Paul Gottfried | |
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Born | Paul Edward Gottfried November 21, 1941 New York City, U.S. |
Alma mater | Yeshiva University (BA) Yale University (MS, PhD) |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy American philosophy |
School | Paleoconservatism |
Institutions |
|
Thesis | Catholic Romanticism in Munich, 1826–1834 (1968) |
Doctoral advisor | Herbert Marcuse |
Main interests | Welfare state, pluralism, Romanticism |
Notable ideas | Therapeutic state, movement conservatism, alternative right, white nationalism (denied) |
This article is part of a series on |
Conservatism in the United States |
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Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. [1] [2] [3] He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles . [4] He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, [5] and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École , a Nouvelle Droite journal. [6]
He is often considered the foremost reactionary critic of the Republican Party in general and neoconservatism in particular. [7] [8]
Gottfried helped coin the term paleoconservative in 1986 and alternative right (with Richard Spencer) in 2008. [2] [1] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described him as a "far-right thinker". [9] He founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which the SPLC considers a white nationalist group. [9] [10] Although noted for working with far-right and alt-right groups and figures, he has said that he does "not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists" or associated with pro-Nazis, "as somebody whose family barely escaped from the Nazis in the '30s". [2] [1] He considers himself a "right-wing pluralist." [11]
Gottfried was born in 1941 in the Bronx, New York City. His father, Andrew Gottfried, was a furrier in Budapest who fled Hungary after the July Putsch of 1934. The family relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, soon after Paul Gottfried's birth. Andrew Gottfried had a fur business in Bridgeport and was involved in its Hungarian Jewish community. [1]
Gottfried attended Yeshiva University in New York as an undergraduate. He returned to Connecticut to attend Yale for graduate school, where he studied under Herbert Marcuse (with whom he disagreed). [1] [12] He defended his thesis on Catholic Romanticism in Munich, 1826–1834 in 1968. [13]
Gottfried had written 13 books as of 2016. [1] With Thomas Fleming in 1986 he coined the term paleoconservative (a term he identifies with), and with Richard Spencer in 2008 he coined alternative right. [2] [14] He has aimed to revitalize the Old Right to counter neoconservative and neoliberal influence in the conservative movement. [3]
He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. [15] [16] He moved to Elizabethtown after his first wife died, and taught at the college until "a school official encouraged his early exit", according to a 2016 article in Tablet. [1]
Gottfried was a friend of Richard Nixon after Nixon resigned from the presidency. [17] Gottfried was expelled as a contributor to National Review in the 1980s; interviewed in 2017, he said National Review "didn’t throw anybody out because they were racist," but alleged that it and the conservative movement had been captured by interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism. [18] In the 1980s, he edited the journal Continuity for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which included some neo-Confederate writing. [19] He was a key advisor in the 1990s to Pat Buchanan, notably during Buchanan's campaign in the 1992 Republican primaries against President George H. W. Bush. [20] [1] He worked for the journal Telos , which embraced some far-right causes. [12] He is opposed to nation-building and is a critic of American interventionist foreign policy;[ citation needed ] he additionally opposes the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel. [21] He has written that Murray Rothbard was a close friend and influence. [22]
Gottfried is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank. [5] In 2018, he joined the Institut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques (Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences), founded by Marion Maréchal and Thibaut Monnier, in Lyon, France. [23] Gottfried is the US correspondent of Nouvelle École , a Nouvelle Droite journal founded by GRECE in 1968. [6]
In 2008, Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, a group the SPLC has described as white nationalist. [9] Richard Spencer was a board member. [24] It is named for the famous writer H.L. Mencken; a Village Voice article about the club in 2013 noted Mencken's casual racism. The Village Voice said the club was "overwhelmingly geriatric" and met in airport hotels near Baltimore. Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism said the ADL did not consider the club a hate group, but that it "attracts a number of white supremacists to their conferences". [24]
Gottfried has spoken at American Renaissance conferences and written essays for VDARE. [10] An Intelligencer article about the far right in 2017 summarized Gottfried as a "nativist strategist" who had "spent a career agitating for an ethno-nationalist conservatism that celebrated white Western values and lamented what feminism and multiculturalism had done to dilute them". [25]
Gottfried helped coin the term alternative right with a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008 envisioning a nationalist and populist right-wing movement; it was published by Richard Spencer in Taki's Magazine with the title "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right". [2] [1] [26] Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to Spencer. [27] [1] [28] As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor at Alternative Right, a website edited by Spencer. [29] He and Spencer co-edited a book in 2015. [3] [1]
In a 2016 article in the online magazine Tablet titled "The Alt-Right's Jewish Godfather", Gottfried said, "Whenever I look at Richard [Spencer], I see my ideas coming back in a garbled form." He also said, "I just do not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists," and "As somebody whose family barely escaped from the Nazis in the '30s, I do not want to be associated with people who are pro-Nazi." Jacob Siegel, author of the Tablet article, described Gottfried as having "tried to build a postfascist, postconservative politics of the far-right" for the past 20 years, but that "Spencer and his acolytes wanted to cross the threshold into fascist thought and beliefs". [1]
In 2018, Robert Fulford of the National Post described Gottfried as the "godfather of alt-right" and wrote that Gottfried's paleoconservative ideas were a major source of the alt-right phenomenon. [30] Three weeks later, Gottfried published a response article objecting to some of its points. He wrote, "I do know Richard Spencer and worked with him in 2010 when he edited the Taki's Magazine website. We did develop the term 'Alternative Right' together — it was a headline he put on one of my articles. But my subsequent strategic differences with him are a matter of public record, which should have been noted." [31]
Paleoconservatism is a political philosophy and a paternalistic strain of conservatism in the United States stressing American nationalism, Christian ethics, regionalism, traditionalist conservatism, and non-interventionism. Paleoconservatism's concerns overlap with those of the Old Right that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s as well as with paleolibertarianism. By the start of the 21st century, the movement had begun to focus more on issues of race.
Paleolibertarianism is a right-libertarian political activism strategy aimed at uniting libertarians and paleoconservatives. It was developed by American anarcho-capitalist theorists Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the American political context after the end of the Cold War. From 1989 to 1995, they sought to communicate libertarian notions of opposition to government intervention by using messages accessible to the working class and middle class people of the time. They combined libertarian free market views with the cultural conservatism of paleoconservatism, while also opposing protectionism. The strategy also embraced the paleoconservative reverence for tradition and religion. This approach, usually identified as right-wing populism, was intended to radicalize citizens against the state. The name they chose for this style of activism evoked the roots of modern libertarianism, hence the prefix paleo. That founding movement was American classical liberalism, which shared the anti-war and anti-New Deal sentiments of the Old Right in the first half of the 20th century. Paleolibertarianism is generally seen as a right-wing ideology.
Modern Age is an American conservative academic quarterly journal, founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk in close collaboration with Henry Regnery. Originally published independently in Chicago, in 1976 ownership was transferred to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Peter Brimelow is an American white supremacist writer. He is the founder of the website VDARE, an anti-immigration site associated with white supremacy, white nationalism, and the alt-right.
John Derbyshire is a British-born American computer programmer, journalist, and political commentator. He was noted for being one of the last paleoconservatives at the National Review, until he was fired in 2012 for writing an article for Taki's Magazine that was widely viewed as racist. Since 2012 he has written for white nationalist website VDARE.
Telos is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles on politics, philosophy, and critical theory, with a particular focus on contemporary political, social, and cultural issues.
The National Policy Institute (NPI) was a white supremacist think tank and lobbying group based in Alexandria, Virginia. It lobbied for white supremacists and the alt-right. Its president was Richard B. Spencer.
The Old Right is an informal designation used for a branch of American conservatism that was most prominent from 1910 to the mid-1950s, but never became an organized movement. Most members were Republicans, although there was a conservative Democratic element based largely in the Southern United States. They are termed the "Old Right" to distinguish them from their New Right successors who came to prominence in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism are two major branches of the American conservative political movement. Representatives of each faction often argue that the other does not represent true conservatism. Disputed issues include immigration, trade, the United States Constitution, taxation, budget, business, the Federal Reserve, drug policy, foreign aid and the foreign policy of the United States.
The Rockford Institute was an American conservative think-tank associated with paleoconservatism, based in Rockford, Illinois. Founded in 1976, it ran the John Randolph Club and published the magazine Chronicles. In 2018 the Rockford Institute merged with the Charlemagne Institute, which became the new publisher of Chronicles. The Charlemagne Institute describes itself as "leading a cultural movement to defend and advance Western Civilization, the foundation of our American republic."
E. Christian Kopff is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Director of the Honors Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has taught since 1973. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the CU Committee on Research. He has been a contributor to far-right publications.
Henry Cosad Harpending was an American anthropologist, population geneticist, and writer. He was a distinguished professor at the University of Utah, and formerly taught at Penn State and the University of New Mexico. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is known for the book The 10,000 Year Explosion, which he co-authored with Gregory Cochran.
Taki's Magazine, called Takimag for short, is an online magazine of politics and culture published by the Greek paleoconservative commentator and socialite Taki Theodoracopulos and edited by his daughter Mandolyna Theodoracopulos. It has published articles by far-right figures such as Gavin McInnes and the white supremacist Jared Taylor; the white supremacist Richard Spencer was an early Taki's editor.
Richard Bertrand Spencer is an American political commentator mostly known for his neo-Nazi, antisemitic and white supremacist views. Spencer claimed to have coined the term "alt-right" and was the most prominent advocate of the alt-right movement from its earliest days. He advocates for the reconstitution of the European Union into a white racial empire, which he believes will replace the diverse European ethnic identities with one homogeneous "White identity".
The Property and Freedom Society (PFS) is an anarcho-capitalist political organization located in Bodrum, Turkey. Founded in May 2006 by the academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe, PFS presents itself as a more radically right-libertarian alternative to the free-market Mont Pelerin Society.
The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European nationalist, ethno-nationalist, far-right political ideology asserting the right of the European ethnic groups and white peoples to Western culture and territories exclusively. Originating in France as Les Identitaires, with its youth wing Generation Identity (GI), the movement expanded to other European countries during the early 21st century. Its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, who are considered the main ideological sources of the movement.
The alt-right is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s, and has been declining since 2017. The term is ill-defined and has been used in different ways by academics, journalists, media commentators, and alt-right members themselves.
The alt-lite, also known as the alt-light and the new right, is a loosely defined right-wing political movement whose members regard themselves as separate from both mainstream conservatism and the far-right, white nationalist alt-right. The concept is primarily associated with the United States, where it emerged in 2017. The term remained in vogue during the Trump administration, as observers assessed all sources for right-wing populism, but has mostly faded from popular discourse as of 2024.
Daniel Friberg is a Swedish businessman, publisher, and writer, and a leading figure of the Swedish neo-fascist movement and global alt-right movements. He is the CEO and co-founder of Arktos Media. He co-founded the AltRight Corporation with American white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2017 but severed ties in May 2018. He is a former CEO of the mining company Wiking Mineral.
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