Three Strategies for the Right
A few weeks ago Jim Antle and I went a few rounds on our personal blogs over Antle’s criticisms of Sen. James Webb here at Taki’s Magazine. Antle showed that Webb is no conservative; if anything, Antle argued, Webb is to paleoconservatism, what Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to neoconservatism. My response: yes, but the neocons were correct by their own lights in supporting Moynihan, and we’re right to support Webb, even if he isn’t really one of us.
Then again, maybe Webb is one of us--what left liberal could say the things Jim Webb has said about the decency, honor, and patriotism of the Confederate war dead? Before Webb arrived in the Senate, there was no doubt where he stood in America’s culture wars. But culture is different from politics, and when Webb decided to run for the U.S. Senate he may not have jettisoned all of his personal principles, but he did embrace a political program not much different from the rest of the Senate Democrats. Webb is a cultural conservative in only the most restrictive sense.
His politics aren’t entirely worthless--he’s against the Iraq War, and he does differ crucially from most Democrats on the right to keep and bear arms--but we cannot expect much from him as a legislator. And it’s on the basis of his politics that paleos should support or oppose his election. But Webb’s cultural conservatism accounts for why some of us like him even more than we can justify supporting him politically.
Culture aside, though, does Webb represent a political trend that paleoconservatives (I’ll continue using the word, despite Paul Gottfried’s epitaph) and libertarians should support? Should we lend our votes and dollars to antiwar candidates of any stripe, even if that means supporting pro-abortion, tax-and-spend, gun-grabbing liberals like Barack Obama? If not, whom do we support--and what is the political reasoning behind our strategy?
On categorical grounds, I’m not going to examine in these brief notes the case for not voting or for supporting third parties. Both of those are honorable, even sensible courses of action, but neither will have any effect on policy-making in Washington. There is more to life, of course, than policy-making in Washington. But what happens in the empire’s capital tends to have serious repercussions even for outright quietists—both in this country and around the world. I’m going to take it for granted that the people reading this post would like to see some policy changes, and would like to see them as soon as possible.
“Paleos”—by which I loosely mean individuals who are antiwar, believe in reasonable immigration restrictions, and have a strong preference for political and economic decentralization—are a tiny minority, negligible in most elections. Ours is not a majority movement, and we commit a democratic fallacy if we believe that it is. (If the majority is always right, and we know that we’re right, we must have a majority behind us, yes? Sadly, no.) Ours is not even a mass movement. A few tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a nation as large as the United States amount to a vanguard, not a mass base. That is not necessarily a bad thing: organized minorities can achieve a great deal. Unfortunately, we are not very well organized. There are only a handful of paleo institutions, most of them academic organizations or publications, and they rarely coordinate their efforts. At times, they seem as determined to anathematize one another as they are to battle the men behind the reigning ideology of the State.
Suppose, though, that paleos were to act as a bloc. How could they affect policy change in the shortest possible time frame? I see three plausible strategies.
The first strategy is integration with the establishment Right. Work within the system. As a practical matter in 2008, it might have entailed supporting Mitt Romney, a well-funded (albeit mostly by his personal fortune), seemingly viable candidate who was not a hard-bitten neocon—in contrast to McCain and Giuliani. Fred Thompson, had his campaign taken off, might have been another potential beneficiary of this strategy. As a small minority, paleos would have the most effect on candidates like these, not as voters but as opinion-mongers and political insiders. Would Romney have listened to paleo voices in 2008? His willingness to campaign on restricting immigration may provide some encouragement. And his serial tergiversations on abortion, gay rights, and other issues suggest that Romney was nothing if not susceptible to change. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see paleos, even had they worked diligently for his success, having much sway over him.
Integration is not an immediately effective strategy, but it may hold promise for the future. Perhaps given enough time, paleos can work their ways up through the magazines and think-tanks of the establishment Right, to the point where they can have a significant say on some mainstream candidate in 2012 or 2016. Yet I doubt that very much. It is not unreasonable to think that if, say, National Review had opposed the Iraq War in 2002 or 2003, Bush might at least have paused, and conservative Republicans in Congress might have put up token resistance, if nothing more. And there were, in fact, antiwar voices close to the magazine at that time. Neal Freeman was on its board of directors—a status that it is difficult to imagine any journeyman paleo journalist aspiring to. Yet Freeman could not even make the magazine seriously consider the peace position, nor could he prevent David Frum’s attack on antiwar conservatives, published the week the war began. As of 2004, Austin Bramwell, also a war skeptic, was one of the five trustees to whom William F. Buckley turned over control of his magazine. But Bramwell could not change the NR‘s direction either. Freeman and Bramwell both resigned.
I know of hopeful young paleo(-ish) journalists who think that one day they will be running institutions like NR. The historical record suggests otherwise. And so far, none of these young men have had much luck—any luck whatsoever, as far as I can tell—at getting antiwar articles into print. Even when they write for their institutions’ websites, they must be careful and circumspect. More than once I have heard them complain that the paleo grassroots are ungrateful for their efforts. But the grassroots have no way of knowing how sound a young paleo journalist is, if his employer lets him publish nothing overtly critical of Bush’s war, while the articles he writes on Ron Paul or Sam Francis, say, turn out to be quite critical indeed. All the grassroots can do is judge the evidence before their eyes.
Integration, then, has a history of failure and at present shows little promise, but perhaps I am too pessimistic, and the young paleo writers of today will succeed where board members and trustees of conservative institutions have failed in the past. Let’s hope so.
If the prospects of moving the Republican mainstream to the right, turning conservative Republicans into paleos, are poor, a radical alternative might be to attempt to push the Democrats to the right instead, turning liberal Democrats into moderates. (Or improving the ration of moderates to liberals among the Democrats in Congress, at least.) In very close elections, such as the Virginia Senate race in 2006, a statistical draw, even the relatively small cohort of paleo voters can make a difference. The logic of this course of action is twofold. In the near term, the Democrats are likely to have more political power than the Republicans, and a change in their political complexion would thus have more effect than a change in that of the minority party. And the Democrats may be closer to paleos’ positions on the Iraq War—and perhaps no farther away on immigration—than John McCain-style Republicans are. It may be easier to push the Democrats in a restrictionist direction than to push the Republicans in an antiwar direction. But that remains to be seen. There is also the question of whether the Democrats’ tax-and-spend is really any worse than the Republicans’ borrow-and-spend, which inevitably saddles the country with debt and inflation: backdoor taxation. The Grand Old Party’s free-market credentials are so tattered that the Democrats may not be worse economically. The subset of paleos who actively oppose the economic ideology of growth may be especially tempted by the marginally less corporatist party.
A more theoretical and long-term logic to attempting to influence the Democrats rather than the Republicans might run as follows: the Left, from at least the time of Woodrow Wilson until today, has been the motive force in American politics and culture. Imagine American politics as a car with front-wheel drive. The Democrats represent the front wheels, with power behind them. The Republicans are the rear wheels. Steering the front wheels will have much more effect on the direction of the vehicle than steering the rear wheels, which would have an effect, but not much of one.
A third consideration in the perverse case for supporting the Left is that it may hasten a reconfiguration of the Right. Reduced to a permanent majority, Republicans and conventional conservatives may radically re-evaluate their beliefs, and perhaps in the course of that re-evaluation they might be influenced by paleos. This is optimistic, but not beyond the pale of possibility.
The downsides to this second strategy, which might be called the balancing or breaking strategy, are obvious. For one thing, the situations in which paleos can affect the outcome of Democratic races or general elections in which there is a moderate Democrat are few. There is no indication that even Democrats as culturally conservative as Webb are much inclined to listen to—let alone act upon—paleo suggestions. And the compromise of principle involved in paleos supporting candidates who oppose them on almost every policy issue could be literally damning.
The third strategy is the one I favor: insurgency. Either of the other two strategies may work as short-term tactics. But if paleos are going to affect policy significantly in the long term, they cannot depend on the magnanimity of either the Left or the establishment Right. They—we—must have institutions of our own, however small they may be to begin with. In politics, this does not mean creating third parties, it means organizing outside of a party structure to take over existing vehicles, including the GOP. Goldwaterites did this during the 1964 campaign—it’s easy to forget that at the time, the GOP was dominated by Rockefeller Republicans. It still stood in the shadow of “modern Republicanism,” which had eclipsed Taft Republicanism. (Unfortunately, Goldwaterism was no restoration of anti-interventionist Taft Republicanism. It was a new Cold War ideology unto itself.) Other organized minorities have achieved similar feats. The Religious Right, through the Christian Coalition and the various organizations of James Dobson and others, took over several state Republican parties in the 1990s and still has considerable influence in Red States. (The national Christian Coalition is a shell of its former self, but state-level organizations are still potent. The Religious Right’s influence has become attenuated as it has assimilated into the Republican Party, effectively switching from insurgency to integration. People who know him say that Ralph Reed, for example, has never known whether he wants to be a Christian first or a Republican.)
This strategy too has its pitfalls. First, it must be noted that both the Goldwater movement and the Religious Right sooner or later blended in with the Republican establishment and vice versa. Rockefeller Republican George Romney begat “conservative Republican” Mitt Romney. Just how changed was the Republican Party—and were whatever changes did take place always for the better? If paleos adopt this strategy they may find themselves, sooner than they realize, becoming indistinguishable from the establishment Right. And that’s assuming that the paleo Right has any success in organizing and taking control of the GOP in the first place.
(As difficult as that may be, however, remember this: There are many fewer voters in a primary than in a general election. A concentrated paleo vote is more likely to have an effect within a majority party’s primary than in supporting a marginal third party in the general election. Consider, too, that there are vast numbers of party loyalists, who will vote for just about any nominee of their team. Winning in primaries automatically gives paleos the support of these unreflective loyalists.)
The Ron Paul movement is adopting something like this third strategy, thanks to Dr. Paul’s decision to remain in the Republican Party and the spontaneous emergence of candidates running as Ron Paul Republicans in a dozen states. To make this strategy work, however, will require endurance and discipline—political trench-work rather than technical glitz and publicity stunts. I see some encouraging signs that political acumen is developing in the Ron Paul ranks. Certainly my own time with the campaign reawakened in my mind principles of grassroots political organization that I had forgotten years before. (I have an article in the April 21 issue of The American Conservative that discusses some of the current and upcoming developments with the Ron Paul revolution.)
I don’t know whether any of these strategies will work. Quietism may well be in order if we cannot effect political change—if we can’t stop the next war or reduce immigration to a legally manageable level and shore up our flagging economy. But the Republic isn’t lost quite yet, so I hope my fellow paleos will give hard thought to what strategy is most likely to pay dividends. We cannot afford to act on whim. For nearly 20 years, the paleo movement (or non-movement) has been getting by on ad hoc measures. We’ve been losing ground all the while. It’s time to think about long term strategy: in politics, a plan will always beat no plan.
Comments
Mr. McCarthy has has contributed well to the reform of our movement’s strategy.
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Mr. McCarthy,
Thanks for a very intelligent analysis. “Insurgency” seems the best prospect among those you offer and its energy and integrity is evident in Ron Paul’s message, which has emphasized “enemies”...”domestic” rather than “foreign.” Although RP qualified this to refer to ideas, the resonance from Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political is clear.
This is good morality as well as good politics: let’s not opportunistically adopt the enemies of our enemies (even for $60,000 a year); let’s not have a few sips of neo-con kool aid as social lubricants (it’s the first sip that gets you drunk); and let’s either tell the truth or quote Wittgenstein on silence.
In the aftermath of Super Tuesday RP addressed his followers as “The Remnant” in a reference to Isaiah via Albert Jay Nock. Nock as you know was a thoroughgoing quietist who never engaged in political activity. Perhaps there is some prospect for an insurgent quietism. For myself I have a rule that I take from Solzhenitsyn’s “Live not by Lies”: Get up and leave when you hear one in public discourse and cancel your subscription when the editor of a journal endorses a lie.
Eric Voegelin considered Saint Augustine’s commentary of the Psalms the key to political change:
They begin to leave who begin to love
Many are leaving unbeknownst
For the feet of those leaving are the affections of the heart
And yet they are leaving Babylon
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This is, I think, Dan McCarthy’s best essay yet. Normally I don’t comment on others’ blogs; but in the present case I’m happy to make an exception. I speak as one who by temperament is politically quietist, or, if/when politicized at all, inclined to a Kirkian outlook.
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“Ours is not a majority movement, and we commit a democratic fallacy if we believe that it is. (If the majority is always right, and we know that we’re right, we must have a majority behind us, yes? Sadly, no.) Ours is not even a mass movement. A few tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a nation as large as the United States amount to a vanguard, not a mass base.”
Very interesting observation. I’ve often pondered myself why paleos are such a rare breed, and one answer that always comes back to me is that most people in this country lack a sufficient knowledge and understanding of history to comprehend why we see things as we do. Ironically, that puts us in a similar situation to how Marxists see themselves - which is why McCarthy’s “vanguard” reference jumps out at me.
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Along these lines, I have been looking for Paul Weyrich’s letter of some years ago advocatinga return to the less glamorous, but even more necessary, work of converting the society, at the local level (one might say, starting at the personal, then the family, and then the local society). To this end, a movement not affiliated with a political party, but with clearly-articulated tenets, elaborated at the philosophical as well as the practical levels, is to my mind the best way to work. The current issue of “Modern Age” gets to some of this, and I highly recommend concluding article, by Claes Ryn, on the lack of high intellectual caliber in the movement at the moment; surely excluding our writers here, of course.
I think that there are actually little cells of traditionally-minded folks out there now, operating in many cases independently, who might be amenable to increased cooperation with each other if introduced with a spirit of cameraderie rather than our more usual intra-traditional sniping. To a certain extent the Rockford INstitute Summer School and other programs do this already, for a very limited group: while traditional Catholics predominate, there are also some good conservative Lutherans and Orthodox who are well-accepted. It might also be helpful to pay more attention to the attempts of Orthodox and Catholics to make common ground on societal matters in Europe: I think of Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev’s work in particular here, but there are many others. It would help us to see how others of more or less like mind are doing things.
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Woody, I’ll second your recommendation of Claes Ryn’s essay—it’s masterful. Also, if you’re looking for Paul Weyrich’s piece on stepping aside from active politics (while remaining defensively involved), I believe this is it: http://www.nationalcenter.org/Weyrich299.html
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In light of the discussion above, this news story implicitly poses a very real strategic question that grows more pressing over time: can we build a nation worth living in out of these kinds of people?
Parents Fight Over Which Gang Toddler Should Join
Police: Mother A Crip, Father A Westside Baller
POSTED: 7:10 pm MDT April 10, 2008
COMMERCE CITY, Colo.—A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father’s arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday.
On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.
After he ran out of the store, police were called and the 19-year-old was arrested at his home.
His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.
“They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically, she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would ‘claim,’” Sandoval said.
Manzanares was charged with disorderly conduct, harassment, and domestic violence. He was transported to the Adams County Detention Facility.
On Tuesday, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and was sentenced to a year of probation. The misdemeanor harassment charge was dropped.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/15851207/detail.html
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Sorry, meant to append this above.
Can paleoconservatism separate cultural-political concerns from considerations of race?
That, to me, is the central question.
In my opinion, a paleoconservatism that cannot address race directly, with no position sworn off a priori, will never be anything but a cringing rump.
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Daniel,
Where do you draw the line? What principle would you not trade for defeat in Iraq?
Webb is pro-illegal alien and pro-affirmative action. For all his empty rhetoric, he spits on Scotch-Irish and all white Americans, who lack legacy positions.
Webb is a disaster on social policy.
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Take a look at the record on George “Win the War” Bush on affirmative action RonL. And tell me why anyone who wanted to get rid of affirmative action (for example) would support Bush and his party over the Webb and his? In behavior, which is what counts, they’re all but indistinguishable on this issue.
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Forget Bush, look at Tom Tancredo.
Tom Tancredo the hero of “national question” conservatives and restrictonist paleos, runs an admittingly single issue campaign to keep illegal immigration at the forefront as a political issue during the presidential election cycle. Though I was not a Tancredo supporter, this was certainly a noble goal and Tancredo has been a consistent immigration hawk. What better guy to lead the charge?
Only problem was that Tancredo proved to be a person who values the sanctity of the GOP more than he values someone strong on immigration. After endorsing technocratic liberal egghead Mitt Romeny when he dropped out in the primary season, he has now given his backing to McCain because Bob Barr has a “blindspot on radical Islam”. In other words he likes his spot on the plantation and doesn’t want to rock the boat for principle.
Compare that to Webb who never pretended to be something he wasn’t. Who is better, the serial lying, compromising, fraud Tom Tancredo, who ran the worst and most dishonest single issue campaign in recorded history, or the consistently anti-war, pro-civil liberties Webb?
As long as restrictionist have people like Tancredo leading their movement they are screwed beyond belief. By contrast the anti-war crowd could use more Jim Webb’s.
Dylan
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Mr. Lang:
A paleoconservatism that cannot abjure “race”, that cannot recognize skin color’s unimportance, that cannot recognize that ethnic identity isn’t based on skin color but rather on history, will never be anything but a cranky rump.
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A propos of Sid’s comment, with which I agree, I would note that Paul Gottfried has an excellent article in the same issue of “Modern Age” mentioned earlier, on interwar right thinkers, featuring Hugo von Hoffmansthal. In there, he makes the point that, as I understand it, a good national sense was viewed by the best then as based on shared history, language, and literary tradition (perhaps there are other such factors). In this sense, perhaps the Central European thinkers had in mind their own histories, with Austro-Hungarian culture and language, even, being a blend of German with some French and Italian additions; and even in Prussia and other northern German areas, there were pockets of Germans with French surnames, going back to the dispersal of the Huguenots from France, e.g., the famous WWII fighter ace Hans-Joachim Marseille, or the current footballer Oliver Neuville (last I heard he had the bad taste to play for opponents of Bayern Munich rather than for die Bayern). This not even to mention the rather surprising frequency of slavic surnames even among the Junkers.
On a more whimsical note, “Chronicles” recently had a small piece by a Mr. Tausch (I think), on the real history of the Germans in Texas and their connection with the late unpleasantness, in which he asserts, based on evidently substantial documentary research, that the Texas Germans were among the greatest supporters of the Confederacy, rather than opponents as has been the conventional wisdom. The most charming part, however, is his retelling the story of a rally of mostly black Texans (former slaves or descendants, of German masters) around Fredericksburg in 1915 or so, to oppose US entry into WWI, complete with speakers saying that “ve Chermans haff got to stick togedder”.
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“Take a look at the record on George “Win the War” Bush on affirmative action RonL. And tell me why anyone who wanted to get rid of affirmative action (for example) would support Bush and his party over the Webb and his?”
So you response to my call of liberal perfidity by Webb and his paleocon supporters is to yell “Bush did it.”
That doesn’t cut it when you are supposed to be a conservative alternative to Bushism.
Being to the left of neoconservatives on race and culture is appaling.
And for the record, I have never liked Jorge Arbusto.
However, the GOP, or at least a majority of its elected officials and grassroots oppose race-quotas.
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Dylan,
In the real world here are the choices:
Open-borders McCain, an open-borders+subsidies Democrat, or Bob Barr who has in the last few years condemned every attempt to deal with illegal immigration. Barr’s libertopianism means he effectively supports legalization.
Tancredo has thus looked to other issues. He is just doing the opposite of you. He is not willing to sell out to be defeated by Islam, he sells out to confront Islam. You just can’t deal with a mirror image.
And Webb once claimed to care about white America and to be a conservative. He a serial liar who you support because he wants us to lose. Bully for you, but don’t mislead yourself.
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Generally, I support the join the Democrats option...truth be told, the Democrat base is not as socially liberal as the party hacks and leadership lead us to believe.
Democrats can’t win elections with just Blacks, unmarried women with children, gay men, and government workers union members. And they know it.
We’ve got a better chance there to make “moderate” improvements like WEBB…
The real problem with real “paleo-conservatism” is this idiotic dedication to free market fundamentalism...the idiocy of the “supply side” economics--or as it’s more accurately known, the right wing “free lunch” theory that you can increase economic growth with tax cuts alone.
This idiocy begat Reagan/Bush budget deficits, the S&L;bailouts, the internet and the real estate bubbles..all proof that by cutting taxes and “deregulation” always lead to booms and busts, with the FED bailing out the whole mess by increasing the money supply, and selling out pieces of the US economic sovereignty to Arab Shieks and Chinese communist commissars.
Folks like me don’t want a command and control economy, but realize that “laissez faire” <snicker> is not the answer, the mixed economy of state capitalism is.
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Yes, Takimag 2.0.
We Jews are unaffected by liberalism.Its not like the number of Jews in America is declining because Jews marry late, have few kids, and intearry now at 55%. It is not like Reconstructionist, Reform/Liberal and “Conservative” Jewish Denominations are not assaults on Judaism.
It’s not like Jews, being fewer in number and less rooted than others, are not more susceptable to liberalism that Christians.
And, in case you don’t get it, I am mocking your petulant hatred, Takimag 2.0
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RonL,
I don’t support Webb or even care that much about him. I just think it is obvious that he is more principled than Tancredo.
It is funny how easy alleged restrictionists and Tancredoites are to forgive and forget the reality of the Tancredo campaign. Tancredo ran as a single issue candidate. His candidacy was in large part a response to the very amnesty bill put forward and proposed by McCain. Yet now he endorses McCain because of someone elses “blindspot on Radical Islam”.
It is not just that supporting McCain is hilariously inconsistent and inherently ridiculous for a restrictionist, it is also tacticially foolish. Even if you have ever intent of voting for McCain, why announce it? As the figurehead of the anti-amnesty movement Tancredo talking like that guarantees that McCain doesn’t even have to listen to hiim or his people. Their votes are already in the bag.
Tancredo could have said he was refusing to endorse anyone. Or that he was a good GOPer, but still had serious conerns about McCain. Instead he blathered on with his fallback “radical Islam” talking point, solidifying his position as the worst single issue candidate in recent memory.
Dylan
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There’s nothing wrong with a multi-progned approach but insurgency is the best option we have
of high-end impact because paleos lack money and clout. They have to get the clout first.
Then they get the money. Simple rules of the game.
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