Authors Forum: Rothbard's "Betrayal of the American Right"

0:00Well, ladies and gentlemen, when Jeff Tucker put me on the program for the New Authors Forum, I think what he had in mind was a book that I myself have coming out in about four months, but I decided that I would rather not speak about that until it actually comes out. I want to steal my own thunder. I will tell you that the title of the book, which I hate, by the way, actually, if I'm trying to think of how I would diagram that sentence, it's not the book I hate, it's the title of the book that I hate. But yet, if you could see the cover, the cover makes this clumsy title work, oddly enough. The title is, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask. And on the cover, there's an Uncle Sam who's going like this, you know, don't ask these questions now, you know, we've got to keep the propaganda going, so don't ask these questions.

0:49So you know, my international fan club will certainly love this one, so it'll be good Good fun to see that. The character assassins will be back in business once again. They're a little rusty by now, no doubt. But actually today I'm talking about a book that I didn't write at all, but for which I contributed the introduction. And that's a book by Murray Rothbard. It's a brand new book no one's ever read before, other than a few people, when this manuscript was circulating sort of in the underground, managed to get their hands on it and read it, but most people have not seen it. It's called The Betrayal of the American Right, and it's a book that Murray wrote in the 70s and then was continually editing it, revisiting it, adding a new chapter here and there, as publishing opportunities for it arose.

1:38But through one fluke or another, it always fell through until just now, until the Mises Institute has decided to bring it out this year, I understand. So I contributed the introduction. So this is just amazing. It's not like a collection of essays that are previously published. This is a brand new book by Murray Rothbard coming out this year. So it's quite something. And it just serves to remind us that there are many living professors today who only wish they could be as productive as a dead Murray Rothbard. Because, of course, we had his two-volume history of economic thought. The Center for Libertarian Studies published a monograph that he'd written on foreign policy for some obscure investment newsletter, I think.

2:27A 20,000-word article, no one would ever see. Now it's been published as a monograph. So all these things are still being dug out. Well, this manuscript is among those new things that are coming out. So it's just wonderful, and I'm thrilled to be able to take part in this, be a small part of it. So the book is called The Betrayal of the American Right, and Sean Rittner was saying to me today that the title of my presentation today, Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right, you know, sounds like he betrayed them, but I think it's more the other way around, actually, considering the way they treated him, particularly at his death. And usually, when somebody dies, you try to be nice to the guy, you know, not... Apparently, Bill Buckley, you know, Mr. Cultivated and Civilized, hadn't learned that lesson. But let's not dwell on that, folks. Let's dwell on... let's accentuate the positive here.

3:13And I want to hasten to assure you that if you have read Murray writing on the subject of what he called the old right before, you might have read him writing on this in the Journal of Libertarian Studies or in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report or in an excellent article in Continuum, which was a very hard to find journal from the 60s that his article in Continuum is available in the Rothbard Archive on lewrockwell.com, I'm fairly certain. You may be thinking, well, I sort of already kind of know about Rothbard's views about the American right and what happened to it and why he felt like he couldn't cooperate with it and so on. But I'm telling you, this is brand new material. It's not just rehashing these articles. It's a whole new book and it's astonishing. Well, let me first engage in some definitions here. Let's define some terms and then proceed, because I don't want to assume that everybody in the room knows what I'm talking about when I refer to the old right.

4:09When Rothbard used this term, the old right, he's not talking about a self-conscious, full-fledged movement, per se, with think tanks and institutions and so on and so forth. and so forth. It was much more of a loose coalition that may not even have been aware of itself really. It was a loose coalition of individuals who, around the time of the New Deal and afterward, persisting into World War II and after World War II, who were against the Leviathan state both in its domestic and its international manifestations. And these were wonderfully diverse people who disagreed with each other on different things, but that was all right. You can still be friendly, you can still carry on intellectual discourse, you don't have to excommunicate people because they disagree with you on one small thing. So, for instance, Murray Rothbard identifies H.L. Mencken, Albert J. Nock as belonged to the old right, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, a bunch of other people.

5:07Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, a bunch of these people, and then some people in politics as well. Well, the traditional sort of anti-interventionist Republicans who were still around even after World War II, still around in the early years of the Cold War, who were budget-conscious and who, along with Senator Robert Taft, were actually skeptical of Harry Truman's early Cold War measures. I mean, these were real old-timey conservatives who didn't buy into grandiose schemes to remake the world. They were skeptical of things like that. Well, here's a memorable brief discussion of the Old Right that some of you may be familiar with from one of my favorite Rothbard articles of all time from 1992. Rothbard says this, if we know what the Old Right was against, what were they for? In general terms, they were for a restoration of the liberty of the Old Republic, of a government strictly limited to the defense of the rights of private property. In the concrete, as in the case of any broad coalition,

6:06There were differences of opinion within this overall framework, but we can boil down those differences to this question. How much of existing government would you repeal? How far would you roll government back? The minimum demand, which almost all old rightists agreed on, which virtually defined the old right, was total abolition of the New Deal, the whole kit and caboodle of the Welfare State, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, going off gold in 1933 and all the rest. Fast. Beyond that, there were charming disagreements. Some would stop at repealing the New Deal. Others would press on to abolition of Woodrow Wilson's new freedom, including the Federal Reserve system and especially that mighty instrument of tyranny, the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service. Still others, extremists such as myself, would not stop until we repealed the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789 and maybe even think the unthinkable and Restore the Good Old Articles of Confederation.

7:06Well in addition to being a kind of a brief history of the old right, this book, The Betrayal of the American Right, is as close to an autobiography of Murray Rothbard as we're ever going to see. So we're getting here a very interesting story of the anti-interventionist tradition in America but we're also getting a kind of slice of Rothbard's own life and his own struggles and his alliances and his friendships and his institutional affiliations, and in addition to that we also are observing his own political and intellectual development, the books he read, the people he met, the organizations he joined, the positions he rethought, all these things are described in here, and the beautiful thing about this book, insofar as some of it is like a memoir, is that Murray does not portray himself the way so many memoir This is a genre full of people who are all far-seeing demigods, who knew everything.

8:03Of course we should have done this, but nobody listened to me, that sort of thing. Rothbard is not interested in running around trying to make excuses for things that went wrong. He freely acknowledges, okay, this was a strategic error on my part. I should have known not to do X, Y or Z. Or he'll even say, this was a philosophical error on my part. He doesn't simply say, well, I was considering the question under a different aspect. No, he admits his shortcomings. This is charming. This is wonderful to see. So he tells us about, he goes from his days as a young boy, he goes up through his education, through his time in Mises New York seminar, from which so many important libertarian thinkers emerged, his early writing career, his activism, all the way through his interaction with the New Left in the 1960s.

8:48And that's really where the book kind of leaves off. The introduction speaks of an additional final chapter that brought the story up to about the early 1990s. We've not been able to find that final chapter, which would have been great to see. So we pretty much leave off late 60s, early 70s here. He's filling, in my opinion, a very important gap in the history of American foreign policy, as well as in the histories of American libertarianism and conservatism. There are people and ideas and debates that are discussed here that are really appearing practically for the first time. And so I think there are dissertation topics to be mined out of this, articles, topics for full-fledged books. There's so much that's new in here and useful.

9:33It is interesting to note, now of course, that Murray was very interested in the subject of war and peace. And at one point in the 50s, he wrote in a private letter, he wrote that he was increasingly convinced I'm convinced that the issues of war and peace were really at the center of the whole libertarian business. That's a quotation that comes from an article called Rothbard's Time on the Left by John Payne from the Journal of Libertarian Studies some time ago. It's very good and worth reading. And so naturally, much of this manuscript is talking about that very subject and the fact that American conservatism suddenly went from being skeptical of foreign interventions to having foreign intervention and the degree of how gung-ho you were being the determining factors to whether you belonged.

10:20Suddenly something happened here. Something happened to the right and Rothbard felt no longer comfortable in it. It's interesting to note, though, that it was both mainstream conservatism and mainstream liberalism that was responsible for Rothbard's sort of alienation from American politics. Because even the liberals, now the liberals supposedly are not sufficiently anti-communist or whatever, but the fact is that the liberals were at least as vicious half the time as the conservatives toward people like Taft, who was a so-called isolationist and therefore a heretic. So interestingly, in 1948 it was said that Taft would be an unsuitable candidate for president, according to one prominent liberal columnist, because the next president, should be an executive of the human race who will boldly champion freedom before the world and for the world, which Taft simply could not do.

11:21Likewise, the nation, now this is the nation, right? Bold and cheeky, right? The nation described Taft and his allies in Congress as super appeasers whose policies should set the bells ringing in the Kremlin. This is the nation. Did they ever apologize for that? Boy, we sure were duped and dopey. I don't know, maybe they did, but probably not. I'm going to add, I think an additional one of Rothbard's laws could very well be, not only does nobody ever resign, nobody ever apologizes, right? Except for things other people did. I'm sorry that somebody held slaves a hundred years ago, but I'm not sorry that I'm a bum and a schmuck. Now, from time to time, Murray found himself red-baited. You know, ah, Murray's just a commie. You know, look, he's so anti-American, because he's against the U.S. government, therefore he's anti-American. There's a leftist idea there, you know, that the government and the people are the same thing. Sort of a Rousseauian idea. Rothbard, of course, he

12:20was so anti-communist, actually, because he was an economist, and he understood this system is not sustainable. That's why he held it in such contempt. He did not think that the Soviet Union's acquisition of a string of satellites, each of which was an economic basket case in need of subsidy, was a particularly menacing imperial strategy. So old right members of Congress, like Howard Buffett and others, argued that the cause of freedom was best served through good example and non-intervention, and this was Rothbard's view. Now, in the late 1970s, Murray was personally responsible for inserting the non-interventionist plank into the Libertarian Party platform at a time when a lot of Libertarians were totally uninterested in foreign policy, which was shocking to him because the issue to him was so fundamental.

13:12Now the 2003 Iraq War was justified, in my judgment, on the basis of propaganda that was worthy of the old Pravda. And the fact that people calling themselves libertarians, who after all are supposed to have an eye for government propaganda, the fact that some of these people swallowed the government's line whole on this, suggests that this problem has not altogether disappeared. There's not a lot of strategic sense in terms of foreign policy among some libertarians. I can only imagine on the subject of the old right, by the way, what Mencken would think if he were alive today, what he would have to say about this war, its architects and and the people who are still trying to defend the grounds on which it started. Oh, look, we found three canisters of some decayed gas.

13:57That justifies hundreds of thousands of deaths. I mean, there's no other way to deal with those decaying cans of gas. I mean, what would Mencken have had to say about that? One can only wonder. Well, what you really, I think, find interesting is that here's Rothbard talking about and explaining his alliance with the left, his alliance with the New Left in the 60s And he felt like he had nowhere to go. He felt like his old home, where he identified himself with the right, was just closed off to him. And so he pursued avenues like the New Left, where he saw anti-war activism, and he saw some good ideological foundation in some of the people that he felt could be sustained and in fact could be built upon, and so he worked with them.

14:44and in this book he talks about the successes and failures of that and why it was ultimately not sustainable or it just didn't work or it fell apart, but it's quite interesting and good and it's interesting to see that there was some reciprocal admiration on the part of those folks on the left vis-a-vis Rothbard. What I happen to like is just a little quotation from the book, I realize I want to make sure Ed Stringham gets his full time up here because he's got an extremely useful book to talk I just love this little quotation because it is so classic. It's just Murray himself talking. He's talking about in the late 60s there was something called the Peace and Freedom Party, which was established in California and went national in the late 60s. And the preliminary platform simply called for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam immediately.

15:34and Murray says that the second plank was some plank so vague about being nice to everyone that almost anyone, left, right or center, could have endorsed it. And so Murray says, great, this was a coalition party dedicated just to immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and no statism, which you get that a lot of times cooperating with the left. Well, we want to spend the money on school lunches instead of on wars. I'd rather spend it on school lunches, I suppose, but Murray just wanted just anti-war party. And here it was. He was so excited. So he said, our whole libertarian group in New York poured into the party, so they all left the phone booth and went into this party. So what he points out is that the Peace and Freedom Party was organized on the basis of clubs. So there would be the Greenwich Village Club, the West Side Club, but there were also some clubs based on occupation.

16:20So there was a faculty club represented in the Peace and Freedom Party. So, okay, so Murray's a professor, he belongs to the faculty club. The Faculty Club was entitled to two delegates at the Delegate Assembly. And so it was divided up between... One was given to the socialists among the professors, and the other one was given to Murray. But here's the quotation that I like. At the first meeting of the Delegate Assembly then, here I was, only in the party for about a week, but suddenly vaulted to top rank in the power elite. Then, early in the meeting, some people got up and advocated abolishing the Delegate Assembly Now, I'll just close with a couple of more little bits of this and then have Ed come up, but this is a quotation that I like, he says,

17:24and the system of majority rule, participatory democracy could only agree on decisions by means of persuasion and unanimous consensus. Voting was believed to violate minority rights. I still remember vividly the board meetings of the Free University of New York where equal votes were cast by staff, unpaid faculty and students alike. Since every decision, no matter how trivial, had to be attained by unanimous consent, The result was that the board meeting stretched on, indecisively and interminably, to become life itself. He says, those of us who left the meeting in the evening to go home were accused of betraying the meeting. But the last thing I want to leave you with, just to show you the kind of thing that you learn about in this book is, I don't know, maybe people already knew this, I didn't.

18:16What was it that made Murray finally say, you know, I can't support limited government, I'm going to go the whole way, you know, and just say, to heck with all of it, it's all a scam. Like, what was it? What idea made him take that step where he was so, basically so lonely? There were not a whole lot of people, but I know there's De Molinari and people like that, but I mean, it's not exactly like there are huge people waiting to greet him with open arms with that position. So, what was it? Here's his own description of what happened. He said, My conversion, this is in the book, my conversion to anarchism was a simple exercise in logic. I had engaged continually in friendly arguments about laissez-faire with liberal friends from graduate school. While condemning taxation, I still had felt that taxation was required for the provision of police and judicial protection and for that only. One night, two friends and I had one of our usual lengthy discussions, seemingly unprofitable.

19:05But this time when they'd left, I felt that for once something vital had actually been said. As I thought back on the discussion, I realized that my friends, as liberals, had posed the following challenge to my laissez-faire position, and they said, What is the legitimate basis for your laissez-faire government for this political entity confined solely to defending person and property? And Murray responded, well, the people get together and decide to establish such a government, and they came back with, well, but if the people can do that, Why can't they do exactly the same thing and get together to choose a government that will build steel plants and dams and whatever? And Murray says, I realized in a flash that their logic was impeccable, that laissez-faire was logically untenable and that either I had to become a liberal or move onward into anarchism. I became an anarchist.

19:51Furthermore, I saw the total incompatibility of the insights of Oppenheimer and Nock on the nature of the state as conquest with the vague social contract basis that I had been postulating for a laissez-faire government. I saw that the only genuine contract had to be an individual specifically disposing of or using his own property. Well, I'll stop there and given that I'm not the author of this book and that we're running low on time, maybe we'll just let Ed go right up. And if you want to talk to me about this, you know, we'll have lunch together today or something. There's a lot to talk about. But when this comes out, you've got to rush out and buy it. I don't make any money on it, so there's no self-interest here, but it's just wonderful. It's finally seeing the light of day. It's really something to celebrate. So thanks. Thank you for watching.