In this excellent book, Justin Raimondo breathes new life into the forgotten icons of the Old Right. These figures include -- among others -- Albert Jay Nock (who was in fact regarded as a "leftist" for part of his career), H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov (born Fishel Chodorovsky -- did you know that? I didn't), Garet Garrett (author of _The Driver_, which Raimondo argues may have been an important unacknowledged source for Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED), John T. Flynn (who among other things wrote a scathing expose of Roosevelt and the "New Deal"), Rose Wilder Lane (author of _The Discovery of Freedom_), and Isabel Paterson (author of _The God of the Machine_ and the former guru of Ayn Rand).
Raimondo also discusses the hijacking of the Right by Bill Buckley and the neoconservatives, doing a much better job than Rand did in her little puff piece, "Conservativism: An Obituary." In fact Raimondo is careful to acknowledge all the genuine conservatives Rand left out of her "obituary"; rather than simply declaring conservatism dead, as Rand did, Raimondo wants to recover it from the people who almost destroyed it in favor of militaristic Statism.
Raimondo also discusses some genuine contemporary conservatives, including the late great Murray Rothbard (Raimondo is also the author of a soon-to-be-published biography of Rothbard), and provides a ringing defense of Pat Buchanan against a number of unfair attacks -- though he also harshly criticizes Buchanan's stand against free international trade. (The back of the book features an endorsement from Buchanan, by the way -- a little tribute to the intellectual integrity of both men.)
His remarks on Rand will also be of interest to bemused watchers of the "Objectivist" movement. Despite some obvious respect for her talents as a novelist (he thinks, and I agree, that _The Fountainhead_ was her best work and ATLAS SHRUGGED was pretty kludgy), he does not spare the rod as regards her pretensions of originality, her claim to stand within no pre-existing tradition whatsoever, her intellectual fraud in each of these respects, her failure to give proper credit even to those of her forebears who were directly influential on her thought (Isabel Paterson being the primary example), and her endorsement of several policies that would have been anathema to the Old Right. I suspect that Raimondo would be happy -- and I know I would -- if Rand were publicly exposed as a pretentious, pseudophilosophical, cult-mongering fraud, discredited as a representative of the classical-liberal Right, and recognized as the "leftist" she really was. (And any "Objectivists" reading this review are hereby invited to click "Not helpful.")
At any rate Raimondo's workmanlike volume belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in recovering the genuine tradition of liberty. His efforts to restore the memory of an important and all but forgotten strain of American thought will be of interest to libertarians and classical liberals everywhere.
