freerepublic goes after EVERYONE who's against the Illegal Alien Invasion and speaks out against bush
I didn't write this but I wish I had. I received it in an e-mail.



Nothing irritates me more than the arguements that say, "I thought you were a conservative/libertarian/free-market defender/blah-blah and now you're saying (fill in the blank)." I rail against immigration, and the left-libertarians get upset. I lambast George W. Bush, and the Republicans forward pouty little protests that I'm undermining "our" commander-in-chief. I condemn the Patriot Act, and "conservatives" shoot their little barbs at me. They all tell me how inconsistent the or (here's my favorite) how unprincipled I am.

Now that hurts.

Here's the bottom line, folks: Ideology is dead. The notion that there can be a best-of-all-worlds political philosophy is an illusion. Sooner or later, the ideologists end up supporting contradictory positions. Mule-headed adherence to part of your ideology will ultimately lead you down a dead end, and maybe to a self-defeating position you're forced to stick to just to remain consistent. Call it Gödel's Theorem applied to political thought.

Consider this depressing little item, something every conservative Republican should digest slowly and thoughtfully:

They come from Mexico, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Colombia, Cambodia and a hundred other countries across the globe to find the promise of America. Increasingly they enlist to fight, and sometimes die, in America's wars.

About 69,300 foreign-born men and women serve in the U.S. armed forces, roughly 5 percent of the total active-duty force, according to the most recent data. Of those, 43 percent - 29,800 - are not U.S. citizens. The Pentagon says more than 100 immigrant soldiers have died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush and Congress, citing long-established wartime powers, streamlined the process by which immigrants in the armed forces could become naturalized citizens.

So here's the deal - you're a conservative. You know that national security is vital. You're alarmed by the threat of radical Islam and by floodtide immigration. So naturally, you support the Republican agenda. But the Republican party is controlled by the universalist Neocon philosophy, and you end up acquiescing to more immigration, as well as to an imperial executive. How'd that happen?

Here's the answer: you let yourself be fooled by a shell game. Your true loyalty is to your culture, your people. But the hucksters who run things in DC, as well as their pitchmen in the media and academia, have successfully sold us the notion that our loyalty to our culture is really the same as loyalty to certain ideas - and that's where we went astray. For when we begin to see ideas as primary, then we have allowed artificial philosophy to elbow its way in to usurp the rightful place of our ultimate loyalties.

Here's an extreme example. I once read an op-ed on an online "conservative" site that argued that REAL conservatives should not object to Third-World immigration. The reason, he argued, is that as long as these new, enthusiastic Americans promoted "conservative" values such as free enterprise, individual rights, and the rule of law, then the "REAL" America would live on. To believe that "America" depends on maintaining the present ethnic balance, he concluded, was "racist." (I regret that I did not save the url. I probably punched the DELETE key in a fit of blind outrage.)

But that's the kind of nonsensical position you end up in when you imagine ideas are more important than the real, physical world. I suppose our "non-racist" conservative wouldn't mind if his family lost the business it had owned for generations to a hostile takeover as long as the new owners continued using the same business plan that great-granddad discovered after decades of hard work, failure, and success. After all, aren't ideas more important than flesh and blood and tradition? Hmm?

The fact is that our Western, Christian standards of interaction between members of society, and between citizens and their government, grew out of our particular character and historical experience as a people. Libertarians will tell you - at least, "Left" libertarians - that "liberty" is a universal value, an ideal that does not depend on something so dreadfully material as a particular cultural practice. Yet, they cannot explain why those Western, Christians practices did not naturally spring up in other countries. They'll try to get away with some talk about the transforming power of ideas and the intellectual giants who birthed these ideas, but if you challenge them to transform Zimbabwe into an American-style republic by carpet-bombing it with copies of The Federalist Papers, they quickly change the subject.

The all-too-human tendency of intellectuals to suppose they can reconstruct the world for the better has been best dissected by Dr. Donald Livingston in his marvelous book, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium. Don't let the title frighten you - Here's what Livingston says about "false philosophy": Philosophical reflection may criticize any prejudice of common life by comparison with other prejudices and in the light of abstract principles, ideals, and models (what Hume calls "general rules"). But these critical principles, ideals, and models must themselves be thought of as reflections, abridgments, or stylizations of a particular domain of custom. What we cannot do is form critical principles from some Archimedian point, or what Thomas Nagel has called the "view from nowhere," which throws into question the order of custom as a whole. . The false philosopher imagines himself to be the sovereign spectator of and lawgiver to whatever domain of custom he is reflecting upon. By contrast the true philosopher recognizes that he is a critical participant in whatever domain or custom he is reflecting upon and so is not entirely free of its authority. P. 21

In discussing sovereignty, Livingston writes:

Each social order has its own reason to be, something of its own to cultivate and to defend. Rights and duties are internal to the social order and are prescriptive, being rooted in secular and sacred traditions held together by memory and communicated through emulation. P. 345

The age of the ideological nation-state died with the fall of the Soviet Union, opening the way for the resurgence of culture as the organizing principle for more human-scaled governments, governments too constrained by their size and local loyalties to perpetrate the massive crimes of 19th and 20th century megastates. As ecological writer Charlene Spretnak urges, we must adopt the peaceful, more human alternative to the soul-crushing modernism the Soviet Union epitomized. What's needed is what she calls the "Resurgence of the Real," that is, the rediscovery of "body, nature, and place" represented by independence movements around the world. The time-tested durability and richness of an historical culture provide a surer guide to intelligent choices than any ideology. Our survival and happiness depend upon this rediscovered focus of our loyalties and energies.