The Betrayal of the American Right [Hardcover]

Murray N. Rothbard (Author), Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2007

This remarkable piece of history will change the way you look at American politics. It shows that the corruption of American "conservatism" began long before George W. Bush ballooned the budget and asserted dictatorial rights over the country and the world. The American Right long ago slid into the abyss. Betrayal of the American Right is the full story, and the author is none other than Murray N. Rothbard, who witnessed it all first hand. He tells his own story and reveals that machinations behind the subversion of an anti-state movement into one that cheers statism of the worst sort. The book was written in the mid-1970s and is only now published for the first time. Each time a prospective publisher promised to go ahead, the deal fell through. Even so, it has been privately circulated for the 30 years since it was written - and everyone lucky enough to own a copy of the manuscript knew he had a treasure. People who have read it swear that it is the best account ever how the old right was subverted to become a propaganda branch of the state, not just recently but fifty years ago. So Rothbard's account is not only a critical historical document; it also has explosive explanatory power. According to Rothbard, the corruption of the right began in the ten years after the end of the Second World War. Before then, a strong movement of journalists, writers, and even politicians had formed during the New Deal and after. There was a burgeoning literature to explain why New Deal-style central planning was bad for American liberty. They also saw that central planning and war were linked as two socialistic programs. The experience of war was telling. Prices were controlled by central edict. Businesses were not free to buy and sell. Government spending went through the roof. The Fed's money machine ran constantly. The war was a continuation of the New Deal by others means. They learned that a president dictatorial enough to manipulate the country into war would think nothing of ending liberty at home. There were wonderful intellectuals in this movement: Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and dozens of others. This movement didn't want to conserve anything but liberty. They wanted to overthrow the alien regime that had taken hold of the country and restore respect for the Constitution. They believed in the free market as a creative mechanism to improve society. They favored a restoration of the gold standard, decentralized government, and peace and friendship with all nations (as George Washington wanted). Murray Rothbard recounts all this, and then enters into the picture. He was a central player in the unfolding events. As a young man, he first encountered the new generation of people on the right who departed dramatically from the old. They were the first "neoconservatives." They favored war as a means. They were soft on executive dictatorship. They considered economics rather trivial compared with the struggle against international foes. They found new uses for the state in the domestic realm as well. They like the CIA, the FBI, and no amount of military spending was enough for them. A leader of the movement William F. Buckley even called for a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" so long as Russia, which had been an alley in the war, had a communist system. This transformation was formative for Rothbard. He began an intellectual journey that would lead to a break from the movement that was now calling itself conservative. He studied with Ludwig von Mises during and after his graduate school years. He wrote a seminal book on economics. He wrote at a fevered pace for the popular press. By 1965, he found that he was pretty much alone in carrying on the Old Right vision. Most everyone else had died or had entered

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

into that long trajectory that would lead to George Bush. As Thomas Woods writes in the introduction, "It is not just a history of the Old Right, or of the anti-interventionist tradition in America. It is the story at least in part of Rothbard's own political and intellectual development: the books he read, the people he met, the friends he made, the organizations he joined, and so much more." Obviously, little of this has made it into the official history of the United States. The movement called the Old Right is rarely discussed or even acknowledged, except to be smeared as backwards and isolationist. Countless times we read that the American right was founded by National Review, and nothing of any merit existed before. In fact, the most consistent opponents of Harry Truman's early Cold War measures were on the ideological right. They saw the whole thing as a trick to keep government control and spending in place. They resisted every step. And they were precisely right: Truman's whole plan was to prevent Republican political advances by distracting people with trumped-up foreign threats. Among the resistors was Senator Robert Taft. He opposed the Truman Doctrine, Nato, the Marshall Plan, and he refused to back more military spending in times of peace. And who supported all these policies? It was people on the left, such as The Nation. The Left favored big government in the mode of FDR. The Right was against it. But how many historians know anything about these crucial years? How many know that the left and right changed place from the late 50s through the 1960s? Very few indeed. What Rothbard shows is that the cause of peace is our heritage, and that free markets has been united with the antiwar cause from the founding fathers through the Old Right and as late as the 1950s. There is so much in this book to appreciate but especially valuable are his comments on the left in the 1960s. There might have seemed to be some hope for some type of collaboration. They were against war and for civil liberties at a time when the right was becoming increasingly imperialist and warmongering. Rothbard explains his attempt to educate the left on economics. Alas, there was no hope. He had to go it alone and forge a completely new movement called libertarianism. Rothbard plays a much more important role in the history of American politics than is usually acknowledged. He is the link between the Old Right and the new libertarian movement of our times. It was Rothbard who brought Mises's work to the attention of a new generation, writing about his ideas and expanding them. It was Rothbard who worked not only as an intellectual but an activist. It shows what one man and a typewriter can do. This book has been the best-kept secret in political writing for the last half century. Now at last it can be revealed to the world. Betrayal of the America Right is the tell-all book that shows why and how the ideological world turned upside down.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 231 pages
• Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute; 1st edition (August 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933550139
• ISBN-13: 978-1933550138
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable history and autobiography, November 11, 2007

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Betrayal of the American Right (Hardcover)

More than a decade after his death, Murray Newton Rothbard continues to make important contributions to libertarian thought, in this case with a manuscript first written in the 1970s and newly published by the invaluable Ludwig von Mises Institute. In typical Rothbardian form, this book is packed with theory and history, but also full of storytelling, personalities, and the author's trademark good humor. It's a book that Rothbard's many fans will certainly enjoy, but could -- and should -- also be read with profit by thoughtful people all over America's political spectrum.

It might seem nonsensical to some to try to draw a distinction between "rightism" and "conservatism," but that's just evidence for Rothbard's main point: that the true form and legacy of the American Right has been hijacked and perverted -- "betrayed" -- by self-styled "conservatives." Not really "rightists" at all, Rothbard argues, modern "conservatives" are a segment of social democracy, accepting the fundamental premises of militarism, corporatism, mercantilism, fiat money, and expensive, intrusive, bureaucratic government at home to enable the Global Anti-Communist Crusade, as it then was, around the world.

As this new kind of "right wing" grew to prominence in the 1950s, Rothbard suddenly found himself redefined as a "left-winger," without having changed any of his own views. This book thus becomes, not only a history of the Right, but also (as editor Thomas E. Woods notes), the closest we'll presumably ever have to Rothbard's autobiography. Given that Rothbard was a man who wrote movie reviews as well as philosophical treatises, "The Betrayal of the American Right" introduces us to personalities, events, and the social dynamics of political groupings around New York City. There is even, to my surprise and delight, mention of an anarcho-capitalist flag design unveiled in the 1960s.

At the root, though, what really stood out for me in these pages is the -- otherwise suppressed -- history of what's come to be called the "Old Right." While modern conservatism teaches that the American Right descended in a straight line from Burke to Kirk then sprung afresh from the brow of William F. Buckley to be carved into the stone tablets of "National Review," there's really quite a bit more to it than that. I would love to find a way to get College Republicans and other young conservatives to read this book and discover, not only how much wider America's political spectrum really is, but also how different "NR conservatism" is from the roots of the American Right.

Rothbard here reminds us of many of the most important thinkers and writers of the pre-NR Right, erased from the canon by modern conservatism. How sad to think Hannity or Coulter are the best there is, when Nock, Mencken, Chodorov, Harper ... or indeed Mises and Rothbard ... are still fresh and relevant. (R. Taft and H. Buffett, N. Gingrich and T. DeLay: compare and contrast.) As in almost any Mises Institute book, the bibliography of "The Betrayal of the American Right" is one of the most rewarding chapters of all.

Finally, I should note something most reviewers don't comment on, and that is the beautiful design and typesetting of this, and again almost any Mises Institute, book. Mises Institute typography is distinctive and, I've found, exceptionally readable. Combined with Rothbard's equally-readable prose, it's a winning combination.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Betrayal of the American Right, January 13, 2008

By 

anarchteacher (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Betrayal of the American Right (Hardcover)

Contrary to popular belief, the betrayal of the American right and the Republican Party did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, his father George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, or Barry Goldwater. It began much earlier as this new book by the late Murray N. Rothbard details.

This is the fabulous book I have eagerly awaited almost thirty years. It meets my every expectation and confirmation of the brilliance of its author. Murray Rothbard remains unsurpassed in analytical insight and clarity of perception.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul often describes himself as belonging to the non-interventionist tradition of the "Old Right" in American politics, and that his hero or mentor in this regard is Ohio Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, son of President and Chief Justice of the United States William H. Taft.

To the mouthpieces of the mainstream news media with their shallow view of American political history, this is very perplexing. Their superficial knowledge of events rarely stretches beyond the Reagan years, if indeed that far back.

The "Old Right" arose in opposition to the welfare-warfare state of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal policies of domestic corporate statism and foreign imperial interventionism.

The "Old Right" Republicans in Congress, such as Senator Taft, Congressman Howard Buffett (father of the billionaire investor Warren Buffett), Congressman George Bender, and Congressman H. R. Gross, were pro-peace opponents of war, militarism, imperialism, and conscription. Reminiscent of Ron Paul, they fought against tyrannical centralization of power in the executive branch, and the undeclared, no-win Korean War as Paul has done with the Iraq War.

Rothbard describes there were lies and intelligence duplicity involved in the Korean conflict as there has been with the war in Iraq. Howard Buffett was convinced the disastrous war in Korea was aggressively launched by the U. S. as described in secret Senate Armed Services Committee classified testimony by CIA director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, much like the role played by George Tenent and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans concerning Iraq.

But after WWII this glorious tradition suffered crucial setbacks (such as the well-documented theft of the 1952 Republican nomination of Taft by the Eisenhower forces) and eventually in the early 1950s the "Old Right" was being replaced by a "New Right" of aggressive militarists committed to a global imperial role for the United States.

I have long believed that the secret role of the intelligence community (in particular that of CIA operative William F. Buckley's National Review magazine) in precipitating this decisive shift in opinion was crucial and Rothbard confirms these suspicions. This terrific new book details how this betrayal all came about. Originally written in the early 1970s and updated in the 1990s prior to his death, it has finally been published and is more timely than ever.

For a terrific description of the 1952 Republican Convention story and much more, see Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice Not An Echo, one of the true American classics of modern political publishing. While Schlafly's 1964 pamphlet was designed to advocate the presidential candidacy of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, it nevertheless remains an on-target expose' of how the "secret kingmakers," the northeastern seaboard anglophile Establishment of the Morgan/Rockefeller international bankers, relentlessly tried to destroy and sabotage the popular "Old Right" Republican forces in presidential elections from 1936 onward.

Another related book is Thomas Mahl's Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, which details the vast secret intelligence campaign of British intelligence, the Roosevelt administration, and the anglophile Establishment to push the United States into World War II and destroy the "Old Right" in the process. As pointed out above, these efforts were continued under the CIA, the successor to the WWII Office of Strategic Services.

The process continues today by the CIA's demonic spawn, the neocons, which dominate the Bush administration.

These guys hated Robert Taft and the "Old Right" and did everything possible to destroy their influence and impact on American policy. Their Establishment descendants hate Ron Paul and will try to do everything to destroy him and his presidential candidacy.

These three books are must-reading for all Americans, especially Ron Paul supporters, to know your history and what we are up against.

Our greatest saving grace today is that the Internet has destroyed the formerly all-powerful impact of the Establishment's mainstream news media's gatekeepers in setting the parameters of the presidential policy debate.

Knowledge is power.

Act upon this knowledge.

Buy and read this first-rate book.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent historical overview but a misleading title, January 20, 2008

By 

Earth that Was - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Betrayal of the American Right (Hardcover)

Murray Rothbard grew up in New York's jewish community in the 1930s where apparently, in politics, everyone was a socialist of some description. The only right wingers among his circle, were Murray and his engineer father. A concerned uncle, a Communist Party member, said young Murray would be safe in the bright egalitarian future to come if he only learned to keep their mouth shut. Murray apparently didn't learn the lesson, and this book covers much of the story of what happened to him.

Posthumously published "The Betrayal of the American Right" is more than an autobiographical work. It's also a fully footnoted overview of the history of the American right, or at least of a significant slice of the right, in the period between 1910 and 1970, along with Murray Rothbard's insider's account covering more or less the second half of that period. Analysis and autobiography comprise the content with the former winning out in the overall page count. It could just as easily have been be called "Fission and Fusion among the Fragments" because it also provides a bird's eye and an on-the-ground view of the synthetic and "antithetic" process of political coalition building and disassembly, the original "creative destruction".

The mainstream academic liberal conventional wisdom has it that the supporters of laisser faire were "radicals" in the first half, or maybe first two thirds, of the nineteenth century and were "conservatives" for the rest. Nay, says Rothbard. There were still a few laisser faire classical liberals at the close of the 19th century and in their opposition to the new American imperialism, two of them, William Graham Sumner and Edward Atkinson, the founder of the Anti-Imperialist League, who used to write to American troops in the Philippines urging their insubordination, were as "radical" as ever.

In the early twentieth century, the H. L. Mencken and Albert Nock, both ardent "individualists", were generally considered part of the left, especially on cultural matters, opposing as they did Wilson's enlistment of America into the Great War and the newly minted Versailles Treaty. They found themselves allied with 'leftist' , mainly Progressives like Borah, Nye, LaFollette, Charles Lindbergh Senior and the pro-labor (arch-opponent of the Anaconda Mining Company that dominated his home state) Montana's Senator Burton K Wheeler. Nock and Mencken even welcomed the Russian Revolution, at least at first. During the twenties and thirties they criticised the Harding, Carnegie and Hoover administrations as corporatists, using the power of government to cement in place a cartelised capitalism. Their loose alliance with the Progressives split as they saw in FDR more of the same, but this time with a populist and egalitarian veneer. The Progressives were perhaps blinded by the veneer. Nock and Mencken were quick to spot that much of FDR's New Deal agenda derived from Wilson's war measures and indeed from Hoover. This insight was lost until resurrected by New Left 'revisionist' historians in the 1970s and only of late has begun to influence popular accounts of the period.

The Progressive economic journalist, and early New Deal supporter, John T Flynn made parallel observations, originally criticizing the Roosevelt for failing to make sufficiently radical institutional reforms impacting big business and preferring the less radical path of borrow and spend populism. Flynn believed war lay at the end of the debt road with armaments being the one form of public spending both left and right would swallow. As the depression continued and FDR's experiments failed to find the magic formula, the administration, as Flynn predicted, turned increasingly to war preparations and foreign intrigues. The old individualists once again found themselves reunited with some of their former colleagues from among the liberal Great War anti-interventionists, a minority of whom now saw the new march to war as destructive of Progressive principles. (Although for lawyer and former new dealer Burton Wheeler FDR's attempts at court packing was the last straw).

The majority of the liberal left however had no problem shelving whatever commitments they may have had to peace and neutrality. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes identified the same split as Rothbard and believed the majority liberals had become inured to power and preferred war to risking electoral defeat of the New Deal. As the relcalcitrant minority of old time liberal neutralists moved one way, the administration scaled down it's early anti-business rhetoric and welcomed big business back into the fold. "Dr. New Deal" became "Dr. Win the War." But business itself was split between the "internationally oriented" (i.e. pro-British) Eastern establishment, which welcomed European intervention in both wars, and their mid-western peers who opposed it.

Old time anti-war Progressives, the individualists and more nationally oriented business people, represented by the Chicago Time's Colonel MacCormick and Senator Robert A Taft, were now fused into a new opposition coalition that Rothbard labels 'The Old Right'. In time they began to share their political and economic ideas not just their foreign policy objections. John T Flynn, for example, shifted to a more laisser faire capitalist position despite originally calling for tighter "utility style regulation" of corporations. The "America First" and the (broader still) isolationist movement was heavily influenced by the Old Right but not identical to it, embracing as it did a broader section of American opinion, including at times Trotskyites, Norman Thomas' Socialist Party and Charles Lindbergh Junior.

Pearl Harbor was the nadir but not the end of the whole isolationist movement. The Roosevelt administration's bungled sedition trial against an odd bod assortment of mostly eccentric anti-war pamphleteers was seen by many as an official warning to the Old Right to cease and desist. During the war Old Right journalists, like John T Flynn, were denied access to journals that had published them for decades, some were thrown out of jobs and even smeared by the Communists, now relishing their chance to play super-patriots.

(The smear continues to this day. Take for example Phillip "Portnoy's Complaint" Roth's recent fantasy novel "The Plot Against America" painting a fascist alternative history under an imagined 1940 President Charles Lindbergh Junior with Burton K Wheeler as vice-president in an anti-semitic America. As wikipedia reports "Roth depicts Wheeler imposing marital law in Lindbergh's absence, whereas the real Wheeler had been a leading opponent of the martial law imposed in Montana during World War I. Author Bill Kaufman describes Wheeler as being, in fact an "anti-draft, antiwar, anti-big business defender of civil liberties"" . Wheeler, who ran for Montana Governor in 1920, on a ticket that included an African American and a Blackfoot Indian makes for an unlikely nazi. Perhaps Roth didn't know it, but back in the 1940s, in a pamphlet also entitled "The Plot Against America", the pro-war communists charged Burton Wheeler and Harry S Truman as fronts for fascism.)

Wars, thankfully, end. Senator Taft, essentially the Congressional leader of the movement, failed to secure the Presidential nomination in 1948 as Eisenhower, who had also been offered the chance to run as a Democrat, swept in. Rothbard notes that the Taft's southern delegates were known as the 'black and tans', they were mainly African American, where the Eisenhower delegates were labelled the 'lilly whites'. The Old Right did not end there. The Truman administration's push for NATO and the Marshall Plan saw a revived Old Right opposing once again a renewed "sphere of influence" global power politics. Taft championed international law and went on to campaign against the Korean War, along with Joseph Kennedy and Herbert Hoover. But patients often seem to revive before death. The last major Old Right campaign was for the Bricker Amendment. This was an ultimately failed attempt to defend federalism by preventing Washington from exploiting it's international treaties power to invade the constitutional jurisdiction of state and local government. Treaty powers are an engine for federal centralization not unique to the United States. Rothbard rounds off his discussion of the Old Right with Robert Taft's eerie prophetic speeches warning against US involvement in Indo-China. Rothbard says Ike partially heeded Taft's warnings and opted for "jaw jaw" not "war war" via the Geneva accords. It would be for a new generation of new frontiersmen to completely ignore Taft.

Interestingly the Kennedy brothers were both friends of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy. Rothbard discusses McCarthyism and the rise of anti-communism as the factor that tipped the mass base of the right from a quasi-libertarian anti-statist movement to a quasi-militarist ultra-nationalist one. He notes that McCarthy, never previously associated with the right-wing of the GOP actually had his first experience in "red baiting" copying attacks made by venerable democratic socialist leader Norman Thomas on a Democrat who was a mutual rival. McCarthy was surrounded by ex-communists and much red baiting had it's roots in the internecine conflicts of the far left. And it was the Truman administration that originally fanned the fires of the red scare, even if the flame they fanned threatened to scald them too. Didn't Herbert Humphrey once call for internment of communists? Still McCarthyism did bring a new wave of urban, working class and catholic rank and file into the right, along with the energy of initiative after decades of reacting. Rothbard admits he was attracted by it's populism and felt, as a libertarian, that 'voluntary McCarthyism', criticisms directed at government employees were fair game, even though he ultimately came to... Read more ›