For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
And up next, he, I guess, is a surprise guest.
We just got it arranged thanks to the hard work of Angela Keaton.
It's Christopher Mannion, whose bio I do not have in front of me, but who's been a guest on this show before.
Welcome back to the show, Christopher.
How are you?
Well, thanks.
It's good to be back.
I'm sorry, I didn't have a chance to get your bio pulled up here.
Tell us who you are.
Well, I write for a Catholic newspaper, the oldest one in the country, and I've taught many years, usually in the political theory and international relations area.
And I'm not a lawyer.
Oh, well, thank God for that.
I have other vices.
Yeah, that would be a problem if you were a lawyer.
We wouldn't want to talk to you.
Okay, well, and anyway, I often read you at the blog over at LewRockwell.com, and I'm actually looking at a blog entry that you put up there on the 20th, National Review to Constitution.
Get lost.
And this is, well, I'll just read the opening sentence here.
National Review has discovered the winning theme for Scott Brown's victory and for a Republican resurgence in 2010.
Torture works.
Is that how it is over at the National Review, Christopher?
Well, I don't think that they're going to get very far advocating or even trying to defend a torture policy as good for America, good for national security, good for freedom.
It just doesn't work.
Well, and you know, isn't this interesting thing?
I was just talking with Ron Paul, and one of the things I mentioned to him was how I saw this interview with Rachel Maddow, and of course she has her own personal reasons, I guess, or political reasons, partisan reasons, for wanting to highlight faction fights on the right.
But that being the case, I think she still really was onto something when she said to Ron Paul that basically, at least in the Republican Party, if not the right in general, in the Republican Party, there are really two leaders, two diametrically opposed leaders.
One of them is Dick Cheney, and the other is Ron Paul.
And that really is the split here between the Libertarians and, what would you call them, the National Review guys?
I mean, Andrew McCarthy's not a neocon, is he?
I don't know him.
He's just a regular con.
I mean, he never was, as far as I know, his past, he never was, you know, a radical leftist like, say, Joshua Mravchik or any of those guys.
Well, here's what's gonna happen.
And you're talking to a guy who was 14 years old outside the 1960 Chicago Convention, where Barry Goldwater was defeated by Dick Nixon for the Republican nomination.
I've been doing this a long time.
And what is going on right now, the young conservatives from those days, nowadays are, like me, pretty close to what used to be retirement age.
And they're looking at how the conservative movement might come back.
Now, many of them are involved in the GOP, and many of them are deeply involved in what I call the Beltway Trough.
The slush fund that is going out to so many people who are working in campaigns and what I would call the GOP establishment is one part of the party that is very powerful, it's very well financed, and it's very experienced.
On the other hand, you have what I consider to be a very widespread Ron Paul style, popular explosion of not only indignation, but of clear thinking about where the country needs to go.
Those two populations, the small population of the DC insiders in the GOP, including the conservatives, and the broad swath of increasingly independent people like me, who are interested in principle and freedom, rather than the GOP.
Those are the two, what I call what I would describe as the two currents within the conservative movement today.
And they are not necessarily compatible.
Well, and you know, it's interesting, too, that you have this whole Sarah Palin thing where basically she represents the policies of the Cheneyites, but in the form of an aw shucks, you know, kind of Midwestern mom, and she talks like she's from Minnesota or something, her accent.
She seems like she's a Tea Party populist, and yet really represents the authoritarian side of the right, for sure.
Well, she doesn't represent that to everyone.
My 12-year-old daughter read her book in four days, and she just got a letter from her.
And what she represents to my daughter is an average gal who played basketball, who goes hunting, like my daughter's dad, me, who loves the outdoors, and who doesn't like Washington and people from Washington.
Now, that image is very well projected.
It's a strong one.
Admittedly, I don't like the fact that she blew off Phyllis Schlafly at the Minnesota convention and met with AIPAC for a day instead.
I thought that was an embarrassment, because her core population are the pro-family people that I really identify with, and she gave them the back of her hand and went with the people that McCain's staff shoved her towards instead.
That shows a lack of spine, and I think that it's been evident ever since.
However, look at the other side of the spectrum, where the left hates her.
Every day you see an avalanche of contempt for her, and I think the reason is that they don't want to talk about John Edwards.
When you compare John Edwards to Sarah Palin, she comes off looking pretty well.
Well, I mean, John Edwards, he's already out of it anyway, right?
He's not running for president again.
Who cares about that?
He was as close to the presidency as she ever was.
Yeah.
He was John Kerry's running mate.
But here's the thing, though.
I mean, she goes around threatening the world with atomic weapons in ways that John Edwards never did, and she's absolutely horrible.
She did a thing on 60 Minutes where she said, the Palestinians, in effect, don't exist, and the Israelis can have all of the West Bank, as far as she's concerned, and Iran better look out, too, because we all know they're on the verge of nuclear weapons, and she's as bad as George Bush on his worst day.
I agree with you, but the guys I play bluegrass with don't know that.
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
That's really what I'm getting at, is there's this narrative where she said, oh, I'm a maverick just like Ron Paul.
That's why I like Ron Paul.
So there's this image fit for a 12-year-old, no offense to your daughter, that this woman is basically the female Ron Paul, but from up north and whatever, when in fact, she's the female Dick Cheney or John McCain when it comes to policy.
The whole hunting soccer mom thing is irrelevant to what she wants to do with the power.
I agree, but symbols are very important in politics, and she has a powerful set of symbols working for her that, to the average person, speak of anti-Washington all the way.
Well, as far as she can actually get people to despise Washington, I guess that's useful, but it's another obstacle for the actual Ron Paulian types who really mean it.
For the long haul, I think that she's going to be ephemeral, but in the meantime, tell me, besides Sarah Palin and Ron Paul, who was there in the GOP that represented principled opposition?
Now, mind you, I'm not saying she did.
Symbolic opposition?
Absolutely.
Ron Paul, principled opposition.
Absolutely.
Well, and I'll go you further.
I mean, the Republican Party has no leadership at all.
Mitch McConnell is their most powerful leader in the U.S. Senate.
The only real brain that they have that I can tell is Newt Gingrich, and everybody hates his guts across the board.
So, I mean, they really have nobody to turn to except for Ron Paul if they really want to answer their question, other than tie him up and then beat him up, which is Cheney's answer to everything.
Well, this reverts back to the issue I talked about of this generation of conservatives.
A lot of them don't want to let go, but people like Paul Weyrich, God rest him, on the conservative side, and Richard Vigery both agreed that it's the next generation, not this generation of trough dwellers who have contradicted and sold out so many times in the hot tub.
They think the Washington sewer is a hot tub by now.
It's going to be a new generation, and true conservative leaders advocate that, and frankly, we are telling our colleagues, step back and let the new guys handle this, because this generation is tainted.
It's been bought and sold so many times.
How many friends that I've worked with on Capitol Hill?
My boss was Jesse Helms.
There are a lot of guys up there who immediately went out, started adding a zero or two by funneling federal money to various contractors in various countries, and they're making a million a year.
These people aren't conservative leaders.
Well, and so I'm interested in how it got this way.
I'm sure the audience is interested in how it got this way, especially from the point of view of a guy who supported Goldwater in 1960 and has witnessed the entire change inside the Republican Party, where the old liberal Rockefeller Republicans were kind of replaced by the Reaganite conservatives, and then the history of this neoconservative movement, which to read Justin Raimondo or Pat Buchanan or Paul Gottfried or any of the self-proclaimed paleos, the neoconservative movement, it still seems, I guess, to you guys like this alien thing that somehow came and installed itself inside conservatism and then won out against you guys who consider yourselves the real conservatives.
Can you just kind of tell us that story over, you know, how it went down over the generations?
We got plenty of time here.
Well, it's actually the same old story.
The conservative, Pat Buchanan in his introduction to the republication of the conscience of a conservative in 1990, that was 30 years after my father published it when no one else would.
My father recruited Goldwater to write that book and published it, and we sold a lot of copies in 30 years.
But Regner republished it, and Pat Buchanan said something that was very insightful.
He said back then in the 60s, there were no conservative opportunists because there was no opportunity for conservatives.
Once conservatives started gaining traction and the ideas started moving millions, then came the guys who were going to ride this horse for their career, and they were the opportunists and they were the self-dealers and they were the unprincipled hacks.
The David Gergens of the world come to mind.
He worked down the hall from me once.
These guys are totally self-oriented, and this is nothing new.
The only reason they were called conservatives, and this came again just last week in the Washington Post, E.J.
Dionne, who was their liberal in residence, said, we can't call ourselves liberal.
It's such an unattractive term to the public.
That's been true for 30 years.
So these people weren't going to be calling themselves neoliberals, even though they believe the neoconservatives in a very strong central government, and they believe in twisting the constitution to serve the power and the glory of the United States as they envision it as a leader, not only of the free world, but as a country which is above head and shoulders above all the other countries in the world.
And because of its inner intrinsic morality deserves to lead the rest of the world.
Now this is Jacobin.
This is the theory of the revolutionaries in France and just before the revolution in 1789 and the people who handled, who ran the guillotines.
This is not conservative.
It's called conservative only because that was a more popular term for the last 40 years than liberal was, but it's liberal and leftist through and through.
Well, and that's really the thing, right?
Is if you go back and look, it was, you know, I grew up in Austin, Texas.
And so, you know, in one neighborhood, you know, people were more liberal.
And then in another neighborhood, they were more conservative because Austin's this liberal town in the middle of Texas, massive conservative state, right?
So I'm a purist libertarian because from such a young age, I was exposed to the best and worst of the left and right.
And I got to keep the best of it.
And what the neocons did, this is, this makes the neocons kind of the evil cousins of libertarians, I think, because they're not really liberal or conservative leftist or rightist either.
They're kind of middle of the road too, but they take the very worst of both philosophies and combine them together.
So we need an unlimited state at home and unlimited state abroad, the exact opposite.
And in fact, you know, my friend Angela Keaton grew up around all these politics in New York City when she was a kid.
And she explained how there's a very kind of social class kind of thing going on here too, where, you know, the old establishment were basically the wasps, or that's what they would be called, not necessarily that all of them were, but that the libertarians and the neocons, those movements kind of grew up together.
And they were mostly made up of Catholics and Jews and people who were sort of upper middle class, able to go to college, but not born rich types.
And that they all had their grudges against the old wasp establishment.
But the libertarians, of course, eschewing power didn't take over the power.
And the neocons worshipping power, of course, came to kind of make their own establishment, as Jacob Hilburn describes it in his book, to replace the old wasps.
Can you talk about that?
Well, I think back in the 1970s, the neoconservatives admittedly were former leftists.
I worked at American Enterprise Institute 30 years ago with Michael Novak, a leading neoconservative Catholic, who was a left wing Democrat who turned against the Vietnam, the anti-Vietnam.
He was against the war in Vietnam and slowly saw that the anti-war movement, in his view, was essentially just a pro-communist movement.
I worked with Gene Kirkpatrick there.
I was a new guy right out of grad school.
But I think that their anti-communism, now I mean by that the anti-Soviet communism, was so prevalent that they became disheartened and disillusioned in their old, very avid pro-leftist vocations, which had been very strong through the 50s and the 60s.
This is true of Irving Kristol, the young Trotskyist, and so on.
So a lot of people there changed and became anti-communist, but they didn't become anti-government.
They still believed in the same old dialectical dimension, and many of them dialectical materialists.
Marxists through and through, but critics of the Soviet communist experiment, which had gone off the rails.
Right, Trotskyism versus Stalinism.
Correct.
Plus they were Americans, so that makes perfect sense that they would take America's side against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
And then of course you have the new left movement where the liberals turned anti-war during Vietnam there at the end of the 1960s, and I guess these neocons couldn't take that.
Yes.
I think what they recognized was the need, and this is very constant in the left.
I spent years plowing through Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin back in the 60s and 70s when any educated political scientist had to know the enemy.
They were the enemy.
And one of the features of Marxism, if you go back to Karl Marx in 1840 to 1845, his most contemptuous, vile criticism he reserved for his fellow leftists.
Not the bourgeois, but the competition for power, because the soul of the left is acquire power and keep it.
And with the neocons, they think that power is fine as long as they and their intelligent and sophisticated and genteel friends wield it.
It's just wrong when the wrong people have power.
Now the libertarians, the constitutionalists, and the, you call them paleocons, but I think the people that really believe in the soil and in their neighborhood and their church, what they're fighting for are historical realities and not some concept.
Those people all reject the fundamental lies of pro-government ideology.
And they revert to very limited government.
And it's a very Christian concept since Augustine that government has to be limited because it can't save your soul for you.
To this day, the only source of truly limited government philosophy is Christianity and its insistence that government is limited because the most important goal of man is salvation and the government can't give it to you.
Well, and so here's the problem though.
There's a whole thing in the conservative movement, in the most broadly defined sense.
In fact, let me take that even back and just say in the sort of country versus rock and roll, red, blue, Vegas sort of cultural split, where on the right people like to prove how much they love their country by loudly supporting the ass kicking of others.
And these are people who are not former radical Trotskyites of any kind or arms manufacturers or anybody, but they are pro-war.
And it's the blurring together completely of patriotism, as you describe it, and nationalism, the kind that can destroy a society.
And it seems like to me, John Basil Utley, who's another one of, I would assume, your contemporaries.
Do you know, John?
Marvelous man.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think his thing when, I'm not even sure, but I guess it was at the dawn of the war on terror.
He created an organization called Americans Against World Empire, adopting Carol Quigley's phrase for the last stage of a civilization before it dies, and saying that this is the definition of conservatism.
I think this is what Pat Buchanan, at least in writing, is always trying to do, is say that the first definition of conservatism is that you oppose empire.
It's impossible to be a conservative and a nationalist imperialist at the same time.
Now, how do you get that through the head of all the people who I think you would identify with as your natural kind of, you know, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin fan, conservatives out there, but who end up falling for the ideology of a Paul Wolfowitz, who's got some crazy Jacobin scheme up his sleeve?
Well, they don't trot those schemes out to the public.
I told you Sarah Palin used symbols very effectively.
So did George Bush.
Now, he wrung out those symbols of any remaining content so that patriotism suddenly became a seal of approval for torture.
But he used those symbols, and the value of those symbols is still very powerful, even if they're empty.
Symbol in politics, the flag, for instance.
Remember flag burners?
There are still people in the Senate and House who support legislation to prevent the burning of a flag.
They are not looking behind a symbol to see what its content is or to see what it represents anymore, or to see how it has been used and abused by people in power or people who want power.
They don't have any second thoughts.
When I was at my nephew's graduation from Annapolis a couple of years ago, first in his class, Cheney spoke and left, and then the chief of naval operations got up, and it was the middle of the Iraq period.
He said, now you young men and women will be fighting for an idea.
An idea.
I wanted to shout up and stand up and scream.
You're not fighting for an abstraction.
You're fighting for your family, your wife, your daughters, your husband.
You're fighting for your neighbors.
You're fighting for your church.
You're fighting for your farm.
These are realities.
If you're fighting for an abstraction, anybody can grab that abstraction or that symbol and pour whatever content they want into it, and that is the recipe for tyranny.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Christopher Mannion.
You can find his blog entries often at lewrockwell.com slash blog.
Thank you very much, sir, for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Take care.
