The US President as "Commander-in-Chief" and the ghost of Old Right isolationism in the Trump campaign

Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute writes about The Creeping Militarization of American Culture The National Interest 05/13/2016.

I try to be very cautious about work from people associated with the "libertarian" Cato Institute even when I find some of their arguments about the problematic nature of US military interventions. Because the Old Right isolationism that informs much of the libertarian and "paleo-conservative" foreign policy viewpoint generally if founded on a narrowly nationalistic view that is at best dismissive of international law and disarmament agreements.

But this part of Carpenter's post is on the mark and addresses one of my pet peeves about the militarization of foreign policy and the political in the United States:

Yet another sign [of the militarization of political language] is the growing tendency to misapply the term “commander-in-chief.” The Constitution makes it clear that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. There were two reasons for that provision. One was to assure undisputed civilian control of the military. The other was to prevent congressional interference with the chain of command.

One thing, however, is abundantly clear. The Constitution did not make the president commander-in-chief of the country. Unfortunately, that is a distinction that is increasingly lost on politicians, pundits, and ordinary Americans[.] The notion that the president is a national commander who can direct the country and it is our obligation as subordinates to salute and follow his lead is an alien and profoundly un-American concept. It also implicitly ratifies the perverse doctrine of the imperial presidency — that the president alone (our commander-in-chief) gets to decide when the nation goes to war. Both are thoroughly unconstitutional, ahistorical, and unhealthy attitudes. Yet they have become common, if not dominant, attitudes in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century America. And that is frightening. Viewing the president as the commander-in-chief of the nation is the epitome of a mentally militarized society. [emphasis in original]

The specific language of the Constitution is, "The President shall be the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United Sates, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States."

The Commander-in-Chief clause is the source of much of the expansion of the war powers of the Executive Branch since 1789, a development which is highly problematic but, for better or worse, generally accepted by both major parties in the US. Instances of Congress overriding the President on war policy during the Cold War or afterward have been few and far between.

The other side of the Commander-in-Chief power is that it establishes clearly the critical democratic principle of civilian control over the military. But that principle too has been undermined in practice in various ways. Andrew Bacevich wrote in Civilian Control? Surely, You Jest. The New Republic 08/18/2010:

Reality turns out to be considerably more complicated. In practice, civilian control—expectations that the brass, having rendered advice, will then loyally execute whatever decision the commander-in-chief makes—is at best a useful fiction.

In front of the curtain, the generals and admirals defer; behind the curtain, on all but the smallest of issues, the military’s collective leadership pursue their own agenda informed by their own convictions of what is good for the country and, by extension, for the institutions over which they preside. In this regard, the Pentagon’s behavior does not differ from that of automakers, labor unions, the movie business, environmental groups, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Israel lobby, or the NAACP.

In Washington, only one decision is considered really final—and that’s the one that goes your way. Senior military officers understand these rules and play by them. When the president or secretary of defense acts in ways not to their liking—killing some sought-after weapons program, for example—they treat that decision as subject to review and revision.

On the war powers issue, I'm very much in favor of Congress using its authority to put prudent limits on Executive power. More specifically, they should be trying to reduce the number of wars we get involved in.

Our real existing Congress, though, is happy to demand more wars and more aggressive foreign policy. That fact doesn't get to the Constitutional issues. But Congress' own frequently irresponsible attitude toward war and peace makes it convenient for them to avoid restrictions of Presidential warmaking.

Gary Wills also addressed the careless use of the Commander-in-Chief title in At Ease, Mr. President New York Times 01/27/2007:

I first cringed at the misuse in 1973, during the “Saturday Night Massacre” (as it was called). President Richard Nixon, angered at the Watergate inquiry being conducted by the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, dispatched his chief of staff, Al Haig, to arrange for Mr. Cox’s firing. Mr. Haig told the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss Mr. Cox. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned. Then Mr. Haig told the second in line at the Justice Department, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused, and accepted his dismissal. The third in line, Robert Bork, finally did the deed.

What struck me was what Mr. Haig told Mr. Ruckelshaus, “You know what it means when an order comes down from the commander in chief and a member of his team cannot execute it.” This was as great a constitutional faux pas as Mr. Haig’s later claim, when President Reagan was wounded, that “Constitutionally ... I’m in control.”

President Nixon was not Mr. Ruckelshaus’s commander in chief. The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

Wills agrees with Ted Galen Carpenter on this semantic usage reflecting a militarization of US politics. "This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics," Wills wrote.

What do Old Right isolationists have in mind when they make similar points? Some of it is undoubtedly the stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day phenomenon. Or, ask Rick Perry famously put it last year, "A broken clock is right once a day."

But Old Right isolationism is not only fundamentally nationalist and even xenophobic. It's also Old Right as in anti-New Deal and pro-segregation, meaning that it opposes federal "overreach" in matters like labor law, enforcing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution's guarantee of voting rights, requiring billionaires to pay taxes to support their country, etc. And expansive federal powers are indeed closely related historically and practically to a broad view of Executive warmaking powers. And to a foreign policy of global hegemony.

Donald Trump is injecting a little more old-fashioned isolationism into the Presidential race than we're accustomed to hearing. Andrew Bacevich has been emphasizing for years that "isolationism" is most often used as a bogeyman to discredit criticism of interventionist foreign policy. For example, 70 Years of “New Isolationism” The American Conservative 10/24/2013

The abiding defect of U.S. foreign policy? It’s isolationism, my friend. Purporting to steer clear of war, isolationism fosters it. Isolationism impedes the spread of democracy. It inhibits trade and therefore prosperity. It allows evildoers to get away with murder. Isolationists prevent the United States from accomplishing its providentially assigned global mission. Wean the American people from their persistent inclination to look inward and who knows what wonders our leaders will accomplish. ...

Most of this, of course, qualifies as overheated malarkey. As a characterization of U.S. policy at any time in memory, isolationism is a fiction. Never really a tendency, it qualifies at most as a moment, referring to that period in the 1930s when large numbers of Americans balked at the prospect of entering another European war, the previous one having fallen well short of its “War To End All Wars” advance billing.

In fact, from the day of its founding down to the present, the United States has never turned its back on the world. Isolationism owes its storied history to its value as a rhetorical device, deployed to discredit anyone opposing an action or commitment (usually involving military forces) that others happen to favor. If I, a grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, favor deploying U.S. forces to Lithuania to keep that NATO ally out of Vladimir Putin’s clutches and you oppose that proposition, then you, sir or madam, are an “isolationist.” ...

For this very reason, the term isolationism is not likely to disappear from American political discourse anytime soon. It’s too useful. Indeed, employ this verbal cudgel to castigate your opponents and your chances of gaining entrée to the nation’s most prestigious publications improve appreciably. Warn about the revival of isolationism and your prospects of making the grade as a pundit or candidate for high office suddenly brighten. This is the great thing about using isolationists as punching bags: it makes actual thought unnecessary. All that’s required to posture as a font of wisdom is the brainless recycling of clichés, half-truths, and bromides.

While I basically agree with Bacevich's description of the isolationist bogeyman, there is, as he puts it, a "tendency" on the far right that traces it's lineage back to the isolationist, more-or-less pro-Nazi Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s. Professional anti-leftist-speaking-as-a-repentent-leftist Ron Radosh wrote about some of the post-World War II examples of this in his disturbingly admiring Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (1975). Investigative reporter Avedis Derounian, publishing under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson, published two books on the Old Right isolationist political hardcores, Under Cover (1943) and The Plotters (1946).

The presumed Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has the dubious honor of having had Roy Cohn as one of his most important political mentors. (Michael Kruse, ‘He Brutalized For You’ Politico 04/08/2016; Olivia Nuzzi, Trump’s Mobbed Up, McCarthyite Mentor Roy Cohn Daily Beast 07/23/2015) So he has had access to the political sewer fed in no small part by Old Right isolationism.

And his foreign policy positioning for the general election may draw on that source quite a lot. Rania Khalek reports in Donald Trump Calls Hillary Clinton “Trigger Happy” as She Courts Neocons The Intercept 05/12/2016:

Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war. ...

“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”

And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.

Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”

“If we would’ve done nothing,” Trump argued, “we would’ve been in much better shape.”

And she explains that such pitches scarcely make Trump a dove:

Of course, Trump is hardly the candidate of peace. Nor is he a credible messenger.

He’s advocated for killing the families of terrorists, endorses torture and in his tirade against Clinton he applauded Saddam Hussein for executing people without trial, saying, “He used to kill [terrorists] instantaneously. … they didn’t go through 15 years of a court case.”

And she warns that Trump could make this kind of political pitch:“'Donald Trump will be running to the left as we understand it against Hillary Clinton on national security issues,' Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said on MSNBC last week. 'And the candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican nominee.'”

It would be more accurate, I think, to say that in conventional pundit-speak, Trump with this pitch will try to run both to the left and to the right of the Democrats. If the likely Democratic nominee sticks closely to the hawkish positions she supported as Senator and Secretary of State, Trump could play well with many swing voters with that pitch.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks looks at this left-right approach by the Trump campaign in Will Trump Be More Liberal Than Hillary? 04/21/2016; he talks about the foreign policy version following 9:00:

Ron Paul fans vs. "China Jon", or, what Old Right isolationism looks and sounds like

Like I said yesterday, the Patriot Militia/Bircher crowd that are Papa Doc Paul's core supporters are not allies for a progressive movement except on the most narrow, technical basis that their views may occasionally coincide.

The relationship of this video to Papa Doc's own campaign is somewhat murky. But it's a good example of how the xenophobia and white racism of Papa Doc's base can be entirely consistent with their allegedly antiwar position. And does this ad sound antiwar to you? It's called Jon Huntsman's Values and has a YouTube date of 01/04/2012:



Sam Stein writes about the ad in Jon Huntsman Denounces Nasty, Jingoistic Video Allegedly Made By Ron Paul Supporters Huffington Post 01/06/2012.

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul, white racism

Papa's Doc's foreign policy

Ben Adler at The Nation addresses Three Myths About Ron Paul 01/02/2012, #2 of which is his segregationist brand of libertarianism and #3 of which is his foreign policy: "Just because Ron Paul opposes imperialism and unnecessary invasions of foreign countries doesn’t mean he has a liberal or progressive bone in his body. Paul is a nationalist and isolationist, staunchly opposed to multilateral organizations."

He links to this piece by Michael Cohen, The World According to Ron Paul Foreign Policy 12/23/2011, which looks at Papa Doc's foreign policy in more detail.

I've been concerned pretty much since the Iraq War started or thereabouts over the way in which neo-Confederate and Old Right isolationist sources like Antiwar.com - which I've quoted numerous times, though normally with a disclaimer about the source - were establishing a presence among war critics for their brand of far-right ideology. Papa Doc's popularity suggests that it's a siren song that some left-leaning critics of US interventionist foreign policy find it hard not to be attracted to.

Cohen writes:

The problem, however, is that there is far more to Paul's view than just his opposition to U.S. military adventurism. Paul also believes that the United States should depart from all international organizations and global alliances. This includes not just NATO, but also the United Nations and the World Health Organization (he introduced legislation to this effect as recently as this March). He stridently opposes NAFTA, all free trade agreements, and even U.S. membership in the WTO on the grounds that free trade should be free of government interference, global rule-making, or apparently dispute mechanisms. He is opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants and believes that securing America's borders should be the "top national security priority."

What about foreign aid? Paul wants to end it completely -- with some vague exceptions made for disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. He claims that "foreign aid never works to achieve the stated goal of helping the poor of other nations." Finally, there is a darker element to Paul's foreign policy views -- a healthy degree of conspiracy-mongering. He has warned against the so-called NAFTA super-highway and the North American Union, a supposed plan to turn the North American continent into an economic union with a single currency and open borders along the lines of the European Union. Paul has even introduced legislation to prevent this non-event from occurring. He has also claimed that the United Nations "wants to influence our domestic environmental, trade, labor, tax, and gun laws" and that "its global planners fully intend to expand the U.N. into a true world government, complete with taxes, courts, and a standing army." [my emphasis]

What some of Papa Doc's left-leaning sympathetic commentators seem to miss is that Papa Doc's rabid nationalism, xenophobia and paranoid conspiracy-mongering are integral parts of his foreign-policy thinking. His antiwar positions don't exist on some parallel track. They are part of a hardcore Old Right isolationist strand of thinking that constitutes an exceptionally ugly tradition. Neither Adler nor Cohen call out climate change as a particular concern. But Papa Doc is also dead set against any kind of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gases. And, for that matter, against any and all domestic government regulations that would control pollution of any kind. Because that would violate the liberty of rich old white guys like the Koch brothers to poison the air, water and soil as they like.

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul

Again on Papa Doc Paul and Old Right isolationism

Andrew Bacevich is right when he argues that "isolationism" is a bogeyman used by the US foreign policy establishment to stigmatize criticism of American interventionism. Actual isolationism in the sense of the isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s is not advocated by either Republicans or Democrats - with a small but important exception. And the fact that some many liberals and progressives these days seem to be unfazed by the accusation of "isolationism" is a healthy thing. Well, mostly.

The Patriot Militia/John Birch Society crowd that operates at the overlap between the Republican Party and far-right fringe parties like the Constitution Party do advocate the kind of Old Right isolationism whose tradition runs from the anti-League of Nations crew after the First World War to the America Firsters of the early 1940s to Pearl Harbor conspiracists to the John Birch Society and to today's militia movement and Koch Brothers-type billionaire rightwingers.

And to the brand of Republicanism practiced by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas and his song, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, aka Papa Doc and Baby Doc.

The Papa Doc brand of Bircher Old Right isolationism does have some appeal to otherwise left-leaning critics of current US interventionist foreign policy. I continue to think that's more of a sign of desperation than of nuanced political advocacy on the part of his admirers on the left.

You just cannot understand the brand of dogma that people like Papa Doc is pushing without realizing that Papa Doc is a hardcore, unrepentant Southern segregationist and Bircher conspiracist. Period. Full stop.

And, yes, I'm sure that Papa Doc's Christian heart is as pure as the driven snow. And that he's entirely innocent in advocating policies that are most at home among far right militia types and that is white racist, xenophobic, anti-democracy, bitterly anti-labor, opposed to any and all arms-control treaties and honest-to-God for real anti-Semitic. Did I also mention overflowing with absolute crackpot theories about "fiat money" and the North American Superhighway and the United Nations and more besides? It's not a matter of ad hominem dismissal of his ideas. It's that you just cannot understand his foreign policy worldview without understanding the Bircher conspiracist worldview of which they are an integral part.

Glenn Greenwald discusses Papa Doc's policies in Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies Salon 12/31/2011.

Glenn links to segment of The Young Turks that among other things mentions favorably a melodramatic anti-intervention ad from Papa Doc. Philip Weiss also praises the ad in The Ron Paul moment – bad and good Mondoweiss 12/22/2011, calling it a "genius video Paul just did opposing our occupation of foreign countries." It's called If China Attacks America (JUST IMAGINE) YouTube date 12/04/2011:



But I doubt very seriously that Papa Doc's Bircher/Patriot Militia base takes this as an ad about peace and love. They will process that business about a foreign military occupation in Texas in terms of black-helicopter fantasies about a secret Mexican army hiding in America ready to pounce at the signal of our Marxist Kenyan Islamunist America-hating President. (And it's really pretty cheesy on the face of it.) Remember, in the militia-movement fantasy-world, the federal government is an occupying force in Texas and other states. You know, the "Zionist occupied government" in Washington (headed by that Marxist Kenyan Islamunist America-hating President) that these folks are terrified of?

Glenn's pieces are always worth reading. But I just think he misses the boat on this whole Papa Doc business. I can certainly agree that we don't have to "see all political issues exclusively as a Manichean struggle between the Big Bad Democrats and Good Kind Republicans or vice-versa." But we should also see Papa Doc Paul for who he is.

I don't believe Papa Doc is someone who has a quirky mixture of progressive antiwar views, earnest civil liberties concerns and hardline rightwing attitudes on the economy, immigration, abortion and just about everything else under the sun. He has spent his career catering to a political underworld to whom all US foreign policy is part of a big Jew Commie plot. His position on civil liberties is that the federal government should do absolutely nothing whatsoever to remedy even the grossest violations of civil liberties by states and localities.

Glenn is very good about analyzing the often cynical and, yes, brutal nature of the Obama Administration. He is not so good at seeing the deep cynicism in the segregation, Old Right isolationist viewpoint Papa Doc has spent his entire political career right into 2012 promoting and supporting.

The bottom line on Papa Doc still is, he's a flaming rightwinger!

See also:

Matt Stoller, Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals Naked Capitalism 12/29/2011. To his credit, unlike many other commentators on the left, Matt digs into the neo-Confederate "libertarian" ideology that is a big part of Papa Doc's and his supporters' worldview. He also speaks from some personal experience working with Papa Doc's staff on Capitol Hill. And he plausibly suggests, "Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order."

Michael Tomasky, 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).

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul

Juan Cole on Ron Paul

Juan Cole has the kind of analysis of Ron "Papa Doc" Paul's Old Right isolationism that we rarely see in Paul, Santorum and the Sixth War (on Iran) Informed Comment 08/12/2011. Papa Doc's views are often treated in the press as a quirky instance of a conservative Republican echoing dovish foreign policy views. But Papa Doc and the Old Right isolationists are coming from a radically different perspective:

Ron Paul was representing the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party. It is not exactly isolationist (note the desire for international trade), but opposes the military-industrial complex. As Right anarchists, they want the least government possible, and see government as a distraction for businesses, who succumb to the temptation to use the government to distort the eufunctional free market. In essence, government [in Papa Doc's view] is a scam whereby some companies are seduced by the possibility of manacling the invisible hand that ought to be magically rewarding enterprise and innovation. A significant stream within libertarianism theorizes war as the ultimate in this racket, whereby some companies use government to throw enormous sums to themselves by waging wars abroad and invoking patriotic themes.

Papa Doc delivers a patriotic baby

 I think he misses a beat by calling "the desire for international trade" a sign that Papa Doc is "exactly isolationist." The dogma of free market international trade is standard for Old Right isolationists. In their view, the magic of the free market would solve all problems if allowed to operate unrestrained everywhere in the world.

Cole notes:

Ron Paul's "peace through trade" approach to geopolitics and skepticism of overbearing imperialism does not have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the foreign policy of the United States. He represents small-town entrepreneurs who see the wars and their expense as a burden and a block to trade opportunities. They are a significant segment of the Republican Party, but I'd put them at 15% at most.

But a large part of what keeps the Old Right isolationists voting Republican is that their worldview includes other factors which they perceive as more closely identified with the Republican than the Democratic Party: white racism, xenophobia, hostility to government regulations. Papa Doc himself, as Dave Neiwert as reported, has been a major conduit for mainstreaming ideas from the white supremacists and Patriot Militia fringe into the Republican Party. "Tellingly," writes Cole, "Ron Paul calls global climate change a 'hoax.'")

He also quotes Papa Doc as follows. Between Papa Doc's own personal quirks and the ideological hash of Old Right isolationist dogma, it's not entirely coherent:

Just think of what we went through in the Cold War when I was in the Air Force, after I was drafted into the Air Force, all through the Sixties. We were standing up against the Soviets. They had like 30,000 nuclear weapons with intercontinental missiles. Just think of the agitation and the worry about a country that might get a nuclear weapon some day.

... That makes it much worse. Why would that be so strange if the Soviets and the Chinese had nuclear weapons, we tolerated the Soviets. We didn’t attack them. And they were a much greater danger. They were the greatest danger to us in our whole history. But you don't go to war with them.

.... Just think of how many nuclear weapons surround Iran. The Chinese are there. The Indians are there. The Pakistanis are there. The Israelis are there. The United States is there. All these countries ... why wouldn't it be natural if they might want a weapon? Internationally, they might be given more respect. Why should we write people off? In the Fifties, we at least talked to them. At least our leaders and Reagan talked to the Soviets. What's so terribly bad about this? And countries you put sanctions on you are more likely to fight them. I say a policy of peace is free trade, stay out of their internal business, don't get involved in these wars and just bring our troops home.

The Old Right isolationists are hardcore nationalists. They oppose international treaties not exclusively concerned with trade, including nuclear arms control agreements. Like the neoconservatives, they are indifferent to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and oppposed to the kind of international agreements and mutual treaty commitments that are the only way to control proliferation.

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul

Franfurt School, 1936: Old Right isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes in his better days

The 2/1936 issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung contained an English-language review by F.N. Howard of a two-volume 1935 work by Harry Elmer Barnes and Henry David, The History of Western Civilization (1936). Barnes (1889-1968) is mainly remembered today as a crackpot Old Right isolationist propagandist, obsessed with That Man Roosevelt and how he allegedly planned the Pearl Harbor attack. His posthumous reputation is reflected in this obituary by Murray Rothbard, an Old Right "libertarian", at the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com site, Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP (1968).

Deborah Lipstadt in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993) writes at some length about Barnes excursions into the exceptionally sleazy field of Holocaust denial. By 1964, he was embracing something just short of full-blown Holocaust denial, which he expressed that year publicly in the rightwing American Mercury in an article called “Zionist Fraud”. (A Holocaust denial site reproduces a version of the article here; but such sites cannot be trusted to reproduce documents with accuracy and integrity, though this one does support their cause.) Barnes also published in the leading Holocaust-denier periodical, the Journal of Historical Review.

But in 1936, Barnes was still an eminent historian who had not yet embraced complete rightwing crackpottery. As Lipstadt writes:

Some of his numerous books and articles, particularly those on Western civilization, were used as required texts through the 1960s at prestigious American universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Barnes also lectured widely at other universities throughout the United States, his arguments about needless American participation in World War I winning the admiration of many people in the United States and abroad, including the publisher of the Nation, Oswald Garrison Villard; the Socialist leader Norman Thomas; the journalist H. L. Mencken; and the historian Charles Beard. At one time he served as bibliographic editor of Foreign Affairs.

But she also notes that a few years after the First World War, Barnes had shifted from his wartime anti-German jingoism to an advocate of the idea that “Russia and France wre chiefly responsible” the war, a view he had occasion to share personally the exiled former Emperor Wilhelm II (Kaiser Bill, as he was known in ridicule in the US during the war) in 1926.

In the 1936 review, F.N. Howard writes:

A strong sense of uneasiness and insecurity, amounting often to panic, takes hold even of historians in time like ours, urging them to desert I lie exhausting absorption in detail and monographic precision for the more ample environment of Weltgeschichte [world history]. Violently shaken from their traditional system the sharp decline in prestige of the sanctioned symbols occasioned by precipitous shifts in the material level, some historians set out once again to provide their nation or race with a compelling myth of its origin, its past, and historic vocation. The tale of the rise and fall of Empires can easily be woven so as to suggest the special destiny of favored nations, yield up evidence for current prejudice, supply a basis for popular yearnings, or offer a vantage point for prophecy and divination. Nature or Providence, it may be alleged ever so cautiously, works to assist a chosen people in their appointed task. Weltgeschichte may, however, be made to serve another and antithetical purpose, that of deflating local pretensions by reference to enlarged horizons.

Barnes, he says, takes the second course in the work under review.

Barnes has been protesting for almost two decades now against dogmatic perspectives and traditional perversions of history. A student of the late James Harvey Robinson, he has from the beginning of his career been affiliated with the self-styled school of the ,,New History”, whose aim it has been to emphasize the significance of modern achievements in the natural and social sciences for political thought and behavior. World history, to them, offers a vast canvas on which to illustrate the fruitfulness of the application of „intelligence" and „open-mindedness" to the perplexing problems which mankind has had to face in its social and cultural evolution. In recent years B. has shown a tendency to move away from Robinson's Enlightenment orientation in the direction of the more materialistic formulations of Beard, Veblen and even Marx. The consequent focus on cultural and social-economic forces in the development of Western civilization makes his book a refreshing contrast to the religious and political apologetic of [Hal Fischer] and [Edward Eyre, whose work was also under review in the same piece].

The dilemma inherent in B.s attempt to fuse the divergent conceptions by which he has been influenced into a consistent philosophy of history results in frequent contradictions and an obvious lack of coherence. The deeper implications of a dialectical conception of history are not fully realized either in the general organization of the work or in the treatment of the history of culture. His diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society is much more realistic than his prescriptions for their cure. The book teems with exhortations to altruism and „experimentalism“ in the adjustment of human affairs. „The chief need of the world today“, he concludes is for „innovators“, to lead us out of our „cultural lag“. [MY EMPHASIS]

Barnes’ brand of “experimentalism” and innovation in the field of history in his later years proved to be very dubious ones.

Since the “dogmatic perspectives and traditional perversions of history” against which Barnes had been protesting since the 1920s were perspectives that attached virtually any blame whatsoever to Imperial Germany in starting the First World War, it’s a little surprising that Howard wasn’t more explicitly critical on that point. Writers and historians on the left didn’t agree with the verdict of the Versailles Treaty that Germany was solely responsible for the outbreak of the war; they tended to view Russia, France and Britain and sharing in the blame. And even Wilsonian internationalists would have found it difficult to escape the thought by 1936 that the Versailles Treaty and the implications of its war-guilt assumptions left something to be desired.

But Barnes' one-sided version of the issue essentially exempting the German Imperial government for any blame for the Great War was not one that anyone of left-leaning viewpoints in 1936 was likely to find very appealing.

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, harry elmer barnes, isolationism, old right, radical right

The problem with Old Right isolationism and crackpot history

I don't know exactly how David Swanson of AfterDowningStreeet.org sees his own political perspective. But in this video, he elaborates what is the Old Right isolationist, rightwing revisionist, dishonest view on the Second World War.



Like (other?) Old Right revisionists, Swanson may be making some good points. But the War of 1812 was a defensive war by Britain against the US? Please. The kind of distorted, even crackpot points he presents make it hard to give credence to pretty much of anything he's claiming.

Tags: isolationism, old right

Tea Party isolationism?

Scott McConnell of the anti-interventionist American Conservative writes about Tea Party Republican foreign policy in Standard Operating Procedures: How the Neocons Are Co-opting the Tea Party Right Web 11/09/2010. Some of the hard right groups whose profile has been raised by the Tea Party marketing blitz on behalf of the Republican Party have Old Right isolationist ideas about foreign policy. Will this mean, as Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham recently suggested, a fight within the GOP over foreign policy? McConnell:

... by 2010, few national GOP officials spoke enthusiastically about the Iraq venture. Why is it then that the neoconservative wing within the party has seemingly emerged unscathed?

Add to this mix the Tea Party, an amorphous, populist, ideologically diverse explosion of anti-Obama activism, permeated with libertarian and quasi-isolationist sentiments. Could the Republicans be on the verge of a battle over foreign policy as divisive as the one Democrats experienced in the 1960s and 1970s? And will the neoconservatives emerge substantially weaker? Many on the paleoconservative and libertarian right hope so.

This battle has not broken out, and there is little reason to think it will soon. Neoconservative tactical flexibility and ingenuity is unmatched by their rivals within the conservative movement. And they have deployed a number of familiar tactics in their efforts to blunt the Tea Party challenge.

These tactics can be grouped into several categories: strategic flattery from national media platforms; offers of technical advice (speechwriting, debate preparation); prominent placement of op-eds; appearances at Tea Party gatherings; subtle and not so subtle encouragements of anti-Muslim bigotry; and advocacy efforts such as circulating petitions to put congressmen on record as supporting a "strong America." In addition, neocons are busy influencing the congressional staffing process and networking operations on Capitol Hill—both areas they excel at—to help shape the new class of politically inexperienced Tea Party lawmakers.

McConnell discusses in some detail how the neocons are approaching this, with the foreign policy education of Sarah Palin being a prime example. "Palin has become the neoconservatism's [sic] reliable vector into the Tea Party world."

While some of the Old Right isolationists types have produced some serious and meaningful criticisms of some of the current interventionist policies - The American Conservative itself and the Old Right Antiwar.com Web site provides examples - Old Right isolationism is really based on the same narrow nationalism which drove neocon allies like Dick Cheney and Rummy during the Cheney-Bush Administration.

When a foreign policy issue like the invasion of Iran becomes an acute issue, most of the Old Right isolationist-nationalist crew are going to line up with their fellow jingoists, neo-Confederates, nativists and gun nuts against the libruls and the tree-huggers and the DFH hippie bloggers.

McConnell describes the efforts by prominent neocons Newt Gingrich and Frank Gaffney to promote anti-Muslim bigotry over the phony issue of Islamic law (shariah, the foreign-sounding name they prefer to use) taking over in the US. He also points to the precedent of the Christian Right:

During the Reagan era, neoconservatives warily watched the rise of the Christian Right, whose Christian Zionist theology had strong anti-semitic overtones. However, Irving Kristol (father of the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol) tried to reassure his fellow Jewish readers of Commentary about points of compatibility between themselves and the Christian Right in their support of Israel. Kristol said succinctly, "Well, it’s their theology but it's our Israel."

In fact, neoconservatism accommodated itself quite well to the Christian Right—a movement that has failed to achieve any of its programmatic aims, despite being an essential part of the conservative electoral coalition. [my emphasis]

As polls and voting patterns have shown, members of the public who identify with the "Tea Party" label are basically loyal Republicans and are generally down with Christian Right ideology. Most of them are already fine with the belligerent, nationalistic Republican foreign policy. Deviations from the general Republican Party line on major foreign policy issues among new members of Congress identified with the Tea Party are likely to be rare, and of little political significance.

Tags: isolationism, old right

An Old Right isolationist take on the Fort Hood massacre

It's not surprising to me that Pat Robertson is banging the Islamophobia drums.

I'm not surprised, either, that Antiwar.com's editorial director Justin Raimondo is also jumping to rightwing conclusions over the Fort Hood shooting untethered from any factual basis. But I thought I would link to his post The War at Home: Jihad at Ft. Hood 11/09/09 for a couple of reasons. One is that it shows how on this particular subject, he's willing to leap to conclusions based on scarce evidence. It's also an example of his Old Right isolationism, in which he simultaneously sounds like he's trying to give an empathetic explanation of why an American Muslim would think himself justified in killing American soldiers and also promote a paranoid rightwing notion of a super-efficient Al Qa'ida having deadly sleeper agents prowling among us here in the Homeland. In his opening paragraphs, he could be mistaken for Michelle Malkin:

It’s been grimly amusing to watch the liberal mainstream media spin the murder spree at Ft. Hood. They are trying mightily to pretend it was all about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s inner psychological turmoil, given his job as an Army psychiatrist whose task it was to counsel troubled veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. He is depicted as a victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome, even though he was never in combat. His identification with his clients’ suffering, his poor job evaluations, even his lack of a wife are all blamed for his rampage, which killed 13 (so far) and wounded dozens of others.

In order to give this narrative of victimization credibility, the touchy-feely school of thought has to ignore the mountains of evidence that – given his premises – Hasan acted rationally and there was nothing inexplicable about his deadly spasm of violence.

Raimondo has already decided that Maj. Hasan is guilty of the shootings (a reasonable enough conclusion at this point) but also that he did so for jihadist religious-political reasons:

In 2001, before his transfer to Ft. Hood, Hasan attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., where Anwar al-Awlaki – recently banned from Britain due to his open advocacy of attacks on British troops in Afghanistan and his support for organizations deemed terrorist – preached and held sway. Two of Hasan’s fellow congregants were Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour, both among the 9/11 hijackers. A third hijacker attended the radical imam’s services in California.

These might be potentially interesting connections, if we knew a lot more than we do about the shooter's motivation than we actually do. Until then, it's speculation. Raimondo proceeds immediately to wilder speculation:

It is perfectly possible Hasan met the two and was recruited into al-Qaeda, a "sleeper" to be awakened at the right moment. The nut-job known as "Azzam the American," a Muslim convert from a Southern California Jewish family, issued a statement not long ago calling on Muslim Americans – specifically Muslim members of the armed services, of which there are thousands – to rise up and strike the infidels on the home front.

It's also "perfectly possible" that most of our TV pundits are space alien Pod People, too. But I would actually say we have more evidence for the Pod Pundit idea than we have for the idea that Hasan was an Al Qa'ida sleeper agent recruited by 9/11 hijackers.

He continues, sounding even more like Michelle Malkin:

The American-born Hasan, son of Palestinian parents who emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the 1960s, joined the military against the wishes of his family. Here is someone who was brought up in this country, presumably immersed in the culture of the West, and yet still responded to the call of al-Qaeda to make war on his homeland. With millions of native-born Muslims in this country, how many are similarly susceptible to Osama bin Laden’s appeal to strike at the "far enemy" – who is, for them, quite near?

This, of course, is just the question the neoconservatives have been asking ever since the Twin Towers were downed, and their answer is, oddly, the same as al-Qaeda’s. Both, for different reasons, are hoping for a crackdown by the U.S. government, starting with the banning of Muslims from our military. If we are indeed embarked on a religious war against Islam – and it sure seems like it – who can argue against this? The wet dream of the neocons and their ostensible opposite numbers in bin Laden’s cave is that the authorities will one day carry out Michelle Malkin’s vision of a repeat of FDR’s wartime internment camps, albeit this time filled with American Muslims instead of Japanese-Americans. That would certainly make both the editors of Commentary magazine and al-Qaeda’s top commanders quite happy. [my emphasis]

Was Hasan responding "to the call of al-Qaeda to make war on his homeland"? We don't know that, and neither does Raimondo. But it didn't stop him from embracing Malkin's suggestion about rounding up potentially disloyal Americans and putting them in preventive detention. It wouldn't at all surprise me for neocons to defend such an action. But it's certainly a broad generalization he makes to say it's their "wet dream".

And Raimondo gives us an example of how an antiwar postion can simultaneously be a xenophobic, rightwing conspiracy theory.

Our wars abroad are a diversion away from the main front in the effort to defeat al-Qaeda, which is right here at home. There is no doubt in my mind that bin Laden’s legions have planted their agents on our soil, and these murderous Myrmidons will spring forth fully armed when the time is ripe. Our borders, our security measures around such facilities as nuclear plants, and our intelligence-gathering methods are the weak links in our defense, made all the more so by the massive diversion of resources to a series of futile, draining, and unwinnable overseas conflicts. [my emphasis]

Antiwar.com is nominally a "libertarian"-type forum featuring antiwar writing from a variety of poltical positions from left to right. The Antiwar Radio feature frequently has sensible commentators associated more with the left side of the political spectrum, including human rights attorney Scott Horton, historian Gareth Porter, Glenn Greenwald and Tom Hayden.

Raimondo is also an "adjunct scholar" of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Ludwig von Mises was a hardline rightwing economist who was also an editor a member of the editorial advisory board of the John Birch Society's American Opinion magazine. The founder and chairman of the Institute is neo-Confederate Lew Rockwell, whose articles can be found in abundance at his LewRockwell.com site. The site also features neo-Confederate Abraham Lincoln revisionism in its King Lincoln Archives.

Chip Berlet writes about the Mises Institute in Into the Mainstream Intelligence Report Summer 2003. "Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream," he writes. And he identifies the Mises Institute as one of the groups performing that service for the extreme right.

Antiwar.com identifies itself as a project of our parent foundation, the Randolph Bourne Institute," whose main reason for existence appears to be funding Antiwar.com. Antiwar.com's mission statement also declares, "Our dedication to libertarian principles, inspired in large part by the works and example of the late Murray N. Rothbard, is reflected on this site." Justin Raimondo is the author of an admiring Rothbard biography, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (2000). Berlet describes Rothbard's "libertarian" approach as follows:

A key player in the [Ludwig von Mises] institute for years was the late Murray Rothbard, who worked with [Lew] Rockwell closely and co-edited a journal with him. The institute's Web site includes a cybershrine to Rothbard, a man who complained that the "Officially Oppressed" of American society (read, blacks, women and so on) were a "parasitic burden," forcing their "hapless Oppressors" to provide "an endless flow of benefits."

"The call of 'equality,'" he wrote, "is a siren song that can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human." Rothbard blamed much of what he disliked on meddling women. In the mid-1800s, a "legion of Yankee women" who were "not fettered by the responsibilities" of household work "imposed" voting rights for women on the nation. Later, Jewish women, after raising funds from "top Jewish financiers," agitated for child labor laws, Rothbard adds with evident disgust. The "dominant tradition" of all these activist women, he suggests, is lesbianism.

Other sources of Old Right isolationist commentary include Taki's Magazine, The American Conservative (which like Antiwar.com also publishes liberal and left war criticism) and Chronicles Magazine (not to be confused with The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Antiwar.com's mission statement claims that while acknowledging their Rothbardian point of view, they take their journalistic role seriously. Having the editorial director publish a paranoid, evidence-free claim about a sophisticated network of Al Qa'ida sleeper agents in the United States does anything but enhance their reputation for journalistic seriousness.

Tags: isolationism, justin raimondo, old right

Ron Paul and the Republicans

Republican Congressman Ron Paul

Ron Paul attracted a good bit of positive attention from critics of the Iraq War during the 2008 Republican primaries because of his antiwar positions. But his political viewpoint is what is politely known as Old Right isolationism. Which is, in a less polite formulation, hardcore anti-union, segregationist, hardcore opposed to government regulations of business, fond of conspiracy theories (especially ones in which Israel or Jews loom large), anti-women's rights and nationalistic/unilateralist/jingoistic to the point of opposing any concept of international law other than narrow trade regulations.

Ron Paul has also been one of the prime conduits through which ideas from the crackpot Bircher/white supremacist/"Patriot" movement far right have been "mainstreamed" into the Republican Party.

So I was interested though not especially pleased to see this piece by David Weigel Ron Paul’s Economic Theories Winning GOP Converts Washington Independent 05/05/09 on the subject of what purports to be Paul's growing influence among Congressional Republicans.

I was particularly struck by the references to what the "libertarian" right - which would be known in Europe as rightwing liberals, a concept that really doesn't compute in the American political vocabulary - call "the Austrian school" of economics, as represented in particular by Frederick von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

I have a friend who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Vienna. I asked her one day out of curiosity if she had studied what some Americans call the "Austrian school" of economics. She was unaware that there was such a thing. Although she did remember having heard of Von Hayek. Which made me wonder if maybe we shouldn't call them the "rightwing American school".

Jamie Galbraith has a cute anecdote about the "Austrian school" in the text of a portion of a debate he recently held with former House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey, reproduced in Causes of the Crisis Texas Observer 05/01/09. Jamie's father John Kenneth was the best-known liberal economist of the 1960s and the two or three following decades. Jamie said in his speech:

Leader Armey spoke to you of his admiration for Austrian economics. I can’t resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school - including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, “would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.” They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They’d all left the country in the 1930s.

The Iraq War gave the Ron Paul-type Old Right isolationists to get a hearing on foreign policy among a wider audience than would have been attracted by the dystopian dogmas of "Austrian" economics. Antiwar.com and The American Conservative are two sources that have notably benefited from their antiwar stance while also producing extreme "free market" economic agendas.

Tags: old right, radical right, ron paul

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 4: Vermont secessionists today

Clement Vallandigham, a Civil War "Copperhead" (Yankee sympathizer with the Confederacy): his soul apparently goes marching on, too

Antiwar.com is a Web site that features some neo-Confederate writers like former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell. The site does not feature only or even primarily far-right isolationist material. But that stuff is there. And there is some definitely ideological/political overlap between Old Right isolationist types and neo-Confederate thought.

The site's Antiwar Radio earlier this year featured Scott Horton Interviews Christopher Ketcham 02/14/08. Ketcham has written on the the secessionist Second Vermont Republic group, and seems to clearly sympathize heavily with their cause.

He wrote about the group in Long live secession! Salon 01/25/05. I commented on this article during Confederate "Heritage" Month of 2005 in a post of 04/29/05.

Ketcham talks about the group's cooperation with the white supremacist League of the South, saying of the two groups that "their common enemy is the United States". He also talks about Christian Exodus.

Bizarrely, Horton quotes Charles Manson approvingly in talking about the Supreme Court!

The interview is an example of 2008 neo-Confederacy. It's alive and well on the far right (and not just on the "far" right), unfortunately.

Tags: antiwar.com, christopher ketcham, confederate heritage month 2008, neo-confederate, old right

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

Ron Paul takes the money and doesn't run, leaving unrequited love behind

Justin Raimondo and other folks at the Antiwar.com Web site have been big fans of Ron Paul in this Presidential election cycle.

But for Raimondo at least, he has reached the point of wondering what Ron Paul, also the darling of white surpremacist groups, was really up to. He writes about it in A Revolution Betrayed? Taki's Top Drawer 02/13/08. (He says that the title wasn't his.)

Paul made big headlines for his prodigious online fundraising. But he actually spent very little money in key primary and caucus states on ad buys. If he was really interested in winning the Republican nomination, laying the groundwork for a third party run, or trying to build opposition to the Iraq War, it doesn't make much sense to not make big media buys in the early contests.

It seems to be dawning on Raimondo that hardline rightwinger Ron Paul may have been playing "libertarians" and other war critics for suckers. He writes of Paul's statement effectively pulling out of the Republican Presidential race and also announcing he will not make a third party run:

To summarize: the presidential campaign is in limbo, there will be no third party run, and we'll get back to you later about what we're going to do with all that money we raised ($6 million still unspent).

As Representative Paul put it: Whoa!

But isn't that how "libertarian" capitalism is supposed to work? Everyone is in it for a buck and acting on perfectly selfish impulses. If you can gull the rubes into giving you their cash, you win. If they're dumb enough to get scammed by you, too bad for them. It just illustrates that the guy who winds up with the money is a winner in the Social Darwinist selection process.

Raimondo accurately points out that Paul was never likely to be the Republican candidate, and that his Presidential candidacy really only made sense as laying the groundwork for a third-party run. If Raimondo takes Paul's opposition to the war as seriously as he claims, one would think he would include building the antiwar movement as a possible rationale. But since I see the core of Paul's Old Right isolationist outlook as being extreme nationalism, I never took Paul's support for anti-militarist that seriously.

Raimondo points out that Paul's claim that he has to worry about preserving his House seat against a well-funded primary opponent is bogus. But his article also conveys the sadness of true faith that has been let down:

Paul’s presidential campaign galvanized so much energy and enthusiasm that, at times, it mimiced the dimensions and depth of a real mass movement, that is, of a serious effort to recapture the GOP from the neoconservatives and inaugurate a new era on the Right. The Paul campaign ignited interest at both ends of the political spectrum, and drew in a broad array of activists and more passive supporters (contributors and voters) that, despite their ideological diversity, showed remarkable cohesion and an amazing degree of self-organization. As a grassroots phenomenon, it has outpaced anything seen in the libertarian movement or, indeed, on the far right side of the political spectrum; since the storied days of Barry Goldwater. (my emphasis)

That would be the "storied days" of Barry Goldwater's Presidential campaign in 1964, when his two main issues were promoting an immediate drastic escalation of the war in Vietnam and opposing integration in the South. It's such things that fire the hearts of Old Right libertarian idealists. He continues:

Furthermore, all this activity generated more publicity in the mainstream media than any comparable candidate: national newspapers, magazines, television, and the Internet have all featured interviews, profiles, stories, and editorials that have focused attention on Paul, and made him the subject of discussion from sea to shining sea. Two appearances on Jay Leno: more publicity than this no libertarian standard-bearer ever dreamed of. ...

Paul set out, I think consciously, to recreate the Old Right coalition on contemporary terrain. Was he so astonished by his own success that he pulled back at the last moment? We can’t know that, but what we can ask is why he failed to give us the leadership implicit in his presidential bid. After all, when you run for president, and put yourself at the head of a movement, you have a responsibility to follow through: you’re asking your supporters to make a commitment, and, implicit in that, is an unwritten agreement on the candidate’s part to follow through. (my emphasis)

Ah, it's so poignant to discover that the idol of white-supremacist and militia types could also be a cheap scamster, just like many of his most passionate followers. So sad.

But, then, there's also the reliable fallback of blaming the Jews neoconservatives:

What really scared the substantial anti-Paul contingent among the conservative GOP establishment is that they looked at the youth movement he had generated and saw that this was the future of their movement and their party--if it was to have a future. The venomous smear campaign organized by the Orange Line Mafia, and the hooligan-style assault launched by Bill Kristol and the worst of the neocons, such as David Frum, was simply a defensive war, at least on their part. After all, Paul has continually gone after the neoconservatives, explicitly pointing to them as the real source of the GOP’s problems. His campaign was and is a dagger pointed at the heart of the neocon network in the Republican party, and they responded in kind – that is, in the only way they could, not with a refutation of Paul’s ideas but with smears and a campaign based entirely on the "principle" of guilt-by-association. I’ve covered that campaign [elsewhere], and won’t get into specifics, except to say that, in assessing the effect of the Paul campaign, this chapter takes on special significance.

Yes, there's special significance, here, know what I mean? (Nudge-nudge, wink-wink)

Never heard the term "Orange Line Mafia"? Me either. And, no, even after I followed the link in Raimondo's post I was still pretty much clueless. Finally I realized they were referring to the "orange line" on the Washington D.C. subway system. And lots of Jews seem to be involved.

But whatever the religious inclinations of these Paul opponents, Raimondo thinks they're down on him because they are, you know, urban elites and stuff who hate good, down-home, all-American white folks:

Of course, when anyone looked at the alleged “hate” in his [Paul's] infamous newsletters, and at the accusations leveled in The New Republic and by Marty Peretz’s "libertarian" cohorts, as I did, it became all to clear that the big objection had nothing to do with what was actually written. Paul’s real crime, in the view of his critics, was the very idea of appealing to what is, after all, Ron Paul’s mass base: rural, white, home-schooling, primarily Midwestern farmers and lower-middle class small business owners and blue-collar workers. For the Beltway “libertarians,” this simply will not do. As Radley Balko, of the Cato Institute, lamented: "The Ann Althouses of the world, for example, are now only more certain that opponents of federal anti-discrimination laws should have to prove that they aren’t racist before being taken seriously." (my emphasis)

Speaking of those dang, mannish-type wimmin:

The Ann Althouses of this world amount to a very small percentage of the general population: after all, what if we got together all the cranky, neoconnish know-it-all female lawyers--;would we even have enough to fill a small room?

Yet it is unfair to apply this argument to the Beltway types, who couldn’t care less about building a real political movement outside the confines of the Georgetown cocktail party circuit. That’s why they care more about the Ann Althouses of this world than they do about that North Dakota farmer who spray-painted “RON PAUL” on hay bales. Heck, they’re embarrassed that Paul won his highest vote totals in rural districts like North Dakota and Montana. Why, those places are nowhere, they don’t matter: only the Washington-New York-Hollywood axis matters: the rest is fly-over country, which, if it isn’t exactly uninhabited, is certainly empty intellectually, as least as far as the Orange Line Mafia is concerned. (my emphasis)

And, hey, we know what kind of people run "New York" and "Hollywood" and of course Washington, too, don't we? (Nudge-nudge, wink-wink)

So, if Paul's true believers can't believe their man bamboozled them as bad as Cheney and Bush and Maverick McCain suckered people about Iraq's WMDs, well, they can always take comfort in thinking that the Jews done him in.

It's a strange, strange world those Old Right isolationist "libertarians" live in.

Raimondo follows up that article with more anguish of unrequited political love in A March to Nowhere, also in Taki's Top Drawer 02/13/08. It includes a video clip of the "antiwar" Ron Paul telling his followers, among other things, grumbling that Republicans are joining with Al Gore on global warming.

Tags: isolationism, justin raimondo, old right, ron paul

Ron Paul and his true believers

Dave Neiwert at his Orcinus blog takes another look at what we see when The real Ron Paul surfaces 10/11/07. Check out the YouTube video with a hearty endorsement of Paul candidacy from Stormfront Radio, Stormfront being one of the best known hardcore militia-type Web sites out there.

This is a good instance of a case where we need to look to see why an extremist organization or group would endorse a candidate. Groups can always make mischief by doing something like that. Campaign laws put restrictions on advertising in such cases. In other words, it would be illegal for the Democrats, say, to create a phony group called the Proletarian Revolutionary League to Destroy Capitalism by Armed Struggle which would then run ads endorsing the Republican candidate for his opposition to gun control laws.

Of course, one of Erik Prince's Blackwater executives could contribute to an existing party, the New Jersey Green Party, in order to pull votes from the Democratic candidate. But that's (technically) a different story.

But in the examples Neiwert discusses, this isn't a case of far-right groups like Stormfront Radio, or David Duke's Web site, or the nativist/racist Robert A. Taft Club promoting Paul as some kind of "lesser evil". Those are his homies. That's the tribe he hangs with. As Neiwert reminds, Ron Paul for a long time has been playing patty-cake "with right-wing xenophobes, racists, and conspiracy theorists". And he closes by asking, "You have to wonder how he's managed to keep it hidden for so long. Has the press been looking the other way?"

Apparently so.

Tags: authoritarianism, isolationism, old right, ron paul

Old Right isolationism, then and now

Robert A. Taft: the Ron Paul of the 1930s (and 40s, and 50s)?

I don’t think the Democrats have any intention to change our policies in the Middle East. I want the antiwar position to be traditional, conservative, and constitutional and not only for the far Left. I don’t object to the Left being opposed to the war. But that Michael Moore image is not going to persuade housewives. I think a lot of Republicans have forgotten their traditional position of being antiwar.

That's a quote from Ron Paul, the antiwar Republican who has been attracting a bit of attention lately with his seemingly quixotic Presidential candidacy, from the Michael Brendan Dougherty article cited below.

I've been thinking about Ron Paul and the limited but significant role of isolationism in US politics. This post relies on the following articles:

The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul by Christoper Caldwell New York Times 07/22/07

'NYT': Ron Paul for President -- Of the 'Wackos'? Editor and Publisher 07/20/07.

Ron Paul vs. the New World Order by David Neiwert, Orcinus blog 06/08/07

Desperate Times by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York Review of Books 11/24/1983 issue (behind subscription), reviewing a book that focuses on Franklin Roosevelt's relations with liberal isolationists in the 1930s, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-45 by Wayne Cole. (Most isolationists were conservatives.)

Lone Star by Michael Brendan Dougherty The American Conservative 06/18/07.

Andrew Bacevich is right to point out that "isolationism" is used as a bogeyman by both major parties to brand critics of some international commitment they support as being unreasonable. The term "isolationism" gained a permanently negative connotation during the 1930s, along with "appeasement", another concept associated with policies toward Hitler Germany that were later widely understood to have been misguided.

And it's true that within the two major parties and in the foreign policy think tanks and the commentariat, Old Right isolationism as represented in the 1930s by politicians like Herbert Hoover or Robert Taft has an essentially negligible influence. But with 70% or so of the American public soured on the Iraq War, Old Right isolationism as represented by Ron Paul does have the potential to act as a kind of Trojan Horse to give Republicans an excuse to keep voting Republican despite their doubts and worries about the war. And to act as a way to "mainstream" some radical-right ideas, something that Ron Paul has been adept at doing for a while, anyway.

As David Neiwert puts it:

Ron Paul has made a career out of transmitting extremist beliefs, particularly far-right conspiracy theories about a looming "New World Order," into the mainstream of public discourse by reframing and repackaging them for wider consumption, mostly by studiously avoiding the more noxious and often racist elements of those beliefs. Along the way, he has built a long record of appearing before and lending the credibility of his office to a whole array of truly noxious organizations, and has a loyal following built in no small part on members of those groups.

Christoper Caldwell's report gives a glimpse at Paul's far-right positions and fans:

Like [Patrick] Buchanan, Paul draws on forgotten traditions. His top aides are unimpeachably Republican but stand at a distance from the party as it has evolved over the decades. His chief of staff, Tom Lizardo, worked for Pat Robertson and Bill Miller Jr. (the son of Barry Goldwater’s vice-presidential nominee). His national campaign organizer, Lew Moore, worked for the late congressman Jack Metcalf of Washington State, another Goldwaterite. At the grass roots, Paul’s New Hampshire primary campaign stresses gun rights and relies on anti-abortion and tax activists from the organizations of Buchanan and the state’s former maverick senator, Bob Smith.

Paul admires Robert Taft, the isolationist Ohio senator known during the Truman administration as Mr. Republican, who tried to rally Republicans against United States participation in NATO. Taft lost the Republican nomination in 1952 to Dwight Eisenhower and died the following year. “Now, of course,” Paul says, “I quote Eisenhower when he talks about the military-industrial complex. But I quote Taft when he suits my purposes too.” Particularly on NATO, from which Paul, too, would like to withdraw. ...

Victor Carey, a 45-year-old, muscular, mustachioed self-described “patriot” who wears a black baseball cap with a skull and crossbones on it, drove up from Sykesville, Md., to show his support for Paul. He laid out some of his concerns. “The people who own the Federal Reserve own the oil companies, they own the mass media, they own the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, they’re part of the Bilderbergers, and unfortunately their spiritual practices are very wicked and diabolical as well,” Carey said. “They go to a place out in California known as the Bohemian Grove, and there’s been footage obtained by infiltration of what their practices are. And they do mock human sacrifices to an owl-god called Moloch. This is true. Go research it yourself.”

Two grandmothers from North Carolina who painted a Winnebago red, white and blue were traveling around the country, stumping for Ron Paul, defending the Constitution and warning about the new “North American Union.” Asked whether this is something that would arise out of Nafta, Betty Smith of Chapel Hill, N.C., replied: “It’s already arisen. They’re building the highway. Guess what! The Spanish company building the highway — they’re gonna get the tolls. Giuliani’s law firm represents that Spanish company. Giuliani’s been anointed a knight by the Queen. Guess what! Read the Constitution. That’s not allowed!”

"Paul is not a conspiracy theorist, but he has a tendency to talk in that idiom." Which in Paul's case, is another way of saying what Neiwert says more directly, that he transmits far-right conspiracy theories and other notions ""into the mainstream of public discourse by reframing and repackaging them for wider consumption, mostly by studiously avoiding the more noxious and often racist elements of those beliefs."

This passage near the end of Caldwell's article is also revealing of what Ron Paul's politics are about:

One evening in mid-June, 86 members of a newly formed Ron Paul Meetup group gathered in a room in the Pasadena convention center. It was a varied crowd, preoccupied by the war, including many disaffected Democrats. Via video link from Virginia, Paul’s campaign chairman, Kent Snyder, spoke to the group “of a coming-together of the old guard and the new.” Then Connie Ruffley, co-chairwoman of United Republicans of California (UROC), addressed the crowd. UROC was founded during the 1964 presidential campaign to fight off challenges to Goldwater from Rockefeller Republicanism. Since then it has lain dormant but not dead — waiting, like so many other old right-wing groups, for someone or something to kiss it back to life. UROC endorsed Paul at its spring convention.

That night, Ruffley spoke about her past with the John Birch Society and asked how many in the room were members (quite a few, as it turned out). She referred to the California senator Dianne Feinstein as “Fine-Swine,” and got quickly to Israel, raising the Israeli attack on the American Naval signals ship Liberty during the Six-Day War. Some people were pleased. Others walked out. Others sent angry e-mails that night. Several said they would not return. The head of the Pasadena Meetup group, Bill Dumas, sent a desperate letter to Paul headquarters asking for guidance:

"We're in a difficult position of working on a campaign that draws supporters from laterally opposing points of view, and we have the added bonus of attracting every wacko fringe group in the country. And in a Ron Paul Meetup many people will consider each other 'wackos' for their beliefs whether that is simply because they're liberal, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, evangelical Christian, etc. ... We absolutely must focus on Ron’s message only and put aside all other agendas, which anyone can save for the next 'Star Trek' convention or whatever."

Now, anyone who's ever been involved in organizing public political meetings know that it's not at all unusual for kooks to show up. But the far-right brand of ideologues (kooks and otherwise) are the basic consituency for Paul's ideas.

Arthur Schlesinger put his finger on the meaning of Old Right isolationism and its fundamental kinship to Cheney-Bush style aggressive internationalism and preventive war in his 1983 article:

Historic isolationism meant not autarky, but unilateralism —no "entangling alliances" in Jefferson's phrase; unrestricted freedom of political and diplomatic action. Many contemporary neo-isolationists [he's talking about liberals like William Fulbright that some referred to as isolationists or neo-isolationist] are quite ready to approve entanglements that they believe protect American interests, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. Traditional isolationism would reject such entanglement per se, whether in the form of alliances or of membership in collective security organizations. (my emphasis)

In the book he was reviewing, the author criticized the Roosevelt administration for painting such an ugly picture of the isolationists of his time:

The crucial device was the "guilt-by-association pattern of identifying leading isolationists with Hitler and the Nazis." [Quoting Wayne Cole] The administration did this with such success that by 1941, Cole ontends, "isolationists were widely viewed as narrow, self-serving, partisan, conservative, antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, fifth columnist, and even treasonous." This may put it a little strongly, though that is rather the way the reader of Ralph Ingersoll's PM, and even to a degree of Helen Reid's Herald Tribune, was instructed to regard isolationists. Professor Cole concedes that isolationist rhetoric depicting Roosevelt as a warmonger, a dictator, a pawn of the British or of the Jews, was equally vicious. (my emphasis)

William Appleman Williams used some of that Old Right isolationist polemic against FDR in his 1980 book, Empire As A Way Of Life, that I recently discussed here.

Schlesinger criticized the Wayne Cole book he was reviewing for failing to understand the essentially conservative, unilateralist nature of the isolationism of the 1930s, an identity which became more pronounced over time:

Nor does he adequately recognize, I believe, the direction in which the isolationist movement was propelled by its own internal dynamics. His emphasis on the Western progressives overplays the liberal role in isolationism. An analysis that took, say, Herbert Hoover rather than Burton K. Wheeler as the representative isolationist would have been equally, probably even more, valid. For, as Professor Cole concedes, isolationism was stronger in the Republican than in the Democratic party, as it was stronger in the business community than in the labor movement. Many isolationists were fanatically anti-New Deal from the start. Even the Western progressives, as they became obsessed with isolationism, tended to move to the right on domestic issues. Wheeler, Nye, Hiram Johnson, Henrik Shipstead, Philip La Follette (who by 1944 was backing Douglas MacArthur for president) all lost their commitment to domestic reform. Among the senatorial progressives only George W. Norris, who abandoned isolationism well before Pearl Harbor, and Robert La Follette, who abandoned it after the war, kept the New Deal faith. The rest marched in increasingly nationalist-rightist directions, not without sinister undertones. Professor Cole notes occasional anti-Semitic outbursts among the isolationists but does not see how, had Pearl Harbor not intervened, anti-Semitism would almost inevitably have grown as part of the isolationist pattern. (my emphasis)

Ron Paul is very much in this Old Right isolationist tradition. Dougherty describes Paul's general outlook:

Beneath pictures of Austrian economists Frederick Von Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, he will eat his lunch alone and in peace.

Those are two "free-market" conservatives that became popular among doctrinaire conservatives in the 1950s, and are still patron saints of "libertarianism". They are still referred to as the "Austrian school", which is pretty ironice, since Austria has one of the most extensive social-democratic systems in the world and is also high among the richest countries per capita in Europe.

When Paul does propose legislation, it is simple, direct, and radical. He’s compiled an impressive list of bills that remain ignored to this day. H.R.1146 : To end membership of the United States in the United Nations. H.R.776: To provide that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception. H.R.1658: To ensure that the courts interpret the Constitution in the manner that the Framers intended.

His cheerful consistency doesn’t end there. Paul not only votes against nearly all government spending, he has refused to be the beneficiary of it as well. As a physician specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, he has delivered over 4,000 babies. He accepted no money from Medicare or Medicaid, often working for free for needy patients. With his support, his five children finished school without subsidized federal student loans. He has refused a congressional pension.

Monetary policy is the issue that brought Paul into politics in the ’70s. Having read deeply in the Austrian school of economics, he was incensed at Nixon for going off the gold standard and ran in a special House election in the 22nd district of Texas. (my emphasis)

Like his John Birch Society fans, Ron Paul is completely opposed to the United Nations and even to US membership in it. Cheney-Bush unilaterialism nominally supports the UN while sneering at it and proudly disregarding it in practice. Paul's Old Right isolationism opposes it outright. The same unilateralist-nationalist assumption underlies both.

His "liberatarianism" is flexible enough to toe the line on the Christian Right's hardline approach to opposing abortion. That business about the gold standard is also an obsession of the far right like the Birchers. I would be curious to know what might turn up if some enterprising reporter checked more closely into those charity medical services he claims he provided.

Dougherty notes that when Ron Paul decided not to run for re-election to his Congressional seat in 1984, the Republican elected to replace him was Tom DeLay.

While Paul considers himself a staunch free trader, he opposed CAFTA and deplored its predecessor, NAFTA. Paul explains, "I was on the side of the protectionists, and I’m not a protectionist. It’s not true free trade. It's special-interest trade. It's managed trade. ... I didn’t like the trade deal because it was another level of government and a loss of sovereignty."

He was opposed to NAFTA not primarily because of its possible negative effects on American workers or their unions or the environment, but because Old Right isolationists view pretty much any kind of treaty that restricts US unilateralism in any way to be treasonous.

As Doughterty describes it, Paul's position on immigration is standard authoritarian-nativist:

On immigration, Paul finds himself on the side of restrictionists. On LewRockwell.com, Paul outlined a six-step approach: 1) Physically secure the border. 2) Enforce current visa laws. 3) Reject amnesty. 4) End welfare state incentives to immigrants. 5) End birthright citizenship. 6) Standardize legal immigration rules and waiting periods.

Notice that severe restrictions on employers of undocumented immigrants is not among the list. Presumably, that would be a violation of the "Austrian school" free-market principles.

Ron Paul provides a way for Republicans worried about the effects of the Iraq War on their taxes and on the pressure it might create for a military draft to say that, "hey, the Democrats with their "internationalist" outlook on foreign policy are just as bad as the Republicans if not worse. Voting for them won't make any difference on foreign policy. And the Republicans are against foreigners and taxes and black people and unions and public schools, so I'm gonna keep voting for them."

However much his position on the Iraq War may coincide with that of more mainstream or even "left" positions, Ron Paul's brand of isolationism is the hard right brand. And a lot of grim, hardcore rightwing Republican positions on economic and social issues come with it. As well as a unilateralist nationalism that may differ on some specifics from the Cheney-Bush approach but shares the same destructive assumptions.

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul