Unlike such groups as Workers World Party and the CPUSA that have played a role in one antiwar coalition or another since the "war on terror" began, Raimondo identifies with the old right, the isolationist current in American society that found expression in the America First Committee at the beginning of WWII. Raimondo is a libertarian as well and obviously has a strong affinity with the positions taken by Congressman Ron Paul who has been opposed to foreign interventions despite his pro-capitalist politics. For that matter, it is also the orientation of the comedian Bill Maher who wears his libertarian politics proudly.

On the "about us" page at antiwar.com, there’s a tribute to Murray Rothbard, an interesting character who I ran across doing some research on a study of the New Deal that like so many of my projects never came to fruition. One of the books I looked at in conjunction with this project was "A new history of Leviathan; essays on the rise of the American corporate state", co-edited by Rothbard and Ronald Radosh. At the time (1972) Radosh was still a leftist while Rothbard was at pretty much the same place as Raimondo today. Fortunately this book is downloadable from Scribd and I recommend it strongly as an antidote to the kind of mush-headed liberalism that puts people like Woodrow Wilson and FDR on a pedestal, especially Radosh’s "The Myth of the New Deal". Rothbard has a couple of essays, including one that makes the case that FDR simply expanded on Herbert Hoover’s own "corporate liberalism". One wonders if Barack Obama might have been inspired by Rothbard’s essay, but putting the emphasis more on Hoover than FDR after taking office.

Like Radosh, Rothbard grew up as a Red Diaper baby. In the 1950s, he took classes with von Mises at NYU and became a convert to the Austrian school of economics, while politically calling himself an anarcho-capitalist. The wiki on Rothbard establishes the link between him and Raimondo:

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party’s internal politics. From 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Williamson Evers.

Rothbard died in 1995 and I guess it is safe to say that Raimondo is carrying a torch for him. It is worth mentioning that he is also openly gay but has derided gay marriage as being "based on a heterosexual model of sexual and emotional relationships, one that just doesn’t fit the gay lifestyle."

Yesterday Raimondo published an article on antiwar.com that took issue with a small Trotskyist group called Socialist Action that had played a key role in organizing a conference in Connecticut that sought to revivify the antiwar movement. His main objection is that some of the speakers attacked the Tea Party movement and other rightist forces. Since Ron Paul has garnered a great deal of support from the Tea Party, Raimondo was naturally offended. He writes:

Now, I did not attend this conference, and have no idea what the upshot of the discussion was; however, Benjamin and Zeese have expressed their support for such a coalition (the former somewhat tentatively, and the latter with more conviction). [This is a reference to a workshop titled "The Rise of Right Wing Populism & the Tea Party: Do We Need a Right-Left Coalition?"] On the other hand, one can easily imagine that [Glen] Ford, who has called the Ron Paul movement and the tea partiers "racists," and advocates of "white nationalism," and Gauvreau, a leftist who spent much of this speech mouthing all the expected slogans, see a left-right coalition as a deadly threat to "their" movement.

Kevin Zeese has advocated building an antiwar coalition with conservative groups in—surprise, surprise—antiwar.com. There is some logic to this since he ran as a Libertarian candidate in 2006, despite his close ties to Ralph Nader. Of course, this makes some sense since Nader’s Jeffersonian embrace of small-town shopkeeper American values overlaps to some extent with far right populism. At times, it would be difficult to distinguish between passages in a Pat Buchanan and a Ralph Nader speech when it comes to "globalization".

For her part, Medea Benjamin raised the possibility of building an alliance with the Tea Party as reported on Huffington Post last April:

Perhaps the Tea Party and peace folks–unlikely allies–can agree that one way to shrink big government is to rein in military spending. Here are some questions to get the conversation going:

* At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference on April 10, Congressman Ron Paul — who has a great following within the Tea Party — chided both conservatives and liberals for their profligate spending on foreign military bases, occupations and maintaining an empire. "We’re running out of money," he warned. "All empires end for financials [sic] reasons, and that is what the markets are telling us today….We can do better with peace than with war." Do you agree with Congressman Paul on this?

Now I might be missing something, but I have seen no evidence of Tea Party opposition to the war in Afghanistan, despite Ron Paul’s laudable opposition to that war. Furthermore, it is his son Rand Paul who is much more of the darling of the Tea Party than his dad. You also have to consider that Rand Paul is on record:

Washington Wire: Your father opposed the war in Iraq.

Paul: I would have voted no on the Iraq war and yes to Afghanistan. The main thing I say on war is that we need to obey the law and formally declare war.

This does not seem very promising in terms of coalition building, does it?

Of some interest to me as an amateur historian of American imperialist wars was Justin Raimondo’s praise of America First, a group I knew only by reputation—and not a very good one, I’m afraid. Raimondo writes:

Their [Socialist Action] account of the America First movement repeats all the old Stalinist canards about the biggest peace movement in American history: it was run by big businessmen, it was "anti-Semitic," it wasn’t really for peace, just pro-Hitler. The article cites the considered opinion of James P. Cannon, the Trotskyist leader at the time, as saying "the 'isolationists’ in elite circles merely held a tactical difference with those of their peers who were for sending U.S. armaments to Britain." Their real goal, he thought, was to consolidate their control over the Western hemisphere in preparation for intervening in Europe.

Cannon’s view is nonsensical, as anyone who has read the writings of America First leader and top activist John T. Flynn would readily understand: Flynn was a principled opponent of US intervention abroad, because he understood what turn of the century liberal Randolph Bourne meant when he said "War is the health of the State." Flynn and his co-thinkers wanted to limit the power of the American state – a goal not shared by Trotsky’s disciples.

In any case, what the Socialist Actioneers fail to note, in their endless polemic, is that the America First Committee mobilized millions against the war: it had 800,000 members (dues-paying members, I might add), and a Washington lobby that very nearly sunk Roosevelt’s ever-accelerating drive to drag us into war in Europe. Massive rallies conducted on a nationwide scale kept the Roosevelt administration in check, right up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The War Party had to take the "back door to war," as one historian put it, in order to get us in.

In a way, all of this is moot for a couple of reasons. Raimondo fails to point out that America First was opposed to building any kind of coalition with the left, including the CP when it was dovetailing politically with isolationists during the short-lived Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact. If, by the way, you want to get a good idea about CP thinking during this period, you should watch the movie "Woman of the Year" that starred Spencer Tracy as a left-leaning isolationist and Katherine Hepburn as an ardent interventionist, evoking women like the awful Samantha Power. Or you can listen to the Woody Guthrie song "Washington Breakdown" that included this lyric:

Franklin D., listen to me, You ain’t gonna send me across the sea, 'Cross the sea, 'cross the sea. You may say it’s for defense, It’s that kind of talk I’m against…

But even more importantly, America First fell apart almost immediately after Pearl Harbor. In an article titled "The America First Committee", written by Wayne Cole for the Winter 1951 edition of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, we learn:

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the death blow for America First. The Committee statement on December 7 urged its followers "to give their support to the effort of this country until the conflict with Japan is brought to a successful conclusion." On December 11, 1941, the national committee voted to dissolve the America First Committee, and its followers were again urged to support the war effort. All that remained was the dreary task of dissolution.

Apparently the America First Committee was just as capable of turning on a dime politically as the Communist Party. Whether that turn is based on the exigencies facing the Kremlin or America’s corporate brass—an element of which that largely comprised the America First Committee—hardly matters when it comes to the all-important question of war and peace.