The point is not to agree with the writers and intellectuals that make up the Old Right, but to understand the critique, borrow from it when you agree, and formulate a response when you disagree. The Old Right shuns 'ideological purity' and demands a wide open debate with everything on the table.
1. It all depends on your current ideological position. In the Hayek/Austrian libertarian model, German/Italian fascism and Communism are essentially the same, though Murray Rothbard in the United States made a profound distinction that the fascists still allowed for private property ownership.
The Depression was caused, in the libertarian and conservative model, by the Fed's inability to provide the market with paper currency. The Left generally sees the Great Depression as 'capitalism and greed' and more recently something about the Smoot-Harley tariff act.
FDR in 1932, ran on a "libertarian-conservative" platform of reduced taxes and a balanced budget, but of course never delivered. He was mostly elected because Hoover was seen as both ineffective but also because of General MacArthur's attack on US veterans, the Bonus Army-- the Waco of its day. MacArthur had stated he believe the Bonus Army was really a Communist outfit and a legit threat to the United States.
You can see there was an air of paranoia that would extend well into the 60s, but not completely unreasonable if you look at the experience of the Weimar Republic and how Hitler came to power as a defense but the property elite against Communists.
Those who lean towards conspiracy theory argue that the currency shortage was intentional, used as a means of driving banks out of business and insuring federalis banking supremacy. Prior to the Fed Bank takeover, Presidents could not simply print the difference and sell debt to foreign speculators the way they have doing for 60 years. It resulted in a major if not final transfer of power from the state to the DC-regime.
One of the reasons the federalis got away with it is that with the Soviet victory in World War II (Britain and France were essentially defeated) there was only one true "safe" economy, with the demise of the British sterling, to put one's wealth. This allowed for the tremendous credit expansion in the post-War period as foreigners bought dollars. In order to resist inflation with printing so much money, there was a need for cheap imports and hence the ruling class signed on with managed trade, which they call "free trade." NAFTA, GAT, IMF etc. It was a complete corruption of the language.
At some point, the factory owners (patriotic American business men, be they Christians, liberals, or conservatives) were replaced with stock boards and managers who went to school (Ivy League no doubt) with the lawyers and gubmint politicians who looked to manage the economy. The 1930 marked the rise of a new ruling class of Managers, and the death of the ruling class that had been in place since the post Civil War Era.
2. Yes, but its more than just 'simplistic.' There are artificial parameters put into the debate that have been indoctrinated into the populace through the centralized education system, a concept born from the Prussian Junkers in the early 1800 by the way.
Lincoln, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, three of the most psychotic and blood thirsty men to ever hold the office are revered, while the fore fathers have been written off as aristocratic slave owning white men who did not want to pay their taxes anymore. How many people know that Hitler wrote glowingly of Lincoln's consolidationist policies in Mein Kampf or that Marx wrote Lincoln a letter of congratulations? On page 566 of the 1999 Mariner/Houghton Mifflin edition of Mein Kampf Hitler clearly expresses the Lincoln/Jaffa view: "[T]he individual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states."
Rather than talk about eliminating the income tax, tremendous resources are used to either move it two points this way or that way, at the same time, the government used the printing press to devalue the currency. Its a completely meaningless debate!
Libertarians and conservatives generally have agreed to look at the USSR as a unique proposition, but after the Cold War, many conservatives and libertarians (call it the rebirth of the Old Right) were ready to return to the ways of Old, in the pre-national security state. Reagan, rhetorically speaking if not in action, was a libertarian, Old Right conservative in this matter, even if he governed as it turned out, as a protector if not a savior of the Welfare State.
The younger of us, discovered the movement in the 1990s as a reaction to the Clinton administration and as a political force, we were generally speaking, used to provide a check on what was a popular President with a popular centrist program. We came from the ranks of political correctness fascism on our college campuses and generally question everything and like a wide open debate.
The split for many of us came over Serbia when the neocons threatened to bolt the GOP if they did not back Clinton's war on the Serbs. That was a 'does not compute' moment, and many of us started looking for other writers and intellectuals on the right who wrote critiques of the neocons.
Libertarians, BTW, produced a theory on a government bureaucracies that look to find reasons to continue to exist. In the past 15 years, the CIA switched from using radical Islam to fight Communism to pursuing other agendas like in the old Yugoslavia. The '9/11 as blowback' critique stems from this historical fact.
3) "A strategy for the right." I am probably not a good one for you to ask as I am fairly radicalized and you may well be Mainstream Right, but I favor regionalism and home rule over ideological battles against the powerful in a rigged game that pits R's wishing to tax us at 45% and print the difference, and D's wishing to tax us at 47%. Churches are probably the best organizing vehicle for localism as well as the Internet.
Restoring a concept of feeling more attached to your region or state and less attached to the alien tax-regime (patriotism vs nationalism) is the key, IMO.
When Rupert (foreigner), Conrad (foreigner), and Scaife ('80s Cold Warrior) control the major print and television vehicles of the 'Right' I am not sure how we can expect to compete. Public schools will continue to churn out state apologists.
4) Drop the current designation of Rs and Ds and think statists versus anti-statists. Ruling elite (line in DC, Hollywood, or Manhattan, amoral, non-Western, non-Christian, non-patriotic) vs America (flyover country, Bubba, Homer Simpson, drunk Irishmen who make it to work on time and Mass every Sunday, stoic Midwesterners, radical individualists of the West...)
The Rs and Ds are two sides of the same coin (statists) and there is really no effective anti-statist coalition in the United States or much of the world. However, the statists have bankrupted the country to the tune of $22 trillion. The end of this ruling class is ordained, be it 15 or 75 years.
The state was revealed as a phony, i.e. it was unable to fulfill it's raison d'être, national security. It will take a while for people to figure it out; there are still too many Cold Warrior types who think tanks and bombs and flag waiving (nationalism) is 'conservatism.' But the forces at play are larger than even Karl Rove can control.
In the meantime Christian Patriots (libertarians are mostly focused on getting off the grid) should continue to play a role in the debate, but they should not subjugate their God for the state, a known liar and thief.