quinta-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2003

Começando pelo fim...da Old Right

Ou os últimos dos moicanos do conservatismo tradicional americano. Estritos anti-comunistas, pelo federalismo limitado e anti-império (desde o tempo da oposição à participação na WWI com o mote de que "War is the Health of the State"), hoje esquecidos e substituidos por ex-trotskistas, ex-socialistas, straussianos, que fizeram da guerra fria contra a sua antiga referência (com origem na oposição de Estaline ao internacionalismo revolucionário do seu ex mentor - Trotsky), o cavalo de tróia para o crescimento do Estado e o assumir do lógica do Bom Império e das guerras intervencionistas moralistas.

Útil para muitos pró-americanos (como eu).

Life in the Old Right, by Murray N. Rothbard
First published in Chronicles, August 1994.

"(...)The Old Right finally began to fade away over the issue of the Cold War.

All Old Rightists were fervently anticommunist, knowing full well that the communists had played a leading role in the later years of the New Deal and in getting us into World War II. But we believed that the main threat was not the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, but socialism and collectivism here at home, a threat that would escalate if we engaged in still another Wilsonian-Rooseveltian global crusade, this time against the Soviet Union and its client states.

Most Old Rightists, therefore, fervently opposed the Cold War, including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the quasi-debacle of the Korean War. Indeed, while the entire left, with the exception of the Communist Party, got behind the Korean War as opposition to North Korean "aggression" under the cover of the United Nations, the Old Right, particularly its hard-core members in the House of Representatives, led by the Chicago Tribune, opposed all of these policies to the hilt. Howard Buffett, for example, was one of the major voices in Congress opposed to the Korean adventure.

By the mid-1950s, however, the Old Right began to fade away. Senator Taft was robbed of the Republican nomination in 1952 by a Rockefeller-Morgan Eastern banker cabal, using their control of respectable "Republican" media.

In the early 1950s, Taft himself and the doughty Colonel McCormick passed away, and the veteran Old Right leaders faded from the scene. The last gasp of the Old Right in foreign policy was the defeat of the Bricker Amendment to the Constitution in 1954, an amendment that would have prevented international treaties from overriding American rights and powers. The amendment was sabotaged by the Eisenhower administration.

Finally, the Old Right was buried by the advent in late 1955 of the lively weekly National Review, a well-edited periodical that filled the ideological vacuum resulting from the deaths of McCormick and Taft and the retirement of other isolationist stalwarts.

National Review set out successfully to transform the American right from an isolationist defender of the Old Republic to a global crusader against the Soviet Union and international communism. After National Review became established as the GHQ of the right, it proceeded to purge all rightwing factions that had previously lived and worked in harmony but now proved too isolationist or too unrespectable for the newly transformed Buckleyite right.

These purges paved the way for later changes of line as well as future purges: of those who opposed anti-Stalinist, pro-welfare state liberals called "neoconservatives," as well as of those who persisted in opposing the crippling of property rights in the name of "civil" and other victimological "rights."

As time passed and Old Right heroes passed away and were forgotten, many of the right-wing rank-and-file, never long on historical memory, forgot and adapted their positions to the new dispensation.

The last political manifestation of the Old Right was the third-party Andrews-Werdel ticket of 1956, which called for the repeal of the income tax and the rollback of the New Deal.

Its foreign policy was the last breath of the pre-Cold War Old Right: advocating no foreign war, the Bricker Amendment, and the abolition of foreign aid."

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