74. From Rebel to Libertarian

74

JEROME TUCCILLE

FROM REBELTO LIBERTARIAN

I SKETCHED MY OWN ODYSSEY from working class Bronx rebel to freestyle libertarian in my second book, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, which was first published in 1971. While many have claimed that my semi-autobiographical book was closer to fiction than fact, the book was true in spirit even if not always literally accurate in mundane detail. As I stated in an Author’s Note in four separate editions of the book, “On those occasions when I was present, I have attempted to re-create the spirit rather than the precise letter of conversations that transpired. For other incidents . . . I have had to rely on information supplied to me by those with firsthand knowledge.”

So much for the existing record. If my own written history as it stands to date is adorned with a bit of hyperbole, as I freely admit, poetic or novelistic license is often necessary for the creation of a better and more readable book than the unvarnished truth. Most memoirs that have withstood the test of time would have faded into obscurity long ago were it not for the creative and novelistic energies of the author.

I agree with Walter Block that autobiography is essential for anyone who has played even a minor role in the passing scene, and that libertarians have not written enough of it. It’s a shame that Murray Rothbard never tried to capture his own life in print. Neither did Ayn Rand for that matter. We have to intuit a lot of what made both of them tick from the respective bodies of literature they left us. If nothing else, autobiography is therapeutic; it helps us sit back and take stock of where we have been, where we are, and where we think we’re going.

With that in mind, the present task is somewhat daunting since this is not the kind of piece where embellishment is helpful. An honest account of my history as a libertarian has to begin with my roots as a rebel in a working class Bronx neighborhood. My teenage years took place in the 1950s in streets populated by wire lathers, tin knockers, garbage men, cops, firemen, and cab drivers—a category that included my father. My own interests tended toward the literary and artistic, subjects that did not go down well with most of the people I faced each day, including my family. They all thought I was weird and were not shy about letting me know it. I hated most of them and was not reticent about expressing my feelings.

No one had to teach me how to be an anarchist; I grew up loathing authority and institutions of all kinds.

In short order I rebelled against the religion of my family (Roman Catholic), the politics of my neighborhood (Social Conservative), and the culture of the class I came from (bigoted blue collar). In place of them I substituted hard-drinking and pugnacity. I got bigger, learned how to fight, and became a bully.

Hardly a weekend passed between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two that I was not battling my way from one barroom brawl to another.

Obviously, this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. If it did I was going to end up in jail or in an AA ward before I was thirty. Escape was my only answer, and escape I did to San Francisco when I twenty-four years old. San Francisco was not far enough away from the Bronx to suit me, so I boarded a cruise ship and sailed to Australia, lived there for six months working on my Great American Novel, then continued on my round-the-globe odyssey through Singapore, India, Malta, the Suez Canal, and finally Europe. Broke and still unpublished, I returned to the U.S. around the time Barry Goldwater was running for president, a time when the big news of the day was the escalating conflict in Vietnam.

Until this time, my anarchism was unstructured and emotional, a mere rebellion against everything I despised. Goldwater articulated a philosophy of life and government that touched a chord inside me in a way no one had done before. His book, Conscience of a Conservative, was the first political book I read that gave me something positive to believe in: individualism, limited government, self-reliance, free enterprise. No longer was I just a rebel looking to smash things as I bulled my way through life. Suddenly I stood for something as well. Now I was a Conservative.

Over the next few years I devoured every book and magazine I could find preaching the Conservative message. I discovered Buckley, Hazlitt, Bentham, Locke, Adam Smith, and eventually Rand. I started writing for Conservative and Classical Liberal publications, including The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and the official magazine of Young Americans for Freedom. By 1968 I had completed Rand’s basic course on Objectivism at the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and had read most of Rand’s work plus books by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. I started calling myself an Objectivist, even though Rand would have denounced me as a second-hander since I had not paid for her advanced courses at NBI.

The problem for me with most Conservatives I encountered at the time was the war in Vietnam and the military draft, both of which kept getting in the way. I was adamantly opposed to our being in Vietnam, I thought a military draft was despicable, and I was troubled by so-called advocates of freedom, individualism, and limited government who supported both positions. Somehow, Conservatism was at odds with my core beliefs, but there was no alternative to turn to.

No alternative, that is, until I discovered Karl Hess. I picked up a newspaper one day and read about this hirsute fellow who had been a speechwriter for Goldwater, and was now calling himself an anarchist and a New Leftist. This was interesting, especially since YAF had invited me to debate Karl at some Conservative gathering in Manhattan. I was supposed to articulate the Conservative message while Karl defended his new anti-war, pro-New Left stance amid a hostile audience. The problem was that, by the time the day of the debate came around, I found myself more in agreement with him than I did with the panoply of Conservative stalwarts on the platform with me, including Libertarian-Conservative Frank Meyer and an out-and-out social nationalist, Henry Paolucci. Into the midst of this ideological circus strode a man I had corresponded with but never met before, Murray Rothbard, and a coterie of his acolytes, including Walter Block, Leonard Liggio, Joe Peden, and probably a dozen others.

As the debate got under way, I found myself more and more pissed off. I was still enough of a working class New Yorker to recognize a pile-on when I saw one, and my gut instinct inclined me to the side of the underdog. Hess had the guts to appear on the podium by himself in enemy territory and subject himself to a drubbing at the hands of hostile forces, one of whom was supposed to be me. Sorry, but I was not about to play along and, instead, delivered a speech sympathetic to Karl’s position, which earned me a relieved smile from him, raucous cheers from Rothbard and his coterie, and an outraged roar from the rest of the assemblage.

I was no longer a Conservative or an Objectivist. I was not a philosophical anarchist yet, but I was willing to be converted to one if that’s what it took to find a new political home. After the so-called debate, I broke bread with Murray Rothbard and company, and before long I was visiting Murray and his merry band of free-market anarchists in his apartment on the Upper Westside of Manhattan. Through Murray I was introduced to the writings of Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Albert Jay Nock, and I developed a deeper familiarity with Murray’s own impressive output—even at that relatively early stage of his career. Before long, Murray launched the Libertarian Forum, for which I became a kind of co-editor and regular contributor.

I was not only an anarchist now, but one with a developing philosophical foundation to support my beliefs. Walter Block took one look at my thick beard and tangled hair and anointed me a “Right Wing Hippie,” even before Ayn Rand got around to popularizing the label.

In addition to Murray and the literature he introduced me to, the other major intellectual influences on me at the time were Leonard Liggio and, to a lesser extent, Joe Peden. Leonard in particular was a walking encyclopedia with a detailed grasp of history, which he colored with a revisionist tinge. Following the publication of my first two books, Radical Libertarianism and It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, liberal reviewers started referring to me as “everyone’s favorite Right Wing anarchist.” I had no problem with the description and started to fancy myself as the Right Wing answer to Hunter Thompson. My conversion to full-blown free market anarchism from Goldwater Conservatism was complete and public enough to have earned me the scorn of William F. Buckley on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

My break with Murray, which came around the time of my quixotic run for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian ticket in 1974 (see my book, It STILL Begins With Ayn Rand), had more to do with differences over our respective views on Israel, and foreign policy in general, than with ideology. He was also troubled by my characterization of him in It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. In any event, Murray and I had little contact with each other after 1975, but I will always remember him for the major impact he had on my philosophical development at a time when I was searching for a new ideological home.

Over the years, my political philosophy has not changed all that much, although my tactics have. Murray, himself, rooted for Pat Buchanan in his 1992 quest for the presidency even though he never repudiated his free-market anarchism. Libertarian feminist Camille Paglia is a registered Democrat and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Politics, indeed, makes for strange bedfellows, and libertarians today cast their votes all over the political spectrum in elections, or vote not at all, while advocating contradictory positions on abortion and the death penalty.

Today, I refuse to get overly exercised about the distinctions between limited government (or mini-government) and free-market anarchism. We are so far removed from either ideal, while continuing to move in the wrong direction, that any reversal toward less-invasive government is to be welcomed. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing free-market anarchism, 1 representing extremely limited government, and 10 representing totalitarianism, I would put the United States today at about a 6 or a 7. And sadly enough, this is the best the world has to offer among fully developed nations.

If we were to end the war on drugs tomorrow, dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and all the other entitlement programs, bring our military forces back from our varied commitments around the globe, and adopt a Hong Kong-style flat tax of 15 percent, we would still be left with a plethora of entangling restraints on voluntary activity that would require another half century to unravel.

These accomplishments, however, would still get us back to only a 3 or a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale, so both the free-market anarchist and mini-government positions amount to a state of affairs akin to Utopia. Too many libertarians have been spinning their wheels over the decades, debating the finer points of philosophy among themselves in a way that only serves to marginalize libertarianism in general. I’m happy that the Cato Institute, Reason, and other libertarian-leaning organizations are out there fighting for a handful of free market solutions where they can find them, but I truly don’t expect to see any real movement in my lifetime—and most probably not in my son’s and grandson’s lifetimes either.

Murray, however, was the eternal optimist and truly believed that his ideal society—one unfettered by government and taxes—was within his grasp. It was his boundless energy and his commitment to the cause he espoused that made him such an effervescent force for liberty. Among writers and thinkers there is room for skeptics (H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain) and for dreamers, and Murray Rothbard clearly belonged to the latter camp. In her own way, so did Rand, although her toxic denigration of anyone who disagreed with her gave her a totalitarian edge that was at odds with her mini-government philosophy.

But her books survive her and continue to influence new generations of intellectuals. She has reached a vast audience of readers that is the envy of everyone, including Rothbard and Yours Truly, who commits libertarian thoughts to paper. I’m sorry that it was not the opposite, that it was not Murray’s joyous sense of life and his bubbly enthusiasm for a government-free society that found the larger audience. Murray painted a more humane picture of the unlimited choices possible under his own model society than Rand, whose model is filled with grim, robotic automatons, all devoid of humor, who spout pre-recorded propaganda instead of spontaneous conversation.

As for me? I belong with the skeptics. I thank God for the optimists and the dreamers, but I will probably go to the grave being an anarchistic iconoclast looking to find the contradictions and humor in other peoples’ systems of logic. But I can write about them at least and have a lot of fun doing so.

Jerome Tuccille is a writer and activistis and the author of more than 21 books.