Anthony Gregory, the Right, and War

Tuesday, Cinqo de Mayo, at the MLK Library in San Jose, was the first time my dad talked to a real-life anarcho-capitalist besides me and knew it. Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute and LRC was there speaking about anti-war sentiment on the political right.

There is a movement today called Paleoconservatism (think Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan) which casts its wistful gaze on a group in the mythical past called the “Old Right”. This group had a classically-liberal stance on economic issues and opposed the expansion of power in the Federal Government. Since it opposed big government, it also opposed war.

There is a lot of room in “Conservatism” for anti-war sentiment. If by “Conservative” we mean respect for religious tradition, appreciation of national heritage, love of individual freedom and distrust of big government, then conservatives have to be anti-war. In his writings on Just War, the 13th century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas established that a war is not just unless it meets three conditions: it has a just cause (it isn’t a land grab for oil or anything like that), it’s fought through just means (unarmed civilians aren’t killed), and it’s winnable (an unwinnable war is needless bloodshed). This doctrine is a cornerstone of Catholic and protestant opinion on war. If we were to take our Christian heritage seriously, then we wouldn’t be so quick to defend America’s land grabs that kill civilians and can’t be won. In fact, we probably wouldn’t defend any war that the US has engaged in.

There is plenty of room in our limited-government heritage for anti-war attitudes. Edmund Burke, the supposed founder of conservatism, condemned British Imperialism in India and the Americas, and sympathized with that bunch of violent malcontents and illegal enemy combatants we call the American Revolutionaries. James Madison wrote that of all the threats to liberty, war is the greatest, for in it sits the germ for every other threat. War requires soldiers, who must be armed and fed, and that requires taxes.

Justin Raimondo, an editor and columnist on Antiwar.com, wrote in his book Reclaiming the American Right that there is an ideological continuum from the Old Right to the modern Paleoconservative and libertarian movements, that these groups were all markedly conservative compared to their opponents, and that today’s Neocons are the ideological spawn of Marxists, Socialists, and the Social Democrats who infested American politics and dominated during the war regimes of Wilson, FDR, Truman, and LBJ (all of whom were Democrats).

This “We are the real conservatives” view of anti-war conservatism is criticized by Jeff Riggenbach in his book Why American History Is Not What They Say. His chapter “The Myth of the Old Right” shows that the people in the Old Right weren’t really conservatives. They were just a bunch of pissed off liberals. They were in the classical paradigm of big government on the right and liberals on the left. Though their views on economics look a bit Reaganesque and would be conservative by our standards, they thought of themselves as relatively leftist. They voted for FDR because he condemned Hoover’s intervention in the economy and predicted it would only make the Depression worse, he called for preserving the gold standard, and he decried big government in general. After FDR did the exact opposite of what he promised, they all got disaffected and started speaking with reactionary overtones. Then comes the era of Ayn Rand’s novels about blowing up concrete eyesores and whatnot.

Riggenbach’s criticisms fall in line with the “We are the real liberals” view. From this perspective, the Neocons aren’t anything new when it comes to warmongering on the right. Conservatism has always had something to do with preserving presently-existing power structures, and has always worshiped authority, war, and the nation. The political right wasn’t hijacked by warmongers; it was rampant with warmongers all along.

Anthony Gregory said that both these views about the relationship between the right and war are too simplistic. Conservatism isn’t an ideology; it’s a temperament. And there’s room in this temperament for both anti-war and pro-war views. What makes conservatives reject foreign war isn’t some principled stance against initiating force against non-aggressors, but a perception of a particular war as going against America’s best interest. Buchanan roused opposition to US entry in the Balkan war when he said our boys shouldn’t be sacrificed for foreign interests. And conservatives happen to like war when they see the war as being in America’s best interest.

On the opposite side of the aisle, leftists oppose war when they see it as sacrificing foreigners to American economic imperialist interests, and they appreciate war when they perceive it as being in the interests of foreigners (“why’d you invade Iraq when there’s a genocide in Sudan?!”). War is most popular, Gregory added, when it is perceived as a sacrifice both for other people’s freedom and for America’s benefit.

Gregory went on to say that conventional American conservatives can turn anti-war, if they seriously examine their “conservative” values and alter their position to fit them. But such a thing won’t happen so easily.

After the formal part of the lecture, different people in the audience asked questions on how we can make conservatives anti-war. I asked what he thought of Molyneux’s “Against Me?” argument, and he said that it’s cleaver but divisive and a little incoherent, and not as persuasive as we wish it were. After a few more rounds of questions I asked him to give a short history on how he became an anarchist.

His answer to my question changed the night’s topic from the prospects of the political right becoming anti-war to WHY ANARCHO-CAPITALISM IS GOOD. And it was a lively, rich, and empowering discussion. He got in some people’s faces, like the brown-skinned social liberal with a British-ish accent who thought that government ensures the provision of services that the free enterprise doesn’t, and my dad, who raised his hand to identify himself as “pro-war” because he thought that he would be considered pro-war relative to everybody else there. The audience participated in the discussion as much as Gregory did, and I can’t tell whether the talk was good because there was a good audience, or because there was a good speaker.