Old Right

Old Right

Thomas Allen

The following is Paul Gottfried’s, editor in chief of Chronicles Magazine, “Hall of Fame” of the Old Right:
– Albert J. Nock (1870–1945, author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, and social critic),
– Frank Meyer (1909–1972, philosopher, political activist, and fusionist),
– Robert L. Dabney (1820–1898, Christian theologian, Southern Presbyterian pastor, Confederate States Army chaplain, architect, and chief of staff and biographer of Stonewall Jackson),
– James Burnham (1905–1987, philosopher, political theorist, and editor, began as a Trotskyite Marxist and later became a public intellectual of the American conservative movement)
– Eugene D. Genovese (1930–2012, historian of the American South and American slavery, abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism),
– Willmoore Kendall (1909–1967, American conservative writer and a professor of political philosophy),
– Robert A. Nisbet (1913–1996, sociologist, and professor),
– H.L. Mencken (1880–1956 journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English),
– Russell A. Kirk (1918–1994, political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic),
– Samuel T. Francis (1947–2005, paleoconservative, writer and syndicated columnist),
– Melvin E. Bradford (1934–1993, conservative political commentator and professor of literature), and
– Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) economist of the Austrian School, historian, and political theorist).

To this list I would add:
– Donald G. Davidson (1893–1968, poet, essayist, social and literary critic, author, professor of English, a founding member of the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians),
– Richard Weaver (1910–1963, American scholar, professor of English, intellectual historian, political philosopher),
– John T. Flynn (1882–1964, journalist),
– Garet Garrett (1878–1954, journalist, author),
– Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968, historian, professor),
– Howard H. Buffett (1903–1964, businessman, investor, and politician),
– Felix M. Morley (1894–1982, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, college administrator),
– Charles A. Lindbergh (1859–1924, U.S. Congressman),
– Frank Chodorov (1887–1966, writer), and
 – Justin Raimondo (1951–2019, journalist, author, writer)

Others included among the Old Right are:
– Robert Taft (1889 –1953, politician, lawyer),
– Frank C. Hanighen (1899–1964, journalist),
– Robert E. Wood (1879–1969, American military officer and business executive),
– V. Orval Watts  (1898–1993, professor, author, lecturer),
– Charles C. Tansill (1890–1964, professor, historian, author),
– George C. Roche III (1935–2006, 11th president of Hillsdale College),
– Thomas Fleming (1927–2017, historian, novelist),
– Robert R. McCormick (1880–1955, lawyer, U.S. Army officer in World War I, owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper), and
– Josiah Bailey (1873 – 1946, politician, lawyer, editor, coauthor of the Conservative Manifest).
To this list, many more can be added.

Identifying characteristics of the Old Right were opposition to the fascistic state that Franklin Roosevelt established in the United States and opposition to an interventionist foreign policy. Although members of the Old Right varied in their economic views and about how much power a government should exercise, especially the federal government, most of the Old Right believed in limited government and free-market economics. Generally, they opposed the government granting favors and preferences. For most, the government was negative; its job was to prevent trespass against other people’s property, life, and liberty. Most opposed the government acting positively, which makes it become the state; consequently, they opposed the welfare state, including corporate welfare, and all forms of socialism. Most favored States’ rights; that is, political power was best retained at the local level. All opposed concentrating political power in the central government. They opposed the US government meddling in the affairs of other countries; thus, they opposed the war state that the United States became under Franklin Roosevelt and have remained until this day. They opposed building an American Empire. Most were cultural conservatives and traditionalists. The Old Right was of the Jeffersonian-Calhounian wing of American politics as opposed to the Hamiltonian-Lincolnian wing. (Today, with rare exceptions, all Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and everyone from the far Left to the far Right are of the Hamiltonian-Lincolnian wing or suffer from a dissociative identity disorder. Almost no one remains in the Jeffersonian-Calhounian wing. Except for those who suffer from a dissociative disorder, which seems to be the majority, most people today are statists and centralists; only a few are libertists and decentralists.)

Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Coley Allen

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