By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Ludwig von Mises Institute
December 31, 2004


Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The
most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone
almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the
dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from
leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional
elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism.
Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the
circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates
power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream
punditry, and hence there have been few attempts to explain it
— much less have libertarians thought much about what it
implies. My own take is this: the Republican takeover of the
presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has
supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning
libertarian movement into a statist one.

The remaining ideological justification was left to, and
accomplished by, Washington's kept think tanks, who have
approved the turn at every crucial step. What this implies for
libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear separation
between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It
also requires that we face the reality of the current threat
forthrightly by extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward
and less rightward.

Let us start from 1994 and work forward. In a stunningly
prescient memo, Murray N. Rothbard described the 1994
revolution against the Democrats as follows:

a massive and unprecedented public repudiation of President
Clinton, his person, his personnel, his ideologies and
programs, and all of his works; plus a repudiation of
Clinton's Democrat Party; and, most fundamentally, a
rejection of the designs, current and proposed, of the
Leviathan he heads…. what is being rejected is big
government in general (its taxing, mandating, regulating,
gun grabbing, and even its spending) and, in particular, its
arrogant ambition to control the entire society from the
political center. Voters and taxpayers are no longer
persuaded of a supposed rationale for American-style central
planning…. On the positive side, the public is vigorously
and fervently affirming its desire to re-limit and
de-centralize government; to increase individual and
community liberty; to reduce taxes, mandates, and government
intrusion; to return to the cultural and social mores of
pre-1960s America, and perhaps much earlier than that.
This memo also cautioned against unrelieved optimism, because,
Rothbard said, two errors rear their head in most every
revolution. First, the reformers do not move fast enough;
instead they often experience a crisis of faith and become
overwhelmed by demands that they govern "responsibly" rather
than tear down the established order. Second, the reformers
leave too much in place that can be used by their successors
to rebuild the state they worked so hard to dismantle. This
permits gains to be reversed as soon as another party takes control.

Rothbard urged dramatic cuts in spending, taxing, and
regulation, and not just in the domestic area but also in the
military and in foreign policy. He saw that this was crucial
to any small-government program. He also urged a dismantling
of the federal judiciary on grounds that it represents a clear
and present danger to American liberty. He urged the young
radicals who were just elected to reject gimmicks like the
balanced-budget amendment and the line-item veto, in favor of
genuine change. None of this happened of course. In fact, the
Republican leadership and pundit class began to warn against
"kamikaze missions" and speak not of bringing liberty, but
rather of governing better than others.

Foreshadowing what was to come, Rothbard pointed out:
"Unfortunately, the conservative public is all too often taken
in by mere rhetoric and fails to weigh the actual deeds of
their political icons. So the danger is that Gingrich will
succeed not only in betraying, but in conning the
revolutionary public into thinking that they have already won
and can shut up shop and go home." The only way to prevent
this, he wrote, was to educate the public, businessmen,
students, academics, journalists, and politicians about the
true nature of what is going on, and about the vicious nature
of the bi-partisan ruling elites.

The 1994 revolution failed of course, in part because the
anti-government opposition was intimidated into silence by the
Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995. The establishment somehow
managed to pin the violent act of an ex-military man on the
right-wing libertarianism of the American bourgeoisie. It was
said by every important public official at that time that to
be anti-government was to give aid and support to militias,
secessionists, and other domestic terrorists. It was a classic
intimidation campaign but, combined with a GOP leadership that
never had any intention to change DC, it worked to shut down the opposition.

In the last years of the 1990s, the GOP-voting middle class
refocused its anger away from government and leviathan and
toward the person of Bill Clinton. It was said that he
represented some kind of unique moral evil despoiling the
White House. That ridiculous Monica scandal culminated in a
pathetic and pretentious campaign to impeach Clinton.
Impeaching presidents is a great idea, but impeaching them for
fibbing about personal peccadilloes is probably the least
justifiable ground. It's almost as if that entire campaign was
designed to discredit the great institution of impeachment.

In any case, this event crystallized the partisanship of the
bourgeoisie, driving home the message that the real problem
was Clinton and not government; the immorality of the chief
executive, not his power; the libertinism of the left-liberals
and not their views toward government. The much heralded
"leave us alone" coalition had been thoroughly transformed in
a pure anti-Clinton movement. 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.
The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual
sterility of a class of lewd would-be authors and artists is
the ransom mankind must pay lest the creative pioneers be
prevented from accomplishing their work. Freedom must be
granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use
it for the benefit of mankind be hindered. The license which
the shabby characters of the quartier Latin enjoyed was one of
the conditions that made possible the ascendance of a few
great writers, painters and sculptors. The first thing a
genius needs is to breathe free air.

He goes on to urge that anti-leftists work to educate
themselves about economics, so that they can have a positive
agenda to displace their purely negative one. 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, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and otherwise bring a
form of statism to America that makes Clinton look
laissez-faire by comparison. The Bush administration has not
only faced no resistance from the bourgeoisie. it has received
cheers. And they are not only cheering Bush's reelection; they
have embraced tyrannical control of society as a means toward
accomplishing their anti-leftist ends.

After September 11, even those whose ostensible purpose in
life is to advocate less government changed their minds. Even
after it was clear that 9-11 would be used as the biggest
pretense for the expansion of government since the stock
market crash of 1929, the Cato Institute said that
libertarianism had to change its entire focus: "Libertarians
usually enter public debates to call for restrictions on
government activity. In the wake of September 11, we have all
been reminded of the real purpose of government: to protect
our life, liberty, and property from violence. This would be a
good time for the federal government to do its job with vigor
and determination."

The vigor and determination of the Bush administration has
brought about a profound cultural change, so that the very
people who once proclaimed hated 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.

Editor & Publisher, for example, posted a small note the other
day about a column written by Al Neuharth, the founder of USA
Today, in which he mildly suggested that the troops be brought
home from Iraq "sooner rather than later." The editor of E&P
was just blown away by the letters that poured in, filled with
venom and hate and calling for Neuharth to be tried and locked
away as a traitor. The letters compared him with pro-Hitler
journalists, and suggested that he was objectively
pro-terrorist, choosing to support the Muslim jihad over the
US military. Other letters called for Neuharth to get the
death penalty for daring to take issue with the Christian
leaders of this great Christian nation.

I'm actually not surprised at this. It has been building for
some time. If you follow hate-filled sites such as Free
Republic, you know that the populist right in this country has
been advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more
than a year now. The militarism and nationalism dwarfs
anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates
the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the
state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to
actually believe that the US is God marching on earth — not
just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.

Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and
a celebration of all things public sector, including egregious
law like the Patriot Act, egregious bureaucracies like the
Department of Homeland Security, and egregious centrally
imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act. It
longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions
like the two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian
charity, the homogeneous community of native-born patriots.

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 ensuring 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.

Paul Craig Roberts is right: "In the ranks of the new
conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It
comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational
emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship
George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There
appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to
kill anyone for George Bush." Again: "Like Brownshirts, the
new conservatives take personally any criticism of their
leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy."

In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and
Americanized fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist
in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It has no
real beef with business. It 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's
needs, and has a special connection to the Creator that
permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.
The American right today has managed to be solidly
anti-leftist while adopting an ideology — even without knowing
it or being entirely conscious of the change — that is also
frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very
difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a 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
that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long
faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we
face in our time? It is not from the left. If anything, the
left has been solid on civil liberties and has been crucial in
drawing attention to the lies and abuses of the Bush
administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to
freedom 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 a messianic and
belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

There is no need to advance the view that the enemy of my
enemy is my friend. However, it is time to recognize that the
left today does represent a counterweight to the right, just
as it did in the 1950s when the right began to adopt
anti-communist militarism as its credo. In a time when the
term patriotism means supporting the nation's wars and
statism, a libertarian patriotism has more in common with that
advanced by The Nation magazine:

The other company of patriots does not march to military
time. It prefers the gentle strains of 'America the
Beautiful' to the strident cadences of 'Hail to the Chief'
and 'The Stars and Stripes Forever.' This patriotism is
rooted in the love of one's own land and people, love too of
the best ideals of one's own culture and tradition. This
company of patriots finds no glory in puffing their country
up by pulling others' down. This patriotism is profoundly
municipal, even domestic. Its pleasures are quiet, its
services steady and unpretentious. This patriotism too has
deep roots and long continuity in our history.

Ten years ago, these were "right wing" sentiments; today the
right regards them as treasonous. What should this teach us?
It shows that those who saw the interests of liberty as being
well served by the politicized proxies of free enterprise
alone, family alone, Christianity 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.

As Rothbard said in 1965:

The doctrine of liberty contains elements corresponding with
both contemporary left and right. This means in no sense
that we are middle-of-the-roaders, eclectically trying to
combine, or step between, both poles; but rather that a
consistent view of liberty includes concepts that have also
become part of the rhetoric or program of right and of left.
Hence a creative approach to liberty must transcend the
confines of contemporary political shibboleths.

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.

Indeed, the current times can be seen as a training period for
all true friends of liberty. We need to learn to recognize the
many different guises in which tyranny appears. Power is
protean because it must suppress that impulse toward liberty
that exists in the hearts of all people. The impulse is there,
tacitly waiting for the consciousness to dawn. When it does,
power doesn't stand a chance.

Lew Rockwell is president of the Mises Institute, editor of
LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.