| Nobody (whom we know of, anyway) ever called Tom Paukenbashful when it comes to speaking his mind. Not when he ran for Congress or headed the ACTION agency under Ronald Reagan. Not as Texas GOP chairman or talk radio host or for that matter as current Texas Workforce Commission chairman.
Pauken’s brand new book — Bringing America Home(Chronicles Press) — continues in entertaining and educational fashion the chairman’s penchant for honesty.
In 204 pages he takes on, for starters, the “threat of militant Islam,” the “coarsening of American culture,” “the destruction of the middle class,” and “Big Government Conservatism.”
He hopes to help rebuild the conservative movement by recapturing the Republican Party from “Machiavellian pragmatists and neoconservative ideologues,” thereby reinvigorating conservatism. At which point, he says, we’ll manage to “get America back on the right track.”
The conservatism of the pragmatists and neocons, Pauken insists, isn’t conservatism at all, rather a tactical stance that, the chairman posits, isn’t working.
Pauken draws largely on his own experience of working alongside — and usually at odds with — neo-conservatives, who, broadly speaking, were and are ex-Democrats disenchanted with the liberal nostrums of the 1960s and ’70s. His association with them began in the Vietnam era, when the neocons called themselves “social Democrats.” It continued during both the Reagan administration and Pauken’s term as state GOP chairman while George W. Bush was governor. Whereas Pauken expresses a personal liking for many neocons, he sees them as far more “neo” than “con.”
Conservatives and Republicans (terms that sometimes fail to overlap, as Pauken notes) may disagree on the book’s policy particulars, especially those having to do with Bush. Pauken slams the ex-governor’s presidential administration for waging pre-emptive war in Iraq. Interestingly, Pauken offers conservative, not liberal or pacifist, reasons for thinking theIraq war a bad idea.
Key to his philosophical thinking is the idea that the conservative movement and the country at large must rediscover their religious fundaments. Several times he references Pope Benedict XVI’s strictures against a “dictatorship of relativism” and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s warning to the West not to retread the path of Communist Russia by “forgetting God.”
The author made time for LSR to pick his brain about the book and his ideas for helping Americans find their way back to the old truths.
Some highlights from our interview:
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Tom Pauken 