So, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on KOS 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our next guest is Bill Coffman.
He's a contributing editor to Chronicles and Liberty Magazine.
He's also written for the American Conservative, the Wall Street Journal, and Counterpunch.
I like that, Wall Street Journal and Counterpunch right next to each other.
He's the author of the novel, Every Man a King, and the non-fiction books, America First, its history, politics, and culture, with good intentions, reflections on the myths of progress in America.
Look homeward, America, in search of reactionary radicals and front porch anarchists.
And his latest is Ain't My America, the Long Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism.
Welcome to the show, Bill.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
It's good to have you here, and I love this book.
It's a great read.
Very funny.
I have to admit, I kind of resent your slight against pirate radio anarchists at the beginning of the book.
What slight was there against pirate radio anarchists?
Oh, it was something about pirated airwaves and reading Proudhon or something.
Oh, that was my previous book.
I've gone beyond that, Scott.
You mustn't indict me for past sins.
Oh, okay.
But no, I'm all for pirate radio.
Okay, good, good.
All right, well, this book rules.
I love it.
It's a story of, well, you don't have to be a hippie to oppose empire.
Isn't that right?
No, it does.
It helps, but you don't have to be.
Right.
It does help, I guess.
It makes it a lot easier.
All right, so let's start off with some kind of discussion of left and right and liberalism, conservatism, what these things mean, and particularly in terms of foreign policy and America's relationship with the rest of the world.
I guess if you could start with explaining how you consider yourself in those political terms and then the anti-war movement overall.
Left, right, liberal, conservative, I mean, these are at best cattle pens and at worst, I think, prison cells, you know, from which no thought is allowed to escape.
I mean, I certainly misfit those straitjackets, and I think most Americans do.
I mean, my own biases are localist, Jeffersonian.
I mean, I live in rural upstate New York just outside of my hometown, and I guess I take my definition of patriotism from the great English writer G.K.
Chesterton, who said, the patriot must always and of necessity boast of the smallness of his country and never of its largeness.
And so, you know, in a long American tradition, there have been men and women who've sort of stood on what they stand for and who, in defending their own little pocious stamp of ground, have said no to empire and expansion and war because they see that these things work a subtle and sometimes not so subtle alteration on their home place, you know?
And that's something that holds true to this day.
You have, for example, the American Conservative Magazine, which was basically founded to be the anti-war conservative magazine.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you look at the current policy, the unpleasantness on the other side of the world, in which the U.S. government has now spent, I guess it's a trillion dollars, somewhat over a trillion dollars, trying to change the form of government of a state, really the antipodes from the United States of America, the very other side of the globe.
We've torn mothers and fathers from children, husbands from wives, and sent these people over to the other side of the world for long tours of duty, and this is, supposedly, the conservative position?
I mean, what do you call those of us who wish to save the taxpayers a trillion dollars and reunite these husbands and wives and parents and children?
I mean, are we liberal?
I don't know.
I mean, I guess they'd call us cringing appeasers of Islamofascism or whatever the stupid, cant phrase of the day is.
Bush, as has been repeated often, he ran in 2000, really, as the less hawkish candidate.
You know, Al Gore came basically from a kind of Cold War Democrat tradition.
And Bush literally killed him.
His running mate, Joe Lieberman, is, you know, the most bloodthirsty political figure in America, a guy who seems to be in favor of all wars at all times, and always with that really annoying, you know, veneer of sanctimony.
Bush, meanwhile, who was obviously sort of untutored and knew almost nothing about American foreign policy, nevertheless, you know, said we should be more humble, criticize nation-building, and then 9-11 happens, and in the blink of an eye, whatever was heretofore healthy, the healthy currents and tendencies in American conservatism were just swept away, you know?
Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, because he had to say those things in 2000.
I mean, he's the son of a Bush, after all, he was going to be some kind of internationalist or another, and in fact had denounced isolationism in other times.
But at some points during that campaign, at least, he didn't just say we ought to be humble, he ridiculed Al Gore and said, oh, what, we're supposed to have, what, some kind of peacekeeping branch of the military or something, nation-building corps?
What is this, he said?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, unfortunately, Bush is a hollow man, you know, he's, what gets me is when his critics deride him as a cowboy.
I mean, I wish he were a cowboy.
He's a prep school cheerleader, a completely placeless figure, you know, there's nothing Texas about him, and he's, like so many political figures of our age, he's basically from nowhere.
And if you're not, you know, if you don't have some place to steady us as you stand in Wendell Berry's phrase, you're just going to fall for anything.
And I, you know, I would say the same is true, really, of most of the current aspirants for Mr. Bush's job.
I mean, McCain, if anything, is even more placeless, you know?
He's the guy who, you know, a classic military brat who exhibits all the pathologies peculiar to military brats, an inability to form any kind of attachment, and so, you know, of course he doesn't mind keeping American soldiers in Iraq for a hundred years.
I mean, life to him is just sort of a series of temporary assignments or stationings.
Right.
You know, and Obama, I mean, Obama, I mean, a guy, you know, from Hawaii, which shouldn't be a state, let's face it.
I mean, with the...
Well, wait, we're going to get to that part of the interview here in a moment.
All right, well, we like to jump around, Scott.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm just kidding.
I'm a digressive fellow.
Yeah, so you really think that's important, huh?
You got to have lived somewhere for a while to really have some roots and some self-identity, huh?
I think so.
You know, and look, it doesn't have to be your hometown, but, you know, the great Booker T. Washington said, cast down your buckets where you are.
Make a place.
It's, to me, the prospect of living in an America in which every town is the same, has the same endless and depressing profusion of chain stores.
God, obviously, that's one America, but there are other Americas out here in the hinterlands.
I know Mr. Obama pities us for clinging to God and guns, but there are healthy tendencies in the country, too, and in a lot of ways, they're kind of linked maybe with the anti-war movement.
I mean, I would see a connection between something like farmers' markets, for instance, and peace, but...
Well, the sense of community that's not just artificial and comes through the TV from the war party.
I mean, that's...
There's that whole thing about Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives, that this is how you make a man out of everybody.
This is how you keep your country together, that, you know, having everybody gather around to all watch American Idol at the same time or something, I guess that's good, but getting everybody cheering the same war together, that's what makes good country great.
Oh, yeah.
My idea of patriotism is like the volunteer fire department, or the old spinster who's writing a history of her town, or going down to cheer on the local high school basketball team.
You know, very highly individuated and localized patriotism.
Their idea, the war party's idea of patriotism is, you know, sprawling out on the Barker lounger and stuffing your face full of microwave tortillas while you're chanting USA, USA, watching the bombs drop on CNN.
To me, that's a totally factitious form of patriotism, and in fact, it's anti-American.
You know, I mean, we're the patriots.
Well, let's get to that, about just what is American and what isn't.
The question really is, when did America become an empire?
Once you become kind of a revisionist historian, you start going back and looking at the Cold War and saying, you know, I'm not sure all this was really necessary, and then you start looking at the World Wars, and then you go back and you see the war against Spain, and then the North's conquest of the South, and then, of course, the stealing of half of Mexico.
You keep dialing your calendar back.
It's hard to find a point where America was a republic before it became an empire.
Well, there's always been this tension, you know, and it's been there since the beginning.
It's funny, I have a book coming out in the fall, a biography of Luther Martin, who was an anti-federalist from Maryland.
He was at the Constitutional Convention, and he walked out of the convention saying he opposed the new constitution because it was going to, what would result would not be a republic but an empire.
So, I mean, there have been farsighted men, or maybe you just think they're sort of dolorous, gloomy gussies, who since the beginning have warned us of the rise of empire.
But, you know, there's this healthy counter-tendency all the way through, too.
And I think they kind of, the last time they were really in balance, I think, was the Spanish-American War, which was a real pivot, you know, in which we liberated Cuba from Spain and then took the Philippines and instead of granting the Filipinos their independence, retained them as a colony and killed God knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.
And you cite in the book William Graham Sumner and the conquest of America by Spain.
Yes, exactly.
Because Sumner saw what this was doing.
He saw this as a kind of rotting of the American soul.
And, you know, but you had at the time a very, very vigorous anti-war, or I should say anti-colonization movement in the anti-imperialist league.
And its adherents and supporters stretched all the way from these kind of aristocratic Brahmins in Massachusetts to these frontier populists, you know, everywhere from Mark Twain to the president of Harvard.
Edgar Lee Masters, who was the poet who wrote the Spoon River Anthology and who was opposed to that war, looking back from the First World War, where there was tremendous clampdown on free speech, said, you know, in 1898, it was still possible for an American to speak against a war and be considered a patriot.
And that's really probably the last time that you had a that the anti-war side was conceded its patriotism by the war party.
And in the 20th century, obviously, the libels and smears have come hot and heavy.
And of course, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson, with the Espionage and Sedition Acts, ended up throwing thousands of Americans in jail.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
There's been a debate lately going on back and forth on the, well, not so much a debate, but a series of blog posts anyway, at the LewRockwell.com blog about the War of 1812.
And I actually was just Googling the phrase perpetual war, and I found an anti-James Madison pamphlet.
And my favorite part of it, the quote was they're referring to their last pamphlet called Mr.
Madison's War and referring to that, they say, we advise the people to despise the anti-Republican despotic opinion that the citizens have no right to discuss the merits of a war after it is declared.
So apparently this is the very same kind of smear that Madison and the Republicans were using against all the war opponents for the War of 1812 to 14.
Back then, this was the guy that wrote the Constitution.
Yeah, it's funny.
It's funny you mention that, because the author of that pamphlet was John Lowell, who was also called Crazy Jack by his enemies.
He was kind of the progenitor of the famed Lowell family of Massachusetts.
And Lowell wanted to detach the original 13 colonies from the Western possessions, you know, the states that had come in through the Louisiana Purchase and such.
And he failed, obviously, but he also represents a certain tendency that I discuss in the book.
I call them the little Americans, people who feared that it was not possible to maintain a Republican government over a large stretch of territory.
And so that's why you get someone like Daniel Webster, who's against both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War.
And he says that, you know, I mean, you know, the system devised in Philadelphia in 1787 will reach a breaking point.
You know, you can't you can't stretch it from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And I think that's I think we've we've seen that it's true in spades now.
I mean, it could work if you adhere to a kind of fairly radical, small F federalism in which, you know, decisions about daily life, social issues and such are left to the states or localities.
You let Utah be Utah and you let San Francisco be San Francisco.
But the liberals and the conservatives are not going to do that.
I mean, it's too much fun telling other people how to live.
Yeah.
You know, one of the turning points, I guess, that I recognized before going back far enough to reexamine the war with Spain was the New Deal and really the end of the Roosevelt Truman years and the Republicans coming to power in the form of Ike Eisenhower.
And they didn't repeal a damn thing.
They basically just consolidated all of that 20 years of treason or whatever, where FDR and Truman had built the government and centralized the government so strongly.
Oh, yeah.
He was his caretaker.
And he went, of course, Ike, the 1952 Republican convention, the two leading candidates were Eisenhower and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who was the son of William Howard Taft, that Senator Taft called Mr.
Republican.
He had been a critic of the Cold War.
I mean, we forget we forget now.
We just assume that a lot of the Republicans, they were all, you know, sort of foaming at the mouth, wanting to to nuke the commies off the face of the earth.
But in fact, there were 13 votes against U.S. participation in NATO, you know, the Western European Defense Organization.
And Taft was the leader of the anti-NATO side.
He was he hearkened back to the original foreign policy tutorial in this country, which was given by George Washington in his farewell address when he counseled us against entanglements and alliances, involvement on the other side of the ocean.
You know, and this was kind of this was almost like a pan ideological statement.
I mean, it was drafted in part by Madison and Hamilton.
It was, you know, Jefferson, who represents sort of the opposite pole from Hamilton, agreed with it.
And in fact, when Jefferson was president, he restated it.
Peace and commerce with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
Well, you know, by 1948, 49, when Senator Taft is essentially restating, you know, Washington's farewell address, he's looked at as as if he's a coup, you know, and Ron Paul and in his new book, Ron Paul says, why don't you people just come out and announce that George Washington was a damned fool?
If you're so smart, then why don't you just come out and admit that that's your view?
That's what they think.
And, you know, I used to work in the U.S.
Senate for several years, and one of the most amusing rituals is on Washington's birthday every February.
Some senator, and usually it's kind of like a freshman who gets, you know, the unpleasant cleaning out the latrine type duties, has to go and read Washington's farewell address on the floor.
And so he does so dutifully.
And, you know, it's it's kind of a case of cognitive dissonance.
I mean, you have this guy reading these these magnificent statements against foreign entanglements and war and, you know, infraction and excessive devotion to party and such.
And the next three hundred sixty four days of the year, the Senate is going to spend repudiating every piece of advice, including, you know, of the and if right in that address.
Yeah, they just won't ever call it that.
They just won't ever admit that.
Yes, we've deliberately betrayed the legacy of George Washington because he was an idiot.
And we know it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, sure.
Which wouldn't be great if they would just say that.
I'd love it.
I don't think anybody would stop them anyway.
Right.
I mean, just be a little bit of honesty.
Well, yeah.
But, you know, there's still there's still kind of ritual obeisance made toward not only the Constitution, but the founders.
And I mean, you see the popular, the great popularity of books about the founders.
And I think, you know, part of that, I think, is that people recognize there's something missing and they're trying to figure out how did you know how did how did the train get derailed this badly?
So, you know, I think that's I think that's a really healthy sign.
Well, it's just funny, though, looking back at the history and seeing that the founders all betrayed themselves, too.
I mean, we talked about what they derisively called at the time Mr.
Madison's war.
Apparently, a large part of the American population didn't see it as necessary at all.
Many now characterize it as mostly an attempt to steal Canada.
And and yet Madison was the guy who said that of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other dot, dot, dot.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
I mean, this was the guy he is, the guy that I cite when I say, listen, it's the most American thing in the world to be opposed to permanent war.
Here's James Madison.
Well, he sure set a lot of these precedents.
Yeah, well, we we all stumble.
We're all fallible.
You know, I mean, he would have said that the cause of the war was British impressment of semen.
And that was partly true.
I think it was also partly a land hunger directed northward.
But, you know, yeah, Madison, in his notes on the Constitutional Convention, 1787, at one point, question of standing armies comes up and he says, look, standing armies are dismissed on all hands is an evil to be avoided.
You know, I mean, it wasn't it wasn't even debatable.
Right.
Everyone held this view.
You know, today, the standing armies, of course, they're never standing, they're always moving, you know, but it's remarkable how you go back when I was writing this Luther Martin biography, I read through the the Elliott's great multi-volume set of the debates in the state conventions on ratifying the Constitution and the anti-militarism in early America.
It's just remarkable.
It was why it was just it was widespread.
It was pervasive.
You know, one of the one of the big questions that came up is, you know, should we constitutionally prohibit the president from sending the militia of one state into another state or at least into a state that doesn't border it?
And, you know, Madison sort of the larger federalists who are shepherding the Constitution through the race convention said, well, you know what?
I mean, it's a moot point.
There's no way we'd ever have a despotic president who would try to send, you know, the militia of Georgia to Pennsylvania.
Well, now, of course, the the heirs to the militia, the the National Guards, you know, these guys are spending months at a time in Iraq, the hypocritical Reaganite Republicans, you know, who who could sometimes talk a good game on states rights.
And some of them really believed it.
When in the the 80s, the governors of Minnesota and Massachusetts objected to the sending of the National Guards of those states to Honduras, where they were going to presumably be used somehow to help overthrow the the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
You know, the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that, in fact, you know, the Minnesota Guard and the Massachusetts Guard are by now thoroughly under the control of the president and the governor or the legislators of the state have no say where they're sent.
Hasn't it been this way since the 1860s?
I mean, the militias of one state being used in another state.
Well, yeah, that did happen in the 1860s and the four year unpleasantness there.
When I was a kid, Bill, I learned that, well, you know, a lot of these questions were settled by the Civil War because one side won and the other side lost.
So, for example, Texas cannot be a sovereign republic again because that question's already been settled with force.
Yeah, well, you know, and yet these questions, these questions have a way of bubbling up.
I mentioned Hawaii earlier.
There's a there's a pretty active independence movement among Native Hawaiians who, you know, still justifiably resent the fact that their country was stolen from them in 1893 and, you know, would like to break off on their own.
Stolen from them literally at gunpoint, right?
Navy ships floating offshores with their guns pointed that way.
Although, you know what?
It's there in at that point.
And there's one of sort of one of the heroes of my story and one of, I think, clearly the two or three best presidents we've ever had, Grover Cleveland, a neighbor of mine in Buffalo, because this all happened at the very end of Harris, Benjamin Harrison's term.
Harrison, by the way, later went home to marry his niece.
Who was like 40 years younger than he was.
So kind of an odd Woody Allen, Sunni type story.
But anyway, Cleveland comes in, scuttles Harrison's annexation treaty of Hawaii, sends one of his deputies over to Hawaii to investigate, and they determine that this was disgraceful.
Cleveland denounces what happened in Hawaii and goes about trying to figure out how to return Hawaii to the Hawaiians.
Alas, McKinley comes into office and is an expansionist who succeeds by resolution in annexing Hawaii.
And then the Spanish-American War comes and Grover Cleveland is interred in the graveyard of forgotten presidents.
You know, the only presidents we remember are those who killed a lot of people.
Right.
They're our greatest presidents.
Yeah, they're the greatest.
Well, you point out in the book, too, that I don't know if you say it exactly this way, but you do point out about how one intervention causes the next one or at least sets the stage for the next one.
Not that they excuse the next one necessarily.
But now, well, you look at the 1940s and the war against Japan.
You say that, listen, we had nothing to fight with them about.
If we'd never stolen the Philippines, never stolen Hawaii, it would have been none of our business.
We wouldn't have even cared.
We have been trading with the Japanese empire.
Yeah, sure.
Our sole interest in the Pacific would have been trade.
It wouldn't have been there.
It wouldn't have been stations and military bases.
And, you know, the same the same is true to some extent to, you know, the link between the first and second World Wars.
I mean, the head Wilson not to overcome the instinct of isolationism and peace loving of many of the American people and sent our boys over there.
It's unlikely that Germany would have suffered quite so severe a defeat in the first World War.
There probably would not have been a punitive treaty of peace and Hitler probably would not have been able to take advantage of those resentments to seize power and launch his reign of evil and terror.
So, you know, I mean, the historian Robert Higgs calls this truncating the antecedents where we just, you know, all of a sudden we're in this terrible mess.
And, you know, we the peace party are asked, well, what are you going to do about now?
Well, what we would have done about it is not intervened in the first World War in 1917.
And it's exceedingly unlikely that we would have faced that horrible choice in 1941.
Yeah, well, you know, in Jim Powell's book, Wilson's War, he makes the case that they also created the Soviet Union, basically allowed it to come to existence because Wilson's bribes to Kerensky were enough to keep him in the war long enough that the communists, Lenin and Trotsky, were able to seize power on their fourth try in October 1917, when the Russians very well could have been out of war by then and had their army at home to protect the capital from the Bolsheviks.
And of course, you also have the smashing for all time of the Ottoman Empire and the turning over of the Middle East to the British and the French at the end of World War One as well.
Yeah, yeah.
And then 35 years later, you have the the Cold War, which absent the Soviet government doesn't happen.
It also doesn't happen if we had hewed to the line that Washington laid down and avoided the European entanglements.
But by that time, by 48, 49, I mean, that sounded like anachronistic advice.
It was as if it was as if the anti-Cold War conservatives were wearing powdered wigs, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and you say in the book that the guys at the New Republic, the good liberals, denounced Robert Taft as a commie sympathizer.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, they said he was, you know, they said he was basically aiding and abetting Stalin, you know, in the Chicago Tribune, which is one of the great anti-war sort of Republican anti-war papers of the Midwest.
I forget it was the New Republic of the Nation saying that would see the day when Stalin would bring out the, you know, the first communist issue of the Chicago Tribune.
I mean, it was incredible around that period, 49, 50, 51, incredible red baiting.
And much of it was directed against the handful by then of peace Republicans who remained who were all sworn capitalists.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
I mean, a lot of them were, you know, I mean, there was many would have been protectionists, but yeah, I mean, for the most part, they were you know, they came from the party's old base, which was kind of the Main Street, George S. Babbitt, civic backbone of small and mid-sized America, you know, domestic manufacturers and such, you know, corner shopkeepers.
You know, this is obviously this is no longer these people still tend to vote Republican, but the Republican Party could not give a damn about that.
The Warhawk Republicans, to the extent that they're, you know, that they're neoconservatives are really more the heirs of Trotsky than they are of, you know, some babbittish Main Street Republican of 1920.
Right.
Well, and that that really is the case, right?
Like all their mentors were buddies of Trotsky at one time or another, Irving Kristol and Leon Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss.
Sure.
And, you know, the thing you look at the the effect that the Cold War had on the American right, you know, where National Review 50s emerges to essentially become the mouthpiece of American conservatism.
And a lot of the the founding editorship of National Review, people like James Burnham and Frank Meyer had been communist.
Why erstwhile apologists for Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky should be entrusted with defining American conservatism blows my mind.
They really did get away with it, though.
William F. Buckley and the National Review, they got rid of all the actual conservatives and replaced them with people who, as you're saying, had been card carrying members of one communist party or another, at least.
Yeah, I've written about this before, but you go back and you look at like National Review in the 50s, late 50s, this obsession with communism, it's strange.
It's like American intellectual life becomes this dispute over a European ideology, basically.
And vast stretches of America are no longer of interest to the American right.
For instance, at the time, the interstate highway system, the national system of interstate and defense highways, it was basically defense, this enormous project in Eisenhower and planning or socialism, whatever you want to call it, is changing the face of the country, in my view, defacing it.
But even if one is an interstate enthusiast, it's changing the country.
You have eminent domain on a massive scale.
It's devastating a lot of inner cities, land, homes, ancestral homes are being stolen often from from working class people, both white and black.
And it's also eventually going to act as a kind of subsidy to long distance shippers, you know, Walmart in some kind of attenuated way is the child of the interstate highway system.
But the National Review never says anything about it.
It's completely uninterested in it.
What matters to them is some change in like, you know, the second secretary of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, you know, they're obsessed by that kind of stuff and they're blind to what's happening in their own country.
And eventually, I think you see on the American right, at least the sort of the organizational institutional right, it doesn't give a damn about America.
I mean, Americans, you know what I mean?
We're you know, we have to pay our taxes and send our send our kids to wars.
But as long as, you know, as long as we watch TV and don't complain too much, that's our role.
And that's to me, that's not citizenship.
Well, now, I want to continue jumping around and ask you about the America First Committee that opposed American entry into World War Two.
But first, I want to ask you about Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet.
Basically, the three major leaders of postwar conservatism and their role in this because they weren't ex-communists, right?
No, no, they weren't.
And and so, of course, they were they were all skeptics of this global role that the U.S. was coming to play in the late 40s, 50s, early 60s.
You know, Nisbet was possibly the greatest sociologist of his age and a and a great gentleman.
And he wrote at length of the the ways in which custom and tradition and local self-government are destroyed by militarism.
Weaver, you know, the the coiner of the oft-repeated epitome ideas have consequences.
And the kind of a seminal figure on the American right to rhetoric and philosophy to literary criticism had been a fierce critic, for instance, of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You know, I mean, now we try to find a critic on the American right who, you know, doesn't lionize, you know, Nagasaki, Harry Truman.
Russell Kirk regarded as in some ways kind of the exemplary traditionalist conservative of of the 50s and early 60s, the stage of McCoskey, Michigan, who, you know, who wrote learned histories and ghost stories all from from his his ancestral home in rural Michigan.
Kirk was, for the most part, a skeptic of militarism.
He wrote a great, really fine biography of John Randolph of Virginia.
And in it, he had a line talking about Randolph's opposition to the War of 1812, Randolph's opposition to expansionism.
And he says conservatives temperamentally, I'm paraphrasing here, are friends to tranquility and foes of aggression.
Well, now, were these guys then read out of the conservative movement or somehow they were able to still be the leaders of it?
Well, they died.
The answer, I guess, we were we were died very young.
Mr. Nisbet lived, I think, into the late 80s, early 90s, and never sheathed his, that's a wrong metaphor, his anti-war sword, I guess I should say, but seldom wrote about matters military or foreign policy.
Russell Kirk maintained pretty cordial relations with the right, was, I think, you know, seen as a whole kind of eccentric but lovable uncle.
Very late in life, he was really got his gander up over the first Iraq war and in fact served, I believe, as the honorary Michigan chairman of the Buchanan campaign in 1992, when Pat Buchanan ran a kind of, if you recall, Buchanan's campaign, I mean, we think of it now, you know, it's it's going to go down in myth that, oh, about the culture war, you know, and about social issues.
In fact, what really motivated Buchanan in that campaign was his opposition to the first Iraq war, the first Gulf War.
Speaking as someone who was, you know, in ninth grade then and had the understanding that TV got across, it was all about social issues.
That was all I ever knew about Pat Buchanan.
I had no idea he was anti-war until probably the early part of this century because TV never said so.
No, it didn't.
And Buchanan's a really interesting figure in the American right.
I think he's a fine writer and he, you know, conservatives from the Buckley conservatives from the 50s on would sometimes concede that having this this the military industrial complex and bases in, you know, 100 countries around the world, that this was unnatural.
But they would say that the Soviet Union, Soviet communism was this unique world's historical enemy, and we wish it would disappear because if it could, the United States would go back to being what Jean Kirkpatrick called a normal country.
But at last it's here and we have to gird ourselves with a fight.
Well, you know, lo and behold, Soviet communism, for whatever reason, disappears by, you know, 89, 90.
Did Buckley at all call for dismantling the empire and returning to a normal country?
No, of course not.
I mean, they, you know, they sought out new enemies.
They ridiculed people who talked about the peace dividend.
Well, Pat Buchanan is one of the only figures on the American right who really went back and rethought everything and emerged, I think, as a combative voice for peace.
Now, well, Pat Buchanan kind of brings this up, too, because a lot of times non-interventionism, particularly in Middle Eastern affairs, is labeled anti-Semitism.
And part of the legacy of the anti-war right is the America First movement from before World War Two.
And I guess if I can refer back to my ninth grade understanding again, these guys were a bunch of pro-Nazis, basically, who were doing everything they could to keep FDR from saving the world.
Well, that is the that's what the most rabid of FDR's publicists, people like Harold Kikis said.
In fact, the America First Committee was the I mean, there's been a great historical injustice done to the America First Committee.
It was the largest anti-war movement in American history, had 800,000 members.
It was founded at Yale Law School.
Its founding group included people like Sergeant Shriver, who went on to head the Peace Corps and who was George McGovern's running mate in 1972.
Potter Stewart, who was a Supreme Court justice.
Kingman Brewster, who went on to be president of Yale University.
R.
Douglas Stewart, who went on to be CEO of Quaker Oats.
Young John Kennedy over at Harvard was enthusiastic and was a contributor to the committee.
Its adult members included people like Ellis Roosevelt Longworth, who was Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, young Gore Vidal, young Kurt Vonnegut, who was at Cornell at the time, Hanford McNighter, head of the American Legion.
There were many Jewish Americans who were involved.
The pacifist Milton Mayer was sympathetic.
There were key staffers or people like Jimmy Lipzig, Congresswoman Florence Kahn, Julius Rosenwald of Serge Roebuck was for a time on the executive committee.
The anti-Semitic smear in the case of the America First Committee all comes down to one speech Charles Lindbergh gave September 11, 1941.
No one else in the committee vetted it.
They didn't know he was going to deliver it.
He said, look, there are three groups pushing the U.S. toward war.
They are the Roosevelt administration, the English and the Jews.
The only group for which he offered sympathetic exculpation were Jewish Americans.
He said, you know, anyone with any kind of conscience is outraged by the Hitlerian infamies and all the horrible things going on over there.
And yet this one speech by one man, I mean, Lindbergh, I don't know that he ever even officially joined the committee.
He was just his most popular speaker because he was probably the most famous man in the world.
So even if one object to Lindbergh's speech, I mean, should one speech by one man tar, you know, an 800,000 strong anti-war group?
Well, the answer is yes, if you're a textbook writer.
The fact that Jane Fonda did that stupid cradling of the anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam, does that discredit the whole peace movement of the 60s?
I don't think it should.
Well, that really does speak to the power of the official narrative to run things.
And I guess to finish up, where do you look for the alternative narrative nowadays?
We mentioned Pat Buchanan, the American conservative magazine.
Where else do you find the anti-war right today?
Well, I think I think the good thing is that it's since the conservative movement is essentially dead and we're going to reap, you know, no, no more categories, maybe, or at least let's redefine the categories.
There are a lot of great people on the left.
Hell, in some ways, I'm on the left.
A lot of good folks in the green movement, big fan of Ralph Nader, obviously the libertarians with their skepticism of war, their knowledge that war is the health of the state.
You said the American conservative magazine.
I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of good stuff happening out here.
And it doesn't have a high public profile, but it's all linked.
And I think the cement maybe is people who care about their own backyards more than they care about Baghdad.
Yeah, well, that ought to be all of us, I think.
Well, actually, according to the latest opinion poll, it's a super majority anyway by now.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your time today.
I highly recommend this book to everybody.
On top of being a great history, it's actually very funny and is a good read all the way through.
Ain't My America, the long, noble history of anti-war conservatism and middle-American anti-imperialism by Bill Kaufman.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
