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April
25
2020

A Conservative Resurrection?
Paul Craig Roberts

Conservative magazines have pretty much disappeared along with conservatives in education, popular culture, politics, publishing, media, and Hollywood.  Magazines that helped to sustain stable families, good manners, the value of integrity, moral behavior, tending to one’s own garden, and Christian virtues such as compassion have been replaced by neoconservatives advocating war for American hegemony.  

One magazine that lingered, Chronicles, was a mild and not very exciting voice, but recent issues under the new editorship of Paul Gottfried have resurrected trenchant writing and analysis of America’s perilous degeneration into a Tower of Babel.

In a recent article, “It’s Not Okay to Be White,” I was encouraged to see that in a recent Congressional hearing designed to close down free speech for white people, it was a black female member of Congress who denounced the intent of the hearing.  

I quote a few paragraphs of the Chronicles article as they describe the process by which what passes for “the left” frames-up  American values by identifying them as “white racist supremacy.”

The left now roundly denounces anyone to the right of Jeb Bush as a “white nationalist,” which it appears is now being equated with “white supremacist,” with the apparently immortal Adolf Hitler acting as the one-and-future ringleader of a group of bad guys and gals that includes everyone from George Washington and Betsy Ross to John Wayne, as well as every single Trump voter, white or not.

In hearings before Cogress last year to address the perceived threat of white supremacy, corporate bigwings representing internet and social media platforms, who have not exactly been lax in their suppression of the right, including the vegetarian mainstream “conservative movement,” duly gave the Congressmen assurances they would do more to suppress speech by putting a high-tech gag on folks that both the Al Sharpton and Che Guevara wings of the Democratic Party—and Chamber of Commerce Republicans, for that matter—regard as “Nazis.” That is, anyone who still risks life, limb, and career by espousing political and social views once held by all conservaives, as well as a number of liberals, until very recently.

While it’s true that some Republican panel members did defend free speech, it was black conservative Candace Owens who got around to telling us what the left is actualy up to.  Owens noted that the “hearing” was meant to be a kangaroo court, it wasn’t about ”hate crimes” but about “fear-mongering, power, and control.” The hearing was, in fact, “a preview of a Democrat 2020 election strategy—the same as the Democrat 2016 election strategy.” The left, said Owens, feared that it had lost control of the “narrative,” and wished to censor dissent. Owens also correctly pointed out that if it’s political violence you are looking for, then look no further than the thuggish activities of the [leftwing] largely white militant group Antifa. What Candace Owens was getting at, of course, is that the left seeks to rally its unstable coalition of competing grievances around an anti-white and implicitly (when not explicity) anti-Christian banner, which acts like a red cape waved in front of a bull.  Resentment, envy, and old hatreds can work wonders for a coalition whose diversity threatens its stability.

The message is pretty clear by now; the old America was wholly evil and deserves to be finished off. This is the America that, for all its faults, some of us recall fondly as an oasis of stable families [both white and black], regional cultures, a still largely healthy popular culture, and a politics of decorum and respect. The old Americans must be overwhelmed by mass immigration to achieve the aim [of deconstructing America].

In her memoir, Circle in the Darkness, Diana Johnstone describes the process that she lived through of the left turning against the working class, against peace, and supporting war to “liberate” populations with bombs from dictators.  The left is now allied with the neoconservatives in support of war, but for a different reason—liberation instead of the imposition of Washington’s hegemony. 

The old left/right paradigm no longer makes sense.  The left is no longer left, and conservatives  underwent their own transformation and became interventionist liberals.  The old left/right tensions produced reforms.  Today reform has given way to extirpation of “whiteness.”

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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