The Modern Freedom Movement, 1940-2014
by
Nelson Hultberg
It began in the early 1940s. FDR had
launched the New Deal's collectivization of America, and a small but prescient
group of libertarian and conservative intellectuals were in rebellion – such
thinkers as Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, John T. Flynn,
Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, to be followed a decade later
by the likes of Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer and Murray Rothbard.
Out of their cerebral and activist efforts there began the movement to
repeal the overweening statism that was infiltrating America from Europe via
Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. The
infamous year of 1913 was the infiltration's major manifestation. FDR's New Deal was its Rubicon. In reaction
to the radical political changes taking place during the 1913-1940 era, today's
freedom movement was born.
It is not well known by the general public, but when the modern freedom movement first began in the early 1940s, it
was not split between libertarians and conservatives. It was one coalition unified in rebellion against FDR's monster welfare
state. By 1970, however, the movement had become tragically bifurcated.
The radical economist Murray Rothbard
took libertarians off into anarchy,
while the traditionalist philosopher Russell Kirk drove conservatives into statism. This split has
created two incomplete visions – contemporary
libertarianism and conservatism – that are, in their singularity,
incapable of effectively challenging the authoritarian mega-state.
Conservatives are caught up in the puritanical swamps of legislating morality and hegemonic conquest of the world, while libertarians chase the philosophical
absurdities of moral subjectivism and ersatz individualism. Conservatives wish to return to the Middle
Ages and mandate morality via the state, while libertarians wish to do away
with any reference to morality altogether. Conservatives revere leaders
like Savonarola and John Calvin. Libertarians excite themselves with Larry
Flynt and the Beatles' "Nowhere Man." Somewhere the Founding
Fathers are twisting in their graves over each of these political movements and
their embarrassing lack of comprehension concerning the requisites for a free
and individualist society.
How
do we confront this lack of comprehension? We must purge the libertarian and conservative movements of the
fallacies they have adopted from Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk. This
will require a "rational theory of politics" that can bring together
the two philosophical streams of John Locke and Edmund Burke so as to restore
the original Republic of States that Jefferson and the Founders
envisioned. More on this theory shortly.
The Tragic
Bifurcation
In
the aftermath of LBJ's defeat of the Goldwater forces in the 1964 election,
most libertarians, under the influence of the pied piper Murray Rothbard, split
off from the official path of the freedom movement and wandered into the
utopian forest of some very radical political-philosophical principles – those of anarchism.
In contrast, conservatives went the
other direction by abandoning principle altogether to align themselves with
Irving Kristol's collectivist neo-conservatives
and tolerate the very government usurpations their movement had been formed to
repeal. They began their
sellout when Richard Nixon declared in 1971 that, "We're all
Keynesians now." They continued it with Ronald Reagan's massive expansion of the welfare state
and when George W. Bush launched a tide of spending, privilege and corruption
totally unhinged from sanity and reality.
Can today's freedom movement be rescued from this tragedy of default? Can
the American people be convinced to restore the republic? Yes, but in order for such a revolution to actually take place, American libertarians and conservatives must
face up to some unsettling realities and take appropriate action.
The
conservative wing of the "freedom movement" has been grievously
corrupted by Machiavellian statists. The most important cause of this has been
Russell Kirk's philosophical emphasis on tradition being transcendent to reason
and his rejection of "equal individual rights" in favor of special
privileges and a flexible constitution. This
has led conservatives into a Faustian bargain with the statist enemy and opened
the door for the hijacking of their movement by neoconservatives, thus moving
most of today's conservatives to the left into lockstep with statist liberals.
The
libertarian wing of the "freedom movement" has been equally
corrupted, but in the opposite direction to the far right on the spectrum. The most important cause of this has been
Murray Rothbard's anarchist politics that privatizes all functions of the
government, even the military, police and courts of law. In addition,
his followers espouse an egoistic "do your own thing" culture that refuses to morally condemn the traditional
evils of history. Whatever is peaceful is their creed. It is a sense of
life that worships what the Greeks called the sin of
"eleutheromania," freedom
without limits.
To
better understand the nature of this disastrous split between libertarians and
conservatives, a brief exposition of America's concept of freedom is necessary.
Jeffersonianism
Is America's Philosophy
The American concept of freedom has its ideological roots in the
Founders' libertarian political
ideal, combined with conservative
metaphysics and culture. It is a
blend of the 17th and 18th century thinkers, John Locke and Edmund Burke (one
libertarian and the other conservative), which heavily influenced Americans
from the start and up through World War I – the former emphasizing reason and
individualism, the latter tradition and community. It manifested in what is called Jeffersonianism.
This political philosophy stands for the individual over the collective,
a strictly limited constitutional government based upon federalism, equal
"rights" instead of equal "results," a free-market economy,
no entangling foreign alliances and an objective code of morality for society
as opposed to the moral neutrality of Rothbardians and modern liberals. This is
what needs to be restored.
The
famous conservative philosopher, Richard Weaver, at the University of Chicago
in the 1940s and 1950s and author of the great classic, Ideas Have
Consequences, understood well this Jeffersonian concept of America and
shaped his defense of freedom around it accordingly. Unlike today's
neoconservatives, Weaver understood the necessity of limiting the tyrannical
danger of the state. He would be horrified with today's neoconservative attacks
upon the Founders' vision of laissez-faire. He grasped the philosophical common
ground between libertarianism and conservatism:
"[C]onservatives and libertarians stand
together," he said. "Both of them believe that there is an order of
things which will largely take care of itself if you leave it alone."
Weaver was a strict constitutionalist because a constitution provided for a
"settled code of freedom for the individual."
This is the crucial issue of our time – restoration of libertarian conservatism in America
and its "settled code of freedom for the individual." If we, who believe in free enterprise and the Constitution, wish to
reverse America's drift into an authoritarian state, our goal must not be to
accommodate, but to purge the Gargantua on the Potomac that usurps our rights
and freedoms with impunity. Libertarians and conservatives must be reunited to
effectively challenge this monster.
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