Justin Raimondo on Murray Rothbard’s Betrayal of the American Right:

“Rothbard takes us on a historical journey, though the early individualism of the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonian movement, and all the way back to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who fought for religious and individual liberty among the American colonists. Rothbard debunks the academic leftist prejudice that radical movements in America were co-opted by the Socialists and the left-Populists, pointing to the New England Brahmins such as Edward Atkinson and William Graham Sumner as the founders of the Anti-Imperialist League – laissez-faire proto-libertarians who mounted the main opposition to America’s first venture into the business of empire-building, opposing the war in the Philippines.

“This is really the essential message of Betrayal, and that is that the Old Right movement was inextricably bound up with the history of the anti-imperialist impulse. In the late 1800s and early 20th century, the Anti-Imperialist League argued that the acquisition of colonies meant the beginning of an internal corruption that would end in the fate that awaits all empires, i.e. decline and fall. By 1940, the America First Committee was essentially making the same argument: that in taking sides in the European war, we would risk contamination by the same totalitarian-collectivist virus that had infected the Old World and would surely prove fatal to our republican institutions. In the winter of 2007, Ron Paul and his supporters are making a modern variant of the same point: that, in choosing between republic and empire we are really faced with a choice between renewal and decline.” Read the rest.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.