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The Irrepressible Rothbard Essays of Murray N. Rothbard Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of
evil, fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century,
we have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism,
socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal
clear to me that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the
sake of ourselves, our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our
neighbors, and our country, to do battle against that evil. It has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have
seen and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists
against it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How
can one see the truth, understand one's compelling duty, and then,
simply give up and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades?
And yet, in the two movements and their variations that I have been
associated with, libertarian and conservative, this happens all
the time. Conservatism and libertarianism, after all, are "radical" movements,
that is, they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends
of statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined
such a movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter,
simply give up the fight? Recently, I asked a perceptive friend
of mine how so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that
"he's the sort of person who wants a quiet life, who wants to sit
in front of the TV, and who doesn't want to hear about any trouble."
But in that case, I said in anguish, "why do these people become
'radicals' in the first place? Why do they proudly call themselves
'conservatives' or 'libertarians'?" Unfortunately, no answer was
forthcoming. Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause
is hopeless. We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great
economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable,
that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very successes,
which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent intellectuals
who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within. His critics
charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the defenders of
capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points out that a
rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing as saying:
don't do the best you can to bail out the boat? In the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the
statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning the
battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look, the inevitable
may be postponed a bit. Why isn't that worthwhile? Isn't it better
to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second, at the very worst,
it's great fun to tweak and annoy and upset the enemy, to get back
at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile. One shouldn't think
of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On
the contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up
arms against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine
surrender, and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least
to give it a good try, to get in one's licks. And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win!
Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the
Soviet Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly
impossible odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly
the chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than
if you simply give up. In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two
major forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most
common and most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar
with: the sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives
in Washington, at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative
aide, ready and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service
to his cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes
gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail
parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start
getting enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are
placing the highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or
on some piddling little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you
are willing to abandon the battle altogether for a cushy contract,
or a plush government job. And as this sellout process continues,
you find that your major source of irritation is not the statist
enemy, but the troublemakers out in the field who are always yapping
about principle and even attacking you for selling out the
cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an indistinguishable
face. We are all too familiar with this sellout route and it is easy
and proper to become indignant at this moral treason to a cause
that is just, to the battle against evil, and to your own once cherished
comrades. But there is another form of abandonment that is not as
evident and is more insidious – and I don't mean simply loss
of energy or interest. In this form, which has been common in the
libertarian movement but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism,
the militant decides that the cause is hopeless, and gives up by
deciding to abandon the corrupt and rotten world, and retreat in
some way to a pure and noble community of one's own. To Randians,
it's "Galt's Gulch," from Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. Other
libertarians keep seeking to form some underground community, to
"capture" a small town in the West, to go "underground" in the forest,
or even to build a new libertarian country on an island, in the
hills, or whatever. Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism.
In each case, the call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to
form some tiny alternative community in some backwoods retreat.
Long ago, I labeled this view, "retreatism." You could call this
strategy "neo-Amish," except that the Amish are productive farmers,
and these groups, I'm afraid, never make it up to that stage. The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral
as well as pseudo-psychological terms. These "purists," for example,
claim that they, in contrast to us benighted fighters, are
"living liberty," that they are emphasizing "the positive" instead
of focusing on the "negative," that they are "living liberty" and
living a "pure libertarian life," whereas we grubby souls are still
living in the corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I
have been replying to these sets of retreatists that the real world,
after all, is good; that we libertarians may be anti-State, but
that we are emphatically not anti-society or opposed to the
real world, however contaminated it might be. We propose to continue
to fight to save the values and the principles and the people we
hold dear, even though the battlefield may get muddy. Also, I would
cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne, who proclaimed that
we are American patriots, not in the sense of patriotic adherents
to the State but to the country, the nation, to our glorious traditions
and culture that are under dire attack. Our stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, even though
he said them as a Marxist, "all right, we are two nations." "America"
as it exists today is two nations; one is their nation, the
nation of the corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., their brainwashing
public school system, their bureaucracies, their media, and the
other is our, much larger, nation, the majority, the far
nobler nation that represents the older and the truer America. We
are the nation that is going to win, that is going to take America
back, no matter how long it takes. It is indeed a grave sin to abandon
that nation and that America short of victory. But are we then emphasizing "the negative"? In a sense, yes, but
what else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our
very being are under attack from a relentless foe? But we have to
realize, first, that in the very course of accentuating the negative
we are also emphasizing the positive. Why do we fight against, yes
even hate, the evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress
on the "negative" is only the other side of the coin, the logical
consequence, of our devotion to the good, to the positive values
and principles that we cherish. There is no reason why we can't
stress and spread our positive values at the same time that we battle
against their enemies. The two actually go hand in hand. Among conservatives and some libertarians, these retreats sometimes
took the form of holing up in the woods or in a cave, huddling amidst
a year's supply of canned peaches and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely
to guard the peaches and the cave from the nuclear explosion or
from the Communist army. They never came; and even the cans of peaches
must be deteriorating by now. The retreat was futile. But now, in
1993, the opposite danger is looming: namely, retreatist groups
face the awful menace of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid
forces of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in their
endless quest for shotguns one millimeter shorter than some regulation
decrees, or for possible child abuse. Retreatism is beginning to
loom as a quick road to disaster. Of course, in the last analysis, none of these retreats, generally
announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory,
have amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale, a
half-way house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to disappearance
from the stage of history. The fascinating and crucial point to
note is that both of these routes – even though seemingly diametrically
opposite, end up inexorably at the same place. The sellout abandons
the cause and betrays his comrades, for money or status or power;
the retreatist, properly loathing the sellouts, concludes that the
real world is impure and retreats out of it; in both cases,
whether in the name of "pragmatism" or in the name of "purity,"
the cause, the fight against evil in the real world, is abandoned.
Clearly, there is a vast moral difference in the two courses of
action. The sellouter is morally evil; the retreatist, in contrast,
is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided. The sellouts are not worth
talking to; the retreatists must realize that it is not betraying
the cause, far from it, to fight against evil; and not to abandon
the real world. The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression, likes
to relax and say who cares about material oppression when the inner
soul is free. Well sure, it's good to have freedom of the inner
soul. I know the old bromides about how thought is free and how
the prisoner is free in his inner heart. But call me a low-life
materialist if you wish, but I believe, and I thought all libertarians
and conservatives believed to their core, that man deserves more
than that, that we are not content with the inner freedom of the
prisoner in his cell, that we raise the good old cry of "Liberty
and Property," that we demand liberty in our external, real world
of space and dimension. I thought that that's what the fight was
all about. Let's put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties,
our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never. Let us act
in the spirit of that magnificent hymn that James Russell Lowell
set to a lovely Welsh melody:
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