American political philosopher (born 1941)
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 Ecole
, a
Nouvelle Droite
journal.
[6]
He 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".
[7]
He founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which the SPLC considers a
white nationalist
group.
[7]
[8]
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]
Early life and education
[
edit
]
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]
[9]
Career
[
edit
]
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]
[10]
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.
[
citation needed
]
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.
[11]
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
.
[12]
In the 1980s, he edited the journal
Continuity
for the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
, which included some
neo-Confederate
writing.
[13]
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
.
[14]
[1]
He worked for the journal
Telos
, which embraced some far-right causes.
[9]
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
.
[15]
He has written that
Murray Rothbard
was a close friend and influence.
[16]
Gottfried is an associated scholar at the
Mises Institute
, a libertarian think tank.
[5]
In 2018, he joined the
Institut des sciences sociales, economiques et politiques
(Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences), founded by
Marion Marechal
and Thibaut Monnier, in
Lyon
, France.
[17]
Gottfried is the US correspondent of
Nouvelle Ecole
, 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
.
[7]
Richard Spencer was a board member.
[18]
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".
[18]
Gottfried has spoken at
American Renaissance
conferences and written essays for
VDARE
.
[8]
An
Intelligencer
article about the far right in 2017 summarized Gotfred 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".
[19]
Coining of
alt-right
and associations
[
edit
]
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]
[20]
Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to Spencer.
[21]
[1]
[22]
As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor at
Alternative Right
, a website edited by Spencer.
[23]
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.
[24]
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."
[25]
Books
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
j
k
l
Jacob, Siegel (November 30, 2016).
"Paul Gottfried, the Jewish Godfather of the 'Alt-Right'
"
.
Tablet Magazine
. Nextbook, Inc
. Retrieved
January 14,
2022
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
"Meet the Jewish 'Paleoconservative' Who Coined The Term 'Alternative Right'
"
. The Forward. August 29, 2016
. Retrieved
November 3,
2016
.
- ^
a
b
c
Drolet, Jean-Francois; Williams, Michael C (2022).
"From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations"
.
Journal of International Political Theory
.
18
(1): 27.
doi
:
10.1177/17550882211020409
.
ISSN
1755-0882
.
S2CID
236406021
.
- ^
"Paul Gottfried"
.
Chronicles Magazine
.
- ^
a
b
"Paul Gottfried"
.
Mises Institute
. June 20, 2014
. Retrieved
May 1,
2022
.
- ^
a
b
Francois, Stephane
(2018). "Reflexions sur le paganisme d'extreme droite".
Social Compass
.
65
(2): 275.
doi
:
10.1177/0037768618768439
.
ISSN
0037-7686
.
S2CID
150142148
.
- ^
a
b
c
Piggott, Stephen (November 4, 2016).
"White Nationalists to Gather in Baltimore for the Ninth Annual H.L. Mencken Club Conference"
.
Southern Poverty Law Center
. Retrieved
November 29,
2022
.
- ^
a
b
"Prominent Racists Attend Inaugural H.L. Mencken Club Gathering"
.
Southern Poverty Law Center
. Retrieved
November 29,
2022
.
- ^
a
b
Braune, Joan (2019).
"Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? "Cultural Marxism" as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory"
(PDF)
.
Journal of Social Justice
.
9
(2164?7100): 1?25.
- ^
Drolet, Jean-Francois; Williams, Michael C (2022).
"From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations"
.
Journal of International Political Theory
.
18
(1): 27.
doi
:
10.1177/17550882211020409
.
S2CID
236406021
.
- ^
Jay, Martin (2020).
Splinters in your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations
. London. p. 164.
ISBN
978-1-78873-604-6
.
OCLC
1122921518
.
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link
)
- ^
Nwanevu, Osita (March 23, 2017).
"National Review Wants Credit for Opposing the Alt-Right Movement It Helped Create"
.
Slate Magazine
. Retrieved
November 30,
2022
.
- ^
Sebesta, Edward H.; Hague, Euan; Beirich, Heidi, eds. (2009).
Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction
. United States: University of Texas Press. p. 31.
- ^
Drolet, Jean-Francois; Williams, Michael C. (January 2, 2020).
"America first: paleoconservatism and the ideological struggle for the American right"
.
Journal of Political Ideologies
.
25
(1): 28?50.
doi
:
10.1080/13569317.2020.1699717
.
ISSN
1356-9317
.
S2CID
213963637
.
- ^
Gottfried, Paul (June 17, 2012).
"Jews Against Israel"
.
The American Conservative
. Retrieved
November 16,
2023
.
- ^
Cooper, Melinda (2021).
"The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation"
.
Theory, Culture & Society
.
38
(6): 29?50.
doi
:
10.1177/0263276421999446
.
ISSN
0263-2764
.
S2CID
233528701
.
- ^
Catherine Lagrange (June 22, 2018).
"L'ecole de Marion Marechal : du business et de la culture (tres a droite)"
.
Le Point
(in French)
. Retrieved
July 22,
2018
.
- ^
a
b
Merlan, Anna (July 10, 2013).
"Is the H.L. Mencken Club an Extremist Hate Group, or Just a Bunch of Weary Old White Guys?"
.
The Village Voice
. Retrieved
December 8,
2022
.
- ^
Read, Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, Noreen Malone, Max (April 30, 2017).
"Beyond Alt: Understanding the New Far Right"
.
Intelligencer
. Retrieved
August 28,
2023
.
{{
cite web
}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link
)
- ^
"Inside the Far-right Podcast Ecosystem, Part 2: Richard Spencer's Origins in the Podcast Network"
.
Southern Poverty Law Center
. Retrieved
November 29,
2022
.
- ^
Finlayson, Alan (2021).
"Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web"
.
Theory, Culture & Society
.
38
(6): 176.
doi
:
10.1177/02632764211036731
.
ISSN
0263-2764
.
S2CID
239690708
.
- ^
Gray, Rosie (January 12, 2017).
"An Alt-Right Leader Sets Up Shop in Northern Virginia"
.
The Atlantic
. Retrieved
August 2,
2023
.
- ^
Keller, Larry (March 15, 2010).
"Paleocon Starts New Extreme-Right Magazine"
.
Southern Poverty Law Center
. Retrieved
November 29,
2022
.
- ^
Fulford, Robert (March 29, 2018).
"Robert Fulford: How the alt-right's godfather transformed our world"
.
National Post
. National Post
. Retrieved
January 14,
2022
.
- ^
Gottfried, Paul (April 17, 2018).
"Paul Gottfried: Don't call me the 'godfather' of those alt-right neo-Nazis. I'm Jewish"
.
National Post
. National Post
. Retrieved
January 14,
2022
.
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