Michael Tomasky on Old Right isolationism

President Dwight Eisenhower with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: models of peaceful restraint?

Michael Tomasky has a book review in the just-released issue of the online Democracy Journal, Ron Paul's America Spring 2008, reviewing Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism by Bill Kauffman (2008). Tomasky writes:

The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.

Tomasky uses most of the review to describe the impulses and assumptions that Kauffman presents as the foundation of his brand of Old Right isolationism (though Tomasky doesn't use that term).

Here's a generous summation of the dogma by Tomasky:

Kauffman’s America is, or was, a place that was content to be small (he uses the phrase "little America" several times to represent his national beau ideal). He is among those who believe that the United States was born a republic, but that it relinquished its republican-ness–most specifically the absolute liberty of its citizens–the minute it started hankering for a piece of the global action. The thirst for power, writes Kauffman, perverted all else, disfiguring the national character, imposing vast taxes upon the citizenry, subordinating liberty to the penchant for loyalty oaths and Patriot Acts, and (not least among its crimes) sending young soldiers off to die for no good reason, creating generations of fatherless children and leaving wives, as Kurt Weill put it, to bewail their dead in their widow’s veil.

But Tomasky argues, citing Kauffman, that "most of the opponents" of wars in the 19th century "were people who fit within the tradition of cantankerous conservatism that Kauffman describes and admires." Tomasky writes:

This remained the case throughout the nineteenth century. Manifest Destiny, the war in Mexican-American War, the misadventure in Hawaii in the 1880s and ’90s, and of course the fateful Spanish-American War were all noisily opposed by forces that saw them as imperialist adventures, although not through the left-wing lens with which we associate such rhetoric today. Instead, their opposition–centered around the Anti-Imperialist League, which started in New England and had spread to a dozen cities by the time of the Spanish-American War–was isolationist, traditionalist, and constitutionalist (as they saw it). They were bankrolled in part by Andrew Carnegie.

This is, at best, misleading. The opponents of the Mexican-American War, famously including Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, opposed the war because they saw it as a war backed by Southern slaveowners for the acquisition of more slave territory. And though the critics of the turn-of-the-century imperialism included conservatives, people like Mark Twain and William James don't fit that description very well.

But Tomasky is on more solid ground in describing and critiquing the isolationist view of the 20th century. I might word it differently. But his description of Woodrow Wilson is basically correct:

I agree with Kauffman, in part, about World War I: Woodrow Wilson was a liar, an abominable foe of rights and liberties, and a racist to boot. At the same time, I think there was something dignified in his aspirations for the post-war world. More to the point, Kauffman’s narrative is punctured here just a bit by the fact that a lot of the anti-war energy was now coming not from the nativist-isolationist right but the ideological left, some of whose figures (Randolph Bourne, for example) he admires as well and tries, with limited success, to herd into his corral.

And according to Tomasky, Kauffman goes through the same contortions as other Old Right isolationists typically do to paint That Man Roosevelt as a terrible warmonger prior to the Second World War. This weakness is also very typical of those who advocate that viewpoint:

Kauffman is entitled to his views, but a conscientious author who wants to argue that America would have done just fine to stay out of World War II cannot ignore the question of likely consequences. Kauffman basically ignores it all. His speculation about what might have happened amounts to two sentences: It might have been an epic disaster; on the other hand, Hitler and Stalin might have bled each other dry. That’s all he has to say about the matter. And he says it with scarcely more gravity than if he were speculating on what might have happened if Lindsay Lohan had gotten someone else to take the wheel that fateful night of her most recent DUI.

I can almost forgive Tomasky's screw-up on the Mexican-American War in exchange for this:

I have to chuckle when I see Eisenhower praised by people like Kauffman for the way he left office (his farewell address), since he came into office green-lighting CIA coups that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had resisted on two hemispheres (in Iran and Guatemala), with hideous consequences.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm sick of hearing Eisenhower's Presidency described as a model of moderation and peaceful restraint. That Iran coup in 1953 is haunting us big-time until this very day. And will continue to do so for quite a while.

He concludes with the useful observation that some of the isolationist historical work at least calls our attention to aspects of our history that deserve more scrutiny.

Tags: isolationism, michael tomasky, old right