A Response to John Ross
John Ross, in his labyrinthine commentary on Ron Paul and his neo-hippy (or is it neo-Bolshevik followers?), introduces himself as a “Kirkian” and a “Burkean,” and in view of this stated pedigree, I’m not at all surprised that he is annoyed with me. Although a self-described “man of the Right” who profoundly admires Burke and various nineteenth-century European conservatives, I have asserted that the quest for conservative roots among post-World War Two intellectuals, an enterprise that was then centered in Midtown Manhattan, was a kind of play-acting. This ‘conservatism” was an attempt to confer on the Cold War a French Revolutionary setting, with appropriate rhetorical flourishes. All of this, I have argued, was a bit like a ballo mascherato, and I say this with due respect to Ross’s “Burkean hopes” and expectations of a new “Kronstadt uprising” against the present order We are a predominantly Protestant people, who used to have a basically classical liberal constitution and bourgeois social character, both of which have been now shamelessly disfigured. Mr. Ross is entitled to call himself anything he wants but unless his self-description has some historical relevance, he is merely striking a pose.
Unlike my friends at the Mises Institute, I am not a philosophical libertarian, but given the current options for the improvement of our derailed republic, Ron Paul seems to be a candidate worthy of my support. Dr. Paul advocates radically cutting back our runaway public administration, and he seems to have no interest in imposing the government or cultural standards of the Big Apple on Arab tribes. Although he and his followers are not self-proclaimed Burkeans, I do not find that a shortcoming. After all, we’re not living in eighteenth-century England, and if Ron takes as his model Bob Taft as opposed to an Anglo-Irish critic of the French Revolution, he is only acting like an American, trying to revive our tradition of limited, responsible government.
As for Mr. Ross’s swipes at me, I have no idea what they prove, except for his ineffectual exasperation. Exactly how did my remarks delivered at an August meeting of the Robert Taft Club in Washington “play to the prejudices of the crowd, which consisted of aspiring young men and women of the Beltway Right”? I’m not sure which “prejudices” Mr. Ross has in mind or why he would even think that my listeners, who were disgusted with the Beltway Right, were “aspiring” to something in it. Quite a few of those who spoke to me and Jim Antle after what is earlier described as our efforts to “be more sober about the future of the right,” are without professional prospect, precisely because they have criticized the neoconservative dominance of the “Beltway Right.”
I’m not sure that Ross can find in this “journal” the 1053 rants “about how the left needs the neocons” that he asserts I have posted here. But from all evidence, these rants have not helped him to understand my purport. What I have stressed is not so much that the left needs the neocons as that the neocons took over the conservative movement while enjoying the favor of the liberal establishment. The fact that they could steer the establishment Right while continuing to appear in the liberal national press and having access to the liberal media aided the neocons in their consolidation of power. My mocking comments about how the neocons have taken on the liberal establishment are intended to underline the lack of substantive difference between the present neocon-controlled conservative movement and its liberal debating partners.
The one cited piece of evidence designed to refute my statements about this ignored friendship is my failure to note that one of Ross’s friends assures him that “Mearsheimer voted straight Republican until 2004.” Assuming arguendo that this unidentified source is correct, I am puzzled as to how this relates to the supposed emptiness of my “rant.” How does Mearsheimer’s possible voting record in Chicago (which is where he lives) disprove that the liberal establishment helped to create and then sustain the neocons as a kind of preferred opposition? Concerning my suspicion that Mearsheimer was somewhat on the left (though clearly a Council of Foreign Relations type) were remarks that I heard him deliver two years ago at Swarthmore, in which he blamed the war in Iraq on “the radical Right” and the heirs of McCarthyism. Needless to say, the war has nothing to do with the “radical Right’ and is a liberal internationalist enterprise that Republicans have bought into. But if I were a liberal democratic critic of the war, I would have sounded like Mearsheimer at Swarthmore. Moreover, the book on AIPAC, which he coauthored with Stephen Walt, cites predominantly leftist and liberal critics of Bush’s Middle Eastern politics and the bullying tactics of AIPAC. By now there is a vast literature on the right that addresses the same concerns, albeit one that Mearsheimer and Walt hardly bring up. For the aforementioned reasons, I quite understandably associated Mearsheimer, who is a highly successful academic in an overwhelmingly leftist profession, with mainstream American liberalism. But whether this assumption is true or not has nothing to do with my argument about the special relation between neocons and liberals.
Comments
Great response Paul,let the debate continue.
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You have hit it on the head with your identification of the false debate that takes place between the so called left and the so called right. REeally the far left and the further left. You can fill in either side with either group. When the neo-cons push through a legislation titled the Patriot Act that should have been the wake up call to any real conservatives left in the Republican Party. The state now has shown it’s true colors and it’s biggest fear is the citizens themselves. We are now to be id’d tagged and bagged if they have their way. If they take the internet away from us the movement may in fact be forced to go underground, forced to meet in person and correspond by hand delivered notes. The time may not be far off when the computer chips are planted in us at birth. What do we see in the face of all this? I look around and what I see more than anything is contentment. People are adaptable and anything no matter how outrageous can be made to seem acceptable to them so long as they don’t have to disturb their daily routine. Most people are so harried by modern life that they have little time or inclination to finding out exactly what is wrong with the system. Why do both our major political parties agree on the most ridiculous things? Don’t know. Can’t worry about it now. Got to get the kids to soccer practice. Put another $40 in gas on the credit card. Meanwhile the updated and amended version of the Patriot Act just went through and you have lost another freedom that was taken for granted.
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Mr. Gottfried, you’re right.
I read the Walt/ Mearseheimer study and I also thought they qouted a lot of left-liberal sources. Not, that there’s anything wrong with that.
Btw, Mearsheimer is not ‘Old Right’ in any sorts. In his great book ‘the tragedy of great power politics’, he describes himself as an ‘offensive realist’, completely in love with foreign interventionism.
He just doesn’t like this particular intervention in Iraq and the Middle East.
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First and foremost, Gottfried is taking a lot of this way too seriously. And can he at least get my name right?
Paul Gottfried seems to have my premise almost exactly wrong. It is worlds away from my purpose to take some sort of high minded aristocratic posture of contempt for the populism Ron Paul is inspiring - on the contrary, I am making the point that as someone who has serious differences with the “one true faith” of anarcho-capitalism and who has a strong Burkean sensibility that a revolutionary response to our present situation, if indeed the Ron Paul Revolution shall prove to be such, is eminently just. I explicitly affirm this by describing my pleasure to see that a broad populist movement, and not just a core libertarian cadre, is behind Ron Paul.
Perhaps a bit unfairly, I specifically had in mind from Dr. Gottfried’s remarks at the Taft Club his stated position that he would without hesitation in a Hillary-Rudy match-up vote for Hillary. I have no desire to argue the merits of this position on its face, but what is significant about it is its total disregard for Ron Paul and the very real possibility, Paul’s own denials notwithstanding, that he would be a third party candidate in the general election.
And I must sharply take issue with Gottfried’s characterization of the younger crowd at the Taft Club as having no professional prospects because they are on the outs with the neocons. Any casual perusing of that crowd asking them what they do for a living reveals that they are indeed boring from within the conservative policy apparatus, most especially through the heavy representation of The Leadership Institute. I will readily acknowledge, if I did not make it clear in my original piece, that characterizing this as “Browderism of the right” directly implies its futility. But on to the core matter, where Dr. Gottfried reveals his complete humorlessness.
Do I actually have to clarify that 1053 is a randomly arrived at and sarcastic number, or that I was referring to rants of that nature in many venues and not just Takimag? I don’t disagree with Dr. Gottfried’s narrative of how the neocons gained the favor they enjoy in the establishment and its media, at least in this particular telling. My point about Mearsheimer was not at all that he directly contradicts this narrative, but that Gottfried has allowed himself to get so carried away with his obsession about this that he would say such a thing.It just so happens that the first time I met Dr. Gottfried was at the very symposium at Swarthmore in 2004 to which he refers. So I would like here to defend the great Dr. Mearsheimer’s choice of semantics, which is also my own.
Conservatism, if by this is meant the Burkean disposition, arises naturally from the love of liberty, i.e. liberalism classically defined, wary if not downright hostile to the left. The right, then, as opposed to conservatism, consists of those who hate the left more than they love liberty, or their own values whatever they may be, and this goes far too explain why virtually all of the right came out of the left, from fascism to neo-conservatism and everything in between. So there is nothing the least bit novel, it even seem obvious once you think about it, that a “radical right” could be committed to such a grand “liberal internationalist” project.
Finally, unless Dr. Gottfried is referring to the innumerable columns on the Lobby by Justin Raimondo, very fine work but which falls under journalism, not scholarship, I simply do not understand the substance of his grievance about the source material used by Mearsheimer and Walt. Odd, especially, for one as pro-Israel as Gottfried.
The bottom line in all this is that, Paul Gottfried’s rigid loyalty to his own definitions aside, there is a realignment occurring in American politics. It may not be perfect by most of our standards, but it is happening nonetheless, and the Ron Paul Revolution is just part of the story.
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In this case, Jack Ross, after attending a single meeting of the Robert Taft Club and undertaking what by his own admission was a “casual perusal” of the attendees, Ross has decided that he’s fit to prnounce on the makeup of the group, the intentions of its members, and their prospects for ... well, I’m not quite sure what Ross thinks he’s getting at with his Browderism b.s., because the Taft Club is not a pressure group or political sect. It’s an intellectual forum, admittedly with an emphasis on questions that touch upon public policy, for serious conservatives and libertarians. I’m sorry that Jack Ross was not sufficiently entertained or moved or otherwise satisfied with the one meeting he attended; perhaps he would have enjoyed the next Taft Club event, an educational talk by Ron Paul, more. Paul Gottfried and I (full disclose: I’m a founding member and board member of the Taft Club) have rather more extensive experience with the group than Ross has, and neither of us would characterize it in anything like the terms that Ross does.
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I’m sorry if I crossed a line here, but the question is moot, since I don’t live in Washington, and I never suggested that the Taft Club is a pressure group or a sect. And I’m aware you got a standing room only crowd for Ron Paul last month, but I of course, as I wrote, saw him in New York the very next day.
Perhaps it was unfortunate that I saw what I was describing mostly through the Taft Club, I just felt it was necessary for journalistic purposes for me to address what I felt was significant component of the Paul phenomenon.
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We are a predominantly Protestant people, who used to have a basically classical liberal constitution and bourgeois social character, both of which have been now shamelessly disfigured.
Dr. Gottfried: I believe that the constitution and social character of our society track the health of the Protestant Church. When the modernists chased the conservatives out of the mainline denomination, the only voice left was that of the Anabaptists, who pretend to be “evangelicals.” Yet there is an uncounted number of us who are still Old School and Old Church—and we have been marginalized too long.
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It’s worth pointing out that what Gottfried intends with his refrain about a preference for Hillary over Rudy is the furthest thing from a “total disregard for Ron Paul” and Paul’s political prospects. Instead he means . . . well, what he means, which is what he often says, which is that if he were forced to choose between Rudy and Hillary he would choose the leftist in leftist clothing over the leftist in a lousy conservative costume, purchased for $10.99 from Ed’s Halloween Emporium. I myself hope that Paul considers a third party run, but I don’t think Gottfried can be criticized overmuch for referring to a Hillary/Rudy showdown as likely. Mr. Ross may think him wrong in his calculation. But there is no reason other than zealotry to criticize Gottfried for dripping on Paul’s future, which he obviously is not seeking to do.
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Excellent punditry per usual.
I might be so bold to suggest that Robert Taft may have had slightly more Old Tory sympathies than did Burke, who expertly, if only theoretically, walked the conservative Tory and progressive Whig line—a remarkable feat that we Yanks have been trying to put into practise with somewhat less than Burkes ideas in the air (or parchment). Is it really possible in the long run?
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