“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.

Wes Pruden, then the managing editor of the paper and the host of the luncheon, hastened to explain to them, accurately but perhaps banally, that, while the Times was certainly anticommunist, that did not mean that we were “against the Russian people.”  The commies hit the lighting fixtures.  The distinction between being anticommunist and being “against the Russian people” was incomprehensible to them.  How could you possibly be against communism and not against the Russian people, they demanded, when it was obvious that communism was indistinguishable from the Russian people?  How Mr. Pruden answered this conundrum, I do not recall.

I remembered this exchange several years later when, in the course of perusing a 1997 article by neoconservative pundits Bill Kristol and David Brooks in the Wall Street Journal, I came across their aperçu that the “national-greatness conservatism” they were espousing that week “isn’t unfriendly to government, properly understood” and their question, “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?”  If you think about it, you will see that the latter question is exactly the one the communists asked the editors of the Times some years before.  The distinction (or absence thereof) in the Kristol-Brooks question between the “nation,” on the one hand, and the “government,” on the other, is precisely that between the “Russian people” and the communism to which the Russian people were enslaved.  It ought to be of considerable interest that self-proclaimed neoconservatives find the nondistinction no less incomprehensible than the communists they claim to despise.

I trust I will not be misread as suggesting that neoconservatives are really communists or somehow part of the international conspiracy that used to put fluoride in the drinking water and advocate graduated income taxes, but I am suggesting that they share more with them than either neoconservatives or communists (or paleoconservatives) perhaps know.  One belief that they share is the concept of a “credal nation,” an idea that has now come to permeate the entire American right.

As far as I can tell, the idea that America is or should be a credal nation originated (on the right) with Harry Jaffa and his doctrine that Abraham Lincoln is the defining icon of the nation through his concept of equality.  For Mr. Jaffa, the Declaration of Independence (or, more accurately, the sentence fragment from its second paragraph declaring that “all men are created equal”) is the original definition of the American creed, which Lincoln at Gettysburg was merely articulating.  The historical and philosophical flaws in Mr. Jaffa’s views have been exposed several times, classically by the late Mel Bradford but by several other conservatives as well, so there is little reason to rehearse them here.  Nevertheless, despite its flaws, this credal egalitarianism has metastasized throughout the body (or perhaps the cadaver) of the American right, and especially among neocons.  It is this concept, that America is defined by a creed and the creed is egalitarianism, that puts the neocons and other egalitarian conservatives on the same wavelength as the Bolsheviki.

To be sure, “equality as a conservative principle,” as Mr. Jaffa once called one of his essays, is not the “equality of condition” that Marx and the socialist left have always drooled over.  “Conservative equality,” we are invariably assured, is supposed to be “equality of opportunity” or “equality before the law.”  Not the least of the problems with this distinction is that what Jefferson called the “self-evident” truth of equality always needs such extended explanations, justifications, and qualifications; if it were really self-evident, it would not.  But “equality,” of course, means equality.  Two plus two is equal to four, because two plus two and four are the same, and to say that Joe is equal to John means and can only mean that Joe and John are the same—not just in opportunities, rights, and legal claims but in abilities and in what their abilities gain them.  It is all well and good to spout off about how committed to “equality” you are and how the nation is based on it, but, sooner or later, there will be masses of folks who insist on taking their equality neat—especially when it becomes clear that “opportunity” and the “law” are never any more equal than nature itself and that some people always wind up getting less than what they have decided, on the grounds of the egalitarianism they have been taught, their fair share ought to be.

Equality, whether as a “conservative principle” or the principle of communism that it really is, always leads to communism or something like it, no matter what “conservatives” dim enough to invoke it think they mean by it.  For the same reason, it also leads to the leviathan states that both the communists and the neoconservatives adore.  As Mr. Kristol and Mr. Brooks noted in their Journal article, Lincoln himself argued for a national government

whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford men an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.

It was through constructing and empowering a state powerful enough to demolish “artificial weights”—the intermediary institutions that restrain the state—that the federal megastate that now prevails in Washington came to exist at all, and it was for much the same purpose that the communist states across the globe were created.  The mission of equality is what animates and justifies these monsters.

The egalitarian content of the supposed “creed” is the immediate source of tyranny; the very concept of a credal nation, however, is tyrannical.  I had thought for some years that the insight that the Soviet Union was a real credal state was confined to paleoconservatives, but I was disabused of that delusion when Irving Kristol himself, in the Weekly Standard last year, acknowledged the same thing: “Large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today,” he wrote, “inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.”  That is why, he argued, the United States should have supported Great Britain and France in World War II and should support Israel today, because, as an “ideological” nation, we “will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces.”  Aside from this non sequitur, what is interesting is that Kristol lumps the Soviet Union in the same category as the United States.  Most conservatives would distinguish them, and the distinction they would draw would largely revolve around the difference between an ideological regime like that of the Marxists and the conservative order that is supposed to prevail in this country.

The whole concept of a nation or state basing itself on a “creed” or “ideology” or abstract doctrine of any kind (including religion) ought to be profoundly offensive to real conservatives, since it means that the whole of the national life as well as its foreign policy must be subordinated to the implementation of the abstraction at the expense of the actual institutions and way of life that really defines the nation and its culture.  A credal or ideological nation is tantamount to totalitarianism, which is why those who advocate such a regime can see no distinction, let alone any antagonism, between its state and the “people” or “nation” the state rules.  In such a system, there is no distinction between state and nation.  If neither Kristol père nor fils grasps this, one who does is Jean Raspail, the once-well-known author of Camp of the Saints, who, last June, published a short article in Le Figaro entitled, “The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic.”

“The Fatherland,” of course is the nation, La Patrie, and the Republic is the government, the state—or, more precisely, the ideology or creed that animates the state.  “The Republic,” M. Raspail wrote,

which is only one shape of government, is synonymous for [the French political class] with ideology, ideology with a capital “I”, the major ideology.  It seems to me, to some extent, that they betray the first for the second.

In France, as indeed in this country and in most other Western societies, the state has become the enemy of the nation.  This brings us to the answer as to how it is that one can love his nation and hate its government.
M. Raspail is especially concerned with the mass immigration from nonwhite, non-Christian, and non-Western cultures that the French political class has allowed to deluge his nation, to the extent that

the situation is moving irreversibly towards the final swing in 2050 which will see French stock amounting to only half the population of the country, the remainder comprising Africans, Moors and Asians of all sorts from the inexhaustible reserve of the Third World, predominantly Islamic, understood to be fundamentalist Jihadists.

It is no accident that the same neoconservatives who peddle the “credal nation” concept in this country are among the most fervent supporters of mass immigration.  Indeed, this ideology is one of the most common arguments that the pro-immigration crowd invokes: How can immigration threaten our culture and identity since all immigrants need do to assimilate is to agree to the propositions of which the creed is composed?  The Soviets used much the same argument in making Soviet citizenship available to anyone who espoused the Marxist-Leninist creed that defined their own ideological state.

Against the domination by ideology, M. Raspail invoked the racial unity of his nation—“France is from the outset a country of common blood.”  So, for that matter, is the United States, as Jefferson, using that very phrase in his draft of the Declaration and similar terminology in the final form (“common kindred,” “consanguinity”), acknowledged, as did John Jay, in Federalist 2, where he wrote of “one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors.”  In fact, every real nation is a “people of a common blood” and “descended from the same ancestors.”  A nation—from the Latin word meaning “to be born”—can have no other meaning.  A nation is a community defined primarily by a common blood, and it is only on the basis of a common blood that its population becomes a people—a community united by a shared language, religion, moral values, social institutions, government, and political and social beliefs (“creeds”).

In France and most of Europe even today, it remains fairly simple to defend the concept of a common blood, but in the United States it is not, in part because of the impact of mass immigration since the 19th century and, in part, because the descendants of some of those very immigrants have been the first to seek to redefine the nation in terms of creed rather than blood.  That is largely why such dubious characters as Harry Jaffa, the two Kristols, and Mr. Brooks are so keen on their own credal definition and their readiness to demonize anyone who insists that there is a good bit more to being an American than the capacity to sneak across the Rio Grande and mumble the appropriate fragments of the Declaration in pidgin English.  To define the nation as a people of a common blood is to establish a boundary, a border that keeps some people in and some people out.  That, indeed, is its whole purpose.

Where the false and dangerous superstition of the “credal nation” ultimately leads is the destruction of the real nation and the construction of what really binds communism and neoconservatism together—what Israeli conservative historian J.L. Talmon called “democratic totalitarianism,” a concept first institutionalized in the French Revolution that really came into its own in the last century but promises to enjoy a renaissance in this century and in this country.  Back when I was at the Washington Times, it looked like a concept that might be dying.  Today, thanks to the triumph of neoconservatism, it thrives.

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

And yet many of these same Americans do make an effort to stay in touch with their relatives and with the places associated with their family past.  My wife’s mother, the widow of a transient military officer, still attends reunions of his fighter wing stationed in England during World War II and makes frequent sentimental journeys to the home of her childhood, the places where she bore and reared her children, and the European lands from which her ancestors emigrated.  Her sister has been working for years on a massive genealogy, and this devotion to family history is hardly unusual.  One of my cousins married a few years ago, and her new father-in-law spends much of his time probing the ancestral roots of the grandchild that has given new life to his declining years.

I grew up hearing a great many stories about my paternal ancestors but never took the trouble to check anything out until all the relatives who might have helped me were dead.  With the help of a kind man whom I found by accident on the internet—his family intersects with mine in the early 20th century—I was able to trace the Flemings back to Castle Island in County Kerry, Ireland, whither they had apparently immigrated from Scotland in the middle of the 18th century.  Because of their Scottish origin and because my father’s mother was of Scottish extraction (the family settled in Prince Edward Island after fleeing the Revolution in North Carolina) from the Carolinas, I have always thought of myself as more Scottish than Irish.

Although my father never accepted it, the standard view is that the Flemings were originally from Flanders, and many of them accompanied William the Bastard on his invasion of England.  I therefore take a justifiable pride in the recent victory of the Vlaams Blok, which gained 24.1 percent of the vote in the Flemish regional elections held on June 13.  Not only is the Vlaams Blok the most important Flemish nationalist party, it is a conservative party, and its victory makes it the largest party not only in Flanders but perhaps in all of Belgium, where political parties are as common as brussel sprouts.  Inevitably, the mainstream parties—Socialists, Christian Democrats, and Greens—have formed a coalition sworn to keep members of the Blok out of government, a tactic described by Vlaams Blok leaders as the “cordon sanitaire.”

The principal beneficiaries of this policy, as Joshua Livestro explained in the Wall Street Journal Europe (June 16), have been the Socialists, who can only hold power, in their moderately conservative country, by freezing out the VB.  Like other nationalist parties in Europe, the Vlaams Blok would like to slow the tidal wave of Third World immigrants that is washing over Europe.  In Bruges (or Brugge, as it is known in Flemish), which I visited this past August, immigrants seemed to outnumber even the mob of tourists, who are attracted by the great beauty of the city.  (Even with the tourists, Bruges is worth seeing.)

Their opposition to immigration is only one of the VB’s sins against the New World Order.  Some leftists are equally disturbed by the party’s defense of traditional morality.  Writing in the January 8 De Standard, Tom Naegels concedes “there are politicians in at least three mainstream parties—the New Flemish Alliance, the Christian-Democrat Party and the governing Liberal Party—who adopt positions similar to the Vlaams Blok.”  The real objection, however, derives from the Blok’s

conservative family policies, its deeply felt ethical objections to abortion and euthanasia, its radical pursuing of the interests of Flanders, its republicanism, these are the issues voiced by no other party[—]these are in practice the indiscussable phantasms of the Vlaams Blok.

The VB is almost unique among nationalist parties in opposing abortion, pornography, and “homosexual marriage.”  In fact, the party was founded in 1977 in a revolt from the Flemish Nationalist Party, whose leaders had joined the sexual revolution.  With the universal defection of Christian Democrats and Liberals to the left, it has gradually evolved into the leading conservative party in Belgium, going from 3 percent of the Flemish vote in the 1987 general election to its current 24.1 percent.  The VB also draws support from conservatives who do not favor the break-up of Belgium.

Of course, those election figures represent only the Dutch-speaking Flemish, who make up about six million of Belgium’s ten million inhabitants.  The other four million are French-speaking Walloons, who (with their Flemish allies) have dominated the Belgian political scene and conveyed the quite false impression that Belgium is a predominantly French country.  The conflict with the Walloons is multifaceted.  There is an economic dimension, as there so often is in regional politics.  The sturdier Flemings have not yet embraced the welfare state with the enthusiasm shown by the French-speaking proletariat, and Vlaams Blok leaders have exposed the Belgian government’s steady transfer of wealth from the Flemish to the Walloon population.  There are also cultural and moral differences, since, by and large, Flanders is more conservative than Wallonia.  Finally, language has been a cause of division ever since Franks and other German tribes drove a wedge into Roman Belgica.

Dislike for the Belgian experiment has not been limited to Flanders.  Many Walloons have dreamed of unification with France, and those dreams had a chance of being realized at the end of World War II.  In 1980, François Perin, proclaiming he no longer believed in Belgium, resigned from the Senate and went on to write Histoire d’une nation introuvable (History of a nation that cannot be found).  Today, the leader of the Mouvement wallon pour le retour à la France, although it has only about 1,200 members, claims that 15 percent of the French-speaking population views unification with France in positive terms.  Wallonian political leaders, like the socialist Claude Eerdekens, have not hesitated to play the French card against Flanders, threatening the Flemish that, if they continued with their nationalist obstruction of socialist progress, France will welcome the Walloons: “Wallonia is not ashamed to live next to such a great country as France, and one day, they will find out that France will be bordering at the gates of Brussels!”

Paul Belien, a Vlaams Blok MP who has been published widely in the English-language press, has argued (in the December 2003 number of the Salisbury Review) that Belgium is the corrupt model for the multinational European Union:

In 1989, the then Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens called his country, the “prototype of Europe.”  “The Federal Belgian State,” he said, “is a prefiguration of a Europe of Peoples, united in their organised diversity.”  Martens also stressed that an artificial country like Belgium “must have a transcendent project to commit itself to, otherwise it becomes very difficult to keep it together.  For me that project is: Europe.”  Based in Brussels, and sharing its capital with Belgium, the European Union is greatly influenced—even infected—by Belgian political attitudes and habits.  But, more importantly, Belgium acts as a model for the EU in the latter’s efforts to “construct a nation” out of different peoples with separate languages, cultures and traditions.  Belgium foreshadows “Europe.”

Belgium, Belien argues, is a nation created to deny nationality.

While I was in Brugge, I was unable to meet with Belien, who was vacationing in the Rockies with his family, but, in a transatlantic interview, he explained that the three pillars of the VB are the independence of Flanders, restricted immigration, and the preservation of traditional morality.  There is some sign of weakening on this last point: Some MP’s, not actually members of the VB but elected on their party list, have recently supported “homosexual marriage” and “free speech” (i.e., pornography).  However, the VB’s leader, Frank Vanhecke, continues to support the conservative position staked out by Dr. Alexandra Colen, a VB member of parliament and, not incidentally, Belien’s wife.  Dr. Colen and other party leaders are working to prevent the VB from turning into one more anti-immigrant coalition that welcomes people like Pym Fortyn, the assassinated Dutch politician whose principal objection to immigration was Islamic intolerance of “gays.”

In Flanders, the left has picked up immigration and sexual morality as sticks with which to beat the right.  In Italy, they throw in fascism; in the United States, it is the legacy of slavery.  The Germans, however, are the worst off.  In Germany, any statement of fact that calls into question the official history of the 1930’s and 40’s exposes a scholar or journalist to the accusation that he is attempting to revive the Third Reich.  Mavericks soon find themselves ostracized, fired, fined, and even jailed.

The most recent victim—or, perhaps, political suicide—is Martin Hohman, an MP for the Christian Democratic Union who has, in the past, opposed both homosexual rights and what he regards as Germany’s unfavorable position within the European Union.

His nationalism had already incited accusations of antisemitism, when Hoh-man, exasperated with German thought control, decided to come out with guns blazing.  Turning the tables on those who say that the Germans are a nation of culprits, he asked if the Jews could not also be considered “culprits” for having played so prominent a role in the Bolshevik Revolution.  Quoting from a recent book by Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, Jewish Bolshevism, Myth and Reality, Hohman suggested that German antisemitism in the 30’s might be explained as a reaction to the fear of red revolution.  The reaction of the CDU leadership was prompt: They expelled Hohman from the party.

Hohman was certainly imprudent to the point of recklessness, and there is an unpleasant “blame the victim” ring to his rhetoric.  The facts, however, are not in dispute, and, for bringing up the unpleasant facts, an influential MP has been drummed out of his party.

One of his friends told me privately that Hohman should have quoted from Jewish books on this question, not from the highly controversial Rogalla von Bieberstein.  I spoke with Rogalla von Bieberstein briefly at a conference in Germany sponsored by Culture Wars.  Although he said nothing to surprise anyone who has studied the history of Bolshevism, his presentation appeared to annoy some of the Germans present in the audience.  One of them, an intelligent and cultivated lady, stood up to declare that there were good reasons why this subject has been taboo in Germany and that it should stay taboo.  Later, she explained that the author was a disgruntled Prussian, whose family had lost everything, and the failure of his career had made him bitter.  When good people feel compelled to adopt ad hominem arguments, the only explanation is fear.

Germany is not my country, and I can well understand why some Germans are tired of being the world’s whipping boy, why others want to put the ugly past behind them, and why still others are afraid of speaking out.  I think they might all be missing the point.  While it is true that a great deal of trouble has been caused by Jewish hate groups such as the ADL here in America and international agitators such as haGalil.com (which assailed Hohman as a classic antisemite and labels critics of Israel as Nazis), the real problem is the international left, which uses any and all available tactics in its campaign to eliminate national and religious identity.  The Germans, because of the undoubted crimes of the Third Reich, are very vulnerable, but what of the Flemings?  What are the crimes that can keep them in the international prison?  I felt a deep sympathy with the Flemish people I met.  Perhaps it is the call of blood.  As one VB member said to me, “Welcome home.”

All the little peoples of the world are opposed by a formidable host arrayed against them: the New World Order (that is, the order imposed by the power of the New World), the European Union, the United Nations, and transnational corporations.  So far no one—not the Serbs, not American Southerners, and certainly not the Germans—has successfully defied these forces of darkness.  What an irony it would be if the people of Flanders, citizens of a nation designed to deny nationality, were the forerunners of the counterrevolution.

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

The story begins in the party faithful’s decision to nominate “conservative” Jack Ryan in the spring primary.  In 1999, Ryan went through a bitter divorce from Star Trek: Voyager star Jeri Ryan.  During the primary campaign, he repeatedly claimed that there was nothing in the sealed divorce proceedings that would embarrass the party, but, after he won the nomination, the Chicago Tribune successfully petitioned to have the documents unsealed.  Inside was a sordid tale of Ryan’s obsession with performing public sex acts with his wife.  Within two days, his support among the party leadership had dissolved, and Ryan—demonstrating the failure of his Catholic schooling by maintaining that nothing in the documents showed that he had broken any of the Ten Commandments—gave up the nomination.

In any other state, the nomination would probably have fallen to the man who placed second in the primary—in this case, dairy magnate Jim Oberweis.  But Oberweis’s strong showing in the primary was the result of a series of campaign ads criticizing President Bush’s amnesty plan for illegal aliens.  Accused by U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) of “demagoging” the issue, Oberweis was not even considered to fill Jack Ryan’s shoes.

Still, in a state of 12.5 million people, fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the party should have been able to find a resident of Illinois to answer the call.  But when Democratic state senator Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, received national accolades for his DNC speech, the race was on to find a black candidate, preferably one “blacker” than the “half-white” Obama (as Republican hacks began referring to him privately, and websites such as FrontPageMag.com began calling him publicly).  In the Land of Lincoln, however, black Republicans remain in short supply.

And so Rockford’s own state senator, Dave Syverson, rode to the rescue, floating Keyes’ name.  Asked about the possibility, Keyes responded, “I do not take it for granted that it’s a good idea to parachute into a state and go into a Senate race.  As a matter of principle, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”  Within days, however, the party offered the nomination to Keyes, and a few days later, Keyes—still a resident of Maryland—accepted it.

A man with any pride might have been embarrassed when clips surfaced of Keyes, on Fox News in 2000, criticizing Hillary Clinton as a carpetbagger for moving to New York to pursue her senatorial ambitions.  “I deeply resent,” Keyes had said, “the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there.  So, I certainly wouldn’t imitate it.”  Questioned by Fox’s Alan Colmes after accepting the Illinois nomination, Keyes—a former student of Straussian gurus Allan Bloom (his favorite teacher at Columbia, with whom he studied privately for a year in Paris) and Harvey Mansfield, Jr. (Keyes was Bill Kristol’s roommate when he studied under Mansfield at Harvard)—responded in true Straussian fashion, revealing the esoteric meaning behind his exoteric remarks: “Well, I was criticizing Hillary for not having proper respect for state sovereignty, for the principle of the integrity of representation in the states . . . Second, there’s a deep issue of principle that divides me from Barack Obama.  The great principles of our national integrity are at stake, and even Lincoln, the great statesman from Illinois, made it clear: when those principles are threatened, state sovereignty has to give way to our defense of the principles of our national union.”

In other words, the destruction of federalism is just fine—indeed, necessary—when questions of “principle” are at stake.  And what are those principles?  Simply put, what Professor Claes G. Ryn of the Catholic University of America has called the “new Jacobinism”—warmed-over Enlightenment universalism, the very opposite of conservatism, usually couched in the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence.  (Indeed, since his last failed run for the Republican presidential nomination, Keyes has been chairman of the non-profit Declaration Foundation, based in Washington, D.C.)  In this case, the particular principle is the “right to life”—Obama is a proponent not simply of abortion but of “live-birth” abortion, in which parents and doctor could choose to allow a child “accidentally” born during an abortion to die.  Keyes, predictably, compared Obama’s support for this heinous act to support for slavery, not so subtly emphasizing his own darker pigmentation.

While claiming that race is a “non-issue” in the campaign, Keyes has repeatedly brought the topic up, as he did in previous Senate runs in Maryland (during his second run, he accused the National Republican Senatorial Committee of racism when, a month before the election, party leaders chose not to dump more money into a race that Keyes was losing two to one) and in his last campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, when he chained himself to the door of an auditorium to protest his exclusion from a debate (he was polling in the low single digits at the time).  This time around, he’s added a novel reparations scheme to his deck of race cards: Blacks who can prove that they are descendants of slaves (like Keyes, but not Obama) “would be exempt from paying taxes for several generations.”

Praised by commentators who should know better for this “radical” and “free market” scheme, Keyes—with his embrace of reparations, his obsession with race (as we go to press, Chicago’s Channel 5, an NBC affiliate, is reporting that Keyes has thrown a fit about Obama’s silly remark that he “wants to win big to give Keyes a spanking” and has “suggested [the word] might be related to slavery and insulting to African-Americans”), and his generally erratic behavior (in a radio interview at the Republican National Convention, he said that “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama”)—has convinced some sitting Republican officeholders that his presence on the ticket may depress Republican voter turnout in November and put their seats at risk.

That is a risk, however, that Alan Keyes is willing to take.  After all, he has no stake in this race other than self-promotion.  Indeed, in a recent interview, he seemed to confuse himself with Hillary Clinton: “‘She was imposing herself on the state of Illinois,’ Keyes said, his arm around host Alan Nathan’s chair, his suit jacket buttons undone.  Nathan jumped in to quickly [sic] correct him: ‘New York,’ he said.”

An honest mistake.

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

Rewriting History
by Dick Morris with Eileen McGann
New York: ReganBooks;
 304 pp., $24.95

My Life
by Bill Clinton
New York: Alfred A. Knopf;
 957 pp., $35.00

Now, the first book I want to mention, which is also the best book I scanned, has merits beyond its own intrinsic and immediate appeal.  Ric Flair’s To Be the Man tells the story of a boy from Memphis (just across the Big Muddy from Arkansas) who will never find out with certainty who his biological parents were.  He was adopted in corrupt circumstances by kind and cultured Minnesotans but could not relate to the demands of conventional life, and his parents had the wisdom to let him go his own way.  By coincidence, he soon found himself in the world of professional wrestling, and Richard Morgan Fliehr became Ric Flair, the Nature Boy, one of the greatest stars of that flamboyant form of folk theater.  Before his first match, Ric Flair did not know whether the contests were fixed or not.  For more than three decades, he says, he has done his all to make his opponents look good and to satisfy the public.

The part of professional wrestling that I like is not the “athleticism” or the gay-pride-parade fashions, but the threats, brags, and vaunts.  No one ever did this better than Ric Flair, not even his friends and competitors, such as Rowdy Roddy Piper or Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream.  Through his rhetoric, not all of it scripted, Ric Flair connects with the roots of American culture in frontier legend.  The bragging and taunts of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett, and of the stranger in Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” ring in our ears, whether we know it or not.  By the time Ric Flair had transformed the tropes of natural energy, violence, and rage into his own act, he was in a tuxedo, drinking champagne and literally smelling the roses with a camera in his face.  Taunting Macho Man Randy Savage, Ric Flair would let fly his trademarked howl, “Woooooo!” as he trashed his latest victim.  Years later, perhaps his greatest inspiration was his extemporaneous response to stories about drugs in the wrestling world.  There was mention of addiction and deaths, but all Ric had to say was, “I am the drug!”  Yeah, baby.

Now, one reason that Ric Flair didn’t need drugs, besides his being the Nature Boy, was that he put away so much booze.  For years, he drank a hundred kamikazes a week, and that was only as a foundation for more ingestions of controlled substances.  I think we can see that, burning with such a hard, gem-like flame, Ric needed a boost just to maintain an even strain, as they say.  And that wasn’t all.  Trying to live up to his persona in the squared circle, Ric also cut a swath through the female population of various metropolitan areas, hosting parties that lasted for 72 hours and generally just carrying on.  Woooooo!

Essentially absent for years from his first marriage, Ric was actually surprised when his wife left him; now he knows she was justified in doing so.  His second marriage has been a much happier one, and Ric Flair today is devoted to his family.  He has also survived riots, a plane crash and a broken back, financial and political skullduggery, and crises of confidence and health.  His account of himself is extended and absorbing, and I found it as impossible to resist the insidious charm of “Slick Ric” on the page as on the tube.  I wondered if there might be any other imposing tricksters around, though.  There is something fascinating about the “Slick” effect altogether, the buncombe of the confidence man, the extravagances of the Duke and the Dauphin, and all the resonances thereof.  I had not heard the last of that, I hoped, strictly from the World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.  Was there perhaps another arena of erotic chaos, political theater, and imposing fraud?

Bingo!  Yes, there was!  And where was this, you ask?  Why, right on your television set—where reality is these days, I hasten to reply.  And that brings me to the second-best book at which I sneaked a peekaloo.

Not that there is anything second rate about Christopher Andersen’s American Evita—quite the contrary.  It’s just hard to compete with Ric Flair, though I must say that, what with her dye-job, Hillary does have in common with the Nature Boy a certain peroxide quality.  And a popeyed or exophthalmic aspect, as well, especially when he gets hostile—but I digress, as who in his right mind would wish to dwell on the junior senatrix from the Big Apple when he could instead concentrate on the glamorous Slick Ric?  But as Miniseries Rodham Clinton has herself declared, “When I look at what’s available in the man department, I’m surprised more women aren’t gay.”  That’s an interesting formulation, as much as for what it suggests as for what it reveals.  It naturally suggests not only, “When I look at what’s available in the woman department, I’m surprised more men aren’t gay,” but, “When I remember the Clinton cabinet, all the women were gay,” as well as, “When I look at what’s available in the senator department, the leading candidate is butch,” not to mention, “When I look at the wife department, I’m not surprised Bill did so many skanks.”  Woooooo!

To give credit where credit is due, I must say that Christopher Andersen’s book is the most incisive treatment of the Hillary Problem that I have seen.  I think that, in the future, this book will be remembered as a valuable or even invaluable supplement or calibrated contradiction to Living History, Miseries Rodham Clinton’s leaden autohagiography.  Andersen’s book is a chronological index of the gaps or yawning chasms between what Ms. Rodham/Mrs. Clinton has said and done, and what she has pretended to have said and done.  With commendable clarity and without wasted words, Andersen provides an account of a lifetime of political obsession, overweening vanity, and ruthless mendacity.

It would be hard to say what the best part of Andersen’s book is, since it is all of a piece.  I rather fancied three aspects, myself: the emphasis on the early radical left-wing associations; the specifics about Clinton’s womanizing, with an update to 2004; and the extended, documented portrayal of Hillie as a foul-mouthed harridan.

I would have to rank Dick Morris’s book, which he wrote with his wife—she holds the copyright, by the way—as inferior in quality to Christopher Andersen’s treatment of much of the same material.  Morris has organized his book, as the title suggests, as a refutation of the Rodham-Clinton Living History, and I do like the result.  After all, nobody knows more about the Clintons than Dick Morris.  Has anyone spent so many hours with them over two decades, listening to their temper tantrums, enduring actual physical assault, and precisely measuring their hypocrisy?  That was Dick Morris’s function for many years, as their political advisor and pollster.  Morris was responsible for much of the successful Clinton strategies of “triangulation” and equivocation and victimization, as they were played out for years.  And today, we often see Dick Morris on the tube, where he dispenses remarkable amoral insights into the dynamics of politics.  So there is no question about the level of his knowledge or understanding—but there is a question about the quality of his writing.

Morris’s book reminds me of an 11th-grade term paper in its organization and clunkiness.  Perhaps worse is its stop-go rhetoric of self-contradiction.  Hillary has a bad side and a good side: Which will prevail when (not if) she becomes president?  The botched opportunity is too bad—there are many valuable things in Rewriting History, which provides the best deconstruction of her myth and her book that I have seen.  (Morris insists that Hillary knew all about Monica: Her insistence on shock and surprise never did compute.)  Dick Morris, with his sense of her character and his analytic ability, has zeroed in on her lies with impressive force.  And, as he recites the lists of her deceptions deadpan, he also rises to comic heights.  The problem is that one part of his book does not know what the other part is doing.

That would not be the problem with Bill Clinton’s little puff piece about what a great guy he is, as one part of his book knows all too well what the other part is doing—namely, justifying it by cross-referencing.  This effort at self-justification leads to stultification rather rapidly, as Bill can rarely leave well enough alone—he has to qualify everything by “relating” to it.  Example: He likes New Orleans and remembers it.  As a boy, he met Al Hirt, who was nice to him and his mother.  Later, when Bill was in the White House, Al Hirt died, so he wrote the widow, expressing his gratitude for that kindness of many years before.  Now, what story did he omit to get the Hirt story in, and can we stand any more of this kind of excitement?  Reading a page of this tome can be unpleasant is the simplest sense.  The writing is off-putting, systematically.  The result is mostly a pain in the neck, if not a pain somewhere else.

But Little Billy Boo Boo (the double or triple diminutive expresses even more familiar affection) has no worries about writing often in a neurotic and effeminate manner.  (The first printing of his book was soon sold out at one-and-a-half million copies, and his advance of $12 million has long since been banked.)  I wonder if the customers got their money’s worth, and I doubt it.  But what readers or consumers were looking for is a subject to which we shall return.

Bubba’s book has already been called the greatest of presidential memoirs, though I do not know of any such exercise from the pen of Georgie Washington, Johnny Adams, Tommy Jefferson, Jimbo Madison, or Little Jimmy Monroe.  In the first place, this autonarrative of prevarication and self-adulation is not really about politics or history but self-justification and self-absorption.  No one ever picked this book up for much relating to this country in its civic aspect, but rather for much else relating to its psychic aspect.  I may have been the only reader who was not let down by the absence of the sex-babble that has entertained the country for years.  Now why did Bill not want to go there?

There was plenty of other blather to go around.  The most remarkable thing about this bloated autopuff is the openness of the author’s contempt for his background.  Bizarrely enough, though the narrator is a country boy from Arkansas who just naturally loves everybody as an individual, he despises them as a group for being Republicans, segregationists, racists, and reactionaries.  This contradiction cannot be resolved and is sustained throughout the book, as throughout the author’s life.  It is a mystery as to how Bill, through sheer intuition, not only knew he would be president but began by holding in contempt all the politics of his environment.  By the time he was a young adult, Bill was already committed to a slate of left-wing political positions that lead him to much back-formation.  He is against Senator McCarthy, for example, through the dates are a bit out of whack, and, as a student in England, visited Marx’s grave in Hyde Park—an odd thing to do, and an even odder one to cite.

One example of what the suckers stood in line for at the mall is an example as well of Bill’s failure as a writer.  The story of Gennifer Flowers is structured in a way that provides to these satchel-footed pages some welcome, though unintended, comic relief.  Bill tells the story as an episode of his persecution by mean-spirited Republicans, but, having forgotten exactly what he was repressing, he lets in an uh-oh at the last minute, without having established a context.  By his own account, six years after the stories were circulated, he had to admit in 1998 that he . . . uh . . . that the mean-spirited Republicans were right!  I insist that this is a failure of writing more than of integrity.  Where is the episode in chronological—not Republican—order, when he first laid eyes on the curvaceous Miss Flowers (“Whoa! Cut me a piece of that!”), or the ensuing 12 years of intermittent bliss?  (You can cross-check the resultant abortion in Andersen’s book, page 64.)

The brilliance of my many astute observations notwithstanding, I do not think that we can reach the root of the Clinton phenomenon without turning our backs on politics in order to scan American folklore, popular culture, and literature.  Hillary Rodham first heard Bill Clinton as he was discoursing on the virtues of his home state, among which were the production of “the biggest watermelons in the world”—a phrase I regard as significant, not silly.  For one thing, it sounds like the florid braggadocio that animates “The Big Bear of Arkansas.”  It connects to the tradition of American oratory in its most humorous and even grotesque mode, and to the politics that is connected to it—the politics of grotesque humor and of the people’s understanding of electioneering as a crude form of folk theater, like revival meetings and professional wrestling.  The roughnecks of the country were nothing without their vaunts, and Mike Fink competed homerically with Davy Crockett in the laying down of challenges.  Everything is done with a wink, as from various populists of a century and a half-century ago on the political hustings, and as in items of popular culture we remember from Will Rogers, Amos ’n’ Andy, and even Pogo.  Bill Clinton likes to associate himself with Abe Lincoln and Frankie Roosevelt, but he has more in common with the Duke and the Dauphin and the Kingfish and Algonquin J. Calhoun.  Yes, Senator Bilbo and his ilk gave us, through Fred Allen, Senator Claghorn—and that wasn’t such a bad deal.  From that image, we got Foghorn Leghorn.

Now, I am not saying that I think that Bill Clinton is funny, except in the sense of being a grotesque trickster figure who has made a fool out of the nation on numerous occasions.  What I am saying is that Bill Clinton misunderstands himself and, therefore, leads others, perhaps not always deliberately, to misunderstand him.  In other words, Wild Bill doesn’t make political sense, but he does make folkloric sense.  He is the country hick become the city slicker talking like a country hick.  He hawks the line of the Communist Party of the 30’s, but in the mawkish tones of Baptist piety.  He is the salesman with his eye on the farmer’s daughter, and she’s looking back.  I see him as a Rip van Winkle who escaped “petticoat government” not by magical sleep but by other magic we do not need to dwell on.  I see him as schizophrenically torn—a Brom Bones pretending to be, or actually mistaking himself as, Ichabod Crane.  I see him as a Crockett: not the sacrificial hero but the phony anti-Jacksonian with the extravagant campaign autobiography, flaunting his accent and coonskin cap to fool the rubes—and himself.  Deep down, the American people have always known, particularly when he started dropping his g’s, that Clinton was a hustler, a liar with a way about him.  Yet he did know enough not to talk about balancing the budget but actually to do it—as in a poker game, also part of the frontier tradition.  The best bluff is no bluff at all—but you have to set it up.  Read ’em and weep, Republicans.

But not understanding himself, Billy Boy is in no position to write a monster book about the wonder of him.  I was incredulous for a while, until I realized that this Rhodes Scholar is no scholar at all.  His attention to his intellectual growth is embarrassingly miniscule because it never happened, and here he does not compare well—indeed at all—to Benjie Franklin or Tommy Jefferson.  (He harps on music all the time, but almost always cites the trashy pop variety.) But the reader would have avoided frustration had the author simply addressed truth, instead of elaborating absurd pretense.  Where is the frontier sense of humor, except here and there a prissy reflection on life’s little ironies?  How about the President of the United States getting serviced in the White House while he was on the phone discussing military appropriations?  That wasn’t a horse laugh, a big dirty joke on everybody?  No?  Another moving story about his sensitivity to minority concerns instead, then?  (Just the thing the book doctor ordered!)

A rogue is a rogue, but a rascal is not necessarily an author—except as a rascal.  Bill does not cut it as a savant or a philosophe, but, having attempted to disrupt the coronation of John Kerry with the timing of his publication, he has filled his pages with fulsome praise of his wife’s political genius.  Slick Willie want squaw Chief—she head many committee.  He writes as though he is being blackmailed, or, as a parodist, like Patrick Dennis inscribing Little Me or First Lady.  We have gone from “The Big Bear of Arkansas” to “the Big Boar” (snork, snork), and now “the Big Bore.”  Slick Ric better than Slick Willie—no speak with forked tongue.

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

Yet the newly “free” Iraqis were not pleased.  Midfielder Salih Sadir told Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wall: “Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign . . . He can find another way to advertise himself.”

Footballer Ahmed Manajid was more to the point: “How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? . . . He has committed so many crimes.”  At least the Olympics are keeping “free” Iraqis from fighting coalition forces: “In fact,” Mr. Wall reports, “if [Manajid] were not playing soccer he would ‘for sure’ be fighting as part of the resistance.”

Manajid rejects the terrorist label that has been placed on resistance fighters. “I want to defend my home.  If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?”  He has good cause to wonder: His cousin Omar was gunned down by coalition forces while defending his hometown of Fallujah.

The Bush campaign reacted to the Iraqi soccer team’s objections with its usual cockeyed optimism: According to campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel, “The ad simply talks about President Bush’s optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror. . . . Twenty-five million people in Iraq are free as a result of the actions of the coalition.”

What sort of “freedom” is this, wonders  Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad, whose m.o. is “destroy everything”? “What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?”

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