Since the debate about Lincoln seems to be winding on and on, I’m adding this comment concerning the material I inserted yesterday as a blog. As far as I can recall, no paleo I’ve known had a particularly favorable view of Lincoln as a statesman, although by no means all of them shared the demonic picture M.E.Bradford drew of him in his occasional writings. Surprisingly, Bradford’s mentor Richard Weaver had expressed a more positive view of Lincoln as an orator from the one associated with Mel.  The picture of Lincoln that emerges from Jaffa, DiLorenzo, and all neocon scribblers is mostly a product of the post-World War Two era; although it could be found intermittently in The New Republic going back to Herbert Croly and the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, it reflects the intertwining iconographies of the 1950s produced by mainstream liberal historians. The most ambitious prefiguring of this view of heroic global democratic statesmen is presented in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (1946), which sets up a series of presidential heroes and anti-heroes going from Lincoln through Wilson to FDR. Schlesinger’s villains at home and abroad are those whom his giants of the egalitarian spirits were destined to war down; and they are identified with fascism and/or linked to the enemies of human Progress. This is obviously the same pseudo-history that the neocons have been producing, and it is also the pseudo-history that our guys are trying discredit, while sometimes absorbing big gobs of the Left’s narrative. Without having to endorse the “statesmanship” of Lincoln, which I agree was probably disastrous, there is no reason to treat him as a precursor of Wilson or to present the Civil War as a precedent for Wilson’s Crusade for Democracy. Almost the entire white South endorsed Wilson’s foreign policy, while his isolationist critics often had Lincoln hagiography on their walls. It was in fact the sons and grandsons of Confederate officers, starting with the then occupant of the White House, who helped thrust our country into the Great War. Lincoln Republicans were far less guilty for this misdeed.

Matthew Roberts may be correct that Chuck Baldwin and his Constitution Party represent the Right in a paradigmatic sense, but what is less demonstrable is whether it would pay for readers of this website to vote for Baldwin as a presidential candidate. The point to be stressed is that our side will not be able to elect a candidate this year, which is being politically dominated by the neocon and liberal Left. The best we can reasonably hope to do is make a statement that the media will have to notice. This would only be possible if we could get behind a presidential candidate who is likely to poll a substantial number of votes. The Pennsylvania primaries indicated how large this number may have to be. Although Ron Paul received 16% in the Republican race here, the media carefully concealed these startling results. I say “startling” not only because Congressman Paul had by then left the race but also because the neocon propaganda apparatus had pulled out all stops to get captive minds to register as Democrats, in order to vote for the “pro-Israeli” Hillary against the “pro-Palestinian” Obama.
Clearly the best outcome in this year of poor choices would be if the neocon mouthpiece McCain went down to an ignominious defeat. But this would only be useful if his rightwing opposition contributed significantly to this outcome.  Since the political-media establishment has no interest in reminding the public that McCain faces non-authorized opposition (except for isolated weirdoes) on the right, it would be necessary to find a candidate, who is both identifiably rightwing and who can poll large numbers of votes. The CP meets the first test, but it has failed repeatedly on the second.  Moreover, there is no reason to assume that it would do better this year than in the past, when its portion of the national vote was well under 1%. 

The latest issue of The American Conservative (April 21, 2008) contains a noteworthy review by Tom Piatak of Sidney Blumenthal’s The Strange Death of Republican America, a screed produced from a partisan Democratic and socially leftist perspective which would not be worth mentioning , save for Tom’s incisive observations. Tom notes the fact that Blumenthal’s invectives against the neocons involve linking them to social traditionalists. Clearly Sid Poison and his buddies are not waiting to jump over to our side in a grand alliance against saber-rattling neocon. The neocons and the liberal Left share common ground; and this situation is not likely to change because of the Bush or McCain foreign policy. It is our guys, far more than the neocons, who embody the “right-wing authoritarianism” and “intolerant identity politics” that Blumenthal detests. Tom’s concluding advice is worth taking to heart: “There must be a way out of the morass of contemporary American politics, where voters are offered the unappealing choice between a neocon-dominated GOP and a Democratic Party in thrall to the social radicalism of the 1960s.” But the options that are open to our side do not include marching arm in arm with the social Left: “trying to construct an alliance between disenchanted conservatives and leftists who think as Blumenthal does will not work.”

In preparing my comments on William F. Buckley posted this morning, I was unaware that another detailed obituary about my subject came out yesterday on www.lewrockwell.com by my close friend and the distinguished linguistic philosopher David Gordon. All readers of this website are urged to look at Dr. Gordon’s heavily documented discussion of Bill Buckley’s “tergiversations,” which is the result of investigation carried out quite independently of mine. This commentary pays special attention to Buckley’s attack on the author’s mentor, Murray Rothbard, an invective that David, who was an admirer but not a slavish devotee of Murray’s, shows was totally baseless.  Even more significantly, however, he fully acknowledges Buckley’s wit and charm and, above all, the mark that he left on American letters as a gifted polemicist. To those who have asked me whether I really looked up to this onetime luminary as a brilliant writer, the answer is an unequivocal “yes.”