10. Gottfried, Encounters, 13– 15.
11. Paul Gottfried, e- mail message to author, November 6, 2017.
12. Gottfried, Encounters, 22– 23.
13. Ibid., 23– 24.
14. For a short biography of Gottfried, read Seth Bartee’s, “What You Need to Know
about Paul Gottfried,” Front Porch Republic, September 13, 2013, accessed
October 1, 2016, http:// www.frontporchrepublic.com/ 2013/ 09/ what- you- need-
to- know- about- paul- gottfried/ .
15. Gottfried, Encounters, 30– 31.
16. Gottfried, message to author, December 24, 2017.
17. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
(New York: Basic Books, 1976).
18. Kimmage, Conservative Turn.
18
118
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
19. See Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and The Conservative Movement in America: A
Critical Appraisal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The expan-
sionist narrative of neoconservative dominance is a key theme in paleoconserva-
tive historiography.
20. See Daniel McCarthy, “The Right’s Civil War,” American Conservative, July 23,
2013, accessed June 29, 2017, http:// www.theamericanconservative.com/ arti-
cles/ the- rights- civil- war/ .
21. See Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 344– 347.
22. McCarthy, “The Right’s Civil War.”
23. For another account of these happenings see Paul Murphy, The Rebuke of
History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chaps. 7 and 8.
24. See Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the
Lincoln- Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959).
25. Alex Smith in discussion with the author, March 2012.
26. Paul Gottfried, “On Neoconservatism,” Modern Age 27 (1983): 36– 41.
27. See Eric Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010).
28. There are two American New Rights. The original New Right was the group
in the 1950s, with the other being the Evangelical Right during the 1980s. See
Raymond Wolters, “New Right,” First Principles, June 5, 2011, http:// www.
firstprinciplesjournal.com/ articles.aspx?article=725.
29. Gottfried, Search for Historical Meaning.
30. See Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
31. There are several schools of thinking about the legacy of Leo Strauss. One
school represented in Laurence Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), sees Strauss as disconnected from
postwar conservatism. In Harry Jaffa’s, Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo
Strauss and Straussianism, East and West (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2012), he shows Straussianism as a sectarian conflict between
competing schools of philosophically inclined conservatives. Paul Gottfried’s
Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) connects Strauss
directly to conservatism and neoconservative politics.
32. Gottfried, message to author, December 27, 2017.
33. George Nash reflected on the publication of this book in 2016. See Nash, “The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Then and Now,” National
Review, April 26, 2016, http:// www.nationalreview.com/ article/ 434548/
conservative- intellectuals- george- nash.
34. See Jennifer Burns, “In Retrospect: George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual
Movement Since 1945,” Reviews in American History 32, no. 3 (2004): 447– 462.
35. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American
Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
19
Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
119
36. Gottfried, Search for Historical Meaning, chap. 7.
37. Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, The Conservative Movement (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1988).
38. For a general history of the Telos group see Timothy W. Luke and Ben Agger,
eds., A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of
Critical Theory (New York: Telos Press Pub., 2011). Also see Gottfried, Encounters,
chap. 5.
39. Paul Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
40. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
41. Ibid.
42. Paul Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular
Theocracy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
43. See Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950),
and Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944).
44. Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New
Millennium (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
45. Ibid., chaps. 1 and 2.
46. Ibid., chap. 3.
47. For contemporary debates among conservative intellectuals, see Joel Aberbach,
Understanding Contemporary American Conservatism (New York: Routledge, 2017).
48. See the H. L. Mencken Club founding statement, “About he H. L. Mencken
Club,” accessed October 14, 2017, http:// hlmenckenclub.org/ about/ .
49. See, “Mission State of Academy of Philosophy and Letters,” accessed October 14,
2017, https:// philosophyandletters.org/ about/ .
50. Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right
(New York: Palgrave, 2007).
51. See Peter Brimelow, “The WFB Myth,” presentation, Annual meeting of the
H. L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, MD, November 5, 2011.
52. Paul Gottfried in discussion with the author, December 2017.
53. Ibid., March 2012.
54. Ibid., March 2012.
55. See Alternative Right (blog), https:// alternative- right.blogspot.com/ . This is not
the original blog that Spencer hosted.
56. See Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-
Right’s Jewish Godfather,” Tablet, November
29, 2016, http:// www.tabletmag.com/ jewish- news- and- politics/ 218712/
spencer- gottfried- alt- right.
57. The H. L. Mencken Club website, which keeps a record of past confer-
ence speakers, shows that Spencer last attended a meeting as a speaker in
November 2013.
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M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
58. For a summary and intellectual history of these controversies see Seth Bartee,
“Imagination Movers: The Construction of Conservative Counter- Narratives in
Reaction to Consensus Liberalism” (PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institution
and State University, 2014).
59. See Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer ed., The Great Purge: The Deformation
of the Conservative Movement (Whitefish, MT: Washington Summit Publishers,
2015) and Revisions and Dissents: Essays (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2017).
60. See Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967).
Left From the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1987).
62. See Bartee, “Imagination Movers,” 301.
63. See Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
64. See Paul Gottfried, “The End of the Conservative Movement,” Lew Rockwell,
September 1, 2017, https:// www.lewrockwell.com/ 2017/ 09/ paul- gottfried/ end-
conservative- movement/ .
12
8
Patrick J. Buchanan and
the Death of the West
Edward Ashbee
PAT R I C K J . B U C H A N A N W A S born in Washington, DC, in 1938. Although
he later embraced the abrasively populist, paleoconservative politics of the
outsider during his quixotic bids for the presidency, he first spent almost
two decades serving in Republican administrations.
Buchanan’s childhood and adolescence were shaped by the ordered
hierarchies of a mid- twentieth- century white urban neighborhood and
the Roman Catholic Church. His father, an accountant, was among those
“white ethnics” (Buchanan and his siblings claimed a German, British,
and Irish lineage) who had become disaffected with the Democrats by
the time Franklin Roosevelt began his third term of office in 1941.1 Within
Buchanan’s boyhood community there was a sense of profound, instinc-
tual loyalty to the US, but at the same time there were strong feelings of
exclusion from, as well as subordination to, its governing institutions. In
his autobiography, Right from the Beginning, Buchanan recalls his days at
Blessed Sacrament School in Washington, DC: “even though we lived in
the nation’s capital, I cannot recall a single ‘field trip’ in eight years to visit
the monuments or institutions of government. While we were all proud to
be Americans, running the country was somebody else’s job.”2
This is a telling claim conveying a deep sense of resentment against
the “somebody else” that administered and staffed the American state.
That resentment haunted Buchanan’s later politics and, if anything, be-
came stronger over time. As he grew up, the WASP “establishment”
elites appeared in the eyes of the Right to overreach themselves through
12
122
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
relentless bureaucratic expansionism, large- scale social engineering, and,
more dramatically, the betrayal of American interests during the Cold
War. For Buchanan, McCarthyism was not only a bid to unmask “red”
espionage or subversion but also a legitimate populist revolt against a cor-
rupt, self- serving, and disloyal political class. The McCarthy movement,
and Buchanan saw it as a movement, began a process of challenging that
class, the progressive- liberal state and the governing New Deal ideology,
that was built over the decades that followed:
McCarthy was cheered because for four years he was daily kicking
the living hell out of people most Americans concluded should
have the living hell kicked out of them. . . . Never again, after Tail
Gunner Joe, would liberalism be entrusted with the governance of
the United States.3
Political career
After working as a journalist and editorial commentator, and backing
Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Buchanan served
his political apprenticeship with Richard Nixon. Following his participation
in the Nixon campaign team, he became a special assistant in the White
House and would retain a very substantial degree of personal loyalty to
Nixon over the decades that followed. While the Nixon administration was
later disavowed by many conservatives because of its enlargement of gov-
ernment, the introduction of direct economic controls, and the rapproche-
ment with China, Nixon was in Buchanan’s eyes an outsider who, like
McCarthy before him, was brought down by the political “establishment.”4
For Buchanan, Nixon was not just a victim. Although toppled, he
had started to chart a new electoral course for his party. Together with
Nixon’s first vice president, former Maryland governor Spiro Agnew,
Nixon had begun the process of turning Republicanism, which in the
wake of desegregation was already drawing white southerners into its
voting bloc (the “Southern strategy”), toward the white working class
in other regions of the country. George Wallace’s 1968 campaign as
presidential candidate for the American Independent Party, when he
won 13.5 percent of the popular vote, had powerfully demonstrated that
nationalism, a populist suspicion of governing elites, and the raising
of issues such as immigration, law and order, and affirmative ac-
tion, many of which had racial connotations, could potentially make
123
Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the West
123
substantial inroads across white working- class communities in much
of the country.5 Nixon’s strategy drew on the Wallace campaign, and as
it took shape, references to the “silent majority” and “Middle American
Radicals” (MARs), on which Buchanan would later build, began to enter
the political lexicon.
After a brief period in the Ford White House following Nixon’s res-
ignation, Buchanan built his credentials as an independent columnist
and commentator contributing to CNN’s Crossfire and The McLaughlin
Group. At the beginning of Reagan’s second term he joined the White
House as Director of Communications, although the lack of a developed
macropolicy agenda, the mediating role of the Chief of Staff, and Reagan’s
hands- off style impeded Buchanan’s ability to shape events. Reportedly,
the more abrasive asides and additions that Buchanan sought to add to
Reagan’s speeches were routinely edited out.6
Buchanan established himself as a television and syndicated print-
media commentator during the period after he left the Reagan White
House in February 1987. At the same time, without using the term, he
openly embraced many of the ideas that defined paleoconservatism. The
move owed much to his long- held sense of being an outsider, a feeling that
Republican administrations had been undermined, and an increasingly
visible impatience with the de jure and de facto constraints that charac-
terize the US political process.7 Indeed, during his period in the Reagan
White House, Buchanan had reveled in some of the covert and illegal ac-
tivities that collectively constituted the Iran- Contra scandal. At the same
time, changing demographics, processes of deindustrialization, long- run
cultural shifts, and the rise of new social movements all appeared to pose
threats to the integrity of the nation. The demise of the Soviet bloc removed
the rationale for the US’s global military commitments and opened up po-
litical opportunities for those who sought a foreign policy based upon a
much more narrowly realist understanding of national interest.
There was some speculation within certain fairly narrow circ
les of
conservatives active in movement organizations that Buchanan might seek
the Republican nomination in 1988. In the event, Vice President George
H. W. Bush had a relatively straightforward path to both the party nomi-
nation and the presidency. Thoughts of Buchanan making a run in 1988
came to little, and those opposed to party elites were instead represented
in the fight for the Republican nomination by the Christian Broadcasting
Network tele- evangelist Reverend Pat Robertson, who went on to found
the Christian Coalition.
124
124
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
Buchanan did, however, contest the 1992 Republican primaries.
A trigger factor may have been the decision by David Duke, founder of the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and an avowed white supremacist who had
served in the Louisiana state legislature, to contest the primaries, thereby
opening up the process. Buchanan’s entry into the race and his campaign
of support for “American culture” brought him to national attention and
allowed him to establish a forceful presence among the Republicans’
voters.8 He secured 37.5 percent in New Hampshire and 35.7 percent in
Georgia, thereby denting President George H. W. Bush’s electoral cred-
ibility and beginning a process that would culminate in Bush’s defeat in
November 1992 at the hands of Bill Clinton. His speech to the Republican
national convention in Houston gave formal support to Bush but invoked
an image of a country under siege from, above all else, its domestic
enemies. Buchanan again sought the Republican presidential nomination
four years later, winning four states and gaining just over a fifth of the total
Republican primary vote in a crowded field.
Buchanan’s third and final bid in 2000 descended into farce. In the
wake of Ross Perot’s third- party presidential bids (the Texan billionaire
had won 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992), the Republican and
Democratic duopoly seemed to have been fractured. Furthermore, the
Republican primaries appeared locked into a battle between Governor
George W. Bush and Senator John McCain. The Reform Party that Perot
founded had, because of its 1996 performance, secured funding from the
Federal Election Commission (FEC). Given all of this, and despite his long-
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 22