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[This article is taken from chapter 5 of The Betrayal of the American Right .] During World War I and the 1920s, “isolationism,” that is, opposition to American wars and foreign intervention, was considered a Left phenomenon, and so even the laissez-faire isolationists and revisionists were considered to be “leftists.” Opposition to the postwar

[This article is chapter 6 of The Betrayal of the American Right .] The advent of World War II brought the Old Right to its darkest days. Harassed, reviled, persecuted, the intellectuals and agitators of the Old Right, the libertarians and the isolationists, folded their tents and disappeared from view. While it is true that the isolationist

For a while the postwar ideological climate seemed to be the same as during the war: internationalism, statism, adulation of economic planning and the centralized state, were rampant everywhere. During the first postwar year, 1945–46, I entered Columbia Graduate School, where the intellectual atmosphere was, oppressively, just more of the same. By

[This article is from chapter 8 of The Betrayal of the American Right .] General MacArthur Receives Distinguished Service Medal from President Truman In the realm of direct politics, it seemed clear that there was only one place for those of us not totally disillusioned with political action: the “extreme right wing” of the Republican Party. It

[ This article is excerpted from chapter 9 of The Betrayal of the American Right. ] One of the most brilliant and forceful attacks on Cold War foreign policy in this era came from the pen of the veteran conservative and free-market publicist Garet Garrett. In his pamphlet “The Rise of Empire,” published in 1952, Garrett began by declaring: “We

[This article is excerpted from chapter 10 of The Betrayal of the American Right , now available in the bookstore . An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .]   In addition to being staunch opponents of war and militarism, the Old Right of the postwar period had a rugged and near-libertarian honesty

After the death of Taft and as the Eisenhower foreign policy began to take on the frozen Dullesian lineaments of permanent mass armament and the threat of “massive nuclear retaliation” throughout the globe, I began to notice isolationist sentiment starting to fade away, even among old libertarian and isolationist compatriots who should have known

[This article is excerpted from chapter 12 of The Betrayal of the American Right , now available in the bookstore .] Garet Garrett had called the shots: in referring to the triumph of the New Deal and then of American Empire, he had summed up the strategy: “revolution within the form.” The New Right did not bother, would not rouse possible

[This article is excerpted from chapter 13 of The Betrayal of the American Right , now available in the bookstore .] My total break with National Review and the right wing, my final emotional divorce from thinking of myself as a right-winger or an ally of the Right, came around 1960. The break was precipitated by Khrushchev’s visit to the United

[This article is excerpted from the final chapter of The Betrayal of the American Right , now available in the bookstore .] For years now, Leonard Liggio and I had been looking for a “left,” for an antiwar movement, with which we could ally ourselves. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the New Left emerged in American life, particularly in two great