The Independent Right

Several recent experiences drove home for me the extent to which any independent intellectual Right (perhaps any independent non-Left) has been kept out of the public discussion. One such experience was being interviewed on his radio program (perhaps for the fifth or sixth time) by Tom Woods and noticing that my host was even more exercised than I by how neoconservatives misrepresented their conservative and paleolibertarian opponents. First, they managed to stick the ideas of those who offended them down a memory hole, and then the ruling class had the chutzpa to lie about those whose lives and reputations they destroyed. They made it appear as if they’d cleansed the Right of psychopaths, illiterates, and accessories of the Ku Klux Klan. In point of fact they had run down and marginalized genuine scholars like M.E. Bradford, when this professor of Southern literature had dared to seek the directorship of NEH in 1981. Neoconservatives then managed to elevate to the post from which they excluded Bradford (while opening for themselves a vast patronage network) the Democratic political hack Bill Bennett. According to Tom, the major intellectual achievement of the neoconservatives when they took power was to replace serious scholars with journalists and hatchet men.

Moreover, the neocons were so good at isolating those they went after that their victims never regained their lost status. In The Week I just encountered a commentary by Michael Brendan Doherty explaining how an “obscure Encounters: My Life wi... Paul Gottfried Best Price: $5.20 Buy New $5.60 (as of 08:10 UTC - Details) adviser to Pat Buchanan had predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996.” Francis had originally associated the leadership qualities he delineated with the presidential bid of Pat Buchanan. But then when the Buchanan campaign fell short, he predicted that someone else would be more successful in carrying out the political transformation that Buchanan had begun.

On the left, John Judis, who met Sam in my home when we all lived in the Washington area, has written in National Journal about an unknown social thinker who predicted the eruption of “Middle American radicalism” at the level of national politics. Like Doherty, Judis gives the impression of having pulled someone out of obscurity in order to pay him his due. Although these authors most certainly know a great deal about their subject, they seem to be approaching him in their commentaries as someone whom they were just discovering. This may be the result of wishing to avoid too much association with a politically incorrect presence. But there may be something more here. Their subject is someone who has to be pulled out of the rubble. I speak about being “pulled out of the rubble” quite deliberately because it is the way in which Communist dissenters described what happened under the totalitarian Left. The fate of the independent Right that fell victim to the neocon hegemony was similar in some ways to what happened to Communist dissenters. Both were reduced to non-persons and saw their traditions of thought vilified or rooted out of public consciousness.

The last relevant recent experience is a conference I just attended in New York City sponsored by Telos magazine and a Telos-affiliated institute.  Although long associated with the editorial board of the publication, I withdrew from most of my contact with Telos after the death of the head editor Paul Piccone. Paul and I had been a close friend, and while he was alive, the magazine has pursued projects that interested me. This was the first time I had Multiculturalism and t... Gottfried, Paul Best Price: $27.23 Buy New $50.00 (as of 03:40 UTC - Details) gone to a Telos event in a number of years, and some things hadn’t changed much. Most of the attendees and participants at the conference, which was held at NYU, were academics who more or less identified with “the Left.” But that didn’t really matter. Particularly on the panels in which I participated, I noticed there were distinct political sides. If there was a split, it was not one between right and left in any Fox-news-CNN sense. It was a split between the neocons, or whatever they called themselves in this setting, and the rest of us.

This became especially apparent in the final session, in which someone from the Hudson Institute joined us, and we were urged to discuss the future of “liberal democracy.” The present directors of the magazine and the guest from Hudson Institute were quite insistent that we express “solidarity” with liberal democracy throughout the world. This was “the only good game in town” and represented for its advocates the only moral choice for moral people. Also we were told that American liberal democracy in its current form embodied the highest manifestation of their salvific creed. Never before in the progress of humankind had citizens been as free and protected as they are at this moment under a regime that is based on liberal democratic values.

But we shouldn’t be satisfied with this achievement. Our work would not be finished until we manifested active support for minorities everywhere who shared our liberal democratic concerns. Indeed in troubled times it might even be necessary to “march into countries” to uphold our ideals, which are supposedly universal. A Polish lady who was there complained that “human and feminist rights” were no longer being protected in Poland in a manner that was proper. The Catholic Church had gained influence since the last election, which meant that abortions would be less accessible. As this lady spoke, I had to wonder where I was. Perhaps I had stepped into AEI or Heritage Conservatism in Americ... Gottfried, P. Best Price: $9.95 Buy New $58.37 (as of 03:50 UTC - Details) by mistake. Were we morally obliged to occupy and re-educate the Poles the way we had done to the defeated Germans after the Second World War? A frequent contributor to NR Jillian Kay Melchior wrote a column in November calling on the US to engage “social-justice issues, including prison reform and transgender right” in Ukraine. I suppose that under whatever now passes for American “conservatism,” these are pressing reasons for global intervention.

In my response in the time allotted to me, I made clear that although a self-described Robert Taft Republican I would gladly make common cause with any Left in the room against the bogus Right. I then went on to argue that liberal democracy is not a genuine theory but an accumulation of rhetoric that is designed to justify an aggressive liberal internationalism.  “The term has no ontological status outside of the polemical use to which it’s been put to justify an expansionist foreign policy in the name of whatever the US has become politically and culturally at a particular moment.” A Russian lady in the audience made a comment soon after my remarks that in countries that she’s visited “there’s a saying. Don’t be bad or the Americans will come and give you democracy.”  Although this sarcasm didn’t amuse the liberal democratic expansionists among my fellow-panelists, I and most of the audience found it quite clever. But then perhaps I am a leftist after all.