Bill Kauffman's Screed & Plea

You've seen Kauffman's writings now and then.  (See UPDATE below!, added 7PM Central 7/4)

Back in 2020 he wrote an essay for The American Conservative which is the sort of essay George Carlin would write, were Carlin a political thinker.  Here are a few choice parts.

 I have long believed that the word conservative is sullied beyond reclamation, so my immediate answer to the question “What is American conservatism?” is “a Beltway-based racket exploiting the healthy instincts of decent Americans on behalf of the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and the Republican Party.” But that answer is confuted by this very magazine, founded as it was in opposition to the criminal Iraq war and animated and inspirited, then and now, by principles and precious things that had long been forgotten or repudiated by most of the American Right: peace, place, humility, community, federalism, the Bill of Rights....

Kauffman goes on to hard-slap the NeoCons.  They deserve it.  

He moves on:

...The wisest, most insightful, most independent-minded men who passed through the late and unlamented conservative movement—Robert Nisbet, Karl Hess, Russell Kirk, Murray Rothbard, Felix Morley—became disaffected and out of step. They understood that a grotesque empire had suffocated and supplanted the erstwhile republic, and that an America that is true to itself and worthy of respect must be decentralist, anti-interventionist, neighborly.

There is a healthy tradition in American political life that breathes this spirit, and that is, in parts and in sum, gentle, rambunctious, lyrical, just, and deeply, deeply American. Its first bloom was the Anti-Federalists, those prophetic backcountry critics of our misbegotten Constitution and champions of a decentralized nation. The tradition stretches on through the Loco Focos, the Populists, the Southern Agrarians, the Catholic Workers, the Old Right, the “freewheeling participatory democracy” wing of the New Left, the Perot-Buchanan-Paul Middle American revolutionaries, the hippie localists....This is the soul, the numen, of political America.

This is not just a literary conceit, or a gallery of lovable romantic losers. I see its expression, in variegated forms, all around us. It’s in farmers markets, grocery co-ops, community-supported-agriculture farms, local theater, and homeschool groups. It’s there wherever Americans gather in defense of the first Ten Amendments (dig all those Ninth Amendment rallies!), or every time a young girl puts up a birdhouse or kids gather for a pickup baseball game. Politically, it takes the form of split-state movements in New York, California, Illinois, and elsewhere; it’s in the Bring the (National) Guard Home campaign and the inchoate yearnings for peace that both parties do their best to snuff out; it’s in the distributist proposals to encourage small shops and home production and in the anarchist calls to expropriate the expropriators; it’s in the libertarian rejection of the surveillance state and in the refusal of those whom Robert Frost affectionately termed “insubordinate Americans” to say hooray for Hollywood. It’s in things hipster (small craft breweries, little libraries, DIY music) and square (Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus, volunteer fire departments)....

Kauffman doesn't say it out loud, but the red-highlighted segment practically calls the names of the multi-national "gimme" bunch known as the Fortune 500; we don't keep troops in 150++ locations around the globe to protect Main Street, ya'know.

...America is not an idea, an abstraction, or a marketing slogan. It is our home, and the land we love above all others.

At church, or public gatherings in my town, a prayer for the young people in the armed services will usually end with “bring them home safely.” I never have the heart to tell the minister that the architects of U.S. foreign policy do not intend for these soldiers to ever come home en masse. They will be over there—the exact location of there changing every few years—forever. It’s no coincidence that the foreign policy slogan most reviled by the foreign policy establishment—after “America First,” of course—was “Come Home, America,” the patriot George McGovern's beautiful, even poetic plea in 1972. Because America ain’t ever supposed to come home.

It’s striking how seldom the word home is used in American political discourse. It packs a visceral punch, it can trigger the tear ducts—“Bring the Boys Home,” to echo the great anti-Vietnam War anthem by Freda Payne—but while home touches something in ordinary Americans, it means nothing to those who stride purposefully through corridors of power. 

Well, if conservatism doesn’t stand for home then it stands for nothing, and to hell with it. ...

Kauffman expresses thanks to Trump (this is 2020, remember) for his 'driving a stake through the heart of the Bush/Clinton dynasties'.  But Kauffman could have spoken far too soon, as those dynasties continue (through proxies and heirs not sharing the family names) to scratch, claw, rip, and shred ordinary, conservative Americans through lawfare and the other terrorism:  outright intimidation and fear-mongering (think weather and disease).  Their attacks on both families and churches, delivered by allies and operatives curiously not prosecuted, are not accidental.  

Those are not the last of their weapons, but they are formidable.  

The most effective counter-attack?  Soldier on with prayer.  It's the "What if they gave a war and no one came?" played out in real life, not rhetoric.

We could do worse than to have more Kauffman.  We can do well if we, too, cry "Home!"

UPDATE:

Wauck notes that the Director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Director will retire soon, and that that Director--a successor to David Rockefeller--endorses the end of the 350-year old Westphalian system of international affairs wherein there are "nations" which govern themselves.  He's really a UN bigot.

He has another suggestion, too:

...new mechanisms are needed for regional and global governance that include actors other than states. This is not to argue that Microsoft, Amnesty International, or Goldman Sachs be given seats in the UN General Assembly, but it does mean including representatives of such organizations in regional and global deliberations when they have the capacity to affect whether and how regional and global challenges are met....

Above we mentioned that US 'foreign policy' was very closely tied to the interests of US corporations such as Microsoft and Goldman, not to mention Boeing, General Dynamics, and countless other military suppliers.

It was very nice that Dr. Haass of the Council of Foreign Relations said the quiet part out loud, no?