Heritage Month Day Fourteen: Robert Taft
Happy Robert Taft Day!
For the fourteenth day of Heritage History month, I wanted someone who exemplified the spirit and ethos of the American Old Right. Studying the Old Right is an interesting experience, if you allow yourself to really get into it, because you quickly realize how far the United States has come culturally since the beginning of the twentieth century. It reminds you how liberal the GOP is, even though you’ve been gaslit into thinking they are a culturally Conservative Party.
The Old Right was a coalition of anti-New Deal Democrats and Republicans who basically stood against what we in retrospect can now call the Managerial Revolution. They were businessmen, political figures, retired military men, writers, and religious leaders. They saw FDR war agitation as an outflow of his overall quest for a system transformation.
Robert Taft embodies their overall instinct and represents the height of their influence in Washington. Hailing from the noteworthy Taft family, Robert was an Ohio Congressman and then Senator who made his mark by opposing the New Deal and its various attempted expansions. Taft not only pushed back on the New Deal, he also opposed entry into WWII on the basis that America did not have a dog in the European fight and that our blood and treasure was not worth expending in a foreign ideological crusade.
Additionally, he stood against the creation of NATO and any other binding agreement which bound America to foreign problems. Taft wasn’t just a nobody with good policy opinions, he was a coalition leader who eventually became the Senate Majority Leader.
The closest he got to the Presidency was in 1952 when he narrowly —some would say suspiciously—lost the republican nomination to Eisenhower, who went on to defeat Harry Truman. Eisenhower ran because he strongly opposed Taft’s non-interventionist instincts and his opposition to NATO. One of Taft’s campaign managers was the committed pro-gold and hardcore Old Right congressman Howard Buffet, father of the much less honorable, crony capitalist Warren Buffett.
Taft represented in ever sense the political world that pre-existed both the postwar consensus and the managerial revolution of the 1930s. He thought the bombing of Nagasaki was a war crime and profoundly anti-conservative—he rightly saw it as a tool of Progressive imperialism. He also thought the Nuremberg Trial was absurd, a repudiation of Anglo-Saxon historical legal standards by initiating a victor’s justice under ex post facto laws (which is where you try someone on laws that were written after the crime was committed, in order to declare them guilty of the crime).
Finally, Taft warned that the imperial endeavors of the United States during the Cold War would produce a type of tyranny that would devour the constitution and the Old Republic he was called upon to represent and defend.