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Note: This is Patrick J. Buchanan's Foreword to the second
edition of Justin Raimondo's 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right - The Lost
Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
For more information visit antiwar.com
What happened to the American Right? What became of a
movement once so united and disciplined it could deliver the presidency,
consistently, to the Republican Party?
That the old house is divided, fractured, fallen, is undeniable. The great
unifier, Ronald Reagan, is gone. The cold war that brought conservatives
together, is over. With the Berlin Wall down, the captive nations free, the
Evil Empire dissolved and subdivided, many on the Right have stacked
arms and gone home. Once there, they have discovered that we come
from different neighborhoods, honor different heroes, believe different
ideas. To understand the new rifts on the Right, scholars have begun to
research its history, explore its roots. Latest to do so is Justin Raimondo,
who, in this book, argues that conservatism is a cause corrupted and
betrayed. His is a story of heroes and villains, heresies and
excommunications, faithfulness and betrayal – a veritable Iliad of the
American Right.
Raimondo's book goes back sixty years to the days when the Old right
first rose in rebellion against the New Deal and FDR's drive to war.
Believers in limited government and nonintervention, the Old Right
feared involvement in a second world war would mean permanent
disfigurement of the old republic, and a quantum leap in federal power
that could never be reversed.
But history is written by the winners.
And these men lost it all: jobs, careers, and honored places in their
nation's memory. But they never lost their principles. Garet Garrett, John
T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov – who has heard of this lost platoon of the Old
Right? They went down fighting and ended their lives in obscurity,
resisting the clamor to sign up for the cold war.
Theirs, declares Raimondo, is the lost legacy. And the failures of
conservatism are traceable to the Right's abandonment of that legacy.
Beginning in the mid-fifties, the Right was captured and co-opted by the
undocumented aliens from the Left, carrying with them the viruses of
statism and globalism.
First in from the cold, Raimondo writes, came the Communists, refugees
from Stalin's purges, from the Hitler-Stalin, and Moscow's attack on the
Baltic republics and Finland. First among these was James Burnham,
ex-Trotskyist of whom Orwell wrote that he worshipped power. Burnham
went o the masthead of National Review from its founding in 1955, to
become grand strategist of the cold war. He would be awarded the Medal
of Freedom by Ronald Reagan himself . . . but, Raimondo argues,
Burnham was never a true conservative; indeed, was barely tolerant of
conservatives. A Machiavellian after renouncing Marxism, Burnham
preached "American Empire" as the necessary means to combat
Communist empire and was first to call for the creation of a "democratic
world order."
A second wave of migrants was the neoconservatives. Though Trotskyist,
socialists or Social Democrat in their youth, by the mid-sixties they were
JRK-LBJ Democrats orphaned by a party dedicated to the proposition
that Vietnam was a dirty, immoral war. In 1972, they signed ads for
Richard Nixon, a man not widely cherished among their number in his
Alger Hiss and Helen Gahagan Douglas days.
With Reagan's triumph, the neocons came into their own, into his
government and his movement. Raimondo echoes the Old Right
journalist who calls the neocons the cow-birds of conservatism, migratory
fowl that wait for other birds to build their nests and lay their eggs, then
swoop down, barge in, and kick the first birds out. If conservatism has
failed, he writes, it is "because a Trojan horse inside the movement has
been undermining the fight against big government. Since the mid-fifties
. . . these interlopers have acted as a Fifth Column on the Right:
conciliating the welfare state, smearing their Old Right predecessors, and
burying the real story of how they came to claim the mantle of
conservatism."
And today? "Two traditions stand head-to-head, contending for the
future of the . . . movement. One piously holds out the promise of
enterprise zones from South Central Los Angeles to Mogadishu, while
the other dares utter the forbidden phrase, America First!" Written in
defense of, and in the style of, the dead lions of the Old Right whom
Justin Raimondo reveres, Reclaiming the American Right is not about
olive branches; it is about conflict, about taking back the movement,
about taking back America. Richly researched, beautifully written,
passionately argued, Reclaiming the American Right is targeted at the
"new generation of conservative theorists and activists [that] yearns to
get back to first principles and get in touch with its roots." Many will call
this revisionist history of the Right, but even those who work for
consensus need to understand how those who do not believe, feel and
think. And the timing is perfect. For, suddenly, all the new issues before
us, Bosnia, Somalia, foreign aid, NAFTA, intervention, immigration, big
government, sovereignty, bear striking resemblance to the old.
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