This was written in January 1992.
WHAT IS RIGHT-WING POPULISM?
The basic right-wing populist insight is
that we live in a statist country and a statist world dominated by a ruling
elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and various
influential special interest groups. More specifically, the old America of
individual liberty, private property, and minimal government has been replaced
by a coalition of politicians and bureaucrats allied with, and even dominated
by, powerful corporate and Old Money financial elites (e.g., the Rockefellers,
the Trilateralists); and the New Class of technocrats and intellectuals,
including Ivy League academics and media elites, who constitute the
opinion-moulding class in society. In short, we are ruled by an updated,
twentieth-century coalition of Throne and Altar, except that this Throne is
various big business groups, and the Altar is secular, statist intellectuals,
although mixed in with the secularists is a judicious infusion of Social
Gospel, mainstream Christians. The ruling class in the State has always needed
intellectuals to apologize for their rule and to sucker the masses into
subservience, i.e., into paying the taxes and going along with State rule. In
the old days, in most societies, a form of priestcraft or State Church
constituted the opinion-moulders who apologized for that rule. Now, in a more
secular age, we have technocrats, “social scientists,” and media intellectuals,
who apologize for the State system and staff in the ranks of its bureaucracy.
Libertarians have often seen the problem
plainly, but as strategists for social change they have badly missed the boat.
In what we might call “the Hayek model,” they have called for spreading correct
ideas, and thereby converting the intellectual elites to liberty, beginning
with top philosophers and then slowly trickling on down through the decades to
converting journalists and other media opinion-moulders. And of course, ideas
are the key, and spreading correct doctrine is a necessary part of any libertarian
strategy. It might be said that the process takes too long, but a long-range
strategy is important, and contrasts to the tragic futility of official
conservatism which is interested only in the lesser-of-two-evils for the
current election and therefore loses in the medium, let along the long, run.
But the real error is not so much the emphasis on the long run, but on ignoring
the fundamental fact that the problem is not just intellectual error.
The problem is that the intellectual elites benefit from the current system; in
a crucial sense, they are part of the ruling class. The process of Hayekian
conversion assumes that everyone, or at least all intellectuals, are interested
solely in the truth, and that economic self-interest never gets in the way. Anyone
at all acquainted with intellectuals or academics should be disabused of this
notion, and fast. Any libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals
and opinion-moulders are part of the fundamental problem, not just because of
error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling system.
Why then did communism implode? Because in
the end the system was working so badly that even the nomenklatura got
fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have correctly pointed out that a
social system collapses when the ruling class becomes demoralized and loses its
will to power; manifest failure of the communist system brought about that
demoralization. But doing nothing, or relying only on educating the elites in
correct ideas, will mean that our own statist system will not end until our
entire society, like that of the Soviet Union, has been reduced to rubble.
Surely, we must not sit still for that. A strategy for liberty must be far more
active and aggressive.
Hence the importance, for libertarians or
for minimal government conservatives, of having a one-two punch in their armor:
not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the corrupt ruling
elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more specifically how
they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is “negative campaigning”
at its finest and most fundamental.
This two-pronged strategy is (a) to build
up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-moulders, based
on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the
dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people against
the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both
socially and economically. But this strategy must fuse the abstract and the
concrete; it must not simply attack elites in the abstract, but must focus
specifically on the existing statist system, on those who right now
constitute the ruling classes.
Libertarians have long been puzzled about
whom, about which groups, to reach out to. The simple answer: everyone, is not
enough, because to be relevant politically, we must concentrate strategically
on those groups who are most oppressed and who also have the most social
leverage.
The reality of the current system is that
it constitutes 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. Therefore, the proper strategy of
libertarians and paleos is a strategy of “right-wing populism,” that is: to
expose and denounce this unholy alliance, and to call for getting this
preppie-underclass-liberal media alliance off the backs of the rest of us: the
middle and working classes.
A RIGHT-WING POPULIST PROGRAM
A right-wing populist program, then, must
concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule,
and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive
features of that rule. In short:
l. Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales,
business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive politically and
personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and
abolition of the IRS.
2. Slash Welfare. Get rid of
underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition,
severely cutting and restricting it.
3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges.
Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that
the root of such quotas is the entire “civil rights” structure, which tramples
on the property rights of every American.
4. Take Back the Streets: Crush
Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not “white collar criminals” or
“inside traders” but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists,
murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant
punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.
5. Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the
Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants.
Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move
from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the
productive members of society.
6. Abolish the Fed; Attack the Banksters.
Money and banking are recondite issues. But the realities can be made vivid:
the Fed is an organized cartel of banksters, who are creating inflation,
ripping off the public, destroying the savings of the average American. The
hundreds of billions of taxpayer handouts to S&L banksters will be
chicken-feed compared to the coming collapse of the commercial banks.
7. America First. A key point, and
not meant to be seventh in priority. The American economy is not only in
recession; it is stagnating. The average family is worse off now than it was
two decades ago. Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all
foreign aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export
industries. Stop gloabaloney, and let’s solve our problems at home.
8. Defend Family Values. Which
means, get the State out of the family, and replace State control with parental
control. In the long run, this means ending public schools, and replacing them
with private schools. But we must realize that voucher and even tax credit
schemes are not, despite Milton Friedman, transitional demands on the path to
privatized education; instead, they will make matters worse by fastening
government control more totally upon the private schools. Within the sound
alternative is decentralization, and back to local, community neighborhood
control of the schools.
Further: We must reject once and for all
the left-libertarian view that all government-operated resources must be
cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate government
facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood
control. But that means: that the public schools must allow prayer, and we must
abandon the absurd left-atheist interpretation of the First Amendment that
“establishment of religion” means not allowing prayer in public schools, or a
creche in a schoolyard or a public square at Christmas. We must return to
common sense, and original intent, in constitutional interpretation.
So far: every one of these right-wing
populist programs is totally consistent with a hard-core libertarian position.
But all real-world politics is coalition politics, and there are other areas
where libertarians might well compromise with their paleo or traditionalist or
other partners in a populist coalition. For example, on family values, take
such vexed problems as pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here,
pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians should be willing to compromise on
a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and
to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and
neighborhoods, that is, to “community standards.”
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the
Austrian School, founder of modern libertarianism, and academic vice president
of the Mises
Institute. He was also editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and appointed
Lew as his literary executor. See his books.