I told you so (a discussion of Powerline and 20th century American liberalism

(Note: Below, a reader strongly disagrees with my conclusions in this entry.)

Since the weblog Powerline became prominent during the 2004 election as a result of its exposure of CBS News’s fraudulent story on George W. Bush and the Texas Air National Guard, it has been one of my regular stops on the Web. I have referenced it frequently, valuing it for its fact-based analysis of leftist lies, and criticized it almost as frequently for its serf-like loyalty to President Bush and Norman Podhoretz no matter how far to the left they went and no matter how absurd and dangerous their Iraq and Islam policies became. Two notable exceptions were Powerline’s regretful disagreement with Bush over his immigration bill and its strong disagreement with him over Israel. (Here is a Google results page with all VFR entries that mention Powerline.) Last week, after McCain’s Kerry-esque foreign policy speech, I predicted that the Powerline writers “will adjust. They always do.” Meaning that they would find a way to continue to back McCain despite his liberal-internationalist foreign policy. I also spoke of their “Soviet-like” silence in the wake of McCain’s speech.

My long time analysis of Powerline, and of the conservatives establishment of which it is a representative voice, has just been confirmed, in spades. Yesterday, in a move that can fairly be described as Orwellian, the authors of this prominent conservative blog declared themselves to be Rockefeller Republicans, meaning that they are liberal Republicans who believe in big government at home and liberal internationalism abroad. And let us remember that liberal internationalism today does not mean what it meant in the mid twentieth century, international cooperation and agreement on the desirability of democracy; it means the relentless move toward transnational governance and the liquidation of sovereign nation-states, including our own. Underlining the Orwellian character of the event, the Powerline writers did not say, “We’ve been calling ourselves conservatives all along. Well, we’ve got news for you. We’re really Rockefeller Republicans.” No, they just came out of the blue and called themselves Rockefeller Republicans. Is it a coincidence that this happened shortly after McCain clinched the GOP nomination and gave his leftist foreign policy speech? I don’t think so. I said that the nomination and election of McCain would destroy the Republican party as a conservative party. And now the Powerline guys, right on cue, blandly announce that they are not even conservatives.

Which proves one of the main insights of traditionalism: conservatives whose conservative-sounding piety and conservative-sounding patriotism are directed not at a concrete country and people, but at liberal universalist principles, are liberals.

The event also explains a long-time gripe of mine, the fact that neoconservatives and establishment conservatives consistently refuse to engage in discourse with people to their right. They cannot do so, because the assumption on which such discussion would be based—that the participants, despite their differences, share basic conservative principles—is not true. The neocons and establicons are liberals, and in any serious exchange with a genuine conservative this fact will soon emerge and thus expose the fraudulence of establishment conservatism. Therefore the establicons avoid such discussion, by dismissing all people to their right as nuts and extremists, or simply by ignoring them.

Also yesterday, as I discuss in the previous entry, Rush Limbaugh said that a McCain victory means that the Republicans will cease to be a conservative party.

* * *

Here is a collection of VFR’s entries on McCain’s foreign policy speech and Powerline’s reaction or non-reaction:

On foreign policy, John McCain has morphed into (or rather taken the mask off and revealed himself as) John Kerry
John McKerry and the neocons: what next?
The McCainites’ dilemma
NeoconWatch
Conservative gress roots sickened by McCain speech; conservative elites still silent
NeoconWatch II: silent on McCain’s move to the left, condemning of Wilders’s exposure of Islam
McCain’s Islam policy
McCain’s globalist agenda
Powerline speaks!
McCain’s conservative supporters demonstrate why he must not be elected
“We are Rockefeller Republicans,” declares Powerline

- end of initial entry -

Mencius Moldbug writes:

While for the most part I agree with your analysis, I have to reiterate that liberal internationalism has always been creepy and weird. It was creepy and weird in 1945, it was creepy and weird in 1918, it was even creepy and weird in 1848. Much of the untold story of the 19th century is the way in which, while Americans pursued principled, Washingtonian neutralism (except in Latin America), British Whigs and Radicals incited and abetted liberal revolutions all around Europe against any government they perceived as “autocratic” or “reactionary.” As the saying goes, they loved everyone’s rebels except their own. Small wonder the Kaiser sent his famous telegram of congratulation to Oom Paul Kruger.

Essentially, liberal internationalism is liberal imperialism. Under the veil of “self-government,” it seeks to establish client states which are dependent militarily, economically, and/or diplomatically on the protector. My favorite example of this was a recent Times story in which, without a single blush or wink, the reporter described Zimbabwe as having “gained its independence” in 1981. No, really.

LA replies:

I hear you, but maybe I have a less negative view of it because in my main knowledge of it, liberal internationalism was a rational policy that took place in the context of the alliance of free countries against Communism. However, given that the creation of the UN was an expression of liberal internationalism, then that is certainly something creepy and weird. And of course, the implication of ultimate global governance is all there in the founding statements of the UN and the various documents supporting the founding of the UN. But doesn’t that also point to two liberal internationalisms? One aiming at leftist global government, the other aimed at an alliance of free countries under U.S. leadership against totalitarianism? But in the long run, do the two merge? Just as right-liberalism tends to turn into left-liberalism?

I understand that the U.S. and Britain sought to undermine traditional societies in the 19th century.

Of course, the role of the West in undermining Rhodesia, S. Africa, etc., and more recently the U.S.-led war against Serbia, were wicked.

Jeff S. writes:

Boy, I think you have gotten waaayyyy ahead of yourself here. The headline was Paul being obviously (at least to me) facetious. Nowhere in Hinderacker’s piece does he use the line “We are all Rockefeller Republicans now.” Nor does anything in Hinderaker’s piece seem terribly complimentary towards Rockefeller, save for one phrase about Rockefeller leaving ” … a rich legacy.” And I thought, given the overall tone of the piece that that could be read several ways. No, all Hinderacker is doing is saying the present reality of our political “leadership” (both sides) owes more to Nelson Rockefeller than it does Ronald Reagan. And I think That’s reasonably close to what you keep saying. The stuff about the political nexus being composed of “left-liberals” and “right-liberals.” Nowhere in this piece did I get the impression that Hinderaker was happy about any of this. Nor does the bulk of Hinderaker’s work on Powerline support this view. Hinderaker says in his piece that never in the country’s history have the majority of its political leadership been as close ideologicallyas they are now. Personally, I have no idea how accurate that might be, but it seems entirely implausible that a guy who spends as much time ripping apart the Other Guy for a wide variety of reasons as does Hinderaker, would suddenly decide that “Yeah, at the end of the day, I’m pretty much where he is.” C’mon, that reading doesn’t make any sense. I think you have wildly mis-read this.

LA replies:

I did not read the Hinderaker article as being critical of Rockefeller Republicanism, but approving of it. Hinderaker is one of the three Powerline contributors. At Powerline itself, Paul announced John’s article with, “We All All Rockefeller Republicans Now.” When President Nixon made the famous comment that Paul is paraphrasing, “We are all Keynesians now,” he did not mean it ironically. So, when one Powerline writer publishes an article in the newsletter of the Rockefeller Center praising Rockefeller Republicanism, and another Powerline writer, instead of disagreeing with his colleague, declares, “We’re all Rockefeller Republicans now,” then I think we can reasonably conclude that Powerline is identifying itself with Rockefeller Republicanism. To deny that they are doing so would be like saying that when when George W. Bush in August 2000 said it was a great thing that the Spanish language was spreading in the United States, he didn’t mean it. It would be like saying that when Pope Benedict at St. Peter’s Square in September 2006 quoted Nostra Aetate to the effect that that Muslims are our fellow adorers of the one God, he didn’t mean it. A basic fact of political reality is that people express their political and other beliefs by what they publicly say. I draw conclusions about people’s beliefs from what they publicly say. But there are always those who tell me that people don’t mean what they say, and that I’m jumping to conclusions.

Jeff S. replies:

Read your reply. Not buying it. Hinderaker’s piece was observational, not judgmental. And, I think Hinderaker’s observations are broadly accurate and reasonably in concert with much of what you yourself have said. I urge all your readers to read Hinderaker’s piece and make up their own minds.

LA replies:

The entire Hinderaker piece is posted at VFR.

Mencius Moldbug writes:

I used to believe greatly in the international struggle against Communism, but now I am not so sure. The relationship of American liberal internationalists to Soviet progressive internationalists strikes me as curiously symmetrical. The actions of both are most easily explained by the simple desire to maximize the size of their empires, larded with enough hypocritical cant to fry an elephant.

Essentially, the American establishment promoted the same policy—a New Deal for the world—both before and after the U.S.-Soviet split. The same measures that were sold in 1946 as creating peace and harmony with our Russian friends were sold in 1949 as part of the fight against Communism. The Marshall Plan itself was offered to the Soviets, and you will certainly search in vain for the State Department ever protesting that its clients were too revolutionary. State’s ideal friend was Tito, who was both Communist and anti-Soviet. Cases, as in Rhodesia and South Africa, when the Soviets and the U.S. supported the same “liberation movements,” are not exceptional but indicative.

The whole anti-Communist movement was diluted and ultimately destroyed by this confusion. The definition of communism was reduced to being actually in the pay of the KGB at the actual present time. Anything else was “red-baiting,” paranoid McCarthyism. Even figures like Mao and the SDS, who if anything were to the left of the old Comintern, could be presented as anti-Communist, inasmuch as they were anti-Soviet. Or at least not pro-Soviet. Or at least not actually on the Soviet payroll. You get the idea. So, as usual, the people who won were the anti-anti-Communists, ie, the Establishment.

The very existence of the Soviet Union, at least post 1919, was due to American liberals. The French and the British wanted to send an army to restore order in Russia. Wilson and Herbert Hoover (who at the time was coordinating the US’s abortive effort to create a galaxy of dependencies in Eastern Europe, via the selective provision of food) refused to allow them to do so, not because they had any illusions about the Bolsheviks but because they felt, quite correctly, that any such restoration would be “reactionary.” As usual, the real enemy was always to the right. Wilson and Hoover essentially believed that the Russian “tyranny” was reaping what it had sowed. Unless you count entering the war itself, this little-known decision was probably the first great disaster of American liberal foreign policy.

Mixed in with all this liberalism were a few genuinely reactionary and effective measures against Communism. For example, the lame and grudging but successful defenses of Taiwan and South Korea, the Forrestal strategy in Greece, the Afghan war, etc. But these policies, unlike their opposite, never had a stable base of support in Washington. The overwhelming tragedy of the Cold War was the US’s wanton destruction of the French and British empires, which provided a much higher quality of government—indeed with far more sensitivity to local cultural norms—than the nominally “independent” client states, Soviet or American, which replaced them. Call it the Scramble for the World.

LA replies:

Mencius’s comment expresses the familiar, hyper-simplified, paranoid view of America’s role in the 20th cenutry that is common in some sectors of the right. Such a distorted picture of history will tend to lead people into relativism and anti-Americanism.

Take this, for example:

“The very existence of the Soviet Union, at least post 1919, was due to American liberals.”

This is as sweeping and wrong-headed a historical simplification as Mencius’s earlier sweeping comment that the EU is a client state of the U.S.

Spencer Warren replies to Jeff S.:

John Hinderaker makes no complaint or conservative criticism of the “rich legacy” of Rockefeller which he claims is widely accepted in both parties. And he writes this for a Rockefeller group.

On another level, his claim of convergence between the parties is so ludicrous and historically wrong that he cannot be taken seriously as a writer on public affairs.

This is how Hinderaker redefines the Bush neocon abandonment of conservative Reaganite principles, and how the Republican Congress squandered their period in power for the sake of buying campaign contributions and votes.

Further, recent decades have seen party divergence, not convergence. Before the Vietnam War, the Democrats were a responsible party on military and foreign affairs. Since then, and today more than ever, they are a far-left anti-American, pacifistic party whose policies led to 9/11. (They are the Henry Wallaceites of 1948, not the Truman wing.) They are promoting the PC Multi-Cult Cultural Marxism that is radically undoing the meaning of what it is to be an American. Few Republicans accept this, or the Democrats’ promotion of the radical homosexual agenda. The parties are also split far apart on the immigration threat to our national survival. The Democrats are the first mainstream far left party in U.S. history, which Powerline thinks demonstrates convergence!

LA replies:

Thanks to Mr. Warren for laying out in more detail and in more vigorous language what I said in milder language, that Hinderaker’s article is on a sub-conceptual level.

It would be interesting to know what is Jeff S.’s basis for saying that Hinderaker is not approving of Rockefeller Republicanism in this article.

Spencer Warren writes:

I also agree with your response to Mencius Moldbug, who appears to be more unhinged from historical fact than John H, such as his claim that we were responsible for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and his criticism of the Marshall Plan! I also do not think he is fair to liberal internationalism during and after World War II. Roosevelt understood power—the Security Council was his concept to put the great powers in the lead, unlike the League of Nations. The excellent scholarship by historian Robert Divine and others shows that FDR understood that to keep the U.S. public committed to a postwar role, and avert the disaster of 1919, it had to be wrapped in the idealism of a new world body. The liberal internationalism of FDR-Truman-JFK appreciated power and national interest, and is closer to conservative principles than the left-wing Henry Wallace-McGovern view that governs the positions of Hillary Clinton and Obama.

Mr. Warren continues:

Two more points:

John H.’s account of convergence reads Reagan out of existence.

The Marshall Plan, which MM describes as a New Deal, was enacted to save Western Europe from Communism and was voted by a Republican-controlled, truly conservative Congress. Now that was a measure of convergence—in 1948.

Mencius Moldbug writes:

I’d be greatly appreciative if you allowed me to post this quote from Herbert Hoover’s The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958), as a response to VFR readers who seem to feel that I’m “unhinged.” From page 116:

The British and French exerted great pressure on Mr. Wilson for Americans to join in a general attack on Communist Russia. General Foch drew up plans for such an attack. Winston Churchill, representing the British Cabinet, appeared before the Big Four on February 14, 1919, and demanded a united invasion of Russia.

The President’s attitude toward Churchill’s proposal is indicated by a telegram from the George Washington [ie, written by Wilson] during the first journey home. It is given in the Swem Papers as follows:

Am greatly surprised by Churchill’s recent suggestion. I distinctly understood Lloyd George to say that there could be no thought of military action and what I said at the hurried meeting Friday afternoon was meant only to convey the idea that I would not take any hasty separate action myself but would not be in favor of any course which would not mean the earliest practical withdrawal of military forces [ie, minimal Allied forces that had entered Russia]. It would be fatal to be led further into the Russian chaos.

Not only was the President opposed to American participation in such a plan, but General Tasker Bliss, on February 26, circulated a strong note among the American Delegation opposing any such intervention. I agreed with General Bliss.

One paragraph in General Bliss’s letter added some information on Allied intentions:

There is every reason to believe (it is quite evident from the statement made by Marshal Foch at the meeting of the Supreme Council yesterday afternoon) that a plan is in preparation for waging war on Russia as soon as peace is concluded with Germany. The plan contemplates the formation of a great army of Greeks, Rumanians, Czecho-Slovaks, Poles, Estonians, and others, under French direction, to fight Russia. It is perfectly well known that every nation in Europe, except England, is bankrupt, and that England would become bankrupt if she engaged on any considerable scale in such an adventure. I have reason to believe that such a plan could not be formulated except in the hope that the necessary assistance will be given by the United States …

On March 26, after the President’s return to Paris, he asked for a memorandum on my information and opinion on the Soviet problem. After I had drawn up the memorandum, it occurred to me that something constructive might actually be done about the problem, and I included my suggestion.

The more important paragraphs of the memorandum were:

Dear Mr. President:

As the result of Bolshevik economic concepts, the people of Russia are dying of hunger and disease at the rate of some hundreds of thousands monthly in a country that formerly supplied food to a large part of the world.

I feel it is my duty to lay before you in just as few words as possible my views as to the American relation to Bolshevism and its manifestations. These views at least have the merit of being an analysis of information and thought gleaned from my own experiences and the independent sources which I now have over the whole of Europe, through our widespread relief organization.

It simply cannot be denied that this swinging of the social pendulum from the tyranny of the extreme right to the tyranny of the extreme left is based on a foundation of real social grievances … The Bolshevik ascendancy or even their strong attempts so far are confined to areas of former reactionary tyranny. Their courses represent the not unnatural violence of a mass of ignorant humankind, who themselves have learned in grief of tyranny and violence over generations. Our people, who enjoy so great liberty and general comfort, cannot fail to sympathize to some degree with these blind gropings for better social conditions …

We have also to … [consider], what would actually happen if we undertook military intervention. We should probably be involved in years of police duty, and our first act would probably in the nature of things make us a party with the Allies to re-establishing the reactionary classes. It also requires consideration as to whether or not our people at home would stand for our providing power by which such reactionaries held their position. Furthermore, we become a junior in this partnership of four. It is therefore inevitable that we would find ourselves subordinated and even committed to policies against our expectations.

What’s truly amazing is that ex-President Hoover, whom most Americans today see as the very emblem of black reaction, published this in 1958 and had no apology at all for his actions or those of his boss, President Wilson. He is wholeheartedly defending both. Note also the strawman switch—Churchill and Foch are not demanding that the U.S. itself invade and police Russia, just that they get the green light and a continuation of bountiful American credits.

In case you need a similar dose of historical revisionism on the Marshall Plan, any Bircher book on the subject will do it. I think None Dare Call It Treason is pretty accurate on the subject, for instance.

Mencius continues:

In case that passage from Hoover doesn’t make my argument clear, I assign the Wilson Administration responsibility for the survival of the Soviet Union in a very simple way: in 1919, it was under “great pressure” (Hoover’s exact words) to act in a way that would almost certainly have terminated the Soviet experiment. For reasons that were clearly liberal in nature, it acted otherwise.

Unless you count this enormous and unforced error, the true “disaster” was not in 1919 but in 1917, when President Wilson betrayed his campaign promise and brought the U.S. into the war, adopting the interventionist policy of England and sealing the fate of old Europe. This is just my opinion, of course.

Mencius continues:

I’d be remiss in not citing:

America’s Retreat from Victory, published under the name of Joe McCarthy but actually written by one of his research assistants (JB Matthews, I think), and Robert Welch’s infamous The Politician. The former is an indictment of George Marshall, the latter of Eisenhower. I certainly don’t consider either a reliable source, but I’d say they are a heck of a lot more reliable than the New York Times—which appears to be many VFR readers’ trusted information source on events pre-1950. What a place to run into a nest of FDR-lovers …

LA replies:

Based on Hoover’s account, I again say that Mencius overstates when he says that “The very existence of the Soviet Union, at least post 1919, was due to American liberals.” We see a mixture of motives: a desire not to get caught up in a long-lasting and complex foreign involvement in which the U.S. would not be calling the shots; a concern about the nature of the people we would be supporting. A desire not to be supporting the Whites doesn’t necessarily indicate liberalism as such but a wariness at allying ourselves with forces that are different from us and not understood by us. Also, it wasn’t just funding at stake. What about the U.S. military force that was in Russia around that time?

I think it’s a terrible thing that the U.S. leadership did not have the vision to help squash the diabolical Bolshevik regime in its cradle, if it could have done so. We don’t know that the means being discussed at the time could have done so. There is surely an element of truth in Mencius idea. But to boil this down to “The very existence of the Soviet Union, at least post 1919, was due to American liberals” is too simple and too tendentious in my opinion.

Also, Mencius seems to be referring to VFR when he writes: “What a place to run into a nest of FDR-lovers …” This is not a way to speak.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 01, 2008 01:39 PM | Send