Matthew Continetti writes in this 2022 book:
* Isolationists paid no price for opposing intervention before Pearl Harbor. One scholar identified 115 isolationist candidates headed into the 1942 midterm elections; only 5 lost. By the last year of the war, Republicans had won a net twenty – one seats in the House and fifteen in the Senate. And the Right had new heroes: Generals Douglas MacArthur, who commanded US forces in the Southwest Pacific; George S. Patton, who led troops in the Mediterranean and European campaigns; and Curtis LeMay, who organized the strategic bombing of Japan.
* In 1944 a pair of America Firsters, Frank Hanighen and Felix Morley, founded Human Events, a free market, antiwar weekly newsletter inspired by Albert Jay Nock’s Freeman. Human Events carried on the anti – Roosevelt tradition of denying any difference between American liberalism and European totalitarianism. The next year the duo became a trio when an Illinois businessman named Henry Regnery joined the enterprise.
* In March 1945 [Friedrich] Hayek arrived in New York to begin his book tour. His publishers told him that his speaking engagements would send him as far west as Oklahoma City. His first appearance, however, was scheduled for the next morning at town hall in Manhattan. Hayek was mortified. He had never lectured in public. The audience had been told he would speak for an hour on law and international affairs. It was a subject to which he had given little thought. “And then I discovered that American audiences are extremely grateful audiences,” Hayek recollected. “You can watch on their faces their interest — completely different from, say, an English audience; and gradually I worked them up into great excitement, and I got through this lecture with great success.” When he returned to England in May, Hayek was an academic celebrity.
* On April 10 the [Mont Pelerin] conference adopted a “Statement of Aims.” It left no doubt that these beleaguered liberals felt themselves engaged on the losing side in a battle of ideas that had been raging for more than a century. “Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared,” the statement began. “The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power.” Together the participants resolved to study, among other things, “the problem of the creation of an international order conducive to the safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations.”
[LF: “Freedom” has no meaning without reference to a particular hero system.]
* Taft was a lone voice in opposition to Truman. NATO, for example, was exactly the sort of permanent entanglement in European affairs that Taft had dreaded ever since his experiences with Hoover after World War I. He argued that NATO would make American foreign policy not less but more venturesome. “It is easy to slip into an attitude of imperialism,” he said, “where war becomes an instrument of public policy rather than its last resort.” He was among thirteen senators to oppose NATO when the treaty came to a vote in 1949.
