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Banned
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Travelers Rest, South Carolina
Posts: 8,795
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Quote:
Originally posted by 914GT
Again, sorry for digging into the memory hole.
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Murray Rothbard on Strom Thurmond and the old right. Dr. rothbard supported Strom Thurmond's run for the Presidency on the States Rights Party ticket. Rothbard was, as usual, quite correct in doing so.
Quote:
Life in the Old Right
by Murray N. Rothbard
First published in Chronicles, August 1994.
One problem with labeling ideological movements "old" or "new" is that inevitably, with the passage of time, the "new" becomes an "old" and the markers get confusing. In the modern, post-World War II right wing, there have been a number of "news" and "olds" over the past half-century. But what I call the "Old Right" has an excellent claim to that label; for it was the original, oldest right, and it was in many ways radically different from all the rights that have followed after its demise.
The original right of which I speak, and of which I am one of the few survivors, stretched from 1933 to its approximate death, or fading away, upon the advent of National Review in 1955. The Old Right began in 1933 in response to the coming of the New Deal. It was "reactionary" in the best and most generous sense: it was a horrified reaction against the Roosevelt Revolution, against the Great Leap Forward toward collectivism that enraptured socialist intellectuals and enraged those who were devoted to the institutions and the strict limitations on centralized government power that marked the Old Republic.
Last fall, David Lauter, writing a think-piece in the Los Angeles Times about the Clinton health plan, wittingly or unwittingly echoed Maoist terminology about this Great Leap Forward, declaring that "every so often... the government collectively braces itself, takes a deep breath, and leaps into a largely unknown future." The Clinton health plan is such a leap, Lauter noted; the previous Great Leap was the civil rights laws of the 1960s; and before that, in perhaps the primordial leap, was the New Deal of the 1930s, when the nation agreed "to give the federal government a whole new set of responsibilities � from providing social security for the elderly to establishing a new system of national regulatory agencies to monitor the economy."
A fairly good summation, except that instead of the "nation" agreeing to give powers to the government the New Deal proceeded in the manner of all nonviolent revolutions: it was the federal government and its new rulers that seized power, drove through a flurry of socialistic measures, and then won "agreement" by using the levers of propaganda and opinion-molding in society, as well as by relying on the sheer force of inertia and habit once the new institutions were in place.
The Old, original, Right realized the horrors of the New Deal and predicted the collectivist road on which it was setting the nation. The Old Right was a coalition of ideologies and forces that did not have one single, common, positive program, but "negatively" it was solidly united: all opposed the New Deal and were committed to its total repeal and abolition � lock, stock, and barrel. The fact that its unity was "negative" did not make it any less strong or cohesive: for there was total agreement on rolling back this collective excrescence and on restoring the Old Republic, the true America.
The Old Right coalition consisted of the following elements. Most "extreme" were the libertarian and individualist writers and intellectuals: H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Garet Garrett, all people who had resisted what they believed to be the mounting statism of the Republican regime of the 1920s and who called for an ultraminimal government that would have rolled back the statism of the Progressive period, the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and perhaps the judicial despotism of Chief Justice John Marshall. Next came now virtually forgotten remnants of the conservative, states' rights Democrats of the nineteenth century, largely from the South, whose views were almost as libertarian as the first group's. These men were led by Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, who was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, and Senator James A. Reed from Missouri. The third group consisted of conservative Republicans who were outraged at New Deal democracy and who largely came from the Midwest. Former Progressives and statists, who believed that the New Deal was going much too far, formed the final group; its leader was former President Herbert Hoover, who, though he had launched many New Deal measures in microcosm in his own administration, denounced the New Deal for going too far into "fascism." It was the first group that set the tone, since individualist and libertarian rhetoric provided the only general concepts with which New Deal measures could be opposed. The result, however, was that hack Republican politicians found themselves mouthing libertarian and antistatist slogans that they did not really believe � a condition that set the stage for alater "moderation" and abandonment of their seemingly cherished principles.
Unity in our hostility and hatreds, however, combined with diversity of positive principle, had a healthy effect on the Old Right. It meant that we could unite and act together in denouncing and moving against the New Deal enemy, while disagreeing and arguing in friendly fashion among ourselves about the kind of America we would ultimately like to achieve. How much government did we wish to roll back? Stop at 1932, or press onward to repeal Progressive measures or even the centralization of the nineteenth century? We were all committed to states' rights, but how far did we want to carry this view? A few libertarian extremists wanted to go all the way back to the Articles of Confederation, but the great bulk of the right was committed to the United States Constitution � but a Constitution construed so "strictly" as to outlaw much twentieth-century legislation, certainly on the federal level.
(center snipped, read the full article at the url below)
By the mid-1950s, however, the Old Right began to fade away. Senator Taft was robbed of the Republican nomination in 1952 by a Rockefeller-Morgan Eastern banker cabal, using their control of respectable "Republican" media. In the early 1950s, Taft himself and the doughty Colonel McCormick passed away, and the veteran Old Right leaders faded from the scene. The last gasp of the Old Right in foreign policy was the defeat of the Bricker Amendment to the Constitution in 1954, an amendment that would have prevented international treaties from overriding American rights and powers. The amendment was sabotaged by the Eisenhower administration.
Finally, the Old Right was buried by the advent in late 1955 of the lively weekly National Review, a well-edited periodical that filled the ideological vacuum resulting from the deaths of McCormick and Taft and the retirement of other isolationist stalwarts. National Review set out successfully to transform the American right from an isolationist defender of the Old Republic to a global crusader against the Soviet Union and international communism. After National Review became established as the GHQ of the right, it proceeded to purge all rightwing factions that had previously lived and worked in harmony but now proved too isolationist or too unrespectable for the newly transformed Buckleyite right. These purges paved the way for later changes of line as well as future purges: of those who opposed anti-Stalinist, pro-welfare state liberals called "neoconservatives," as well as of those who persisted in opposing the crippling of property rights in the name of "civil" and other victimological "rights."
As time passed and Old Right heroes passed away and were forgotten, many of the right-wing rank-and-file, never long on historical memory, forgot and adapted their positions to the new dispensation. The last political manifestation of the Old Right was the third-party Andrews-Werdel ticket of 1956, which called for the repeal of the income tax and the rollback of the New Deal. Its foreign policy was the last breath of the pre-Cold War Old Right: advocating no foreign war, the Bricker Amendment, and the abolition of foreign aid. The betrayal of Senator Taft in 1952 had driven me out of the Republican Party, and after supporting the Andrews-Werdel ticket, I spent the following decades in the political wilderness, trying to join abortive third "Constitutional" parties and to separate libertarians out from a right wing that I no longer recognized and that seemed to me far closer to the hated New Deal, domestic and foreign, than to its Old Right enemy, which I had happily discovered and embraced in the years just after World War II.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the founder of modern libertarianism and the dean of the Austrian School of economics, was the author of The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty and many other books and articles. He was also academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the editor � with Lew Rockwell � of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Copyright - 2003 Ludwig von Mises Institute
All rights reserved.
Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard45.html
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03-03-2006, 07:34 AM
