Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone.
In the Libertarian Institute today, I'm joined by Daniel
McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, a conservative review, and
a contributing editor to The American Conservative.
Mr. McCarthy, where can people go to find your collection of
articles or materials you've written?
Well, you can go to modernagejournal.com if you'd
like to see my work at modern age, which I edit as well as
write for. You can also follow my work at
creators.com, which is the Creators Syndicate.
I have a weekly syndicated newspaper column and you can
find it collected on that website.
You can also find my my syndicated column at Chronicles
magazine or at the New York Post, a number of other outlets.
And I write for here and there and everywhere.
So the American Conservative, the University Bookman, all
kinds of outlets. But generally, if you will
follow my account on X, which is at Tory Anarchist.
So on the platform formerly known as Twitter at Tory
Anarchist, you can follow my not only Twitter feed but also all
the articles that I write and promote on that platform.
Terrific. Can you please explain the
principal difference between people on the left and the
mindset of people on the right? Well, that's, you know, a nice
big question to start off with. You know, I, I think the left of
today in the 21st century is characterized by two things.
One of them is a belief that existing institutions of almost
all kinds, whether it's capitalism and property rights,
whether it's the inheritance of Western civilization, the
Christian religion, whatever the case may be, there's a tendency
on the left to believe that these elements that have come
down to us from the past are holding us back and they are
preventing us from achieving all human happiness and, you know,
sort of peace and love and harmony.
And they So that's, that's, that's the premise.
The premise is that the past is a burden upon us.
The answer they provide to that burden is to say, well, what we
need to do is to create an institution or a set of
institutions that are able to free us, to liberate us from the
burden of the past. And the institutions that they
put their support behind tend to be institutions like the federal
government and its regulatory apparatus, but they also tend to
be institutions like higher education, which is going to
free our minds from all the ideas that we have inherited
from our ancestors. It's, you know, in many cases,
the mass media, especially the prestige media, the elite media,
these institutions are going to provide information which the
left expects citizens will then use to, you know, always vote
against Republicans, vote for Democrats, vote for
progressives, vote for people from the left.
But then progressives are often, people on the left are often
shocked when it turns out that all of these institutions are
not welcomed by ordinary people and that ordinary people often
feel as if these institutions are in fact run by a new elite
that does not have the best interests.
You know, of ordinary people at heart.
And they think that this alienation that ordinary people
feel towards the institutions of power that the left dominates is
itself a by product of all of the wrong things that we have
inherited from the past. So you would think if they were
just pure Democrats on the left, they would say, look, if the
people don't like what you're offering, then you know, you
can't continue offering the same thing.
But progressives, people on the left don't really have that
view. They actually think we are
correct. No matter how few of us there
are. If the if the public doesn't
accept our views that that's neither here nor there, that
just shows that the public is wrong.
And really what we have to do is get the public to accept our
views. And we're going to do that
through the means of education and through a lot of nudges and
incentives and in some cases outright coercion even, which
are going to hurt the people, change the way they think.
And then they will affirm the things you want them to affirm.
This whole picture that I painted is really, you know,
it's kind of set out very effectively in Jean Jacques
Rousseau in The Social Contract. And I think most of, you know,
the left since then has been a fading echo of Rousseau and that
Rousseau is actually, he's an evil genius, but he is a genius.
He really does understand human nature very well.
And the modern left is still trying to work through some of
the insights that Rousseau had. And if you could briefly explain
the mindset of someone on the right, how do they see the
world? Yeah, well, the right is exactly
the opposite. The right says, actually all the
good things that we currently enjoy in life are as a result of
the things that have come down to us, that it would be, you
know, counterproductive for us to get rid of our inheritance
because, in fact, that's what makes us free.
That's what makes us prosperous. That's what makes us, you know,
people who don't know how to live good lives.
And if we get rid of the things that have made civilization
successful, you're going to an unsuccessful civilization.
The left says if you get rid of those old things, you're going
to have a more successful civilization.
And the right says you're actually not going to have
you're going to have a less successful civilization or no
civilization at all. Now, this means that the right,
you know, tends to support a whole variety of institutions
which are besieged in the 21st century.
Sometimes that might be the nuclear family.
Sometimes it might be traditional religion.
Sometimes it will be, you know, 19th century kind of independent
proprietorship of businesses and economic activities.
All of these things might wind up being part of a right wing
coalition because they're all trying to preserve something
about the past that they think was absolutely essential to
creating what's been successful about our civilization of our
country. Today we are going to discuss
Murray and Rothbard's 1992 speech, A Strategy for the
Right. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Murray
and Rothbard was an economist at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, someone who I have learned a great deal from with
regards to philosophy, economics, and libertarianism.
So Mr. McCarthy, who is Rothbard referring to when he says the
old right? Yeah.
Rothbard in that essay also used the phrase the original right.
And he notes that there are successive waves of movements
that call themselves a new right, which always makes the
previous new right, now an old right.
So it can be confusing if you use these relative terms of old
and new. But Rothbard argues that there
was such a thing called the original right, by which he
means a number of intellectuals and some politicians who were
staunch opponents of the New Deal back in the 1930s.
And these original rightists, as Rothbard sees them, were, in
many cases, folks who had started out as being somewhat
progressive, somewhat liberal, somewhat on the left.
In many cases, they were, you know, classical liberals or free
markets, you know, inclined individuals in terms of, you
know, what they appreciated philosophically.
And Rothbard says that, you know, basically, the New Deal
radicalized them and it made them realize, wait a minute,
America already had a lot to conserve.
And the New Deal is actually a revolution against that.
It's a revolution against, you know, the freedoms and the
independents and the property rights that Americans had
enjoyed. And therefore the New Deal was,
you know, a very destructive thing.
And these people who previously had been thought of perhaps in
some sense as being rather progressive, or at least, you
know, very classically liberal, they now were branded by the New
Dealers, by Roosevelt as being arch conservatives, as being
enemies of progress. And many of them said, well,
actually, you know what there is, there is a lot that we need
to conserve. And so we are perhaps going to
be more comfortable with the label conservative in the
future. There's some nuances that need
to be introduced. And then perhaps, you know,
further in our discussion, we can we can get into that.
Certainly there there are examples of various kinds of
conservatism that go back well beyond the 1930s.
And even in the 1930s, not all of the conservatives were these
individualists and, you know, sort of old classical liberals
that Rothbard is referring to. Some of the particular
individuals that Rothbard has in mind and that he names in his
essay are Albert J NOC, who was a sort of brilliant cantankerous
essayist and a self-proclaimed anarchist.
He in fact didn't even like to identify as anything like a
liberal. He thought of himself as
actually being in the tradition of radicalism.
And he was, you know, an individualist anarchist.
HL Mencken, who was, you know, one of the first Americans to
really appreciate Friedrich Nietzsche and who, you know,
Mencken was a a great critic of mass culture and democracy in
its cultural forms as well as in its political forms.
So Menken and Knock are both very, you know, sort of
complicated figures who are not just, you know, sort of run of
the John Stuart Mill classical liberals, so to speak.
He also mentions Garrett Garrett and John T Flynn, Isabel
Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane. These were writers, in some
cases novelists, in many cases journalists who had an
attachment to freedom and were strong critics of the New Deal
back in the 1930s. And we'll get into, I think in
the course of our discussion kind of what happens to this
original, right? So they were anti welfare and
anti warfare. Would that be a fair way to
categorize Garrett, Garrett, John T Flynn and all those other
people? Absolutely, that's exactly
right. So, you know, not only were they
opponents of the New Deal, but they, you know, in some cases
they, they may have supported World War One.
But even the few who did support World War One, by the end of the
at that war, they were extremely disillusioned and critical about
what Woodrow Wilson had done. And they were very critical of
the fact that America had gotten into the war.
They realized that they had been duped basically.
So the old right or the original right was very anti war.
When they saw, you know, the storm clouds leading to World
War 2 on the horizon, they said, you know what, this is going to
be very much like World War One. This is also going to be a war
that America can and should stay out of.
So the old right was very anti war as well as being against the
welfare state and against the New Deal.
And then after World War 2, many these old right figures,
especially the ones that we've named already, they continue to
be quite skeptical of or opposed to the idea of fighting a Cold
War with the Soviet Union. And that's a point that Rothbard
thinks is highly important. Rothbard mentions friendly
differences within the paleo movement, referring to
immigration, military isolationism, and free trade.
What was the Paleo movement? Yeah.
So the paleo conservatives basically emerge as a movement
in the late 1980s, and they are emerging in response to a couple
of things. By the late 1980s, there had
been, and I apologize for the complexity of this, but you
know, it is kind of a kind of like a series of dominoes, you
know. So to explain one one thing
falling over, you have to actually go back a little bit to
the previous development in the 1960s and 70's, the American
left basically split and there was a new left, which was, you
know, in many cases anti war, but it wasn't just anti war.
It was often anti Western. It was also anti Israel.
It it was, you know, beginning to adopt, you know, the ideas of
kind of multiculturalism and what we would now call woke ISM
that new left started to emerge. And then a lot of the old Cold
War left, which had supported, you know, American Cold War
actions, it became very alienated from this new left and
decided to start migrating into the Republican Party and start
identifying itself as being more conservative.
The interesting thing is though, these, you know, formerly Cold
War liberals who became what's called neoconservatives, they
never actually liked the old right.
Not only did they not like the old right that Rothbard is
talking about, they didn't even like the old right or the, you
know, slightly less old right of the Barry Goldwater era, of
National Review and of, you know, Russell Kirk and thinkers
like that. The neo conservatives basically
thought that the conservatives who came before them in the
1950s and 1960s were either too libertarian or too
traditionalist, that they were not sufficiently, you know, open
to the possibility of a conservative welfare state and
that they also had too many isolationist or non
interventionist instincts. The neoconservatives, because
they had been Cold War liberals all along, they wanted America
not only to continue being a Cold War, you know, active
power, but they also at the end of the Cold War said, you know
what, let's keep going. Let's let's go on and build, you
know, kind of worldwide, you know, liberal democracy or
social democracy. Let's export that to every
corner of the planet through military force as well as
through regime change by means of propaganda and covert action
and other things. Well, all of this, this, you
know, sort of neo con takeover of the American right in the
1980s, especially by the late 1980s, this was really shocking
to anyone who remembered what the right had been before the
neocons took it over. And that included not only folks
who still were loyal to the memory of Barry Goldwater and
folks who were loyal to the memory of, you know, Russell.
Well, Russell Kirk was still alive in the late 80s and early
90s. So the people who are still
loyal to him were very shocked and appalled by the neocons, And
so were folks who had started to rediscover what Murray Rothbard
calls the original. Right.
So there were both libertarians and traditionalists who saw the
neocons as being in favor of basically worldwide, you know,
military interventions to promote, you know, the worst
aspects of not just the American, you know, sort of
liberal welfare state. But in the case of the paleo
conservatives, they also didn't like, you know, some of the idea
of promoting American style capitalism or corporatism really
to the world as well. So an issue like free trade
became one of the key, you know, hot spots or, you know, trigger
points for people like Pat Buchanan, for example, in this
era. So the paleo conservatives, they
tended to be opposed to globalism, by which they meant
not only foreign intervention but also free trade.
And then they also were very restricted when it came to
immigration. So the neoconservatives thought
everyone all around the world is basically already an American
and is just waiting for our bombs to liberate them from
these oppressive institutions in their, you know, their own
countries that are preventing them from realizing their full
Americanness. Well, if the neocons had that
view, they also thought if we just open our borders to the
whole world, that's also just going to bring in more people
who will be good Americans. And maybe even they will be
better Americans than these other Americans who are already
here who have been corrupted by the legacy of American
conservatism and in some cases, the original right.
So you can see why the neocons, why I think of them as being
just like today's left. They think that the legacy of
the past is what's holding back the entire planet from enjoying
the benefits of liberal democracy, and that force and
revolution must be used to change institutions all around
the world. And they also think that
Americans here are guilty of wrong think that, you know, too
many people in small towns don't have a sufficiently progressive
cosmopolitan attitude as the neocons would define it.
And therefore they have to be re educated, you know, and
manipulated by the same instruments that the left uses.
Murray Rothbard asks who is the agency of social change?
Which group may be expected to bring about the desired change
in society? He refers to Is it 1 the
unwashed masses? Is it the proletariat as Marxist
say, or is it the power elite, which we today call the Deep
state? Who do you think is the agency
of social change? I'm sorry, who does Rothbard say
is the agency of social change and do you agree with him?
Yeah, Rothbard says it is the people who are now called the
deplorables. So they are the people who are
shut out of the institutions of power.
And I think he's basically correct about that, at least in
terms of the mass base or the popular base for any kind of
resistance to not just the left, but also to the entire kind of
administrative state apparatus, the deep state and so forth.
Rothbard asks, you know, a question.
Basically, he investigates this alternative hypothesis which FA
Hayek had endorsed. Hayek believed that if you could
just educate the ruling class in the principles of classical
liberalism or the principles of freedom, that the existing
ruling class would kind of willingly surrender its
privileges or would take on, you know, a kind of more selfless
attitude towards the public and would not try to dominate them.
And I think Hayek was a little bit naive in terms of, you know,
what the actual self-interest and, you know, plausible
psychology of the ruling class was going to be.
So yes, you can. You when you give the ruling
class the ideas of classical liberalism, the ideas of liberty
and libertarianism, what does the ruling class actually do
with them? It simply finds a way to adapt
those ideas for the service of that ruling class itself.
So Rothbard's right, you need to go for the people who are
outsiders, the people who are, you know, actually actively
rejected and attacked by and oppressed by the the
establishment. And he's been proved right.
I think he's been vindicated by, you know, the rise of Donald
Trump. It's not because Donald Trump is
either a great paleo conservative philosopher or
certainly not a great, you know, sort of Roth Barty and
libertarian. But Trump is someone who
understands instinctively that you need to connect with this,
you know, base of Americans who are being, you know, shut out
from power and actually being demonized.
These people are the ones who can, you know, help to elect
someone who actually is going to disrupt the system.
And with Trump, you know, a lot of it is an instinctual
disruption. It's not, again, that he's
someone who studied Murray Rothbard, who studied, you know,
Paul Gottfried or Sam Francis. He's just someone who
instinctively understands how the power structure in
Washington and in, you know, the financial world, how it works
and what's necessary in order to shake it up.
There is a general theory referred to as the iron law of
oligarchy, and I've seen people both on the left and right.
Of course, the left always talks about these institutions,
education, healthcare. This should be decided by the
people, not just a few elite. Even Steve Bannon said the
problem is the Federal Reserve, which piqued my interest, to
which he said the problem is you only have a few elites running
this. It's the people who need to be
in charge of the central bank. However, there's an iron law of
oligarchy, which simply says all complex organizations,
regardless of how democratic they are when started,
eventually develop into oligarchies.
Since no sufficiently large and complex organization can
function purely as a direct democracy, power within an
organization will always get delegated to individuals within
that group, elected or otherwise.
What are your thoughts on the iron law of oligarchy?
And is this something that just makes if this law is real, then
all of leftism is completely irrelevant to anything we should
consider? What are your thoughts on this?
Well, I think the left, you know, would find the iron law of
oligarchy inconvenient in terms of its rhetoric.
So the left wants to say that all of its agenda is actually
the people's agenda. And of course, this goes all the
way back to Rousseau. Rousseau says basically all of
these ideas that are Rousseau's own ideas about reshaping
society, He says these are going to be the ideas of the general
will. Well, you know, who speaks for
the general will. Apparently Rousseau has
nominated himself. It's a little more complicated
than that, but that's that's the gist of it.
That's the bottom line. And likewise today, I think, you
know, a lot of progressives would say, well, they do say
that, you know, they want to defend democracy and that they
stand for, you know, the people themselves.
But in fact, you know, obviously this is a self appointed left
wing progressive elite, which, you know, has its own agenda
that most Americans have never heard of or that most Americans
would find bizarre, or perhaps, you know, something they want to
oppose. But most Americans are just
politically disengaged. They're not, you know, they're
not the ones driving all of these initiatives.
Instead, the people who are driving these left wing
progressive ideas are, you know, at the intellectual level, the
the universities and and the law schools and at the political
level, they are the Democratic Party itself and the various,
you know, apparatus of the progressive movement.
Now for the right, you know, there are problems here as well,
because, you know, if you are a right wing populist and you're
talking about giving more power to the people, the iron law of
oligarchy would seem to say, well, you know, you can't really
do that. I think the one thing that does,
you know, sort of it doesn't completely negate the iron law
of oligarchy, but it does limit the damage of the iron law of
oligarchy. The one thing that helps is
federalism and decentralization. So it's true that, you know, any
kind of large organization is going to be run by, you know, a
kind of small elite. But the answer to that is to
have smaller organizations, including smaller political
organizations. Now, the reason why I favor, and
I like to use the word federalism rather than a kind of
secessionism that would break everything down into the
smallest possible political units is that I think there
actually is a lot of truth in, you know, to be derived from the
experience of the ancient city states, for example, in Greece
and also from the city states of Renaissance Italy.
In terms of if you have too small of a political polity,
political community, you're going to have a constant
struggle between the few and the many, which is going to lead to,
you know, a kind of cycle of revolutions.
Tyrants will occasionally emerge in order to side usually with
the people against the few, but sometimes the other way around.
And also these, you know, very small units have a hard time
defending themselves if they get attacked by empires or by
barbarian hordes from abroad or by, you know, any number of
larger external forces. When they succeed in defending
themselves, they do so in the way that Athens did, you know,
kind of building a, an alliance system to fend off the Persian
Empire. And this is told, you know, in
Herodotus, Herodotus histories, you can build an effective
coalition among city states that can repulse a big empire.
But when you do that, you then wind up with another problem,
which is that some of the powers, some of the cities that
were most important in that old coalition, are now in a position
to bully the people who were their junior partners in that
coalition. And that's basically exactly
what the city state of Athens does after defeating the
Persians, where, you know, suddenly the Athenians are, you
know, demanding money from their allies.
And when the allies aren't paying up, they're pressuring
them and then attacking them. So you get into this kind of
civilizational war, the the Peloponnesian War in Greece as a
result of a coalition, an alliance which starts to turn
into an Athenian empire. It's one of the most amazing
contradictions that I've come across with the left.
They say monopolies are really bad.
They lead to higher prices and lower quality than you would
otherwise get under more competitive circumstances.
Then they say Washington, DC should have a complete monopoly
over the lives of 330 million strangers.
Anyone who even talks about secession is basically George
Lincoln, Rockwell, or Jefferson Davis.
It's like you just said, monopolies were bad and now
you're afraid of competitors. It's just unbelievable.
Well, I love what Rothbard does. He sort of starts introducing
you to this strategy when he talks about John C Calhoun's
disquisition on government, summarizing it as the very fact
of government and of taxation creates inherent conflict
between 2 great classes, those who pay taxes and those who live
off them. The net taxpayers versus the net
tax consumers. The bigger government gets,
Calhoun noted, the greater and more intense the conflict
between these two social. The reason I brought this up is
every time we hear this is the most important election of our
lifetime, well, as the government keeps growing, it's
now the most important election ever because the government's
that much bigger. And in four more years it will
be the most important election because the state keeps growing
and this is increasing the conflict within society.
My question is, when it comes to conservatives, people on the
right who value civilization over barbarism, shouldn't they
see the state as the central cause of conflict in society?
Well, if Calhoun and Rothbard were completely correct, that
would be the case. The trouble is that the state
comes into being in the 1st place as a result of somebody's
interest. And at that point, we're talking
about before you have someone who's in a position to use the
apparatus of the state to take taxes, for example, from other
people. So the state, you know, is a
thing that evolves as a result of the interest of people who
already have something they want to protect, usually property.
And you can see this historically, you know, in the
Middle Ages. You can see it in the
development of the modern nation state.
You know, Karl Marx talks about the state being the executive
committee of the bourgeoisie. He sees it as being a extension
of the class interest of the leading bourgeois.
Now, Marx, of course, is not someone with whom we typically
agree, but there actually is a lot of precedent, you know, even
in John Locke and certainly going back to the classical
world for saying that you're going to have a pre-existing
power elite which decides it wants to start creating a state
in order to protect, first of all, the power that already has.
Once it's created the state, it then may have additional means
to be able to amplify its power. But the other thing that happens
though, is that once a existing elite creates a state, the state
then becomes a competitor with as well as an ally to that older
elite. And I think that's what explains
things like crony capitalism, for example.
So yes, there are there are businesses, there are economic
interests that want to maintain the state, that get a lot out of
it. But then there are others who
are victimized by the state and really would like to be
independent of it. One of the things Murray
Rothbard always noted was that in fact, corporate America is
often an enemy of American liberty, an enemy of capitalism,
an enemy of free markets, precisely because this power
elite knows how to to use the state to its own advantage.
And the the flip side to this as well, which you find is
discussed by Rothbard in that essay he's talking about, you
know, why is it that ordinary people who vastly outnumber the
power elite, why do they go along with these things?
If you if you think of it in terms of pure coercion, it
doesn't make any sense because there are not enough, you know,
members of the government, although you're right, it's
constantly growing. But Even so, if there are not
enough members of the government itself to physically coerce
every single person who is going along with the government into
going along with it. So something else has to account
for why people are willing to continue to put up with the
government that we have. Rothbard says it's as a result
of propaganda and myth making and ideological indoctrination.
I I think Rothbard does mention briefly at least the
universities in his essay, but certainly they're a very large
part of what's going on and making people more malleable and
more accepting of power. But the other element of this
too is that the pre state elite which creates the state in the
1st place usually has economic and other means of incentivizing
people even before the state comes into being.
So in fact, you know, I think there are economic relationships
as well as the power of propaganda and the power of
actual coercion that all come into play in accounting for why
people go along with the state to the extent that they do.
Even with all of the depredations that the state is
clearly guilty of, not only in terms of the taxes that it
withdrawals from people, but also the interference that it
has in their lives and their families and their happiness.
Yes, Rothbard says. Herein lies the critical role of
intellectuals when it comes to explaining why there's this
double standard for the state and why you should uniquely obey
this organization. He pins it mainly on the
intellectuals. I know Lick Nixon was quoted a
number of times as saying, well, the real power in this country
is not the Congress, it's not the courts, it's the media.
As far as where the power really lies in opinion moulding, where
do you see it as? Well, I agree with that, that
one of the things that's happened is that, you know, the
modern state, which is different from, you know, kind of the
medieval feudal state. In the medieval feudal state,
you know, the, the ruling class were basically land owners.
And so the state was based upon, you know, and political power
was based upon who was claiming to, you know, have ownership of
the land. Their ownership was claimed, of
course, through military force. So, you know, the King of
England, for example, from William the Conqueror onwards,
claimed to be the ultimate owner of all of the land in England.
But then he would grant large amounts of the land to his
barons, the people who were, you know, kind of his chief military
supporters. And they in turn would then kind
of act as local, you know, rulers in their own districts.
In theory, the king was over them, but in practice they were
often, you know, so powerful themselves that they can resist
the king or in some cases even overthrow the king.
What happens as you get into the, the early modern period in
the Renaissance and then, you know, in the 15th century, 16th
century onwards, is that you have a rise of new powers that
kings in alliance with people who are now basically becoming
the first capitalists who are able to raise money, who are
dealing in, in credit and debt merchants who are becoming
wealthier and wealthier as a result of stability.
That you have, you know, the wealth which kings are then able
to ally themselves with, which they're then able to purchase
mercenary armies and actually build up citizen armies as well.
And that these larger military forces are then able to crush
these barons, these, you know, land owners who had previously
been characteristic of feudalism, which was very
fragmentary. And so, you know, in, in, in
conjunction, kings and capitalists are able to create,
you know, the first stage of the modern state.
What then happens, however, is that, you know, for the people
who are, you know, from wealthy towns, they say, well, we should
have more power. You know, what the heck is the
king doing for us that we can't do for ourselves?
Therefore, parliament should be more powerful than the king.
Parliament should be the one that's raising taxes and that's
paying for the armies. So there's this process, you
know, of the creation of the modern state out of the old, you
know, feudalism and monarchies. But once again, once the the
modern state is created, the officials of the modern state,
the deep state, the people who are basically permanent
bureaucrats, people who are lifetime military officials,
they're able to say, wait a minute, well, maybe we do need
these businessmen still in order to provide us with money.
We don't want to kill the golden goose that, you know, the gold,
the goose that's laying the golden egg.
We still depend on them and we still have this relationship
with the economic elite. We still want them to continue
to, you know, make their employees answerable to us.
But we're able to assert, assert ourselves simply by the fact
that we control the state, that we are the ones who actually
have direct control over the army.
We're the ones who have direct control over the judges and the
legal apparatus. And therefore, what starts out
as being perhaps the capitalist class creating the state as an
agent for itself. The agent then takes over from
the principal and says, you know, now where does the power
lie? And I think that's kind of
basically what we see, you know, throughout the modern era is
that the the state tries to kill its own father in a way.
It's got an Oedipus complex. It wants to slay the capitalists
who built it and, you know, create itself as an independent
power. And of course, this
recapitulates what had happened, you know, at the end of the
Middle Ages were basically the kings destroyed their own barons
and made alliances, which then ultimately proved fatal to
themselves. That's where we are now.
Is that the state, especially the permanent, you know, sort of
administrative apparatus, is trying to tear itself free even
from the, you know, sort of centers of wealth that had once
been so essential to maintaining the state's power?
Rothbard's final word on intellectuals is intellectuals,
academics and the media are not all motivated by truth alone.
Economic interests, as well as their interests in prestige,
power and admiration are wrapped up in the present welfare
warfare state system. This is his discussion on the
unholy alliance between intellectuals and the state.
The intellectuals need the reliable income and the
prestige. The state needs its intellectual
defense. The other strategy Rothbard
talks about as being used, but something he doesn't support is
the Fabian Freedom strategy, where people assume the Fabian
socialists basically slowly nudge.
People like George Bernard Shaw slowly nudged the British
government into growing and growing and growing.
They didn't make their demands explicit.
They sort of started off small and slowly but surely, as a wolf
in sheep's clothing brought the British state to socialism,
there are people who say, well, we should just do the same exact
thing in the opposite direction. What does Rothbard say is the
shortcoming to this strategy, and what are your thoughts?
Yeah, Rothbard says. There's an asymmetry here that
basically, you know, people like George Bernard Shaw and the
Fabians, we're only trying to convince the British government
to do things that the British government already wanted to do.
So the interests of the folks who already had power were
aligned with those of the Fabian socialists.
The Fabian socialists were just a lot more sophisticated and
perhaps more farsighted about where they were going to take
society. But the natural, you know,
incentives that the ruling class already had, we're going to
point them in the direction of consolidating and expanding
their power anyway. Rothbard says the problem with
trying to do this in reverse is that of course, those incentives
are the opposite. The people who have power, they
had every reason in the world to listen to the Fabian socialists
who are telling them to take more and more and keep
expanding. They have every, every reason in
the world to reject the people who are telling them stop
expanding and in fact, give up your I'll gotten gains, give up
your power. So it doesn't work in reverse.
There, there are some complexities, you know,
intellectuals, they they want Rothbard's exactly right.
They, they do want money and they do want influence.
They really want prestige. There is libertarians and
conservatives often talk about, you know, the natural
inequalities among people. People have different talents.
Different talents lead to different performance in the
workplace, which then leads to of different economic outcomes.
And this would be true even in the most fair possible system.
So even an anarcho capitalist would say, you know, inequality
is part of human nature in terms of outcomes.
And you know, you can't complain about that.
That is, that's the just way things should be because people
are different. They have different interests,
they have different abilities. It's also the case that people
have differences in terms of ambition.
Some people, in fact I think most people want to just get on
with their lives, get on with the things that are important to
them personally and their, their sense of well-being does not
depend upon being above other people.
Or at least it minimally depends on that.
It's not really about that. But there are other folks who
just have naturally a heck of a lot more of ambition.
And these people are always eager to find ways to combine
their thirst for ambition with institutions that will deliver,
you know, a social status commensurate with that thirst
for ambition. So that's why intellect, that's
one reason why intellectuals love the state.
Intellectuals already think of themselves in their own heads as
being the ruling class. And it really irritates them.
And Rothbard, you know, gets at this and is quite right.
Rothbard says they are. They're they're so bitter about
the fact that the market does not reward them to the extent
that they themselves believe they should be rewarded.
They think everybody should be falling at their feet and
fawning over them and saying these intellectuals are the best
thing that they've got. They're literally God's gift to
humanity. And yet people are not giving
these intellectuals all the money that you would expect to
come with that kind of Worshipful status.
So the intellectuals want to ally with the state.
They want to support the state and they want to, you know,
insinuate themselves into the state so that they can enjoy the
status that they think is appropriate for the ambitions
that they have and for the genius they believe they
possess. So the arrogance of
intellectuals and this, you know, sometimes even libertarian
intellectuals can be Co opted by this and they often are.
And then again, you know, even the language of freedom, even
the rhetoric of freedom can be corrupted and put to the use of
the ruling class in the state because, you know, ambition is
something that, you know, allows you to turn people in a very
corrupt direction. Rothbard says therefore, in
addition to converting intellectuals to the cause, the
proper course for the right wing opposition must necessarily be a
strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and
excitement. A strategy, in short, of rousing
the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites
that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them
and ripping them off. How does Rothbard say we could
inflamed the passions of the masses in such a direction?
And this is where Rothbard is very excited by the potential
for populist politicians, especially right wing populist
politicians, to basically galvanized a movement against
this whole state apparatus and the whole, you know, the deep
state, not only in government itself, but also in the Academy
and in the media and sort of throughout, you know, the
establishment. So, you know, by having a
populist politician who goes out there and the politician may not
have a theoretically very good ideas.
I mean, that's a separate question.
But simply by, you know, saying, you know what, not only does the
emperor have no clothes, but the emperor is actually trying to
steal your clothes or is trying to kind of set fire to your own
home. That kind of, you know, rhetoric
that connects with the people because the people already know
that that's true, or at least millions of them know that.
And yet they can't find someone to express it.
They certainly can't find representatives of the ruling
class who are going to say things like that.
And it's one one reason why Donald Trump is the phenomenon
that he is. He comes from outside of
politics. He's wealthy.
You'll often see critics say, oh, Donald Trump must be a
complete fraud because he's wealthy.
You know, he went to the Wharton School of Business.
He, you know, is clearly part of the elite himself.
That's true in certain respects, but he he is enough of, he's
confident enough of himself that he is willing to annoy and
outrage and scandalize everyone within his own class.
And in some ways, you know, that that may be a result of a
certain ambition or arrogance on Trump's own part, but that's
actually kind of a healthy counterpart to the whole
systematic ambition and the whole systematic arrogance of
the entire ruling class. So Trump is a mutant branch of
the ruling class in a way that is causing trouble for all the
rest of them by basically saying, you know what, all these
other people who are have my kind of background, they're all
frauds and they're all causing massive damage to this country.
They're getting us into endless wars.
They can never win any of these wars.
These wars are killing Americans.
They're also killing people in other countries.
They are, you know, just damaging and they're they're
threatening civilization itself. There's a possibility of World
War three. This is stuff that the American
elite, it really doesn't like to say.
It never says it, and it doesn't even like to hear it.
It is absolutely subversive to have someone like Donald Trump
going out there and talking about these kinds of ultimate
stakes involved in American politics.
And then, of course, you know, Trump says the same thing about
how we're being ripped off by China.
We're being ripped off by our own elites.
This is revolutionary rhetoric basically coming from Donald
Trump. Murray Rothbard anticipated that
he could see someone like Pat Buchanan as an early example of
that kind of right wing populism.
And Rothbard thought we need a lot more of that in the future.
Now, admittedly, you know, Rothbard would like to see
ultimately a libertarian populism prevail, and he would
like to see that right wing rhetoric combined with
libertarian ideas about market freedom.
But I think Rothbard understood, and it comes through in this
essay, that you have to start with what you have.
What you actually have is a right wing rhetoric that that,
you know, speaks to the people's alienation from the centers of
power and the culture of the centers of power, right?
It's not just the taxes that the big government is taking from
the people. It's also the the contempt, the
arrogance, the hatred that, you know, the ruling class and the
government exhibit towards Americans who are not part of
their club. And, you know, the word
deplorable is wonderful because it it speaks precisely to the
way, you know, the ruling class that controls government, looks
at ordinary people who are facing, you know, hardships in
terms of fentanyl and lost jobs, lost jobs, you know, not just
because of competition from abroad, but because they've been
told, you know, people like you are no longer wanted in this
country, that people like you are just, you know, you're
oppressors. You are, you are a living memory
of the America, you know, the American people of 50 years ago
or, or, or 100 years ago. And we don't like that.
We think that, you know, we progressives believe that, you
know, liberation for all Americans and for all the world
depends upon the extinction of people like you who are still an
anchor to the past. It's so important to address
that humiliation or the arrogance of the elites.
I remember just having originally been an Obama
supporter. I was watching him talk about
how inequality is really bad. And I'm doing this on my couch.
And I'm just like, is there anything more unequal than me
going to college exhausted, not making money, and this guy who's
president of the United States has the right to make executive
orders and the right to tax. It was such a blatant like I do
not think I see this. The second time was when he got
in front of cameras and said, you know, the gender wage gap is
not myth, it's math. Women earn $0.77 on the dollar
for every dollar a man makes. And I just go, hold on you, Mr.
Columbia, graduate, Harvard graduate, president of America,
you don't actually believe that, do you?
But you're expecting me to believe it.
Those moments just stuck out in my mind as so insulting.
Not to mention when Bush said September 20th of 2001, they
hate us for what they see in this chamber right here, a
democratically elected government.
Their leaders are self appointed.
They hate our freedom to vote, our freedom to disagree.
That is just so insulting on every single level.
Or when they say, well, this is the most divided the country's
ever been. Well, there was a civil war
which was about 600,000 lives. I'm constantly insulted by these
people. So who does Rothbard say has so
far done this the best when it comes to obviously Trump is the
best example today, but he wrote this in 1992.
Who was he saying using as evidence that this can really be
done? It was chiefly Pat Buchanan, and
Buchanan was, you know, think about all the things that
Buchanan talked about in 1992 when he first ran against George
HW Bush for the Republican nomination.
So many of the themes that he was speaking about back then,
you know, more than 30 years ago now, are the themes that brought
Donald Trump to power in 2016. He was talking about
immigration. He was talking about trade, but
he was especially focused on war.
And, you know, America had the chance after the end of the Cold
War, you know, regardless of whatever, you know, Cold War
inertia had built up in 19 ninety, 1991, you now had a
chance to completely change the way that America engaged with
the world. You didn't have to have the same
sort of wartime mentality that the Cold War had had.
But what did George HW Bush do? He got us directly into, you
know, you know, this world policing ambition, which, you
know, you get the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
You get, you know, the idea that America is going to be promoting
regime change all around the planet and that we're going to
not only keep NATO, even though the enemy that NATO was created
to, to block Soviet Union has now gone.
We're not only going to keep NATO, we're going to expand
NATO. And then we're going to be
shocked when anyone looks at this NATO expansion and says,
Gee, that kind of looks like aggression.
That kind of looks like a hostile move when you're
continuing to build up this alliance even though the enemy
that you said this alliance was meant to defeat is now gone.
It reminds me a lot. Again, looking to Greek history,
you know, the Athenians, they say, well, look, we're only,
we're only building up this military alliance that we're
running because we need to keep all of Greece safe against the
Persians. But then, you know, they keep
building it up and demanding more money.
And it's like, well, wait a minute, You clearly are starting
to assert power over your neighbors.
This is not about protecting us from a foreign threat.
This is about dominating us here at home.
One of the key things I think you brought up that I want to
emphasize, the progressives, the left, the statists, they think
that they can just buy off discontented Americans.
So, you know, when people say I'm so angry that I'm being lied
to constantly by Barack Obama, by these generals who say that
we're willing, we're winning in Afghanistan, you know, it's 20
years. And they say, oh, yeah, we're
winning. Next year is going to be
perfect. It's going to be over.
We're going to have total victory.
People get ticked off at being lied to.
And even if those people are, you know, receiving a check in
the mail from the government, as happened during COVID, or if
they're, you know, getting welfare benefits or whatever,
they still know that their dignity as human beings is being
insulted by these people who lie to them and these people who
really can't disguise their contempt and their hatred for
them. So it's very much about not just
money, which the left thinks it can solve that problem, if no
other way by just printing money and mailing it to people.
Right. But but it's also about human
relationships and the fact that the left has this, you know,
such a blinding contempt and such obvious contempt for other
people that these other people say, you know what?
I don't care if, you know, if I if I need the money you're
giving me through Social Security or through Medicare,
I'm I'm going to oppose you. I'm going to vote against you
because I do not like the way you talk to me and you talk
about me. And that's why you get this
ironic situation. You know, a lot of progressives
and even some libertarians like to make fun fun of the Tea Party
a decade ago. And they like to make fun of
Trump voters. And they say, oh, these guys are
just, you know, these voters are also big government people who
want more Social Security. And they want to keep big
government off my, you know, my Medicare or whatever.
But what people are saying is that, you know, we can't be
bought off just because we're receiving these benefits.
Maybe we want to continue receiving them.
Maybe we think we need to, but we still do not want to be
treated the way progressives and the state basically are treating
us. AJP Taylor wrote a book called
Bismarck the Statesman in which he says that this was Bismarck's
intention to usher in a welfare state in order to decrease the
likelihood that the German population would rise against
the Kaiser. Do you know if there's evidence
for this? I heard even Paul Krugman in his
book The Conscience of a Liberal says this.
I've never seen primary sources. Do you know if that's true?
I'm not sure I can cite an ideal primary source, but it is
something that many people, except it's a, you know, a
pretty. I don't want to say it's the
purely orthodox view of what Bismarck was up to, but
certainly is it's well documented and lots of
historians would agree with it. Bismarck basically.
So what happens in all of Europe between the French Revolution
and essentially World War One is that you have a constant
pressure towards revolution. And this pressure is if it
confuses people in the 21st century because this
revolutionary ferment often is a combination of four different
things. It's a combination of
nationalism and also liberalism and also socialism and democracy
as well. And these are things that we
think of as being incompatible with one another or, you know,
they're not supposed to mix together.
But basically all of these forces were against the, you
know, sort of kings and aristocrats of the old, you
know, order in Europe, the order before the French Revolution.
So all four of those forces were against kings and aristocrats
and, of course, the established privileges of the Catholic
Church. So you can see why those four
forces all seem to be revolutionary.
And basically, by the end of the 19th century, there were
pragmatists who said, you can't stop all four of these
revolutionary forces, but you can choose which ones to, you
know, emphasize over the others. So Bismarck was very worried
about socialism, for example, gaining so much momentum that it
would lead to, you know, the Bolshevik revolution hadn't
happened yet. But it was clear that, you know,
you could read Karl Marx and you can see these guys are serious
about revolution. They're serious about
expropriating all property owners.
They really mean what they say. So Bismarck said, you know what,
we're going to blunt the appeal of socialism and of the kind of
welfarism that the the communists are promising by
creating a welfare state that is not going to be socialist, or at
least not going to be as socialist as the hard left is
calling for. And that's going to, you know,
sort of deprive the communists of their biggest issue.
That's what what Bismarck was trying to do.
He was trying to create. He wanted to combine, you know,
certain amounts of limited nationalism with enough
socialism to stave off any kind of revolutionary left wing
socialist movement. Interestingly enough I was just
reading recently, Bismarck was very anti imperialistic.
He hated the idea of a more unified Germany creating
colonies all around the world in imitation of the British Empire.
Bismarck thought that would be a disastrous over extension.
And he also thought that, you know, some degree of existing
federalism, even though he was a great nationalist who was, you
know, unifying Germany, he didn't want to have nationalism
in Germany go so far as to completely obliterate some of
the older sort of cultural units within Germany.
So Bismarck, in a way, created a monster he could not control,
and that wound up actually being much more dangerous than he
himself had intended it to be. Rothbard talks about who is the
most hated man in all of American history.
David Duke. Nope, he says.
It's not even all these terrible right wing people.
It's Joseph McCarthy. That's who they really hate.
Now, the reason this was so interesting to me is because
whenever I ask leftists, I'm like, you think you don't like
Trump? I, I cite Connor Freeman at the
Libertarian Institute. I go, here's evidence that oh,
and the Watson Institute at Brown University, Donald Trump
increased civilian deaths in Afghanistan by 330% from 2017 to
2020. Isn't that unbelievable?
And they don't care about that at all.
I'm like, well, how about this drone strike in Yemen, which
Trump authorized, which killed people?
How about killing Soleimani, almost provoking the war with
Iran after he was on Soleimani's side fighting against ISIS?
And they don't really care, yet they hate Trump.
They hate McCarthy more than anything else.
Why is it that the left hates trivial things about these
people when there's so much, when there's so many better
examples? Yeah, I think a lot of it does
go back to what we were discussing earlier, that many of
these progressives are folks who think of themselves, you know,
as being intellectuals. Their credential, they went to
universities, they got good degrees.
They're bitter about the fact that the market by itself is not
rewarding them the way they feel like they should be rewarded.
And for that matter, they may be bitter about the fact that, you
know, traditional institutions say, hey, you may be a clever
college kid, but that doesn't mean we're going to change, you
know, the way of life in small town Ohio or someplace else just
because you've got some clever idea about changing the world
and improving the world. So what these people, you know,
fixate on are the symbols of class and the symbols of who
you're with and who you're against.
And they see that Donald Trump, you know, regardless of his
actions, you know, even if his actions are similar in some
cases to what Barack Obama or, you know, other, you know, sort
of Democrats who used, you know, military force, which they all
do. Of course, even when when Trump
is the one, you know, who is resorting to military actions,
they don't focus on that which they could.
I mean, they certainly did with George W Bush.
But instead, they leave even that aside.
And what they want to focus on are the things that show Donald
Trump has a connection to these Americans were being demonized
and who are being said to be, you know, again, a kind of
living reminder. That's the thing, right?
The left, look at how crazy they went about statues, statues in
2020. Now we can talk about, you know,
police brutality. We can talk about, you know,
issues regarding, you know, policing in general.
I obviously, you know, I'm a I'm a right wing conservative.
I do not agree with the left and their view.
I think, you know, most of the time these police officers were
responding to actual criminals who actually were dangerous.
But but there's a real issue here.
Certainly real abuses of human beings by police officers are
things that have to be recognized and addressed.
But the, you know, sort of Black Lives Matter movement and all
these rioters, they started, you know, they started trashing
businesses, of course, but then they went after inanimate
statues as if inanimate statues were the things that were
oppressing them. Well, of course, what they
didn't like was what the statues could be interpreted as standing
for. And if a statue is bad in terms
of what it stands for, what about actual living human beings
who are more statues? What about, you know, the, you
know, auto worker who has politically correct views on
sexuality or religion or anything else?
The auto worker in, you know, Ohio who has those kinds of
attitudes or in Pennsylvania or in Michigan.
You know, these people again, are they are the living statues
of these? You know, obviously it was not
just, you know, Confederate statues that were being torn
down. It was statues of, you know, all
sorts of people, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln,
founding fathers, I mean, you know, any kind of reminder of
America having a past and having, you know, come to where
it is today through where it had been before.
That is something the left wants to destroy.
It really is. I mean, again, it's it seems so
cliche to to invoke George Orwell in 1984.
But look at the whole logic of the story that Orwell is telling
in that book. The thing with cliches is that
you become so used to them you forget their original truth with
1984. Go back and reread it and look
at how Orwell is saying the destruction of the past is the
key to controlling the future and basically depriving people
of any sense of who they are and how they can resist you.
And the left, you know, feels exactly that way.
And it wants to destroy not only the symbols of the past, it
wants to destroy the memory of the past through indoctrination.
And it also wants to destroy, you know, any populations that
still remind people of America, you know, with the kind of
workforce that it had, for example, in the mid 20th century
as opposed to the 21st century. So the working class and, you
know, white people, Christians, all these groups, they're hated
not just, you know, for, you know, what would be considered
racist reasons. That's certainly an element of
it. But there's also this
fundamental idea that these groups all represent the past.
And it's fundamentally the past that progressives hate.
They want to destroy and they want to, you know, have a blank
slate with which to create something new that they think is
going to be much better. But in fact, what they're what
they're driving us to is, you know, not a left wing utopia,
but a condition of, you know, sort of chaos, crime,
unhappiness on the part not only of the people who are being, you
know, taxed and who are being, you know, called oppressors, but
also, you know, it's funny how much unhappiness there is even
in the ruling class. You look at how many, you know,
progressive women who vote for the Democratic Party, how many
of them are on powerful psychoactive medications because
they're so personally unhappy and so personally disturbed.
The left wing is creating, I think, you know, a a state and a
society that is profoundly unhappy, profoundly troubled,
profoundly wracked by divisions, by crime, and yet they want to
create even more of that by getting rid of the old sources
of stability. Yes, and for all the BLM
advocates watching trying to expand their worldview.
I keep trying to ask you guys men are 95% of those killed by
police doesn't disprove discrimination.
Please I'm begging for an answer for you people to enlighten me.
Final thing that Rothbard discusses in his speech here is
how the old right was Co opted. He says it was by William F
Buckley and the National Review infiltrating making it
neoconservative. Rothbardians frequently cite the
Party in the Deep Blue Sea 1952 article by Buckley where he says
we have got to accept big government for the duration for
neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged given
our present government skills except through the instrument of
a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.
The question is raised, Does it make a great deal of difference
if we lose our freedom to a Georgian bandit or a Missouri
ignorance? What is it that we should know
about how National Review and the neocons replace the old
right? Yeah.
So the story that Rothbard tells is rather oversimplified.
And here I have. I've come to discover a lot of
nuances or a lot of facts that I think, you know, somewhat alter
the picture. So Rothbard says that there is a
sharp discontinuity between what he calls the original right and
then the Cold War, right. That was, you know, largely
coalesced around National Review.
There actually, however, was an organic transition.
You had a lot of figures who were not interventionists during
World War Two who later became much more supportive of the Cold
War and of interventionism when facing exclusively the Soviet
Union and the idea of an expanding communism, especially
an expanding communism in China. So people like Henry Regnury,
for example, would fall into that category.
There were even people who were closely associated with HL
Mencken and with Albert Che NOC who had the same sort of
evolution. There's a guy that no one's ever
heard of called Paul Palmer, who is actually referred to a couple
of times in some of Rothbard's work.
And Rothbard praises him because basically he was kind of a, you
know, a lesser known member of the old right or the original
right. But Palmer actually even before,
even before the end of World War 2, is starting to become a Cold
Warrior and is starting to see say that, you know, the Soviet
Union is a different kind of threat than just, you know, sort
of national, you know, border disputes and invasions going on,
you know, in Europe or elsewhere.
So there are a lot of people who treat the Cold War quite
differently from, you know, World War 2 or and certainly
World War One. By the way, I do think there is
some, you know, and it's too much of A discussion for today's
podcast. But I do think there are some
valid reasons for treating Soviet communism differently
generally. You know, I think that a Cold
War that emphasized not a military approach, but the idea
that you have to really call out the Soviet Union for exactly the
kind of tyranny that it is. That's the right approach.
And that, you know, you may, in fact, need to strengthen Western
Europe and prevent it from becoming prey to, you know,
Soviet intimidation. There's a lot that needs to be
done. So the defensive part of the
Cold War, I think, is very well justified, as is sort of the
propaganda war, you know, in Europe, at least during the Cold
War. But then the Cold War also
becomes military adventurism and nation building in Vietnam and a
number of other interventions which are disastrous.
Rothbard says that the Cold War right was a completely new
thing. It is partly new because a lot
of the Cold War right was drawn from ex communists who had left
behind communism. They said communism is evil.
You know, it's taken me a long time to recognize this, but now
I do and that I want to impose, oppose communism no matter what.
So because communism continued to be such a large part of their
worldview previously it was the thing they supported.
Now it's the thing that they oppose.
Some of these, you know, anti communist ex communists remain
obsessed with communism and they're not as acutely aware of
the dangers to American liberty and American traditions that are
involved in embracing a very hawkish Cold War foreign policy.
So this influx of, you know, new ex communists into the right
does start to change things as well.
Rothbard puts a lot of emphasis. And here, ironically enough,
Rothbard actually agrees with Bill Buckley's self estimation.
Buckley was proud of at times. He was proud of having
supposedly exiled and excommunicated various groups
from the Cold War conservative coalition.
And Rothbard actually agrees with that.
He only, he says it was a bad thing.
He says, you know, Buckley got rid of the John Birch Society.
Buckley got rid of Iran supporters.
Buckley got rid of the non interventionists.
But actually that story is not as true as Bill Buckley wanted
it to be. And it's not as true as Rothbard
thought it was either. So certainly within National
Review, Buckley was not quite alone, but he was, I think,
pretty much in the minority in terms of wanting to get rid of
the John Birch Society. And, you know, they tried to do
this to get the John Birch Society to have less leverage
over the Barry Goldwater campaign, for example.
They sort of failed. Goldwater and his campaign were
by no means, you know, simply a tool of the John Birch Society.
But there were a lot of John Birch people who were involved
in the Goldwater campaign. And the John Birch Society
continued to be a very, you know, important component of the
grassroots American right until the death of its founder.
And then subsequently the death of Larry McDonald, who takes
over the John Birch Society afterwards and is killed in a
very strange incident in which he is in a civilian aircraft
that has shot down over Soviet airspace.
So again, that's a whole story for another podcast.
But the John Birch Society was not really destroyed in the way
that Buckley and Rothbard both would talk about it as a result
of Buckley's attack on. Robert Welch, who was the leader
of the John Birch Society and then about the society itself.
So there's a more complicated story there.
I'm Rand, of course, never thought of herself as a
conservative. That was not a word that she
would ever use. She was not necessarily eager to
be part of the National Review Coalition, you know, at any
point. So to say that Buckley exiled
her or excommunicated her, that's also not really true.
She was she was a product into herself, a brand and a set of
ideas into herself. And then with the non
interventionist right, again, there is a curious and very odd
transition phase between the non interventionist right and the
Cold War right. And Buckley himself is actually
part of this. Buckley's father, Will Buckley
was a very strong non interventionist.
Buckley was very strongly shaped by his father.
So Buckley's Catholicism and Buckley's commitment to free
markets and even a a certain element of libertarianism to be
found in Bill Buckley are all inheritances from his father.
And his father had all those elements to an even stronger
degree plus than under interventionism.
So, you know, Will Buckley, Bill Buckley senior was actually, you
know, precisely one of these original right folks that
Rothbard talks about, one of the first people to publish Bill
Buckley as a as a paid author. One of the first people to put
Bill Buckley's name into print nationally was Frank Chatorov.
And Frank Chatorov was a radical individualist.
He said he would punch in the nose of anyone who called to
make conservative. Chatorov was so much part of the
old non interventionist right that Chatorov even opposed World
War 2 after Pearl Harbor. So Chatorov had been the
president or the director of the Henry George School in in New
York City, which is still around.
And Chodorov was actually fired by the Henry George School
because he continued to be an opponent of World War 2.
And yet after World War 2, when Chodorov is still a radical
individualist, he's still very anti war.
Chodorov says that, look, if you want to defeat communism, you're
not going to do it by building as many bombs as the communists
built. You're going to do it by
basically teaching Americans the ideas of liberty, the ideas of
the Western tradition, and why Marxism and communism are wrong.
So that's why Chodorov actually is the impetus to founding an
organization that's originally called the Intercollegiate
Society of Individualists. It later becomes the
Intercollegiate Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which is my
employer today. But Chodorov is is the founder
of ISI. Bill Buckley is the person he
hires to be ISIS 1st president. And of course, Chaturov, as I
said, is also, you know, he's someone who publishes Buckley's
first paid work. So he's really a mentor of sorts
to Bill Buckley, even though he and Buckley come to have very
different views about the Cold War and Buckley continue to
honor Chaturov for quite a long time.
Buckley also, you know, this was not really well known in 1992
when when Rothbard wrote this essay and gave the speech that
the essay was originally delivered as.
But Buckley was also someone who, you know, he often would
publish members of the old original right in the pages of
National Review. The trouble is a lot of these
members of the old original right were much older by the
time National Review Review was founded in 1955.
S you know, Albert J Nacca died in 1945.
He was already gone. HL Mencken had had a stroke.
So he was not publishing very much in the 1950s or really
anything. A lot of folks like John T Flynn
were very much, you know, quite old by that point.
Buckley, you know, publish them sometimes, you know, other times
he would not publish them because of this disagreements on
on, you know, foreign policy during the Cold War.
But Buckley did not try to purge them or dishonor them or get rid
of them. And in fact, Buckley actually
continued to provide as much income, as much, you know, money
as he could to sustain a lot of these, you know, old members of
the original right who in many cases were quite economically
impoverished by the 1950s. I mean, the old right was so
principled that they would not cash Social Security checks.
So even though people like Isabel Patterson and Rose Wilder
Lane were being taxed by the new Social Security system and
having money taken away from them, they refused to cash the
checks when the money was sent back, you know, in the form of
Social Security payments. I Rand, of course, rather
infamously made the opposite decision.
She she said, hey, if I paid my taxes and I get to accept the
government checks that are sent to me, Well, some of the other
individual has said, you know, we will not cross that bridge.
We do not want to be seen taking government money because sets a
very bad example and it's morally corrupting even if
government has tax this money from us to begin with.
Yes, I got to say I would like to get some restitution from
these people. It would be hard to put that
check in the paper shredder. Check out the links in the
description. I was amazed I was really
brought the Mr. MacArthur was brought to my attention in July,
July 11th of this year when he made the case for JD Vance.
A lot of people said is it going to be Ramaswamy?
Is it going to be RFK? Who is Trump going to pick?
And days before Trump picks Vance, Mr. McCarthy had
predicted it and gives extensive reasoning in this excellent
article at the American Conservative.
Links to this as well as Mr. McCarthy's Twitter will be in
the description below. Thanks to everyone for watching
Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian
Institute. Mr. McCarthy, it has been a
pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.
Well, thank you. Not only have I enjoyed this
conversation, but you've actually helped me out a lot by
spurring me to go and revisit this classic Rothbard essay.
I was working on something recently about class theory and
libertarianism and right wing populism, and this essay, which
I've read before but hadn't revisited in about a decade or
so, is actually it provides me with a reminder of some of the
key components that I need to include in the essay I'm working
on right now. So I'm very grateful to you for
inviting me on the show and for causing me to revisit that
essay.