[This post is drawn from chapter 4 of The Betrayal of the American Right.]
During the 1920s, the emerging mavericks and libertarians– the Menckens, the Nocks, the Villards, and their fans– were typically thought about Male of the Left; like the Left generally, they bitterly opposed the emergence of Huge Government in twentieth-century America, a government allied with Industry in a network of unique advantage, a government dictating the individual drinking practices of the citizenry and quelching civil liberties, a federal government that had employed as a junior partner to British imperialism to boss around nations across the globe. The mavericks were opposed to this blossoming of State monopoly, opposed to imperialism and militarism and foreign wars, opposed to the Western-imposed Versailles Treaty and League of Nations, and they were usually allied with socialists and progressives in this opposition.
All this altered, and changed dramatically, however, with the introduction of the New Deal. For the lone wolves saw the New Deal quite plainly as merely the rational extension of Hooverism and World War I: as the imposition of a fascistic government upon the economy and society, with a Bigness far worse than Theodore Roosevelt (“Roosevelt I” in Mencken’s label) or Wilson or Hoover had ever been able to achieve. The New Deal, with its burgeoning corporate state, run by Big Business and Big Unions as its junior partner, allied with corporate liberal intellectuals and utilizing welfarist rhetoric, was perceived by these libertarians as fascism pertained to America. Therefore their awe and bitterness were excellent when they discovered that their former, and supposedly educated, allies, the socialists and progressives, instead of joining in with this insight, had rushed to embrace and even deify the New Deal, and to form its lead of intellectual apologists. This embrace by the Left was quickly made consentaneous when the Communist Party and its allies joined the parade with the arrival of the Popular Front in 1935. And the younger generation of intellectuals, a number of whom had been fans of Mencken and Villard, cast aside their individualism to sign up with the “working class” and to take their part as Brain Trusters and planners of the seemingly new Utopia taking shape in America. The spirit of technocratic dictation over the American resident was best expressed in the well-known poem of Rex Tugwell, whose words were to be engraved in horror on all “conservative” hearts throughout the nation:
I have actually collected my tools and my charts,
My plans are completed and useful.
I shall roll up my sleeves– make America over.
Only the couple of laissez-faire liberals saw the direct filiation between Hoover’s cartelist program and the fascistic cartelization enforced by the New Offer’s NRA and AAA, and few recognized that the origin of these programs was specifically such Big Business collectivist plans as the popular Swope Strategy, generated by Gerard Swope, head of General Electric in late 1931, and embraced by a lot of big business groups in the following year. It was, in truth, when Hoover refused to go this far, denouncing the plan as “fascism” despite the fact that he had himself been tending in that instructions for years, that Henry I. Harriman, head of the US Chamber of Commerce, alerted Hoover that Industry would throw its weight to Roosevelt, who had actually agreed to enact the strategy, and indeed was to perform his contract. Swope himself, Harriman, and their effective mentor, the financier Bernard M. Baruch, were undoubtedly heavily included both in drafting and administering the NRA and AAA.
The individualists and laissez-faire liberals were shocked and embittered, not simply by the mass desertion of their previous allies, however also by the abuse these allies now heaped upon them as “reactionaries,” “fascists,” and “Neanderthals.” For years Guy of the Left, the individualists, without altering their position or viewpoints one iota, now discovered themselves bitterly attacked by their erstwhile allies as benighted “severe right-wingers.” Hence, in December 1933, Nock composed madly to Canon Bernard Iddings Bell: “I see I am now rated as a Tory. So are you– ain’t it? What an ignorant blatherskite FDR must be! We have actually been called lots of bad names, you and I, but that a person takes the reward.” Nock’s biographer includes that “Nock thought it odd that an announced radical, anarchist, maverick, single-taxer and apostle of Spencer need to be called conservative.”
From being the leading intellectual of his day, Mencken was rapidly disposed of by his readership as reactionary and passé, unequipped to deal with the period of the Anxiety. Retiring from the Mercury, and thus denied of a national online forum, Mencken could only see his development fall under New Deal-liberal hands. Nock, as soon as the toast of the monthlies and reviews, virtually dropped from sight. Villard caught the lure of the New Deal, and at any rate he retired as editor of the Nation in 1933, leaving that journal too in sturdily Brand-new Deal-liberal hands. Only separated cases remained: thus John T. Flynn, a muckraking financial reporter, writing for Harper’s and the New Republic, criticized the Industry and monopolizing origins of such essential New Deal measures as the RFC and the NRA.
Separated and abused, dealt with by the New Dispensation as Guys of the Right, the lone wolves had no alternative but to end up being, in effect, right-wingers, and to ally themselves with the conservatives, monopolists, Hooverites, and so on, whom they had previously disliked.
It was thus that the modern right wing, the “Old Right” in our terms, entered into being: in a union of fury and despair against the enormous acceleration of Huge Federal government produced by the New Deal. But the intriguing point is that, as the far larger and more respectable conservative groups used up the cudgels versus the New Offer, the only rhetoric, the only concepts offered for them to use were precisely the libertarian and individualist views which they had actually formerly scorned or disregarded. For this reason the unexpected if highly superficial accession of these conservative Republicans and Democrats to the libertarian ranks.
Therefore, there were Herbert Hoover and the conservative Republicans, they who had actually done so much in the twenties and earlier to pave the way for New Deal corporatism, but who now balked highly at going the whole way. Herbert Hoover himself all of a sudden jumped into the libertarian ranks with his anti– New Deal book of 1934, Challenge to Liberty, which moved the bemused and wondering Nock to exclaim: “Consider a book on such a subject, by such a man!”
A prescient Nock composed:
Anybody who points out liberty for the next 2 years will be expected to be somehow beholden to the Republican party, just as anybody who mentioned it because 1917 was expected to be a mouthpiece of the distillers and makers.
Such conservative Democrats as the former anti-Prohibitionists Jouett Shouse, John W. Davis, and Dupont’s John J. Raskob formed the American Liberty League as an anti– New Deal company, however this was just somewhat less distasteful. While Nock wrote in his journal of his wonder about at the dishonest origins of the League, he already showed desire to consider an alliance:
The thing may open the way occasionally for something … a little bit more intelligent and objective than the dreary run of propagandist profusion … I will check out it … and if a correct opportunity is open, I shall help.
In reality, the individualists remained in a bind at this abrupt accession of old opponents as allies. On the favorable side, it meant a fast velocity of libertarian rhetoric on the part of various prominent political leaders. And, moreover, there were no other possible political allies offered. But, on the unfavorable side, the acceptance of libertarian ideas by Hoover, the Liberty League, et al., was clearly shallow and in the realm of general rhetoric only; given their true choices, not one of them would have accepted the Spencerian laissez-faire model for America. This suggested that libertarianism, as spread throughout the land, would stay on a superficial and rhetorical level, and, additionally, would tar all libertarians, in the eyes of intellectuals, with the charge of duplicity and special pleading.
In any case, nevertheless, the independents had no location to go but an alliance with the conservative opponents of the New Deal. Therefore H.L. Mencken, previously the most resented single person in the Left of the 1920s, now composed for the conservative Liberty magazine, and concentrated his energies on opposition to the New Deal and on agitation for the Landon ticket in the 1936 campaign. And when the young libertarian Paul Palmer presumed the editorship of the American Mercury in 1936, Mencken and Nock cheerfully signed on as routine writers in opposition to the New Deal routine, with Nock as virtual coeditor. Fresh from the publication of Our Opponent, the State, Nock, in his very first column for the brand-new Mercury, really astutely explained that the New Deal was an extension of the extremely 2 things that the whole Left had actually disliked in the statism of the 1920s: Prohibition and federal government aid to organization. It resembled Restriction because in both cases a determined minority of guys “wished to do something to America for its own great,” and “both relied on force to achieve their ends”; it resembled the 1920s financially because
Coolidge had actually done his finest to utilize the government to assist business, and Roosevelt was doing precisely the same thing … To put it simply, many Americans desired government to help just them; this was the “American custom” of rugged individualism.
However the attempt was hopeless; in the eyes of the bulk of the intellectuals and of the general public, Nock, Mencken, and the mavericks were, just, “conservatives,” and “extreme rightists,” and the label stuck. In one sense, the “conservative” label for Nock and Mencken was, and had actually been, appropriate, as it is for all independents, in the sense that the individualist believes in human differences and for that reason in inequalities. These are, to be sure, “natural” inequalities, which, in the Jeffersonian sense, would develop out of a totally free society as “natural upper class”; and these contrast sharply with the “artificial” inequalities that statist policies of caste and unique privilege impose on society.
But the lone wolf must always be antiegalitarian. Mencken had constantly been a frank and jubilant “elitist” in this sense, and a minimum of as strongly opposed to democratic egalitarian federal government regarding all other kinds of federal government. However Mencken emphasized that, as in the free enterprise, “an aristocracy needs to constantly validate its existence. In other words, there must be no synthetic conversion of its present strength into perpetual rights.” Nock came over this elitism slowly over the years, and it reached its complete blooming by the late 1920s. Out of this developed position came Nock’s dazzling and prophetic, though totally forgotten, Theory of Education in the United States, which had outgrown 1931 lectures at the University of Virginia.
A champ of the older, classical education, Nock chided the normal conservative detractors of John Dewey’s progressive educational developments for missing out on the entire point. These conservatives assaulted contemporary education for following Dewey’s views in shifting from the classical education to a proliferating kitchen-midden of professional and what would now be called “relevant” courses, courses in driver-education, basket-weaving, and so on. Nock explained that the problem was not with trade courses per se, however with the speeding up dedication in America to the idea of mass education.
The classical education confined itself to a little minority, an elite, of the youth population. And just a small minority, according to Nock, is truly “educable,” and hence ideal for this sort of curriculum. Spread the idea that everybody need to have a college, nevertheless, bring the excellent mass of uneducable youth into the schools, and the schools always have to turn to basket-weaving and driver-ed courses, to simple occupation training, instead of real education. Nock plainly believed, then, that the compulsory presence laws, in addition to the brand-new excellent myth that everybody need to finish from high school and college, was wrecking the lives of most of the young, requiring them into jobs and occupations for which they were not appropriate and which they disliked, and likewise damaging the instructional system at the same time.
It is clear that, from a similarly libertarian (though from a “right-wing” instead of a “left-wing” anarchist) viewpoint, Nock was expecting an extremely similar position by Paul Goodman thirty and forty years later on. While outfitted in egalitarian rhetoric, Goodman’s view equally condemns the existing system, including mandatory attendance laws, for requiring a mass of kids into school when they must really be out working in purposeful and pertinent tasks.
One of the most strong aspects of the establishing ideology of the Right was the concentrating on the dangers of the growing tyranny of the executive, and specifically the president, at the expense of the withering of power all over else in society: in the Congress and in the judiciary, in the states, and among the citizenry. A growing number of power was being focused in the president and the executive branch; the Congress was being decreased to a rubber stamp of executive decrees, the states to servitors of federal largesse. Regulatory bureaus substituted their own arbitrary decrees, or “administrative law,” for the typical, even-handed procedure of the courts. Once again and once again, the Liberty League and other rightists hammered away at the massive accession of executive power. It was this apprehension that led to the storm, and the defeat of the administration, over the well-known strategy to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937, a defeat engineered by frightened liberals who had formerly supported all New Deal legislation.
Gabriel Kolko, in his brilliant Accomplishment of Conservatism, has actually pointed out the serious error in liberal and Old Left historiography of the declared “reactionary” function of the Supreme Court in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in overruling regulatory legislation. The Court has actually always been dealt with as a spokesperson of Industry interests attempting to block progressive steps; in truth, these judges were sincere believers in laissez-faire who were attempting to block statist measures crafted by Industry interests. The exact same may one day be stated of the “reactionary” Nine Old Guys who overruled New Offer legislation in the 1930s.
One of the most gleaming and influential attacks on the New Deal was written in 1938 by the well-known author and editor Garet Garrett. Garrett began his handout “The Transformation Was” on a startlingly perceptive note: conservatives, he wrote, were setting in motion to try to avoid a statist revolution from being imposed by the New Offer; but this transformation had currently happened. As Garrett wonderfully put it in his opening sentences:
There are those who still believe they are holding the pass against a transformation that might be showing up the roadway. But they are looking in the incorrect direction. The transformation lags them. It passed in the Night of Anxiety, singing songs to freedom.
The New Deal, Garrett charged, was an organized “transformation within the type” of American laws and customizeds. The New Deal was not, as it ostensibly seemed to be, a contradictory and capricious mass of pragmatic error.
In an innovative circumstance mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd stated in The Green Pastures, that when you have actually passed a miracle you need to pass another one to look after it, so it was with the New Offer. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one outcome. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased.
Draw a curve to represent the increase of executive power and look there for errors. You will not discover them. The curve corresponds.
The New Offer and business people were utilizing words in two really different senses, added Garrett, when each mentioned preserving the “American system of totally free private enterprise.” To the business owners these words “stand for a world that remains in threat and might have to be protected.” However to the New Offer they “mean a conquered province,” and the New Offer has the right analysis, for the “supreme power of initiative” has passed from private enterprise to government.
Led by an advanced elite of intellectuals, the New Offer centralized political and financial power in the executive, and Garrett traced this process step by step. As a consequence, the “ultimate power of effort” passed from private enterprise to federal government, which “became the fantastic capitalist and enterpriser. Automatically service yields the reality when it broaches a mixed economy, even accepts it as inevitable.”