FrankRep
02-21-2010, 08:30 AM
National Review and the Triumph of the New Right (http://mises.org/daily/2759)
Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises Institute (http://mises.org/)
November 29, 2007
Garet Garrett had called the shots: in referring to the triumph of the New Deal and then of American Empire, he had summed up the strategy: "revolution within the form." The New Right did not bother, would not rouse possible resistance, by directing a frontal assault on the old idols: on the dead Senator Taft, on the Bricker Amendment, or on the old ideals of individualism and liberty. Instead, they ignored some, dropped others, and claimed to come to fulfill the general ideals of individualism in a new and superior "fusion" of liberty and ordered tradition.
How, specifically, was the deed done? For one thing, by hitting us at our most vulnerable point: the blight of anti-Communism. For red-baiting came easily to all of us, even the most libertarian. In the first place, there were the terrible memories of World War II: the way in which the Communist Party had gleefully adopted the mantle of war patriots, of "twentieth-century Americanism," and had unashamedly smeared all opponents of war as agents of Hitler.
Conservative and former liberal isolationists could scarcely forget and forgive; and hence, when the Cold War began, when the "great patriotic coalition" of the United States and Russia fell apart, it was difficult for the Old Right to resist the temptation to avenge themselves, to turn the agents-of-a-foreign-power smear back upon their old tormentors. Furthermore, blinded by hatred of Russia as an interventionist power, we mistakenly believed that repudiation of the fruits of the Russian alliance, including Teheran and Yalta, was in itself a repudiation of World War II. We unfortunately did not realize — as later New Left historians were to point out — that the Cold War and the intervention into World War II were part and parcel of the same development: that one was the inevitable outgrowth of the other, and that both were an integral part of American imperialism rampant.
But the problem was still deeper than that. For our main problem was our simplistic view of the ideological-political spectrum. We all assumed that there were two poles: a "left" pole of Communism, socialism, and total government; and a "right" pole of libertarianism and individualist anarchism. Left of center were the liberals and social democrats; right of center were the conservatives. From that simplistic spectrum we concluded, first, that conservatives, no matter how divergent, were our "natural" allies, and second, that there was little real difference between liberals and Communists. Why not then fuzz the truth just a bit, and use the anti-Communist bludgeon to hit at the liberals, especially since the liberals had become entrenched in power and were running the country? There was a temptation that few of us could resist.
What we didn't fully realize at the time was that the Communists and socialists had not invented statism or leviathan government, that the latter had been around for centuries, and that the current developing liberal-conservative consensus and in particular the triumph of liberalism was a reversion to the old despotic ancien régime. This ancien régime was the Old Order against which the libertarian and laissez-faire movements of the 18th and 19th centuries had emerged as a revolutionary opposition: an opposition on behalf of economic freedom and individual liberty. Jefferson, Cobden, and Thoreau as our forbears were ancestors in more ways than one; for both we and they were battling against a mercantilist statism that established bureaucratic despotism and corporate monopolies at home and waged imperial wars abroad. But if socialism and liberalism are reversions to the Old European Conservatism, then it becomes clear that it is statist conservatism — now joined by liberalism and social democracy — that is still, and not simply in 1800, the major enemy of liberty. And if liberals and Communists sound alike, this does not mean, as we thought then, that liberals had somehow become crypto-Communists; on the contrary, it was a sign that Communists had become liberals!
But for us this analysis — to be developed by Leonard Liggio — was still far in the future. During the 1940s and '50s we merrily engaged in red-baiting. My own position was characteristically libertarian: I distinguished between "compulsory" red-baiting, using the power of the State to repress Communists and leftists, which I deplored, and "voluntary" red-baiting by private organizations and groups, which I supported. The former included the Smith Act prosecutions, the McCarran Act, and the inquisitions of HUAC. Another of my blind spots is that I did not realize the virtual impossibility of keeping domestic and foreign red-baiting strictly separate; it was psychologically and politically impossible to persecute or harass Communists or leftists at home, while at the same time pursuing a policy of peace, neutrality, and friendship with Communist countries overseas. And the global anti-Communist crusaders knew this truth all too well.
From early in the postwar period, the major carriers of the anti-Communist contagion were the ex-Communist and ex-leftist intellectuals. In a climate of growing disillusion with the fatuous propaganda of World War II, the ex-Communists hit the intellectual and political worlds like a bombshell, more and more forming the spearhead of the anti-Communist crusade, domestic and foreign. Sophisticated, worldly, veteran polemicists, they had been there: to naive and breathless Americans, the ex-leftists were like travelers from an unknown and therefore terrifying land, returning with authentic tales of horror and warning. Since they, with their special knowledge, knew, and since they raised the terrible warnings, who were we to deny that truth? The fact that "ex-es" throughout history have tried frantically to expiate their guilt and their fear of having wasted their lives by attempting to denigrate and exterminate their former love — that fact was lost on us as well as on most of America.
From the very end of the war, the "ex-es" were everywhere on the Right, whipping up fear, pointing the finger, eager to persecute or exterminate any Communists they could find, at home and abroad. Several older generation "ex-es" from the prewar era were prominent. One was George E. Sokolsky, columnist for the New York Sun, who had been a Communist in the early 1920s. Particularly prominent on the Right was Dr. J.B. Matthews, foremost Communist fellow traveler of the early 1930s, who by the end of that decade was chief investigator for the Dies Committee; Matthews was to make a fortune out of his famous "card files," a mammoth collection of "Communist front" names which he would use to sell his services as finger man for industries and organizations; pleasant and erudite, Matthews had been converted from socialism partly by reading Mises's Socialism (http://mises.org/store/Socialism-P55C0.aspx). But the first libertarian-red-baiting marriage was effected shortly after the end of the war by the veteran red-baiter Isaac Don Levine, who founded a little-known monthly called Plain Talk, which featured a curious mixture of libertarian political philosophy and ferocious exposés of alleged "Reds" in America. It was particularly curious because Don Levine has never, before or since that short-lived venture, ever exhibited any interest in freedom or libertarianism. When Plain Talk folded, Don Levine moved to West Germany to play in the revanchist politics of East European emigré groups.
Plain Talk disappeared after several years to make way for the weekly Freeman in 1950, a far more ambitious and better-financed venture which, however, never achieved anything like the influence or readership of the later National Review. Again, this was a libertarian-conservative-red-baiting coalition venture. Coeditors were two veteran writers and journalists: Henry Hazlitt, a laissez-faire economist but never an isolationist; and John Chamberlain, a man of libertarian instincts and a former isolationist, but an ex-leftist deeply scarred by a Communist cell which had been nasty to him in Time magazine.[1] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note1) And so the isolationist cause was never well represented in the Freeman; furthermore, Willi Schlamm later came in as book editor, and Chamberlain brought in the profoundly antilibertarian Forrest Davis to be a third coeditor. Davis, along with Ernest K. Lindley, had written the official Roosevelt administration apologia for Pearl Harbor, and then moved on to become a ghostwriter for Joe McCarthy.[2] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note2)
It was, in fact, McCarthy and "McCarthyism" that provided the main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right wing from isolationism and quasi-libertarianism to simple anti-Communism. Before McCarthy launched his famous crusade in February 1950, he had not been particularly associated with the right wing of the Republican Party; on the contrary, his record was more nearly liberal and centrist, statist rather than libertarian. It should be remembered that red-baiting and anti-Communist witch-hunting was launched by the liberals and, even after McCarthy arose, it was the liberals who were the most effective at this game. It was, after all, the liberal Roosevelt administration that passed the Smith Act, which was then used against Trotskyites and isolationists during World War II and against the Communists after the war; it was the liberal Truman administration that prosecuted Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs — and that launched the Cold War; it was the eminently liberal Hubert Humphrey who put through a clause in the McCarran Act of 1950 threatening concentration camps for "subversives."
In fact, New Left historians Steinke and Weinstein have shown that McCarthy himself learned his red-baiting from none other than the saintly social democratic figure Norman Thomas. During the 1946 campaign, McCarthy first ran for the Senate against the great isolationist leader Robert LaFollette, Jr. While McCarthy did a little red-baiting of the still-consistent isolationist LaFollette in the primary, McCarthy was then a standard internationalist, or Vandenberg, Republican, with indeed a few maverick endorsements of the idea of negotiating peace with the Soviet Union. Then, on August 26, 1946, Norman Thomas, speaking at an annual picnic of the Wisconsin Socialist Party, red-baited the Democratic senatorial candidate, Howard J. McMurray. Thomas in particular accused McMurray of being endorsed by the Daily Worker, an accusation that McCarthy picked up eagerly a few weeks later. McCarthy had gotten the bit in his teeth; he had learned how from a veteran of the internecine struggles on the Left.[3] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note3)
McCarthy's crusade effectively transformed the mass base of the right wing by bringing into the movement a mass of urban Catholics from the Eastern seaboard. Before McCarthy, the rank-and-file of the right wing was the small-town, isolationist Middle West, the typical readers of the old Chicago Tribune. In contrast to the old base, the interest of the new urban Catholic constituency in individual liberty was, if anything, negative; one might say that their main political interest was in stamping out blasphemy and pornography at home and in killing Communists at home and abroad. In a sense, the subsequent emergence of Bill Buckley and his highly Catholic-ish National Review reflected this mass influx and transformation. It is surely no accident that Buckley's first emergence on the political scene was to coauthor (with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, a convert to Catholicism) the leading pro-McCarthy work, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). To the McCarthy banner also flocked the increasingly powerful gaggle of ex-Communists and ex-leftists: notably, George Sokolsky, a leading McCarthy adviser, and J.B. Matthews, who was chief investigator for McCarthy until he stepped on too many toes by denouncing the supposedly massive "infiltration" of the Protestant clergy by the Communist Party.
Not seeing this transformation process at work at the time, I myself was a McCarthy enthusiast. There were two basic reasons. One was that while McCarthy was employing the weapon of a governmental committee, the great bulk of his victims were not private citizens but government officials: bureaucrats and Army officers. Most of McCarthy's red-baiting was therefore "voluntary" rather than "compulsory," since the persons being attacked were, as government officials, fair game from the libertarian point of view. Besides, day in and day out, such Establishment organs as the New York Times kept telling us that McCarthy was "tearing down the morale of the executive branch"; what more could a libertarian hope for? And "tearing down the morale of the Army" to boot! What balm for an antimilitarist!
Recently, I had occasion to see once again, after all these years, Emile de Antonio's film of the McCarthy censure hearings, Point of Order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Order_(film)). Seeing it with an old-time member of the Circle who had also abandoned the right wing long since, we were curious about how we would react; for neither of us had really rethought the long-dead McCarthy episode. Within minutes, we found ourselves cheering once again, though in a rather different way, for that determined symbol of the witch-hunt. For the film began with McCarthy pointing as his basic premise to some crazed map of the United States with the "international Communist conspiracy" moving in a series of coordinated arrows against the United States. (It was for all the world like some '50s issue of the Harvard Lampoon, satirizing an absurd military "menace.") But the crucial point is that McCarthy's army and senatorial adversaries never contested this absurd axiom; and once given the axiom, McCarthy's relentless logic was impeccable. As Steinke and Weinstein point out, McCarthy did not invent witch-hunting and red-baiting. "Nor, as many liberals complain, did he abuse or misuse an otherwise useful tool; he simply carried it to its logical conclusion." Indeed, he took the liberals' own creation and turned it against them, and against the swollen-leviathan army officials as well; and to see them get at least a measure of comeuppance, to see the liberals and centrists hoisted by their own petard, was sweet indeed. In the words of Steinke and Weinstein, McCarthy
rode the monster too hard, turning it against its creators, and they, realizing finally that their creation was out of control, attempted in flaccid defense to turn it back upon him.[4] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note4)
As a bit of personal corroboration, I fully remember the reaction of a close acquaintance, an old Russian Menshevik, a member of the Russian Social Democratic Federation and veteran anti-Communist, when McCarthy's movement began. He was positively gleeful, and ardently supported the McCarthy crusade; it was only later, when he "went too far" that the old Menshevik felt that McCarthy had to be dumped.
But there was another reason for my own fascination with the McCarthy phenomenon: his populism. For the '50s was an era when liberalism — now accurately termed "corporate liberalism" — had triumphed, and seemed to be permanently in the saddle. Having now gained the seats of power, the liberals had given up their radical veneer of the '30s and were now settling down to the cozy enjoyment of their power and perquisites. It was a comfortable alliance of Wall Street, Big Business, Big Government, Big Unions, and liberal Ivy League intellectuals; it seemed to me that while in the long run this unholy alliance could only be overthrown by educating a new generation of intellectuals, that in the short run the only hope to dislodge this new ruling elite was a populist short-circuit. In sum, that there was a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment: of the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals, of the Republican-Democrat political party structure. This appeal could be done — especially in that period of no organized opposition whatever — only by a charismatic leader, a leader who could make a direct appeal to the masses and thereby undercut the ruling and opinion-molding elite; in sum, by a populist short-circuit. It seemed to me that this was what McCarthy was trying to do; and that it was largely this appeal, the open-ended sense that there was no audacity of which McCarthy was not capable, that frightened the liberals, who, from their opposite side of the fence, also saw that the only danger to their rule was in just such a whipping up of populist emotions.[5] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note5)
It is surely no accident that, with their power consolidated and a populist appeal their only fear, the liberal intellectuals began to push hard for their proclamation of the "end of ideology." Hence their claim that ideology and hard-nosed doctrines were no longer valuable or viable, and their ardent celebration of the newfound American consensus. With such enemies and for such reasons, it was hard for me not to be a "McCarthyite."
The leading expression of this celebration of consensus combined with the newfound fear of ideology and populism was Daniel Bell's collection, The New American Right (http://books.google.com/books?id=k6c4AAAAIAAJ) (1955). This collection was also significant in drawing together exradicals (Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer) along with an antipopulist liberal "conservative" (Peter Viereck), into this pro-elitist and antipopulist consensus. Also noteworthy is the book's dedication to S.M. Levitas, executive editor of the social democratic New Leader, the publication that bound "responsible" red-baiters and liberals into the postwar Cold War consensus.[6] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note6)
The peak of my populist and McCarthyite activities came during the height of the McCarthy turmoil, in the furor over the activities of Roy Cohn and S. David Schine. It was shortly after the founding of the Circle Bastiat, and the kids of the Circle, in their capacity as leaders of the still-functioning Students for America, were invited to address a massive testimonial dinner given for Roy Cohn upon his forced ouster from the McCarthy Committee at the Hotel Astor in New York on July 26, 1954. Major speakers were such McCarthyite leaders as Godfrey P. Schmidt, Colonel Archibald Roosevelt, George Sokolsky, Alfred Kohlberg, Bill Buckley, and Rabbi Benjamin Schultz. But the speech which drew the most applause, and which gained a considerable amount of notoriety, was the brief address given by one of our Circle members (George Reisman), which I had written. The speech asked why the intensity of the hatred against Cohn and McCarthy by the liberal intellectuals; and it answered that a threat against Communists in government was also felt to be a threat against the "Socialists and New Dealers, who have been running our political life for the last 21 years, and are still running it!" The speech concluded in a rousing populist appeal that
As the Chicago Tribune aptly put it, the Case of Roy Cohn is the American Dreyfus Case. As Dreyfus was redeemed, so will Roy Cohn when the American people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers, and Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.
Rabbi Schultz, presiding at the dinner, warily referred to the tumultuous applause for the Reisman speech as a "runaway grand jury," and the applause and the speech were mentioned in the accounts of the New York Journal-American, the New York Herald-Tribune, Jack Lait's column in the New York Mirror, the New York World-Telegram and Sun, Murray Kempton's column in the New York Post, and Time magazine. Particularly upset was the veteran liberal and "extremist-baiting" radio commentator, George Hamilton Combs. Combs warned that "the resemblance between this crowd and their opposite members of the extreme left is startlingly close. This was a rightist version of the Henry Wallace convention crowd, the Progressive Party convention of '48."
Particularly interesting is the fact that the by-now-notorious concluding lines of the speech became enshrined in Peter Viereck's contribution to the Daniel Bell book, "The Revolt Against the Elite." Viereck saw the Reisman phraseology as a dangerous "outburst of direct democracy" which "comes straight from the leftist rhetoric of the old Populists and Progressives, a rhetoric forever urging the People to take back 'their' government from the conspiring Powers That Be." Precisely.
Viereck also explained that he meant by "direct democracy," "our mob tradition of Tom Paine, Jacobinism, and the Midwestern Populist parties," which "is government by referendum and mass petition, such as the McCarthyite Committee of Ten Million." Being "immediate and hotheaded," direct democracy "facilitates revolution, demagogy, and Robespierrian thought control" — in contrast, I suppose, to the quieter but more pervasive elitist "thought control" of corporate liberalism.[7] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note7)
Since I failed to understand the interplay of domestic and foreign red-baiting that was at work in the McCarthy movement, I was bewildered when McCarthy, after his outrageous censure by the Senate in late 1954, turned to whooping it up for war on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in Asia. Why this turnabout? It was clear that the New Right forces behind McCarthy were now convinced that domestic red-baiting, angering as it did the center-right establishment, had become counterproductive, and that from now on the full stress must be on pushing for war against Communism abroad. In retrospect it is clear that a major force for this turn was the sinister figure of the millionaire Far Eastern importer, Alfred Kohlberg, a major backer of McCarthy who supplied him with much of his material, and boasted of his position as Dean of the powerful "China Lobby" on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek. While a failure in the short run, the McCarthy movement had done its work of shifting the entire focus of the right wing from libertarian, antistatist, and isolationist concerns to a focus and concentration upon the alleged Communist "menace." A diversion from domestic to foreign affairs would not only consolidate the right wing; it would also draw no real opposition from liberals and internationalist Republicans who had, after all, begun the Cold War in the first place.
The short-run collapse of the McCarthy movement was clearly due, furthermore, to the lack of any sort of McCarthyite organization. There were leaders, there was press support, there was a large mass base, but there were no channels of organization, no intermediary links, either in journals of opinion or of more direct popular organizations, between the leaders and the base. In late 1955, William F. Buckley and his newly formed weekly, National Review, set out to remedy that lack.
In 1951, when Bill Buckley first burst upon the scene with his God and Man at Yale (http://books.google.com/books?id=FBE4AAAAMAAJ), he liked to refer to himself as a "libertarian" or even at times as an "anarchist"; for in those early days Buckley's major ideological mentor was Frank Chodorov (http://mises.org/daily/2499) rather than, as it would soon become, the notorious Whittaker Chambers. But even in those early "libertarian" days, there was one clinker that made his libertarianism only phony rhetoric: the global anti-Communist crusade.
... continued ...
Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises Institute (http://mises.org/)
November 29, 2007
Garet Garrett had called the shots: in referring to the triumph of the New Deal and then of American Empire, he had summed up the strategy: "revolution within the form." The New Right did not bother, would not rouse possible resistance, by directing a frontal assault on the old idols: on the dead Senator Taft, on the Bricker Amendment, or on the old ideals of individualism and liberty. Instead, they ignored some, dropped others, and claimed to come to fulfill the general ideals of individualism in a new and superior "fusion" of liberty and ordered tradition.
How, specifically, was the deed done? For one thing, by hitting us at our most vulnerable point: the blight of anti-Communism. For red-baiting came easily to all of us, even the most libertarian. In the first place, there were the terrible memories of World War II: the way in which the Communist Party had gleefully adopted the mantle of war patriots, of "twentieth-century Americanism," and had unashamedly smeared all opponents of war as agents of Hitler.
Conservative and former liberal isolationists could scarcely forget and forgive; and hence, when the Cold War began, when the "great patriotic coalition" of the United States and Russia fell apart, it was difficult for the Old Right to resist the temptation to avenge themselves, to turn the agents-of-a-foreign-power smear back upon their old tormentors. Furthermore, blinded by hatred of Russia as an interventionist power, we mistakenly believed that repudiation of the fruits of the Russian alliance, including Teheran and Yalta, was in itself a repudiation of World War II. We unfortunately did not realize — as later New Left historians were to point out — that the Cold War and the intervention into World War II were part and parcel of the same development: that one was the inevitable outgrowth of the other, and that both were an integral part of American imperialism rampant.
But the problem was still deeper than that. For our main problem was our simplistic view of the ideological-political spectrum. We all assumed that there were two poles: a "left" pole of Communism, socialism, and total government; and a "right" pole of libertarianism and individualist anarchism. Left of center were the liberals and social democrats; right of center were the conservatives. From that simplistic spectrum we concluded, first, that conservatives, no matter how divergent, were our "natural" allies, and second, that there was little real difference between liberals and Communists. Why not then fuzz the truth just a bit, and use the anti-Communist bludgeon to hit at the liberals, especially since the liberals had become entrenched in power and were running the country? There was a temptation that few of us could resist.
What we didn't fully realize at the time was that the Communists and socialists had not invented statism or leviathan government, that the latter had been around for centuries, and that the current developing liberal-conservative consensus and in particular the triumph of liberalism was a reversion to the old despotic ancien régime. This ancien régime was the Old Order against which the libertarian and laissez-faire movements of the 18th and 19th centuries had emerged as a revolutionary opposition: an opposition on behalf of economic freedom and individual liberty. Jefferson, Cobden, and Thoreau as our forbears were ancestors in more ways than one; for both we and they were battling against a mercantilist statism that established bureaucratic despotism and corporate monopolies at home and waged imperial wars abroad. But if socialism and liberalism are reversions to the Old European Conservatism, then it becomes clear that it is statist conservatism — now joined by liberalism and social democracy — that is still, and not simply in 1800, the major enemy of liberty. And if liberals and Communists sound alike, this does not mean, as we thought then, that liberals had somehow become crypto-Communists; on the contrary, it was a sign that Communists had become liberals!
But for us this analysis — to be developed by Leonard Liggio — was still far in the future. During the 1940s and '50s we merrily engaged in red-baiting. My own position was characteristically libertarian: I distinguished between "compulsory" red-baiting, using the power of the State to repress Communists and leftists, which I deplored, and "voluntary" red-baiting by private organizations and groups, which I supported. The former included the Smith Act prosecutions, the McCarran Act, and the inquisitions of HUAC. Another of my blind spots is that I did not realize the virtual impossibility of keeping domestic and foreign red-baiting strictly separate; it was psychologically and politically impossible to persecute or harass Communists or leftists at home, while at the same time pursuing a policy of peace, neutrality, and friendship with Communist countries overseas. And the global anti-Communist crusaders knew this truth all too well.
From early in the postwar period, the major carriers of the anti-Communist contagion were the ex-Communist and ex-leftist intellectuals. In a climate of growing disillusion with the fatuous propaganda of World War II, the ex-Communists hit the intellectual and political worlds like a bombshell, more and more forming the spearhead of the anti-Communist crusade, domestic and foreign. Sophisticated, worldly, veteran polemicists, they had been there: to naive and breathless Americans, the ex-leftists were like travelers from an unknown and therefore terrifying land, returning with authentic tales of horror and warning. Since they, with their special knowledge, knew, and since they raised the terrible warnings, who were we to deny that truth? The fact that "ex-es" throughout history have tried frantically to expiate their guilt and their fear of having wasted their lives by attempting to denigrate and exterminate their former love — that fact was lost on us as well as on most of America.
From the very end of the war, the "ex-es" were everywhere on the Right, whipping up fear, pointing the finger, eager to persecute or exterminate any Communists they could find, at home and abroad. Several older generation "ex-es" from the prewar era were prominent. One was George E. Sokolsky, columnist for the New York Sun, who had been a Communist in the early 1920s. Particularly prominent on the Right was Dr. J.B. Matthews, foremost Communist fellow traveler of the early 1930s, who by the end of that decade was chief investigator for the Dies Committee; Matthews was to make a fortune out of his famous "card files," a mammoth collection of "Communist front" names which he would use to sell his services as finger man for industries and organizations; pleasant and erudite, Matthews had been converted from socialism partly by reading Mises's Socialism (http://mises.org/store/Socialism-P55C0.aspx). But the first libertarian-red-baiting marriage was effected shortly after the end of the war by the veteran red-baiter Isaac Don Levine, who founded a little-known monthly called Plain Talk, which featured a curious mixture of libertarian political philosophy and ferocious exposés of alleged "Reds" in America. It was particularly curious because Don Levine has never, before or since that short-lived venture, ever exhibited any interest in freedom or libertarianism. When Plain Talk folded, Don Levine moved to West Germany to play in the revanchist politics of East European emigré groups.
Plain Talk disappeared after several years to make way for the weekly Freeman in 1950, a far more ambitious and better-financed venture which, however, never achieved anything like the influence or readership of the later National Review. Again, this was a libertarian-conservative-red-baiting coalition venture. Coeditors were two veteran writers and journalists: Henry Hazlitt, a laissez-faire economist but never an isolationist; and John Chamberlain, a man of libertarian instincts and a former isolationist, but an ex-leftist deeply scarred by a Communist cell which had been nasty to him in Time magazine.[1] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note1) And so the isolationist cause was never well represented in the Freeman; furthermore, Willi Schlamm later came in as book editor, and Chamberlain brought in the profoundly antilibertarian Forrest Davis to be a third coeditor. Davis, along with Ernest K. Lindley, had written the official Roosevelt administration apologia for Pearl Harbor, and then moved on to become a ghostwriter for Joe McCarthy.[2] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note2)
It was, in fact, McCarthy and "McCarthyism" that provided the main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right wing from isolationism and quasi-libertarianism to simple anti-Communism. Before McCarthy launched his famous crusade in February 1950, he had not been particularly associated with the right wing of the Republican Party; on the contrary, his record was more nearly liberal and centrist, statist rather than libertarian. It should be remembered that red-baiting and anti-Communist witch-hunting was launched by the liberals and, even after McCarthy arose, it was the liberals who were the most effective at this game. It was, after all, the liberal Roosevelt administration that passed the Smith Act, which was then used against Trotskyites and isolationists during World War II and against the Communists after the war; it was the liberal Truman administration that prosecuted Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs — and that launched the Cold War; it was the eminently liberal Hubert Humphrey who put through a clause in the McCarran Act of 1950 threatening concentration camps for "subversives."
In fact, New Left historians Steinke and Weinstein have shown that McCarthy himself learned his red-baiting from none other than the saintly social democratic figure Norman Thomas. During the 1946 campaign, McCarthy first ran for the Senate against the great isolationist leader Robert LaFollette, Jr. While McCarthy did a little red-baiting of the still-consistent isolationist LaFollette in the primary, McCarthy was then a standard internationalist, or Vandenberg, Republican, with indeed a few maverick endorsements of the idea of negotiating peace with the Soviet Union. Then, on August 26, 1946, Norman Thomas, speaking at an annual picnic of the Wisconsin Socialist Party, red-baited the Democratic senatorial candidate, Howard J. McMurray. Thomas in particular accused McMurray of being endorsed by the Daily Worker, an accusation that McCarthy picked up eagerly a few weeks later. McCarthy had gotten the bit in his teeth; he had learned how from a veteran of the internecine struggles on the Left.[3] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note3)
McCarthy's crusade effectively transformed the mass base of the right wing by bringing into the movement a mass of urban Catholics from the Eastern seaboard. Before McCarthy, the rank-and-file of the right wing was the small-town, isolationist Middle West, the typical readers of the old Chicago Tribune. In contrast to the old base, the interest of the new urban Catholic constituency in individual liberty was, if anything, negative; one might say that their main political interest was in stamping out blasphemy and pornography at home and in killing Communists at home and abroad. In a sense, the subsequent emergence of Bill Buckley and his highly Catholic-ish National Review reflected this mass influx and transformation. It is surely no accident that Buckley's first emergence on the political scene was to coauthor (with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, a convert to Catholicism) the leading pro-McCarthy work, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). To the McCarthy banner also flocked the increasingly powerful gaggle of ex-Communists and ex-leftists: notably, George Sokolsky, a leading McCarthy adviser, and J.B. Matthews, who was chief investigator for McCarthy until he stepped on too many toes by denouncing the supposedly massive "infiltration" of the Protestant clergy by the Communist Party.
Not seeing this transformation process at work at the time, I myself was a McCarthy enthusiast. There were two basic reasons. One was that while McCarthy was employing the weapon of a governmental committee, the great bulk of his victims were not private citizens but government officials: bureaucrats and Army officers. Most of McCarthy's red-baiting was therefore "voluntary" rather than "compulsory," since the persons being attacked were, as government officials, fair game from the libertarian point of view. Besides, day in and day out, such Establishment organs as the New York Times kept telling us that McCarthy was "tearing down the morale of the executive branch"; what more could a libertarian hope for? And "tearing down the morale of the Army" to boot! What balm for an antimilitarist!
Recently, I had occasion to see once again, after all these years, Emile de Antonio's film of the McCarthy censure hearings, Point of Order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Order_(film)). Seeing it with an old-time member of the Circle who had also abandoned the right wing long since, we were curious about how we would react; for neither of us had really rethought the long-dead McCarthy episode. Within minutes, we found ourselves cheering once again, though in a rather different way, for that determined symbol of the witch-hunt. For the film began with McCarthy pointing as his basic premise to some crazed map of the United States with the "international Communist conspiracy" moving in a series of coordinated arrows against the United States. (It was for all the world like some '50s issue of the Harvard Lampoon, satirizing an absurd military "menace.") But the crucial point is that McCarthy's army and senatorial adversaries never contested this absurd axiom; and once given the axiom, McCarthy's relentless logic was impeccable. As Steinke and Weinstein point out, McCarthy did not invent witch-hunting and red-baiting. "Nor, as many liberals complain, did he abuse or misuse an otherwise useful tool; he simply carried it to its logical conclusion." Indeed, he took the liberals' own creation and turned it against them, and against the swollen-leviathan army officials as well; and to see them get at least a measure of comeuppance, to see the liberals and centrists hoisted by their own petard, was sweet indeed. In the words of Steinke and Weinstein, McCarthy
rode the monster too hard, turning it against its creators, and they, realizing finally that their creation was out of control, attempted in flaccid defense to turn it back upon him.[4] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note4)
As a bit of personal corroboration, I fully remember the reaction of a close acquaintance, an old Russian Menshevik, a member of the Russian Social Democratic Federation and veteran anti-Communist, when McCarthy's movement began. He was positively gleeful, and ardently supported the McCarthy crusade; it was only later, when he "went too far" that the old Menshevik felt that McCarthy had to be dumped.
But there was another reason for my own fascination with the McCarthy phenomenon: his populism. For the '50s was an era when liberalism — now accurately termed "corporate liberalism" — had triumphed, and seemed to be permanently in the saddle. Having now gained the seats of power, the liberals had given up their radical veneer of the '30s and were now settling down to the cozy enjoyment of their power and perquisites. It was a comfortable alliance of Wall Street, Big Business, Big Government, Big Unions, and liberal Ivy League intellectuals; it seemed to me that while in the long run this unholy alliance could only be overthrown by educating a new generation of intellectuals, that in the short run the only hope to dislodge this new ruling elite was a populist short-circuit. In sum, that there was a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment: of the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals, of the Republican-Democrat political party structure. This appeal could be done — especially in that period of no organized opposition whatever — only by a charismatic leader, a leader who could make a direct appeal to the masses and thereby undercut the ruling and opinion-molding elite; in sum, by a populist short-circuit. It seemed to me that this was what McCarthy was trying to do; and that it was largely this appeal, the open-ended sense that there was no audacity of which McCarthy was not capable, that frightened the liberals, who, from their opposite side of the fence, also saw that the only danger to their rule was in just such a whipping up of populist emotions.[5] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note5)
It is surely no accident that, with their power consolidated and a populist appeal their only fear, the liberal intellectuals began to push hard for their proclamation of the "end of ideology." Hence their claim that ideology and hard-nosed doctrines were no longer valuable or viable, and their ardent celebration of the newfound American consensus. With such enemies and for such reasons, it was hard for me not to be a "McCarthyite."
The leading expression of this celebration of consensus combined with the newfound fear of ideology and populism was Daniel Bell's collection, The New American Right (http://books.google.com/books?id=k6c4AAAAIAAJ) (1955). This collection was also significant in drawing together exradicals (Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer) along with an antipopulist liberal "conservative" (Peter Viereck), into this pro-elitist and antipopulist consensus. Also noteworthy is the book's dedication to S.M. Levitas, executive editor of the social democratic New Leader, the publication that bound "responsible" red-baiters and liberals into the postwar Cold War consensus.[6] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note6)
The peak of my populist and McCarthyite activities came during the height of the McCarthy turmoil, in the furor over the activities of Roy Cohn and S. David Schine. It was shortly after the founding of the Circle Bastiat, and the kids of the Circle, in their capacity as leaders of the still-functioning Students for America, were invited to address a massive testimonial dinner given for Roy Cohn upon his forced ouster from the McCarthy Committee at the Hotel Astor in New York on July 26, 1954. Major speakers were such McCarthyite leaders as Godfrey P. Schmidt, Colonel Archibald Roosevelt, George Sokolsky, Alfred Kohlberg, Bill Buckley, and Rabbi Benjamin Schultz. But the speech which drew the most applause, and which gained a considerable amount of notoriety, was the brief address given by one of our Circle members (George Reisman), which I had written. The speech asked why the intensity of the hatred against Cohn and McCarthy by the liberal intellectuals; and it answered that a threat against Communists in government was also felt to be a threat against the "Socialists and New Dealers, who have been running our political life for the last 21 years, and are still running it!" The speech concluded in a rousing populist appeal that
As the Chicago Tribune aptly put it, the Case of Roy Cohn is the American Dreyfus Case. As Dreyfus was redeemed, so will Roy Cohn when the American people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers, and Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.
Rabbi Schultz, presiding at the dinner, warily referred to the tumultuous applause for the Reisman speech as a "runaway grand jury," and the applause and the speech were mentioned in the accounts of the New York Journal-American, the New York Herald-Tribune, Jack Lait's column in the New York Mirror, the New York World-Telegram and Sun, Murray Kempton's column in the New York Post, and Time magazine. Particularly upset was the veteran liberal and "extremist-baiting" radio commentator, George Hamilton Combs. Combs warned that "the resemblance between this crowd and their opposite members of the extreme left is startlingly close. This was a rightist version of the Henry Wallace convention crowd, the Progressive Party convention of '48."
Particularly interesting is the fact that the by-now-notorious concluding lines of the speech became enshrined in Peter Viereck's contribution to the Daniel Bell book, "The Revolt Against the Elite." Viereck saw the Reisman phraseology as a dangerous "outburst of direct democracy" which "comes straight from the leftist rhetoric of the old Populists and Progressives, a rhetoric forever urging the People to take back 'their' government from the conspiring Powers That Be." Precisely.
Viereck also explained that he meant by "direct democracy," "our mob tradition of Tom Paine, Jacobinism, and the Midwestern Populist parties," which "is government by referendum and mass petition, such as the McCarthyite Committee of Ten Million." Being "immediate and hotheaded," direct democracy "facilitates revolution, demagogy, and Robespierrian thought control" — in contrast, I suppose, to the quieter but more pervasive elitist "thought control" of corporate liberalism.[7] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note7)
Since I failed to understand the interplay of domestic and foreign red-baiting that was at work in the McCarthy movement, I was bewildered when McCarthy, after his outrageous censure by the Senate in late 1954, turned to whooping it up for war on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in Asia. Why this turnabout? It was clear that the New Right forces behind McCarthy were now convinced that domestic red-baiting, angering as it did the center-right establishment, had become counterproductive, and that from now on the full stress must be on pushing for war against Communism abroad. In retrospect it is clear that a major force for this turn was the sinister figure of the millionaire Far Eastern importer, Alfred Kohlberg, a major backer of McCarthy who supplied him with much of his material, and boasted of his position as Dean of the powerful "China Lobby" on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek. While a failure in the short run, the McCarthy movement had done its work of shifting the entire focus of the right wing from libertarian, antistatist, and isolationist concerns to a focus and concentration upon the alleged Communist "menace." A diversion from domestic to foreign affairs would not only consolidate the right wing; it would also draw no real opposition from liberals and internationalist Republicans who had, after all, begun the Cold War in the first place.
The short-run collapse of the McCarthy movement was clearly due, furthermore, to the lack of any sort of McCarthyite organization. There were leaders, there was press support, there was a large mass base, but there were no channels of organization, no intermediary links, either in journals of opinion or of more direct popular organizations, between the leaders and the base. In late 1955, William F. Buckley and his newly formed weekly, National Review, set out to remedy that lack.
In 1951, when Bill Buckley first burst upon the scene with his God and Man at Yale (http://books.google.com/books?id=FBE4AAAAMAAJ), he liked to refer to himself as a "libertarian" or even at times as an "anarchist"; for in those early days Buckley's major ideological mentor was Frank Chodorov (http://mises.org/daily/2499) rather than, as it would soon become, the notorious Whittaker Chambers. But even in those early "libertarian" days, there was one clinker that made his libertarianism only phony rhetoric: the global anti-Communist crusade.
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