I'm pleased that my lament of the lack of reader response seems to be bearing fruit, above all on the subject of liberalism. I won't necessarily go on belaboring it forever; but the responses deserve a response in return. And surely I'm not the only person who sees a protracted pursuit of a subject not as a "word-war" but as an enjoyable and even illuminating dialogue. Liberalism and conservatism and the other isms tend to blur together and become at times hard to differentiate. One reader offered us as a third alternative "libertarianism." But as I see it, libertarianism is simply liberalism carried to an extreme. Both terms derive from liber, free; yet while many modern liberals seem prepared to, as it were, "force people to be free" (a bit of a contradiction in terms) by the intervention of omnipotent government, libertarians would free people in just the opposite way: by eliminating government, or at least rendering it impotent. The end is the same in either case; the only argument concerns the means. The conservative answer: It's been tried, both ways. Every revolution since 1789 was an orgy of "freedom" that soon sank into chaos and brought on a "conservative" reaction, a Stalin or Napoleon who imposed an order far more tyrannical than what was rebelled against. Civilized life requires a delicate balance between the community and the individual. The Middle Ages hardly acknowledged the individual's existence. But the Renaissance, and then the Romantic movement, exalted the individual at community expense. The trend accelerates in our own day, in the extreme individual self-centeredness spawned by the 1960s. This points to the ultimate, perhaps fatal danger posed by liberalism, as I see it. Nowhere do liberals, much less libertarians, seem to deplore or oppose the consequences of our loss of the sense of community. Amid the apparent grassroots patriotism, the recent war saw quintessential liberals, e.g. in the media, refusing to wear American flags because it would mean "taking sides," and it's "politically incorrect" to take the side of one's own culture or country, since according to bedrock liberal doctrine all cultures and countries are equal. Our own scrupulous war-waging is suspiciously scrutinized, and the slightest accidental infraction cried up to the heavens, while the enemy's egregiously duplicitous actions are overlooked or excused. Virtue is looked for in the likes of the U.N. or other international talking-shops, while the sovereign nation-state, above all America, is deplored as not only outmoded but immoral. Especially wicked is to think of basing national policy on national self-interest. The deliberate neglect of national self-interest wrecked Britain as a world power, and it's taken its toll on America as well, the clear result of liberal altruism being allowed to replace selfinterest, or even self-defense. Such works as James Burnham' s "Suicide of the West" make it clear that the decline of Europe is the result, not of shifts in real power, but of Western abdication and loss of faith, will, and self-confidence after decades of liberalist preaching of equality and universal brotherhood, of Western wickedness and the virtues of the "developing" world. As for America, liberalism can hardly disown the Immigration Act of 1965, brainchild of "Mr. Liberal" Edward Kennedy and crowning catastrophe of that ironically-named Great Society. One wonders if his kneejerk Irish hatred of the English (as flexed by his pro-Nazi father in 1940) played a part in this legislation that's gone far toward turning the U.S. from an English-speaking nation into, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, "a polyglot boarding house." Or could Kennedy's reason (like Bill Clinton's eleventh-hour baptism of millions of new "Americans") have been that nine out of ten "new Americans" always vote for the party likeliest to ladle out the government gravy with a free hand: the Democrats? Isn't it liberalism that all human beings are not only equal but equally good? So all are to be welcomed into our midst. We "old Americans," heirs of the Founders, count for no more than the latest, illegallest alien. The easiest thing in the world is to become an "American." The hard-hearted conservative grants the goodness of individuals, but suspects that in the mass these "new Americans" would cut our throats if they once had the power. "Muslim-Amencans?" It's a contradiction in terms! There was that Muslim FBI agent who (forgetting his oaths of office and of citizenship) spurned an order with: "A Muslim doesn't spy on a fellow Muslim." The FBI not only didn't fire him, it hurried out to hire more Muslim agents! Bemused by radical individualism, besotted by self-indulgence, debauched by prosperity, "old Americans" seem to look forward with indifference to the day when their "community" will no longer exist at all; when they, bedrock of our institutions, of our heritage of "ordered liberty," will be swamped by unassimilated strangers lacking all affinity for those institutions. The aliens, to which liberalism has thrown wide the country's doors, not only are coming in in floods we seem to lack the will to stanch, they're "fruitful" the way our own forebears were back when they peopled a continent, but whose example we've rejected. While Western women, "liberated" by liberalism, "have careers." Third-World women (including the millions already in our midst) have rafts of children. Overpopulation may get us all, as the doomsayers warn; but if there's any earth left to inherit, surely it's obvious who will and won't inherit it. Nowhere is it more true that "those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it." As early as Augustus, the Romans frantically passed laws trying to check Rome's racial transformation. "As the sons of freedmen [read: immigrants] automatically became citizens, the fertility of aliens combined with the native stocks' falling birth rate to change the ethnic character of Rome. Augustus wondered what stability there could be in so heterogeneous a population." "A law of Septimus Severus speaks of a penuria hominum, a shortage of men" (i.e. of Romans). "Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within." "What had caused this fall in population? Above all," charges Will Durant, "family limitation." And with the population classical culture itself declined and fell. "The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand it, did not accept it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding Orientals were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it for the comforts of sterility." He might have been describing ourselves. Abortion, contraception, "women's liberation," all are certainly among liberalism's fruits. And the liberal answer to their inevitable demographic debacle seems to be to try to export them to the Third World. But as Pat Buchanan asks in "The Death of the West," why should they join us in a suicide pact when they stand to inherit the earth when we are gone?