Revolt from the Heartland

The Struggle for an Authentic Conservatism

Joseph A. Scotchie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780765801289
• eBook ISBN: 9781351324540
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The dominant forces of American conservatism remain wedded, at all costs, to the Republican Party, but another movement, one with its roots in the pre-World War II era, has stepped forth to fill an intellectual vacuum on the right. This Old Right first rose in opposition to the New Deal, fighting both statism at home and the emergence of an American empire abroad. More recently this movement, sometimes called paleoconservatism, has provided the ideological backbone of modern populism and the opposition to globalization, with decisive effects on presidential politics. In Revolt from the Heartland, Joseph Scotchie provides an intellectual history of the Old Right, treating its main figures and defining its conflict with the traditional left-right political mainstream.

As Scotchie's account makes clear, the Old Right and its descendents have articulated an arresting and powerful worldview. They include an array of learned and provocative writers, including M.E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Murray Rothbard, and more recently, Clyde Wilson, Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis, and Chilton Williamson, Jr. Beginning with the movement's anti-Federalist forerunners, Scotchie traces its developments over two centuries of American history. In the realm of politics and economics, he examines the anti-imperialist stance against the Spanish-American War and the League of Nations, the split among conservatives on Cold War foreign policy, and the hostility to the socialist orientation of the New Deal. Identifying a number of social and cultural attitudes that define the Old Right, Scotchie finds the most important to be the importance of the classics, a recognition of regional cultures, the primacy of family over state, the moral case against immigration. In general, too, a Tenth Amendment approach to such recurring issues as education, abortion, and school prayer characterizes the group.

As Scotchie makes clear, the Old Right and its grass-roots supporters have, and continue to be, a powerful force in modern American politics in spite of a lack of institutional support and media recognition. Revolt from the Heartland is an important study of a persisting current in American political life.

1

Reading America

“Our enemies realize that to control the past is to enjoin the future.” So claimed M.E. Bradford in 1986, during a time of Old Right discontent with the administration of Ronald Reagan. When Bradford spoke of “our enemies,” he meant not only the left, but also elements of American conservatism then at loggerheads with the Old Right. Liberals are smart enough to know that the culture wars represent the most important political battles. Paleoconservatives share that sentiment, too. Throughout the twentieth century, American conservative intellectuals have long considered themselves an embattled minority, out of step with an ever-daunting “age of enormity.” The result has been an intense study not only of America’s wrong turns, but Western civilization’s as well.¹

Richard Weaver, for instance, lamented the collapse of the High Middle Ages, the era of knighthood and chivalry. Followers of Edmund Burke, especially Russell Kirk, point to the French Revolution and the rise of egalitarianism under the bloodied slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity” as paving the way for twentieth-century-style tyranny. Eric Voeglin, the famed emigré political scientist, singled out the gnosticism of the first and second centuries, where the first major revolt against Christian dogma took place. What such theses have in common is the leveling of a responsible hierarchy in favor of a revolution characterized by state planning and social engineering. Man may think he is his own “priest and ethics professor,” when in fact, he is a willing ward of the state. Furthermore, most of these calamities point to the fall of a non-materialistic, generally religious society.

Such upheavals, with the exception of the French Revolution, took place by the time the American Revolutionary War was won, the U.S. Constitution was ratified, and with it, the birth of the first republic in the modern world. For the Old Right, this modest attempt at self-government represented at least a chance to build a “refuge from the historical process,” a Switzerland in North America that might escape the decadence and torpor nations inevitably fall into. The struggle to maintain a republic has been the great drama of American history.²

The debate over the ratification of the Constitution itself represented a high-water mark in the intellectual life of the United States. Thirteen colonies had fought a long, eight-year struggle to free themselves from the most powerful nation on earth; a nation to which the leaders of the revolution had once willingly pledged their allegiance. This new-found freedom could easily be squandered by creating a government with the same tyrannical impulses. The ratification debate was highly philosophical, graced with the Founders’ immense knowledge of world history. It focused also on the nature of man and what form of government might best serve to curb his evil instincts. But even that document, widely hailed as America’s great gift to the world, has been a cause of great scrutiny, if not real misgivings among Old Right scholars.

Even more so than Russell Kirk or Murray Rothbard, Bradford, a longtime professor of English at the University of Dallas before his death in 1993, exerted the greatest intellectual influence on the post-Cold War Old Right. For example, the back cover of his 1991 collection, The Reactionary Imperative, contains praise from a Who’s Who of important paleoconservatives: Kirk, Fleming, Clyde Wilson, Samuel Francis, U.S. Senator John East, Chilton Williamson, Jr., and Tom Landess. For Bradford, the convention in Philadelphia represented a great showdown on the desirability of a national government between the Federalists and anti-Federalists. Bradford’s two great heroes of the founding era were Virginia’s Patrick Henry and John Dickinson of Pennsylvania. Henry opposed ratification of the Constitution, while Dickinson, an opponent of the Declaration of Independence, went along with James Madison’s final document.

An all-but-forgotten figure today, Dickinson accepted, but did not vote for the Declaration of Independence, disliking Thomas Jefferson’s “vehement language” concerning what forever could be interpreted as an endorsement for a disastrous equality of results. Dickinson’s writings, especially his “Letters From A Pennsylvania Farmer,” were extremely popular in their day, giving great clarity to the colonies’ revolutionary fervor. His only rival in this sphere was the British author, Tom Paine. But Dickinson stood on much firmer ground than the mercurial Paine. He counseled that history, with its never-ending story of man’s triumphs and follies, and not reason, should be the young republic’s guide when drafting a constitution. Dickinson understood that American-style liberty was rooted firmly in the “English political identity,” itself unique in its emphasis on private property and equality under the law.³

For Bradford, Patrick Henry was the age’s greatest prophet of political decentralization. An opponent of ratification, Henry strongly advised his fellow Southerners not to make a political alliance with gnostic New Englanders. Patrick Henry was the true spokesman of the American Revolution, the electrifying orator who energized the resistance to the Stamp Act and other regressions by King George III. Henry viewed the Revolutionary War as a matter of self-defense and self-preservation; simply the right of the colonies to have self-government. As Russell Kirk long noted, the war did not represent a “revolution made” but one prevented. The real revolutionary was King George III and his attempts to deny the colonies liberties they had long enjoyed under English law.

Henry, however, feared the Federalists’ constitution would upend the gains of the war. Their document would lead to the “divinization of the state” with “men living for government” and government itself “existing for the sake of ideology alone.” A “remote, arbitrary, potentially unfriendly” government might take hold. Patrick Henry’s America, Bradford observed, did not “exist to pursue certain military, economic, moral or philosophical objectives.” Rather, it was comprised of people “living privately in communities, within the ambit of family and friends; living under the eye of God out of the memory of their kind.” While Dickinson recoiled at the “horror of a government forever performing experiments,” Henry held the same feelings for a “totally politicized world.”⁴

An unabashed admirer of these two giants, Bradford’s sympathies were with Henry and the anti-Federalists. Following the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation, whose first draft was penned by the ubiquitous Dickinson, allowed for an alliance between the thirteen states. Each of the former colonies remained a sovereign political entity. Recalling the Old Right debates of the 1930s, Murray Rothbard noted that some conservatives had wanted to “go to all the way back to the Articles of Confederation.” In that same spirit, Lew Rockwell could speak of our “badly flawed Constitution,” while Clyde Wilson would lament that document’s call for “the general welfare” to be tended to, undoubtedly because such a sentiment has forever been interpreted as an excuse for extensive, never-ending government action.⁵

A strict reading of the Constitution, one free of incorporation clauses and hidden meanings, is good enough for the Old Right. Still, it is easy to see why they have always felt a kinship with the anti-Federalists. Not only did they fervently oppose centralized power; the anti-Federalists also placed a great emphasis on a generally homogeneous, religious, and moral society. As with their leader, Patrick Henry, the opposition party feared a strong national government that would eventually undermine the sovereignty of the states. They worried that the Federalists, with such a government, would then lead the young nation on the road toward empire. The anti-Federalists were not, of course, against individual freedom, but such freedom could only endure if it were complemented by republican virtues, by a people with a strong interest in all political affairs, local, national, and foreign, a people whose “manners, sentiments, and interests” were similar. The naturalization of aliens, for instance, should be the domain not of the federal government, but of the states. Why? Because, the states represented a government close to home, they were sensitive to the integrity of local cultures. Here, the anti-Federalists were influenced by the example of Pennsylvania, where not only Benjamin Franklin worried that excessive German immigration might destroy the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic character of that commonwealth.⁶

Furthermore, the anti-Federalists did not view wealth as the measure of a man—or of a nation. Preferring a “simple [and] sturdy” people, the anti-Federalists also believed that a wholly materialistic populace would inevitably become soft, decadent, and spoiled, incapable (and undeserving) of self-government. A strong Christian morality was the underpinning of a virtuous society. The anti-Federalists, according to Herbert Storing, would have strengthened the religious establishments that already existed in several of the former colonies. “Without the prevalence of Christian piety and morals,” one Charles Turner claimed, “the best republican Constitution can never save us from slavery and ruin.”⁷

The great debate was an early example of the losing side exerting influence over the final outcome. While the Federalists secured ratification, the anti-Federalists won the intellectual contest, namely, the war against centralized power. “[Their] ideas,” Samuel Francis maintains, “…have informed the long American tradition of resistance to the leviathan state…appearing in the thought and on the lips of John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, the leaders of the Confederacy, the Populists of the late nineteenth century and the Southern Agrarians of the early twentieth.”⁸

Opponents of empire, most paleos, nonetheless, have said little about the War of 1812, the Indian wars throughout the continent, or the Mexican War, and the idea of Manifest Destiny itself. Once Thomas Jefferson brilliantly executed the Louisiana Purchase from a retreating French Empire, America’s expansion to the Pacific Coast was inevitable. Nineteenth-century America was a young nation with high birthrates, an expanding economy, one populated by a confident, industrious, and often highly moralistic people. Its historic victory over Great Britain only seemed to make the nation more eager to take on all comers. Americans perceived that good land in Texas and the Southwest was being squandered by the Mexican government. That same government also welcomed Anglo settlers into Texas. Some members of the Mexican parliament warned about these Anglos and their desire for land. However, such warnings went unheeded until the newcomers began to outnumber the Mexicans in Texas, a demographic revolution that led to Texas’s independence and its eventual inclusion into the United States. Immigration transformed Texas from a Mexican entity to an American one.⁹

America’s early wars and land expansions, as Pat Buchanan has contended, were a combination of defensive actions and the result of European powers leaving North America. A declining Spanish Empire put Florida up for grabs. American control brought order to that strip of land. When the French gave up on the continent, they left Thomas Jefferson with an offer too good to pass up. The War of 1812 was a reaction to lingering British designs on the continent, as was the Mexican War. If James Polk made a mistake, it was letting the defeated Santa Anna back into Mexico from his exile in Cuba. There, Santa Anna demagogued against America. A border dispute between Mexico and America led to the first shots of a war that would add the entire Southwest, from Texas to California, to the young nation. The 7,000 or so Mexicans of Spanish descent then living in California preferred American rule to Mexican. Still, the war represented another major land grab by the United States. More ominously, it forever altered the delicate population balance that existed in the republic’s early years between the North and South. Going back further, the War of 1812 had its own baneful aftermath. The short conflict led to protectionist legislation in a vain attempt to pay for war costs. Such legislation, in turn, made the tariff issue a serious bone of contention between the two regions. Old Rightists eagerly subscribe to Charles Adams’s thesis that the tariff was the reason for both the Deep South’s secession and Abraham Lincoln’s decision to go to war.¹⁰

And so, the War Between the States was a far more serious story. Here was the first great American catastrophe, the dividing line in American history, a war whose consequences led many conservatives to despair that the old Republic had been vanquished forever. Again, Bradford was a leading light on the revisionist front. He wasn’t the first to criticize the Lincoln legacy, just the most accomplished. Bradford’s Lincoln scholarship is not large (only a handful of essays), but it is sweeping—and, needless to say, it gained him a lasting notoriety among the conservative elite. Bradford attacked Lincoln on rhetorical and practical grounds. Like most Republicans, Lincoln rejected the abolitionists, but like those New Englanders, he often engaged in extreme flights of rhetoric. He was, in fact, the first true revolutionary to occupy the White House. Consider the Gettysburg Address. Calling for a “new birth of freedom” was one thing. Previous presidents were only happy to preserve the genuine birth of republican-style freedom won at Yorktown and Philadelphia. That was all the job entailed. At Gettysburg, Lincoln performed a sleight of hand by attempting to make the Declaration of Independence a governing document. Again, American presidents always understood that only the U.S. Constitution could be used for that purpose. Furthermore, the American nation was never imperiled by the secession of seven, sparsely populated states. Nor was self-government in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth; after all, it existed in numerous nations thousands of miles and oceans apart from America’s shores. Prior to the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s most damaging pronouncement was that the nation, nay, the world, must be “all one thing or all another.” There’s no room for dissent in such sentiments, no room for pluralism, or for distinct cultures to survive and flourish. Even conservatives such as Richard Weaver, who generally admired Lincoln, interpreted that single phrase as paving the way for the coming American empire. It could also serve as a guide for the totalitarian fanatics that defined the twentieth century.¹¹

There was also Lincoln’s handling of the war. He approved and encouraged the total war waged on Southern property and civilians by various federal armies. Here, in Bradford’s view (and many others, including Lincoln’s political opponents of the day), was an American-style tyranny. In one particularly stinging passage from Bradford’s “The Lincoln Legacy: The Long View,” the author charges that Lincoln’s “tenure as dictator” began in April, 1861 with the summoning of a militia, the suspension of federal law (including the right of habeas corpus), military recruitment, a naval blockade of Southern ports, and the pledging of the nation’s credit—all done while Congress was out of session. Throughout the war, Lincoln created both units of government “not known to the Constitution,” including the state of West Virginia; he seized property in both the North and South; arrested thousands of political foes; shut down hundreds of adversary newspapers; interfered with duly elected state legislators (especially using federal troops to ensure a pro-Union victory in Maryland state elections); and finally, “employed the Federal hosts to secure his own reelection,” an election where 38,000 votes cast the other way “might have produced an armistice and negotiated peace under a President McClellan.”¹²

In our jaded world, the ends justify the means, but for Bradford, the Constitution was a sacred trust. Meanwhile, Lincoln would serve as the model many a future president would both envy and seek to emulate.

It is understandable that Bradford, whose ancestors wore the gray, would deliver such a devastating critique. What is notable is that well before Bradford, much of the criticism leveled at Lincoln came from Northern intellectuals: Edmund Wilson, Edgar Lee Masters, H. L. Mencken. Modern-day conservative critics of the sixteenth president were also from the Upper Sixteen, many of them descendants of European immigrants, with no familial roots in the 1860s America. Take the case of Frank S. Meyer, former communist appartchik and native of the industrial city of Newark, New Jersey, or Murray Rothbard, the New York City-born son of an iconoclastic Polish Jewish immigrant. For them, a legacy of the war was the rise of centralized power in a nation whose Founding Fathers held a dim view of an energetic, all-powerful national government. Meyer, for one, saw the Lincoln administration as the baneful predecessor to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Such criticism held some currency during the vibrant conservative debates of the late 1950s. A damning critique came also from Joseph Sobran. American principles of self-government, even taken to the point of secession (which the young Lincoln himself endorsed as a congressman opposed to the Mexican War) were washed away, maybe forever, by the War Between the States. “There is no exit from the federal government’s jurisdiction,” Sobran lamented in a 1996 column, “no matter how badly it abuses or exceeds its constitutional powers. That is the ultimate meaning of ‘Saving the Union.’”¹³

Not all conservatives, even those on the Old Right, would vilify Lincoln. Richard Weaver always claimed that Lincoln’s “argument from definition,” one based on individual freedom and reform according to law, was a good enough rhetorical model for conservatives to follow. Russell Kirk would champion Lincoln as a “common clay defender of order.” Kirk acknowledged that Lincoln fought for union rather than abolition, that he wanted the freeman relocated in the West Indies or South America. Still, Lincoln was a president who would have practiced moderation in peacetime. The defeated South, if Lincoln had his way, would have been spared the horrors of reconstruction. Like Bradford, Andrew Lytle was highly critical of Lincoln’s war policies, but he was also convinced that Lincoln’s “malice toward none, charity towards all” stand, inspired by the learned horrors of a total war policy, was sincere, even though the running dogs of radical Republicanism would never allow that to happen. Such opinions, however, increasingly became minority ones. Lincol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Reading America
• 2. The First Old Right
• 3. Cold War Conservatism
• 4. The Chapel Hill Conspiracy
• 5. Suicide of the West—Again
• 6. Against American Empire
• 7. What the Old Right is For
• 8. The Survival Question
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index