Author: Paul Gottfried

The theme of an article and possibly a book (providing that I can find a suitable commercial press) is “The End of Triangulation and the American Conservative Movement.” My examination of this theme will draw on previous material that I’ve published on the transformations of American conservatism and will focus on the escalating divisions within the conservative movement and their implications. Since the 1980s, and arguably since the 1950s, conservative movement elites have built relations and, when possible, friendships with the Center Left, while marginalizing any hard or pesky Right that stands in its way professionally or programmatically. Thus from … Continue reading →

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Looking at a French nationalist website Boulevard Voltaire this morning, I notice a repetition of the conventional American media account of what occurred in Charlottesville on Saturday. The news commentary explained that a white racist had run down and killed with a vehicle a thirty-two-year-old “anti-racist” demonstrator, Heather Heyer, while injuring other anti-racists who were protesting a “Unite the Right” rally in downtown Charlottesville. The supposed occasion for the demonstration, the removal of a twenty-six foot statue of Robert E. Lee, did not seem to interest the French commentator, although presumably if French anti-fascists were calling for dismantling statues of … Continue reading →

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Recent talk about the “deep state,” with its suggestion of machinations being carried out by stealthy federal administrators, brings to mind my life in a Washington suburb in the late 1980s. From 1986 until we moved to Pennsylvania in 1990, my family and I resided in a part of Bethesda bordering on Rockville (or was it a part of Rockville bordering on Bethesda?). From there I commuted every day to work as senior editor of The World and I, a gargantuan monthly put out by the Washington Times Corporation that eventually folded. Being in Washington was not an entirely negative experience. … Continue reading →

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A dispute recently erupted at a conference sponsored by the Mises Institute between right- and left-leaning libertarians, that is, between Jeff Deist, President of the Mises Institute, and Steven Horwitz, who is something of a fixture at CATO Institute programs. Since Tom Woods has provided a spirited defense of Deist’s position, which calls for a combination of liberty with traditional social morality and traditional community identities, I needn’t rush to Jeff’s defense. Although I’ve never (to my knowledge) met the President of the Mises Institute, I fully share his perspective on the necessary preconditions for living in a free society … Continue reading →

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Several friends on the independent Right have been sending me notes stating their frustration with the Trump administration for playing them for fools. These fellow-members of the independent Right (yes, I’ll admit to my own leanings) complain that after all their efforts in campaigning for the president, he’s turning into a tool of the moderates and neocons. I for one am less critical of Trump, because although I wrote and donated on his behalf, I never thought his election would change much in our society or politics. Nor do I believe that if the improbable happened and Marine Le Pen … Continue reading →

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Several friends on the independent Right have been sending me notes stating their frustration with the Trump administration for playing them for fools. These fellow-members of the independent Right (yes, I’ll admit to my own leanings) complain that after all their efforts in campaigning for the president, he’s turning into a tool of the moderates and neocons. I for one am less critical of Trump, because although I wrote and donated on his behalf, I never thought his election would change much in our society or politics. Nor do I believe that if the improbable happened and Marine Le Pen … Continue reading →

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Burton Yale Pines’s work America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One is hardly a new book. (It came out in 2012.) Nor was it published by a leading commercial press, despite the author’s long, distinguished career as a Time magazine correspondent and later, as vice-president of Heritage Foundation. My one, brief contact with Pines was our joint appearance on a panel featured by the Philadelphia Society in 1986, in which we were pitted against each other as a critic and defender of the neoconservatives’ influence on the American conservative movement. Our exchanges were extremely acrimonious; and I … Continue reading →

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A commentary posted on The American Interest website (March 29, 2017) about the “protest and subsequent riot” at Middlebury College occasioned by the appearance of Charles Murray, the respected critic of liberal racial and welfare state policies, as a speaker provoked my interest in an unintended way. The author of this piece, Flagg Taylor, obviously wanted us to root for the educational psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who founded the Heterodox Academy website and organization. This NYU faculty member is supposed to be the good guy, as opposed to his co-discussant on “Charlie Rose” Frank Bruni, who works at the New York Times. Taylor … Continue reading →

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As the confirmation hearings of Neil Gorsuch grind on, and as he continues to be grilled by Democrats, he has allowed himself to be bullied by California senator Diane Feinstein, without responding in kind. Feminist and gay rights advocate Feinstein defends a ‘living constitution,” that is, one that allows courts to enact her PC wish list without having to worry about elected legislatures. And she seems upset that Gorsuch would interpret the Fourteenth Amendment too narrowly. The Colorado judge, she complains, would stray as an originalist into arguing the equal protections clause does not apply to groups that its framers … Continue reading →

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This writer wishes Jacoby would sound even less like other Boston Globe columnists. I’ve nothing against Jeff Jacoby, who from all accounts is a fine family man and a journalist who occasionally produces informative columns. (My eldest daughter and he attend the same synagogue, and my daughter has praised his soft-spoken manner.) Jacoby was among the few columnists at The Boston Globe, who went after former President Obama and his smarmy, social engineering administration. After a stint as an editorialist at the Republican-leaning Boston Herald, Jacoby in 1998 was invited to become the “conservative” columnist at the Globe. There he … Continue reading →

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This paper was delivered at the Mises Institute’s 2017 Austrian Economics Research Conference in Auburn, AL. Having devoted considerable time over the last forty years to studying the Great War, an interest that I developed in graduate school in the mid-1960s, I am no longer surprised or disappointed by fictional accounts of this conflict. In a forthcoming anthology, I try to explain why the glaringly obvious is so often neglected in most popular histories of the War. This is seen particularly in the attempt to attach overwhelming responsibility to the losing side while making the Allied governments look better than … Continue reading →

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Recently, one of my neighbors saw students from Elizabethtown College, where I taught for many years, walking down the street wearing what looked like the puzzle pieces featured as symbols by Autistic Awareness. When he asked why they were wearing the all-white puzzle pieces, one of the coeds proudly explained that they were dramatizing the outrage of “white privilege.” About 50 students and alums had pledged to wear these puzzle pins for the next month until everyone became sensitive to how we were oppressing blacks. A detailed Daily Mail story concerning this campaign against “white privilege” informed readers, “The school’s … Continue reading →

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My young friend Jack Kerwick in a column on townhall stated that protestors against Donald Trump who are destroying property and assaulting suspected Trump supporters are “not snowflakes but leftist thugs.” Jack is absolutely right in his description, although there is another qualification that I would add. Contrary to other commentaries that I see on the same website and on other Republican forums, the protestors aren’t “fascists.” They are exactly what Jack calls them, “leftist thugs.” Last year I published a carefully researched book on the uses and abuses of the term “fascist.” What motivated this project was first and … Continue reading →

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About ten years ago I published a book, The Strange Death of Marxism, which argued strenuously that the present Left is not Marxist, but post-Marxist. Unlike traditional Marxists and European democratic socialists, the type of Left that has gained ground since and even before the fall of the Soviet Empire is culturally radical but only secondarily interested in economic change. Our present Left makes its peace with private enterprise and even large corporations, providing it can impose its idea of social and cultural transformation on increasingly powerless citizens and their increasingly indoctrinated children. Not that this Left is particularly friendly … Continue reading →

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Every day I hear exasperated Trump-backers exclaim that the Left has gone crazy. And their complaint seems justified, at least up to a point. The demonstrations against Trump, which now involve such gestures as setting fires, destroying property and beating up suspected Trump backers, look utterly “irrational.” It’s as if the election and subsequent inauguration of Donald Trump released forces of madness that can no longer be contained. Wild accusations are being made against those who voted for Trump, that they yearn to exterminate blacks and gays and put Jews into concentration camps, etc. One of my close acquaintances has … Continue reading →

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