Reanimated corpse of Old Right isolationism discovered on the prowl

Isolationist hero Charles Lindbergh at America First Rally: "The three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." - Lindbergh 09/11/1941

Well, it looks like the ship has hit the sand. (I always wanted to use that dumb euphemism from Tennessee Ernie Ford.) The Calvin Coolidge and Ayn Rand fans are ready to proclaim Glenn Greenwald their new prophet.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com says in Why Are They So Afraid of Ron Paul? 11/14/07 that Greenwald "has risen as Ron's champion on the Left", defending Mr. Gold Standard against "the Smear Bund" composed of "liberals of the old school" and their (our) "viciousness" and "juvenility". Andrew Jackson? Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal? Hell, yeah, I'm a "liberal of the old school"! And that ain't what Raimondo's LewRockwell.com crowd call "Austrian school" liberals, either, by which they mean hardline "free market" Buccaneer Capitalism partisans like their boy Ron Paul.

Ron Paul has made a career out of "mainstreaming" far-right notions into the Republican Party. Now he's created a new opening. And the ideological spawn of Herbert Hoover and the America First Committee are rushing through it. Us "liberals of the old school" have some idea where they're coming from.

Check out Raimondo's article. I'm down with Andrew Bacevich's take on how "isolationism" is used as a bogeyman by Establishment foreign policy types. Writing about Old Man Bush's demagoguery as President, Bacevich says in American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2002):

There were in fact few indications that the American people after the Cold war were inclined to "turn their backs on the world" - few, indeed, that they had ever done so throughout their history. But by reviving this shopworn refrain - and by portraying every foreign policy issues as a test of whether Americans would stay the course [yes, Old Man Bush liked the phrase, too] or shirk their duty to the world - Bush used isolationism as a calculated device for shoring up popular and congressional deference to the executive branch. Bill Clinton would do likewise.

But Ron Paul and the Paulists are isolationists in the tradition of William Borah, Charles Lindburg, Robert Taft and the pre-World War II America Firsters.

And Justin Raimondo is offering us a guided tour in his piece: John T. Flynn, the "antiwar" American First Committee, Murray Rothbard, Bob Barr (pal of the White Citizens Council), neo-Confederate Lew Rockwell. Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes. But if those are my bedfellows on the Iraq War, I want a full-body condom!

Raimondo goes after Dave Neiwert, a recovering former Republican, who is one of the country's leading journalistic authorities on the radical right. He credits Neiwert with an accomplishment of which I was not aware, referring to Neiwert's carefully documented criticisms of Ron Paul: "It's mass smearing on a scale never before attempted." Boy-hidey! I guess ole Goebbels was an amateur compared to that badass Dave Neiwert - if you buy Raimondo's version, that is. He continues on to refer to Neiwert as a "fool" after crediting him with a world-historic level of "smearing".

Raimondo also spends a long paragraph verbally (or at least literarily) rending his garments over anyone who actually bothers to analyze authoritarian movements. To make sense of this, you have to keep in mind that to the America First crowd, the New Deal was fascism. Abandon your sense of the normal meaning of words, all ye who enter into the wonderland of New Old Right isolationism. Justin Raimondo and the LewRockwell.com crowd definitely do not want people looking too closely at what authoritarian movements are about.

Bottom line: I think the tacit alliance is starting to wear very thin between rightwing "libertarian" critics of the Iraq War and the majority opposed to the war - liberals, independents, maybe a few conservatives, those who refer to themselves as "progressives" or "leftists": pretty much everyone who's actually part of the peace movement.

Tags: america first committee, authoritarianism, charles lindbergh, dave neiwert, isolationism, justin raimondo, ron paul