Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: A Response to John Ross Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_response_to_john_ross#8644 Post contents: 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. Sent at: 2008 09 06