LewRockwell.com and the Annoying Paleos

I get a kick out of The Nazis were Socialists headline--as if that is the worst thing you can call those who gave us the Holocaust (and WWII).

That's not the point. The point is that the media have perpetrated a gigantic fraud over the last 50 years by implying that Nazis are the result when a nation moves to far to the right. The reality is that they were socialists, and therefore leftists.

I think this may have been the authors passive aggressive cowardly way of upholding the leftist idea of far-rightwing extremism is nazism or now the sum of all fears, neo-fascism.. lol.

It looks to me to be a radical, thoughtless and negative ideology, that just wants the opposite of what exists now, without looking for deeper understanding of what is really possible or desirable. When the password for entering the club is to accept that one's country would better have been broken up into little satrapies, who would bother going inside, especially as the club never seems to have anything else to say?

Absolutely. I call these types "contrarian contrarians." They are indeed contrary for the sake of being contrary. I find this mindset shallow and airy. The only thing consistent about it is contrariness. If the reader follows, yes, it is hard to conceptualize this into anything coherent, let alone concrete.

The Weekly Standard wants to create the foundations of a powerful, but conservative state and bureaucracy. As loathsome as Rockwell is, I have serious doubts about signing on to either of these projects.

Which I find equally as loathesome as a powerful, Leftist state and bureaucracy. This thinking is akin to what the communist apologists used to say about communism's failure(s).

They didn't do it right.

A huge bureaucratic state that is "conservative" is no better than one that is on the other side. In fact, I find this to be an impossiblity if the meaning of the term "conservative" is used.

What will save conservatives will be something that they can unite against and build an opposition to. This has already happened at the popular level. We are in a war. Bush is our President. We rally around him. But among activists and ideologues and kibitzers, the disputes will be pronounced until a Democrat is elected President and gives the right something to rally against again.

This thinking, which does occur, is seriously myopic. If it takes a single rallying point for the Right to point to as a means of unity, then we are nothing but reactionists. Since the nature of the conservative movement is indeed reactionary, there is nothing to do once power is in the hands of the Right because there's nothing to react to other than a state of war. And just as a society whose citizens are dependent upon its government for individual well-being outside of defense is doomed to failure, a society (movement) that can't be galvanized other than to oppose either an internal or external force is doomed to failure as well.

There is, however, a point to rally around for us: THE LEFT. But we can't really fight this fractured into myriad groups. We can't fight it because far too many of us don't understand the nature of politics. The Left's strength is in politics. The Left is a political creation. Outside of real war with real weapons and real blood, it must be politically defeated. We can't defeat it in our current status because too many of us would rather accuse others in the conservative camp as being with the Left as to truly fighting it. Needless to say, but I'm a radical anti-Leftist.

This is my main problem with so-called "paleo-conservatives." The mindset is so static and crystalized. Vision is like blood in movements. If the blood stops moving within a body, the body dies. If vision stops moving within a movement, the movement dies. It's a wonder why this mindset is still around.

Since the most drastic of circumstances must take place before the entire Right can move in the same direction, I posit that conservatism is dead.

You read right. I submit that conservatism is dead. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.

In my radical mind, I think that serious self-criticism must take place within the entire Right. What are our flaws? What are our strengths? Where are we going? What do we want? How do we get from where we are to where we want to be? Are arms necessary? What are the terms of engagement?

These are not some sort of new age ramblings. No, they are serious questions and mysteries that must be addressed soon. If these questions are asked, debated, and theorized, maybe what we can devise is what I call "post-conservatism." I can't come up with a hardline definition of the term, but I can describe "post-conservatism" as "the renewal of the American experiment."

Just my thoughts. Hammer away.

Murray Rothbard, like many early libertarians, had a very anti-Cold War, radically anti-state point of view. But he didn't attract much of an audience. Nor was there much support for secession or enthusiasm for the Confederacy. Rothbard and Rockwell cobbled together this kind of do-it-yourself paleo-libertarian ideology in the early nineties building on Rothbard's earlier articles.

X, they tried to put back together the pre World War 2 right. The TAFT wing of the GOP. Sound money, Free Trade and a mind our own business foreign policy.

Rothbard left the libertarian party after a dispute with supporters of Ayn Rand right after it started.

Good luck with your search. I basically approach politics with a good deal of skepticism. When there is some great public issue or danger or crisis I'm interested in politics, but otherwise I'm not one for great ideological combats or projects, so we probably look at things very differently.

But I do think you're right about Rockwell and the paleos. They want a formula that will give them all the answers without having to deal with specifics. They don't want to face the way things are or what it's possible to do, or what it would take to change things. The problem of what we are to do about and for our country doesn't really get serious consideration from Rockwell. It's sad, because the paleos started out with a great deal of concern about the path the country's taken. But now it seems like once they can demonstrate that we don't need a nation, government or foreign policy they don't have to worry about these things any more. We can simply do without such things and walk away from pressing issues. There is a lot of escapism in the Rockwellite ideology.

I think you're also right that a lot of things are going to change. Ironically, the Rockwellites may be right about one thing: nations, even ours, may break up into smaller units. Even without a break-up, power may well be diffused downward to states and localities. But it does seem petty and childish to revile those who tried to build our country and preserve and defend it and prevent it from breaking up into hostile nations, when it was very important to do so.

The Taftites were hard-headed, hard-working, honest, grown-up small town businessmen who had earned some respect in their communities. I don't think you can say that about most of Rockwell's writers.

There's some overlap on the issues between Rockwellites and the old Taft-wing of the Republican party. And you can see that Rothbard wanted to hold back from some of the cultural extremes of other libertarians. Still, I can't help thinking that the Taftites would be really shaken up meeting the Rockwellites.

Taft's supporters, largely Middle Western Republicans with no aversion to high tariffs, would be mortified if they ever read some of the articles posted at LRC about their party, its history and its heroes.

Rothbard and Rockwell moved in their direction by supporting an America First foreign policy and by not taking the usual libertarian line on immigration. But to say that breaking up the country would have been a good thing, and to argue that it should have been done to prevent high tariffs would be to lose their support.

I get the feeling Rothbard was trying to reconcile libertarianism with conservatism, or nationalism or traditionalism. Such ideas have much good in them. They probably can be reconciled to some degree, though not in their purest state. But Rothbard didn't have the right or the best recipe. He couldn't cut back on any of the spices he loved to make a more palatable dish. And all Rockwell can do since is make messes in the kitchen.

As I perused this old thread I was thinking that folks here used to think more.