There is no antiwar Right, at least not beyond the very limited number of contributors to and readers of magazines like Chronicles and The American Conservative. We could all fit into a college football stadium and still have plenty of seats to spare. There is, to be sure, a conservative intellectual tradition critical of war and militarism that outshines anything the belligerent Right or neoconservatives can offer. To one extent or another, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakeshott, John Lukacs, and Russell Kirk are all in the anti-militarist camp. Up to a point, right-wing militarists can be brought around to the side of peace and nonintervention by showing them that the best conservative arguments are against war, especially total war, and a quasi-imperial foreign policy. But the number of conservatives who are smart enough to understand such arguments, or interested enough to listen, is very small indeed.

It gets steadily harder to deny that militarism is the sine qua non of “conservatism” as it is actually practiced in America. So perhaps Lieberman’s bedfellows are not so strange as they might appear, regardless of whether Lamont or any of the rest of us who oppose this stupid bloody war are “far Left” or not. ~Daniel McCarthy

I’d like to be able to say that there was more of a constituency out there for the antiwar Right, that there are just hordes of real conservatives waiting to be shown the right path or waiting to be woken out of their stupour, but it isn’t so and I think I realised that it wasn’t so after ’04.  The Khaki Elections of ’02 and ’04 confirmed a lot of my suspicions. 

For one thing, it confirmed that trusting the good sense of the people was a bad idea; for another, that there is no policy so misguided that it will not win public approval at the time if it is dressed up as something that will enhance “security”; finally, that there are very few conservatives left whom any of the men Mr. McCarthy mentions would recognise as such, which means that there are very few left period.  That is not really meant as an accusation here, but simply an observation.   

We are seeing the divide that Prof. Lukacs has been talking about for years (and I’m paraphrasing more than a little here)–the split between patriots and nationalists, people who prefer the village common, so to speak, to concrete jungles and those who would rather walk down Main Street to the neighbourhood shops than drive thirty minutes to Wal-Mart to save $5.  These groups might not all perfectly overlap, but they are likely to cross paths more often than not.  In my experience, I routinely find myself more in sympathy with my green and “far-left” friends (and I tend to have far more friends of this stripe), most of whom have probably identified with the “far-left” because they were unaware that there was a humane, decent and moral alternative on the Right now or ever–and no wonder they didn’t know about it, considering what passes for the mainstream of conservatism.  They are typically among the more sane and decent people I know.  Obviously, we are not in agreement on everything, and they can no more really understand my religion than I understand their enthusiasm for activism, but there is a surprising amount of common ground for people who are supposed to be diametrically opposed to one another. 

As it happens, I am fairly sure that Lamont is a pretty conventional liberal Democrat in most respects, and while he is against the Iraq war (and good for him that he is) his other policy positions on foreign and domestic affairs are perfectly routine and predictable–they might as well come out of the “consensus” script.  This is especially why the charges of far-left extremism are a joke–not only is it no longer “far-left” or “far-right” to oppose the Iraq war (if 60% oppose the war, that makes the “moderates” into the oddballs), but Ned Lamont hardly fits the former label in any sense.  I know a number of far leftists, far leftists are friends of mine, and Mr. Lamont is not one of them.  But on Iraq, at least, he is a lot closer to them–and to me–than the shrieking banshees who are howling about poor Joe Lieberman, which would tend to put him in more of the “patriot” than “nationalist” camp and that seems like a very good place to be.