Brainpolice

In addition to our re-evaluation of the origins and nature of the Cold War, we engaged in a thorough reassessment of the whole "left-right" ideological spectrum in historical perspective. For it was clear to us that the European Throne-and-Altar Conservatism that had captured the right wing was statism in a virulent and despotic form; and yet only an imbecile could possibly call these people "leftists."

But this meant that our old simple paradigm of the "left Communist/total government … right/no government" continuum, with liberals on the left of center and conservatives on the right of center, had been totally incorrect. We had therefore been misled in our basic view of the spectrum and in our whole conception of ourselves as natural "extreme rightists." There must have been a fatal flaw in the analysis. Plunging back into history, we concentrated on the reality that in the 18th and 19th centuries, laissez-faire liberals, radicals, and revolutionaries constituted the "extreme Left" while our ancient foes, the conservatives, the Throne-and-Altar worshippers, constituted the right-wing enemy.

Leonard Liggio then came up with the following profound analysis of the historical process, which I adopted.

First, and dominant in history, was the Old Order, the ancien régime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a war-making, feudal or despotic ruling class, using the church and the priesthood to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was pure statism; and this was the "right wing." Then, in 17th- and 18th-century Western Europe, a liberal and radical opposition movement arose, our old heroes, who championed a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free markets and free trade, international peace, and separation of Church and State — and in opposition to Throne and Altar, to monarchy, the ruling class, theocracy, and war. These — "our people" — were the Left, and the purer their libertarian vision the more "extreme" a Left they were.

So far, so good, and our analysis was not yet so different from before; but what of socialism, that movement born in the 19th century which we had always reviled as the "extreme Left"? Where did that fit in? Liggio analyzed socialism as a confused middle-of-the road movement, influenced historically by both the libertarian and individualist Left and by the conservative-statist Right.

From the individualist Left the socialists took the goals of freedom: the withering away of the State, the replacement of the governing of men by the administration of things (a concept coined by the early 19th-century French laissez-faire libertarians Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer), opposition to the ruling class and the search for its overthrow, the desire to establish international peace, an advanced industrial economy and a high standard of living for the mass of the people.

From the conservative Right the socialists adopted the means to attempt to achieve these goals: collectivism, state planning, community control of the individual. But this put socialism in the middle of the ideological spectrum. It also meant that socialism was an unstable, self-contradictory doctrine bound to fly apart rapidly in the inner contradiction between its means and its ends. And in this belief we were bolstered by the old demonstration of my mentor Ludwig von Mises that socialist central planning simply cannot operate an advanced industrial economy.

The socialist movement had, historically, also suffered ideologically and organizationally from a similar inner contradiction: with social democrats, from Engels to Kautsky to Sidney Hook, shifting inexorably rightward into accepting and strengthening the state apparatus and becoming "left" apologists for the Corporate State, while other socialists, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, shifted leftward toward the individualist, libertarian pole.

It was clear, too, that the Communist Party in America had taken, in domestic affairs, the same "rightward" path — hence the similarity which the "extreme" red-baiters had long discerned between Communists and liberals. In fact, the shift of so many ex-Communists from the Left to the conservative Right now seemed to be not very much of a shift at all; for they had been pro–Big Government in the 1930s and "Twentieth Century American" patriots in the 1940s, and now they were still patriots and statists.

From our new analysis of the spectrum we derived several important corollaries. One was the fact that alliance between libertarians and conservatism appeared, at the very least, to be no more "natural" than the older alliance during the 1900s and 1920s between libertarians and socialists. Alliances now seemed to depend on the given historical context.[10]

Second, the older intense fear of Marxian socialism seemed inordinate; for conservatives had long ignored Mises's demonstration of the inevitable breakup of socialist planning, and had acted as if once a country had gone socialist, then that was the end, that the country was doomed and the process irreversible. But if ours — and Mises's — analysis was right, then socialism should fall apart before too many years had elapsed, and much more rapidly than the Old Order, which had had the capacity to last unchanged for centuries.

Sure enough, by the early 1960s we already had seen the inspiring development of Yugoslavia, which after its break from Stalin had evolved rapidly away from socialism and central planning and in the direction of the free market, a course which the rest of Eastern Europe and even Soviet Russia were already beginning to emulate. And yet in contrast, we saw to our chagrin that even the most economic-minded of the New Right were so caught up in their hysterical anti-Communism that they refused to greet or even acknowledge the breakup of socialism in Eastern Europe.

This blind spot was obviously connected with the conservatives' long-time refusal to acknowledge the corollary breakup of the international Stalinist monolith within the Communist movement; for both of these insights would have weakened greatly the Right's characteristic campaign of hysteria against the supposedly invincible and ever-expanding Communist world — an expansion that could, in its eyes, be checked only by nuclear war.

Our analysis was greatly bolstered, moreover, by our becoming familiar with the work of domestic revisionism of an exciting group of historians who had studied under William Appleman Williams at the University of Wisconsin. Williams himself, in The Contours of American History, Williams's students who founded Studies on the Left in 1959, and particularly the work of Williams's student Gabriel Kolko in his monumental Triumph of Conservatism (1963), changed our view of the 20th-century American past, and hence of the genesis and nature of the current American system. From them we learned that all of us believers in the free market had erred in believing that somehow, down deep, Big Businessmen were really in favor of laissez-faire, and that their deviations from it, obviously clear and notorious in recent years, were either "sellouts" of principle to expedience or the result of brainwashing and infusing of guilt into these businessmen by liberal intellectuals.

This is the general view on the Right; in the remarkable phrase of Ayn Rand, Big Business is "America's most persecuted minority." Persecuted minority, indeed!

To be sure, there were charges aplenty against Big Business and its intimate connections with Big Government in the old McCormick Chicago Tribune and especially in the writings of Albert Jay Nock; but it took the Williams-Kolko analysis, and particularly the detailed investigation by Kolko, to portray the true anatomy and physiology of the America scene. As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation and welfare statism, beginning in the Progressive period, that Left and Right alike have always believed to be a mass movement against Big Business, are not only backed to the hilt by Big Business at the present time, but were originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy. Under the guise of regulations "against monopoly" and "for the public welfare," Big Business has succeeded in granting itself cartels and privileges through the use of government.

As for the liberal intellectuals, their role has been to serve as "corporate liberals," as weavers of sophisticated apologies to inform the masses that the rulers of the American corporate state are ruling on behalf of the "common good" and the "general welfare." The role of the corporate liberal intellectual in justifying the ways of the modern State to man is precisely equivalent to the function of the priest in the Oriental despotisms who convinced the masses that their emperor was all-wise and divine.

Liggio and I also focused anew on the crucial problem of the underdeveloped countries. We came to realize that the revolutions in the Third World were not only in behalf of national independence against imperialism but also, and conjointly, against feudal land monopolists in behalf of the just ownership of their land by the long-oppressed peasantry. Genuine believers in justice and in private property, we concluded, should favor the expropriation of the stolen and conquered lands of Asia and Latin America by the peasants who, on any sort of libertarian theory, were and still are their proper and just owners.

And yet, tragically, only the Communists have supported peasant movements; American or native "free enterprisers," when they did not ignore the crucial land problem altogether, invariably and tragically came down on the side of the oppressive landlords in the name of "private property." But the "private" property of these monopoly landlords is "private" only by virtue of state conquest, theft, and land grants; and any genuine believer in the rights of private property must then side with the drive of the peasants to get their land back. The peasants of the world are not socialists or communists; instinctively, they are individualists and libertarians, consumed with a perfectly understandable passion to reclaim the right to own their own lands. The Zapata revolution in Mexico and the Reies Tijerina movement in the Southwest, are only the most clear-cut examples of the profoundly libertarian struggle of peasants to defend or reclaim their just property titles from loot and conquest at the hands of the central government.[11]

Isolated and alone, Leonard Liggio and I nevertheless set out on what seemed to be a superhuman threefold task: to advance the minuscule and scattered libertarian, anarcho-capitalist movement; to convert these libertarians at least to a solidly isolationist position; and finally, to try also to convert them to our newfound anti-imperialist and "left" or "left-right" perspective.

On the libertarian front, there was one bright ray of hope: pacifist-individualist anarchist (who calls himself an "autarchist") Robert LeFevre had established a Freedom School in the Colorado Rockies in 1956, to supply intensive two-week summer courses on the freedom philosophy. LeFevre had previously worked in New York for Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council, rising to vice-president, and then, in 1954, had moved out to Colorado Springs to be editorial page editor for R.C. Hoiles's anarcho-capitalist daily Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph. Over the years, since 1956, LeFevre had built a remarkable record of converting a great many people, and especially young people, to the libertarian creed. And so, slowly, throughout the country, a growing libertarian cadre, graduates of the Freedom School, were emerging. As a dedicated pacifist, LeFevre was of course opposed to the war drive of the New Right, and said so in a 1964 leaflet, Those Who Protest.

With the help of a base of Freedom School graduates, we were able to rebuild a small circle in New York, this time dedicated to the "left-right" analysis. There was Edward C. Facey, Robert J. Smith, who had been influenced by the Volker Fund and the Freedom School, and Alan Milchman, whom we had managed to convert from his post as head of Brooklyn College YAF. And then there was the "first generation" of the libertarian youth movement at the University of Kansas, headed by Bob Gaskins and David Jackman. Gaskins and Jackman had been anarchists, but politically they had been "right-wing" laissez-fairists and they edited a magazine called The Standard. When Gaskins and Jackman moved to New York in late 1962 we were able to convert them to our perspective, and the result was an all-peace issue of The Standard, April 1963, which included antiwar reprints from Chodorov, Mises, and others, and an article of my own, "War, Peace, and the State," which greatly expanded and more firmly grounded my old Faith and Freedom derivation of isolationism and anti-imperialism from libertarian theory.

In the winter of 1963–64, LeFevre organized a winter-and-spring long "Phrontistery" at Colorado to pave the way for transforming Freedom School into a Rampart College. To the Phrontistery flocked some of the nation's leading young libertarians, including Smith, Gaskins, Jackman, Peter Blake, and Mike Helm, many of whom formed for the first time in public an aggressive "Rothbardian" block that stunned the visiting conservative and laissez-faire dignitaries who had been invited to teach there.

For the first time in public some of the group also unfurled the "black-and-gold flag," the colors of which we had all decided best represented anarcho-capitalism: black as the classic color of anarchism and gold as the color of capitalism and hard money.

Meanwhile, on the larger political scene, things grew more dismal as the National Review game plan finally succeeded, and Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination. I personally grew frantic; at long last, the fingers of my old National Review associates were getting close to the nuclear button, and I knew, I knew to my very marrow that they were aching to push it. I felt that I had to do something to warn the public about the menace of nuclear war that Goldwaterism presented; I felt like a Paul Revere come to warn everyone about the threat of global war that these people were about to loose upon the world.

Second, I tried to hive off some conservative and libertarian votes from Goldwater by recalling to them their long-forgotten libertarian heritage. In contrast to many "fair-play minded" liberals, I was not at all horrified at the famous Democratic TV spot showing a little girl picking flowers while a Goldwaterite nuclear explosion loomed to annihilate her. On the contrary, I rejoiced at what I believed to be, at last, a zeroing in on the true dimensions of the Goldwaterite menace.

I could, however, play only a very small direct role in the stop-Goldwater crusade. The Standard was now defunct, and so the most I could do was to write in the Southern California anarcho-Randian newsletter, The Innovator, warning the readers of Goldwaterite war and fascism (which can be defined, after all, as global war, anti-Communist crusading, suppression of civil liberties, and corporate statism disguised in free-market rhetoric — which delineated the New Right). I succeeded, however, only in alienating the stunned readership.[12]

I also addressed a group of veteran disciples of Frank Chodorov — the "Fragments" group — just before the election, denouncing Goldwaterism, and unaccountably found myself engaged in a lengthy defense of the foreign policies of Communist China as being pacific and nonaggressive — for wasn't there at least a "Chinese menace"? The only result of my endeavors was to have half the audience brandishing their canes in my direction and shouting, "We haven't voted in thirty years, but by God we're going out next Tuesday and voting for Barry Goldwater." My only success was in greatly weakening the Goldwaterite enthusiasm of the Queens College libertarian movement, headed by Larry Moss and Dave Glauberman. Looking around also for some periodical, any periodical, in which to publish a critique of the transformation of the American Right from Old to New, from isolation to global war, I could find only the obscure Catholic quarterly Continuum.[13] For the Left was still defunct in America.

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