what my schooling never learned me

"TWENTY YEARS AGO I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone 'Neanderthal' (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that 'Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists.' Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed by a single iota in these two decades!"

So opens Murray Rothbard's 1968 essay, "Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal".

I've added the next line to my Rothbard quotes file:

My personal odyssey is unimportant; the important point is that if I can move from "extreme right" to "extreme left" merely by standing in one place, drastic though unrecognized changes must have taken place throughout the American political spectrum over the last generation.

Murray N. Rothbard,
"Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"

Think of it: changes that were "drastic and unrecognized"! How drastic these changes were is obvious once you know them. The unrecognized part I (or any of us who were schooled after 1968) can attest to simply by asking, "Was I ever taught any of this?"

My own schooling was left-wing by 1948 standards, left-wing by 1968 standards, and left-wing by 1988 standards. My history teachers made much effort to tie it all together so it seemed coherent. Specifically, there's this tricky problem of how to teach the Old Right: how can you explain the fact that opposition to both world wars was conducted by Quakers, communists, anarchists, and the Old Right? Simple: just claim that the Old Right were pro-German, even pro-Nazi. They weren't so much anti-war on principle as anti-this-war-against-their-own-kind.

This is FDR's propaganda (investigated by his own Justice Department and found to be utterly without evidence) still being taught a half-century later as history. Disgusting. I can't believe I ever considered my education to have been high-quality. (All I had to compare it to was government schooling, where even the statist indoctrination is less efficient!)

How's this for Orwellian? One of the main figures of the anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-centralization, anti-leftist Old Right was president of Quaker-founded Haverford College, where I went after Quaker high school. I had never heard of him until I read about him in Jude Blanchette's brief primer on the Old Right:

While there are many who comprised the Old Right, three are worth singling out for the volume of their writings, and the influence they had during the late 30s and early 40s. The first is Felix Morley, the Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Washington Post (1933-1940), president of Haverford College, co-founder of Human Events and prominent critic of American imperialism. See Joseph R. Stromberg's Felix Morley: An Old Fashioned Republican Critic of Statism and Interventionism (Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 269-277) and Felix Morley: An Old Fashioned Republican. Leonard Liggio, in Felix Morley and the Commonwealthman Tradition: The Country-Party, Centralization and the American Empire (Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 279-286) looks at Morley's historical analysis of the libertarian movement and the rise of the state. Of Morley's books, Freedom and Federalism (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981 [1959]) and The Power in the People (Nash Publishing, 1972 [1949]) are his best critiques of imperialism abroad and the welfare state at home.

Furthermore, the heroes of the Old Right, according to Rothbard, were "such men as Jefferson, Paine, Cobden, Bright and Spencer; but as our views became purer and more consistent, we eagerly embraced such near-anarchists as the voluntarist, Auberon Herbert, and the American individualist-anarchists, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker. One of our great intellectual heroes was Henry David Thoreau, and his essay, 'Civil Disobedience,' was one of our guiding stars. Right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau." [links added by me, obviously]

Gosh, in high school, we were practically taught to worship Thoreau. We spent most of one semester reading primary and secondary texts. It's interesting that "Civil Disobedience" wasn't among them, as I recall. Certainly it was mentioned over and over again, to give some historical weight I suppose to the civil disobedience of the 20th-century Left, but the emphasis was the title, and the connection between Thoreau's opposition to slavery and American imperialism and the Left's campaign for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. So far so good -- I'm sure Thoreau would have opposed Jim Crow and Vietnam, just as Rothbard did. But what about the fact that the Left (and the later civil rights movement) wanted to build up the size and scope of government while Thoreau's essay is an early American anarchist manifesto?

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.

Henry David Thoreau

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

Henry David Thoreau

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which we will have.

Henry David Thoreau

My American history teacher in high school (whom I loved at the time -- I loved all my history teachers at the time) taught us to think of the Left in terms of liberals and radicals and the Right in terms of conservatives and reactionaries. I'm not making this up. He really did spend part of one class making sure we used a one-dimensional left/right ideological map based on the progressive theory of history (without identifying it as such) and made sure we'd use the words the way he wanted us to. Imagine my surprise when I read the following forgotten history in Rothbard's essay:

Anti-communism was the central root of the decay of the old libertarian right, but it was not the only one. In 1953, a big splash was made by the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. Before that, no one on the right regarded himself as a "conservative"; "conservative" was considered a left smear word. Now, suddenly, the right began to glory in the term "conservative," and Kirk began to make speaking appearances, often in a kind of friendly "vital center" tandem with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. [emphasis added]

Well, I won't try to summarize Rothbard's great great essay. Please read it.

I will mention, however, that I've added a line or two to my Black Crayon dictionary, under the definition of Big Business:

As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation and welfare statism that left and right alike have always believed to be mass movements against Big Business are not only now backed to the hilt by Big Business, but were originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy that would benefit it. Imperialistic foreign policy and the permanent garrison state originated in the Big Business drive for foreign investments and for war contracts at home.

Murray N. Rothbard,
"Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"

[rothbard]