The following opinion editorial was a response to Ryan Girdusky’s column, Why Neocons Created The Alt-Right. Interested in contributing to Red Alert? Find out more here.
Conservatism has changed throughout U.S. history from the country-club, alt-right to neoconservative and other variations of the right side of the American political spectrum. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a significant base of supporters who identify on the alt-right — a bigoted, xenophobic ideology that cannot even be considered conservative, neo or otherwise.
Ideologically, neoconservatism embraces the mainstream conservative tenants of freedom and capitalism, while the alt-right bemoans those principles. While the alt-right embraces racism, neoconservatives endorsed Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. Additionally, neoconservatism domestically is a flexible principle. Irving Kristol — known as the “godfather of neoconservatism” — said that to preserve democracy, government intervention and budget deficits may sometimes be necessary. Furthermore, while George W. Bush — who is said to have been influenced by the neoconservative persuasion — may have increased the quantitative size of government, the issue, as former Reagan adviser Henry Nau wrote in his book Conservative Internationalism, should not be the absolute size of government, but rather the size of government relative to society. (Under the Obama administration, government has grown relative to society through imposing regulations such as transgender bathroom requirements, etc.)
On the other hand, the alt-right, led by Pat Buchanan, decries the shared mainstream and neoconservative belief of free-market capitalism. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Buchanan now favors caps on executive salaries, expansion of Medicare benefits, and high trade barriers. He fumes about the excesses of Wall Street and the free market.”
Goldberg adds, “[Buchanan] writes in The Great Betrayal: ‘Better the occasional sins of a government acting out of the spirit of charity than the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference’…That could easily come from It Takes A Village. Indeed, Buchanan’s policies on immigration and culture and his support affirmative-action quotas for non-Jewish whites amount to what my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru calls ‘identity politics for white people.’”
In fact, the alt-right isn’t conservative whatsoever. Noah Rothman of Commentary magazine — a staple within neoconservative circles — writes, “This is a movement that rejects conservative policy prescriptions ranging from the need to reform entitlements to the very idea of limited government. They mock reverence for the Constitution as mere idol worship. The limitations the Constitution imposes on the federal government represent an unacceptable impediment to their preferred program. They reject the notion of an extroverted American foreign policy, preferring instead the appeal of retrenchment and the fantasy of Fortress America. This is a movement that mocks social conservatism, defined as reverence for traditional mores and values, as backward religiosity.”
Last year, former senior Bush aide Tevi Troy wrote in Commentary how the GOP, influenced by neoconservative policy, changed its tone from anti-Semitic to accepting, especially from being hostile to hospitable toward the US-Israel relationship. But, this wasn’t so for the alt-right. “Open anti-Semitism reared its head as well, in the personages of the writers Patrick J. Buchanan (a protest candidate for president in 1992 and 1996) and Joseph Sobran. When Buchanan called Congress ‘Israeli-occupied territory,’ he was not only giving foul voice to a classic anti-Semitic theme but was accurately reflecting the fact that by this point, anti-Israel sentiment on Capitol Hill had become a mark of extremism in both parties,” Troy writes. “More important, both Sobran and Buchanan received a very public cold shoulder from the mainstream conservative movement. William F. Buckley Jr. himself wrote a long indictment of his friend Sobran in National Review and consigned his and Buchanan’s brand of Jew-hatred to the margins of the conservative movement.”
As Troy correctly indicates, neocons kicked Buchanan and his alt-right cult to the curb. Imagine if the neocons and their “hawkish” policy didn’t come into existence. Would Reagan have been influenced to change the status quo from détente to directly telling Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall?” As Goldberg notes, “Neoconservatism is a product of the Cold War.” Had the alt-right — with its isolationist “America-first” attitude — been center stage in the Reagan administration, the Berlin Wall would likely not have fell in 1989.
Ryan Girdusky writes, “The alt-right only exists because the neocons failed at governing, and the few traditional intellectual conservatives left writing today refuse to adapt to the 140-character, headline-driven news media.” He’s wrong.
Not all of America’s politicians are neoconservative. The alt-right has made its presence public because Washington consists of a broken system of conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, who have failed at representing the American people. Trump has expressed this frustration, resulting in the resurrection of the alt-right.
