“In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.” Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby, who died Tuesday, was largely correct about that. As Bill Kauffman wrote in our pages three years ago:
Oglesby rejected the “socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal” and challenged the New Left to embrace “American democratic populism” and “the American libertarian right.”
Invoking Senator Taft, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Congressman Buffett, and Saturday Evening Post writer Garet Garrett, among other stalwarts of the Old Right, he asked, “Why have the traditional opponents of big, militarized, central authoritarian government now joined forces with such a government’s boldest advocates?” What in the name of Thomas Jefferson were conservatives doing holding the bag for Robert Strange McNamara?
Antiwar.com’s Eric Garris further highlights the libertarian side of Oglesby here.
I can vaguely recall Murray Rothbard, at the 1979 Cato summer seminar at Dartmouth, mentioning with approval Oglesby’s speculative work from 1976, The Yankee and Cowboy War, in which the flashlit power struggles between rival northeast and southwest financial-electoral blocs played across the divers shadows of the Kennedy-through-Nixon years.
From the tribute to Oglesby by Jesse Walker over at reason:
“The center-left establishment, [Oglesby] felt, was much more dangerous than the free-market right.”
Neither of them has ever really posed a threat to this country’s sole tradition in the political economy, that of a mildly reformist, relentlessly centralizing corporate liberalism whose manifest destiny came to embrace the entire planet, and thence unto space itself. American culture has never really produced an ongoing conservative tradition capable of competing with its default liberalism: American capitalism permanently underwrites our signature New York dailies and weeklies, our publishing houses, and our prestige research universities, in ways with which their “counterparts” on the right can never hope to compete, as a perusal of the shriveled, party-line cultural content in, e.g., National Review, (the post-1970) Commentary, The Weekly Standard, demonstrate in every issue. You will never see, coming from the right, an answer to the Encounter of c. 1962-1967, with the jaw-dropping density of its contributors drawn from a dozen national literatures, and the very cream of 1960s academic humanism. For one thing, the locus of money and its handmaiden power in America lies always and everywhere in the modern corporation, which is anything but right-wing. For another, the right itself is overwhelmingly political rather than cultural in its priorities – conservatives who choose the hard slog of grad school in the humanities are outnumbered by a factor of around 30 to 1, if not more: right-wing talent has a tendency to self-siphon, practically from high school, into the hothouse of “movement” activity and its Byzantine network of alternative, talking-points media outlets. And the minute a writer of real range and depth and general culture appears in the back of the right-wing book, he will view his early venues as derivative farm teams, and head for the greener pastures and the tall grass of the higher-paying flagships of Gotham and DC, a phenomenon that neither began nor ended with that first-wave NR diaspora (Wills, Didion, Davenport, Kenner, &c.) whose ticketed-to-ride graduates led WFB to muse plaintively that he had not figured on running a finishing school for apostates.
And by the way, that “center-left establishment”, however often it issues its share of “globaloney” and middlebrow mush, is anything but a monolith – for every NYT/WaPo editorial page, it gives birth to (or absorbs), e.g., the Columbia Encyclopedia, a rich annual harvest of first-rate university-press titles, a rich presence in the TLS (British, yes, but with substantial stateside academic-publishing advertising and humanist contributors, many far from the dominant Boston-Washington axis), Dwight Macdonald doing politics (and Politics) by other means in his attacks in The New Yorker on the cultural division of the prevailing “lib-lab”
mush, and such uncomplacently “liberal” anti-ideological academic humanists as John Searle, Martin Malia, Richard Taruskin, Robert Nisbet, Jacques Barzun, John Lukacs, George Kennan, Joseph Frank, Czeslaw Milosz, Leszek Kolakowski, Robert Conquest, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert Alter, Daniel Bell…for top-of-head starters: none the product of “movement” culture, all worth arguing with – and indispensable in helping the general reader to educate himself.
And that is not even to discuss the work being done in the sciences, whose disciplines – in two senses of the word – all too often show up the modish derangements prevailing, at less enduring levels beneath that of those mentioned above, among their humanist colleagues, and whose import, flowering over time, in restoring to us the primacy of nature over nurture, cannot but plant depth charges under the calm surface of the social-engineering imperatives of the age…