Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #703240 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 375 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781933859606
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Recovering the Old Right
In this excellent book, Justin Raimondo breathes new life into the forgotten icons of the Old Right. These figures include -- among others -- Albert Jay Nock (who was in fact regarded as a "leftist" for part of his career), H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov (born Fishel Chodorovsky -- did you know that? I didn't), Garet Garrett (author of _The Driver_, which Raimondo argues may have been an important unacknowledged source for Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED), John T. Flynn (who among other things wrote a scathing expose of Roosevelt and the "New Deal"), Rose Wilder Lane (author of _The Discovery of Freedom_), and Isabel Paterson (author of _The God of the Machine_ and the former guru of Ayn Rand).

Raimondo also discusses the hijacking of the Right by Bill Buckley and the neoconservatives, doing a much better job than Rand did in her little puff piece, "Conservativism: An Obituary." In fact Raimondo is careful to acknowledge all the genuine conservatives Rand left out of her "obituary"; rather than simply declaring conservatism dead, as Rand did, Raimondo wants to recover it from the people who almost destroyed it in favor of militaristic Statism.

Raimondo also discusses some genuine contemporary conservatives, including the late great Murray Rothbard (Raimondo is also the author of a soon-to-be-published biography of Rothbard), and provides a ringing defense of Pat Buchanan against a number of unfair attacks -- though he also harshly criticizes Buchanan's stand against free international trade. (The back of the book features an endorsement from Buchanan, by the way -- a little tribute to the intellectual integrity of both men.)

His remarks on Rand will also be of interest to bemused watchers of the "Objectivist" movement. Despite some obvious respect for her talents as a novelist (he thinks, and I agree, that _The Fountainhead_ was her best work and ATLAS SHRUGGED was pretty kludgy), he does not spare the rod as regards her pretensions of originality, her claim to stand within no pre-existing tradition whatsoever, her intellectual fraud in each of these respects, her failure to give proper credit even to those of her forebears who were directly influential on her thought (Isabel Paterson being the primary example), and her endorsement of several policies that would have been anathema to the Old Right. I suspect that Raimondo would be happy -- and I know I would -- if Rand were publicly exposed as a pretentious, pseudophilosophical, cult-mongering fraud, discredited as a representative of the classical-liberal Right, and recognized as the "leftist" she really was. (And any "Objectivists" reading this review are hereby invited to click "Not helpful.")

At any rate Raimondo's workmanlike volume belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in recovering the genuine tradition of liberty. His efforts to restore the memory of an important and all but forgotten strain of American thought will be of interest to libertarians and classical liberals everywhere.

A Legacy Worth Discovering
Justin Raimondo's "Reclaiming the American Right" is one of the most fascinating political books I have ever read. I first read this work a couple of years ago, but return to it often because the stories of the various figures of the Old Right are so relevant to the current political situation. This book should be required reading for all who associate the word "conservative" with "troglodyte" or "warmonger". It wasn't always so! The "Old Right" conservatives were very interested in personal liberty and bitterly opposed to war and the Merchants of Death who profit from them. They saw that in trying to police the world, America would lose it's liberty. Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov ... these are names that deserve to be widely known, men whose works should be read as an antidote to the interventionist dogma of our times. Raimondo performed a valuable service in presenting their views to a new generation.

Retracing the steps of the long march from Trotskyism to Neoconservatism
Great eye for detail. Author traces the rise of "neoconservatism" (surely a contradiction in terms) in the US from it's beginnings amongst 1930s Trotskyites and hard line anti-communist liberals and social democrats in the cold war.

Justin Raimondo shows how these groups were alienated by the developments on the American left during the post-Vietnam era and thus migrated to the right becoming a key part of the Reagan coalition. This faction displaced older line isolationist conservatives. It's not just the defection of former leftists to right as individuals, it was a factional migration.

The trail for the neocon migration of the 1970s was blazed for them by a previous generation of National Review affiliated "New Right" thinkers in the 1950s such as James Burnham.

There is a most interesting profile of Trotsky's main US apostle, Max Schactman. Max had raced to Trotsky's death bed after Stalin had him killed. Max never had the actual elective surgery that converts leftists to a fully fledged neocon, he remained a lifelong socialist. Max saw Washington as the real centre of the true revolution for global social democracy. He even saw the JFK / LBJ's interventions in Cuba and Vietnam as the historically "progressive" force versus Fidel and Ho Chi Minh, essentially reactionary fascist nationalists in marxist drag. The shadow of Max and Leon now influences US policy. Unfortunately.