Justin Raimondo tried to warn us. The co-founder of Antiwar.com devoted his life to warning Americans and particularly the American right against the relentless pull of the military-industrial complex and the bipartisan-established warfare-welfare state.
Raimondo would’ve turned 74 today. He passed away on June 27, 2019 in Sebastopol, California at the age of 67 after battling lung cancer. But his legacy lives on and his message is as necessary as ever.
Born in New York on Nov. 18, 1951, Raimondo developed an interest in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy as a teenager, even meeting Rand. This early interest no doubt reinforced an antistatist inclination that would remain for the rest of his life.
After graduating high school, like many gay young men, he moved to San Francisco, where he participated in gay rights and libertarian activism. After a time working within the Libertarian Party, including runs for office, he joined the Republican Party and worked to revive the Old Right notions of noninterventionism and truly limited government associated with figures like Sen. Robert A. Taft, writer Rose Wilder Lane and journalist Garet Garrett.
In 1993, upon the end of the Cold War, he wrote his signature and highly prescient political work, “Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement” correctly identifying the direction the Republican Party and by extension the United States was heading toward.
“As America enters the postcommunist era, the future appears to be the British model: social democracy at home and do-good imperialism abroad,” he wrote, critiquing the vision of the neoconservatives who would come to dominate the GOP.
“With the end of the Cold War, the political pressure to reduce military spending is irresistible,” he observed. “A major component of the welfare-warfare state, the great jobs-creation machine of the defense industry, is in danger of running down. If, however, we are going to have a New World Order—if U.S. troops will now enforce United Nations Security Council edicts from Mogadishu to Sarajevo—then the rationale for military spending is restored.”
And, indeed, that’s what happened. In 1995, reacting to the Clinton administration’s Balkan interventions, Raimondo and his good friend and fellow anti-war activist Eric Garris founded Antiwar.com to counter the ceaseless demand for American wars abroad.
“Justin was a brilliant and thorough analyst of political and foreign affairs who worked tirelessly for peace and liberty,” remembers Garris. “He would be proud to know that his legacy has been carried on in his writings and the continued success of his most important project.”
In 1996, Raimondo even took the fight to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, challenging her as a Republican candidate for Congress due in large part to her support for American intervention in the Balkans. He received 25,739 votes.
Throughout the 1990s, he would campaign in support of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, who shares his skepticism of American interventionism. Asked at the time he, as a gay man, could ally with a social conservative like Buchanan, Raimondo replied, “He does not think that homosexuality is all that great a thing. But I don’t need his approval. Why does any gay person need anyone’s benediction?”
Raimondo’s antiwar activism would press on throughout his life. He unfortunately saw his worst fears for the right embodied by the presidency of George W. Bush, whose neoconservative agenda at home and abroad took the warfare-welfare state to new heights.
He was likewise critical of the vanishing antiwar movement during the presidency of Barack Obama, despite Obama’s extension of Bush’s foreign policy. “The antiwar Left defeated itself by electing a Democrat little different from Bush. And now Barack Obama is dismantling his own party by repudiating the causes that animated his base—the opposition to war and fear of the imperial presidency,” he wrote.
In 2016, he supported Donald Trump over the hawkish, Iraq war-supporting Hillary Clinton. In his final years, Raimondo remained a prolific writer and while critical (even strongly so) of specific actions by the Trump administration, he remained hopeful that Trump’s election would serve as an enduring blow to the interventionists.
“Of course nothing is inevitable: it could be that the President is so lacking in understanding the historical forces that propelled him into the White House that he drags his presidency into ruination by, say, going to war with Iran,” he wrote in 2019. “The influential Israel lobby has a lot of clout in this administration and it will be interesting to see if this formidable enemy of peace can be held off and even defeated in a battle for the President’s mind.”
Agree with him or not, Raimondo was one of a kind. A consistent voice for nonintervention, a relentless critic of the warfare-welfare state and a champion of limited government, Raimondo’s insights are as relevant as ever. We encourage readers to visit his archives on antiwar.com and his many books, including his 2000 biography, “An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard.”