A WSJ editorial celebrating the life and times of W.F. Buckley sums up the pre-Buckley right as follows: “a loose assortment of isolationists, protectionists, traditionalists, anti-Semites, Southern Agrarians and just plain cranks.” It’s a standard cliche but still: it’s a remarkable way to describe Mencken, Nock, Garet, Chodorov, Flynn, and Hazlitt–all intellectual leaders of the Old Right. Compare with the more informed position of M.N. Rothbard from his 1978 article “The Foreign Policy of the Old Right” (JLS, Vol. 2, N. 1, pp. 85-96).: “The major thrust of the Old Right, set forth consistently by its theoreticians and of course more fuzzily by its political figures, was a deep hostility and antipathy to government power…. The Old Right favored the liberty of the individual as its central principle, and advocated a free-enterprise and free-market economic as the economic corollary and application of that principle.” The major difference with Buckley, of course, concerned foreign policy.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/2208/savior-of-the-right/
Savior of the Right?
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The most offensive part of the article in the once great Wall Street Journal is the claim that the Buckley “new right” are capitalists. They are not.
Capitalism is not about self-sacrifice, the new right is.
Capitalism is not based on faith, the new right is.
Capitalists do not apologize, the new right do.
Capitalism does not employ force, the new right is defined by force.
Capitalism is the only system that supports the ideology of the American Revolution, individualism, the new right supports the New Deal and is collectivist.
Mr. Buckley is a refined erudite and engaging individual, always interesting, but the “new right” that revolves around the Buckley-Kirk axis and which is the Republican Party today, is dominated by collectivists, anti-semites, protectionists and the irrational.
And since Bill Buckley, the right has been a loose assortment of neocons, “national greatness conservatives,” big government conservatives, straussians, dispensationalist nutballs, authoritarian fundies, jackbooted police state apologists, and groupies of the perpetual warfare state.
Big improvement.
To be brief. The policies of the “right” as they have been shaped by Mr. Buckley and his supporters are little different than those expounded by Wilson and FDR. Our country’s march towards statism in both domestic economic and foreign policy has been helped, not hindered, by Mr. Buckley. And this the Wall Street Journal celebrates?
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