The Hunt Is Up
by Michael McMahon

Letter From Victoria: Just Win, Baby
by Kevin Michael Grace

VITAL SIGNS

ECONOMICS: Can We Trust Economists on Free Trade?
by Ian Fletcher

DEMOCRACY: Democracy and God
by Thomas Storck

COLUMNS

BREAKING GLASS
by Philip Jenkins

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Bright Young Things
by George McCartney

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
The Ballad Rode Into Town
by William Baer

ON THE COVER

Cover by George McCartney, Jr.  Inside illustrations
 by Melanie Anderson and Elizabeth Wolf.

For American manufacturing, however, the employment recession has been the longest and most severe since the Great Depression. From June 1998 to January 2004, 3.5 million workers lost their jobs—a decline of 19.7 percent.  As of May 2004, only 187,000 were reemployed, just one out of every 19 laid-off employees.

Since the 1950’s, manufacturing’s share of the U.S. economy has been in a relentless decline, and its current share of GDP is less than half of what it was in the 50’s. Employment in manufacturing, as a share of total U.S. employment, has fallen proportionately. (See Exhibit I.)

The origin of this downward trend can be explained partly by manufacturing’s relatively greater productivity and partly by the rapid growth of government and the “service” economy. Since the 1970’s, however, this trend has been exacerbated by the growing competitive advantage enjoyed by foreign competitors. In a follow-up article in the December issue, I will show that this advantage is largely the result of a system of border-adjusted taxation that is not available to U.S. manufacturers. As a consequence, the trade deficit in goods, which began in 1971, has increased ever since. To put the deficit in simple terms: U.S. companies today are only producing the equivalent of 4 dollars worth of every 5 dollars of manufactured goods consumed in the U.S. The U.S. trade deficit in goods for 2003 was more than $500 billion, the bulk of which was in manufacturing.

The United States has a sizable negative trade balance in goods with every principal nation and region. Although the negative balance in goods has been somewhat offset by exports of U.S. services, this positive balance has leveled off. The merchandise deficit is predicted to continue to grow through at least 2005, despite the recent devaluation of the dollar (which, according to conventional wisdom, makes U.S. goods more attractive to foreign customers). The trade deficit is currently more than five percent of GDP, and the net amount of U.S. assets now owned by foreigners is currently estimated at four trillion dollars. This figure is roughly comparable in scale to the total privately owned portion of the U.S. federal debt. The United States, which was the world’s largest creditor in 1982, has since become the world’s largest debtor—a consequence of the relentless growth of the trade deficit.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) warned earlier this year that “the country may be dropping below critical mass in manufacturing.” This is not hard to believe, as depressed manufacturing centers lose vital supporting services and as traditional industries provide neither the volume nor the financing required for the new factories and equipment that employ the newest and most productive technology. The United States is the leader in high-tech product innovation, yet current exports are only one third of the value of imports in electronic data processing and office products.

One crucial element in the trade deficit is American industry’s higher manufacturing costs. According to a study prepared by the Manufacturing Alliance/MAPI for NAM (December 2003), the U.S. cost of $24.30 per labor hour exceeds the $19.30 average of nine principal trade partners by $5 per hour. The study goes further to show that other disadvantages saddle U.S. manufacturers with added costs of regulation, energy, employee benefits (particularly health insurance), and a significant difference in corporate-income-tax rates that total an additional $4.45 per labor hour. This adds up to a $9.45 disadvantage.

What is not considered by the MAPI/NAM study is the effect of border-adjusted value-added taxes (VAT) imposed by U.S. competitors on imports from the United States and rebated on exports to the United States, which exceed the total of the average U.S. disadvantage in labor and burden costs identified by MAPI. The average VAT imposed on U.S. exports by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) trade competitors is 17.7 percent ad valorem, which, expressed as MAPI’s labor “raw cost” index, is the equivalent of $14.76 per hour, over half again more than the $9.45 total burden calculated in the study. A conservative estimate of average VAT rebated on OECD exports to the United States is $13.04 per hour, nearly 40 percent more than the total of all adverse cost factors identified by MAPI. This important advantage enjoyed by our competitors is the source of much of our misery, but it also points the way to the solution.

Many optimists look to our strong improvement in manufacturing productivity as the source for a restoration of U.S. competitiveness. However, a recent BusinessWeek article, “U.S. Factories Falling Behind,” showed that our principal trading partners are increasing their productivity at higher rates than the United States. The other straw the optimists grasp at is the devaluation of the dollar, which will supposedly right the trade balance, but such predictions have not proved reliable in past.

In an open world economy, in which neither commodity pricing nor capital is limited by borders, the parity achieved by devaluation is temporary. What devaluation does achieve is recurrent bargain-basement prices for the most strategic and productive American economic assets. In other words, “America is for sale and for a low, low price.” Once markets have adjusted to the new exchange rates, the principal burden of lower real prices is forced upon labor. In the area of corporate taxation, Arnold Harberger arrives at the same conclusion: The wedge of corporate taxation primarily impacts labor. When governments at the federal, state, and local levels raise taxes (unless they are border adjusted) to augment depressed revenues and pay for rising welfare costs, they only pour fuel on the fire. After World War II, the United Kingdom opted for the quick fix of devaluation. The effect was to prolong rather than to remedy the problems caused by their uncompetitive manufacturing sector. It was only by adopting competitive VAT policies and supply-side income-tax reductions that Britain became productive.

There are many experts who actually deny that a trade imbalance is a problem, since foreigners must reinvest their dollars in the United States if they do not buy our merchandise. However, those dollars invested in U.S. debt and equity securities or productive assets by foreigners have a price tag—the interest, dividends, and rentals that will leave the United States increasingly indebted.

Most neoconservative and libertarian economists think that the problems in manufacturing can be resolved by tax reforms that will provide greater saving for investment and lower composite marginal rates of taxation. But greater investment in manufacturing productivity in the 1990’s and lower marginal rates in the 1980’s did not reverse the downslide.

The crisis in manufacturing is being obfuscated by internationalists who are indifferent to American concerns and by those who profit from the trade advantage of foreign-produced goods in competition with U.S. manufacturers. The federal government has negotiated bilateral trade agreements that have exposed U.S. manufacturers and their workers while granting them no commensurate concessions in return. This is not in our national interest. Yet all who have profited from or gave their blessings to this folly are joined in a chorus of denying reality.

The deterioration of the U.S. manufacturing sector threatens the progress and prosperity of the American economy. It also poses a risk to our military security. Manufacturing has traditionally provided the technological advances that drive productivity across all sectors of the economy, and America’s military capability has been strengthened by the industrial development of new technology.

Industrial decline also threatens social stability. The declining employment and earnings in U.S. manufacturing are a principal cause of the declining incomes of blue-collar workers. The average factory wage per hour in real dollars declined 11.3 percent from 1978 to 2001, despite an increase of productivity by one half in the business sector and a doubling of productivity in manufacturing. The laid-off workers from manufacturing seeking re-employment in highly price-elastic service markets have brought further pressure to bear on blue-collar workers. The increasing share of income enjoyed by the top ten percent of wage earners is not the result of, as leftists would have us believe, excessive returns on physical and intellectual capital; it is the result of the stagnation of labor income, itself the result of the stagnant demand for manufacturing employment, which is exacerbated by the excessive immigration. It may be true that, in the years following World War II, labor (especially organized labor) was overpaid. Today, the opposite is the case: It often takes two workers to provide a family with a living income. The United States, which adopted the 40-hour work week in the 20th century, enters the 21st century with many families working an 80 hour week, often of necessity.

Many of the proposed remedies will do some good without actually solving the basic problem. Supply-side economic prescriptions—lower government spending, lower marginal-income-tax rates, and deferred taxation of saving for investment—though helpful, will not be sufficient to overcome the VAT advantages enjoyed by our competitors. Internationalists sometimes forget that we are not the only country in the world. Foreign competitors can also lower their own corporate income taxes relative to U.S. levels, and some of them are already undertaking fundamental tax reform. The Netherlands has adopted a system for expensing fixed investment, and Russia has adopted the flat tax.

As David Enger and Kevin A. Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute observed in their recent review of international corporate taxation, “[I]f current EU trends continue, the corporate income tax may virtually disappear and be replaced by revenue from the VAT in just a few decades.” And, if the United States fails to adopt border-adjusted taxation, the U.S. corporate income tax may all but disappear for a different reason—the loss of manufacturing corporations.

David A. Hartman, a retired banker, is chairman of the board of directors of The Rockford Institute.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I knew that no major national party had emerged since the Republican Party was formed in the 1850’s, helped along by the implosion of the Whig Party and the increasingly sharp divide between North and South.  I knew, too, that the most successful of all third-party candidacies, Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1912, accomplished little beyond the election of Woodrow Wilson.

There were more recent precedents, however, showing how third parties could effectively shift the national debate.  George Wallace’s 1968 campaign sounded the death knell for the great New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics since 1932.  Wallace’s campaign pushed the GOP to the right on social and cultural issues and laid the groundwork for millions of Southerners and ethnic Catholics to join Reagan and the Republicans in 1980.  Ross Perot’s 1992 bid forced both the Republicans and the Democrats to make at least an effort to address ballooning deficits and burgeoning debt, helping make the 1990’s a time of comparative fiscal restraint in Washington.  In fact, if Perot had not temporarily withdrawn from the 1992 race and if he had never begun talking about Republican dirty tricksters plotting to ruin his daughter’s wedding, he may very well have won: Most Americans had soured on Bush the Elder and were wary of Clinton, who was better known for the many scandalous rumors (most of them true) swirling around him than whatever he may have accomplished as governor of Arkansas.

I knew, too, that the major argument offered against conservative third parties by Republican propagandists—that the worst Republican candidate for president would always be better than the Democrat—was both unconvincing and, taken to its logical conclusion, a guarantor of the continued incremental leftward drift of American politics.  The flaw in this argument can be seen by examining a favorite specter raised by those making it, that of a Democratic president being able to nominate new justices to the Supreme Court.  Although we are always told that the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, this is seldom the case.  Republican commentators poured forth column after column in 2000, warning that Al Gore would get to pick three Supreme Court justices if he were elected.  In point of fact, he would have been able to appoint zero.  None of the current justices seems particularly eager to leave, and the only events that will reliably create a vacancy—death or disabling illness—are beyond the control of even Karl Rove.

More to the point, justices appointed by Republican presidents have repeatedly been responsible for the decisions that have caused the most distress to conservatives, beginning with Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren.  The two decisions of most concern to the GOP’s conservative base were both written by Republican justices: Roe v. Wade was authored by Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun; and Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, which struck down all statutes against sodomy, was penned by Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy.  (Ironically, a Democratic appointee, Byron White, both dissented in Roe and wrote Bowers v. Hardwick, the opinion overturned by Lawrence.)  So many liberal justices have been appointed by so many Republican presidents that conservatives who insist that Bush will appoint only conservatives to the high court sound like nothing so much as a battered woman insisting that, “this time,” her drunken, abusive boyfriend will act differently.  After all, a Machiavellian Republican strategist might not want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would both risk the wrath of voters who want abortion to remain legal (a group that includes many major GOP donors and such figures as President Bush’s mother and wife) and perhaps allow some pro-life voters to declare “Mission Accomplished” and return to their ancestral home in the Democratic Party.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the Republicans’ standard argument against third parties also paves the way for a continued, incremental movement to the left in American politics.  If conservatives should vote for George W. Bush because he is better than John Kerry, shouldn’t they also support Rudy Giuliani for president?  Only when Republicans are made to realize that they cannot take conservatives for granted will Republicans regularly begin giving conservatives anything more than occasional rhetoric.

Unfortunately, my experience with Buchanan’s Reform Party candidacy—while not vindicating Republican arguments—fell far short of my hopes.  I underestimated the many practical challenges facing third parties.  I was not aware of the often fractious and occasionally unstable nature of some of the people attracted to third-party efforts.  Above all, I mistakenly believed that most Americans were interested in having presidential candidates willing and able to conduct a serious debate on the major issues facing the country.  These factors doomed Buchanan’s candidacy, and they threaten to doom any attempt to create a serious conservative third party in the foreseeable future.

Ballot access is a daunting challenge for a third-party candidate, consuming a large amount of his scarce resources: Third-party candidates need to be familiar with the election laws of all 50 states, and campaigns need to allocate many volunteers to gather the necessary petitions, pay professionals to do it, or both.  Furthermore, they must deal with the open hostility of the two major parties.  For a time, virtually all of Buchanan’s national campaign staff disappeared in 2000, because they were all in North Carolina gathering signatures to get Buchanan on the ballot.  Even though he had greater resources than other third-party candidates, Buchanan was unable to get on the ballot in all 50 states.  The GOP kept him off the ballot in Michigan, just as the Democrats are trying to keep Nader off the ballot in such places as Oregon and Pennsylvania this year.

Getting media access is also a challenge.  Media coverage is geared toward the horse-race aspects of campaigning, which means little attention is given third-party candidates, even those who regularly provide good copy, such as Buchanan.  In 2000, both Buchanan and Nader were shut out of the debates, even though there is little doubt that they would have enlivened them and forced Bush and Gore to confront issues of great concern to many Americans, including the impact of globalization.

Globalization is also directly related to another daunting obstacle—money.  In 1996, Buchanan was able to finance a credible run for the GOP nomination by raising small amounts from many individual donors, mostly through direct-mail solicitations.  This is how conservative candidates have raised money since the early 1970’s.  Buchanan enjoyed the support of only one Fortune 500 CEO.  By contrast, in 2000, George W. Bush almost wrapped up the GOP nomination before the first primary vote was cast by raising an unprecedented amount of money from many large donors throughout the country.  Estimates of the total cost of this year’s campaign near one billion dollars.  Any candidate skeptical of globalization (as any conservative third-party challenger likely would be) simply cannot compete in the money race with candidates enjoying ready access to corporate donors, which means that such candidates will find it increasingly difficult to compete in the primaries and almost impossible to run a third-party campaign.

Another obstacle facing third-party candidates can be the nature of some of the people drawn to third parties.  Both the Republican and Democratic parties tend to be relatively cohesive because those running the parties are motivated primarily by the prospect of enjoying monetary gain from holding office, lobbying those who hold office, and cashing in on connections made while holding office.  Few congressmen ever return to gainful employment (or even go home) after reaching Washington.  By contrast, third parties are often fractious, as shown by three of the third parties that competed in 2000: The Reform Party has split into two parties, the America First Party and the Reform Party; Nader has run away from the party that supported him last time, the Green Party; and the Natural Law Party, which attracted Reform Party members who opposed Buchanan’s nomination, has simply disappeared.

Such infighting takes a toll.  There is little doubt that Buchanan’s campaign was badly hurt by the protracted battle for the Reform Party nomination and the well-publicized walkout of malcontents from the party’s Long Beach convention.  In my experience, those who bitterly fought Buchanan were motivated not by ideology (which can be a cohesive force) but by personality: Fighting was what they enjoyed doing.  Indeed, Buchanan’s opponents gravitated toward the unlikely (and gravity-defying) figure of John Hagelin, an instructor in physics at a school established by the Transcendental Meditation movement in Iowa.  Hagelin, like other TM adherents, believes in “yogic flying,” which so far consists of crossing one’s legs and bouncing but is said to offer the possibility of effortless flight through the air.

The greatest obstacle facing a serious third-party effort on the right is not the suprarational beliefs of the likes of John Hagelin but the suprarational nature of politics today.  Our politics are at once acrimonious and meaningless.  The acrimony is obvious to anyone who spends five minutes watching cable TV.  The meaninglessness is shown by the nature of the debate between the major candidates.  They are in substantial agreement on such major issues as globalization, immigration, trade, the need for an interventionist foreign policy, and the need to continue expanding the federal government, differing largely on how best to tinker with the tax code.  They do not even have any fundamental disagreements over Iraq: Kerry voted for the war and has said he would cast his vote the same way today, even after we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.  Can any debate be more meaningless than the one we have seen so far this year, with the liveliest discussion focusing on what John Kerry did or did not do in Vietnam 35 years ago?

At least since the beginning of the Clinton presidency, American conservatism has been characterized less and less by an interest in ideas and policies and more and more by intellectually disabling cults of personality—first, the negative cult of personality surrounding Bill Clinton; now, the more conventional one surrounding George W. Bush.  The left is following suit, as many Democrats now feel about Bush the way many Republicans feel about Clinton.  For each side, there is far more passion generated by the real or imagined misdeeds of the other candidate than by the policies advocated by their own candidate.

Presidential politics have become so bitter because the major differences between the candidates are now cultural, not ideological; many voters now treat the presidential campaign not merely as one front in the Culture War but as the only front.  This is dangerous for conservatives because the White House has not been the instrument of the left’s victories in the Culture War, and merely having a Republican in the White House will do little to alter the outcome of that struggle, especially when the President is committed to nothing more rigorous than “compassionate conservatism.”  As long as conservatives view voting for president as a way of registering which side they are on rather than as a way of advancing a meaningful agenda, there is little chance of building a credible third party focused on promoting conservative issues.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Democrats did not get out in front on the sex issue until fairly late.  In fact, Southern Democrats were, if anything, more conservative than Midwestern Republicans on questions of divorce, pornography, and abortion.  Beginning with Playboy President John Kennedy, however, Democrats have embraced sexual liberation, in every form and combination, with a passion.  Of course, their speeches still resound with the fine old Democratic rhetoric of free speech, civil rights, and the Tenth Amendment, but these days, free speech means the rights of pornographers to abuse children; the only important civil right is a mother’s right to have her living baby hacked to death as it is being born; and the rights of the states are reduced to providing fake marriage certificates for homosexuals who want to shack up for three days or more.

Socialism, as every American knows, was embraced by the Democratic Party in 1932, and, despite a few dissident voices in the South, the party has not looked back since FDR won reelection in 1936, and, although neoconservatives would like us to look back nostalgically at Harry Truman, FDR’s Vice President was nothing better than a coarse-mannered machine politician who defended Alger Hiss.

The Democratic Party’s protection of treason and sedition did not begin with the employment of Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and other known communists and subversives.  Throughout World War II, the President had been protecting communists in America as part of his constructive engagement with Stalin.  Before Stalin, however, there was Churchill, and, partly as a result of FDR’s special relationship with Churchill, British agents were able to do as they pleased in the United States, and some agents assassinated their German counterparts in America; others kept tabs on influential American political figures who opposed U.S. entrance into the war.  Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, among the most prominent isolationists, was set up with a girlfriend and then blackmailed.

Far from blaming perfidious Albion for these activities, I salute the bravery and resourcefulness of patriotic Englishmen who helped to drag a reluctant America into the war.  Both interventionists and isolationists, however, should acknowledge that it was a mistake bordering on treason to allow foreign agents to ply their trade within the United States.

After the war, Democrats gave up their bellicosity and began slowly evolving into the party of appeasement.  By 1972, the imperialists had ceded control of the party to the appeasers, and, ever since, the American people have quite correctly regarded the Democratic Party as incapable of defending their interests or security.  On the one occasion in over 30 years that Democrats have gone to war—Mad Albright’s illegal bombing of the civilian population of Yugoslavia—they picked the wrong side.  American money was spent, and American lives risked, to put Islamic Albanian terrorists—the allies of Osama bin Laden—into power in Kosovo.

Small wonder that many patriotic Americans, who think that the Bush administration has simultaneously botched the “War on Terror” and the economy, are refusing to support the party of John Kerry.  Kerry is a study in deceit: a Catholic who supports infanticide and keeps mum on the subject of homosexual “marriage”; a soldier who returned from Vietnam and denounced his comrades-in-arms for political gain; a senator who voted for the Iraq War and yet reserves the right to attack the war without every changing his position.  So far from voting for such a representative of such a party, I would not even let him enter my house.

Then why not swallow hard and vote to give President Bush four more years?  He is no conservative, but the Republican Party has never been the conservative party that some of its members have wanted to believe in.  Of its presidential candidates since the election of 1940, only two would qualify as to any extent conservative by a reasonable definition: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.  Willkie and Dewey were clones of FDR; Eisenhower had no discernible political ideology.  Russell Kirk’s famous response to the Birchers—Ike’s not a communist, he’s a golfer—comes close to defining the prince of managers, whether as general or as statesman.  Nixon never claimed to be a conservative and believed that the only reason conservatives ever supported him was his prosecution of Alger Hiss.

Despite their lack of principle and incoherence, Republican presidential candidates have typically represented the lesser of two evils.  On economic matters, Republicans have been uniformly better than their rivals.  Where the Democrats have always been good at spending money, Republicans have usually spent their lives making money, which is a far more difficult business.  Even when Republicans engage in deficit spending, it is not out of a desire to extend the socialist state.  Republican presidents are typically driven to extravagance by a Democratic Congress, by political necessity, or by a mistaken belief that “deficits don’t matter.”  Yes, it is true that the Republican Party’s free-trade ideology is destroying our manufacturing base, but the Democratic Party is in the grips of exactly the same ideology—if somewhat different lobbyists.  The same might be said of the two parties’ actual positions on immigration, as well as on most social and cultural issues.  There is hardly George Wallace’s dime’s worth of difference between them, and a dime does not buy what it did 35 years ago.  It was not, after all, a Democratic NEH chairman who wrote a pornographic lesbian novel: It was Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current Vice President.  Mrs. Cheney, who sold herself to the neoconservatives in her first year at the NEH, is just smart enough to block the republication of Sisters but not smart enough not to have written it.

And yet, for all the cowardice, vice, corruption, and lack of principle among Republican leaders, the Republican Party continues to represent the more nearly normal elements of American society, and, despite the trade policies that are throwing Americans out of work and the Iraq War that was apparently engaged without sufficient cause and continues to be fought without conspicuous success, I would be tempted to vote for George W. Bush: Kerry and Bush are both spoiled Yalies, but Bush’s bubba persona, whether real or feigned, is less hard to take than a stuck-up prig who talks through his nose down to ordinary Americans.

Then why are so many conservatives so reluctant to hold their noses one more time?  During the summer, an old friend came to my office and wanted my opinion on the election.  He had been a Republican all his life and had cast his first vote in a presidential election for Thomas Dewey.  This time, he was ready to support Kerry, if only to rid the GOP of the pernicious influence of the neoconservatives.  Although he has always supported the U.S. alliance with Israel, he was particularly disgusted with the obvious pressure that Israel’s government is able to exert on our foreign policy through such prominent neoconservatives as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.  I told him I did not think a man of good conscience could vote for Kerry.  He could, however, choose not to vote at all.  I have had the same conversation with not a few conservatives, some of whom are determined to vote for Kerry—or Ralph Nader, who has been denounced by the Christophobic ADL for describing George Bush as the puppet of Ariel Sharon.

My friend’s suspicions must have been aggravated when, a few weeks later, it was revealed in the press that the FBI was engaged in a two-year investigation of Lawrence Franklin, of the Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense.  Franklin, who had served in the Defense Intelligence Agency and as military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, is suspected of passing secrets to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and to the government of Israel.  Longtime neoconservative policy analyst Michael Ledeen calls the charge “nonsensical,” but then Ledeen—best known these days as the most hysterical imperialist at National Review Online—is widely rumored to be implicated in the leakage.  He is also a contractor hired by Feith.

The real issue is not Franklin himself: He is only a small cog in a vast network of Israeli influence that extends to the highest circles of the Bush administration.  Franklin reports to Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy and thus the number-three man in the Department of Defense.  It is Feith who put Franklin in a position to damage his country’s national security, and it is Feith who should be held accountable.

Feith is an amazing character.  Like many American bureaucrats, he has gone through the usual revolving door between public and private, but Feith’s door has also opened on to Tel Aviv.  His law-firm, Feith and Zell, which does the predictable lobbying for Israeli interests, allied itself with the Israeli firm Zell and Goldberg, in order to better serve their Israeli clients.

In 1996, Feith was one of the principal sources (along with Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, James Colbert, and Charles Fairbank) of a policy paper drawn up for then-prime minister Netanyahu, the Likud Party extremist who continues to denounce Ariel Sharon for his timidity.  The paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advocates an aggressive, no-compromise approach to the Palestinians.  That was to be expected.  What is disconcerting, however, is the American authors’ decision to speak in the first person when describing Israeli interests:

We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East.  We in Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.  Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes.  We live in a dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries.  Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading “land for peace” will not secure “peace now.”  Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble.  It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally.  Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, “peace for peace,” is a solid basis for the future.

Meyrav (Mrs. David) Wurmser is an Israeli national (like the wife of Douglas Feith), and she has a perfect right to lobby for Likud, but her husband (Dick Cheney’s advisor on the Middle East), Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle—American citizens who have served the government of the United States as high-level advisors on security and foreign policy—are not only advising Netanyahu to reject U.S. policy in the Middle East but speaking as spokesmen for Israel and the Likud Party.  If they have been misrepresented, they have not apparently said so.

The provision of “A Clean Break” that has attracted most attention is the recommendation to oust Saddam Hussein:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.  This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

The authors also advised Netanyahu to make a “clean break” with American independence and to turn away from Israel’s status as American dependent to that of a mature ally, “formulating the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.”  In other words, manipulate American opinion by appealing to Cold War anxieties.  This is exactly what Ariel Sharon did in the weeks following September 11, when he and his adherents rang endless changes on the theme: “Now Americans know what it is like to be Israelis.”

When Feith is not advising Israeli politicians on how to manipulate the United States, his supposed expertise is in areas of military intelligence: It was Feith who was in charge of setting guidelines for the new, more aggressive methods of interrogation used on Iraqi prisoners, and it was Feith who brilliantly suggested that the United States was not bound by the Geneva Convention—the two biggest p.r. blunders of the war in Iraq.  Feith also failed to deliver accurate intelligence to the commanders who led the invasion of Iraq.  Gen. Tommy Franks was so disgusted with the quality of the intelligence he received that he told Bob Woodward that Feith is “the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”  Bush’s neoconservatives seem to elicit obscenity.  In the build-up to the war, Colin Powell, according to BBC reporter James Naughtie, referred to the lot of them as a bunch of “f---ing crazies.”

Feith hardly ever talks in public about Israel per se or about his own strong connections with the Likud Party; he justifies his total opposition to negotiating with the Palestinians on the grounds of their violations of human rights.  Israel’s denial of basic rights to Christians, however, never seems to come up.  In 1997, the Zionist Organization of America honored Douglas Feith along with his father, Dalck Feith.  Who is Dalck Feith?  A follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and a member of Jabotinsky’s fascist youth group, Betar.  Jabotinsky was no liberal Zionist or even a Likudnik like Ariel Sharon.  He boldly called for the elimination of Palestinian Arabs as a people.  Ridiculing the more moderate Zionists who hoped to live in peace with Arabs, Jabotinsky demanded that the Zionists emulate the Americans who destroyed the Plains Indians and eliminated their cultural identity.

In other words, Feith comes out of a Zionist tradition that even Begin and Sharon would rather not talk about, and, as a senior official in the Department of Defense, he has never ceased to advocate policies designed to promote Israeli, not American, interests.  In this, however, he is no different from Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Ledeen, and the entire neoconservative network of think tanks and publications that have dominated the foreign policy of the Bush administration.  When Feith wanted to put out the disinformation that the CIA had clinched the connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, he leaked his own memo to the Weekly Standard, whose bogus article was then quoted triumphantly by Dick Cheney—a disinformational triple play.  (See Laura Rozen’s “Ye of Little Feith,” American Prospect Online, May 18, 2004—though some caution may be needed in treating statements from Karen Kwiatkowski.)

Ronald Hatchett, retired U.S. Air Force colonel and arms negotiator, worked under Feith from 1984 to 1988 and knew him well.  In an interview, Hatchett describes Feith as pure Machiavellian.  “He is almost Straussian in his contempt for the public.  Tell them whatever is necessary, he would say, all we need is plausible denial.  The important thing is to win.  The public always supports a winner.”  Hatchett added that Feith was completely devoted to two things: surrounding himself with like-minded associates (whom he referred to as “true patriots”) and promoting the security of Israel.  “He did believe that America should be kept strong, but the main reason was to support the security of Israel.”

In his combination of arrogance and incompetence, Feith is just another neoconservative policy expert.  One thing does distinguish Feith from his colleagues: He lost his first job at the National Security Council in the first Reagan administration when he fell under suspicion of passing secrets to Israel.  National Security Advisor Richard Clark gave as grounds for dismissal that Feith “had been the object of an inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.”  Pentagon officials from those days (and others in the Reagan administration) told me they were shocked to learn that Feith’s disgrace was only a temporary setback, since his mentor Richard Perle, another Netanyahu advisor, got him rehired at the Department of Defense six months later.  This proved, as one Pentagon source told me, that Perle was virtually omnipotent.  Ever since, Feith has been obsequious in his obedience to Perle.

I do not at all blame the Israelis for the espionage and treason they have instigated in the United States.  On the contrary, I salute them for their bravery and their patriotism.  In Israel, I met many solid supporters and advisors of the Likud Party.  They love their country the way Crockett and Travis loved America, and they would, as they say in Texas, rather fight than run.  I think they are quite wrong, but I can only admire them.

Most governments, from time to time, practice espionage against foes and keep tabs on their friends.  There is this difference, however: Israel depends upon the United States for her very existence, and the Mossad is not an occasional eavesdropper on diplomatic conversations.  Israel has been spying on her principal benefactor for decades, counting on the fact that American governments will not retaliate by cutting off the aid and loans that subsidize Israel’s lavish welfare state—and her expensive war machine.  A few years ago, I spoke with a man who retired from the CIA decades ago, because of the steady leakage to Israel.  The worst part of it, he said, was not the treason committed by agents more loyal to Israel than to the United States but the fact that Israel used some of her stolen intelligence as bargaining chips with countries that were enemies of the United States.  Such deals could ruin an operation and put agents at risk, but, after repeated complaints, he concluded that the CIA was never going to stop the leaks.  That was four decades ago; now, the problem is worse.

Why blame Sharon for crimes committed by American citizens and ignored by the American government?  If the Mossad is more effective than the CIA, so much the better for the Israelis.  When we discover their agents—like Jonathan Pollard or, if he is guilty, Lawrence Franklin—they should be prosecuted exactly the same as if they were agents of China or Iran.  We should also consider punitive measures against any country caught spying on the United States.  We should not, however, fall into the trap of blaming “the Jews” for the crimes committed by a few ultra-Zionists, nor should we allow the lunatic fringe at Commentary and the ADL to get away with the claim that they represent Jewish-Americans.

On the other hand, espionage and influence-peddling are very serious matters.  People such as Douglas Feith and Richard Perle have time after time displayed their loyalty to a foreign power, and, even if their activities may fall short of treason and espionage, they are clearly unfit to be trusted with any important position in government.

Instead of weeding out these agents of influence, however, the Bush administration continues to rely on them for guidance on the Middle East.  First Iraq, then Iran, then Syria.  And even when the FBI was on the verge of arresting Lawrence Franklin, Attorney General John Ashcroft apparently decided to postpone the arrest and to reduce the charge to something less than espionage.  Ashcroft’s reluctance to antagonize AIPAC two months before the election may be politically justified, but Republicans cannot expect the support of patriotic conservatives until they clean out the nest of vipers in the Department of Defense.  If President Bush would only promise to fire, in order, Franklin, Feith, and Wolfowitz—along with the man who hired them and bungled the war in Iraq—he would have their support.  Until then, I do not see how he can even look them in the eye.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“One day he’s saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons,” the once-and-never-again presidential candidate remarked in an interview on CNN’s Late Edition in August.  “The next day he’s standing there, ‘I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran.’  Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served.  He wasn’t the only one in Vietnam.”

The point of the ugly little business about John Kerry’s war record is not whether he did or did not really do some courageous things in Vietnam or did or did not deserve the medals the Navy gave him.  Those who claim he didn’t have not proved their case, despite the bottomless eagerness of the conservative establishment to believe them.  Even if the Swift Boat allegations were settled one way or another, it would have little to do with whether the Massachusetts senator should be president.  Just as predictable as conservatives’ embrace of the allegations against Mr. Kerry, his supporters leapt to resurrect the still-unsettled questions about President Bush’s own military record (or lack thereof).

Such is the level of presidential politics these days, that this sort of trivia is all the contenders and their surrogates can think of to say about each other.  And how can they do otherwise?  On the major issues of the day, the two candidates are barely distinguishable.  Each one simply grunts the appropriate noises that can be anticipated to rally his own legions and avoids violating any of the ever-multiplying constraints on what can be said publicly.  Those constraints apparently do not extend to prohibiting the insinuation of the most vicious charges about each other’s characters.

Nevertheless, the ethics of smearing your opponent is not the point either.  Smears have a long and not especially distinguished history in American politics, reaching back at least as far as Joseph Calender’s lies about Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings woman.  More recently, the liberals who spent a good part of the summer whining and whimpering about Republican demagoguery over the Kerry war record are themselves the first to lob whatever vagaries they can concoct about conservative “links” to “racism,” “extremism,” “Nazism,” etc.  The current crop is only one generation removed from the one that pioneered the modern art of Smearpolitik by defaming every figure on the American right from Robert A. Taft through Barry Goldwater down to Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan.  So let’s hear no more sermons from them about “demagoguery.”

What Mr. Dole had to say about the Kerry affair was, at least in the remarks quoted above, distinctly different from smear.  It had nothing to do with what may or may not have “really” happened nearly 40 years ago halfway around the planet but with what Mr. Kerry is known to have said and done.  After he won his medals, Mr. Kerry came back to this country, made a big splash out of throwing them away, and proceeded to denounce his former comrades, his country, and the war in which it was then involved.  Political ads citing his testimony before the U.S. Senate make what he said back then perfectly clear.

“They told the stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,” he testified, speaking of Vietnam veterans who had publicly claimed they had committed these acts.  Apparently, there was never any thought on his part of bringing legal charges or working for an actual investigation of these crimes by the government.  Frankly, most who hurled such charges were just interested in grandstanding, for personal or political reasons.  I have known dozens of guys who made such claims at the time.  Some had actually been in Vietnam, or at least in one military service or another.

Admittedly, Mr. Kerry was a lot younger then, and there is evidence he was by no means as nutty as some of his buddies in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  He resigned from it after a substantial section began considering committing a few more atrocities against Americans.  But, just as the point is not whether he really deserved his medals, so it is also not that he once said silly things.

The point is that he cannot now believably renounce what he said and did in 1971 concerning his own comrades and his own country and, at the same time, boast of his heroism in the same war and run for president on that record.  But that is precisely what he is trying to do.  The controversy about the war in Iraq, and Mr. Kerry’s criticisms of it, seems to demand that the Democrats wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotism at least as much as the Republicans always do.  In 1971, it was politically convenient for Mr. Kerry to renounce that mantle.  Today, it is politically convenient to don it.

And that is what tells us all we need to know about John Kerry.  It is as good a reason as any why he should not be president.  The real question for voters who agree with that reason is this: Can they come up with a good reason why George W. Bush should be president at all?

This article first appeared in the October 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Call of Blood
by Thomas Fleming

Old Europe versus the New World Order.

VIEWS

There Once Was a New England
by John Willson
Timothy Dwight’s New England catechism.

Tocqueville’s America and America Today
by Claude Polin
Liberty, Equality, Materialism.

NEWS

H.R. 3313 and the Imperial Judiciary
by William J. Quirk
A welcome constitutional crisis.

What? Are You Crazy?
by B.K. Eakman
The screening of America.

REVIEWS

The Big Bore of Arkansas
by James O. Tate

Ric Flair: Ric Flair: To Be the Man
Christopher Andersen: American Evita
Dick Morris: Rewriting History
Bill Clinton: My Life

plus

Sue Huck on G. Edward White’s Alger Hiss’ Looking-Glass Wars

Stephen B. Presser on
 William J. Watkins’ Reclaiming the American 
Revolution

Patrick J. Walsh on Alistair
 Horne’s The Age of Napoleon

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From the Upper Midwest: Last Call?
by Sean Scallon

Letter From Poland: A Model for the West
by Mark Wegierski

Letter From Albania: 10,300 Nights in the Gulag
by Alberto Carosa

VITAL SIGNS

FILM: Remembering the Alamo
by Wayne Allensworth

INTELLIGENCE: No Political Pressure?
by Margie Burns

DEMOCRACY: Democracy for Whom?
by Doug Bandow

COLUMNS

THE WESTERN FRONT
by Paul Gottfried

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
The Village, The Manchurian Candidate,
 María, Full of Grace
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
The New Calvinism by Paul Lake
and In Praise of Still Life by Sally Cook       

ON THE COVER

Cover by David Merrill; inside illustrations by
 H. Ward Sterett and Elizabeth Wolf.