By DeAnn Rossetti

Philip Gold knows what is wrong with American politics, what is wrong with the conservatives and what is wrong with the liberals, and he envisions a third political party that might be able to fix those wrongs to help America move in a more positive direction.

Gold’s new book, “Take Back the Right” is as much a rallying cry for thinking Americans who are fed up with politics, as it is a personal memoir of an extraordinary life led in the thick of conservative machinations. Gold split with the conservatives over the war in Iraq.

“One of the things conservatives have always hated about liberals is `social engineering’ and yet we’re trying to remake the Middle East at a cost of more than $200 billion and counting,” said Gold.

Originally from Pittsburgh, Gold graduated from Yale a year behind Island resident and conservative talk-show host Michael Medved with a degree in history. After a three-year tour of duty in the Marines as an intelligence officer, he earned a doctorate in American cultural history. Gold taught history at Georgetown University for 14 years, did the “D.C. thing” at conservative think-tanks such as the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Free Congress Foundation. He and served as a staff journalist for Insight Magazine for a dozen years covering national defense and advertising.

Gold commuted from Washington, D.C., to Anchorage, Alaska, for some time before serving for 10 years as a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, another conservative think-tank founded by former Washington state secretary of state Bruce Chapman.

In 2002, Gold became one of the first mainstream conservatives to come out against the Iraq War.

“We had an amicable divorce,” Gold said, of his leaving the Discovery Institute and conservatives behind. “If you deviate from the party line, someone has to leave. They weren’t taking a position on the war, but they didn’t want to jeopardize their connections (to the Bush administration) and their funding.”

Gold took a break and began working on his fifth book, “Take Back the Right,” in July of last year. His other books, written mainly for academics, include “Evasions,” a book about the draft, “From Salesman to Therapy,” about the psychology of advertising, “Justice Matters,” on legal reform and “Against All Terrors,” which came out right after Sept. 11, 2001.

Gold has been a frequent contributor to the Washington Times and other newspapers and magazines with more than 800 articles, columns and reviews to his credit. “Take Back the Right” is his views on state of political discourse in America and how both the left and the right have failed to cultivate a better civilization.

The right, in particular, is dissected in a brilliant and engaging manner, from early William Buckley to Bush’s war on terror and the hijacking of the conservative movement by neo-conservatives and the religious right, he said. Gold argues that the conservative movement was betrayed and he shows that a conservative movement, true to its original ideals, would never have mounted the Iraq War.

“Conservativism said we’re going to ignore all the injustice, so you have 30 years where the right got waxed in the culture war. Now we’re into culture war II, where the right is using the war to take back the culture, by using gay marriage as a great fundraising issue and a way to galvanize the troops,” said Gold. “The Bush administration is in bed with (the religious right) so that it has more clout. The right is now the party of big religion, big business and big government.”

As a defense analyst early in the decade, Gold said he “ran the numbers” for the Iraq War, and says that the war is wrong from a fiscal point of view as well. According to Gold, there are only two ways out of these fiscal troubles — inflation or default.

“You either inflate currency and print money, or default and cut back benefits,” he said. “In 10 to 20 years, the Euro could replace the dollar as the main international currency.”

Having served in the Army and worked for the past year as an embedded journalist in Iraq, Erin Solaro, Gold’s fiancée, feels that not only is the price too high for civilians, many enlisted men and women in the Army aren’t happy with the way the war is going, either.

“The Army does not want to suck us into occupying tens of thousands of miles of useless ground in Iraq,” she said. “Especially if it comes with a price tag of military and economic bankruptcy.”

Solaro states that what the United States wants for the Iraqi people isn’t necessarily what they want for themselves.

“We had ideologues so enamored by their theories that they said the Iraqi people will welcome us and we’ll turn Bagdad into a suburb of Cleveland, but the strongest neocon advocates for the war were utterly divorced from the military realities and the political and cultural realities of the Middle East.”

Gold added, “Most insurgencies fail; what has to happen is that unless the Iraqi people fight their own insurgency, they won’t win. They’re not willing to fight on their own behalf, because they’re not interested in freedom enough to fight for it. They’re more interested in security, wealth and the triumph of one particular sect of belief. The idea that we’re going to turn Iraq into a shining example of democracy is delusional.”

Gold and Solaro have lived on Mercer Island for years, and are planning on becoming resident intellectuals. “Erin and I have a goal to replace the Medveds as the literary `fun couple’ of Mercer Island,” quipped Gold.

Recently, Gold and Solaro have set up a public and cultural affairs center called Aretea, and are trying to structure a third political party from it.

“We may see a movement to a third party, built from the top down,” said Gold. “Frustrated Democrats and Republicans would come together to form their own party that would be very strong on civil rights and individual liberties, conservative financially and very cautious in foreign policy. The American people want a diverse, tolerant society and a government that starts dealing with the national debt and job loss, and sees gay marriage as a citizenship issue. Marriage is a fundamental human right.”

While Gold works on their “tri-partisan” Aretea, he and Solaro have been collaborating on a novel called “Change of Command” about a confrontation between a woman who wants to be the secretary of defense and a Marine.

Gold is planning a sequel to “Take Back the Right” called “Wars of the Ways.” Meanwhile, He will be promoting and signing “Take Back the Right” and espousing the ideas therein.

Philip Gold will sign copies of “Take Back the Right” at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 21, at Island Books.