Left and Right Today

In the 1960s, the great Murray Rothbard expended a considerable amount of his intellectual energy on a publication he started entitled Left and Right. It was based on the idea that Old Right thinkers of the late 1960s – or what was left of them – had much in common with the emerging New Left thinkers who opposed the war in Vietnam as well as federal encroachments into consensual private activities. Always the optimist, Murray thought that Left and Right could provide the basis for a melding of these two groups into and intellectual vanguard that would oppose the alarming spread of the welfare and warfare states that had accelerated during the decades following the New Deal.

There was a strong basis for agreement among the two groups, and there still is today, although while the Old Right is still surging, thanks largely to the foundation laid by Rothbard, the New Left has never regained the cultural and intellectual status it enjoyed during the glory days of 30 years ago.

I was reminded recently, however, that just as the New Left and Old Right could find common ground when a unique set of circumstances came together, so can the neoconservatives and neoliberals of today. Consider, for instance, the comments made by Peggy Noonan on the Wall Street Journal's opinion web site and Jim Wallis, a writer for modernist Catholicism's Sojourners magazine, regarding the Janet Jackson episode at the Smarmy Bowl. Writes Noonan,

Our culture has been on a boil for years. Then it cooled a bit. The other night at the Super Bowl they put the flame higher and the water began to boil. The frog – that would be us – is still alive. And may, in his shock, jump out of the water. But the question is: How? How to turn it around. I wonder if all the sane adult liberals and conservatives couldn't make progress here.

Noonan's comments sound an awful lot like Wallis':

Some people think that only right-wing conservatives care about such moral pollution. Wrong. Most parents I know, liberal or conservative, care a great deal about it, as do most self-respecting women and men. It defies stereotypes to suggest that a healthy moral consistency applies to personal and sexual ethics as well as to social and political values. It's time to break out of those old ideological shibboleths and forge a unified front against the amoral corporate greed that violates all our ethics – personal and social – creating a system that sells beer and breasts in the same advertising plans just to make a buck.

Both neocon Noonan and neoliberal Wallis believe that morality can be legislated – Noonan with her support of Bush's moralist legislation and Wallis with his support for State intervention in corporate affairs (a long-running theme at Sojourners, based on the magazine's definition of something called "social justice"). Maybe they have never been as ideologically opposite as one may think? One could easily imagine both supporting increased funding for the Federal Communications Commission with the false expectation that a War on Breasts will be as successful as the War on Drugs.

One seriously doubts that either Noonan or Wallis would consider abolishing the FCC for its many and obvious failures, end anachronistic regulation of the public airways (how 20th century!), and support the formation of private regulatory institutions to set standards that more closely reflect those of the body politic (an Underwriters' Labs for broadcasting). One wonders if it has ever dawned on them that liberal or conservative attempts to curb future Janet Jacksons with State power will simply result in more of them?

For me, this incident reminded me of why my family homeschools. There is no doubt that I would have had to explain Janet Jackson to my second grade son if he were stranded in the local public school for six-plus hours a day. (It was hard enough, but more morally fruitful, explaining Homer's Odyssey.) The same would apply to the local Catholic school, thanks to the American Church's wrecking of Catholic education by embracing tacky ideology that has become a staple in publications like Sojourners.

We should pity the kids who cannot be left behind from the kind of socialization that robs them of their innocence – which, by the way, occurs during practically every commercial break of every NFL game of the year, with nary a word from the likes of Michael Powell, Peggy Noonan, or Jim Wallis. The griping of those three (and many others) over the last few days reminded me of one of the truly original characters of American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, who yells at his TV in protest of gyrating bodies on American Bandstand, while at the same time incapable of turning the TV off.

Murray Rothbard was right that there can be common ground between left and right. When it serves to expand liberty, it can be a good thing. We should beware when neocons and neoliberals find common ground. The results can be more perverting than a Janet Jackson dance.

February 6, 2004