A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.
Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, "Misfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults — ah! There is the sting of life." Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford's friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.
Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, "in what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying." Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class "unprepared or with little thought as to what he would say" and that his students found his classes "unfocused, with often rambling discussions," he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a "neocon attack."
"[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, 'totalitarian.' But that's liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country."
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL