Recently by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: Left-Liberal Catholics: Yay for the Atomic Bombings!
I figured that would be it. There is no wiggle room left for Lord after that. As Gary North put it, "The lesson here is simple: don’t get Woods on your case if you are saying really stupid things about American history."
Yet he came back for more. With a busy schedule both personally and professionally, I have only now had the time to respond, which I’m doing in a series of bullet points.
1) I pointed out in the video that the anti-imperialist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by the conservatives, as historian William Leuchtenberg has noted. I likewise pointed out that we may count on one hand the number of Progressives who opposed U.S. entry into World War I. I further noted that the recent interventions Lord supports were likewise supported by Hillary Clinton, Howard Stern, the New York Times, and the Washington Post (among others I mentioned). Before Lord goes attacking other people for their tactical alliances, he might make note of the beam in his own eye.
Lord does not acknowledge any of this. I wouldn’t, either, were I in his shoes.
2) Lord is obsessed with Ronald Reagan, and again condemns Ron Paul for opposing Reagan’s expansion of government power. The weird cult of personality around the deceased former president reveals that Reagan has become the Right’s Obama: a man whose every action is to be treated as ipso facto brilliant, perhaps even divinely inspired. Critics are mere heretics whose arguments need not actually be refuted; the mere fact that they have disagreed with the Great Leader is enough to condemn them forever.
How dare you say Ronald Reagan wasn’t free-market enough! He supported the free market to the precisely correct extent, says the Supreme Neocon Council.
That Lord is more interested in someone’s loyalty to a man than he is in loyalty to the principles that the man was supposed to represent, is the classic expression of a cult of personality.
3) In pointing out that Felix Morley, one of the founding editors of the weekly conservative newspaper Human Events, was himself a noninterventionist, it was obviously not my intention to argue that Human Events favors nonintervention abroad as an editorial position. I myself have been published and interviewed numerous times in Human Events, so I’m quite familiar with its editorial line. The point is that Lord describes nonintervention as a "liberal" (as in left-liberal, not classical liberal) position. As long as I can find some indisputably non-liberal supporters of nonintervention, I win. No one in his right mind would consider Morley a left-liberal. But Morley is simply Exhibit A.
4) Here’s Exhibit B: Lord’s own superior at The American Spectator, senior editor Angelo Codevilla. Speaking on the Mike Church Show about the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus to which Lord and Levin subscribe, Codevilla said:
This is a radical departure from the way that America’s status in the world was built in the first place. It was built by a founding generation and the statesmen of the nineteenth century who adhered to the traditional view that the governors of any country are the stewards of the interests of that country only, and they are not entitled in any way to interfere in the affairs of other countries….
Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, people like Woodrow Wilson began supposing that we had the right and duty to be the world’s keepers, and they have proceeded to mess things up around the world ever since.
What I try to do in this book [A Student’s Guide to International Relations] is to explain…that the world really is filled with people who are really different, who really do think differently, and that they work in an international system which gives them full rein, full capacity to be what it is they want, and that makes it impossible for foreigners to conduct their affairs... read more>>
