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In
the day to day struggle to bring your message to the people
of Colorado, there will doubtless be moments when the immensity
of the task is overwhelming. How, you will ask ourselves,
can a small band of people organize a movement that can challenge
the bipartisan Establishment and restore our old Republic?
The Democratic and Republican parties and their candidates
have tens of millions of dollars to throw around, a lock on
the presidential debates, and automatic ballot status. Yes,
but we have something they don't have. They are merely the
burnt-out shells of parties that once expressed some coherent
idea, and had some sense of their own history, but today are
merely two wings of the same vulture, as Pat Buchanan puts
it. We, on the other hand, are more than just an electoral
machine: we are an intellectual and ideological movement with
a long and glorious (if largely unsung) history.
For
as long as the cold war lasted, the history of the conservative
movement before about 1955 – the history of what I call the
Old Right – was for the most part ignored: when they talked
about it all, historians of both the left and the right invariably
dismissed it as too politically incorrect to be taken seriously.
But the conservative response to the New Deal and the looming
prospect of war produced a powerful and very well-organized
movement whose active adherents numbered in the millions – and who almost saved our Republic from taking a giant
step on the road to Empire.
The
Old Right was a coalition of conservative businessmen, progressive
Republicans in Congress; and disillusioned liberals who were
alarmed by the corporatist direction the New Deal was taking.
All of these elements had their grievances against FDR – the
court-packing controversy, the fascist-style of the National
Recovery Act, the massive and unprecedented centralization
of power in Washington – but they all came together in the
great antiwar movement of the late 1930s, the America First
Committee.
Now
there is a slogan we have all heard. This is our intellectual
and political heritage: a movement that numbered in the millions,
and that posed a deadly threat to the war plans of the Roosevelt
administration, which were formulated long before Pearl Harbor.
It has long since been established that Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"lied us into war," as Clare Boothe Luce put it. Even the
man's idolaters admit that. The consensus, however, is that
he did it for our own good, because the people – who
overwhelmingly opposed getting into the European war –
did not have the wisdom to jump into the bloodiest and costliest
war in human history at the first opportunity.
Pat
Buchanan's masterful analysis the events leading up to World
War II, in his book, A
Republic, Not an Empire, reflects the Old Right of
that crucial period in world history. It was a war that was
fought to preserve the Soviet Union. Instead of letting Hitler
and Stalin tear each other to pieces, we intervened on Stalin's
behalf – at the behest of our own fellow-traveling liberals.
We might have skipped the cold war, but instead embarked on
a fifty-year global crusade, the cost of which – in lives
and in treasure – is beyond calculation.
Another
cost of the global anti-Communist crusade was that the real
history of the American conservative or right-wing movement
in America was suppressed, or distorted. The great irony is
that conservatives in America have no real sense of their
own history. The official story, of course, is that the whole
thing was essentially founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.,
when the first issue of National Review came out, but this,
to be charitable, is a load of malarkey. Buckley's own father
was an active member of the America First Committee, as were
all the conservatives of the time: they represented the majority
opinion in this country, as war clouds darkened the European
horizon, that the US ought to stay well out of it. It was
1939, and the Left was the vanguard of the War Party. The
Soviet Union had just been invaded by Hitler's armies, and
the American Communists and their fellow travelers were the
vanguard of the War Party. Conservatives, on the other hand,
were the Party of Peace. They saw, correctly, that war would
not only save the failing New Deal, but would give the President
near dictatorial powers and expand the power and scope of
government beyond anything imagined by the founders.
The
America First Committee was founded in 1940, by a bunch of
college students at Yale, but soon attracted the support of
conservative businessmen such as General Robert E. Wood, the
head of Sears and Roebuck, and a base of activists and supporters
centered in the Midwest. Disillusioned liberals such as the
journalist best-selling author John T. Flynn, who was banished
from the pages of the New Republic and the Yale
Review for his opposition to the President's policies,
due in no small part to the personal intervention of FDR himself,
who declared that in a letter to an editor that his articles
should not appear in any "respectable magazine or newspaper."
By respectable, the President did not mean to include the
Chicago Tribune, the flagship newspaper of the Old Right,
and publisher Robert McCormick was glad to print Flynn's stinging
denunciations of the President's drive to war.
Flynn
was a leading light of the America First Committee, a member
of its national committee, and the chief organizer of its
vital New York City chapter; with the prospect of war looming
ever larger, he traveled around the country addressing big
crowds, and his speeches capture the spirit of the original
America Firsters. At a rally in Kansas City, Missouri, he
declared that America stood on the brink of a war that was
not a war for democracy, but a war between empires and about
imperialism. England was besieged, but the British Empire
was just the biggest of all these imperialist grabbers. Britain
held India and millions of people in Asia and Africa in subjection,"
yet we must risk our own democracy to save an empire on which
the sun never sets.
If
you take the ruckus raised by the publication of Pat Buchanan's
last book, in which he dared challenge the official mythology
of the second world war, and multiply it by one hundred, you
will get some faint idea of the smear campaign Flynn and the
original American Firsters had to contend with. Not only that,
but as the historian Thomas E. Mahl and others have shown,
the interventionist lobby was largely a series of front groups
set up by British intelligence – which conducted a whole series
of covert actions against the America First Committee, infiltrating
their meetings, disrupting the AFC's activities, heckling
and picketing meetings, and conducting campaigns to get the
AFC banned from holding meetings. The smear campaign conducted
in the press was a veritable avalanche of lies, in which the
insignificant utterances of some marginal pro-Axis crackpot
would be "exposed" as having joined the AFC – a handful out
of nearly a million dues-paying members.
In
the crusade to keep us out of war, a grand alliance was forged,
consisting of populists and libertarians, conservatives and
old-style antiwar liberals, businessmen and Midwestern progressives
who hated bigness, in business and in government. The great
fear of this broad coalition was that we would win the war
against national socialism in the trenches, and lose it on
the home front.
The
victory over the Axis did not give us any respite: instead,
it gave rise to the Soviet colossus, and led to the enslavement
of a third of the world's peoples; a Red holocaust fully comparable
to the one enacted by Hitler occurred in the Communist bloc
nations. We were in for another fifty years of global crusading,
this time in a "cold war" that turned hot on several occasions.
Most conservatives went along with this, eventually, forgetting
the tradition of America First and subordinating the fight
for liberty at home to the struggle against Communism abroad.
The foreign policy of the US was aptly summed up by the historian
Charles A. Beard as "perpetual war for perpetual peace." Such
Old Rightists as Flynn saw the postwar Welfare-Warfare State
as a giant boondoggle, a jobs-making machine fueled by inflation,
the planned economy, and a permanent war hysteria. Flynn saw
that in the new postwar world, war and the preparation for
war would become our greatest industry. As he foresaw in his
1943 book, As
We Go Marching, the postwar world promised "the most
romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and
domination, all to be done under the authority of a powerfully
centralized government in which the executive will hold all
the powers, with Congress reduced to the role of a debating
society."
In
1952, at the height of the cold war, the Old Right editor
and author, Garet Garrett, wrote that "we have crossed the
boundary that lies between Republic and Empire." Like Rome,
we have passed into Empire without quite knowing it – or,
at least, without acknowledging it.
Our
policy of global intervention has, since that time, not suffered
any serious challenge. The last presidential candidate to
call our bipartisan foreign policy of universal meddling into
question was Senator Robert A. Taft, who had the Republican
nomination snatched from him twice. The Eastern Republican
establishment, committed to internationalism and our mercantilist
corporate-driven foreign policy, has exercised its veto power
ever since. In the GOP's big tent, there is room for every
interest group and caucus, including Republicans for Choice,
the Log Cabin Clubs, and organizations representing every
ethnicity under the sun – but none for those who put
America first. Although a Republican congress opposed the
Kosovo war, the party's presidential candidate fully supported
it – indeed, he declared that we shouldn't have held
back.
For
as long as the cold war lasted, the conservative consensus
in favor of global interventionism was solid. Except for us
libertarians, who alone preserved the memory of the Old Right
and kept the legacy of the old America First movement alive,
both conservatives and most liberals were fervent internationalists,
united in favor of the forward deployment of American centurions
from Korea to Germany to the jungles of southeast Asia. A
few, like Flynn and Garrett, dissented, but they were not
listened to: and so the Empire grew, along with the size and
power of the federal government, feeding certain sectors of
the corporate elite and providing a kind of playground for
the national security bureaucracy.
When
the cold war ended, rather abruptly, this corporate and governmental
national security bureaucracy did not evaporate, or seek a
more useful and productive line of work. Instead, they looked
for new enemies, and new worlds to conquer. The US, as the
last superpower left standing, far from enjoying the peace
dividend and turning to solve some of our more pressing internal
problems – problems in our culture, in our children, in our
future as a coherent society – we are now asked to embark
on yet another global crusade. The Serbians, the Russians,
the rogue states of North Korea and Iraq, the awakening peoples
of the Arab world – there is no shortage of proposed enemies
and dire threats to the peace of the world. Our national interest
is now apparently such an elastic concept that it can stretch
to any corner of the world, no matter how far from our shores.
The
domestic political effects of the fall of communism and the
end of the cold war have yet to be completely played out in
this country. The Buchanan campaign is the just the beginning
of a new movement in America that may have started on the
Right but will certainly not end there. As North Korea comes
in from the cold, and the Koreans themselves begin to chafe
at the continued US military occupation of their country,
will we have the good sense to come home – before we are asked
to leave? Not if the candidates of the two major parties have
anything to say about it. On all the vital foreign policy
questions of the day, Gore and Bush are in basic agreement:
NATO expansion, the occupation of the Balkans, the increasingly
worrisome US-sponsored war against Colombian guerrillas, and
the insistence on US hegemony over every continent.
Since
Ralph Nader won't talk about foreign policy at all, there
is only one candidate in this race who reflects the views
of most Americans when it comes to foreign policy. We know
that the people and the elites are split on foreign policy,
with the elites chiding ordinary Americans for not caring
about the rest of the world and selfishly living in a consumer's
paradise. But the isolationist impulse – the tendency to keep
out of the incomprehensible quarrels of foreign factions,
and attend to their own problems – is a natural one for Americans,
at least for those who remember the words of Washington's
Farewell address. Only Pat Buchanan represents the majority
American sentiment on this important issue: only he dissents
from the bipartisan consensus, and is making Kosovo, the starvation
of Iraq, the provocations aimed at Russia, and the insufferable
arrogance of the megalomaniacs in the State Department a campaign
issue.
The
cold war is over, and Americans want their troops to start
coming home. They didn't support the Kosovo war, which was
cut short just in time for the popular backlash to be forestalled.
If and when it resumes – and that could be at any moment – those of us who stood against this "humanitarian" obscenity
in the first place will have the kind of moral and political
authority to mobilize a mass movement against globalism. And
that will have consequences, in the polls and at the ballot
box.
In
Iraq, in the Caucusus region of Russia, in the Baltics where
NATO expansion threatens the peace of Europe – war clouds
are gathering on the horizon, just as they were in the 1930s.
Once again, a movement whose battlecry is "America first"
has organized to fight the rising tide of interventionism.
This time, there is no Hitler, no major threat comparable
to that of the old Soviet Union – but give them time, and
they'll come up with something. They always do.
You
are the vanguard of that movement, the second generation of
America Firsters fighting to redeem the legacy of your predecessors.
In the midst of that fight, it is important to know that you
have a history, that you are fighting a battle that began
before you were born and will in all likelihood continue after
your death. The struggle continues, but these days the pace
is picking up. We approach a crisis, and this cries out for
new leadership. Fortunately, such leadership has stepped forward:
we could have no better representative of this new and joyously
combative insurgency than Patrick J. Buchanan.
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