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January
23
2018

First the Battle Flag, Then What Remains
Boyd D. Cathey

The Attack of the Orcs

Occasionally I will read articles on the ostensibly conservative web site, Townhall.com. Indeed, my good friend Jack Kerwick has published some fine pieces there. Recently, Paul Gottfried forwarded on to me an essay written by a Neoconservative Republican operative, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, “The Confederate Flag is Anti-American,” and I wanted to make a few comments on it while my blood pressure is sky high. 

One of my bete noires continues to be the group of East Coast, mostly New York, largely (but certainly not exclusively) Jewish intellectuals who now dominate and generally control what is called “Conservatism.” This control extends to the point that just about any opposing conservative view, whether that of Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, or Paul Gottfried, is condemned out of hand as “racist,” or “isolationist,” or “anti-immigrant,” or—and very ironically in Paul Gottfried’s case as he is Jewish–”anti-semitic.” The Neocons are now, in fact, the “brain trust” for the national Republican Party (although I use the term “brain trust” advisedly). What should be very disturbing to grass roots conservatives (but mostly isn’t) is that the Neocons propound a basic philosophy which, if anything, is over on the historic Left, and encompasses across-the-board-egalitarianism, moral relativism, and a zeal for imposing globally a system of governmental and economic control they label “liberal democracy.”

For some time, I have been documenting this situation in what passes for the American “conservative movement”: recently the managing editor of National Review, came out for same sex marriage (Jason Lee Steorts, “An Equal Chance at Love: Why We Should Recognize Same Sex Marriage,” May 19, 2015,” ); major leaders of the College Republicans have also endorsed it and warned GOP candidates not to oppose it (“Study finds 61% of young Republicans support same-sex marriage,”); on Fox News, the leading Neocon media organ in the nation along with The Wall Street Journal, Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and former Marxist Charles Krauthammer (again, how much Marxism has actually left him?) have endorsed same sex marriage, and George Will literally has been orgasmic about it (no pun necessarily intended). They may not agree with the unconstitutional means of achieving it, but they have no qualms with the end result.

These men and their journals and Fox TV network, and their Republican political camp followers in Congress, are supposed to be our “conservative leaders.” Even the supposedly “conservative” John Locke Society here in North Carolina had Krauthammer as their big anniversary speaker earlier this year, as well as the cretinous Fred Barnes a little earlier. (They scrupulously avoid social and cultural issues, as those might scare away their Chamber of Commerce supporters.)

This, you see, is what parades as conservatism nowadays. And in practical politics, let’s don’t forget the bumbling GOP leaders, including that character straight out of the “dark lands” of Lord of the Rings, Reince Priebus, whose minions got on the phone after the Charleston killings and demanded that the Southern GOP governors do away with CSA symbols, so as not to hurt ole’ Jeb Bush, who called those symbols racist and had suppressed them a few years back in Florida. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s announcement came just a couple of days after she had solemnly intoned that “now is not the time to discuss that question, not now as the funerals of the slain victims are beginning.” But when the RNC demands that these pusillanimous toadies jump, they respond: “How high?” Haley jumped the height of a flag pole.

These aforementioned types are our modern day American Orcs, again using Lord of the Ringsimagery: filthy and loathsome creatures who have used and abused Southerners (and other Americans), “triangulated” and told us that “hey, you ain’t got no place to go: it’s either those totally evil Dems or us (who are only about 95% evil)!” And we Southerners, like the lemmings that most of us are, have followed along and voted for such great conservative intellects like…let’s see…George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John “Bomb’em All to Hell” McCain, and Mitt the Twit Romney, Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham. And in the process the old country, what very little is left of is, has literally gone to hell in a handbasket.

You see, the conflict over the Confederate Battle Flag is only the tip of the iceberg: it symbolizes something larger and much deeper. It symbolizes a resistance dating from 150 years ago to the Enlightenment Idea of Progress, opposition to the Triumph of the Heresy of Equality, and standing athwart the march of an ideology which, while firmly ensconced on the Left, also forms the motivating principle of modern Neoconservatism, whose eventual goal is the same as that of the Cultural Marxists, just a bit slower and by another, more circuitous route.

The Neconservative genealogy is strictly Marxist in origin, or, rather Trotskyite Marxist. Back in the 1960s and then in the 1970s when I was assistant to the late Dr. Russell Kirk and was close friends with the great Southern scholar, Dr. Mel Bradford, I was pre-warned about the Neocon infiltration and subversion of an older conservatism and constitutionalism. I read Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and others of that ilk. But, too many of our friends and leaders bought into the Neocon vision, and now, instead of honoring Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington (the one-time father of this country, but, alas, a horrid slave owner!), we honor “the liberator” Abe Lincoln, the philandering plagiarist and communist Martin Luther King, and Karl Rove’s favorite historian, the hard core Stalinist Eric Foner.

So, in reading Jeff Jacoby’s screed, dripping with hatred against the “boobs” and rednecks who live south of the Mason-Dixon Line and in between Manhattan and San Francisco (i.e., all us who’ve not had the privilege of attending Harvard or Boston U., or taking cocktails with the glitterati on the Upper East Side in Noo Yawk City), I remember what Paul Gottfried wrote in great detail in his superb trilogy (After Liberalism, The Strange Death of Liberalism, and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt), about the rise and triumph of Neoconservative ideology. I recall Russell Kirk’s excoriation of them at the old Heritage Foundation in 1988: “And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States”. Accordingly, he was attacked by Midge Decter as an “anti-semite.”

We have been used by these folks, looked down on by them, and now, over the issues of same sex marriage and the Confederate Battle Flag, their surrogates have let the mask slip off that hid their ulterior intentions. From the feckless inanities at the RNC to their inept Republican political puppets and hacks who got elected in states like South Carolina (the traitoress Nikki Haley) and North Carolina (the bumbling Pat McCrory), presenting themselves as “conservatives,” but who were little more than wolves in sheeps’ clothing hawking the tawdry and odiferous enticements of cultural corruption and defecation, they now stand revealed for all to see.

So, when I take a look at Neocon GOP hack Jacoby’s screed and cast my eyes on the photograph of the face of a modern day Orc, I see a denizen of the dark world, who serves “the Dark Lord” and whose attack is actually much broader than just attacking the Confederacy and the symbols of the old South. He represents an Evil conception of power and the state that will not be content until each and every one of us either fully accepts the pestilent template he pushes, or is safely six feet under.

 

 

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey (email him) holds an MA in American history (as a Jefferson Fellow) from the University of Virginia and a doctorate from the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (as a Richard M. Weaver Fellow).  He writes a daily column titled MY CORNER, sent to those requesting it. This is adapted from his installment of September 22, 2017

 

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