Edward Sebesta has moved his blogging to Blogspot, specifically to Anti-Neo-Confederate.
In a post earlier this week (Cindy Sheehan and her adventures with Neo-Confederates lewrockwell.com 12/26/05), he talked about the strange political bedfellows which the far-right and liberal-left war critics make. He mentions Cindy Sheehan's former close association with the LewRockwell.com crowd and observes provocatively:
This is a distressing aspect of the so-called "Left-Right" anti-war alliance which would be better called the "Left-Racist" alliance.
But he also says, "I don't know if Cindy Sheehan knew what the Lew Rockwell people were about," and reports that she "did drop at least any outward associations with the Lew Rockwell people."
Check out the post and the new site.
I want to mention here a couple of aspects of this "strange bedfellows" antiwar phenomenon that he doesn't discuss in his relatively short post.
Rightwing isolationists and their baggage
One I've discussed at some length before here, as in my post Justin Raimondo, an isolationist critic of the Iraq War of 11/13/05. That is the fact that conservative-isolationists opponents of the Iraq War tend to be coming from what can be meaningfully described as an Old Right perspective, Old Right meaning pre-Second World War rightwing isolationists. My 11/13/05 post goes into some of what that meant historically in terms of foreign policy.
Here, I would stress that a lot of baggage often comes along with that Old Right foreign-policy outlook. Regular old racism in the Southern segregationist vein is often one of them, the point Sebesta's post discusses. Anti-Semitism is another.
And in social policy, the Old Right viewpoint generally includes some or all of the following: bitter hostility to unions; extreme suspicion of the positive contributions of government, including democratic government (maybe especially democratic government!); ideological celebrationof guns (never to be confused with actual proficiency in using them or practical knowledge of self-defense); Reconstruction/Dominionist Christianity, or some bizarre variant of such; hostility to government regulation of business, including especially anti-discrimination laws; tolerance of crony-capitalist corruption; and total opposition to even the most basic social legislation like child-labor laws, the minimum wage and social insurance (e.g., Social Security).
And even in foreign policy, the Old Right isolationist perspective comes from the same fundamental nationalistic/jingoistic perspective that animates the Bush/Cheney/Rummy policies, even though Dubya is inclined to dress it up in pseudo-Wilsonian rhetoric. The Old Right is very much opposed to international alliances, the United Nations and arms-control agreements. Although they may oppose Republican unilateralists on an issue like the Iraq War (for many of them, not least because they perceive it as being a pro-Israel policy), they share the same basic faith in heavy reliance on military threats in foreign policy.
The Iraq War has changed a lot of thinking
The second aspect is that the Iraq War has stimulated a certain amount of realignment in American politics. How much we won't know for a while. And it obviously depends on many variables that people can influence. It seems to me that the Iraq War has had far more of such an effect than the 9/11 attacks did.
That means that there is a lot of genuine rethinking of past positions going on right now. I think of a guy like Andrew Bacevich, for instance, who had been known as a conservative voice on foreign policy during the Clinton years. But he's coming from a democratic and pragmatic perspective that has made him one of the country's leading critics (at least as far as I'm concerned!) of the Bush foreign policy.
Then there are former intelligence officials who are speaking and writing about their concerns on the Bush foreign policies, and the Iraq War in particular. Ray McGovern seems to fall more into a liberal internationalist strategic outlook. Pat Lang and Michael Scheuer seem to be more in the hard-boiled realist mode.
Scheuer in particular seems almost naive and simplistic in some of the things he says about more general foreign policy questions. But he's also one of the best-informed people in the world (literally) on Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and jihadist terrorism.
People like this have professional experience that make them keen and perceptive observers of current events. And their concerns about the Iraq War and about how the Bush administration is approaching the fight against jihadist terrorism leads them right now to find a lot of common ground with people from the liberal-international, and even leftwing anti-imperialist, viewpoints. Pat Lang a few days ago explained a bit of his "libertarian conservative" outlook: The "Threat" and our Liberties Sic Semper Tyrannis blog 12/26/05.
I use those individuals as examples. But what is true for them is also true for many people who wouldn't know what you meant if you asked them to describe themselves as "liberal internationalists" or "realists" in foreign policy. Some of them are going to wind up thinking about politics differently as a result of the current debates. Maybe someone who has previously thought Republican promises to cut taxes on the upper brackets was the pinnacle of wisdom has suddenly become more worried about the perils of a reckless foreign policy.
Some people who previously saw the Republicans as being the most reliable on security issues will wonder if their confidence hasn't been misplaced, as they look at failed prosecutions in terrorist cases, neglect of important disaster preparations and billions squandered on questionable crony-capitalist contract deals with the Halliburtons and Bechtels. Some people who genuinely worry about government sticking their noses into people's personal lives will start to see NSA mega-surveillance as more frightening than IRS forms. And some people who saw the Republicans as practicing the kind of values that would keep their teenage daughter from getting pregnant will start questioning more seriously the Christian Right values that end in worshipping war and looking forward to an apocalyptic slaughter in the Middle East which they think it's the job of America to help bring about.
As the Spanish European leader Javier Solano once said, only idiots never change their minds. So a certain amount of mixing of ideas among the internationalist liberals and the isolationists conservatives may end up encouraging them to support more policies not favored by the neo-Confederate types.
Of course, people can also change their minds in idiotic ways. So it's always possible that some people will find their antiwar stance a bridge from a more liberal outlook to a reactionary one. It happens.
A last thought about political bedfellows
Finally, in looking at these things, it's well to remember that "politics is politics", as Joe Stalin famously said shortly before he made his Nonaggression Pact with Hitler Germany. When Germany finally dumped that agreement and invaded Russia, Winston Churchill said that if Hitler had just just invaded Hell, he would find a few nice things to say about the Devil on the floor of Parliament.
Sometimes groups with very different agendas and very different outlooks find themselves on the same side of particular issues. But as Edward Sebesta reminds us, a tactical political understanding on a particular issue doesn't mean we can or should close our eyes to what groups like LewRockwell.com are ultimately about.
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