Conservatives inadvertently make case for Obama

Roger Kimball has an article at Pajamas Media entitled:

How do you spell “cringe-making”? (Hint: it begins “Obama in Berlin”)

I’ve posted the following comment beneath Kimball’s article:

How do you spell “cringe-making”? How about spelling it like this? “Neoconservatives who fiercely attack Obama for statements or positions that the neocons quietly accept or actively support when the same statements and positions come from Republicans”?

Several commentators have pointed out that both Reagan and Bush have called themselves citizens of the world. Indeed, even George Washington once called himself a citizen of the world. Attacking Obama for the mere use of the phrase “citizen of the world” is childish.

More to the point, Bush and McCain are outspoken advocates of the one-world vision: pro open-borders, pro the Hispanicization of the U.S., pro-European Union, pro-admitting Muslim Turkey into the borderless EU, pro the expansion of the EU to include the Muslim world, pro the equivalent of the EU for the Americas. And then the neocons have the audacity to attack Obama for his globalism, claiming that they and their guy, McCain, believe in America first!

The neocons are cringe-making, partisan fools, trying to fool the rest of us.

Not only are the neocons partisan fools, but, ironically, their attack on Obama’s globalist rhetoric provides the most powerful argument in favor of Obama’s election. As I’ve said before, the neocons and mainstream conservatives generally go along with the leftism of a Republican president or presidential nominee, but passionately oppose the leftism of a Democratic president or presidential nominee. Their fiery attacks on Obama in Berlin have proved that theory in spades.

So the rank hypocrisy of the mainstream conservatives in denouncing Obama’s globalist agenda, while they support the globalist agenda of Bush and McCain, will have its uses, if Obama is elected president. Who cares if the conservatives’ opposition to Obama’s one-worldism is unprincipled? The point is, they oppose it, and if he is elected, they will for the next four years be defending American nationhood and sovereignty against his one-worldism, whereas if McCain is elected they will go along with his one-worldism.

For example, Kimball writes that “no one, not even Barack Obama, is a ‘citizen of the world,’ because a citizen by definition is someone who owes loyalty to and enjoys the protection of a specific state.” Now, apart from Kimball’s silliness in attacking the time-honored phrase, “citizen of the world,” have you heard a neocon speak so forcefully about loyalty to a specific American nation-state during the years of Jorge “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande” Busheron? Nope! Under Busherino, the neocons only talked about how all people in all cultures want democracy, just like us, and how there are no differences that matter between Muslims and us, and how anyone who says there are differences between Westerners and Muslims is a condescendinig bigot (and even if neocons themselves didn’t quite say that, they never once complained when Rice and Busheroni said it), and how the whole world must move toward a single, unified, democratic capitalist system led by America. The same neocons never had a word against the EU (except of course when it was blocking U.S. foreign policy); never had a word against the ongoing construction of a single borderless global economy in which distinct nations fade away and the only thing that’s left is six billion free and equal, deracinated, culture-less individuals—very much like Obama’s vision, very much like John Lennon’s vision in “Imagine.” (My gosh, the neocons were so into the universal democracy thing that they even went along, at least until very recently, with Bush’s idea that the absurd chimera of Palestinian “democracy” was the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and they didn’t protest while Bush, in the name of Palestinian democracy, kept pushing Israel to the wall.) But now, all of a sudden, neocons are aggressively affirming the ideal of “loyalty to a specific state.”

So I say, Bring It On! The neocons don’t really oppose globalism, but as long as it is being advanced by a Democratic president they will fight it, while if it is advanced by a Republican they will support it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 29, 2008 02:29 PM | Send