Overthrowing the Regime
What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms “old” and “new” inevitably get confusing, with a new “new” every few years, so let’s call it the “Original” Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the leviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal.
This anti–New Deal movement was a coalition of three groups:
- the “extremists” — the individualists and libertarians, like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and Garet Garrett;
- right-wing Democrats, harking back to the laissez-faire views of the 19th-century Democratic party, men such as Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland or Senator James A. Reed of Missouri;
- moderate New Dealers, who thought that the Roosevelt New Deal went too far, for example Herbert Hoover.confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.
But can we call such a strategy “conservative”? I, for one, am tired of the liberal strategy, on which they have rung the changes for forty years, of presuming to define “conservatism” as a supposed aid to the conservative movement. Whenever liberals have encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, have wanted to repeal the New Deal or Fair Deal, they say “But that’s not genuine conservatism. That’s radicalism.” The genuine conservative, these liberals go on to say, doesn’t want to repeal or abolish anything. He is a kind and gentle soul who wants to conserve what left-liberals have accomplished.
The left-liberal vision, then, of good conservatives is as follows: first, left-liberals, in power, make a Great Leap Forward toward collectivism; then, when, in the course of the political cycle, four or eight years later, conservatives come to power, they of course are horrified at the very idea of repealing anything; they simply slow down the rate of growth of statism, consolidating the previous gains of the Left, and providing a bit of R&R for the next liberal Great Leap Forward. And if you think about it, you will see that this is precisely what every Republican administration has done since the New Deal. Conservatives have readily played the desired Santa Claus role in the liberal vision of history.
I would like to ask: How long are we going to keep being suckers? How long will we keep playing our appointed roles in the scenario of the Left? When are we going to stop playing their game, and start throwing over the table?
I must admit that, in one sense, the liberals have had a point. The word “conservative” is unsatisfactory. The original right never used the term “conservative”: we called ourselves individualists, or “true liberals,” or rightists. The word “conservative” only swept the board after the publication of Russell Kirk’s highly influential Conservative Mind in 1953, in the last years of the Original Right.
There are two major problems with the word “conservative.” First, that it indeed connotes conserving the status quo, which is precisely why the Brezhnevites were called “conservatives” in the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was a case for calling us “conservatives” in 1910, but surely not now. Now we want to uproot the status quo, not conserve it. And secondly, the word conservative harks back to struggles in 19th-century Europe, and in America conditions and institutions have been so different that the term is seriously misleading. There is a strong case here, as in other areas, for what has been called “American exceptionalism.”
So what should we call ourselves? I haven’t got an easy answer, but perhaps we could call ourselves radical reactionaries, or “radical rightists,” the label that was given to us by our enemies in the 1950s. Or, if there is too much objection to the dread term “radical,” we can follow the suggestion of some of our group to call ourselves “the Hard Right.” Any of these terms is preferable to “conservative,” and it also serves the function of separating ourselves out from the official conservative movement, which, as I shall note in a minute, has been largely taken over by our enemies.
It is instructive to turn now to a prominent case of right-wing populism headed by a dynamic leader who appeared in the last years of the Original Right, and whose advent, indeed, marked a transition between the Original and the newer, Buckleyite Right. Quick now: who was the most hated, the most smeared man in American politics in this century, more hated and reviled than even David Duke, even though he was not a Nazi or a Klu Kluxer? He was not a libertarian, he was not an isolationist, he was not even a conservative, but in fact was a moderate Republican. And yet, he was so universally reviled that his very name became a generic dictionary synonym for evil.
I refer, of course, to Joe McCarthy. The key to the McCarthy phenomenon was the comment made by the entire political culture, from moderate left to moderate right: “we agree with McCarthy’s goals, we just disagree with his means.” Of course, McCarthy’s goals were the usual ones absorbed from the political culture: the alleged necessity of waging war against an international Communist conspiracy, whose tentacles reached from the Soviet Union and spanned the entire globe. McCarthy’s problem, and ultimately his tragedy, is that he took this stuff seriously; if communists and their agents and fellow travelers are everywhere, then shouldn’t we, in the midst of the Cold War, root them out of American political life?
The unique and the glorious thing about McCarthy was not his goals or his ideology, but precisely his radical, populist means. For McCarthy was able, for a few years, to short-circuit the intense opposition of all the elites in American life: from the Eisenhower-Rockefeller administration to the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex to liberal and left media and academic elites — to overcome all that opposition and reach and inspire the masses directly. And he did it through television, and without any real movement behind him; he had only a guerrilla band of a few advisers, but no organization and no infrastructure.
Fascinatingly enough, the response of the intellectual elites to the specter of McCarthyism was led by liberals such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, who are now prominent neoconservatives. For, in this era, the neocons were in the midst of the long march which was to take them from Trotskyism to right-wing Trotskyism to right-wing social democracy, and finally to the leadership of the conservative movement. At this stage of their hegira the neocons were Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jackson liberals.
The major intellectual response to McCarthyism was a book edited by Daniel Bell, The New American Right (1955) later updated and expanded to The Radical Right (1963), published at a time when McCarthyism was long gone and it was necessary to combat a new menace, the John Birch Society. The basic method was to divert attention from the content of the radical-right message and direct attention instead to a personal smear of the groups on the Right.
The classical, or hard, Marxist method of smearing opponents of socialism or communism was to condemn them as agents of monopoly capital or of the bourgeoisie. While these charges were wrong, at least they had the virtue of clarity and even a certain charm, compared to the later tactics of the soft Marxists and liberals of the 1950s and ’60s, who engaged in Marxo-Freudian psychobabble to infer, in the name of psychological “science,” that their opponents were, well, kind of crazy.
The preferred method of the time was invented by one of the contributors to the Bell volume, and also one of my least favorite distinguished American historians, Professor Richard Hofstadter. In Hofstadter’s formulation, any radical dissenters from any status quo, be they rightists or leftists, engage in a “paranoid” style (and you know, of course, what paranoids are), and suffer from “status anxiety.”
Logically, at any time there are three and only three social groups: those who are declining in status, those who are rising in status, and those whose status is about even. (You can’t fault that analysis!) The declining groups are the ones whom Hofstadter focused on for the neurosis of status anxiety, which causes them to lash out irrationally at their betters in a paranoid style, and you can fill in the rest.
But, of course, the rising groups can also suffer from the anxiety of trying to keep their higher status, and the level groups can be anxious about a future decline. The result of his hocus-pocus is a nonfalsifiable, universally valid theory that can be trotted out to smear and dispose of any person or group which dissents from the status quo. For who, after all, wants to be, or to associate with, paranoids and the status anxious?
Also permeating the Bell volume is dismissal of these terrible radicals as suffering from the “politics of resentment.” It is interesting, by the way, how left-liberals deal with political anger. It’s a question of semantics. Anger by the good guys, the accredited victim groups, is designated as “rage,” which is somehow noble: the latest example was the rage of organized feminism in the Clarence Thomas/Willie Smith incidents. On the other hand, anger by designated oppressor groups is not called “rage,” but “resentment”: which conjures up evil little figures, envious of their betters, skulking around the edges of the night.
And indeed the entire Bell volume is permeated by a frank portrayal of the noble, intelligent, ivy-league governing elite, confronted and harassed by a mass of odious, uneducated, redneck, paranoid, resentment-filled, authoritarian working and middle-class types in the heartland, trying irrationally to undo the benevolent rule of wise elites concerned for the public good.
History, however, was not very kind to Hofstadterian liberalism. For Hofstadter and the others were consistent: they were defending what they considered a wonderful status quo of elite rule from any radicals whatever, be they right or left. And so, Hofstadter and his followers went back through American history tarring all radical dissenters from any status quo with the status anxious, paranoid brush, including such groups as progressives, populists, and Northern abolitionists before the Civil War.
At the same time, Bell, in 1960, published a once-famous work proclaiming the End of Ideology: from now on, consensus elitist liberalism would rule forever, ideology would disappear, and all political problems would be merely technical ones, such as which machinery to use to clear the streets. (Foreshadowing thirty years later, a similar neocon proclamation of the “End of History.”) But shortly afterwards, ideology came back with a bang, with the radical civil rights and then the New Left revolutions, part of which, I am convinced, was in reaction to these arrogant liberal doctrines. Smearing radicals, at least left-wing ones, was no longer in fashion, either in politics or in historiography.
Meanwhile, of course, poor McCarthy was undone, partly because of the smears, and the lack of a movement infrastructure, and partly too because his populism, even though dynamic, had no goals and no program whatsoever, except the very narrow one of rooting out communists. And partly, too, because McCarthy was not really suited for the television medium he had ridden to fame: being a “hot” person in a “cool” medium, with his jowls, his heavy five-o’clock shadow (which also helped ruin Nixon), and his lack of a sense of humor. And also, too, since he was neither a libertarian nor really a radical rightist, McCarthy’s heart was broken by the censure of the US Senate, an institution which he actually loved.
The Original Right, the radical Right, had pretty much disappeared by the time of the second edition of the Bell volume in 1963, and in a minute we shall see why. But now, all of a sudden, with the entry of Pat Buchanan into the presidential race, my God, they’re back! The radical right is back, all over the place, feistier than ever, and getting stronger!
The response to this historic phenomenon, by the entire spectrum of established and correct thought, by all the elites from left over to official conservatives and neoconservatives, is very much like the reaction to the return of Godzilla in the old movies. And wouldn’t you know that they would trot out the old psychobabble, as well as the old smears of bigotry, anti-Semitism, the specter of Franco, and all the rest? Every interview with, and article on Pat, dredges his “authoritarian Catholic” background (ooh!) and the fact that he fought a lot when he was a kid (gee whiz, like most of the American male population).
Also: that Pat has been angry a lot. Ooh, anger! And of course, since Pat is not only a right-winger but hails from a designated oppressor group (white, male, Irish Catholic), his anger can never be righteous rage, but only a reflection of a paranoid, status-anxious personality, filled with, you got it, “resentment.” And sure enough, this week, January 13, the august New York Times, whose every word, unlike the words of the rest of us, is fit to print, in its lead editorial sets the establishment line, a line which by definition is fixed in concrete, on Pat Buchanan.
After deploring the hard-edged and therefore politically incorrect vocabulary (tsk, tsk!) of Pat Buchanan, the New York Times, I am sure for the first time, solemnly quotes Bill Buckley as if his words were holy writ (and I’ll get to that in a minute), and therefore decides that Buchanan, if not actually anti-Semitic, has said anti-Semitic things. And the Times concludes with this final punch line, so reminiscent of the Bell-Hofstadter line of yesteryear: “What his words convey, much as his bid for the nomination conveys, is the politics, the dangerous politics, of resentment.”
Resentment! Why should anyone in his right mind resent contemporary America? Why should anyone, for example, going out into the streets of Washington or New York, resent what is surely going to happen to him? But, for heaven’s sake, what person in his right mind, doesn’t resent it? What person is not filled with noble rage, or ignoble resentment, or whatever you choose to call it?
Finally, I want to turn to the question: what happened to the Original Right, anyway? And how did the conservative movement get into its present mess? Why does it need to be sundered, and split apart, and a new radical right movement created upon its ashes?
The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: what happened to the Original Right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and the National Review. By the mid-1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement. Senator Taft and Colonel McCormick had died, and many of the right-wing congressmen had retired.
The conservative masses, for a long time short on intellectual leadership, were now lacking in political leadership as well. An intellectual and power vacuum had developed on the Right, and rushing to fill it, in 1955, were Bill Buckley, fresh from several years in the CIA, and National Review, an intelligent, well-written periodical staffed with ex-communists and ex-leftists eager to transform the Right from an isolationist movement into a crusade to crush the Soviet god that had failed them.
Also, Buckley’s writing style, while in those days often witty and sparkling, was rococo enough to give the reader the impression of profound thought, an impression redoubled by Bill’s habit of sprinkling his prose with French and Latin terms. Very quickly, National Review became the dominant, if not the only, power center on the right-wing.
This power was reinforced by a brilliantly successful strategy (perhaps guided by National Review editors trained in Marxist cadre tactics) of creating front groups: Intercollegiate Studies Institute for college intellectuals, and Young Americans for Freedom for campus activists. Moreover, lead by veteran Republican politico and National Reviewpublisher Bill Rusher, the National Review complex was able to take over, in swift succession, the College Young Republicans, then the National Young Republicans, and finally to create a Goldwater movement in 1960 and beyond.
And so, with almost blitzkrieg swiftness, by the early 1960s, the new global crusading conservative movement, transformed and headed by Bill Buckley, was almost ready to take power in America. But not quite, because first, all the various heretics of the Right — some left over from the Original Right — all the groups that were in any way radical or could deprive the new conservative movement of its much-desired respectability in the eyes of the liberal and centrist elite, all these had to be jettisoned. Only such a denatured, respectable, nonradical, conserving right was worthy of power.
And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and the National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the nonrespectables. Consider the roll call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil-rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it. But if, by the middle and late 1960s, Buckley had purged the conservative movement of the genuine Right, he also hastened to embrace any group that proclaimed its hard anticommunism, or rather anti-Sovietism or anti-Stalinism.
“Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the Left over to neoconservatism on the Right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. ”
And of course the first anti-Stalinists were the devotees of the martyred communist Leon Trotsky. And so the conservative movement, while purging itself of genuine right-wingers, was happy to embrace anyone, any variety of Marxist: Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, Mensheviks, social democrats (such as grouped around the magazine the New Leader), Lovestonite theoreticians of the American Federation of Labor, extreme right-wing Marxists like the incredibly beloved Sidney Hook — anyone who could present not antisocialist but suitably anti-Soviet, anti-Stalinist credentials.
The way was then paved for the final, fateful influx: that of the ex-Trotskyite, right-wing social democrat, democrat capitalist, Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jackson liberals, displaced from their home in the Democratic party by the loony left that we know so well: the feminist, deconstructing, quota-loving, advanced victimological left. And also, we should point out, at least a semi-isolationist, semi-antiwar left. These displaced people are, of course, the famed neoconservatives, a tiny but ubiquitous group with Bill Buckley as their aging figurehead, now dominating the conservative movement. Of the 35 neoconservatives, 34 seem to be syndicated columnists.
And so the neocons have managed to establish themselves as the only right-wing alternative to the Left. Theneocons now constitute the right-wing end of the ideological spectrum. Of the respectable, responsible right wing, that is. For the neocons have managed to establish the notion that anyone who might be to the right of them is, by definition, a representative of the forces of darkness, of chaos, Old Right, racism, and anti-Semitism. At the very least.
So that’s how the dice have been loaded in our current political game. And virtually the only prominent media exception, the only genuine rightist spokesman who has managed to escape neocon anathema has been Pat Buchanan.
It was time. It was time to trot out the old master, the prince of excommunication, the self-anointed pope of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr. It was time for Bill to go into his old act, to save the movement that he had made over into his own image. It was time for the man hailed by neocon Eric Breindel, in his newspaper column (New York Post, Jan. 16), as the “authoritative voice on the American right.” It was time for Bill Buckley’s papal bull, his 40,000-word Christmas encyclical to the conservative movement, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” the screed solemnly invoked in the anti-Buchanan editorial of the New York Times.
The first thing to say about Buckley’s essay is that it is virtually unreadable. Gone, all gone, is the wit and the sparkle. Buckley’s tendency to the rococo has elongated beyond measure. His prose is serpentine, involuted and convoluted, twisted and qualified, until virtually all sense is lost. Reading the whole thing through is doing penance for one’s sins, and one can accomplish the task only if possessed by a stern sense of duty, as one grits one’s teeth and plows through a pile of turgid and pointless student term papers — which, indeed, Buckley’s essay matches in content, in learning, and in style.
Lest anyone think that my view of Buckley’s and National Review’s role in the past and present right wing merely reflects my own “paranoid style,” we turn to the only revealing art of the Buckley piece, the introduction by his acolyte John O’Sullivan, who, however, is at least still capable of writing a coherent sentence.
Here is John’s remarkable revelation of National Review’s self image: “Since its foundation, National Review has quietly played the role of conscience of the right.” After listing a few of Buckley’s purges — although omitting isolationists, Randians, libertarians, and anti–civil rightsers — O’Sullivan gets to anti-Semites, and the need for wise judgment on the issue.
And then comes the revelation of Bill’s papal role: “Before pronouncing [judgment, that is], we wanted to be sure,” and then he goes on: was there something substantial in the charges? “Was it a serious sin deserving ex-communication, an error inviting a paternal reproof, or something of both?” I’m sure all the defendants in the dock appreciated the “paternal” reference: Papa Bill, the wise, stern, but merciful father of us all, dispensing judgment. This statement of O’Sullivan’s is matched in chutzpah only by his other assertion in the introduction that his employer’s treatise is a “great read.” For shame, John, for shame!
The only other point worth noting on the purges is Buckley’s own passage on exactly why he had found it necessary to excommunicate the John Birch Society (O’Sullivan said it was because they were “cranks”). In a footnote, Buckley admits that “the Birch society was never anti-Semitic,” but “it was a dangerous distraction to right reasoning and had to be exiled. National Review,” Bill goes on, “accomplished exactly that.”
Well, my, my! Exiled to outer Siberia! And for the high crime of “distracting” pope William from his habitual contemplation of pure reason, a distraction that he never seems to suffer while skiing, yachting, or communing with John Kenneth Galbraith or Abe Rosenthal! What a wondrous mind at work!
Merely to try to summarize Buckley’s essay is to give it far too much credit for clarity. But, taking that risk, here’s the best I can do:
- His long-time disciple and NR editor Joe Sobran is (a) certainly not an anti-Semite, but (b) is “obsessed with” and “cuckoo about” Israel, and (c) is therefore “contextually anti-Semitic,” whatever that may mean, and yet, worst of all, (d) he remains “unrepentant”;
- Pat Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, but he has said unacceptably anti-Semitic things, “probably” from an “iconoclastic temperament,” yet, curiously, Buchanan too remains unrepentant;
- Gore Vidal is an anti-Semite, and the Nation, by presuming to publish Vidal’s article (by the way, a hilarious one) critical of Norman Podhoretz has revealed the Left’s increasing proclivity for anti-Semitism;
- Buckley’s bully-boy disciples at Dartmouth Review are not anti-Semitic at all, but wonderful kids put upon by vicious leftists; and
- Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol are wonderful, brilliant people, and it is “unclear” why anyone should ever want to criticize them, except possibly for reasons of anti-Semitism.
Gore Vidal and the Nation, absurdly treated in Bill’s article, can and do take care of themselves, in the Nation in a blistering counterattack in its January 6–13 issue. On Buchanan and Sobran, there is nothing new, whether of fact or insight: it’s the same thin old junk, tiresomely rehashed.
Something, however, should be said about Buckley’s vicious treatment of Sobran, a personal and ideological disciple who has virtually worshipped his mentor for two decades. Lashing out at a friend and disciple in public in this fashion, in order to propitiate Podhoretz and the rest, is odious and repellent: at the very least, we can say it is extremely tacky.
More importantly: Buckley’s latest encyclical may play well in the New York Times, but it’s not going to go down very well in the conservative movement. The world is different now; it is no longer 1958. National Review is no longer the monopoly power center on the Right. There are new people, young people, popping up all over the place, Pat Buchanan for one, all the paleos for another, who frankly don’t give a fig for Buckley’s papal pronunciamentos. The Original Right and all its heresies are back!
“The clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back but lies dead and broken forever. But we must not rest content with this victory.”
In fact, Bill Buckley is the Mikhail Gorbachev of the conservative movement. Like Gorbachev, Bill goes on with his old act, but like Gorbachev, nobody trembles anymore, nobody bends the knee and goes into exile. Nobody cares anymore — nobody, except the good old New York Times. Bill Buckley should have accepted his banquet and stayed retired. His comeback is going to be as successful as Mohammed Ali’s.
When I was growing up, I found that the main argument against laissez-faire, and for socialism, was that socialism and communism were inevitable: “You can’t turn back the clock!” they chanted, “you can’t turn back the clock.” But the clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back but lies dead and broken forever. But we must not rest content with this victory. For though Marxism-Bolshevism is gone forever, there still remains, plaguing us everywhere, its evil cousin: call it “soft Marxism,” “Marxism-Humanism,” “Marxism-Bernsteinism,” “Marxism-Trotskyism,” “Marxism-Freudianism,” well, let’s just call it “Menshevism,” or “social democracy.”
Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the Left over to neoconservatism on the Right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever.
One of the authors of the Daniel Bell volume says, in horror and astonishment, that the radical right intends to repeal the 20th century. Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the 20th century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that.
With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.
One of the most inspiring and wonderful sights of our time was to see the peoples of the Soviet Union rising up last year to tear down in their fury the statues of Lenin, to obliterate the Leninist legacy. We, too, shall tear down all the statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of Woodrow Wilson, melt them down and beat them into plowshares and pruning hooks, and usher in a 21st century of peace, freedom, and prosperity.
This article was first published in 1992, in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
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