Old Right War Lessons

American Conservative Union Foundation ^ | July 23, 2008 | Donald Devine

[K-oneTexas]

Old Right War Lessons
by Donald Devine
Issue 112 - July 23, 2008

“Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”

“America was created to break every kind of monopoly and to set men free upon a footing of equality.”

Are these anti-property and pro-equality quotes from Marx or Lenin? In fact, they are from two U.S. presidents, the first from Theodore Roosevelt and the second by Woodrow Wilson, the fathers of American progressivism, the radical doctrine that explicitly broke with the philosophy of the Founders. The Founders idea to create a Constitution of limited authority that divided and dispersed rather than concentrated power for government control; to prefer liberty as an inalienable right of man’s created nature to an equality provided by government.

To rely on the market and private property and the common law to regulate the economy and monopoly was outdated, the two progressives taught. The new idea was to progress beyond these old beliefs to a more positive, modern view of government, which would utilize a plan devised by experts to guarantee human equality and freedom for all.

If America is to understand its present discontent, it is essential to return to the days of Teddy and the “Schoolmaster” when we first disdained the Founders limited view of government and were seduced into the idea it could do everything.

A discussion of what conserves the Founders’ ideals and what “progresses” beyond them is timely now that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has formally declared that any new agreement with U.S. forces must “put a timetable on their withdrawal.” As is clear from the debate among a group of long-time conservatives periodically reported upon here, the old movement leadership is bitterly divided over the Iraq War. A forced withdrawal of American troops would further inflame the controversy. Those opposed to U.S. military intervention would take forced-withdrawal as proof the supporters were imperialists rightly receiving their comeuppance, and those favoring intervention would take acceptance of a timetable as akin to defeatism if not actual treason.

Revisionist rightist/libertarian intellectuals from the noninterventionist camp - Patrick Buchanan, Justin Raimondo, Thomas Fleming and Murray Rothbard among others - have long made the case that the American Right was betrayed by “new world order” neoconservatives, whose foreign adventures have weakened limited government and built the “welfare-warfare state” that now threatens U.S. freedoms. The roots of their conservatism lie in the pre-World War II opposition to the domestic New Deal and its foreign aid to Britain before Pearl Harbor. But this is strange, since the major leftist assault (and even Teddy wrote that he always considered himself a man of the left) came a generation earlier – first among “progressive” scholars, including Wilson, who were educated in and impressed by the efficiency of Bismarck Germany at the end of the 19th Century, and who then translated their progressive ideas of equality and government omnipotence into public policy in the early 20th—, in a trickle under TR and then in a deluge under Wilson.

Why do these revisionists not start with the first progressive revolution, hailing those who opposed it in defining the Old Right? For one thing, it is an embarrassment that almost all of the revisionist heroes of the later period supported or at least did not oppose TR’s or even Wilson’s policies. The revisionists were mainly interested in foreign policy, concerned about restoring nonintervention as the first principle of the right, especially focusing on the pre-World War II America First mass movement and the errors of policy leading to war, as Buchanan does in his new book. Even that is strange since World War I was certainly less defensible as being in the U.S. interest than the second, which was forced upon the U.S. (even if there were some provocations) by an attack from Japan and a declaration of war by Germany.

If nonintervention is the issue, World War I should be the focus since without the U.S. in the first war, there would have been a stalemate and no World War II, no Hitler and perhaps no Lenin!

One suspects the reason the revisionists ignore the earlier period is this lack of continuity between the earlier right that opposed Wilson and their America First heroes. The closest they come is Sen. Robert Taft – but that is more through his family than himself, and even he was not a member of the America First organization. Actually his father, William Howard Taft, Secretary of War, President, Yale Law Professor, and Supreme Court Chief Justice presents a good place to begin. The earlier Taft started as a protégée of Theodore Roosevelt, who appointed him to various executive branch positions and selected him as his successor. Taft originally considered himself a progressive and supported the income tax; but he came to question the wisdom of an active presidency in domestic affairs—even having reservations on a national bank--and turned from military force to prioritize arbitration treaties in international affairs. He came to believe that Congress as direct representative of the people should be the initiator of legislation and relied more and more on the conservative Speaker of the House, Joseph Cannon.

Congress and especially the House had been the redoubt of the old Constitutional right, back to Cannon’s predecessor, Thomas Bracken Reed. Although tattered somewhat by the Civil War, the old order was basically still in operation when Reed became Speaker in 1889 supported by conservative majorities in Congress, the Supreme Court, the universities, business and even the media. The great majority of government spending was local and the national government was limited basically to interstate matters. Reed’s most famous saying was: “One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation,” a wisdom later reprised by President Taft as “The world is not going to be saved by legislation.”

Reed can be considered the first exemplar of the real Old Right. He ran as a conservative for president in 1896 against William McKinley and later helped adopt the latter’s conservative economic policies. Reed was especially responsible for defeating the inflationary free silver policy. His views on antitrust were simple: “What keeps capital from charging an unfair price is the well-founded fear that they will thereby risk and lose the vast funds already piled up.” He supported McKinley’s attempts to avoid war with Spain by trying to convince that old empire to liberalize. He resigned from Congress when the president succumbed to pressure and declared this most unnecessary war. Then the unthinkable happened—McKinley was assassinated and Teddy came to power determined to advance the full progressive agenda.

While Roosevelt was successful in regulating business by increasing the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate monopolies and beginning national inspection of food and drug companies while also passing some measures for conservation, he was mostly limited by the conservative Congress led by Cannon. He exercised his creativity mostly by building a world-class navy. Frustrated even in foreign affairs, he handed power to Taft and left public life. But during his retirement he could not fail to notice that the new president was moving right, in effect repudiating his legacy. What forced the issue was Taft’s statement that Roosevelt "ought more often to have admitted the legal way of reaching the same ends" and his statement of the conservative philosophy he now espoused:

“Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.”

Roosevelt’s New Nationalism manifesto of 1910, quoted above, was a direct response to Taft’s defense of liberty and property and led him to challenge Taft for the presidency in 1912. The conservatives still controlled the GOP so TR was forced to run under the Progressive Party banner. Progressives were giddy with two candidates from both parties ready to defeat the colorless conservative stalwart, with Wilson coming in first and Roosevelt second. As a consequence, conservatives also lost control of Congress, first when Cannon was stripped of his powers by a Democratic-progressive Republican coalition in the House and then with the loss of GOP legislative control in the following election. Progressivism had triumphed and it looked like it was all over for the right—somewhat like today.

But the country had not changed. The following 1916 election was one of the closest in history, in which the incumbent Wilson could only win by promising to say out of the war, which he preceded to ignore just after the election to the chagrin of the Republicans. By 1920, the voters had enough, led by a remarkably affable politician named Sen. Warren Harding, who won the nation with his own campaign slogan: Return to Normalcy. After the massive increase in domestic government agencies and of power turned to Washington, including by the war, this was just what the doctor ordered. Harding had supported Taft over Roosevelt, and in fact gave his nominating speech, was the conservative’s chairman of the Republican National Committee for the 1916 election, and ran for president on an agenda to cut taxes, spending and bureaucracy. Like an equally affable much later successor, he delegated much to his appointees. Unfortunately, he had more bad apples than most presidents but, had he not died in 1923, he still might have had prevailed since he remained extraordinarily popular through it all.

Harding was succeeded by everyone’s favorite conservative president of the period, Calvin Coolidge. His view of progressivism was succinct, as was all of his thought:

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences that have given us a great advance over the people of that day and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to that great charter [the Declaration of Independence]. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

Congress too returned to conservative control and the Supreme Court had never wavered. But outside forces had shifted. Academic Wilson had participated in the formation of national associations of economists, political scientists and public administrators who began the long march to control the universities, and then the progressive muckrakers had begun to dominate the media. Still, for a short period still, there was strong political and intellectual support for the limited government, old-Constitution right—especially at Harvard in the persons of Frederick Turner, Josiah Royce and Roscoe Pound and on the Supreme Court, with associate justice Steven Field providing the intellectual leadership.

The Great Depression – ironically partly caused by Wilson’s Federal Reserve Bank and partly by another progressive Republican, Herbert Hoover – ended the conservative era. The revisionist Old Right continued the fight against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but it was so ineffective that when the GOP won Congress in 1946 and the presidency in 1952 there was little energy to reverse FDR’s programs. It was not until William F. Buckley Jr. and his editors that a rousing counterrevolutionary doctrine was devised. This “fusionist” doctrine, based on the ideas of the Founders, successfully united traditionalists and libertarians in the formula of using libertarian means to achieve traditionalist ends. It did not come to fruition until Ronald Reagan, who did reduce domestic, nondiscretionary spending by 9.7 percent over his term and even total domestic spending including entitlements went down relatively from 17.9 to 16.4 percent of GDP – an enormous cut in a trillion-dollar economy.

But the rightist revisionists rejected Buckley and the movement he created as insufficiently rightist. Buckley’s supposed sin was to cast off the World War II Old Right leaders because his rabid anticommunism did not fit with their noninterventionist views. Buckley supposedly adopted a militaristic foreign policy that rejected the more realistic views of the old right. Rothbard actually considered Buckley part of a CIA plot, basing this on Buckley’s early work for the agency. Raimondo rejects this as “misleading.” His charge was that Buckley was led by his former Trotskyite editor, James Burnham, to become so fervently anticommunist that it overrode his limited government predispositions. But Raimondo (and to a lesser extent Rothbard) were careful to concede that Buckley himself and especially his “Principles and Heresies” editor Frank Meyer were libertarian, even if they had lapses.

Raimondo’s objection is based on the fact that he will allow only two possible positions on foreign policy, either interventionist neoconservatism or nationalist-America First noninterventionism. The Buckley right that very much included Ronald Reagan rejected the slogan America First in favor of one stated in its 1960 Sharon Statement (drawn up at Buckley’s homestead) that foreign policy must be based on what is in the “just interests of the United States.” America First has almost a blasphemous sound, especially for one in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Sharon view, dogmatic interventionism is wrong to base decisions on abstract internationalist pieties, but America First should not mean American interests should be pursued no matter the practical and moral costs either. This common sense element is what makes nonintervention as an absolute principle untenable to the Buckley-Reagan right. Even the revisionist hero Sen. Taft not only supported World War II following Pearl Harbor but after opposing NATO later concluded the treaty should be honored.

Raimondo (his “Reclaiming the American Right” is careful and serious scholarship) concedes that the core issue is whether anticommunism was a permanent and fundamental policy of the Buckley right or was just a pragmatic exception to a general noninterventionism. Actually, Buckley never rejected Robert Taft (nor Albert Nock for that matter, another revisionist hero). More important, Raimondo misses the critical fact that the Sharon Statement explicitly recognized the temporary “at this time” nature of the communist threat and, of course, he could not know then that Buckley (if not the current editors of NR) did ultimately decide that the post-communist world required new assumptions and, specifically, that military involvement in Iraq should not have been undertaken.

The revisionist solution for the current crisis of conservatism, strangely, is right out of the early playbook. Raimondo and Fleming propose a “new fusionism” of libertarianism and traditionalism, using the very phrase most identified with Buckley theoretician Frank Meyer. The old fusionism—which Fleming declared “dead”--had failed for being too interventionist, they argued, so the new fusion must link anti-war libertarianism and nationalist conservatism.

The problem is that Raimondo sets free trade as an essential plank and Buchanan and Fleming demand nationalist protectionism. The old fusionism has similar difficulties today but it always recognized that foreign policy was based upon a pragmatic evaluation of just interests. Honest people can disagree what is in that interest or not, as long as they use American national interests as the guide. Therefore, Iraq should not be a litmus test since intervention there could be defended as being in America’s just interests, as Buckley originally did. A general presumption against government involvement and for private, local and peaceful means first should be enough as conservatives debate their future.

Conservatism survived low points before. Wilson was succeeded by Harding and Coolidge, the two Roosevelts were followed by Ronald Reagan and it will survive the two Bushes and whoever comes after if it returns to the old fusionism that inspired the original anti-progressive right. That fusionism was based upon suspicion of national government intervention, domestic and foreign, and pragmatically evaluating foreign policy exceptions on the basis of whether such action is in the just interests of the United States as defined by the traditional Western ideas of freedom, morality and justice.

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Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.

[QBFimi]

Jeez, could you have found a worse picture for W.F.B.?

[TEXOKIE]

bttt

[K-oneTexas]

Thank the author.