Paul Gottfried: As the person who has been asked to deliver this year’s Murray N. Rothbard address, it seems appropriate to relate my remarks to the person being honored. Although the observations that follow may not have come directly from Murray, he and my speech do have some connection. My pleasurable, often edifying conversations with this remarkable polymath, the letters we exchanged, his book America’s Great Depression and, not least of all, his study of American intervention in the First World War strengthened for me beliefs that I continue to hold.
I never truly grasped where we were heading as a country until my encounters with Murray. Nor did I fully assess the worthlessness of the American conservative movement up until that point. Those realizations took place despite the fact that Murray and I did not always agree on all issues. We often debated political theoretical questions, as a mental exercise, without expecting to come to full agreement. But we did hold the same views about the present age, while I deferred to Murray on all economic matters, because unlike me, he was the proven expert. Most importantly, I finally accepted his arguments about the damage inflicted on our freedoms by America’s run-away administrative state.
Well into my forties I was going through a learning experience about the modern American government. In 1980 I was appointed as an alternate delegate for Ronald Reagan to the Republican nominating convention; a few months earlier I had spent primary night in my state, which was then Illinois, with Mrs. Reagan, waiting for her husband to achieve his by then predicted electoral victory. After Reagan’s election as president I served briefly as an adviser to the Department of Education and urged its immediate abolition, in accordance with a campaign promise made by candidate Reagan. Instead of being doomed to eradication, this department that Jimmy Carter created as a favor to the teachers’ unions, continued to flourish. Meanwhile Washington was flooded with “conservative” office-seekers, claiming to have come to this “swamp on the Potomac” in order to “dismantle the federal behemoth.”
Needless to say, these supplicants and sycophants had come for jobs and most of them stayed on as “part of the problem.” As late as the early 1980s I believed that the GOP was committed to loosening the government’s grip on our lives and earnings; I also nursed the illusion that something called “the conservative movement” would help in this process. The ease with which the neoconservative master class took over and proceeded to purge the Old Right, or that part of the Right that resisted them, removed any lingering sympathy I had felt for “the movement.” Almost overnight, I noticed the list of conservative heroes changed, from such figures as John C. Calhoun, Robert A. Taft, and Calvin Coolidge, to Martin Luther King, Sidney Hook, and even Leon Trotsky. While I had once wanted to believe that the American Right, like John Randolph, “loved liberty but hated equality,” conservatives were now urged to view “equality as the essential conservative principle.”
I also perceived how the Reagan administration went from talking about containing Soviet imperialism to launching crusades for “our democratic values.” This imperialist mission sounded nothing like what the traditional American Right, and certainly not what the interwar American Right, understood as a realistic or defensive foreign policy. It resembled the world revolutionary vision that I associated with Marxist-Leninist expansionists. It was upsetting that the American Right, together with our Republican president, dutifully followed these positions. And even more regrettably that they became standard Republican ideas.
Murray’s understanding of the American state influenced my book After Liberalism, which was the work of a recovering Republican. The state that he analyzed with scalpel-like precision was the American regime as it had grown since the nineteenth century. It was a structure of power that had vast economic resources, expanded at the expense of local and regional authorities, and engaged in war measures when the governing class thought they were advantageous. According to Murray, quoting Randolph Bourne, the US had become a “welfare-warfare state.” Although this was not intended by America’s founders, it happened nonetheless for reasons that Murray carefully explained.
After Murray’s untimely death I accorded him an honored place in my studies about the managerial state. His examination of the alliance of American public administration with crony capitalism and military expansionists infused my work on multiculturalism and political correctness. Murray’s perceptions also helped explain the rise of Cultural Marxism as the new civil religion in both the US and Western Europe. In these societies the administrative state furthers its control by enforcing ideological orthodoxy. And the state in question is not the relatively restrained bourgeois Victorian state of the nineteenth century, but something the tentacles of which reach into every social, educational and commercial activity.
This brings me to the core of my argument: The most publicized critics of multiculturalism, whether neoconservatives or “cultural conservatives,” ignore with equal disregard the contemporary state’s role in generating and sustaining the object of their criticism. Allow me to list some of the standard explanations given for the spread of Political Correctness. First on my list, because it may come closest to the truth, is the “cultural conservative” lament, which stresses that our long established values are in free-fall. PC now substitutes for ethics because of our ignorance and moral blindness. We reject the great teachers of the past and those inherited religious teachings that remain relevant for our collective existence; and this has resulted in cultural and social chaos.
Another explanation for the rise of PC treats academic culture as a uniquely corrupted part of an otherwise exemplary America. Perhaps most conspicuously it has been David Horowitz of neocon fame who has popularized this argument. According to Horowitz, our democratic government is sound and our country in every way “exceptional.” But universities have become “totalitarian islands in a sea of freedom.” The government must therefore intervene and make universities conform to the standard of freedom that exists elsewhere. We also hear complaints about the spoiled generation that has now taken over, about pampered little monsters who are running wild. Or this variation on the same theme: “the young carry with them popular culture, and together they’re corrupting our entire society.” Presumably the self-indulgent young, and their transmission of popular cultural values, are the principal reasons that PC is thriving.
There is also this anti-egalitarian critique that I myself have been known to belabor, to wit, PC is the latest variation on the ideal of universal equality. Although once integrated into orthodox Christianity in a benign form, this poisonous obsession is now running riot. But since some of you have already heard me ranting against equality, I won’t rehash my peeves, at least not this afternoon. Finally, we come to this oft heard assessment of PC that issues from its least concerned critics. Here attention is drawn to the essential decency of those impulses from whence the ideology arose. Neoconservatives and their dependents maintain that we’ve simply gone a bit too far trying to be just. But we can easily address this by adopting a new government policy. For example, it’s possible to help victims of past discrimination, without engaging in “reverse discrimination,” or we can practice equity feminism instead of gender feminism or affirmative recruitment instead of affirmative action. Curiously those who minimize the social effects of Political Correctness at home often rage against it when the subject turns to foreign policy. Thus the failure to be more confrontational in dealing with a worldwide Islamicist threat or with the figure whom George Will describes as a “thug and war criminal” Russian president Vladimir Putin is attributed to an epidemic of Political Correctness.
Some of these observations do have merit. We dismiss at our peril the great minds of the past. Civilizations, which are an intergenerational human creation, decay unless we protect them. Kids are watching too much mindless TV and are not sufficiently under parental supervision; although their parents may be just as poisoned by cultural toxicity. Moreover, popular culture, as far as I can tell from occasional channel-surfing, has nothing cultural about it. It features uninterrupted vulgarity.
Despite these insights and just censures, none of the critical observations I’ve listed engages what is specifically political about Political Correctness. One might ask why so many people are paying at least lip service to something that anyone with half a mind should find laughable. Although most reported criminal violence against American blacks has been caused by other blacks, the true culprits, we are supposed to believe, are the police, whether white or black. If only the racist police recognized that “black lives matter,” then the contagion of violence in black societies would end.
Gender and racial differences are judged to be social constructs and only tangentially related to what is biologically rooted. And let’s not forget that there are multiple genders; and the same person can experience more than one gender identity within a single day. The media would also have us believe that most domestic terrorism results from white male nativists; and as Ann Coulter recently observed, our journalists, academics, and most TV commentators are “delighted” if reality occasionally confirms their superstition. Evidence is no longer required for any of these daring assertions, providing the appropriate feeling is present. Nor does evidence have to be furnished that a statue of Robert E. Lee in downtown New Orleans that has stood there 131 years has to be removed because its presence is causing mental hardship to local blacks. Here as elsewhere, the PC Taliban are assumed to hold the moral high ground.
Meanwhile Princeton is about to remove plaques with the name of a former university president Woodrow Wilson, who defended segregation. Yale’s administrators and student body are renaming Calhoun College, which for the last seventy-five years has carried the name of a Southern slave-owner. Little does it matter that the South Carolina Senator who is now in disgrace may have been America’s most brilliant political theorist and as late as the 1960s was considered by John F. Kennedy and most professional historians to have ranked among our greatest senators.
A growing body of protestors, including New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio, are working to rename Yale University, which commemorates an eighteenth-century London merchant. Yale’s early benefactor, Eli Yale, funded the infant educational institution as a way of fostering Christian learning in the New World. But this merchant may have pocketed money that he obtained, however circuitously, through the slave trade. At Lebanon Valley College, a few miles down the road from me, nationally publicized demonstrations broke out against the name of a particular building. This edifice bears the moniker of a long-dead munificent college benefactor, Clyde Lynch, but his name also bears a phonetic association with a practice once linked to racial oppression. Suitable replacement names have also been provided by the demonstrators but I shall spare this audience the pain of having to listen to them.
The neoconservative New York Post demanded in the wake of the Charleston killing that the racist movie “Gone with the Wind” cease being publically shown. In the same issue a Post columnist proposed that a tile in the New York City subway that depicts a Confederate Battle flag be torn out. The tile, which shocks neoconservative sensibilities, was the gift of the German Jewish owner of the Times Adolf Ochs. This man’s family, which resided in Chattanooga, had fought for the Confederacy; and the tile in the subway was intended to honor a cause to which Ochs’s parents had been especially devoted. Little did the newspaper owner know how vigilantly our neoconservatives more than a hundred years later would expose this vile act!
Since the audience should get my drift by now, there may be no reason to multiply my examples further. All such illustrations feature claimants to a fictitious moral high ground who revel in bullying others; and since the others offer no resistance, the bullies feel free to go on making trouble. PC’s advocates appeal relentlessly to the ideal of equality, but it is only the white Christian world that is attacked for breaching this ideal. Although all identities would appear to be sacred, in practice only those identities that please designated victims or their self-styled advocates need to be accommodated. If, for example, I chose to advocate for a neo-Confederate or secessionist position, neither the state nor its subject institutions would have to honor my choice. A university or employer might even be morally or legally impelled to “discipline” me for being hateful.
If one compares these student and faculty protests to those of the 1960s, certain differences become apparent. In the 1960s students were protesting a sometimes life-and-death issue. They feared being drafted and sent to Vietnam in a bloody war that went on and on. In the 1960s student protestors opposed institutions that often resisted the protestors and sometimes even sent in police to arrest them. Now the kids and their instructors manufacture grievances as the action unfolds. Protestors are for or against the wearing of Hallowe’en costumes on campus, depending on which side can be used to humiliate gutless administrators. They take offense at the name of any dead white man or denounce any form of lookism or micro-aggression, providing the resulting protest permits them to express outrage.
In the early 1960s such things did not happen, and for a self-evident reason. Sixty years ago we did not have a vast state apparatus fighting “discrimination,” judging “hate crimes” and by implication “hate speech,” and monitoring the treatment of protected minorities. It’s no surprise that establishment Republicans and so-called conservatives tip-toe around this fact. Those who live off government patronage and from devising government policies are not likely to bite the hand that feeds. And the last thing I would expect them to do is notice the most powerful institution promoting Political Correctness.
I know the response these arguments are likely to elicit from the political and verbalizing classes, if they spoke to me, which they don’t. I’m oversimplifying a complex problem that has to be addressed in various ways. Such ways would include a new batch of government policies, preferably drafted through Heritage and then implemented by a non-extremist Republican president. I’m also blaming the state for what the “culture” has done. The state only reflects cultural forces that operate independently of politicians and administrators. It supposedly responds to conditions that the “culture” brings about. Finally I’ve no decent respect for all the good things the American “liberal democratic” state has already done, for example, combatting racism, sexism, homophobia and more recently, popular revulsion for cross-dressers and transsexuals. Without the modern administrative state, women would still be chattel slaves, our electorate restricted to white male property-holders, and women’s “health services” would not be readily available to those who want to dispose of their fetuses.
Comments to Paul Gottfried:
* One big cultural revolution we’ve seen has happened in the military.
But it has been so selective. If the Progs are really interested in making the military ‘equal’ and ‘progressive’, why not go all the way?
Why not get rid of boot-camp training? Isn’t it abusive, bullying, male-dominated? Doesn’t it promote an us-versus-them tribal mentality? Shouldn’t the US military be about loving other nations? So, why promote warfare and tribal camaraderie of USA-USA-USA? Why not pass out flowers and sing songs about US should be friends with all countries?
Why not get rid of ranks? Ranks are hierarchical. It’s not egalitarian. Why should some officers be generals, colonels, captains, majors, and etc?
Why must some men be in infantry? And that is insulting. It sounds like children or babies. There should be equality. And all ranks should face equal danger in combat. Why should upper-rank officers just give out orders while lower-rank soldiers do all the dying and getting maimed? That isn’t equal. That isn’t fair.
Why not get rid of uniforms? It promotes conformism. We should welcome more hijabs and other such garb to promote ‘diversity’. Same uniform for everyone promotes aesthetic homogeneity, and we know homogeneity of any kind is evil and wicked. So, let each soldier dress as he, she, or he/she pleases. Promote aesthetic diversity!
Why not get rid of marching and other coordinated behavior? Such promote unity and obedience. And we know ‘progressivism’ is about being ‘different’ and being ‘deviant’. So, let each soldier march in his, her, or his/her way? Why must all march the same way?
And why should soldiers who do all the dying have no say in which wars to fight? Shouldn’t they have a veto power over a certain war, at least if it’s overseas and if the nation in question did NOT attack the US? How is the US military part of national defense when it acts offensively against other nations? That is imperialism.
And why should US military be the strongest in the world? Isn’t that a form of supremacism? US military should seek equality with militaries in other nations. Not supremacy and domination. That is so unequal and America-domineering.
US should share its weapons technology with all nations to spread equality.
And why should American military favor the agenda of Israel? That is favoring one ethnic group over others. That is ‘racist’.
And we need to end ‘age-ism’ in the military. Why shouldn’t middle-aged men and women join the military? Some middle aged people are more fit than overweight young men and women. ‘Age-ism’ must end!!!
Someone should make a propaganda video promoting my vision of the New Progressive Military.
Lenin said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
What goes for ropes also goes for roads.
After all, the roads that Romans built conquer other lands turned into roads used by barbarians to sack Rome.
“The capitalists will build the roads with which we will conquer them.”
It seems many Third World migrants and immigrants feel that way. Globalism creates all these connections, electronic and transportational, that allow the West to expand all around the world. But those same connections allow the non-West to come barging into the West.
Alt Right must take advantage of these connections, and to an extent, they have in the Age of the Internet. Internet was created by globalists to spread globalism. But anti-globalists have used it to challenge globalism. Globalists still have a huge advantage, but more connections also cause them more problem cuz formerly ‘fringe’ elements are given a platform. Google exists to spread globo-power. But google platform can be used to spread anti-globalist voices.
The Bolsheviks and others used the system created by the Tsars and capitalism to undermine the Tsar and capitalism.
And sometimes they did so not by championing Bolshevism but by creating divisions in the enemy. They did it by looking for contradictions within the dominant enemy — the Tsarist order and then the Kerensky regime — and playing on them. There are always cracks within the system. The thing is to make those cracks bigger.
The true Right had a core following that upholds its key principles and convictions.
But it also needs to develop a subversive wing that hides its agenda and instead works at creating havoc and divisions with the cracks of the globalist power.
The central contradiction with the globo-Liberal power is that between globo-homos and the rest. Globos and Homos are the ruling elites of so-called ‘progressivism’. Homomania is no longer about tolerance or rights for homos. It is a full-blown religion. Homos and trannies are sacralized into divine figures who must be celebrated and worshiped endlessly. This is why Libs, who claim to disdain religion, are so eager to turn all the Churches into ‘gay havens’. They want churches to exclaim that Jesus died so that men who are into fecal penetration could get married and so that men could lop off penises to get fake vaginas. They want this stuff preached IN the church. Homomania is the new faith.
But the fact is Globos and Homos who yammer so much about equality are all about power and privilege. And they offer little for Negroes and Hispanics. And nothing for white working class. The Right must play on this division. Not by speaking Right points but by vilifying the globo-homo elites as a bunch of greedy, hypocritical, lecherous, and disgusting liars and crooks who’ve taken most of the globalist pie.
Once the Prog coalition cracks up — and we should welcome Black Lives Matter for messing up Liberal colleges and creating havoc in Jew-homo-run cities — , there will be more space for political action.
We need more unity on our side, more division on the other side.
Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War cuz they were united whereas the whites were divided.
Franco won the Spanish Civil War since the Right was united whereas the Left was divided among anarchists, socialists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, liberals, etc.