The late columnist, Joe Sobran, diagnosed America’s political malaise with scalpel-like precision:
If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.
By this clinical standard, the forgotten American qualifies as a dangerous extremist—and it is high time people like this wear that scarlet letter with pride.
Sobran was one of those extremists. At one time, he was an influential columnist and a prominent voice on the American right, but by the mid-1980s, he started to have second thoughts about U.S. policy in the Middle East. For possessing such pluck, he was summarily banished from the so-called “conservative movement” by his mentor and publisher at National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr.
It must be noted that what masquerades as conservatism today would send Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, spinning like a Kentucky Derby toteboard. The movement that once defended “an enduring moral order” and championed “prudent restraints upon power” has been colonized by Trotsky’s ideological grandchildren—neoconservative saboteurs who mistake perpetual warfare for patriotic duty.
The linguistic battlefield has also been scorched beyond recognition. The inheritors of Buckley’s drift against Sobran’s extremism—Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and their bow-tied confederates—have transformed a robust intellectual tradition into cocktail-party conservatism: respectable enough for Georgetown dinner parties, toothless enough for progressive approval. Meanwhile, the moderate serpents perform their familiar slithering routine between positions with wind-licking dexterity.
Invade the world? Absolutely, Senator. Tax-and-spend domestically? Without question, Congressman.
They represent the most insidious threat of all—ideological chameleons who stand for nothing except their own advancement up the greasy pole of political ambition.
Jack Callahan, American, puts it more bluntly: “These weasels in Washington would sell their grandmothers for committee assignments and their principles for campaign contributions. At least honest liberals will tell you they’re coming for both your wallet and your freedoms. These moderate frauds smile while picking both pockets simultaneously.”
In this blood-soaked century alone, the neoconservative itch for foreign intervention has drained nearly a generation’s worth of American blood and treasure. Their incessant pruritus, developed from a longing for overseas adventurism, never gets scratched sufficiently to satisfy their imperial appetites.
Iraq. Afghanistan. Syria. Ukraine. The drumbeat continues. Meanwhile, American cities crumble like ancient Rome, with their borders dissolving like sugar in acid rain.
So yes, go ahead and call these non-interventionists “extremists.” They’d be guilty as charged by every current tribunal of acceptable opinion. Nevertheless, the demand is for the rascals in government to keep their grubby hands off both domestic tranquility and the sovereignty of foreign nations.
Today’s extremists understand that both “permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.” They also adhere religiously to “custom, convention, and continuity,” because, as that dangerous extremist Edmund Burke observed centuries ago, “the individual is foolish, but the species is wise.”
Furthermore, Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, had the gall to tell progressives and others that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
Reflect. Should liberty even serve as a rallying cry in today’s cultural wasteland?
The modern mind has perverted the very concept beyond recognition, confusing liberty with libertinism and freedom with license. When most Americans hear “liberty,” they envision the unconstrained ability to do whatever feels good—a guaranteed recipe for civilizational collapse.
Consider the French revolutionary motto. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Not surprisingly, this also serves as Haiti’s motto. Objections to “liberty,” so-called, were previously noted, but fraternity remains beyond reproach—community bonds matter more than individual whims.
More importantly, equality has failed spectacularly wherever attempted, from the Reign of Terror to Haiti’s ongoing tragedy. Contra Meat Loaf’s romantic nonsense, two out of three is catastrophically bad.
“The problem with equality,” Callahan observes, “is that God didn’t create equal people. He created unique souls with different gifts, different callings, and different destinies. Trying to force equality is like trying to make every river flow uphill—you can attempt it with enough government force, but you’ll destroy the natural landscape in the process.”
Today’s extremists champion voluntary community over involuntary collectivism. We stand as proud inheritors of ancestral wisdom, not “unburdened by what has been,” despite what 2024’s most prominent philosophizer—with her daily samplings of vapid word salad—tried to force Americans to believe.
The accumulated wisdom of a society’s forebears allows the populace to peer further into the future precisely because it is standing on the shoulders of a previous generation. Extremists don’t dance upon the graves of their ancestors.
Consider. The crisis isn’t about government itself. That’s another argument for another day, if the Republic is still breathing. The immediate problem lies with the current regime’s personnel, those who consistently make everything worse through their ham-fisted interventions.
Whether Pentagon bureaucrats are planning the next overseas adventure or Education Department commissars are targeting first-graders with gender ideology, the pattern remains depressingly consistent. This type of interference breeds chaos like mosquitoes do in stagnant water.
Extremists possess something today’s liberals, moderates, and conservatives conspicuously lack: inherited wisdom. They understand that authentic “conservatism” means conserving what matters—family, faith, community, and country—not some globalist empire masquerading as the world’s policeman in today’s political theater.
Callahan’s final verdict cuts through the fog: “They call us extremists because we remember what America was supposed to be. We believe in borders, babies, and baseball played without pitch clocks. We think fathers should be fathers and mothers should be mothers, that children need both, and that ‘Follow The Science’ usually means ‘ignore common sense.’ If that makes us extreme, then every previous generation of Americans was extreme too.”
The establishment will continue hurling “extremist” like a playground epithet, as if the label stings. Let them.
Extremists—those as Sobran described—will wear the label as a badge of honor, knowing that in an age of manufactured lies, telling simple truths has indeed become an extreme act. In a culture gone certifiably mad, sanity appears radical to the inmates that run the asylum.
The choice will soon crystallize and do so with brutal clarity: embrace extremism or watch civilization finally unravel from the comfortable sidelines of moderate respectability.
Some battles demand that sides be chosen without apology. This is one of them.
The forgotten Americans have spoken. Now let the extremists govern.
Reprinted with permission from O’Leary Review.
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