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Summary: Defining the Old Right.
Comment: "Reclaiming the American Right" is an investigation into the evolution of the conservative movement. What went wrong in the movement can best be answered by reexamining the movement's past.
WWII and the Viet Nam wars introduced a different kind of "conservative" into the conservative movement. The original conservatives were non-interventionists. This era found some of these new "conservatives" were internationalists or globalists. That's where the change became very evident. Even today the branding of some conservatives as isolationists is disingenuous. A point Mr. Raimondo effectively makes clear is that this tag is used rather than a more accurate word- nationalist.
In the Introduction the author addresses the changes resulting from the "co-optation" and "corruption" of what today could be called the Old Right. Rather than favoring nationalism or "America First" like the Old Right of Taft, Garrett, Flynn, and today's Pat Buchanan; neoconservatives favor a global empire with as much defense spending as they can get.
On page 30 Mr. Raimondo addressed globalism and the neocon buzzphrase "exporting democracy".
"This is the new myth in the name of which the world-savers and world planners empty our wallets and fill their coffers; the new rationale for the existence of countless think-tanks and the cushy jobs that go with them; the latest code word for a frankly imperial policy, unrestrained by either modesty or common sense."
He contrasts the priorites that have changed. The Old Right emphasized individual rights and property rights where today the key word is "democracy."
This edition was published in 1993. I am surprised by how vividly some of the quotes from more than 50 years ago have summed up the politics of today.
"The Washington of the nineties is ruled, not by Congress, or even the President, but by the lobbyists of every group aspiring to victimhood, competing to rob the taxpayers blind."- page 240. Sound accurate for today? I think so.
A Samuel Francis quote addresses what needs to be done to reclaim the original conservative movement(there was a conservative movement before Bill Buckley,jr. and National Review). "In short, what is needed, says Francis, is a populist revolt. Not a movement of intellectuals directed at the elite, not an attempt to preserve what has already been destroyed, but a grassroots movement against the welfare-warfare state."
Some more topics that the author covers in the book are:
*He identifies the first neoconservative.
*The origin of the New World Order concept.
*The European influence on American domestic policy.
*Chronicles the evolution of the left-wing anticommunists of the fifties and sixties to the neoconservatives of the seventies and eighties.
*He devotes a lot of pages to Garet Garrett and his books. The "Rise of Empire", published in 1952 was way ahead of it's time! The material on Garet Garrett alone make this book indispensable.
*Garrett's view that the federal income tax was nothing less than power to redistribute wealth and assume power over money. That is an important component of imperialism.
*Why the word "isolationist" is a straw man argument and always was.
One motivating factor for my interest in this book was the short recommendation of the book by Ron Paul on this Amazon page.
I wasn't disappointed. The author has written an honest, unbiased book about the old conservative movement and some of it's prominent figures.
I would rate this book higher than 5 stars if that was possible!
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Summary: A look back that's essential for looking ahead
Comment: I've wanted to read this book for a long time, and was very happy when ISI announced its republication earlier this year. Certainly worth the wait, it ended up being more than I expected. While the jury is still out, I'm inclined to agree with Scott P. Richert in the first of two "critical essays" added to this new edition that "Reclaiming..." is "well on its way to being considered a classic of American political conservatism, on the order of those works of Albert Jay Nock and John T. Flynn and Garet Garrett which are discussed herein" (p. 299).
Other authors before and since 1992, when "Reclaiming..." was first published, have told the history of the Old Right and made the case that American conservatism did not, as I put it in another review, spring fully-formed from the brows of Buckley and Burnham at a "National Review" editorial conference in 1952. Few of those other authors, though, can match the depth of Justin Raimondo's research, the apparent range of his reading, or his skill in tying it all together.
At least until we get a chance to see Bruce Ramsey's brand-new "Unsanctioned Voice - Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right," "Reclaiming..." may be the definitive taxonomy of his place in the history of American conservatism. Raimondo's salvaging of this all-but-forgotten writer -- and his fascinating and important proof of the influence of Garrett on Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- are alone worth the price of the book.
"Reclaiming..." was first published in 1993, and wasn't updated for this new edition (except for the addition of those "critical essays"). It therefore doesn't address George W. Bush and his form of "conservatism," the war on terror and the expansion of empire both at home and abroad, or, most recently, the Ron Paul campaign and the thousands of newly-minted Revolutionaries it raised. Though that makes it obvious this book is 15 years old, you could almost claim Raimondo saw it coming. His sections on the neocons and their imperial project more than stands the test of time.
Where this book ended up surprising me (though having read some of the author's other works and having met him a few times many years ago, it probably shouldn't have), though, is that it's not only a well-researched and documented history, but also a spirited call for the intellectual heirs of the Old Right to, well, reclaim the American Right. His energetic defense of Pat Buchanan, his takedown of the myth of Rand as philosopher-sui-generis, and his feisty rejection of American Empire all deserve close reading. And as someone admittedly prone to Nockian pessimism, I found his invocation of Rothbard's driving optimism a valuable tonic.
One of Raimondo's major documentary sources, in fact, was Rothbard's then-unpublished manuscript for "The Betrayal of the American Right." Now that it too is in print, these two titles together make for great, indeed I'd argue essential, reading for today's conservatives, both newly-minted members of the Ron Paul Revolution and those weaned on Ann Coulter (if you'll pardon the imagery) and Fox News. The idea that we can ever escape our history is a profoundly Leftist one. Fortunately, the American Right has a history that not only is worth studying, but one its heirs can learn and take inspiration from.
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Summary: Retracing the steps of the long march from Trotskyism to Neoconservatism
Comment: Great eye for detail. Author traces the rise of "neoconservatism" (surely a contradiction in terms) in the US from it's beginnings amongst 1930s Trotskyites and hard line anti-communist liberals and social democrats in the cold war.
Justin Raimondo shows how these groups were alienated by the developments on the American left during the post-Vietnam era and thus migrated to the right becoming a key part of the Reagan coalition. This faction displaced older line isolationist conservatives. It's not just the defection of former leftists to right as individuals, it was a factional migration.
The trail for the neocon migration of the 1970s was blazed for them by a previous generation of National Review affiliated "New Right" thinkers in the 1950s such as James Burnham.
There is a most interesting profile of Trotsky's main US apostle, Max Schactman. Max had raced to Trotsky's death bed after Stalin had him killed. Max never had the actual elective surgery that converts leftists to a fully fledged neocon, he remained a lifelong socialist. Max saw Washington as the real centre of the true revolution for global social democracy. He even saw the JFK / LBJ's interventions in Cuba and Vietnam as the historically "progressive" force versus Fidel and Ho Chi Minh, essentially reactionary fascist nationalists in marxist drag. The shadow of Max and Leon now influences US policy. Unfortunately.
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Summary: The True Origins of Neoconservatism
Comment: Justin Raimondo has written a fairly respectable book on the history of American Conservatism within the 20th century and how it has changed as a result of World War II and the subsequent Cold War Era. However, in the first chapter covering the legacy and significance of James Burnham (an anti-communist conservative), it is erroneously stated that Burnham was the first "neoconservative." Neoconservatism was an intellectual movement whose pedigree can be traced back to the founding of a publication called "The Public interest" by Irving Kristol in 1965. James Burnham was one of the first conservatives however to identify this movement's first emergence within political circles in 1972 during the Nixon years. For a more accurate and complete account of the achievement as well as significance of James Burnham within the context of 20th century conservatism, I would highly recommend Sam Francis's book "Beautiful Losers."
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Summary: Recovering the Old Right
Comment: In this excellent book, Justin Raimondo breathes new life into the forgotten icons of the Old Right. These figures include -- among others -- Albert Jay Nock (who was in fact regarded as a "leftist" for part of his career), H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov (born Fishel Chodorovsky -- did you know that? I didn't), Garet Garrett (author of _The Driver_, which Raimondo argues may have been an important unacknowledged source for Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED), John T. Flynn (who among other things wrote a scathing expose of Roosevelt and the "New Deal"), Rose Wilder Lane (author of _The Discovery of Freedom_), and Isabel Paterson (author of _The God of the Machine_ and the former guru of Ayn Rand).Raimondo also discusses the hijacking of the Right by Bill Buckley and the neoconservatives, doing a much better job than Rand did in her little puff piece, "Conservativism: An Obituary." In fact Raimondo is careful to acknowledge all the genuine conservatives Rand left out of her "obituary"; rather than simply declaring conservatism dead, as Rand did, Raimondo wants to recover it from the people who almost destroyed it in favor of militaristic Statism. Raimondo also discusses some genuine contemporary conservatives, including the late great Murray Rothbard (Raimondo is also the author of a soon-to-be-published biography of Rothbard), and provides a ringing defense of Pat Buchanan against a number of unfair attacks -- though he also harshly criticizes Buchanan's stand against free international trade. (The back of the book features an endorsement from Buchanan, by the way -- a little tribute to the intellectual integrity of both men.) His remarks on Rand will also be of interest to bemused watchers of the "Objectivist" movement. Despite some obvious respect for her talents as a novelist (he thinks, and I agree, that _The Fountainhead_ was her best work and ATLAS SHRUGGED was pretty kludgy), he does not spare the rod as regards her pretensions of originality, her claim to stand within no pre-existing tradition whatsoever, her intellectual fraud in each of these respects, her failure to give proper credit even to those of her forebears who were directly influential on her thought (Isabel Paterson being the primary example), and her endorsement of several policies that would have been anathema to the Old Right. I suspect that Raimondo would be happy -- and I know I would -- if Rand were publicly exposed as a pretentious, pseudophilosophical, cult-mongering fraud, discredited as a representative of the classical-liberal Right, and recognized as the "leftist" she really was. (And any "Objectivists" reading this review are hereby invited to click "Not helpful.") At any rate Raimondo's workmanlike volume belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in recovering the genuine tradition of liberty. His efforts to restore the memory of an important and all but forgotten strain of American thought will be of interest to libertarians and classical liberals everywhere.
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