By Murray N. Rothbard
Ludwig von Mises Institue
June 10, 2005


[This classic piece appeared in Ramparts, VI, 4, June 15,
1968. It was the fulfillment of an ideological trend that
began a few years earlier when consistent libertarians, led
by Rothbard, sensed an estrangement from the American
right-wing due to its support of militarism, police power,
and the corporate state. Here Rothbard presents a rationale
for why he and others had, by 1968, largely given up on the
Right as a viable reform movement toward liberty, realized
that the Right was squarely on the side of power, and
thereby developed an alternative intellectual
historiography. The relevance of this essay in our own time
hardly needs to be explained, given the record on liberty of
the Republican president, congress, and judiciary, to say
nothing of conservative and right-wing media.]

TWENTY YEARS AGO I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a
young and lone "Neanderthal" (as the liberals used to call us)
who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that "Senator
Taft had sold out to the socialists." Today, I am most likely
to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate
withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate
Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom
Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed by a
single iota in these two decades!

It is obvious that something is very wrong with the old
labels, with the categories of "left" and "right," and with
the ways in which we customarily apply these categories to
American political life. My personal odyssey is unimportant;
the important point is that if I can move from "extreme right"
to "extreme left" merely by standing in one place, drastic
though unrecognized changes must have taken place throughout
the American political spectrum over the last generation.

I joined the right-wing movement—to give a formal name to a
very loose and informal set of associations—as a young
graduate student shortly after the end of World War II. There
was no question as to where the intellectual right of that day
stood on militarism and conscription: it opposed them as
instruments of mass slavery and mass murder. Conscription,
indeed, was thought far worse than other forms of statist
controls and incursions, for while these only appropriated
part of the individual's property, the draft, like slavery,
took his most precious possession: his own person. Day after
day theveteran publicist John T. Flynn—once praised as a
liberal and then condemned as a reactionary, with little or no
change in his views—inveighed implacably in print and over the
radio against militarism and the draft. Even the Wall Street
newspaper, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, published a
lengthy attack on the idea of conscription.

All of our political positions, from the free market in
economics to opposing war and militarism, stemmed from our
root belief in individual liberty and our opposition to the
state. Simplistically, we adopted the standard view of the
political spectrum: "left" meant socialism, or total power of
the state; the further "right" one went the less government
one favored. Hence, we called ourselves "extreme rightists."

Originally, our historical heroes were such men as Jefferson,
Paine, Cobden, Bright and Spencer; but as our views became
purer and more consistent, we eagerly embraced such
near-anarchists as the voluntarist, Auberon Herbert, and the
American individualist-anarchists, Lysander Spooner and
Benjamin R. Tucker. One of our great intellectual heroes was
Henry David Thoreau, and his essay, "Civil Disobedience," was
one of our guiding stars. Right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov
devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an
appreciation of Thoreau.

In our relation to the remainder of the American political
scene, we of course recognized that the extreme right of the
Republican Party was not made up of individualist
anti-statists, but they were close enough to our position to
make us feel part of a quasi-libertarian united front. Enough
of our views were present among the extreme members of the
Taft wing of the Republican Party (much more so than in Taft
himself, who was among the most liberal of that wing), and in
such organs as the Chicago Tribune, to make us feel quite
comfortable with this kind of alliance.

What is more, the right-wing Republicans were major opponents
of the Cold War. Valiantly, the extreme rightist Republicans,
who were particularly strong in the House, battled
conscription, NATO and the Truman Doctrine. Consider, for
example, Omaha's Representative Howard Buffett, Senator Taft's
midwestern campaign manager in 1952. He was one of the most
extreme of the extremists, once described by The Nation as "an
able young man whose ideas have tragically fossilized."

I came to know Buffett as a genuine and thoughtful
libertarian. Attacking the Truman Doctrine on the floor of
Congress, he declared: "Even if it were desirable, America is
not strong enough to police the world by military force. If
that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be
replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals
cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns."
When the Korean War came, almost the entire old left, with the
exception of the Communist Party, surrendered to the global
mystique of the United Nations and "collective security
against aggression," and backed Truman's imperialist
aggression in that war. Even Corliss Lamont backed the
American stand in Korea. Only the extreme rightist Republicans
continued to battle U.S. imperialism. It was the last great
political outburst of the old right of my youth.

Howard Buffett was convinced that the United States was
largely responsible for the eruption of conflict in Korea; for
the rest of his life he tried unsuccessfully to get the Senate
Armed Services Committee to declassify the testimony of CIA
head Admiral Hillenkoeter, which Buffett told me established
American responsibility for the Korean outbreak. The last
famous isolationist move came late in December 1950, after the
Chinese forces had beaten the Americans out of North Korea.
Joseph P. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover delivered two ringing
speeches back-to-back calling for American evacuation of
Korea. As Hoover put it, "To commit the sparse ground forces
of the non-communist nations into a land war against this
communist land mass [in Asia] would be a war without victory,
a war without a successful political terminal . . . that would
be the graveyard of millions of American boys" and the
exhaustion of the United States. Joe Kennedy declared that "if
portions of Europe or Asia wish to go communistic or even have
communism thrust upon them, we cannot stop it."

To this The Nation replied with typical liberal Red-baiting:
"The line they are laying down for their country should set
the bells ringing in the Kremlin as nothing has since the
triumph of Stalingrad"; and the New Republic actually saw
Stalin sweeping onwards "until the Stalinist caucus in the
Tribune Tower would bring out in triumph the first communist
edition of the Chicago Tribune."

The main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right
wing from an isolationist and quasi-libertarian movement to an
anti-communist one was probably "McCarthyism." Before Senator
Joe McCarthy launched his anti-communist crusade in February
1950, he had not been particularly associated with the right
wing of the Republican Party; on the contrary, his record was
liberal and centrist, statist rather than libertarian.

Furthermore, Red-baiting and anti-communist witch hunting were
originally launched by liberals, and even after McCarthy the
liberals were the most effective at this game. It was, after
all, the liberal Roosevelt Administration which passed the
Smith Act, first used against Trotskyites and isolationists
during World War II and then against communists after the war;
it was the liberal Truman Administration that instituted
loyalty checks; it was the eminently liberal Hubert Humphrey
who was a sponsor of the clause in the McCarran Act of 1950
threatening concentration camps for "subversives."

McCarthy not only shifted the focus of the right to communist
hunting, however. His crusade also brought into the right wing
a new mass base. Before McCarthy, the rank-and-file of the
right wing was the small-town, isolationist middle west.
McCarthyism brought into the movement a mass of urban
Catholics from the eastern seaboard, people whose outlook on
individual liberty was, if anything, negative.

If McCarthy was the main catalyst for mobilizing the mass base
of the new right, the major ideological instrument of the
transformation was the blight of anti-communism, and the major
carriers were Bill Buckley and National Review.

In the early days, young Bill Buckley often liked to refer to
himself as an "individualist," sometimes even as an
"anarchist." But all these libertarian ideals, he maintained,
had to remain in total abeyance, fit only for parlor
discussion, until the great crusade against the "international
communist conspiracy" had been driven to a successful
conclusion. Thus, as early as January 1952, I noted with
disquiet an article that Buckley wrote for Commonweal, "A
Young Republican's View."

He began the article in a splendid libertarian manner: our
enemy, he affirmed, was the state, which, he quoted Spencer,
was "begotten of aggression and by aggression." But then came
the worm in the apple: the anti-communist crusade had to be
waged. Buckley went on to endorse "the extensive and
productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous
anti-communist foreign policy"; he declared that the "thus far
invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union" imminently
threatened American security, and that therefore "we have to
accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an
offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except
through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within
our shores." Therefore, he concluded—in the midst of the
Korean War—we must all support "large armies and air forces,
atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and
the attendant centralization of power in Washington."
The right wing, never articulate, has not had many organs of
opinion. Therefore, when Buckley founded National Review in
late 1955, its erudite, witty and glib editorials and articles
swiftly made it the only politically relevant journal for the
American right. Immediately, the ideological line of the right
began to change sharply.

One element that gave special fervor and expertise to the
Red-baiting crusade was the prevalence of ex-communists,
ex-fellow travelers and ex-Trotskyites among the writers whom
National Review brought into prominence on the right-wing
scene. These ex-leftists were consumed with an undying hatred
for their former love, along with a passion for bestowing
enormous importance upon their apparently wasted years. Almost
the entire older generation of writers and editors for
National Review had been prominent in the old left. Some names
that come to mind are: Jim Burnham, John Chamberlain,
Whittaker Chambers, Ralph DeToledano, Will Herberg, Eugene
Lyons, J. B. Matthews, Frank S. Meyer, William S. Schlamm and Karl Wittfogel.

An insight into the state of mind of many of these people came
in a recent letter to me from one of the most libertarian of
this group; he admitted that my stand in opposition to the
draft was the only one consistent with libertarian principles,
but, he said, he can't forget how nasty the communist cell in
Time magazine was in the 1930's. The world is falling apart
and yet these people are still mired in the petty grievances
of faction fights of long ago!

Anti-communism was the central root of the decay of the old
libertarian right, but it was not the only one. In 1953, a big
splash was made by the publication of Russell Kirk's The
Conservative Mind. Before that, no one on the right regarded
himself as a "conservative"; "conservative" was considered a
left smear word. Now, suddenly, the right began to glory in
the term "conservative," and Kirk began to make speaking
appearances, often in a kind of friendly "vital center" tandem
with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

This was to be the beginning of the burgeoning phenomenon of
the friendly-though-critical dialogue between the liberal and
conservative wings of the Great Patriotic American Consensus.
A new, younger generation of rightists, of "conservatives,"
began to emerge, who thought that the real problem of the
modern world was nothing so ideological as the state vs.
individual liberty or government intervention vs. the free
market; the real problem, they declared, was the preservation
of tradition, order, Christianity and good manners against the
modern sins of reason, license, atheism and boorishness.
One of the first dominant thinkers of this new right was
Buckley's brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, who wrote fiery
articles in National Review attacking liberty even as an
abstract principle (and not just as something to be
temporarily sacrificed for the benefit of the anti-communist
emergency). The function of the state was to impose and
enforce moral and religious principles.

Another repellent political theorist who made his mark in
National Review was the late Willmoore Kendall, NR editor for
many years. His great thrust was the right and the duty of the
majority of the community—as embodied, say, in Congress—to
suppress any individual who disturbs that community with
radical doctrines. Socrates, opined Kendall, not only should
have been killed by the Greek community, whom he offended by
his subversive criticisms, but it was their moral duty to kill him.

The historical heroes of the new right were changing rapidly.
Mencken, Nock, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine—all these either
dropped from sight or were soundly condemned as rationalists,
atheists or anarchists. From Europe, the "in" people were now
such despotic reactionaries as Burke, Metternich, DeMaistre;
in the United States, Hamilton and Madison were "in," with
their stress on the imposition of order and a strong, elitist
central government—which included the southern "slavocracy."
For the first few years of its existence, I moved in National
Review circles, attended its editorial luncheons, wrote
articles and book reviews for the magazine; indeed, there was
talk at one time of my joining the staff as an economics columnist.

I became increasingly alarmed, however, as NR and its friends
grew in strength because I knew, from innumerable
conversations with rightist intellectuals, what their foreign
policy goal was. They never quite dared to state it publicly,
although they would slyly imply it and would try to whip the
public up to the fever pitch of demanding it. What they
wanted—and still want—was nuclear annihilation of the Soviet
Union. They want to drop that Bomb on Moscow. (Of course, on
Peking and Hanoi too, but for your veteran anti-communist—
especially back then—it is Russia which supplies the main
focus of his venom.) A prominent editor of National Review
once told me: "I have a vision, a great vision of the future:

a totally devastated Soviet Union." I knew that it was this
vision that really animated the new conservatism.
In response to all this, and seeing peace as the crucial
political issue, a few friends and I became Stevensonian
Democrats in 1960. I watched with increasing horror as the
right wing, led by National Review, continually grew in
strength and moved ever closer to real political power.
Having broken emotionally with the right wing, our tiny group
of libertarians began to rethink many of our old, unexamined
premises. First, we restudied the origins of the Cold War, we
read our D.F. Fleming and we concluded, to our considerable
surprise, that the United States was solely at fault in the
Cold War, and that Russia was the aggrieved party. And this
meant that the great danger to the peace and freedom of the
world came not from Moscow or "international communism," but
from the U.S. and its Empire stretching across and dominating the world.

And then we studied the foul European conservatism that had
taken over the right wing; here we had statism in a virulent
form, and yet no one could possibly think these conservatives
to be "leftist." But this meant that our simple "left/total
government—right/no government" continuum was altogether wrong
and that our whole identification of ourselves as "extreme
rightists" must contain a basic flaw. Plunging back into
history, we again concentrated on the reality that in the 19th
century, laissez-faire liberals and radicals were on the
extreme left and our ancient foes, the conservatives, on the
right. My old friend and libertarian colleague Leonard Liggio
then came up with the following analysis of the historical process.

First there was the old order, the ancien régime, the regime
of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a despotic
ruling class, using the church to dupe the masses into
accepting its rule. This was pure statism; this was the right
wing. Then, in 17th and 18th century western Europe, a liberal
and radical opposition movement arose, our heroes, who
championed a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of
rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free
markets, international peace and separation of church and
state, in opposition to throne and altar, to monarchy, the
ruling class, theocracy and war. These—"our people"—were the
left, and the purer their vision the more "extreme" they were.
So far so good; but what of socialism, which we had always
considered the extreme left? Where did that fit in? Liggio
analyzed socialism as a confused middle-of-the-road movement,
influenced historically by both the libertarian left and the
conservative right. From the individualist left the socialists
took the goals of freedom: the withering away of the state,
the replacement of the governing of men by the administration
of things, opposition to the ruling class and a search for its
overthrow, the desire to establish international peace, an
advanced industrial economy and a high standard of living for
the mass of the people. From the right the socialists adopted
the means to achieve these goals—collectivism, state planning,
community control of the individual. This put socialism in the
middle of the ideological spectrum. It also meant that
socialism was an unstable, self-contradictory doctrine bound
to fly apart in the inner contradiction between its means and ends.

Our analysis was greatly bolstered by our becoming familiar
with the new and exciting group of historians who studied
under University of Wisconsin historian William Appleman
Williams. From them we discovered that all of us free
marketeers had erred in believing that somehow, down deep, Big
Businessmen were really in favor of laissez-faire, and that
their deviations from it, obviously clear and notorious in
recent years, were either "sellouts" of principle to
expediency or the result of astute maneuverings by liberal intellectuals.

This is the general view on the right; in the remarkable
phrase of Ayn Rand, Big Business is "America's most persecuted
minority." Persecuted minority, indeed! Sure, there were
thrusts against Big Business in the old McCormick Chicago
Tribune and in the writings of Albert Jay Nock; but it took
the Williams-Kolko analysis to portray the true anatomy and
physiology of the American scene.

As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal
regulation and welfare statism that left and right alike have
always believed to be mass movements against Big Business are
not only now backed to the hilt by Big Business, but were
originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free
market to a cartelized economy that would benefit it.
Imperialistic foreign policy and the permanent garrison state
originated in the Big Business drive for foreign investments
and for war contracts at home.

The role of the liberal intellectuals is to serve as
"corporate liberals," weavers of sophisticated apologias to
inform the masses that the heads of the American corporate
state are ruling on behalf of the "common good" and the
"general welfare"—like the priest in the Oriental despotism
who convinced the masses that their emperor was all-wise and divine.

Since the early '60s, as the National Review right has moved
nearer to political power, it has jettisoned its old
libertarian remnants and has drawn ever closer to the liberals
of the Great American Consensus. Evidence of this abounds.
There is Bill Buckley's ever-widening popularity in the mass
media and among liberal intellectuals, as well as widespread
admiration on the intellectual right for people and groups it
once despised: for the New Leader, for Irving Kristol, for the
late Felix Frankfurter (who always opposed judicial restraint
on government invasions of individual liberty), for Hannah
Arendt and Sidney Hook. Despite occasional bows to the free
market, conservatives have come to agree that economic issues
are unimportant; they therefore accept—or at least do not
worry about—the major outlines of the Keynesian
welfare-warfare state of liberal corporatism.

On the domestic front, virtually the only conservative
interests are to suppress Negroes ("shoot looters," "crush
those riots"), to call for more power for the police so as not
to "shield the criminal" (i.e., not to protect his libertarian
rights), to enforce prayer in the public schools, to put Reds
and other subversives and "seditionists" in jail and to carry
on the crusade for war abroad. There is little in the thrust
of this program with which liberals can now disagree; any
disagreements are tactical or matters of degree only. Even the
Cold War—including the war in Vietnam—was begun and maintained
and escalated by the liberals themselves.

No wonder that liberal Daniel Moynihan—a national board member
of ADA incensed at the radicalism of the current anti-war and
Black Power movements—should recently call for a formal
alliance between liberals and conservatives, since after all
they basically agree on these, the two crucial issues of our
time! Even Barry Goldwater has gotten the message; in January
1968 in National Review, Goldwater concluded an article by
affirming that he is not against liberals, that liberals are
needed as a counterweight to conservatism, and that he had in
mind a fine liberal like Max Lerner—Max Lerner, the epitome of
the old left, the hated symbol of my youth!

In response to our isolation from the right, and noting the
promising signs of libertarian attitudes in the emerging new
left, a tiny band of us ex-rightist libertarians founded the
"little journal," Left and Right, in the spring of 1965. We
had two major purposes: to make contact with libertarians
already on the new left and to persuade the bulk of
libertarians or quasi-libertarians who remained on the right
to follow our example. We have been gratified in both
directions: by the remarkable shift toward libertarian and
anti-statist positions of the new left, and by the significant
number of young people who have left the right-wing movement.

This left/right tendency has begun to be noticeable on the new
left, praised and damned by those aware of the situation.(Our
old colleague Ronald Hamoway, an historian at Stanford, set
forth the left/right position in the New Republic collection,
Thoughts of the Young Radicals (1966). We have received
gratifying encouragement from Carl Oglesby who, in his
Containment and Change (1967), advocated a coalition of new
left and old right, and from the young scholars grouped around
the unfortunately now defunct Studies on the Left. We've also
been criticized, if indirectly, by Staughton Lynd, who worries
because our ultimate goals—free market as against
socialism—differ.

Finally, liberal historian Martin Duberman, in a recent issue
of Partisan Review, sharply criticizes SNCC and CORE for being
"anarchists," for rejecting the authority of the state, for
insisting that community be voluntary, and for stressing,
along with SDS, participatory instead of representative
democracy. Perceptively, if on the wrong side of the fence,
Duberman then links SNCC and the new left with us old
rightists: "SNCC and CORE, like the Anarchists, talk
increasingly of the supreme importance of the individual. They
do so, paradoxically, in a rhetoric strongly reminiscent of
that long associated with the right. It could be Herbert
Hoover . . . but it is in fact Rap Brown who now reiterates
the Negro's need to stand on his own two feet, to make his own
decisions, to develop self-reliance and a sense of self-worth.
SNCC may be scornful of present-day liberals and 'statism,'
but it seems hardly to realize that the laissez-faire rhetoric
it prefers derives almost verbatim from the classic liberalism
of John Stuart Mill." Tough. It could, I submit, do a lot worse.

I hope to have demonstrated why a few compatriots and I have
shifted, or rather been shifted, from "extreme right" to
"extreme left" in the past 20 years merely by staying in the
same basic ideological place. The right wing, once in
determined opposition to Big Government, has now become the
conservative wing of the American corporate state and its
foreign policy of expansionist imperialism. If we would
salvage liberty from this deadening left/right fusion on the
center, this needs be done through a counter-fusion of old
right and new left.

James Burnham, an editor of National Review and its main
strategic thinker in waging the "Third World War" (as he
entitles his column), the prophet of the managerial state (in
The Managerial Revolution), whose only hint of positive
interest in liberty in a lifetime of political writing was a
call for legalized firecrackers, recently attacked the
dangerous trend among some young conservatives to make common
cause with the left in opposing the draft. Burnham warned that
he learned in his Trotskyite days that this would be an
"unprincipled" coalition, and he warned that if one begins by
being anti-draft one might wind up opposed to the war in
Vietnam: "And I rather think that some of them are at heart,
or are getting to be, against the war. Murray Rothbard has
shown how right-wing libertarianism can lead to almost as
anti-U.S. a position as left-wing libertarianism does. And a
strain of isolationism has always been endemic in the American right."

This passage symbolizes how deeply the whole thrust of the
right wing has changed in the last two decades. Vestigial
interest in liberty or in opposition to war and imperialism
are now considered deviations to be stamped out without delay.
There are millions of Americans, I am convinced, who are still
devoted to individual liberty and opposition to the leviathan
state at home and abroad, Americans who call themselves
"conservatives" but feel that something has gone very wrong
with the old anti-New Deal and anti-Fair Deal cause.
Something has gone wrong: the right wing has been captured and
transformed by elitists and devotees of the European
conservative ideals of order and militarism, by witch hunters
and global crusaders, by statists who wish to coerce
"morality" and suppress "sedition."

America was born in a revolution against Western imperialism,
born as a haven of freedom against the tyrannies and
despotism, the wars and intrigues of the old world. Yet we
have allowed ourselves to sacrifice the American ideals of
peace and freedom and anti-colonialism on the altar of a
crusade to kill communists throughout the world; we have
surrendered our libertarian birthright into the hands of those
who yearn to restore the Golden Age of the Holy Inquisition.
It is about time that we wake up and rise up to restore our heritage.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was teaching at Brooklyn
Polytechnic Institute when this article was written.