As Bill Kauffman makes clear, true conservatives have always resisted the imperial and military impulse: it drains the treasury, curtails domestic liberties, breaks down families, and vulgarizes culture. From the Federalists who opposed the War of 1812, to the striving of Robert Taft (known as "Mr. Republican") to keep the United States out of Korea, to the latter-day libertarian critics of the Iraq war, there has historically been nothing freakish, cowardly, or even unusual about antiwar activists on the political right. And while these critics of U.S. military crusades have been vilified by the party of George W. Bush, their conservative vision of a peaceful, decentralized, and noninterventionist America gives us a glimpse of the country we could have had--and might yet attain.
Now we only have to sit back and wait for the glowing reviews from Victor Davis Hanson in National Review and perhaps, Fred Barnes in the Weakly Standard. It is being published by the American Empire Project, who should take a lesson from ISI Books and host a group blog along the lines of Reactionary Radicals.
The only catch is that we must wait until next April to get the book.
2 comments:
Too bad about the wait but the writings of Bill Kauffman, "the sage of Batavia" as Gore Vidal called him, are very much worth waiting for. His is a noble effort to redeem the once eminently respectable title of "conservative" from the clutches of the statist, war- and fear-mongering imperialists who now rule us.
This is great news and I thank you for posting it. There's something to be said for us Western New Yorkers.
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