Good-Bye to All That - A former National Review trustee surveys the wreckage of contemporary conservatism.

I'll be back with some new material including my promised "Thoughts of a Young Paleo" after Thanksgiving. Until then chew on this intertesting article from Austin Bramwell, former board member of the National Review on the death of the conservative movement. Now is the time we start a new movement.

---Sean Scallon

Good-bye to All That

A former National Review trustee surveys the wreckage of contemporary conservatism.

by Austin W. Bramwell

Until recently, it has been almost impossible for me to speak candidly about the conservative movement, for it was my strange fate to serve as director and later trustee of the movement’s flagship journal, National Review. Earlier this year, at William F. Buckley’s request, I resigned both positions. I can therefore now declare what perhaps has oft been thought but never, at least not often enough, expressed. Notwithstanding conservatives’ belief that they, in contrast to their partisan opponents, have thought deeply about the challenges facing the United States, it is they who have become unserious.

The unseriousness began not long after 9/11. On Oct. 15, 2001, for example, National Review—still the most powerful brand in conservative opinion, whose pronouncements the movement must either accept or at least refrain from challenging—wrote, in an editorial entitled “At War: Defining Victory”:

The logic of a ‘war on terrorism’ points beyond itself. … The phrase is meant to suggest that our hostility is not confined to those people who can be proved to have materially aided the attacks of September 11. It encompasses all those who mean to do our people harm. … Bombing bin Laden, if we find him, will not end [this war]. Nor will overthrowing the Taliban. Victory requires either changing the regimes of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Sudan, or frightening them enough to change their behavior towards us.

“Defining Victory” describes the post-9/11 world in terms that have since become familiar. First, it insists on a war that has no definite enemy and no foreseeable end. Short of one-world despotism or universal brotherhood, the U.S. cannot literally defeat “all those who mean to do our people harm.” To trim the hyperbole, NR goes on to name five examples of potential enemies (plus, in later editorials, Saudi Arabia) but does not explain how the list was generated or whether it is even complete. The reader gathers only that we should threaten or go to war with an unspecified number of troublesome nations.

Second, the editors use the term “war” in a purely figurative sense. At the time of the editorial, the U.S. was not at war with Syria, Sudan, or Iran nor, realistically speaking, with any other nation on the list. No matter how vulnerable or despised, no Muslim nation can be turned into a sacrificial substitute for bin Laden. Nor, no matter how often incanted, can the phrase “at war” be made to describe an actual state of affairs. A rhetorical bludgeon designed to compel assent to certain policies, it begs the question of whether war is advisable in the first place.

Third, “Defining Victory” does not identify a casus belli. Neither Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, nor Sudan attacked us on 9/11. Later debate would focus on the legitimacy of preventive war as a defense against future threats. All foreign nations, however, by definition pose hypothetical threats; at some point, those threats become so remote, trivial, or contingent that preventive war cannot be distinguished from an aggressive war of domination. By urging belligerence against nations with no known designs—to say nothing of any capacity—for harming the U.S., “Defining Victory” surely advocated crossing that point.

Finally, the editorial defines “victory” in terms of a goal—regime change—that war advances only incidentally. War by itself cannot cause regime change. To overthrow and replace a government militarily, one must either invade and occupy a country (a technique that works best when the occupier has made a policy of slaughtering civilians en masse, as in Dresden or Hiroshima) or else so punish the civilian population that they rise up against their government. By saying, incoherently, that the United States was “at war” with a list of regimes, NR gave no indication of what policies it was actually touting.

In sum, NR declared that we were “at war” when we were not, for reasons that it did not specify, against enemies that it could not define, and to achieve goals that war does not advance. “Defining Victory” dresses up as policy but inchoate thirst for vengeance against someone, anyone who hates us. How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed / when vengeance listens to the fool's request! On Oct. 15, 2001, National Review had no position on post-9/11 foreign policy.

Nor did it find a position thereafter. In December 2001 NR declared:

Even Osama bin Laden, whose humiliation and death is one of our prime war aims, is only a pustule on the diseased body of the Middle East. After Afghanistan comes Iraq. … After it comes Saudi Arabia …

A fortnight later:

If Saddam Hussein were toppled and Saudi Arabia reformed or restructured, the Middle East would be emptied of many of its poisonous humors, like a bathtub when the plug is pulled away.

Upon a metaphor and a simile—the diseased body and the wet bathtub—did National Review hang all its post-9/11 prescriptions. Yet the editors never explained what these figures actually meant. Presumably, the theory to which they allude is that (a) the Middle East suffers from certain conditions (b) that cause threats to the U.S. to emerge and (c) that by removing those conditions the threats will cease.

Thus spelled out, however, the theory behind the metaphors provides little policy guidance. First, what conditions cause threats to emerge? Lack of democracy? The world is full of non-democracies, very few of which actually threaten us. Lack of a sound ideology? Crazed ideologues are ubiquitous, even (perhaps especially) in democracies. Sophisticated Westerners can’t even agree on what democracy is. Islam itself? It is a major world religion that comes in diverse forms and which American policy cannot mould to its liking as if it were soft wax. Tyranny? Philosophers have agreed that democracy itself is a kind of tyranny.

Second, what threats emerge from the Middle East and how do the alleged conditions cause them? Terrorism? It flourishes in democracies, especially under conditions of occupation, no matter that the occupier or the occupied is democratic. Democracy may even worsen terrorism as it tends to arm terrorist groups politically as well as technologically. Nuclear proliferation? Many nations, of all ideologies, religions, and political systems, seek nuclear weapons, largely as guarantors of their security. Hostility to our ally Israel? It is Arab dictators who strike deals with Israel; anti-Zionism, by contrast, is a demotic passion.

Finally, how do you change the alleged conditions that cause the alleged threats? By what psychological techniques, for example, do you cause people to accept a new ideology? Brainwashing? Relentless propaganda? Feats of strength? And how do you go about establishing a democracy in the first place?

Each of these questions alludes to a serious policy debate. Possibly, by speaking only in metaphor, National Review was announcing that it had resolved them already and no longer needed to be troubled. If so, the editors concealed their reasoning in the dunnest haze. NR’s subsequent editorials offered one nebulous metaphor after another. After curing diseased bodies and draining bathtubs, NR was changing “the political map of the Middle East,” erecting a “new model for Middle Eastern governance,” “transforming the geopolitical balance in the Middle East,” and establishing a liberal “beachhead.” Bodies, bathtubs, swamps, maps, models, balances, beachheads: each metaphor conceals a paucity of analysis.

Despite their vacuity, the metaphors have inspired specific policies. In defending the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and possible attacks on Syria or Iran), conservatives invoke 9/11 with astonishing alacrity. I once heard an NR senior editor, a man revered for his high-mindedness, begin his defense of the Iraq occupation by reminding the audience that on 9/11 “they” attacked “us.” In his mind as in others’, the invasion of Iraq has so inescapable a connection to 9/11 that only a traitor or fool would deny it.

But the movement’s leaders have no more defined the connection between Iraq and terrorism than they have defined the war on terror. While acknowledging that the occupation of Iraq may be increasing the short-term risk of anti-American terrorism, NR nonetheless argued more recently:

If we prevail [in Iraq], we will have destroyed a dictatorship supportive of terrorism and Arab radicalism and replaced it, we hope, with a government opposed to both of those things. That will be a significant step forward in the War on Terror. … If we succeed in creating a stable, democratic Iraqi state, it will be clear that the terrorists are opposed not so much to the ‘crusaders’ and ‘occupiers’ as to the legitimate aspirations of Muslims in the Middle East. [Quoting John Negroponte] ‘[S]hould the Iraqi people prevail in establishing a stable political and security environment, the jihadists will be perceived to have failed, and fewer jihadists will leave Iraq determined to carry on the fight elsewhere.’

Never mind the conflation of “Arab radicalism”—presumably a reference to Ba’athism—with bin Laden’s Muslim jihadism (how would discrediting Saddam’s ideology discourage bin Laden’s?), the allusion to Hussein rewarding the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (how does terrorism in Israel threaten the United States?), or the assumption that foreign terrorists are driving the insurgency in Iraq (if Iraqis hate the relatively benign Americans, why would they turn over their country to a bunch of foreign wackos?). Let us observe only that the conservative movement’s best argument for staying in Iraq is that jihadists “will be perceived” differently, for “it will be clear” that they are harming Muslims at large. In short, if all goes well, the occupation of Iraq might just produce a useful propaganda victory. War as propaganda: surely this is the thinking of clownish dictators rather than mature analysts.

To justify the long-term occupation of a foreign country, the supposed propaganda victory must bring overwhelming benefits to Americans. Consider, however, what must happen before Iraqi democracy can make us safer from terrorism. First, Iraqi democracy must exist. National Review, by offering the occasional potpourri of new tactics that might or might not improve the situation, poses as the voice of maturity (neither unrealistic like the neocons nor defeatist like the cut-and-run Democrats) in the debate over whether Iraq can be salvaged. To the extent, however, that NR dares to name what forces are actually driving events in Iraq, it offers either blandishments (“we must keep the political process on track as the key to making progress on the ground”) or such naïvetes as the theory that peace and stable government have a chance in Iraq because that is what Iraqis ultimately want. Alas, if people always got what they wanted, the whole world would be well-governed. A nation cannot afford to premise its policies on the universal hope for something better.

Second, Muslims must recognize Iraqi democracy as such. Accurately perceiving “democracy,” however, requires a degree of information and political sophistication beyond most people, Muslims included. Conservatives complain, for example, that the media give Americans a distorted view of Iraq. Surely the Muslim media would do even worse. Most people around the globe, after all, dispute that even the United States is a democracy on the perfectly plausible theory (given lack of information) that Bush simply crowned himself president.

Yet even if fully informed, Muslims may still not perceive Iraq as a “democracy.” Scholars can’t even agree on the meaning the word. Joseph Schumpeter, the most penetrating modern theorist of democracy, argued in essence that “democracy” is a misnomer, while economist Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel Prize for proving (on one interpretation) that it is literally impossible for a democratic process to satisfy all relevant normative criteria of legitimacy. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people (what George Orwell in 1984 called the “proles,” or the 85 percent of the world so uninterested in politics as to have no ideology whatsoever) have not even the most basic grasp of the concepts of democracy or legitimacy. Even if everything in Mesopotamia came up roses, therefore, Muslims may never see the Iraqi government as legitimate. To do so, they would need the minds of angels, not men.

Finally, before Iraqi democracy can cure terrorism, Muslims in general, and Muslim extremists in particular, must infer from “democracy exists in Iraq” that “terrorism is wrong.” But even assuming that Muslims think logically, surely it is too much to ask them to commit a non sequitur. Democracy in Iraq will leave in place any number of grievances—our occupation of Muslim lands, our support for Israel, and our continued alliance with Muslim dictators—any one of which may continue to inspire terrorism. Ironically, conservatives pooh-pooh the danger that the occupation plays into the hands of terrorist propagandists yet blithely assume that Iraqi democracy would play into the hands of our own. To the chagrin of ideologists everywhere, however, Muslims are creatures as complex and unpredictable as the rest of us. They cannot tenderly be led by the noses as asses are, no matter that the U.S. adds Iraq to the ranks of Muslim democracies.

In short, the steps in the causal logic whereby Iraqi democracy defeats anti-American terrorism are so numerous and doubtful that it becomes impossible to believe that Bush’s supporters have ever actually thought them through. Those who wonder what error befell the conservative movement since Bush took office are asking the wrong question. Since 9/11, the conservative movement has not made unsound or fallacious arguments for supporting Bush’s policies. Rather, it has made no arguments at all. T.S. Eliot once asked, “Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?” The answer: “Nothing, again, nothing.”

It follows that Mephistophelean neoconservatives did not suddenly commandeer the conservative movement. Whatever may be said of neoconservatives, at least they know what they think. (The Weekly Standard for this reason has always been a good read.) Every nation has a faction zealous for national glory and horrified by decadence and dishonor; in the United States, a famously idealistic country, that faction emphasizes the blessings that American power confers upon all mankind. Today, we call them neoconservatives, but in some sense they have always existed.

After 9/11, neoconservatives championed any war that we waged in reaction. In this, they were acting opportunistically but not hypocritically: in their view, 9/11 is what happens when the United States suffers any challenges to its authority. The rest of the movement knew only that it wanted a ruthless response. Neoconservatism just happened to provide a convenient ideological infrastructure with which to justify metonymic revenge against some Muslim Arab or other. Before 9/11, the movement was praising modesty in foreign affairs; after 9/11, it did not so much embrace neoconservatism as blunder into it by accident.

To be sure, conservatives have hotly denied the charge of neoconservatism but never by actually disagreeing with it. (National Review Online, which now far outshadows the magazine in influence, has become the world’s most prolific organ of neoconservative opinion.) In an article in The National Interest, for example, NR editor Rich Lowry and an anonymous co-author contrasted neoconservatism to what they called the “Reagan synthesis.” The Reagan synthesis, as they describe it, endorses the neoconservative project of expanding liberty abroad and exerting American power as a force for good but nonetheless recognizes that foreign policy “should be prudent, flexible, aware of power relationships and immune to juvenile excess.” When exactly do prudence and awareness of power relationships conflict with the imperative to spread the blessings of American power abroad? The authors do not say. The grand Reagan synthesis turns out to be nothing more than “as much neoconservatism as the world lets us get away with.” As the world has a strong tendency to frustrate neoconservative ambitions, no practical difference exists between actual neoconservatism and the authors’ neoconservatism-in-everything-but-name.

As it happens, the broader conservative public supports Bush for very sensible, non-neoconservative reasons. Those reasons just happen to be poorly informed. For example, many believe—including an astonishing 90 percent of soldiers serving in Iraq—that the U.S. invaded to retaliate against Saddam Hussein for his role in the 9/11 attacks. Now that Saddam is gone but Iraqis are still giving us trouble, they reason, we must kill them before they kill us. If Americans understood that soldiers were dying not to kill the bad guys but to prevent them from killing each other, Bush’s popularity would evaporate.

The movement’s leaders may be better informed, but they have no clearer idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham that seeks to understand the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be. Analysis, however, requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment (some mainstream figures favorably compared Bush not just to Ronald Reagan but to Abraham Lincoln), has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.

Sadly, analysis is also often lacking outside the mainstream movement. Every movement throws off disgruntled outsiders (conservatives sometimes call them “paleoconservatives”) who feel bitterly their loss of power. They write obsessively, sometimes quite fancifully, on the alleged perfidies of the mainstream. Often, however, their critiques want credibility.

Some, for example, carry on the Cold War obsession with the so-called “crisis of the West.” Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error. (Not surprisingly, this approach has little popular appeal, although it still commands respect among professional conservatives.) The notion of a crisis of the West, however, grossly overestimates the importance of ideas; indeed, it requires an unphilosophical and almost paranoid ability to treat ideologies (most conspicuously, liberalism) as living, breathing omnipresences to which intentions, tactics, strategies, feelings, disappointments, and conflicts can all be attributed. Believers in the crisis of the West rest almost their entire worldview on an elusive notion—modernity—borrowed from a half-formed science—sociology. Crisis-of-the-West conservatism, at one time a fruitful response to the calamities of the 20th century, has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.

Another group pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles. “If only people would still read Russell Kirk,” one hears. But the movement never had any first principles to begin with. Although it boasts a carefully husbanded canon of supposedly foundational texts, the men who wrote them—Kirk, Strauss, Voegelin, Weaver, Chambers, Meyer—were notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure. Russell Kirk, for example, even as he shrewdly positioned himself as the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement, had almost no political opinions whatsoever.

Still others eulogize local attachments and ancestral loyalties. They invoke a litany of examples: family, church, kin, community, school, the “little platoons” in which Burke found the basis of political association. Celebrating such “infra-political” institutions may well have made sense in the 1950s, the high tide of American nationalism and federal government prestige. At most other times, however, ancestral attachments are dangerously subversive. The U.S. could not have survived had it not ruthlessly extirpated the ancestral loyalties of both natives and newcomers; Great Britain suffered endless civil wars before the great constitutional oak that Burke praised took root; the West itself succeeded precisely because it cut short the reach of the extended family or clan. Ancestral loyalties are the curse of uncivilized peoples, most especially in the hypermnesiac Middle East. Most ominously, praise of local attachments now comes in the guise of multiculturalism, perhaps the most insidious threat to a just order today. Not for nothing did communitarianism become a left-wing vogue.

For all their philippics, disgruntled conservatives remain decidedly of the movement, if not in it, for they share with the mainstream the fundamental conceit that conservatism exists to advance some core set of beliefs or principles. Like a soul animating a body, these principles allegedly guide, smooth or grim, all the movement’s institutions, programs, publications, alliances, tactical feints, and shifting positions. Hence, even those outside the mainstream keep the faith that the movement will not stray forever. Conservatism, in this view, can no more betray its principles than the God of Abraham can betray His covenant with Israel.

But “conservatism” has no mystical essence. Rather than a magisterium handed down from apostolic times, it is an ideology whose contours are largely arbitrary and accidental. By ideology, I mean precisely what Orwell depicted in 1984. I do not mean, of course, that conservatism is totalitarian. Taken as prophecy, 1984 has little merit. Taken as a description of the world we actually live in, however, it is indispensable. 1984 reveals not the horrors of the future but the quotidian realities of ideology in mass democracy. Conservatism exemplifies them all.

First, like Ingsoc, conservatism has a hierarchical structure. Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,” those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly. Millions of conservative epigones believe nothing less than what the movement’s established organs tell them to believe. Rarely does a man recognize, like Winston Smith, his own ideology as such.

Second, conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.” Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Third, and closely related to doublethinking, the conservative movement engages in selective editing of history. When events have a tendency to disconfirm ideology, down the memory hole they go. Thus, conservatives do not recall their dire warnings about the Soviet Union during the Cold War or about the economy after the Bush I or Clinton tax increases. On the Iraq invasion, they will not remind you of their claims that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the world would soon be applauding the Iraq invasion, or that events in Lebanon and the Ukraine heralded global democratic revolution. Nor will conservatives remind you of their predictions that the insurgency’s demise was imminent, that Saddam Hussein and then Zarqawi were the Big Men of the insurgency, or that the insurgency consisted largely of foreign jihadis. As in 1984, the ability to forget that any of these events ever occurred signals one’s loyalty to the movement. (Hence, the rise of hawkishness against Iran, not four years after the last effort to sell a war to an otherwise balky public.) To prove his loyalty to the emperor, everyone must compliment him on his new clothes. The most loyal believe that the emperor is wearing clothes to begin with.

Fourth, conservatism is entertaining. Understanding the world, though rewarding, provides nothing like the pleasures of a “Two Minute Hate,” a focused, ritualized denunciation of enemies. To induce its own Two Minute Hates, conservatism, like Ingsoc in 1984, manufactures bogeymen such as “judicial activists,” “so-called realists,” or “moral relativists” that become symbolic representations of detested outsiders. Meanwhile, like the Inner Party in 1984, conservative leaders tolerate the more vulgar, angry purveyors of ideology—think talk-show hosts or authors of bestselling political books. The most vicious attacks, meanwhile, are reserved for turncoats, like Goldstein in 1984. (Of course, as many paleoconservatives could attest, the hatred is usually mutual.) Rooting for conservative ideology is as engrossing to its partisans as rooting for the local football team is to its fans.

None of this is to suggest that conservatism is uniquely pernicious. The roots of ideology lie deep in our cognitive limitations and instinct for group loyalty. One could make similar observations of any ideology. The most distinguishing feature of conservatism is its misleading name. Lexically, “conservatism” denotes caution, prudence, and resistance to change. Conservatism the ideology, however, has if anything tended towards recklessness. “Nuke ‘em!” has always been a popular conservative sentiment, never more so than today with respect to the Muslim world. For frantic boast and foolish word / Thy mercy on thy people Lord!

Whatever its past accomplishments, the conservative movement no longer kindles any “ironic points of light.” It has produced fewer outstanding books even as it has taken over more of the intellectual and political landscape. This trend will only continue. Worse, no reckoning will be made: they hope in vain who expect conservatives to take responsibility for the actual consequences of their actions. Conservatives have no use for the ethic of responsibility; they seek only to “see to it that the flame of pure intention is not quelched.” The movement remains a fine place to make a career, but for wisdom one must look elsewhere.

A victory for reality - The real meaning of the 2006 mid-term elections

The recent mid-term elections were nicely framed between the “reality-based” community and the Bush II Administration, as this quote from journalist and author Ron Suskind shows:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Thus like ancient gods of myth and lore did the Bush II Administration believe they could create the reality in the world we all live in all by themselves. And when you control the most powerful military the world ever seen, one has the means to make all sort of realities I suppose.

But alas the would-be gods have failed and their failure was confirmed in the latest accountability moment. It seems that other people and forces have a way of affecting reality too besides “history’s actors” and ultimately they bended reality to their will rather than the Administration’s.

Those realities include the Iraq insurgency, which was a reality none in the Administration admittedly foresaw or chose to ignore despite repeated warnings. Then there was the reality of hurricane Katrina, an act of Mother Nature that was compounded in its magnitude by governmental incompetence that shattered any illusions that “history’s actors” could read their lines. The Mark Foley scandal exposed the reality that there was a culture of corruption that permeated throughout the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress, not mention a homosexual cabal that occupied staff level positions of a party who’s members often preach their damnation. Then there was the reality of our undefended borders that in this age of 9-11 and mass immigration that can no longer be kept out of sight and mind. All these realties combined until the voters finally realized what was reality and what was fantasy.

Reality bites, doesn’t it?

Thus reality got its revenge against those who thought they could control
it, shape it, fix it, spin it, and do whatever they could to make reality conform to their own fantasies. In doing this, the current Administration has shown themselves to be no better than their predecessors when it creating illusions they tried to pass off as reality, which is interesting when you recall that they were supposedly elected in a backlash against the Clintonite spinmeisters. I guess you can’t beat them, join ‘em.

Yet, to the end, history’s actors tried to prove all was well and prove that they could not be defeated. Supposedly reality was microtargeting Republican voters, 72-hour Projects, spending millions more than their opponents and residing in safe, gerrymandered districts. They tried to convince the reality-based community everything was going there way with help from their allies: the conservative radio talk-show enablers, the pundits and bloggers all across the nation.

But then came the final reality that they could not control, actual votes. And when those votes were counted the reality was they were out of power on Capital Hill and in many statehouses and they could not act to change it. Money and political machinery are nice things to have, but the reality in politics is that no amount of machine muscle or TV commercials change voters mind when events, real events, dominate their thinking. And Iraq and Capital Hill corruption were plainly on their minds as they entered the voting booth.

Thus the fantasy that history’s actors tried to pass off as reality was shattered into itsy-bitsy pieces and first to feel the affects was Donald Rumsfeld. Whether the rest of the Administration sees the world the way it is rather than how they wish it to be remains to be seen. As far as their allies go, some have reacted better to being hit upside the head by the reality 2x4 than others. In full spin mode have the Limbaughs and Hannitys describe the election as a victory for conservatism and call for the GOP to return to so-called Reaganite principals. That’s a funny statement considering that even Ronald Reagan never lived up to own principals, so why should we think far lesser men will be able to do so? The true reality of Reagan as far conservative principals go is less than the mythology that has been created around him. That myth is largely based on the Reagan the campaigner, not Reagan the governor of California or Reagan the President. To believe the reality the talk-show jokers are trying to create, you would have to believe that a group of alien body-snatchers took control of the GOP and only pretended to act like Republicans and that if we just get rid of them all will be right once again.

But alas, the reality is old conservative movement is long since gone away what has replaced it is in reality, right-wing social democracy masquerading as conservatism. What is needed is not a return to a past that never was, but a new movement altogether. Once that is based on what’s real, like blood, soil and faith, rather than the unrealities of finance, power and self-righteous hypocrisy. Only then will we all be back in the real world instead of arrogantly trying to create it in our own image.

---By Sean Scallon

No we won't all be speaking Arabic next year

This article was sent to be by Doug Newman.
---Sean Scallon


NO, WE WON'T ALL BE SPEAKING ARABIC NEXT YEAR
By Doug Newman

November 9, 2006


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Lies are powerful things. Hitler knew that if you just tell lies often enough -- no matter how outrageous they might be -- people will believe them. Just keep lying and lying and lying.

For the 14,425th time, George W. Bush is not Adolph Hitler. However, he and his spin doctors also know the power of lies. Ever since September 11, 2001, they have told the American people countless times that We Are At War With Terrorists Who Seek to Take Away Our Freedom And Undermine Our Very Way Of Life.

Millions of Americans believe that Osama bin Laden wants to take over the world, when he hasn’t even taken over Afghanistan. Millions of Americans still support a war in Iraq, a nation which even GWB admits had nothing to do with 9/11. Millions of Americans still believe that Osama and Saddam posed a clear and present threat to what was left of America’s freedom. Millions of Americans support a domestic police state to thwart these threats.

Just scare people enough and -- if they lack any moral convictions -- they will believe anything.

GWB wants us to believe that you are with him or you are with "the terrorists". The Democrats' triumphs in Tuesday's election have already been called a "win" for "the terrorists." As someone said to me last weekend, "If it weren't for Bush, we'd all be speaking Arabic!"

On that horrible afternoon of September 11, I received an e-mail from an old friend which has turned out to be downright prophetic.

The subject line read: “They Want You to Panic...”

The body of the e-mail read, in part, as follows:

“...So don't.

“I already have had enough conversations with people across the country (via phone) to know that the sheeple are thinking everyone is a target and are losing any remaining common sense because of other people who have become detached from reality by this horrific act.

“Please: The nation is on these bastards' menu -- not you, personally.

“I know this is going to sound horrifically insensitive, but the fact that what amounted to -- militarily speaking -- a strategic pinprick can bring a nation's people to a state of disarray we're seeing unfold (even as I type this initial response) gravely concerns me. As terrible as this may sound, ultimately, it is the financial blow -- both real and perceived -- that will concern you and yours. I have even greater concerns...

“Yes, pray for the dead, the dying, the injured and their loved ones, but NEVER lose sight of the fact that many more people gave their lives over the past 226 years to make sure you live and breathe in Freedom -- relative Freedom though it may be these days. Do NOT go off the deep end and cry for ‘more security’ at the cost of your basic Liberty. Believe me -- there are powerful men who will willingly accommodate you at ANY cost.

“This nation no longer shares the same collective soul we did in 1941 -- or even 1962. We have, in recent years, become a nation of cowards who believe we can legislate our way to safety and security. We have to be better than that now. We have to be much better than that now. We have to be strong. We have to act in concert, BUT AS FREE MEN -- not as national socialists.

“America: Scream for their heads to be handed to you on a platter, not your own.

“So, while you're not panicking, and if you are of a mind to see farther than the latest newscasts' ill-informed speculation, please take this one warning to heart: The enemy from without is a far less formidable threat to our Liberty than the one presented by the enemy from within.

“From one who loves his country and zealously guards its welfare against all enemies -- foreign, domestic and elected:

“God Bless America and the Republic for which it stood.

“In respectful memory of those who died the Day America Changed,”

Ever since 9/11, we have seen what was left of our Constitution sent through the shredder. This was done not by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, but by GWB and the U.S. government. We have seen this in the USA Patriot Act, (1) warrantless domestic spying, horrendously intrusive airport security, torture of prisoners and, now, the Military Commissions Act of 2006. (MCA 2006)

To be sure, other presidents – John Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and Clinton – have recklessly disregarded the Constitution to accomplish their ends. However, two – or five or ten or fifty – wrongs don’t make a right. (And do all you Bush groupies out there want to use Bill Clinton as your moral yardstick?)

And, no, the end did not justify the means. We are far less free in America than we were in 1798, 1861, 1918, 1942 or 1993. (Slavery was on its way out in 1861 and would have gone away without Abe Lincoln’s war.)

Is there anything less American than suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional guarantee against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment? What is American about arbitrarily arresting someone and detaining them indefinitely with no presumption of innocence, no right to face their accuser, no right to see all the evidence against them, no jury of their peers, no right to obtain witnesses in their favor or any other aspect of due process of law?

(If I had lunch with Keith Olbermann, I would probably enjoy talking baseball with him. Politics, on the other hand, would spark a few disagreements. However, his commentaries on MCA 2006 are among the most eloquent political observations in recent times.) (2)

But we are at war, you say, and don’t extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures? We have lost 2800 Americans in Iraq, supposedly in the name of fighting a rogue government. Those who survive combat tours in Iraq now come home to a land that has just taken a huge lurch in the direction of everything we say we are fighting against.

If you would trust GWB to exercise prudently his newfound authority under MCA 2006, let me ask you two questions. First, would you trust Bill Clinton with such power? Second, would you trust a future Democratic president -- say, Hillary Clinton -- with such power?

Norman Vincent Peale once remarked that “Americans used to roar like lions for liberty. Now they bleat like sheep for security.” If, as the neocons want us to believe, Osama Bin Laden wants to bring America to its knees, he has, with GWB's help, been quite successful.

Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano recently pointed out that freedom was not attacked on September 11. America was attacked. Freedom was subsequently attacked by GWB’s drastic expansion of police powers.

Terror is a tactic that has been around at least since the French Revolution. While terrorists are horrible people who deserve severe punishment for their crimes, there is no unified terrorist front hell bent on world domination. A global war against a tactic is a totally illogical idea.

"The terrorists" have not even taken over Afghanistan, so it is preposterous to think they can take over the world. It is similarly preposterous to believe that Democratic majorities will result in us "all speaking Arabic" come the middle of next year.

It is not "the terrorists" who threaten what is left of our freedom. It is our own government.

It is not "the terrorists" who are recklessly “undermining our very way of life” in America. It is our own government. And they are doing so with our blessing.

But, hey, you know, like, I’ll give up my freedom for a time so that the feds can do what they need to do to fight terrorists. And when they get their victory over the terrorists, then I’ll get my freedom back.

Like totally, dude. Just how much freedom will you give up and for how long? In 1933, the German people gave up their freedom – like, totally -- for the promise of security. They got it back in 1945.

But I am not a terror suspect. What do I have do worry about?

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent eight years in prison for opposing Hitler:

When they came for the dope smokers, you did not say anything because you were not a dope smoker. When they came for the Branch Davidians, you did not say anything because you were not a Branch Davidian. When they came for the terror suspects, you did not say anything because you were not a terror suspect.

When they come for you will you still be able to say anything?

Intrusions on freedom frequently start out mildly. In 1935, no one could have envisioned that your every move and transaction could be tracked by means of your Social Security Number. In 1913, the original income tax had a top rate of six percent.

If the screening process at airports is any indicator, we are all terror suspects already. Someone far wiser than I am has stated that, on September 11, 2001, horrible crimes were committed. On September 12, 2001, the American people became suspects.

Freedom is being attacked, but not by "the terrorists." Freedom is being attacked by GWB and the government over which he presides.

And freedom must be defended.

Calhoun puts blame on GOP losses right where it belongs

William Calhoun cries J'Accuse! to the neocons who caused the GOP defeat at the polls. Like me he calls for a new cosnervative movement with them left out on the fringes where they belong, to brood in the dark.

---Sean Scallon

GOP Losses the Fault of NeoCons
By William H. Calhoun


What does the 2006 election signify? What should conservatives do? On email lists, I have been hearing the same story: "It's the fault of the neocons." "These neocons have completely screwed us over." And you know what, they are right.


Conservatives should whole-heartedly rebuke the neocons and their reptilian allies. Neocons should be removed from places of power. They should be fired from editorial positions. And, in some cases, they should be deported.


According to almost all exit polls, the primary issue in this election was the war in Iraq - an unnecessary neocon war. The irrational transformation of the Middle East to democracy is hardly conservative. It is Jacobean; it is Wilsonian utopianism. Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, criticized the first Iraq war for these reasons, and predicted the horrors to come from these ideologues who "mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States."


The second greatest issue was corruption, much of which can be traced to neocon sources. Whether the lying about WMDs, making bribes or seeking to undermine American sovereignty with the NAFTA superhighway, neocons have been front and center in these scandals.


The third issue of importance was free trade, which helped to decide the Senate races in Ohio and Missouri. Free trade has destroyed the American economy, and it must end. Historically, conservatives have opposed free trade. Russell Kirk and other traditional conservatives noted the destructive tendencies of free trade; it undermines first-world markets and national sovereignty. Real conservatives do oppose free trade, but many in the GOP have been "neoconned" on this issue.


Despite the neocon lies in the media, Americans still overwhelmingly oppose increases in both legal and illegal immigration. Every candidate – Democrat or Republican – was running on a platform to reduce immigration. Recent Zogby polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer an enforcement-only approach to any path-to-citizenship treason. Unlike John McCain, Bush and Linda Chavez, most Americans do not want to see the US become a third-world cesspool. American voters punished House Republicans because of Iraq, not immigration.


What would be done in a just world? All neocons should be removed from the Republican Party. First of all, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be ousted. Neocon publications like Weekly Standard, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, First Things, and Commentary should be condemned. Thugs like Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol and Podhoretz should be expatriated.


David Frum, Feith, and Ledeen should be removed from US soil. Propagandists like Medved, Krauthammer, Jaffa, Jonah Goldberg, and Neuhaus should be ostracized. The neocon henchmen like Specter, McCain, Condoleezza Rice, Fred Barnes, David Brooks and Andrew "Bareback" Sullivan (all radical left-wing activists in disguise) should be shut out from all discussion. And traitors like Alberto Gonzales, Linda Chavez, and Gutierrez should all be deported to Mexico.


Real conservatives (such as those you would find at the American Conservative or Chronicles Magazine) have been vindicated. They have always been right about these traitorous Trotskyites.


This neocon stranglehold on "conservatism" must end. Neocons have done more to kill conservatism than a whole army of Leftists. The neocon, in short, is the conservative's worst enemy. Neocons delendi sunt!


-----------
William H. Calhoun is a conservative, writer and graduate of the University of Chicago. He can be reached at williamhcalhoun@yahoo.com

Time magazine article about FSP

This article on the Free State Project appears in the latest issue of Time Magazine.
--Sean Scallon

How to Stage a Coup, American-Style
Libertarian activists are moving to a state where they'll have maximum clout

By NATHAN THORNBURGH
Posted Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006

If Ron Helwig can join the revolution, then so can you. All you have to do is believe, as Helwig does, that the government has gone way too far in regulating your personal life, taxing your income and invading your privacy. And, of course, you have to move to New Hampshire.

That's exactly what the affable computer programmer from Minnesota did this year. He's a new member of the Free State Project, a group of like-minded libertarians from around the U.S. whose goal is to come together in the tiny New England state in sufficient numbers to create a libertarian showroom for the rest of the country.

The Free State idea was the brainchild five years ago of Jason Sorens, then a grad student in political science at Yale. Card-carrying libertarians make up just under 1% of voters around the country, a number that has made them achingly irrelevant in national politics. Sorens argued in online forums and later at political events that if 20,000 libertarians would move to the same small state, they would no longer be in the electoral wilderness. They could finally make a difference and show the rest of America what real liberty looks like--the kind where you don't have to wear seat belts or register your guns and nobody passes laws about what the neighbors can do in their bedroom.

By 2003 thousands had agreed in principle to make the move once a total of 20,000 had signed on. They settled on New Hampshire as their destination. The state's motto, after all, is LIVE FREE OR DIE, and its low taxes and high regard for minding your own damn business proved irresistible. Republican officials were delighted. "Come on up," Craig Benson, the Governor at the time, told them. "We'd love to have you."

At a recent Free State Project meet-and-greet in Deerfield thrown by Helwig and his two housemates, also Minnesotan émigrés, it was clear that 20,000 is an ambitious goal. No more than a few dozen movement members from around the state showed up for the beer and pizza. In all, fewer than 200 have moved to New Hampshire in the past three years. "Getting libertarians to do anything together is like herding cats," groused a partygoer.

It would be wrong to write off the Free Staters entirely, though. Those who have moved have been putting on a display of rambunctious, representative democracy. Some prefer civil disobedience and street demonstrations: one was recently arrested at a local IRS office handing out pamphlets that said, "Hitler had a revenue service too." Although the Free State Project doesn't endorse political candidates, some members have been making competitive runs for local office, including some staunch home-schooling advocates who have been elected to local school boards. With one state legislator for every 3,000 or so citizens (the best ratio of any state), New Hampshire has a proud tradition of hyper-representative government, but as in the rest of the country, many of its citizens are apathetic about politics. By simply showing up and speaking out at public meetings, the Free Staters are filling the participatory void. They helped block a statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants and joined forces with elements of the two main parties to pressure the statehouse to vote down a pilot program for a national ID card.

the Republican establishment was expecting the movement to deliver loyal conservative voters, the libertarians--who want to lift controls on both guns and narcotics--are proving more complicated creatures. Cathleen Converse used to be a by-the-book conservative in South Carolina. But she says that the free-spending, prying Bush Administration sped up her defection from the G.O.P. and eventually brought her husband and her to the Free State Project. "As Republicans showed their true colors," she says, "we had to choose the side of liberty." She adds, "Back home, most of the people thought we were crazy. But here, when you talk about real freedom, people actually nod their heads."

Moving to New Hampshire has given Helwig a new faith in politics. "Democracy isn't really ruled by the majority," he says. "It's ruled by the vocal minority." With more Free Staters driving their U-Hauls north each month, the vocal minority may slowly be growing a little louder.

The state within a state - The centralists better get used to it

Last weekend 43 delegates from a variety of local secessionists, independence and decentralizing movements from across North America descended upon Burlington, Vermont for the first-ever North American Secessionist Convention hosted by the Middlebury Institute, the intellectual force behind the Second Vermont Republic movement.

The fact that the Philadelphia Inquirer sent a reporter to cover this event and the fact the Los Angeles Times and New York Sun did preview articles of the convention showed that this was no mere fringe grouping, as it would have been dismissed even just a few years ago. Indeed, the fact that many of people attending the conference either were or are part of academia shows there is a growing intellectual foundation for secession for the first time since the War Between the States.

It may very well be that such dreams of secession for say, Hawaii or Alaska or even the South once again, may very well be just that, just dreams. But as events around the world are showing, there are ways to declare one’s independence on a de facto basis, whether it is secession of the mind or culture, or creating parallel governments to rival the central authority.

In short, the state within a state.

The centralizers better get used to it.

It is the wave of the future.

If there was one thing that seemed to annoy the Bush II Administration more than anything about Hezbollah during its recent war with Israel, was that Hezbollah was “a state within a state,” i.e. a parallel government was operating within the bounds of sovereign state (Lebanon). Apparently the Bushes and the centralizers within the Beltway don’t like “state within states” very much. Apparently such an idea seems to run afoul of the U.S.’ global hegemony. If the U.S. is the dominant power on the globe, then there is supposedly no room for such little entities to be able to operate. Don’t they know we’re an empire now according to one administration official?

They probably do and they could care less.

Hezbollah is a good model for the state within a state. It is homogenous, meaning that it is largely made up of one particular religious, ethnic, regional or racial or economic group. In this case, Hezbollah represents the Shiites of South Lebanon. Shiites as group may make up at least 45 percent of Lebanon’s population and yet all they control within the Lebanese government is the speakership of the parliament, whatever that’s worth. Many Shiites feel Hezbollah is the only political party that represents their interests and that feeling has been created by the wide variety of social services Hezbollah provides to the residents of rural South Lebanon and the slums of South Beirut. In so doing, Hezbollah, like an old U.S. political machine, maintains its political control for the goodies it hands out, like free medical care or money to rebuild bombed out homes thanks to the IAF. Since the Lebanese government has been unwilling or unable to help the Shiites, Hezbollah has stepped in and filled the vacuum and the residents have given Hezbollah their loyalties, like it or not. Such bonds helped the Hezbollah guerillas fight off the Israeli Defense Forces thanks to an extensive tunnel network, local intelligence and safe houses to hide in as well.

There are other examples as well. Sadr City in Baghdad, for all intents and purposes, is a state within a state. That's something that drives the U.S. military in Iraq up a wall because their enemy, the radical cleric Motaqda Al-Sadr, can act with impunity thanks to the loyalty of the 2.1 million Shiites who live in the slum and give its loyalty to Sadr’s Mahdi Army. No doubt another Hezbollah is in the making and this one has its guns targeted at U.S. soldiers. Meanwhile in Mexico, presidential candidate Lopez-Obrador plans on forming a parallel government after losing a disputed race with the apparent president –elect Calderon. No doubt such a parallel government will want to form in Mexico’s southern provinces where Lopez-Obrador‘s PDR did quite well and in Oaxaca state where there has been much leftist-inspired unrest. In a reverse example, regions in eastern Bolivia wish to be a state within a state to protect its natural gas resources from being nationalized from the leftist, western Bolivian government of Indian miners.

Other, less violent, states within states include Quebec and Alberta within Canada; Scotland and Wales within Great Britain; the Breton regions of France, Sicily within Italy; Catalonia and the Basque regions within Spain; Bavaria within Germany; Transylvania within Romania and Hungary; The Trans-Dneister region of Moldavia; Lapland in the Scandinavia Artic Circle as European examples. Kurdistan is a state within many states of the Middle East (and a destabilizing one at that) while Tibet is a captive state within a state inside China. Taiwan is considered a “rebellious” province.

So if such places can have “states within states,” why not the U.S.? Especially why not the U.S.? After all, modern global connecting technology like the internet and GPS satellites give such small places the opportunity to survive economically and preserve their unique cultures through independence, de facto or de jure. An independent Vermont could very well survive on its own no worse than tiny Singapore, Lichtenstein or Andorra. And even if Vermont, or New Hampshire, or the South was just independent in the mind only, such distinct regionalism is the very hallmark of the American experiment.

It should be pointed out that when the U.S. won its independence, what it did more or less was secede from the British Empire. And for much of that struggle, it governed not by the Constitution, but by the Articles of Confederation, which allowed the states a great deal of freedom within structure of the American nation. It only because of powerful economic, commercial and political interests that the convention that ultimately adopted the Constitution was called to convene. Such forces tend to be the gravitational pull of centralism. But the very technologies that are supposed to pull the world together in one globalized mass, can also pull it apart. Such technologies make persons across the globe realize there is no "golden straightjacket" that encloses them. They can "be yet separate" in mind and in fact as well, one way or another and not suffer some sort of catastrophe as the elites always warn. They just have to be brave enough to do so.

---Sean Scallon

The morning-after the accountability moment

Looking at the election results from a variety of different angles:

1). Conservative Democrats indeed have risen again. The party smarty figured out that their previous majorites dependended on such Tory Democrats and needed them once again and several prominent ones were elected. This is a good thing because this increases the amount of normal people within the Democratic Party and keeps them from becoming akin to French Communist/Socialist Left.

2). The culture wars maybe becoming to end, at least in some cases. The political left (not the activist left) may very well be dropping activism on cultural issues like gay marriage, gun control and abortion because it does not help them politically, especially in "red" states. This goes back to the rise of Conservative Democrats. What would keep such Democrats like Jon Tester, Heather Shuler and Jim Webb in the fold?....

3). ....The rise of economic nationalism. Many Conservative Dems are economic nationalists, not Clinton-style "New Democrats." There is little prospect for any free-trade agreements being passed through this Congress as such Dems join with liberals and many Republicans.

4). There were disappointments like the loss of the abortion ban in South Dakota, loss of some anti-immigration Congressmen and races here and there. Some success too like the election of the CP's first state legislator Rick Jore of Montana and the Free State Project electing one of its supporters to the New Hampshire legislature. Percentages for many non-major party candidates were up at least but not too many victories. Kinky Friedman crashed and burned although he at least ended the apathy surrounding Texas politics. LP had a bad, bad night overall. They may have changed their platform but they still need to find the groups that can help it increase it votes to become a factor in local politics, stressing the word, local.

5). In my neck of the woods, the Independence Party of Minnesota once again cost the DFL the governor's chair for the third election in a row and also cost it a seat in Congress. But the IP is at a crossroads now. It's perceived in many circles as DFL lite and unless it develops a strong local and regional base, voters will abandon it as a spoiler party soon enough.

Again, for non-major parties, it comes back to such parties developing strong local bases and candidacies for local offices and perhaps state legislative seats. They need to find groups of voters who can support them and give them good percentages at the polls. Otherwise they're just spinning their wheels. I said this at the beginning of 2006 and its true after election day as well.

Report on secessionist conference

Here's a good report from the Philadelphia Inquirer on the first-ever North American Conference on Secession held in Middlebury, Vermont last weekend sponsored by the Middlebury Institute.

--- Sean Scallon

By Paul Nussbaum

Inquirer Staff Writer


BURLINGTON, Vt. - Separatists, unite!

That was the pitch this weekend by neo-Confederates, New England free-staters, Hawaiian nationalists, and a clutch of other dissenters who want out of the United States.

The First North American Secessionist Convention, billed as the first national gathering of secessionists since the Civil War, included an eclectic mix of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, left-wing Green Party zealots, and right-wing Christian activists.

The bearded, denim-vested representative of the Alaskan Independence Party sat next to the United Texas Republic man in his gray suit and red tie, just across from the blond pony-tailed representative of Cascadia (better known as Oregon, Washington and British Columbia).

They joined folks from such disparate groups as the League of the South, the Confederate Legion, the Free State Project, Christian Exodus, Free Hawaii, the Alliance for Democracy, the Abbeville Institute, and the Center for Democracy and the Constitution.

All agreed on one thing: their disdain for "the empire" of modern America.

The latter-day separatists inveighed against government intrusion, the influence of corporations, and the loss of individual freedoms. They castigated the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and corruption in Congress.

"Reform is useless. Rebellion and revolution are useless," said Kirkpatrick Sale, a New York author who organized the session. "What is left? Secession."

But what about that annoying precedent of the Civil War?

That is a problem, the secessionists acknowledged.

"Abraham Lincoln really did a number on us," said Thomas Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who is a leader of the Second Vermont Republic movement. "He convinced the vast majority of Americans that secession is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional."

At the moment, most Americans show little interest in divorcing their government. Even here in Vermont, home of one of the most active secessionist movements, only 8 percent of residents said in a recent University of Vermont poll that they favored secession.

The separatists see hope in the widespread citizen dissatisfaction with Washington. And they predict that global political unrest and natural disasters may soon push disaffected Americans toward the exit. It's only a matter of time, they insist, before so many citizens see the light that the federal government will have to let its people go.

"We have to make secession sexy, we have to make it a viable option, as it was in the first 70 years of this country's history," said Rob Williams, a Champlain College history professor who is a leader of the Second Vermont Republic, which advocates for Vermont independence. "Secession is every American's birthright."

Don Kennedy, the Louisiana author of The South Was Right, warded off the Vermont chill by wearing his gray Confederate greatcoat, which he usually reserves for Civil War reenactments. Kennedy, a leader of the League of the South, said that was as close as he intended to get to civil war.

"We're not going to repeat that," he said. "What we're talking about is not raising an army and declaring our independence tomorrow. We want to change minds. It may look impossible, but I think it's worth doing."

Some of the Northern secessionists quizzed the Southern secessionists about race. The 12-year-old League of the South has been accused by the Southern Poverty Law Center of being a white-supremacist "hate group," which the League denies.

"How can you believe in liberty and discriminate against your neighbor?" Kennedy said. "Equality before the law is something we want, and we're on the record for that."

Race was only one issue where the Southern and Northern separatists showed strains beneath their common goal. Mark Thomey, of the Louisiana chapter of the league, said an independent South would not permit abortion on demand, gun control or open borders, and would not take the Ten Commandments out of courthouses.

The Alaskan Independence Party representative, Dexter Clark, promptly asked about states that might want to permit abortion.

Thomey acknowledged that if a state "wanted to allow that immoral and heinous act to continue, it would be allowed." He said that "in a new Southern republic, states may have different ideas of how they want to order their society, and if you don't like it in Louisiana, you can get your butt out" and go to a state more to your liking.

The general tone, though, remained congenial, with animosity mostly reserved for "the empire." At the end of the day Saturday, the group adopted a Burlington Declaration, borrowing liberally from the Declaration of Independence and asserting that "any political entity has the right to separate itself from a larger body... and peaceably to establish its independence."

The obvious challenge for the group was finding a way to make its effort more than just an intellectual exercise.

"I'm glad to see it didn't implode over ideological differences," said Cory Burnell, leader of Christian Exodus, a group that says it wants to import conservative Christians to South Carolina. "At some point, though, you eventually have to see movement. The question is, how long do you give it to come to fruition?"

David Towery, a leader of the Confederate Legion, said, "I haven't been hearing how we're going to make this happen... . How do you get the majority of the people behind you and believe that this is a real possibility?"