As we arrive at today’s election, there is good news in the US conservative movement regardless of who wins. While the old guard – mostly “boomers” – who still cling to the levers of power continue to mouth the tired old shibboleths (“peace through strength,” “rules based order,” “our greatest ally“), a new generation of young conservatives has emerged that is revitalizing the Old Right view that the focus of conservatism should be to conserve what is actually great about the United States.
First and foremost is the idea, espoused by our first president George Washington, that the United States can only prosper if it is capable of jettisoning “passionate attachments” to any foreign country and embrace, as outlined by John Quincy Adams, the view that America…
…goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
To this point, the focus in the mainstream media and among “boomer” and Beltway neocon Republicans has been that the opposition to US backstopping the Israeli destruction of Gaza is made up of radical, Marxist, Hamas-loving dupes. As I decry in my recent speech to the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Washington Memorial in DC, there has been a notable absence among my fellow “pro-life” and right wing Americans to speak out against the snuffing out of perhaps 200,000 innocent civilian lives – many of them Christian – in Gaza and Lebanon.
I chalked some of that hesitation up to the fear of being labeled “anti-Jewish,” while at the same time I pointed out that a significant proportion of the US university campus protests against the Israeli slaughter in Palestine and Lebanon are led by Jewish students. Likewise, Jewish intellectuals in the US constitute a significant and powerful voice against the policies of the Israeli government and in opposition to the US “special relationship” with that country.
Whatever the case, a younger generation on the Right is getting it. And they are threatening the establishment in ways that should warm all of our conservative hearts. Take for example a new poll by the progressive “Data for Progress” outlet. Among the usual fluff about progressive attitudes toward Kamala etc., a fascinating metric was reported:
In our survey of voters aged 18-29, we find that young voters support imposing an arms embargo on Israel by a +26-point margin.https://t.co/zHxVe4yW9i pic.twitter.com/fmrKiBizRV
— Data for Progress (@DataProgress) October 23, 2024
By a solid 52 percent majority, Republicans aged 18-24 support a US arms embargo against Israel over their massive slaughter of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an outlier, as many polls including this Pew survey from April show that only 28 percent of young Republicans “lean more with the Israeli people” in the current war in Gaza:
Young conservatives are actually conservative!
This may seem radical in the post-Reagan era of neocon control over the Republican Party and what passed for conservative thought, however there is also a long tradition of Republican and conservative opposition to America joining itself to the hip of a small and insignificant country in the Middle East as the basis of its foreign policy. And the tide is turning back in its favor.
On June 15, 1990, maverick Republican Patrick Buchanan bucked the neocon trend that had infected the Reagan White House in which he did some of his most important work as Communications Director and uttered the “emperor’s new clothes” phrase that rocked DC:
“Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.”
For many already ensconced in Capitol Hill it was hardly a revolutionary statement. But as the institutions were being captured by pro-Israel neocons, it was the equivalent of exposing the man pulling the levers behind the carefully constructed Potemkin edifice of “modern” conservatism.
Buchanan was to be drummed out of polite society. And of course the neocon gatekeeper (and CIA asset) William F. Buckley, Jr. did his best to destroy Buchanan (among others) in his Stalinesque, “In Search of Anti-Semitism.”
William “Stalin” Buckley, Jr. also drummed out another of the best right wing writers of the 20th century, Joseph Sobran, thus clearing the way for the total domination of the warmongering obsessive devotees of Israel in the conservative movement.
Well not quite total. It turns out there was another writer who, like Buchanan and Sobran, was fiercely independent and came to embrace the conservatism of old – some call it paleo-conservatism but it should just be conservatism. I am referring to my former mentor, the late Robert Novak, whose half century career in media had come to define not only modern conservatism but the evolution of a young liberal “mugged by reality,” as neocon godfather Irving Kristol put it.
Novak’s “reality mugging” was that spending a life in the journalistic limelight as a Jewish-born atheist left him feeling empty inside. He was inspired by his television partner Rowland Evans who in the Middle East wars of the 1970s onward had openly sympathized with the Palestinians. Eventually Bob Novak converted to the Roman Catholic faith in a ceremony that rocked Washington, DC. It was not a smart career move. What made it worse is that unlike many DC “Catholics,” he adopted an authentic traditional Catholicism that rejected donor-driven neocon obsession with bowing to “our greatest ally” in the Middle East.
In the early 2000s, Novak told a large assembled audience at a gala DC dinner honoring the new class of “Novak Journalism Fellows” (I was a 1998 Fellow) – and I paraphrase from memory: “unlike most conservatives, I do not support Israel.” You could have heard a pin drop in that neocon gathering that bore his name.
It is too bad he could not be with us to witness that tide beginning to change.
Indeed there is a new trend rising in conservative circles that is encouraging. We see it in the polls. We see it on TikTok. We see it in the bright young conservative intellectuals in publications like Antiwar.com and elsewhere. We even see it in weird places like in the Trump interview on Rogan where he trashes pro-war, Israel-first neocon John Bolton as an “idiot.”
Trump is not anywhere near embracing the camp of the young non-interventionist conservatives, but I believe he hears their footsteps behind him. He hears it to the point where he is even invoking Pat Buchanan’s name – as a “good man.” Not even Miriam “Daddy Warbucks” Adelson’s $100 million can stop an idea whose time has come.
It is easy to feel despair in these times, but take heart: As Dylan once wrote, “something is happening and you don’t know what it is…”
