This June 1992 text is a polemical political essay. Rothbard reads two neoconservative attacks on Pat Buchanan and the paleoconservative right—Richard John Neuhaus in First Things and Norman Podhoretz in Commentary—as symptoms of a broader struggle over who controls American conservatism. Its structure is simple: an opening indictment of neoconservative “political correctness,” followed by separate sections on Podhoretz and Neuhaus. Its thesis is that neoconservatives police conservative discourse through accusations of anti-Semitism, racism, nativism, and conspiracy-mindedness, while presenting this policing as moral guardianship.
It is important to realize that, for all their complaints about left Political Correctness, it was the neocons who pioneered in that odious practice.
Rothbard’s first conceptual move is reversal. He denies that “political correctness” belongs only to the left and argues that neoconservatives developed an earlier right-liberal version of it, centered on taboo accusations and exclusionary labels. The Buchanan controversy becomes, for him, not primarily a dispute over one politician’s statements but a campaign of boundary enforcement. He sees coordination in the similarity between Podhoretz and Neuhaus:
The first point to make about the two articles is that they are oddly—or not so oddly—alike.
The Podhoretz section portrays Commentary as an ideological command center rather than a forum of argument. Rothbard objects to Podhoretz’s treatment of “America First,” his attacks on Buchanan sympathizers, and his criticism of National Review for insufficient zeal. The rhetoric is deliberately caustic, but the underlying claim is institutional: neoconservatism is represented as an imported liberal faction occupying conservative space.
Poddy is a commissar, not a thinker.
That charge culminates in Rothbard’s attempt to redescribe neoconservatives as displaced Cold War liberals rather than conservatives. Podhoretz’s own contrast between healthy liberalism and New Left corruption becomes, in Rothbard’s reading, an admission.
Podhoretz and his ilk are simply Old Leftists: not of the Bolshevik, but of the Menshevik wing of the church.
The Neuhaus section is more concerned with moral language and public excommunication. Rothbard argues that Neuhaus treats refusal to apologize as itself culpable, whereas Rothbard interprets Buchanan’s refusal as resistance to ritual submission. His defense of Buchanan rests on distinguishing criticism of Israel or Zionism from anti-Semitism, and on rejecting elastic moral categories that function as political weapons.
In Pat Buchanan, you and your neocon ilk tremble because here is a man who will not bend the knee to your victimological blackmail.
The essay’s most explicit analytical passage is Rothbard’s proposed definition of anti-Semitism. He complains that Neuhaus defines racism imperfectly but leaves anti-Semitism undefined, allowing the term to operate as stigma rather than concept. Rothbard therefore substitutes a narrow ordinary-language definition:
In my defense of Pat Buchanan in the Los Angeles Times (Jan. 6), I offered a definition: of personal anti-Semitism as someone who hates all Jews, and of political anti-Semitism as someone who wishes to levy political disabilities on Jews.
This definition is central to the essay’s argumentative architecture. By narrowing the term, Rothbard seeks to show that leading paleoconservatives cannot fairly be classified under it, and that the accusation functions mainly to discipline dissent within the right.
Not only is this the only cogent definition I know of, but it’s the only one that accords with the ordinary-language view of this concept.
The final movement broadens the dispute into a theory of conservative pluralism. Rothbard says his objection is not that every excluded tendency is correct, but that no faction should possess the authority to expel heterodox views from conservative public life.
It’s not that I agree with all of these variants, Pastor; it’s that I am opposed to their being excommunicated from the conservative movement.
The essay’s relevance lies in its snapshot of the early-1990s paleoconservative-neoconservative rupture: Buchananism, nationalism, anti-interventionism, immigration, Israel, and the meaning of “respectable” conservatism all converge. Rothbard’s closing conceptual move is to translate Neuhaus’s language of “democracy” and “civitas” into a language of ideological rule.
“Democracy” and “civitas” are only code words for the submission of all of us to that rule.
Thus the essay is not merely a defense of Buchanan; it is a polemic against gatekeeping itself. Rothbard casts neoconservatism as a managerial, moralizing regime whose power depends on naming heresies and excluding heretics.
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