← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · SARTRE

Whither the Old Conservatism?

Thread ID: 17972 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2005-04-26

Wayback Archive

SARTRE [OP]

2005-04-26 12:44 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.oldright.com/2005/03/whither-old-conservatism-accuracy-in.html]An Accuracy in Academia Address[/URL] by Paul Gottfried

[I]Delivered at AIA’s 1999 Conservative University at Georgetown University[/I]

The topic on which I was asked to speak is “Whither the Old Conservatism?”

Yesterday I was looking at this book, (now I don't want to scare you, I’m not going to read this to you in German) but it’s something called “Das Lexikon des Konservatismus” which a friend of mine, Kaspar von Schrenk Notzing put together. The purpose of this work is to discuss great conservative thinkers and movements in the U.S. and in Europe since the 18th century. If you look here, you will find no mention of William Buckley, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, or the Wall Street Journal. You do, however, find H.L. Menken, Albert Jay Nock, and other people whom the younger generation of self-described American conservatives would not be able to identify.

The question is, “why are these by now unacknowledged people, who have fallen into a memory hole in the US, important in Europe?” As a paleo-conservative polemicist, which I have been on occasion, I suppose one might answer, “well that’s because the American conservative movement is no longer conservative. It is no longer recognizable as anything other than a moderate social democratic movement fighting more extreme social democrats.” Anyone who knows me has heard me make these arguments in the past. I’ve been making them for the past 25 years. So have Sam Francis and others considered to be remnants of the Old Right.

Nonetheless, I think it’s important to bear in mind that the people we are describing as the “Old Right” did not belong to a conservatism that would be recognizable as such to historians of European political movements. Our conservatives were predominantly middle-class liberals. They were not defending a hereditary aristocracy. Although in Europe they coexisted with one and with established churches, such conservative liberals were interested in upholding a distinctively bourgeois civilization.

They generally believed in a free market economy and held traditional views toward what is called the “nuclear family.” They believed in intellectual freedom (at least freedom for those certified as professors or for those operating within a recognizably scientific methodology) to express their views without governmental threats. They also believed in a government of laws, be it a constitutional monarchy or a constitutional republic.

And finally they believed in a separation between government and civil society. What goes on in civil society is a matter best left to families and communities. Such liberals did not believe that it was government’s business to be reconstructing social arrangements.

If one asked, “what about the problem of a patriarchal family?” they’d say, “fine, families are supposed to be patriarchal; in any case it is not the state’s business to make them other than what they’ve been.” Most would have looked askance at the idea of giving women the vote. They believed very much that women should be treated with dignity and respect but not as political actors. Most bourgeois liberals opposed women’s suffrage. Some went along reluctantly, but were rarely the sponsors of feminist demands.

Well, what I’m describing would be recognizable (except for women’s suffrage, which had already been enacted) as the views of the Old Right.

The United States, with the exception of some New England Brahmins and Southern planters, really had nothing like European aristocracy. While our government, up until the last few decades, was generally sympathetic to the Judeo-Christian religion, it did not feature an established church. America began as a liberal society. But one has to be careful as to what one means by the word liberal. I am not referring to what is liberal today or to what has been considered liberal for most of the 20th century.

America starts with arrangements like distributive power, dual sovereignty between state and federal government, and a general respect for ideas of constitutional freedom. And it was not opposed to personal freedom though that was left to the states and to the communities, who were given grants of power by the states. But it would have been considered improper for the federal government at the time the country was set up, and well into the 20th century, to have interfered in the way civil society was run.

Nor would any level of government have dared to reconstruct gender relations. Congress did pass laws and amendments affecting the legal status of blacks, but that was the result of the catastrophes of the Civil War. During that war, freeing blacks from slavery became a declared aim of the Union and thus, at least for a time, it became necessary for the federal government to be involved in race relations at the state level.

But this was not a continuing project in American history. Soon after the Civil War the courts reaffirmed the principle that the federal government had limited powers relative to the states. States by the way, were a meaningful concept because people had deep loyalties toward them. Families lived in the same places for generations. Remember that Robert E. Lee had opposed secession and slavery but fought on the side of Virginia against the federal government because he was a Virginian first. Unless people have that profound sense of belonging to a state, it cannot mean to them what it meant to people in the 18th and 19th centuries. States can serve as a limited check on the federal government, but not as a real focus of human loyalty.

So the attempt by classical liberals in the United States to build on states rights, even before the race issues and the civil rights movement came along, may have been doomed to failure.

From the time that America became industrialized in the last century, the federal government became increasingly involved in commerce conducted by the states. This development further undermined the states rights position held by the Old Right.

Another thing that is particularly important, if you look at the Old Right in the ‘20s and ‘30s, is what is generally called “isolationism.” Now it is important to understand what is meant by isolationism. It is not xenophobia. It does not mean that the conservatives are supposed to hate foreigners. It means that the Old Right expressed constitutional scruples about sending armies to invade foreign countries. And this is different from the way the Wall Street Journal, or Commentary magazine, or the New York Times see either the world or the American Constitution. As my late good friend Murray Rothbard used to put it, “By isolationism, I mean protecting the American people, and the rest of the world, from the American government.” I think that epitomizes Old Right isolationism, whether or not one agrees with it. It is based on the notion that the federal government should have an extremely limited role in foreign affairs. It is there to protect the United States against invasion, or against something that affects our national interests in a very palpable way. Obviously, the crisis in Serbia did not meet that criterion.

Isolationism was further based on a fear of what was seen by the Old Right as the “welfare-warfare state.” In order to sustain a big welfare state, it is useful to make war, or to be always mobilizing for it. As one left-leaning libertarian expressed this relation, “War is the health of the state.” The more war you prepare for, the stronger the state becomes.

In the 1930s, the Old Right opposed the state that was clearly becoming a managerial state. Such a development came about in the United States and Europe for reasons that were not always understood by the Old Right. One of the most commonly heard complaints in the 1930s among Old Right figures Albert Jay Nock, William Henry Chamberlain, and others is that the New Deal is fascist; that the United States is creating a fascist, corporatist state. Almost all of their writings are directed not against Communism but against fascism. Though they didn’t want to fight the fascists (or anyone else), the reason was not a particular sympathy, but fear that the government by mobilizing for war would create a fascist corporate state at home.

This is the argument of the America First people. In 1941, one heard that argument from Charles Lindbergh and others opposed to intervention in Europe, that we were going to become like the fascists if we allowed our welfare state to become militarist.

If one is looking for anti-fascism, there was a good deal in the 1930s among the Old Right. Of course, that anti-fascism is different from our own, which is the war cry of the left-liberal establishment fifty years after the end of the Third Reich. Now the media seeks to mobilize the American people to fight fascist ghosts 24 hours a day. Journalists work to cleanse our language and our mind against the non-existent fascist enemy. But there was also concern in the 1930s about fascism, as a possible American future. There was much less interest in Communism, even on the American Right. One of the few people in the America First who was excited about Communism, was Lindbergh. We read about Lindbergh as being soft on the Axis powers, and fearful of the Communists as a major danger. This was true, although he was generally an isolationist (not wishing to help either side in the war).

In Europe, meanwhile, there was a “left-right” division, in which the left was sometimes allied with the Communists against fascism, and some on the right proclaimed “better Hitler than Blum.” Leon Blum was a prime minister of France in the 1930s and a leftist. In the United States anti-fascism is what you hear from the Old Right. My sense is that they knew that there was a new kind of government aborning that was swallowing up constitutional government. This was happening in Europe, as well. I think the Old Right saw that, and people in the New Deal administration, like Adolph Berle, saw the same development but also approved of it. In the 1920s, The New Republic and other progressive, left of center magazines were high on Mussolini. They were all pro-fascist because Mussolini was still perceived as a leftist. By the late ‘30s, though perhaps by ‘29 when Mussolini made a pact with the Pope (the left didn’t like the Catholic Church), you have a change in the popular perception of fascism.

But the Old Right was screaming about fascism all the time. This is what they dreaded, rightly or wrongly, about the New Deal. What happened in the post-World War II period is that a shuffling took place on the Right, and this is important to understand for grasping how the postwar conservative movement came into being. I wrote a book on this, in which I tried to show the extent to which anti-Communism took over the American Right.

And there is a group responsible for this anti-Communists coalition; most especially Frank Meyer, James Burnham, and Willie Schlamm. Buckley was influenced by these former Communists, who became bitterly disillusioned with their old faith. They came to view Communism as the world’s greatest danger. They believed we would have to fight the Communists in a protracted struggle that should override other political issues. Therefore any further opposition to the central, managerial state had to be put on hold, though this was not always overtly declared. They did talk-the-talk about “we want to get rid of the New Deal, we’re going to roll it back,” etc. But by the late ‘40s, you do find the revealing statement by the young William F. Buckley, that in order to fight Communism, we may have to accept “bureaucratic totalitarianism” on these shores. If this was the price, that was OK because Communism was the greatest danger that Western civilization had ever faced.

Now, one can understand “anti-Communism” in the context of the European right. Because there were people on the European Right who threw in their lot with Hitler?certainly with Mussolini. They were terrified of the Communists. There is a great deal of work done by a German historian, Ernst Nolte, on the European Civil War, showing the affinity of people on the interwar European Right to fascism and even Nazism because of their fear of Communism. But there were others on the Right, like DeGaulle and Churchill, who feared the Germans more than the Communists, and who allied themselves with the Communists against the Germans. There was, however, also a widespread fear of Communism and an awareness of the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union animating the European Right. In the US, anti-Communism is also, initially, a movement of the Right. It is very much intertwined with conservative Catholicism in the post-war period. The young William F. Buckley illustrated this connection. Anti-Communism also became identified with rhetorical attacks on the welfare state. The welfare state, as explained by Frank S. Meyer, imitated in a diluted form what was being undertaken by the Communists.

This fear of the Communists did have basis in fact. There were, after all, Communists working at the State Department in the ‘40s. And I suspect, for all of his shenanigans, that some of the subversion Joe McCarthy claimed to have found was exactly where he said it was. Truman ran to cover it up, not because he loved Communists, but because they were in his party and had belonged to the Roosevelt Administration.

What is going to happen is, there will be a struggle for power on the American Right in which the Old Right goes down to defeat. A prime figure in administering the beatings is William F. Buckley, who even then starts comparing the conservative movement to the Catholic Church. Both presumably must be guarded against heresy. And Buckley was going to clean up the conservative movement, and get rid of people who did not understand the protracted struggle against the Communists. So there were people purged from the conservative movement while being irreversibly vilified. I suspect that in 1964, the reason that National Review violently denounces the John Birch Society is not because many of its members were kooky, which they were, but because they opposed the Vietnam War, and were generally isolationist on foreign affairs. This was unthinkable to the National Review conservatives. One of the justifications later provided by Buckley for the marginalization of the Old Right was the sinister presence of anti-Semitism. In point of fact, many of the purges were Jewish. Nor was the concern of Buckley after his alliance with the neoconservatives the one that had likely motivated him twenty-five years earlier.

The fact is, the Old Right did not fit into the agenda of a reconstructed conservative movement. And once its devotees had been marginalized or died off, a second purge would get underway. The history of the American conservative movement, like that of the American Communist Party, is marked by successive purges. In this case the second purge is almost necessitated by the first. Once you start purging and lying about those who don’t fit into your agenda, and once you have a movement centered in New York City and becoming consciously tributary on the cultural and intellectual life of the place, other sorts of purges come as a matter of course. The newly transformed conservatism-as-anti-Communism fights the Communist enemy for Zionist and social democratic reasons. These are the reasons for the anti-Communism prevalent among the New York crowd into whose orbit Buckley and his staff were moving by the mid-sixties. These people had access to the media and were willing to treat sympathetically a conservatism made to resemble their own politics.

Moreover, some of these new friends became critical of what they perceived as the excess of the New Left. They claimed that the Left had been stolen from them and favored a diluted counter-revolutionary agenda, one opposed to New Left extravagance. While moderate feminism or welfare statism is to be defended, more radical expressions of these things are indefensible. Thus, we find a leftward lurch in the American conservative movement, without any loss of the anti-Communist component.

I think it is also important to keep in mind the general historical forces driving the conservative movements to the left. There is an historical inevitability about the process going beyond the personality of William F. Buckley, the people at National Review, and the luncheon companions of Norman Podhoretz.

Conservatism was swallowed up, together with American society, by the modern managerial state. This kind of government came to power in the 20th century, first in places like Scandinavia, then in the United States. And one might say that the Scandinavians are part of the first wave; we are part of the second wave. The English are part of the second wave. Events that happened here in the sixties influenced events in Germany and France and elsewhere in the Western world. As the working class became enfranchised, and as union movements gained more influence, power would be given to public administration to redistribute money, to provide social benefits, and to educate the young. Once you have a government like this throughout the western world, it is only a matter of time before ideologies are redefined in terms of administrative imperatives.

American conservatism today accepts the lineaments of an expanded managerial state, while insisting on particular restraints. Thus conservatives call for tax caps and work incentives while at the same time professing their belief in entitlement programs. Some may believe this is a pact with the devil, but the neocons never cease proclaiming a mixed economy and anti-discrimination legislation to be the best of all worlds. None of this may matter any longer because the general drift of political life under public administration is leftward, with or without neocon advisors. The managerial state comes about in two phases. Phase 1, I discuss in my most recent book. Phase 2, I intend to discuss in a sequel. In its early phase, the managerial state is concerned mostly with redistributing income and in Europe with nationalizing the means of production and providing a vast array of social programs.

Phase 2 takes place when the government becomes interested in sensitizing people, which assumes victimology. Public administration sensitizes people in terms of groups that are seen as disadvantaged. These also happen to be the special constituencies of the managerial state; for example, blacks, gays, Hispanics, to some extent Jews, American Indians, and other groups that occasionally get affirmative action if there are enough of them. My friend Bob Weissberg did a book on “political empowerment” that came out a few months ago. Who does the empowering? asks Weissberg. It is the government. “We will empower you by giving you money and by protecting you through hate laws.” Hate crimes are much more popular, by the way, in Europe than they are in the US, and “hate speech” is a criminal offense in most European countries and in the province of Ontario. I have a long article on the subject in Chronicles. There are more people jailed in Germany today for saying the wrong things than there was under the East German Communists by the time their regime came apart.

All of this shows not only why the American Old Right has ceased to be effective but how “democracies perish,” to use the English translation of a 1980s French polemic on the danger of appeasing the Communists. As an irony of history, it is no longer the armed might of the Soviet empire but the progress of managerial democracy that threatens our society. Significantly, the Old Right warned incessantly about such consequences, not always coherently, but with a generally accurate view of life under an American managerial empire. For these courageous, spirited prophecies, we continue to be in their debt.

Franco

2005-04-26 15:27 | User Profile

As someone well-schooled in political science, I have never seen FDR's New Deal as fascist. Leftist, yes. But fascist??

In fact, FDR's Jewish administration locked horns with Mussolini over the 1936 Ethiopia matter, and shunned Hitler and the Japanese. In other words, FDR was shunning fascist states.

FDR was against fascism, but sympathetic to communism.

SARTRE

2005-05-03 14:20 | User Profile

Franco,

Is there really any difference between a Communist and a Fascist? Both are Statist. FDR was a Communist – American style. The only policy opposition among Statists is which despotism will rule over the other tyranny.

Submit that the proper way to view the Twenty Century is to contest all regimes that place the government over their own people. That leaves very few examples for independent administration that respects the natural rights of citizens.

Until folks understand and accept that a benign domination is inherently evil, the false left/right distinctions will never be discarded as disinformation.

FDR was the second worse president after Lincoln. What did victory in WWII bring, but the destruction of the American heritage of limited government.

SARTRE

CornCod

2005-05-15 20:52 | User Profile

Some of FDR's braintrusters did borrow a little bit form Mussolini. Rexford Tugwell, one of Roosevelt's intimates, advocated copying some elements of the Il Duce program. The important thing to be remembered here is what were Roosevelt's motivations. Roosevelt instituted reforms because he wanted to defend the capitalist class against a possible revolution. The best way of doing this were some modest efforts to spread the wealth around a little. To call Roosevelt a Fascist is an insult to Fascists. For all his faults, I think Mussolini really loved the Italian people. FDR was just another ultra rich guy out to defend the perogatives of his class.

Okiereddust

2005-05-17 08:42 | User Profile

[QUOTE=SARTRE]Franco,

Is there really any difference between a Communist and a Fascist? Both are Statist. FDR was a Communist – American style. The only policy opposition among Statists is which despotism will rule over the other tyranny.

Whay at exactly does "statist" mean? Does it mean any strong state? If so, I would say that most governments today are "statist", which means they are no different than communist or fascist.

Practically really the level of state control was really far, far greater under communism than under communism and national socialism. Libertarianism's equating of the two I think was pretty much affected by Hayek's Von Mises's and the rest of the Austrian schools dogmatic opposition to the two movements as foreign dominants in Austria. It also is a product I think of much of neo-conservative's close relationship with much of business-libertarian's network. It is an unfortunate habit of paleo-libertarianism to carry this PC element of libertarianism over with them.

[QUOTE]Submit that the proper way to view the Twenty Century is to contest all regimes that place the government over their own people. That leaves very few examples for independent administration that respects the natural rights of citizens.[/QUOTE]

Isn't this overriding "natural rights" emphasis a big thing of Joffre and othger neo-conservatives at Claremont for instance?

[QUOTE]Until folks understand and accept that a benign domination is inherently evil, the false left/right distinctions will never be discarded as disinformation. [/QUOTE] How is benign evil?

Aznuife-ke

2005-05-23 04:55 | User Profile

[QUOTE=SARTRE]Franco,

Is there really any difference between a Communist and a Fascist? Both are Statist. FDR was a Communist – American style. The only policy opposition among Statists is which despotism will rule over the other tyranny. [/QUOTE]A true communist "state" ("communist state" being an oxymoron) has never existed. As such, the Socialist states to which you refer as Communist, not to mention FDR's USA, are profoundly different from Fascist ones. [QUOTE]Submit that the proper way to view the Twenty Century is to contest all regimes that place the government over their own people. That leaves very few examples for independent administration that respects the natural rights of citizens.[/QUOTE]That sounds nice and rosy, but let's not forget that when given the opportunity to not do so citizens hardly respect the "natural rights" of one another. If a government doesn't dominate its citizens, some of those citizens will create de facto power structures using which they will dominate other citizens. [QUOTE]Until folks understand and accept that a benign domination is inherently evil, the false left/right distinctions will never be discarded as disinformation.[/QUOTE]Explain why you find benign domination to be "inherently evil". Does this extend to parental domination of teenagers, which is carried out "for their own good"? [QUOTE] FDR was the second worse president after Lincoln. [/QUOTE]LMAO. [QUOTE]What did victory in WWII bring, but the destruction of the American heritage of limited government. SARTRE[/QUOTE]The USA emerged from WWII as one of two remaining superpowers, for starters.

kane123123

2005-06-10 19:43 | User Profile

I think I would describe FDR as a Socialist, not a Communists. Some of the modern Democrats are becoming Communist but I don't think FDR was that far. I understand he made the Great Soceity but I consider that Socialist.