of the original group. Gottfried believes his appeal to Telos was based on
his isolation in the conservative movement.16 Nostalgia and the idea of lost
opportunities also played a key role in Gottfried’s thinking about the his-
tory of conservatism in the US. If the conservative movement was the safe
place for rightists all of persuasions before the 1980s, Gottfried opined, it
became less friendly to debates concerning political correctness because
of the neoconservative influence during the Reagan years. Therefore,
Gottfried felt no compunction about joining a faction of which shared his
same concerns.
Gottfried’s reminiscence was not unwarranted, given the in-
flux of neoconservatives into conservatism and the Republican Party
during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president. The historian George
106
106
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
Nash has shown that the neoconservative wing grew increasingly in
universities and the publishing world throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The neoconservatives later challenged the Goldwaterites who supported
escalated use of military force in Vietnam, and a reduced role of govern-
ment in the US.17 This influx of Jewish ex- radicals into the conservative
movement also resulted in the purging of the traditionalist wing of con-
servatism from influencing the Republican Party and its major publica-
tion, National Review.18 Once the neoconservatives’ influence trickled
down from the Republican Party to publications and think tanks, their
dominance became apparent.19 What seemed like a minor debate in the
1960s between two conservative intellectuals— Harry Jaffa and M. E. (Mel)
Bradford— created sparks on the pages of conservative journals during
what is now remembered as “The Lincoln Wars.”20 The first historian to
contextualize American conservatism, George Nash, referenced the spar-
ring between Jaffa, a student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, and
traditionalist conservatives such as Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, Wilmoore
Kendall, and Bradford. The controversies amounted to an important but
mostly ignored debate concerning the nature of America’s founding.
Supporters of Jaffa argued that the founding was primarily democratic
while traditionalists saw the creation of the US as a special moment in
history limited to a particular people and culture. Jaffa’s followers believed
the original founding was flawed while most traditionalists had no issue
with the founding or with antebellum Southern criticisms of the expan-
sion of democracy and industrialism.21
These competing forces fleshed out in an unforeseen set of events
following the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Just as
conservatives celebrated the landslide victory of the former California
governor over the incumbent Jimmy Carter— something that had not
happened since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932—
conservative intellectuals split over the position for the chair of the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
The division between neoconservatives and traditionalists started in
the Lincoln Wars. Mel Bradford, a humanities professor and admirer of
the antebellum South, was nominated to become chairman of the NEH.
Bradford was a supporter of Reagan and a recognized humanist. However,
a campaign instigated by the neoconservative intellectuals helped oust
Bradford from consideration in favor of William Bennett, based on a foot-
note in a book where Bradford had compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf
Hitler.22 Bennett was reported to have voted in the Democratic primary in
107
Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
107
1980, and Bradford was thereby labeled a racist for his dislike of Lincoln.23
Neoconservatives, especially the Jaffaites, look at Lincoln as the key figure
that renewed a flawed process for creating a constitution.24 This seemingly
small event split conservative intellectuals and launched Gottfried’s career
as a paleoconservative.
Gottfried’s work
Gottfried’s early work reflected his dissertation interests pertaining to
aspects of German culture and history. His chosen field of study even
revealed a bravado and willingness to go against the expectations of
conservative historians of this period as well. While there are seeds of
his key beliefs in his first book, Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic
Experience in Bavaria, he now dismisses that 1979 work as unrefined and
unrelated to his mature body of literature.25 The observer, however, can
find an evident shift in his scholarship following Bradford’s bruising at
the hands of the neoconservatives. In 1983 Gottfried published an article
“On Neoconservatism” for the conservative journal Modern Age. In this
article, Gottfried argued that neoconservative intellectuals had accepted
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and liberal arguments for
hiring quotas, and therefore wanted only to make sure that the federal glut
went to the Right instead of the Left.26 Yet, Gottfried still held out hope
in 1983 that the neoconservatives might become friendly to traditionalists
despite the falling out about the chair of the NEH just years earlier.
Gottfried’s historicism
Throughout his career, Gottfried became more critical of conservatism as
both an ideology and in political practice. His intellectual journey in the
conservative movement can be divided into three periods. In the first part
of his career (1980 and 1990) Gottfried served as a highbrow critic of con-
servatism but from within the mainstream of the movement. The second
phase of Gottfried’s career began in the early 1990s culminating the pub-
lication of his Marxism trilogy in the middle of the 2000s. This most
fruitful intellectual period was defined by his friendship with Christopher
Lasch and close association with the Telos group. Lasch was a former New
Leftist turned “right- wing populist” by the 1980s. A midwestern- born
historian, Lasch spent most of his career directing graduate students at
the University of Rochester in upstate New York.27 The third phase of
108
108
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
Gottfried’s career started in 2008, as founder of the H. L. Mencken Club,
and as an activist moving farther away from the conservative mainstream.
Gottfried’s first major work and his grand opus is The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar Right. This is one of the most
important, and underappreciated, conservative books ever written for its
recognition of the theoretical weaknesses in the founding generation of
the postwar American New Right. These supposed weaknesses included
a brief but fruitful fusion of conservative intellectuals that included
traditionalists, libertarians, and Straussians striving to either preserve
things lost from premodernity or to roll back some aspect of the New Deal
order.28 The Search for Historical Meaning was written at a moment of con-
servative victory— Ronald Reagan was serving his second term as president
following his 1984 reelection landslide. Despite Gottfried’s unwelcomed
criticisms, the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet complimented The
Search for Historical Meaning as not just a theoretical work but also a re-
minder that the conservative movement was rooted in the ideas of histor-
icism.29 In other words, the conservative movement was supposed to curb
liberalism’s desire to universalize the American political project. Nisbet,
like Gottfried, believed that the neoconservatives were making a similar
mistake by universalizing the language of conservatism.30
The Search for Historical Meaning stood out because Gottfried questioned
the legacy of Leo Strauss as a genuine conservative intellectual. Debates
between Straussian intellectuals and members of the New Right had
taken place as early as the 1960s, but often Strauss himself was absent
from these conflicts. The philosopher died in 1973 and never witnessed
the growth of “Straussianism” that flourished in the 1980s and beyond.31
Nisbet wrote that thinking historically was key to the original project of
the New Right because of its recognition that the American founding was
exceptional . . . but limited to the US alone. Gottfried’s ultimate claim is
that the neoconservatives universalized the American experience in the
language of human rights.32
Yet, in The Search for Historical Meaning Gottfried revealed a tension
within conservatism that only astute observers noticed. When George
Nash published The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since
1945, he presented a picture of conservatism that showed polite disa-
greement instead of the fierce sectarianism that had often prevailed in
conserv ative circles.33 As Jennifer Burns revealed in her 2004 review of
Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement, the book has become a
classic as a primer on conservatism even though few scholars have actually
109
Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
109
engaged Nash’s arguments directly.34 Gottfried further boiled down these
differences to reveal, as he did later in his career, that conservatism was
far less conservative and less theoretically sound than Nash had shown it
to be. He agrees with the mid- twentieth- century thinker Louis Hartz when
he claimed that America did not have a genuine conservative tradition be-
cause it lacked a background in the kind of feudalism Europe experienced
during the Middle Ages.35
First, Gottfried thought, conservative intellectuals wrongly rejected
historicism because of its association with Nazism. However, denuncia-
tion of all forms of historicism was costly for conservatives because it left
them without a weapon against the progressive impulse of liberalism. For
years, paleoconservatives have been highlighting conservative Republican
presidents’ failures to defund the Department of Education, overturn Roe
v. Wade, and significantly scale down the size of government. One of his
greatest insights was that German- influenced historicism had merely been
replaced by the terminology of “Burkeanism” and “Western Civilization.”
In other words, Kirk and others modified Burkeanism to mean localism,
regionalism, and a general escape from the progressive impulse of liber-
alism while Burkeanism in its original context was associated closely with
Romanticism and not populism.36 Contemporary Burkeanism was com-
mitted to the same kind of thinking without connecting itself to German
thought. The main thrust and conclusions of The Search for Historical
Meaning was that the traditionalist wing of conservatism had permanently
injured its cause by accepting Leo Strauss’s rejection of historicism as an
implicit anti- Semitic idea linked to the Holocaust and National Socialism.
Just two years following the publication of The Search for Historical
Meaning, Gottfried coauthored The Conservative Movement (1988) with
the libertarian thinker Thomas Fleming. The Conservative Movement was
one of the first histories of the movement since George Nash published
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 in 1976.37
Nash’s story of the conservative movement as a fusionist convergence of
various strands of conservatism seemed to stand up to criticism in 1976,
but twelve years later this no longer seemed to be the reality. In fact,
Gottfried and Fleming challenged the fusionist thesis that all conservative
intellectuals worked under the same umbrella by demonstrating the ideo-
logical divergences between various kinds of conservatives.
The turning point in Gottfried’s career, and one that was unforeseen,
was his interaction with the Telos group. As the Telos group made a con-
servative turn away from the liberalism of the 1960s counterculture, they
10
110
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
did not openly support the Republican Party or lock arms with National
Review magazine founder and conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.
What they did do was to form close associations with Paul Gottfried and
Christopher Lasch as they shifted toward paleoconservatism, which really
represented the rejection.
Gottfried explains that under the direction of Paul Piccone, he was
welcomed into the group as they embraced populism. Piccone’s group al-
ready included the self- proclaimed right- wing populist Christopher Lasch,
who openly criticized the new class of global elites who worked to create
international governance of the world without consideration of the tra-
ditional mores that bonded society together.38 It was during this era that
Gottfried also began formulating his most prescient criticisms of both
contemporary versions of liberalism and conservatism.
In 1999, six years after the death of his friend Christopher Lasch,
Gottfried published the first book of what became known as his Marxism
trilogy. The three monographs that make up this triumvirate are After
Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State; Multiculturalism and
the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy; and The Strange Death of
Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. These texts amount
to a formidable examination of the trajectory and ostensible collapse of
nineteenth- century liberalism, as it reverted to what Gottfried calls the
democratic- multicultural “managerial state” in the postbourgeois era.
After Liberalism is a genealogy of liberalism where Gottfried shows that lib-
eralism has become progressively more disconnected from its bourgeois
foundations in nineteenth- century Europe. For Gottfried, liberalism is
perpetually adrift because intellectuals on the Left have labeled themselves
internationalists, localists, revolutionaries, and so on without disrupting
the chain of leftist ideology in America.39
The main thesis in Gottfried’s work is that all modern political ideas
have become unmoored from their historical settings. He borrowed this
idea from Christopher Lasch who believed that American political parties
adopted a progressive axiomatic approach to politics.40 Lasch believed that
all modern political ideologies are utilized by a new class of elites looking
to subsume all identity into a perverse jousting match for administrative
supremacy.41 One can think of the contemporary political upheavals in
both the US and in Europe as revealing elite class rivalries concerning
administrative supremacy. Gottfried’s main difference with Lasch is that
the former University of Rochester professor saw hope in a kind of in-
tellectual populism, while Gottfried believes that democracy depends on
1
Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
111
centralization leaving little hope for genuine dissent. It is possible that as a
conservative intellectual who faced career difficulties, Gottfried witnessed
what he considered the impossibility of a compromise between progres-
sive politics and the Right’s desire to soak in traditions considered anti-
quated by the Left.
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt was published in 2002.42 It
concerns the supposed therapeutic dogmatism that props up the manage-
rial state. By “managerial state,” Gottfried means the class of global elites
that oversee the affairs of government. This new class of elites, unlike
their earlier forefathers the early twentieth- century progressives, have less
at stake because they are often far removed from the American middle
class. Gottfried points to the Frankfurt School theorists Theodore Adorno
and Gunnar Myrdal as examples of therapeutic thinkers advocating for
societal reeducation for anyone dissenting from the ideology of liberal de-
mocracy. Adorno’s 1950 Authoritarian Personality and Myrdal’s 1944 An
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy both reveal
a new casting of liberalism, which belongs to a genre of literature that ap-
plied Freudian psychoanalysis to the treatment of societal ills.43 In other
words, these works served not as narrative histories that told a story but as
history used to solve problems. Again, building upon the work of Lasch,
Gottfried posits that contemporary philanthropic and paragovernment or-
ganizations borrowed these ideas and thus maintain a therapeutic ide-
ology to ward off dissent. In the final work of the Marxism trilogy, The
Strange Death of Marxism, Gottfried finalizes his arguments against man-
agerial liberalism.44
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 20
