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The Betrayal of the American Right

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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.

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.

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 conclude with Frank Chodorov that "..the right way to eliminate communists from government jobs is to eliminate the jobs".

Eisenhower must have felt much the same opportunistic attraction as Rothbard. His critics have noted that Ike was slow to defend his friend General Marshall from McCarthyite claims. Ike's unusual lapse here is usually attributed to simple party political opportunism. The Old Right had plenty of bones to pick with General Marshall over his role on the eve of Pearl Harbor, bones already being exhumed by the first wave of Pearl Harbor revisionists who were then in print. Interestingly, as Rothbard notes, McCarthy didn't pick any of these 'old right' bones. McCarthyism, especially as it began to target Army and business officials, was now widely seen as "going too far". When the political "establishment" of the GOP's centre right required it, the domestic anti-communist campaign was halted and it's energies directed entirely to the foreign communist threat.

In Rothbard's account, critical to this switch and the replacement of the Old Right by the globalist and anticommunist New Right was the emergence of McCarthy biographer, former OSS agent, William F Buckley and his "National Review". The NR masthead fluttered with a whole crew of ex-communists including James Burnham, previously America's leading Trotskyite theoretician, and Frank Meyer, who once ran the Communist Party training school. Buckley and NR believed in sidelining the small government agenda for the unspecified duration of the Cold War. He also mustered up a gaggle of mostly European emigre "traditionalist conservatives" who looked back to the old Tory campaign against the French Revolution, rather than the campaign for the American Revolution, where the "Old Right", with it's strict construction constitutionalism had it's heart. Meyer proposed a "new fusionism" between traditionalist conservatism, libertarian economics and cold war anti-communism. This is where the Goldwater / Reagan / Bush movement that proudly marched under the "conservative" label drew it's source. In contrast the Old Right stalwarts like Taft always protested liberal attempts to brand them as "conservatives". Rothbard says the trad-cons were, in any case, only of ornamental value to Buckley.

Rothbard airs, but does not explicitly endorse, the speculation that NR may itself have been a CIA front. There is certainly some circumstantial evidence to support this, the CIA often used "ex-agents" to pursue it's goals and NR had a small army ex-agents. It is now undisputed that the agency covertly subsidised small intellectual journals, mainly in Europe, which gave a platform to mainly pro-US social democrats. As intriguing as the idea is, someone surely would have blabbed by now. Although Rothbard himself wrote the odd economic piece for NR, his "dovish" views on nuclear brinkmanship were unacceptable. It was a mutual dislike. The New Right's mass base, Rothbard believed, positively drooled at the thought of nuking the Kremlin. The rejection by Buckley of articles criticising American militarism from former liberal, former America Firster and sometime McCarthy supporter John T Flynn, in effect reiterating the treatment Flynn had previously received from his former liberal peers, showed the wheel had turned full circle once again.

Rothbard thus broke with the "New Right" dominated right and, although still an isolationist and free market libertarian, sought temporary alliances in the newly emerging and anti-war New Left of the 1960s. The British free market economist Samuel Brittain also, at least theoretically, found much of interest in the New Left. There was some return of the favour too. SDS President Carl Oglesby explicitly praised the Old Right, and, although Rothbard doesn't note it, Charles Reich's popular 1970 paen to the counter-culture "The Greening of America" displayed, at least, some sympathy for the `small town, individualist' values dear to the Old Right. Rothbard's keen eye provides some dissecting observations during his sojourn on the left too. He found their fashion for "participative decision making", essentially a process of non-decision making where out-boring ones rivals became the way power was pursued. And he saw first hand Nixon's opportunist genius in pulling the anti-conscription mass base rug out from under the New Left 'leadership' in the early 1970s, effectively killing it off as a political force. (For most of the one time radicals their personal future would be to fade to grey in the bureaucracy.)

The strength of "Betrayal" is three-fold. It spotlights a little known and now politically inconvenient chapter of American history. And it combines historic overview with inside anecdotes yet equipped with academic grade footnotes and references to guide further investigation. This depth is also a weakness. Rothbard's focus, and his definition of "Old Right", is the libertarian and quasi-libertarian right almost exclusively. This is understandable in a semi-autobiographical work by a major libertarian thinker, but it's certainly not the whole story of the whole American right. The book, for example, tells us nothing about, for example, Henry Cabot Lodge or Lawrence Dennis. It focuses on a handful of threads but not the whole cloth. An attempt to document the whole right over such a period would require a tome, and indeed one has recently been written, Frohnen, Beer and Nelson's "American Conservatism. An Encyclopedia" (ISI Books, Delaware 2006). I stopped counting the number of it's contributors when my count exceeded 82. There are no prizes for guessing which of the two books is easier to read. In "Betrayal" the quality of writing and argument is sound, and often entertaining, but even with it's 1970 finish, this raises the question as to why Rothbard did not publish this book in his own lifetime. Perhaps he was aware of it's flaw and may have intended eventually to produce a more broadly focused book. Either that or a better title may have been in order.

I was somewhat familiar with many of the figures in Murray Rothbard's excellent The Betrayal of the American Right thanks to my earlier reading of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Both books provide a history of the early American libertarian movement -- the key difference is that Rothbard's account is first-hand, and thus, vastly superior.

Rothbard's gloriously acerbic writing style is on full display in this volume, as he relays his meanderings from mainstream conservatism, to support for Adlai Stephenson and then the New Left, introducing the reader to forgotten heroes of the Old Right along the way: Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Colonel Robert McCormick, Frank Chodorov, and many more. Even if you're tacidly familiar with some (or all) of these figures, chances are you'll be enriched by Rothbard's vivid accounts of them, which stand in stark contrast to Radicals for Capitalism's more detached portrayals.

Two nuggets I'd like to share: 1) In speaking of the 1952 Republican National Convention, Rothbard teasingly mentions what appears to have been a race-based stolen nomination for Dwight Eisenhower. The Southern GOP delegations were very small in those days of Dixiecrat supremacy, and composed largely of African Americans and working-class whites. This was in stark contrast to the elites who made up the Northern GOP. Well, the Southern Republican delegations overwhelmingly supported Old Rightist Robert Taft for the nomination, but -- according to Rothbard -- the "black and tans" (as the African Americans and working-class whites were known) were disenfranchised by the party in favor of Northern carpetbaggers known as the "lily whites" -- Northern businessman transplants. If you Google this, you won't find much... But tellingly, what you do find is how the mainstream has reversed this tale so that it was a "victory for democracy" wherein the "reactionary" Southerners almost "stole" the nomination for Taft, but they were luckily thwarted.

2) Rothbard throws out the idea that William F. Buckley may have been a CIA plant within the conservative movement to derail the isolationist tendencies of the Right and make the Old Left's foreign policy the consensus policy. There isn't a lot of evidence, other than Buckley having previously worked for the CIA, but it certainly makes sense.

Those are but two of the tasty bites Rothbard gives the reader to chew on. Buy this book and read it immediately!

No matter what changes in our political discourse, the distinction between "left" and "right" stubbornly remain. Yet, what is "right" or "left" depends in large part on the decade or time one is living in. And, breaking the entire political "spectrum" (as if it is a straight line between two poles) down to two categories is, well, simplistic. Perhaps those who persist in making the left/right distinction should read Rothbard's "The Betrayal of the American Right."

This book is both political history and an autobiography of one of the great libertarian thinkers. It is the story of Murray Rothbard's attempt to find a political home in a constantly changing and shifting national landscape. The first third or so is Rothbard's account of the "Old Right" and its influence on him: figures like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Garett Garet, John T. Flynn, and Isabella Patterson. The next third is largely devoted to how World War II and the lead into the Cold War shifted the "Old Right" a bit toward the center, leaving many of the aforementioned figures (and Rothbard) quite politically homeless. The republican party ceased to be the party of small government, individualism, and isolationism, and instead became the home of the pro-war neoconservatives. The last third of the book details Rothbard's attempts to forge an alliance with the "New Left," who he saw as very similar in their libertarian leanings to the "Old Right." Alas, that allegiance collapsed as well. Where the "New Right" was about anti-communism at any cost (folks like William Buckley suggesting that fighting communism necessitated a "totalitarian bureaucracy" at home), the "New Left" came to depend on increasing statism to achieve any and every type of egalitarianism.

"The Betrayal of the American Right" sparkles! Not only is it an absolute treasure for anyone wishing to read about the history and development of libertarianism in the twentieth century, but it is an absolute gold mine for anyone wishing to understand the constantly moving (unfortunately toward statism) politics of the twentieth century. And finally, "The Betrayal of the American Right" illustrates several great lessons that any who have libertarian inclinations should learn:

(a) While short of an iron-clad law, the worst enemy to the philosophy of liberty is war and the panic it helps to produce. The best way for governments to gain and justify sweeping powers, and pander for approval while doing so, is to manufacture or overblow threats of catastrophe. If today's world doesn't prove that, check out Rothbard's account in this volume. (And while you are at it, read conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet's magnificent The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, another great blow-by-blow account).

(b) The tendency libertarians often have to automatically wince whenever "leftist" ideas are mentioned is a mistake. As Rothbard points out, the "left" has a tendency to be just as libertarian in outlook as the right, depending on the circumstance. The historians of the "New Left" in the 1960's, for instance, are surprisingly libertarian in their distrust of the state. (For a great example, check out Gabriel Kolko's Triumph of Conservatism).

(c) No matter what, a person must stay true to what they believe. Rothbard admits (a rarity for autobiographical works) to making several mistakes, most to do with compromising with others in order to find a political home. While alliances can be useful, one of the big messages I took from "Betrayal" was that, in the end, alliances with those whom you have significant disagreement are always temporary. In the end, Rothbard broke with both the "left" and "right" and worked to create a party that was wholly libertarian.

Unlike the autobiography of one of Rothbard's idols (Albert Jay Nock) - Memoirs of a Superfluous Man - this book ends on a very optimistic note. To quote: "The difficulties are great, but the signs are excellent that such an anti-Establishment and antistatist coalition can and might come into being. Big government and corporate liberalism are showing themselves to be increasingly incapable of coping with the problems that they have brought into being. And so objective reality is on our side."

Are these words any less true today than they were when this manuscript was written? If anything, they should be more pertinent today, as government has only expanded, and liberty diminished, since this book was written. Read it!

Murray Rothbard never wrote an autobiography, but THE BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN RIGHT serves as something of a history of the Old Right intertwined with Rothbard's involvement in it.

The Old Right was a diverse group committed, generally speaking, to laissez-faire and a non-interventionist foreign policy. It also (like any movement) had its share of cranks and eccentrics, a fact which its critics have used to pain the entire movement as a bunch of kooks.

Rothbard saw in the Old Right more or less consistent defenders of his libertarian vision, and this lead him to support, among all people, Joseph McCarthy. As Rothbard tells it, the Old Right was coopted by William Buckley's brand of conservatism which advocated foreign intervention aboard and big government at home.

With the decline of the Old Right, Rothbard began an association with the New Left. Although always committed to principle, perhaps Rothbard tried to see too much in the various movements with which he associated. One area of disagreement that many will have with Rothbard was his belief that the Soviet Union was not bent on expansion and that the Cold War was a mistake. No doubt there were excesses and even atrocities committed by the US and its allies in the fight against global communism, but Rothbard seemed blind to the expansionist nature of the USSR.

Rothbard's opinions are always strong, but as Prof. Woods points out in his introduction, he was willing to see his mistakes. He later regretted his red-baiting and apparently his involvement with the New Left.

In addition to Rothbard's view of the Soviet Union, there are a few areas where I think his "take no prisoners" approach leads to one-sided interpretations. Ayn Rand in her better moments did realize the connection between Big Business and the corporate state. Likewise, his brief mention of James Burnham doesn't do justice to a significant thinker who in some ways was a member of the Old Right. In fact the very National Review article in which Rothbard mocks Burnham for his "fleeting interest in liberty" by calling for the legalization of firecrackers, Burnham also called (if not unambiguously) for a repeal of numerous other laws of the "leviathan state." (David Kelly, JAMES BURNHAM AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WORLD, p. 206.)

Reading Betrayal was for me like being center stage on "This is Your Life" - everything from arguing with my childhood playmates against America entering WWII to the Vietnam War and most of the authors, personalities, and events in between. It is an entertaining account of an intellectual sellout during the post WWII period. I disagree with Rothbard on many fronts and will deal with a few of them in what follows. Having said that, I recommend the book for those interested in the intellectual history of the period as well as for those who wish to get a better understanding of Murray Rothbard.

Rothbard broke with National Review over the Khrushchev visit. Quoting from Betrayal, National review stated "that we must not Shake the Hand of the Bloody Butcher of the Ukraine." He then goes on to say that they are proud to shake the hand of Winston Churchill "even though Churchill was responsible for more slaughter (in World Wars I and II) than Khrushchev had ever been." Call me old fashioned, but I make a moral distinction between going to war, however ill conceived, and systematically slaughtering millions of civilians. Apparently Rothbard doesn't.

He became an anarchist after an exchange with some friends. They asked him to state the basis for his laissez-faire government. His response was "Well, the people get together and decide to establish such a government." To which his friends said that if they could do that why can't they "get together to choose a government that will build steel plants, dams, etc.?" On that basis he concluded that anarchy was the only choice.

This seems a rather anemic epiphany for such a powerful brain. People getting together is not exactly a basis. Might he not have said that an objective, dispassionate, uniformly applied administration of justice is superior to vigilante justice? That is the substantive basis, not the getting together of people.

Perhaps he would have thought of that answer if he hadn't been staring at government's half empty cup. It seems to me that he had stared at that half empty cup so long and so hard that he couldn't see that it was half full and concluded that the cup was bone dry.

Rothbard thought that American imperialism was a greater threat than the USSR. "Why was SANE ever so careful not to discuss imperialism? Why did it clearly favor the U.S. over the Soviet Union? ... we were looking for an anti-imperialist movement, a movement that zeroed in on the American Empire as the great threat to peace, and therefore to liberty, of the world."

Does America force nations to trade exclusively with America? No. Does America exact tribute from other nations? No, America pays foreign aid tribute to them. If America is imperialist, it is the most benign convoluted imperialism the world has ever seen.

And why indeed did SANE favor the U.S. over the Soviet Union? Perhaps it's because the rulers of the Soviet Union adhered to an ideology that was in recent memory responsible for the murder of 100 million noncombatants.

Somewhere along the way Murray Rothbard lost his common sense. A famous George Orwell quote says it best. "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

When a free nation is in conflict with a totalitarian nation peace movements are asymmetrical. They tend to disarm the free nation and have no effect on the totalitarian nation. Totalitarian nations do not tolerate spontaneous movements of any kind, much less peace movements. Peace movements thus become a weapon of totalitarian nations.

The Vietnam War is an outstanding example. The American military won the war in Vietnam, but America lost the war. It lost the political war, and that was the deciding factor. It lost the political war in large part because Murray Rothbard and his pals on the Left defeated America with the peace weapon.

Both Ayn Rand and Douglas Mac Arthur opposed sending American troops to Vietnam. But unlike Murray Rothbard they had the common sense to know where to draw the line and the decency not to cross it.

One of my motives in reading Betrayal was to find evidence for or against third hand information that Rothbard cheered when America was defeated in Vietnam. Of course he cheered. He had been working toward that end.

As for me, I will not stare at the half empty Rothbard cup - the Rothbard of Orwell's intelligentsia. I will focus on the half full Rothbard cup - the Rothbard of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Rothbard of "Conceived in Liberty," "Man, Economy, and State," the important "The Mystery of Banking," the delightful and eye opening "An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought," and many other works that have enriched my life.

A pity that I had to read till page 180 to find out the real heart of the man writing this book: "we began to rethink the origins of the cold war ... indeed, the United States (with the aid of Britain) was solely responsible for the Cold War, in a continuing harassment an aggression against a Soviet Union whose foreign policy had been almost pathetic in its yearning for peace ... even in Eastern Europe, Stalin had not imposed Communist regimes until the United States had been pressing it there and had launched the cold war for several years ... Stalin, in the vain hope of seeking peace, with an implacably aggressively and imperialistic Unites States, repeatedly sold out the world Communist movement ... in Poland aggressive anti-Sovietism had forced Stalin to rake full control."

And he seemed such a nice fellow till then. The two issues on which he founds Libertarianism are isolationism and anti-collectivism/socialism/statism. When the time to split with the New Right came, he (Libertarians) had to choose on whose side to fight the political battle. They took up isolationism, anti-militarism, and joined the left side of the Democratic party. They give up, therefore, the battle for small government. Why they had to sell their soul in the first place is not said.

But the result is there, regardless of what their origin, or true nature might have been. They are with the Liberals, and that's final. I really don't know what to make up of this story. The continuous invocations to geographical positions, left and right, make the book a little muddling, and that may distract us here. What is at stake is what they (Libertarians) stand for, not geographical abstractions. I can't care less about what they would really like, if what they actually do is stand up for the same things as Liberals.

And then there's that maniacal aversion to all things military, that Utopian belief in peaceful relations, even with nations as cruel as the Soviet Union. It's just too radical, to think that the US can just look inward and live happily ever after regardless of what goes on in the world, with potential enemies everywhere arming up to the teeth: Venezuela, Iran, Russia... tell it to them! According to Rothbard the US shouldn't have intervened in any foreign world. Is he also one of those nuts who deny the Holocaust? If not, he wouldn't have done anything to stop it, for sure.

I can only agree on the anti-statism they propound. But what good is it anyway? That's an issue dead and buried long ago, through the years of Socialistic policies that have drugged all Western societies. Who can possibly expect to win any credibility among the political factions if one was to propose doing away with all the socialist policies that we have grown so addicted to?

And then there's that warm affection that Rothbard does not even hide for Anarchism. An Anarchism of the Right, he says. Yeah, well, count me out. They say you know somebody by the enemies the has. Rothbard's political enemies are today's Right. And that's the only Right there is: today's. I think his multiple references to Old and New Right and Left are only meant to confuse. A man who speaks so kindly of the late Soviet Union (which, by the way, was beat by America's President Reagan and Britain's Thatcher), and so negatively of the military of America (mind you, but not of other countries'), deserves more than our suspicion. As for me he gets a clear response: Thanks, but I'd rather trust in America's military than in his "fine" ideas. And I would even accept Socialism rather than a defenseless and narcissistic America.