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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/The idea that today's conservatives are in any way defenders of individual liberty, the free market, and what Russell Kirk called "the permanent things," i.e., the sacred traditions that have accumulated over time to constitute the core of our Judeo-Christian culture, is no longer a defensible proposition. Instead, what used to be called the conservative movement has morphed, almost overnight, into a coterie of moral monsters, whose political program is one of unmitigated evil.
My good friend Lew Rockwell has recently come to this conclusion:
"Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing. … What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less rightward."
Various libertarian scholars and writers – see here, here, and here – seem to be drawing the same broad conclusions. I might add, for the record, that I reached a similar conclusion a couple of years ago, except that, far from abandoning my efforts to reach out to authentic (i.e., old-style) right-wingers, this merely accelerated my efforts to split off the authentic Remnant from the neoconized conservative movement.Great editorial.
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