By Llewellyn H. Rockwell
Ludwig von Mises Institue
March 2005


In the ten years between 1994 and 2004, a dramatic turn took place
within the Republican Party. The themes of the 1994 election weren’t
just about cutting government, though that was the central campaign
promise of that generation of elected officials sent to Washington.

The core was more revolutionary than that: it was a dogged
commitment to full freedom philosophy forged in opposition to all
the works of the central state.

Of course you could dismiss this movement as a partisan reaction to
Bill Clinton’s presidency, and that surely accounts for much of the
libertarian spirit of that time. Even so, public opinion had turned
decidedly in the direction of a consistently pro-freedom position.
There was growing public skepticism about Clinton’s wars, with
Republicans leading the charge against foreign intervention. The
HillaryCare debacle had turned public opinion against government
management of enterprise. There was a growing clamor for radical
decentralization and against high taxes.

The timing itself was interesting: only a few years after the end of
a Cold War that had provided the government its primary raison
d’etre. With the Russian threat out of the way, and the horrors of
the Waco and Ruby Ridge events fresh in the public mind, radical
questions were being asked about why we permit this far-away
institution to grab and redistribute 40 percent of the national
income, why we allow unelected bureaucracies to manage our
businesses, why we give people we have never met the right to
dictate our kids’ educations, and why we grant more authority to
federal commissars than the Constitution allows them to have.

How that revolution against government came to be subverted from
within and diverted from without is another story, let us now see
what guides the same "red state" voters and the Republican Party.

Judging by the polls, the publications, and the practices of the
Republican regime, the guiding light is no longer liberty for
Americans but power for the government.

In four years, George W. Bush has nationalized airport security,
created the largest bureaucracy in history in the form of Homeland
Security, tossed our constitutional protections we used to take for
granted, enacted the largest expansion of welfare in three
generations with the prescription drug benefit, intruded into local
schools as never before with No Child Left Behind, brought many
industries under protectionist regulation, hammered corporate
upstarts with antitrust law, and undertaken two major wars that have
cost hundreds of billions and left only destruction and chaos in
their wake. Clinton increased spending 13.4 percent in his first
term and 16 percent in his second, but Bush’s first-term spending
soared +29.

That is just in the first term. The second term could likely bring a
new forced savings act, a revival of the idea of national service,
more welfare programs for the middle class, more intervention in
enterprise to fix the problems created by the previous
interventions, and probably a few more wars.

Where are the cries of betrayal? They exist among libertarian
intellectuals and thoughtful people all over the country but the
impulse among the pundit class, think tanks, and the party
rank-and-file has been to cheer every step down this road to
serfdom. Had Clinton done half as much damage to the cause of
limited government, there would be loud outcries for his scalp, and
rightly so. But Bush has gotten away with this by invoking party
loyalty, fear of a worse opposition, and because of the needs of
national security in the post 9–11 era.

This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry
because very few are even alert to its meaning. The mainstream left,
of course, is only unhappy about these developments because they are
the ones behind it. Otherwise they support the spending, regulating,
and nationalization. But why hasn’t the right protested? How is it
that the right is so passionate in its defense of this administration?

There are echoes of Nixon and Reagan here, both of whom expanded the
state but paid no political price. With Bush, however, there is a
deeper ideological root to the problem. The "leave us alone"
coalition of the 1990s had been gradually transformed into an
anti-Clinton movement by the end of the decade. The right in this
country began to define itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994
but simply as anti-leftist, as it does today.

There are many good reasons to be anti-leftist but let us revisit
what Mises said in 1956 concerning the anti-socialists of his day.
He pointed out that many of these people had a purely negative
agenda, to crush the leftists and their bohemian ways and their
intellectual pretension. He warned that this is not a program for
freedom. It was a program of hatred that can only degenerate into statism.

A positive agenda of liberty is the only way we might have been
spared the blizzard of government controls that were fastened on
this country after Bush used the events of 9–11 to increase central
planning. The very people who once proclaimed hatred of government
now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts, especially
against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian
bureaucracy of the military or suggest that Bush is something less
than infallible in his foreign-policy decisions.

The lesson here is that it is always a mistake to advocate
government action, for there is no way you can fully anticipate how
government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a slice of the
population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the police power.

In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main
threat to the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for
keeping the family together and assuring its ascendancy. In 1994,
the state was seen as the enemy of education; today, the same people
view the state as the means of raising standards and purging
education of its left-wing influences. In 1994, Christians widely
saw that Leviathan was the main enemy of the faith; today, they see
Leviathan as the tool by which they will guarantee that their faith
will have an impact on the country and the world.

Let us never forget that there are two dangers to liberty, not only
the socialism of the left but also the fascism of the right. Why
fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or
redistributionist. It has no fundamental objection to business,
doesn’t sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is
for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family,
faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the central organizing
principle of society, views public institutions as the most
essential means by which all these institutions are protected and
advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows
better than anyone else what the country and world needs and has a
special connection to the creator that permits him to discern the
best means to bring it about.

For a very long time, we’ve tended to see the primary threat to
liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to
control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that
the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to
liberty, one that comes from the left and the other which comes from
the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter
threat, but its reality is only now coming home to hit us fully.

There is a clear and present danger to freedom that comes from the
right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased
to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of
society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use belligerent
nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

Ten years ago, those who saw the interests of liberty as being well
served by the proxies of free enterprise alone, family alone, faith
alone, law and order alone, were profoundly mistaken. There is no
proxy for liberty, no cause that serves as a viable substitute, and
no movement by any name whose success can yield freedom in our time
other than the movement of freedom itself. We need to embrace
liberty and liberty only, and not be fooled by groups or parties or
movements that only desire a temporary liberty to advance their pet interests.

There has never in my lifetime been a more urgent need for the party
of liberty to completely secede from conventional thought and
established institutions, especially those associated with all
aspects of government, and undertake radical intellectual action on
behalf of a third way that rejects the socialism of the left and the
fascism of the right. .FM

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.