David: Your LRC blog today discussing George Will reminded me of his egregious article, “In Defense of the Welfare State,” The New Republic, May 9, 1983, where he cites the great “conservative” Otto von Bismarck as setting the precedent for what was to follow with the welfare-warfare state. I still have a faded photocopy of it to remind me of where this Tory socialist is coming from. Yet it was both Will and William F. Buckley Jr. who broke the ground for the neoconservative contagion that now dominates National Review and the phony “conservative movement.”
I always thought that I was a Johnny-come-lately when it came to learning about the dangers posed by the neoconservatives.
I first discovered who they were and the threat they posed in 1976 upon reading the first edition of George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.
It was there that I learned of this motley crew of mostly New York intellectuals — former Trotskyists, Menshevik social democrats, and liberals, associated with publications such as The Public Interest, Commentary, Dissent, etc. — who would become the neocon vanguard. However besides Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, and their ilk, there was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Moynihan, the liberal Democrat sociologist turned key Nixon adviser (and later US senator from New York), was central to the neocon story.
He saw President Richard Nixon as “the American Disraeli” who would create a conservative welfare state based on Milton Friedman’s negative income tax and vouchers for public education.
So the neocon contagion did not begin with the Republican administrations of George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, or Gerald Ford. It began with the Nixon administration. Even Bill Buckley’s National Review recognized this at the time and supported the token presidential candidacy of conservative John Ashbrook to run against Nixon in the 1972 primaries to bring this to light.
This was when the Buckleyites were still New Right “fusionist” conservatives (who hated Murray Rothbard and the Old Right) but before National Review totally sold out to today’s neocons.
Former Trotskyist communist, OSS/CIA consultant, and pioneer Cold Warrior James Burnham was the dominant influence on CIA agent Buckley and National Review since the magazine was founded.
According to the CIA’s own history site – James Burnham was “there at the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” Burnham’s role was played down so as not to tip off the reds.
This was like something out of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian: ‘The People’s Front Of Judea’ — Neocon style…
Burnham’s American Workers Party colleague, another Trotskyist and Ur-neocon Sidney Hook was originally tied up with a leftist outfit called “The Committee for Cultural Freedom” which was no relation to “The Congress for Cultural Freedom” that came a dozen years later. An even later outfit called “The American Committee for Cultural Freedom” was the actual CCF affiliate in the US. Presumably these naming choices were a deliberate tactic.
In 1941 Burnham published his most famous work, The Managerial Revolution. Some of his former Trotskyist comrades accused him of virtually reproducing without attribution the ideas of Lawrence Dennis who managed to get his book out a year before Burham’s. I don’t think they prove plagiarism, however much they would like to, but the similarities of the overall analysis are very striking. British socialist George Orwell also wrote a lengthy critique of this book, which greatly influenced his Nineteen Eighty Four.
But the Trotskyist influence upon neoconservatism has always been there.
Neocons have always loved FDR, the New Deal, and the welfare-warfare state he created. They have only wanted to tinker with it, make it more efficient, make it “conservative.”
That’s also why all true Torys such as George Will have always loved Bismarck, Disraeli, and their welfare-warfare states.
Conservatism arose in opposition to the individualism, capitalism, and intellectual freedom spurred on by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
Like communism, socialism, or fascism, conservatism has the same collectivist, anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic roots. The concept of ideology comes from the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte, when Burke, Coleridge, Hegel, Comte, de Bonald, de Maistre, Southey, Saint-Simon, de Maistre, and Chateaubriand, were outlining the fundamentals of what emerged as the ideological construct of conservatism — anti-individualism, anti-capitalism, anti-classical liberalism, anti-egalitarianism, elite hierarchy and status, alliance of throne and altar, counter-revolution, defense of statism and the status quo.
My next real education regarding the neoconservative threat was a series of eye-opening pieces by Ralph Raico and Murray Rothbard in the late 1970s. By now many mainstream conservatives were making accommodations with (or appeasing) the neocons, who were making their covert strategic move in capturing the foundations, think tanks, publishing arms, etc. of the “conservative movement.”
The neocons were beginning to jump ship from the Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and making their nests in and around Ronald Reagan policy circles. They are true cuckoos in this respect. They will invade and take over any nests, any opportunity to rise to and consolidate power.
Finally, the person who put it all together — who traced the who, what, when, why, and how neoconservatism arose and came to power — was Justin Raimondo in his seminal 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, praised by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul.
Sentinels such as Rothbard, Raico, Raimondo, Rockwell, and Ron Paul, have always been the real Paul Reveres warning of the neocon threat — “The Turncoats are coming! the Trotskyists are coming! The War Party is coming!”
It’s just some of us have been paying attention to their warnings for a little while longer.
6:11 pm on June 3, 2017
