Realignment in American Politics: The Prospects for LibertyTo restore the ideal of the original republican system, which allows maximum freedom for individuals and communities to govern themselves, should be the sum total of our agenda. I'm convinced that we are in a better position to succeed at this goal now than at any point in a century -- from Rockwell's speech before the Republican Liberty Caucus in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 9, 2000, printed below There is a class of pundits that defends public confidence in big government, and trashes those who celebrate its undoing. The model for them is 1950s-style civic idealism, in which people gladly paid, obeyed, and otherwise had few discouraging words for our leaders in Washington. We've come a long way from those days, and it's been all to the good. These pundits had a fit following this year's election. The election not only produced no clear winner in the presidential race, but also revealed the least flattering side of the US system of government. If we thought the process of making laws was ugly, few were prepared to observe in slow motion the even more contemptible process of picking lawmakers. Those who still see the American system as blessed by the Almighty, and thus think it should be exported far and wide, haven't been paying attention to the events of November 2000. Indeed, the election revealed more than just the mendacity that stains the electoral process from top to bottom. It also showed us, as we hadn't seen in 140 years, the deep sectional, ideological, and interest-group divides that have left no political institution untouched. A county-by-county map, published first in USA Today and circulated widely on the internet, demonstrated that a government partisan who promises enough to those on the government payroll can nearly rule the country by only winning a majority in 20% of the land. And the counts and recounts, and recounts of recounts, showed that it may be possible to win elections by manipulating the outcome via the courts, provided the margin of victory is small enough. So let's cut through all the headlines concerning chads and ballot applications, and take a hard look at that map, which put the counties that Bush won in red and those Gore won in blue. The red dominates the country entirely, while the blue won a handful of large population areas and much of the two coasts. By itself the map doesn't tell you all you need to know, though someone looking at it for the first time would be shocked to hear that this election is being contested at all. But bring to the map insights drawn from David Hume and Ludwig von Mises, namely that the government is and always must be a small minority of the population, and combine that point with some elementary demographics concerning who voted for which candidate. Government employees and those they support, like unions and welfare recipients, were Gore's base. As Albert Jay Nock would say, these are the tax-takers. Middle-class families of independent means were Bush's base: people who constitute the taxpayers. This is the core of the political war raging in America today. Partisans of liberty have no trouble deciding which side to support. All of this confirms the suspicions of political cynics, or, as I like to call such people, realists. Count me among those who believe that the pre-election polls were a more accurate reflection of American popular opinion than the alleged election results. The problem of vote fraud is ubiquitous, and enough experts have reported on irregularities in this election to lead me to think that the election was not nearly as close as it was declared to be on election night. If we ever develop a system with honest and reliable registration and counting, Republicans will benefit enormously. This election also taught the man on the street a thing or two about political reality. Government power is a dirty and dishonest business. We are reminded of the wisdom of the framers, found primarily in their desire to curb power as much as possible by distributing it as thinly as they thought possible. Even today, especially today, that insight is the basis of all sound political judgment. When the Constitution was ratified, there were 13 states, and as compared to today, those sovereign entities were united only in a love of liberty. Now, there are 50 states of radically diverse populations stretching a distance far too wide to be managed by a single regime extracting more than 2 trillion dollars from the national wealth per year. The president initially had very few powers, and the ones he did have were subject to Congressional veto. There was no regulatory apparatus. There was no income tax. The Supreme Court could not legislate for the states. The states were in charge of setting their own immigration rules. There were no national health care plans or government-imposed retirement systems. There were no centralized rules restricting the freedom of association. There was no national policy on anything but foreign policy, and, even here, there was no permanent stationing of troops outside the borders. Indeed, there was no standing army. Congress was supreme and the Senate was elected by state legislatures and mostly loyal to the citizens of the states, not some mythical national constituency. The stakes of national elections just weren't that high. The framers' system permitted a president (not a king), but the office was based on the idea that he would largely be a figurehead. He would have no power to impact the daily lives of the people. Impeachment was to play a huge role in American life, as the centralist Alexander Hamilton was forced to concede. Even in Alexis de Tocqueville's America of the 1830s, the citizens had little or no contact with the federal government. It didn't tax them, regulate their businesses, tell them whether and how they could be armed, or say how they must conduct their private lives. The president's power is "temporary, limited, and subordinate," Tocqueville wrote. He has "little wealth, and little glory to share among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or the ruin of a faction to depend upon his elevation to power.... The influence which the President exercises on public business is...feeble and indirect." No matter who was elected, average people would go on living their lives in liberty, fearing only robbers, poverty, and hard winters – not public agents. Beginning in 1861 all this began to change, as summed up in Lincoln's declaration that "I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy." The states were not permitted to exit the regime, a right which many states had asserted in their original constitutions. During the Progressive Era, a new theory emerged. The idea, promoted by Woodrow Wilson, is that of the president as an embodiment of the Rousseauian general will. Since that time, we have developed the implicit view that the president becomes known to us only after the Holy Spirit descends over the nation and anoints a Chosen One to lead us. Our job was to submit. To question the outcome, much less to bitterly resent it, was to be unpatriotic, even to flirt with treason. All through the 1990s, the Clintons invoked this notion of the presidency, suggesting time and again that because Bill had been elected to this imperial office, he should have his way in all things. If there is any merit to the gritty and grueling process of election 2000, it is that the modern myth of that magical and holy office of the presidency has been completely debunked, first by Clinton's debasement of the office and now by the debasement of the voting process itself. The entire outcome, and to what extent we are to be looted, hinges on the wishes of one state, one county, a few thousand people, and that will not easily be translated into an undisputed outcome, given the vote fraud and outrageous get-out-the-vote tactics of the Democrats. To restore the ideal of the original republican system, which allows maximum freedom for individuals and communities to govern themselves, should also be the sum total of our agenda. And I'm convinced that we are in a better position to succeed at this goal now than at any point in a century. One reason for my optimism is the dramatic change in public opinion toward all institutions of government. Today it is difficult for us to remember a time when the Left could confidently speak for most people as it celebrated the efficiency and security made possible by State intervention. But in the 1930s through the 1970s, the phrase government planning was not used with any sense of irony. The welfare state was not always associated in the public mind with profligacy, waste, and cultural destructionism. Indeed, the word bureaucrat once called forth respect and appreciation, exactly as Max Weber intended it to. His definition: "Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational." Who would not laugh at such a characterization today? Few young people have any desire to join the ranks of the bureaucrats. Neither is this trend limited to the US. All over Western Europe, the same loathing of the State has become a fixture of political reality. For years leading up to this election, we were told by the pundit classes that the public has once again fallen in love with big government. People didn't want tax cuts. Indeed, we were told, people would be glad to pay higher taxes in exchange for more government services. The spirit of 1994 and 1776 were gone forever, we were told. At the time, I suspected that these were the usual attempts to intimidate sound-thinking Republicans and libertarians into surrendering. And, I'm sorry to say, it worked pretty well. The party conventions displayed few if any serious differences of opinion between the Republicans and Democrats. Sophisticated observers knew it was merely a show, and that the two parties represent dramatically different visions of our future – not as dramatic as I would like, but they are there nonetheless. In the waning days of the campaign, let us not forget that both candidates declared themselves opponents of big government. Bush refined his message down to a simple line: "I'm for the people; he is for the government." That comment by itself has radical implications, for it recognizes that the government is something separate from the people and opposed to their interests. Gore responded defensively: "I don't ever want to see another era of big government.... I'm opposed to big government... I'm for a smaller, smarter government." Still quoting Gore: "I don't believe there's a government solution to every problem. I don't believe any government program can replace the responsibility of parents, the hard work of families, or the innovation of industry." Now, if it is really true that the American people have abandoned that old libertarian spirit, why were the candidates talking this way? Of course: they and their pollsters knew what the voters on the margin wanted to hear. This is an extremely significant fact. If the pundits had been right, we would have expected to hear the opposite language. The activity we saw at the state level confirmed that the top of the ticket had seized on language used by winners. Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Oregon, Arizona, and Massachusetts all passed some form of tax cut or tax limitation measure, while tax increases and measures to make it easier to increase taxes failed in Louisiana, California, and Oklahoma. Spending measures such as school vouchers failed by 2 to 1. Land-use controls went down to defeat in states where environmentalists thought they had a clear margin. There's no telling how much better we might have done had our side been more frank about the urgency of controlling government power. Certainly Bush should have settled on his final message much sooner. Rallying just one percent more middle-class families with bank accounts and 401Ks would have put him over the top, and prevented the attempted coup by his opponent. There is a lesson here for Republicans and for libertarians. But we know that the presidential election didn't get really interesting until after voting day. After a year of keeping the lid on ideological wrangling and personal attacks, the post-election dispute unleashed amazing and entirely deserved rhetorical blasts. Forget unity, bipartisanship, and an end to negative campaigning: it has been all-out war for a month, and the government-defending pundit class is unhappy about this. Robert Reich, for example, worries in the New York Times that the entire episode has not reconnected Americans to their system of government, but, rather, "deepened public cynicism." Reich is alarmed that "the combatants seem to lack any sense that they are risking a loss of public confidence in vital public institutions." Frank Rich, also in the Times, notes that the election saga has occasioned "violent, government-bashing rhetoric and actions." Jonathan Chait in the New Republic reaches back into 1950s political lore to decry the "paranoid style" on display, with Republicans taking to the streets to work out their supposed psychological problems. I use the 1950s as a benchmark of the bad old days because, back then, we were in the midst of an escalating Cold War, and the near-universal impression that the federal government was all that stood between us and atomic attack and/or the communization of America. This Manichean drama wrought unswerving popular loyalty to the central State, and a wildly exaggerated opinion about the merits of the US system of government. The skeptics of the regime, Right and Left, were banished to the outer-darkness. And don't think the political elites didn't appreciate it while it lasted. The rise of the New Left, with its opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam and its civil disobedience, changed everything. The protests in recent weeks, against the attempt by the Democrats to manipulate the election outcome in their favor, were conscious imitations by the Right of the behavior and rhetoric of these protests. As they used to chant in the old days, "One, two, three, four, we don't want your [blanking] war. Five, six, seven, eight, organize to smash the State." But even before the New Left got into the act, the Old Right from the 1950s had its protests to "Impeach Earl Warren," the Supreme Court chief justice who led the effort for judicially imposed social engineering. This campaign was the first postwar effort to bring into question the legitimacy of a major State official, and at the time, it was considered a huge sin and crime. All these years later, the Democrats have gotten into the act, with Al Gore personally traducing the political vision of two Supreme Court justices. I don't happen to agree with Gore's opinion in this regard, but what matters here is the larger picture. It has become permissible and even commonplace to express extreme distrust of government leaders. This attitude is essential to a free society. It recalls Thomas Jefferson's admonition. "In questions of power," he wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions, "let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." "Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence." Murray Rothbard saw in the early 1970s that Watergate also represented a turning point. Instead of treating the president as a Caesar-like figure, he was now seen as nothing more than a foul-mouthed, self-interested political fixer who represented, not the public good, but the people who paid him. In the aftermath of Watergate, civic-minded pundits including Bill Buckley fretted that we might not ever be able to restore the glory days when unquestioned obedience to the president, the kind we saw in wartime, was the ruling attitude. Indeed, they were right to worry. The presidency, the personification of the power of the State, has never recovered its moral stature. There was a fundamental contradiction at the heart of politics throughout the 1980s. The advocates of small government were nearly universal in their support for ever-larger military budgets and an ever-expanding military empire. Meanwhile, the skeptics of an overblown military sector and national security apparatus wanted to replace them with a bigger welfare state. If you opposed both the welfare and the warfare state, there seemed to be no place for you in the political spectrum. The end of this false choice is a main reason libertarians have reason to celebrate the political constellation of our time, when supporters of small government also tend to be those who doubt the wisdom of globalist nation building, while those who favor big government at home are also most likely to push for the globalization of government authority abroad. This is a huge step in the right direction: Republicans are working toward shedding the ideological baggage of imperialism and approaching something like a consistent set of principles. In retrospect, it is clear that Reagan's main contribution to American political dialogue consisted in giving us a rhetoric with which to oppose the centralization of power in Washington. When the time came for Clinton to assume the presidency, the grass roots were predisposed to resist any attempt to expand the welfare state-a point which the Clinton administration didn't anticipate, and still to this day does not understand. During the 1990s, the mainstream left-liberals worked to restore some public confidence in government, realizing that without it, there was not much hope for their agenda. They were taken aback with the ferocity with which Clinton's proposal to nationalize health care was rejected. And they suspected that there was more at the root of this than distrust of government-managed medical risk pools. They worried that an abiding hatred of the State was swelling up among the public, and many on the Left swore to strike it down. Thus we have seen many dozens of books appear in this decade decrying the lack of public confidence in the State and urging a new form of patriotism, one that celebrates not the original idea of the Constitution, but, rather, one that enshrines unswerving loyalty to anything and everything the government decides to do to us. But of course this is not patriotism but plain-old compliance with despotism, an attitude that wholly contradicts the American spirit. It doesn't matter how many books Robert Reich or Garry Wills writes in defense of the biggest, most well-funded empire in the history of the world. A sizeable chunk of the American public, and indeed a solid majority, is unlikely to ever fall into love with it again. This poses serious problems for the State and its partisans. It grew up during a period of wildy inflated views of the public sector. It cannot continue to grow at the same pace or in the same way with the massive public hostility that now greets every activity and program of the feds, including even its apparatus of social security. Wars garner nowhere near the public support that they did even ten years ago. And wars that lead to the killing of American soldiers are avoided with studied deliberation by presidents and military commanders. Few are willing to die for the government anymore, or to see their fellow citizens die. But to understand the events of recent days, and gain insight into why the Left has fought so hard to restore public confidence in the State, we have to look at events that occurred in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union ten and more years ago. To many people on the Left, these systems may not have been perfect, but they were on the right side of history. In his heart, no true leftist celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, as Rothbard reminded us, this term "history" has a very special and precise meaning among left-liberals, and it traces to the Marxian concept that history has an internal logic of its own. In the Marxian dynamic, history marches through stages from feudalism through capitalism and onward to socialism. The extent to which this theory of history permeates not only the American Left but American public culture in general is remarkable. When we speak of reactionary and progressive as political categories, we are drawing on the Marxian view of history's trajectory. When we say that we can't turn back the clock, we are invoking something close to the same rationale. It is with this doctrine of history in mind that we can understand why statists can celebrate civil disobedience in defense of welfare rights, but condemn it as proto-fascist when it is done to protect the election victories of Republicans. The Dade County protesters were considered criminal and conspiratorial by the opinion class because they represented the interests of property holders rather than the proletariat. Jesse Jackson's minions are celebrated as conscientious objectors because they are seeking to break down the bourgeois property order. The Republican demonstrators were working against the tide of history, in the socialist sense, and the Jesseites were surfing that tide. To the Left, any means is suitable for keeping history on its proper track. Only Left-wing mobs are permitted to shout "No Justice, No Peace," but if conservative whites do it, it is considered the ultimate threat. The same people who blasted the Dade County Republicans for making too much noise were excusing the LA rioters five years ago as they burned down whole neighborhoods. Many conservatives and libertarians have unwittingly bought into the same view of history, not as a theoretical matter but as a habit of mind. We are so used to seeing the State grow, and so used to losing every political battle, so accustomed to giving up our liberties one piece at a time, that we have come to despair about our prospects. This is a wholly incorrect attitude. Just from a strategic point of view, most people will not engage in fights that they think they are destined to lose. More important, it is just as wrong from a factual standpoint. The State has never been as vulnerable to attack as it is today. What we are seeing in America, in a very real sense, is a continuation of the revolution against central social and economic management that began during the 1960s, accelerated in the 1970s, and culminated in Eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties-though it has far from played itself out to a definitive conclusion. The events of 1989 and 1990 in Eastern Europe completely broke the clock. They were anticipated by neither the Right nor the Left. And from the point of view of the Left, these events literally stood outside of history. They watched in horror as government after government fell, and even their beloved champion Mikhail Gorbachev was toppled by his own people. Transition leaders were dumped by their mere affiliation with the communists. In Czechoslovakia, home of the velvet revolution, the transition was peaceful. In Romania, the president and first lady were tried by a people's court and executed. In Poland, a labor strike did the work. In Russia, the fearsome State security apparatus, built up over seventy years, crumbled. Now, hard as it is to believe today, we must never forget that all of these regimes – the most murderous in world history – had strong defenders in the US. For example, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Clinton's first head of the Council of Economic Advisers, did graduate and post-doc work on the miraculous productivity of the Romanian economy. She studied Ceausescu's work and concluded, based on certain Keynesian assumptions, that it was in some respects more productive than the US. Paul Samuelson's economic textbook, the most widely circulated in the country, still argued in the last edition before the Soviet collapse that the USSR would soon pass the US in annual productivity. Did you ever wonder why we hear so little about the collapse of socialism, much less the historical crimes of socialism, on television and in the press? Why there are few if any classes in universities on the subject? Why the topic is not brought up on talk shows or the evening news? It's not just because it's old news. Plenty of old news is held up before our eyes regularly. The glories of FDR and how he supposedly saved us from the depression, for example. For that matter, the 4000 killed by the medieval Inquisition has a greater public presence today than the 100 million victims of socialism. The reason is quite simple: the Left doesn't want to talk about it. The establishment doesn't want to talk about it. And especially, the government doesn't want to talk about it. All these people and institutions fear that we will learn the real lessons of this period of history. One lesson we learn is that socialism doesn't work. Once the regimes were swept away, we were confronted with impoverished and filthy countries populated by undernourished, sickly, and politically bitter and often morally warped people. They really did create the New Soviet Man. But there is another, and more profound, lesson to take from studying the collapse of socialism. The lesson is that no government, no matter how powerful and pervasive, is forever. We might even say that the more powerful governments are more vulnerable to being undermined and overthrown. What's more, we learn that history doesn't move just in one direction. These events were not planned by the State. They were the spontaneous result of public revolt. And such public revolts have appeared in nonsocialist countries in the intervening years. Think of the massive gasoline protests in England and France and elsewhere in Europe this year. As the days went on, it became clear that the truckers and consumers were not objecting to high prices so much as high taxes. This fact led the Left to decry the mostly working-class activists as, you guessed it, reactionaries in disguise. In the same way, the protests in Dade County this month, with Republicans in coats and ties storming the secret offices of the ballot counters, were made of the same stuff. In the same way the collapse of socialism and the revolts against government control across Europe were not planned by the State, the recent election fiasco was not planned either. The elites had no viable contingency plan on how to deal with it. And so the hot potato of who would become president has been flung from courtroom to courtroom, and all the while public confidence in once-unquestioned institutions has slipped further and further. Let me offer some predictions concerning the ultimate outcome of this fiasco, and then point to some strategic implications for libertarians. First, the Democrats have lost mightily in this struggle. The sheer grasping for power on their part has been more conspicuous than on the Republican side. Those middle-class Americans who supported the Democrats because they believed Gore when he said he would fight for working families now see a party that fights only for power, and at the behest of some of the most dangerous interest groups in America. There is no way Gore could come close to winning the election if it were held again today. Second, the desanctification of the judiciary will accelerate and prove to be an important step for freedom. The courts are a key means by which the State exercises control over economy and society. Until very recently, most people thought of the courts as somehow above politics, and deserving of more respect than we tend to give the executive or legislature. We have desperately needed some event to trigger a complete rethinking of the role of courts in the American political system. Election 2000 begins this process. Third, I'm sorry to report that third parties are dead. Call it an unfortunate feature of the winner-take-all electoral system, but the fact remains: there is no hope for any third party gaining power in the polarized environment we have today. There is still room for a third party that seeks to make ideological points, like the socialist party of old. And in that sense, but in that sense only, such a party can wield influence. But let's just set aside, once and for all, the hope that third parties are going to win elections. I don't happen to like this conclusion, but it is a reality, especially now that Republicans and Democrats have become fiercely loyal to their respective parties, and many independents have rallied to one side or the other. Fourth, and this is the downside of my second point, the Republicans are going to disappoint their grass-roots supporters. They always have before, and this tendency is heightened, not lessened, by the fact that they can count on extreme party loyalty in the aftermath of the attempted Gore coup. It is up to libertarian Republicans to keep their feet to the fire, opposing every attempt to expand the scope of federal power. We must stand firmly in the opposition camp on a range of areas, from social issues like hate-crime legislation, to economic issues like taxes, to foreign policy issues like trade and war. We must be utterly uncompromising. Fifth, our eventual reform and revolution will come from outside the bounds of conventional politics. Parties respond to public opinion more than they do to their own platforms or their election promises. We are far better off to focus the bulk of our energies on raising up new intellectuals, swaying public opinion, and otherwise telling the truth to the masses. That is my private goal in editing LewRockwell.com, and that is the mission of the Mises Institute that I founded and head. Now to the strategic advice. It has been very fashionable among libertarians to seek to convert groups from the disenfranchised and marginal sectors of society. In an ideal world, it is of course true that people jailed for using dope, or the poor who pay high excise taxes, would support libertarian policies. In the 1960s, indeed, there may have been a solid case for working with draft resisters to bolster our ranks. And it is certainly true that any and all victims of the State, no matter what sector of society they come from, deserve our defense. In reality, however, our most passionate and influential supporters are going to continue to come from sectors of society representing property owners, middle-class families, and the vast majority of the country that lives outside the four major urban centers. Our natural constituency these days consists not of jailbirds, but, for example, home-schooling moms who are tired of being oppressed by regulators, small businessmen sick of environmental edicts, savers and investors, and middle and upper-middle class entrepreneurs. All of these people have the strongest possible stake in the restoration of freedom, and they can be expected to work harder toward that goal. The classical liberal tradition of political economy emerged from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, and it is within these ranks that it retains its support today. Libertarians should not alienate these people, but rather seek to provide philosophical, ideological, and political guidance. Another thing about our natural supporters: they are overwhelmingly religious. They are also likely to be fed up with courts telling them that they have no right to practice their religion in their public life. The other day, National People's Radio ran a segment expressing outrage at the violation of Supreme Court edicts at a public high school in rural Georgia. It seems that the high-school band was persisting in their tradition of performing half-time shows with religious themes. NPR was especially upset that they couldn't find a single person to complain about it, even though, they opined, what they were doing was contrary to federal law. But despite NPR's spin, these people are not religious fanatics and they are not ideological zealots. They are doing no more than continuing to do what they have always done, which is to freely express the values and display the symbols that define their community life. This is an important aspect of practical freedom, and it does not, of course, violate the Constitution. If they are committed to a principle, it is that the central government has no business dictating to them the content of their half-time shows in their own town. In adhering to their traditions, they are unwitting participants in a vast and growing movement of defiance. This defiance takes many forms-intellectual, political, but also religious. We must never lose sight of that. We must defend their liberties too, because their cause is our cause. The overthrowing of communism was decisively set off by the passions of religious people, who demanded the right to freely live out their faith without interference by central authorities. The libertarian revolt of the future will draw from these experiences. There is a reason Rousseau hated Christians. He said they were "uncivilizable," which is to say they couldn't be good citizens, by which he meant they would never treat the State as god. That is the starting point for all libertarian philosophy. Throughout history, the strongest defense of liberty has come from the natural elites in society who own property, form families, establish dynasties, worship their God, and serve as the backbone of the business class. We should never forget that the signing of the Magna Carta was forced on the court by the nobility, and that the ideological support for the American revolution began among property holders, and was carried out by them. Also learning from this history, let us not be shy about declaring our unswerving allegiance to the economics of the capitalist system. Now more than ever, the free economy is a populist issue. With average people holding stocks and moving their money out of the banking system and into the brokerage system, the public has a strong stake in preserving the freedom to trade and an unhampered competitive marketplace. This is true whether we are speaking about domestic or international issues. Interventionist economics and protectionism benefit only the State and its friends. The Republicans have missed out on emphasizing this.
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