The Real American Right: Part III
Edited and with an introduction by Thomas E. Woods
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 231 pages, $20
The year was 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy [.pdf file] started congressional hearings on alleged Communist infiltration of the federal government, Marilyn Monroe wedded Joe DiMaggio, President Dwight David Eisenhower refused French pleas for American intervention in the battle of Dienbienphu – and Murray Rothbard was red-baited for the first time.
This last may not make the Encyclopedia Brittannica, or even Wikipedia, but it was surely a watershed event for the young Old Rightist, who had just entered the lists on behalf of a movement that was just about to expire.
This was really the year that marked the nadir of the Old Right, and the nearly complete evisceration of the conservative movement in America. National Review had yet to be founded – not that that would have been a plus, but more about that later – and the organizations and leading figures of the Right were at an all-time low in terms of influence as well as numbers. The complete rout of the Taft wing of the GOP had been accomplished with the nomination of Eisenhower, and the General’s election marked the beginning of a decade or more of “moderate” hegemony in the party.
Within the conservative movement of the time, such as it was, the main appeal was a visceral anti-Communism, which generally appeared in two varieties. The McCarthyite “enemy within” version, practiced with alacrity by such outfits as “Counterattack,” which put out the infamous Red Channels pamphlet that purportedly exposed “Communist-inspired” propaganda in the media, and the advocates of “rollback,” who concentrated on pushing a foreign policy that would, in effect, declare war on the Soviet Union and seek to free the “captive nations” behind the Iron Curtain.
Naturally, these two tendencies meshed easily with each other, with one flowing into the other without much contradiction, and yet they were different in that the McCarthyites, or many of them, were former “isolationists,” with some, like John T. Flynn, still adamantly upholding the old faith. McCarthyism was really, in an important sense, a movement motivated in large part by the desire for revenge against the Commies and left-wing “liberals” who had hounded the antiwar conservatives before, during, and immediately after World War II. The Roosevelt administration and its Popular Front supporters had smeared such stalwarts of the America First Committee as Flynn and Charles Lindbergh as agents of the Third Reich. Now, at last, the Left was getting it’s come-uppance! The Communists and fellow-travelers who had called for prosecuting America First and the “isolationists,” and accused them of acting as a German ‘fifth column,” were now getting a taste of their own medicine – and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.
Yet it was inevitable that the fierce anti-Communism directed at an internal fifth column or conspiracy could easily be re-directed to alleged enemies and threats abroad, and so the second arm of the anti-Communist upsurge of the Fifties took the form of a demand to confront Communism militarily. Rothbard, who had by this time begun moving in these circles, was an enthusiastic supporter of McCarthy, but was also determined to revive the Old Right tradition of non-interventionism, which had by this time largely faded out of the picture. The sudden recruitment of a passel of ex-Communists, who made a veritable industry out of red-baiting, infused the conservative movement with a militaristic air, with their calls for aiding the Chinese Nationalists against the followers of Chairman Mao – actively supported by the infamous China Lobby [.pdf file] – and increasing belligerence directed at alleged Communist attempts to dominate Southeast Asia. In 1947, the ex-Trotskyist James Burnham published The Struggle for the World in which he advocated nuking the Soviet Union and setting up a “World Federation” with the US at its head.
Truly a man ahead of his time.
A few years later, Professor Burnham would become one of the founding editors of National Review, and a leader of the “New” Right” which would make a militant (and militaristic) anti-Communism the linchpin of the modern conservative movement. In the meantime, however, the battle of the ex-Communists to engage in the politics of revenge by taking over the Right and turning it into a vehicle for obliterating their old enemies in the Kremlin, had begun with assaults on the remnants of the Old Right.
In April of 1954, Rothbard -- determined to fight back against the rising interventionist tide -- convinced William Johnson, the editor of Faith and Freedom, to put out an all-“isolationist” issue of the magazine, which reached thousands of supporters around the country. It was a blockbuster, featuring Rothbard’s comprehensive piece – provocatively entitled “The Real Aggressor” -- which argued that militarism was incompatible with the freedom philosophy in economics, politics, and every sphere of life. Also making an appearance was Garet Garrett, who attacked the War Party for threatening to start World War III with Russia and averred that “the idea of imposing universal peace on the world by force is a barbarian fantasy.” Another contributor was Ernest T. Weir, whom Rothbard deems “the Cyrus Eaton of the 1950s,” head of the National Steel Corporation, who had seen the non-interventionist light and made a lecture tour of the country counseling caution against the alleged Communist colossus. In Faith and Freedom, he wrote:
“We have to accept the fact that it is not the mission of the United States to go charging about the world to free it from bad nations and bad systems of government. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that there will always be bad nations and bad systems of government.”
This was too much for the proto-neocons over at The New Leader, the semi-official organ of Social Democracy in America, which published a piece by the ex-radical William Henry Chamberlin, “Appeasement on the Right,” which targeted Weir as a fellow traveler or maybe even a Commie, whose article “could have appeared in the Nation, perhaps even in Masses and Mainstream.” Rothbard’s piece was attacked for having drawn up “a blueprint for American policy tailor-made to the specifications of the Kremlin.”
Notice how the neocons’ tactics have changed little over the years. Yesterday, opponents of a preemptive strike on the Soviets and a world crusade to impose “democracy” at gunpoint were smeared as agents of the Kremlin – today they calumniate opponents of the Iraq invasion as doing bin Laden’s bidding – and, of course, typified as “leftists” (a ridiculous charge, on its face, when applied to Weir, whose reputation as a union-busting reactionary made him an unlikely fellow-traverler).
In both cases, their battle cry was and is “Appeasement!” “Munich” came up in Chamberlin’s smear piece, as did the specter of Hitlerian evil. And yet Chamberlin himself had opposed US entry into World War II: he had even written an entire book, America’s Second Crusade, which made the “isolationist” case, i.e. that the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany should have been left alone to tear each other to pieces. Now that Hitler was gone, however, Chamberlin, the former “isolationist,” had no compunctions about bringing out the old smears that had been hurled at him earlier. When Rothbard wrote to the New Leader, taking Chamberlin to task for his hypocrisy, all the old turncoat could manage to do was splutter that Weir had recently been “hailed in the Warsaw Trybuna Ludu, and that perhaps I would soon ‘receive [my] appropriate recognition from the same or a similar source.”
This battle with the New Leader prefigured the internal battle within the organization that put out Faith and Freedom, the Spiritual Mobilization movement (see Part II), which pitted Rothbard against his fellow Faith and Freedom columnist, the German émigré Willi Schlamm. Senor Schlamm had been an editor of the German Communist Party’s daily, Rote Fahne, defected to the Trotskyists, and then abandoned Leninism altogether: his sole concern, after leaving the Communist movement, was exacting retribution on his former comrades. In 1959, he would come out with a book calling for a preventive war against the Communist bloc.
In response to Rothbard’s March, 1955, column in Faith and Freedom calling for US withdrawal from Taiwan, Schlamm red-baited Rothbard, demanding to know how he could possibly be taking the “Communist” line.
Yet there was nothing “communist” about the line Rothbard was taking. How would we react, Rothbard wanted to know, if the Chinese Commies had a base in, say, the Great Lakes? Like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, he wanted peace on the Korean peninsula, but this was heresy to the vehement Schlamm, who answered him with the usual neocon smears. Soon afterward, Rothbard’s column was discontinued: the reason, he was told, was that “because [Faith and Freedom’s] Protestant minister readership had come to the conclusion that I was a ‘Communist.’ Red-baiting again, and this time from ‘libertarians!’”
The year 1954 also saw the ascension of Frank Chodorov, “a libertarian’s libertarian,” to the editorship of The Freeman: once a weekly, the direct descendant of Nock’s sprightly individualist review of the 1920s and 30s, the publication had been taken over by the Foundation for Economic Education and turned into a monthly. It was still, however, “the leading organ of the intellectual Right,” as Rothbard dubs it, and the battle for the future of the conservative movement soon commenced in its pages.
Chodorov fired the first shot, with “The Return of 1940?”, accusing the interventionist conservatives of deferring the rollback of Big Government until the Commies could be defeated. The war had given us a federal Leviathan, confiscatory taxation, the loss of personal liberties (including a peacetime draft): “All this,” wrote Chodorov, “the ‘isolationists of 1940 foresaw.” Yet it was happening again, only this time with the threat of nuclear war hanging over the human race like Damocles’ sword:
“We are again being told to be afraid. As it was before the two world wars so it is now: politicians talk in frightening terms, journalists invent scare-lines, and even next-door-neighbors are taking up the cry: the enemy is a the city gates; we must gird for battle. In case you don’t know, the enemy this time is the USSR.”
It is interesting, how nothing really changes: the same scare tactics, the same demagoguery, and almost identical appeals to what Garet Garrett called “http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3317">a complex of vaunting and fear.” These words might have been written yesterday, or tomorrow: it’s an old game the neocons of 1954 were playing, and they’ve continued to play it to the present day, with variations in terms of the identity of the “enemy” – but always with the same objective in mind: to institute a wartime atmosphere of hysteria and conformity, in which dissent, if not outlawed outright, is practically unthinkable.
Schlamm replied not merely with the usual calumnies, but with a campaign to oust Chodorov from The Freeman, which succeeded shortly after the exchange between the two. The Freeman was turned over to the tender mercies of Leonard Read, who proceeded to imbue it with the high-school-level free-enterprise-is-great ethos that persists to this day.
The interventionist assault on the former institutions of the Old Right continued in the takeover of Human Events, which had been founded, in the 1940s, by Felix Morley, a Washington Post editor and president of Haverford College, the journalist Frank Hanighen, and Henry Regnery, a conservative businessman and founder of the Regnery publishing firm. Morley, an intellectual and a libertarian of the “old liberal” school, was aghast at McCarthyism and objected to the trumpeting of the Hiss case in Human Events. The final split came when the China Lobby made its big push to get the US to guarantee the Nationalist dictatorship on Taiwan. Morley did not want to become the spokesman for a foreign despot: Hanighen and Regnery had no such compunctions. Morley was out, and Human Events went on to become the unremarkable and reliably neoconnish rag it is today.
The Old Right – beleaguered by attacks from the right-wing Social Democrats and ex-Commies of Schlamm’s ilk, and considerably shrunken in numbers and influence – soldiered on. Such groups as “For America,” run by Dean Clarence Manion – whose radio and television broadcasts on the “Manion Forum” were a mainstay of conservative activism – came out against the draft and also issued a platform plank warning that American foreign policy must be to “Enter no foreign wars” unless the continental US came under direct attack. The Congress of Freedom also became host to a number of libertarian and Old Right activists, who took it over, albeit briefly, and managed to make a few anti-interventionist pronouncements before control reverted to more conventional rightists.
“The last great gasp of the isolationist Right,” as Rothbard explains, “came in the fight for the Bricker Amendment.” Designed to prevent treaties and UN regulations from becoming the law of the land in the US, the Bricker Amendment garnered the support of virtually all the conservative grassroots groups of the day, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Farm Bureau, as well as more ideological groups such as For America and the Committee for Constitutional Government.
The Amendment went down to inglorious defeat, and, with it, what was left of the Taft wing of the GOP in Congress. As the Eisenhower administration lined up with Americans for Democratic Action, the American Association for the United Nations, and the United World Federalists, so did a number of “moderate” and formerly “isolationist” Republicans: the stampede to internationalism crushed the Old Right underfoot, and it would not rise again, in any significant form, until the present day.
The rise of National Review coincided with – and accelerated -- the demise of the Old Right as the dominant intellectual tendency in opposition to liberalism, and the beginning of a conservative movement dominated by one overriding general principle: the inevitability and indeed the desirability of war with the Soviet Union. Rothbard complains that “at right-wing rallies no one cheered a single iota for the free market, if this minor item were ever so much as mentioned; what really stirred up the animals were demagogic appeals by National Review leaders for total victory, total destruction of the Communist world.” He cites L. Brent Bozell, Buckley’s nephew, who later went off on a Carlist tangent, declaring at a rightist rally: “I would favor destroying not only the entire world, but the entire universe out to the furthermost star, rather than suffer Communism to live.”
Crazed is not the word, and it wasn’t long before Rothbard had his fill of such rhetorical mania. Aside from this, however, there was the suspicion – which sounds creditable, although not provable – that the National Review faction of the Right was in large part a CIA creation. Rothbard cites the CIA affiliation of several prominent National Review editors, including not only Buckley but also Burnham: he also cites Frank Meyer as telling Gary Wills that he, Meyer, was certain that the magazine was a CIA operation. Meyer, a longtime National Review editor and veteran of the Communist Party, knew whereof he spoke, at least as far as Rothbard was concerned.
The editors of National Review were culled from the ranks of what Rothbard calls “the exes” – the ex-leftists who migrated rightward in their pursuit of revenge, respectability, money, and power, although this harsh judgement certainly did not apply to all: Frank Meyer was a sterling exception, as was John Chamberlain. As for the overwhelming majority of these converts from the left fringe, however, they were not so much for liberty as against the Communists, and especially the brand of Communism that toed the Kremlin line. Many of them started out on the anti-Stalinist left, and wound up in the conservative-libertarian movement by default. On account of their intellectual weight, and the machinations of Buckley and his circle, they soon came to dominate the movement, although, in many cases, their domestic politics were no more rightist than the New Leader.
Mind you, this was before the Great Migration of story and song that the neocons of today undertook: Irving Kristol was still a leftist, Norman Podhoretz was still writing paeans to the Soviet defense of Stalingrad: and the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party had not yet jumped the aisle and penetrated the GOP with such devastating effect, giving us Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz, to name the most infamous graduates of this school for warmongering statists. The neoconservative takeover of the American Right is not, contrary to what is generally assumed, a recent phenomenon: it occurred at the dawn of the modern conservative movement, and its main vehicle was National Review, which nevertheless tried to maintain at least a veneer of libertarianism, which it trotted out on special occasions.
It was all a show, however, as Rothbard soon began to realize, and the final break with the Buckleyites – he’d been writing economics pieces for them, as well as occasional book reviews – came with Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, which the editors of NR took as an affront to the anti-Communist cause and an outrage that had to be protested. An exchange of letters with Buckley, in which Rothbard averred that Winston Churchill had been responsible for far more deaths in two world wars than old Nikita had ever dreamed of, was not calculated to heal the growing rift. From that point on, Rothbard, the Old Rightist, would wander in exile until the end of the cold war and the rebirth of the Old Right in the Buchanan campaign of 1992.
There is much more to this volume: Rothbard’s adventures in the League of Stevensonian Democrats (!), more conflicts with Buckley (this time in the pages of the New Individualist Review, with the issues being foreign policy and the draft), and the sudden collapse of the Volker Fund – which he had worked with for over a decade – due to the conversion of its leading light to the lure of a Calvinist dictatorship that would stamp out Communism, ban pornography, and defeat Evil itself as the prelude to a nuclear Armageddon.
Rothbard said “So long!” to the American Right at that point, and wandered gaily(if uncertainly) in the pastures of the Left as the tumult of the 1960s began to shake things up and the Vietnam war loomed large as the political issue of the day. Rothbard and the small circle of New York-based libertarians began to move on the edges of the ascendant New Left: in Betrayal, there are some truly hilarious stories of his adventures in the land of the lefties.
The book comes to an end in the 1970s, with Rothbard taking his place as the grand old man of libertarianism – a movement that, thanks in large part to his intellectual entrepreneurship, strategic acumen and amazing persistence, had grown far beyond the ability to fit into his living room. Yet the story doesn’t end there, with the founding of an independent pro-freedom movement and the launching of the libertarian institutions with which we are all too familiar. In looking at the Ron Paul phenomenon, for instance, I often wonder how Rothbard would have reacted: well, actually, I don’t wonder, because I know he would be thrilled at the birth of a real mass libertarian movement, at last – one opposed not just to taxation and the ministrations of the Welfare State, but also unalterably opposed to the Warfare State, the motor of the tyranny that grinds us underfoot.
The Old Right is back, and in a big way. The Buchanan campaign(s) were the harbinger, and the rise of the “paleoconservatives” as a separate tendency within the American Right was another premonition of the coming rebirth. The Paul campaign is the apotheosis of a long process of rediscovering and reclaiming our intellectual roots. In his book, Rothbard shows how the American Right was betrayed – and points the way to its possible redemption. As the Old Right once again rears its head, and roars its defiance, one might justifiably call this latestt chapter in the history of the Right “Rothbard Vindicated.”
Comments
Excellent way to start an essay. You had my attention at the mention of Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, the French, and Murray Rothbard.
How to reconcile the differences between the libertarians, the Tories, the conservatives, the paleo-conservatives, the Whigs, the republicans, the traditionalists, the counter-Revolutionaries, the Carlists, the Legitimists, the Orleanists, the Jacobites, etc.?
Sure, some have almost no differences between them (the counter-Revolutionaries and the Legitimists, for example), but all of them jumbled together have no real future.
More importantly for those of us living in the USofA: all of those groups combined represent less than 10% of the population.
Modern America was born of the power of the central state, controlled by by a political party named, ironically enough, the Republicans. Their brothers across the aisle, the Redeemer Democrats, have taken control of the opposition.
America today is in a perpetual state of Revolution. Authority is something to be destroyed, that is, authority that is outside of the State. Just like the Mexican “Institutional Revolutionary Party”, except without all of the Revolutionary baggage. America has perfected the idea of the institutional (r)evolution; the revolt against housewives led to working mothers, which led to unwed working mothers (often times unwed and unworking), which leads to lesbian mothers, which leads to who knows where. Permanent marriage led to divorce which led to “shacking up”, which led to gay marriage, which leads to who knows what? No income tax led to an emergency, which led to a permanent income tax of some small percent which led to some income tax of a large percent, which leads to, eventually, total enslavement to the State. Revolution is the plan, and it will be enacted.
My source of hope is that even in the Soviet Union, the Sacraments were still valid and licit, just as they will be in enslaved America.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Rothbard’s libertarian dogmatism was not a part of the Old Right. Some would say it’s antithetical to it. These essays are an exercise in revisionism.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Capp/Cundiff, you’re slipping.
How to reconcile the differences between the libertarians, the Tories, the conservatives, the paleo-conservatives, the Whigs, the republicans, the traditionalists, the counter-Revolutionaries, the Carlists, the Legitimists, the Orleanists, the Jacobites, etc.?
How many America-hating, “Catholic”, “Southerners” spew pedantic lists like the one above? Well, there’s Capp and there’s Cundiff. And he says the jumbled Right has no future. And that we will all be enslaved.
How very Bernard Lewis of you, Capp/Cundiff. We just need to accept our inevitable future, huh? Sort of like accepting a new Islamic Europe. And you just hope that things will go as well for Catholics in the future American dystopia as they did for Catholics in the Soviet Union?
You are a transparent propagandist, Capp/Cundiff.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
doug cooper- how is rothbards “dogmatic libertarianism” antithetical to the old right?
also “the high-school-level free-enterprise-is-great “ is about the level of economic thought the GOP is at today.
wasn’t the bricker amendment shot down partially because it was deemed unneccasary because the bill of rights provided similar protections. I don’t know where I read that
Click to flag this comment as abusive
from wikipedia
“Three years later the United States Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Reid v. Covert that the Bill of Rights cannot be abrogated by agreements with foreign powers and that such agreements cannot extend the powers of Congress beyond those permitted by the Constitution”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
“Roger Thatchery” needs to be very certain that Capp and Cundiff are the same person before he makes the identification. I in fact disagree with Mr. Capp’s analysis above.
I’ve made it plain as day that I’m for a Tory Conservatism
(1) purged of Fascists and Extremist Nationalists (e.g. Nazis),
(2) purged of the Hamiltonians/Whigs/Lincoln /Neocons/Wilsonians
(3)in a loose alliance with the Mengerian Libertarians and Jeffersonians
(4) and learning some things from European Christian Democracy and Catholic Social Teaching.
The now dead “Paleoconservative” movement failed in all four points, even in #2, for the Sam Franciscans openly ridiculed those of us who pointed out the error of Lincoln’s ways. The Sam Franciscans continue to do this, and on this website. But Lincoln is the biggest Neocon of them all.
I have said that are purified Tory Conservatism should join the three-front war: Against Cultural Marxism (which is quickly becoming a kind of “Leftist” nationalism), against Racialist and Ethnic Nationalism, and against Hamitonianism.
Mr. Capp does not endorse these things, as far as I can tell.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Rich Lowry has a column out titled “Liberal Fascism: A Conservative Slur No Longer.” The column, ostensibly based on a book by that intellectual giant, Jonah Goldberg, makes the same point that Rothbard and the Old Right thinkers and leaders have been making for more than a half century now that fascists and Nazis were big enemies of the capitalist system and that “the fascist exaltation of youth, glorification of violence, hatred of tradition” are generally agendas of the left. Yet, having made these true (but banal) points, how does Lowry and presumably Goldberg not take the next logical step and critique the influence of neoconservatism on the right which seems to embrace all these things which he and Goldberg are condemning? The way I see it Lowry and Goldberg just want to turn the fascist label on their leftwing opponents, and they could care less about the implications of their argument. In essence, the argument is merely a scheme to score political points at the expense of the left, and it sums up well the mentality of today’s establishment right.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
As for the article: I invite readers to consider the consequences of Stalin’s or Benito/’Dolf’s victory. We know, vividly, what those horrible and tyrannical consequences would have been. There are those who would have welcomed those consequences: The “Left”, old and new, would have welcomed a Communist victory, and said so. Our “Right” thought Benito and ‘Dolf were pretty cool, and said so at the time. They are too cowardly to say so today.
Libertarians need indeed to be about the business of opposing all who oppose liberty, among them latter-day Communists, Fascists, extremist racialists and ethnic nationalists, and Hamiltonians
The real problem with the Hamiltonians is that they equate the “war against Prussian Militarism”, as they call it (World War I) and the struggle agains “Islamofascism”, as they call it, with the struggle against Fascism, Naziism and Communism. These are not to be equated.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Mr Cundiff,
In a mass democracy, as is the USofA today, there just aren’t enough people left over on the “right”, after eliminating everyone from the movement that you dislike. That the Whigs and the racists make up a large portion of the American population is a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless.
As for endorsing a “three-front war” against the cultural Marxists, racists, and the Whigs: I endorse it, but don’t expect it to go anywhere. Such a “war” would be about as successful as Dr Ron Paul’s presidential campaign (8% in NEW HAMPSHIRE). Less than 10% of Americans want peace and freedom.
How do the McCains and Romneys of the world get large amounts of votes, and Ron Paul does not?
Well, first of all, I don’t know who Ron Paul’s father is, and neither does 99.99% of Americans. McCain’s father was an admiral in the US Navy. Romney’s father was governor of Michigan. GW Bush’s father was president of the USofA. Reagan was governor of California, back when California wasn’t an oddball, and had more in common with Alabama than San Francisco. Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and didn’t cause a scene. He simply kept up the same policies as had been going on for some time (including killing Iraqis and welfare “reform"). Washington City politics is an insiders game, and it always has been. The only way to turn back the tide of the cultural Marxists and the Whigs (the war agains the racists either has already been won, or hasn’t started yet) is to do it locally - town, city, and county politics. You will still send a significant portion of your paycheck to Washington City, but if you can just do something small, at the local level, those things can build up until your neighborhood is more like what you want, and less like what the cultural Marxists and Whigs would want. Eventually, such local campaigns might add up to something on the countrywide scene, but if not, then oh well, “all politics is local”, and “we’ll always have Paris...”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Assuming that this is a revisionist piece, as some have suggested, one must only say that revision is sometimes necessary. I cannot judge that at all because I am too ignorant of the facts. This article gives me a starting point with enough information to check out and verify. For that, I am indeed grateful and hope to make it a foundation for learning.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Perhaps others can step in here who know more about the writings of Sam Francis, but Francis was not an unqualified supporter of Lincoln. In fact, in most of what I’ve read, he was quite critical. In Shots Fired, for instance, I know there’s an essay quite critical of Lincoln.
Furthermore, Francis is hardly a neocon. In fact, the neocons detested Francis. Neocon Anthony Gancarski condemns Francis: “Criticism of Lincoln is a staple of Francis’ rhetoric.” See: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={A5E92EF2-103D-4C77-A046-E3A0874A384B}
Click to flag this comment as abusive
You should have mentioned that Rothbard was one of those neo-confedrates that are reviled of late.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
A lot of the responding posts on this blog seem to envision a revived conservative - or libertarian, or “anarcho-capitalist” - movement every bit as rigid and contrived as the late, unlamented Left. And, so, every bit as doomed.
There needs to be a lot less talk about “purging” and more plans for building. There is no “pure” answer here. Any approach must be flexible and – more than anything else – practical. We don’t need another fixed, jackass ideology: Our ideologies, our faiths, our religions and dogmas… are killing us. We need a loose framework. We need to rid ourselves of the delusion that we have all the answers. We need ideas – all kinds of ideas. We need to listen.
We do that, and we will be the exact opposite of neoconservativism. And, just maybe, we’ll re-establish a movement whose time again has come.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Francis call the League of South “infantile”, as has one columnist on this site of his persuasion. Which means Francis endorsed Lincoln’s work.
I thank for the reference to his criticism of Lincoln. Just what of Lincoln did he fault?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The key to everything is undoing Buckley’s deal with the devil--this idea that the Right must countenance unbridled socialism/statism at home in order to fight whatever happens to be the popular crusade of day. In Buckley’s day, it was “the war against Communism”. In George W. Bush’s day, it is the “war on terror”. And if Guiliani or McCain get in the White House, it will be the “war on Islamofascism” (despite the many contradictions inherent in the concept).
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The excesses of the 1950s anti-Communists aside, 1950 was not 1940. World Warr II had destroyed or weakened the principal anti-Communist powers and left Communists astride both China and the Russian Empire and Communist militnats active all over the world. It was not unreasonable for conservatives to advocate measures to counter this threat. The problem is that the policy spun out of control; instead of holding the line until others could defend themselves, our leaders dtermined to to create a hegemony in the name of anti-Communism.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Bravo to Roger Thatchery!
I can only add that paleocons who yearn for a Catholic “South” which exists only in the misty chambers of their brains are free to pack up and leave the nation which they hate so resentfully. Why they support Ron Paul--a man who clearly loves his own people and nation--is mind-boggling.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid, I totally agree with your concept of conservatism ("Tory") and with your three-front war proposal. Your vision is very well balanced and responsible, it’s refreshing to see that.
There’s just the quite delicate problem of co-ordinating the alliance with Mengerian-Austrian/Jeffersonians and maintaining a principled submission to Christian values
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The strange thing here about WF Buckley is that he did not emerge out of a Leftist crucible like the Neo Con Bolsheviks he bequeathed the NR to. He reportedly had the benefit of lunchtime lectures from Nock, who was a friend of his pappy. He does seem to be an old school Federalist Oligarch though, that odd kind that seems to simultaneously loathe and encourage big government while dipping into the Noble Lie Locker to address the questions of the day. Perhaps his strains are part of the political schizophrenia of the age.....where only absurdist irony explains anything.
I suppose we must all be chastened by the “realities” of 50’s and 60’s America...when the Soviets seemed to be eating our lunch, launching into space before us and purportedly free of poverty and racism. When Nikita pounded his poorly made shoe on the Kitchen Counter, an awful lot of people thought it just may be credible. Many here actually hoped it was.
I can tell you that my feelings for the Soviets were crystalized as I participated in the Nuclear Attack Drills of good old Horace Mann School, where they had a beehive farm at the main hall window to condition us to hive life. Being 8 years old and filing down to the basement to think about bombs raining down and our own little Hiroshima....it was an odd thing. At that time, Soviet Socialism seemed to be something that would always be there.
Perhaps it is a lesson for today regarding terrorism because left to it’s own devices, terrorism, like Soviet Socialism will consume itself. It punishes most, those who it claims to represent. Before the Iraq War, moderate elements in Iran were gaining momentum. Our belligerence begets theirs.
The fearsome thing here is that after ‘defeating Soviet Socialism, we became something like them and so one wonders how much like the terrorists we will become. It seems obvious already. No good will come of it.
Osama, a product of the international Oligarchy, fed by us, nurtured in the Cold War and immersed in the Royal Saudi Family’s favorite factory of diversions, Wahabbism and therefor part of the great ongoing hoax on his society’s underclass.....He is a Hollywood protagonist for this President of ours, another scion of the industrial oligarchy, molded by the Cold War, cosseted by elitism but claiming to be a “reglar guy “ and part of the under and middle class which is experiencing their own great hoax by his policies.......There is such root tradition, simplicity, symmetry and purity of narrative as to make it a story straight out of antiquity. Unfortunately, our Greek Chorus is a media that appears to be comprised of Touretic Hair Triggers whose favorite theme is rent garments and the occasional Starlet Melt Down.
Tremendous summary Raimondo.........the narrative is re-growing, if slowly and perhaps, a tad late.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Dirk W. Sabin: I don’t follow Buckley too closely these days, but I understand that he has stated publicly that the Iraq war was a mistake and he certainly doesn’t seem to be much of a voice of belligerence--neocon or otherwise-- these days (perhaps in his case with old age comes wisdom). I also understand that Dr. Paul has some open supporters at NR, particularly John Derbyshire. And even Lowry and Goldberg, who are the most neocon of the bunch, seem to be taking steps (however small) in our direction.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I thought Ledeen, Rubin, Victor David Hanson, Frum and the like were the biggest neocons at National Review.
I completely agreed with your post beforehand though GM. Dirk Sabin is spot on too.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Lowry and Goldberg are fair weather friends of Republican politicians. They have shifted allegiance from Giuliani to Romney and from Romney to McCain within a year.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid Cundiff’s obsession with “purging” the conservative movement reminds me of Trotsky wanting to “purge” the communist movement to make it pure. But then again, Sid is no real conservative.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Martin: Well, to clarify, I view NR as something of a bellwether of establishment right opinion, and there do seem to be some factional splits at the magazine that have developed. I do agree with you that Ledeen, Rubin, Victor David Hanson, Frum are hard core, totally nuts neocons, but, at the same time, John Derbyshire and some others at the magazine appear support Dr. Paul’s campaign which is a development of considerable note. Goldberg and Lowry are also big neocons, but from what I know of their writings they aren’t as militant as Ledeen, Rubin, Victor David Hanson, or Frum (though I admit I may be wrong on this point). Perhaps, if they use their brains a little more, they could come to a paleo-viewpoint. As for Buckley, his coming out against the Iraq war is definitely a positive, anti-neocon step in the right direction for him and the magazine. I haven’t read a lot of his more recent writings so I don’t know to what extent he still buys into the neocon viewpoint. If he is still supports ill conceived wars for empire, at least he is fairly quiet about it.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Excellent article as always, but one small point: L. Brent Bozell was WFB’s brother-in-law. His son, Brent Bozell III, is WFB’s nephew and the head of the Media Research Center.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Nice series of well written articles Justin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ennyhoo, the right is just as mucked up, apparently, as the left and I find no real solace with either party. I see all this talk of Hitler, the left, Stalin, the Right, Spinosa, Marx, Strauss, Rand, Hayek and on and on. I scoff at such educated hermaneutics meant to bamboozle an otherwise intelligent hoi polloi.
Our so called public servants, these scoundrels, have become rogue elements in our own home and like a computer trojan have more control than its rightful owners. They gleefully rob us blind, slowly, to keep us in debt, while daring us to do anything about it with the help of their media cohorts, many of which truly have no idea what tools they are. Crowing craniums on the teevee do not mock one party or the other, they mock all of us.
The cure does not lie in the bamboozled owners bashing one another for the actions of their rogue servants. After all, what good does it do for me to go over to your house and bash you for the actions of your servant in cahoots with mine while parroting the latest obfuscative bloviations from a media pundit?
Sadly, I fear the only thing to stop the servants from their porking and pillaging is their own actions or the fall of their corrupt empire.
I hope its a soft landing.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
All,
I guess this is my punishment for dabbling in some really strange stuff. I try to lead an insurgency against the neo-cons and instead I get stuck with a bunch of lunatics who probably still have copies of my old newsletters under their mattresses.
What was I thinking? That America was worth saving, I guess, but after reading some of this, I’m ready to hang it up and pass the baton (and most of the 20 million I raised) to someone who can lead the charge without attracting so many refugees from the fever swamps.
Who can step up and raise the banner? Who would want to?
Sincerely,
Ron Paul
PS
Remove my signs from your lawns.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
1. Paul: I agree that there are conflicts between the Jeffersonian/Libertarian
and the Catholic Christian. The case was well stated in Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society, one of our basic documents.
So we work with them in common causes.
2. “Nigel” is no real (Tory) conservative. I’ve made it plain that my ideology is mostly identical with Burke, Kirk, T.S. Eliot, and Leo XIII; with a little Filmer thrown in. “Nigel” should tell us from whom he’s getting his ideas: Giovanni Gentile? Alfred Rosenberg? No conservatives they!
3. It is clear that “Ron Paul” above is fake, and I ask the Editor to oblige the writebacker use another name. Should the writebacker refuse, his writeback ought be removed.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Mr Raimondo, I think Rothbard would be pleased with the populist rebellion against the Establishment. If I were him I’d be worried that the rebellion ends with this election season. The War Party is doing everything it can to break the American populist spirit and snuff it out.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I think Mr. Buckley has handed off the baton and is attempting to enjoy is semi-retirement ...as well he should. NR still publishes some of his work but the majority appear to me to be steadfast adherents to this Bolsheviki neo-conism that has utterly wasted the moment we have just gone through.
While both Cato and NR publish some traditional laissez faire Republican writers, the majority are still enraptured by Big Government Conservatism. I suppose this is to be expected when Sovietism has gripped Washington like a bunch of chiggers on a Delta Hound dog.
Whoever derided the urges to “Purge” is spot on. Cultural Marxism and lockstep have gotten us into the mess and babble we inhabit. Frightened people always abjure dissent, particularly when they do not trust their own strength or when they know their actions are in opposition to the strong egalitarianism of our foundational theory.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid,
It’s funny that you mentioned Eliot’s essay “The Idea of a Christian Society”. I picked the book ("Christianity and Culture”, which features another essay “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture") the other day in my library as I had never read it before. Now that you mentioned it as a standard of Toryism I’m even more curious to read it.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
geez sid you really think that post wasn’t by ron paul? wow, you are a genius. yea, many people post anonymously using proxy servers
like this one: http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html
so that they cannot be harassed by leftists like you.
regarding eliot i especially like his articles in the 1930s french journals where he argues that the white race is by far the most advanced.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
That makes you a racist by all acounts, sir elliot wheeton. Aren’t ashamed of yourself?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
If anyone thinks that Eliot was a “race denier” I suggest you read Eliot’s poem “How I Set the N****r Free.”
I think Sid should purge any mention of Eliot from this site. It is obvious that Eliot did not conform to liberal thought. If anyone mentions Eliot’s name, he should be permanently banned from this site.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Paul:
Take a look at The Idea of a Christian Society. Eliot still had some things to learn about the Nazis, but the essay otherwise could almost serve as our party platform, or at least the ideal upon which other societies are to be measured.
Note that when he speaks of “liberalism”, he means what Europeans mean by that term: The Whig tradition. Europeans, I think mistakenly, have a tendency to call libertarians “Ultraliberals”.
What Americans call “liberals” Europeans, correctly call “Social Democrats”.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid,
Sure I will take a look at Eliot’s book. I don’t like his poetry much (what a heresy!) but his essays are brilliant and I’m curious about his writings on christianity. It’s funny he never converted to catholicism in a time when the best and most brilliant minds of England were adhering to the Catholic Faith. Jacques Maritain said Eliot would never convert because he had “exhausted his capacity for conversion when he became an Englishman”. I wonder if becoming an Englishman is so exhausting a conversion as Maritain want us to believe ...
Click to flag this comment as abusive
<<I wonder if becoming an Englishman is so exhausting a conversion as Maritain want us to believe ...>>
I don’t believe one can “convert” into an English Catholic...that is one of those things you simply are or are not. For example, GK Chesterton was an Englishman, all he had to do was become a Catholic. Only one step is possible; although it just might be possible to be a Catholic convert that becomes an Englishman, but even then you’d never be an English Catholic, simply a Catholic Englishman, if that makes any sense.
Perhaps TS Eliot considered the papacy much to counter-Revolutionary for his Englishness, and his English Revolutionary Protestantism held sway over his heart. I’ll pray my beads for the repose of his soul tomorrow, pray his Purgatory is gentle…
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I had a very enlightening discussion with a educated and articulate English Catholic exactly one year ago about why Eliot and Lewis never became Catholics of the Roman Rite. When I ventured the view that they were swayed by anti-Irish feeling (Eliot’s “Sweeney” and Lewis’ Orangeman ancestry), he said this wasn’t the case. At the risk of my misquoting him: he said that Lewis and Eliot wanted to be “in the faculty club”, and at that time Catholics were still outsiders. This argument rings persuasive. Chesterton and Waugh scorned “the club”, each in his own way. I can’t speak about Tolkien.
Can the same be said of the Anglo-Catholic Charles Williams? Did he want to stay “in the club”? In fact are there any Anglo-Catholics left at all? (not the same as “High Church") Can a Tory conservative (lower case “c") be today anything other than RC? Roger Scruton, are you out there?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid, nice to hear your acquaintance’s view on Eliot’s reluctance to convert. The “faculty club” thesis may be persuasive but it’s a bit diminishing of Eliot’s intellectual integrity. I’d rather think that Chesterton converted because he felt it was the right thing rather than suppose he didn’t bother with the faculty career. And I’d rather think Eliot had a more subtle and spiritual reason not to follow his fellow British intellectuals.
By the way, since you mentioned Roger Scruton, I always wondered what faith he professes and if he’s not Catholic, how come such a man, so intelligent and learned, never converted. He’s the very reason of my being a conservative today (after reading “Thinkers of the New Left")and would like to know he admitted (at last) to the superiority of the Catholic Church.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Have you ever seen the statistical percentage of Alabama citizens
that fill the ranks of the military? No other State comes close.
The guilt trip is over! The internet has provided the Southern
culture with enough true information to ask the question,
“Why the fuck are we dieing for a government that ruined our culture?”
Canon fodder from Dixie to impress Globalist Northeasterners
has now become a waste of time and treasure. We will now educate our children and grandchildren about the truth, regarding “Leviathan”, inorder for
them to see the NATION in it’s true image. Vicksburg Mississippi,
was correct in not recognizing the “4th Of July” again untill
1944, and from now on out Southern Infants will understand why!
There WILL come a day when Dixie’s response to “Leviathans”
imperialistic ambitions will be met with, “Screw You! Send your Harvard think tanks to die for your GLOBALISM!.....We owe you Nothing!”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Scruton has written with feeling about how he almost became Catholic during visits to pre-1989 Poland. If memory serves right, it’s in his Gentle Regrets. I regard him the premier Tory intellectual of our day. I wish he’d write for this site!
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid: I like some things about Scruton, but he has written articles in favor of the war in Iraq. If memory serves, he wrote an article in the New Criterion calling for the complete democratization of the Middle East. Tories are dead. Cameron (pro-EU, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-multiculturalism, pro-immigraiton) is a joke. All the (real) conservatives I know in the UK are now voting BNP or UKIP. The last true Tory was Enoch Powell.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
John McCain was racist in the SC debate, read it here:
http://www.nolanchart.com/article1084.html
Unfortunately it took segregationist Governor Wallace to reveal the truth that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between” Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats willingly went along with the War in Iraq, suspension of Habeas Corpus, detaining protesters, banning books like “America Deceived’ from Amazon, stealing private lands (Kelo decision), warrant-less wiretapping and refusing to investigate 9/11 properly. They are both guilty of treason.
Support Dr. Ron Paul and save this great nation.
Last link (before Google Books bends to gov’t Will and drops the title):
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-38523-0
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Too much is made of the “they sacrificed everything for anti-communism” bit. By the late 60s at the latest these foreign crusades were more of a refuge for defeated back home conservatives than anything else, just as they are today. They didn’t drive the destruction of conservative principles as much as they were a product of that destruction.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.