A WSJ editorial celebrating the life and times of W.F. Buckley sums up the pre-Buckley right as follows: “a loose assortment of isolationists, protectionists, traditionalists, anti-Semites, Southern Agrarians and just plain cranks.” It’s a standard cliche but still: it’s a remarkable way to describe Mencken, Nock, Garet, Chodorov, Flynn, and Hazlitt--all intellectual leaders of the Old Right.
Compare with the more informed position of M.N. Rothbard from his 1978 article “The Foreign Policy of the Old Right“ (JLS, Vol. 2, N. 1, pp. 85-96).: “The major thrust of the Old Right, set forth consistently by its theoreticians and of course more fuzzily by its political figures, was a deep hostility and antipathy to government power.... The Old Right favored the liberty of the individual as its central principle, and advocated a free-enterprise and free-market economic as the economic corollary and application of that principle.” The major difference with Buckley, of course, concerned foreign policy.
