Author: Paul Gottfried

Franklin Einspruch, A commentator in The Federalist, describes me as a “circumspect conservative” scholar who has written responsibly about Cultural Marxism.  I’m also deemed to be a conservative who agrees with other conservative critics of the Frankfurt School on the harmful effects of this group’s radical ideas. But I must part ways with Mr. Einspruch when he tells us:  “It’s plain fact that political correctness and multiculturalism derive from notions hailing from the Frankfurt School, which in turn took most of its cues from Karl Marx.” Although I can discern a connection between feminist attacks on inherited gender roles and Frankfurt School views on sexual … Continue reading →

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For a long time, it’s been obvious that GOP politicians and media personalities bend backwards to avoid raising what are supposed to be settled social issues, lest they turn off certain voting blocs.  Whether it’s the Supreme Court redefining marriage for all fifty states, the dismantling of Confederate monuments, or wishing to find a “path to citizenship” for various groups that are here illegally, Republican public relations experts try not to notice these issues, except to criticize those who won’t accept “necessary” or “positive” change.  This attitude is partly attributable to the fact that Republicans are trying to capture at least some … Continue reading →

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While you are here…For the last 15 years, our magazine has endeavored to be your refuge from the nasty partisan politics and Washington echo chamber with thoughtful, smart conservatism, fresh and challenging writing, and authors who, above all, bravely hew to our most basic tenets: Ideas over ideology, principles over party. Please consider a tax-deductible, year-end contribution so that TAC can make an even bigger difference in 2018! A new anthology of the writings of intellectual historian David Gordon contains a devastating review of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Reading it reminded me how bad GOP propaganda dressed up as “history” can really be. Time to … Continue reading →

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I recently ordered and am now eagerly devouring the anthology of David Gordon’s reviews and essays An Austro-Libertarian View published by the Mises Institute. Gordon belongs in more than one way to the institute that brought out this volume. Indeed in his Foreword he lets the reader know that when he first read Man, Economy and the State in 1962, he became a “convinced Rothbardian,” and “it is from this standpoint that I have written my articles.” This may understate the relation described. David was a close friend as well as disciple of Murray, who returned David’s admiration by describing … Continue reading →

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Last Saturday, President Trump stated that he thought Russian president Putin “meant what he said” when he denied interfering in the American presidential election. Whereupon Senator John McCain shot back that he was shocked that our chief executive “would take the word of a KGB official over that of the American intelligence community.” Leaving aside certain obvious questions, such as whether Trump may be justified in suspecting the trustworthiness of some past leaders of the intelligence community and whether Trump was actually agreeing with Putin’s disclaimer, let’s focus on McCain’s designation of Putin as a “KGB official.” This is the same characterization … Continue reading →

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Let me confess that I’ve never liked Ben Shapiro, ever since I first saw his smirking face on Fox-news. He spouts minicon banalities with all the smiling assurance of a con artist selling ownership deeds for Time Square. It’s also annoying to watch all the media-authorized conservatives drooling over Ben every time he opens his mouth to say something that is strikingly uninteresting. Therefore when he was dispatched to Berkeley by conservatism, inc. to defend free speech, values or whatever else he was sent there to defend, I found myself actually rooting for the antifascist mobs. These rowdies looked far … Continue reading →

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Reading a recent commentary by Seth Lipsky about the Balfour Declaration, and then seeing a photo of British Prime Minister Theresa May and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu celebrating the 100th anniversary of this so-called declaration, I had to ask myself: How did this 67-word document, which was actually a letter sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, an influential Zionist, on November 7, 1917, authorize a Jewish state in the Middle East or, for that matter, anywhere else? The letter speaks about “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” At that time the … Continue reading →

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It is with considerable pleasure that I observe this turnout for the tenth annual gathering of the H.L. Mencken Club. Our organization has survived both its troubled beginnings (which I won’t bother to recount on this happy occasion) and its growing pains to become a focal point for the independent Right. This has come to pass because of your kind participation, generous donations, and the persistent work of those who serve on our board. Unlike those who work for the Beltway conservative movement, the H.L. Mencken Club depends entirely on voluntary efforts; and these have come from dedicated people who … Continue reading →

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A brouhaha erupted this week over the creation of a highly questionable and lurid dossier on Donald Trump. That document is of the utmost importance—it may have been cited to authorize wiretaps of Trump Tower—but the controversy over it has unfolded without the true affiliations of some key players being named. We’re not talking about the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton campaign or their lawyers—all of whom are reportedly behind hiring the opposition research firm that delivered the dossier. This is about the Washington Free Beacon, the neoconservative news site that’s admitted to retaining Fusion GPS before the Democrats did. Oddly, mainstream … Continue reading →

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In a speech delivered last week in New York City, former president George W. Bush fiercely attacked American nationalists as narrow-minded nativists. Among the memorable phrases in his oration were these: “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism, and forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” he lamented. “Bigotry seems emboldened, our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” he said. “There are some signs that support for democracy itself has waned, especially for the young.” Although it is possible to claim that, like his friend John McCain, the former president was only attacking “spurious nationalism,” clearly … Continue reading →

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Senator John McCain, never one to play it close to the vest, has amped up his criticism of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, calling it a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.” Quoted fully: To fear the world we have organized and led for three quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would … Continue reading →

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Homer’s masterpiece, The Iliad, begins with these portentous lines that I used to make my students in a Greek class translate: Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος :οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε, (Sing, oh goddess, of the destructive anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, which brought grief to tens of thousands of Achaeans.) The implacable wrath of the semi-divine Achilles drives Homer’s ancient narrative; and among the consequences of Achilles’s anger, according to this epic, is “dragging down the doughty spirits of many brave warriors to Hades and preparing carrion (heloria) for dogs and vultures.” In The Iliad we are … Continue reading →

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Every time I listen to Sean Hannity or some other Trump-enthusiast stressing the “mission” for which our president was elected, I hear flattering references to “the people.” Mind you, I’m not against populist tropes being used to execute an end-run around the likes of Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi. Moreover, I’ve never pretended to be a “Never-Trump” establishment Republican. My endorsement of Trump during last year’s presidential campaign is too much a matter of record to be credibly denied. But the endless appeals to “the people” have begun to wear on me. Trump’s core constituency covers about 39 percent of … Continue reading →

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A few days ago I brought home from our local library, nestled in Pennsylvania Dutch country, Milo Yiannopoulos’s self-published livre de scandale. Dangerous is supposedly dynamite, because even Milo’s putative adversary Bill Maher praises the author as “a young, gay alive Christopher Hitchens.” Milo promises that anyone who makes it through his book can learn how “to fight back against campus commies, their enabling professors, the mainstream media, and establishment Republican bores.” All one needs to acquire this ability is Milo’s text, providing the reader can get though his frenetic prose centered on his activities as a self-promoting gadfly. Time to buy … Continue reading →

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Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who achieved fame through his observations about early American democracy, noted that American political rhetoric is so abstract and imprecise that it both “exaggerates and hides any true thought.” He would have loved neocon warhawk Ralph Peters, who, in his many rhetorical screeds published by the New York Post, is calling for a preemptive nuclear attack on North Korea. After the usual spiel about North Korea being the new Nazi Germany, a meme repeated by John Bolton in his latest call to arms, Peters gets down to our real moral problem. What we suffer from in the … Continue reading →

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