"the long, noble history of anti-war conservatism"

Doug Bandow with a review of Bill Kauffman's book, Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism...

American politicians routinely chatter about peace while inaugurating war. Indeed, despite the bitter partisan wrangling over Iraq, war has more often united than divided Washington's establishment. Today, despite the ongoing debacle in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats compete to breathe more and hotter fire against Iran. It is Democrat Hillary Clinton who threatens to "obliterate" that nation if it attacks not America, but a far distant allied state, one already nuclear-armed and well able to defend itself. Both of the dominant political parties are war parties.

The one constant of the wars so regularly and enthusiastically promoted is that they will be fought by Middle America. Members of today's public warrior class are private pacifists. The Bill Clintons, Dick Cheneys, Paul Wolfowitzs, and conservative pundits and activists who fill the Neocon Greek Chorus never don a uniform. A few, like George W. Bush, carefully choose the right uniform to avoid actually ending up in combat. But all chirp their thanks for the sacrifices of those who do join and fight. Some, like President Bush, even prattle on wistfully about how they wish they could join today's romantic struggles.

Worse, these faux patriots attack anyone who dares criticize the war – any war, whichever one it happens to be – as being a wimp, defeatist, or even traitor. This demonization has been made easier by the fact that opposition to war has in recent years has been concentrated on the Left. The same people who "lost" Vietnam are determined to "lose" Iraq, we are told.

Yet a different, or more complex, story comes from Bill Kauffman, onetime Senate staffer and think tank editor turned essayist and author, who lives in upstate New York – quintessential Middle America. He observes:

"[T]here is a long and honorable (if largely hidden) tradition of antiwar thought and action among the American Right. It stretches from ruffle-shirted Federalists who opposed the War of 1812 and civic-minded mugwump critics of the Spanish-American War on up through the Midwestern isolationists who formed the backbone of the pre-World War II America First Committee and the conservative Republicans who voted against U.S. involvement in NATO, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam. And although they are barely audible amid the belligerent clamor of today's shock-and-awe Right, libertarians and old-fashioned traditionalist conservatives are among the sharpest critics of the Iraq War and the imperial project of the Bush Republicans."...

Kauffman highlights these conservatives for peace running back throughout U.S. history. What sets Ain't My America apart from most foreign policy books is that it is less about foreign policy and more about America. Kauffman is a fine stylist, a literary composer whose editorial symphony appeals to the spirit as well as the mind. He discovers an eclectic mix of antiwar patriots as he joyously romps through the American tradition.

Kauffman appropriately begins with the nation's founders, men whose views on war are dismissed as quaint by most politicians today....There is, Kauffman observes, George Washington's Farewell Address, which is "as close to an expression of early American political omnifariousness as one might find," a veritable "sacred text among conservative critics of empire." American children typically read it, or parts of it, but how many learn that, as Kauffman writes, "Washington's valedictory amounts to a repudiation of U.S. foreign policy from 1917 to the present"?...

Current political heroes include Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), the sole antiwar voice in the Republican presidential race, and Rep. John "Jimmy" Duncan (R-Tenn.), an old line conservative who told Kauffman: "I've become convinced that most of these wars have been brought about because of a desire for money and power and prestige." Duncan, ever gracious to those around him, "is a throwback, a Taft Republican in search of a party of peace and frugality," as well as "a glorious anachronism as a representative of a place and a people," enthuses Kauffman.

Most disastrously, writes Kauffman, "the Republicans in the age of George W. Bush have become a War Party, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Dissident GOP voices are rare and unwelcome echoes." Even more tragic is the fact that the so-called Religious Right has joined the War Party. Notes the waggish Kauffman: "The Christian conservatives who have supplied Bush with an indispensable, almost blasphemously enthusiastic following might consider alternative Christian political traditions," such as that of William Jennings Bryan, "Or, if I am not being too much of an originalist, a biblical fundamentalist, that of Jesus Christ."

Conservatism once was an honorable term, associated with "decentralism, liberty, economy in government, religious faith, family-centeredness, parochialism, smallness," notes Kauffman. But he thunders: "The cockeyed militarism of the Bush administration, and the historical ignorance and cowardice of the subsidized Right that has cheered him on, have poisoned the word conservative. For years, if not wars, to come."...