One confusing development is the identification of any activist foreign policy or non-libertarian domestic policy with neoconservatism, as if pure libertarianism were the true standard of authentic conservatism. This is simply a misnomer. Gaullism is not neoconservatism. Rockefeller Republicans–who are more “libertarian” on issues like gay rights and abortion–is not neoconservatism. Nixonian authoritarian pragmatism is not neoconservatism. And libertarianism is certainly not conservatism. As is evident in the writings of Russell Kirk and older issues of National Review, libertarians have always been uneasy coalition partner with conservatives. The temporary unity of many paleoconservatives and libertarians on the undesireabiliy of the Iraq War should not be mistaken for a melding of the two groups and their views. Even without Bush and the Iraq War, conservatives still believe in ordered liberty, which is to say, an historical and inherited Anglo-American balance of state action and private life. This is traditionally translated as economic libertarianism and social conservatism. That is, while conservatives favor a relatively free economy and a small federal government, no principle tells them that local and state governments cannot engage in everything from traditional control of vice, the provision of public education, prohibitions of drugs, and modest welfare programs for the “deserving poor.”
For a time, particularly the early 1990s, paleoconservatives and libertarians joined forces in opposition to the burgeoning federal welfare state. Prior to this marriage, the Cold War created unity among conservatives of all stripes–including Rockefeller Republicans and neoconservatives–all of whom recognized the need for opposing Soviet Communism. Paleolibertarians existed as a species apart for the most part during this era, with Murray Rothbard infamously saluting Nikita Khruschev during his 1959 visit to the United States. Just as national defense in World War II was not a major point of debate among conservatives after Pearl Harbor, neither too was the need for protecting America, Europe, and various resource-rich corners of the Third World from an explicitly statist and expansionist threat in the form of Soviet Communism. In fact, the alliance with the Soviets against Hitler was itself a point of friction during WWII for many conservatives, otherwise disposed to defer to leaders of state during a national crisis.
The Soviet system also provided a useful symbol with which to contrast the American way of life. Everything from urban renewal, interference with freedom of contract (including the freedom to discriminate), and generous farm subsidies could be legitimately described as a kind of creeping socialism, rooted in the same egalitarian values and technocratic faith that reached its apotheosis in the Soviet Union.
At the end of the Cold War, conservatives were in a state of disunity and ferment intellectually. Neoconservatives demanded a continuation of the Cold War model of interventionist foreign policy and a rejection of the small government conservatism popular in the South and West, while many neo-nationalists, such as Pat Buchanan, demanded a turn inward and a dismantlement of much of the welfare state, while also advocating restrictions on immigration to reduce its largest and (more important) growing constituencies.
If the expanded government power of the Cold War was a necessary evil in the eyes of paleoconservatives, for neoconservatives this constituted America’s finest hour. Neoconservatives, it must be remembered, were liberal defectors from many Democrats’ turn to the New Left at the tail end of the Vietnam War. In the New Left, the neoconservatives saw nihilism, indifference to Soviet expansionism, solidarity with anti-Western (and anti-Israeli) movements for “national liberation,” and alienation from the consensus American position of the Cold War. As liberals with strong ties to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, neoconservatives saw themselves as natural moderates without the taint of racism that characterized the right, which largely opposed the social-engineering utopianism of the civil rights movement, while also avoiding the unpatriotic nihilism of the New Left.
In the early 90s, the burgeoning Welfare State with its invasive focus on the activities of private life and private businesses presented itself as a logical locus of unity among traditional conservatives uneasy with the compromises of the Cold War–compromises that could no longer be justified as necessary and temporary measures to oppose the Soviet Union. This anti-Welfare/Warfare State coalition included the self-described paleolibertarians. As the “emergency” needs of the Cold War ended, paleoconservatives urged a major reduction in America’s foreign policy commitments, just as they had continuously urged an end to the federal government’s involvement in the economy through the “emergency” programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. The divisions between traditionalist paleoconservatives with the neoconservatives–revealed with great drama in the derailment of Mel Bradford’ appointment to head the NEA–became manifest, as the neoconservatives advocated US interventionism for the sake of power, expanding democratic capitalism, protecting Israel, resisting a revanchist Russia, and generally preserving the exceptional US power of the post-war era.
Earlier friction on such varied issues as antidiscrimination laws, the meaning of the Civil War, and the existence and nature of “racism” provided continued fodder for friction. Since liberals, libertarians, and traditionalist conservatives all had various degrees of opposition to the War in Iraq–or developed opposition as WMDs did not materialize and the war’s idealist nature became manifest–pacifist libertarian ideas on foreign policy allowed paleoconservatism in some people’s eyes to be reduced to a single, small government principle. Like any authentic conservatism, paleoconservatism demands different treatments of different situations and peoples. If paleoconservatism is for small government at the federal and international level, it often embraces “republicanism” at the local level, a tradition that extols the idea of a small, self-governing society where the virtue of its members consists in part of the salutary act of considering the good, being an active citizen, and expressing that commitment politically.
Conservatism is defined above all else, in my view, by the instinct to defend a known way of life that is under threat. In the American context, that means the limited government traditions of the Founders, the tone and tenor of civil society provided by the WASP elite, and the rough-hewn unpretentiousness provided by the Scotch-Irish that exists today in America’s scorn for elitism and disdain for dependency. A “conservatism” that decries everything from 1789 onward is not conservatism, but is instead a kind of ideological romanticism. Like any ideology, it does not have to deal with compromise, results, facts, statistics, and lived experience. The past and the present both can be castigated as hopeless compromises. For romantics–including libertarians–the best is yest to come, and if we enact their a priori proposals the perfect society is just over the the next hill, like the Lost City of El Dorado.
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The dirty little secret amidst the paleos is that their (seemingly inevitable) Reaganesque fixation facilitated an expansive military-and latent martialism.
Somebody do the math and get back to me on defense spending under RR. I’ll venture it was thru the roof, and that’s not counting his star wars panacea.
From which, sad to say, we witnessed the gradual usurption of first principles by the neocons.
Please tell me I’m wrong. Tell me it was not the carte blanche defense spending, spearheaded by the Reaganistas and condoned by the paleos, that let the neocon cat out of the bag. Tell me I’m blind and that what the king does is not a tacit invite for his minions to do the same, and to excess.
Tell me that Scoop Jackson wasn’t the linchpin to this sordid nexus, defind above.
Limited government is a wonderful thing; as you hint, it’s the underbelly of The FFs and defines the pristine spirit of the conservative movement. But one needs to remind the paleoconservatives that limited government is not to be bartered for hero worship, nor for the ideological phalanx that is uber-patriotism.
I don’t mind that you show disdain for the neocons. I do mind that you were silent when Reagan made the war machine the coin of the realm.
It’s not quite a secret. It was a calculated risk. In 1989, the Soviet Union, a real existential threat unlike the modest threat of radical Islam, dissolved. This was a major achievement. And it happened without a world war. The Cold War was a unique time and the Soviet threat was a unique threat; it’s gone. We should have returned to our farms a la Cincinnatus.
This was a great post. I enjoyed it.
You may have implied this, but I think that anyone that strictly adheres to any ideology is a romantic, as their arguments tend to boil down to a vision of the “ideal” society. In other words, every idea works while confined within the set parameters of a theory.
If in 1989 we had returned to our farms a la Cincinnatus, I am fairly confident we would still be radical Islam’s #1 target, which would have put us right back into the same position.
Oil prices would also be a lot higher, as Saddam would control both the Kuwaiti and Saudi oil fields.
I’m all for returning to the farm myself, but this is a 20-40 year process.
Precisely, DM.
Roach forgets, or fails to introduce, that Cincinnatus had the luxury of repose and plowing fields. Conversely, the neocons are waging war against a global jihad, not against some microscopic clan from the obscure plains of Italy who got cranky cause a few Roman soldiers peed on their vineyards. Or whatever.
If you ask me, the neocons-including Roach’s erstwhile mentor Strauss-were 1) prescient and 2) ahead of their time.
(Hmm…maybe that’s the same thing.)
Anyway, the cure for the virus that is fanatical Islam is hardly a return to the farm. Better that we turn ploughshares into political modernity and awaken the brain dead.
Surely there was a leader to pattern named democratist?
1989 was a perfect time. And Saddam would have been just fine with us if we bought his oil after taking over Kuwait. We could’ve brokered a truce with him and the Saudis, and we’d not be there right now. I’m not convinced Islam has it in for us–other than in a vague, someday we’ll take you over or you’ll all convert kind of way–because of Madonna and MTV. They seem to complain far more about troops in Saudi Arabia, support for corrupt regimes in Islamic lands, and American-made Israeli helicopters killing Palestinians.
Some of our mistakes are at meta-level, because we are trying to accomplish nation-building and modernity infusion in a land quite ill disposed to that sort of thing. Obama facilely suggests we should focus on Afghanistan. But the question begs itself: why is the same strategy that’s not working terribly well in Iraq going to succeed in Afghanistan? And is this sort of ambitious nation-building really necessary to scare off or kill folks like Bin Laden and company?
“And is this sort of ambitious nation-building really necessary to scare off or kill folks like Bin Laden and company?”
Short answer: yep.
Long answer: I don’t pretend to know bin Laden any more than you do. But his eschatological visions and pious machinations are as clear as they are retrograde. He’s looking for life as it was portrayed and practiced in and circa, Deuteronomy. So cometh his inexorable crusade.
Oh, the joy.
Or read some Qutb, maybe Maududi, his alter-egos. The whole anti-western, anti-science, anti-intellectualism mantra therein rings as loudly as a midnight tocsin.
Double joy.
Yes, indeed, bin Laden was angered that his homeland was occupied by the infidels, the USA. But his madness transcends that episodic bitterness. Hence his ideological reach into Afghanistan, Somalia, Albania, Tanzania, Chechnya, Pakistan and beyond.
But to your direct query. See if these words, below, carefully disguised (just to make you guess)do anything for you. I ask only because to me they parallel-and suitably address-our untidy confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism of today with, well, with an equally untidy and dreadful menace from the past. So, too, do these words represent a kind of neocon mindset, perhaps less militant and less idealistic but no less convincing (and ultimately successful) in their utilitarian truths.
So why not use them. Still.
“the main element of any United States policy toward the must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of expansive tendencies… pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”
Inserts mine.
I’m thinking the author was one of your heroes, as he was to a generation.
[...] Roach, who has also been holding the fort along with Marcus Epstein at Taki’s Magazine, has a great post on the libertarian tendency to label any deviation from libertarianism [...]
Murray Rothbard never saluted Khrushchev. That was just bullshit from the mind of William F Buckley.
“Conversely, the neocons are waging war against a global jihad….”
Far from it, as is amply demonstrated by the fact that neocons continue to invite the jihadis to live among us. In fact, the neocons are triangulating off this jihad, exploiting it for their own benefit.
“Far from it, as is amply demonstrated by the fact that neocons continue to invite the jihadis to live among us. In fact, the neocons are triangulating off this jihad, exploiting it for their own benefit.”
1) Jihadists living “amongst us”?
Ok. Have you contacted your local police dept.? In my home town, the people’s republic of Philly, we have more Elvis sightings than jihadists.
2) “Their” own benefit?
And what, praytell, would those benefits be? Is Cheney plotting a future role as emperor of Baghdad?
3) Triangulating.
Can we get past any political discussion in the modern era sans that word? I’m strangulating from its over-use.
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