I generally refer to my political philosophy as conservative libertarian, in order to distinguish it from left libertarianism or modern American “Progressive liberalism.” Hayek’s preferred term, “classical liberalism,” causes too much confusion in contemporary political discourse, although when I say that I am a conservative libertarian what I mean is that I want to conserve the classical liberalism of America’s Founders, with such core principles as individual and economic freedom, limited government, and the rule of law. Whatever confusion has come about regarding political nomenclature, at least in America, is largely a result of the Progressive movement and the fact that it has turned the term “liberal” on its head to mean one who favors a concentration of power in the hands of the state and as one who advocates state intervention in most facets of life, whether Constitutional or not. The Republican Party and the conservative movement, to a large degree, have gone along with this distortion of the understanding of the political term “liberalism,” to such a degree that the term has now become a derogatory epithet that not even the left will own up to, the preferred term now being Progressive. And to add to the confusion: while in nineteenth century speech, “liberal” was in opposition to “conservative,” in that earlier era a conservative was someone who favored a monarchy and aristocracy, and was usually opposed to free institutions and free markets, whereas a contemporary conservative is in favor of such things.

In contemporary political parlance, libertarians are generally considered to be on the Right end of the political spectrum, although I’m sure that the Libertarian Party would either not consider the Left-Right spectrum to be relevant (which is a good point) or they would consider themselves to be neither left nor right. But significantly perhaps, some of the most radical adherents of libertarianism, such as anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard, came to consider contemporary libertarianism to be on the Right. For example, a follower of Rothbard, Justin Raimondo, has written Reclaiming the American Right (1993), which situates libertarianism firmly on the Right. The book contains sections on what is now referred to as the “Old Right,” including such classical liberals as Garet Garrett and John T. Flynn who opposed the New Deal, as well as proto-libertarian New Deal opponents such as H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, and Albert J. Nock.

I recently read Jeff Riggenbach’s “The Myth of the ‘Old Right,’” (Mises Daily, November 20, 2009), which is an excerpt from his book, Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism. As I had previously written “The Conservative-Libertarian Debate,” Riggenbach’s article caused me to rethink some of my prior conclusions, and so I also began reading his book. Riggenbach basically agreed that “the very term liberal had been hijacked” by the Progressive left of the twentieth century. Speaking of John T. Flynn, Riggenbach wrote:

John Moser reports of John T. Flynn that “to the end of his life he never referred to himself as anything but a liberal.… Flynn claimed that it was the American political climate that changed during his lifetime, not he. Indeed, he believed that the very term liberal had been hijacked. (Ibid., p. 154)

This is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s comment that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me” (Wikipedia, Ronald Reagan ). Quoting Moser again, Riggenbach wrote:

John T. Flynn, a journalist and commentator and a noted liberal spokesman since the 1920s, wrote in 1940 that “I see the standard of liberalism that I have followed all my life flying over a group of causes which, as a liberal along with all liberals, I have abhorred all my life.” (p. 152)

Riggenbach concluded:

The writers and intellectuals who made up the most visible contingent of the “Old Right” were in no meaningful sense on the Right at all. They were on the Left, where they had always been. They were liberals. The term liberal had in fact been hijacked. The “two-party system” in the United States now consisted of two conservative parties and no liberal party. (p. 154)

Riggenbach has essentially asserted that Roosevelt’s New Deal was conservative and on Right because it was statist, and therefore, not liberal and of the Left: “The irony of all this was that the New Deal, the program of the fraudulent “liberals” of the Roosevelt administration, was, at heart, a profoundly conservative program” (p. 155).

Using pragmatic criteria, one might ask: What difference does it make whether the old libertarian opponents of the New Deal were on the Right or on the Left? What matters is where people stand today. To answer that question, one needs to know how Riggenbach came to his conclusions. Following Rothbard’s revisionist interpretation of American history, while the Democratic Party had been the party of liberalism and free market economics in the nineteenth century, things began to change dramatically in the Progressive era of the twentieth century, culminating in FDR and the New Deal. (Ironically perhaps, revisionist historiography began with such Progressive historians as Charles Beard and his acolyte, Harry Elmer Barnes.)

According to Riggenbach (following Rothbard again), American political history has been a struggle between liberalism and statism, beginning with the conflicts between Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans on the one hand, and Hamilton and the Federalists on the other: the former advocating limited government, low taxes, and free markets, while the latter favored a strong central government, a powerful central bank, and higher taxes and protective tariffs to benefit American manufacturing. While the Federalist Party dissolved in the nineteenth century, they were replaced by the Whigs, and then finally by the Republican Party in 1856. According to revisionists, both left and right, Lincoln was a Big Government statist, who promoted the interests of the northeastern financial and industrial elite against the agrarian South. Following this version, the Great Emancipator fought the Civil War (or War of Southern Secession as his opponents called it) in order to preserve the Union and deny the South the right to secede, which in his own writings he would have done without freeing a single slave. Lincoln is reported to have told Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it” (Ibid., p. 188). While slavery is certainly an abomination according to libertarian principles, the evidence indicates that Lincoln did not primarily fight the war to end slavery, and that he did in fact exceed his Constitutional authority when he denied the South the right to secede and become self-governing. During the war, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, censored the press, and imprisoned newspaper “editors who oppose[d] his policies” (p. 58). Whatever one thinks of Lincoln as President, the main point in the revisionist narrative of American history is that the Republican Party, going back to its inception, was the party of Big Government, in collusion with Big Business and Big Banking. It was not the party of small, limited government and free markets. The latter was the party of the Democratic left, representing classical and Jeffersonian liberalism. Following Riggenbach’s analysis, it is important to understand that he defines both conservative and right wing as statist. During the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, in Riggenbach’s view, both parties became conservative, and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, when they did hold on to their ideals, pursued them with conservative (statist) methods (p. 144). The watershed moment though, in this change from a liberal, free market Democratic Party was really the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The irony of the situation was that Roosevelt ran on a liberal, small government platform. (Of course, we Americans have unfortunately become quite used to the fact that campaign promises are meaningless.) Roosevelt promised to reduce government expenditures, reduce deficits and government borrowing, reduce government bureaucracy and eliminate unnecessary bureaus, and maintain a sound currency. Of course, once in office, he did the exact opposite, continuing and expanding Hoover’s interventionist programs (pp. 151 – 52). As Riggenbach wrote: “First he [Roosevelt] took Hoover’s Hamiltonian policies and enormously expanded them; then, astonishingly, he had the effrontery to describe himself and his stolen program as ‘liberal’” (p. 152).

As Murray Rothbard has argued in “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty” (Left and Right, Spring 1965, pp. 4-22):

[T]he New Deal was not a qualitative break from the American past; on the contrary, it was merely a quantitative extension of the web of State privilege that had been proposed and acted upon before: in Hoover’s Administration, in the war collectivism of World War I, and in the Progressive Era.

Rothbard referred to the work of historian Gabriel Kolko, whose Triumph of Conservatism: A Re-interpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1963) argued that contrary to the myth that the Progressive era fostered the breakup of monopolies and trusts, the reality was that it was during this period that big business colluded with the federal government to reduce free market competition. Rothbard continued:

In short, the [Progressive era] intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business  . . . had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both Left and Right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business.

According to Rothbard, this was the beginning of “State monopoly capitalism,” or what Kolko called “political capitalism.”

While I have little argument with Riggenbach’s thesis that the Republican Party was always a statist party and still is to a large extent, I think his thesis that liberalism has always been on the left only confuses the issue. In point of fact, there is a political philosophy called classical liberalism that was revolutionary in the eighteenth century, but going back to the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century there has always been a form of so-called left wing statism promoting a form of egalitarianism or socialism. Riggenbach correctly refers to this history when he speaks of historian Vernon Parrington’s observation that many American revolutionary leaders were critical of the “French revolutionists for preaching ‘equality of persons and property’” because “the concepts of liberty and equality, when equality is taken to mean the equality of income or equality of property, are ‘contradictory’” (p. 121). In other words, to achieve equality of income or property a powerful state, with the right to expropriate property by force whenever it pleases, is required. Thus the French Revolution, when equality became a primary objective, inevitably drifted into a tyrannical dictatorship. An egalitarianism of wealth requires a concentration of power in the hands of the state, to the detriment of individual liberty, in order to succeed in its aims.

While Riggenbach essentially agrees with Rothbard’s analysis of American history, he takes issue with Rothbard’s designation of the libertarian opponents of FDR’s New Deal as the “Old Right” because it is inconsistent with Rothbard’s historical account that liberalism has always been on the left. In response to Rothbard’s claim that “In short, this libertarian Right based itself on eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism, and began systematically to extend that doctrine even further” (“Transformation of the American Right,” Continuum, Summer 1964, pp. 220–231), Riggenbach argued as follows: “But if they were extending the doctrine of liberalism even further, they must have been liberals, right? They must have been men and women of the Left, not the Right — right?” Riggenbach’s critique of Rothbard is complicated by the fact that Rothbard basically agreed with him, that libertarianism was on the left, and yet he still designated opponents of the New Deal as the “Old Right” (Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty”). In fact, during the 1960s, Rothbard even made an attempt to make common cause with the New Left, which failed to produce results.

The problem with Riggenbach’s analysis, in my view, is that it places too much emphasis on a Left-Right political spectrum that may in fact be obsolete. Yes, the “Old Right” would have been considered to be on the Left in the nineteenth century, but times have changed. The American Left, during the Progressive era and especially with the advent of the New Deal, had become a statist party, a party that believes in concentrations of power in the hands of a large, interventionist central government. This may have at least partially been due to the influence of the European Left, which had a powerful statist bent going back to the French Revolution. The classical liberals or libertarians were still liberal, and they were a leading force in opposition to the New Deal, but according to the radical politics of the twentieth century they were conservative because they wanted to conserve liberalism in opposition to egalitarian and socialistic projects. Thus, while I would argue that the term liberal has a specific meaning which was corrupted by the left, what is now considered left has been so completely expropriated by socialism, communism, and statism in general that it is pointless to argue that liberalism and libertarianism are actually on the Left. Instead, I would argue that it’s more useful to define the political spectrum on a continuum from maximum individual liberty to maximum state control, with anarchism and libertarianism on the former end and statism, socialism, and various forms of totalitarianism on the other, than it is to cling to the old Left-Right spectrum. The left has become statist — socialism and communism are both statist — and both the Democratic and Republican Parties are largely statist. If the Republican Party was not statist, then it would have made significant strides to limit the size and scope of government power when in control of Congress and the Presidency. But it has not. Nevertheless, in post-New Deal America, one is more likely to find a libertarian, such as Ron Paul, in the Republican camp than in the Democratic Party. The problem is further explicated when we observe that when people speak of core conservative principles, they are usually referring to core libertarian principles, such as limited government, rule of law, and individual and economic freedom. So the issue remains: how do we define conservative? Although I would argue that the Republican Party is still largely controlled by statist forces (pseudo-conservatives), post-New Deal conservatism has largely embraced libertarian principles that have been abandoned by the left and the Democratic Party.

I think part of Riggenbach’s motive for placing contemporary libertarianism on the left is to distinguish libertarianism from conservatism (and perhaps, the Libertarian Party from the Republican Party). Certainly, he has no delusions of a libertarian takeover of the statist Democratic Party. Interestingly enough, Ron Paul, who ran for President on the LP ticket in 1988, but later won election to Congress as a Republican, was quite laudatory of former Republican Presidential candidate Robert Taft, as well as traditional conservatives such as Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet, in his recently published The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008).  He was particularly in agreement with their stance in favor of limited government and their opposition to military interventions and adventurism. While there are definitely differences between traditional conservatism and libertarianism, I would like to point to another essential area where I think they could make common cause, aside from their mutual opposition to military interventionism; and that is in the area of what Nisbet has called intermediate associations, a concept that he borrowed from Burke (“little platoons”) and Tocqueville (“voluntary associations”). These are the various social structures that stand between the individual and the state, such as family, neighborhood associations, churches, and various other community groups and clubs. While libertarians have not always been in favor of all these disbursed forms of authority, they do tend to act as a buffer between the monolithic state and the individual, and so in that sense, foster freedom from the state.

So to conclude: While I think that much of Riggenbach’s analysis is exemplary and well worth the read, I think his argument that libertarianism is on the left is pointless for contemporary political discourse. One can argue logically that “the very term liberal had been hijacked” by the Left because Political Correctness is inconsistent with a belief in free institutions, but the Leftist label has such a long association now with statism, socialism, and communism that to dispute the case will only lead to needless confusion. That train has left the station and won’t come back.

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Tags: conservatism, Democrats, Left, liberalism, libertarianism, Lincoln, New Deal, Republicans, Right, Roosevelt, Rothbard

This entry was posted by Mark Amagi on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 10:43 PM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.