Re: Conservative Crack-Up

Following up on this post about James Antle’s recent article about libertarians and conservatives–I mentioned to him in private email that it is curious that some conservatives were on the pro-war side during Cold War, but are now on the libertarian side, e.g. Pat Buchanan (and some libertarians are now on the neo-con side!). I was curious if Antle had a theory on why this is the case. My guess was that his view is that it was genuine defense then, but now is Wilsonian nation building etc. Still, why can some conservatives, like Buchanan, see the difference, but others cannot?

His reply, reprinted with permission, follows: “The Cold War did of course separate libertarians from conservatives, though not to the extent that has been evident in the War on Terror. Until the Vietnam war, many if not most of the libertarian critics of the Cold War were those who were never absorbed by fusionism at all, chiefly the students and admirers of the late Murray Rothbard. One irony of this is that many Rothbardians are more culturally conservative than the Randians and other mainstream libertarians more at home collaborating with the conventional right.“The question you raise is an interesting one to which there is probably more than one answer. I think many conservatives would argue that the Cold War represented a more tangible challenge by an identifiable Soviet foe, while the War on Terror has degenerated into an open-ended conflict against a foe not clearly defined. But some of it also has to do with the perceived compatibility of dismantling the New Deal state at home with rolling back communism abroad. Today’s conservatives superfically invoke the same principles, but in fact favor the projection of government power through “conservative” welfarism at home and nation-building abroad.

“Of course, many conservatives come to different conclusions in this debate because they differently motivated. JP Zmirak had an excellent piece, also published in The American Conservative, pointing out that many on the right hardened conservatism into an ideology during the Cold War in an attempt to come up with a system of thought and politics to compete with communism. Some conservatives today want to defend these abstractions; others are interested in preserving their particular country, communities and civilization. The latter tend to be the ones opposed to the current neoconservative foreign policy project. The return of conservatism to rootedness and an attachment to both the particular and actual people, cultures, traditions and customs is the driving force behind what is called paleoconservatism. We have seen even many conventional Cold War conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, become heavily influenced by it.”

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1:30 pm on November 16, 2003