Fooled By Folksy Republicans
2007-01-10 20:50:03 UTC
Interesting perspective from a Libertarian, not that I would agree with
everything here:
"The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while
adopting an ideology - even without knowing it or being entirely conscious
of the change - that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns
out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/red-state-fascism.html
quote
The Reality of Red-State Fascism
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most
significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely
unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state
bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the
Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism.
Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the
federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state,
particularly its military wing.
This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry, and hence
there have been few attempts to explain it - much less have libertarians
thought much about what it implies. My own take is this: the Republican
takeover of the presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has
supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning libertarian
movement into a statist one.
The remaining ideological justification was left to, and accomplished by,
Washington's kept think tanks, who have approved the turn at every crucial
step. What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear
separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also
requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by
extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less rightward.
Let us start from 1994 and work forward. In a stunningly prescient memo,
Murray N. Rothbard described the 1994 revolution against the Democrats as
follows:
"a massive and unprecedented public repudiation of President Clinton, his
person, his personnel, his ideologies and programs, and all of his works;
plus a repudiation of Clinton's Democrat Party; and, most fundamentally, a
rejection of the designs, current and proposed, of the Leviathan he heads..
what is being rejected is big government in general (its taxing, mandating,
regulating, gun grabbing, and even its spending) and, in particular, its
arrogant ambition to control the entire society from the political center.
Voters and taxpayers are no longer persuaded of a supposed rationale for
American-style central planning.. On the positive side, the public is
vigorously and fervently affirming its desire to re-limit and de-centralize
government; to increase individual and community liberty; to reduce taxes,
mandates, and government intrusion; to return to the cultural and social
mores of pre-1960s America, and perhaps much earlier than that."
This memo also cautioned against unrelieved optimism, because, Rothbard
said, two errors rear their head in most every revolution. First, the
reformers do not move fast enough; instead they often experience a crisis of
faith and become overwhelmed by demands that they govern "responsibly"
rather than tear down the established order. Second, the reformers leave too
much in place that can be used by their successors to rebuild the state they
worked so hard to dismantle. This permits gains to be reversed as soon as
another party takes control.
Rothbard urged dramatic cuts in spending, taxing, and regulation, and not
just in the domestic area but also in the military and in foreign policy. He
saw that this was crucial to any small-government program. He also urged a
dismantling of the federal judiciary on grounds that it represents a clear
and present danger to American liberty. He urged the young radicals who were
just elected to reject gimmicks like the balanced-budget amendment and the
line-item veto, in favor of genuine change. None of this happened of course.
In fact, the Republican leadership and pundit class began to warn against
"kamikaze missions" and speak not of bringing liberty, but rather of
governing better than others.
Foreshadowing what was to come, Rothbard pointed out: "Unfortunately, the
conservative public is all too often taken in by mere rhetoric and fails to
weigh the actual deeds of their political icons. So the danger is that
Gingrich will succeed not onlyin betraying, but in conning the revolutionary
public into thinking that they have already won and can shut up shop and go
home." The only way to prevent this, he wrote, was to educate the public,
businessmen, students, academics, journalists, and politicians about the
true nature of what is going on, and about the vicious nature of the
bi-partisan ruling elites.
The 1994 revolution failed of course, in part because the anti-government
opposition was intimidated into silence by the Oklahoma City bombing of
April 1995. The establishment somehow managed to pin the violent act of an
ex-military man on the right-wing libertarianism of the American
bourgeoisie. It was said by every important public official at that time
that to be anti-government was to give aid and support to militias,
secessionists, and other domestic terrorists. It was a classic intimidation
campaign but, combined with a GOP leadership that never had any intention to
change DC, it worked to shut down the opposition.
In the last years of the 1990s, the GOP-voting middle class refocused its
anger away from government and leviathan and toward the person of Bill
Clinton. It was said that he represented some kind of unique moral evil
despoiling the White House. That ridiculous Monica scandal culminated in a
pathetic and pretentious campaign to impeach Clinton. Impeaching presidents
is a great idea, but impeaching them for fibbing about personal peccadilloes
is probably the least justifiable ground. It's almost as if that entire
campaign was designed to discredit the great institution of impeachment.
In any case, this event crystallized the partisanship of the bourgeoisie,
driving home the message that the real problem was Clinton and not
government; the immorality of the chief executive, not his power; the
libertinism of the left-liberals and not their views toward government. The
much heralded "leave us alone" coalition had been thoroughly transformed in
a pure anti-Clinton movement. The right in this country began to define
itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994, but simply as anti-leftist, as
it does today.
There are many good reasons to be anti-leftist, but let us revisit what
Mises said in 1956 concerning the anti-socialists of his day. He pointed out
that many of these people had a purely negative agenda, to crush the
leftists and their bohemian ways and their intellectual pretension. He
warned that this is not a program for freedom. It was a program of hatred
that can only degenerate into statism.
The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual sterility of a
class of lewd would-be authors and artists is the ransom mankind must pay
lest the creative pioneers be prevented from accomplishing their work.
Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can
use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered. The license which the shabby
characters of the quartier Latin enjoyed was one of the conditions that made
possible the ascendance of a few great writers, painters and sculptors. The
first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.
He goes on to urge that anti-leftists work to educate themselves about
economics, so that they can have a positive agenda to displace their purely
negative one. A positive agenda of liberty is the only way we might have
been spared the blizzard of government controls that were fastened on this
country after Bush used the events of 9-11 to increase central planning,
invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and otherwise bring a form of statism to
America that makes Clinton look laissez-faire by comparison. The Bush
administration has not only faced no resistance from the bourgeoisie. it has
received cheers. And they are not only cheering Bush's reelection; they have
embraced tyrannical control of society as a means toward accomplishing their
anti-leftist ends.
After September 11, even those whose ostensible purpose in life is to
advocate less government changed their minds. Even after it was clear that
9-11 would be used as the biggest pretense for the expansion of government
since the stock market crash of 1929, the Cato Institute said that
libertarianism had to change its entire focus: "Libertarians usually enter
public debates to call for restrictions on government activity. In the wake
of September 11, we have all been reminded of the real purpose of
government: to protect our life, liberty, and property from violence. This
would be a good time for the federal government to do its job with vigor and
determination."
The vigor and determination of the Bush administration has brought about a
profound cultural change, so that the very people who once proclaimed hated
of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts,
especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian
bureaucracy of the military, or suggest that Bush is something less than
infallible in his foreign-policy decisions. The lesson here is that it is
always a mistake to advocate government action, for there is no way you can
fully anticipate how government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a
slice of the population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the
police power.
Editor & Publisher, for example, posted a small note the other day about a
column written by Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, in which he mildly
suggested that the troops be brought home from Iraq "sooner rather than
later." The editor of E&P was just blown away by the letters that poured in,
filled with venom and hate and calling for Neuharth to be tried and locked
away as a traitor. The letters compared him with pro-Hitler journalists, and
suggested that he was objectively pro-terrorist, choosing to support the
Muslim jihad over the US military. Other letters called for Neuharth to get
the death penalty for daring to take issue with the Christian leaders of
this great Christian nation.
I'm actually not surprised at this. It has been building for some time. If
you follow hate-filled sites such as Free Republic, you know that the
populist right in this country has been advocating nuclear holocaust and
mass bloodshed for more than a year now. The militarism and nationalism
dwarfs anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates the
shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new
ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US
is God marching on earth - not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy
for God himself.
Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration
of all things public sector, including egregious law like the Patriot Act,
egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and
egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act.
It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the
two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous
community of native-born patriots.
In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main threat to
the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for keeping the family
together and ensuring its ascendancy. In 1994, the state was seen as the
enemy of education; today, the same people view the state as the means of
raising standards and purging education of its left-wing influences. In
1994, Christians widely saw that Leviathan was the main enemy of the faith;
today, they see Leviathan as the tool by which they will guarantee that
their faith will have an impact on the country and the world.
Paul Craig Roberts is right: "In the ranks of the new conservatives,
however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded,
ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who
literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry.
There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill
anyone for George Bush." Again: "Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives
take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a
critic is to be an enemy."
In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized
fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian
or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn't
sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core
institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it
sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public
institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are
protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who
knows better than anyone else what the country and world's needs, and has a
special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means
to bring it about.
The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while
adopting an ideology - even without knowing it or being entirely conscious
of the change - that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns
out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a
long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from
the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the
center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there
are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other
that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the
latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.
What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our
time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil
liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses
of the Bush administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to
freedom comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people
who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down
management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a
messianic and belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on
the world.
There is no need to advance the view that the enemy of my enemy is my
friend. However, it is time to recognize that the left today does represent
a counterweight to the right, just as it did in the 1950s when the right
began to adopt anti-communist militarism as its credo. In a time when the
term patriotism means supporting the nation's wars and statism, a
libertarian patriotism has more in common with that advanced by The Nation
magazine:
"The other company of patriots does not march to military time. It prefers
the gentle strains of 'America the Beautiful' to the strident cadences of
'Hail to the Chief' and 'The Stars and Stripes Forever.' This patriotism is
rooted in the love of one's own land and people, love too of the best ideals
of one's own culture and tradition. This company of patriots finds no glory
in puffing their country up by pulling others' down. This patriotism is
profoundly municipal, even domestic. Its pleasures are quiet, its services
steady and unpretentious. This patriotism too has deep roots and long
continuity in our history."
Ten years ago, these were "right wing" sentiments; today the right regards
them as treasonous. What should this teach us? It shows that those who saw
the interests of liberty as being well served by the politicized proxies of
free enterprise alone, family alone, Christianity alone, law and order
alone, were profoundly mistaken. There is no proxy for liberty, no cause
that serves as a viable substitute, and no movement by any name whose
success can yield freedom in our time other than the movement of freedom
itself. We need to embrace liberty and liberty only, and not be fooled by
groups or parties or movements that only desire a temporary liberty to
advance their pet interests.
As Rothbard said in 1965:
"The doctrine of liberty contains elements corresponding with both
contemporary left and right. This means in no sense that we are
middle-of-the-roaders, eclectically trying to combine, or step between, both
poles; but rather that a consistent view of liberty includes concepts that
have also become part of the rhetoric or program of right and of left. Hence
a creative approach to liberty must transcend the confines of contemporary
political shibboleths."
There has never in my lifetime been a more urgent need for the party of
liberty to completely secede from conventional thought and established
institutions, especially those associated with all aspects of government,
and undertake radical intellectual action on behalf of a third way that
rejects the socialism of the left and the fascism of the right.
Indeed, the current times can be seen as a training period for all true
friends of liberty. We need to learn to recognize the many different guises
in which tyranny appears. Power is protean because it must suppress that
impulse toward liberty that exists in the hearts of all people. The impulse
is there, tacitly waiting for the consciousness to dawn. When it does, power
doesn't stand a chance.
December 31, 2004
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of
Speaking of Liberty.
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
Lew Rockwell Archives
Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/red-state-fascism.html
end quote
This passage is spot on:
"Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration
of all things public sector, including egregious law like the Patriot Act,
egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and
egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act.
It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the
two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous
community of native-born patriots. "
Fooled By Folksy Republicans
everything here:
"The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while
adopting an ideology - even without knowing it or being entirely conscious
of the change - that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns
out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/red-state-fascism.html
quote
The Reality of Red-State Fascism
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most
significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely
unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state
bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the
Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism.
Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the
federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state,
particularly its military wing.
This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry, and hence
there have been few attempts to explain it - much less have libertarians
thought much about what it implies. My own take is this: the Republican
takeover of the presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has
supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning libertarian
movement into a statist one.
The remaining ideological justification was left to, and accomplished by,
Washington's kept think tanks, who have approved the turn at every crucial
step. What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear
separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also
requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by
extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less rightward.
Let us start from 1994 and work forward. In a stunningly prescient memo,
Murray N. Rothbard described the 1994 revolution against the Democrats as
follows:
"a massive and unprecedented public repudiation of President Clinton, his
person, his personnel, his ideologies and programs, and all of his works;
plus a repudiation of Clinton's Democrat Party; and, most fundamentally, a
rejection of the designs, current and proposed, of the Leviathan he heads..
what is being rejected is big government in general (its taxing, mandating,
regulating, gun grabbing, and even its spending) and, in particular, its
arrogant ambition to control the entire society from the political center.
Voters and taxpayers are no longer persuaded of a supposed rationale for
American-style central planning.. On the positive side, the public is
vigorously and fervently affirming its desire to re-limit and de-centralize
government; to increase individual and community liberty; to reduce taxes,
mandates, and government intrusion; to return to the cultural and social
mores of pre-1960s America, and perhaps much earlier than that."
This memo also cautioned against unrelieved optimism, because, Rothbard
said, two errors rear their head in most every revolution. First, the
reformers do not move fast enough; instead they often experience a crisis of
faith and become overwhelmed by demands that they govern "responsibly"
rather than tear down the established order. Second, the reformers leave too
much in place that can be used by their successors to rebuild the state they
worked so hard to dismantle. This permits gains to be reversed as soon as
another party takes control.
Rothbard urged dramatic cuts in spending, taxing, and regulation, and not
just in the domestic area but also in the military and in foreign policy. He
saw that this was crucial to any small-government program. He also urged a
dismantling of the federal judiciary on grounds that it represents a clear
and present danger to American liberty. He urged the young radicals who were
just elected to reject gimmicks like the balanced-budget amendment and the
line-item veto, in favor of genuine change. None of this happened of course.
In fact, the Republican leadership and pundit class began to warn against
"kamikaze missions" and speak not of bringing liberty, but rather of
governing better than others.
Foreshadowing what was to come, Rothbard pointed out: "Unfortunately, the
conservative public is all too often taken in by mere rhetoric and fails to
weigh the actual deeds of their political icons. So the danger is that
Gingrich will succeed not onlyin betraying, but in conning the revolutionary
public into thinking that they have already won and can shut up shop and go
home." The only way to prevent this, he wrote, was to educate the public,
businessmen, students, academics, journalists, and politicians about the
true nature of what is going on, and about the vicious nature of the
bi-partisan ruling elites.
The 1994 revolution failed of course, in part because the anti-government
opposition was intimidated into silence by the Oklahoma City bombing of
April 1995. The establishment somehow managed to pin the violent act of an
ex-military man on the right-wing libertarianism of the American
bourgeoisie. It was said by every important public official at that time
that to be anti-government was to give aid and support to militias,
secessionists, and other domestic terrorists. It was a classic intimidation
campaign but, combined with a GOP leadership that never had any intention to
change DC, it worked to shut down the opposition.
In the last years of the 1990s, the GOP-voting middle class refocused its
anger away from government and leviathan and toward the person of Bill
Clinton. It was said that he represented some kind of unique moral evil
despoiling the White House. That ridiculous Monica scandal culminated in a
pathetic and pretentious campaign to impeach Clinton. Impeaching presidents
is a great idea, but impeaching them for fibbing about personal peccadilloes
is probably the least justifiable ground. It's almost as if that entire
campaign was designed to discredit the great institution of impeachment.
In any case, this event crystallized the partisanship of the bourgeoisie,
driving home the message that the real problem was Clinton and not
government; the immorality of the chief executive, not his power; the
libertinism of the left-liberals and not their views toward government. The
much heralded "leave us alone" coalition had been thoroughly transformed in
a pure anti-Clinton movement. The right in this country began to define
itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994, but simply as anti-leftist, as
it does today.
There are many good reasons to be anti-leftist, but let us revisit what
Mises said in 1956 concerning the anti-socialists of his day. He pointed out
that many of these people had a purely negative agenda, to crush the
leftists and their bohemian ways and their intellectual pretension. He
warned that this is not a program for freedom. It was a program of hatred
that can only degenerate into statism.
The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual sterility of a
class of lewd would-be authors and artists is the ransom mankind must pay
lest the creative pioneers be prevented from accomplishing their work.
Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can
use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered. The license which the shabby
characters of the quartier Latin enjoyed was one of the conditions that made
possible the ascendance of a few great writers, painters and sculptors. The
first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.
He goes on to urge that anti-leftists work to educate themselves about
economics, so that they can have a positive agenda to displace their purely
negative one. A positive agenda of liberty is the only way we might have
been spared the blizzard of government controls that were fastened on this
country after Bush used the events of 9-11 to increase central planning,
invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and otherwise bring a form of statism to
America that makes Clinton look laissez-faire by comparison. The Bush
administration has not only faced no resistance from the bourgeoisie. it has
received cheers. And they are not only cheering Bush's reelection; they have
embraced tyrannical control of society as a means toward accomplishing their
anti-leftist ends.
After September 11, even those whose ostensible purpose in life is to
advocate less government changed their minds. Even after it was clear that
9-11 would be used as the biggest pretense for the expansion of government
since the stock market crash of 1929, the Cato Institute said that
libertarianism had to change its entire focus: "Libertarians usually enter
public debates to call for restrictions on government activity. In the wake
of September 11, we have all been reminded of the real purpose of
government: to protect our life, liberty, and property from violence. This
would be a good time for the federal government to do its job with vigor and
determination."
The vigor and determination of the Bush administration has brought about a
profound cultural change, so that the very people who once proclaimed hated
of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts,
especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian
bureaucracy of the military, or suggest that Bush is something less than
infallible in his foreign-policy decisions. The lesson here is that it is
always a mistake to advocate government action, for there is no way you can
fully anticipate how government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a
slice of the population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the
police power.
Editor & Publisher, for example, posted a small note the other day about a
column written by Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, in which he mildly
suggested that the troops be brought home from Iraq "sooner rather than
later." The editor of E&P was just blown away by the letters that poured in,
filled with venom and hate and calling for Neuharth to be tried and locked
away as a traitor. The letters compared him with pro-Hitler journalists, and
suggested that he was objectively pro-terrorist, choosing to support the
Muslim jihad over the US military. Other letters called for Neuharth to get
the death penalty for daring to take issue with the Christian leaders of
this great Christian nation.
I'm actually not surprised at this. It has been building for some time. If
you follow hate-filled sites such as Free Republic, you know that the
populist right in this country has been advocating nuclear holocaust and
mass bloodshed for more than a year now. The militarism and nationalism
dwarfs anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates the
shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new
ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US
is God marching on earth - not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy
for God himself.
Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration
of all things public sector, including egregious law like the Patriot Act,
egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and
egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act.
It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the
two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous
community of native-born patriots.
In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main threat to
the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for keeping the family
together and ensuring its ascendancy. In 1994, the state was seen as the
enemy of education; today, the same people view the state as the means of
raising standards and purging education of its left-wing influences. In
1994, Christians widely saw that Leviathan was the main enemy of the faith;
today, they see Leviathan as the tool by which they will guarantee that
their faith will have an impact on the country and the world.
Paul Craig Roberts is right: "In the ranks of the new conservatives,
however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded,
ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who
literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry.
There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill
anyone for George Bush." Again: "Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives
take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a
critic is to be an enemy."
In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized
fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian
or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn't
sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core
institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it
sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public
institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are
protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who
knows better than anyone else what the country and world's needs, and has a
special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means
to bring it about.
The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while
adopting an ideology - even without knowing it or being entirely conscious
of the change - that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns
out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a
long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from
the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the
center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there
are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other
that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the
latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.
What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our
time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil
liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses
of the Bush administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to
freedom comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people
who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down
management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a
messianic and belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on
the world.
There is no need to advance the view that the enemy of my enemy is my
friend. However, it is time to recognize that the left today does represent
a counterweight to the right, just as it did in the 1950s when the right
began to adopt anti-communist militarism as its credo. In a time when the
term patriotism means supporting the nation's wars and statism, a
libertarian patriotism has more in common with that advanced by The Nation
magazine:
"The other company of patriots does not march to military time. It prefers
the gentle strains of 'America the Beautiful' to the strident cadences of
'Hail to the Chief' and 'The Stars and Stripes Forever.' This patriotism is
rooted in the love of one's own land and people, love too of the best ideals
of one's own culture and tradition. This company of patriots finds no glory
in puffing their country up by pulling others' down. This patriotism is
profoundly municipal, even domestic. Its pleasures are quiet, its services
steady and unpretentious. This patriotism too has deep roots and long
continuity in our history."
Ten years ago, these were "right wing" sentiments; today the right regards
them as treasonous. What should this teach us? It shows that those who saw
the interests of liberty as being well served by the politicized proxies of
free enterprise alone, family alone, Christianity alone, law and order
alone, were profoundly mistaken. There is no proxy for liberty, no cause
that serves as a viable substitute, and no movement by any name whose
success can yield freedom in our time other than the movement of freedom
itself. We need to embrace liberty and liberty only, and not be fooled by
groups or parties or movements that only desire a temporary liberty to
advance their pet interests.
As Rothbard said in 1965:
"The doctrine of liberty contains elements corresponding with both
contemporary left and right. This means in no sense that we are
middle-of-the-roaders, eclectically trying to combine, or step between, both
poles; but rather that a consistent view of liberty includes concepts that
have also become part of the rhetoric or program of right and of left. Hence
a creative approach to liberty must transcend the confines of contemporary
political shibboleths."
There has never in my lifetime been a more urgent need for the party of
liberty to completely secede from conventional thought and established
institutions, especially those associated with all aspects of government,
and undertake radical intellectual action on behalf of a third way that
rejects the socialism of the left and the fascism of the right.
Indeed, the current times can be seen as a training period for all true
friends of liberty. We need to learn to recognize the many different guises
in which tyranny appears. Power is protean because it must suppress that
impulse toward liberty that exists in the hearts of all people. The impulse
is there, tacitly waiting for the consciousness to dawn. When it does, power
doesn't stand a chance.
December 31, 2004
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of
Speaking of Liberty.
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
Lew Rockwell Archives
Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/red-state-fascism.html
end quote
This passage is spot on:
"Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration
of all things public sector, including egregious law like the Patriot Act,
egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and
egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act.
It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the
two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous
community of native-born patriots. "
Fooled By Folksy Republicans