At one time, perhaps fifty or eighty years ago, there were patricians imbued with a sense of limited national interest and with a desire to stay out of entangling alliances, unless American survival was at stake. Back in the good old days, secretaries of state and presidential confidants did not rant against the non-democratic world or call for foreign crusades to impose the American way of life.

Such an age of sobriety has not existed for a very long time. The sober realist Kennan was an isolated dinosaur by the end of the Second World War; and it is hard to think of many struggles that the US has engaged in since the First World War that was not sold as a crusade for democracy and universal rights. The late Hans Morgenthau, who was supposedly a foreign policy realist, argued that it was OK for the US to wage foreign wars for universal ideals, as long as our leaders understand that it was all for show. But that dichotomy has never worked. All crusades for democracy, from the time they are launched, have to be defended and prosecuted as struggles with global moral significance. In the two World Wars this ideological zeal resulted in demonizing the enemy. Particularly in the last two years of the Second World War this governmentally incited demonization facilitated the mass bombing of the "undemocratic" civilian population on the other side. The US also insisted on unconditional surrender in both Europe and Asia and it engaged in expensive efforts to either kill or imprison the leaders of its erstwhile enemies and then to reeducate the surviving civilian population, until they became more or less like us. That’s how democratic crusades fought for universal ideals are likely to end, particularly if they involve large standing armies and continue to be fought with considerable bloodshed until the other side has been totally defeated.

This did not happen while Russian Jewish Trotskyists or super-Zionist hawks were running American foreign policy. Rather we are looking at the demonstrable actions of WASP patricians like FDR, who espoused a drastic course of action in destroying anti-democratic enemies that FDR believed Americans had failed to take during an earlier American crusade for democracy.

That of course was the war that the Southern patrician Wilson had pulled his country into in 1917. Other bluebloods between 1914 and 1917 such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge, were profoundly disgusted that Wilson had taken so long to throw us into the European meat grinder. Many of these patricians balked (as they should have) at American adhesion to the League of Nations. They did not want armies being sent to Europe to aid the French and those successor states in East Central Europe created or expanded to contain Germany and Soviet Russia in perpetually holding down the losers, namely the Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. But the argument could be made that these patricians should have thought twice before embroiling us in a massive war, one in which we became complicit in mass killing and in the unjust treaty that ended that struggle. Far better if the US had taken the advice of Wilson’s first secretary of state, the decidedly non-patrician prairie populist William Jennings Bryan, someone who had been serious about being neutral and about working to reconcile the European belligerents.

The WASP patrician pressure to push this country into the war to end all wars was far more destructive than anything that any sleazy operator in the Bush administration did by dragging us into Iraq. Although neocons applaud in retrospect what WASP patricians did to spread democracy by force of arms, there was nothing they themselves achieved that was quite as catastrophic as what our social elite did to this country and to Europe during the First World War. We sacrificed American lives to bring about an unjust peace, when we had opportunities to act as an honest peace broker in the European conflict.

Needless to say, the appeal to the universal or universally applicable ideal of democracy played a big part in greasing the skids; and whether it was our ambassador to England Walter Hines Page, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, or President Wilson, the war in Europe was always featured as a global struggle between world democracy and military autocracy. Presumably by fighting for the British and Japanese Empires against the Habsburg and Hohenzollern Empires, we were making the world safer for democracy. Pursuing this position required us to ignore certain injustices committed against the anti-British side, starting with the illegal hunger blockade that Churchill and the British navy imposed on the Germans, several weeks before the war began.

Now it is possible to look back at nineteenth-century American framers of foreign policy, whether John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, or even Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward, and notice the absence of democratic missionary tropes in their statements about national interest. And though the Spanish American War in 1898 featured rhetoric about America’s progressive republic opposing Spain’s decadent Catholic monarchy, the US did not claim to be waging that war in order to spread democracy or to obliterate its enemies. It was fighting for a time-bound nineteenth-century cause, for a vigorous Germanic Protestant world against Latin Catholic decadence. And once we got the colonies we wanted, no American in his right mind spoke about occupying Spain and then converting its inhabitants to global democratic values — or even Protestantism.

The real shift in attitude came around World War One, which was the source of so many evils, save for Communists and neoconservatives. Trying to explain why American social and ethnic elites became obsessed with a democratic world mission before and during the war, historian Richard Gamble in The War for Righteousness focuses on the transformation of American Protestant culture in the early twentieth century. According to Gamble, the liberalization of Protestant doctrine and the beginnings of the Social Gospel movement produced two characteristic attitudes among those affected by these trends. One, Protestant, democratic missionaries believed it was their mission to bring moral uplift to the entire world; and such improvement was often associated with the transmission of American political ideals, ideals that liberal Protestants, like George W. Bush and Michael Gerson, have also touted as universally applicable. Two, the non-traditional Protestants whom Gamble cites held to an increasingly secularized pre-millennialism, one in which Christ’s Kingdom would be prepared by changing social and political structures to conform to the believer’s vision of the Good. Indeed every change these Protestants approved of would be given cosmic significance in terms of the end times, understood as democratic political perfection.

When war came to Europe, the liberal Protestants, exemplified by Woodrow Wilson, who had ceased to be an orthodox Calvinist, considered it to be a struggle between democratic Good and autocratic Evil. Once the partisans identified their English kinsmen as the progressive side, it became a moral and millenarian imperative for the US to enter the European war on behalf of the Allies. Anything less would have been a dereliction of religious duty and would have prevented God’s Kingdom from being rapidly established. And those who at home failed to take their side in the war deserved to be treated as enemies of the Good. Such liberal Protestants were totally intolerant of the neutralists or pacifists, and they continued to rage against the Central Powers long after the war was over.

Although Gamble documents his arguments, one point he never addresses to my satisfaction is why liberal Protestants held such strong views about the war from the outset. Why did they view Germany and Austria so negatively and England so positively? England certainly had a more robust tradition of parliamentary government than Germany, but German workers had a higher standard of living, were better educated and far less subject to social prejudice than the English lower orders. If the Germans invaded Belgium on their way to fighting France, the English navy was starving German civilians in violation of international law. What I’m suggesting is that there would have been good reason for Gamble’s Protestants to have taken the same position as other Protestants, including some very liberal ones, who wanted the US to stay out of the European war.

The reason these figures didn’t is that most of them were Anglophiles of English descent, like Henry Sloane Coffin, Lyman Abbott, and most of the editorial board of Christian Century. Gamble ignores certain cultural shifts that began before the War and which expressed or resulted in changed allegiances. From the 1890s on, England and Germany were competing European powers; and of the two, Germany was outpacing England economically and educationally. Germany would also challenge England’s and France’s race to divide up African colonies and insist on being given her share as a rising colonial power. And although Germany was behind England and several other countries as a naval power, by the 1890s the Germans were engaged in producing state-of-the-art battle ships, which the British government considered a threat to British naval supremacy. The naval race was not really a race, since the Germans were not likely to catch up to the British; and in the end they provided grist for the mills of British politicians like Churchill, who called for military preparations against the German Empire.

This rivalry caused emotional problems for American patricians. In the nineteenth century this group had adored the British and Germans with almost equal enthusiasm. New Englanders had gone off to study in England and Germany both; and they viewed each as a Protestant Germanic land that had contributed to the practice of liberty. This process was tortuous, since the value in question had traveled far, from the forest of Germania to Westminster Abbey and from there, to the American frontier by way of Boston and Philadelphia. But this legacy of constitutional freedom in any case had come from the Saxons, who had settled Central Germany and England; and it was also a Saxon Martin Luther who had freed the Germanic world from Latin religious bondage by spearheading the Protestant Reformation.

As a plaque from the early twentieth century on the Conrad Weiser estate, near Reading, Pennsylvania, reminds the visitor even now, the German Lutheran clergymen who settled this land in the mid-eighteenth century were thought to represent Germanic Protestant civilization, against Latin Catholic civilization. That was how many Pennsylvanians once interpreted the Anglo-French rivalry that eventually burst into the French-Indian War. Even more importantly, the phrase also indicates that Protestant Americans in the early twentieth century viewed themselves as Germanic rather than strictly English. The First World War and the Anglo-German competition preceding it made it harder and harder to accept that Germanic identity; and what took its place, as the German historian Heinz Gollwitzer points out, is a fractured Germanism, splitting into English and continental German types. Although this fracturing had begun even before the War, the struggle that broke out among Germanic kinsmen made it much sharper.

The Imperial School of History, inaugurated by Louis Andrews at Yale in 1910, focused on early America as a part of British civilization. Although a famous revolution severed the American colonies from their mother country, this, according to Andrews and his fan Woodrow Wilson, occurred after a permanent British Protestant identity had been imparted to the colonists. Note how well this corresponds to Francis Parkman’s history of the French-Indian War, which had been written two generations earlier. Parkman too had presented the victory of Protestant Anglo-Saxon institutions over French Catholic ones in the New World as the defining American experience. Any subsequent American break from England becomes in Parkman’s narrative anticlimactic.

In 1914 WASP patricians had a full set of arguments for why they were part of a British cultural and political world rather than a German one. They were heirs to the English language and literature, English common law, and English parliamentary democracy. This last point was particularly useful for the pro-British side. British parliamentary institutions were clearly better established than German ones, despite the fact Germans were less class-bound and enjoyed a higher standard of living than Englishmen. But the main point here is WASP patrician loyalties were formed on the basis of ethnic identity — and not because of any mystical belief in the democratic nature of English society or the British Empire.

The leftist opponents of America’s entry into the war saw through this appeal to democracy, and especially when it came from racial segregationists and extremely aloof social elites. John Lukacs properly observes that the typical Anglophile interventionist in the US in 1916 was usually not less but more socially conservative than American neutralists. But those who wanted the US to come to the aid of the English mother country with American lives and treasure invented a form of global democratic rhetoric that became a permanent part of American thinking about the rest of the world.

Still, as Erich Kaufmann shows in The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, WASP patricians continued to mix their liberal internationalism, which was often a codeword for Anglophilia and an Open Door policy in China, with ethnic national attitudes. This was particularly the case, once the crusade for democracy was over. A look at the membership list of the liberal internationalist Council for Foreign Policy, formed in 1919 under the guidance of former Secretary of State Elihu Root, would have contained not a few of the members of the Immigration Restriction League. Henry Cabot Lodge was both a chastened liberal internationalist and an outspoken opponent of the de-WASPization of the United States, starting in Boston as viewed from Beacon Hill. Lodge’s close friend A.B. Lawrence, president of Harvard since 1909, combined support for liberal internationalist politics and wartime Anglophilia with deep concern about the passing of WASP America. When Lowell was not campaigning for American adhesion to the League of Nations, a matter that he and Lodge disagreed about, he was working to limit the number of non-Northern European immigrants coming to the US. Lowell was a fervent advocate of the Johnson-Reed (immigration reform) Act of 1924; and as president of Harvard expressed alarm about his institution being reshaped by ethnic newcomers. Above all, he feared the arrival of Latin Catholics and Eastern European Jews at his Brahmin institution, a concern that never hindered him however from embracing the aggressive democratic internationalism that had characterized his presidential predecessor at Harvard Charles W. Eliot.

At least some of the WASP establishment defected from liberal internationalism in the decades between the two wars. Onetime enthusiasts for the war to end all wars, such as Robert McCormick, Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover, joined Midwestern and Western isolationist Progressives, in scolding FDR for plunging the US into a second European war. These onetime Anglophiles expressed second thoughts about what they thought was the misguided crusading spirit among the American patriciate. And although the Century Club, which was an ingathering of Anglophile interventionists just before the Second World War, contained some of the same people who had been interventionists in the Great War, the roll call of prominent WASP interventionists was shrinking by 1940.

In summing up, ethnic loyalty had a great deal to do with WASP liberal internationalism. That is why this stance attracted Southern politicians, who were certainly not liberal in their cultural views but whose region viewed itself as Anglo-Saxon. It also explains why members of the Immigration Restriction League saw no contradiction between international crusades for democracy and favoring ethnic nationalism at home. Therefore it must be concluded that their political outlook did not entirely coincide with the world vision now associated with neoconservatives and neoliberals. Henry Cabot Lodge, A.B. Lowell, Carter Glass and Richard Byrd of Virginia were not the predecessors of Michael Ledeen or of other neocon advocates of cosmic political reconstruction. They were WASP nativists. They were also Anglophiles rather than dedicated Zionists, which is another obvious difference between WASP interventionists of an earlier generation and later neoconservative-neoliberal policy advisors.

But these differences should not overshadow the continuities between these groups. Anglophile internationalism and its rhetorical justification paved the way for neoconservative values and emphases in the framing of American foreign policy. One served as a building block for the other; neoconservative internationalism would not have prevailed had it not been for the WASP internationalism that had become an American orthodoxy in the early twentieth century. Here then is an example of what historians call the law of unintended consequences.

November 25, 2009

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. His latest book is Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.

The Best of Paul Gottfried

This double standard may be riling some Republicans, and it may help explain the hysteria into which I saw Sean Hannity descend last night at nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time. But there is also more to the story than my readers recognize. For decades the GOP’s share of the black vote has been falling steadily; and although that vote could rise slightly from its present 2%, it is not likely that the GOP, at least during my now dwindling lifetime, will be able to garner 20% of the black vote. If it could capture a higher percentage of that minority vote, such a coup would certainly help it in states with large urban areas. There black turnout typically hurts Republican candidates of all races.

But there is no way the GOP can presently outbid the Democrats in offering set-asides and public money to minorities, despite the efforts of Karl Rove and other Bush-advisors to provide sub-prime rate mortgage loans to them, by intimidating bankers. The Dems are able to provide transfers of tax money and other public bribes to minorities on a steadier and more predictable basis. Moreover, Republican presidents have to deal with at least some strict constitutionalists among their constituents. And so they occasionally appoint federal judges who oppose quotas for minorities and other goodies that black political bosses demand. This has the likely effect of driving down the black vote for Republicans even more.

All the same, the Republicans can outdo the Democrats as PC purists. They can scream at Democrats for not destroying Harry Reid for his innocuous observations about Obama’s pigmental advantage spoken in private company. They can also wallow in guilt about American racism, like presidential candidate McCain after losing the election to our first black president or Bush lamenting American slavery in Senegal in July 2003. But Republicans can reach out even further in their rhetorical gestures. FOX, Heritage and other voices of the GOP now celebrate Martin Luther King as a national icon with a zeal that can only be matched by my very leftist college. The GOP press has meanwhile reconstructed King as a conservative thinker and conservative theologian, who took his ideas about civil disobedience from Aquinas and his view about original sin from Augustine.

Although the evidence for either claim is exiguous, here the effort is more important than factual accuracy. The GOP is trying to appropriate black symbols and heroes, and it went so far in 2006 as to distribute campaign brochures in, among other places, the South, comparing the war to spread democracy in the Middle East with the Union’s occupation of the defeated South during and after the Civil War. Supposedly a new Reconstruction, which would be more thorough than the original, was to be the model for Bush’s Iraqi policy. Although Southern whites came out and voted for the Bush-Rove party of Reconstruction, the blacks voted predictably for the Dems. (My gut reaction at the time was: good for the blacks.)

It is also the case that pace Sarah Palin, it was the Reps, not the Dems, who "immolated" Lott, in the words of Dan McCarthy, as a propitiatory offering to blacks. Dan has further observed in an email note to me that "Lott’s head on a pike did nothing to help George Allen [the liberal Republican politician who lost the black vote badly in the Virginia senatorial race in 2006]."

But such a useless strategy can be continued because until now it has done nothing to drive away most of the white Republican core. In the South more than elsewhere, the GOP has become the white party, as opposed to the Democrats, who attract almost every black vote. Presumably being a Republican, no matter what the party leaders say, identifies the party loyalist as a white Southerner. One might also observe, as Lew Rockwell has many times, that the South is full of military installations and disproportionately represented among military forces. Given such a connection, white Southerners with fading historical memories don’t seem to care about supporting a party that condemns the display of Confederate flags and praises the glories of Reconstruction. After all, the GOP is good at providing military build-ups and military engagements.

One can imagine the situation staying as it is, that is, with the GOP reaching out by putting us under a more oppressive PC regime. I expect Republican politicians will soon be engaging in an even more vigorous wooing of minorities, as Senator McCain did starting in 1998. That was when McCain declared his support for minority quotas at the University of Washington, a position he held until he ran for president in 2008. The GOP may go from waffling into strongly backing affirmative action as well as speech control in the name of sensitivity. Providing it can hold on to the business interests it serves, offer military opportunities for certain constituents, and pacify the Religious Right by allying itself with the Zionist Right and critics of abortion rights, the GOP could possibly move to the left on minority outreach, without incurring any major defections in its ranks.

But there is also the possibility that what remains of a principled Right, which the GOP has held on to, may grow sick and tired of the party’s opportunism. Every day I run into people who were once Republicans but are now disgusted by how the GOP has betrayed the American heritage of freedom. I trust this disgust will become even more widespread and that it will generate support for an alternative party, one that is serious about a return to small, decentralized government and about opposing the tyranny of Political Correctness. Needless to say, I don’t expect the Republican leadership to help forge such a party. They are the opposition that would have to be dealt with if such an alternative can prevail.

January 14, 2010

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. His latest book is Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.

The Best of Paul Gottfried

For
once in a blue moon, I find myself agreeing with Dana Milbank
of the Washington Post (October 18) when he observes that
"conservatives are mum about Mitt's moderation." Making
allowances for Milbank's ideologically colored view, when he says
that in recent weeks the Republican presidential candidate "sprinted
toward the center," this columnist is correct on two points.
One, Romney has abandoned just about every "conservative"
social position he took during the primaries; and two, "conservative"
commentators and GOP regulars don't seem to mind. They're too
busy celebrating Romney's ascent in presidential polls, or else
complaining that Romney hasn't savaged Obama's foreign policy
furiously enough.

GOP media celebrities may be receiving their worldview as well
as money from neoconservative fat cat Rupert Murdoch, who is an
ardent American interventionist. They seem to be oblivious to
the fact that most Americans are not complaining about Obama's
insufficient aggressiveness in international relations. How many
women voters or even old-time conservatives, like me, do Republican
mediacrats think they'll attract by continuing to scream about
Benghazi or, as Ryan did in his debate with Biden, gripe that
our president didn't get tough enough with Putin over Syria? Contrary
to something else Ryan suggested in his debate with Biden, it's
not at all clear that the anti-government side in Syria is any
more freedom-loving than those Alawi Muslims who are now in power
and whom the Russian government backs.

Are
we really eager to jump into another Near Eastern quagmire, particularly
while we're still involved in the occupation of two Muslim countries?
And allow me to express (for a person of the Right) two other
heretical ideas: I'm not sure whether Obama is more to blame for
what happened in Benghazi with the attack on our embassy than
was George W. Bush for 9/11. Although Obama and his staff misrepresented
the facts afterwards, I can't figure out how they were responsible
for the terrorist attack itself. I'm also not sure what Romney
intends to do to stop Iran from developing a nuclear device. Will
he join the Israelis in launching an attack on that country? I
doubt his foreign policy advisors would hold back President Romney
if he decided on this course.

Such
warlike positions may drive away far more voters than Romney's
adherence to whatever social positions he took as a primary candidate.
In the primaries and once or twice since, he's claimed to be pro-life
but when Obama stated during the debate that Romney does not support
Planned Parenthood, Romney predictably tried to weasel out of
the charge. What he should have answered is that he heartily endorses
all the other activities provided by Planned Parenthood, but wishes
this organization would restrict its activities to those endeavors
and not facilitate abortions. But being a consummate opportunist,
Romney wouldn't take this straightforward position. Perhaps it's
because it's not the one that he's consistently held throughout
his political career.

When
Obama accused his opponent of supporting those tough measures
introduced in Arizona under Governor Jan Brewer against illegal
immigration, Romney again switched colors. Although he had enthusiastically
backed this law and although, as Obama correctly pointed out,
had put the person who wrote it on his advisory staff, in the
second debate, Romney tried to align his position with Obama's.
Here too he was clearly equivocating in order to reach out to
potential Democratic voters.

And
I found even more egregious his answer as to whether he supports
legislation enacted by Obama and the Democrats allowing women
to bring suit against employers for unequal pay (relative to what
men were receiving) without time limitations. For someone who
supposedly believes in a free market economy and who should not
want to saddle employers with endless, expensive litigation by
groups of women claiming to have been given unequal pay in the
past, Romney should have explained why he opposed this legislation.
Of course he did no such thing. He answered instead by boasting
about how he had recruited lots of women for his administration
in Massachusetts. When Romney decided to outdo Obama on the subject
of who could provide more student loans, I yelled out the answer
that he should have given: "They drive up tuition and leave
students with debts that many of them will default on."

One knows more or less what four more years of Obama will bring,
but Romney seems harder to figure out. He looks nice enough and
does have a photogenic family. He probably would manage the economy
a bit better than the present administration and would please
the Right and center by probably appointing (but who knows!) less
left-leaning judges to the federal courts than those favored by
the Democrats. But this guy changes his positions the way Beyoncé
switches her hair styles. Even worse, his supporters have been
so conditioned to hate Obama that they don't even notice.

October
22, 2012

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

Last week,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got people's juices going when
he announced in the Senate "the word is out." Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney had not been paying his taxes
for at least a decade; and to show this was the case, various
Democratic dignitaries, including Nancy Pelosi, suggested that
Reid was divulging self-evident charges even if they still hadn't
been proved. The trick may have worked because Romney, being Romney,
had no effective rejoinder and his poll numbers have continued
to plummet. (He is now about ten points behind the present disaster
in the White House, according to FOX and CBS polls.)

The best
the GOP could muster as a response to Reid's apparently made-up
but tactically useful charge is belaboring a historical comparison.
As Rich Lowry correctly notes (The Incredible Lightness of Reid),
"Republicans have condemned Reid's unsupported allegations
as modern-day McCarthyism." Then, as testimony to the fact
he had taken a freshman college course from an instructor with
conventional liberal views. Lowry goes on to observe: "Old
Tail Gunner Joe was deflated at the Army-McCarthy hearings when
he was confronted with the famous question, u2018Have you no decency,
Sir?'"

Lowry gets
part of the story right: In 1954 the junior Senator from Wisconsin
and a World War Two marine veteran (he had been a tail gunner
on a plane in the Pacific during the War), Joseph R. McCarthy,
was censured by the Senate for making what seemed unsubstantiated
charges against the Army. McCarthy accused the military of allowing
itself to be infiltrated by Soviet agents. The accuser then was
a tongue-loose alcoholic, who would die of cirrhosis three years
later. And he did behave during the hearings like the "swash-buckler"
that one of his critics (and a mentor of mine, hardly a man of
the Left) Will Herberg thought he had become by 1954. After one
of Joe's longer rants, probably delivered under the influence,
the attorney then representing the U.S.A. Joseph N. Welch uttered
his famous rhetorical line questioning whether the junior senator
had any decency left. The line of course was cribbed from Cicero's
denunciation of Catiline, which we studied in high school Latin.
Although often depicted as a conservative as well as blueblood,
Welch had spent years working for the Communist front organization,
the National Lawyers Guild. Why such a moving target was the counsel
for the army during the senatorial hearings, remains for me a
mystery.

The problem
with these comparisons, as
Ann Coulter points out and M. Stanton Evans demonstrates in
a heavily documented book of many hundreds of pages Blacklisted
by History (Random House, 2007), is that McCarthy's charges,
when he started out as an anti-Communist, were substantially correct.
The list he waved in his hand in the Wheeling, West Virginia speech,
in February 1950, inaugurating his anti-Communist crusade, contained
the names of 205 suspected Communist agents. They were mostly
the names given as suspected agents by (Democratic) Secretary
of State James Byrnes in 1946. As late as 1956 Truman continued
to deny the Communist affiliations of state department official,
Alger Hiss, although those affiliations (and Hiss's perjury) had
been proved in a court of law during Truman's presidency. In 1946
Truman pushed successfully into the US Directorship of the IMF
a blatant Soviet agent (at the time there was overwhelming evidence
for this soon to be confirmed charge), Harry Dexter White.

Coulter ascribes
the failure of her fellow-Republicans to appreciate the justification
for at least some of McCarthy's accusations to the failure "of
Republicans to read." Presumably if her fellow-Reps had read
Evans, the defense of the Senator done by WFB and his brother-in-law
L. Brent Bozell McCarthy
and His Enemies in 1954, and her own journalistic distillation,
they would know the truth. Ann might also have noticed that support
for McCarthy and a general adherence to what Buckley praised as
"McCarthyism" was the defining principle of the postwar
conservative movement that sprang up around National Review
in 1955. Back then McCarthyism and anti-Communism went together
as an inseparable pair in the emerging New Right.

This may
be as relevant for our analysis as the fact that anti-McCarthyism
and a defense of the presidency of Harry Truman were basic to
the historical perspective of those who took over the conservative
movement in the 1980s. From the Cold War liberal perspective of
the neoconservatives, there was no need for a McCarthyite attack
on Communist agents in high place. Although such a problem may
have existed, President Truman was on top of the issue. Once he
had destroyed fascism and Japanese militarism and had begun to
reeducate our defeated enemies, he could deal with the new foreign
threat. In fact he was already doing just that, when McCarthy
and other Republicans began pushing him around.

Or so Ronald
Radosh, a veteran anti-Communist of the moderate Left, explains
in a very establishment review of Evans's massive tome in National
Review (December 17, 2007). McCarthy was supposedly a derailer
of the good (read social democratic) war against Communism, who
brought unnecessary rightwing baggage with him. Radosh does everything
that is comme il faut in today's journalism, and Ann Coulter therefore
expresses no surprise that his broadside was published in the
"increasingly irrelevant National Review." (December
5, 2007). All that Radosh omits in what Coulter describes as his
desperate effort "to apologize to the Left" is bringing
up the Left's accusation that McCarthy and his followers created
a Nazi-like witch hunt that lasted through the Red Scare Decade,
aka the 1950s.

Contrary
to the authorized account, universities were increasingly dominated
by the Left throughout that period. The pro-McCarthyite professor
of political science and Buckley's teacher at Yale Willmoore Kendall
was pushed out of his tenured position by hectoring tactics, until
he finally allowed himself to be bought out. Having attended Yale
after the supposed horrors of the McCarthy decade, I can report
that neither the history nor political science department contained
a single figure of the Right. The only effect of the fictitious
rightwing purge that I can determine, except for the fact that
Communist or former Communist film-writers had to operate temporarily
behind the scenes, is that the Left got to increase its hold on
our social and cultural institutions. From the 1960s on, this
became increasingly obvious.

Surveying
the anti-McCarthyite effusions coming from GOP sources in the
wake of Reid's attack, I would have to give the prize for saying
the dumbest thing to that Truman Democrat and neoconservative
par excellence, Charles Krauthammer. In a stem-winder against
Reid last week on FOX, Krauthammer proclaimed that the Senator
Majority Leader was descending to the especially iniquitous depths
of demagoguery perhaps reached only by guess whom? Krauthammer
appeals to our selective historical memory by declaring that McCarthy
in his address in Wheeling waved an empty piece of paper on which
he pretended to have a list of Communist agents. As Evans and
others have proved beyond any doubt, that paper was not empty
and those who were listed may well have been Soviet agents, as
recognized even by officials in the Truman administration.

Once on a
trip with my family to a vacation spot on a lake in the North
Woods, we stopped in Ripon, Wisconsin to visit one of the two
birthplaces of the Republican Party (the other being Jackson,
Michigan). In the museum we noticed a particularly florid display
surrounding a devotional picture of Tail Gunner Joe (his home
in Appleton was only a forty minute-drive from there). The museum
curator who saw me examining this display ran up to explain away
this source of embarrassment. "They just keep bringing this
stuff here, the people who liked him," the curator pointed
out." And then to show he was on the side of History, he
added: "They say he was the worst disgrace the Republican
Party ever had to deal with." My rejoinder at the time was
"I wouldn't believe that for a moment." What I would
answer now is "Joe wasn't half as bad as our recent GOP presidential
candidates! Even when pickled, he gave the impression of being
alive."

August
14, 2012

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

I belong
to a generation that still values what is now indiscriminately
referred to as “higher education.” What that once
meant was going to a four-year college, if one’s high-school
grades showed promise, and in return for about $700 each semester
spending the next four years immersed in books. Back then we studied
traditional disciplines, such as math, languages, and those liberal
arts that still defined our Western civilization. If a bright
student wanted to branch out to other cultures and languages,
like Chinese or Japanese, he or she was encouraged to do so. Unlike
some colleges nowadays, we most certainly did not have “hands-on
learning.” The prevalent view was that if students didn’t
want to read books, they shouldn’t be in college.

Not insignificantly,
we lived like medieval monks. We had next to no control about
what was served in the dining room; and watching TV in the evening
was only possible if one shared this amenity with other adolescents
in some far-off corner of the campus. We were in college strictly
to learn, with few learning devices. We were definitely not there
to hang out, play video games in our dorm rooms, or choose from
multiple culinary options in an eating area that looked like the
circular dining room in the Hotel Hershey.

I used to
get dirty looks toward the end of my teaching career when I asked
students in Western Civilization courses what books they had read.
These students didn’t open books, perhaps on principle. I’ve
no idea why they’re in college, except to meet significant
others and to enjoy leisure time at the expense of their parents
or of American taxpayers. As I like to point out, such college
residents are students in the same sense I would be a player in
the national hockey league, if I signed up in a program that allowed
me to imagine I was something I was not. Of course, since these
kids, or their enablers, are paying at least one hundred times
more than I did for my education, they get their illusions and
sybaritic tastes indulged.

Lest I forget,
let me mention that the number of administrators I recall seeing
at Yale University in the mid-1960s was a fraction of the army
of paper-pushers that is there now. I suspect these paper-pushers
are now earning salaries that correspond to the tuition that Yale
requires from each undergraduate, which is $58,000 a year. Although
this money is icing on the cake, since most Ivy League and at
least some state universities could survive from their endowments,
Yale and schools of similar caliber do provide enormous professional
advantages to their graduates. I'm not sure what comparable advantages
accrue to those who attend considerably less prestigious institutions
of learning and are paying almost as much for the experience.

Read
the rest of the article

July
6, 2012

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

Since neoconservative
journalists, at least to my knowledge, have not been lately slamming
the “German connection,” I rejoiced at a feature
article in yesterday’s New York Post (March 20)
going after the “series of German outrages” that helped
push us into World War One. A commentary by Thomas A. Reppetto,
on German saboteurs during World War, focuses on an explosion
at an ammunition factory on Black Tom Island on July 30, 1916,
which is now Liberty State Park in New Jersey. In this incident
and other similar ones that erupted in the area between New York
and Baltimore, German agents prevented by violent means the delivery
of arms “to the Allied powers.”

Reppetto
suggests that the federal government dealt effectively with such
explosions, by declaring war on Germany and then taking counter-espionage
into its own hands. At first this could not be done because we
were mollycoddling Germans residents in the US while indulging
such uncooperative figures as the authoritarian mayor of Jersey
City Frank Hague. Reppetto does not hide the moral here, which
is drawing a direct line between the sneaky, anti-democratic Germans
in World War One and the present terrorist danger. “New Jersey
officials need to recall the lessons of Black Tom.” “Islamic
militants have operated out of Jersey City,” just as once
other bad folks did.

Allow me
to set the record straight. The greatest outrage in Reppetto’s
account came from the Wilson administration, which turned the
US into perhaps the chief supplier of arms to the Allied side.
Wilson’s decision in 1915 to allow American arms manufacturers
to sell to both sides was a belligerent act directed against the
Central Powers. Only one side was in a position to acquire American
arms, because Germany at the time, as everyone knew, was being
blockaded. The English blockade, which was aimed at starving the
Germans, arguably in violation of international law, also kept
arms from reaching Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary.

Moreover,
most arms manufacturers were far from neutral. One of the largest
Pierre du Pont, who had his ammunition factory blown up, was a
pro-British interventionist, who was giving arms to the side he
backed in the war. Even before the arms embargo was officially
lifted, the American government was turning a blind eye to the
sending of contraband to the Allies. According to Colin Wilson’s
1972 study, the bombing of the Lusitania, which was advertised
as a British passenger vessel, took place in May 1915, because
the ship was loaded with arms being sent to England. The torpedoing
however had the effect of turning American public opinion against
the Central Powers and permitted Wilson to replace the truly neutralist
Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, with the pro-British
interventionist Robert Lansing.

Read
the rest of the article

March
22, 2012

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

A vastly
underexplored topic is the British government’s role in greasing
the skids for World War I. Until recently it was hard to find
scholars who would dispute the culturally comfortable judgment
that “authoritarian Germany” unleashed the Great War
out of militaristic arrogance. Supposedly the British only got
involved after the Germans recklessly violated Belgian neutrality
on their way to conquering “democratic“ France.

But British
Foreign Secretary Lord Edward Grey had done everything in his
power to isolate the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies,
who were justified in their concern about being surrounded by
enemies. The Triple Entente, largely constructed by Grey’s
government and which drew the French and Russians into a far-reaching
alliance, encircled Germany and Austria with warlike foes. In
July 1914 German leaders felt forced to back their Austrian allies
in a war against the Serbs, who were then a Russian client state.
It was clear by then that this conflict would require the Germans
to fight both Russia and France.

The German
military fatalistically accepted the possibility of England entering
the struggle against them. This might have happened even if the
Germans had not violated Belgian soil in order to knock out the
French before sending their armies eastward to deal with a massive
Russian invasion. The English were anything but neutral. In the
summer of 1914 their government was about to sign a military alliance
with Russia calling for a joint operation against German Pomerania
in case of a general war. The British had also given assurances
to French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé that
they would back the French and the Russians (who had been allied
since 1891) if war broke out with Germany.

Grey spurned
attempts by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to
woo his government away from their commitments to Germany’s
enemies.

German concessions
in 1912 included:

• The
  acceptance of British dominance in constructing railroads and
  accessing oil reserves in what is now Iraq
• Investments
  in central African ventures that would clearly benefit the English
  more than the Germans
• Meekly
  following England’s lead in two Balkan Wars where Austria’s
  enemy Serbia nearly doubled its territory.

The Russians
and French were also vastly expanding their conscription to outnumber
the German and Austrian forces, but neither German concessions
nor the saber-rattling of England’s continental allies caused
the British government to change direction. Lord Grey, who remained
foreign secretary until 1916, never swerved from his view that
Germany was England’s most dangerous enemy.

Read
the rest of the article

March
2, 2012

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

In his recent
syndicated column “A
U.N. for the good guys,” Jonah Goldberg evokes the mindset
of seventeenth-century puritanism. This is entirely understandable.
Much of what the American left teaches, including its neoconservative
element, resembles American Calvinism – albeit in a warmed-over
form. In Puritan New England, Congregationalists – the only
authorized communicants – were deeply troubled that unredeemed
polluted their assemblies. Those who considered themselves visible
saints were forced to break bread with those who could not properly
prove their divine election. This led to a sectarian split that
resulted in Rhode Island’s settlement by breakaway Calvinists
disgusted by the toleration of impure religious assemblies in
Massachusetts. This determined group of dissenters formed a purified
congregation of the saints

In a similar
way Jonah is looking for pure souls. He is agitated that Russia
and China would not vote for “a fairly toothless U.N. resolution
condemning the regime in Syria and calling for President Bashar
Assad, the lipless murderer who runs the place, to step down.”
Jonah points to a terrible spiritual defect in the governments
that opposed the resolution. To him it is an outrage that the
UN Security Council assigns seats to countries “because they
are powerful, not because they are decent, wise or democratic.”
This stems from what Jonah says is a “category error”:
“There is nothing in the UN Charter…that says a government
has to be democratic or even care for the welfare of its people.”
The UN does something even more grievous from the neoconservative
standpoint: It serves as a “counterweight to the United States”
and allows morally reprehensible countries to thumb their noses
at America..

Although
Jonah holds back on the idea of “getting rid of the UN”
completely, he says it may be possible to create a “league,
or concert, of democracies” under American ideological leadership.
Here the pure of heart would be able to assemble and act in concert
because “good nations want to see good things done.”

Goldberg
writes:

A permanent
global clubhouse for democracies based on shared principles
would make aiding growing movements easier and offer a nice
incentive for nations to earn membership in a club with loftier
standards than mere existence.

Read
the rest of the article

February
18, 2012

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

A book of
mine, Leo
Strauss and Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal,
is about to come out with Cambridge University Press; and it has
a special connection to the Mises Institute. Much of the critical
thrust comes from attending conferences sponsored by the Mises
Institute and from getting to know my fellow- participants and
their writings. Although I harbored strong doubts about my latest
subjects even before these encounters, my conversations with David
Gordon, Murray Rothbard, Robert Higgs and Thomas DiLorenzo and
later, discovering Mises's comments about Strass gave additional
substance to my suspicions. My project became a way of calling
attention to a significant body of criticism that the liberal-neoconservative
press and most scholarly organizations wouldn't deign to present.
I was upset in particular by the inability of David Gordon (and
Lew Rockwell) to find a suitable publisher for a long, incisive
work that David had produced about Harry Jaffa's reading of American
history. It was one of the most cerebral "value critiques"
by a living thinker that I had seen.

Why, asks
David, should Jaffa, a cult figure who is wined and dined by GOP
benefactors, be immune from the type of assessment that other
authors of scholarly works should have to accept? Why do Straussians
like Jaffa, Allan Bloom, Thomas Pangle, and Charles Kesler achieve
canonical status as "conservative" thinkers without
having their ideas rigorously examined in widely accessible forums?
It seems that the only appraisals such figures have to deal with
are puff pieces in neoconservative publications and the scribbling
of inflamed leftists attacking them as rightwing extremists.

Note that
my book does not come out of any political engagement. It is in
no way a statement of my political creed. Although hardly friendly
to the Wilsonian Weltpolitik of the Straussians, I devote more
space to defending my subjects from unjust critics than I do to
dissecting their views. Nor was my book produced, as one nasty
commentator writing to the executive editor of an Ivy League press
explained, because I'm "a very angry person" trying
to settle scores. Apparently my madness would "permanently
discredit" any press that was foolish enough to publish me.
My book at any rate is not an expression of pique, and I bend
backward to make sense of arguments that I have trouble accepting
at face value. I also treat main subject, Leo Strauss, with respect
and empathy, even while disagreeing with his hermeneutic and liberal
internationalism. I stress that for all his questionable judgments,
Strauss was a person of vast humanistic learning, and more thoughtful
and less pompous than some of his famous students. I fully sympathize
with the plight that he and others of his background suffered
who because of their Jewish ancestry were driven out of their
homeland and forced to live in exile. My own family suffered the
same fate.

What seemed
intolerable, however, was the unwillingness of Straussians and
their adulators to engage serious critics, some of whom have been
associated with the Mises Institute. These expressions of moral
self-importance may go back to Strauss himself. Murray Rothbard
observed that at a Volker Fund conference, his teacher Mises had
argued vainly with Strauss about the need to separate facts from
values in doing research. Strauss had retorted that there are
moral judgments inseparably attached to our use of facts. This
supposedly indicates that one could not or, perhaps more importantly,
should not draw the fact/value distinction that Mises, and before
him, in a different form, Max Weber had tried to make. In response
to these statements, Mises argued that facts remain such, no matter
how people dress them up. "A prostitute would be plying the
same trade no matter what designation we choose to confer on such
a person." As the debate wore on and Strauss began to moralize,
Mises lost his equanimity. He indicated to Rothbard that he was
being asked to debate not a true scholar but a "gymnasium
instructor."

In my book
I quote David, who has taken over and elaborated on the criticism
offered by his teacher and Murray's teacher Mises, namely, that
the Straussians reach for moral platitudes against those who are
better- armed with "facts." One reason David is mentioned
so often in my monograph, and particularly in the chapter "The
Method Deconstructed," is that he did much of the deconstructing
for me. While helping with the proofreading, which is another
service he performed, David commented about how much he enjoyed
my text; then, in typically David-fashion, he listed as his favorite
parts of my book those pages on which he's mentioned. Actually
he missed more than half of the references to him, including two
of them in the acknowledgements.

Like other
thoughtful critics of Straussian methodology, specifically Grant
Havers, Barry Shain, and Kenneth McIntyre, David was essential
to my work. But in his case listening to him reel off what was
wrong with how the Straussians read (or misread) selected texts,
inspired my project. Without the fact that David cornered me about
ten years ago at a conference in Auburn and explained to me in
between Borscht Belt jokes the fallacies of Strauss and his disciple,
I doubt that I would have done my book. His conversation and written
comments, stored in the bowels of the Lew Rockwell Archives, made
my task considerably less burdensome. One remark from David's
conversation in Auburn that I still remember was his hypothetical
rejoinder to Harry Jaffa in a debate that never took place. Jaffa
insisted on the pages of National Review, and in fact wherever
else he wrote, that we should believe in equality because Lincoln
did (never mind that Di Lorenzo, among others, has challenged
this view of Lincoln with counter-evidence). David asked that
"even if we assume that Jaffa was expressing Lincoln's real
opinion, why should we have to hold the same view"? And why
are we supposed to impose Lincoln's opinion on unwilling subjects
by force of arms? No one else to my knowledge has asked these
indelicate questions.

Even then
David and I were sick of the smarminess with which certain Straussians
would respond to logical and factual objections. Calling one's
opponent a "relativist" or scolding him for not embracing
universal democratic values is not an answer at all. It is an
arrogant evasion of a discussion. David also observed that in
their attempt to find "secret writing" in texts, Straussians
would almost compulsively read their own values into the past.
Presumably all smart people who wrote "political philosophy,"
no matter when they lived, were religious skeptics, yearning for
something like "liberal democracy." This speculation
could be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed and contributed zip
to scholarly discussion. Like me, David also wondered why none
of the great minds whom the Straussians wrote about was ever shown
to be a Christian heretic or something other than a forerunner
of those who are now revealing their concealed meanings. One might
have thought that if concealment was their intention, these fellows
on at least some occasions would have been hiding non-modern thoughts
from the public or their monarchs. Why do all "secret writings"
seem to have originated with a Jewish agnostic residing in an
American metropolitan area?

An observation
in my book contrasting Straussian enterprises to the Mises Institute
also warrants some attention here. The Miseans and the Straussians
both claim intellectual descent from Central European Jewish scholars
who fled from the Nazis. Moreover, both groups have processed
these biographical experiences and incorporated them into their
worldviews, but in totally different ways. Whereas the Miseans
view their founder as the victim of a particularly noxious form
of state socialism, the Straussians emphasize the evils of the
"German connection," as explained by Allan Bloom in
The
Closing of the American Mind. While the Miseans focus
on the link between state planning and tyranny, the Straussians
finger the uniquely wicked heritage of the Germans in telling
us why "liberal democracy" is always under siege. Strauss
himself established this perspective, when in Natural
Right and History he stressed the continuing danger of
German ideas, even though the German military threat had been
defeated six years earlier.

While the
disciples of Mises favor an isolationist foreign policy designed
to dismantle socialism at home, the Straussians are perpetually
reliving Munich 1938, when the "democracies" backed
down to a German dictatorship, just as they had failed to confront
the supposed iniquities of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914. One might push
the contrast even further: while the Mises Institute celebrates
the Vienna in which the Austrian School of Economics took form,
including the generally supportive liberal monarchy of Kaiser
Franz Josef, the Straussians have continued their efforts to counter
a threat that they see originating in Central Europe. During the
student revolts of the 1960s, Allan Bloom and his soul-brothers
blamed these outbursts on German critics of modern democracy.
Strauss's star students managed to find the German threat wherever
they looked. In one of my earliest encounters with Straussian
professors, at Michigan State in 1967 and 1968, it was explained
to me that German historicists had fueled the antiwar student
protest with their antidemocratic notions. This connection seemed
to me so surreal that it caused me to reflect on the life's experiences
of those who could believe such things.

Significantly,
these Straussian attacks on the tainted German heritage play well
in our society of letters. A Jewish liberal-neoconservative presence
(perhaps predominance) in the media and in the academy renders
some Straussian fixations profitable. Well-placed intellectuals
are still agonizing over the "German catastrophe" in
a way that they don't about other bloodbaths, particularly those
unleashed by Communist tyrants. There is also a culture of defeat
and self-rejection among the Germans which fits perfectly with
the Straussian war on German ideas and German illiberalism. Although
the Left may attack the Straussians rhetorically as "fascists,"
it shares many of their sentiments, particularly their revulsion
for German culture and for German politics before the First World
War.

Another factor
has helped the Straussians professionally: Their impassioned Zionism
has enhanced their moral acceptability in Jewish and neoconservative
circles. If their interpretive gymnastics may sometimes drive
their political fans up the wall, Strauss's disciples win points
where it counts. They are recognized as part of the journalistic
establishment. Whereas the Miseans (and a fortiori this author)
would have trouble getting into the New York Times, Washington
Post or neoconservative publications, Straussians (and their
allies) appear in all these venues as both authors and respected
subjects. Nothing is more baffling than the complaint that the
"liberal media" ignore or persecute Straussians. This
gripe is almost as baseless as another related one, that Straussians
are excluded from elite universities. Would that I had been excluded
from academic posts during my career the way the Straussians have
been.

I do not
mean to suggest that there is something wrong with how the Mises
Institute has dealt with its founder's experiences in Central
Europe. Its approach to this aspect of twentieth-century history
has been rational and even commendable. But it has certainly not
won the Mises Institute the moral acceptability that the Straussians
have achieved by taking the opposite position. Curiously, leftist
opponents have laced into the Straussians for not being sufficiently
Teutonophobic. Despite the scornful references to German ideas
in their polemics, these Straussians are alleged to be perpetuating
the hated German connection while pretending to denounce it. In
short, one can never hate German thought sufficiently (except
of course for Marx and a few other selected German leftists) to
please our current cultural industry. But Straussians can at least
be credited with having made a start here.

One final
point may belong here: The professional and journalistic successes
of Strauss's students have had little to do with their efforts
to revive a "classical heritage" or to make us appreciate
Plato and Thucydides. The argument I try to make in my book is
exactly the opposite: the Straussians have done so well at least
partly because they have bet on the right horse in our current
liberal internationalist politics. They provide window-dressing
and cultic terminology for a widely propagated American creed
pushed by government and the media, featuring calls for armed
"human rights" campaigns, references to the Holocaust
and the Anglosphere, and tributes to liberal or social democratic
"values." The Straussians have made names for themselves
by putting old and even stale wine into new bottles.

December
7, 2010

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

Last spring
GOP columnists were already urging their fellow party-members
to nominate a centrist for the presidential race. Kim Strassel
(April 5, 2011) and Peggy Noonan (April 29, 2011) in Wall Street
Journal and Michael Barone and Jonah Goldberg in their syndicated
columns all warned against reaching too far right for a presidential
candidate. Noonan identified this practice with a "mood of
antic cultural pique" and a tendency "to annoy the mainstream
media" that came out of the Tea Party insurgency last year.
She pointed to McCain, Dole, the two Bush presidents, and Romney
as suitable candidates for a party that needs "the center
where most of the voters are." On May 18 Goldberg announced
that "already the conversation on the right is moving toward
the all-important question of electability — which candidate can
peel off the handful of independents needed to win an election
that will be a referendum on Obama and his record." He knows
his fellow "conservative voters" "barring a truly
fringe nominee" can be counted on to "vote against Obama,
no matter what."

Goldberg,
Noonan and other Republican journalists were and are shoving their
party toward the center even before the primaries get underway.
Fortunately for them, the targets of their advice may already
be where they want. Republican voters have usually favored presidential
candidates who hug the "center." Unlike the Democrats,
who in 2008 happily reached leftward to nominate and win with
"the candidate of hope," Republicans try hard to avoid
controversy.

They are
happy with lackluster moderates like Jerry Ford, Robert Dole,
and George H.W. Bush and perhaps they will soon be nominating
that ultimate waffler Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts
moved from the social and economic left to the center right, when
he decided to seek the presidency in 2007. Once Romney sews up
his party's nomination, he'll be expected to move a bit to the
left, in order to pick up independents and perhaps a few stray
black, Jewish and Hispanic voters from the Democrats. Stephen
Baldwin, who is gathering information for a book The Manufactured
Candidate, has argued that Romney holds no "coherent
worldview" except for shameless flipping on issues to advance
his career. Black Republican columnist Deroy Murdock complained
as early as February 2007 that Romney is so "fine a thespian"
that" no one knows where the performer ends and the character
begins."

This may
in fact be an exaggeration. In foreign policy Romney is a paradigmatic
neoconservative who in his recent Iowa debate stated that "democracy
is not defined by a vote. There has to be the underpinnings of
education, health care…." According to the former governor's
website, his foreign policy will not only expand NATO and build
closer alliances with Israel and Russia's neighbors (thereby ringing
Russia with enemies), but also "promote and defend democracy
throughout the world." Here we have the makings of another
George W. Bush in Barbie Doll form. Note a major complaint against
Obama from Republican strategists Dick Morris and Karl Rove is
that he won't play by their rules. Obama won from the left and
continues to rule from there. This president won't be a "centrist,"
that is to say, a Republican president.

All of this
is even truer of Romney's latest rival Newt, who true to his centrist
credit was instrumental in giving us the Martin Luther King festival
and getting Confederate symbols removed from public places in
Georgia. Gingrich in his centrist inclinations also pushed for
sanctions against apartheid South Africa and has been even more
strident than W in calling for a liberal internationalist foreign
policy, built around cooperation with the Israeli government.
With due respect for Israel and its oppressive security problems,
does Gingrich really have to begin every discussion of the Middle
East with the phrase "our fellow democracy Israel"?

Even a Republican
leader now widely identified as a world-historical president,
Ronald Reagan, played by the Morris-Rove rules. On the positive
side, Reagan avoided tax increases and reduced marginal tax rates;
and he helped topple the "evil empire" by placing military
and financial pressures on the Soviets. But he failed, or perhaps
didn't even try, to abolish major departments of government; and
while Reagan didn't support quotas and set-asides, his attorney
general's office prosecuted more cases of discrimination in the
private sector than any other administration had done until then.
In 1987 Reagan supported an amnesty bill for illegals that opened
the door to many of the problems that Congress is now (more or
less) addressing. Undoubtedly Reagan nominated (or tried to nominate
in the case of Robert Bork) far more conservative federal judges
than his Democratic successor. But a survey of his record also
shows that he brought others on board.

These were
the Republican hangers-on who went to Washington supposedly to
rid us of bureaucracy but who stayed on to become big-government
conservatives. The Reagan-appointees would also include the neoconservatives,
who during the Reagan years acquired a powerful foothold in the
foreign policy establishment as well as in the department of education,
national endowment for democracy, and national endowment for the
humanities. The current attempts to depict Reagan as a "conservative"
version of Wilson or FDR border on the ridiculous. At home Reagan
was a transactional not transformational president, aside from
the cataclysmic effects of his incorporation of neoconservative
ideologues into his administration.

In 1994 the
Reps focused on critical reductions in government and won both
houses of Congress, but in 1996 they ran for president a centrist
looking leftward, Bob Dole. Two achievements that candidate Dole
boasted of having brought about, with encouragement from centrist
Republican president George H. W. Bush, were the American with
Disabilities Act and a 1991 Civil Rights Act, which reopened the
door to racial quotas. Dole's endorsement of the latter bill was
appropriate, seeing that another centrist Republican Richard Nixon
had introduced racial set-asides with his Philadelphia Plan in
1969. This may be a rule in American politics: Each time a Republican
presidential candidate goes begging for minority votes, he loses
a higher percentage of them than the centrist Republican presidential
candidate who preceded him.

But why do
Republicans expect their standard-bearers to display this center-mindedness?
The answer most often given stresses strategic necessity. Although
Republicans (allegedly, since there is no evidence of this) would
like to run principled "conservatives" in presidential
elections, the votes simply aren't there. Elections are decided
where Dick Morris, Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan indicate they are,
somewhere in the center and among independent voters.

But Republicans
aren't likely to win by running low-octane Democrats. The more
they imitate the opposition even while attacking it, the more
likely it is they will drive the vital center of political debate
toward the left. GOP candidates have been pursuing what is generally
a no-win strategy for decades, by trying to sound like Democrats
while throwing mud at the opposition. Equally silly has been their
tendency to blame the other party for doing what Republican administrations
have been doing almost as frenetically, engaging in massive deficit
spending, monetizing wars and giving away lots of patronage. Listening
to Fox-News and Republican politicians, one gets the impression
that all runaway federal spending began the day Obama took office.
Parties that market such moonshine, while offering little in the
way of significant change are not likely to look believable. That
may be why even with Obama in trouble, the Republicans have not
been gaining in popularity.

There are
two compelling reasons that the Republicans keep trotting out
faceless moderates (usually turned leftward once the primaries
are over). First of all, being Republican is a sociological more
than ideological choice. The party is predominantly white Protestant;
and according to the Pew survey, 81% of the Republican votes cast
in the 2010 election came from churched white Protestants. On
a good day a GOP candidate may be able to peel off 40 to 45 percent
of the Catholic vote, 15 to 20 percent of the Jewish vote, 30
to 40 percent of the Hispanic vote and about 3 to 5 percent of
the black vote. But this doesn't change the recruiting problem.
Only 5% of Hispanics and only 2% of blacks identify themselves
as Republicans, and despite their often over-the-top Zionist rhetoric
and neoconservative advisors, Republicans rarely pick up as much
as 20% of the Jewish vote.

Party strategy
has aimed at expanding this base, and the logical next step would
be to work for increased Republican support among white Catholics.
(Republicans obtained a majority of their votes in 2010). While
some effort has gone toward this end by appealing to anti-abortion
Catholics, more energy seems to be directed toward roping in black
and Hispanic voters. This has taken the forms of waffling on illegal
immigration, except in the case of Gingrich who openly supports
amnestying illegals, and making public apologies for past expressions
of white Protestant prejudice. Republican voters can generally
live with these maneuverings. They are mostly people who hope
to keep things as they are. They rarely undo (or expect their
elected officials to undo) what the Dems have done, and their
politicians pride themselves on managing the federal welfare state
in a fiscally responsible way. Unlike the protesting minorities
in the Democratic Party, Republicans were not inclined to manifest
outrage before the Tea Party surfaced. They were delighted with
the Bush-status quo before Obama and Obamacare came along, and
they are still celebrating our government even in its present
disarray as a shining and exportable example of "exceptionalism."

Republicans
also want minorities to like them and the city on a hill their
ancestors settled. And so they probably expect their leaders to
be like George W. Bush, who on a visit to Senegal on July 8, 2003
condemned the transatlantic slave trade as "one of the greatest
crimes in history." Needless to say, this terrible crime
was not associated in any way with non-Westerners, whether African
tribal chiefs or Arab slave-traders. Bush was placing the blame
on the West, more specifically on white Americans. In his memoirs
Bush noted that his most bitter presidential experience was having
the radical black intellectual Cornell West call him a "racist."
This kind of remark may be more hurtful for Republicans, whose
desperate wooing of the blacks has been unsuccessful, than for
Democrats, who can assume overwhelming black support. Moreover,
presidential candidate McCain made a point of reproaching Southerners
who fly Confederate flags, for upsetting black Americans. McCain
could do this without having to worry about offending Southern
white sensibilities. White Protestants who fancy Confederate battle
flags will likely vote Republican no matter what.

Republicans
who think their party has been about cutting back government are
grossly mistaken. The GOP has only rarely been a friend of decentralized
government or to limited, cautious intervention abroad. In the
1860s the party was for consolidated government and defeating
the rebellious South; then Republicans gave us Reconstruction
together with cozy deals between industrialists and the state.
They were later the party of imperial expansion; and under TR,
the Republicans became the promoters of a federal managerial state,
even before the Democrats turned in this direction under Wilson.
There was never a war until the 1930s that most Republican congressmen
didn't welcome; and the Spanish-American War and the War to End
All Wars were more popular among Republicans than they were among
Democrats. The liberal interventionist Council on Foreign Relations,
created in 1919, boasted such Republican founders as Elihu Root,
Herbert Hoover and Henry Cabot Lodge.

If some Republicans
later protested the New Deal and were reluctant to get involved
in the Second World War, such attitudes have not been the rule.
Republicans have usually embraced both big government and foreign
adventures and were ahead of the curve on women's right when Democrats
were still arguing for a single-family wage for the male breadwinner.
Indeed down to the time of Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the Democrats
were generally perceived as the more conservative party, that
is, the one that supported states' rights and commanded the loyalties
of fervently Catholic ethnics and the defeated South. What opposition
there was to an interventionist foreign policy came typically
from the Democratic side, represented by such heroic figures as
William Jennings Bryan.

It is no
surprise therefore that the Republicans today are crusading for
democracy abroad. Discounting such constitutionally-minded leaders
as Calvin Coolidge, the Republican opponents of European intervention
before the Second World War and the anti-interventionists who
survived briefly into the postwar era, the Republicans have a
fairly consistent history of crusading for democracy. Bush II,
McCain, Romney, and Gingrich are all in the Republican interventionist
mold. Those who talk about the GOP's going back to its small-government
and isolationist past don't have much to look back to.

A second
factor for understanding why the GOP shuns rightwing presidential
candidates is its present priorities. While the last Republican
president did little to cut government expenses and made only
scattered concessions to the Religious Right's moral positions
(mostly in Supreme Court appointments not always freely made),
Bush was frenetic about launching wars to bring American-style
democracy to other countries. The moral core of his administration
could be found in the memorable speeches he made about a global
democratic crusade, orations that we owe to David Frum and Michael
Gerson. Such tropes reflect the vision of the heavily neoconservative
GOP media, although for the advocates first things must come first.
They have to attack Obama's wasteful spending in order to capture
the presidency. Then they'll be able to stop Obama's timid approach
to foreign relations and address the continuing threat of an undemocratic
"axis of evil." Can anyone think of a leading Republican
presidential candidate, except for Ron Paul, who doesn't march
in lockstep on foreign policy with Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol,
and the Wall Street Journal editorial page?

In a penetrating
commentary for Amcon Online (May 18) "Has the Republican
Party Left Reagan?" Jack Hunter quotes CPAC director Christopher
N. Malagasi on the conservative "tripod" that Republican
presidential candidates are believed to represent. Supposedly
presidential candidate John McCain embraced all three legs of
this tripod, because he was a fiscally responsible social traditionalist
who favored "national defense." This three-pronged conservative
world view, according to Malagasi, was putatively the legacy of
Ronald Reagan, and it is one that GOP presidents and presidential
candidates have continued to uphold. Therefore an isolationist
like Ron Paul is not truly "conservative" but a "liberal
Democrat" because he rejects the third, and perhaps most
vital, of the three legs.

Hunter has
no trouble shredding these assertions, first by showing that most
Republican presidential candidates, and certainly the last Republican
occupant of the White House, have not been conservatives at all,
with due respect to misleading media labels. Republicans have
allowed the "conservative" brand to be identified with
a neoconservative foreign policy — not national defense, which
Paul does not oppose. Adopting neoconservative rhetoric and policies
and complaining about high federal budgets when the Dems are in
power is what currently defines a "conservative" presidential
candidate. Those who meet the foreign policy standard often get
a pass on other things. Thus we saw Religious Right hero Bill
Bennett support the pro-abortion- and gay rights advocate Joe
Lieberman for president, because Lieberman was good on Middle
Eastern affairs. Republican Evangelist Pat Robertson not only
had kind words for Lieberman but in 2008 also backed for president
another socially liberal Zionist and war hawk Rudy Giuliani. Obviously
not all legs in the tripod are of equal importance, particularly
with the neocons supplying the funding for "conservative"
enterprises.

This brings
up the question about what if any opposition will confront the
neocon-Republican establishment as it tries to put one of its
friends into the presidency in 2012. One group this establishment
will not in any way have to fear is the Old Right. What there
was of this opposition when the neocons were getting into the
driver's seat has been either coopted or professionally destroyed.
And there is no chance that those who were removed from public
view will be achieving belated prominence, seeing that most of
its leaders are already senior citizens.

But the libertarians
are another story. They are better funded and more of a media
presence than the hapless paleos; and their presidential standard-bearer
Ron Paul has already recruited multitudes to work in his campaigns
and vote for him. Paul is not likely to gain the presidency but
he can run as a spoiler against a Dole-like candidate in 2012.
This 74-year old congressman can help keep Obama in the White
House, if he siphons off enough votes as a third party candidate.

Unlike older-generation
conservatives, who appeal to social traditions and inherited hierarchies
and unlike the neocons advocating a neo-Wilsonian, Zionist foreign
policy, libertarians take a relatively value-free position by
opposing America's centralized public administration. They view
an aggressive missionary foreign policy as an extension of a constitutionally
questionable government that has seized power at home. They therefore
wish to avoid military commitments abroad while reducing the scope
of government to a few constitutionally allowable tasks. Usually
these tasks are negatively stated, for example, staying out of
the affairs of other countries, not monetizing our debts, abolishing
the Federal Reserve, and not allowing the federal government to
go on infringing on the constitutionally delegated power of the
states.

Finally it's
not true that libertarian political figures avoid taking stands
on social issues. Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin are devout Protestants,
who strongly oppose abortion. What such libertarians stress is
that moral questions should be settled by state legislature, not
legislated by federal bureaucrats, and least of all by the Supreme
Court. While libertarians of the Right, like Paul, hold no brief
for homosexuality and the taking of mind-altering drugs, they
also believe that the federal government has exceeded its constitutional
powers by interfering in such matters. Further, the state's attempts
to ban drug-use, libertarians argue, has allowed police power
to be used against property and other rights without solving the
problem it was meant to remove.

Not surprisingly,
Paul's candidacy has picked up support from lifestyle liberals
as well as from small-government conservatives. Although neoconservatives
launched attacks on Paul during the 2008 campaign, accusing him
of being a disguised racist and fanatical anti-Zionist (Paul opposes
giving foreign aid to Israel or to any other country) the accusations
didn't stick. Unlike the neocon smears against the Old Right,
which worked all too well, these attacks seem to go nowhere. Paul
enjoys credibility even on the left, as someone who opposes military
adventures and wants to legalize drugs. The libertarian problem
is not about to go away for establishment Republicans or for their
neoconservative PR-network. Although libertarians in the short
run may not be able to keep Republicans from nominating a presidential
candidate, they will continue to put pressure on the party, from
without as well as from within. And let us remember that they
are not entirely dependent on Republican votes. Libertarians can
reach out effectively without promising government programs and
without abjectly apologizing to Democratic minority-voters.

December
5, 2010

Paul
Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown
College and author of Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, The
Strange Death of Marxism,
Conservatism
in America: Making Sense of the American Right, and Encounters:
My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.
His latest book, Leo
Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal,
was just published by Cambridge University Press.

The
Best of Paul Gottfried

Beck could list many more. Self-described Progressives included President Wilson’s son-in-law and secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo; the Wisconsin antiwar senator Robert La Follette; California governor and longtime senator (from 1917 to 1945) Hiram Johnson; Idaho senator William Borah; historian Charles Beard; sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes; and Republican president Herbert Hoover. In fact, there were so many prominent Progressives in the early 20th century that Beck would have to devote several of his talkathons to the topic to give us some idea of the broad range of personalities and positions within the movement.

The radio host’s history is not altogether wrong. Originally identified with the reform wings of both national parties before World War I, Progressivism attracted many luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover, and Wilson. Those who adhered to this vaguely defined tendency typically favored the expansion of public administration as an alternative to party patronage, periodic use of referenda for determining the popular will, and public education as a source of national solidarity. Progressives generally preferred a highly centralized government run by professional bureaucrats, and they naïvely believed that the methods of the hard sciences could be applied to governing.

Indeed, Progressives thought that government should be the “science of administration.” This was an idea that Woodrow Wilson promoted as a professor and president at Princeton, as governor of the Garden State, and finally as the 28th president of the United States. Scientific administration demanded some significant changes in political practice. Progressive judges like Louis Brandeis and those who came after him used the courts to increase the powers of organized labor and extend federal authority at the expense of the states. Hiram Johnson, as California governor from 1911—1917, worked to expand the civil service; he also favored women’s suffrage because he hoped the fair sex would rally to his notion of an impartial public administration.

Certainly there are features of Progressivism that anyone concerned about centralized power has every right to criticize. But there are problems with how Beck frames his critique. There were different types of Progressives who stressed diverse themes, not all of which can be subsumed under the rubric of “big government.” The connection between Progressivism and modern liberalism is weak. And in truth, Fox News personalities like Beck support many federal programs vastly more intrustive than any the Progressives dared contemplate.

There are many several sides to Progressivism that Beck fails to acknolwedge. Progressives like Robert La Follette were more interested in popular referenda than they were in centralized public administration. Others like Senator Borah came out of a rural populist tradition and never overcame their distrust of the national government. Although McAdoo designed the Federal Reserve System at Wilson’s behest, he was a zealous hard-money man and fought to maintain the gold standard until it was abolished under Franklin Roosevelt. McAdoo was at most an unwitting agent for bringing about inflated paper money.

In foreign policy there was an unbridgeable divide in the Progressive camp between liberal internationalists and isolationists. Most of the opposition that FDR encountered to Lend-Lease and other policies leading to America’s entry into World War II came from his fellow Progressives in both parties. Antiwar Republicans in 1917 and again in 1939—1941 included Progressives such as La Follette, Borah, and FDR’s neighbor in upstate New York, Hamilton Fish. Hiram Johnson not only opposed American entry into both European wars but had the distinction of being the only U.S. Senator to vote against America’s joining the League of Nations and the United Nations. Although a self-described “Lincoln-TR Republican,” Johnson protested entangling foreign alliances and carrying an overly big stick into the international arena.

Pro-war Progressives came to be known as liberal internationalists and are the ancestors of today’s neoconservatives, not a few of whom have taken to calling themsleves “Hard Wilsonians.” Some of the original internationalists broke ranks, however. Though a pro-war Progressive in 1917 and lifelong admirer of President Wilson, Herbert Hoover changed his foreign policy stance in the 1930s and became a critic of American military involvement in Europe. Nevertheless, even as president, Hoover considered himself to stand firmly in the Progressive tradition of strong public administration.

Contrary to the impression conveyed by Fox News, Progressivism had effects in more than one ideological direction. By today’s standards its cultural orientation might seem quite conservative and was certainly pro-family. Even left-wing Progressives like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins would have emphatically opposed anti-discrimination legislation aimed at encouraging women to enter the workforce. Progressives in the interwar years favored government support for a single-family wage, one that would allow men to provide for their families “in dignity” while wives stayed home and tended to their children.

In Central Europe, Progressives’ notions about consulting the people in critical political decisions became their primary legacy. Interwar European jurists, including many on the Right, appealed to the idea of holding frequent referenda as an alternative to party-run politics. Conservative authoritarian leaders in the Baltic States admired and quoted American Progressives not as socialists but as nationalist populists.

In the postwar U.S., meanwhile, liberals such as historian Richard Hofstadter went after some Progressives for what was seen as their right-wing suspicion of administered democracy. Hofstadter attributed this populist streak to an atavistic dislike for rational control from the top, and he saw this as a blemish on the their left-wing credentials.

Read the rest of the article

November 18, 2010

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. His latest book is Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.

The Best of Paul Gottfried

These protestors against the Democrats are by no means hardliners, and they already enjoy places of honor at the GOP table. These spokespersons for “smaller government” are not asking for much that the party can’t give them. Or else they are asking for what GOP leaders might claim they would give them if the media and Democratic politicians allowed them to do more. Such Republicans have made it a practice to scream loudly at the Dems. But they also tend to fall meekly into line once their party returns to power.

In 1994 after the great Republican congressional sweep, the late journalist Robert Novak urged the new House Speaker Newt Gingrich to abolish government-promoted quotas for minorities. Gingrich is reputed to have explained to Novak that there’s no reason to drive away blacks, women, and Hispanics by doing anything risky. In any case Republicans would vote Republican, no matter what. Gingrich was of course right.

What the Speaker might have also mentioned was that the 1992 Civil Rights Act, which re-institutionalized quotas after the Reagan administration had backed away from them, was mostly a Republican achievement. President G.H.W. Bush and Senate Minority leader Robert Dole had strongly backed the bill and induced Republicans in Congress to get behind it. Only heaven knows why a Republican Congress, once back in control, would have bothered to rescind it. Their voters were happy simply having their party win elections.

This group of Republican non-insurgents often shares the stage with another bunch of Tea Party activists. Although this second group may applaud the ungrammatical platitudes and gesticulating of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, it seems driven by something more than fear of Obamacare or anxiety about losing Medicare payments. This group senses that something was wrong with the government long before John McCain lost the presidential sweepstakes in 2008.

Read the rest of the article

November 1, 2010

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. His latest book is Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.

The Best of Paul Gottfried

Read
Prof. Gottfried’s Response

I
am not surprised that Professor Gottfried remains convinced that
Leo Strauss and his followers speak with one voice on all matters
of importance. After all, Gottfried has contended for many years
that neither Strauss nor his movement of supporters was ever conservative,
given what he takes to be the typical "Straussian" enthusiasm
for liberal democracy and its related disdain for conservative tradition.

Yet I am surprised that Gottfried ignores some important elements
of my essay which attempt to clarify the relation between Strauss
and American conservatism. Gottfried believes, for example, that
my purpose was to portray Strauss as a consistent conservative.
That is simply not the case. While I argued that Strauss took reliably
conservative positions on liberal democracy and tradition, I also
emphasized in the latter half of my paper that Strauss was not
conservative in his approach to revealed religion, and would
not have shared American conservatives' enthusiasm for synthesizing
biblical symbolism with politics. This argument was the whole point
of my comparison of Strauss's ideas with those of his admirer Willmoore
Kendall, a prominent postwar American conservative who was somewhat
more confident than Strauss about the usage of Scripture in politics.
Gottfried omits discussion of this section altogether, claiming
that "it is hard to see how a defense of his [Kendall's] thinking
contributes appreciably to a vindication of Strauss." Yet the
truth is that I was sharply contrasting the ideas of Kendall and
Strauss, not using the one to "vindicate" the other!

Gottfried also faults my essay for ignoring his own writings on
Strauss, other than an essay which he contributed to The
Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right (edited
by Joseph Scotchie, 1999). Yet I also made two references to his
insightful study The
Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right
(1986) in order to elaborate upon his view that Strauss and
his students do not fit into traditional conservatism.

Speaking of his study of Hegel's influence on the Right, I find
it curious that Gottfried in this work (as I noted in my essay)
actually makes a distinction between what Strauss thought and what
his students thought he thought. On pages 132–133 of this work,
Gottfried admits that Strauss himself "might well have deplored"
the antitraditional conservatism (that celebrates "Lockean
materialism") which some of his students have extracted from
his writings on natural right. This admission is astounding for
a scholar who otherwise has insisted that Strauss and his students
always sing from the same hymnbook. Granted, a scholar can change
his mind over the years, but this is quite a sea-change.

Gottfried also doubts my claim that the failure of the Weimar Republic
influenced Strauss's ideas on democracy, noting that Strauss only
developed a "passion" for democracy decades after the
end of World War 2. Yet I never claim that Strauss had a passion
for democracy, before or after Weimar. It is true, nonetheless,
that Weimar was on Strauss's mind late into his academic life. As
I observed in my essay, Strauss in 1962 (in his new preface to his
study of Spinoza) expressed concern that Weimar's version of liberal
democracy was far too tolerant of the enemies (e.g., Nazis and Communists)
of this regime. This should put to rest once and for all any suggestion
that Strauss was an unabashed cheerleader for liberal democracy
(or had only a passing interest in Weimar).

Generally, I still believe it is unfair to blame Strauss for the
arguments which some of his students have attributed to him,
especially on the subject of American democracy. (Strauss even occasionally
sympathized with the Heideggerian-Kojèvian view that America,
like the Soviet Union, was a product of modern techne.) While
Gottfried admits that "would-be disciples twist particular
thinkers, and radically divergent followers have laid claim to the
same master," he insists that in Strauss's case "the paternity
seems to fit more than it does for other figures." Really?
Is the Straussian movement such a clear echo of the master? Personally,
I find the so-called "Straussian" literature to be remarkably
divergent in its teachings. On the issue of the US founding alone,
the differences are quite dramatic. While some supporters portray
the American regime as based on majority-rule democracy (e.g., Martin
Diamond, Willmoore Kendall), others portray it as a polity deeply
committed to individual rights and liberties (e.g., Harry Jaffa,
Thomas Pangle). While some students celebrate the US as the best
regime (Jaffa again), others despair over the moral drift of the
republic and its influence on the world (e.g., Allan Bloom). Some
students even claim that Strauss would have refused to support any
regime categorically (e.g., Heinrich Meier). As Ernest Fortin once
quipped, there are Sunday and week-day Straussians too!

Gottfried clearly has a personal axe to grind. Apparently, Strauss
and his students (who behave "thuggishly" in academia)
have contributed nothing of value to political philosophy in America
or anywhere else, and are on the same intellectual level as "the
party officials assigned to German universities under the Third
Reich"! Hyperbole aside, Strauss's hermeneutic of reading classical
texts with an eye to their secret meaning is particularly obnoxious
to Gottfried. Yet he contends that this hermeneutic owes much to
eighteenth-century rationalism (Strauss, by the way, admitted this
in Persecution
and the Art of Writing). Is this not a tradition which continues
to have great value for the humanities? Or is eighteenth-century
rationalism on the same level as the party officials of the Third
Reich?!

On a larger scale of guilt-by-association, Gottfried (like so many
others) claims that Strauss and his followers are "neoconservatives"
who unconditionally support an aggressive democracy-building role
for America (and protection of Israel), although they are apparently
unclear about what "liberal democracy" stands for (despite
their extensive studies of the American republic). Yet "neoconservative"
itself is another term crying out for qualification. (Divergent
personalities from Tony Blair to William F. Buckley Jr. have all
been branded as neos.) As incredible as it may sound, neoconservatives
may even differ from students of Strauss and his supporters on pivotal
issues. For example, a prominent neoconservative, Michael Novak,
has faulted students of Strauss for downplaying the Judeo-Christian
foundations of the American regime (see his On
Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding,
2002).

It is true that many neoconservatives and students of Strauss support
Israel, since it is the only functioning democracy in the Middle
East. It is also true that Strauss was respectful of his ancestral
faith. Yet Strauss's own views on Judaism are complex. Strauss never
claimed to be a believer in revelation (his understanding of philosophy
as unbelief precludes a commitment to faith) and even dared to call
Judaism a "noble illusion" in a public lecture. Like Freud,
Strauss lived the paradox of being a secular thinker who hoped for
the survival of his ancestral faith but did not believe in its tenets.
The nuance of this tension is usually lost on Strauss's critics.

I share Gottfried's view that Straussians can be "agenda-driven
political intellectuals" (is there any other kind?), but I
do reject his choice of the particular agenda in question. As if
associating Strauss with neoconservatism is not enough, Gottfried
blames his students (and thus Strauss) for subjecting "the
morally impoverished American right" to the "warmed-over
rhetoric of Saint-Juste and Trotsky," which then explains the
Straussian objective to transform the world in a violent "neo-Jacobin"
manner (this is the argument of Professor Claes Ryn, whose views
I also critiqued in my essay). In short, the Straussians are left-wing
versions of a pseudo-Right. Yet it is simply mind-boggling that
Strauss, whose life's work systematically critiqued the foundations
of the historicism which shaped the various schools of Marxism in
the 20th century, could ever be associated with these
historicist revolutionaries. (In a 1950 letter to Eric Voegelin,
Strauss denounced the Marxist mantra of "Interpreting the world
or changing it" as "the root of the evil" of modernity.)
How does a commitment to the truth of natural right flip into its
opposite, radical historicism? Or, despite Gottfried's earlier claims,
is Strauss now a historicist reborn?

Strauss is simply too complex a thinker to fit neatly into
any ideological box, "Straussian" or not, although I still
believe that he can be read with profit by conservatives (and even
the few open-minded liberals left). Still, I suspect that both the
left and right will continue to see in Strauss a useful scapegoat
for the problems of our time.

June
17, 2006

Dr.
Grant Havers [send him mail]
teaches philosophy and politics at Trinity Western University (Canada).

As an avid reader of The Washington Times, I was stunned at the childish and unprofessional review of Paul Gottfried’s new book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Books, Sunday).

Reviewer Herb Greer, a self-described “American writer who lives in Salisbury, England,” is guilty either of gross incompetence or appalling ignorance, since no other explanation can account for how he could portray Mr. Gottfried’s book as merely a lengthy conspiracy theory. Mr. Gottfried’s whole point is precisely that multiculturalism is not a conspiracy, but rather is promoted by a reigning ideology whose premises are taken for granted in the media, government and even in corporate America.

In fact, he specifically pointed out that in Britain, the politically correct regime of Tony Blair may well be what the British public wants. Isn’t that the opposite of a conspiracy?

Your reviewer seems to think that by accusing Mr. Gottfried — a Yale Ph.D., by the way, whose 1999 book, After Liberalism, was published by Princeton — of peddling nothing more than a conspiracy theory, readers will conclude that this poor soul must be some kind of crank who can be safely ignored. No one who read even part of Mr. Gottfried’s book could have arrived at this dishonest conclusion.

If I want brusque, uninformed dismissals of distinguished conservative scholars, I’ll read The Washington Post.

Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [send him mail] holds a AB from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia. He teaches history, is associate editor of The Latin Mass Magazine, and is co-author (with Christopher A. Ferrara) of The Great Faade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church (2002). The book (as well as a sample chapter) is available at greatfacade.com.

Thomas Woods Archives

Equally to the point, and contrary to a flat assertion made by the Fox Network loudmouth Bill O’ Reilly (New York Post, August 8, 2002) Germans do not "owe" the American government to the point of being obligated to put themselves at risk in a neocon-fomented war against Iraq. O’Reilly repeats the fiction that the US "rebuilt" Germany after lots of devastation just happened to occur there. In fact the Germans rebuilt their own country, thanks to patriotic classical liberals like Ludwig Erhard, despite the fact the US, like the other occupying powers, set out to treat postwar Germany vindictively. Erhard worked around the American administrators, who enforced price-and-wage controls and in some cases deliberately injured Germany’s postwar recovery attempts, to create something like a free-market economy. He succeeded in doing so because of American inattention and because Erhard enjoyed deserved prestige as an anti-Nazi, although one who was equally a friend of freedom.

As for why Germany needed rebuilding, the U.S. and Britain did play critical roles here, by turning the country into a junkyard. They engaged in the later stages of the war in relentless saturation bombing of civilian populations, well beyond arguable military targets. As a result, large parts of almost all major German cities were destroyed, while Dresden, an overcrowded refugee and Red Cross center by the end of the war, almost disappeared from the map because of British bombing. Making this point is not to excuse Nazi brutality or Nazi conquests. It is simply to underline the obvious truth, that the relation of the Western "democracies" to Germany has not been a predominantly benevolent one, from at least the starvation blockade and the Treaty of Versailles onward. And the fact that we got nice to the Germans (when we needed them) during the Cold War does not negate the mutually unkind relations that preceded that turn.

Ironically, the sense that Germany is a moral pariah, which now fuels German pacifism, was also a gift of the American presence in Central Europe. Postwar American "re-educators" in Germany, with the assistance of the occupation government, undertook to help Germans "overcome the past," by filling their heads with negative thoughts about their entire national history. Nazism and Auschwitz were presented as the necessary culmination of a wicked collective past, which abounded in militarism and lacked the democratic spirit. If the fruits of this Umerziehung can now be seen in Chancellor Schroeder’s statements about how a repentant Germany is committed to abstinence from military force and to justice for the Third World, one must conclude that he has learned well from his American re-educators and their German assistants.

Attacking him, as neocons have begun to do, as an enemy of global democracy, is profoundly dishonest. Schroeder and his leftist pals are following the Teutonophobic script that American and German journalists, including neocon ones, expected his contrite (but never quite contrite enough) country to follow, until now. Schroeder wishes to keep Germans away from military operations, given their collective predisposition for mass murder, the way one tries to prevent alcoholics from smelling booze. Old habits can come back, with catastrophic results. Little did Schroeder know that by turning his back on the putative German past, he would soon be accused of doing exactly the opposite, showing the habitual German contempt for "democracy," as defined in the offices of the Weekly Standard and National Review.

Observing the neocon gasbags on Fox News, led by the apparently amiable Morton Kondracke, push American youth into what in all likelihood will be a bloody war, I am drawn back to a commentary recently published by John Laughland in The European Journal and written by London Daily Mirror journalist John Pilger. Contrary to the questionable assertion that the US is a stable conservative world power, Pilger explains in his book The New Rulers of the World that there is something frenetic and utterly destabilizing about American imperialism: "The Americans, in other words, do not mind whether their son-of-a-bitch is on the left or right, so long as he does what he is told. They are also quite capable of dropping an ally, even a long-standing one, when they feel like it. To describe present U.S. policy as right-wing is therefore a mistake, especially when the U.S. has devoted the last 10 years to bringing Communists back to power in Eastern Europe."

Pilger and Laughland, a favorite Australian and Englishman of mine, have given the reasons why no self-respecting European patriot would want anything to do with the American empire. As an American, however, I find the problem to be even worse. We are running after neocon journalists, who try to compensate for the facts that they are physically puny and don’t personally bear the hardships of their Middle-Eastern commitments, by pushing the US into bloodbaths. Even scarier, these militarists of the pen are getting away with this exercise in psychological compensation — and may be propelling the US into a war that we should not be fighting. At the very least, the Germans and the other Europeans would do well to stay out of it.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

What is less obvious is why Bush, Jr. chooses to honor a neocon publicist who is long past influencing anyone — and who has done nothing for the GOP or for the world of learning. One might be reckless enough to compare this choice to James Burnham, who received a Medal of Freedom in 1983, but the comparison fails. Although Burnham and Kristol were both intellectuals generally identified with "conservatism," the distinction in their achievements is enormous. There is simply nothing in Kristol’s journalistic output to compare to Burnham’s masterpieces on the managerial revolution and on the Machiavellian tradition in political thought.

Although both started off as Trotskyists, significantly Burnham, even in that phase of his career, was by far the more distinguished thinker, enjoying the high opinion of his Communist mentor in exile in Mexico, who considered the then linguistic philosopher his most brilliant follower in the U.S. It is also questionable whether Kristol makes it into the class of notables represented by Placido Domingo and Henderson, who have made signal contributions to our time, one as a magnificent opera singer and the other as someone who has helped to eradicate small pox worldwide. He may, however, bear comparison to the equally tedious author, Peter Drucker, though having studied Drucker’s early output, it seems that this Austrian exile scholar once did serious sociology.

The catering done to Aaron, Cosby, Rosenthal, and Graham posthumously indicates the perfect match between the stupid party and its presidential standard-bearer. All of these Medal of Freedom recipients represent in a shrill fashion groups that the Republican Party will attract when, as my mother used to say, "hair will grow on the palm of your hand." Although Cosby, Aaron, Rosenthal, and Graham, have all pursued careers of some sort, Cosby as a mouthy comedian, Aaron as a gifted baseball player, Rosenthal as a not so gifted journalist and Graham as the accidental inheritor of the Washington Post, in recent years these figures have gained public attention as spokespersons for the Left.

Aaron has competed with Jesse Jackson in complaining about the discrimination allegedly practiced against blacks in baseball, lamenting the dubious fact that there are not enough black managers and coaches while black baseball players are somehow being treated worse than white ones. Although Willie Mays was arguably as great a ballplayer, unlike Aaron, he never played the race card and may therefore have escaped the attention of Republican presidents as a worthy recipient of national recognition. Cosby has made the same noises as does Aaron, when he has not been busy blaming black crime on racist police or refusing to hire whites.

Graham devoted her newspaper to the same kind of politics, when she was not going after Republican presidents as threats to the poor and to minorities. To the extent Mandela has political views, they are socialist tinged with Marxism. One wonders whether a Republican leader would now show the same courage in reaching out to Communist victims as they do in feting Marxist revolutionaries.

As for Rosenthal, who yells anti-Semite at the unwelcome drop of a pin, the less said the better. Despite his undoubtedly feigned hysteria in describing paleos or anyone who deviates from his opinions on Middle Eastern affairs, Rosenthal sounds credible when he claims to have been utterly "surprised" by Bush’s choice of him as a recipient of the Medal of Honor. After all, this longtime New York Times editor is neither a Republican nor a conservative; and it is hard to find anyone who goes more ballistic than he does about Republican core voters in the Religious Right, except when said religionists are expressing their support for Premier Sharon.

Assessing the current batch of Medal of Freedom recipients reminds me of how much more I respect the Democrats than the Republicans. Clinton, a man of relative dignitude, invariably rewarded loyalists, even when he picked talented artists and performers, like Isaac Stern. An unabashed party-man, he understood the need to reward and stroke his partisan followers and those who stood for the ideological foundation of his party.

But the Republicans behave differently. They treat everything as an occasion to "reach out" to those who have given them nothing, in order to show that they are "tolerant" and have ceased to be cultural WASPs. It would serve them and Dubya right if Rosenthal, Cosby and Aaron did the predictable thing and came out in support of the Democrats, as the alternative to Republican bigotry. I can hardly wait to see that happen. As I told my friend Mark Dankof, anything disastrous that befalls the reaching-out party will make my day.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

A few kind readers sent notes to me about their experiences in teaching high school and college courses in US Government; and it may be useful to offer the following collective response. I was not suggesting that my students could not recognize "American democracy" in the way their textbooks depicted it. To whatever extent they do think about political structures, they believe that what the textbooks describe epitomizes constitutional self-government. What the framers put into the Constitution seems to them purely antiquarian. Indeed they resent any attempt to have them read the original articles of that document or the subsequently adopted Bill of Rights. They find the phraseology unintelligible and cannot see why any smart or decent person should be forced to look at "stuff" scribbled down hundreds of years ago. Note that most of these students come from longtime Republican (WASP) families and were loudly patriotic after 9/11. Criticizing the American regime in its present form, which is the only one they know or care about, is a profoundly unpopular act. As my colleague Wes McDonald and I have learned over the years, our irritated customers pour out their bile against us, into bad evaluations.

Despite the tributes to "our system," the same students go along with attacks on the American experience from the left. The reason, as Lynne Cheney, who has just written a celebration of America done for young children, explained this week on Fox News, "we have not always lived up to our ideals in the case of minorities." My students and other Americans I encounter think that the framers, who were otherwise irrelevant writers, had certain nice "ideals" they did not put into the Constitution but expected later generations to make good on. Whence the need for dictatorial presidents, philosopher judges, and enlightened bureaucrats, who are the real heroes of our "democracy." Without them, the unwritten morality we are expected to revere could not have brought forth the wonderful, expanding empire we’ve become.

This is not a putdown of students who should not be in college in the first place or of supposed citizens of a constitutional republic who have no more aptitude for self-government than I do for playing in the NBA. The problem is making constitutional self-government operate in a society that is too unwieldy, politically apathetic, and self-indulgent to care about republican freedom. The textbooks my classes look at confirm beliefs they already have, from taking civics courses, watching TV, going to church, and attending other college classes. Those involved in the college Republicans or Democrats undergo the same indoctrination in a more intense form. Both parties glorify the present American regime and emphasize how "far we’ve come" from the bad old times, when women and other minorities were not allowed to make our politics "compassionate."

One of my respondents observes that blacks are more skeptical than whites about "whether or not we are speaking about their government." My own view is different. What distinguishes blacks I’ve taught from Karl Rove, Lynne Cheney, and Theodor Lowi is that the blacks were bent on shaking down the white majority even more and were upset that the state did not help them enough to get what they wanted. For defenders of the status quo, the state is doing about the right amount of shaking down, which is that amount that the framers would have favored in their better moments.

I also received a letter from an ill-tempered respondent who, after flooding me with obscenities, indicated that he would never again read anything with my name on it. Said respondent was upset that I would not agree that we should all take up arms against the present American regime, which he declared to be a "tyranny." Aside from the sad fact that the tyrants could blow him and me away without blinking an eyelash and could then count on the support of "conservative" journalists to endorse their action, there is little that can be done to overthrow a government widely perceived as protecting our liberties and looking after our welfare. This guy was ticked off that I dared to explain the problem, although I did not agree with the general perception under discussion. Apparently pointing out the unfavorable climate for placing limits on the central state is tantamount to pro-government hype. My role is actually that of a pathologist, warning about a grave illness that cannot be cured by haphazard surgery. The fact that the illness is mistaken for the cure complicates matters even more.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

The residual authority of the states, the defined powers of Congress in Article One of the Constitution, and the notion the Supreme Court should be the "weakest of the three branches" are treated as inconvenient archaisms that had to be overcome in order to lift up the oppressed members of our society. We learn that Hamilton favored strong federal power but did so for reactionary reasons, unlike modern judicial activists who have allegedly applied federal power positively, to make us a "more open society."

By now, thank Heavens, I am mercifully free of the job of running these cheering sessions for big government but still receive ads for the PR that publishing companies dutifully put out as shills of the central state. Last week my mail included a glossy post card from Brookings Institute that invited me to order Paul C. Light’s Government’s Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Security.

The ad encourages teachers to order this text if they wish to "help students learn how government succeeds." Moreover, "Light explores the federal government’s most successful accomplishments over the previous five decades" and expresses the hope that these good things will continue to multiply. If what is being advertised is like other celebrations of managerial bigness in government, against which it will have to compete for college sales, it is based on misrepresentation about the sources of American prosperity.

As Thomas Sowell cogently shows in Civil Rights: Rhetoric and Reality (originally written in the early 1980s when I began assigning it to my students), American blacks had a history of solid socio-economic achievements in the generation preceding the civil rights legislation of the fifties and sixties. Significantly, this rate of black improvement decreased from the mid-sixties on, a situation that spurred on such dubious federal intervention as busing and affirmative action.

Moreover, given the economic changes generated in the private sector already by the sixties, it is doubtful that segregation would have continued for much longer. What took its place, however, was "integration" as practiced by social engineers. But this would not have taken place unless government control of society had not been increasing throughout the same period. Nor would various governmental attempts have been undertaken in the last thirty-five years to reconstruct our society, for the sake of "inclusiveness."

Unfortunately the greatest recent "success story" of our federal government and its truly pernicious counterparts in Europe is its colonization of the family and of other intermediate institutions. The managerial state has parlayed revenues and brute force to gain influence and even control over such institutions and over social relations in the workplace and in universities.

It is unseemly for a people that once prided itself on authentic liberty to begin sounding like the court lackeys of the ancient pharaohs, reveling in the unprecedented power of the sovereign and praising his assault on centers of opposition to his will.

The fact that we have elected officials, in addition to unelected judges and tenured bureaucrats, running our regime, does not make what is produced any more palatable. As I used to tell my students, to no avail, it is inappropriate for citizens of what was intended to be a limited government to treat its derailment as a "successful accomplishment." And with due respect to US government textbook authors, any return to the primitive practice of worshipping the sovereign has nothing to do with real human progress.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

But none of these positions demonstrates that Orthodox Jews, with few notable exceptions, have been in the forefront of resisting Zionism or a Jewish state. By the time Israel was established, the Agudath Yisroel and other Zionist blocs representing Orthodox interests already existed and were quickly absorbed into the Israeli party system. From the beginning the Orthodox were given the power to decide who was a Jew and whom Jews could or could not marry. They have always been overwhelmingly associated with the Jewish nationalist right, although one can find exceptions, that is, self-described Orthodox Jews who have favored conciliation with the Palestinians. But the vast majority of the Orthodox here and in Israel sound very much like the editors and readers of the Jewish Press or the publications of Yeshiva University. In short, they would have no use at all for Sheldon’s attempt at an even-handed Middle Eastern politics.

Sheldon is right in noting the long-term resistance to Zionist projects by Reform Jews in Germany and later, in the US. Until the end of the Second World War the majority of American Reform Jews either opposed or were unenthusiastic about the creation of a Jewish state. When this position no longer commanded the majority it once did, the anti-Zionists withdrew and became known as the American Council for Judaism. A thorough and dispassionate history of these developments is available in Thomas Kolsky’s Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948 (Temple University Press, 1992), which explains why the anti-Zionist Reform Jews lost out. What distinguished this group was ethnic and social as well as theological identity. The American Council was at least initially composed heavily of German Jews; and its members were typically found in Milwaukee, Galveston, or Montgomery, Alabama, rather than in New York City. (From my knowledge of the group, the second is still overwhelmingly true, while the first may be less so but is still relevant.)

Unfortunately for Sheldon’s argument, I find nothing to suggest that the anti-Zionist Jews are somehow more authentically Jewish — or that Jewish nationalism represents a radical break from the normative Rabbinic Judaism that preceded it. The fact that some of the Orthodox in Eastern Europe had viewed Zionists as a threat to rabbinical authority or that some of the ultra-Orthodox believe Jewish nationalists have jumped the gun by establishing a pre-messianic commonwealth does not mean that these dissenting Orthodox were or are not Jewish nationalists. What separates them from the Zionists is the purely strategic question of when it is permissible to create a Jewish national state, where Jews can live apart from the nations of the earth. The Orthodox and the Zionists have never disagreed over whether such a project is desirable.

Finally I would stress the futility of trying to present Jews as Eastern European Unitarians who allegedly stumbled into ethnic nationalism because somebody tricked them into this position a few generations ago. Having lived most of my life among Jews, I must blink in disbelief when I hear Sheldon or the American Council for Judaism describing most Jews throughout time as ethical universalists who would want no part of the supposed tribal narrowness represented by the Israeli right. As far as I can tell, the other kinds of Jews, the real ones, are highly noticeable and certainly could easily defend their sentiments by citing loads of rabbinic authorities going back thousands of years. In fact I’m at a loss to find what traditional Jewish sources the other side can muster to build its anti-Zionist version of Jewish religion.

Please note that I have nothing against those who imagine that their Jewishness equates with ethical universalism and I would chose them socially and esthetically over most of the vocal Zionists I’ve known. Their efforts to dissociate Jewish religion from Jewish nationalism are doomed to failure, because they are based on wishful thinking.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

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A German-Jewish classicist who fled to the US in 1938, Strauss (1899-1973) drew around himself enterprising graduate students, who went on to successful academic careers, first at the New School for Social Research and then, between 1949 and 1969, at the University of Chicago. His studies on Hobbes, Machiavelli, Plato, and Xenophon show his particular approach to the history of political theory, a perspective set forth most starkly in Natural Right and History (1953). To all appearances, Strauss was vindicating ancient political philosophy against the claims of historicists and natural rights theorists, who were more concerned with individual pleasure than with a vision of the good life. But the archaicism was deceptive: since rationalism, skepticism, and a pervasive presentism were discernible in Strauss’s tracts even on the ancients. But I should say in Strauss’s defense that at least two of his works are worth reading, his critique of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political and his study of Hobbes. Both were written originally in German and came early in his career; neither shows the manipulative albeit ponderous style that is characteristic of his later books and a fortiori of those of his less well-educated and politically crazed students.

Mitch has apparently moved, by some thoroughly natural progression, from being a fervent Straussian to the gates of paleoconservative wisdom. For me, however, this is truly mind-boggling. Unlike Mitch, I cannot imagine anyone, who has not undergone second thoughts, embracing paleoconservative positions after sojourning among the Straussians. Having said that, I should note that the “cultural Marxism” that came out of the Frankfurt School reinforced my conservatism. But by the time I began imbibing this German radical tendency, an exposure that David Gordon picked up on in reviewing my books, I was already decidedly on the right. Thereafter I drew selectively from Adorno, Horkheimer, and my teacher Herbert Marcuse, to construct a critique of the practice and ideology of the managerial state.

It is arguably possible for a paleo to be influenced by Frankfurt School critical theory in a way that would not be the case with exposure to Straussianism. The reason for insisting on this distinction is simple and it is one that Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who has also incorporated some aspects of critical theory into his work, would give as well: whereas so-called Cultural Marxists provide a key to grasping the substance and fictions of managerial tyranny, Straussians have created a defense of such tyranny, disguised as global democracy or as standing up for "values." In short, while critical theory can help one to look more deeply into leftist mechanisms of control and global democratic agitprop, the Straussians have worked to justify and misrepresent such control. In the language of Antonio Gramsci, whose thinking overlapped that of the Frankfurt School, Straussians predictably defend the "hegemonic ideology" associated with the ruling class. They are also heavily, indeed obscenely, rewarded defenders of that ruling class, holding high places in leftist academic institutions, in the government bureaucracy, and in bogus conservative "thinktanks."

What is also problematic for me about a Straussian road leading to the right (see my book, Search for Historical Meaning) is that Straussians uphold a version of the American regime that is quintessentially leftist. Their version of "democracy," which receives its final apotheosis in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, abhors historical and cultural particularities. Its advocates are always beating the drums for an American imperial mission to make every country over into a "universal nation" nurtured by the concept of "human rights" and open borders.

Israel is the one famous exception to this enforced universalism; and all Straussians are both obsessed and experts at wielding the anti-Semitic branding iron against anyone who does not accept their “Middle Eastern policy.” Mitch identifies Straussians with an ethic of “prudence,” but I see no evidence of this virtue in their political statements. For the most part, like all neocons, Strauss’s epigones are busy pushing our country into war on behalf of their pet causes. And outside of admitting more Palestinians to Israel, I am not aware of Straussians screaming “non mas” to immigration, on the basis of “prudence” or anything else.

It was Straussians who saddled us with the odious slogan that "the U.S. is a propositional nation," the proposition in this case being whatever strikes the fancy or political interests of neoconservatives. By the way, Mitch, can you cite a single case in which Straussians have broken from their neocon look-alikes to stand with the paleos? I know of no such situation. And if the Straussians and I are so much alike, why did they invest time and funding to have a graduate professorship denied to me after being offered at Catholic University fourteen years ago? Perhaps that was only fraternal admonition that I mistook for an unfriendly act.

As for taking Straussian thinkers seriously, the problem is they rarely transcend their social democratic agendas, their casting of those they dislike, particularly Southerners and Germans, as perpetual villains, and their zealously maintained historical distortions. Note while Straussians do not believe in "historicism," they do confabulate on historical topics for the good of "the regime." And they are not merely inaccurate historians. Their crusade to vilify Tom DiLorenzo for telling the truth about the reserved right to secession among states entering the federal union, and about Lincoln’s conventional Victorian views about blacks, seems entirely fueled by nineteen-sixties left-liberal fanaticism. The Jaffaite response to Professor DiLorenzo has been an exercise in Stalinism, featuring name-calling instead of documented refutation.

Finally I am unimpressed by most of Strauss’s characteristic interpretations of “political philosophers” who are turned into precursors of his own school of hypocritical skeptics. Strauss’s Averroist reading of Plato resurrects questionable medieval interpretive methods, supposedly to show that Plato did not really believe in eternal ideals as the basis of knowing. Strauss’s appeal to an Arab skeptic’s skeptical reading of Plato’s dialogues is ultimately non-demonstrable — and therefore arbitrary. Moreover, I still recall my shock when I encountered Strauss’s students offering trendy interpretations of Aristotle’s Politics, e.g., discovering that the ancient father of political analysis was providing in Book One an "esoteric" critique of slavery and sexism. When I asked a published proponent of this view whether she had read Aristotle’s biological observations, I was told they were irrelevant, by which was meant not reflecting fashionable opinions on social questions that were being fathered on dead white males.

Having recently read Strauss on Thucydides, about whom I know a great deal, I was struck by the forced application of the usual Straussian grid. Never would I have guessed from my own examination of the text that Thucydides was writing his histories to demonstrate the superiority of Athenian imperial democracy over the Spartan military aristocracy. Not only was I befuddled, but so obviously were almost all of the classicists I had read on Thucydides, who had not probed deeply enough to discover what a fan their subject was of whatever Straussians are supposed to like. I guess one learns new things every day, though in this case, that new thing is always more of the same, an extended Wall Street Journal editorial or a gloss on a speech by Martin Luther King or Ariel Sharon.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

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Academics at Catholic University of America and their neocon confreres elsewhere, who had openly resented what they perceived as my insufficiently Germanophobic outlook, went after me in the late eighties. They browbeat the institution’s administration into turning down an appointment recommended on my behalf by the politics department. The issue at the time was not neoconservative anger over my views on Israel (which were not even known) but my criticism of German refugee historians who had read the Holocaust into the entire course of German history.

Allow me to explain what I think Taki and certainly I mean about World War One. Unlike Francis Fukuyama, we do not celebrate the war and its outcome as the turning point in the development of a global democratic society. I for one despise Fukuyama’s managerial imperialism, dressed up as free government, and believe it has nothing to do with the bourgeois liberal society that Fukuyama, his pals, and their historical icon, Woodrow Wilson, have helped to bury.

I also agree with English historian Niall Ferguson that the English, and particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, did more to bring on the war than one is generally taught in the Anglo-American world. Churchill and other English military-political leaders in 1914 were long itching for a showdown with their German rival and were deploying the British fleet against Germany quite belligerently weeks before the war broke out.

Moreover, the English were in a position to stay out of the struggle without damaging their financial and naval power; while given its resources, wealth, and population, the United States would have emerged by the end of a European war as the strongest commercial and industrial nation, no matter which side won. The Anglo-American world would not have suffered by sitting out a continental war in 1914; and an Austro-German victory would have been something far less disastrous, contrary to what neocons and other Teutonophobes insist, than would have been a Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940. Needless to say, the second would not have been possible without the Allied victory and Allied peace achieved in 1918-19.

Taki is correct about the merits of the Austro-German world in 1914, which was highly civilized, politically far less centralized than the current version of "democracy," and in the case of the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire, a model of bourgeois liberal economic policies. During the struggle, the German and Austrian empires allowed far more open criticism of the war than Wilson’s new democratic order. Those who protested the war in Germany sat unmolested in the Reichstag; in France and the US they were jailed and often the targets of government-incited violence.

No one is denying that there was a militaristic legacy in the German Empire and that the military, owing to the collapse of civilian government, had assumed too much control of the German state by 1916. On the other hand, it is not Wilhelmine Germany but the Third Reich that prefigured the global imperialist rhetoric that fills the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, and other supposed advocates of American constitutional government. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm, in his most self-indulgent fantasies about "Germany’s place in the sun," sounded quite as whacked-out as the "new American nationalists" who have now captured the American Right. One could only imagine how American global democrats would react if their megalomania and self-righteousness were expressed by someone in a Prussian uniform.

What is being argued is not that an Austro-German victory in 1914 would have been the most desirable historical course. Rather, it would have been preferable to what did happen in 1918, the destruction of the imperial governments of Germany and Austria, a vindictive Allied peace, and the subsequent unleashing of totalitarian governments in Europe. This is not even to speak of the parlous state of civil liberties and the eruption of managerial tyranny in Wilsonian America, a condition thoroughly described by Murray Rothbard, Arthur Ekirch, Ralph Raico, and Robert Higgs.

In comparison to these conditions produced by a prolonged, costly war in which Europe tore itself apart and a peace that was simply a prelude to new war, a relatively early German victory in a continental war, as Bertrand Russell in a moment of geopolitical lucidity grasped, would have been a blessing.

A postwar policy that neocons are always recommending, which is that the US should have stayed in Europe after the Treaty of Versailles to hold down the Germans, was both unworkable and genuinely stupid. It would have turned the American military into a permanent accessory of the European winners in 1918u2014and committed to maintaining a Carthaginian peace settlement by force that most Americans by the twenties had no desire to uphold.

It is hard to see how the US, by entangling itself in military alliances directed at the continued subjugation of the Central Powers, would have been contributing to peace anywhere. What President Coolidge and Secretary Dawes did, while not the best policy for a total non-interventionist, had much to be said for it, namely helping to finance the recovery of Europe, while enjoying a favorable balance of trade, by lending money to the winning and losing sides both.

If the Depression had not struck in 1929, European recovery would have continued; and while the Germans would have pursued revision of the treaty by means short of war, as they had been doing in the twenties, the Nazis would not have taken power. Note that what is being given is not the happiest outcome that the Anglo-American world could have achieved in the postwar years. That would have been possible if the Americans and Brits had stayed out of the continental war that broke out in 1914.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

Paul Gottfried Archives

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That movement has its own understanding of who is being denied academic freedom: e.g., Orthodox Jewish students who shout Yiddish insults at rowdy black girls at the University of Pennsylvania, audiences hectored on their way to hearing Linda Chavez lecture on the virtues of American pluralism, or student "conservative" newspapers defending the "real" legacy of Martin Luther King, against its supposed black misinterpreters. In any case there will be no "conservative movement" divisions riding to the rescue of pro-Confederate interpreters of the Civil War being booted out of junior colleges in Randolph County, North Carolina. Absent a powerful support system, teachers like Perdue can expect to endure exactly what was inflicted on him. Indeed the journalist who went after him seems to have taken his script from the leading lights of the current conservative movement.

What can be done to prevent other similar misfortunes, without having to make everyone talk like the New York Times editorial page, is to make sure that two results will occur when the liberal establishment swings into operation against the non-authorized Right. Boycotts should be organized against newspapers that publish the kinds of distortions that Yates and the author Jerry Bledsoe point out. Libelously anti-Southern or anti-white newspapers must be put on notice that they will not enjoy carte blanche any longer when they take apart their favorite targets.

At the very least these bullies should lose paid readers, a price that I have been urging the members of the real Right to impose on publications that have been captured by the neocons. Just boycott them — the way the civil rights movement did with segregated buses in Birmingham, Alabama. The difference of course is that while segregationists allowed blacks to sit in the back of buses, neocons will not allow us to express our views anywhere in their publications, including in the back of them.

Another indispensable tactic for combating the kind of leftist bigotry that Yates explores is by having all columnists on our side highlight the same infuriating incidents. Despite our relative weakness in firepower, we are in a position to create embarrassment if we can reach a critical mass of readers. Let’s say that in a given week Paul Craig Roberts, Lew Rockwell, Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Charley Reese, Pat Buchanan, and other columnists of a paleolibertarian or paleoconservative bent decide to write on the same incident affecting a North Carolina educator, who had been fired and hounded to death for defending his state’s right to secede from the Union in 1861.

Let’s also say that all of these columnists specifically attack the libeler in question and the paper that incited his work and publicized his libels. Do we honestly think such coordinated efforts would have no effect at all, particularly on the generally conservative white readers of a Southern paper? My own guess is that such well-planned efforts would succeed, once limited resources were effectively coordinated.

Note that the neoconservatives were not more numerous or better heeled than our side when they began their ruthless ascent to power. What they enjoyed, beside tolerably good relations with the rest of the liberal Left, were iron discipline and squeaky tight organization. It is high time we imitate these strengths.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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The same piece, published in a Jewish Global News Service, explains that the consideration of Isabella for canonization is the latest in a series of offenses that the church has recently inflicted on Jews and other sensitive people. For example, the church canonized Edith Stein, who died in a concentration camp as a Jewish woman but had previously become a Catholic. And the church has the temerity to propose Pius XII as a saint, despite the fact that "he was generally silent during the Holocaust."

The collected gripes here reproduced have the value of one enormous whine. Having studied the matter, I think Pius deserves praise (canonization I leave to the church) precisely for his admirable behavior in helping out Jews during the Holocaust. As for Edith Stein, I suppose the same objection raised against her canonization could be made just as easily against St. Paul, who abandoned the Jewish community of his time by taking on Christian beliefs. I am also struck by the fact that the Spanish Jewish leader quoted does not have a Sephardic but a Central or Eastern European Jewish name. The overwhelming odds are that his own ancestors were not driven out of Spain after the conquest of Granada in 1492.

As far as I know, Sephardic Jews, those descended from the Jewish families expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, are not the ones now heard complaining. The majority of Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula, from Portugal as well as Spain, landed up in the Levant and are today a small part of the total Jewish population, despite their production of such illustrious Westernized representatives as Spinoza, David Ricardo, Georges Bizet, Judah Benjamin, and Benjamin Disraeli. Sephardim should also not be confused with the generally hitherto poor and usually badly educated Mizrachim, Jews from Arab countries who have taken over the Sephardic book of prayers and share the same pronunciation of Hebrew but are ethnically distinct from their liturgical cousins. Sephardim were naturally and justifiably unhappy about their treatment at the hands of a Spanish monarchy that at least some of them had served. Less defensible is the screaming now pouring out of those whose ancestors Isabella had not in any way victimized.

Although Isabella may not have been a Mother Theresa or an Edith Stein, she is a figure who contributed mightily to the forging of a Spanish national identity. (And there seems to be silence about her role, now more politically correct, in reconquering Spain from the Muslims.) One can understand why Basque separatists object to her canonization, the same way that American Southerners before their recent lobotomization resented the original cult of Abraham Lincoln, as a national consolidator rather predecessor of Martin Luther King. Neither Louis IX of France nor Stephen I of Hungary, nor Constantine in the Orthodox Church, would strike one as a Christ-like figure or as a model of religious tolerance.

But the church canonized such rulers in part as a way of affirming the ties between itself and particular peoples. Such actions simply take over the sacralization of national liberators and rulers practiced among other groups, e.g., the Jewish veneration of David and Solomon or the Jewish celebration on Chanukah of what became the consolidation of Hasmonean rule, and indigenous Jewish tyranny before the Roman occupation of the Jewish commonwealth.

Allow me, however, to suggest how Catholic leadership can spare itself further embarrassment when it comes to beatifying and canonizing. It should look for candidates like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Jewish Communists who had cordial relations with the Soviet Union and who therefore will not likely be accused of anti-Semitism and its supposed twin evil, anti-Communism. No doubt if Pius XII has snuggled up to the Commies instead of declaring them to be the "scourge of God," Cornwell would not have had to invent a Nazi lineage for this unfortunate figure.

Nor would Goldhagen be writing and publishing his screeds against Pius; nor would the Franco-Greek Communist Costas Gavras be entertaining the Paris haut monde with his new play "Amen" about Pius’s supposedly adamant refusal to resist Nazi anti-Semitism. Who, after all, cares about the heavily documented record of ferocious anti-Semitism attached to Karl Marx, unlike those recently publicized comments about Hollywood Jewish leftists made by anti-Communist Christian Billy Graham, in conversation with his fellow-anti-Communist and fellow-Christian, Richard Nixon.

What makes one an anti-Semite and therefore unfit for canonization is having the wrong politics. And certainly the Rosenbergs could not be accused of that. For the anti-anti-Communists who push the victim racket, these martyrs of anti-Semitic anti-Communism would be the perfect Catholic saints as well as the perfect victims of McCarthyism. One should add, providing this presumably saintly couple held the proper views about immigration, gay marriage, and other now-burning social questions.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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Such commentators turn a blind eye as to what has caused Buchanan’s book to continue to rise on the best-selling list, having now reached almost 200,000 sales. Not only has the volume done well, in spite of nasty comments placed in leading newspapers and without any puff pieces from the Left or from the neoconservative establishment. It has also helped turn its author once again into a highly visible presence on TV talk shows, with a more plausible claim to being there than the one provided by his recent fumbling race for the presidency.

Adding to Buchanan’s credibility as a political commentator are two aspects of his work: his exhaustive research, particularly in the first two chapters, about declining Euro-American birthrates; and the stated, documentable reasons he gives for this pattern. Buchanan attempts to link the demographic drain to a moral and cultural crisis that he assumes lots of people are beginning to feel in their bones. His talk about a Third World invasion since the Immigration Act of 1965 builds on an impressive body of scholarship, including the works of Peter Brimelow, George Borjas, and Roy Beck, which suggest that the economic benefits of mass Third World, mostly Latino, migration have been slight or non-existent, while the social costs, particularly increased welfare and crime, have more than offset those material benefits.

Moreover, the social experiment of transferring culturally different and materially impoverished groups into the U.S. and Western Europe is no longer a discussable issue for the media or for the two major parties, while in much of Western Europe even raising the question of whether Western peoples should be able to decide through open discussion what kind of culture they wish to live in can result in having the instigator go to jail for a "crime of opinion." What Buchanan emphasizes, especially in his chapter "The Intimidated Majority," is that politically enforced sensitivity is about the eradication of self-government and about the end of intellectual freedom. Quoting a phrase from my tome After Liberalism about the "dehumanization of [insensitive] dissent," Buchanan observes that the suppression of discussion about immigration points to a culture of intimidation, now being packaged as "multiculturalism." And the inroads of that culture, which has captured the state, the media, the universities and many churches, can only be explained by looking at various interlocking causes, from Western self-hate and Western self-indulgence and the loss of traditional religious faith to the influence of well-placed intellectuals, like members of the German refugee Frankfurt School, who created a theory for "pathologizing" middle-class decency.

Contrary to what his critics suggest, Buchanan does not go after his targets from a far-out rightist position. The impression he creates is that American life and politics were highly satisfactory in the fifties, except for the Soviet threat and for the lingering problem of anti-black discrimination. This latter problem would be addressed in the late fifties and early sixties, when "African-Americans who could still be described as socially conservative, patriotic, proudly Christian," asked to become "full and equal members of our national family, to which they and their families had contributed all their lives." "America said yes. Black and white together." Buchanan seems equally positive about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though he believes it was later distorted to mandate quotas and that it should be amended to allow employers to discriminate financially in favor of parents living on a single wage. Unlike his earlier books, he never mentions Joe McCarthy as an iconic figure but does extol Eisenhower and treats Martin Luther King respectfully.

Arguably Buchanan avoids asking certain serious questions about long-range political trends, in order to make mid-century America look idyllic, and the civil rights movement less cataclysmic than it turned out to be. Although he might have written a different book, he is clearly trying not to look extreme, except on the irrepressible cultural war that he thinks has engulfed the Western world. Immigration enters his discussion as, among other things, a tactic of cultural war. It is a policy for displacing Western core populations by groups that are culturally different and, in some cases, openly antagonistic, a displacement widely defended by the self-identified despisers of traditional Western civilization. Enforcing this defense, Buchanan argues with ample evidence, are the neoconservatives, who have grabbed the American Right-Center and combine their advocacy of large-scale Third World immigration with attacks on anti-immigrationists and warnings to the Right not to pay too much attention to cultural struggles.

But despite the mutual animosity between him and this last group, Buchanan has obviously followed them in one critical respect. He has avoided attacking the entitlement state and calls on big government to help us win the demographic and cultural battles he describes. Although Pat mocks the Weekly Standard for identifying American patriotism with affection for the federal government, he himself lands up taking what might be called a non-hostile position on this object of idolatry. He is thereby exhibiting a survival instinct and forestalling a public perception of him as a nutty extremist who opposes our political way of life. Those who are big-government conservatives have necessarily captured the Right and public attention because Americans and other Westerners want the state to look after them and their by now dwindling families. To his credit, Buchanan does not slobber over our degenerate constitutional regime or pretend that ours is a more humane version of what our founding fathers intended. A vast managerial state has become an accepted fact of life, and Buchanan indicates how we can use it to make childbearing financially appealing for yuppie women and to inculcate patriotism in our schools. Having been dealt a lousy hand for a true man of the Right, he has learnt to play it with considerable skill.

A shorter version of this essay appeared in Insight magazine.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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An Old Wife’s Tale

An Old Wife’s Tale is one of the least offensive but also one of the least instructive books I’ve ever tried to read. Neither its colloquial style, which resembles nothing so much as the chatter of elderly Jewish women taking the sun in Palm Beach, nor its warnings against excessive feminism and overly accessible abortions, offers anything to which I can possibly take offense.

Nor is there much here that can rivet my attention. If a storyline is to be extracted, it goes perhaps like this: Midge Decter, a proudly Jewish and proudly anti-Communist female publicist, married Norman Podhoretz after a largely uneventful youth in the Twin Cities and after a first, unsuccessful marriage to someone who dragged her into the suburbs but is left nameless. (His name is actually Moshe Decter, and I met him once when a friend introduced me to this unassuming fellow, while I was coming out of my friend’s flat in an apartment building in Northwest Washington.)

Unlike the earlier marriage, the second one has been for Ms. Decter an unadulterated joy, despite the fact that she continues to go by the name of Hubby One. But let us not be fooled by such affectations! Midge and Norman have led, according to her account, stimulating professional and social lives at Commentary and in Midtown Manhattan and, for a spell, when their son-in-law rose to high place in the Reagan administration, in Washington circles as well.

What strikes me after perusing her narrative is how little I can identify with the author, although my life may be said to overlap hers ethnically, geographically, and, despite the ten to fifteen years’ difference in our ages, chronologically. Perhaps my existence has been sufficiently different from hers to blur this apparent overlap. My family was less typically American Jewish than the one she describes for herself. My maternal family came to the US well before the arrival of Decter’s, while my father and his relatives were refugees from Hitler’s world order.

Although I lived only 60 miles from New York City, the cultural and social attractions of this Weltstadt, whither Decter desperately fled from Minnesota, meant little to my family, which lived in a predominantly refugee community it hardly ever left. Trips to the City were undertaken almost exclusively to see cousins who were not fortunate enough to live in Connecticut. Those of us who went on to college were encouraged to study and, except for me, did study technical fields, specifically pharmacy and medicine.

Having read Decter’s rhapsodic evocations of her social and cultural ambience, I do not regret my youthful deprivation. Perhaps clinging to what Nietzsche called "amor fati," I would prefer my youth in Bridgeport and New Haven to Decter’s in New York.

Indeed, I find little about her existence to justify the space she lavishes on it, let alone the expressions of self-importance she hides not at all. Although I applaud her critical views about abortion and feminism, Decter does not shed much light on either by unloading her barrowful of grandmotherly opinions. Better good morals than bad, yet the question must be raised by what authority does Midge Decter tell us how she feels on knotty ethical problems?

By her admission, she was never a diligent scholar but agreed to study Hebrew at the Jewish Theological Seminary to get to live in New York. What happened to her studies afterwards is never quite explained, since her story then segues into her work as a stenographer at Commentary and then, into her life with an uncongenial and unnamed spouse. The limitations of her background, however, do not keep her from going on to become what is called in Yiddish a maven.

The classical Greek term polupragmon carries more or less the same meaning but is less colorful than maven, a self-proclaimed expert who may even attract a considerable following because of his/her bursting self-confidence. Despite her educational limits, by the end of the book Midge is hobnobbing with scholars in foreign relations, patristic theology, and Greek etymologies.

At the Institute on Religion and Public Life, where she goes "to hang out," at the urging of her clerical friend, the Reverend R. J. Neuhaus, Decter "began an ordeal fully compensated for" by her new associations. She was "now living in a community of religious thinkers whose language was as familiar to me as the dialect of an African tribe." "Anyway I found myself well into my sixties, rushing like a schoolgirl to the dictionary and like a schoolgirl again, almost immediately forgetting the definition I found there."

Curiously, none of this hobnobbing causes Decter to wonder about how she got into this pleasant "ordeal." It is simply assumed that by being a quasi-educated Jewish grandmother with a sharp tongue and growing girth one gets asked to discuss New Testament Greek or Old Testament Hebrew with the best of them.

Throughout the second half of the book, Decter is being continuously put on boards, e.g., at Heritage and Radio Marti, or being invited to "hang out" at some institute, but it is never made clear why these honors should befall her.

Without being overly personal, I might note that as an avid reader of classical Greek, I know the words that Decter had to look up. Nonetheless, neither I nor conservative classicists of my acquaintance, even those of them who are intensely committed Christians, would likely be asked by Father Neuhaus to "hang out" at his Christian Institute. Nor would Edwin Feulner of Heritage recruit any of us to sit on his board, the way he did Midge Decter. The reason is not, as we are told, "Ed’s innocence" or his presumed need for a wily Jewish grandmother to compensate for his "highmindedness and innocent generosity."

The explanation, as I point out in the second edition of The Conservative Movement, is exactly the opposite. Beltway foundations that used to be authentically conservative have taken over the neoconservative opinions and neoconservative vassals of the Podhoretz and Kristol families, while driving away members of the unconverted Right, as "extremists" and "nativists."

The crowning achievement of Decter’s life, which is never brought up directly but referred to in a fleeting allusion to how her old friend Pat Buchanan had become "unacceptable" as a "nativist," is having contributed to this monumental process. By running around brokering "philanthropic" exchanges between one group of anxious gentile "conservatives" and another, aka, as donors and recipients, Decter, Irving Kristol, and others of their ilk had been able to redefine American conservative thought and practice. This achievement was made possible by, among other things, the lurching of the political spectrum and cultures of every Western country since the 1960s leftward, not in the direction of Marxist Leninism but toward a reconstructed Left based on state-protected kinky sex and the destruction of the bourgeois Christian family.

Needless to say, such a feat was not carried out by public administration alone but enjoyed the support of those whose lives would be affected. The trick of the neoconservatives, which can be glimpsed from Decter’s moral saws, is to absorb and defend some of the emancipating changes, while at the same time railing at other ones that seem over the top. Whence the advocacy of moderate feminism, instead of the allegedly more extreme kind, and the maternal advice Decter hands out to her nubile readers about not taking good things too far. Even more significantly, among those whom the new politics and culture highlights as victims of white Christian civilization (note the Georgetown University speech given by former president Clinton on November 7) are the Jews.

The most articulate and professionally the most energetic of those designated as victims by our socially contrite Protestant society, Jews have contributed disproportionately on two fronts, grinding out the continuing invectives against the surrounding self-condemned civilization of victimizers, and assisting with the moderate critique of this critique that a neutred Right has allowed itself to express. In her often-rambling commentaries Decter furnishes the critical comments about Jewish liberals that the goyim are too shamed to produce and propagate on their own. Having researched a book now in press that examines the connections between today’s Christian mainstream and political correctness, I am amazed to find that there is anyone left on the Right who will speak bluntly about the Jewish liberal hatred of Christians and Christianity.

To her credit, Decter expresses such blunt criticism, while Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition, goes on frenetically apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League for what may be the American Baptist role in the Holocaust and Spanish Inquisition. If only Christians could overcome their self-inflicted spasms of guilt, they might write lines like these: "It was no secret that some significant part in the emptying of the [moral-religious] public square had been played by Jewish liberals. It was understandable to me why this was so, because their long history had left many Jews with an atavistic fear of Christian authority — so the more public life could be kept strictly secular the safer they felt. But understand it or not, I believed that the religion-free public condition to which they had made such a vital contribution had left American society, and particularly American culture, vulnerable to pernicious influences."

Although much else in the book is easily forgotten, and no more than vaporous chatter, this audacious passage came from someone who obviously feels a deep investment in a Western civilization now under siege mostly from within. It is the kind of statement that might offend Decter had it come from a Christian, whom she would in all probability dismiss, perhaps like Buchanan, as a "nativist" or worse.

Still she deserves praise for having told a bitter truth. It is far more than one usually hears these days from the self-conscious Religious Right or (Heaven knows!) the Republican Party. Unlike such representatives of religious conservatism, Decter does not affect sentimental affection in reaching out to the gay lobby. But she also does not tremble over the possibility of being called a bigoted anti-Semite or over the venom that might be released against her by such liberal heavies as Abe Foxman and Alan Dershowitz. For her expression of politically incorrect opinions that gentile white conservatives might eventually muster the courage to replicate, Decter deserves the "two cheers" that her longtime friend Irving Kristol has offered in a book by that title to capitalism.

This book review first ran in Culture Wars.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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Another critic faulted me for ignoring the fact that while Pius XII protected many Jews, he "was a Satan" to the Serbs. This point is exaggerated. Certainly Pius did not call public attention to Serbian Orthodox minorities persecuted in Croatia and Bosnia during the Second World War. Croatian Franciscans were among the Nazi-sympathizers who incited violence against the Serbs. Unfortunately there is a long history of nastiness between the Eastern and Western churches; and it is hard to tell which side has the edge. What should be mentioned on the other side is that Orthodox nationalists cooperated with the Nazis in Poland, Ukraine, and Rumania and brutalized Catholics and Jews in all of these places.

In Communist countries, State-appointed Orthodox clergy showed the same lack of gumption as the Jewish rabbinate in standing up to tyrants. While the Eastern church continues to hold a grudge over the Fourth Crusade, it is alas all too easy to ignore one’s own group’s moral failings. In the case of American Protestants who have converted to the Orthodox faith, and many on the right have, it may be best to stay out of this blame game entirely. There is no good spiritual reason for taking over European ethnic hates together with Orthodox theology.

Moreover, it is foolish to think that disgruntled Orthodox Christians are going to get mileage out of Goldhagen’s brief. He is beating up on all of Christian civilization, by recycling and expanding the already discredited charges against Pius XII. Neither he nor Marty Peretz could give a wrap what Pius supposedly failed to do for persecuted members of the Orthodox Church in Croatia. And it is hard not to notice the connection between this free-swinging attack and the progress of the anti-anti-Communist Left. One of the unfounded proofs that Cornwell cites of Pius’s anti-Semitism and his supposed softness on the Nazis is that the pope was obsessively afraid of Communist takeovers in Europe.

In Hitler’s Pope that statement comes up repeatedly, to demonstrate Pius’s proto-fascist and anti-Semitic personality. Supposedly it was impossible for someone who feared that European Communists would profit from the Second World War or who believed that Communism posed a danger to Christian societies to rescue the Jews from the Nazis. Though there was indeed a greater fear of Communism than Nazism on the interwar European right, many conservative Christians of the time, e.g., Pius XI, all of the Habsburgs, much of the Prussian nobility, and even the anti-Semitic Polish National Democrats, were strongly opposed to Nazis and Communists both.

Like his predecessor, Pius XII not only expressed distaste for both, but, to the consternation of Cornwell and the contemporary Left, said perfectly correct things about the Communist danger. Note that for the anti-anti-Communist Left and for victimologist Goldhagen, one can never be sufficiently alerted to fascist and Nazi dangers, which always lurk in Christian hearts and societies. Nor did anyone, with the possible exception of Communists and Communist fellow-travelers, do enough to save Nazi victims, seeing that all believing Christians, by virtue of their beliefs, should be killing or at least encouraging the extermination of Jews. At the same time, the anti-anti-Communist Left is always suggesting, there are no Communist crimes or atrocities that nice people would bother to criticize, save perhaps for the failure of the Soviet authorities to allow Jewish dissenters to bake matzos or the intolerance of Stalin toward more progressive Communists, like the Trotskyists.

In 1998 the Socialist premier of France, Bernard Jospin, performed the most horrendous act of Holocaust denial ever carried out in his country. But since he did so to shield his Communist coalition partners against the charge of fronting for Communist mass-murderers, his depiction of European Communists as honorable "anti-fascists" did not create much of a stir. At the time both the New York Times and Le Monde expressed sympathy for Jospin, trying to keep his coalition together in the face of rightwing anti-Communist sniping. In France one can still be jailed for "a crime of opinion," thanks to the Communist-Socialist left and its right-center look-alikes, for claiming it was the Soviets, not the Germans, who killed the ten-thousand Polish officers found dead in the Katyn Woods. Thanks also to the prevalent anti-fascist moral asymmetry, the media and the academy continue to honor Stalinist toadies, Sergei Eisenstein and Ilya Ehrenburg, as great tormented Soviet artists. Meanwhile, although this woman has already passed her hundredth birthday, a non-Nazi filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, continues to live in public disgrace for having made two films for Hitler.

A final criticism cries out for response, because it is so elliptical. It is offered by a wannabe Goldhagen defender, who claims I would not admit that John Calvin supported the execution of Spanish free-thinker Michael Servetus (carried out in Geneva in 1553 after Servetus had been expelled once before). I could not imagine why I would deny this fact, but am also unclear about how this incident bears on anything said in my last piece. To my knowledge, neither Calvin nor the magistrates of Geneva, who arranged for the dispatching of Servetus, a noisy anti-Trinitarian, occupied the See of Rome. I certainly would have opposed the act, although it did produce one positive side-effect. Thereafter no Protestant country would inflict the death penalty on anyone specifically for heresy. Punishing Catholics, as in England or Ireland, for suspicion of political disloyalty was of course another matter.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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Why would Peretz at this particular time be devoting a forthcoming issue of The New Republic to the accusations of Daniel J. Goldhagen, who, having produced a mostly invented account of how all the Germans by the 1930s were "eliminationist" anti-Semites, has turned the same tirades against the "Christian West"? Does Peretz really believe that Goldhagen’s recycling of the arguments of John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, in a manner that even Cornwell considers "over the top," represents the work of "a thorough, relentless, and daring historian"?

Almost every page of Cornwell’s totally unfounded depiction of Pius as a Nazi sympathizer has been subject to devastating criticism, starting with the misleading picture on the cover that deliberately makes the future pope’s visit to the president of the German Weimar Republic in 1926 look like an act of obeisance to Hitler.

Goldhagen’s remarks in an interview with the London Times (published on January 13) that he is taking Cornwell’s "moral reckoning" even further, treating Pius not only as a Nazi sympathizer but as the very symbol of Christianity’s "dishonorable past," makes it clear exactly where he’s headed. As always, Goldhagen is moving into the realm of hallucinatory victimology. With some luck he may even reach the sales of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a work that is pitifully short of factual accuracy but cashed in on both ethnic resentment and German self-hate. On the basis of his earlier work, young Goldhagen received a promotion at Harvard as well as amassing a fortune in royalties. Undoubtedly, given the widespread guilt uninformed by historical understanding among generic Christians, Goldhagen should do comparably well with A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church during the Holocaust and Today, an opus that Knopf will publish this fall, after Peretz has greased the skids for the author.

Despite his fervent Zionist outpourings, Peretz has no interest in going after the Muslim opponents of Israel in the company of self-affirming Christians. In September of 2001, in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, The New Republic was already offering in editorials the now standard left-liberal comparison between the Taliban and the American Religious Right. Peretz and his friends at Slate and American Prospect, who hold the same general political views, have chosen the present, apparently inopportune, time to accentuate their distance from traditional Christians.

Two of their representatives, Joshua Michael Marshall and Steve Emerson, both of whom are widely featured, professional anti-Islamicists and the second of whom has spent most of his adult life in jerry-built "institutes" funded by Peretz and Mrs. Peretz’s ancestors, are quite candid about where they stand. They are fighting for a secular, feminist democracy.

For such publicists, like the editors and owner of New Republic, there is no "West" worth preserving, except for one that has been thoroughly cleansed of its essentially anti-Semitic religious and cultural heritage. Unfortunately that taint is seen as so pervasive that everything substantive has to be eliminated from the pre-global democratic "Western" heritage, save perhaps for the charms of some archaic architecture, useful literary platitudes, and early references to "human rights." Of course "human rights" in this context have no meaning other than the one assigned by the journalists or intellectuals who are busily pushing their value-preferences and warlike designs.

Having underlined the intention of these anti-Christian global democratic imperialists, it is still necessary to consider why they pursue their geopolitical aims while abusing traditional Christians. Why launch a propaganda offensive against the largest Christian church by featuring already discredited charges about the Papacy and the majority Christian population, at the very time one’s interests should be leading one to appeal to embattled, self-identified Christians against the Muslims?

Allow me to elaborate on this argument. Among those who favor the "war against terrorism," not everyone is holding out for the same kind of extensive war. Some would be happy with ending the struggle once the presumed terrorists who were involved in the events of September 11 have been duly punished; while others, typified by Peretz and his clients, would like to extend the war to include Iraqis and Palestinians, that is, enemies of Israel who are presumed to be also those of the US. The point is not whether these judgments are correct geopolitically or in terms of US security. What matters is that fighting the extended war desired by neoliberals and neoconservatives will require popular enthusiasm and martial ardor, beside huge expenditures of public monies. The question is how to inspire this ardor and enthusiasm, while going about trashing the Western religious heritage. Obviously Peretz believes that one can do both successfully.

The reason for this stand is that Peretz and his circle are relatively honest people. While they hope to seize the present opportunity to beat up on the Palestinians and other Muslim enemies of Israel, they will not lower themselves to express insincere sentiments. That is to say, they will not pretend to embrace groups they really loathe. Unlike Commentary, which went in the eighties from blaming the Holocaust on the "crucifixion myth" to hailing the Religious Right as Zionist allies, the New Republic shows dignity even while exhibiting irrational hate.

Finally I would note that not everyone on the official Right proclaiming the anti-Islamic crusade is aware of the real reasons for why The New Republic and the American Prospect favor an expansion of that struggle. On conservative websites, the war is still being naively built up as a replay of the Battle of Vienna or as a replication of the battle for Jerusalem in the First Crusade. While the conservative war party is certainly correct about anti-Christian feeling on the Muslim side, they are deluding themselves about how the war is being billed on their front. They might do well to listen to Bush and Blair to find out about the American "anti-fascist" principles that cause Muslim terrorists to dislike us.

The most frequently encountered defense of this war is that it is being waged for openness, sensitivity, and democracy (the last term being defined by the first two). This presentation of the "war against terrorism" is one that Peretz would have no trouble accepting, providing that he could also link it to his pet peeve. His showcasing of Goldhagen’s latest temper tantrum, one that seems to extend Cornwell’s extravagant charges against the Vatican to implicate all of Christianity in the Holocaust, is an indication of where Peretz and his friends are coming from.

From their perspective, it is fine if nominally Christian troops do the fighting, so long as those who determine what the fight is about treat the pre-secularist history of the West with at least the same contempt as the Muslim world.

Postscript: While Goldhagen targets explicitly the Church of Rome and treats its condemnations of Nazi anti-Semitism as sheer hypocrisy, it is not clear that he is sparing other Christian confessions. In the opening chapter of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen attacks Christianity per se as History’s "major source of anti-Semitism" and as the necessary backdrop of the Holocaust. In subsequent chapters he tries to illustrate his sweeping charge by citing Protestant as well as Catholic sources. It is therefore doubtful that in his new book he will be drawing useful or fictitious distinctions between more and less anti-Semitic forms of Christianity. More likely he is focusing on the Catholic Church as the largest Christian confession and as a stand-in for Christianity in general.

Noting this tiresome hate being paraded as scholarship, a courageous opponent of the Nazis, Gitta Sereny (the step-daughter of Ludwig von Mises), offers this opinion in the London Times: "He has a point of view and looks for something to prove that point of view. This is not how you write history." Frau Sereny is correct in her assessment of someone whom Murray Rothbard would have undoubtedly called the "evil Goldhagen." Unfortunately she is wrong about what now passes for the "writing of history."

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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Despite this drifting conservative identity, it seems that contemporary mislabeled conservatives have been able to keep their ill-fitting label through a combination of favorable circumstances. Certainly their gaggle of liberal media friends do not begrudge them the use of false packaging, particularly when the alternative is to have to face those farther to the right. It is nice for leftists be able to hold debates with their own kind, that is, with those one can schmooze with over the size of a tax cut or over whether Hillary Clinton or Rick Lazio will be the more caring Senator from New York. And another factor contributes to the problem of misidentity: the funding, apparently without strings, that has come from Rupert Murdoch and from other press barons has permitted the neoconservatives to build a vast communications empire.

Such a position has allowed them to market themselves as "conservative," by virtue of their access to tens of millions of viewers and readers. It matters little what people actually are, providing they and their well-placed friends keep ascribing to them a particular identity. Those who differ from this judgment can always be accused of antiquarian definitions. In this case dissenters will likely be accused of much more, such as insensitivity, anti-Semitism, and fascist isolationism. When all is said and done, nothing beats having power to get one’s frame of reference accepted.

But there is more to the story of how non-conservatives can bestow on themselves a conservative identity without being laughed at as clownish impostors. "Conservative" journalists have perfected certain tricks to get away with semantic nonsense. Thus Jonah Goldberg, in the latest issue of National Review, expresses the pious hope that the "Pope will come closer to the West." What in Heaven’s name is this West that Goldberg has set out to defend and which John Paul ll is being urged to join?

Readers of NR who are dumb as stumps (and I must assume that most are) will leap to the conclusion that Goldberg is upholding traditional Western civilization, on which the bishop of Rome has mysteriously turned his back. But the "West" that NR’s editors have in mind is a post-Christian, postliberal, and postconservative phenomenon, run by retread Communists and supranational social engineering bureaucracies. The only thing Western about this West is that its population is still (in spite of NR) predominantly Euro-American and its sprawling administrative governments occupy a region in which Western civilization once existed and thrived as a distinctive religious-cultural entity.

As far as I can make out, this is not the West that Goldberg talks about online or in his magazine. That West is a neoconservative creation, based on global democratic imperialism, inclusion of Israel as a prototypical American-style democracy, and calibrated versions of certain progressive movements, like feminism, that triumphed in the second half of the twentieth century. The Pope, who leads the ancient Western church, is allegedly anti-Western because he has failed to rally to the neoconservative position on bombing. Since being for the West means being a neoconservative, the Pope’s real failing is not following the Commentary-National Review line.

Another neoconservative game for legitimating claims to being the true conservative side is identifying those who are on the genuine right with the unacceptable left. This of course takes as a given the social democratic platitude that "the two extremes touch," which they sometimes do but more often don’t. To illustrate my point: the authoritarian right may be arbitrary in trying to restore order but does not create totalitarian societies; by contrast, the left, if given enough time and control, will bring about such societies as a matter of course. Total social control is the telos of leftist politics, the end toward which it inevitably moves because of its unswerving dedication to social planning.

Yet the neoconservatives keep rejecting conservative critics of the modern world, ostensibly because they are crypto-leftists who are mistakenly identified with the conservative side. For those who recall my comments on Goldberg’s attack on Joseph de Maistre, made last June, it simply blew my mind that one could treat a French counterrevolutionary as a leftwing radical, because he questioned the notion of "universal right." Maistre was in fact an ultra-conservative, in the early nineteenth-century sense. As a man of the old European right, he did not hold the leftist view on human rights that Goldberg presents as the quintessential conservative doctrine. Without necessarily agreeing with all of Maistre’s opinions, it seems to me inexcusably dishonest to treat him as a leftist precisely for not sounding like one.

Equally illustrative of neocon duplicity is a response that a young friend of mine, H. Lee Cheek, received from the book editor of National Review. Cheek had politely asked (and he does everything with conspicuous courtesy) whether the inscrutable Michael Potrema intended to send out for review his recently published work Calhoun and Popular Rule (University of Missouri, 2001); whereupon he learned that Calhoun was not a fit subject for discussion because he had presented more or less the same theory of government as "the leftist Lani Guinier."

This response is breathtakingly untrue. Only a low-grade moron, which I shall generously assume Potrema is not, can believe Guinier’s critique of the democratic majority, based on her views of racial and gender "fairness," is the same as Calhoun’s understanding of "concurrent majorities." One can oppose either or both theories but the two are not remotely similar.

Nor would Cheek, a conservative political theorist and devout Christian minister, have been sent so cynically on his way if he were a famous leftist like Guinier. NR would have slobbered over his personage, the way it does with all the leftists it happily publishes and whose books it obligingly reviews. By pretending that those on their right are really on their left, the pseudo-right can continue to do what it does best, attack the real right as the hidden left while fawning on the liberal establishment.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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Although its ethnic nationalist character does not bother me personally, it is absurd to pretend that Israel meets the standards of democratic universalism attributed to it by neocons. Such fantasists are always at pains to present Israel as a peerless paradigm of whatever the U.S. is supposed to be at a particular point in its lurching history. Israel is not a microcosm of multicultural New York (nor need it be to justify its existence), except to the extent that it has to deal with unwelcome Arab "diversity." Nor was I denying, pace my critics, that some liberal journalists and liberal news-commentators, like Peter Jennings, have dramatized the suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. My intention was both explicit and limited, to point out some of the non-conservative obsessions on the media Right, not the manifestation of pro-Palestinian views that sometimes surface on the Left.

But now that this subject has been broached, it might be well to note that strong support for Jewish nationalism exists on the liberal Left as well as among neocons. One need only check out back issues of New Republic and the Salon websites for evidence of this contention. The Peretz-Emerson-Pipes-Dershowitz line that I keep encountering is that Israel is a bulwark of Western secular pluralism. Because of "our values" and the culpability of American goyim in sitting on their anti-Semitic hands during the Holocaust, the U.S. must do everything in its military power to help Israel against Arab theocrats and crypto-Nazis. Just because the American Right is coming to sound like AIPAC headquarters does not mean that the same no longer is true on the other side. When, by the way, was the last time that such known advocates of the Israeli Right as Steve Emerson, Bill Safire, George Will, and Daniel Pipes were not allowed to express themselves in the liberal national press or on TV?

I most certainly do not claim, contrary to the assertion of one irate respondent, that being for the Israeli Right is a position exclusively taken by Jewish journalists. This stand is even more typical of Christians, broadly understood, who pander to the neoconservatives. The most toadying remarks on Israeli politics have been those of Cal Thomas, Michael Novak, Bill Bennett, and George Will, all non-Jews. Such publicists, particularly Thomas who has called in his columns for the expulsion of the Palestinians from Israeli territory, manage to outshout even the most hardened Jewish Zionists. While there may be more than one reason for such behavior, the desire for social acceptance is clearly the most prevalent. Will and Bennett do not have to worry about Arab opinion in the circles in which they move. Nor does Will have to give a rap about the League of the South or the Daughters of the Confederacy when he praises General Sherman for exterminating the Southern gentry. The salonniers and salonnards with whom he hangs out are Jewish neocons and gentile liberals, white and black, who hate the traditional American South intensely.

I should finally mention an observation made to me in a letter by Clyde Wilson in 1983, concerning the rise of Jaffaite doctrines on the American Right. Professor Wilson remarked that "there is absolutely nothing unusual" in the views on the civil rights movement and about the elevation of equality as the preeminent American political value that one finds in Harry Jaffa and his neocon followers. What is unusual is that such views are put forth as conservative ones. It would be, Wilson goes on, as if Arthur Schlesinger’s hymn to social democratic universalism The Vital Center were suddenly raised up as the authoritative text of the Right. By now of course even stranger things have happened in the movement the two of us were then discussing.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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Nonetheless the situation shows rights and wrongs on both sides. I therefore wince with distaste when Will and his neocon pals refer to Palestinians as interlopers and "thugs." Will’s assertions in the aforementioned polemic that Israeli settlers occupy "only 1.5 percent of the West Bank" and that the "West Bank is an unallocated portion of the League of Nations 1922 Palestine Mandate… to be settled by negotiation" are entirely misleading. Jewish settlers on the West Bank, who are predominantly Orthodox Jewish nationalists, have been located near large concentrations of Palestinians, thereby creating an incendiary situation. The reference made by Will to the 1922 mandate is likewise disingenuous. Transjordan, which then included the West Bank, was placed under English control, pending a final settlement, and then marked out by the British for Arab habitation. The final resolution of this territorial problem between what had become Palestinian and Jewish settlements went over to a UN commission in 1947, which intended to assign to the Arabs 50% more of the mandated land than what they could take after launching a rash war against the newly declared Israeli state in May 1948. The Arabs behaved stupidly but had claims to Palestine at least as strong as those of Jews newly arrived from Europe.

It is equally dishonest to go on, like the neocon press, pretending that Israel perfectly exemplifies whatever form of "liberal democracy" the U.S. is then claiming to incarnate. Israel is not a multicultural or even pluralistic regime, except by pure accident. It was founded as an ethnic state based on a nationalist ideal and persists necessarily in treating non-Jewish groups as second or third class citizens. Gentiles hold no significant elective, judicial, or military positions, and the political place accorded to the established Orthodox Jewish state church serves to limit social contacts, and certainly marital possibilities, between Jews and non-Jews. Israel is certainly not an oppressive state, unless one happens to be a Palestinian living on the West Bank, but the democracy it practices is more like that of interwar Poland, before it sank into dictatorship, than like the (perhaps even more bizarre form of) democracy now practiced in Western countries. The two types of democracy are not the same, and only a partisan zealot would pretend they are.

American conservatives who hold moderate positions on the Middle East, although they may form the majority of those associated with the Right, count for zilch on today’s media-packaged Right. That kind of conservatism, which happens to be the only one encountered in the national press, Fox News, and the Beltway "policy community," is savagely Zionist, committed to expanding presidential power to export its vision of global democracy, and slanderously opposed to immigration reform. As far as I can see, our side, which is everyone to the right of what used to be called Cold War liberals, no longer belongs to the "conservative movement." At least for the time being, we have become more or less invisible men, identified, as far as the general public is concerned, with whatever positions neoconservatives or neoliberals care to take. A few years ago I was shocked to learn that as a "conservative" I should be defending the dropping of atomic bombs on what were a battered Japanese people in August 1945 and even the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese descent in 1942. Neither was in fact a conservative position during World War Two; and both had their primary support among liberals and leftists. (The Communist-dominated ACLU and Governor Earle Warren were early backers of the forced resettlement of Japanese Americans and the commandeering of their property during the War. Most of our military leaders, including MacArthur, had expressed reservations about the bombing, as did even more vehemently conservative foreign policy hands like Joseph Grew.)

Why in God’s name should conservatism now be identified with the archaic anti-Axis hysteria that neocons, like liberals, are whipping up in the late nineties? The answer is obvious: such people have media control and are using it to exclude more authentic conservative voices. And how does one distinguish conservative thought in New York City from the sludgy editorials that keep coming out in the New York Post, a paper that combines the cults of FDR and Martin Luther King with pro-Likud propaganda? All of this applies equally well to the Wall Street Journal, albeit with some qualification, given the Journal’s usual avoidance of outright slander against its conservative critics.

Although the real Right, and on this I am sure, will survive its present diminishment, the question is qu’y faire maintenant. Without large media outlets and generous benefactors, we’ll have to face continuing problems in getting alternative views before the public. Up until recently our neocon opponents did us the favor of making war on us. Although not well intentioned, such a tactic called attention to our existence and the presence of more than one set of opinions on the right. What has now begun to happen may be more ominous. No opinions, except for those of the center-left in the second half of the twentieth century, are given media attention as "conservative" views. Consequently all "conservatives" have been redefined as Humphrey liberals, global democrats, and Israeli hawks.

For "conservative" reading and viewing junkies, as illustrated by a close friend at Elizabethtown College, it is hard to resist contamination from the Left. My friend is always telling me about what he learns from or finds confirmed by his preferred sources of information, National Review, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh. Such outlets unfortunately form a seamless web of neocon and centrist Republican opinions and rarely differ in what they report and advocate. Although my colleague is not a hopeless naïf (and has spent years writing scholarly studies of postwar conservative thinkers), he is exposed to neoconservative partylines, whenever he opens a conservative publication reaching more than 8,000 readers or turns on the "Republican channel." This is a problem that we non-leftists have to address as soon as circumstances permit.

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.

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