Politics

Rothbard on How the Right Went Wrong

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Murray Rothbard's early 1970s book The Betrayal of the American Right (which, had it been published as scheduled by Ramparts Press, would have made one more irony in the career of David Horowitz, an editor at the lefty magazine Ramparts from which the publishing concern derived, who has since turned from leftist anti-Vietnam Warrior to right-wing war cheerleader) has finally been issued by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

They are putting it online piece-by-piece, and Anthony Gregory is liveblogging his reading of it.

Rothbard's summation of the book's message:

The book was a cry in the wilderness against what I saw as the betrayal of what I here call the "Old Right." Or, to allay confusion about various "olds" and "news," we call it the Original Right. The Old Right arose during the 1930s as a reaction against the Great Leap Forward (or Backward) into collectivism that characterized the New Deal. That Old Right continued and flourished through the 1940s and down to about the mid-1950s. The Old Right was staunchly opposed to Big Government and the New Deal at home and abroad: that is, to both facets of the welfare-warfare state. It combated U.S. intervention in foreign affairs and foreign wars as fervently as it opposed intervention at home.

At the present time, many conservatives have come to realize that the old feisty, antigovernment spirit of conservatives has been abraded and somehow been transformed into its statist opposite. It is tempting, and, so far as it goes, certainly correct, to put the blame on the Right's embrace in the 1970s of Truman-Humphrey Cold War liberals calling themselves "neoconservatives," and to allow these ex-Trotskyites and ex-Mensheviks not only into the tent but also to take over the show. But the thesis of the book is that those who wonder what happened to the good old cause must not stop with the neocons: that the rot started long before, with the founding in 1955 of National Review and its rapid rise to dominance of the conservative movement. It was National Review that, consciously and cleverly, transformed the content of the Old Right into something very like its opposite, while preserving the old forms and rituals, such as lip service to the free market and to the Constitution of the United States.

Rothbard's story, among many others, is related in my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.