A Strategy for the Right

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:

1. the “extremists” — the individualists and libertarians, like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and Garet Garrett;
2. 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;
3. moderate New Dealers, who thought that the Roosevelt New Deal went too far, for example Herbert Hoover.

Interestingly, even though the libertarian intellectuals were in the minority, they necessarily set the terms and the rhetoric of the debate, since theirs was the only thought-out, contrasting ideology to the New Deal.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. The neocons 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:

1. 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”;
2. 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;
3. 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;
4. Buckley’s bully-boy disciples at Dartmouth Review are not anti-Semitic at all, but wonderful kids put upon by vicious leftists; and
5. 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 worshiped 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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