The Fight for Liberty and the Beltway Barbarians

The Fight for Liberty and the Beltway Barbarians

by Murray and Rothbard.

In the conservative and libertarian movements,

there have been two major forms of surrender,

of abandonment of the cause.

The most common and most glaringly obvious form

is one we are all too familiar with, the sellout.

The young libertarian or conservative

arrives in Washington at some think tank

or in Congress or as an administrative aid,

ready and eager to do battle,

to roll back the state in service

to his cherished radical cause.

And then something happens.

Sometimes gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness.

You go to some cocktail parties,

you find that the enemy seems very pleasant.

You start getting enmeshed in Beltway, Marginalia.

And pretty soon you are placing the highest importance

on some trivial committee vote

or on some piddling little tax cut or amendment.

And eventually you are willing to abandon the battle

altogether for a cushy contract or a plush government job.

And as this sellout process continues,

you find that your major source of irritation

is not the statused enemy,

but the troublemakers out in the field

who are always yapping about principle

and even attacking you for selling out the cause.

And pretty soon you and the enemy have an indistinguishable face.

We are all too familiar with this sellout route.

And it is easy and proper to become indignant

at this moral treason to a cause that is just

to the battle against evil

and to your own once cherished comrades.

But there is another form of abandonment

that is not as evident and is more insidious.

And I don't mean simply loss of energy or interest.

In this form, which has been common

in the libertarian movement,

but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism,

the militant decides that the cause is hopeless

and gives up by deciding to abandon the corrupt

and rotten world and retreat in some way

to a pure and noble community of one's own.

To Randians, it's galt's galt from Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Other libertarians keep seeking to form

some underground community to capture a small town in the west,

to go underground in the forest,

or even to build a new libertarian country on an island

in the hills or whatever.

Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism.

In each case, the call arises to abandon the wicked world

and to form some tiny alternative community

in some backwards retreat.

Long ago, I labeled this view, retreatism.

You could call this strategy neo-Amish,

except that the Amish are productive farmers.

And these groups I'm afraid never make it up to that stage.

The rationale for retreatism always comes couched

in high moral as well as pseudo-psychological terms.

These purists, for example, claim that they, in contrast

to us benighted fighters, are living liberty,

that they are emphasizing the positive,

instead of focusing on the negative,

that they are living liberty and living a pure libertarian life,

whereas we grubby souls are still living in the corrupt

and contaminated real world.

For years, I have been replying to these sets of retreatists

that the real world, after all, is good,

that we libertarians may be anti-state,

but that we are emphatically not anti-society

or opposed to the real world.

However, contaminated it might be.

We propose to continue to fight, to save the values

and the principles, and the people we hold dear,

even though the battlefield may get muddy,

also I would cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne,

who proclaimed that we are American patriots,

not in the sense of patriotic adherence to the state,

but to the country, the nation,

to our glorious traditions and culture,

that are under dire attack.

Our stand should be in the famous words of Dos Pazos,

even though he said them as a Marxist.

All right, we are two nations.

America, as it exists today, is two nations.

One is their nation, the nation of the corrupt enemy,

of their Washington DC, their brainwashing public school system,

their bureaucracies, their media,

and the other is our much larger nation,

the majority, the far nobler nation,

that represents the older and the truer America.

We are the nation that is going to win,

that is going to take America back,

no matter how long it takes.

It is indeed a grave sin to abandon that nation

and that America, short of victory.

But are we then emphasizing the negative in a sense, yes?

But what else are we to stress when our values,

our principles, our very being, are under attack

from a relentless foe?

But we have to realize first that in the very course

of accentuating the negative,

we are also emphasizing the positive.

Why do we fight against, yes, even hate, the evil?

Only because we love the good and our stress

on the negative is only the other side of the coin,

the logical consequence of our devotion to the good,

to the positive values and principles that we cherish.

There is no reason why we can't stress

and spread our positive values at the same time

that we battle against their enemies.

The two actually go hand in hand.

Among conservatives and some libertarians,

these retreats sometimes took the form

of holding up in the woods or in a cave,

huddling amidst a year's supply of canned peaches

and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely to guard the peaches

and the cave from the nuclear explosion

or from the communist army.

They never came and even the cans of peaches

must be deteriorating by now.

The retreat was futile, but now in 1993,

the opposite danger is looming.

Namely, retreatist groups face the awful menace

of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid forces

of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

in their endless quest for shotguns,

one millimeter shorter than some regulation decrees

or for possible child abuse.

Retreatism is beginning to loom as a quick road to disaster.

Of course, in the last analysis,

none of these retreats generally announce

with great fanfare as the way to purity,

if not victory, have amounted to a hill of beans.

They are simply a rationale, a halfway house

to total abandonment of the cause

and disappearance from the stage of history.

The fascinating and crucial point to note

is that both of these routes,

even though seemingly diametrically opposite,

end up inexorably at the same place.

The sellout abandons the cause and betrays his comrades

for money or status or power.

The retreatist, properly loathing the sellouts,

concludes that the real world is impure and retreats out of it.

In both cases, whether in the name of pragmatism

or in the name of purity,

the cause, the fight against evil in the real world is abandoned.

Clearly, there is a vast moral difference

in the two courses of action.

The sellout is morally evil.

The retreatist in contrast is to put it kindly, terribly misguided.

The sellouts are not worth talking to.

The retreatist must realize that it is not betraying the cause

far from it to fight against evil

and not to abandon the real world.

The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression,

likes to relax and say,

who cares about material oppression

when the inner soul is free?

Well sure, it's good to have freedom of the inner soul.

I know the old bromides about how thought is free

and how the prisoner is free and is in her heart.

But call me a low-life materialist, if you wish.

But I believe, and I thought all libertarians and conservatives

believe to their core,

that man deserves more than that,

that we are not content with the inner freedom

of the prisoner in his sell,

that we raise the good old cry of liberty and property,

that we demand liberty in our external real world of space and dimension.

I thought that that's what the fight was all about.

Let's put it this way.

We must not abandon our lives, our properties,

our America, the real world, to the barbarians, never.

Let us act in the spirit of that magnificent hymn

that James Russell Lowell set to a lovely Welsh melody.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide

in the strife of truth with falsehood for the good or evil side.

Some great cause, God's new Messiah,

offer in each the bloom or blight,

and the choice goes by forever,

twix that darkness in that light,

though the cause of evil prosper,

yet his truth alone is strong,

though her portion be the scaffold upon the throne be wrong,

yet that scaffold sways the future,

and behind the dim unknown,

stand of God within the shadow,

keeping watch above his own.

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