Alright everybody, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, we're on Chaos Radio Austin and the Liberty Radio Network.
Our next guest on the show is Daniel McCarthy, he's editor of the American Conservative Magazine, he keeps the blog The Tory Anarchist there, the website is amconmag.com.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Very good, Scott, and thanks for having me on.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today.
So well, I guess this will probably seem simple and overly broad or something, but I don't know, it probably would be pretty useful too for me to just go ahead and ask you, in 2010, halfway through here, what is conservatism?
There's a very funny line that William F. Buckley used to use whenever he was asked about this, he would say it is the paradigm of the essences towards which the world is a continuing approximation, or something along those lines.
He had taken that from Richard Weaver, actually, who obviously had a lot of platonic philosophy in his background.
So, no, I mean, I think in practical terms, the conservatism that the American Conservative represents, and that I think is most relevant, in politics at least, is trying to conserve certain fundamental liberties, certain fundamental elements of the rule of law, which Americans are, or at least believe that their tradition has represented.
So the Bill of Rights, you know, the Constitution, the idea that the President does not have supreme authority to do whatever he wants, some very basic things having to do with the protection of people from their own government, and protecting our own independence against not only the supposed foreign threats that are out there, but also the idea that our government is now going out and trying to create a world empire, and is trying to expand its own power into something that is quite inimical to the traditions that our founding fathers had in mind.
So conservatism doesn't really lend itself well to a nice capsule summary, but I think people kind of know in their hearts what it means, as the sort of phrase Valbury Goldwater used to be, you know, in your heart, you know, he's right.
Well, people have a sense of what it is in this country that they need to conserve.
And you know, it's just a matter of sort of arguing for it and clarifying it, as opposed to having a capsule definition.
Well, now, so I think you kind of touch on this a little bit, I didn't see the whole thing, but I saw a bit of a talk that you gave on YouTube, there was a campaign for liberty thing.
And you're talking a little bit about how the real liberal conservative distinction didn't really come about the way we think of it now, until at least, you know, into the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century, and how really before that people thought of themselves more in terms of the presidents that they identified with.
And I mean, for people who just have a cursory understanding of American history, it makes sense, doesn't it, to kind of divide people rather more than left and right, if you have to in political groupings and traditions in America, you could go with the Jeffersonians and the Jacksonians, and the Hamiltonians and the Wilsonians.
And so you have, you know, kind of people on the right and the left, as we would define it now, who would agree on, say, peace and the Bill of Rights and things like that, who are much more libertarian and Jeffersonian.
And then you have kind of the big business, nationalist, Hamiltonian types.
And then you got the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Wilsonian types.
And then who'd I leave out there?
Anyway, you know what I'm getting at.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right, Scott.
One of the things that's kind of interesting as you study intellectual history and look at how different political philosophies have created themselves, is that not only do they change over time, but as they change, they start to rewrite their own histories and rewrite the histories of other philosophies as well.
So as a result, it becomes very confusing, actually.
And it's often a good idea to kind of step back away from the way we use some of these terms like conservative and liberal today, and look at other potential frameworks that would at least clarify some things like foreign policy, where you actually find that there are elements on the right which are non-interventionist, and there are also elements on the left that are non-interventionist.
And there are certainly elements both on the right and the left and in the center that are, you know, basically believe in using U.S. world power to go out there and try to transform the world, you know, whether it's for the benefit of the vested interest in economics or whether it's for, you know, some sort of mad dream of universal human rights.
There are people in the center and on the left and right who clearly do, you know, have a shared practical ideology, even if they claim to be coming from very different points on the spectrum.
And what you mention about, you know, that you can sort of use these paradigmatic presidents, Audra Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and then of course the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, as benchmarks for describing certain tendencies within, you know, sort of overall American character, that's something that Walter Russell Mead proposes in his book Special Providence.
And, you know, some people object.
They say like, well, technically Jackson wasn't as much of a, you know, militarist as, you know, Walter Russell Mead would say.
But I think actually the gist of what he's getting at is correct, and that there are these character traits and these tendencies or traditions within America, which they're better understood in that light by these sort of archetypal references than they are by, you know, a sort of two-dimensional left-right conservative-liberal kind of paradigm.
The other thing, too, is that there certainly are people who don't quite fit into, you know, even that more sophisticated model.
So, for example, there are a few people who consider themselves Hamiltonians who are clearly not, you know, believers in creating a world empire, and Hamilton himself occasionally at least had leanings that seemed to be certainly mercantile, but less sort of overtly militaristic than what we've come to see today.
I think even Alexander Hamilton would be appalled by our current sort of political system.
Yeah, well, boy, and isn't that really saying something?
Even Hamilton.
We get that a lot around here.
Man, even Hamilton would think that this is going to be fair.
Well, now, so here's the thing that I got a real problem with.
Lew Rockwell wrote about this a few years ago in his great article, The Reality of Red State Fascism, and it's these are the people who loved Bush the most and are the core of the Palin side of the Tea Party now, the sore losers who just can't stand the fact that their, I guess, settled for hero John McCain didn't win the election, and so, you know, now they don't like elections anymore, these people, or whatever their problem is.
And these are the Jacksonians, right?
The working class heroes who are always for, kicking butt, and don't need to know whose butt they're kicking or what's going on.
Let's just have some explosions here, sign up, my son.
These are the people who fight the wars.
Maybe.
And who vote Republican.
Yeah, I mean, there's an element of that, and I think that, you know, Lew Rockwell is not entirely wrong in writing about, you know, red state fascism.
But on the other hand, it's sort of difficult to overgeneralize and to claim that everyone, even for that matter, everyone who can be classified, broadly speaking, as a Jacksonian who, you know, believes in this kind of unilateral kind of foreign policy where it's interventionist, they just don't like certain kinds of intervention because they consider them a little too namby-pamby and, you know, too much directed towards nation building.
But even certain people like that who are definitely not libertarians, definitely not Jeffersonians, in some cases, they can actually be brought around to, I think, a practical kind of non-interventionism.
So, for example, you have people like Angelo Cotevilla, for example, and Mark Halperin, who is an author who's written, you know, he's affiliated with the Claremont Institute actually in California, a very neoconservative and Straussian outfit.
But he has basically said that he thought the Iraq War was just a terrible idea strategically speaking.
And Cotevilla, I think, has also been quite critical of the way the war on terror has been waged.
Closer to our side, but still, I think, quite different from someone who is actually a non-interventionist, you have, for example, Michael Scheuer, who, you know, has done a number of books talking about why, you know, the current U.S. foreign policy is crazy, but who also, you know, really does believe in, certainly, retaliatory, you know, force on a massive scale, even regardless of civilian casualties, in his own preferred foreign policy.
So, yes, there are all kinds of problematic and ultra-militaristic types, you know, even on the right and, you know, in the red states, but even there, there are gradations between them and among them.
And I think it's very important to build this kind of effective anti-war coalition to figure out where the fault lines within those Jacksonian or militaristic traditions lie and what can be changed and moved around.
Right.
Because, after all, the empire, if you're against it, you realize it's the most important thing of all.
It's at the core of almost everything that's wrong with this society.
It's, you know, it ought to be the priority that we can, you know, reorder things around.
And after all, I'm sure you're familiar with the old Carol Quigley quote, the only reason we have a conservative party and a liberal party is so half the population will be satisfied and then angry again.
And we'll just switch off every four or eight years if necessary.
And we get away with having a one-party state and the policies never change and the people are frustrated.
And that's how we got to where we are right now.
We'll be back with Daniel McCarthy, editor of the American Conservative Magazine, right after this.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Daniel McCarthy, he's editor of the American Conservative Magazine, that's amconmag.com.
Great stable of writers there at the American Conservative Magazine, I highly recommend it.
Subscribe.
Why not?
Definitely check out the website.
Some call them the paleo-conservatives, the anti-war conservatives.
And now, I kind of, you know, bumper music was playing and I was in a hurry and I sort of made a non sequitur there before the break.
But I was saying on one hand, Daniel, that the empire is the most important thing and on the other hand that we have a one-party state, the war party, the bipartisan war party, whatever you want to call it, the consensus for endless empire until it destroys everything.
And so, what I was trying to get to was, we have to change ideas to get beyond this old, silly junior high school left-right spectrum that has us locked under the control of John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi.
That's exactly right, and I think one of the things people have been surprised about with the American Conservative, and that sometimes makes the magazine a little bit hard to market, is that we're equally hard on, equally tough on both the Republicans and the Democrats.
We really, you know, don't have any particular leaning in terms of, you know, thinking that either party is necessarily going to be capable of doing good things.
So, for example, during the Bush years, we were always extremely critical of Bush's foreign policy and of, you know, for that matter, his domestic policy, his war on civil liberties, which you know, he called, of course, a war on terror, and of so many other initiatives as well.
And now, under the Democrats, it turns out that the policies certainly have not changed, and so our opposition has not changed.
We've continued to sound exactly the same notes.
And it's quite funny, because, you know, during the Bush years, we had, you know, a lot of conservatives, including a lot of ones here in D.C., actually, who are within the movement, but who have, you know, are smart enough or who are old enough and mature enough to see that what Bush was doing was absolutely catastrophic for our constitutional liberties.
A lot of these people came up to us and said, you know what, I'm not in a position where I can speak out, but I actually agree with what you guys are doing.
And the very funny thing is, now, under, you know, the Obama administration, Nancy Pelosi, and so forth, we're getting liberals who come up to us and say, you know what, Dan, I actually like the American conservative better than I like most of our liberal publications, because you guys will, you know, go for the jugular with Obama and talk about how terrible his policies are, whereas, you know, some people on the left, yes, will criticize Obama's escalation in Afghanistan a little bit, but it's very clear that they want to give him the benefit of every possible doubt, whereas the American conservative is fearless and will go after, you know, the leaders of both parties, because as you say, Scott, it really is one party.
I mean, it's an establishment party that has basically a uniform foreign policy with a few sort of gradations between the two wings of it, the left and the right.
But we certainly need a change on a more dramatic level, the kind of thing that, you know, certainly Pat Buchanan stood for a very different kind of foreign policy in the 1990s when he was a candidate.
And Ron Paul more recently has also, you know, advocated a very different, a more, you know, sort of genuinely small-R Republican kind of foreign policy.
And that's what we need to get closer to.
We need to oppose this sort of monstrous establishment that is leading us down the road to perdition.
All right, well, okay, so I have a crazy conspiracy theory for you.
Okay.
Okay, there's some really good guy that controls the secret evil Illuminati that controls everything.
And he brilliantly came up with the Center for a New American Security and had these dingbats come up with this nation building to the nth degree policy that says that we have to occupy all of Central Asia for generations in order to rebuild all of Afghan society into a Western European nation state and turn every one of our Marines into a traffic cop and just nonsense.
And I think that that evil secret Illuminati guy that controls everything is actually good and did this in order to completely discredit the Republican foreign policy that all these Jacksonians went along and supported.
And so you see not just conservatives, but even Republicans in droves abandoning the policy of endless war in Central Asia.
Is it possible that there's could actually be, I mean, because you're right, the Democratic opposition has gotten really muted, but they're still not for it.
And if the right, if the support on the right starts falling apart, do you think we could possibly be in a situation where politically someone like Petraeus could say, you know, the smart thing is to just go ahead and go and that maybe we could go ahead and go possibly?
Well, there are a couple of things.
There's actually one of my favorite Onion articles for the last few years was a piece saying that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had been hippies in the 1960s and they cooked up this wild plan to destroy the Republican Party.
And clearly, I mean, one could hardly have, you know, it's one of those satires that is just so accurate that you kind of wonder.
Right.
But on the one hand, I have some hope that there's almost the possibility of an interference pattern forming where the right favors certain kinds of interventions.
The left favors certain other kinds of interventions.
But to the extent that they favor different ones, they may oppose the interventions that are going on when the other group has a little bit of power.
And they may, to some extent, cancel out, not altogether.
But I think, for example, we're a lot less likely to attack Iran under Obama than we would have been under John McCain.
And I think that some of the things that Obama would like to do in terms of, you know, humanitarian interventions perhaps down the line will be much harder if the Republicans wind up getting control of Congress this winter.
So certainly on the one hand, there is a sort of steady foreign policy elite that doesn't change a great deal, regardless of which party is in power.
On the other hand, there are these kind of small gradations between, you know, the two parties and the two factions.
And I think making the most of those gradations and kind of widening those cracks is one of the most promising approaches that we have.
But certainly one has to be skeptical because we've seen time and time again that you'll have an uprising on the right or on the left, for that matter, claiming that it wants some really dramatic change.
And then, of course, once it gets in power, you actually proceed as normal.
We saw that in 1994, where we had, you know, a lot of grassroots Republicans saying they were just fed up with Washington in general, not just the Democrats in power, and that, you know, we were going to have a real revolution when we got in those Republicans who took over in the fall of 94.
And of course, that ultimately petered out.
You saw it again more recently when you had a lot of Democrats really charged up about civil liberties and ending these horrible wars that Bush had started.
You saw, you know, them go to the polls in 2006 and 2008.
And of course, now that Obama's in office and is escalating the war in Afghanistan and expanding it into Pakistan, there doesn't really seem to be as much, you know, sort of effort or initiative to end the conflict.
And people are muted about the civil liberties abuses that are continuing under Obama.
So certainly there's an element in which we can use the conflict, sometimes which appear more sort of illusory than apparent, than real, rather.
But there are ways in which we can use some of these differences to our advantage.
But there are also sort of underlying similarities between all these factions, which we have to get beyond.
We have to find a way to break those up before we can actually change things.
Well, since I've been led to believe it's Friday, I'm going to be optimistic today and say that even though Ron Paul still will not get the nomination or the presidency, that the upcoming campaign for president that must be going to happen is going to really do a lot to further change the conversation.
After all, when he started his campaign for president in 2007, he had to announce it on Washington Journal.
And there were the few of us who were, you know, he always is underground fans or whatever.
Did you know there's one good congressman all around the country?
But now he's world famous and he's going to be starting from there, not on Washington Journal.
And I think we're going to see more meetup groups all around the planet sprouting up.
And I think it's going to, you know, like Ron says himself, actually, you know, the people get the government they want.
Ultimately, these politicians got to do with the people insisting, you know, we just got to change their minds is all the American conservatives is a big part of minds being changed.
Check it out.
Amcon mag dot com.
That's Daniel McCarthy, their editor.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
