Comments Elsewhere

‘I don’t understand what you are talking about. British politics have nothing to do with American politics.’

This would come as a surprise to Russell Kirk, who explicitly drew from the work of British conservatives such as Edmund Burke. American conservative thought and practice has always been directly linked with English conservatism. It would be downright foolish not to understand the connections between Tory thought in the wake of the French Revolution—including, in particular, their critique of univeralist ideology and reconstructive politics (in both cases, their main target was the classical liberals, who they blamed for the Revolution). American conservatives have certainly made no bones about these connections.

‘Neo-conservatives aren’t part of the American “Conservative Tradition;”’

Is there any particular reason for saying this other than the fact that you don’t like them? Anarchists typically loathe the fact that Marxist-Leninist butchers are also part of the socialist tradition, even though they were, comparatively, Johnny-come-latelies who mangled a huge amount of the tradition to serve their own bloody-minded ends. But few would deny that the Marxist-Leninists were, in fact, part of the socialist tradition.

“Look up Bill Buckley on lewrockwell.com, and you’ll find out exactly what it meant to be a conservative before the neo-cons showed up. Not because Buckley is one, but because he, more than any other person, fucked it all up. Also, conservatives (circa 1930’s-1940’s) were traditionally not widely associated with any social regulation, merely economic issues.”

I’m well aware of Rothbard’s broadsides against Buckley. You may notice that the Commonweal quote from Buckley that I linked is one commonly cited by Rothbard. And pretty much everything that can be said against Buckley is well-deserved.

But I can’t agree with the notion that there was anything of value in the conservative tradition to be fucked up when Buckley reached the scene. This, for example, is simply not true: “conservatives (circa 1930’s-1940’s) were traditionally not widely associated with any social regulation, merely economic issues.” In fact, American conservatives during the 1930s and 1940s routinely embraced militant white supremacy—especially in the South. The Old Right that LewRockwell.com fawns over included many very honorable people with good reasons for opposing interventionist warfare—but also an unfortunate number of anti-Semites and admirers of fascism. (Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin are not to be praised for their anti-interventionism: they only opposed intervention because they were fond of the Nazi terror-empire.)

Neo-conservatism is Prussian authoritarianism combined with rampaging Trotskyist globalism. That sucks; but paleoconservatism, with its legacy of social authoritarianism, (sometimes) economic protectionism and welfare populism, and (always) xenophobia and militant racism is not an improvement. Both of them are ugly movements that trace important parts of their influence to ugly forebearers in British conservatism, the French Right, and the Kaiser’s Prussia. The conservative tradition is not worth saving. If you want to find a tradition to reclaim from statism, it is anti-state liberalism that you should look into. (Generally speaking: the dude who wears the Crown is a less reliable libertarian than the dudes who are chopping that crowned head off.)