Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind) - Softcover

Raimondo, Justin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933859601 ISBN 13: 9781933859606

Verlag: ISI Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Many conservatives want to know: Where did the Right go wrong?

Justin Raimondo provides the answer in this captivating narrative. Raimondo shows how the noninterventionist Old Right - which included half-forgotten giants and prophets such as Senator Robert A. Taft, Garet Garrett, and Colonel Robert McCormick - was supplanted in influence by a Right that made its peace with bigger government at home and "perpetual war for perpetual peace" abroad.

First published in 1993, Reclaiming the American Right is as timely as ever. This new edition includes commentary by Pat Buchanan, political scientist George W. Carey, Chronicles executive editor Scott Richert, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute's David Gordon.

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Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard.

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RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN RIGHT

The Lost Legacy of the Conservative MovementBy Justin Raimondo George W. Carey

ISI Books

Copyright © 2008 ISI Books
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933859-60-6

Contents

FOREWORD by Patrick I. Buchanan.................................................................VIIINTRODUCTION TO THE 2008 EDITION by George W. Carey.............................................xiINTRODUCTION.....................................................................................XVII1) James Burnham: From Trotsky to Machiavelli....................................................12) Max Shachtman: Journey to the West............................................................273) Garet Garrett: Exemplar of the Old Right......................................................514) John T. Flynn: From Liberalism to Laissez-Faire...............................................1095) The Remnant: Mencken, Nock, and Chodorov......................................................1296) Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune.....................................................1497) The Postwar Old Right.........................................................................1738) Birth of the Modern Libertarian Movement......................................................2219) The Paleoconservative Revolt..................................................................26310) Taking Back America..........................................................................285CRITICAL ESSAYSTHE OLD RIGHT AND THE TRADITIONALIST ANTIPATHY TO IDEOLOGY Scott P. Richert.....................299WHY THE OLD RIGHT WAS RIGHT: A FOREIGN POLICY FOR AMERICA David Gordon..........................313Selected Bibliography............................................................................327Notes............................................................................................333Index............................................................................................353

Chapter One

James Burnham: From Trotsky to Machiavelli

In a lifetime of political writing, James Burnham [showed] only one fleeting bit of positive interest in individual liberty; and that was a call in National Review for the legalization of firecrackers! -Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 1970

The intellectual crisis of socialism preceded the political and military collapse of the socialist bloc by more than fifty years. Ever since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Left has suffered numerous setbacks-the Moscow Trials, the Hungarian revolt, the revelations of Stalin's crimes-each one setting off a wave of defectors. Over the years, the intellectuals among them have coalesced into a potent ideological force. What characterizes this otherwise diverse fraternity is that, for the most part, they started out in the Third International and wound up in the camp of Ronald Reagan via the Fourth-the Fourth International, that is, stillborn rival to Stalin's Comintern, founded by Leon Trotsky after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Trotsky's schismatic sect never achieved a mass following and went into decline after his assassination, in 1940, by a Stalinist agent. For a brief moment during the thirties, however, Trotskyism was a fad that swept through the radical intelligentsia of Manhattan and environs and corralled quite a few.

By taking refuge in the doctrines of Trotsky, who taught that the Russian party had been taken over by a "bureaucratic caste," these leftist intellectuals could hold on to their core beliefs even as the Moscow trials were going on. The Revolution, said Trotsky, had been betrayed, and the only thing left to do was to build a new International, reclaim the banner of authentic communism, and overthrow the bureaucrats so that true socialism could be unleashed. The Trotskyites made a great show of denouncing the Stalinist terror, rightly claiming that hundreds of thousands went into Stalin's prisons and never came out. What they neglected to say was that Trotsky's policy, had he won, would have been no less bloodthirsty. The only difference was that he would have chosen different victims, and, perhaps, executed them at a more leisurely pace.

Those who still retained their faith in socialism, but were profoundly affected by the sight of the purges and the show trials, were naturally attracted to the Trotskyist movement. Trotsky's problem, however, was that while he insisted on the distinction between anti-Stalinism and anti-Sovietism, in practice these two were often blurred. In an important sense, the Fourth International became a kind of halfway house between communism and reconciliation with bourgeois society. A whole bevy of intellectuals in retreat from communism parked themselves in the Trotskyist organization for some months or years at a time. Long after abandoning Marxism and Socialism, these types retained their Stalinophobia. Their fixation intensified with the years, the one constant encompassing careers that started out in the Trotskyist youth group and ended up in the conservative movement.

Intellectual defectors from communism have always played a key role in the modern conservative movement. Up until the Great Revolution of 1989, there was always a spot on the right-wing lecture circuit for ex-Communists, who enthralled conservative audiences with lurid tales of internal subversion directed by Kremlin masterminds. Benjamin Gitlow, a top leader of the Communist Party from its founding, was one of the first to go that route, and was followed by many others, a great number of whom eventually found themselves on the staff of the National Review. Whittaker Chambers was one; Frank S. Meyer, the conservative polemicist and theoretician of "fusionism," was another. Freda Utley and Eugene Lyons, both ex-Communists, were also on the NR staff at its birth, along with ex-leftists Max Eastman and Ralph de Toledano. These, then, were the precursors of today's neoconservatives, who made careers out of destroying what they had once fought to build, and whose lifelong obsession colored the modern conservative movement in its formative years.

But there are some striking differences, as well as obvious similarities, between these disparate figures. The ex-Stalinists, who came directly into the anticommunist movement from the Kremlin-loyal Communist Party, such as Frank S. Meyer, for the most part became genuine conservatives, even if of an idiosyncratic sort. Meyer, once a top Communist official, was the progenitor of the old "fusionist" school of conservative thought, which sought to fuse the best features of conservatism and libertarianism.

On the other hand, the great majority of those who came in from the anti-Stalinist Left, usually one sort of Trotskyist or another, were an altogether different breed. They retained more of their old allegiances and stubbornly resisted rejecting the central moral and political premises of collectivism. The conversion of the ex-Trotskyist intellectuals to the conservative cause was-with a single important exception-a long process extended over many years. Instead of jumping over to the other side of the political spectrum, this group of mostly New York-based intellectuals-such as Max Shachtman, who was one of the three original founders of the American Trotskyist movement-slowly worked themselves over from the Far Left, sidling up to the Social Democracy, then worming their way into the Democratic Party. By...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISI Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1933859601
• ISBN 13: 9781933859606
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 375
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar