The Rise of Conservative Nationalism Makes Beating Democrats Useless

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Conservative nationalism was already on the rise in the 1980’s. This was 1988 when Nisbet delivered the Jefferson lecture. The four men who have served as presidents since Robert Nisbet delivered this lecture make Reagan seem like an isolationist. Remember his 1976 plea at the Republican National Convention to end the problems of nuclear war or his suggestion to the Soviet premier in 1986 in Iceland that Americans and Soviets simply eradicate all nuclear weapons?”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  There is a frenzied nationalism, a very dangerous nationalism that has taken hold and has taken root and is very stubbornly refusing to be removed as the cancer that it is from the body “conservative” politic.  This is a very discouraging state of affairs.  [mocking] “Mike, what do you mean by nationalism?  We all love our country, Mr. Church.  You don’t love yours more than the rest of us.”  The love of country is as old as there have been countries.  Of course, the Romans even created a word for it in the Latin patriam, meaning homeland or home.  If you’re a patriot, you’re a defender of home.  Defending home does not mean defending home’s errors, and it does not mean defending home when home has become imperia, yet that’s exactly what’s going on today.  It’s not getting better.  For those that refuse conversion and will not see the error of their Jacobin ways, the nationalism is becoming more bellicose because they’re getting angrier.  It’s not just the libs that they think they have to contend with now, it’s people like me.  Because of that, people like me, Senator Rand Paul and Ron Paul and other non-interventionists, because of that they’re growing angrier.

I keep seeing and keep getting emails from — I must be subscribed to, and no, I didn’t subscribe myself to any of these, but I must be subscribed to 12, maybe 15 different national Tea Party groups that I get a daily newsletter from.  I haven’t unsubscribed because I just read the headlines

[private FP-Monthly|FP-Yearly|FP-Yearly-WLK|FP-Yearly-So76]

and see what it is that’s going on out there across the amber waves of fuel.  Some of the emails I see that come from some of these Tea Party groups — I won’t mention any of their names right now because I don’t have them in front of me — some of the emails come under the title of “They Must Pay.”  Okay, who’s “they” and what must they pay for?  “We’re Not Going To Let The GOP Be Taken Over By RINOs.”  Okay, I thought you were the Tea Party.  When did you become a subsidiary of the GOP, and why is it your job to defend it?

Folks, the Jacobin nationalism — [mocking] “Mike, you never explain what a Jacobin is.”  That’s a good point, I don’t.  A Jacobin was a member of that repugnant, disgusting, despicable group of Frenchmen that executed, and I mean that pragmatically, the French Revolution, marauding through the streets seeking out nuns and priests and Catholics and anyone else that disagreed with their revolution.  They did specify and specifically go after Catholic clergy, bringing them either to the guillotine or the gallows, or making great sport out of finding new and inventive ways to kill these people.

There’s a great little film you can watch if you can get past the fact that the film is populated with children playing adults.  It’s called The War of the Vendee.  You’ll see the story of the people of the village of Vendee who basically told the French Jacobins: Look, man, we don’t want any trouble from you.  All we want to do is be left alone.  We’re not going to cause you any problems.  We won’t go into parish.  We won’t ask for anything.  Come and you can take some of our vegetables if you want.  Just leave us alone.  Of course, the Jacobins wouldn’t do that and wound up killing and executing certainly the clergy of the village and many of those that lived in it.

This is where the term Jacobin comes from.  The Jacobins were of the same stripe.  They could not be convinced that hauling people off to the guillotine and cutting their heads off was anything other than a wonderful, patriotic exercise.  That’s the basis of the term Jacobin.  There are too many American Jacobins today who participate in the same process.  I hear and see this every single solitary day.  It’s discouraging because, number one, you mourn for and weep and feel responsible and helpless at the same time to try and stop some of the carnage, to try and stop or slow down some of the imperial tendencies.

Brad Birzer has a post at The Imaginative Conservative website, “The First Continental Congress: Lest We Forget.”  Birzer writes:

[reading]

This year will mark the 240th anniversary of the First Continental Congress…I don’t want to miss the opportunity to discuss and explore this institution and its importance.

[end reading]

Mike:  Folks, that’s a great reading exercise.  If you’re ever bored or looking for something to read, read the journals of the First Continental Congress.  In my movie Road to Independence, which about 98 percent of you still have not seen — it’s available at MikeChurch.com or at Amazon.com — I cover the first day or the first meeting of the First Continental Congress.  There are a lot of great things that happened in the First Continental Congress.  I’ll tell you one of the things that I admire about the First Continental Congress and that you should admire, too.  Just put yourself in their position for a moment.  They were ruled by the British crown, folks.  Let’s exchange the word “British crown” for “federal congress.”  They were ruled by the federal congress.  They were so tired of being screwed over and told they would submit to the federal congress that they said: Oh, yeah?  Guess what?  We’re going to make our own congress.  They called it the First Continental Congress.

Number one, they had to have rules of order, so they had to make up their parliamentary rules.  Then they had to figure out: How are we going to vote on things?  Are we going to vote on things?  Under what authority are we going to vote on them?  When we vote on them, what are we going to do with them?  Are we going to send them as requests to the states or the colonies?  What is the purpose of all this?  They had to figure all this out. No one did it for them.  They actually had to do it.  How amazing of a story is that?  Find that one in your “conservative” textbooks.  It’s a great book.  If you’d like to read it, it’s in every library widget at the bottom of every post at MikeChurch.com.  It’s called Creation of the American Republic by Gordon S. Wood.  Wood starts in 1776 and not in 1774, but he does cover the last days of the First Continental Congress.

My point about that is, number one, they had to have the courage of their convictions to create this Continental Congress, and number two, they actually had to wade through the minutia and boring details and hard work of trying to figure out: How do we want this to work?  We don’t like the way it’s working now with our royal government, so how do we want ours to work?  As they made mistakes, I’m sure, and we’re possessed of them today, they also got some things right.  They decided that they would vote by state.

I guess the point of the exercise is, there is nothing that is preventing anyone from saying: Why don’t we have the Third Continental Congress and do what our forefathers did?  [mocking] “You can’t do that.  We have to preserve our republic.  We have to preserve our union.  Haven’t you ever heard of Lincoln?”  Getting back to Birzer here, he wants us to acknowledge the First Continental Congress.  I want you to acknowledge that too many of your friends are Jacobins.  Why does that matter?  The men of the First Continental Congress were not Jacobins, even though they couldn’t have been because Jacobins hadn’t been created yet, but they were not of a Jacobin stripe.  Birzer writes about what has transpired since — he just says: I want you to remember the First Continental Congress and now let’s talk about what’s happened in the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan.  He writes this:

[reading]

In his Jefferson Lecture of 1988, Robert Nisbet [Mike: Nisbet has a great book, also in the library at MikeChurch.com. The book is called Quest for Community.] effectively argued that the Founding Fathers would find our present military strength and interventions across the world the most shocking aspect of our current world. [Mike: I think that Nisbet, Birzer, and the founders are correct, ladies and gentlemen.]

Imagine! This was 1988. The four men who have served as presidents since Nisbet delivered this lecture make Reagan seem like an isolationist. Remember his 1976 plea at the Republican National Convention to end the problems of nuclear war or his suggestion to the Soviet premier in 1986 in Iceland that Americans and Soviets simply eradicate all nuclear weapons? I don’t mean to suggest that the last four presidential administrations have embraced indiscriminate nuclear warfare, though we have employed nuclear tipped missiles repeatedly in the Near East, but we have involved ourselves militarily and ideologically around the world in ways unimaginable even a short quarter century years ago.[/private]

In 1991, Nisbet’s close friend and ally, Russell Kirk, feared that George H.W. Bush and his neo-conservative allies would build a New World Order based on the indiscriminate use of military force, [Mike: This is where it gets really provocative.] the reckless imposition of democratic forms of government (a form of religion, Kirk argued), and a substitution of a Soviet empire with an American one.

At the time, some defenders of the first post-Reagan presidency lamented that “New World Order” had been chosen poorly by Bush. In hindsight, it seems the perfect title. We have done nothing less than create a New World Order, a religion of democracy, and a slightly friendlier version of the Soviet empire.

[end reading]

Mike:  Wow!

End Mike Church Show Transcript