Key Thinkers of the Radical Right

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Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 21

by Mark Sedgwick (ed)


  Initially, and contrary to popular representations, Gottfried claimed

  that the US, and not Europe, is the most influential liberal influencer

  in the world. This has been so since the Frankfurt School theorists left

  Europe, according to Gottfried, and returned with their ideas radicalized

  by American democratic practices.45 The most provocative of Gottfried’s

  claims were that the historical Marxists in Europe failed to grasp why the

  working class did not embrace revolution. Instead of allowing the conserv-

  atism and traditionalisms of the working classes to prevail, neo- Marxists

  abandoned their rigid orthodoxy and began supporting Third World lib-

  eration movements when the hope of a genuine revolution in Western

  Europe failed.46 At the root of Gottfried’s criticisms of late modernity and

  liberalism is the belief that democracy needs the centralizing impulse of

  the state to maintain its aims, which increases with each year and electoral

  cycle. Ultimately, Gottfried’s wider but unspoken belief is that liberalism

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  is an authoritarian ideology not content to remain within the borders of

  politics as it seeks to become a permanent and undisputed civil religion.

  By the time that Gottfried had published the final volume of the

  Marxism trilogy in 2005, conservatism was in the process of splintering.

  The second Bush presidency made many conservative intellectuals

  shudder.47 Many rightists opposed the Second Iraq War and President

  Bush’s insistence on using the federal government to spread democratic

  principles domestically and abroad. Gottfried and other paleoconservative

  intellectuals, in dismay at the state of the movement, began forming new

  paleo- Right organizations with the goal of renewing something lost from

  the first generation of American conservatives. Gottfried and a Catholic

  University philosophy professor, Claes Ryn, formed the Academy of

  Philosophy and Letters, but split soon afterwards because of differences

  concerning axiomatic approaches to conservatism. The division resulted

  in Gottfried’s belief than anyone of a conservative persuasion, religious or

  not, should be able to join the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Ryn,

  a bourgeois Swedish Anglophone philosopher, disagreed with Gottfried’s

  populism, as Gottfried would allow almost any dissenter from liberalism

  into his organization if it meant grinding the wheels of the state to a halt.48

  However, when it became apparent that several who wanted to join the

  Academy of Philosophy and Letters had affiliations with neo- Confederate

  groups, Gottfried and Ryn parted ways.49

  It is during this period that Gottfried revisited conservatism for a third

  time. In Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right

  (2007), Gottfried finalized his criticisms of the conservatism movement.50

  Here Gottfried chided conservative intellectuals for failure to see that his-

  toricism was the missing ingredient to provide a real alternative to liber-

  alism. Several new and additional elements highlight this work, with one

  being that American conservatives often rejected European conservatism,

  and relied heavily on imagination and not enough on the historical record.

  In 2008, Gottfried’s H. L. Mencken Club met for the first time

  in Baltimore, Maryland, in a convention hotel near the Baltimore-

  Washington International Airport at the same location where the Academy

  of Philosophy and Letters met until 2017. The Academy of Philosophy and

  Letters would meet in the summer, and the H. L. Mencken Club met in

  the fall. Its meetings were attended by those who had often been associ-

  ated with the conservative movement at one time, but had either become

  intellectually removed from it or found one of its leaders (such as William

  Buckley) to be less than virtuous characters. Peter Brimelow, a former

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  editor of Buckley’s National Review, described Buckley as a self- interested

  and egotistical person interested only in preserving his power in the

  conserv ative movement and not being intellectually committed to true

  conserv ative principles.51 The first several years of the H. L. Mencken

  Club drew renowned conservative intellectuals from all over the spectrum

  including the Catholic political philosopher Patrick Deneen, a former

  Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and Richard Spencer,

  later the leader of the Alt Right. However, Gottfried never embraced white

  nationalism nor attended any of Spencer’s protests.52

  It was known that the H. L. Mencken Club allowed conservatives to

  present who took both race and biology as key factors in their conception

  of conservatism, even if Paul Gottfried did not.53 Yet, Gottfried defended

  his kind of conservatism by calling it “right- wing pluralism.” By right-

  wing pluralism, Gottfried meant that he wanted to offer both an organi-

  zation and venue where conservatives of all stripes could converse openly.

  Gottfried said these conservatives were without power institutionally

  and politically. For example, these kinds of conservatives could be neo-

  Confederates, who were, he believed, harmless since they held onto a

  worldview that had been demolished long ago. Gottfried says that rooting

  out these types of “reactionaries” is a ridiculous plan because they are

  “harmless” figures without any real social power.54

  Gottfried’s association with the Alt Right was more of a stepping- stone

  for Spencer than it was an end point for Gottfried. Spencer found him-

  self at odds with several mainstream conservative organizations before

  meeting Gottfried and attending H. L. Mencken Club meetings. Spencer

  originally created a blog he called The Alternative Right, which was not

  just a blog for interviews but also for thoughts on anything Spencer

  considered worthy of his efforts.55 Jacob Siegel’s November 2016 Tablet

  article linked Gottfried directly to Spencer as his mentor, but this seems

  to be a nefarious claim as Spencer was never a student of Gottfried.56 In

  fact, Gottfried reports that Spencer stopped attending H. L. Mencken Club

  meetings in favor of creating his own organizations such as The National

  Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers. Spencer stopped

  attending the meetings of his H. L. Mencken Club years before his repu-

  tation garnered national attention, according to Gottfried.57

  The formation of the H. L. Mencken Club is also a canonical crea-

  tion and a reaction against Burkean conservatives who looked to

  Europe for inspiration. Russell Kirk and others have been important in

  reintroducing Edmund Burke into the canon of conservatism. However,

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  Kirk’s claim that the US had a kind of Burkean founding was not without

  criticism and controversy even among conservative intellectuals.58

  Gottfried only recently connected conservatism to the mind and actions

  of the Baltimore journalist, editor, and writer H. L. Mencken. Mencken

  questioned
the popular idols of American life during the first half of

  the twentieth century, as well as the creation of the twentieth- century

  welfare state.

  Mencken was not a conservative and never identified as one, as that ter-

  minology was not in popular usage during his lifetime. However, the sage

  of Baltimore offers hope for contemporary American conservatives. He

  was a critic of the New Deal and decried the fundamentalism represented

  by evangelical progressive William Jennings Bryan. For Gottfried,

  Mencken represents a high critic of ideology without succumbing to the

  need to be admired. Accordingly, Gottfried affirms Mencken’s skepticism

  of democracy and egalitarianism.

  In this way, Gottfried has successfully returned conservatism to the

  Right. In other words, the conservative movement that the post– Second

  World War organized is now fracturing again. Gottfried is returning con-

  servatism to its classical liberal and laissez- faire atomism and is doing so

  with texts at the center of his worldview. Yet, Gottfried is not an atheist like

  Mencken and finds the genuine conservative tradition in the US to be one

  that is Protestant. Following the publication of Gottfried’s autobiography

  with a traditionalist conservative publisher in 2009, he began publishing

  works that were explicitly reactionary,59 in the sense that they were outside

  of the conservative mainstream with the intent of upsetting status quo

  conservatism.

  Beginning in 2012, Gottfried began writing for publishers who were

  linked to right- wing elements not associated with the mainstream of

  the Republican Party. Arktos published a compilation of his essays in

  2012 and, in 2015, Gottfried edited a book titled The Great Purge: The

  Deformation of the Conservative Movement with Richard Spencer. The Great

  Purge included a host of authors associated with the H. L. Mencken Club

  such as Lee Congdon, Keith Preston, James Kalb, and William Regnery.

  The idea of purge works in cooperation with a Menckenian persona of

  reaction against the mainstreams of both conservatism and liberalism.

  The genesis of this story often begins with the neoconservative surge

  during the 1960s and 1970s when these ex- Marxists began criticizing the

  counterculturalism of the Left and the civil rights movement.60 The influ-

  ence of neoconservative intellectuals increased throughout the 1970s and

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  into 1980s when we find them impacting key conservative think tanks

  such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the

  Philadelphia Society, along with National Review, and more. These same

  ex- Marxists also founded their own journals that included Public Interest

  and took over Commentary magazine with Norman Podhoretz editing the

  publication for decades.61

  The idea of political correctness is one that pervades these works.

  For Gottfried and his Menckenians, the therapeutic idealization of cul-

  ture destroys everything it touches. Mostly, it has distorted the true his-

  torical narrative of conservatism. In 2012, he published Leo Strauss and

  the Conservative Movement in America. This monograph serves as a re-

  vision of Strauss, and his role in conservatism, which he is generally

  disassociated from in most accounts. A main reason for writing this ac-

  count was to reveal Strauss to be a kind of sinister element within con-

  servatism instead of a gentle philosopher whose ideas were expropriated

  by his students.

  According to Gottfried, Leo Strauss was a philosopher who sowed

  the seeds of progressivism in the conservative movement by finding

  a philosophical plot that would disturb historicism of the conserva-

  tive movement. Gottfried’s main theoretical criticism of Strauss and

  Straussianism is that their conservatism “does not require historical

  imagination or any serious acceptance of the possibility that others,

  separated by time and circumstance, were not like themselves, namely

  religious skeptics who would have celebrated their good fortune in being

  able to live in a materialistic democracy.”62 It is with these criticisms that

  Gottfried demonstrates his importance to the conservative movement.

  Gottfried is returning conservatism back to the Right when it served as

  both a laissez- faire and philosophy of skepticism toward progressivism

  and democracy.

  Gottfried’s return to the Right

  Gottfried holds a rare place in American conservatism. He met and knew

  many of the key first generation of American conservatives such as Russell

  Kirk. And he came of age in a time when the conservative movement first

  splintered during the NEH controversy between the paleoconservatives

  and the neoconservatives. Yet, Gottfried was an academic, not an inde-

  pendent scholar, and therefore occupied a space that the likes of Kirk,

  Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley never inhabited. For this

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  reason, Gottfried encountered the Telos group, and most importantly

  Christopher Lasch as he was moving away from liberalism.

  There are many compilations and genealogies of the conservative

  movement. Gregory Schneider published The Conservative Century: From

  Reaction to Revolution in 2009. Schneider’s book is important in that he

  shows that conservatism often defies definition.63 In his final chapter,

  Schneider addressed the issue that conservatism was often stuck between

  the desire for political prowess and principle. For Gottfried and the pa-

  leoconservative supporters, it was not so much that principles had been

  destroyed, but that the theoretical foundation was never in place to begin

  with. Gottfried repeats the irony of political conservatism and its intellec-

  tual equivalencies:

  Although some Fox-

  news viewers and some subscribers to

  magazines like National Review have deeply ingrained loyalty to

  the Republican Party and to Republican talking points, one must

  ask whether these senior citizens agree with the leftward drift

  shown by widely featured conservative celebrities on salient social

  issues. How many Southern white senior citizens are pleased to

  hear Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, and Max Boot

  come out passionately in favor of dismantling Confederate memo-

  rial statues?64

  Gottfried’s paleoconservatism has not necessarily spurred the rise of

  the Alt Right. If anything, Spencer gravitated toward Gottfried prima-

  rily because the Yale graduate offered a platform for networking among

  ostracized paleoconservatives in the H. L. Mencken Club. Gottfried’s

  record reveals a historian who has struggled to spread his warnings

  to fellow conservatives long before terminology and labels such as Alt

  Right were thought about. In an effort to be heard, Gottfried linked him-

  self to certain figures that a student of Herbert Marcuse would never

  associate with. Neither is the father of paleoconservative a pundit that

  can be dismissed for lack of education and refinement. Gottfried has

 
the rare ability to write a well- respected monograph, and then change

  tone and publish polemics on the level of H. L. Mencken. It is the com-

  bination of both abilities that Gottfried has returned conservatism from

  its Cold War manifestations back to the Right where skepticism and

  disillusionment with late modernity are the only two principles worth

  maintaining.

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  Notes

  1. Most historians agree that Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: from Burke to

  Eliot (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995); Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences

  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and

  History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); and Whittaker Chambers’s

  Witness (New York: Random House, 1953) make up the essential canon of texts

  for the New Right.

  2. See Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped

  the American Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).

  3. See Paul Gottfried, The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar

  American Right (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986).

  4. See Marvin Olasky, Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and

  How It Can Transform America (New York: Free Press, 2000).

  5. See Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers,

  and the Lessons of Anti- communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

  2009); and Matthew Berke, “Neoconservatism,” in A Companion to American

  Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox et al. (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998),

  484– 486.

  6. See Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1, 1980,

  https:// www.commentarymagazine.com/ articles/ the- boys- on- the- beach/ .

  7. Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half- century of Literary

  Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1995).

  8. See Paul Gottfried’s autobiography, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and

  Other Friends and Teachers (Wilmington, ISI Books, 2009).

  9. See Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World

  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Alan Wald, The New York

  Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti- Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the

  1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

 

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