From Under the Rubble

Several recent experiences drove home for me the extent to which any independent intellectual Right (perhaps any independent non-Left) has been kept out of the public discussion. One such experience was being interviewed on his radio program (perhaps for the fifth or sixth time) by Tom Woods and noticing that my host was even more exercised than I by how neoconservatives misrepresented their conservative and paleolibertarian opponents. First, they managed to stick the ideas of those who offended them down a memory hole, and then the ruling class had the chutzpa to lie about those whose lives and reputations they destroyed. They made it appear as if they’d cleansed the Right of psychopaths, illiterates, and accessories of the Ku Klux Klan. In point of fact they had run down and marginalized genuine scholars like M.E. Bradford, when this professor of Southern literature had dared to seek the directorship of NEH in 1981. Neoconservatives then managed to elevate to the post from which they excluded Bradford (while opening for themselves a vast patronage network) the Democratic political hack Bill Bennett. According to Tom, the major intellectual achievement of the neoconservatives when they took power was to replace serious scholars with journalists and hatchet men.

Moreover, the neocons were so good at isolating those they went after that their victims never regained their lost status. In The Week I just encountered a commentary by Michael Brendan Doherty explaining how an “obscureby mistake. Were we morally obliged to occupy and re-educate the Poles the way we had done to the defeated Germans after the Second World War? A frequent contributor to NR Jillian Kay Melchior wrote a column in November calling on the US to engage “social-justice issues, including prison reform and transgender right” in Ukraine. I suppose that under whatever now passes for American “conservatism,” these are pressing reasons for global intervention.

In my response in the time allotted to me, I made clear that although a self-described Robert Taft Republican I would gladly make common cause with any Left in the room against the bogus Right. I then went on to argue that liberal democracy is not a genuine theory but an accumulation of rhetoric that is designed to justify an aggressive liberal internationalism.  “The term has no ontological status outside of the polemical use to which it’s been put to justify an expansionist foreign policy in the name of whatever the US has become politically and culturally at a particular moment.” A Russian lady in the audience made a comment soon after my remarks that in countries that she’s visited “there’s a saying. Don’t be bad or the Americans will come and give you democracy.”  Although this sarcasm didn’t amuse the liberal democratic expansionists among my fellow-panelists, I and most of the audience found it quite clever. But then perhaps I am a leftist after all.

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