Paleocons we have with us always? America First isolationism from right to "left"

Every time a war becomes big news and looks to go on for a while, which the Russia-Ukraine was does, I find myself rehashing some recurring phenomena in American public discourse about war.

There's a trend of political thought that runs from the pre-World War II rightwing isolationists who morphed into the original American Firsters. It's postwar incarnations later came to be known as the Old Right, who continued their American First kind of criticism as postwar rightwing revisionism on the war. Harry Elmer Barnes were Percy Greaves, Jr. were notable figures in the Pearl-Harbor-was-a-Roosevelt-conspiracy school of thought. Progressive historian Charles Beard climbed on this kind of rightwing isolationist bandwagon and continued it after the war with his book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), a sad "classic" of this school of thought.

Sarah Churchwell gives an interesting history of "America First" as a political slogan in 2021 Twitter thread and this 2016 Twitter document.

In more recent decades, this view has been represented by the Pat Buchanan/"paleo-conservative" niche that is basically hardline militarism and nationalism dressed up with America First rhetoric of the Bircher "Git US out of the UN" attitude. While this tend shares some positions with antiwar liberals and more consistent left-leaning anti-imperialists. But the core of the perspective is a rightwing militarist one.

The Antiwar.com website is a good example of this trend. That does not mean they don't run some useful material. Although I myself check the site much less often than I once did. As their Mission Statement shows, they come from a fundamentally conservative-reactionary foreign policy position. Being aware of the source's perspective is important.

This view is popular among some self-identified libertarians. The rightwing father-son Paul duo, Ron Paul and Rand Paul, aka, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, are good examples of this trend. Part of the America First perspective is a deep suspicion of foreign countries, which combines xenophobia against immigrants and very often white racism against other ethnic groups. That typically translates into opposition to the general liberal-internationalist concept of international law, including nuclear arms-reduction agreements. They are chronically suspicious of formal international alliances, e.g., "Git US out of the UN."

This is where the overlap in the libertarian/isolationist/MAGA foreign policy view often turns out to be incidental, even coincidental. The peace movements in America and Europe would generally support the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement with Iran that the Trump-Pence administration unilaterally withdrew, because the regard nuclear nonproliferation as vital, and they see it reducing the likelihood of war. But the MAGA crowd, of course, was totally fine with the US ending its participation for no good reason.

Similarly, the America Firsters may criticize the neoconservatives for particular wars or military interventions. But the unilateralist view of how the US should conduct its foreign and military policies of both groups is fundamentally the same.

This "libertarian" strain of foreign policy criticism also provides a good narrative for people who want to rebrand themselves from left to right. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example of someone who made that shift since her 2020 Presidential bid. One "tell" in her previous dovish posture was her hardline, Islamophobic positions.

This is also the route that what we might call the "Jimmie Dore" trend. Their basic play there is strike a superficially dogmatic-left foreign antiwar position and use it go on rightwing programs like Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and criticize the Democrats and pass off Trumpista MAGA positions as somehow antiwar. Dore and Glenn Greenwald are two current practitioners of this tack. In Greenwald's case, even in his more left/anti-imperialist days there was always a dubious "libertarian" streak, as David Neiwert has documented at some length. (The Tale of the Pontifex Maximus and His Lawyer: Glenn Greenwald's strange far-right blind spot Daily Kos 05/21/2019)

There's something of an analogy here to the path that Charles Beard took.

Tulsi Gabbert even recently guest-hosted Tucker's show, griping like a loyal Trumpista about the FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property seeking stolen classified documents. She also referred to "the Unaparty - the permanent Washington and the Biden regime." (Is "Unaparty" supposed to be a play on "Unabomber"?)

I've written about Matt Taibbi's political evolution in Matt Taibbi rants against Herbert Marcuse 02/25/2021.

In a more general sense, it's also important to remember that media sources of all sorts change and evolve over time. The New Republic when it was run by Andrew Sullivan, for instance, was notably different than today's New Republic. And that was very much a change for the better!