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While the left hails the Trumpist turn toward “humanitarian intervention,” the right is increasingly “isolationist,” i.e., committed to a policy of minding our own damned business and solving our many problems right here at home. This is the opening I’ve been talking about for many years, the great switching of polarities that occurs every 40 years or so: and now it is upon us, brought about by an accidental figure – Trump – who nevertheless unleashed forces he neither understands nor controls.
Those forces – a populist movement that has rallied to the banner of “America First” – are a mass movement that rejects the Empire and longs to restore our old republic. They reject neoconservatism and the old leadership of the GOP, which is interventionist to its rotten core, which is why they put Trump in the White House.
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The “deplorables” had to go through this betrayal before they could begin to understand the real nature of US foreign policy – and the fact that the War Party is their greatest enemy. The virtue-signaling Beltway “libertarians,” who are even now jumping on the anti-Russian cold war bandwagon – and refusing to challenge the evidence-free claims of the US government and its British allies – are clueless as usual. They don’t care to dirty their pristine hands by joining with the Trump voters of flyover country: they’re concerned exclusively with impressing their Washington cronies with how “woke” they are – not at all like those Ron Paul-loving hillbillies!
The Beltway quasi-libertarians never cared about building a grassroots movement: they just wanted to build a box-like monstrosity of a glass-and-steel headquarters in order to impress their donors and the Washington Post. It’s a monument to their towering self-regard.
I’ll never forget during the first Gulf War, meeting – in secret – with Bill Niskanen, a top official of the Cato Institute. We had to meet in secret since I was – and still am – considered persona non grata by those preening worthies. How, he asked me, can we build a movement to oppose the coming war? When I told him we had to ally with and recruit from a growing “isolationist” movement on the right, mentioning Pat Buchanan as a prominent example, he drew back in horror. “Pat Buchanan?!” he said. “Why we can’t have anything to do with him!”
This history is why I’m not at all surprised that those who invoke Niskanen’s name today have totally rejected libertarianism, and have joined with the War Party in rejecting the traditional libertarian opposition to foreign wars, endorsing globalism, and joining hands with the CIA, the FBI, and the NeverTrumpers. And very often being a renegade invites certain rewards, and that is certainly the case with the Niskanenites. Follow the money.
Non-interventionist foreign policy is the first thing defectors from the liberty movement throw overboard in their journey to join the Washington “mainstream.”
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More:
https://original.antiwar.com/justin/...e-deplorables/
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