Well, if you think that the death penalty is good and high taxes are bad, then there’s something wrong with it. 
To be precise, they’ve embraced European internationalism. They’re not completely rolling over themselves to embrace Turkey’s entrance into the EU, and they sure as heck aren’t racing to bring in Northern Africa either.
Ethnically & culturally, Israel would be a natural candidate for EU membership- I’d love to see the poo hit the fan when that application would be made.
No . . . it’s something more than an alliance but less than a state. All the member states have kept their own cultural identities, including their political cultures. But within those limits it has been successful. Practically all of Europe-west-of-Russia is now a single customs union and free trade zone, where people can cross borders freely without passports, and vote for a representative parliament to set Union policy. (That’s the most important difference between the EU and NAFTA – there is no NAFTA Parliament, and policy is set by national politicians, bureaucrats and businesscritters.) Even more importantly, Europe has reached a point where it might never again know war between European states.
The EU satisfies those criteria perfectly. Would Welch object to the U.S. joining it?
No it can’t, Ted. The present right-wing hegemony is coordinated – we might even call it the result of a “conspiracy,” to use JBS terminology, except that the process has not been secret enough to warrant the name. Not quite. (But there has been a fair amount of skullduggery and Trojan-horsing in it.) The left’s cultural pervasiveness is a relic of the Johnson years, when everybody who was anybody was a liberal on what seemed to be common-sense grounds, and somebody like Goldwater would get laughed off the stage. A core of conservative zealots started laying the groundwork then for a gradual takeover. With the support of some important millionaires, and by organizing a mass base of conervative and, not to put too fine a point on it, racist white Southerners (Nixon’s "Southern strategy), and putting together an unlikely alliance between them, the religious zealots, the big-business interests, and foreign-policy neocons – that movement succeeded. The left today has nothing to compare with the right-wing network of lavishly funded foundations, think-tanks, PACs, lobbies and media outlets. (And no, CNN is not liberal; how that canard got started beggars the imagination.) Read Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s book, it tells the whole story (and it’s a good read, too). Also, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, by David Brock (Crown 2004).
If Welch had lived to see it, I don’t think he would have been pleased. Based on your descriptions of him in this thread, he more likely would have supported the dissident paleoconservative nativist-isolationist and economic-populist faction embodied by Pat Buchanan’s America First Party and The American Conservative magazine.
That will come in time. They just have to get used to the idea of being a not-entirely-Christian union. But once Turkey is a member, that will open up a lot of doors.
The EU started about 50 years ago (I think it was a treaty concerning iron + coal).
You could argue that e.g. Napoleon tried to unite Europe, but it would have been conquest, not union.
Surely the US has taken several hundred years (and had a civil war) to get to its present position.
In Birchite thought, as it presently stands, US entrance into the EU would just put us under one more layer of semi-socialist statist bureaucracy which we have enough of in the US. Also, Europe is saddled with the paradox of having state-subsidization & protectionism of established churches while being thoroughly secularized in culture & morality, both things being totally anathema to Welch.
Btw, while I haven’t seen an actual policy statement, I would think JBS would oppose federal aid to faith-based social services on the grounds that such services are not the Federal gov’t’s responsibility, it compromises the faith-based
group by making it vulnerable to gov’t regulation, and that such services are best done in the private realm & PERHAPS on local gov’t levels.
But those are characteristics of some of the member states, not the Union as such. The Union subsidizes no churches, and the peoples of member states can be as religious or as secular as they like. If Turkey becomes a member, it will still be left to make its own decisions on the status of Islam in society and in the state.
“McCarthy and HUAC really needn’t have bothered.” True…if they were really looking for Communists. But they weren’t. The truth, which couldn’t have been said out loud at the time, was that they were looking to outflank, discredit, and neutralize New Deal liberals. In order to keep the broader public from catching on, Tilgunner Joe et al. had to hide behind “Communism” as a blanket threat.
Thanks for starting the thread, Friar Ted.
I’m more curious about what it’s like to be a member of the JBS. What were the meetings like? Did they open with a prayer and the Pledge, or some type of (for lack of a better term) ritual, or nothing at all? Did meeting have an agenda, or were they just kind of a get-together?
How is leadership selected?
Any common threads among rank and file members? As in, tend to be blue collar, or college educated, younger, older, or what?
Like some other members of the JBS, this thread is undead.
Aaaaaah! Zombie John Birchers are attacking!
:eek: Dammit! We all went “LA-LA-LA” at the time . . . but I just knew that someday, somehow, we would regret putting fluoride in the water! :mad:
Moderator’s Note: I think FriarTed had mentioned elsewhere about maybe starting a sequel to this; if so, he can just link to this one.