The American Conservative is a publication that seems like it should be better than it is and have a greater influence that it does. They have always struggled to keep it going, so that’s probably part of the problem, They tried to be a traditional paper journal, but that’s not something with a future. They have a website, but it is the antiquated “webzine” style that does not seem to work very well. The content has often been of the paleo variety, which is becoming a bit of an anachronism these days.

Anyway, this was posted the other day. It hits on why conservatism in general, but paleoconservatism in particular, never seem to work. There was always an effort to superimpose whatever they meant by conservatism onto the culture. That is, they often tried to take something that was obviously not Right and argue that it was actually conservative. often, the result was taking yesterday’s radicalism and making ti today’s right-wing orthodoxy. You see that in the Seeger piece.

Seeger was the authentic voice of the old American left and understood that conservatism, far from being inimical to socialism, was actually an essential component of it. In an interview with the New York Times in 1995 he declared, “I like to say I’m more conservative than [Barry] Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Seeger’s vision of the ideal society was not some high-tech futuristic metropolis but was rooted firmly in the past. America’s past. “When I was a boy, I read every single book by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton,” he said in a 1982 interview.

Seeger was an unrepentant communist, long after it was clear Stalin was a murderous psychopath. He actively conspired with foreigners to do harm to his fellow citizens for no other reason than ideological zeal. If mass murder is a conservative principle, the Right may want to have a meeting or something to figure out what went wrong. Just because someone has fond memories of the past, it does not make them Edmund Burke. There is more to being conservative than being a reactionary.

Seeger rejected the egotism of the modern elbow society which neoliberal capitalism has created. “There was no ‘I’ in Seeger’s music, only a big, broad encompassing ‘we’” writes Jody Rosen. Seeger never liked to talk in terms of his career. “I hate the word ‘career’ because it implies one is searching after fame and fortune—two of the silliest things to want,” he said. He abhorred commercialism. When he was given a microphone he used it to forward the causes he believed in—and not push a new album or CD.

As Kathy Shaidle covered last week, Pete Seeger was a money grubbing thief who would screw his mother for a nickel.

He was a better socialist than the Trotskyite ideologues who accused him of being a Stalinist, and he was a better conservative than the McCarthyites who persecuted him. He understood, probably better than any other figure on the American Left, that in order for the human race to go forward we need to go back. Way, way, back.

That’s complete nonsense. Seeger was never “persecuted.” He was a proud Stalinist long after Khrushchev revealed the details of Stalin’s crimes.  In fact, he was dissembling about Uncle Joe right up until the end. As Mark Steyn pointed out, Seeger could never bring himself to condemn the man who murdered fifty million people just to prove a point. if being on the Right means anything it means opposing grand social experiments that slaughter tens of millions of people.

That gets back to the weirdness of American Conservative and that whole fringe right-wing world that operates around paleoconservatism. Maybe it is just the nature of fringe politics. As these people were pushed out of the main stream, many went looking for something else they can support. Inevitably, that mean embracing or accepting some crap pot stuff. Of course, everything outside the main looks like crack pottery when you’re standing inside the main. Crack pots are a matter of perspective.