Conservatives, get your heads out of the sand: The establishment left and right have already aligned on the side of empire.

Ivan Eland over at Antiwar.com posted a great piece criticizing the movie Charlie Wilson's War back in January entitled "Charlie Wilson's Warlords". Eland hits the nail on the head, warning of Hollywood's dangerous oversimplification of complicated issues and its tauting of interventionism without examining the consequences.

But Eland also hits on another key point, that the establishment left and right have for years been in line with one another on interventionism and empire. Writes Eland:

"It is ironic that during the Cold War, liberals like Charlie Wilson and neoconservatives like Ronald Reagan agreed on pursuing this costly and interventionist containment strategy. The venues in which they preferred to challenge the Soviets may have differed – the neoconservatives preferred the futile effort to support the Contras in Nicaragua, while the liberals preferred backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan – but they had the same foreign policy."

As Eland points out, the neocons and the big government liberals both firmly subscribe to the fatally flawed logic of interventionism and big government. There may not be a cohesive alliance (although they did in the case of Charlie Wilson and the Afghan war), but they sure as hell seem to have formed at least a loose one. They squabble over power, but they are both perfectly happy with the advantages they enjoy as proponents of interventionism and the military industrial complex. They are reaping the rewards as allies of empire.

Why then are so many paleoconservatives steadfastly opposed to a tactical alliance with those on the left who are clearly of a decentralist stripe? Should we not put aside certain differences on domestic policy (mostly of a social nature) to fight the far greater threat of continued empire and the inevitable collapse it will bring?

The statist/interventionist Left and right have already banded together in support of empire. Why shouldn't the decentralist/non-interventionist Left and Right band together to save the Republic?