Ralph Nader discusses a potential left-right alliance.

Vincent Navarro discusses the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain.

James Peron discusses how people who hate gays also hate capitalists in the context of the businesses refusing to discriminate against them.

Qatryk interviews Roderick Long in Poland.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the death penalty.

Danny Haiphong discusses the left flank of U.S. imperialism and respectability.

Kevin Carson discusses May Day.

Kevin Carson discusses the governmentalist educational establishment and equality.

Stefan Haus discusses the rise of the right in Europe.

Ron Keine discusses why ending the death penalty should be a conservative priority.

Sheldon Richman discusses how the U.S. blew a chance to reconcile with Iran.

Tessie Castillo discusses a Georgia mother who arrested her own daughter for heroin.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses racism in government programs.

Sheldon Richman discusses the thick and thin libertarian debate.

Travis Wilson discusses why he uses the word voluntarylist rather than anarchist or libertarian.

Ron Jacobs discusses the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Mateo Pimentel discusses the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

Justin Raimondo discusses the non-interventionist sentiment among the American populace.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the continuing Cold War against Cuba.

Zenon Evans discusses the drug testing of teens at three private high schools by a company with a CEO that is a brother of the principal of SEHS.

Robert Fantina discusses U.S. terrorism against Cuba.

Steve Chapman discusses the secrets and lies of the American drone war.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the ticking time bomb scenario and torture.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses how government created the campus rape crisis.

Christopher Westley discusses e-cig manufacturers who support regulation.

David Stockman discusses why the warfare state must be dismantled.

Magnus Carlsen beats Anand before the World Chess Championship.

Magnus Carlsen beats Boris Gelfand.

Estado: Instituição que intervém no livre mercado através do exercício direto da coerção ou da concessão de privilégios (sustentados pela coerção).

Impostos: Forma de coerção ou interferência no livre mercado em que o estado coleta tributos (os impostos) que permitem que ele contrate forças armadas para agir de forma coercitiva na defesa de privilégios, além de se envolver em guerras, aventuras, experimentos, “reformas” e outras atividades custeadas não por seus próprios recursos, mas às custas de “seus” súditos.

Privilégio: Do latim privi, privado, e lege, lei. Uma vantagem concedida pelo estado e protegida por seus poderes de coerção. Uma lei em benefício privado.

Usura: Forma de privilégio ou interferência no livre mercado em que um grupo, apoiado pelo estado, monopoliza a emissão de moeda e, com isso, cobra tributos (juros), diretos ou indiretos, sobre todas as transações econômicas.

Latifundismo: Forma de privilégio ou interferência no livre mercado em que um grupo, apoiado pelo estado, passa a ser “dono” da terra e, assim, extrai tributos (rendas, aluguéis) daqueles que vivem, trabalham ou produzem nela.

Tarifas: Forma de privilégio ou interferência no livre mercado em que as mercadorias produzidas fora do estado não podem competir em igualdade com aquelas produzidas dentro do âmbito do estado.

Capitalismo: Organização social que incorpora elementos como impostos, usura, latifúndios e tarifas e, portanto, é contrária ao livre mercado, embora alegue representá-lo.

Conservadorismo: Escola filosófica capitalista que afirma apoiar o livre mercado, mas que, na verdade, defende a usura, os direitos artificiais à terra, as tarifas e, às vezes, impostos.

Social-democracia: Escola filosófica capitalista que pretende corrigir as injustiças do capitalismo acrescentando novas leis às já existentes. Toda vez que os conservadores passam novas leis que criam privilégios, os social-democratas criam outras leis modificando esses privilégios, o que impele os conservadores a fazerem leis mais sutis que recriam os antigos privilégios e assim por diante, até que “tudo que não seja proibido é obrigatório” e “tudo que não seja obrigatório é proibido”.

Socialismo: Tentativa de abolição de todos os privilégios através da concentração de todo poder no agente coercitivo por trás dos privilégios, o estado, transformando a oligarquia capitalista em monopólios estatais. É o mesmo que tentar branquear uma parede pintando-a de preto.

Anarquismo: Organização social na qual o mercado opera de modo livre, sem impostos, usura, concentrações de terras, tarifas ou outras formas de coerção ou privilégio. Os anarquistas de “direita” preveem que, num livre mercado, as pessoas escolheriam voluntariamente competir mais do que cooperar; anarquistas de “esquerda” preveem que, num livre mercado, as pessoas escolheriam voluntariamente cooperar mais do que competir.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

Note: In my view, this is a silly article. The author does to conservatism just what the more brain dead conservatives do to libertarianism – that is, to pick out one strand from a cluster of movements, and to take that as representative of the whole. There are conservative objections to war and to moral regulation. Indeed, the moral regulation of the Victorian Age was mostly brought in by “liberals” against Tory opposition. And the most prominent calls for a negotiated end to the Great War came from within the Tory aristocracy. As for point 3), there are conservative defenses of tradition that are not at all incompatible with libertarianism. I give this one out of five on the grounds that the author got her spelling right. SIG

I admit to lumping all conservatives together, but what I described has gone under the label of conservative. As for defenses of tradition being compatible with libertarianism; I disagree with this. The essence of libertarianism is individualism and individual rights. This conflicts with obedience to inherited collectivist traditional social norms. Independent judgment and reason tend to undermine traditionalism.

The conservative’s tendency to favor the preservation of established institutions will also come into conflict with the libertarian. All institutions are subject to rational examination and change in a free society. This can’t be reconciled with a conservative defense of tradition or inherited institutions. Tradition also tends to require coercion or ostracism to maintain. Both of which are tools for controlling people. This is not to say that coercion and ostracism are always unjustified, but they are preferably used for something other than the continuation of existing social norms.

Another way in which tradition and libertarianism are at odds is historical. History is replete with examples of tyranny and unfree societies. There is a dearth of relative freedom throughout history, so it’s strange to look to what has come before for inspiration.

Tradition is not favorable to liberty. It cannot substitute for a rational delineation of rights. The social norms that most human beings have embraced are simply not conducive to liberty. We error in relying on them. Murray Rothbard provides a fine conclusion to this post below:

“Come join us, come realize that to break once and for all with statism is to break once and for all with the Right-wing. We stand ready to welcome you.” ~ Murray Rothbard

Libertarian and conservative are practically opposites, but America is a special place. American libertarianism is a different breed of libertarianism and American conservatism is a different breed of conservatism. Both are much more enamored of classical liberalism than their international counterparts (and their traditional forms).

Much truth above, but the contemporary conservative right in the U.S. pays more lip service to classical liberal ideals than actively embracing them. Observe the attitude of the GOP establishment towards war, civil liberties, immigration, public secularism, corporatism, and so on.

In terms of your five points:

1) Grass roots small-government conservatives (“tea party” types) seem to be rediscovering their party’s isolationist traditions. No doubt much of this is because there’s a Democrat in the White House.

Not sure of the Republician Party’s isolationist roots, but I acknowledge that some conservatives are anti-war. Not all Tea Party types are anti-war though, and it remains to be seen whether what anti-war sentiment exists is due to a Democratic being in office.

2) There has been -some- movement on drug policy on the part of such conservatives.

This may be true, but the GOP establishment remains pretty firmly favorable to the War on Drugs.

The preservation of the state has left and right minarchists on one side and left and right anarchists on the other. It’s an anarchist-minarchist rivalry, not a conservative-libertarian one.

It’s true that there is an anarchist-minarchist divide on the issue, but the conservative also wants to preserve the state. I fail to see how it can’t also be an anarchist-conservative divide.

Populist conservatives have also been kvetching about airport security, since there’s a Democratic administration. And of course the American far-right “patriot” types have always had their slogan “love my country, fear my government.”

It still couches things in nationalistic or patriotic terms, but it’s true that conservatives seem more insistent on civil liberties under a Democratic administration.

I think it’s significant that the fifth item on the list contrasts not conservatives and libertarians, but conservatives and left-libertarians. Left libertarians are on the opposite side from conservatives on bosses and corporate overlords–although even tea party types have adopted the phrase, when addressing libertarian and other leftists, “it’s really ‘corporatism’ you’re against.” Left libertarians are on the same side as conservatives on seeing competition as a positive thing, believing market equilibrium represents the best (most efficient) of all possible worlds, and having generally positive attitudes toward Mises, Hayek, etc.

I am not of necessity an uber fan of Mises and Hayek. My conception of markets is considerably different from the conservative one too. I also don’t believe markets are the best in all cases. It’s one part of a unified theory. The type of markets I embrace dilute plutocratic or oligarchic power, rather than reinforce it.

But the comparison is not only just plain wrong: It benefits supporters of statism on both the putative “left” and “right” at the expense of liberty. It allows conservative politicians to pretend to be libertarians (pandering to, and often fooling, libertarian-leaning voters) and “progressive” politicians to falsely caricature libertarians as conservatives (so as to preemptively defeat libertarian ideas without having to actually engage them).

It’s not that conservative politicians can never be “libertarian-leaning,” as Amash himself arguably is (a rarity among conservatives, he actually DOES usually vote against big government instead of just talking the “smaller government” talk out of one side of his mouth while growing government as fast as he can with the other). It’s that any similarities between libertarianism and conservatism are contingent and coincidental, not essential.

The central tenet of libertarianism is liberty. While there’s considerable debate within the libertarian movement itself as to the nature and scope of the liberty to be protected, libertarians generally defend the freedom to do as one wills, provided one does not coercively infringe the freedom of others.

The central tenet of conservatism is conservation. Similarly, there’s considerable debate within the conservative movement as to WHAT must be “conserved” — Amash wants to “conserve” the long-dead “classical liberal principles” of America’s founders, which are nominally libertarian in many respects; some conservatives would repeal the New Deal and “conserve” Coolidgeism; most modern conservatives want to “save” the New Deal by putting it on a more reasonable fiscal footing, but would love to ditch the Great Society — but once again there’s no doubt about conservatism’s philosophical lodestar: “Protecting” society from radical change.

To explain the difference in terms of one issue, take same-sex marriage:

For  libertarians, the answer to “should a same-sex couple be permitted to marry?” is “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg — end of discussion.” Libertarians have held this position ever since the issue first came to their attention.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are at odds with each other on it.

Amash, for example, tweeted last year that the “[r]eal threat to traditional marriage & religious liberty is government, not gay couples who love each other & want to spend lives together” — a libertarian answer, but also the answer one would expect from someone who wants to “conserve” a Madisonian/Jeffersonian view of government’s role.

Then there are conservatives (e.g. Jonah Goldberg) who now tentatively support, or have at least stopped actively opposing, same-sex marriage because they regard the fight as pretty much over. They’re coming around to “conserving” the emerging new status quo rather than the old one.

And of course there are conservatives who still want to “conserve” a past in which same-sex marriage was illegal. They’re afraid of the prospective effect of rapid and radical social change on existing institutions (and power/authority relations), and want to use the force of the state, in a very un-libertarian way, to stop and/or reverse that social change. This is the conservatism which, per William F. Buckley, Jr., “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

As an anarchist — a libertarian who takes the principle all the way and advocates the abolition of the state — I think that Amash wastes his libertarian pearls by casting them before congressional swine. On the other hand, I can’t really hold it against him and it’s nice to see someone speaking truth to power on Capitol Hill. I just wish he’d give up the silly notion that “conservatives” can ever be more than temporary allies of convenience.

Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of conservatism deserves, for conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary American form, the recent Conservative revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however, of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run pessimism of the modern Libertarian easy to understand. But this chapter contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.

The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history which holds, first, that before the eighteenth century in Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In sum, life was “nasty, brutish, and short”; here was Maine’s “society of status” and Spencer’s “military society.” The ruling classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.

The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow. When we consider that basically the Old Order had existed since the dawn of history, in all civilizations, we can appreciate even more the glory and the magnitude of the triumph of the liberal revolution of and around the eighteenth century.

Part of the dimensions of this struggle has been obscured by a great myth of the history of Western Europe implanted by antiliberal German historians of the late nineteenth century. The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before. Capitalism, indeed, flourished earliest and most actively precisely in those areas where the central State was weak or nonexistent: the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League, the confederation of seventeenth-century Holland. Finally, the Old Order was overthrown or severely shaken in its grip in two ways. One was by industry and the market expanding through the interstices of the feudal order (for example, industry in England developing in the countryside beyond the grip of feudal, State and guild restrictions). More important was a series of cataclysmic revolutions that blasted loose the Old Order and the old ruling classes: the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, all of which were necessary for the ushering in of the Industrial Revolution and of at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of church and state, and international peace. The society of status gave way, at least partially, to the “society of contract”; the military society gave way partially to the “industrial society.” The mass of the population now achieved a mobility of labor and place, and accelerating expansion of their living standards, for which they had scarcely dared to hope. Liberalism had indeed brought to the Western world not only liberty, the prospect of peace, and the rising living standards of an industrial society, but above all, perhaps, it brought hope, a hope in ever-greater progress that lifted the mass of mankind out of its age-old sinkhole of stagnation and despair.

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: one was liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order. Since liberalism admittedly had reason on its side, the Conservatives darkened the ideological atmosphere with obscurantist calls for romanticism, tradition, theocracy, and irrationalism. Political ideologies were polarized, with liberalism on the extreme “left,” and conservatism on the extreme “right,” of the ideological spectrum. That genuine liberalism was essentially radical and revolutionary was brilliantly perceived, in the twilight of its impact, by the great Lord Acton (one of the few figures in the history of thought who, charmingly, grew more radical as he grew older). Acton wrote that “Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is.” In working out this view, incidentally, it was Acton, not Trotsky, who first arrived at the concept of the “permanent revolution.” As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her excellent study of Acton:

. . . his philosophy develop(ed) to the point where the future was seen as the avowed enemy of the past, and where the past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform to morality. To take seriously this Liberal theory of history, to give precedence to “what ought to be” over “what is,” was, he admitted, virtually to install a “revolution in permanence.”

The “revolution in permanence,” as Acton hinted in the inaugural lecture and admitted frankly in his notes, was the culmination of his philosophy of history and theory of politics. . . . This idea of conscience, that men carry about with them the knowledge of good and evil, is the very root of revolution, for it destroys the sanctity of the past. . . . “Liberalism is essentially revolutionary,” Acton observed. “Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.” [1]

The Liberal, wrote Acton, far surpassed the Whig:

The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins the reign of ideas. . . . One is practical, gradual, ready for compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically. One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a philosophy seeking a policy. [2]

What happened to liberalism? Why then did it decline during the nineteenth century? This question has been pondered many times, but perhaps the basic reason was an inner rot within the vitals of liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor and, therefore, their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned. First is the abandonment of natural rights and “higher law” theory for utilitarianism, for only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle by focusing on the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on the other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order.

The second great philosophical influence on the decline of liberalism was evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, which put the finishing touches to liberalism as a radical force in society. For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power, and that, therefore, liberalism had to break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism.

An interesting illustration of a thinker who embodies within himself the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth century is Herbert Spencer. Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millennia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical creed and confined his liberalism in practice to a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well, so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in theory, for example, in repudiating his famous chapter in Social Statics, “The Right to Ignore the State.”

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British Liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher-law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life. [3]

Thus, with liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a party of hope in the Western world, no longer a “Left” movement to lead a struggle against the state and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.

In short, Russell Kirk, who claims that socialism was the heir of classical liberalism, and Ronald Hamowy, who sees socialism as the heir of conservatism, are both right; for the question is on what aspect of this confused centrist movement we happen to be focusing. Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within socialism: one was the right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism; but especially the smashing of the state apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the “replacement of the government by men by the administration of things,” can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen versus workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus. [4] Saint-Simon at one time in his confused and chaotic life was close to Comte and Dunoyer and picked up his class analysis from them, in the process characteristically getting the whole thing balled up and converting businessmen on the market, as well as feudal landlords and others of the State privileged, into “exploiters.” Marx and Bakunin picked this up from the Saint-Simonians, and the result gravely misled the whole left-socialist movement; for, then, in addition to smashing the repressive State, it became supposedly necessary to smash private capitalist ownership of the means of production. Rejecting private property, especially of capital, the left socialists were then trapped in a crucial inner contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually “withering” for Marx), then how is the “collective” to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself in fact, even if not in name? This was a contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists were ever able to resolve.

Having replaced radical liberalism as the party of the “left,” socialism, by the turn of the twentieth century, fell prey to this inner contradiction. Most socialists (Fabians, Lassalleans, even Marxists) turned sharply rightward, completely abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals of revolution and the withering away of the State and became cozy conservatives permanently reconciled to the State, the status quo, and the whole apparatus of neomercantilism, State monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and war that was rapidly being established and riveted on European society at the turn of the twentieth century. For conservatism, too, had re-formed and regrouped to try to cope with a modern industrial system and had become a refurbished mercantilism, a regime of statism, marked by State monopoly privilege, in direct and indirect forms, to favored capitalists and to quasi-feudal landlords. The affinity between right socialism and the new conservatism became very close, the former advocating similar policies but with a demagogic populist veneer. Thus, the other side of the coin of imperialism was “social imperialism,” which Joseph Schumpeter trenchantly defined as “an imperialism in which the entrepreneurs and other elements woo the workers by means of social welfare concessions which appear to depend on the success of export monopolism.” [5]

Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism – the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the imperialists in England. [6]   When, in the mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients; as one of the leading members of this club, the Tory imperialist, Leopold S. Amery, revealingly wrote:

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were much more concerned with getting their ideas of the welfare state put into practice by anyone who might be prepared to help, even on the most modest scale, than with the early triumph of an avowedly Socialist Party. . . . There was, after all, nothing so very unnatural, as [Joseph] Chamberlain’s own career had shown, in a combination of Imperialism in external affairs with municipal socialism or semi-socialism at home. [7]

Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I. [8]

The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out of the Second International to reestablish classic revolutionary Marxism in a revival of left socialism.

In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying” movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true among the original classic sources. … Lenin’s camp turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the State, and consistently defended and supported movements of national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceives to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissez-faire capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the libertarian than that of Karl Marx. In recent years, the splits in the Leninist world have brought to the fore a still more left-wing tendency: that of the Chinese. In their almost exclusive stress on revolution in the undeveloped countries, the Chinese have, in addition to scorning Right-wing Marxist compromises with the State, unerringly centered their hostility on feudal and quasi-feudal landholdings, on monopoly concessions which have enmeshed capital with quasi-feudal land, and on Western imperialism. In this virtual abandonment of the classical Marxist emphasis on the working class, the Maoists have concentrated Leninist efforts more closely on the overthrow of the major bulwarks of the Old Order in the modern world.

Fascism and Nazism were the local culmination in domestic affairs of the modern drift toward right-wing collectivism. It has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard fascism and communism as fundamentally identical. But while both systems were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their socioeconomic content. Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites, while fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counterrevolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism. [10] Here was the reason that fascism proved so attractive (which communism, of course, never did) to big business interests in the West – openly and unabashedly so in the 1920s and early 1930s. [11]

We are now in a position to apply our analysis to the American scene. Here we encounter a contrasting myth about recent American history which has been propagated by current conservatives and adopted by most American libertarians. The myth goes approximately as follows: America was, more or less, a haven of laissez-faire until the New Deal; then Roosevelt, influenced by Felix Frankfurter, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and other “Fabian” and communist “conspirators,” engineered a revolution which set America on the path to socialism, and further on beyond the horizon, to communism. The present-day libertarian who adopts this or a similar view of the American experience, tends to think of himself as an “extreme right-winger”; slightly to the left of him, then, stands the conservative, to the left of that the middle-of-the-road, and then leftward to socialism and communism. Hence, the enormous temptation for some libertarians to red-bait; for, since they see America as drifting inexorably leftward to socialism and, therefore, to communism, the great temptation is for them to overlook the intermediary stages and tar all of their opposition with the hated Red brush.

One would think that the “right-wing Libertarian” would quickly be able to see some drastic flaws in this conception. For one thing, the income tax amendment, which he deplores as the beginning of socialism in America, was put through Congress in 1909 by an overwhelming majority of both parties. To look at this event as a sharp leftward move toward socialism would require treating President William Howard Taft, who put through the Sixteenth Amendment, as a Leftist, and surely few would have the temerity to do that. Indeed, the New Deal was not a revolution in any sense; its entire collectivist program was anticipated: proximately by Herbert Hoover during the depression, and, beyond that, by the war-collectivism and central planning that governed America during World War I. Every element in the New Deal program: central planning, creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership, all this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two decades. [12] And this program, with its privileging of various big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism; there was nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with socialism-communism but with fascism, or socialism-of-the-right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the twenties expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could control. And, surely, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Clark Hoover make far more recognizable figures as proto-Fascists than they do as crypto-communists.

The essence of the New Deal was seen, far more clearly than in the Conservative mythology, by the Leninist movement in the early 1930s; that is, until the mid-thirties, when the exigencies of Soviet foreign relations caused a sharp shift of the world communist line to “Popular Front” approval of the New Deal. Thus, in 1934, the British Leninist theoretician R. Palme Dutt published a brief but scathing analysis of the New Deal as “social fascism” – as the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. No Conservative opponent has ever delivered a more vigorous or trenchant denunciation of the New Deal. The Roosevelt policy, wrote Dutt, was to “move to a form of dictatorship of a war-type”; the essential policies were to impose a State monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business, banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial expropriation of the mass of the people through lower real-wage rates and to the regulation and exploitation of labor by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration. When the New Deal, wrote Dutt, is stripped of its “social-reformist ‘progressive’ camouflage,” “the reality of the new Fascist type of system of concentrated State capitalism and industrial servitude remains,” including an implicit “advance to war.” Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of the highly respected Current History Magazine:

The new America [the editor had written in mid-1933] will not be capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be socialist. If at the moment the trend is towards fascism, it will be an American fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions, and the hopes of a great middle-class nation. [13]

Thus, the New Deal was not a qualitative break from the American past; on the contrary, it was merely a quantitative extension of the web of State privilege that had been proposed and acted upon before: in Hoover’s administration, in the war collectivism of World War I, and in the Progressive Era. The most thorough exposition of the origins of State monopoly capitalism, or what he calls “political capitalism,” in the United States is found in the brilliant work of Dr. Gabriel Kolko. In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900–1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly “monopolistic”; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and to regulate these evils. Kolko’s great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that big business turned, increasingly after the 1900s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.

Thus, Kolko shows that, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and culminating in Wilson’s New Freedom, in industry after industry, for example, insurance, banking, meat, exports and business generally, regulations that present-day rightists think of as “socialistic” were not only uniformly hailed, but conceived and brought about by big businessmen. This was a conscious effort to fasten upon the economy a cement of subsidy, stabilization, and monopoly privilege. A typical view was that of Andrew Carnegie; deeply concerned about competition in the steel industry, which neither the formation of U.S. Steel nor the famous “Gary Dinners” sponsored by that Morgan company could dampen, Carnegie declared in 1908 that “it always comes back to me that government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem.” There is nothing alarming about government regulation per se, announced Carnegie, “capital is perfectly safe in the gas company, although it is under court control. So will all capital be, although under government control.” [14]

The Progressive Party, Kolko shows, was basically a Morgan-created party to reelect Roosevelt and punish President Taft, who had been overzealous in prosecuting Morgan enterprises; the leftish social workers often unwittingly provided a demagogic veneer for a conservative-statist movement. Wilson’s New Freedom, culminating in the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, far from being considered dangerously socialistic by big business, was welcomed enthusiastically as putting their long-cherished program of support, privilege, and regulation of competition into effect (and Wilson’s war collectivism was welcomed even more exuberantly). Edward N. Hurley, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and formerly president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, happily announced in late 1915, that the Federal Trade Commission was designed “to do for general business” what the ICC had been eagerly doing for the railroads and shippers, what the Federal Reserve was doing for the nation’s bankers, and what the Department of Agriculture was accomplishing for the farmers. [15] As would happen more dramatically in European fascism, each economic interest group was being cartelized and monopolized and fitted into its privileged niche in a hierarchically-ordered socioeconomic structure. Particularly influential were the views of Arthur Jerome Eddy, an eminent corporation lawyer who specialized in forming trade associations and who helped to father the Federal Trade Commission. In his magnum opus fiercely denouncing competition in business and calling for governmentally-controlled and protected industrial “cooperation,” Eddy trumpeted that “Competition is War, and ‘War is Hell’.” [16]

What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period, damned by the present-day Right as “socialistic”? Socialistic in a sense they were, but what kind of “socialism”? The conservative state socialism of Bismarck’s Germany, the prototype for so much of modern European – and American – political forms, and under which the bulk of American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century received their higher education. As Kolko puts it:

The conservatism of the contemporary intellectuals . . . the idealization of the state by Lester Ward, Richard T. Ely, or Simon N. Patten . . . was also the result of the peculiar training of many of the American academics of this period. At the end of the nineteenth century the primary influence in American academic social and economic theory was exerted by the universities. The Bismarckian idealization of the state, with its centralized welfare functions . . . was suitably revised by the thousands of key academics who studied in German universities in the 1880s and 1890s. [17]

The ideal of the leading ultraconservative German professors, moreover, who were also called “socialists of the chair,” was consciously to form themselves into the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern” – and that they surely were.

As an exemplar of the Progressive intellectual, Kolko aptly cites Herbert Croly, editor of the Morgan-financed New Republic. Systematizing Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Croly hailed this new Hamiltonianism as a system for collectivist federal control and integration of society into a hierarchical structure. Looking forward from the Progressive Era, Gabriel Kolko concludes that:

a synthesis of business and politics on the federal level was created during the war, in various administrative and emergency agencies, that continued throughout the following decade. Indeed, the war period represents the triumph of business in the most emphatic manner possible . . . big business gained total support from the various regulatory agencies and the Executive. It was during the war that effective, working oligopoly and price and market agreements became operational in the dominant sectors of the American economy. The rapid diffusion of power in the economy and relatively easy entry virtually ceased. Despite the cessation of important new legislative enactments, the unity of business and the federal government continued throughout the 1920s and thereafter, using the foundations laid in the Progressive Era to stabilize and consolidate conditions within various industries. . . . The principle of utilizing the federal government to stabilize the economy, established in the context of modern industrialism during the Progressive Era, became the basis of political capitalism in its many later ramifications.

In this sense progressivism did not die in the 1920s, but became a part of the basic fabric of American society. [18]

Thus the New Deal. After a bit of leftish wavering in the middle of the late thirties, the Roosevelt administration recemented its alliance with big business in the national defense and war contract economy that began in 1940. This is an economy and a polity that has been ruling America ever since, embodied in the permanent war economy, the full-fledged State monopoly capitalism and neomercantilism, the military-industrial complex of the present era. The essential features of American society have not changed since it was thoroughly militarized and politicized in World War II – except that the trends intensify, and even in everyday life men have been increasingly molded into conforming organization men serving the State and its military–industrial complex. William H. Whyte, Jr., in his justly famous book, The Organization Man, made clear that this molding took place amidst the adoption by business of the collectivist views of “enlightened” sociologists and other social engineers. It is also clear that this harmony of views is not simply the result of naïveté by big businessmen – not when such “naïveté” coincides with the requirements of compressing the worker and manager into the mold of willing servitor in the great bureaucracy of the military-industrial machine. And, under the guise of “democracy,” education has become mere mass drilling in the techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the vast bureaucratic machine.
Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats remain as bipartisan in forming and supporting this establishment as they were in the first two decades of the twentieth century. “Me-tooism” – bipartisan support of the status quo that underlies the superficial differences between the parties – did not begin in 1940.

How did the corporal’s guard of remaining libertarians react to these shifts of the ideological spectrum in America? An instructive answer may be found by looking at the career of one of the great libertarians of twentieth-century America – Albert Jay Nock. In the 1920s, when Nock had formulated his radical libertarian philosophy, he was universally regarded as a member of the extreme Left, and he so regarded himself as well. It is always the tendency, in ideological and political life, to center one’s attention on the main enemy of the day, and the main enemy of that day was the conservative statism of the Coolidge-Hoover administration; it was natural, therefore, for Nock, his friend and fellow-libertarian H. L. Mencken and other radicals to join quasi-Socialists in battle against the common foe. When the New Deal succeeded Hoover, on the other hand, the milk-and-water socialists and vaguely leftish Interventionists hopped on the New Deal bandwagon; on the Left only the Libertarians such as Nock and Mencken and the Leninists (before the Popular Front period) realized that Roosevelt was only a continuation of Hoover in other rhetoric. It was perfectly natural for the radicals to form a united front against Roosevelt with the older Hoover and Al Smith conservatives who either believed Roosevelt had gone too far or disliked his flamboyant populistic rhetoric. But the problem was that Nock and his fellow radicals, at first properly scornful of their newfound allies, soon began to accept them and even don cheerfully the formerly despised label of “Conservative.” With the rank-and-file radicals, this shift took place, as have so many transformations of ideology in history, unwittingly and in default of proper ideological leadership; for Nock, and to some extent for Mencken, on the other hand, the problem cut far deeper.

For there had always been one grave flaw in the brilliant and finely-honed libertarian doctrine hammered out in their very different ways by Nock and Mencken; both had long adopted the great error of pessimism. Both saw no hope for the human race ever adopting the system of liberty; despairing of the radical doctrine of liberty ever being applied in practice, each in his own personal way retreated from the responsibility of ideological leadership, Mencken joyously and hedonically, Nock haughtily and secretively. Despite the massive contribution of both men to the cause of liberty, therefore, neither could ever become the conscious leader of a libertarian movement, for neither could ever envision the party of liberty as the party of hope, the party of revolution, or a fortiori, the party of secular messianism. The error of pessimism is the first step down the slippery slope that leads to conservatism; and hence it was all too easy for the pessimistic radical Nock, even though still basically a Libertarian, to accept the conservative label and even come to croak the old platitude that there is an a prioripresumption against any social change.

It is fascinating that Albert Jay Nock thus followed the ideological path of his beloved spiritual ancestor Herbert Spencer; both began as pure radical Libertarians, both quickly abandoned radical or revolutionary tactics as embodied in the will to put their theories into practice through mass action, and both eventually glided from Tory tactics to at least a partial toryism of content.

And so the Libertarians, especially in their sense of where they stood in the ideological spectrum, fused with the older Conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology (but with no real libertarian content) in opposing a Roosevelt administration that had become too collectivistic for them, either in content or in rhetoric. World War II reinforced and cemented this alliance; for, in contrast to all the previous American wars of the century, the pro-peace and “isolationist” forces were all identified, by their enemies and subsequently by themselves, as men of the “Right.” By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the Conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day. In particular, the modern libertarians forgot or never realized that opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included Libertarians; and hence when the historical aberration of the New Deal period corrected itself and the “right-wing” was once again the great partisan of total war, the Libertarians were unprepared to understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake of their supposed conservative “allies.” The liberals had completely lost their old ideological markings and guidelines.

Given a proper reorientation of the ideological spectrum, what then would be the prospects for liberty? It is no wonder that the contemporary Libertarian, seeing the world going socialistic and communistic, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization – the overthrow of the Old Order – was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy, and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the eighteenth century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher.

It might be retorted, however, that this bleak historical record of despotism and stagnation only reinforces pessimism, for it shows the persistence and durability of the Old Order and the seeming frailty and evanescence of the New – especially in view of the retrogression of the past century. But such superficial analysis neglects the great change that occurred with the revolution of the New Order, a change that is clearly irreversible. For the Old Order was able to persist in its slave system for centuries precisely because it awoke no expectations and no hopes in the minds of the submerged masses; their lot was to live and eke out their brutish subsistence in slavery while obeying unquestioningly the commands of their divinely appointed rulers. But the liberal revolution implanted indelibly in the minds of the masses – not only in the West but in the still feudally-dominated undeveloped world – the burning desire for liberty, for land to the peasantry, for peace between the nations, and, perhaps above all, for the mobility and rising standards of living that can only be brought to them by an industrial civilization. The masses will never again accept the mindless serfdom of the Old Order; and given these demands that have been awakened by liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, long-run victory for liberty is inevitable.

For only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy. Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns and economic crises. This crisis of statism becomes particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society; and hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist (that is, communist) camp. For socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means. Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism. This progressive breakdown of socialist planning was at first partially obscured. For, in every instance, the Leninists took power not in a developed capitalist country as Marx had wrongly predicted, but in a country suffering from the oppression of feudalism. Second, the Communists did not attempt to impose socialism upon the economy for many years after taking power; in Soviet Russia until Stalin’s forced collectivization of the early 1930s reversed the wisdom of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which Lenin’s favorite theoretician, Bukharin, would have extended onward towards a free market. Even the supposedly rabid Communist leaders of China did not impose a socialist economy on that country until the late 1950s. In every case, growing industrialization has imposed a series of economic breakdowns so severe that the communist countries, against their ideological principles, have had to retreat step by step from central planning and return to various degrees and forms of a free market. The Liberman Plan for the Soviet Union has gained a great deal of publicity; but the inevitable process of desocialization has proceeded much further in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Most advanced of all is Yugoslavia, which, freed from Stalinist rigidity earlier than its fellows, in only a dozen years has de-socialized so fast and so far that its economy is now hardly more socialistic than that of France. The fact that people calling themselves “communists” are still governing the country is irrelevant to the basic social and economic facts. Central planning in Yugoslavia has virtually disappeared. The private sector not only predominates in agriculture but is even strong in industry, and the public sector itself has been so radically decentralized and placed under free pricing, profit-and-loss tests and a cooperative worker-ownership of each plant that true socialism hardly exists any longer. Only the final step of converting workers’ syndical control to individual shares of ownership remains on the path toward outright capitalism. Communist China and the able Marxist theoreticians of Monthly Review have clearly discerned the situation and have raised the alarm that Yugoslavia is no longer a socialist country.

One would think that free-market economists would hail the confirmation and increasing relevance of the notable insight of Professor Ludwig von Mises a half-century ago: that socialist states, being necessarily devoid of a genuine price system, could not calculate economically and, therefore, could not plan their economies with any success. Indeed, one follower of Mises, in effect, predicted this process of desocialization in a novel some years ago. Yet neither this author nor other free-market economists have given the slightest indication of even recognizing, let alone saluting, this process in the communist countries – perhaps because their almost hysterical view of the alleged threat of communism prevents them from acknowledging any dissolution in the supposed monolith of menace. [19]

Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and ineradicably forced to desocialize and will, therefore, eventually reach the free market. The state of the undeveloped countries is also cause for sustained libertarian optimism. For all over the world, the peoples of the undeveloped nations are engaged in revolution to throw off their feudal Old Order. It is true that the United States is doing its mightiest to suppress the very revolutionary process that once brought it and Western Europe out of the shackles of the Old Order; but it is increasingly clear that even overwhelming armed might cannot suppress the desire of the masses to break through into the modern world.

We are left with the United States and the countries of Western Europe. Here, the case for optimism is less clear, for the quasi-collectivist system does not present as stark a crisis of self-contradiction as does socialism. And yet, here, too, economic crisis looms in the future and gnaws away at the complacency of the Keynesian economic managers: creeping inflation, reflected in the aggravating balance-of-payments breakdown of the once almighty dollar; creeping secular unemployment brought about by minimum wage scales; and the deeper and long-run accumulation of the uneconomic distortions of the permanent war economy. Moreover, potential crises in the United States are not merely economic; there is a burgeoning and inspiring moral ferment among the youth of America against the fetters of centralized bureaucracy, of mass education in uniformity, and of brutality and oppression exercised by the minions of the State.

Furthermore, the maintenance of a substantial degree of free speech and democratic forms facilitates, at least in the short run, the possible growth of a libertarian movement. The United States is also fortunate in possessing, even if half-forgotten beneath the statist and tyrannical overlay of the last half-century, a great tradition of libertarian thought and action. The very fact that much of this heritage is still reflected in popular rhetoric, even though stripped of its significance in practice, provides a substantial ideological groundwork for a future party of liberty.

What the Marxists would call the “objective conditions” for the triumph of liberty exist, then, everywhere in the world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals. What is needed, then, is simply the “subjective conditions” for victory; that is, a growing body of informed libertarians who will spread the message to the peoples of the world that liberty and the purely free market provide the way out of their problems and crises. Liberty cannot be fully achieved unless libertarians exist in number to guide the peoples to the proper path. But perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the creation of such a movement is the despair and pessimism typical of the Libertarian in today’s world. Much of that pessimism is due to his misreading of history and his thinking of himself and his handful of confreres as irredeemably isolated from the masses and, therefore, from the winds of history. Hence he becomes a lone critic of historical events rather than a person who considers himself as part of a potential movement which can and will make history. The modern Libertarian has forgotten that the Liberal of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries faced odds much more overwhelming than those which face the Liberal of today; for in that era before the Industrial Revolution, the victory of liberalism was far from inevitable. And yet the liberalism of that day was not content to remain a gloomy little sect; instead, it unified theory and action. Liberalism grew and developed as an ideology and, leading and guiding the masses, made the revolution which changed the fate of the world. By its monumental breakthrough, this revolution of the eighteenth century transformed history from a chronicle of stagnation and despotism to an ongoing movement advancing toward a veritable secular utopia of liberty and rationality and abundance. The Old Order is dead or moribund; and the reactionary attempts to run a modern society and economy by various throwbacks to the Old Order are doomed to total failure. The Liberals of the past have left to modern Libertarians a glorious heritage, not only of ideology but of victories against far more devastating odds. The Liberals of the past have also left a heritage of the proper strategy and tactics for libertarians to follow, not only by leading rather than remaining aloof from the masses, but also by not falling prey to short-run optimism. For short-run optimism, being unrealistic, leads straightway to disillusion and then to long-run pessimism; just as, on the other side of the coin, long-run pessimism leads to exclusive and self-defeating concentration on immediate and short-run issues. Short-run optimism stems, for one thing, from a naïve and simplistic view of strategy: that liberty will win merely by educating more intellectuals, who in turn will educate opinion-molders, who in turn will convince the masses, after which the State will somehow fold its tent and silently steal away. Matters are not that easy. For libertarians face not only a problem of education but also a problem of power, and it is a law of history that a ruling caste has never voluntarily given up its power.

But the problem of power is, certainly in the United States, far in the future. For the Libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set out on the road to its attainment. To do this, he must, perhaps first of all, drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are. Armed with this knowledge, let him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism that one of the great figures in the history of libertarian thought, Randolph Bourne, correctly identified as the spirit of youth. Let Bourne’s stirring words serve also as the guidepost for the spirit of liberty:

[Y]outh is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition; youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established – Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, customs and ideas and finding them stupid, inane or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. . . .

Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic. . . . It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail. . . .

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress – one might say, the only lever of progress. . . .

The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate – a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation. [20]

Translations for this article:

• Chinese, 左与右：自由的前景

References:

[1] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 204–05.

[2] Ibid., p. 209.

[3] Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), chap. 6.

[4] The information about Comte and Dunoyer, as well, indeed, as the entire analysis of the ideological spectrum, I owe to Mr. Leonard P. Liggio. For an emphasis on the positive and dynamic aspect of the Utopian drive, much traduced in our time, see Alan Milchman, “The Social and Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Utopia and Ideology,” The November Review (November, 1964): 3–10. Also cf. Jurgen Ruhle, “The Philosopher of Hope: Ernst Bloch,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism 

[5] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 175. Schumpeter, incidentally, realized that, far from being an inherent stage of capitalism, modern imperialism was a throwback to the precapitalist imperialism of earlier ages, but with a minority of privileged capitalists now joined to the feudal and military castes in promoting imperialist aggression.

[6] Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[7] Leopold S. Amery, My Political Life (1953). Quoted in Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, pp. 74–75.

[8] The point, of course, is not that these men were products of some “Fabian conspiracy,” but, on the contrary, that Fabianism, by the turn of the century, was socialism so conservatized as to be closely aligned with the other dominant neo-Conservative trends in British political life.

[9] Thus, see Horace O. Davis, “Nations, Colonies, and Social Classes: The Position of Marx and Engels,” Science and Society (Winter, 1965): 26–43.

[10] See the penetrating article by Alexander J. Groth, “The ‘Isms’ in Totalitarianism,” American Political Science Review (December, 1964): 888–901. Groth writes:

The Communists . . . have generally undertaken measures directly and indirectly uprooting existing socioeconomic elites: the landed nobility, business, large sections of the middle class and the peasantry, as well as the bureaucratic elites, the military, the civil service, the judiciary, and the diplomatic corps. . . . Second, in every instance of Communist seizure of power there has been a significant ideological–propagandistic commitment toward a proletarian or workers’ state . . . [which] has been accompanied by opportunities for upward social mobility for the economically lowest classes, in terms of education and employment, which invariably have considerably exceeded the opportunities available under previous regimes. Finally, in every case, the Communists have attempted to change basically the character of the economic systems which fell under their say, typically from an agrarian to an industrial economy. . . .

Fascism (both in the German and Italian versions) . . . was socioeconomically a counter-revolutionary movement. . . . It certainly did not dispossess or annihilate existent socioeconomic elites. . . . Quite the contrary, Fascism did not arrest the trend toward monopolistic private concentrations in business but instead augmented this tendency. . . .

Undoubtedly, the Fascist economic system was not a free-market economy, and hence not “capitalist” if one wishes to restrict the use of this term to a laissez-faire system. But did it not operate . . . to preserve in being and maintain the material rewards of, the existing socioeconomic elites?

[11] For examples of the attractions of fascist and right-wing collectivist ideas and plans for American big businessmen in this era, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000). Also cf. Gaetano Salvemini and George LaPiana, What to Do With Italy (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), pp. 65ff.

Hayek said that centralized planning will lead to serfdom. It follows that a decrease in the economic authority of the State should lead away from serfdom. The Communist countries may show that to be true. It would be a withering away of the state the Marxists have not counted on nor has it been anticipated by those who agree with Hayek. (p. 35)

Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility.  By that they mean taking responsibility for your own well being and perhaps that of your family and community.  But if you are not within the circle, what that comes down to is “fend for yourself.”

Liberals talk about taking responsibility for the less fortunate.  By that they mean donating time or money to organizations (that employ other liberals) and letting them help people in need.  But that creates dependency and doesn’t question the privilege underlying their altruism.

Anarchism, as a system based on cooperation, addresses the weaknesses in both liberal and conservative philosophies.

Like conservatives, anarchists think we should be taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities.  But where conservatives want to put up a wall, beyond which their responsibilities don’t go, anarchists have always understood that resolving our problems requires taking responsibility on a worldwide scale.

Like liberals, anarchists are concerned with the vast majority of people who struggle to have even the basic necessities of life.  But anarchists don’t want to install themselves in positions of power where they can met out drips and drabs of whatever liberals have been willing to give up.  Anarchists want to work side by side with people, questioning the hierarchies and privileges that cause those inequities.  We are not creating dependency, we are recognizing interdependency.

And anarchist principles work.

Worker managed coopertives are more productive than hierarchical models. Community policing is more effective than conservative models.  Community involvement in schools means better results for kids.  Community involvement in budgeting means better allocation of resources.  The more people around when a conflict begins, the less likely that conflict will escalate.

These examples aren’t perfect representations of anarchism by any stretch of the imagination, but they do exhibit anarchist principles of responsibility and cooperation.  They demonstrate that we can solve our own problems.

Its easy to sit here and criticize our “leaders”.  But what did we expect?  Did people think we could just pull a lever every few years and then go back to watching American Idol?  If we want problems to be solved, we need to take responsibility for solving them.  And anarchism is a philosophy built around taking responsibility.

Harkening back to a classical approach, Rothbard identifies the left with liberty and the right with statism:

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order.

More novel is where Rothbard places the state socialist movement on his spectrum:

Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.

This is all well and good but valid criticisms readily arise. Libertarians might find it strange to orient themselves closer on the spectrum to state socialists and furthest away from conservatism, which in most forms seems no worse than totalitarian communists who would presumably be in the middle. Conservatives might take offense at being described as further from libertarianism than communist rulers or even Marx, who advocated dissolution of the state but also an emergency dictatorship and the abolition of voluntary exchange. And anti-authoritarian leftists and well-meaning state socialists might also protest, as many are accustomed to seeing Stalinism as a species of the extreme right, somewhere in the proximity of Nazism, rather than a centrist position on any scale.

Indeed, one could make a strong case that the 20th century communist regimes rival the worst governments in history, that many of them easily compare to the most reactionary states in their hostility to liberty. Lenin and Stalin waged wars of extermination against dissidents and party enemies.Mao committed cultural genocide and starved tens of millions with his agricultural policies. On a per capita basis, Pol Pot was easily as murderous and totalitarian as any rightwing regime in the history of humanity. These appraisals could find agreement from libertarians and “small-government” conservatives, but also well-intentioned socialists and anarchists of all stripes.

Within the United States, it was not so much communism, but progressivism, that wedged itself between Jeffersonian liberalism and Hamiltonian conservatism to become the middle-of-the-road American ideology, dedicated to libertarian goals through rightwing means. In Wilson, FDR, and even the modern Democratic Party, we see some libertarian rhetoric persist and most of the collectivist rhetoric is about elevating the common person, the worker, the poor and middle class, against the royalist rich. Yet a radical reading of American history demonstrates that just as in the rest of the world, the middle-of-the-road ideology yielded some of the worst authoritarianism and state violence ever perpetrated by the U.S. government. Those who could plausibly be called progressive Democrats (or modern liberals) were principally responsible for U.S. entry into World War I, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. The American progressives and their New Deal and Great Society successors have had a dismal civil liberties record, from the Palmer Raids and Sedition Act to Japanese Internment and surveillance on the antiwar movement, from FDR banning marijuana to Obama’s kill list and indefinite detention. The corporate state was at least as much the darling of the middle-of-the-road progressives as it was the design of America’s more consistent conservative statists.

What gives? Can Rothbard’s spectrum be salvaged despite the tendency of “middle-of-the-road” state socialists to be responsible for some of the greatest crimes against liberty and human rights?

The key to understanding this paradox is to appreciate that the conservative right and libertarian left have always agreed on one thing that the middle-of-the-road socialists have attempted to deny: the true nature of the state. The state is about privilege. It is about power. It is about class stratification, redistribution of wealth from the many to the few, war, torture, tribalism writ large, prisons, police, borders, and control. The state is the negation of liberty, as Mises said. For this reason the libertarians have always opposed statism. For the same reason, the monarchists, theocrats, mercantilists, and feudal lords always favored statism.

The state socialists want the state to be something it cannot be—an engine of humanitarian equality, a bulwark of peace, a tool of worker’s liberation, a break on corporate and religious privilege, a tribute to the international brotherhood of man. Insofar as the state expands its power, liberal ends become more elusive. So the state socialist continues pushing for more interventions, more crackdowns, more taxes, more regulations, more penalties. It never works. The harder you try to turn the state into something it isn’t, the more you will see it for what it really is.

Achieving monarchism or fascism through the state is a much easier project than achieving liberation and equality with it. Propping up unearned wealth is an expensive political program, but states have managed to do it for centuries. Dismantling privilege and leveling the playing field are another matter. When the state only needs to please the elite, there is some limit to its rapaciousness. When it is allegedly geared toward supporting the masses, it must maintain all the costly and vicious apparatuses of the conservative state—taxes, armies, police, borders, and bureaucrats—but it must do even more. To trick the people into thinking it rules on their behalf it must adopt a welfare state. To put in a more earnest attempt it needs to utilize even more violent means. The more people try to  turn the state into something it is not, the worse it becomes. This is not always because state socialists have abandoned their ideals and become corrupted by power, although that is a large part of the story. But even if they remain true believers, statists acting out of genuine conviction in an impossible plan can do just as much damage, refusing to give up on their fantasy and making the problem worse with every expansion of power pursued in the guise of empowering the powerless. Whereas the conservative authoritarians must only go so far to get their way, the state socialist gets further from her goal the more she sees conservatives means employed to achieve her liberal ends. This is because conservative means can only yield anti-liberal ends.

Once in a while, a persecuted group actually overthrows a regime and comes out on top. But then they become the ruling class. They can decide to rule as their predecessors did, which is bad enough, or they can try in earnest to achieve the impossible: liberation through enslavement, peace through war, or equality through the greatest institution of privilege of all time, the monopoly on violence known as the state. Thus do all leftist middle-of-the-road attempts become at best a carbon copies of conservative rule, at worst an unlimited orgy of state violence and oppression aiming for a categorical impossibility.

It is sometimes said of the conventional American left-right spectrum that all you see in the middle of the road is roadkill. This is even truer of Rothbard’s left-right spectrum. Nothing is deadlier than the pursuit of liberal ends through conservative means. While state socialists are truly in the middle of the road, they have the most naive and distorted understanding of the workings and movement of traffic. They must make their decision: liberal means through liberal ends or conservative means through conservative ends. Dancing in the center divide is bound to get someone killed.

THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).

TAX: That form of coercion or interference with the Free Market in which the State collects tribute (the tax), allowing it to hire armed forces to practice coercion in defense of privilege, and also to engage in such wars, adventures, experiments, “reforms”, etc., as it pleases, not at its own cost, but at the cost of “its” subjects.

PRIVILEGE: From the Latin privi, private, and lege, law. An advantage granted by the State and protected by its powers of coercion. A law for private benefit.

USURY: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group monopolizes the coinage and thereby takes tribute (interest), direct or indirect, on all or most economic transactions.

LANDLORDISM: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group “owns” the land and thereby takes tribute (rent) from those who live, work, or produce on the land.

TARRIFF: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which commodities produced outside the State are not allowed to compete equally with those produced inside the State.

CAPITALISM: That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.

CONSERVATISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which claims allegiance to the Free Market while actually supporting usury, landlordism, tariff, and sometimes taxation.

LIBERALISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to the existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until “everything not forbidden is compulsory” and “everything not compulsory is forbidden”.

SOCIALISM: The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. “Right” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate; “left” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (New York: Dell, 1975) pp. 622-23

Translations for this article:

• Deutsch, Begriffserklärungen und Unterscheidungen.
• Dutch, Definities en onderscheid.
• Portuguese, Definições e distinções.

Unfortunately McCobin’s article, like many free-market libertarian works, does not look deeply enough into the assumption that conservatives support economic liberty. Are conservatives in general really in favor of a free economy?

Conservatives do not appear to be more likely than liberals to support the freedom to compete against patent monopolists. Or the liberty of Iraqis to use their property to transport wounded people without being shot at by helicopter gunners.

Conservatives are more likely to support dictatorships than the freedom of developing-world workers to organize for better bargaining power. And they are more likely to back developing-world plutocrats who have been handed land titles by government privilege than to back those who actually work the land. When one segment of the economy is supported by state intervention, the economy is not free, but is instead based on military-backed domination.

McCobin rightly notes “the inability/lack of desire by conservative leaders to turn the rhetoric of economic freedom into substantive reform.” But how consistently does conservative rhetoric support economic freedom?

Immigration is often motivated by personal economic concerns. Conservatives are likely to advocate the building of walls and the arming of enforcers to keep immigrants away from the jobs they want, using government force to prevent people from creating wealth that will benefit themselves and others.

Any time someone imposes a tax on you, he is telling you what to do with your money. He is requiring that a portion of your earnings go to government programs. Conservatives who support government war policy are telling you that you have to spend your money on enriching war profiteers.

Just as police protect and serve power first, conservatives have a tendency to support economic freedom for the powerful, not equal liberty among all individuals.

But the division between economic and personal liberty is nonsensical anyway. The absurdity of liberty falling under one of two categories based on whether or not money changes hands might be best illustrated by the Drug War. Why should growing marijuana shift from a matter of personal liberty to a matter of economic liberty once the grower starts selling it to friends? And are conservatives more likely than liberals to oppose state restrictions on either activity?

Oppression of queer people interferes with their economic freedom. The decision to marry is often partly an economic decision, and conservatives are likely to advocate government interference in this decision. Harassment sanctioned by governing homophobes makes it harder for targeted people to participate in economic activity, and transgendered people categorized against their will by government documents will be less able to meet employer requirements.

Identifying conservatism with economic liberty obscures true freedom with the darkness of government-backed privilege. The liberty to create any consensual economic arrangement that individuals choose to work with should not be confused with the “liberty” of the rich to keep the poor from competing against them.