When rightists fall out

This is a post I wrote back in 2008 but wound up not posting. But I'm posting it know, with minor edits, because it gives some perspective on the "libertarian" position of which Rand Paul is currently the most prominent.

The reporting on the 2008 Ron Paul campaign kicked up a lot of information on the "libertarian" right.

The Libertarian Party split in 1988, after Paul's Presidential run on their ticket. The wing of the movement reflected by the Cato Institute and Reason magazine focuses on business deregulation but presents a friendly, personal-liberties face. Although since even that wing is generally opposed to anti-discrimination laws, their actual commitment to individuals' freedom from invidious discrimination is more than questionable. The Cato crowd also tends toward isolationist foreign policy.

The other wing centered around the Von Mises Institute, that wing probably best know to critics of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy through the Antiwar.com Web site. Prominent leaders in that wing of the movement were longtime Paul staffer and business associate Lew Rockwell and Old Right isolationist Murray Rothbard.

This article by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters? Reason 01/16/08, gives their version of the split and an account of how the Rockwell-Rothbard "paleoconservatives", as they called themselves, begin pandering hard to racists and nativists. Sanchez and Weigel describe their strategy this way:

The [Ron Paul] newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian" movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition.

Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused." To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. "State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."

The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America." (my emphasis)

See also, The Reckoning Over Ron Paul by Jamie Kirchick New Republic blog 01/15/08.

Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, an adherent of the Rockwell-Rothbard school of "libertarianism", has written on his version of Old Right isolationist history at the online magazine Taki's Top Drawer:

The Real American Right: Part I 01/08/08

The Real American Right: Part II 01/09/08

The Real American Right: Part III 01/10/08

In the same publication, he defends the leading theorist of "national socialism" in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s: The Subversion of Lawrence Dennis 09/26/07

The American Liberty League and coup plotting

Antiwar general Smedley Butler ratted on wealthy American fascist wannabes

When Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933 and it quickly became apparent that he didn't plan to restrict his economic recovery measures to balancing the federal budget and preaching optimism, a lot of the most wealthy Americans got very nervous about this whole "New Deal" business. In August, 1934, some of them formed a lobby group called The American Liberty League to defend the interests of the "economic royalists", as FDR came to call them.

The most dramatic event involving the Liberty League, at least indirectly, was a charge made by antiwar retired Gen. Smedley Butler, who was a popular figure at the Bonus Army protest during the Hoover Administration which had been put down by troops under the command of Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. He testified before a Congressional Committee about being approached by a representative of wealthy plotters wanting him to front a military coup against the federal government. He claimed that it was the some of the same people who went on to form the Liberty League that were behind the plotting.

Apparently, there is no hard evidence that the people guiding the Liberty League were directly involved in the plot testified to by Butler. And it's not clear how serious the plot was, although the people directly involved seemed to have taken the idea very seriously.

The Liberty League's main influence was in its anti-New Deal propaganda and its support for legal action against pro-labor legislation, primarily from its founding in 1934 through the Presidential election of 1936. Roosevelt's landslide victory against Republican Alf Landon pretty much took the wind out of the Liberty League's sails. Though the organization lingered on until 1940, its main activity ended with the 1936 election, in which they "unofficially" supported Landon against That Man Roosevelt.

Since I discovered I have access to the JSTOR periodical database through the public library, I've been poking around in some older periodicals. One of the more interesting pieces I've come across is "The American Liberty League, 1934-1940" by Frederick Rudolph The American Historical Review Oct 1950. Rudolph tells the story of the League (without mentioning Butler's coup allegations) and analyzes its failure.

With the Cheney-Bush administration seriously pushing Social Security phaseout as recently as 2005 using much the same arguments the 1936 Republican Party platform used against the then-new program, the Liberty League's mossback ideas still have some relevance. Despite the fact that they were reactionary even in 1934.

First, who backed the Liberty League? Rudolph gives this rundown:

At a time when economic distress encouraged an increasing emphasis upon the forgotten man and the common man, it came to the defense of the uncommon man who stood at the pinnacle - the uncommon man, whose freedom to follow the bent of his natural talents, unfettered by government regulation and control, had long been an ingrained tenet of the American faith. The roster of its officers and of its chief financial contributors is a roster of the uncommon men of the time, the men whose ambitions and abilities had been rewarded with the success, the power, and the prestige to which Americans of every background have been traditionally conditioned to aspire: Irknke, Pierre, and Lammot du Pont, controllers of a vast industrial empire; Ernest T. Wier, steel man; Will L. Clayton, Texas cotton broker; Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors; Edward F. Hutton, chairman of General Foods; J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil; William S. Knudsen, also of General Motors; Joseph E. Widener, Philadelphia transportation magnate; Sewell L. Avery of Montgomery Ward; George H. Houston, president of Baldwin Locomotive. And with them were corporation lawyers, professional politicians, some academicians, and others who represented a mixture of business with politics or business with academics. They were men who subscribed, out of conviction or experience, to that combination of social Darwinism and American experience which evoked a constant stream of leaflets, pamphlets, radio addresses, and press releases from the offices of the Liberty League. Its spokesmen included Alfred E. Smith, 1928 presidential candidate of the Democratic party, whose biography was a story out of Horatio Alger; John W. Davis, 1924 presidential candidate of the Democratic party and chief counsel for J. P. Morgan; Bainbridge Colby, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson and attorney for William Randolph Hearst; Neil Carothers, director of the College of Business Administration at Lehigh; Edward W. Kemmerer, professor of international finance at Princeton; Albert G. Keller, professor at Yale and student of William Graham Sumner [the chief advocate of Social Darwinism], who constructed a Science of Society which was shot through with the transfer of Darwinian analysis to social institutions; and Samuel Harden Church, head of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. (my emphasis)

The fact that the Democratic Presidential nominees of 1924 and 1928 both became spokespeople for this reactionary anti-New Deal group is a sign of how completely corporate interests dominated both parties in the 1920s. It's also a reminder that in the 1930s, ideological differences strongly cut across party lines. Some of the strongest supporters of New Deal measures, such as Sen. George Norris, were Republicans.

Conventional histories of the New Deal will sometimes talk about "Thunder on the Left" faced by Roosevelt in 1933-36. There was certainly pressure on Roosevelt from the left by the labor movement and various reformers. But many of the groups that are categorized as part of the so-called Thunder on the Left were actually rightwing demagogues.

Rudolph observes that the country-club reactionary nature of the Liberty League's propaganda had limited popular resonance during the Great Depression:

Caring no more for the common man than the minimum requirements of public relations demanded, the Liberty League, nonetheless, could have built a larger popular following had it adopted the techniques of the demagogues who were amassing a more impressive membership in such groups as the Townsend clubs, Share-the-Wealth clubs, and in the Union for Social Justice [led by Charles Coughlin]. Its appeal, however, was pitched on a level which placed its emphasis upon the defense of something which most Americans had very little of property. The truly popular movements of the decade, the New Deal included, promised something specific for the common man, for the aged, for the economically underprivileged, while the Liberty League offered rather to protect property holders from the people and from their government in Washington. (my emphasis)

The "Share-the-Wealth" movement was begun by Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, who I think is rightly considered by many as the closest thing the United States had to an Adolf Hitler type figure in that period. He did have a significant public appeal. Although he ran Louisiana like a thoroughly corrupt personal dictatorship, he also put the unemployed to work on building roads and other public works (with the obligatory kickbacks, of course) and provided free public school textbooks for the first time in his state. But after Long's assassination in 1935, the leadership his movement was taken over by Gerald L. K. Smith and it took a more overtly reactionary tone. Smith became a raving anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer.

Rudolph points out that the League in its propaganda relied on themes such as "individualism" that had strong resonance in American tradition. In my favorite part of his article, he writes that "the American Liberty League learned the very hardest way that the common man, who started on his way up under the auspices of Andrew Jackson had replaced the industrial leader in giving the directions in American life". (Sadly, Jacksonian democracy has been in eclipse in the US since 1969.)

The tone of his article makes me think that Rudolph himself didn't want to appear as overly approving of the Jacksonian moment of the 1930s. But this observation is a reasonable one:

The emotive symbols which [the League] used - the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the Declaration of Independence - and the American heroes to whom it appealed for sanction - Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln - have generally been extremely useful in manufacturing mass opinion in the United States, but the symbols and the sanctions must also have been put to use for something the people wanted. In the 1930's the cult of the common man had become sufficiently embedded in American society to make clear that any pressure group or political organization must disregard it at its own peril...

As Rudolph also notes, the League "discovered that Thomas Jefferson proved to be a more effective symbol for the left than for the right." I should hope so. Certainly, no one during Jefferson's lifetime mistook him for a conservative, much less a flaming reactionary like the Liberty League's backers.

I'll close with a long paragraph from Rudolph's summary of how the Liberty League managed to frame their message in the Jacksonian climate of 1936 in a way that made it sink like a lead balloon:

The [political] performance of the League was little better designed to bring the desired results than was its [propaganda] approach. Its first and almost only practical alternative to the New Deal was to suggest that the Red Cross be commissioned to handle all direct relief. The effect of its pronouncements on the unconstitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act was to encourage industrialists to disregard the collective bargaining provisions of the legislation, throwing struggling unions into courts all over the country and leading eventually to the sit-down strikes of 1936. ... The presence of twelve Du Ponts at its 1936 dinner at which A1 Smith spoke destroyed the desired effect of the presence of the boy from the streets of the East Side [i.e., Al Smith]; indeed, when Smith spent the summer of 1936 in a more concerted attack on the New Deal, he carefully refrained from accepting Liberty League sponsorship. In 1936, too, the Republican party asked the Liberty League, by then a political liability, to "stay aloof from too close alliance with the Landon campaign": the League co-operated by announcing that it would remain nonpartisan during the campaign, and it never did endorse Landon. When the League sponsored a six-day institute at the University of Virginia on "The Constitution and the New Deal," Virginius Dabney, the Richmond editor, reported that "the audiences were so openly hostile to the League and its spokesmen that the round table proved something of a boomerang." Congressional investigations disclosed that the guiding figures of the League were large contributors to all and sundry anti-New Deal groups; the Du Pont brothers, Alfred Sloan, and John J. Raskob were the principal financial backers, for instance, of the Southern Democratic convention at Macon in 1936, when Eugene Talmadge made his bid for the presidency, with the assistance of Gerald L. K. Smith, inheritor of the toga of Huey Long; lesser right-wing groups like the Crusaders, Sentinels of the Republic, National Conference of Investors, and the Farmers' Independence Council - most of them masthead organizations, operated by professional publicists and lobbyists, many of whom, like the principal officers and backers of the League, were veterans of the prohibition repeal movement - owed substantial financial backing to the same small group of industrialists who sponsored the Liberty League. A [New York] Times editorial observed at the time that the League's founders were making some rather poor investments." (my emphasis)

Other online resources:

New Deal Nemesis: The Liberty League was star-studded, wealthy, professional, and a flop by David Pietrusza Reason Magazine Jan 1978: a "libertarian" treatment which shows appreciation for the League's free-market dogmas, praising it for its "a remarkably coherent libertarian position". Indeed it was, in the contemporary meaning of rightwing "libertarianism".

The American Liberty League by Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion! n.d. Web site of the Canadian Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT)

Responses to the Great Depression 1929-1939 History Department at the University of San Diego, n.d. includes this brief description of the League:

The "Old Right" emerged in the 1930's in opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal. The American Liberty League founded in August, 1934, as a bipartisan anti-FDR coalition of the rich and corporate oligarchy, led by the duPonts as the leading contributors - organizers were John J. Raskob, John Davis, Nathan Miller, Irenee duPont, James Wadsworth - supported by Al Smith who opposed the New Deal and declared in Nov. 1935 that he was going to "take a walk" - spent $1m 1934-36 to defeat FDR, especially with propaganda sent to newspapers - Postmaster General Jim Farley called it the "American Cellophane League" because it was a DuPont product you could see right through - but Liberty League financed lawsuits against the New Deal, especially the 1935 Wagner Act that required collective bargaining (my emphasis)

BBC report on Butler's coup allegations by Mike Thompson BBC Radio 4 07/23/07, whose text introduction says:

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

At about 20:30ff, the report discusses the pro-German activism in the later 1930s of Hamburg-America Lines, of which one of the senior managers was Prescott Bush, future Senator from Connecticut and father and grandfather of US Presidents.

The text of Smedley Butler's 1935 antiwar tract War Is A Racket is available at this Scuttlebutt and Small Chow site online.

Tags: american liberty league, authoritarianism, libertarianism, new deal, prescott bush, smedley butler

"Libertarianism" at the airport

Herbert Hoover: he was against the "fascist" New Deal and Roozevelt socialism, too

Continuing my grumbling about "libertarianism" from Friday, there's a good example of how dingy "libertarian" dogma can be at Antiwar Radio (on Antiwar.com). Dated 10/05/07, it's an audio interview by Scott Horton with Becky Akers, who the site describes as follows:

Becky Akers discusses the case of Carol Anne Gotbaum who was killed while being detained by cops at the Phoenix airport, how the government’s control over TSA [Transportation Safety Administration] and countless other entities results in waste and mismanagement, the benefits of free-market security and America’s descent into despotism.

It also identifies her as a regular contributor to the neo-Confederate site LewRockwell.com.

Both interviewers who are currently featured at Antiwar Radio, Charles Goyette and Scott Horton, seem to assume that we already live in a "police state" in the US. Akers is on board with that concept. Now, I'm not familiar with the details of the Carol Anne Gotbaum case, where a woman died after being taken custody by police at the Phoenix airport. But I'm not sure from the interview how familiar Akers is with it either. She mainly uses it to rant about the evils of government.

It's a good example of how "libertarians" come up with surprising arguments which are often unfamiliar to those who are not immersed in Ayn Rand when we first hear them.

Akers complains that the government has anything to do with airport security. And even that the government owns airports. In her utopia, private businesses would own airports and they, working together with the airlines, would provide security. And that security, being sprinkled with the magic of the Private Sector, would be far better than what the TSA currently provides. Because the airlines and the private airports would know their customers wanted security, so they would provide it.

But wait, you may be saying, isn't that what happened prior to 9/11? Those airlines used to provide security. And being responsive in the free market to their customers' complaints about the annoyance of the security checks, they tried to minimize the checks. Being subject to the competitive pressures of the free markets, they tried to keep ticket prices for major routes down. And being under the sovereign authority of their stock holders in the free market, they were under tremendous pressure to show rising profits each year and each quarter, which means they needed to cut costs wherever they could.

The result of this lovely free-market process? Inadequate security equipment, inadequate procedures, and very low-paid security personnel, many of whom were in jobs with more than 100% turnover in a year. This also meant that the personnel were often inexperienced, poorly trained, not terribly motivated and often not very friendly. So how is it going to help things if we go back to that system?

Oh, silly you. You obviously don't understand the, uh, depths of libertarian dogma. Because, you see, the airlines are government, too! True, they're technically private companies. But they get subsidies from the federal government! That means they're all just another set of socialistic institutions crushing out our liberty in the police state. (Hey, the hardcore libertarians actually do talk this way.)

In Aker's utopian free-market Eden, the airlines, the airports and all the security people will be privately owned. (A bit of a slip there; I guess it is the security services which will be privately owned, not the security people: but with libertarians, you can't be sure.) They will all be free of government safety and security regulations, they won't have to worry about all those pesky financial reporting standards or about lawsuits from irate customers, and of course they won't have hassle with any of those dang unions!

And what if these companies foolishly cut corners to squeeze out a bit of extra profit or just skim the company funds? Well, you don't need to worry, because we'll all be able to carry the weapons of our choice onto the airplanes with us. Akers was really irritated that people coming into the airports are "disarmed". Shoot, once we can bring our Glocks and Uzis and double-barrelled shotguns onto the plane with us, we won't have to worry about no terrorists. Somebody starts talkin' Arabic or some funny language like that, or if you hear somebody say something that sounds like "Allah", or some dark-skinned guy stands up and looks like he's up to something, the passengers can just gun him down right away. Who needs these socialistic government-paid police?

Akers griped that when she goes to the airport now, she feels helpless because "I don't have my gun, I don't have my knife". This, she says, is destroying civility and even civilization itself.

You get the drift. You can listen to the interview if you want to hear Akers explain how somebody named Leviathan has a giant conspiracy going through the TSA to make middle-class and wealthy white folks think like poor black people. Or something like that. It starts around minute 16. Mr. Leviathan's ultimate goal, she says, is to have police stationed in all our neighborhoods to make us go through scanners before we enter our houses. Scott Horton reminded her that there would be eyeball scans, too. And he gets in his usual plug for the crackpot rightwinger Ron Paul.

Now, this is the sort of thing that you can only take seriously if you grew up doing something like spending your every waking hour by the pool at the country club. If fans of this kind of stuff are antiwar, it's probably because they think war threatens to raise taxes on rich people and risks subjecting nice white youngsters to a military draft. No true AynRandian individualist would want to compromise his soul by having to spend a couple of years in a collectivist institution like the Army. And this idea that the wealthy should have to pay taxes or do anything else to support their country, why that's just another version of fascocommunistislamistdefeatocratism!
Sure, libertarians when you catch them running loose like on that radio interview will say things that don't sound like your standard stodgy Republican, such grouching about the cops or whining about intrusions on privacy.

But, in practice, to the extent that libertarians have any noticeable impact on American politics, it tends to be through advocacy of their free-market, no-regulations-on-business ideas, like through the "libertarian" think-tank, the Cato Institute. As of this writing, the following items are featured on their Web site's homepage:

"The Antitrust Religion", which looks to be a polemic against gubment regulation of business

"Cato Scholar Testifies on Reforming Health Care in Wisconsin" (hint: he's not demanding a broad new government program to plug gaps in health insurance)

"Bush Vetoes SCHIP Expansion", praising Bush's veto of the dangerous socialistic program to provide health care for more children, with links to several articles explaining why such dreadful threats to American liberty have to be blocked

"Supreme Court Begins New Term", bitching about how That Man Roosevelt turned the Supreme Court into stark raving socialists, or something to that effect

Less prominent items on the front page include an article about "what FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 1930s". Follow the link and you can read about the "surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler". Well, Stalin, too, but it's a review of a book that focuses on the other three.

This is not unusual. While the Antiwar.com site usually presents the antiwar and civil-libertarian side of libertarianism, that's not the main focus of the small libertarian movement. Theoretically, libertarians generally may be concerned with such things. But their main influence is to promote Republican-friendly, "pro-business", anti-regulation, anti-union causes. Their political and philosophical affinities, and those of some of their biggest bankrollers, are much closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats.

In the end, so is their narrowly-nationalistic, isolationist foreign policy perspective. They mostly share the unilateralist outlook of Dick Cheney and George Bush. They just don't approve of their current wars.

Tags: antiwar.com, becky akers, isolationism, libertarianism, republican party, scott horton