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Lucille
07-15-2008, 08:39 AM
This article will appear in the Aug/Sept print issue of reason.

Conservatives Against Empire
The forgotten tradition of the antiwar right (http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127552.html)


If you are trying to discover how a particular conservative understands conservatism, a good place to start is to ask him what he thinks about Ron Paul. Paul’s admirers on the right don’t just consider the 10-term congressman from Texas a conservative. They tend to think the libertarian favorite was by far the most conservative of this year’s Republican presidential candidates. Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), now making a presidential run himself as a Libertarian, told the Conservative Political Action Conference that Paul is “the gold standard of conservatism.” (If you are a Paul supporter, then you already know the gold standard is a good thing.)

Paul’s detractors on the right take a different view, to put it mildly. When not likening him to the Branch Davidians, they dismiss him as a crazed liberal. Free Republic founder Jim Robinson told site members that Paul was no different from Hillary Clinton on the Iraq war, a verdict that either exaggerates Clinton’s anti-war credentials or dramatically understates Paul’s. Upon hearing his famous foreign policy exchange with Rudy Giuliani, in which Paul argued that the 9/11 attacks were “blowback” from U.S. interventions abroad, Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis called for Paul’s exclusion from future GOP presidential debates, saying, “I think he would have felt much more comfortable on the stage with the Democrats in what he said last night.”

Even some Paul voters seemed to feel the same way. In New Hampshire this year, exit polls showed Paul carrying 16 percent of the primary’s self-described liberals—second only to John McCain—and just 6 percent of conservatives. While 7 percent of Paul’s voters considered themselves “very conservative,” more than twice as many (15 percent) were “somewhat liberal.” Paul’s conservative supporters thought they were challenging the Republican establishment from the right in the tradition of Barry Goldwater, John Ashbrook, and Patrick Buchanan. Others saw something more analogous to long-shot liberal campaigns by Pete McCloskey and John Anderson.

No matter how often Paul invoked Robert Taft’s noninterventionism, Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and a fellow Texan’s campaign promise of a “humble foreign policy,” the Hannity-and-Coulter set did not budge from this simple formulation: Opposing the war is liberal; shock and awe is conservative. Or as the antiwar journalist Bill Kauffman puts it in the opening line to his most recent book, “Left stands for peace, right for war; liberals are pacific, conservatives bellicose.”

[...]

Only six Republican congressmen and one GOP senator voted against authorizing the Iraq war. The upper chamber nay vote was cast by Lincoln Chafee, the most liberal Republican in the Senate. The six House members were divided evenly between noninterventionist conservatives (Paul, Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee, and John Hostettler of Indiana) and Rockefellerites (Jim Leach of Iowa, Connie Morella of Maryland, and Amo Houghton of New York). Almost six years later, after more than 60 percent of the American people have concluded that our Mesopotamian adventure was a fiasco, there are exactly four consistently anti-war Republicans in Congress.

[...]

Politically speaking, modern anti-war conservatives are men without a country, a fact that Ron Paul’s presidential campaign illustrated brutally. When Paul started talking about foreign policy at GOP debates, he could not have made less sense to his audience had he been speaking in a language of his own creation.

[...]

Yet this remains a country that prefers baseball diamonds to global hegemony, bringing the boys home in victory to sending them in search of monsters to destroy. That American character cannot be preserved in a garrison society. Nor can crusades to transform faraway regions of the world be undertaken lightly without changing our nature. The limits of the U.S. government’s power, wisdom, and competence do not stop at the water’s edge, a fact too many conservatives have forgotten.

Kauffman is correct that the warfare state is as injurious to many conservative goals—keeping government small and taxes low, promoting free enterprise, maintaining stable families, affirming the value of human life—as the welfare state. It’s an odd conservatism that doesn’t seek to conserve the people’s blood and treasure.

Does Ain’t My America have anything to say to the vast majority of conservatives who have moved decidedly in the opposite direction? Buckley, George Will, and Robert Novak are hardly paleo noninterventionists, yet they did dust off some Old Right principles in criticizing the Iraq war. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan said that his political message could be summed up in “Just five words: family, work, neighborhood, freedom, and peace.” When the right applies these principles more consistently to foreign policy, it will be morning in Bill Kauffman’s America.

Add this book to your reading lists:

Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism, by Bill Kauffman (http://www.amazon.com/Aint-America-Conservatism-Middle-American-Anti-Imperialism/dp/0805082441/reasonmagazineA/), New York: Metropolitan Books, 304 pages, $25

speciallyblend
07-15-2008, 08:53 AM
just reminds me how much scum is in the gop. we must puke them out and flush them down forever!!

Throwback280s
07-15-2008, 10:18 AM
I just finished this book. It's beautifully written, like a poetic novel. Must read.

Lucille
07-15-2008, 10:18 AM
just reminds me how much scum is in the gop. we must puke them out and flush them down forever!!

It's a Quixotic effort, IMO, especially if McCain wins. "Taking the GOP back" will be lost for at least a generation.

The neoconservatives' only success has been in redefining "conservatism" as the big-government, borrow-and-spend War Party, and the Republican sheep happily followed along. They have damaged the conservative brand so badly, all of America is under the misguided impression that what we have suffered under for the last 8 years IS conservatism.

The only hope of getting the GOP get back to its roots is for McCain to lose. Frankly, I'm afraid the Democrats will once again prove their uberskillz at snapping defeat from the jaws of victory.

Kevin Tracy repeats what we all know to be the truth:

The Likely Libertarian Impact Beyond 2008 (http://ktracy.com/?p=1488)


... if John McCain loses the Presidency because of the Libertarian faction splitting from the Republican Party, you can sure as hell bet the Republican Party is going to try to appease them with a limited government agenda between now and 2012.

If the Republican Party wins the Presidency, then they’ll likely decide they can win elections without the Libertarian faction and we’ll have another 4 years of government growth under a Republican administration.

In other words, the only way the Libertarian faction is going to have an impact beyond 2008 is if John McCain loses. And the better Bob Barr does, the clearer the message delivered to the GOP will be.

dannno
07-15-2008, 11:04 AM
Nice article, well put.

Bprimbs
07-15-2008, 11:22 AM
That sums of some of the dynamics and problems of the race this year.

Indy4Chng
07-15-2008, 11:23 AM
Nice article. I am not alone.