I hate to pick on Pat Buchanan since, whatever his other flaws, he’s been an early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war and the broader “maximalist” view of the “war on terror.” Still, there seems to be a persistent confusion running through his recent writings that bears on the present troubles.

In his latest book, as well as his magazine, Buchanan has peddled the conceit that the conservative movement of Reagan and Goldwater has been “hijacked” by nefarious neo-conservatives who want to send America on a delusional messianic crusade to impose freedom and democracy on the world. By contrast, Buchanan wants the USA to return to what he argues is the traditional foreign policy of the fouders – non-interventionism (a.k.a. “isolationism”).

What he often seems to do though, is to conflate Goldwaterism/Reaganism with the isolationist “Old Right” that flourished in the years between the world wars. In arguing that the necons have hijacked the movement, he implies that they represent a radical departure from the tradition of Goldwater and Reagan. But I think by anyone’s reckoning Goldwater and Reagan were far more interventionist than isolationist, and this has been true of the post-World War II conservative movement as a whole. It was founded on the twin pillars of scaling back the state at home and defeating communism abroad. Non-interventionists either broke with the movement, or kept their views on foreign policy to themselves during the Cold War (for an excellent discussion of the various factions within the postwar conservative movement, see George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America).

To the extent that one accepts the logic of the Old Right – that domestic statism and foreign interventionism are simply two sides of the same coin – the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan can only seem contradictory. The neoconservatives that Buchanan deplores have resolved the contradiction by making their peace with big government at home in exchange for aggressive government action abroad.

John Henry Newman once said that Protestantism was nothing but a halfway house between Roman Catholicism and liberalism. It may be that Goldwater-Reaganism holds the same place between the Old Right and the neoconservatism, and that Buchanan is trying to take up residence in that lonely halfway house.