To schedule an interview with Justin Raimondo, or to request a review copy, contact Caitlin Justiniano at media@isi.org or (800) 526-7022 x168.

The book in one sentence:

This is the definitive history of the Old Right.

What makes Reclaiming the American Right different from other books on the topic?      

Other than scattered biographies and treatments of the figures treated here, there are no competing books. Bill Kauffman’s America First!, George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, Leo Ribuffo’s The Old Christian Right, and Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement touch lightly on the same ground, but only lightly. They are not, nor do they pretend to be, histories of the Old Right.

One recent book on neoconservatives, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn (Doubleday, January 2008), does have much to say about Max Shachtman and James Burnham, but from a very different point of view. 

Main features of the book

• The book shows, in detail, how neoconservatism was spawned in the internal feuds of the far Left, especially through major treatments of ex-Trotskyists Max Schachtman and James Burnham.
• Volume contains unique and valuable portraits of individual Old Rightists, including John T. Flynn, H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Colonel McCormick, Robert Taft, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Louis Bromfield. Its treatment of Garet Garrett is the only detailed profile of an important (and unjustly neglected) figure.
• The book was remarkably prescient in going on to predict the slide toward utopianism of conservative politics under neoconservative leadership.
• Contains well-researched, independent, still-fresh accounts of the neocon/paleocon split and the birth of the modern libertarian movement.
• Author is the controversial editorial director of online site antiwar.com.
• Book helped to inspire the Ron Paul presidential campaign.

1. Why should anyone care about the Old Right?

   Well, this tome is not for just “anyone” – for example, if your main interest in life is Britney’s Spear’s latest manufactured “scandal,” or if you really care about stamp-collecting to the exclusion of all else, you’re probably not going to be interested. However, that leaves us, still, with quite a broad spectrum of potential readers. This book is for anyone – left, right, or center, politically – who is concerned with the vital issue of our times, which is the question of war and peace. For one of the major themes of this book is that one’s position on this question – the issue of what foreign policy is proper for a republic based on constitutional law and the concept of limited government – determines one’s views on most other matters.

   This is true whether or not one realizes it, or is fully or partially conscious of it: readers who want to see this principle demonstrated in action should examine, in my book, the chapter on John T. Flynn, the old-style liberal whose views did not change appreciably over the years, and yet found himself – a former writer for the liberal New Republic – categorized as a rightist and “ultra-conservative” when he came to oppose FDR’s super-centralism, and, later, the President’s drive to war.

   The same was true of H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, who started out life as flaming “liberals” (of the old school), and, as the “progressive” revolution on the left took off with the New Deal and the war (WWII), found themselves excoriated as “reactionaries” and “right-wing extremists.” And all without any real fundamental change in their views!

2. How did conservatives become so hawkish and interventionist, given the history detailed here?

   The incursion of the neoconservatives from the left was a major factor in this, but not the only factor: the cold war played a major role by giving the neocons their entre in the conservative movement, but it really started much earlier, with the transposition of McCarthyism, so-called, from a movement directed at domestic “reds” to the overseas variety. This was a powerful impetus. As for the neoconservatives: the early history of the “modern” conservative movement, organized around National Review magazine, which has a preponderance of ex-leftists on its staff (e.g. James Burnham), meant that the old principles of limited, constitutional government took a back seat to warmongering, and were subsumed by the rise of the national security state.

3. Where does Barry Goldwater fit in your “Old Right”/neocon dichotomy?

   Goldwater was a transitional figure, the bridge between the Old Right of the 1950s – think of Dean Clarence Manion, or, say, Dan Smoot – and the “New” Buckleyite Right, which managed to fuse the three basic elements of twentieth century American conservatism – militant anti-Communism, traditionalism, and ostensible devotion to free markets. The “draft Goldwater” movement created a grand coalition, and did what Robert A. Taft never succeeded in doing, despite three successive tries – and that is re-take the GOP from the Eastern establishment, represented by Nelson Rockefeller.

   Goldwater, however, for all his libertarian rhetoric, and explicitly libertarian figures such as Karl Hess around him, was fatally flawed in his foreign policy outlook – which was the “rollback” position taken by National Review. The idea was that, probably through military action, the US was going to have to “roll back” Communism by “liberating” the Captive Nations. That this could result in a nuclear Armageddon is something that did not seem to bother the New Rightists: indeed, they seemed, at times, to glory in it.

   It was inconceivable, at the time, that, as far as the Captive Nations themselves were concerned, the captives would do the rolling back, and not some outside force, such as the US. This inability to anticipate what happened was based on the neoconservative view of Communism as some sort of Borg-like organism: once you were overwhelmed by it, there was no escape, no going back. Of course, that turned out to be very wrong, as the spectacular implosion of the Soviet empire proved. Yet some did see it coming. Old Right author Louis Bromfield disdained the Soviets as a “ramshackle” empire run by a “worldwide psychopathic cult” that could not and would not long survive, and which served only as a means by which militarism was gaining a foothold in America. Garet Garrett, too, foresaw our present predicament in 1956:

   “How now, thou American, frustrated crusader, do you know where you are?
   “Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world.
   “To thine own self a liberator, to the world an alarming portent, do you know where you are going from here?”

   Talk about prescience! That’s from The American Story, a long-lost gem just waiting to be uncovered by some enterprising publisher. It’s one of the many such lost jewels rediscovered in my book.

4. How did you know the neocons would become such a major focus of attention?

   For two reasons: one, they were and are the best-organized, most well-financed ideological grouping on the right, with a conscious agenda and a neo-Leninist methodology that gives them a great advantage. In spite of their militaristic mindset, they understand that ideas rule the world, not brute force, and they have acted accordingly. They understand the importance of not only having ideas but also of communicating them to the right people. They nurture their cadre, and invest a lot of resources into training and empowering them, which gives the neoconservative movement an influence way out of proportion to its actual numbers. Someone once remarked that there are only 19 or so real live neocons in the country, and seventeen of them are newspaper columnists.

   I think, also, that the central tenets of neoconservative ideology – “big government conservatism” as well as its attendant militarism – were already present, to a large degree, in the inchoate and ideologically-confused American right of the 1950s and 60s. The neocons moved in on some very fertile territory, and the resulting fruit has been copious albeit bitter. As the various writers, publicists, activists, and political figures that made up the Old Right of the 1940s and 50s passed from the scene, they left an intellectual and spiritual vacuum just waiting to be filled.

5. What’s wrong with the conservative movement today?

   See above. Also, to expand on this point, I would add that not everything is all that bad. Conservatism is in crisis, but people are often at their best in moments of crisis. They rise to the occasion. They reexamine their past, and ask: what went wrong? Sometimes they even come up with some coherent answers. My book, I believe, has at least some of the right questions, if not all of the right answers.

6. How did the neoconservatives take over the American Right?

   See above.

7. Why did you write this book?

   Well, I would say for two reasons: first, I am not a passive observer, but an active participant. I think we can say that the Old Right is not just the subject of historical study, but a living reality today. Such magazines as The American Conservative, such political figures as Patrick J. Buchanan and Ron Paul, and web-sites such as Antiwar.com and others – these are the institutions of a real living movement, one that needs to understand its own history so that it can learn the lessons of the past and ensure its continuity into the future. So that’s one reason.

   The other is that I was very close to Murray N. Rothbard, the late libertarian economist and theorist, who was really one of the last generation of the Old Right, the link between, say, Frank Chodorov and Garet Garrett, and the conservative-libertarian movement of the 1950s and 60s. His manuscript, The Betrayal of the American Right, a memoir of life in the Old Right of the 1940s and up to the 60s, which I read in the late 1980s, was the immediate inspiration. It put my own political views in historical context, and gave me the sense that I was the inheritor of a long and glorious tradition. I put down the manuscript – which wasn’t published until well after his death – and determined, then and there, to write a history of the movement. Not just as an historical study, but as a polemic aimed at restoring the best elements of the old conservative-libertarian credo.

8. You’re the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and yet you’ve written a book on the history of the American Right—what’s up with that?

   Well, it’s no more unusual than the fact that the biggest peace organization in American history is not to be found on the left side of the political spectrum, but on the right – the 800,000-member America First Committee, organized and funded by conservative businessmen from the Midwest and libertarian intellectuals and publicists such as John T. Flynn, who headed the New York City chapter. So that’s what’s up with that: anti-interventionism, far from being alien to the conservative movement and the GOP, is an essential part of the legacy of the Old Right, and we are seeing its revival, today, in the Ron Paul movement, and the Buchanan movement before it.

   Of course, Antiwar.com is ideologically eclectic: we run pieces by leftists as well as rightists, and our pages are open to commentary that is in basic agreement with our anti-imperialist perspective, as long as its interesting and well-written. This is right in line with the Old Right tradition of building broad anti-interventionist coalitions: remember that Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party candidate for President, was on the America First speakers list, and appeared at their rallies.

   So we’re building a broad “Popular Front” over at Antiwar.com – and injecting the ideas of the Old Right, especially its libertarian orientation, into the mainstream.