A German rightwinger writes about Jürgen Habermas. And, yes, the result is weird.

Paul Gottfried is a professor and polemicist associated with the German “New Right.” Similarly to the US and other places, they are rightwingers who spin out theories dressed up with “highbrow” pretensions.

German New Right ideologue Paul Gottfried, 2017 (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Tony Senatore recently wrote a piece for the Times of Israel giving Gottfried credit for recognizing that William Buckley was a squish when it came to defending True Conservatism. Buckley gained some measure of respectability even among liberals when he explicitly broke with the paranoid conspiracism of the John Birch Society, in particular. He scolds Buckley for watering down True Conservatism to be respectable to “the establishment, [by] prioritizing respectability over foundational principles.” (1)

In a drearily familiar rightwing conversion narrative, Senatore recalls how Gottfried’s perspective allowed him to see the True Light of Pure Conservatism:

I discovered that the early conservative movement was once composed of a diverse and brilliant array of figures, including Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, and the John Birch Society. [Rightwing cranks all.] Over time, Buckley’s leadership became dominant. Importantly, Buckley was essentially a libertarian, heavily influenced by Albert J. Nock. Some anticipated the 1960s communist threat would only temporarily override Buckley’s libertarian inclinations, but this proved untrue. Ultimately, Buckley removed anyone unwilling to support the welfare-warfare state, the Cold War, and the neoconservative economics underpinning it.

The Wikipedia entry for Gottfried notes:

Gottfried helped coin the term alternative right with a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008 envisioning a nationalist and populist right-wing movement; it was published by Richard Spencer in [the flaming rightwing] Taki's Magazine with the title "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right". Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to [the American neo-Nazi Richard] Spencer. As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor at Alternative Right, a website edited by Spencer. He and Spencer co-edited a book in 2015. [italics in original] (2)

Now the paleocon American Conservative has published a piece by Gottfried on Jürgen Habermas, the recently deceased German political and legal philosopher who had a major influence on how the German “memory culture” (Vergangenheitspolitik) treats the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. (3)

I’m commenting here on Gottfried’s obituary of Habermas not because it’s worth reading but because The American Conservative picked a guy like this to write an obituary on one of the world’s most famous philosophers, who as a part of the “Second Generation” of the Frankfurt School trend of “critical theory,” was also an important advocate for a politics of militant democracy and a critical of Trumpism and its European soulmates.

The American Conservative is part of the nationalist-unilateralist foreign policy perspective that Trump practices. And so it does sometimes publish articles by foreign policy “restrainers” who are not rightwing crackpots. It’s just a shady digital neighborhood to hang out to find such material. As of this writing, it is running an article (which I’m not going to bother to link) warning about the imminent danger of something called “moderate lib terrorism” in the United States. When the entire premise of your article is an oxymoron, you might as well give up trying to convince anyone not high on oxycontin.

Gottfried’s article is “highbrow” rightwing nonsense. He expresses his regret that Habermas, who did a dissertation in 1954 on the philosopher F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854). As a young student in Tubingen, he was close friends with Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and all three was passionate admirers of the French Revolution. Hegel and Hölderlin maintained their progressive political orientation later in life, but Schiller became a Catholic reactionary. When Hegel passed away, Schelling was called by the conservative Prussian educational ministry to take Hegel’s place so that he could undo the effects of what then-Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV reportedly called the “dragon’s seed” of progressive religious and political thought that Hegel represented to conservatives.

Gottfried in his ridiculous article mourns the fact that Habermas didn’t adopt some version of what Gottfried seems to regard as the healthy conservative/reactionary-Romantic perspective of the later Schelling. He also tries in his article to imply that Habermas may have been an aspiring Nazi at that time. (4)

Notes:

(1) Senatore, Tony (2026): Paul Gottfried, William F. Buckley and American Conservatism. Times of Israel 02/10/2026. <https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/paul-gottfried-william-f-buckley-and-american-conservatism/> (Accessed: 2026-06-05).

(2) Paul Gottfried. Wikipedia 05/05/2026. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Gottfried&oldid=1352656287> (Accessed: 2026-06-05).

(3) Gottfried, Paul (2026): Habermas’s Age. American Conservative 05/01/2026. <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/habermass-age/> (Accessed: 2026-06-05).

(4) Philipp Felsch provides a sober account of Habermas’ early philosophical work including the Schelling dissertation in Der Philosoph. Habermas und Wir (2025).