Speaking of the prospects for anti-war conservatism, Michael Tomasky reviews (free registration required) Bill Kauffman’s upcoming Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism. Tomasky gives a largely sympathetic hearing to Kauffman’s history-cum-commendation of conservative isolationism and notes that “it wouldn’t be a bad thing to see the Republican Party, and even a good third to 40 percent of the Democrats in Washington (the ones who voted for the Iraq War and continue to support it or the Bush doctrine to some degree), pay the man some heed.”

However, Tomasky dissents (rightly, in my view) from Kauffman’s revisionist take on World War II, and, to a lesser extent, the Cold War. This has always seemed to me to be a weak spot in the paleocon/libertarian take on US military history. It’s well and good to point out, for instance, that the US didn’t face an imminent threat in World War II, but are we supposed to have been sanguine about the prospect of Hitler overruning Western Europe?

Where Tomasky and Kauffman agree, of course, is that the present-day GOP and the conservative movement are precisely 180 degrees away from the non-interventionism of the Anti-Imperialist League and the other conservative stalwarts who populate Kauffman’s story. As Tomasky puts it:

The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.

I once thought that the Republican Party could be the anti-war party. During the 90s Republicans in Congress opposed the Clinton administration’s military adventures, and some even talked in ways that suggested we could become a normal country again rather than a globe-straddling colossus. I even remember a New Republic cover in the late 90s asserting that the parties had switched places: the Republicans were now the doves and the Democrats the hawks (to the liberal hawks of TNR this was a welcome development). But, in any event, we’ve all seen how that turned out.

For the foreseeable future, whatever opposition to a policy of US global hegemony there’s likely to be will largely come from the Left. Paleocon isolationist-types make up a miniscule part of the conservative movement and the GOP coalition, as Ron Paul’s candidacy amply demonstrated. We can talk about the betrayal of “true conservatism” till the cows come home, but conservatism–like any political perspective–is as conservatism does. To moan about the loss of true conservatism is like Marxists complaining that “real” socialism hasn’t been tried yet.

P.S. I reviewed Kauffman’s last book here.