Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse by Thomas E. Woods

Author:Thomas E. Woods
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781596981720
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2011-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

Out with the phony conservatives, the Tea Party movement says. We want the real thing. But the real thing, far from endorsing global military intervention, recoils from it. The conservative cannot endorse a policy that is at once utopian, destructive, impoverishing, counterproductive, propaganda-driven, contrary to republican values, and sure to increase the power of government, especially the executive branch.81 George Nash, whose book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 has long been a standard reference work on American conservatism, identifies Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet as the three most significant figures in the branch of conservatism he describes as “traditionalist”; all three were wary of militarism and the warfare state.82

Kirk, whose seminal book The Conservative Mind became one of the most important texts of the postwar conservative movement, was a withering critic of the Persian Gulf War, and called for “prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs.” Writing of Senator Robert Taft, known in his day as “Mr. Republican,” Kirk noted his subject’s aversion to war.

War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom.…Though he was no theoretical pacifist, he insisted that every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action. War would make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, break in upon private and public morality.83

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