Justin, you’re also an expert on the Neo-Conservatives, one of my least favorite ideological groupings. Tell us about the Neo-Conservatives and the lost legacy of the conservative movement.
RAIMONDO: Well, what happened is that during the Cold War — conservatives used to be like Bob Taft, anti-interventionists for small government at home because they realized that you couldn’t have an empire and a republic, limited government at the same time. But that died out after McCarthyism. And the fervent anti-Communism of so many people on the right logically led — as Murray pointed out in his great book The Betrayal of the American Right, logically led to warmongering. Because if we’re out to root out the Commies on the home front, then what’s to stop us from doing it abroad? So naturally — perhaps not so naturally — what happened was that a lot of ex-Communists, ex-Trotskyites and right-wing Social Democrats jumped on the conservative bandwagon early on, like James Burnham, for example, who was one of the founding editors of National Review. And Bill Buckley gathered these people around him. They soon took over the conservative movement and so the conservative movement became the militaristic bunch of nut jobs that we see today. Their big dream, as Murray pointed out, was to nuke the Soviet Union. And they made speeches to their followers saying, yes, we’re going to nuke the Soviet Union; it’s going to be great. Of course, the Soviet Union failed, like Mises predicted that it would, without any nuking being necessary.
So all these right-wing Social Democrats originally started in the Democratic Party and they were grouped around “Scoop” Jackson, the Democrat from Boeing, as we used to call him –
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