Useful Idiots

The conservative movement is threatened by two things. First, the Left. Second, members of our own movement who would pervert it down one ideological rat-hole or another. I am willing to support paleoconservatives when I think their arguments have merit. As I wrote in my review of Pat Buchanan’s book The Death of the West, the paleocon position on immigration, “Stop!” is correct. I credit paleocons in general, and Mr. Buchanan in particular, with understanding that politics in our time is a game played for civilizational stakes. But then we come to a parting of the ways. For as his new magazine The American Conservative shows, reminding us that no-one can damn a man as effectively as himself, paleoconservatism includes some very dangerous and palpably false ideas. Since The American Conservative has been explicitly launched by eminent paleocons to give expression to their world-view, it is worth using its first issue to take the temperature of this philosophy. I find it distinctly chilling.

The quotations below are all taken out of context, but I hope I have not twisted any of them counter to their intended meaning. (The reader can verify this from a copy of the magazine, which is not yet on the web.) I realize that not all paleocons subscribe to all its views. I apologize for giving such prominence to its views on the contemplated war with Iraq at the expense of wider concerns, but this is the pressing issue of the day and it makes many essentials clear.

The core paleocon case against war with Iraq is dumb to the point of prolixity. Leaving aside their apocalyptic predictions of what will happen if we do to Iraq what we have done to Afghanistan, its essence consists, in the words of Auberon Waugh, roughly of this question:

“How can any intelligent person be expected to believe that a country of 15 million people, mostly impoverished desert dwellers, poses a threat to world peace?” (p.9)

Because it has weapons of mass destruction. As kids say, like duh. This theme of Iraq’s fundamental weakness as a nation, upon which paleocons stake a significant part of their case against the war, is so obviously irrelevant that one wonders how they can believe anyone will be convinced by it. It’s like asking how any intelligent person can believe that a tiny bug like an anopheles mosquito can kill you.

Paleocons generally have the courtesy, when they are not engaging in ad hominem attacks, of laying out their arguments in plain English, rather than in a primal scream of inchoate resentment like the Left. But these arguments don’t hold water, and for very simple reasons. Let’s look at one:

“The first question, of course, is why should the US attack Iraq, a nation that has not committed any act of war against America.” ( p.11)

Because they pose a threat of weapons of mass destruction against us. What else is there to say?

Next we encounter an inappropriate historical comparison:

“The Bush administration’s insistence on the right to intervene preemptively anywhere on earth recalls the old Brezhnev Doctrine of Soviet days.” ( p. 11)

For a start, this is just false history. The Brezhnev Doctrine had nothing to do with preempting attacks on the USSR, but was that socialism would suffer no losses, i.e. that the USSR had the right to invade to stop ideological change in its satellites. For a second, Bush is not claiming a right to intervene anywhere on earth. As Henry Kissinger has said, he is only claiming the traditional right to defend oneself, which takes the form of preemption only when the threat is such that deterrence cannot be relied upon and retaliation would be too late. If paleocons want to savage Bush policies that Bush doesn’t hold, fine with me, but it doesn’t prove Bush wrong.

Next we encounter disingenuous naiveté:

“Equally unclear is why the US refuses to seek diplomatic accommodation with Iraq rather than war.” ( p.11)

This reminds me of a woolly liberal I know who keeps insisting that, “conflicts should be resolved through diplomacy, not force.” Now let’s get one thing straight: diplomacy is speech about political power as it applies to international relations. It is not that power, and it does not do anything in and of itself. In particular, non-violent solutions tend only to work when the threat of violence backs them up. We can diplomat the guy to death and he’ll just laugh at us and keep on doing what he perceives to be in his self-interest. We’ve been through the Let’s-Make-A-Deal thing with Saddam already, and he has welched every time.

Paleocons may not be anti-Semites as such, but they certainly seem to have a bug up the butt about Jews in general and Israel in particular. One of their favorite ideas, at which they constantly hint but don’t quite have the guts to express, is that the contemplated war with Iraq is being imposed on the US by a Jew-dominated clique of neocon intellectuals and policymakers for the benefit of Israel. To take one quote:

“For administration hawks who view the Mideast mainly through the lens of Israel’s strategic needs, crushing Iraq is a high priority.” (p. 12)

Now look: no-one’s denying that Israel will benefit. But to eschew a war because a country friendly to the US will get something out of it is absurd. Should we have not fought WWII because Britain would benefit? There were certainly some cranky Irish- and German-Americans at the time who thought so. And those State Department WASPs have a dual loyalty, don’t you know? Should we have not fought in Vietnam because Australia would benefit? Should we not have defeated the USSR because India and China, which were not even friendly for this whole period, would benefit? Please. This is not an argument.

Paleocons’ need to sustain invalid arguments leads them to some conclusions that are simply bizarre, though consistent with their train of argument. One article, for example, has an extended encomium to Saddam Hussein. Here’s my favorite section:

“However brutal and aggressive, Saddam Hussein has also been Iraq’s most effective ruler since 1957. It was Saddam who transformed Iraq into a modern, industrialized nation with one of the Arab world’s highest standards of education and income.” (p. 13)

One could write these words about Hitler or Mussolini! If that kind of government is OK, why in hell have we been wasting our time with a constitutional democracy for 200 years? Let’s just have a dictator who gets things done, and ignore the exterminations, the aggressions, the brutality, the injustice. We can even ignore the kitschy parades and the knock on the door at 3 A.M. Not to mention the mausoleum stage-set architecture and the posters of the bastard’s face everywhere. And they’re not talking about the man as the lesser of two evils or as a bulwark against a worse enemy, the way one might discuss King Fahd or Gen. Pinochet. This is a positive endorsement of his achievements.

When challenged on their isolationism, paleocons tend to insist that they’re not really isolationists, just critics of promiscuous interventionism. But Mr. Buchanan is occasionally more honest, as when he says,

“Most of us ‘neo-isolationists,’ a disparate, contentious lot, are really not ‘neo’ anything. We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana.”( p. 7)

This seems to confess the isolationist charge, but what’s scarier is that he’s not just against empire, but explicitly against our greatest international achievement: the Pax Americana.

Lest anyone be blasé about it, let us remind ourselves that the alternative to pax is bellum, war. Without Pax Americana, there would, as a simple historical fact, either be war or its brutal aftermath in Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and probably a few other places besides. Millions, if not tens of millions, of people would be dead or living under tyranny. The tyrants would, if history is any guide, almost certainly be plotting to attack America next. If you can be indifferent to all these things, then maybe paleoconservatism is right for you.

The magazine also contains a bizarre suggestion that shows just how loopy and irresponsible their geopolitics can get. It reads,

“But I believe that we Britons have for too long cleaved to the United States of America and ought now, with good grace, cleave instead to the United States of Europe.” ( p.9)

Leaving aside the issue of why a magazine that pretends to American nationalism should be arguing the national interest of a foreign country, here they are positively endorsing the notion that our best ally should abandon us. Uncle Sam’s pet bulldog has been invaluable to us for 60 years – can you imagine invading Normandy from the East Coast of the US, rather than from the South Coast of England? Do you think our air force would have been happy with its bases on the European mainland where they could be overrun by Soviet tanks? It will presumably remain so. Other than Canada, Israel, and a few others, Britain’s the only reliable friend we’ve got. It’s now being told not just to dump us, but to join the tyrannical EU superstate. What a great deal for America. (Frankly, I am grateful that Britain’s Special Relationship with America is one of the few serious roadblocks to her being swallowed whole by the Holy Belgian Empire.)

One comes to suspect that paleocons, who criticize the exertion of American power, become in the end like Noam Chomsky: hostile to the idea of a powerful America as such. Under this assumption, it makes perfect sense for them to want to strip us of effective allies.

Even the valid ideas in The American Conservative are compromised. Take this quote, for instance:

“So much of what passes for contemporary conservatism is wedded to a kind of radicalism — fantasies of global hegemony, the hubristic notion of America as a universal nation for all the world’s peoples, a hyperglobal economy.” (p.3)

This is quite true, and captures fairly nicely the neoconservative creed. But we’ll be stuck with that creed forever if the alternative is the isolationism and protectionism that Mr. Buchanan, and presumably his magazine, stand for. Politics is about choosing between real alternatives, and if paleocons define the alternative to the present mess, then people will choose that mess. Thus they are helping the opposition by setting up a false choice in which the conservative alternative must lose.

Despite doggedly holding to an extreme isolationist position on war with Iraq, The American Conservative is wimpy on other important issues, including, unbelievably, Pat Buchanan’s signature issue: immigration. We can dispense any hope that paleocons are reliably tough-minded allies against the worst vices of liberalism, or that they have the guts to stand up to political correctness. Consider the following astonishing sentences:

“We believe that America has gained and still does from new immigrants. But, after two decades of intense immigration, we also believe that the nation needs a slowdown to assimilate those already here.” (Buchanan & co-editor Taki, p.3)

“Be that at it may, every vibrant country such as the United States needs immigration, but it needs to be controlled.” (Taki, p.31)

This kind of mealy-mouthed, apologetic, back-pedaling, softball, meaningless criticism could have appeared in The New Republic. What’s the point of the notorious abrasiveness of the serious Right if it can’t do better than this? As I have written, simple respect for our own laws requires not a slowdown in immigration, but 10-15 years of substantial net emigration, simply to repatriate those who are here illegally. We don’t need a reduction in the rot, but its reversal. Immigration is not a good thing that we have too much of. It is, with very limited exceptions, something that simply confers no benefit on this country anymore, as I have documented in a series (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11) of articles.

I have the feeling that Mr. Buchanan and his friends have deliberately soft-pedaled this issue because of their existing reputation as Huns. This is precisely the problem with these people: because they push so hard on things that do not matter, they have to pull back on things that do. This is precisely the way not to engage in politics.

However tough we must be on the bad positions, however, ours is fundamentally an argument among friends: we are all conservatives and, at the end of the day, regard each other as opponents but not the enemy. One of the corollaries of this is that we don’t get into bed with the real enemy, the Left, in order to score tactical points. We may print articles by intelligent leftists like Christopher Hitchens when they have something useful to say, but we don’t print their attacks on our side. In particular, however much we may criticize the Republican party for failing to live up to its own conservative ideals, we do not print things which constitute naked attacks aimed at discrediting the Republican party as such. Therefore it is very disturbing, and indeed bordering on political treason, to find The American Conservative printing articles like one it carried by Kevin Phillips, a formerly acute conservative writer who has descended into the muck of crude economic populism.

Mr. Phillips’ article, entitled “Why I Am No Longer A Conservative,” contains some insightful remarks about something I have written about: the fact that we increasingly have not a capitalist society, but a corporatist one in which the free market is manipulated by government to benefit those who can bribe it to do so. He rightly decries corporate welfare. But as I said, corporatism represents a degeneration from capitalism, and while it is very hard to roll back, we would be better off with a more authentic capitalism in this country, not with a further expansion of the redistributionist state. Real capitalism, if we could get it, would cure most of the corruptions of corporatism in this country.

But Mr. Phillips misses this. He thinks the essence of corporatism is government-sponsored upwards redistribution of wealth and that the answer is redistribution downwards. So does Ralph Nader. He condemns the Republican party as being as corrupted by special interests and wedded to an outdated ideology as the Democrats used to be. This is a preposterously exaggerated conclusion, based on forgetting everything we should have learned since 1960 about the failure of redistributionism and the superiority of free enterprise. Phillips entirely ignores, or cavalierly dismisses, our economic gains since Reaganomics. His position is something that no conservative of any stripe can rationally accept. If our enemies deserve to win, what in hell are we doing? At least Mr. Phillips has the honesty to admit that this takes him out of our camp. The magazine he writes in does not.

One gets the feeling that in their hearts, paleocons don’t really care if the Republican Party does lose. Mr. Buchanan, of course, is no longer a Republican, having run for president, and nearly cost G.W. Bush the election, in 2000 as candidate of the Reform Party. But these third-party dreams are absurd. They are destructive of the only party that has any chance of imposing conservative values on America. If paleocons continue endorsing them, they are objective allies of the Left.

They are Al Gore’s useful idiots.

Note: I would like to end on a happy note, so I shall concede that J.P. Zmirak, who also writes for us, produced in his devastating Uncle Screwtape review of Gary Wills’s willfully dishonest book Why I Am a Catholic one of the wittiest pieces of writing on religion I have seen in years. Wills must be fuming, though I doubt he reads The American Conservative.


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The red and the brown

With his new magazine, Pat Buchanan links the old right to the new left

By Ronald Radosh, 10/13/2002

HEN THE FIRST ISSUE of The American Conservative, the new weekly edited by Patrick J. Buchanan, recently hit the newsstand, readers might have been excused for wondering if they had accidentally picked up The Nation. Buchanan's magazine, which he co-edits with the journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, resembles its left-liberal counterpart in appearance and is printed on the same cheap newsprint. Even more remarkably, much of The American Conservative's contents could just as easily have appeared in the flagship publication of America's left.


In their Oct. 7 debut, the editors bitterly lament the victory of the ''neoconservatives'' in our country's cultural and political wars; the neoconservatives, in their view, stand for unfettered interventionism, free trade, and unlimited immigration. By contrast, The American Conservative promises to champion a number of causes that also find support on the political left: protectionism to keep workers' wages high in America; opposition to globalism (''we will point to the pitfalls of the global free trade economy''); and the struggle against ''global hegemony.'' Noam Chomsky probably would not put it differently.

Above all, The American Conservative is antiwar. In his own signed contribution, Buchanan complains about ''a new triumphalist America'' that is leading us into ''an imperial war on Iraq.'' As one might expect, he believes that the '' war party'' is being manipulated by the Israeli government, which hopes that war with Iraq will provide an excuse to return to Lebanon ''and settle scores with Hezbollah.'' Buchanan goes on to claim that the Israelis are ''tugging at our sleeve, reminding us not to forget Libya.'' Meanwhile, Eric S. Margolis writes that the United States ''has been buttressing autocracy and despotism'' in the Middle East for years. As for Iraq, it ''has not committed any act of war against America,'' and to invade would be ''an act of brazen aggression.'' Writing from Britain, Stuart Reid cites the acerbically conservative writer Auberon Waugh to ask how a country of 15 million impoverished ''desert dwellers'' can conceivably be viewed as a ''threat to world peace.'' America, Reid writes, should not ''make a burnt offering of innocent Arabs.'' These are, to be certain, blame-America-first conservatives.

On domestic affairs, the magazine is aggressively populist and critical of corporate elites. The maverick journalist Kevin Phillips, whose 1969 classic ''The Emerging Republican Majority'' championed a ''Southern strategy'' that would give Republicans control over the electoral map, condemns ''extreme levels of wealth concentration and polarization'' as well as the ''ideological corruption'' of conservative ideology that stems from the ''worship of markets,'' ''triumphalist Pentagon saber-rattling,'' and ''Axis of Evil foreign policy theology.'' His proposal: a campaign for Democratic retention of the Senate or an independent presidential bid by Arizona Senator John McCain.

The magazine's second issue is more substantive, though it continues to sound the same notes. In it, Buchanan goes so far as to praise Al Gore for the antiwar speech he recently gave in San Francisco. Gore, he enthuses, offers ''Democrats a choice, not an echo.'' Indeed, Gore shows the same ''savvy'' that Richard M. Nixon, Buchanan's former employer, did in engineering his comeback from defeat in 1960. Gore, says Buchanan, is ''Albert M. Nixon.'' The issue also includes a heartfelt tribute by executive editor Scott McConnell to the late Jim Chapin, a brilliant historian and lifelong social democrat. And its centerpiece is a 10,000-word essay opposing the newly-minted Bush doctrine of ''preemptive war,'' written with considerable intellectual sophistication by the European historian Paul W. Schroeder. The article, which echoes recent arguments by liberal historians, would be a typical realist critique of US policy, were it not for the author's claim that if the United States invades Iraq, the result ''would be an imperialist war.''

How did Buchanan come to this particular pass? The most obvious antecedents of his magazine lie in the old right of the 1930s and '40s - the pre-World War II isolationists, or ''noninterventionists,'' as they preferred to call themselves. Buchanan's ruminations over Israeli influence call to mind Charles Lindbergh's 1941 accusation that the drive to enter the war against Hitler was emanating from ''the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.'' These Jewish interventionists - neoconservatives, Buchanan might say now - were influential, Lindbergh said, because of their ''large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.''

The American Conservative proudly roots itself in this past by publishing Justin Raimondo's ode to ''the Old Right [who] knew something about the temptations of Empire.'' Raimondo is a gay conservative activist from San Francisco whose chief claim to fame is his single appearance on ''Politically Incorrect,'' when Bill Maher made fun of him for being one of the few openly gay supporters of Buchanan. Now Raimondo runs a Web site called antiwar.com, in which he extols the good old days of the America First Movement. For a short time, he points out, that movement included not only conservatives, but socialists like Norman Thomas and, in the period before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Communist leader Earl Browder.

Indeed, it seems that Raimondo is now attempting to forge his own Red-Brown alliance, as Europeans refer to the coming together in post Soviet Russia of right-wing nationalists and unreconstructed Communists. In August 2001, he even published an article in Pravda (yes, that Pravda) in which he dismissed the idea that ''America is a civilized country,'' and, referring to World War II, maintained that ''the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.'' As for Israel, last week Raimondo continued to proclaim the myth that ''Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11,'' a claim that puts his Web site in league with the most extreme anti-Semitic canards coming from the Arab world, not to mention the poetry of Amiri Baraka.

Buchanan, too, has sought allies on the far left before. For a short time in 1996, the announced vice- presidential candidate on his Reform Party ticket was none other than the fringe radical Lenora Fulani - a New York City activist whose politics combine radical psychotherapy, anti- Semitism, and black nationalism. As a ''classic socialist,'' Fulani said, she backed Buchanan because he, too, realizes that ''the great goal of social justice is not being served in America'' by the capitalist economic system.

Buchanan may continue to dislike the left for many reasons, but one of the chief influences on his current thinking is William Appleman Williams, the radical historian who did the most to develop the New Left approach to American history in the 1960s and '70s. In his most famous book, ''The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,'' Williams argued that the United States insisted on free trade, or an ''open door'' for its products around the world, as a means of acquiring an empire without shouldering the burden of old-style European colonialism.

Williams was my mentor in graduate school. Reading Buchanan's 1999 book, ''A Republic, Not An Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, '' I had the strange feeling of deja vu, as if I were reading a rewrite of ''Tragedy'' and Williams's other works. It was Williams who acquainted scores of students with John Quincy Adams's Fourth of July oration of 1821, in which Adams warned that America ''goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy... . She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue... which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom... . She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.''

In ''A Republic, Not an Empire,'' Buchanan echoes Williams's enthusiasm for the Fourth of July oration. Williams would no doubt agree with Buchanan that not since Adams's speech ''had U.S. foreign policy been stated with such clarity, force, and eloquence.'' At other points in his book, Buchanan cites Williams's work directly, though without telling his readers that Williams was a self-proclaimed radical and admirer of Karl Marx.

Williams himself well understood the connections between his own aspirations and certain aspects of the conservative movement in America. Writing in 1959, he saw little hope for the kind of radical upheaval that would lead America to stop intervening abroad. Thus, he argued, ''the well-being of the United States depends - in the short run but only in the short run - upon the extent to which calm and confident enlightened conservatives can see and bring themselves to act upon the validity of a radical analysis.'' A few years later, he bemoaned the fact that they had not done so - as the United States found itself seeking empire in Vietnam. If Williams was still alive, I have no doubt that he would find Buchanan and his new journal to be the kind of ''enlightened conservative'' voice he had hoped for. With the divisive issue of the Soviet Union gone, both men could join together and try to resurrect the old-style isolationism once so favored by both left and right.

Williams's admirers on the left will undoubtedly chafe at my comparison of the historian to Buchanan. Where Williams admired the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, Buchanan looks back fondly on the likes of Joe McCarthy and General Francisco Franco. But their world views have much in common, echoing as they do mid-century critics of American internationalism from Herbert Hoover to the historian Charles A. Beard.

Early in the Cold War, Joseph M. Jones, a key Truman adviser, wrote perceptively that ''most of the outright opposition'' to Truman's foreign policy came from ''the extreme Left and the extreme Right ... from a certain group of `liberals' who had been long strongly critical of the administration's stiffening policy toward the Soviet Union, and from the `isolationists,' who had been consistent opponents of all foreign-policy measures that projected the United States actively into World Affairs.'' Some 50 years later, with new threats to American interests, the opposition to centrist policies remains the same, with left and right standing once again on common ground.

Ronald Radosh, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, is author of "Prophets on the Right: Profiles of conservative critics of American Globalism," to be re-published by Cybereditions this month.