Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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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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113
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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Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
115
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).