journals and think tanks, but student groups, newspapers, rituals,rnmyths, and martyrs. Unfortunately most eonservatives—rnlike most liberals—are children of the Enlightenment; thev arernuncomfortable with sentiment, with irrational attachment.rnLike the bloodless and charmless robots who obey the orders ofrnforeign gurus, conservatives have failed or rather refused to constructrna counterculture, a countermythology. When GeorgernWallace—a man with many flaws in his character and blackrnmarks on his career—when Wallace actually challenged thernregime and whipped up crowds in the Midwest and South intorna sentimental frenzy, conservaties not only held back, but theyrnstabbed Wallace in the back, preferring the unprincipled Nixonrnin the same way that they preferred Bush and Dole tornBuchanan.rnWallace and Buchanan were both rejected b conservatives,rnbecause they represented a fundamental challenge to thernregime, and for any practical purpose other than self-aggrandizement,rnthe American right has been an abysmal failure. Ifrnwe take just the period since the New Deal, it is clear that conservativesrnproved themselves incapable of slowing, much lessrnreversing the revolution. Every decade sees the state swollenrnlarger after swallowing the liberties and energies of the people:rnfirst in the name of charity, then civil rights, then gender equityrnand sensitivity. Perhaps defeat was inevitable, but at leastrnthere might have been an honorable struggle. Instead, the conserrnatives have consistently and uniformK’ sold out to a series ofrnwindow dummies whom the left might hae invented: Dewey,rnEisenhower, Nixon, Bush.rnWhat is worse, by concentrating all their energies on gettingrnmoderates—that is collaborators—elected, conservatives neverrnseemed to have time to build their own counterculture. Inrnpart, it was cowardice; but conservatives are prone to some veryrndangerous fantasies, such as the fantasy that we live in a Christianrncountry, or the fantasy that the business class is basicallyrnconservative, and in funding the left, big business is mistakingrnits own interest. If only the Kennedys and Rockefellers andrnKochs could be made to understand. Believe me, they understand,rnand that is why they are funding the two-headed monster,rnand that is why Senator Dole got the Republican nomination.rnWhat right-wing opposition there is in America alwaysrnmanages to fission itself at key moments. In 1992 andrn1996, for example, the Buchanan candidacy should have beenrnthe occasion of a great rallying of social conservatives and freemarketeers,rnbut both groups allowed themselves to get distracted.rnSome right-to-lifers fell for the passionate rhetoric of AlanrnKeyes, as if there were any other purpose to Keyes’ laughablerncampaign except to steal votes from Buchanan, while many libertariansrnturned against Buchanan because of his protectionism.rnAntinationalist libertarians did make convincing economicrnarguments in favor of free markets and, in real terms, freerntrade—not the free trade jiggered by NAFTA and the WTO,rnbut the free passage of goods across the borders of free countries.rnThere are, however, libertarians who go much further.rnThey dislike the idea of nations and nationality: they repudiaternany loyalty that would compel them to sacrifice a single will tornthe common good. They reject the whole idea of the commonrngood, opposing not just nationalism and nations, but opposingrnany form of human community that cannot be reduced to contract.rnMarriage, for them, is just another contract like the dealrnmade between a prostitute and the man she—or he—picks up.rnMore sober libertarians freely acknowledge the significancernof family, community, and e’en nation, as structures that arernessential for human happiness, and the conservatives who arcrncelebrating the nation see very clearly the importance of freernmarkets and minimal government, and yet they seem unable torncooperate even on the practical level of a political campaign. Isrnthere some magic formula on which they can all agree? Somethingrnlike Frank Meyer’s Fusionism? I hope not. It is embarrassingrnto think that independent-minded men and womenrnv/ould accept some new creed like the Boy Scout Oath or thernTwehe Step Program. Speaking for m’self, I already have arncreed—and it was adopted at the Councils of Nicea, Chalcedon,rnand Constantinople in the fourth and fifth centuries. Irndo, hoveer, have a few suggestions that might, in the future,rnserve to redirect discussion in channels that might lead some-rnVvhere.rnOn the most basic levels, I think all of us need to be very clearrnthat our enemy is the Jacobin state—not the State itself, as AlbertrnJ. Nock mistakenly believed—but the specific state formrnthat has been imposed since the French Revolution. Anythingrnthat builds up the Jacobin state is to be opposed; anyone whornVv’ould reinforce it is the enemy.rnWe also need to recognize that radical individualism is justrnone more Jacobin ploy used to destroy all the communities capablernof resisting the state. Human rights, minority rights, andrnall the other rights are inventions of dictators who designedrnthem to suppress the productive majority that constitutes thernreal enemy of the state. If Clint Bolick is not the lackey of thernregime, then there are no lackeys.rnNational communities, whether of the size of a city-state orrnof the extent of Canada and the United States, have the rightrnand necessity to defend the interests of their people from internationalrnpredators, whether those predators take the form of anrnopposing nation such as Russia or Germany, a hostile ideologyrnlike communism, international agencies like the U.N. andrnWTO, or parasitic transnational business conglomerates thatrnsuck the life out of their hosts and hop off to Mexico or Singaporernin search of fresh blood. So long as a nation-state exists, itrnhas the duty to defend its citizens against all these hostilernforces, and if this requires certain nationalist economic policies,rnthose policies are not to be condemned out of hand—althoughrnthey should be subjected to the same cost-benefit critique asrnany other policy.rnThe question comes down to one of direction. In which directionrnis the transfer of power going: from top to bottom—rnwhich is where we want it to go, that is from cities to neighborhoods,rnneighborhoods to families—or bottom to top: fromrncities to states and states to the nation?rnNationalist policies that effectively transfer wealth and thernpower to make decisions from states, communities, and enterprisesrnup to the federal level, no matter how well-intentioned,rnmust be resisted. Wage and price controls, national economicrnplanning, minority set-asides—these are socialism, whetherrnthey are advocated by Dick Gephardt or by a nationalist conservative.rnOn the other hand, there are nationalist policies,rnsome of them advocated by Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan,rnwhich transfer power from international government andrntransnational business back to the people and governments ofrnthe United States. This is a nationalism that opposes, for example,rnAmerican soldiers being forced to serve under an alienrnflag, that opposes multilateral trade agreements that overridern12/CHRONICLESrnrnrn