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.

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.

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 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.

Download The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray N. Rothbard

PDF format, 804KB, 256Pages. Provided by Mises.org.

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
THOMAS E. WOODS, JR.
Copyright © 2007 Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Introduction by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.:

It is a cliché of publishing to observe, when a book appears before the public years after it was first written, that it is more relevant now than ever. But it is difficult to think of how else The Betrayal of the American Right can be described. Murray N. Rothbard chronicles the emergence of an American right wing that gave lip service to free-market principles and “limited government,” but whose first priority, for which it was willing to sacrifice anything else, was military interventionism around the world. That sounds familiar, to be sure, but as Rothbard shows, it is neither recent nor anomalous. It goes back to the very beginnings of the organized conservative movement in the 1950s.

Since this book is likely to reach beyond Rothbard’s traditional audience, an initial word about the author is in order. Murray N. Rothbard was a scholar and polymath of such extraordinary productivity as almost to defy belief. His Man, Economy, and State, a 1,000-page treatise on economic principles, was one of the great contributions to the so-called Austrian School of economics.

For a New Liberty became the standard libertarian manifesto. In The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard set out the philosophical implications of the idea of self-ownership. He told the story of colonial America in his four-volume Conceived in Liberty. His America’s Great Depression, now in a fifth edition, used the explanatory power of the Austrian theory of the business cycle to show that monetary interventionism, rather than “capitalism,” was to blame for that catastrophe.

He also wrote a great many groundbreaking articles. To name just two: “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics” laid out a distinctly Austrian approach to the contentious area of welfare economics, and “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” may be the best brief Austrian contribution to the study of law and economics. In addition to his 25 books and three thousand articles, which spanned several disciplines, Rothbard also taught economics, edited two academic journals and several popular periodicals, wrote movie reviews, and carried on a mountain of correspondence with a diverse array of American intellectuals.

Even this overview of Rothbard’s work cannot do justice to his legendary productivity. But we learn a great deal about Murray N. Rothbard from a simple fact: more Rothbard books have appeared since his death than most college professors publish in a lifetime.

Two volumes of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, which Rothbard had been working on at the time of his death, were released in 1995. The Logic of Action (1997) consisted of a thousand pages of Rothbard’s scholarly articles, now conveniently available for the general public. A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002) brought together much of Rothbard’s important work in monetary history, much of which
had previously been available only in scholarly journals or as chapters in books long out of print. It may as well have been a brand new Rothbard book.

It wasn’t only Rothbard’s scholarly work that was assembled into handsome volumes and made available for general consumption; his popular writing began to appear in new collections as well. Making Economic Sense (1995) collected a hundred of Rothbard’s shorter economic articles in a book that can instruct and entertain beginner and specialist alike. A 20,000-word article Rothbard had written for a small-circulation investment newsletter became the 1995 Center for Libertarian Studies monograph Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy. The Irrepressible Rothbard (2000) assembled some of Rothbard’s contributions to the Rothbard-Rockwell Report of the 1990s, where we encounter the master at his funniest and, at times, his most scathing.

The present book, however, consists of material being made available to the public for the very first time. The manuscript was written in the 1970s, as Rothbard points out in the Preface, and went through periodic edits and additions over the years as publication opportunities arose. Each time, though, unforeseen circumstances interfered with the book’s release, and so it is finally appearing only now, under the Mises Institute’s imprint.

To be sure, Rothbard had written published articles on the Old Right: in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Continuum, and the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, among other venues. But here he tells the full story, from the point of view of someone who was not only a witness to these events but also an important participant.

What was this Old Right, anyway? Rothbard describes it as a diverse band of opponents of the New Deal at home and interventionism abroad. More a loose coalition than a self-conscious “movement,” the Old Right drew inspiration from the likes of H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, and featured such writers, thinkers, and journalists as Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Felix Morley, and the Chicago Tribune’s Colonel Robert McCormick. They did not describe or think of themselves as conservatives: they wanted to repeal and overthrow, not conserve. ...

Comments (0)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment