March 05 2010
Carl Oglesby Was Right
By Daniel McCarthy
American Conservative
The tail end of last week was a busy time for TAC staff. Thursday, which was also the first day of CPAC, was our print date. I made it to the conclave just long enough to emcee Thomas DiLorenzo�s talk, �Lincoln on Liberty: Friend or Foe?�, before hotfooting it back to the office for a last round of proofreading.
As big as CPAC was this year, particularly with Ron Paul�s stunning straw-poll win, for me the biggest event of the weekend was a 40-person conference I attended on Saturday, a gathering of progressives, libertarians, conservatives, and radicals opposed to militarism. Some of the other attendees have already blogged about their impressions (vide Jesse Walker, Michael McPhearson, Sam Smith, David Henderson, and co-organizer Kevin Zeese). For my part, I�ve been sanguine about the prospects for Left-Right cooperation against the warfare state since the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002. Subsequently it�s only become more obvious that the old political-cultural divisions established during the 1960s are now moot. Neither the Cold War nor the culture war tells us much about what needs to be done in a world wracked by terror, hot wars, and teetering financial systems. These crises are not novel in the abstract, but their manifestations today � under conditions of U.S. hegemony and the rise of nonstate actors � are profoundly different from what Americans experienced in the mid-to-late 20th century.
Moreover, the strategic and economic crises confronting the U.S. are not entirely separate beasts. One theme that emerged at the conference from both Left and Right was the recognition that we cannot afford the foreign policy we have. Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives would all like to have that �peace dividend� we were promised after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even if we might put it to different uses. Almost any use would be better than perpetuating our self-destabilizing attempts to manage the globe, from Mesopotamia to the Caucasus to Latin America.
Surprisingly, the shift from the previous Left-Right spectrum to a new continuum has already had practical consequences. Ron Paul and Barack Obama both attest to this, albeit in radically different ways: Paul was sidelined in the old Left-Right fights, as a strict constitutionalist whose interests in monetary policy and noninterventionism seemed out of place in the era of identity politics. Yet suddenly he�s become a timely figure, a hero not only to libertarians and Old Right conservatives, but to a fair number of progressives. Obama also received support from some unexpected quarters, including conservative dissidents like Jeffrey Hart and Christopher Buckley and others not accustomed to voting Democratic (or at all all), though Obama swiftly betrayed whatever hopes his new supporters had for him. The Democrats� meteoric descent illustrates just how poorly Obama and the congressional majority understood the forces that had elected them.
Ralph Nader, by contrast, who spoke at Saturday�s gathering, has a pretty firm grasp on what�s going on. His talk impressed me on a number of scores. At times, in emphasizing the primacy of Congress in the constitutional system and the importance of localism, he sounded almost like Willmoore Kendall. Even his anti-corporate philosophy is not something conservatives or libertarians ought to dismiss too readily. His objections to corporate personhood are very much in line with Felix Morley�s objections. Morley didn�t want to attack corporations, but he understood that the abuse of the 14th Amendment was giving the federal government and corporations together power to steamroll over the states and individuals. (See Morley�s Freedom and Federalism for more on this.)
Nader�s views on campaign-finance restrictions, on the other hand, I find quite unpalatable. David Henderson has some notes on that here. I don�t think it�s too much of a barrier to cooperation on other issues. (What�s more, there is some very quiet pro-campaign-finance-reform sentiment on the Right, though I�m in the anti camp myself.)
I�m skeptical of what under-funded advocacy groups can achieve in politics, but there are at least a few steps a Left-Right coalition can take toward cracking the ideological ice of contemporary politics. There are significant differences of principle among the journalists, intellectuals, and activists who attended the meeting, but that doesn�t mean cooperation has to be unprincipled. As my headline suggests, I think Carl Oglesby was on to something when he suggested that the Old Right and New Left have (some) common ground. Oglesby�s 1967 thoughts on the topic (from Containment and Change) were included in the conference�s reading packet, and they�re worth quoting at length:
It would be a piece of great good fortune for America and the world if the libertarian right could be reminded that besides the debased Republicanism of the Knowlands and the Judds there is another tradition available to them�their own: the tradition of Congressman Howard Buffett, Senator Taft�s midwestern campaign manager in 1952, who attacked the Truman Doctrine with the words: �Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns�We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.� There is the right of Frank Chodorov, whose response to the domestic Red Menace was abruptly to the point: �The way to get rid of communists in government jobs is to abolish the jobs.� And of Dean Russell, who wrote in 1955: �Those who advocate the �temporary loss� of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty�We are rapidly becoming a caricature of the thing we profess to hate.� Most engaging, there is the right of the tough-minded Garet Garrett, who produced in 1952 a short analysis of the totalitarian impulse of imperialism which the events of the intervening years have reverified over and again. Beginning with the words, �We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire,� Garrett�s pamphlet unerringly names the features of the imperial pathology: dominance of the national executive over Congress, court, and Constitution; subordination of domestic policy to foreign policy; ascendency of the military influence; the creation of political and military satellites; a complex of arrogance and fearfulness toward the �barbarian�; and, most insidiously, casting off the national identity�the republic is free; the empire is history�s hostage.
This style of political thought, rootedly American, is carried forward today by the Negro freedom movement and the student movement against Great Society-Free World imperialism. That these movements are called leftist means nothing. They are of the grain of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic associational action; and it is only through them that the libertarian tradition is activated and kept alive. In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.
Yet their intersection can be missed. Their potentially redemptive union can go unattempted and unmade. On both sides, vision can be cut off by habituated responses to passe� labels. The New Left can lose itself in the imported left-wing debates of the thirties, wondering what it ought to say about technocracy and Stalin. The libertarian right can remain hypnotically charmed by the authoritarian imperialists whose only ultimate love is the subhuman brownshirted power of the jingo state militant, the state rampant, the iron state possessed of its own clanking glory.
Source: American Conservative
American Conservative
The tail end of last week was a busy time for TAC staff. Thursday, which was also the first day of CPAC, was our print date. I made it to the conclave just long enough to emcee Thomas DiLorenzo�s talk, �Lincoln on Liberty: Friend or Foe?�, before hotfooting it back to the office for a last round of proofreading.
As big as CPAC was this year, particularly with Ron Paul�s stunning straw-poll win, for me the biggest event of the weekend was a 40-person conference I attended on Saturday, a gathering of progressives, libertarians, conservatives, and radicals opposed to militarism. Some of the other attendees have already blogged about their impressions (vide Jesse Walker, Michael McPhearson, Sam Smith, David Henderson, and co-organizer Kevin Zeese). For my part, I�ve been sanguine about the prospects for Left-Right cooperation against the warfare state since the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002. Subsequently it�s only become more obvious that the old political-cultural divisions established during the 1960s are now moot. Neither the Cold War nor the culture war tells us much about what needs to be done in a world wracked by terror, hot wars, and teetering financial systems. These crises are not novel in the abstract, but their manifestations today � under conditions of U.S. hegemony and the rise of nonstate actors � are profoundly different from what Americans experienced in the mid-to-late 20th century.
Moreover, the strategic and economic crises confronting the U.S. are not entirely separate beasts. One theme that emerged at the conference from both Left and Right was the recognition that we cannot afford the foreign policy we have. Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives would all like to have that �peace dividend� we were promised after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even if we might put it to different uses. Almost any use would be better than perpetuating our self-destabilizing attempts to manage the globe, from Mesopotamia to the Caucasus to Latin America.
Surprisingly, the shift from the previous Left-Right spectrum to a new continuum has already had practical consequences. Ron Paul and Barack Obama both attest to this, albeit in radically different ways: Paul was sidelined in the old Left-Right fights, as a strict constitutionalist whose interests in monetary policy and noninterventionism seemed out of place in the era of identity politics. Yet suddenly he�s become a timely figure, a hero not only to libertarians and Old Right conservatives, but to a fair number of progressives. Obama also received support from some unexpected quarters, including conservative dissidents like Jeffrey Hart and Christopher Buckley and others not accustomed to voting Democratic (or at all all), though Obama swiftly betrayed whatever hopes his new supporters had for him. The Democrats� meteoric descent illustrates just how poorly Obama and the congressional majority understood the forces that had elected them.
Ralph Nader, by contrast, who spoke at Saturday�s gathering, has a pretty firm grasp on what�s going on. His talk impressed me on a number of scores. At times, in emphasizing the primacy of Congress in the constitutional system and the importance of localism, he sounded almost like Willmoore Kendall. Even his anti-corporate philosophy is not something conservatives or libertarians ought to dismiss too readily. His objections to corporate personhood are very much in line with Felix Morley�s objections. Morley didn�t want to attack corporations, but he understood that the abuse of the 14th Amendment was giving the federal government and corporations together power to steamroll over the states and individuals. (See Morley�s Freedom and Federalism for more on this.)
Nader�s views on campaign-finance restrictions, on the other hand, I find quite unpalatable. David Henderson has some notes on that here. I don�t think it�s too much of a barrier to cooperation on other issues. (What�s more, there is some very quiet pro-campaign-finance-reform sentiment on the Right, though I�m in the anti camp myself.)
I�m skeptical of what under-funded advocacy groups can achieve in politics, but there are at least a few steps a Left-Right coalition can take toward cracking the ideological ice of contemporary politics. There are significant differences of principle among the journalists, intellectuals, and activists who attended the meeting, but that doesn�t mean cooperation has to be unprincipled. As my headline suggests, I think Carl Oglesby was on to something when he suggested that the Old Right and New Left have (some) common ground. Oglesby�s 1967 thoughts on the topic (from Containment and Change) were included in the conference�s reading packet, and they�re worth quoting at length:
It would be a piece of great good fortune for America and the world if the libertarian right could be reminded that besides the debased Republicanism of the Knowlands and the Judds there is another tradition available to them�their own: the tradition of Congressman Howard Buffett, Senator Taft�s midwestern campaign manager in 1952, who attacked the Truman Doctrine with the words: �Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns�We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.� There is the right of Frank Chodorov, whose response to the domestic Red Menace was abruptly to the point: �The way to get rid of communists in government jobs is to abolish the jobs.� And of Dean Russell, who wrote in 1955: �Those who advocate the �temporary loss� of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty�We are rapidly becoming a caricature of the thing we profess to hate.� Most engaging, there is the right of the tough-minded Garet Garrett, who produced in 1952 a short analysis of the totalitarian impulse of imperialism which the events of the intervening years have reverified over and again. Beginning with the words, �We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire,� Garrett�s pamphlet unerringly names the features of the imperial pathology: dominance of the national executive over Congress, court, and Constitution; subordination of domestic policy to foreign policy; ascendency of the military influence; the creation of political and military satellites; a complex of arrogance and fearfulness toward the �barbarian�; and, most insidiously, casting off the national identity�the republic is free; the empire is history�s hostage.
This style of political thought, rootedly American, is carried forward today by the Negro freedom movement and the student movement against Great Society-Free World imperialism. That these movements are called leftist means nothing. They are of the grain of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic associational action; and it is only through them that the libertarian tradition is activated and kept alive. In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.
Yet their intersection can be missed. Their potentially redemptive union can go unattempted and unmade. On both sides, vision can be cut off by habituated responses to passe� labels. The New Left can lose itself in the imported left-wing debates of the thirties, wondering what it ought to say about technocracy and Stalin. The libertarian right can remain hypnotically charmed by the authoritarian imperialists whose only ultimate love is the subhuman brownshirted power of the jingo state militant, the state rampant, the iron state possessed of its own clanking glory.
Source: American Conservative
