August 30, 2021
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
The Unwanted Southern
Conservatives
Friends,
No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to what is termed broadly the “American conservative movement” would be complete without an examination of events that have transpired over the past fifty or so years and the pivotal role of the powerful intellectual current known as neoconservatism.
From the 1950s into the 1980s Southerners who defended the traditions of the South, and even more so, of the Confederacy, were welcomed as allies and confreres by their Northern and Western counterparts. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and Dr. Russell Kirk’s Modern Age, perhaps the two leading conservative journals of the period, welcomed Southerners into the “movement” and onto the pages of those organs of conservative thought. Kirk dedicated an entire issue of Modern Age to the South and its traditions (Fall issue, 1958), and explicitly supported its historic defense of the originalist constitutionalism of the Framers. And throughout the critical period that saw the enactment of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Buckley’s magazine defended the “Southern position,” arguing forcefully on constitutional grounds that the proposed legislation would undercut not just the guaranteed rights of the states but also the protected rights of citizens. Southern authors like Mel Bradford, Richard Weaver, Clyde Wilson, Tom Landess, and James J. Kilpatrick lent their intelligence, skill as writers, and arguments to a defense of the South.
Yet by the 1990s, that “Southern voice” had pretty much been exiled—expelled—from major establishment conservative journals. Indeed, friendly writers from outside the South, but who were identified with what became known as the Old (or Paleo) Right, that is, the non-neoconservative “Right,” were also soon purged from the mastheads of the conservative “mainstream” organs of opinion: noted authors such as Joe Sobran (from National Review), Sam Francis (from The Washington Times), Paul Gottfried (from Modern Age) and others were soon shown the door.
Perhaps the first major example of this critical process came in early 1981, after the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Conservative Republican stalwarts Senators Jesse Helms and John East, both from North Carolina, joined by Democrat Howell Heflin of Alabama, lobbied hard for the nomination of the distinguished Southern scholar, Mel Bradford, to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bradford was originally tapped for the position by Reagan.
According to intellectual historian David Gordon, Reagan’s wish “to elevate [Bradford] to the prestigious post did not stem solely from Bradford's academic credentials. The president and he were acquaintances, and he had worked hard in Reagan's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Influential conservatives such as Russell Kirk and Senator Jesse Helms also knew and admired Bradford."(1) But the selection met with strong opposition from various neoconservative writers and pundits, including syndicated columnist George Will and prominent figures like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who objected strongly to Bradford's criticisms of Abraham Lincoln. They circulated to the press and to Republican political leaders quotes from Bradford characterizing Lincoln as "a dangerous man” and "indeed almost sinister." He was even accused of comparing Lincoln to Hitler. More, Bradford's support for the 1972 presidential campaign of Governor George C. Wallace was brought up negatively. In the end, it was neoconservative choice, William Bennett, who was selected for the post later in 1981. (2)
What had happened? How had the movement that began with such promise in the 1950s, essentially with the publication of Kirk’s seminal volume, The Conservative Mind (1953), descended into internecine purges, excommunications, and the sometimes brutal triumph of those who only a few years earlier had shown links to the Marxist Left?
To address this question we must first examine the history of the non-Stalinist Left in the United States before and after World War II. And we need to pinpoint significant differences between neoconservatives who made the pilgrimage from the Left into the conservative movement, and those more traditional conservatives, whose basic beliefs and philosophy were at odds with those of the newcomers. As a mostly neglected but useful source of information, we might look at a long list of critical interpreters of American conservatism, starting with Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and Mel Bradford, and continuing through Paul Gottfried, Gary Dorrien (The Neoconservative Mind, 1993), and Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke (America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, 2004). I also bring in my own experience as a witness to the transformation under discussion. That transformation saw the triumph of a pattern of thinking that went back to only partially recovered onetime adherents of certain deviationist forms of Marxist Leninism.
The complex history of that ideology
and, in particular, of the aggravated differences between developing factions
in the dominant power structure in Russia would have profound effects on the
Communist movement in the United States. After the death in 1924 of the leader
of the newly-formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Vladimir Lenin,
a political struggle between the two major leaders who emerged, Joseph Stalin
and Leon Trotsky, revealed the fissures in Marxist Leninist theory and
practice. While both men had served the Communist revolution in Russia,
1918-1921, Trotsky advanced a Marxist Leninist position that would stress
global proletarian revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on
working class self-emancipation, and a form of mass (workers’) democracy.
Unlike the Stalinist position which posited the establishment of “socialism in
one country” as a prerequisite for furthering the socialist cause elsewhere,
Trotsky advanced the theory of “permanent revolution” among the working class.
Trotsky’s desired that revolution would be worldwide and pay homage to
“democracy.” This would set it apart from Stalin’s more insular emphasis on
Russian geopolitical interests.(3)
In the United States, the prominent
American Marxist Jay Lovestone (born Jacob Liebstein, of Jewish parentage, in
what is now Lithuania) would play a pivotal role not only in the early history
of the Communist Party USA, but also in the eventual emergence of what is now
known as neoconservatism. (4)
Lovestone’s allegiances were with the Trotsky and another adversary of
Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin. Their faction of Communism stressed internationalism,
workers’ revolution, and opposition to what was perceived as the overly
bureaucratic concentration of power in the hands of high party members. (5)
Eventually expelled
from the Communist Party in 1929, Lovestone began a pilgrimage to the Right
that brought him finally into the ranks of fierce anti-Communist union
activities and eventually counter-espionage action on behalf of the CIA. Thus
the title of Ted Morgan’s exhaustive biography, Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, Spymaster (1999), which
chronicles his subject’s intellectual journey, and also indicates a direction
taken by other American Marxists, beginning in the late 1930s and continuing
until their entry into the ranks of staunch anti-Communist movement
conservatism in the 1970s.
Indeed, the final breaking point for
many of those Marxists who would within a few decades gain a foothold in the
American conservative movement probably came with the recrudescence of anti-Semitism under
Stalin in post-World War II Russia (e.g., the infamous “doctors’ plot”). Horrified and disillusioned by the further
derailment of the socialist revolution, these “pilgrims from the Communist
Left”—who were largely Jewish in origin—moved toward an explicit
anti-Communism. Notable among them were Podhoretz and Kristol, both of whom had
sons who would figure prominently in the current neoconservative establishment.
Embraced by an older generation of
conservatives, and invited to write for conservative publications, the
neoconservatives soon began to occupy positions of leadership and importance.
More significantly they changed views associated with the older movement to
mirror their own vision. For even though shell-shocked by the effects of Soviet
Communism, they nevertheless brought with them a world view drawn from the
Left. And they brought with them relentless zeal for furthering this worldview.
A remarkable admission of this
genealogy came in 2007, in the pages of NationalReviewOnline.
Here one finds the expression of sympathies clearly imported from the onetime
far Left and presented in a onetime Old Right publication. As
explained by the contributor Stephen Schwartz:
“To my last breath, I will defend Trotsky who
alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in his own blood
in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling to
Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic,
and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the imposition
of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my
last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and Stalinists in their
second childhood make of it what they will.” (6)
Integral to their quest for power
within the conservative movement, members of the conservative “new class” were
also motivated by a strong desire for professional advancement. This too made
it necessary that older, more traditional conservatives give way. Although not
a Southerner (albeit sympathetic to Southern conservatives), the respected Old
Right scholar Paul Gottfried is a case in point. Advanced by the relevant
departments as a candidate for a chair in the humanities at the Catholic
University of America, he saw his nomination, like that of Bradford, torpedoed
by massive neoconservative intervention. This may have occurred, he
subsequently learned, because his neoconservative opponents had someone else in
mind for the position that he had sought and was on the point of obtaining.
By the late 1990s the neoconservatives
had taken over most of the major conservative organs of opinion, journals, and
think-tanks. They also, significantly, exercised tremendous influence
politically in the Republican Party (and to some degree within the Democratic
Party, at least during the presidency of Bill Clinton). Irving Kristol, one of
the intellectual godfathers of neoconservatism, carefully distinguished his
doctrine from traditional conservatism. It was “forward-looking” and progressive in its attitude toward social
issues like civil rights, rather than reactionary like the earlier
conservatism. Its adherents rejoiced over the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s,
unlike Buckley’s National Review at
the time. Neoconservatives were also favorable to the efforts to legislate more
equality for women and for other groups who they felt had hitherto been kept
from realizing the American Dream.
Rather
than simply attacking state power or advocating a return to states’ rights, the
new conservatives, according to Kristol, hoped to build on the existing federal
administration. They believed that the promise of equality, which
neoconservatives found in the Declaration of Independence, had to be promoted
at home and abroad, and American conservatives, they preached, must lead the
efforts to achieve global democracy, as opposed to the illogical and
destructive efforts of the hard Left, or the reactionary stance of the Old
Right. (7) It goes without saying that this neoconservative vision
would clash glaringly with traditional Southern conservatism and its
foundational principle of states’ rights and opposition to what was perceived
to be government social engineering.
Neoconservative rhetoric and
initiatives did not go unopposed in the ranks of more traditional conservatives.
Indeed, no less than the “father” of the conservative intellectual movement of
the 1950s, Russell Kirk, publicly denounced the neoconservatives in the 1980s.
Singling out the Jewish intellectual genealogy of major neoconservative
writers, Kirk boldly declared in 1988: "Not seldom has it seemed as if some
eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United
States." (8) Kirk’s resistance, and the warnings of Paul
Gottfried, Sam Francis, Patrick Buchanan and others of like mind emphasized the
sharp differences between the Old Right and the ascending neoconservatives.
From the perspective of the Old Right
the neoconservatives were “unpatriotic” in the sense that they placed their
globalist values of equality and liberal democracy above their allegiance to
any historic nation. Indeed they converted their bizarre nationalism into a
kind of world faith. According to this post-Christian faith, America was the
“exceptional nation,” which held a duty to go round the world and impose its vision,
as articulated by neoconservatives, on unenlightened countries. The term
“American exceptionalism” enjoyed favor with Lovestone and his break-away,
radical socialists. These partisans insisted that the United States existed
independently of the otherwise ironclad Marxist laws of history because of its
economic abundance and the lack of rigid class distinctions in our society. Lovestone and his followers believed
that the strength of a self-reforming American
capitalism rendered unnecessary a Communist revolution. America was uniquely
open to gradualist approaches for righting social and racial inequalities. (9)
As the former Marxists made their trek
rightward more than a half century ago, the linguistic template and ideas
associated with “American exceptionalism” were deployed to signify the
universal superiority of their conception of the American experience. Further,
these retread Marxists read their conception of a reformed and crusading
American democracy back into the American Founding. For example, a
neoconservative favored political thinker Allan Bloom offers this opinion in The Closing of the American Mind: “And
when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of
freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere
applicable.” Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to
force those who do not accept these principles to do so.” (10)
Although the two groups may seem at
times in major disagreement, both the multicultural Left and the
neoconservative Right share a basic commitment to certain ideas and tropes.
Both use comparable phraseology—about “equality” and “democracy,” “human
rights” and “freedom,” and the desirability of exporting “our values.” Despite
this overlap, both the dominant Left and the neoconservative Right will try to
give their discrete meanings to the foundational doctrine of equality that the
two sides share with equal enthusiasm
In their defense of the civil rights
legislation of the 1960s and their advocacy of moderate feminism and equal
rights for women (now extended to same sex marriage and even transgenderism), the
neoconservatives mirror the political stances of the Left. They also seem to
agree with the Left’s overarching premises while also criticizing the Left for
being excessive in how they implement their policies. Thus we have such
neoconservative notables as Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, George Will, Guy
Benson, and others essentially endorsing same sex marriage and wishing to
accommodate transgenderism but also insisting that they are moderate
“conservatives” who are recognized by reasonable liberals as such. (11)
From the showcasing of such figures one
gains the impression that the most recent reversal of traditional moral
standards—same sex marriage, or transgenderism—is actually conservative.
Or, in foreign policy that it is critically necessary to send American soldiers
to fight in faraway jungles or deserts to establish democracy, in effect, to
prevent one group of rebels in a Asia or Africa from killing off another group
of rebels in that territory—that other group being willing to do the bidding
economically and politically of the United States. This crusade takes place
supposedly in the name of spreading global equality and freedom and other
benefits of American democracy.
Not
surprisingly, the Southern conservative historian Mel Bradford stressed the incompatibility
of the neoconservative vision with the older republican constitutionalism of
the Founders and Framers. According to Bradford, our old republic was not
founded on abstractions about equality or democracy, or on some imperative to
impose our democracy on the rest of the world.(12) We were not intended to be
“the model for the rest of the world,” to paraphrase Allan Bloom. Those notions
in the case of the neoconservatives were a hangover from their immersion in a
universalism that owed its origin to the radical Left. Traditional Southerners
by contrast regarded as the basis for their unity, kinship and blood, an
attachment to community and the land. Moreover, both states’ rights and a
central religious core annealed the older republican tradition as understood by
Southern traditionalists.
Understanding the old republican
legacy, as interpreted by Bradford and likeminded Southerners, is essential for
differentiating Southern traditional conservatism from the neoconservative
vision. North Carolinian Richard Weaver aptly described the society created in
the Old South, a century before the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, as one based on a communal or “social bond”
individualism.(13) By that Weaver meant
that colonists from Europe brought with them to the South a community-oriented
individualism which offered enumerated liberties and autarky to each of its
members within the parameters of a hierarchical society anchored in commonly
accepted traditions.
Settlers on America’s Southern shores,
according to Southern conservatives, were not seeking to create an “exceptional
nation” dedicated to spreading the gospel of equality and democracy. They were
only trying to preserve the order in which they already lived. Paramount for
Southerners was the defense of localism and co-existing with other communities
and states within a federalized union. According to this Southern conservative
understanding of American history, the Northern victory in 1865 overthrew the
original republic and paved the way for the present-day success of what the
late author Sam Francis called the managerial state…and what we now
characterize as the Deep State.
In the so-called “conservative wars” of the 1970s
and 1980s Southern conservatism found itself fighting side-by-side with a
dwindling contingent of the Old Right. That was understandable, seeing that the
Old Right treated the South and even the Confederacy with some sympathy. By
contrast, the neoconservatives never hid their contempt for the white South as
a quagmire of reaction and racist attitudes. This now supposed linkage between
the white South and reactionary bigotry was reflected in the recent efforts of
neoconservative TV celebrity Ben Shapiro to defame conservative Republican
candidate Corey Stewart in the Virginia Republican primary for the US Senate.
Not only did Stewart’s support for Confederate heritage become a negative issue
for Shapiro and other neoconservatives, he also made much of the fact that
Stewart at one time associated with a former congressional candidate, Paul
Nehlen, who later made statements that some observers characterized as
anti-Semitic. (14) The tarring of Stewart through guilt by association with
someone’s hypothetical anti-Semitism followed a customary neoconservative
script. Southern whites who stray to the Right of the neoconservatives are
pummeled with charges of racism and anti-Semitism.
Neoconservative
historian and Fox News media star, Victor Davis Hanson, also can’t quite master
his hatred of Southern white society. In a critique of Massachusetts Senator
Elizabeth Warren for her insistence on her claimed remote Native American
ancestry, Hanson compared modern hard core Leftists to Southerners on the eve
of war in 1861. He predictably dredged up images of Southern white racism,
accusing Warren of “harkening back to the old South’s ‘one drop rule’ of
‘invisible blackness.’ Supposedly any proof of sub-Saharan ancestry, even one
drop of ‘black blood,’ made one black and therefore subject to second-class
citizenship.” Further: “The yellow star rectifies
this strange situation in which one human group that is radically opposed to
the people of white blood, and which for eternity is unassimilable to this
blood, cannot be identified at first glance.” Hanson’s linkage between Nazis
and traditional Southern conservatives was unmistakable but also unlikely to
render him unpopular with his equally bigoted sponsors. (15)
It may be relevant to
mention that neoconservative revulsion for white Southerners of a
traditionalist persuasion does not seem to be grounded in an unforgiving
attitude toward the South for having once practiced slavery and segregation. As
Gary Dorrien and other historians have noted about the origins of
neoconservatism, a strong identification of this movement with the civil rights
revolution came mostly long after the event.(16) In the 1970s neoconservative
authors were openly critical of black civil rights leaders for opposing Jewish
public educators in New York City and for failing to support Israel. It was the
campaign to unseat the Southern conservative Mel Bradford for the directorship
of the NEH in 1981 that turned neoconservative journalists into raging enemies
of supposed Southern bigotry. This emotion was not however entirely feigned.
Neoconservatives have fairly consistently associated the white South with
anti-Jewish prejudice; and the invective they unleashed on Bradford may well
have been motivated by hostility to someone whom they saw as culturally
different from and possibly hostile to their own Jewish subgroup.
Given their
profound repugnance for defenders of the white South, it seems unlikely that
establishment conservatives would be welcoming them back into their movement
very soon. But other developments occurred that suggest that such a welcome
would be unnecessary. With the Civil Rights
revolution and the subsequent abandoning of the South by the Democratic Party,
a change took place in political party identification in the former
Confederacy. From the mid-twentieth century when figures such as Senators Harry
Byrd Sr. of Virginia, Richard Russell of Georgia, and Sam Ervin of North
Carolina—all Southern Democrats—defined Southern conservative politics, the
political leadership of the South has undergone transformation.
Ervin is now remembered
mostly as the “Watergate senator” who helped bring down Richard Nixon. A Bible-quoting, story-telling, and well-educated,
conservative Democrat who rose to become North Carolina’s senior US senator,
“Senator Sam” was an archetypal traditional Southern conservative. His speeches
on the Constitution and his autobiography, Preserving the Constitution: The
Autobiography of Senator Sam J. Ervin (1984), are like a journey back
into the mind of the Framers. Ervin defended an American republic and American
society that have all but vanished. As a leader of the opposition to the Civil
Rights bills of the 1960s he warned against the long-range consequences of federal
overreach. Ervin upheld strict-constructionism, and his understanding of
states’ rights as an effort to create a bulwark against the modern
social-engineering state. His strictures against the Watergate break-in were
also directed against the same target, unchecked centralized government. (17)
Ironically, despite its Northern and Jewish roots,
neoconservatism gained adherents in the states of the old Confederacy and today
seems to dominate Southern Republican politics.
In this it was aided by favorable conservative
media, and, in particular, by the generally neoconservative-oriented Fox News
Channel. This network offers neoconservative views on a wide range of themes,
from American intervention in Syria or Afghanistan and an often awkward
outreach to racial minorities, to militantly pro-Likud policies for the Middle
East.
Although
some political leaders in the South continue to claim the conservative mantle,
they stand worlds apart from men like Ervin, Jesse Helms and Harry Byrd. A
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, demonstrates
the influence of the pervasive neoconservative narrative. Like many other
Southern solons in Washington, such Republicans have advocated vigorous
American intervention across the globe and accept the enunciated tenets of an
American exceptionalism that would, in effect, impose American-style democracy
and equality on nations that appear backward or “undemocratic.” Southern
political leaders who are sometimes ranked as “conservatives” also affirm such
once-taboo practices as same sex marriage, couching their acceptance as a
matter of individual choice. In June 2015, after the Supreme Court rendered its
Obergefell vs. Hodges decision, Senator Graham announced that he no longer
favored a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one
woman because it might hurt the Republican brand among independents and
millennial voters: “…no, I would not
engage in the Constitutional amendment process as a party going into 2016.
Accept the Court’s ruling.”(18)
Graham also
joined South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley and other political and
cultural leaders in calling for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from
the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol. This came after the shooting
in a black church in Charleston in 2015 by a lone gunman who displayed
Confederate iconography.(19) The connection between the flag on the capitol
grounds and the shooter was tenuous at best, but it afforded the occasion for
nervous Southern politicians to discard an indelible image of Southern heritage
identified by the media as a hate symbol. The position taken by many Southern
Republican politicians was one more reminder of the difference between
traditional Southern conservatives and their putative newer incarnations.
Neoconservatives have also enjoyed
success in bringing over to their side Southern Evangelicals. Neoconservative
positions have often dovetailed with those of Southerners who profess
Dispensationalism or “end times theology,” in which the modern State of Israel
is seen to possess the divine mandate given to Israel of the Old
Testament. Perhaps most notable here has
been Pastor John Hagee, Pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, with
his international media network.(20) Hagee’s
role and activities are similar to those of other church figures, and their
influence among Southern Evangelicals is significant. Because of their
unswerving theological devotion to the Israeli state and its policies, these
advocates and their followers have been open to neoconservative influence
generally.
Among traditionally conservative Southern Baptists,
moreover, there has been a tendency to adapt to the leftward drifting media. A
notable example can be found in the reaction to the violent confrontation
between demonstrators from the militant Left and militant Right that occurred
in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. A scheduled march by various
partisans in defense of a threatened monument to General Robert E. Lee
was met by counter-protesters from Black Lives Matter, the Antifa movement, and
others on the Left. One counter-protester was killed in the resulting
melee’. The media denounced only the
right-wing “extremist” demonstrators but avoided mentioning the complicity of
the Left in the violence that erupted.(21)
Whereupon a group of Evangelical Protestant leaders announced
the formation of a group, “Unifying Leadership,” and sent an “Open Letter” to
President Donald Trump. Spearheaded by such prominent Southern Baptists as Dr. Steve
Gaines, President of the Southern Baptist Convention; Danny Akin, President of
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and
Baptist social activist Russell Moore, the group urged President Trump to
denounce the “Alt-Right” movement and “white nationalism.” (Trump had
previously condemned provocateurs on both
sides at Charlottesville, an act that raised the hackles of the Washington
establishment and prominent neoconservatives.)
The signers also asked the president to “join with many other
political and religious leaders to proclaim with one voice that the ‘alt-right’
is racist, evil, and antithetical to a well-ordered, peaceful society.” Other
leaders of American Evangelical Protestantism soon added their signatures to
his document. (22) This followed a condemnation by the Southern Baptist
Convention earlier that year of what was termed “white supremacy.” Thus in
addition to their ultra-Zionist position, Baptist and Evangelical Protestant
leaders made common cause with neoconservatives in highlighting the danger of
white racism that government must continue to address.
The surprise election of Donald Trump with his vision to “make America
great again” was an indication that a somnolent and older grass roots
tradition, a native populism that owed more to William Jennings Bryan than to
George W. Bush, was on the rise again. The future president’s apparent
questioning of the shared Left/Right consensus on America’s duty to spread
democracy and equality together with his later refusal to follow the consensus
narrative on the Charlottesville incident suggested that he was not in the mold
of establishment Republicans.
The rise of Trump threw both the
neoconservatives and their Southern imitators off stride, at least temporarily.
Despite his New York origin and his brashness of manner and language, the
electoral earthquake occasioned by Trump’s triumph had wide–ranging
consequences beyond the election of a president. Such stalwart neoconservatives
and establishment Republicans as Bill Kristol (Irving’s son), George W. Bush
aide Peter Wehner, Steve Schmidt (who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential
campaign), former New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, and Max Boot (major
foreign policy advisor to McCain) joined the Never Trump opposition. Boot, in a
Washington Post column, announced
that he was leaving the Republican Party and blasted what he termed the
“Trumpian revolution” that was working “to transform the GOP into a
European-style nationalist party that…believes in deportation of undocumented
immigrants, white identity politics, protectionism and isolationism backed by
hyper-macho threats to bomb the living daylights out of anyone who messes with
us.” (23)
Indeed, the alacrity and eagerness with
which white Southerners voted for the new president has been frequently noted,
and not always favorably. But since white Southern support for the GOP has been
surging for decades, none of this should have been entirely unexpected. Certainly Trump did not go out of his way to
appoint Southern conservatives to his administration, but he has also not been
hostile to them and even came out in defense of preserving Confederate
monuments. (24)
There has also been a revival of
interest in preserving “Southern heritage” which has found followers in all
social classes. This has been fueled by the war to pull down monuments and
plaques commemorating the Confederacy and by efforts to remove the Confederate
Battle Flag in the South from public buildings. In this crusade
neoconservatives have been largely vocal as enemies of anything that treats the
Southern white past favorably. But opposition to the leftist anti-Confederate
Taliban project has surfaced nonetheless at the same time. During the furious
debate over monuments, much to the surprise and shock of both pollsters and the
governing class, nearly two-thirds of Southerners favored keeping them in
place. (25)
What is abundantly evident, however, is that Southern conservatives, properly understood, have no place in the present establishment conservative movement. Well over a century ago Jefferson Davis declared: “Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.” It will be interesting to see if this will be true for that older Southern conservatism. They are plainly a hindrance to the “movement” as it reaches out and tries to form alliances and frame dialogues with the opposition, always on the Left. Southern conservatives may also be anathema to the conservative movement in its present instantiation because that movement continues to depend on neoconservative funders and media personalities. In any case what has happened to this ousted and defamed part of the Old Right warrants our attention if we seek to understand where the conservative movement has gone since the 1960s. In this case as in others those bearing an ideology with leftist roots have been allowed to marginalize the true Right.
*************
NOTES:
(1) David Gordon, “Southern
Cross: The Meaning of the Mel Bradford Moment,” The American Conservative,
April 1, 2010, accessed at: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/southern-cross/
(2)
David Frum, “Culture Clash on the Right,” The
Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1989; and Gordon, “Southern Cross: The Meaning
of the Mel Bradford Moment.”
(3) See Elliott Johnson, Elliott David Walker and Daniel Gray, Daniel.
Historical Dictionary of Marxism. Historical Dictionaries of Religions,
Philosophies, and Movements (2nd ed.). (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 2014), p. 294; and also generally, Leon Trotsky, The
Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects [1906].
New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974 edition.
(4) Paul Buhle, “Jay Lovestone’s Thin
Red Line,” The Nation, May 6, 1999,
accessed at: https://www.thenation.com/article/lovestones-thin-red-line/
(5) Ted
Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and
Spymaster. (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 4-6 et sq.
(6) Quoted by Paul Gottfried inTakimag.com,
April 17, 2007
(7) See Irving Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1945-1995,” The Public Interest, Fall 1995.
(8) Russell Kirk, “The
Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species,” Address, The Heritage Foundation,
December 15, 1988, accessed at: https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-neoconservatives-endangered-species
In response to Kirk’s comments, Midge Decter, wife of Norman Podhoretz and
director of the Neoconservative-oriented Committee for the Free World,
denounced his remark as "a bloody piece of anti-Semitism.”
See John Judis, “The Conservative Crackup,” The
American Prospect, Fall 1990, accessed at: http://prospect.org/article/conservative-crackup
(9) Albert Fried, Communism
in America: A History in Documents
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 7.
(10) Allan Bloom, quoted in Paul
Gottfried, War and Democracy: Selected
Essays, 1975-2012 (London: Arktos Media, 2012), p. 110.
(11) See, for example: Jonah
Goldberg, “America Is Not As Intolerant We Make It Out To Be,” National
Review, April 20, 2018, accessed at:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/america-not-most-racist-sexist-nation-progress-made/#slide-1;
Seth Stevenson, “The Many Faces of Ben Shapiro,” Slate, January 24, 2018,
accessed at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/is-ben-shapiro-a-conservative-liberals-can-count-on.html; and Guy Benson, “SCOTUS
Rules 7-2 Against Anti-Religious Bullying, But Punts on Key Legal Question,” Townhall.com, June 4, 2018, accessed at: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2018/06/04/scotus-sides-with-christian-baker-72-what-the-ruling-does-and-doesnt-mean-n2487144?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=. While
Benson defends the recent Supreme Court decision supporting the Christian
bakers’ refusal to bake an individualized cake for a gay wedding, he also
declares “some of us [conservatives] support LGBT rights,” an increasing number
within the conservative movement. Benson, himself, is openly gay.
(12) M. E. Bradford, “The Heresy
of Equality: Bradford Replies to Jaffa,” Modern
Age, Winter 1976, pp. 62-77, accessed at: https://www.unz.com/print/ModernAge-1976q1-00062
(13) Richard Weaver, “Two Types
of American Individualism,” reprinted as chapter five in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, edited by George M.
Curtis III and James J. Thompson Jr. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 82, 102. See also,
generally, Weaver, The Southern Tradition
at Bay: A History of Post-Bellum Thought (New Rochelle, NY, first edition,
1968).
(14) Peter d’Abrosca, “Daily Wire
Tries to Coerce Jerry Falwell Jr. to Drop Corey Stewart Endorsement,” Big League Politics, June 6, 2018,
accessed at: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/texts-daily-wire-tries-to-coerce-jerry-falwell-jr-to-drop-corey-stewart-endorsement/
(15) Victor
Davis Hanson, “The Confederate Mind,” National
Review, March 20, 2018, accessed at: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/progressives-elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton-race-based-worldview/
(16) See
Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 150-155, for a discussion of
Kristol’s controversial essay, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” Commentary 35, no. 2 (February 1963).
(17) See Boyd Cathey, “Rejecting Progressivism by
Recovering the Fullness of the American Past: Senator Sam Ervin,” My Corner by Boyd Cathey, October 23,
2017, accessed at: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2017/10/october-23-2017-my-corner-by-boyd.html
(18)
Stassa Edwards, “GOP Should Change Its Position on Gay Marriage,” Jezebel.com, June 28, 2015, accessed at:
https://jezebel.com/lindsey-graham-gop-should-change-its-position-on-gay-m-1714496783
(19)
Eugene Scott, “Graham: ‘Flag had to Come Down. And thank God it has’,” CNN,
July 9, 2015, accessed at: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/09/politics/confederate-flag-2016-south-carolina-lindsey-graham/index.html
(20) “Pastor John Hagee,” Christians United for Israel. Leadership, accessed at: https://www.cufi.org/impact/leadership/executive-board/pastor-john-hagee/
(21) See Boyd
Cathey, “Thoughts on Charlottesville and What It Means for Us, The Unz Review, August 15, 2017,
accessed at: http://www.unz.com/article/thoughts-on-charlottesville-and-what-it-means-for-us/
.
Among Neoconservative pundits Ben Shapiro has been consistent in his attacks on
President Trump’s response to the Charlottesville incident, accusing the
president of turning a blind eye to what he called “increasingly reactionary
racial polarization” by not forcefully singling out for condemnation the Alt-right and what he
terms white nationalism. See Shapiro, “Left Tries To Blame Trump For
Charlottesville. Here’s Why They’re Wrong,” The
Daily Wire, August 14, 2017, accessed at: https://www.dailywire.com/news/19676/left-tries-blame-trump-charlottesville-terror-ben-shapiro
(22) “Southern Baptists, Others
Release Letter on ‘Alt-Right’ to Trump,” Christian
Index, October 2, 2017, accessed at: https://christianindex.org/southern-baptists-others-release-letter-on-alt-right-to-trump/
(23) Max Boot, “I left the
Republican Party. Now I want Democrats to take over,” The Washington Post, July 4, 2018, accessed at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-left-the-republican-party-now-i-want-democrats-to-take-over/2018/07/03/54a4007a-7e38-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.99d9ea3eba6a
(24) John
Savage, “Where the Confederacy Is Rising Again,” Politico, August 10, 2016, accessed at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/texas-confederacy-rising-again-214159;
Max Greenwood, “Trump on removing Confederate statues: They’re trying to take
away our culture,” The Hill, August
22, 2017, accessed at: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/347589-trump-on-removing-confederate-statues-theyre-trying-to-take-away-our; and a northern perspective, “Feeling Kinship
With The South Northerners Let Their Confederate Flags Fly,” National Public
Radio, May 4, 2017, accessed at: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/04/526539906/feeling-kinship-with-the-south-northerners-let-their-confederate-flags-fly.
For a fearful but revealing Leftist view: Mason Adams, “How the Rebel Flag Rose
Again—and Is Helping Trump,” Politico,
June 16, 2016, accessed at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-south-confederate-flag-racism-charleston-shooting-213954
(25) See,
for example: Jennifer Agiesta, “Poll: Majority see Confederate Flag as Southern
pride symbol, not racist,” CNN, July 2, 2015, accessed at: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-poll-racism-southern-pride/index.html;
also, Elon University Poll results and article, News and Observer, October 3, 2017, accessed at: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article176748721.html#storylink=cpy; Meredith College Poll, October 11, 2017, accessed
at: https://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/according-to-a-new-poll-61-percent-of-north-carolina-voters-are-fine-with-confederate-monuments/Content?oid=8681113; and
Marist College Poll, August 17, 2017, accessed at: http://maristpoll.marist.edu/nprpbs-newshourmarist-poll-results-on-charlottesville/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credit:
“The Unwanted Southern Conservatives,” by Boyd D.
Cathey, from The
Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism, edited by Paul Gottfried. Copyright (c) 2020 by Cornell
University. A Northern Illinois University Press book published by Cornell
University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
