1

Young American Revolution

 2
June 2009
Contents
June 2009 / Issue 02

4 Editorial
Prelude to a Revolution

12 History Lesson
By Gregory L. Schneider
What Young Americans for Liberty
can learn from Young Americans
for Freedom

Illustration by Anthony Rousseau

20 The Revolution Comes to CPAC
By Patrick J. Ford
Amid the has-beens of movement
conservatism, Ron Paul stages
5 The Next Ron Paul? By Jack Hunter an insurgency.
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford isn’t perfect— 23 Who Owns You?
but he may be the anti-Obama we need. By David Gordon
The philosophical justifications for liberty.
8 Audit the Fed! By Matthew Hawes 28 Who Killed Our Economy?
From deals with foreign governments to inflating our currency,
By Christopher Best
our central bank’s secrecy has been a cover for fraud.
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the
Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy
10 Tea Parties and Tax Revolts By W. James Antle III Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will
Americans rebel against pork and big-government. Make Things Worse
by Thomas E. Woods Jr.

12 The New Left Was Right By Dylan Hales 30 Conserving the Constitution
The earliest 1960s radicals opposed “corporate liberalism” By Mark Nugent
— as the Revolution does today. Defending the Republic: Constitutional
Morality in a Time of Crisis
Bruce P. Frohnen and
18 Enemy of the State By Kelse Moen Kenneth L. Grasso, eds.
Emory’s Donald Livingston champions the cause Leviathan
fears most—secession. 32 Art for Survival’s Sake
By Jeremy Lott
The Art Instinct: Beauty,
26 The Trouble With Burke By George Hawley Pleasure, and Human Evolution
The fight for liberty must be radical, not counter-revolutionary. by Dennis Dutton

37 Liberty at the Oscars

34 We Don’t Need Another Hero By Franklin Harris By John Payne
Alan Moore’s Watchmen remains a stirring warning against The award for pro-freedom film
absolute power. of the year goes to…

3
Young American Revolution

Publisher
Jeff Frazee
Editorial Director
Daniel McCarthy
Deputy Editors
Patrick J. Ford,
Edward King
Art Director
Matthew Holdridge
Illustration
Shane Helm,
Anthony Rousseau
Contributing Editors
W. James Antle III, Dylan Hales,
George Hawley, Trent Hill,
Jack Hunter, Bonnie Kristian,
Kelse Moen, John W. Payne
Young American Revolution is the official publication
of Young Americans for Liberty (www.YALiberty.
org). Subscriptions are $50 for one year (4 issues).
Checks may be made out to Young Americans for
Liberty and sent to PO Box 2751, Arlington, VA 22202.
Young American Revolution accepts letters to the
editor and freelance submissions. Letters should
be between 50 and 300 words. Submissions should
be between 700 and 2400 words. Letters and
submissions may be edited for length and content.
Write to us at contact@yaliberty.org or PO Box
2751, Arlington, VA 22202.
Young Americans for Liberty is the continuation of
Students for Ron Paul (SFP). In less than 8 months,
SFP established over 500 college and high school
chapters in all 50 states and over 26,000 students
joined the Ron Paul 2008 campaign.
The mission of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL)
is to train, educate, and mobilize youth activists
committed to “winning on principle”. Our goal is to
cast the leaders of tomorrow and reclaim the policies,
candidates, and direction of our government.
We welcome limited government conservatives,
classical liberals, and libertarians who trust in the
creed we set forth.
Opinions expressed in Young American Revolution
are not necessarily the views of Young Americans
for Liberty.
Copyright 2009 Young Americans for Liberty
Prelude to a Revolution
T o Rachel Mad-
dow and the
rest of the left-wing
media, the anti-tax
tea parties of April
15 were a cause for
mockery. To Fox
News and the Re-
publican establish-
ment, the parties
were a reassuring Photo by Eric Slee
sign that all is forgiv-
en after the budget-busting years of Bush
and the grassroots are once more enthusi-
astic about the GOP. Don’t believe it: the
left-wing and right-wing statists are both
wrong.
The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was no
laughing matter: it was an act of civil dis-
obedience, a defiance of royal authority.
The original tea party was a prelude to the
American Revolution. The protestors of
April 15 (and the weeks before) also want
a revolution—an end to unchecked federal
spending, asphyxiating taxes, and the on-
going debasement of our currency. Plac-
ards demanding “End the Fed!” could be
seen at more than a few of the protests.
But tea parties are not enough. While
thousands of the activists who gathered
on April 15 had sound constitutional
views, many thousands more did not—as
the easy acceptance of so many oppor-
tunistic politicians as speakers at these
events demonstrated. And even some of
the most well-informed protesters have
not been given the tools necessary to make
their principles a political reality. The me-
dia and government classes will continue
to deride and co-opt the rebellious spirit
of the tea parties so long as popular dissat-
isfaction with the political system is only
given symbolic, emotional outlets. For a
real revolution, we need the right ideas and
the means to make them effective—to win
on principle.
This issue of the Young American Revolu-
tion looks at the tea parties and the revolt
against the Fed and inquires into the deep-
er principles behind both. (Our next issue
4
June 2009
will concentrate on
how to operational-
ize those principles
on your campus or
in your community.)
Within these pages
you will find more
than one perspec-
tive on what the
soundest basis for
opposition to execu-
tive power, imperial
wars, and financial fraud is. Mastering the
philosophy of liberty requires more than
reciting talking points that might go down
easy on talk radio. There are issues of con-
tention among liberty-minded people that
have to be pondered carefully. And build-
ing a successful anti-statist coalition means
bringing together people of very different
viewpoints: libertarians, conservatives,
anarcho-capitalists, and perhaps even (as
Dylan Hales’s article suggests) decentralist
leftists. YAL does not impose any single
set of doctrines on anyone—we welcome
the full diversity of young Americans who
love liberty and hate Leviathan.
This issue of YAR also presents some
of the most vexing questions that confront
students of liberty. Is conservative icon
Edmund Burke a radical enough figure
for anti-statists today? Should historically
evolved tradition or pure natural rights
be our guide to liberty—or can the two
paths be reconciled? How can we distin-
guish ourselves as constitutionalists when
every power-grabbing politico, from Bush
to Obama, claims to uphold the Constitu-
tion? Don’t just accept the arguments our
authors make—if you have a better argu-
ment, write to us at contact@yaliberty.org
and make your case.
To win on principle, we need to test our
ideas rigorously—then put them to work
in political campaigns and public policy.
The tea parties were just the first step.
Now it’s time for the Revolution.
- �e Editors
 The Next Ron Paul?
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford isn’t perfect—
but he may be the anti-Obama we need.

Jack Hunter

“ South Carolina governor

slams GOP on eve of debate,”
read the headline for The Politico,
let’s-focus-on-spending plea was
already a defining feature of his
campaign was catapulted to star-
and headline worthy it was. In dom during that debate by dar-
May 2007, when every Republi- ing to buck his party on foreign
can running for president (except policy, as Ron Paul explained to
Ron Paul) believed the candidate a GOP and a nation something
who was most bombastic about they had never heard before—
his willingness to bomb foreign how U.S. interventionism resulted
nations would win the GOP in “blowback” and contributed
nomination, Republican Gover- to 9/11. Rudy Giuliani blustered
nor Mark Sanford chastised his that Paul was blaming the U.S. for
party for being blind to what he 9/11 and demanded an apology.
believed was the most ominous Rudy never got it—and America
threat on the political horizon. got the Ron Paul Revolution.
Wrote Sanford: In looking for future Revolu-
tion allies and leaders, one could
On Tuesday, our state will
do much worse than Sanford.
host the first debate in the
Sanford’s financial warnings
South among the Republican
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford came long before any Wall Street
presidential candidates. It’s my
bailouts or stimulus packages.
hope that this debate kicks off
Sanford’s predictions were con-
a much larger conversation
sistently ignored during the same period Paul and market observer
among the presidential candidates—and all Americans—on
Peter Schiff were making similar forecasts. All three men were
the vital issue of government spending. Spending is one of
dismissed or laughed at by pundits and politicians for their lack
those prickly issues that the media has seemed to assign as
of optimism, relentless “doom and gloom,” and “sky-is-falling”
too boring, the pundits as too complex. (But) for the candi-
economics.
dates in this crowded field, the spending debate represents a
That is, until the sky fell. As the economy faltered, Sanford
real opportunity. It is a big issue that will make a difference in
emerged on the national scene as a hard-line fiscal conservative
every American’s life in the years ahead, and it’s an area that
for whom more government spending was not simply undesir-
has not been graced with leadership. Let’s face it: My party,
able but an albatross. While being against stimulus spending is
the Republicans, have been in control, and they have blown it
all the rage among Republicans now that President Obama is in
when it comes to government spending.
the White House, Sanford was the only governor to plead with
Of course, the debate that followed was about more spend- President Bush and Congress not to go forward with their own
ing—and how each candidate (except Ron Paul) was willing to stimulus last year. Reported the Augusta Chronicle in November:
spend even more billions to prolong and expand President Bush’s
Let’s hear it for South Carolina’s GOP Gov. Mark Sanford.
War on Terror. Ironically, the one candidate for whom Sanford’s

5
Young American Revolution
 Governors and mayors are holding out tin cups in Washing-
ton in hopes of getting a chunk of yet another bailout pack-
age... Sanford made his plea too, but he wasn’t holding a tin
cup. He was the only governor to urge the House Ways and
Means Committee last Wednesday to drop the whole idea of
another bailout, or as it’s called in D.C.—a ‘stimulus pack-
age.’
Sanford told the committee, “I’m here to beg of you not to
approve or advance the contemplated $150 billion stimulus pack-
age... this $150 billion salve may in fact further infect our econo-
my with unnecessary government influence and unintended fiscal
consequences.”
The debate and eventual passage of Obama’s $787 billion
stimulus further elevated Sanford’s profile, but this time he was
joined in opposing it by congressional Republicans and a handful
of GOP governors. In the ongoing media obsession with who
will lead the GOP, it’s worth noting that in contrast to Sanford,
some of the most prominent names bandied about, particularly
governors like Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal, were not only more
than willing to accept federal stimulus packages and similar spend-
ing under President Bush but remain tepid at best in rejecting his
legacy now. Says Sanford forthright of Bush’s massive spending,
“That is what ‘compassionate conservatism’ was about. It was a
disaster. Our niche is maximizing individual liberty.”
For Sanford, “maximizing liberty” has always been more than
just empty, clichéd Republican rhetoric—it has defined his entire
political career. With the possible exception of the PATRIOT
Act, the Bush-sponsored Homeland Security measure REAL ID,
an attempt to force states to adopt a new system of federal iden-
tification, has threatened to become the most sweeping infringe-
ment on Americans’ civil liberties in recent memory. Sanford not
only joined a number of governors in rejecting the mandate (it
should be noted that while in Congress current Louisiana Gov-
ernor Jindal voted for both the REAL ID Act and for making
the PATRIOT Act permanent) but was one of the leading voices
of resistance. Sanford explained his opposition to REAL ID in
a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff:
REAL ID represents another step against a limited federal
government. Our greatest homeland security is liberty and,
yet, based on the history of civilizations, its biggest threat
is found in a central government that is too powerful. Our
founding fathers were explicit in reserving first to individu-
als, then to states, all the powers that were not expressly del-
egated to the federal government. As mentioned, they did
this because they considered the biggest threat to liberty a
large federal government, and as a consequence, they put in
place checks on its prerogative ... . The First Amendment
guarantees Americans the right to assemble and petition their
government, and in it there has never been a qualification
that said, ‘Only if you have a REAL ID card.’ I think it would
be best to let the Founding Fathers’ original work stand.
While opposition to REAL ID was broad, Sanford’s concern
for civil liberties has remained steadfast even when unpopular. Re-
cent state legislation that would require DNA samples to be taken
6
June 2009
from suspects upon an arrest for a felony was touted as a neces-
sary “law and order” measure by most Palmetto State Republicans
and law enforcement, yet Sanford frustrated both by vetoing it.
Sanford’s veto was eventually overridden, and in defying his party,
police chiefs, countless newspaper editorials, numerous mayors,
and more than a few of his constituents, the governor found
himself on the same side as the ACLU and the NAACP—not
exactly an enviable position for a Southern Republican governor.
Reported the Associated Press:
A new South Carolina law requiring DNA samples from
people arrested on felony charges is overly intrusive and har-
kens to ‘totalitarian regimes,’ the governor said today as he
joined with the NAACP to call for the rule to be changed.
Law enforcement officials argue the new law will be more ef-
ficient than having to seek court orders to collect samples. By
that reasoning, Sanford said police could do their jobs even
more efficiently if they didn’t have to obey the Constitution’s
Fourth Amendment against unlawful search and seizure.
‘With all due respect, efficiency—supposed efficiency—is
the mark of totalitarian regimes,’ Sanford said at a news con-
ference today with Lonnie Randolph, president of the state
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. ‘Again, we’ll look at any and all options as an
administration to thwart this effort because, again, we think
it breaks the premise of the American system, which is: One
is innocent until proven guilty,’ the governor said.
Standing alone or in unpopular company is nothing new for
Sanford, as he has always put his conservatism before personal
or party expediency. When President Bill Clinton declared, “the
era of big government is over” in 1996, it was in response to
the so-called “Republican Revolution” of 1994, when the GOP
swept the House and picked up eight seats in the Senate on prom-
ises to bring fiscal responsibility back to Washington. One of that
class, Congressman Sanford made news by sleeping on a cot in
his Washington office to save taxpayer dollars (still occasionally
theatrical, governor Sanford would later show up in the South
Carolina Statehouse with two baby pigs to mock state lawmakers’
pork-laden budget) and stuck to his limited government promise,
unlike many of his colleagues. As National Public Radio recently
noted, “Sanford came to the Capitol with the torch-bearing troops
of Newt Gingrich but proved even more conservative than his
cohort. He often lined up with libertarian hero Ron Paul, even
when no one else did. And unlike many who took the three-terms-
and-out pledge, Sanford did his three and left.”
Sanford’s dedicated libertarian-leaning conservatism is also, no
doubt, what prompted him often to be the lone Republican to
vote with Paul against constitutionally questionable bills—every-
thing from legislation protecting historical sites associated with
the Underground Railroad to numerous pork barrel projects that
would have benefited his district. On constitutional grounds, San-
ford was one of only two Republicans (do I have to say who the
other was?) who voted against a 1998 resolution calling for regime
change in Iraq, and he opposed President Clinton’s war in Kosovo.
Sanford told The American Conservative in March, “I don’t believe
in preemptive war…For us to hold the moral high ground in the
world, our default position must be defensive.” Sanford has also
long been an advocate for ending the U.S. embargo against Cuba,
which to date has been a rare position amongst Republicans.
This isn’t to say that Sanford’s antiwar credentials stand up
to Paul’s, or that he is a noninterventionist in the strictest sense. Democrats, Sanford is also reviled, and I have heard some of the
When Sanford appeared alongside Gingrich on Fox News in
April, seemingly agreeing, although mutedly, with the former
Georgia congressman about “taking out” North Korea’s missile
capabilities, the whole exchange left anti-empire admirers of the
governor scratching their heads. Explained Sanford press secre-
tary Joel Sawyer during a phone conversation, “To call Sanford
a ‘non-interventionist’ is not exactly true. But the threshold for
him is so high, ridiculously high” for any military intervention or
involvement that it’s hard to make the distinction. Sawyer brought
up that Sanford opposed both the Kosovo intervention and the
invasion of Iraq because he did not believe they were justified.
On the question of the North Korea missile test, Sawyer said
that Sanford meant what he said—Washington, D.C. cannot keep
talking tough to North Korea and never back it up. And if there
is a way for the U.S. to make good on its warnings without com-
mitting troops or invading a nation, Sanford sup-
ports it.
That Sanford has a “ridiculously high” threshold
for what justifies foreign intervention is comfort-
ing—but if his elevated threshold is low enough
to include unwise, politically costly, and needless
attacks on nations like North Korea, Sanford may
leave Ron Paul supporters who are otherwise sym-
pathetic to him wondering if he’s really any better
than the average Republican hawk.
Sanford could lose a significant base of support
in the process. Paul himself highlighted his relation-
ship with Sanford in Congress during his speech at
the St. Louis Campaign for Liberty regional con-
ference in early April. This is remarkable in itself,
considering that Paul spends more time attacking his Palmetto revolutionary?
spendthrift, Constitution-trashing, warmongering
colleagues than praising exceptions like Sanford.
Elected chairman of the Republican Governors Association in
November, Sanford continues to raise his profile—and with it,
speculation that he might run for president in 2012. Often men-
tioned in the same breath as governors Jindal and Palin, Sanford
is markedly different precisely because his celebrity has nothing to which party occupies the White House. And there are even fewer
do with race, gender, or the cult of personality. As the Republi-
can Party continues to hunt for personalities that might outshine
the president’s in the next election, Sanford remains the anti-
Obama—not only on fiscal matters but as a man too concerned
about bringing budgets down to earth to worry about the pomp
and circumstance of Hollywood-style politics. Much like Paul,
Sanford isn’t the most charismatic personality, yet his most ardent
admirers remain such because of his ideas alone.
Sanford is the most popular politician in South Carolina—de-
pending on whom you talk to. Among rank-and-file Republicans,
Sanford is adored. In my work in talk radio, trying to find a con-
servative Republican who will disparage Sanford is like trying to
find one who will talk down Reagan—it simply doesn’t happen.
Within the state GOP establishment, Sanford is paid polite lip
7
Young American Revolution
service but is often secretly reviled for refusing to play politics as
usual. (In 2004, the Republican-controlled South Carolina State-
house overrode 105 of Sanford’s106 budget vetoes.) Among state
nastiest conversations in restaurants and bars directed at the gov-
ernor—and guess why? For the same reason Sanford is disparaged
by his own party: refusing to play politics as usual, which means
voting for pork and happily accepting whatever “stimulus” Wash-
ington doles out.
In understanding Sanford’s exceptional yet old-fashioned Re-
publicanism, it’s worth contrasting him with another high profile
Palmetto politician, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a man who often
finds himself on the opposite side of his governor’s conservative
agenda. It’s easy to see why the authoritarian-leaning Republican
Graham—who has butted heads with the libertarian-leaning gov-
ernor on everything from REAL ID to amnesty for illegal aliens,
the Wall Street bailout to nationalizing banks—is more embraced
by his party than Sanford is. Graham is the quintessential Repub-
lican establishment candidate. Graham is also overwhelmingly
unpopular among the Republican rank and file—on
talk radio, Graham’s name is spoken with the type
of scorn usually reserved for Obama. It is widely
believed that the only thing that saved Graham in
the last election was the “R” next to his name and
a $4 million war chest. (His opponent spent about
$23,000.) The deep-red state of South Carolina sim-
ply doesn’t send Democrats to D.C. these days.
But it might be sending a worthy Republican
governor to the capital before too long. Speculation
about the 2012 presidential election is mostly aca-
demic, as even much-touted frontrunners like Palin
were unknown nationally a year ago. The political
world is constantly changing and today’s celebri-
ties could easily become tomorrow’s footnotes. But
some things remain constant—real conservative
principles and the economic truth that spending
money that does not exist will invariably lead to di-
saster. Only a leader who possesses the former can possibly stop
the latter.
There are few Republicans on the national scene whose con-
servative principles don’t flap aimlessly in the wind depending on
whose dedication to liberty—and recognition that economic free-
dom is not separate but integral to liberty—demands that spend-
ing must stop, budgets must be cut drastically, and constitutional
freedoms are non-negotiable. Mark Sanford is among those few.
After four or eight years of Obama, America will no longer be
able to afford—quite literally—just another smooth talker, an-
other pretty face, or a more politically correct GOP smile. Serious
crises call for serious leaders, and the future may demand much
more than another nominal Republican. The country needs a true
conservative we can believe in.
“The Southern Avenger” Jack Hunter [southernavenger@southernavenger.
com] is a personality for 1250 AM WTMA talk radio in Charleston, South
Carolina, a columnist for the Charleston City Paper, and a contributing
editor for Taki’s Magazine.
 Audit the Fed!
From deals with foreign governments to inflating our currency,
our central bank’s secrecy has been a cover for fraud

Matthew Hawes

O ne of the most amazing aspects

of the Ron Paul Revolution is the
diversity of the activists who have as-
sembled from all manner of religious,
cultural, and political backgrounds to
champion a common cause. Though
we have our disagreements on the
finer points of various issues, we stand
united in support of reclaiming our
Republic and restoring our Constitu-
tion.
And one particular subject unifies our
movement like no other: economics.
If you have attended a Ron Paul rally
in the past, you are well aware that it Ron Paul greets co-sponsors Congressman Bartlett
does not take long for the crowd to (left) and Congressman Thompson (right)
start chanting, “End the Fed!”—some-
thing you don’t hear at other political gatherings. Ron Paul’s 2008
presidential campaign returned the sound-money debate to the
national stage and warned our country that a time of reckoning
would soon come as a result of the Federal Reserve’s loose mon-
etary policy and a Congress that mortgages our future for its own
political gain.
In contrast, the mainstream media would have Americans be-
lieve that no one could have foreseen the current economic crisis
and that the free market is the root of all evil in our society. Those
who preach the big-government gospel have wasted no time in
grabbing as many unconstitutional powers as the present econom-
ic turmoil will allow them to assume. The Federal Reserve System
stands at the center of these power plays.
Since its inception in 1913, the Federal Reserve System has
held sway over the creation of Amer-
ica’s money and credit. This control,
coupled with Congress’s allegiance to
Keynesian deficit spending, has re-
sulted in a 95 percent decrease in the
value of our dollar and a national debt
approaching $11 trillion. (And that’s
before you add in trillions of dollars
in unfunded liabilities awaiting us in
decades to come.)
Though it was created by Con-
gress, the Fed has remained largely
unchecked and unaccountable in its
operations.
Over the past two years, the Fed has Campaign for Liberty volunteers sort 47,000 petitions of Information Act requests…”
loaned out over $2 trillion in taxpayer demanding a Fed audit
8
June 2009
dollars to financial institutions, yet it
refuses to release the list of who re-
ceived the funds. When asked for this
information by Sen. Bernie Sanders at
a Senate Budget Committee hearing,
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke flat out
said, “No.” Can you imagine anyone
else getting away with such an answer
to a congressional inquiry?
The Fed has loaned billions of dol-
lars to foreign central banks, but it will
not provide details of these loans ei-
ther. And while the central bank does
release the minutes of its Open Mar-
ket Committee meetings to Congress,
they are provided weeks after the fact
and are edited.
The time has come to end the shroud of secrecy surround-
ing the Fed’s operations and hold it accountable to the American
people for how it handles our money.
On Feb. 26, Congressman Paul introduced HR 1207, the Fed-
eral Reserve Transparency Act. This bill would require the Gov-
ernment Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a full audit of
the Fed by the end of 2010.
As Dr. Paul stated in his introduction of the bill:
“How long will we as a Congress stand idly by while hard-
working Americans see their savings eaten away by infla-
tion?
“…Since its inception, the Federal Reserve has always oper-
ated in the shadows, without sufficient scrutiny or oversight
of its operations. While the conven-
tional excuse is that this is intended
to reduce the Fed’s susceptibility
to political pressures, the reality is
that the Fed acts as a foil for the
government. Whenever you ques-
tion the Fed about the strength of
the dollar, they will refer you to the
Treasury, and vice versa. The Fed-
eral Reserve has, on the one hand,
many of the privileges of govern-
ment agencies, while retaining ben-
efits of private organizations, such
as being insulated from Freedom
Note that the GAO has conducted
limited audits of the Fed in the past, ments and other central banks.
which the Fed will use to try to boast With your help, Campaign for
of its transparency. A close look at “How long will we as a Congress stand idly Liberty and Young Americans for
Section 714 in Title 31 of the U.S. by while hard-working Americans see their Liberty will lead the fight to bring
Code, however, reveals the full story. savings eaten away by inflation?” - Ron Paul transparency to an institution that
According to that section, the GAO has helped to destroy our currency
cannot audit, “transactions for or and plunge us into a roller coaster
with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, ride of booms and busts. Campaign for Liberty has already cre-
or nonprivate international financing organization; deliberations, ated petitions in support of HR 1207 for our members to send to
decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including dis- their representatives and senators, and, as funds allow, we plan to
count window operations, reserves of member banks, securities run newspaper ads and take to the radio and television airwaves to
credit, interest on deposits, and open market operations; trans- spread the word about this historic legislation.
actions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Within three weeks of its introduction, HR 1207 had attracted
Committee; or a part of a discussion or communication among 30 cosponsors, (now it is up to 124, as of going to press) and the
or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has com-
employees of the Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)-(3) mitted to holding a hearing on the bill. Visit www.Campaignfor-
of this subsection.” Liberty.com to stay current on our actions to get HR 1207 passed
As Dr. Paul likes to say, the GAO is allowed to audit the Fed as by the Financial Services Committee and onto the House floor
long as it does not audit anything the Fed actually does. for a vote.
HR 1207 would remove these restrictions, allowing a full audit This effort is more than just a philosophical exercise. It is a
for the first time in the central bank’s history. Its funding facilities, battle we can win. Congressman Paul has led the way, but it is up
such as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, Term Securities Lend- to us to finish the fight.
ing Facility, and Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility,
would be opened to congressional oversight, and we could finally
Matt Hawes is vice president of programs for the Campaign for Liberty.
learn the details of the Fed’s arrangements with foreign govern-

9
Young American Revolution
 Tea Parties and Tax Revolts
Americans rebel against pork and big-government

W. James Antle III

W hen President Barack Obama flew to

Denver to sign the federal stimulus
package—price tag: $1.2 trillion, counting
interest—into law, not everyone celebrated
the momentous occasion. Down the street
from the signing site, on the steps of the
Colorado state capitol, a crowd of 300 gath-
ered to burn the bill in effigy. Jim Pfaff, a
local taxpayers’ activist, condemned the
“economic recovery” scheme as a “Ponzi
scheme, Madoff-style.”
The anti-stimulus protesters dined on Party time. Photo by Eric Slee.
roast pig, which symbolized the more than
96 percent of the bill that went toward spe-
cial-interest “pork-barrel” spending projects. They chanted, “No
more pork!” and “You don’t know stimulus!” One demonstration
leader even held up oversized checks to signify the $30,000 in debt
imposed by the stimulus on each American family.
It wasn’t the first time ordinary Americans had taken to the
streets to rally against the Obama administration’s massive un-
funded federal spending—and wouldn’t be the last. On President’s
Day in Seattle, blogger Keli Carender gathered 100 people deep in
the heart of Obama country to protest the price of the stimulus
package and the way it was rammed through Congress without
meaningful debate. Like the event in Denver, activists wore pig
noses and feasted on pulled pork. They held up signs saying, “Say
no to generational theft” and condemning the “porkulus.”
CNBC commentator Rick Santelli took to the floor of the Chi-
cago Board of Trade and railed against the Obama administra-
tion’s plan to bail out irresponsible borrowers and lenders alike.
“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mort-
gage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli that the anti-tax initiative was “a fraud on the taxpayer that will
asked, as traders hooted and cheered around him. “I’m thinking
of having a Chicago Tea Party!”
Santelli’s idea caught on. By one estimate, more than 150 anti-
spending “tea parties” have taken place throughout the country.
According to official crowd estimates, 4,000 people turned out for
a rally in Cincinnati. Taxpayers protested in Chicago and in the
rain in Atlanta. Tea parties have also sprung up in less conserva-
tive areas, from Cleveland to Santa Monica. Even Washington,
D.C. has gotten into the act, with 200 demonstrating in late Febru- did not rise.
ary right in the belly of the federal beast.
President Obama may have awakened a sleeping giant—the
American taxpayer. When he traveled to Mesa, Arizona to un-
veil his $100 billion to $200 billion mortgage bailout plan, he was peatedly promised relief in exchange for other revenue sources,
greeted by nearly 500 protesters shouting anti-bailout slogans and
carrying signs. Some facetiously demanded that the government
10
June 2009
buy them liposuction, large-screen TV’s, or
beer for their horses. Others made libertar-
ian arguments against the runaway govern-
ment growth on display and the ever ex-
panding sense of entitlement that fuels it.
It’s a tradition that’s as old and American
as the Republic. The protesters in Denver,
Mesa, and Washington are paying tribute to
the Boston Tea Party, an act of rebellion by
American colonists against British taxation
that eventually culminated in a successful
war for independence. But anti-tax protests
haven’t been confined to Bostonians dump-
ing tea in the harbor. Periodic “tax revolts”
have often been a precursor to the electorate’s turn away from big
government in favor of fiscal discipline.
Over 30 years ago, Californians were feeling oppressed by
growing property tax burdens and the rising cost of government.
Activists Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann spearheaded a ballot initia-
tive to cap property taxes in the Golden State, thereby limiting the
political class’s claim on the wealth of California’s taxpayers. The
Jarvis-Gann Amendment appeared on the state ballot as Propo-
sition 13, benefiting from deep anti-tax sentiment. Yet the tax-
payers’ outrage did not deter a coalition of big business and big
government from mobilizing against the initiative.
Former California governor Pat Brown told the Washington Post,
“If I were a communist, I would vote for Proposition 13.” Los
Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley warned that Proposition 13 “will hit
the city like a neutron bomb, leaving some city facilities standing
virtually empty and human services devastated.” Even the presi-
dent of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce complained
cause fiscal chaos, massive unemployment and disruption of the
economy.”
But the taxpayers still had their say. Proposition 13 passed with
65 percent of the vote as 70 percent of registered voters streamed
to the polls. Property taxes were slashed by an average of 57
percent across California. The massive layoffs of police officers,
firefighters, and teachers that were predicted by the proposition’s
opponents did not come to pass. Unemployment across the state
Proposition 13 was so successful that it was emulated in an-
other, even more liberal state. At the time, Massachusetts had the
second-highest property tax burden in the country. Politicians re-
but property taxes did not come down. “So by 1980,” anti-tax
activist Barbara Anderson recalled in the Boston Globe, “we had a
high income tax, a sales tax, a lottery, and high property taxes.”
Not for nothing was the Bay State called “Taxachusetts.”
Anderson’s Citizens for Limited Taxation and Government put
a referendum question on the Massachusetts ballot that limited
property taxes to 2.5 percent of a community’s value and held
increases to 2.5 percent a year. Dubbed Proposition 2 1/2, it also
cut the automobile excise tax from $66 per $1,000 to $25 per
$1,000, provided an income tax deduction for renters, and banned
the state from imposing new unfunded mandates on cities and
towns.
Tax-eaters did not cede money back to taxpayers willingly,
however. “Battle lines were drawn: CLT, the Massachusetts High
Technology Council, the Massachusetts Auto Dealers Association,
and the National Federation of Independent Business against al-
most everybody else,” Anderson wrote about the Proposition 2
1/2 debate. “Leading opponents were the Legislature, the Mas-
sachusetts Municipal Association, the Massachusetts Taxpayers
Foundation, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and other
public employee unions, various human service organizations, the
Massachusetts Council of Churches, the Catholic Church, and,
incredibly, the Massachusetts Association of Older Americans.”
Union leaders asked which interested initiative supporters more:
“Cutting taxes? Or cutting our throats?”
Proposition 2 1/2 passed nevertheless, with the support of 59
percent of voters. Massachusetts voters also went for Ronald Rea-
gan in 1980 and 1984. But the public-sector unions coordinated
marches and still tried to oppose the initiative even after it became choice in the Middle East.
law. They hoped to persuade the legislature to repeal Proposition Today, taxpayer groups benefit from better organization. There
2 1/2. A majority of governors since its enactment have vowed is a highly developed patchwork of state and national organiza-
to veto any attempt to reverse or dilute the tax-limiting measure, tions willing to sponsor or endorse proliferating tea parties across
however, and it still standards almost 30 years later in a state where the country. And networking technology makes it easier for con-
the forces of big government remain powerful. As with Proposi- cerned citizens to organize even without establishment support.
tion 13, the dire predictions regarding the state’s economy and The D.C. tea party alone had the backing of Americans for Tax
basic government services were not borne out by the events. Reform, FreedomWorks, the National Taxpayers Union, and
Over the years, comparable initiatives have passed in states as Americans for Prosperity. But it was also substantially put to-
varied as liberal Oregon and then-conservative Colorado. But the gether through a Facebook page set up by conservative journalist
tax revolts brewing now differ in some important respects from J.P. Freire (full disclosure: an American Spectator colleague of this
the ones that led to Proposition 13, Proposition 2 1/2, and the writer), with some promotional efforts by nationally syndicated
Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights. All of those protests, culminat- columnist and pork donor Michelle Malkin and no small amount
ing in ballot initiatives, were a reaction to high taxes after they had of Twitter chatter.
already been imposed. The Obama administration hasn’t raised Organizations like Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty might be
taxes yet and hasn’t completely spelled out what tax increases it able to harness their supporters’ Internet savvy and their ability to
will seek. The president continues to pretend he will cut taxes for build coalitions with anti-bailout progressives that conventional
95 percent of the American people and that the tax increases im- conservatives might have trouble working with. Although for the
plicit in his $3.55 trillion budget proposal will be levied against present even Republican voices seem open to a broader anti-tax
the super-wealthy alone. The Bush tax cuts remain in force until and anti-spending coalition: “Now is the time for all good tax-
2011. payers to turn the tables on free-lunching countrymen and their
Today’s tax rebels are sophisticated enough to understand that enablers in Washington,” Malkin wrote in a recent column. “Com-
the bailouts, stimulus packages, and rescue plans can be paid for munity organizing helped propel Barack Obama to the White
through deficits and inflation only for so long. This government House. It can work for fiscal conservatism, too.”
spending will suck resources out of the real private economy now For every tax revolt that is successful, many more are quelled.
and lead to higher taxes in the long term. In the past, economic Just ask the economic libertarians who organized against the esca-
conservatives have had to wait for the tax burden to cripple the lating costs of the New Deal in the 1930s or the sponsors of the
economy before they could generate any popular outrage. Or they 30 anti-tax initiatives that were defeated the same year Proposition
have gone along quietly when Republican presidents have prac- 13 passed. But if this new movement prevails, it could create con-
ticed borrow-and-spend economics, as long as a few modest tax ditions where “Tax, spend, elect” is a political slogan of the past.
cuts accompanied the GOP’s massive new entitlements, record
annual discretionary spending increases, and unfunded wars of W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

11
Young American Revolution
 The New Left Was Right
The earliest 1960s radicals opposed “corporate liberalism”—much like the Revolution today

Dylan Hales

A ccording to the popular my-

thology of the mainstream
conservative movement, the
somed during the Age of Aquari-
us have become commonplace on
the Right, they are far too broad
“New Left” of the 1960s is re- in scope. The result has been a
sponsible for almost all of this disproportionate demonization
world’s current ills. As the story of a multifaceted movement
goes, while brave American GI’s whose best instincts and brightest
were sloughing through the hell minds were more quintessentially
of Southeast Asia, ungrateful col- American than much of what
lege kids and university brats were passes for conservatism today.
burning flags and bras while im- Though often remembered
bibing every illegal psychotropic as a bicoastal, big-city bonanza
substance known to man. The (New York City, San Francisco)
war against the Commies went the origins of the New Left lie in
south with the culture, and only the American Midwest. The jump
Ronald Reagan was successful, if point occurred on June 12, 1962,
just temporarily, in saving us from Karl Hess, Goldwater speechwriter and New Leftist when the youthful congregants
this endless hippie excess. of a beautifully random piece of
Like most great historical myths, flyover country known as Port
this one has some slivers of truth. Single parenthood, abortion on Huron, Michigan met to declare their independence from the
demand, drug abuse, and much of the hedonistic behavior con- moribund and totally irrelevant consensus liberalism of the Ken-
demned by the New Right of the Reagan years did explode during nedy era. They represented a marked departure from the Old Left
the 1960s. The unintended consequences of the sexual revolution of Soviet apologists and their obnoxious opponents in the anti-
combined with the rise of organized identity politics to contribute Communist social-democratic center. At Port Huron, an equally
heavily to the ascent of the federal welfare state under Presidents fractured but far more spirited authentic Left was born.
Johnson and Nixon, as both presidents opposed socialism abroad Though much has been written about Students for a Demo-
while embracing it at home. “Yes We Can!” was first the cry of cratic Society, the group that met at Port Huron, its rightful place
that generation, a legacy that remains with us today. in history has never been fully established, primarily as a result of
But what about the other truths, the rest of the story, and the a mainstream media that has consistently glamorized the worst
best of the ’60s generation? Were all those students clamoring for aspects of SDS while obscuring its uniquely American character-
a democratic society dangerous Marxoids devoid of manners or istics. The early days of SDS have been almost totally ignored,
good sense? Could it be that a movement founded on a principled leaving one with the impression that the infamous Bill Ayers had
devotion to “free speech,” a fierce opposition to the managerial been the epitome of the group from day one, when nothing could
state, and a rigid do-it-yourself ethic lacked any qualities that this be further from the truth.
generation’s youthful anti-statists could learn from? For those who associate that era with tear gas and townhouse
Hell, no! explosions, the tranquility of the New Left’s opening salvos are
Though indictments of the radical youth movements that blos- almost impossible to fathom, as the early stages of the movement

12
June 2009
were defined by a commitment to “participatory democracy.” In
the beginning, there was no market for the sort of personality cult
that ultimately led to the movement’s implosion. Consensus deci-
sion-making was a practiced principle and attempts to address the
root of youth alienation were the impetus behind most SDS posi-
tions. As former SDS president Carl Oglesby noted in an interview
with Reason: “SDS was founded to be a democratic organization,
not to be socialist. Its most basic slogan was ‘People Should Be
Involved in Making the Decisions that Affect Their Lives.’ That
was what SDS was about. Whatever decision gets made, it should
be democratic.”
Collectivism was unquestionably an implied outcome of the sort
of grassroots democracy favored by many of the young activists.
But early SDS activism was not the bureaucratic, top-down model
of the Old Left. In fact, this New Left was deeply contemptuous
of party lines and what their manifesto of principles—the Port
Huron Statement—called “politics without publics”:
The American political system is not the democratic model
of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democ-
racy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy dis-
cussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of mili-
tary and business interests.
In promoting this civic philosophy of volunteerism, the New
Left was expanding on Jeffersonian concepts and cultural ideals
in line with the thinking of conservatives like Russell Kirk and
commonly associated with the Populism that had littered the same
Midwestern landscape 60 years earlier.
Like their Midwestern Populist forefathers, SDS was deeply
suspicious of the Eastern power centers and financial institutions
that controlled the domestic and foreign policies of the Republic.
Though they occasionally overreached and made rash decisions,
both Populists and the New Left sought to remove power from
Washington and place it back into the hands of local agents who
best understood the needs of their communities.
Self-declared enemies of “corporate liberalism,” the students at
Port Huron had almost nothing in common with the Progressive
movement that had taken over much of American Left in the early
20th century. Whereas the Progressives of then and now sought
the extension of national power and the aggrandizement of bu-
reaucracy for the “public good,” early SDSers sought to “disman-
tle the institutions” of social control and beat back the dangerous
tide of military statism. The later splintering of the movement
into various Maoist sects notwithstanding, the early days of the
New Left were spent bitterly opposing such orthodoxies and cri-
tiquing the notion that such grandiose concepts could ever deliver
on their promises.
The oppositional sentiment expressed by the early SDS was
foreshadowed in 1956 when the ideological godfather of the New
Left, C. Wright Mills released his magnum opus The Power Elite.
Like the Port Huron Statement, The Power Elite is an inherently
anti-Progressive text that takes a decidedly critical view of the
corporatist state. According to the motorcycle-riding, hyper-indi-
vidualist Mills:
As the means of information and of power are centralized,
13
Young American Revolution
some men come to occupy positions in American society
from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by
their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordi-
nary men and women. They are not made by their job; they
set up and break down jobs for thousands of others; they
are not confined by simple family responsibilities; they can
escape. They may live in many hotels and houses, but they are
bound by no one community. They need not merely meet the
demands of the day and hour; in some part, they create these
demands, and cause others to meet them. Whether or not
they profess their power, their technical and political experi-
ence of it far transcends that of the underlying population.
Though such criticisms were uncharacteristic on the liberal-left
at the time, many conservatives of the era offered similar critiques
of power. To cite just one example, James Burnham’s The Manage-
rial Revolution propounded a theory that closely paralleled Mills’s.
Unfortunately for conservatives of that time, Burnham’s fierce
anti-Communism led him to embrace the welfare-warfare state.
Mills and the New Left did not fall victim to such follies.
In exposing the nexus between big business and big govern-
ment, Mills’s book became a bible of sorts for baby boomers
raised on the decommissioned scraps of World War II-era military
Keynesianism. The children of the military-industrial complex
had come home to roost, as all over the United States opposition
to empire both home and abroad emerged as a dominant feature
of youth culture.
The Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” exploded in the fall of
1964 after the University of California fiercely enforced a rule
barring political activities that weren’t directly subordinate to the
two major political parties. Led by Mario Savio, an amalgamation
of libertarians, liberals, conservatives, and all points in-between
participated in several protests and sit-ins that resulted in ma-
jor concessions by the university. In a series of speeches—one
of which was made on the roof of a police car holding another
member of the FSM—Savio summed up the nature of the beast
in a style rarely seen before or since: “There’s a time when the
operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick
at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part!
And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the
wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got
to make it stop!”
The machine being discussed here wasn’t capitalism, it was the
superstructure of the modern university and the cult of bigness
that propped it up. Such decentralist rhetoric would resound again
nearly 50 years later in the presidential campaign of a certain OB/
GYN from the Gulf Coast of Texas.
The New Left also intersected with the various organizations
and causes that made up the burgeoning Black Power movement.
Though ethnic identity movements are often seen as antithetical
to libertarian ideas, this myopic view only serves those who wish
to stymie real challenges to entrenched power. In the early days of
the radical civil rights movement, one could find a communitarian
spirit sorely lacking in most of the establishment politics of the
era, liberal or otherwise.
Consider the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Though the group’s Marxist platitudes and support of Mao would
be deeply at odds with libertarians from any period, that troubling
rhetoric did not necessarily match the reality. Led by the fiercely
independent Fred Hampton, the Chicago BPP disavowed the cul-
tural nationalist tendencies of other branches of the party and fo-
cused explicitly on promoting street autonomy. Though Hampton
was not known to shy from confrontation, he publicly disavowed
the senseless violence of the Weatherman faction when that SDS
offshoot was still in its infancy. Just at the moment when other
chapters of the Panthers were decaying into cesspools of violence
and addiction, the Chicago outfit began to implement private wel-
fare systems and education programs which, not surprisingly, led
to direct conflict with state authorities.
When Hampton was murdered by the largest criminal gang in
the city on Dec. 4th, 1969 there was no punishment for his killers.
There never is when the killers are state-sanc-
tioned agents. After Hampton’s political assas-
sination, the chairmanship of the state party
was taken over by Bobby Rush, the last man to
defeat Barack Obama in an electoral encounter.
At least the BPP produced someone who could
beat Obama. What has the GOP given us?
Though contemporary accounts tend to sepa-
rate the predominantly white New Left from the
Black Power movement, the spirit of anti-au-
thoritarianism was a shared and primary trait of
both. Though the bombastic attitudes and Mao-
ist mania of the Black Panthers eventually led
to that group coming to define the very worst
aspects of the time, the early Panthers embod-
ied the self-determinist localism envisioned by
many early American conservative icons. The
ten-point program of the party included many
overtly socialist proposals, to be sure, but its
framework and implementation were a separate Carl Oglesby’s
Left
matter.
To put the Panthers and early New Left in
perspective, how many modern-day proponents of the Second
Amendment would actually form citizen militias to patrol the
communities they reside in? How many would call for full and
direct control over their children’s education? For that matter, how
many would seriously question the role of federal power at all?
In organizing at the community level, the radical movements of
the ’60s touched on a principle often fetishized by conservatives
but rarely practiced. “Home rule” as a cause worth actualizing,
rather than something slick politicians merely pay lip service to, is
a principle that liberty-minded youth ought to take to heart. It is
this sort of activity alone that can subvert the centralized political
structure, something that will become increasingly necessary if
our economic freefall continues.
At its heart, the best of the New Left went beyond mere criti-
cism of institutions and cut right to the root problem—power
itself. In fact, it was a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater,
SDS convert Karl Hess, who provided the simplest explanation
of the problem. “Will men continue to submit to rule by politics,
which has always meant the power of some men over other men,”
June 2009
he asked, “or are we ready to go it alone socially, in communi-
ties of voluntarism, in a world more economic and cultural than
political”?
For conservative opponents of mass democracy, it is notewor-
thy that the “participatory democracy” of SDS was not mob rule
at all, but an attempt to put the words of men like Hess into ac-
tion. By disengaging from national politics and building a ground-
up movement, the New Left was seeking a thorough devolution
of America’s overgrown bureaucracies. The fear of “King Num-
bers” so eloquently guarded against by James Madison and friends
had no stronger (or stranger) practical adherents than the kids of
SDS.
When the Weatherman malcontents took to the streets, played
revolutionary, and destroyed private property, they didn’t win any
recruits. Nor did the phony class-antagonism of the egghead (and
Maoist) Progressive Labor Party faction of SDS.
By the end of 1968, the squabbling between
these groups and others led to the total destruc-
tion of the movement and the descent of many
of its adherents into total madness. Given the
radical ideas and real threats to power expressed
in the movement’s early days, it should surprise
no one that government repression played a role
in this. Still, the ultimate responsibility lies with
those who corrupted an important and thor-
oughly American cause and replaced it with yet
another cause celebre.
Despite the popular right-wing caricature of
the movement today—or the foolish canoniza-
tion of the post-’68 hippie free-for-all by many
leftists—there are many worthwhile lessons to
be drawn from the New Left. One could begin
by asking a few questions relevant for our cur-
rent predicament. Must the term “community
tale of the New organizer” be seen as a synonym for “commu-
nist”? Is it really beneficial to embrace bigness
and international grandiosity at the expense of
place and local custom? Do movements always have to be judged
by their worst moments and most foolish figures?
One can rightly criticize the welfare statism of much of the
New Left or the later excesses of its adherents without abandon-
ing the notion that promoting civic values at the local level is an
approach worth adopting, cherishing, and promoting. At the very
least, surrendering the term “community” to the denizens of the
Daily Kos hardly seems like a winning political tactic—or one
with any relationship to the American political tradition conserva-
tives so frequently tout.
If one were looking to take the best aspects of the New Left
and the best aspects of the Old Right and create a fresh political
alternative out of them, one would find oneself smack dab in the
middle of the Ron Paul Revolution of 2008. And this is the best
hope we have.
Dylan Hales [dylanwaco@gmail.com] is a freelance writer from Charleston,
South Carolina. His blog, The Left Conservative, can be found at www.
leftconservativeblog.blogspot.com.
14
 15
Young American Revolution
 History Lesson
What Young Americans for Liberty can learn from Young Americans for Freedom

Gregory L. Schneider

O ne of the most interesting

developments of last year’s
presidential contest was the
groups was the Intercollegiate
Society of Individualists (ISI),
which dispensed free books to
mobilization of young people students and supported the for-
on behalf of two candidates, mation of conservative clubs
Barack Obama, who easily won on campuses. Through the late
the election, and Texas con- 1950s several of these clubs
gressman Ron Paul, a longshot helped set the stage for the
to win the GOP nomination. Right’s movement into politics.
An antiwar, pro-constitutional, A particularly galvanizing issue
laissez-faire physician who has was an effort to remove a loy-
served 10 terms in Congress alty oath from the post-Sput-
and was the presidential nomi- nik National Defense Educa-
nee of the Libertarian Party in tion Act. An odd organization
1988, Paul drew more interest with the benefit of hindsight,
on campus than any candidate formed by two individuals who
save for Obama. While much of had interned at National Review
Paul’s support could be traced Students against the state—now and then and Human Events, the Student
to his opposition to the wars in Committee for the Loyalty Oath
Iraq and Afghanistan, his appeal mobilized conservative students
with young people extended far beyond foreign policy. Paul is rep- on 44 campuses in the fall of 1958 to preserve the loyalty oath in
resentative of a growing interest on the Right in returning to first the law. The argument of the two founding members, Douglas
principles after years of Republican acquiescence to the goals of Caddy and David Franke, was principled—if students received
liberal Washington. federal money for education in defense-related coursework in sci-
One would have to go back almost 50 years to find a similar ence, shouldn’t they be loyal to the Constitution? Their argument
student-led revolt on the Right. Ronald Reagan produced loyalty convinced enough politicians to defend the act that the loyalty
among young Americans which translated into political support oath was spared.
at the polls, as well as for his agenda of building up America’s After that victory, conservative students continued to look for
military against the Soviets and revitalizing the economy. Yet his ways they could make a difference in politics. They found one
administration never produced the intensity of campus interest in the growing influence of Barry Goldwater in the Republican
engendered by the Paul campaign or by the campaign of Arizona Party. In March 1960, Clarence Manion—radio host and former
Sen. Barry Morris Goldwater for the Republican vice presidential dean of the Notre Dame Law School—arranged for the publica-
nomination in 1960. tion of Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative, which de-
Back then, one of the strangest developments in American buted to wide acclaim. Young people devoured the book hungrily
politics was the awakening of American youth to principles of and contributed to the cause by organizing Youth for Goldwater
conservatism. Two important individuals in this awakening were for Vice President clubs. The drive received support from National
Goldwater himself and William F. Buckley Jr., who founded Na- Review, and the push was on to get Goldwater nominated for VP
tional Review in 1955 and whose writing and celebrity served as a at the August GOP convention in Chicago. But it was not to be.
beacon drawing young people towards the conservative principles Richard Nixon had already met with New York Governor Nelson
espoused in the early years of his journal. Buckley launched the Rockefeller and had made a deal that liberal Republican Henry
magazine out of a desire to combat the regnant New Deal liber- Cabot Lodge would be his running mate. Conservatives booed
alism of American politics—to “stand athwart history shouting when the name was announced, leading Goldwater, in his speech
stop!”, as he famously wrote in the journal’s opening issue, Buck- to the convention to say, “let’s grow up, conservatives.” He urged
ley was a huge attraction on college campuses which (sadly) lacked his supporters to take back the GOP. Young conservatives did
as much diversity of ideas then as they still do today. just that.
Conservatives had organized youth groups to address the Over the weekend of September 9-11, 1960, at the Buckley
paucity of non-liberal ideas on campus. Foremost among these estate in Sharon, Connecticut, a group of around 90 young con-
16
June 2009
servatives from around the country gathered to found a new na-
tional organization named Young Americans for Freedom. The
students and several older conservatives present, dubbed OAFs
(Old Americans for Freedom) by direct-mail impresario Marvin
Liebman, approved a charter called the Sharon Statement, which
was written by Indianapolis News editor M. Stanton Evans en route
to the conference and which stipulated the fusionist vision of the
conservatives of the 1950s—traditional references to God bal-
anced by a commitment to free-market economics and support
for the Cold War against international communism. They also
elected a national board and appointed Robert Schuchman as na-
tional director and Douglas Caddy as executive director.
What is impressive about Young Americans for Liberty is how
much it has followed this now half-century old script. YAL has a
national committee, a statement of principles, and is publishing a
national magazine (much as YAF published a periodical called The
New Guard). The goals of the organiza-
tion are clear and well articulated and by
every measure YAL should prosper both
organizationally and philosophically as
it moves to combat statists of the Left,
Right, and Center and defend individual
liberty in American society.
Yet as with any student organization,
it is imperative that the members stay
away from factional politics and avoid
the conflagration of competing interests
and cliques that eventually made YAF a
relatively ineffective organization.
Here too, history may be on YAL’s YAL Executive Director Jeff Frazee. Photo by Matt
side. In the early 1960s some competi- Holdridge.
tion existed between YAF, which explic-
itly defined itself as a conservative youth organization, and groups
like the Young Republicans, which were party organizations for
young people. And there were other tensions plaguing YAF. In my
history of the organization, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans Party.
for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (1999), I document
the disputes that erupted between the national board and officers
and the chapters and state boards that were much more activist
and intent on fulfilling the goals of the Sharon Statement. Any
student organization should avoid what befell YAF early on, the
lure of a national board ensconced in comfortable offices and
spending lavishly on privileges it did not need to be effective.
Eventually, fundraiser Richard Viguerie was brought in to help
stabilize the YAF national office, and he helped the organization
dramatically, employing techniques such as direct-mail solicitation, state.
which he had learned from YAF advisor Marvin Liebman.
Other factional fights in the early days concerned ideology and
political power. Some feared that the John Birch Society was at-
tempting to gain control of YAF through a board member named
Scott Stanley. Other leading YAF members even had a dalliance
with the forces of Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal New York gov-
ernor who was eager to use YAF for his own ends—an improb-
able match that garnered laughter and derision from former YAF
members when they discussed it some 30 years later. Fears of
Birch or Rockefeller takeover did not hobble the organization,
however, and for its first four years, working on behalf of the
17
Young American Revolution
Goldwater campaign, YAF continued to function vitally, recruit-
ing members, building its movement, and serving as shock troops
for the conservative cause.
But as the Vietnam War escalated and the New Left focused
on antiwar organizing on campus, YAF began to split. Most YAF
members were anticommunist and were initially exposed to the
conservative movement through Buckley, National Review, ISI, or
Goldwater. So it was no surprise that the majority of YAF mem-
bers remained committed to the Vietnam War. But a growing
number of libertarian students, who often came to their philoso-
phy through the writings of Ayn Rand, began to express doubts.
Some even began to look into alliances with the New Left over
the war. They urged an end to the draft, which in fact the great
majority of YAF members, as well as YAF advisors like Milton
Friedman and Russell Kirk, also supported.
The dispute between libertarian and conservative students
erupted into a purge, however, at the
1969 YAF convention in St. Louis. Lib-
ertarians protested YAF’s position on
the war, and one member incinerated
a replica draft card on the convention
floor. Conservative students heckled the
libertarians, calling them “laissez-fair-
ies,” and there was talk of fisticuffs in
the hotel hallways. Libertarian students
gathered at the St. Louis Arch to pro-
test the “fascist” tactics of YAF, with
speeches by former Goldwater speech-
writer Karl Hess to rally the assembled
crowd. In the end, many of the radical
libertarians split from YAF, forming Stu-
dents for Individual Liberty (SIL). While
short-lived, SIL became the basis for the creation or revival of
a variety of libertarian organizations and institutions outside of
the conservative movement, including Reason and the Libertarian
YAF’s internal tumult, at least over ideological differences,
subsided by the early 1970s, though it remained an organization
plagued by factional differences and disputes over power. By the
1980s, at the highpoint of conservative institutional power, YAF
was a shadow of its former self, suffering from charges and coun-
tercharges of ethical and legal misconduct between national board
members. YAF still exists, but it is hardly the organization it was
in the late 1960s, when it claimed as many as 80,000 members in
hundreds of chapters and had active groups in just about every
YAL has a chance to avoid the perils that brought YAF down.
First, there will not be competing outside factions seeking to draw
YAL into their orbit, as was the case for YAF in early 1960s. In
those days, because YAF tried to represent almost the full spec-
trum of young activists on the Right, every external center of
power sought to co-opt it and thereby win control over the next
generation of conservative leaders. Second, YAL may not so soon
face the temptations of power and politics that YAF did. YAF
board members eventually bought their own national headquar-
ters in Virginia. While it turned out to be a decent financial invest-
ment, it never was a good use of resources for a student activist
organization. Third, the Internet and better communications may
keep factionalism to a minimum in a group like YAL, facilitat-
ing understanding between the leadership and base of the group.
Fourth, the organization is more focused on liberty and the beliefs
of Ron Paul. YAF, like conservatism in general during the 1960s,
was discordant, and its many mansions eventually split up once
the communist threat diminished.
But YAL faces unique dangers, too. Libertarians, as Brian
Doherty documents in his splendid history Radicals for Capital-
ism, tend to be very sectarian. YAL would do well to avoid the
chronic sectarianism that beset just about every libertarian group
in the 20th century. Anarchists and Objectivists and others should
work together to create an effective organization, to build on the
principles embodied in YAL’s mission statement. They should be
ecumenical, and members should never allow one faction to dom-
inate ideologically, or the effectiveness of YAL’s mission will be
diminished accordingly. That is what happened to YAF. Absolute
power and absolute ideology tend to destroy, if organizations suc-
cumb to them, absolutely. Avoid those pitfalls, learn from history,
and YAL should have a bright future. I wish you well.

Gregory L. Schneider is Associate Professor of History at Emporia State

University and the author, most recently, of The Conservative Century:
From Reaction to Revolution (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) as well
as Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and
the Rise of the Contemporary Right (NYU Press, 1999).

Enemy of the State

Emory’s Donald Livingston champions the cause Leviathan fears most—secession.
Kelse Moen

D rive a few minutes beyond the shadows of central Atlanta’s

skyscrapers, past the prostitutes and panhandlers along Ponce,
and you will reach Emory University, the land of manicured lawns
and marble buildings. And tucked away off the campus quad, you
will find Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy, lost in con-
templation in his office, as he frequently has been since 1984.
A genteel South Carolinian with tweed coat and full white
beard, his office in perpetual disarray and stacked with books by
dead white men, Livingston is both the quintessential Southerner
and the quintessential philosophy professor—but with a twist. He
is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow but also an
associate at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a Ron Paul supporter
who has spent much of his career addressing what he calls the
“moral, legal, and philosophical meaning of secession.” Read: de-
fending the right to secede and condemning that Great Central-
izer, Abraham Lincoln. Livingston founded in 1998 and still helps
run the Abbeville Institute—named after fellow South Carolinian
John C. Calhoun’s hometown—in order to promote the study of
Southern culture and values. The institute’s purpose is not to play
cheerleader in some regionalist competition or (if I may assuage
the fears of the miseducated) to promote racism or slavery. The
values that it advances are “private property, place, piety, humility,
manners, classical liberal studies, rhetoric, and the importance of a
human scale to political order.” In short, conservative values.
The conservative or libertarian college professor is a rare breed.
But here at Emory, Livingston is an even greater anomaly. He’s
a voice of conservatism on a campus where, to the extent that
people care about politics at all, they are progressive by default;
here, at bottom, the highest value is oneself. Livingston will spend
hours talking to students about Calvinist philosopher and theolo-
gian Johannes Althusius on a campus where people are always on
the go. Emory is no place to cultivate what Russell Kirk called “the
permanent things”: we are nothing if not impermanent. We are a
collection of individuals on our way to somewhere else, whether
to business school or medical school or law school, and Emory
is just an impressive notch on our belts, a credential for future
admissions departments. In this sense, Emory melds perfectly
with the city of Atlanta itself, the city which was razed by General
Sherman’s marauding army, only to be replaced by a skyline of
shiny new buildings, populated by ambitious business profession-
als by day, yet empty by night. At Emory, the Yankee invasion
never stopped. We’re awash in would-be fashionistas from Long

18
June 2009
Island, fratboys from Massachusetts, and legions of amoral, high-
intensity business schoolers. The result is that we have no shared
culture of our own.
Toss into this mix me: a studious philosophy major from Bos-
ton. In the fall of my junior year, I happened to sign up for a class want to reform government, we have to start dividing it. This is
called Philosophy of Law taught by one Dr. Donald Livingston. I
was a Northerner whose primary libertarian influence at the time
was Ayn Rand, and Livingston’s class blew my mind.
Livingston believes that the divided society is the best society. even if we get rid of the Federal Reserve,” Livingston remarks,
“The more masters we have, the freer we are,” he says. “And that
is the most we can hope for.” Originally, that is what the whole
American Constitution was about. We would have a central gov-
ernment in Washington to ensure free trade
among the states and provide for the com-
mon defense, but all other powers were left
to the states, and within the states power
was divided between the cities, towns, and,
in most, the church. The benefits here came
from the fact that the masters would be in
perpetual squabbles with each other and no
single master would gain enough power to
oppress the rest of us.
But that ended with the Civil War, which
Livingston calls “the real American revolu-
tion.” Unlike the 1776 revolution—a con-
servative revolt that kept our traditions and
system of government intact and sought
only to throw off a power that betrayed
them—the Civil War effected a fundamental
change in American thinking. It shifted pow-
er decisively and forever out of the hands of
the several states and into Washington. And
while some of President Lincoln’s more dra-
conian wartime measures—issuance of fiat
money and suspension of habeas corpus Livington’s Philosophical Melancholy and
Delirium
for instance—ended when the war did, the
system was by then in place to bring them
back whenever our betters in Washington so desired. Later, of
course, they would so desire, and there was little any of us could
do about it.
This is why secession is so important. Nothing sends a message
to power so well as literally leaving—and taking your land with
you. Thus for all those who genuflect before the altar of state
power, secession must be crushed. And it has been crushed, as
Livingston readily admits. Now, whenever we consider division,
we panic, he says. But this wasn’t always the way. The Declaration
of Independence is a declaration of secession from Britain. In
the 1850s, the city of New York considered leaving the Union to
become a free-trade city, and New England threatened secession
in 1804, 1808, and 1812. Maine, Kentucky, and Tennessee were
created by seceding from other states. When Jefferson bought
the Louisiana Purchase, he never expected the Union to extend
from “sea to shining sea.” He assumed that new states would form
but then secede from the larger whole, creating their own unions
with distinct governments but that would be bound together by a
shared culture in an “empire of liberty.”
19
Young American Revolution
A government of a few hundred elected officials presiding over
a country of 300 million is simply dysfunctional, Livingston says.
It can no more function as a republican government than a five-
story tall man can function as a healthy human being. Thus, if we
where Livingston differs from most mainstream libertarians. They
don’t think about the politics of size and proportion—only about
ending the war in Iraq or the Fed or the PATRIOT Act. “But
“the ruling class will still find a way to get what it wants.” They
have the power “to push one button and make 300 million people
jump,” and that power cannot be diminished just by doing away
with its emanations. Only by physically di-
viding power via secession or federalism can
we regain control of ourselves.
But there’s another reason to support
division, Livingston says. Liberty requires
a virtuous people, and the seeds of moral
virtue are in the family and the commu-
nity. They are the institutions that raise us,
and the character we develop in youth is
the character that will guide our conduct
throughout our lives. The virtues that we
learn from family and community are vir-
tues of affection, self-worth, and personal
rectitude. They instill in us virtues that make
the State and all its enticements unnecessary.
Who needs a welfare check when you were
raised to work hard and know that, should
financial catastrophe hit, you have caring
neighbors to fall back on? Livingston’s lib-
ertarianism is the libertarianism of Burke,
Hume, and Tocqueville—the libertarianism
that actually begets liberty. It comes from
people who see themselves as participants in
a moral universe, people who can clearly see
right from wrong, who know that stealing
and murder are wrong whether they are committed by street-cor-
ner thugs or agents from the IRS or CIA.
That is the type of virtue in which we can only be raised. But
the State can better profit from weak and isolated people with no
strong moral values. Libertine “libertarians,” who just want the
freedom to have an abortion, practice witchcraft, or take LSD, are
in fact the perfect subjects for an oppressive State. Seeing them-
selves merely as individuals with desires to be satisfied rather than
as moral actors, and incapable of seeing the value of the tradition
in which they live, they fall into the pit of moral relativism and
self-indulgence. And no one is so easily dominated as he who be-
lieves there are no values worth defending.
There will still be those who claim that the central government
has been a force for good; that without it we never would have
abolished slavery, or ended segregation, or achieved equal rights
for homosexuals. Even many conservatives and libertarians have
come to think of government as, if not a source for good, at least
the arena in which our liberties are to be won. The yelps of joy
from Beltway libertarians when the Supreme Court tossed gun
owners a few crumbs in last summer’s Heller decision are testa-
ment to this, as are the hordes of enthusiastic young conservatives
who descend on the Imperial Capital for CPAC every year with
grandiose plans to purge our Arlen Specters and Olympia Snowes
and bring real, conservative values back to Washington.
But as Dr. Livingston taught me, the very idea of legislating
conservatism from above is fundamentally unconservative. The
conservative order has to come from below, from our distinctive,
organic communities. And although the central government has
been able to squelch some of society’s uglier sides, are we really
better off ? Lincoln abolished plantation slavery, but he replaced
it with the slavery of the income tax and the military draft. What-
ever “gains” we make by appeal to Washington have the ultimate
effect of increasing central power and turning the rest of us into
beggars, palms out, asking, “Excuse me, sir, could you spare some
rights?”
Donald Livingston may be living at the wrong time. We are at
the zenith of centralized power, which doesn’t seem to be decen-
tralizing anytime soon. But then again, while the imperial worker
bees buzz around the capital planning wars and bailouts under the
immortal marble gaze of the Great Centralizer, forever enthroned
before the National Mall, there are those of us, far away in a prov-
ince he once conquered, who want to know what liberty really
means. There’s never been a better time to learn the answer. And
Livingston, the genteel old philosophy professor, can teach us.

Kelse Moen is a senior at Emory University. His column appears regularly

in the Emory Wheel.

The Revolution Comes to CPAC

Amid the has-beens of movement conservatism, Ron Paul stages an insurgency.
Patrick J. Ford

K nown across the right-wing

spectrum as the most important
weekend for conservative activism, the
Conservative Political Action Confer-
ence (CPAC) was held in Washington,
DC for the 36th time this past Febru-
ary, and with it came the Right’s leg-
islative and philosophical baggage. In
its previous two years, the three-day-
long CPAC felt like a pep rally for the
GOP and its demagogues. “Bush is my
homeboy” T-shirts were big sellers at
CPAC ’07 and ’08 while small govern-
ment Republicans like Ron Paul and
Mark Sanford were ignored in favor Dr. Paul educates CPAC. Photo by Matt Holdridge.
of Dick Cheney and John McCain.
President George W. Bush was the “highlight” of CPAC 2008. Yet
Cheney, McCain, and Bush were nowhere to be found this year.
For those of us who attended in the past, CPAC 2009 felt akin to sands of war casualties in its wake. To borrow from a tired and
arriving on the other side of Alice’s rabbit hole.
By now the plight of modern conservatism is well known but
still bears repeating: two major election
defeats, the end of a horrid Republi-
can presidency, a colossal forfeiture
of principle on the size and scope of
government, and dogmatic ties to an
unsuccessful and unpopular war are
merely symptoms of the intellectual
rot plaguing the GOP and its establish-
ment mouthpieces like National Review
and The Weekly Standard. Conservatism
limped into CPAC this year in search
of its base and itself, a wandering Mc-
Candless, equal parts earnest and ar-
rogant, self-conscious and confident.
Rather than aiming into Jon Krakauer’s
“wild,” it searched for a way out of the
wilderness and into the mainstream it had already entered and
exited, having left nothing but bloated bureaucracy and thou-
Orwellian slogan of the Left, was CPAC representing change, or
more of the same?

20
June 2009
 Inside the Omni Shoreham Hotel, registration tables were lo-
cated outside the main exhibit hall, where numerous right-wing
groups set up shop and were assigned spaces. From PalinPAC to
the National Rifle Association to Young Americans for Liberty,
it is hard to argue that intellectual diversity was not present at
the Omni Shoreham. But CPAC had humored the libertarian and
traditionalist Right at previous conferences, too. The Libertarian
Party has had a presence at CPAC for years, as has the Ameri-
can Civil Liberties Union. Ron Paul was given a speaker’s slot in
2008 only to be upstaged by an establishment candidate (Romney)
conceding the Republican nomination to another establishment
candidate (McCain). Just as the GOP trots out the abortion issue
to draw cautious pro-lifers to the polls—regardless of whether
the GOP has accomplished anything of substance on the issue—
CPAC has always given the alternative Right just enough attention
to ensure that when we go to the ballot box, noses held, we pull
the lever for the lesser evil.
Initially, CPAC 2009 felt the same. An attendee, upon enter-
ing the exhibit hall, was greeted by
a host of dubious right-wing carica-
tures: the College Republican hack
sporting slicked hair and pinstripes;
the Palin clone, beautiful in a short-
skirt and dumb as a bag of hammers;
the prep-school neocon working the
Young America’s Foundation table,
still angry as hell despite eight years
of war and no end in sight; the slick
businessman—a successful mover-
and-shaker—far too old to be there
and only stopping in before his ap-
pointment at the massage parlor. The
vitriol directed at Premier Obama
was palpable, and those who were si- The YAL and Campaign for Liberty booths at CPAC 2009. who has seen him speak before, but
Photo by Matt Holdridge.
lent during the big-government Bush
administration and its gross expansion of the State now drew eye-
rolls from those of us who spoke out at the time as they now
harped endlessly on about small government.
At least initially, the speaker list did not inspire. On Thursday, to the stage. It was a dark event to witness firsthand.
John Bolton spoke before lunch with characteristic acrimony
and took part in a book signing for his latest work, the bellicose
Surrender is not an Option. Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher was a
guest on a panel discussing new media strategies for conserva-
tives. Mike Huckabee was the first major political figure to speak
this year, and he decried the selfishness of a GOP that is far too
dedicated to capitalism, without deigning to elaborate on his non-
sensical assertions that free enterprise is to blame for the country’s tractor working for the American Conservative Union. It was not
economic mess. Dozens of Joe and Jane Sixpacks sat in an audi-
torium to watch “Sarah Palin: Unplugged on the Media,” while
Tucker Carlson, the only speaker of substance so far, was booed
during a panel addressing the Fairness Doctrine because he sug-
gested conservative media outlets should put as much effort into
getting their facts straight as liberal ones do. All of these events
and speakers, clearly pushed by the establishment Right, would
suggest that the conservative movement is as likely to find itself
reformed as any member of the Podhoretz family is likely to join
the U.S. Marine Corps.
21
Young American Revolution
But if the CPAC attendee found his way to the adjoining Young
Americans for Liberty and Campaign for Liberty tables in the
exhibition hall, he found himself in an entirely different atmo-
sphere. As typical as it may seem for an article published by YAL
to speak fondly of the organization’s presence at CPAC, it was
clear to every attendee, friendly and unfriendly alike, that the en-
ergy, enthusiasm, and creativity of the members of YAL and C4L
were unmatched throughout the conference. “You’re here loud
and proud, that’s for sure,” said a polite younger woman wearing
a Palin 2012 T-shirt.
C4L handed out literature and sold liberty-promoting merchan-
dise while YAL sported a “Pop the Fed” dart game featuring color-
coded balloons for contestants to burst, with prizes correspond-
ing to the color of the balloon. Fake fiat currency was handed out
for one color, while candy (gold) was handed out for another, with
the big prize for hitting a smaller balloon being a Ron Paul-signed
Constitution. The point came across loud and clear, and was easily
one of the most popular activities in the exhibit hall.
“I feel like I’m in occupied territo-
ry,” said a YAL volunteer at the close
of Day 1, and his sentiment seemed
shared by his colleagues. Senator Jim
DeMint spoke in the morning on
Friday, Day 2, and DeMint, though a
neocon through and through on for-
eign policy, is as eloquent a Senator
one will find on economic matters.
Senator Coburn followed, though his
presence was not as exciting, thanks
to his notable sellout on the Wall
Street bailout. One of the lows of
CPAC was Newt Gingrich’s speech.
It was familiarly pompous to anyone
the real spectacle was his entrance—
an arrogant exercise in self-adulation where he entered from the
back instead of the front (as every other speaker had) in order to
draw the drooling masses around him as he slowly made his way
But Day 2 brought shafts of light as well. In anticipation of
Ron Paul’s speech to the CPAC floor, a serpentine line wrapped
itself around the whole of the hotel. Even after the room reached
full capacity, which it did well before Paul appeared at the podium,
hundreds of people patiently waited in line for a chance to see the
man that sparked the energetic and eclectic “R3volution” of the
2008 GOP primary. “They’re waiting for Romney!” shouted a de-
true. As far back as the very end of the line, Paul supporters could
be found, including two young men in their Citadel uniforms ar-
guing with a civilian “chickenhawk” who believed soldiers should
be fighting and dying half a world away from home. “There must
be bullshit in the water,” said the neocon as he retreated from the
argument, leaving the two Citadel students shaking their heads.
At least the confrontation took place. Were it not for Ron Paul,
these small but representative conflicts over the future of the
movement would not have been in evidence. When he rose to
speak that became clear to everyone in attendance. He argued that
the Republicans, once in power, were as bad as the Democrats had
been. He argued that the Federal Reserve, not the free market, was
principally to blame for the financial crisis. He spoke of how em-
pire and policing of the world expand and empower government.
And no one booed. In fact, he was “greeted with thunder” accord-
ing to a neoconservative blogger. “It’s good to be among friends,”
said Paul, and those of us who fought through the Giuliani cackles
and Fox News jeers of the campaign couldn’t help but smile. Ron
Paul was among friends at CPAC.
Paul’s speech was to be upstaged, but only by the very move-
ment he had sparked. Campaign for Liberty held its Liberty Forum
on the night of Day 2, a standing-room-only event packed with
liberty donors and featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano, historian
Thomas E. Woods Jr., constitutional attorney Bruce Fein, director
of Gun Owners of America Larry Pratt, president of National
Right to Work Mark Mix, and the headline speaker, Dr. Paul. The
room was electric, featuring an educated crowd that booed the
Alien and Sedition Acts as well as President Lincoln’s suspension
of habeas corpus and George W. Bush’s notorious PATRIOT Act.
Thomas Woods addressed those who had awoken from the “eight
years drunk” of the Bush years “with a hangover” and welcomed
them into the movement for liberty. But if those on the Right
were going to “defend bailouts and bank nationalization, and tell
us how sadly necessary it all is, or defend Ben Bernanke and the
Federal Reserve, as if that has anything whatsoever to do with a
22
June 2009
free market,” he had a message for them: “Get out of the way!”
The crowd erupted.
Those in the room who “held liberty in their hearts,” as Judge
Napolitano said, couldn’t help but leave with a renewed sense of
optimism. The liberty movement—an eclectic set of traditional-
ists, antiwar Republicans, libertarians, and anarchists—may be rel-
atively small. But it is loud. It is educated. The liberty movement
is, in the immortal words of Howard Beale, “mad as hell and not
going to take it anymore.”
Day 3 brought Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz,
Rick Santorum, and that familiar sinking cynicism that those of us
on the alternate Right have become quite accustomed to. Back to
the usual. But it remains to be seen whether the story of liberty’s
resurgence in the conservative movement will have such a dark
ending. The “Pop the Fed” games need to turn into policy papers
and magazine articles and books and campaign speeches if the
conservative movement is to be reoriented for good. This work
is in the hands of the young radicals who manned the YAL and
C4L tables. They will determine whether great men like Ron Paul
will be “among friends” when they arrive at events like CPAC in
the years to come.
Patrick J Ford is a senior at the George Washington University, where he is
editor of The GW Patriot. He blogs at northernagrarian.wordpress.com.
 Who Owns You?
The philosophical justifications for liberty
David Gordon
I t doesn’t require much philosophical argu-
ment to see that to launch a war in Iran
would be a bad idea or that to turn our econ-
omy over to Obama and his minions has little
to recommend it. Many people have come to
realize that something is radically wrong with
our customary American politics, and liber-
tarianism, ably represented on the national
scene by Ron Paul, has aroused great interest.
According to libertarians, the role of govern-
ment should be reduced to a minimum, if not
eliminated altogether; economic affairs, in par-
ticular, are impeded rather than helped by the
heavy hand of the state. Given its sharp break
with conventional political views, the question
inevitably arises: does this way of looking at
politics rest on a sound philosophical basis?
To some people, this query rests on a mis-
apprehension. One cannot properly inquire
whether libertarianism, or any other political
system, is true or false. Questions of fact have Murray N. Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian
an objectively true answer: we can estimate,
e.g., how likely it is that Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon; and,
if it does, whether the device is likely to be used against us. We
cannot, though, factually say whether it is good or bad that Iran
acquire this type of weapon. We may not want it to do so, but
this merely is a preference. It makes no more sense to claim that
it is objectively better that Iran not obtain an atomic bomb than
to insist that vanilla ice cream is objectively better than chocolate. Hobbes, he thought that Locke had developed classical and me-
To think otherwise is to commit the supreme sin of inferring a
value from a fact. David Hume long ago exposed this fallacious
pseudo-inference.
But is it really a fallacy? Murray Rothbard, the foremost 20th-
century libertarian and a major intellectual influence on Ron Paul,
did not think so. In his Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, following Leo
Strauss, argues that Hume made a mistake. (As we will see later,
Rothbard and Strauss diverged sharply on other matters.) Sup-
pose that you are waiting in line for a movie and, just as you are
about to reach the cashier, someone jumps ahead of you. Surely
it is right to say that he has behaved rudely. There are objective
criteria for rudeness, and our miscreant’s act qualifies. Thus it is
a “fact” that he is rude; but is it not also true that using the term
“rude” carries with it a negative value judgment? The gap has dis-
solved.
For another example, let us return to Iran and nuclear weapons.
Suppose that atomic war between America and Iran resulted in the
deaths of millions of people. Is it really reasonable to say that it
23
Young American Revolution
is a mere matter of opinion that this outcome
would be a bad thing? Supporters of the fact-
value gap have counterarguments, and I won’t
go further into the debate now. But at the very
least it isn’t obvious that the gap exists.
If Rothbard is right about this, how do we
go on to arrive at libertarianism? Rothbard,
taking his cue from Aristotle and St. Thomas
Aquinas, maintained that a system of pre-
cepts—natural law—could be derived from
the needs of human nature. But he had to
confront an obvious objection. Aristotle and
St. Thomas, though philosophers of the high-
est distinction, were hardly libertarians. How
did Rothbard then propose to get libertarian
conclusions from their framework for natural
law?
Rothbard’s response to this question posed
a fundamental challenge to an influential the-
sis defended by Leo Strauss. In Natural Right
and History, Strauss contrasted classical natural
right to its modern successor. Classical natu-
ral right stressed virtue and was oriented toward the polis, i.e., the
relatively small city-state. Strauss held that modern natural right, as
found in Hobbes and Locke, broke with virtue and put in its place
the individual pursuit of power and wealth. It was not concerned
with the good of man as the Greeks understood that notion.
Rothbard emphatically disagreed. Though he had little use for
dieval natural law in a new and fruitful direction. Locke took self-
ownership to be the key principle of political philosophy: each
person had the right to dispose of his own body and labor as he
wished. (One complication: Locke thought that at the most basic
level, God owns everyone. It is only as regards other human be-
ings that each person owns himself. You do not have to answer
to others how you understand God’s commands, but you do not
have the right to kill yourself.) Further, individuals could acquire
land by laboring on it: once someone did so, he had the right to
exclude others from using his property. Property acquisition, on
this view, does not depend on the state for its validity: property
rights exist in the state of nature.
In placing so great an importance on individuals and their rights,
Locke did not, pace Strauss, break free from classical natural law.
He too addressed himself to the needs of human nature.
On this foundation of self-ownership, libertarianism quickly
follows. Once given individuals and the rights to property they
have acquired, no room remains for any other sort of rights. In
particular, there are no welfare rights. To claim that the poor or
disabled had a right to help would be to aver that their infirmi-
ties made them the masters of the labor and property of their
more fortunate fellow citizens. Rothbard certainly did not deny
our moral duty to be charitable. (In this respect, he differed from
the egoist ethics of Ayn Rand.) Rather, what concerned him was
the proper use of force, in his view the defining topic of political
philosophy. The duty to be charitable was one of many moral ob-
ligations that one cannot use force to compel people to fulfill.
What happens, though, if you think that Hume was right? Sup-
pose that there is a gap between facts and values and, accordingly,
natural law in Rothbard’s style must go by the board. Are there still
good philosophical arguments for libertarianism?
To answer this, it is imperative to grasp a key point that people
often miss. Even if you cannot derive values from facts, it does
not follow that ethics reduces to arbitrary preferences. There can
be ground level, objective moral truths. In other words, some
moral truths do not have to be derived from facts about the world.
Just by thinking about these moral claims, we can grasp that they
are true. (This position in philosopher’s trade talk is called “intu-
itionism.”)
Aside from his main natural law arguments, Rothbard in Eth-
ics of Liberty also deploys intuitionist considerations. Isn’t it obvi-
ously true that slavery is morally wrong? As Lincoln, not a favorite
among libertarians, rightly said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing
is wrong.” Rothbard argued ingeniously that if you reject slavery,
and think through the implications of your rejection, you will see
that you must embrace libertarian self-ownership. If it is wrong
for some people to own others, what but self-ownership is left?
Alleged third alternatives, such as contemporary democracies that
fail to recognize full self-ownership, reduce to variants of slav-
ery. In an unlimited majority-rule democracy, the majority “owns”
each person, taken as a separate individual. If you are drafted into
the army by virtue of democratically sanctioned legislation, you
are just as much a slave as if someone had bought you in a slave
market.
Yet another type of moral theory can be used to support lib-
ertarianism. We have so far considered attempts to derive moral
truths from facts about human nature and claims that moral prop-
ositions can directly be seen to be true. Some philosophers try to
justify morality in a different way. Are there truths of morality that
reason requires us to recognize? Kant and his successors answered
with a resounding yes. Just as someone who affirms both sides of
a contradiction has violated a requirement of theoretical reason,
so someone who refuses to accept the “categorical imperative”
has transgressed a demand of practical reason.
The details of Kant’s argument need not detain us. I mention
him only to provide the necessary background to understand the
argument advanced by one of Rothbard’s most important follow-
ers, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In his Economics and Ethics of Private
Property and other works, Hoppe offers a strikingly original argu-
ment in defense of libertarian conclusions. (He arrived at this ar-
gument by modifying work of his teacher Jürgen Habermas and
of Karl-Otto Apel, both philosophers with very different political
views from Hoppe’s.)
Hoppe defends self-ownership by asking us to consider what
happens if someone denies it. He says that anyone foolish enough
24
June 2009
to do so is caught in a “performative contradiction.” One could
not make the statement, “I do not own myself ” unless the state-
ment were false. Just as one cannot say, “I am now dead” unless
one is not now dead, so one cannot deny self-ownership without
being a self-owner. In order to make any statement, Hoppe claims,
one must own one’s own body. His argument has generated much
interest and controversy among libertarians, and whether he is
right, you will have to judge for yourself. His argument stands
squarely within the Kantian tradition: a principle of morality is
held to be a requirement of reason. He derives other tenets of
libertarianism using the same strategy, as readers of his books will
see.
I have tried to show that several different approaches to moral-
ity can be used to support libertarian conclusions. One cannot
ignore the fact, though, that most contemporary political philoso-
phers reject libertarianism. Why do they do so? The most common
reason for skepticism about libertarianism is an argument found
in the most influential book of the 20th century about political
philosophy. In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls assailed what
he termed the “natural system of liberty.” In a libertarian society,
what you earn depends on the money that people are freely willing
to give you for your services. People with greater natural abilities,
who are talented in ways that people value, will fare much better
than people less well endowed with these gifts. Rawls contends
that this disparity is “arbitrary from the moral point of view.” Ti-
ger Woods earns millions of dollars because of his superlative
golfing skills. He did not acquire these skills through moral merit:
he just happened to be born with extraordinary athletic aptitude.
Rawls thinks that Woods does not deserve to make more than
his less talented competitors. Inequalities, according to Rawls’s fa-
mous “difference principle,” are allowable only to the extent they
benefit the worst off. If Woods is allowed an exceptional income,
e.g., he will work more than he otherwise would. Doing so will
make available more funds for redistributive taxation.
Rawls’s Harvard University colleague Robert Nozick gave the
best answer to Rawls in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). As he
points out, Rawls treats individuals’ abilities as if they belonged to
society collectively. Since, in Rawls’s opinion, you do not deserve
to profit from your natural abilities, the value of these abilities
belongs to “society”—in effect, to the state. Such collectivism ill
comports with the liberty that Rawls elsewhere in his book pro-
fesses to defend.
But Nozick strikes at Rawls with another, though related, fatal
thrust. If one strips individuals of their talents and abilities, hold-
ing them to be morally arbitrary, what is left? Nothing but a bare
self without attributes: any individual property will be deemed the
product of arbitrary influence from heredity or the environment.
The proper subject of political philosophy, Nozick holds, is peo-
ple as we really find them, not selves run through a sieve to drain
them of what Rawls thinks they do not “deserve.”
If several promising arguments support libertarianism, and the
main consideration advanced against it utterly lacks merit, is there
not excellent reason for everyone who recoils at our present politi-
cal morass to give this philosophy his utmost attention?
David Gordon is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor
of The Mises Review.
 25
Young American Revolution
 The Trouble With Burke
The fight for liberty must be radical, not counter-revolutionary

George Hawley

E dmund Burke, the late 17th-century

British statesman who denounced the
French Revolution, has long been a tow-
libertarians would like to acknowledge.
I should first note that there is nothing
conservative, and certainly nothing inher-
ering figure in the conservative pantheon. ently Burkean, about the irresponsible bel-
Burke has recently been especially favored licosity and governmental aggrandizement
by those few conservatives who opposed we experienced during the Bush years.
America’s messianic social-engineering ef- Russell Kirk, arguably Burke’s most prom-
fort in the Middle East and who wish to inent American expositor, noted long be-
return to a more humble, humane foreign fore they directed American foreign policy
policy. It is easy to see why Burke is so much that the neoconervatives “have been rash
beloved by antiwar conservatives and many in their schemes of action, pursuing a
libertarians: his blistering critiques of the fanciful democratic globalism rather than
Jacobins and their “metaphysical dogma” the true national interest of the United
can be just as easily applied to modern-day States.” Kirk based his opposition to the
ideologues (such as the neoconservatives) neoconservative ideology of “democratic
who wish to remake the world in the image capitalism” on Burkean principles.
of their own abstract ideas. But if Kirk was right, and the neocons
Nonetheless, advocates of liberty and Was Edmund Burke unprincipled? are not really authentic conservatives, how
peace do themselves a great disservice did they come to control the Republican
by holding fast to Burkean principles. In Party and the American Right? Part of the
the May 2008 edition of The Atlantic, liberal columnist Jonathan answer can unfortunately be found in the defects of Burkeanism
Rauch, no friend of conservatism, compared the perpetually bel- itself, particularly that form of Burkeanism promoted by Kirk.
ligerent Sen. John McCain, who was then running for the Repub- The notion that American conservatives follow an intellectual
lican presidential nomination, to Burke. Rauch may have been tradition begun by Burke has become axiomatic. But this was not
closer to the mark than most self-described Burkean conserva- always conventional wisdom. The American Right’s fascination
tives would care to admit. with Burke can largely be traced back to 1953, when Kirk pub-
To most antiwar conservatives and libertarians, Rauch’s argu- lished The Conservative Mind. This work, like many since, rooted the
ment must seem patently absurd: war-mongering Republicans ea- origins of modern Anglo-American conservatism in Burke, who
ger to spread democracy at gunpoint are far more intellectually and provided a framework for “the politics of prescription.”
temperamentally similar to French revolutionaries like Condorcet Kirk noted that Burke’s political conservatism was based on
and Robespierre than to the traditionalist Burke. Many traditional prudence and convention, rather than on abstract principles.
conservative arguments against neoconservative madness are, af- Burke believed public policies should be founded upon tradition,
ter all, built on appeals to Burkean principles of prudence and but he chose not to speculate as to any specific tradition’s ori-
order. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Rauch’s point cavalier- gin, declaring, “There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the begin-
ly. McCain and other mainstream Republicans represent Burke’s nings of governments.” Conservatives can find much to admire in
principles better than most pro-liberty, anti-war conservatives and Burke’s work, and his Reflections on the Revolution in France—a literary

26
June 2009
assault on the Jacobins—remains one of history’s finest attacks on
political radicalism. What we must remember, however, is that in
Burke’s time, the status quo in England was culturally conservative
and the government was comparatively limited in its powers. That
being the case, his defense of tradition and precedent was also a
defense of civilization and liberty.
Yet even if we admire Burke for what he said and did in his time,
an important question remains: does Burke provide advocates of
liberty with sound guidance today? To answer that, it is useful
to look back to those conservative writers who disputed Burke’s
indispensability. Richard Weaver, a contemporary of Kirk’s and
like him one of the most important postwar conservative writ-
ers, was disturbed by the American Right’s Burkean turn. Weaver
presciently noted that adopting Burkean principles and rhetorical
techniques would eventually rob the Right of
its coherence. Burkean rhetoric, according to
Weaver, can be properly described as the “ar-
gument from circumstance”:
This argument merely reads the circum-
stances—the “facts standing around”—and
accepts them as coercive, or allows them
to dictate the decision. If one should say,
“This city must be surrendered because the
besiegers are so numerous,” one would be
arguing ... from present circumstances. The
expression “In view of the situation, what
else are you going to do?” constitutes a sort
of proposition-form for this type of argu-
ment. Such argument savors of urgency
rather than perspicacity; and it seems to be
preferred by those who are easily impressed
by existing tangibles.
This form of argument was Burke’s hall-
Burke’s anti-Jacobin masterpiece
mark. It has also been the most commonplace
style of argument among American conserva-
tives. In the past 60 years, the Right has “pru-
dently” abandoned one city after another to besiegers on the statist
Left. American conservatives may still have a political army on the
field, but, in the name of prudence, expedience, and a “big tent,”
they have surrendered every great citadel and now find themselves
with precious little to defend. In The Betrayal of the American Right,
Murray Rothbard noted that the Right in America once stood
fast against the welfare-warfare state. Conservatives have since
abandoned that position. At the close of Bush II’s administration,
mainstream conservative Republicans stood for nothing but per-
petual war and imperialism and had lost all interest in combating
government growth. Regrettably, their positions can now be justi-
fied on Burkean grounds.
Since World War II, the American Empire has steadily expand-
ed. The “foreign entanglements” the Founding Fathers warned
us against have become a fixed part of the political landscape,
and there are few living today who can remember when this was
not the case. At home, despite a half-dozen Republican presidents
expressing devotion to vague ideals of “limited government,” Le-
27
Young American Revolution
viathan has inveigled its way into every aspect of our daily lives.
A new explosion of state power during the Obama administra-
tion will not represent a radical break with tradition—it will be as
American as baseball and apple pie.
Deference to precedent was a key component of Burke’s politi-
cal philosophy, and in that regard, McCain and the other ineffectu-
al mainstream Republicans are far more Burkean than small-gov-
ernment, antiwar conservatives and libertarians. As Rauch noted
when praising McCain for refusing to challenge the status quo:
The best way [to balance individual rights with social order],
for Burke, was by respecting long-standing customs and in-
stitutions while advancing toward liberty and equality. Soci-
ety’s traditions, after all, embody an evolved collective wis-
dom that even (or especially) the smartest
of individuals cannot hope to understand
comprehensively, much less reinvent suc-
cessfully.
One may argue with Rauch as to the degree
to which Burke desired “equality,” but the rest
of his description is accurate. The bloated
government spawned by the New Deal and a
century of hot and cold wars is now a long-
standing institution. Is anyone therefore sur-
prised that the Left now appeals to Burke when
discussing domestic policies, and the neocon-
servative Right invokes Burke when excusing
and expanding our empire? The neoconserva-
tives may be dangerous ideologues, and liberal
Democrats may be power-hungry socialists,
but can anyone honestly say that they break
with American political conventions?
Russell Kirk warned American conservatives
to be wary of ideologies, preferring instead
the Burkean reliance on vague principles and
tradition. It is time to acknowledge that Kirk’s
advice is useless to us. If we want liberty and
peace, we cannot rely on tradition, prudence, or arguments from
circumstance to provide them for us. We need rhetoric founded
on first principles, and true advocates of liberty must be commit-
ted to winning and governing on those foundations.
Congressman Ron Paul has provided an example of this kind
of leadership and rhetoric. Paul and his supporters stand on their
principles, tradition be damned. Unlike Burke or contemporary
mainstream Republicans, he is not “easily impressed by exist-
ing tangibles.” He unashamedly declared his most recent book a
“manifesto,” a word historically embraced by revolutionaries. Tra-
ditional conservatives, who, like Kirk, instinctively bristle at such
rhetoric, had better get over their horror if they sincerely wish
to regain lost liberties. Paul’s outspoken extremism, not Burke’s
thoughtful discretion, is the American Republic’s only hope for
revival. Tradition now only serves tyrants—we need a revolution.
George Hawley [hawley.gs@gmail.com] is a student at the University of
Houston.
Who Killed Our Economy?
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked,
and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
Thomas E. Woods Jr., Regnery Publishing, 194 pages
Christopher Best
M eltdown, by Thomas E. Woods
Jr., is a concise and compelling
account of the origin of the economic
collapse. Relatively comprehensive de-
spite its brevity, Meltdown is perfectly
accessible to the novice, providing in-
sight into the economy at a time when
it is needed most.
Americans have been floored by
this ever-deepening recession. They
have defaulted on mortgages, lost
their jobs, and seen their investments
disappear practically overnight. So
the Obama administration is playing
mother, waiting with a box of cook-
ies, a gallon of milk, and a cabinet
full of medical supplies, ready to do
whatever it takes to bandage up their
scrapes and bruises. But as Woods’s
account of the recession shows, the
government not only misunderstands
the economic crisis but caused it, and
Obama’s actions are only deepening
and prolonging it with a fruitless and
costly strategy.
Our political masters are respond-
ing to the crisis with vigor, backed by
what they perceive as electoral man-
dates. They believe that they can put bandages on the Ameri-
can people and throw them back out into the economy. But the
economy is burdened by a monetary system that doesn’t work, a
government that impedes the free market, and a central bank that
has carte blanche to distort interest rates and economic conditions.
Fixing this mess will not be painless, and government efforts can
only impede the market reconfiguration that needs to take place.
Woods, an adherent of the Austrian School of economics and
a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Instiute, explains why the
economic landscape is so unstable. It all comes down to market
interventionism. Woods’s primary goal in Meltdown is to put Aus-
trian theory and its application to the crisis into an easy-to-under-
stand package. One obstacle to confronting the crash, according
to Woods’s diagnosis, is that the government has designated the
economy as a subject that only the intellectual few can understand.
The problem is that these people—the government, the Fed, and
those economists who make excuses for them—are the very ones
who ignited the crisis in the first place.
Meltdown is a smashing success—accurate, lucid, a joy to read.
28
June 2009
At times I wanted to run across the
quad and throw it at people, yelling,
“Read this!” The only trouble was
that I couldn’t stop talking about it
for weeks. Meltdown provides enough
facts and details for any person to un-
derstand the economic crisis and the
forces behind it. And Woods provides
answers to the most pressing ques-
tions. For example, did greed kill the
economy?
Meltdown explains why the usual
scapegoats do not provide a sufficient
explanation for the market’s down-
fall. The prevailing opinion on the
economic collapse—I say prevailing
only in the sense of popularity—is
that corporate greed and lack of gov-
ernment regulation were the primary
causes of the collapse. But as Woods
and several other economic writers
have noted, “blaming the crisis on
‘greed’ is like blaming plane crashes
on gravity.”
Greed is a constant. Greed exists in
any economic setting. In fact, econo-
mists count on people to be greedy.
Economics operates on the axiom
that every individual makes decisions that he believes will be
profitable—decisions whose benefits for the individual outweigh
the costs to him. People are always looking to make more profit
(whether that profit is financial or merely psychological). In the
classroom, these people are called economically rational. But on
the political stage, they are called thieves.
Human nature did not change within the last several years. The
economic collapse did not result from sudden surge of unchecked
greed. In truth, the economy cratered not because people were
too greedy but because the government created opportunities that
would not have existed in a free market, and ordinary people—
from small businessmen to corporate leaders to salary-men—took
advantage of the possibilities created by artificially low interest
rates. The guilt here falls not on the economically rational, who
saw opportunities to make profit and indulged in them legally.
Rather, the blame belongs with the government that created those
opportunities in the first place.
Of course, to deflect attention from itself, the government
likes to point to individuals such as Bernie Madoff, who destroyed
his investors’ wealth with a Ponzi times not-so-silent) secondary
scheme. But people like Madoff have agenda. The ancillary objective of
always existed and always will. The
“Human nature did not change within the this book is to proselytize for the
Madoffs of the world represent so last several years. The economic collapse Austrian School and criticize those
small a portion of the population did not result from sudden surge of who write it off as an impure sci-
that the pretense that they could ruin unchecked greed.” ence for being grounded in logic
the economy is absolutely ludicrous. rather than statistics. Meltdown of-
Government also casts aspersions against a corporate culture ten attacks, explicitly or otherwise, other schools of economic
where executives can make a hundred times more money than thought. This does not detract from the overall quality and accu-
their employees. The government wags a finger (guess which one) racy of the work, however—non-Austrians will also benefit from
at speculators and “Wall Street wiz kids.” And statists bring for- reading it.
ward the usual suspects: the rich. They point to people who pros- Meltdown, all 194 pages of it, is the perfect counterargument
pered during the economic crisis and call them unpatriotic, even to the mainstream’s perception of our economic problems. In-
indecent. stead of White House rhetoric from Barack Obama, regurgitated
But the real culprits are not the risk-takers who exploited the Keynesianism from the liberal media, or Republican contrarianism
economic climate. In fact, those people are necessary for the from Fox News, Meltdown gives the reader a thoughtful analysis of
economy. Woods reminds us that speculation “performs an im- the crisis, consistent with the highly articulate views of the Aus-
portant social function, making the economy more efficient by trian School. Meltdown is ideal both for the economically savvy and
speeding the pace at which prices adjust to coordinate supply and for those who don’t consider economics to be their forte. If you’re
demand.” But in this case, the speculators expedited the inflation like me, you’ll swallow the book in a day and then come back to
in the housing market—not because they were acting irrationally it again and again. Woods provides facts enough to ground his
but because the Federal Reserve had altered market forces. theory in reality without diluting his message. The book is fasci-
So why did the economy really collapse? nating and comprehensive, with each contention leading naturally
The greatest strength of Meltdown is Woods’s comprehensive into the next, building a nigh irrefutable argument against central
explanation of the reasons behind the crash. Woods points to economic planning and government interventionism.
many factors, including the Community Reinvestment Act, the
Bush administration’s push for an “ownership society,” the moral Christopher Best, a student at Occidental College, blogs at http://
hazard implicit in “government sponsored enterprises” (GSE’s) revolutioneconomics.blogspot.com.
such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and, most important of all,
the manipulation of interest rates by the Federal Reserve.
Through all of these institutions, government worked to ex-
pand credit. The Austrian School of economic thought teaches
that the boom and bust cycle of the economy is the result of such
artificially expanded credit.
Woods provides a brief and incisive summary of how the busi-
ness cycle works. He argues that the only way for a “cluster of
errors” to occur is through economic planning by a central bank.
When a central bank lowers interest rates, it necessarily defies the
natural conditions of the market. When interest rates are set low
by the market, that indicates that people want to invest now in
long-term projects and spend money later. Low interest rates of-
ten lead firms to make farsighted investment decisions. But when
these rates are deliberately set low by the central bank, businesses
receive a misleading signal.
By lowering the interest rate, the central bank aims to incentiv-
ize firms to undertake long-term projects. But to support long-
term investment, consumers must postpone purchases they could
have made in the present; their savings provide a supply of “loan-
able” funds to firms. When interest rates are artificially lowered
without this increase in savings, firms will make long-term invest-
ments that cannot be supported or completed.
“If the Fed manipulates the interest rate, we should not be
surprised to observe discoordination on a massive scale,” writes
Woods. The aforementioned “cluster of errors” can only occur
when the Fed lowers interest rates.
For all its virtues, Meltdown is hindered by a silent (and some-

29
Young American Revolution
Conserving the Constitution
Defending the Republic: Constitutional Morality in a Time of Crisis
Bruce P. Frohnen and Kenneth L. Grasso, eds., ISI Books, 352 pages
Mark Nugent
I n American politics, everyone claims to
be on the side of the Constitution. A
return to our constitutional Republic was,
of course, the predominant theme of Ron
Paul’s presidential campaign and is central to
the alternative Right that has coalesced in its
wake. But mainstream politicians also claim
to follow the Constitution, despite their sup-
port of unbridled judicial lawmaking, far-
reaching regulation of virtually all economic
activity, and global imperial crusades. Even a
sincere call to return to the plain meaning of
the Constitution may yield more questions
than answers. How is the document to be in-
terpreted, what commitments does it imply
for us as a nation, and what is the nature of
the Republic that it was designed to govern?
George W. Carey, professor of govern-
ment at Georgetown University, has dedicat-
ed his career to addressing these questions.
Carey is arguably the pre-eminent constitu-
tionalist conservative alive today. Edited by
Bruce Frohnen and Kenneth Grasso, Defend-
ing the Republic: Constitutional Morality in a Time of Crisis is a collec-
tion of essays examining Carey’s thought and offering reflections
on some of the primary themes of his scholarship. The editors’
introduction and Frohnen’s essay “George Carey on Constitutions,
Constitutionalism, and Tradition” together provide a penetrating
overview of the full range of Carey’s academic work.
Carey began his scholarly career by working closely with the
political theorist Willmoore Kendall, who was a prominent, if
unorthodox, figure in the post-World War II conservative move-
ment. After his mentor’s death in 1968, Carey assembled a series
of Kendall’s lectures, amplified by material of his own, into The
Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, a classic text that
remains indispensable for understanding the religious and philo-
sophical matrix that gave rise to the Constitution.
A symbol, in this context, refers to a concept or commitment
by which a people conceives of its purpose in history. In Basic
Symbols, Carey and Kendall examine the political tradition of the
early American Republic by tracing the evolution of its symbols
through the history of the colonies, beginning with the Mayflower
Compact. These basic symbols eventually expressed themselves in
the Constitution, The Federalist, the Declaration of Independence,
and the Bill of Rights.
The “official literature,” as Carey and Kendall term our errone-
ous modern-day understanding, holds that our supreme ideals as a
nation attain their archetypal expression in the Declaration of In-
dependence: the equality of all men and their possession of sacred,
30
June 2009
inalienable rights that cannot be abridged by
government. The Constitution, according to
the official narrative, is a reactionary docu-
ment—its various checks and balances were
constructed to thwart the democratic will
of the people and the egalitarian impulses
that underlay the Revolution. But the Bill of
Rights was soon engrafted onto it, supply-
ing a legal commitment to individual rights.
This is where we get the idea of America
as a unique “propositional nation,” founded
upon abstract, universal ideals, rather than
an actual set of communities bound to a
specific place, time, and culture.
According to Carey and Kendall, “the su-
preme symbols of the American tradition,”
as they were understood at the time of the
Founding, are “the symbols of a virtuous
people through deliberative processes striv-
ing to achieve and advance their declared
purposes which involve, inter alia, better or-
dering with justice”—that is to say, the com-
mon good. While the legislature is not con-
strained by formal rules (what Madison called parchment barriers)
concerning the protection of individual rights, it is restrained by
its commitment to deliberation, consensus, and just laws.
This commitment expresses itself in the Constitution through
structural features that are designed to foster deliberation and con-
sensus and to discourage oppressive measures from being passed
by bare majorities. Moreover, while no exact boundary between
state and federal authority is spelled out in the Constitution, the
authority of Congress is limited to certain specific areas, leaving
the states a broad measure of autonomy to govern themselves as
their citizens see fit.
In short, the Constitution as it was originally understood “is
clearly nomocratic in character, largely concerned, that is, with
providing rules and limits for the government through which the
people express their will,” according to Kendall and Carey. But in
the modern conception, “the Constitution is increasingly viewed
from a teleocratic perspective as an instrument designed to ful-
fill the ends, commitments, or promises of the Declaration.” The
modern regime, in other words, prizes egalitarian ends over struc-
tural and procedural means.
Carey’s career can be seen as a sustained defense of the older,
“nomocratic” understanding of the Constitution and an examina-
tion of its corruption into our modern “teleocratic” regime. In his
scholarship on the Constitution, Carey pays particular attention to
The Federalist, which he sees as an essential source for determining
the intended operation of the federal government and its proper
relationship with the states. The Federalist also sheds light on the
“constitutional morality” that provides tacit rules for the opera-
tion of government unstated in the text of the Constitution, such
as the respect and restraint each branch of government should
show towards the prerogatives of the other branches.
In the early Republic, the legislature expressed the deliberative
sense of the people, and therefore naturally predominated over
the other branches. But the task of representation was not re-
stricted to the legislative bodies, as Gary Gregg writes in his es-
say “No Presidential Republic: Representation, Deliberation, and
Executive Power in The Federalist Papers.” While representatives
bring “a knowledge of the conditions and interests of their local
constituency,” the Senate, being “further insulated from the pas-
sions that may from time to time sweep through the people ...
introduces order and stability.” This leaves the presidency, through
the power of the veto, to check “improper laws” and defend con-
stitutional institutions from attacks emanating from imprudent
congressional majorities.
The derailment of the American political tradition, however,
has resulted in a presidency that has attained vastly expanded
power and initiative. This derives from a messianic aspect of our
latter-day political tradition: an idealized America is presented not
as a virtuous people enacting wise policy through deliberation and
consensus but as a centralized state led by “an apostolic succes-
sion of great leaders,” each moving America closer to an egalitar-
ian ideal.
A particularly belligerent messianic ideology stemming from
the corruption of our political tradition is neoconservatism,
which Claes G. Ryn examines in his contribution to this volume,
a trenchant essay titled “Neo-Jacobin Nationalism or Responsible
Nationhood?” Despite their appropriation of the term “conser-
vative,” the neoconservatives’ ambition to put the United States
at the forefront of a global democratic revolution places them
decidedly toward the left end of the political spectrum. Ryn labels
them “neo-Jacobins,” after the radicals of the French Revolution,
who also saw themselves as the vanguard of a violent struggle
to liberate mankind—to force men to be free. The neoconser-
vative movement finds itself unconstrained by a respect for the
Constitution or for the culture and traditions from which it arose.
Despite the elevated rhetoric of neoconservative ideology, “the
will to power is throwing off inner and outer checks,” Ryn writes.
“Neo-Jacobinism is ultimately an ideological front for the desire
to dominate others.”
While the neoconservatives primarily direct their aggression
toward those hapless foreign populations stubborn enough to
resist “American values,” the modern Supreme Court focuses its
destructive powers on the American people themselves. The ju-
diciary has enabled the dramatic centralization of power in the
federal government, and through its decisions on such issues as
school prayer, criminal justice, and abortion, it has removed some
of the most critical and contentious issues we face from the pur-
view of legislative deliberation.
In his essay “Rights in a Federalist System,” Francis Canavan
attempts to trace the philosophical origins of the liberationist ide-
ology that animates the Supreme Court’s self-imposed role as the
interpreter and guarantor of an ever-expanding sphere of individ-
ual rights (administered, of course, by a vastly powerful central-
31
Young American Revolution
ized state). Canavan believes the roots of this development lie in
the social contract theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
These theories view “civil society as a mutual nonaggression pact.”
But by removing decision-making power from states, towns, and
other sources of authority such as churches and families, central-
ization and judicial activism actually degrade those intermediate
institutions. “As the late George H. Sabine said,” Canavan writes,
“the absolute sovereign and omnicompetent state is the logical
correlate of a society which consists of atomic individuals.’”
The ideology that forms the core of liberationist Supreme
Court decisions can also be seen as a triumph of one side of a cul-
tural divide over another, as Kenneth Grasso argues in “Religious
Pluralism and the American Experiment: From Articles of Peace
to Culture Wars.” Colonial America was religiously pluralistic in
the sense that a wide variety of sects found their home there, but
operated under a broad cultural consensus informed by the basic
tenets of Christianity that they shared. To accommodate the reli-
gious diversity of the United States, and to provide a measure of
“civic unity” despite this diversity, the concepts of federalism and
limited government left the resolution of contentious moral is-
sues in the hands of states, local communities, and churches. The
First Amendment is an expression of the “articles of peace” that
place decision-making on moral and religious questions outside
the purview of the central government, whose authority extends
only to secular matters.
But the growth of both centralized, unlimited government and
cultural secularism has undermined this consensus. For one thing,
the dramatic expansion of government into such formerly private
spheres as health care and education leads to intensified debate
and strife over issues such as abortion and religious observance
in schools. Additionally, the “massive expansion of federal power
and a dramatic decline in the power and autonomy of state gov-
ernments” robs “localities of their authority to handle matters at
the very core of their being.”
Much of this newly centralized authority emanates from the
Supreme Court, “an institution significantly less equipped to suc-
cesfully navigate the treacherous waters of policymaking in a plu-
ralist society” than legislative bodies. In sum, the usurpation of
legislative powers by the judiciary and the displacement of state
and local decision-making by centralized authority are both causes
and symptoms of the disorder of our current regime.
Young Americans for Liberty and other institutions of the
freedom movement are now attempting to return to our constitu-
tional moorings. The deeply disordered conception of our system
found in progressive and neoconservative notions has come to be
institutionalized in our government and deeply entrenched in the
popular consciousness. Any kind of restoration of our old con-
stitutional norms will be a formidable task indeed. Reviving the
American Republic will require a deep and textured understanding
of the Constitution and the civil society for which it was created.
Such an understanding requires renewed and continuing attention
to the work of scholars such as George Carey and those who
build upon his thought in Defending the Republic.
Mark Nugent is an attorney and Web designer living in Arlington, Virginia.
He blogs at spinline.net/blog.
Art for Survival’s Sake
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
Dennis Dutton, Bloomsbury Press, 279 pages
Jeremy Lott
D enis Dutton is a professor of philoso-
phy at the University of Canterbury in
Christchurch, New Zealand, but he’s had a
greater impact on the American academy
than any dozen professors who have toiled
their whole careers in the United States. Dut-
ton founded the journal Philosophy and Litera-
ture, which frequently made headlines with its
annual Bad Writing Contest. The idea was
to mock turgid scholarly writing and thereby
shame profs into using language in such a way
that intelligent people could understand what
the hell they were talking about.
In 1998, the award went to University of
California, Berkeley post-structuralist philos-
opher Judith Butler for this peach of a pas-
sage:
The move from a structuralist account in
which capital is understood to structure so-
cial relations in relatively homologous ways
to a view of hegemony in which power re-
lations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticula-
tion brought the question of temporality into the thinking of
structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects
to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility
of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony
as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power.
If you didn’t make it all the way through that or get the gist,
don’t feel bad. As Dutton wrote when he was bestowing top hon-
ors on Butler: “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This
sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that
they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual com-
munication has nothing to do with it.” It’s the academic equivalent
of “Ignore the man behind the curtain!”
As enjoyable as Philosophy and Literature was, it was the growth
of the Internet in the late ’90s that really made Dutton’s name.
The most famous and most enduring of his online projects is Arts
& Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). These days, the site is owned
by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Arts & Letters Daily grew out
of Dutton’s “Phil-Lit” e-mail list. The simple site’s motto is veri-
tas odit moras—truth hates delay. Six days a week, the site’s three
news columns bring readers the latest in “ideas, criticism, [and]
debate.”
News sites pine for a link from the Drudge Report. Academic
journals and opinionated outlets pray for an Arts & Letters Daily
teaser. These are short squibs followed by a link to the article. A
32
June 2009
teaser of this review might read: “What mat-
ters more: that a book is enjoyable or that its
argument proves correct? …more>>”
That was the question that bounced around
this critic’s highly evolved brain like a long
game of box ball as I read The Art Instinct: Beau-
ty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. The argument
probably should matter more. But it’s rare to
read a book aimed at a highly literate audience
that is this laugh-out-loud funny. The experi-
ence turns what would have been an obvious
answer into a moment of sober philosophical
reflection: facts or funny? Hmmm.
And by funny, I mean mordant and dead-
pan. Dutton gives us funny because it’s ob-
vious: “Medicine began from a pretheoreti-
cal understanding of health and disease; as a
developed discipline, medicine has produced
sophisticated theories and clinically effec-
tive cures, but not in ten thousand years has
it abolished the ordinary distinction between
robust good health and feeling nauseated or bleeding to death.”
And funny because it’s unexpected: “In order to better understand
how innate instincts interact with cultural traditions, I want to turn
to another powerful universal instinct that has clear cultural impli-
cations: incest avoidance.”
Dutton gets so much right about so many subjects that one is
tempted to concede the central argument of his book as thanks
for not wasting our time. He doesn’t even get around to pressing
his case seriously for over a hundred pages. The first half of The
Art Instinct is a quarrel about art in which Dutton cuts the knees
off of a host of art critics, anthropologists, and vulgar multicul-
turalists who insist that art is culturally constructed and that there
can be no aesthetic universals. In refuting this, Dutton is by turns
analytical and scathing.
Analytical: It’s true the art instinct manifests itself differently
in different cultures, Dutton concedes. He further acknowledges
that some modern art is so weird that it really is suspect. But he
comes up with 12 criteria that form a rough cross-cultural an-
swer to the question, “What is art?” Art, he explains, involves (1)
“direct pleasure.” It takes (2) “skill and virtuosity,” a sense of (3)
“style,” and (4) “novelty and creativity” to produce. It is open to
(5) “criticism” and involves (6) “representation” and (7) “special
focus.” Arts are a channel for (8) “expressive individuality” and
combine (9) “emotional saturation” with (10) “intellectual chal-
lenge.” Artistic refinement is furthered by (11) “art traditions and
institutions.” Arts are an (12) “imaginative experience,” above all.
Scathing: In chapter 4, “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of
Art,” Dutton shows how critics who argue such things are con-
fused about foreign cultures and often astonishingly ignorant of
their own. “Despite the fact that jyonti paintings [by women from
Uttar Pradesh] are straightforward, colorfully stylized depictions
of Hindu mythological themes ... [anthropologist Lynn] Hart in-
sists on using ‘producer’ instead of ‘artist’ and ‘visual image’ in-
stead of ‘art’ to refer to this work (if it is ‘work’),” Dutton writes.
He insists, sensibly, that if images look and function like art then
they are, in fact, art.
If you were inclined to believe that art is entirely culturally
constructed, you will probably be less so after reading the first
half of The Art Instinct. Art is just too much a part of the history
of mankind, in every era and every civilization, to deny Dutton’s
argument. Tastes and traditions vary wildly. But with the excep-
tion of some excesses of modern art—think Andres Serrano, or
Duchamp’s urinal—we can all recognize plays, movies, carvings,
paintings, embroidery, poetry, decoration, storytelling, and the like
as art.
There does indeed appear to be an art instinct, or set of in-
stincts, that form an important part of human nature. Huns,
Britons, and even neoconservatives can recognize this brute fact.
Where Dutton is less persuasive, however, is in his theorizing
about where the art instinct came from. The late paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould argued forcefully that much of what makes us
human is not an evolutionary adaptation but a by-product of that
adaptation. According to Gould, our large brains are the adapta-
tion, and most of human culture is what painter Bob Ross would
call a “happy accident.”
Gould admitted that we do have some instincts but contended
that we are free from most evolutionary pressures that limit other
animals. Dutton counters that humans are far more hardwired and
that most of our circuitry was installed by evolutionary develop-
ments during the Pleistocene period. The human capacities that
33
Young American Revolution
make art possible were preserved from this prehistoric era be-
cause they proved useful in survival and reproduction. It’s ironic
that Gould’s politics were of the Left, while the more determinis-
tic Dutton is something a classical liberal.
Dutton might well be right, but it’s hard to know for sure. Ste-
phen Colbert made light of Dutton’s highly speculative arguments
when he interviewed the author on the “Colbert Report.” When
Dutton talked about the survival and reproduction advantages
of our ancient ancestors’ imaginative abilities, Colbert quipped
that cavemen “were using their imagination. Like imagine what
it would be like to not be devoured by a saber tooth tiger. What
would that be like? Think big!” and asked, “Is everybody doing
art just to get laid?” Colbert also asked, “Mr. Dutton, is there any
chance that I am art?”
Sometimes the most unfair questions are the best ones. Dut-
ton’s perspective is informed by a school of thought called “evo-
lutionary psychology” that tries to understand the mind through
the lens of human evolution. This approach has led to some im-
portant insights. But even Dutton admits that some speculations
of evolution psychology are far-fetched. He cites one example of
linguist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker—who blurbs
this book—tripping all over himself in attempting to explain how
storytelling can confer evolutionary advantage. Dutton believes
Pinker erred by reducing stories to their morals—after all, he ar-
gues, it would be fairly easy to drum those morals into people’s
heads without the stories. Yet Dutton may be embarked on a simi-
larly reductionist project. The Art Instinct wants us to understand
art as a product of human evolution but, like Gould, I suspect
there’s much more to it than that.
Jeremy Lott is author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the
American Vice Presidency. His blog is JeremyLott.net.
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Alan Moore’s Watchmen remains a stirring warning against absolute power
Franklin Harris
Y ou can tell a work of fiction is influ-
ential when other writers are still grap-
pling with its implications nearly a quarter
of a century later—usually with limited
success.
Since its publication in the mid-1980s,
Watchmen has been the poster child for
pop art that transcends its origins. Hav-
ing garnered accolades usually reserved
for highbrow literary fiction, Watchmen is
the reason we now refer to comic books as
graphic novels. It birthed countless news-
paper stories with unfortunate headlines
like “Bam! Pow! Comic books aren’t just
for kids anymore.” It changed the aesthet-
ics of superhero comics, both for better
and for worse. And this year, of course,
it inspired a major motion picture that,
if nothing else, perplexed audiences ex-
pecting the next “Dark Knight” or “Iron
Man.”
While “Iron Man” and “The Dark
Knight” both deal with issues of power
and corruption, they ultimately side with
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
their vigilante protagonists. Superheroes,
those movies tell us, are a good thing.
“Watchmen,” however, remains admirably faithful to its source
material and comes to a different conclusion. Its costumed cru-
saders are, at best, powerless when it comes to doing good and,
at worst, make the world a far more dangerous place. If, as Lord
Acton said, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely, then unaccountable superhumans with near God-like
powers are not necessarily a good thing. Like a powerful central
government that is able to dominate local governments or an im-
perial presidency that co-opts powers properly belonging to Con-
gress, superheroes upset existing power structures. “Who watches
the Watchmen?” is a question with no obvious answer.
It is little surprise, then, that anti-statists have latched onto
Watchmen, claiming it, along with the works of Ayn Rand and
Robert Heinlein, and the 1960s cult-favorite television series “The
Prisoner,” as part of libertarianism’s artistic canon.
The graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by
Dave Gibbons, is set in an alternate 1985 in which the existence
of superheroes has turned the United States into a virtual dicta-
torship. President Richard Nixon, having engineered the repeal
of the 22nd Amendment, is in his fifth term, and corruption and
chaos are rampant. As gangs terrorize the streets, the U.S. and the
34
June 2009
Soviet Union plunge toward seemingly in-
evitable nuclear annihilation.
The main point of divergence between
our 1985, which turned out comparatively
well, and the 1985 of Watchmen is the ex-
istence of Dr. Manhattan, the one cos-
tumed hero in the story who possesses su-
perhuman abilities. With Dr. Manhattan’s
help, the U.S. wins the Vietnam War, a
victory that Nixon uses to become all but
president for life. The Soviets, meanwhile,
regard Dr. Manhattan as such a threat that
they’re willing to risk nuclear war to avoid
U.S. domination.
Dr. Manhattan, in short, changes ev-
erything. As one character in the graphic
novel observes, “It is as if—with a real
live Deity on their side—our leaders have
become intoxicated with a heady draught
of omnipotence-by-association, without
realizing just how his very existence has
deformed the lives of every living crea-
ture on the face of this planet.”
Dr. Manhattan is the literal embodi-
ment of amoral power. Following the
accident that gives him his superhuman
abilities, he gradually becomes more and more removed from his
humanity. Time, for him, has no real meaning because he can see
past, present, and future simultaneously. As a result, death has no
meaning for him, either. Thus he is the perfect tool for the politi-
cians who seek to exploit him.
The U.S. government in Watchmen maintains a monopoly on
superheroes. A law bans costumed adventurers except for those
who work for the state, namely Dr. Manhattan and the more ag-
gressively amoral Comedian. The only masked crimefighter work-
ing illegally is Rorschach.
Of the characters in Watchmen, Rorschach comes closest to be-
ing a libertarian, although Moore’s portrait of libertarianism isn’t
exactly flattering. Rorschach is brutal, malodorous, and, most im-
portantly, psychotic. Moore bases him on The Question and Mr.
A, two characters created by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko,
an adherent of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Despite his
antiauthoritarianism, Moore is still a man of the political Left,
and his Rorschach is a not-at-all-subtle critique of Ditko’s “right-
wing” libertarianism.
There are positive character traits hidden beneath Rorschach’s
psychosis, however. Rorschach believes in truth and justice, and
he is uncompromising in his pursuit of them, which is why he
continues to work outside of the law even after the government
criminalizes costumed vigilantism. He is, whether Moore likes it
or not, the moral center of Watchmen, and readers—not just lib-
ertarians—gravitate toward him. Rorschach may be insane, but at
least he sticks to his principles, even in the face of death.
Even as Moore’s Rorschach was capturing readers’ imaginations
in 1986, Frank Miller’s daring interpretation of an old mainstay
was doing the same, and for the similar reasons.
Published at about the same time as Watchmen, Miller’s The Dark
Knight Returns covers many of the same themes and is no less in-
fluential. It casts a middle-aged Batman in the Rorschach role of
uncompromising individualist and Superman in the Dr. Manhat-
tan role of government stooge. Yet despite the dark tone of both
works, the similarities between Watchmen and The Dark Knight Re-
turns end there. Moore’s only solution to the problem of Dr. Man-
hattan is for his superman to leave Earth, abandoning humanity
to its own fate. Miller, however, has faith in superheroes, so long
as it is the right superhero.
Miller’s Batman is a quasi-libertarian anarchist, a genius who,
like the characters in Rand’s novels, uses his brain to thwart the
brute, physical power of Superman and the state. Miller’s version
of Batman as an ordinary man prepared to stand up to seemingly
omnipotent power has endured, inspiring everyone from libertar-
ians to politically apathetic comics fanboys to subsequent Batman
writers.
The libertarian/Randian themes are even more explicit in Mill-
er’s 2001-2002 follow-up, The Dark Knight Strikes Again. In the se-
quel, Miller introduces Ditko’s The Question as a mouthpiece for
Objectivism, of sorts. The difference here is that Miller’s version
says, “I’m no Ayn Rander! She didn’t go nearly far enough!”
But can antistatists put their faith in even a libertarian super-
hero? The treatment of Batman post-Miller raises lots of red
flags. Just as Miller’s Batman developed a contingency plan to
take down Superman, Batman, as portrayed in more recent com-
ics, has formulated plans to deal with just about any superhero
who, for whatever reason, might go bad. Unfortunately, time and
again, Batman’s plans have fallen into the wrong hands, with di-
sastrous results. For example, in the recent series Countdown, Bat-
man creates Brother Eye, an artificial intelligence to watch over all
of Earth’s superpowered heroes and villains. As one might guess
from Brother Eye’s Orwellian name, this ends badly when a covert
government agency takes control of the AI for its own purposes.
As a new generation of comic-book writers embellishes the
ideas Moore and Miller first explored, it seems there is need for a
critique of even “libertarian” superheroes. Ultimately, even super-
heroes who operate without government sanction, so as to pre-
serve their independence and integrity, run into problems because
they still serve a law-enforcement function. They’re still append-
ages of the state, if only unofficially.
Marvel Comics’ recent Civil War story arc illustrates the point.
After a battle in which a team of young superheroes accidentally
kills 600 civilians, the political leaders in Marvel’s fictional universe
take a page from Watchmen. They pass a law banning all costumed
superheroes except for those who agree to register with and work
for the federal government. The Superhuman Registration Act
splits the superhero community, with pro-registration heroes lin-
35
Young American Revolution
ing up behind Iron Man and anti-registration heroes backing Cap-
tain America.
Although it is never spelled out explicitly in Civil War, the pro-
registration side has a point. What are superheroes anyway, except
unauthorized, unaccountable law-enforcement agents? Superhe-
roes don’t obtain search warrants. They don’t read suspects their
Miranda rights. If they screw up, they don’t face disciplinary ac-
tion. And it’s almost impossible for a wronged party to sue them
for misconduct. Just try serving a court summons to the Hulk. In
short, all of the real-world problems associated with police mis-
conduct are potentially worse when it comes to superheroes. They
exist outside the rule of law.
Against that possibility, the Superhuman Registration Act
seems, in libertarian terms, the lesser of two evils. Of course, the
lesser evil is still evil. Any law that can be abused eventually will be
abused. In our world, Republicans constantly pass laws they would
never trust Democrats to enforce and vice versa. Each side, when
out of power, complains that the other is abusing the powers of
government. Yet when they swap places, the incoming party never
repeals the laws that the other side abused.
In the Marvel Universe, Iron Man currently finds himself on
the outside, on the run and wanted for crimes he didn’t commit.
Meanwhile, the villainous Green Goblin, in his civilian identity of
Norman Osborn, has become leader of the government’s regis-
tration effort. If there is any consolation, it’s that Iron Man may
have learned his lesson.
For all their efforts, no one writing superhero comics has yet
come up with an answer to Moore’s critique of superhero power.
Moore’s own solution isn’t really conducive to writing ongoing
superhero comics. He sends Dr. Manhattan packing. Dr. Manhat-
tan decides to leave our galaxy—end of story. When all else failed,
Moore opts for abolition, which is, of course, what one would
expect of any anarchist, of either the left-wing or the anarcho-
capitalist variety.
Perhaps that is why Watchmen maintains its resonance with
libertarians, despite Moore’s antipathy toward much of libertar-
ian thought. Unlike Miller, Rand, Ditko, and others who gave us
idealized libertarian supermen who could fly in and save the day,
Moore takes a more radical, yet more realistic approach. His hero-
turned-villain, Ozymandias, is named so as to evoke the image of
the broken idol in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name.
Essentially, Moore is telling us to put not our faith in idols, even if
they’re wearing a smile and spandex.
The “Watchmen” movie and the renewed interest in the graphic
novel couldn’t have been better timed. Several comic-book artists
have taken to depicting President Barack Obama in superheroic
terms. Alex Ross’s painting of the president striking a Superman
pose emblazons posters and T-shirts. Spider-Man and Obama do
the fist bump in a recent issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And for his
part, the new president seems happy to play up his heroic image,
as when he posed with the statue of Superman in Metropolis,
Illinois.
Whatever your politics, if you’ve grasped the message of Watch-
men, images like that ought to have you worried.
Franklin Harris (franklin@pulpculture.net) is a writer and editor based
in Alabama.
 36
June 2009
 Liberty at the Oscars
The award for pro-freedom film of the year goes to...
John Payne
Note: This article contains spoilers for several films, so proceed
with caution.
2008 was a good year for film, particularly the types of films
that typically win over Oscar voters: dramatic, serious, and at least
ostensibly profound. The release schedule from late October to
the end of December was more jam-packed with these movies
than any time in recent memory. But it was not just the Oscar-sea-
son releases that grabbed the attention of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences this year. A superhero movie—a genre
that usually isn’t even mentioned in the same breath as “the Acad-
emy Awards—received eight nominations and even managed to
grab one of the major awards with the late Heath Ledger winning
Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his disturbing portrayal of the
Joker in “The Dark Knight.” Most importantly for our purposes,
however, is that a number of Oscar contenders featured libertar-
ian themes.
Some of these themes were explicit. Any libertarian can ap-
preciate seeing a president who grossly abused his powers get his
public comeuppance (“Frost/Nixon”), the struggle not to be ha-
rassed by the government for whom you sleep with (“Milk”), and
the exposure of a corrupt and unchecked police force by scandal
(“Changeling,” about which much more below). But in several
cases, the libertarian ideas in these films are not so evident.
To take the most prominent example, consider the Oscars’ big
winner, “Slumdog Millionaire.” If you are still unfamiliar with the
story, it follows the travails and ultimate triumph of Jamal Malik,
an orphaned boy from Mumbai, in his quest to reunite with the
girl of his dreams by winning on India’s most popular game show,
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” In one of the more unbelievable
aspects of the movie, it is revealed that Jamal knows the answer to
each successive question because of different pivotal events in his
life that just happen to come in handy in chronological order. Es-
sentially, “Slumdog Millionaire” is Horatio Alger set in India, and
like an Alger story, it requires a strong dose of the suspension of
disbelief, but it also serves to reinforce the market-oriented values
of hard work and perseverance.
As Jamal and his brother Salim grow up without their mother,
they live as street urchins and meet Latika, the girl who will serve
as Jamal’s love interest throughout the movie. All three are even-
tually discovered living in a landfill and taken in by a seemingly
kind man named Maman, but it is quickly revealed that Maman
just takes in street children to form gangs of beggars to work
the streets of Mumbai. Eventually, he decides to put out one of
Jamal’s eyes because one-eyed children receive more money, but
Jamal is saved by the daring actions of Salim, and they both es-
cape, leaving Latika behind. Maman is one of the film’s primary
villains, and by casting him as such, the film shows that begging
37
Young American Revolution
and crime are not the path to a good life.
This lesson is further reinforced by the arc of Salim’s life. After
escaping from the clutches of Maman, both boys resort to crime
(although not all of their activities are criminal in a libertarian
sense) to support themselves. As they grow older, however, Jamal
chooses legitimate employment like working at a call center while
Salim delves deeper into India’s underworld. Of course, Salim’s
choice ends up destroying him, while Jamal is rewarded for his
efforts with both money and the girl.
Another Oscar-winning film that has a somewhat hidden lib-
ertarian message is “The Reader,” for which Kate Winslet won
the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The film’s plot is
more than a little convoluted, which is one of its major weak-
nesses (along with the unbelievable nature of its fundamental con-
ceit), but the major point of interest for libertarians is the revela-
tion that Winslet’s character—Hanna Schmitz—was an SS guard
at Auschwitz. A large section of the movie focuses on her 1966
trial with several other female guards. Hanna confesses to helping
choose which prisoners would die and which might have the small
luck of making it to the next culling. When the judge asks Hanna
if she realized she was sending these women to their deaths, she
responds that “there were new arrivals. New women were arriving
all the time, so the old ones had to make room for the new ones.
.... We couldn’t keep everyone. There wasn’t room.” The statement
is made as if she were tossing out old clothes or the week’s refuse,
not ending human lives.
But here’s the rub: Hanna is not an evil woman. Both earlier
and later in the movie she is portrayed as emotional and caring, yet
she carried out acts of tremendous evil. Thus the film raises again
Hannah Arendt’s (one cannot help but wonder if the character’s
name is homage to Arendt) point about the banality of evil: most
great acts of evil are not carried out by sociopaths or fanatics filled
with malice but by ordinary people who simply accept the jobs
they have been given. It is a sobering reminder that it is not so
much individual wickedness that leads to great evil but overpow-
ering institutions, like the state, and the strong tendency of people
to trust that their own societies are morally right.
Finally, it would be impossible to write about libertarian themes
in the past year’s Oscar-contenders without discussing Clint
Eastwood’s “Changeling,” which although nominated for three
Academy Awards did not win any. It is entirely appropriate that
Eastwood directed the year’s most libertarian film considering that
the actor-director is a self-described libertarian. According to the
Advocates for Self-Government’s libertarian celebrity website,
Eastwood told Parade magazine in 1997 that “[a]buse of power
isn’t limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own
country if we’re not vigilant. Those in power get jaded, deluded,
and seduced by power itself.” Though many of his films have
dealt with this issue, none has done more directly or forcefully
than “Changeling.”
The film is based on the true story of the disappearance of
Walter Collins. After Walter had been missing for several months,
the police tell his mother Christine Collins—played by Aneglina
Jolie—that he has been found alive in DeKalb, Illinois. When the
police reunite Christine with her “son,” she recognizes that the
boy is not Walter, but the police insist that he has changed in the
intervening months and she should take him home anyway. She
initially agrees but is quickly convinced that the boy cannot be
Walter and returns to the police demanding they resume the search
for her son. The police respond by trotting out a doctor to exam-
ine the boy given to Christine and to testify to the newspapers that
the boy is indeed Walter and that Christine must just be reacting
emotionally to his return. With the help of popular Presbyterian
minister Gustav Briegleb—played expertly by John Malkovich—
Christine decides to challenge the LAPD publicly with her own
evidence. In order to avoid embarrassment, the police have Chris-
tine involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward unless she signs
a document stating that the boy in her care is Walter.
There are a couple of salient libertarian points to be fleshed
out here. The first is that this is an effective demonstration of the
flaws in the very popular Progressive Era belief in the power of
experts. There was a strong consensus among Progressive intel-
38
June 2009
lectuals that almost all things—from the economy to schools to
reproduction—should be handed over to boards of experts so
that they could be “rationalized.” Naturally, it followed that there
was no need to question these experts, and as this idea seeped into
the populace at large, people would simply assume that a person
(especially a woman) placed under the control of “experts” at a
mental hospital by the police must be there for good reason. This
leads directly into a point first made by the great libertarian thinker
Thomas Szasz: psychiatry, particularly involuntary commitment,
can be used by the State as a weapon against those whose ideas
could be dangerous, or, in this case, embarrassing.
In the course of explaining how the LAPD had become a mur-
derous instrument for a gang to wipe out its competition, Rev.
Briegleb makes the most powerful libertarian statement in the
movie: “Once you give people the freedom to do whatever they
want—as the Lord found in the Garden of Eden—they will do
exactly that.” Of course, on the face of it, that is a very anti-lib-
ertarian statement, but Briegleb is not talking about a freedom
restrained by the rights of others. He is talking about the freedom
to crush those who oppose you, about absolute power. Even in a
year of many great libertarian films, “Changeling” is the strongest
indictment of that power.
John Payne is a social studies teacher at East Carter County High School in
Southeast Missouri. He blogs at RoughOlBoy.com.
 39
Young American Revolution
 This much is true: You are being lied to
Don’t Weep for Me, America-How Democracy
In American Became the Prince (While We Slept)

Abraham Lincoln’s Prediction-1864

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of
my country...corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and
the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the
people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

“THIS BOOK IS THE RED PILL” –Michael Wolsey

The American public is, overall, completely ignorant of their true history. Practically everything they
know about their country is a systematic, orchestrated falsehood.

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is
false.” –William Casey, former CIA Director, said in 1981

We are there.

What makes this book different from other books out there is the weaving in and out throughout the story
of the methods of deception used to fool the public and keep them under control, such as George Orwell’s
1984 and Plato’s Cave.

The American founders knew our republic would not last. Machiavelli would have predicted as much.
Tocqueville knew it.

The reason why the American Republic didn’t last is given by Abraham Lincoln in 1864: Ultimately, “...
all wealth is aggregated in a few hands”!

Chillingly, in this provocative book, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Orwell all come together to provide an ac-
curate picture of America today!

Written for the heart that yearns for freedom, This must-read book is essential reading and
available from the publisher, Dorrance Publishing at:
http://www.dorrancebookstore.com/doweformeamh.html or by calling 800-788-7654.
Quantities are limited.

ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY! 40

June 2009