November 22, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
THE VANISHING TRADITION: Perspectives on American
Conservatism
A New Book You Will
Want to Read
Friends,
Shortly
after the turn of this year, in early 2020, a book will be published by Cornell
University Press. Its title is: The
Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism, and it is
edited by distinguished traditional conservative author Dr. Paul Gottfried. Intended
to be a critical view of what has happened to the “conservative movement” over
the past half century, it offers both detailed discussion and history that for
many readers will not be found elsewhere.
Among the
contributors to this volume are: Gottfried, Jack Kerwick, Jesse Russell,
Marjorie Jeffreys, Keith Preston, Jesse Merriam, and others. I have been
privileged and honored, as well, to have a chapter to appear in the book, “The
Unwanted Southern Conservatives,” in which I recount what has happened to the
Southern tradition, to Southern conservatives, once so celebrated and welcomed
by “national” conservatives and by such journals as National Review, but now reviled and exiled by the “establishment”
Neoconservatives who dominate and control the conservative narrative.
Robert E.
Lee, John C. Calhoun, and more recently, the late Mel Bradford, have been
“ejected from the bus,” no longer honored by the likes of National Review editor Rich Lowry, or by Brian Kilmeade, Ben
Shapiro, or by the Fox News “All Stars.” Those Southerners were, you see, “racists” and
“white supremacists,” and their places in the contemporary conservative
pantheon are now taken by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and
“Saint” Martin Luther King. What my
chapter attempts to do with ample documentation is offer reasons why this has
occurred.
But my contribution is just one of several to this volume.
*****
Here is a pre-publication review; I hope you will purchase The Vanishing Tradition when it comes
out, soon:
Conservatism: A Vanishing Tradition
[The Vanishing Tradition: Perspective on American Conservatism. Edited by Paul Gottfried. Cornell University
Press, 2020. 223 + pages.]
Paul
Gottfried’s excellent anthology of essays on American conservatives chronicles
a key phenomenon of our times. Understanding it is important not only for
those, like Gottfried and his contributors, who are traditionalist
conservatives, but for anyone concerned with freedom. The phenomenon in
question is the takeover of American conservatism by neoconservatives.
Why should
this development concern us? In brief, the neocons, interested in their own
agenda, have joined with the left in enforcing a public orthodoxy that excludes
certain views from discussion. As Gottfried explains: “We might note some of
the offenses for which an older Right was read out of the movement by the
1990s. Such presumed enormities included opposing the First Gulf War,
supporting Patrick Buchanan’s presidential bid in 1992, and complaining about
the influence of the American Israeli lobby. Some of the same people had also
been critical of the cultural effects of Third World immigration, the
extensions of the Voting Rights Act that would increase the electoral strength
of the Left and bring the electoral process almost totally under federal
administrative control, and the elevation of Martin Luther King — a
controversial figure of the Left in his own time — to iconic status with a
national holiday.”
Obviously,
those who favor the suppressed positions should be concerned, but others should
be as well. The Left, joined by the neocons, not only insists on its agenda but
will not allow dissent. If, for example, you don’t think that Martin Luther
King was a “moral saint,” as more than one eminent philosopher has termed him,
the Left will not try to show that your arguments for your view are mistaken.
It will deny you a forum to express your arguments at all and then try to
destroy you personally. Even if you admire King or accept other tenets of the
public orthodoxy, you should be troubled by the suppression of free speech.
Two of the
contributors, Keith Preston and Boyd D. Cathey, discuss in detail one such
smear campaign against a dissenter from the Official Truth. This was directed
at Mel Bradford, a literary scholar and historian, who criticized Abraham
Lincoln. In 1981, Ronald Reagan intended to nominate Bradford to head the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and Bradford’s opinions about Lincoln would
on the surface seem irrelevant to his fitness for the post. But Lincoln’s role
as the savior of the Union and scourge of slavery is a key part of our public
orthodoxy. The Left joined forces with the neocons to strike at Bradford.
Preston writes: “As a legal scholar, Bradford was an advocate of a ‘strict
constructionist’ approach to interpreting the Constitution, his view of the
American founding as a conservative revolution, and his defense of the South
against what he considered to be the usurpations of state sovereignty by
President Lincoln during the Civil War [aroused neocon ire].”
Because he
had attacked Lincoln, Bradford had to be denied the nomination. “Among the
prominent neoconservatives who expressed opposition to Bradford were Irving
Kristol, a former Trotskyite and the coeditor of The Public Interest, who is
credited with having coined the term ‘neoconservative.’ The neoconservative
movement’s other leading intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, another former leftist
and the publisher of Commentary magazine,
also expressed opposition to Bradford’s nomination.”
Why are the
neocons willing to join forces with the Left? Doing so permits them to advance
more effectively their own goals, strong support for Israel and for an
interventionist foreign policy. Marjorie Jeffrey gets at the heart of the
matter: “In what may be considered one of the founding documents of what became
Bush-era neoconservatism, [William] Kristol and [Robert] Kagan wrote in ‘Toward
a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’ that instead of either Clinton’s ‘Wilsonian
multilateralism’ or Buchanan’s ‘neo-isolationism’, America should seek a policy
of ‘benevolent global hegemony.’” Those who opposed this policy were assailed:
“Against these efforts [opposing war], David Frum penned his famous ‘Unpatriotic
Conservatives’ essay in the pages of National
Review, charging antiwar conservatives and libertarians with being
anti- American: ‘They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist
antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror.
They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild
conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their
nation’s enemies.’” As Jeffrey accurately notes, Ron Paul has with
characteristic insight brought into question whether an interventionist foreign
policy is in America’s interests, and for this he has been vilified.
Preston in
his excellent essay makes the same criticism of neocon foreign policy, but he
wrongly traces interventionism to the Jacobins: “A former assistant secretary
of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, has
described the foreign policy views of the neoconservatives as emanating from
the fanaticism that emerged during the French Revolution, observing ‘there is
nothing conservative about neoconservatives. Neocons hide behind ‘conservative’
but they are in fact Jacobins. Jacobins were the 18th century French
revolutionaries whose intention to remake Europe in revolutionary France’s
image launched the Napoleonic Wars. A similar critique of the neoconservatives
has been offered by the conservative scholar Claes Ryn.” The Jacobins in fact
were mainly concerned with internal reform: it was the Gironde that wished to
spread the Revolution abroad.
But this
minor error pales into insignificance when put beside Preston’s indispensable
point, also drawn from Ryn: “The ongoing project of the neoconservatives has
been to purge from the American Right any tendency that is suspected of
opposing aggressive military interventionism, the revolutionary spread of
‘democratic capitalism’ on an international level, the geopolitical agenda of
Israel’s Likud Party, or the cultural values of urban cosmopolitanism.
Meanwhile, the neoconservatives will make common cause with anyone on the left
they deem aggressively militarist enough.”
Some of the
contributors find an epistemological source that in their opinion accounts at
least in part for the errors of the neocons. The neocons favor principles that
are universally true, regardless of historical time and circumstance. This
contention seems to me mistaken. Isn’t the problem rather that the neocons
favor the wrong universal principles? If like Murray Rothbard we support
self-ownership, property rights, and peace, we would not fall victim to neocon
delusions.
Mention of
Rothbard of course brings to mind that he too was the victim of smear campaigns
by both Buckley’s National
Review and the neocons. As Gottfried remarks: “In some cases,
however, those thrown off the bus were subject to at least intermittent abuse
intended to justify their fall. This happened in a particularly bizarre way to
Murray Rothbard, in the form of an obituary that Buckley inserted into National Review shortly
after Rothbard’s death. Here Buckley offered a comparison between Rothbard and
cult leader David Koresh. Neither apparently had more than a handful of
followers: Rothbard had ‘as many disciples as David Koresh had in his redoubt
in Waco.’ ‘Yes, Rothbard believed in freedom; David Koresh believed in God.’ It
had not been enough for National
Review’s founder to scold Rothbard during his lifetime.”
Fortunately, neither Buckley nor the neocons
succeeded in suppressing Rothbard. His teaching continues to guide and inspire
us.
Author:
David Gordon is Senior Fellow at
the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review.
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