Return of the anti-war right.

• Author: Krayewski, Ed
• Position: Follow-Up

In the February 1987 issue of reason, Bill Kauffman wrote about the history of the "antiwar capitalists," explaining that while this cohort of activists did not look like the kind of protesters that were most prominent in the "peace movement" of the 1960s, '70s, and even '80s, they could trace their intellectual roots through a long tradition of libertarian anti-warthinking. Kauffman explained that before the era of the left-wing peace movement, opponents of war were "midwestern industrialists and retired military officers, publishing giants and Texas oilmen, or minerals executives and Great Plains farmers."

That such people once dominated the antiwar movement, Kauffman noted, was "an inconvenient fact that has been consigned to the memory hole by left and right alike." Non-intervention, wrote Kauffman, had become part and parcel of a "grand mosaic of socialism, ecologism, holistic feminism, etc.," ideas that might turn off the majority of ordinary Americans who had, in Kauffman's view, retained a distinctly Jeffersonian view of foreign policy and non-intervention.

Today, the idea of non-interventionism has reentered the mainstream, in part because of the growing influence of libertarianism in American politics. An April Wall StreetJournal/NBC News poll found 47 percent of Americans say the U.S. should...