WEBVTT NOTE 1. The Libertarian Heritage: The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Chapter 1. The Libertarian Heritage. The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism. 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:25.000 On Election Day 1976, the Libertarian Party presidential ticket of Roger L. McBride for president and David P. Berglund for vice president amassed 174,000 votes in 32 states throughout the country. 3 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:34.000 The sober Congressional Quarterly was moved to classify the fledgling Libertarian Party as the third major political party in America. 4 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:45.000 The remarkable growth rate of this new party may be seen in the fact that it only began in 1971, with a handful of members gathered in a Colorado living room. 5 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:55.000 The following year, it fielded a presidential ticket, which managed to get on the ballot in two states, and now it is America's third major party. 6 00:00:55.000 --> 00:01:05.000 Even more remarkably, the Libertarian Party achieved this growth while consistently adhering to a new ideological creed, libertarianism. 7 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:10.860 anditarianism, thus bringing to the American political scene for the first time in a century 8 00:01:10.860 --> 00:01:16.340 a party interested in principle rather than in merely gaining jobs and money at the public 9 00:01:16.340 --> 00:01:18.180 trough. 10 00:01:18.180 --> 00:01:23.540 We have been told countless times by pundits and political scientists that the genius of 11 00:01:23.540 --> 00:01:30.700 America and of our party system is its lack of ideology and its pragmatism, a kind word 12 00:01:30.700 --> 00:01:36.700 for focusing solely on grabbing money and jobs from the hapless taxpayers. 13 00:01:36.700 --> 00:01:42.660 How then explain the amazing growth of a new party which is frankly and eagerly devoted 14 00:01:42.660 --> 00:01:45.380 to ideology? 15 00:01:45.380 --> 00:01:51.540 One explanation is that Americans were not always pragmatic and non-ideological. 16 00:01:51.540 --> 00:01:57.380 On the contrary, historians now realize that the American Revolution itself was not only 17 00:01:57.380 --> 00:02:21.380 The American revolutionaries were steeped in the creed of libertarianism, an ideology which led them to resist with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, the invasions of their rights and liberties committed by the imperial British government. 18 00:02:21.380 --> 00:02:26.540 Historians have long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution. 19 00:02:26.540 --> 00:02:31.940 Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological? 20 00:02:31.940 --> 00:02:38.140 We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict between moral 21 00:02:38.140 --> 00:02:43.260 and political rights on the one hand and economic freedom on the other. 22 00:02:43.260 --> 00:02:48.740 On the contrary, they perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and 23 00:02:48.740 --> 00:02:54.980 and the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one unblemished system, what Adam 24 00:02:54.980 --> 00:03:00.340 Smith was to call, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the 25 00:03:00.340 --> 00:03:05.140 obvious and simple system of natural liberty. 26 00:03:05.140 --> 00:03:10.980 The libertarian creed emerged from the classical liberal movements of the 17th and 18th century 27 00:03:10.980 --> 00:03:17.740 in the Western world, specifically from the English Revolution of the 17th century. 28 00:03:17.740 --> 00:03:23.300 This radical libertarian movement, even though only partially successful in its birthplace, 29 00:03:23.300 --> 00:03:28.560 Great Britain, was still able to usher in the Industrial Revolution there by freeing 30 00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:35.260 industry and production from the strangling restrictions of state control and urban government-supported 31 00:03:35.260 --> 00:03:36.980 guilds. 32 00:03:36.980 --> 00:03:43.080 For the classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian revolution 33 00:03:43.080 --> 00:03:49.140 against what we might call the old order, the Ancien Régime, which had dominated its 34 00:03:49.140 --> 00:03:51.640 subjects for centuries. 35 00:03:51.640 --> 00:03:57.080 This Régime had, in the early modern period beginning in the 16th century, imposed an 36 00:03:57.080 --> 00:04:03.660 absolute central state and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older restrictive 37 00:04:03.660 --> 00:04:09.820 web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions. 38 00:04:09.820 --> 00:04:15.600 The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes and monopoly 39 00:04:15.600 --> 00:04:21.500 privileges to produce and sell, conferred by central and local governments upon their 40 00:04:21.500 --> 00:04:23.960 favorite producers. 41 00:04:23.960 --> 00:04:29.940 This alliance of the new bureaucratic war-making central state with privileged merchants, an 42 00:04:29.940 --> 00:04:36.080 alliance to be called mercantilism by later historians, and with a class of ruling feudal 43 00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:41.420 Classical landlords constituted the old order against which the new movement of classical 44 00:04:41.420 --> 00:04:48.360 liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the 17th and 18th centuries. 45 00:04:48.360 --> 00:04:53.160 The object of the classical liberals was to bring about individual liberty in all of its 46 00:04:53.160 --> 00:04:55.640 interrelated aspects. 47 00:04:55.640 --> 00:05:02.240 In the economy, taxes were to be drastically reduced, controls and regulations eliminated, 48 00:05:02.240 --> 00:05:08.600 and Human Energy, Enterprise and Markets set free to create and produce in exchanges that 49 00:05:08.600 --> 00:05:13.660 would benefit everyone and the mass of consumers. 50 00:05:13.660 --> 00:05:18.760 Entrepreneurs were to be free at last to compete, to develop, to create. 51 00:05:18.760 --> 00:05:25.080 The shackles of control were to be lifted from land, labor and capital alike. 52 00:05:25.080 --> 00:05:29.400 Personal freedom and civil liberty were to be guaranteed against the depredations and 53 00:05:29.400 --> 00:05:36.200 and Tyranny of the King or His Minions Religion, the source of bloody wars for centuries 54 00:05:36.200 --> 00:05:41.860 when sects were battling for control of the state, was to be set free from state imposition 55 00:05:41.860 --> 00:05:49.540 or interference, so that all religions, or non-religions, could coexist in peace. 56 00:05:49.540 --> 00:05:54.040 Peace too was the foreign policy credo of the new classical liberals. 57 00:05:54.040 --> 00:06:00.480 The age-old regime of imperial and state aggrandizement for power and pelf was to be replaced by 58 00:06:00.480 --> 00:06:05.680 a foreign policy of peace and free trade with all nations. 59 00:06:05.680 --> 00:06:12.400 And since war was seen as engendered by standing armies and navies, by military power always 60 00:06:12.400 --> 00:06:19.180 seeking expansion, these military establishments were to be replaced by voluntary local militia, 61 00:06:19.180 --> 00:06:24.540 by Citizen Civilians who would only wish to fight in defense of their own particular homes 62 00:06:24.540 --> 00:06:26.460 and neighborhoods. 63 00:06:26.460 --> 00:06:33.380 Thus, the well-known theme of separation of church and state was but one of many interrelated 64 00:06:33.380 --> 00:06:39.220 motifs that could be summed up as separation of the economy from the state, separation 65 00:06:39.220 --> 00:06:45.360 of speech and press from the state, separation of land from the state, separation of war 66 00:06:45.360 --> 00:06:48.220 and military affairs from the state. 67 00:06:48.220 --> 00:06:54.120 Indeed, the separation of the state from virtually everything. 68 00:06:54.120 --> 00:07:00.300 The state, in short, was to be kept extremely small, with a very low, nearly negligible 69 00:07:00.300 --> 00:07:01.820 budget. 70 00:07:01.820 --> 00:07:07.660 The classical liberals never developed a theory of taxation, but every increase in a tax and 71 00:07:07.660 --> 00:07:14.300 every new kind of tax was fought bitterly, in America twice becoming the spark that led 72 00:07:14.300 --> 00:07:20.460 or almost led to the Revolution, the Stamp Tax, the T-Tax. 73 00:07:20.460 --> 00:07:25.380 The earliest theoreticians of libertarian classical liberalism were the Levellers during 74 00:07:25.380 --> 00:07:31.420 the English Revolution and the philosopher John Locke in the late 17th century, followed 75 00:07:31.420 --> 00:07:38.740 by the true Whig or radical libertarian opposition to the Whig Settlement, the regime of 18th 76 00:07:38.740 --> 00:07:40.580 century Britain. 77 00:07:40.580 --> 00:07:46.620 John Locke set forth the natural rights of each individual to his person and property. 78 00:07:46.620 --> 00:07:51.640 The purpose of government was strictly limited to defending such rights. 79 00:07:51.640 --> 00:07:55.660 In the words of the Lockean-inspired Declaration of Independence, 80 00:07:55.660 --> 00:07:59.820 To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, 81 00:07:59.820 --> 00:08:04.000 deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. 82 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:08.220 That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, 83 00:08:08.220 --> 00:08:13.260 It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. 84 00:08:13.260 --> 00:08:18.660 While Locke was widely read in the American colonies, his abstract philosophy was scarcely 85 00:08:18.660 --> 00:08:22.420 calculated to rouse men to revolution. 86 00:08:22.420 --> 00:08:28.620 This task was accomplished by radical Lockeans in the 18th century, who wrote in a more popular, 87 00:08:28.620 --> 00:08:34.220 hard-hitting and impassioned manner and applied the basic philosophy to the concrete problems 88 00:08:34.220 --> 00:08:39.320 of the Government and especially the British Government of the day. 89 00:08:39.320 --> 00:08:45.000 The most important writing in this vein was Cato's Letters, a series of newspaper articles 90 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:52.720 published in the early 1720s in London by true Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. 91 00:08:52.720 --> 00:08:57.680 While Locke had written of the revolutionary pressure which could properly be exerted when 92 00:08:57.680 --> 00:09:03.280 government became destructive of liberty, Trenchard and Gordon pointed out that government 93 00:09:03.280 --> 00:09:08.480 always tended toward such destruction of individual rights. 94 00:09:08.480 --> 00:09:13.760 According to Cato's letters, human history is a record of irrepressible conflict between 95 00:09:13.760 --> 00:09:20.640 power and liberty, with power, government, always standing ready to increase its scope 96 00:09:20.640 --> 00:09:25.080 by invading people's rights and encroaching upon their liberties. 97 00:09:25.080 --> 00:09:31.800 Therefore, Cato declared, power must be kept small and faced with eternal vigilance and 98 00:09:31.800 --> 00:09:36.880 and Hostility on the part of the public to make sure that it always stays within its 99 00:09:36.880 --> 00:09:39.720 narrow bounds. 100 00:09:39.720 --> 00:09:45.840 We know by infinite examples and experience that men possessed of power, rather than part 101 00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:51.160 with it, will do anything, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it. 102 00:09:51.160 --> 00:09:56.320 And scarce ever any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry everything 103 00:09:56.320 --> 00:09:58.600 his own way in it. 104 00:09:58.600 --> 00:10:04.740 This seems certain, that the good of the world or of their people was not one of their motives 105 00:10:04.740 --> 00:10:09.200 either for continuing in power or for quitting it. 106 00:10:09.200 --> 00:10:15.360 It is the nature of power to be ever encroaching and converting every extraordinary power granted 107 00:10:15.360 --> 00:10:22.560 at particular times and upon particular occasions into an ordinary power to be used at all times 108 00:10:22.560 --> 00:10:29.400 and when there is no occasion, nor does it ever part willingly with any advantage. 109 00:10:29.400 --> 00:10:36.000 Alas, power encroaches daily upon liberty, with a success too evident, and the balance 110 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:39.320 between them is almost lost. 111 00:10:39.320 --> 00:10:45.560 Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole earth, and striking at mankind root and branch makes 112 00:10:45.560 --> 00:10:51.160 the world a slaughterhouse, and will certainly go on to destroy till it is either destroyed 113 00:10:51.160 --> 00:10:58.760 itself or, which is most likely, has left nothing else to destroy. 114 00:10:58.760 --> 00:11:04.400 Such warnings were eagerly imbibed by the American colonists who reprinted Cato's letters 115 00:11:04.400 --> 00:11:09.960 many times throughout the colonies and down to the time of the revolution. 116 00:11:09.960 --> 00:11:15.720 Such a deep-seated attitude led to what the historian Bernard Balin has aptly called the 117 00:11:15.720 --> 00:11:21.480 The Transforming Radical Libertarianism of the American Revolution 118 00:11:21.480 --> 00:11:26.560 For the revolution was not only the first successful modern attempt to throw off the 119 00:11:26.560 --> 00:11:32.840 yoke of Western imperialism, at that time of the world's mightiest power. 120 00:11:32.840 --> 00:11:38.160 More important, for the first time in history, Americans hedged in their new governments 121 00:11:38.160 --> 00:11:44.540 with numerous limits and restrictions embodied in constitutions and, particularly, in bills 122 00:11:44.540 --> 00:11:50.000 Rules of Rights Church and state were rigorously separated 123 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:54.580 throughout the new states, and religious freedom enshrined. 124 00:11:54.580 --> 00:11:59.220 Remnants of feudalism were eliminated throughout the states by the abolition of the feudal 125 00:11:59.220 --> 00:12:02.980 privileges of entail and primogeniture. 126 00:12:02.980 --> 00:12:09.820 In the former, a dead ancestor is able to entail landed estates in his family forever, 127 00:12:09.820 --> 00:12:13.660 preventing his heirs from selling any part of the land. 128 00:12:13.660 --> 00:12:20.880 In the latter, the government requires sole inheritance of property by the oldest son. 129 00:12:20.880 --> 00:12:25.940 The new federal government formed by the Articles of Confederation was not permitted to levy 130 00:12:25.940 --> 00:12:31.940 any taxes upon the public, and any fundamental extension of its powers required unanimous 131 00:12:31.940 --> 00:12:35.540 consent by every state government. 132 00:12:35.540 --> 00:12:41.000 Above all, the military and war-making power of the national government was hedged in by 133 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:43.360 restraint and suspicion. 134 00:12:43.360 --> 00:12:49.340 For the 18th century libertarians understood that war, standing armies and militarism had 135 00:12:49.340 --> 00:12:54.720 long been the main method for aggrandizing state power. 136 00:12:54.720 --> 00:13:00.520 Bernard Balin has summed up the achievement of the American revolutionaries. 137 00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:05.680 The modernization of American politics and government during and after the revolution 138 00:13:05.680 --> 00:13:11.040 took the form of a sudden radical realization of the program that had first been fully set 139 00:13:11.040 --> 00:13:17.020 set forth by the opposition intelligentsia in the reign of George I. 140 00:13:17.020 --> 00:13:21.980 Where the English opposition, forcing its way against a complacent social and political 141 00:13:21.980 --> 00:13:28.880 order, had only striven and dreamed, Americans, driven by the same aspirations but living 142 00:13:28.880 --> 00:13:35.920 in a society in many ways modern and now released politically, could suddenly act. 143 00:13:35.920 --> 00:13:42.000 Where the English opposition had vainly agitated for partial reforms, American leaders moved 144 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:47.400 swiftly and with little social disruption to implement systematically the outermost 145 00:13:47.400 --> 00:13:53.060 possibilities in the whole range of radically libertarian ideas. 146 00:13:53.060 --> 00:13:59.000 In the process, they infused into American political culture the major themes of 18th 147 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:03.900 century radical libertarianism brought to realization here. 148 00:14:03.900 --> 00:14:10.460 The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps, but an evil necessity, 149 00:14:10.460 --> 00:14:15.540 that it is infinitely corrupting and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted 150 00:14:15.540 --> 00:14:20.420 in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order. 151 00:14:20.420 --> 00:14:27.240 Written constitutions, the separation of powers, bills of rights, limitations on executives, 152 00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:33.700 on legislatures and courts, restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war, all express 153 00:14:33.700 --> 00:14:39.360 express the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American 154 00:14:39.360 --> 00:14:45.220 Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after. 155 00:14:45.220 --> 00:14:51.640 Thus, while classical liberal thought began in England, it was to reach its most consistent 156 00:14:51.640 --> 00:14:57.420 and radical development and its greatest living embodiment in America. 157 00:14:57.420 --> 00:15:02.580 For the American colonies were free of the feudal land monopoly and aristocratic ruling 158 00:15:02.580 --> 00:15:11.620 In America, the rulers were British colonial officials and a handful of privileged merchants, 159 00:15:11.620 --> 00:15:16.960 who were relatively easy to sweep aside when the revolution came, and the British government 160 00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:19.640 was overthrown. 161 00:15:19.640 --> 00:15:24.760 Classical liberalism, therefore, had more popular support and met far less entrenched 162 00:15:24.760 --> 00:15:29.880 institutional resistance in the American colonies than it found at home. 163 00:15:29.880 --> 00:15:35.160 Furthermore, being geographically isolated, the American rebels did not have to worry 164 00:15:35.160 --> 00:15:45.120 about the invading armies of neighboring counter-revolutionary governments, as for example was the case in France. 165 00:15:45.120 --> 00:15:46.120 After the Revolution 166 00:15:46.120 --> 00:15:54.800 Thus, America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly libertarian revolution. 167 00:15:54.800 --> 00:16:01.640 A revolution against empire, against taxation, trade monopoly and regulation, and against 168 00:16:01.640 --> 00:16:05.080 militarism and executive power. 169 00:16:05.080 --> 00:16:11.700 The revolution resulted in governments unprecedented in restrictions placed on their power. 170 00:16:11.700 --> 00:16:17.960 But while there was very little institutional resistance in America to the onrush of liberalism, 171 00:16:17.960 --> 00:16:24.320 there did appear from the very beginning powerful elite forces, especially among the large merchants 172 00:16:24.320 --> 00:16:29.440 Groups and Planters who wished to retain the restrictive British mercantilist system of 173 00:16:29.440 --> 00:16:35.920 high taxes, controls and monopoly privileges conferred by the government. 174 00:16:35.920 --> 00:16:40.800 These groups wished for a strong central and even imperial government. 175 00:16:40.800 --> 00:16:45.760 In short, they wanted the British system without Great Britain. 176 00:16:45.760 --> 00:16:51.040 These conservative and reactionary forces first appeared during the revolution and later 177 00:16:51.040 --> 00:16:58.080 underformed the Federalist Party and the Federalist Administration in the 1790s. 178 00:16:58.080 --> 00:17:02.640 During the 19th century, however, the libertarian impetus continued. 179 00:17:02.640 --> 00:17:08.460 The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movements, the Democratic-Republican and then the Democratic 180 00:17:08.460 --> 00:17:15.880 parties, explicitly strived for the virtual elimination of government from American life. 181 00:17:15.880 --> 00:17:21.220 It was to be a government without a standing army or navy, a government without debt and 182 00:17:21.220 --> 00:17:27.640 with no direct federal or excise taxes and virtually no import tariffs, that is, with 183 00:17:27.640 --> 00:17:33.720 negligible levels of taxation and expenditure, a government that does not engage in public 184 00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:40.000 works or internal improvements, a government that does not control or regulate, a government 185 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:45.000 A government that leaves money and banking free, hard and uninflated. 186 00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:50.360 In short, in the words of H. L. Mencken's ideal, a government that barely escapes being 187 00:17:50.360 --> 00:17:52.840 no government at all. 188 00:17:52.840 --> 00:17:59.320 The Jeffersonian drive toward virtually no government, founded after Jefferson took office, 189 00:17:59.320 --> 00:18:04.000 first with concessions to the Federalists, possibly the result of a deal for Federalist 190 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:09.760 votes to break a tie in the Electoral College, and then with the unconstitutional purchase 191 00:18:09.760 --> 00:18:12.520 Office of the Louisiana Territory. 192 00:18:12.520 --> 00:18:17.720 But most particularly it foundered with the imperialist drive toward war with Britain 193 00:18:17.720 --> 00:18:24.100 in Jefferson's second term, a drive which led to war and to a one-party system which 194 00:18:24.100 --> 00:18:30.600 established virtually the entire statist federalist program, high military expenditures, 195 00:18:30.600 --> 00:18:37.000 a central bank, a protective tariff, direct federal taxes, public works. 196 00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:43.320 Horrified at the results, a retired Jefferson brooded at Monticello and inspired young visiting 197 00:18:43.320 --> 00:18:50.200 politicians Martin Van Buren and Thomas Hart Benton to found a new party, the Democratic Party, 198 00:18:50.200 --> 00:18:56.440 to take back America from the new federalism and to recapture the spirit of the old Jeffersonian 199 00:18:56.440 --> 00:19:03.560 program. When the two young leaders latched on to Andrew Jackson as their savior, the new Democratic 200 00:19:03.560 --> 00:19:06.140 Party was born. 201 00:19:06.140 --> 00:19:09.300 The Jacksonian Libertarians had a plan. 202 00:19:09.300 --> 00:19:14.120 It was to be eight years of Andrew Jackson as president, to be followed by eight years 203 00:19:14.120 --> 00:19:17.900 of Van Buren, then eight years of Benton. 204 00:19:17.900 --> 00:19:24.500 After 24 years of a triumphant Jacksonian democracy, the Mancheanian virtually no government 205 00:19:24.500 --> 00:19:27.800 ideal was to have been achieved. 206 00:19:27.800 --> 00:19:33.320 It was by no means an impossible dream, since it was clear that the Democratic Party had 207 00:19:33.320 --> 00:19:37.800 had quickly become the normal majority party in the country. 208 00:19:37.800 --> 00:19:42.380 The mass of the people were enlisted in the libertarian cause. 209 00:19:42.380 --> 00:19:47.940 Jackson had his eight years, which destroyed the central bank and retired the public debt, 210 00:19:47.940 --> 00:19:53.780 and Van Buren had four, which separated the federal government from the banking system. 211 00:19:53.780 --> 00:20:00.000 But the 1840 election was an anomaly, as Van Buren was defeated by an unprecedentedly 212 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:07.160 A demagogic campaign engineered by the first great modern campaign chairman, Thurlow Weed, 213 00:20:07.160 --> 00:20:14.700 who pioneered in all the campaign frills, catchy slogans, buttons, songs, parades, etc., 214 00:20:14.700 --> 00:20:17.300 with which we are now familiar. 215 00:20:17.300 --> 00:20:23.400 Weed's tactics put in office the egregious and unknown Whig, General William Henry Harrison, 216 00:20:23.400 --> 00:20:25.860 but this was clearly a fluke. 217 00:20:25.860 --> 00:20:31.980 In 1844, the Democrats would be prepared to counter with the same campaign tactics, and 218 00:20:31.980 --> 00:20:36.020 they were clearly slated to recapture the presidency that year. 219 00:20:36.020 --> 00:20:41.740 Van Buren, of course, was supposed to resume the triumphal Jacksonian march. 220 00:20:41.740 --> 00:20:44.340 But then a fateful event occurred. 221 00:20:44.340 --> 00:20:49.960 The Democratic Party was sundered on the critical issue of slavery, or rather, the expansion 222 00:20:49.960 --> 00:20:52.700 of slavery into a new territory. 223 00:20:52.700 --> 00:21:02.700 Van Buren's easy re-nomination foundered on a split within the ranks of the democracy over the admission to the Union of the Republic of Texas as a slave state. 224 00:21:02.700 --> 00:21:12.700 Van Buren was opposed, Jackson in favor, and this split symbolized the wider sectional rift within the Democratic Party. 225 00:21:12.700 --> 00:21:19.700 Slavery, the grave anti-libertarian flaw in the libertarianism of the Democratic program, 226 00:21:19.700 --> 00:21:25.500 had arisen to wreck the party and its libertarianism completely. 227 00:21:25.500 --> 00:21:31.380 The Civil War, in addition to its unprecedented bloodshed and devastation, was used by the 228 00:21:31.380 --> 00:21:37.940 triumphal and virtually one-party Republican regime to drive through its statist, formerly 229 00:21:37.940 --> 00:21:40.140 HWIG program. 230 00:21:40.140 --> 00:21:46.020 National government power, protective tariff, subsidies to big business, inflationary paper 231 00:21:46.020 --> 00:21:52.060 over money, resumed control of the federal government over banking, large-scale internal 232 00:21:52.060 --> 00:21:59.180 improvements, high excise taxes, and, during the war, conscription and an income tax. 233 00:21:59.180 --> 00:22:05.380 Furthermore, the states came to lose their previous right of secession and other states' 234 00:22:05.380 --> 00:22:09.060 powers as opposed to federal government powers. 235 00:22:09.060 --> 00:22:15.100 The Democratic Party resumed its libertarian ways after the war, but it now had to face 236 00:22:15.100 --> 00:22:21.780 A Far Longer and More Difficult Road to Arrive at Liberty Than It Had Before 237 00:22:21.780 --> 00:22:27.300 We have seen how America came to have the deepest libertarian tradition, a tradition 238 00:22:27.300 --> 00:22:32.740 that still remains in much of our political rhetoric and is still reflected in a feisty 239 00:22:32.740 --> 00:22:38.500 and individualistic attitude toward government by much of the American people. 240 00:22:38.500 --> 00:22:44.700 There is far more fertile soil in this country than in any other for a resurgence of libertarianism. 241 00:22:44.700 --> 00:22:49.700 Resistance to Liberty 242 00:22:49.700 --> 00:23:04.700 We can now see that the rapid growth of the libertarian movement and the libertarian party in the 1970s is firmly rooted in what Bernard Bailyn called this powerful permanent legacy of the American Revolution. 243 00:23:04.700 --> 00:23:09.700 But if this legacy is so vital to the American tradition, what went wrong? 244 00:23:09.700 --> 00:23:18.400 Why the need now for a new libertarian movement to arise to reclaim the American dream? 245 00:23:18.400 --> 00:23:23.900 To begin to answer this question, we must first remember that classical liberalism constituted 246 00:23:23.900 --> 00:23:30.220 a profound threat to the political and economic interests, the ruling classes who benefited 247 00:23:30.220 --> 00:23:36.720 from the old order, the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, 248 00:23:36.720 --> 00:23:44.200 The Military Machines, The State Bureaucracies Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated 249 00:23:44.200 --> 00:23:51.120 by the liberals, the English of the 17th century and the American and French of the 18th, victories 250 00:23:51.120 --> 00:23:54.360 in Europe were only partial. 251 00:23:54.360 --> 00:24:00.680 Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments 252 00:24:00.680 --> 00:24:06.920 and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted 253 00:24:06.920 --> 00:24:09.600 to the wealthy elite. 254 00:24:09.600 --> 00:24:14.720 The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both 255 00:24:14.720 --> 00:24:20.360 sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in 256 00:24:20.360 --> 00:24:22.960 individual liberty. 257 00:24:22.960 --> 00:24:28.040 It is interesting to note that by the early 19th century, the laissez-faire forces were 258 00:24:28.040 --> 00:24:33.820 were known as liberals and radicals, for the purer and more consistent among them, and 259 00:24:33.820 --> 00:24:38.840 the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the old order were broadly known 260 00:24:38.840 --> 00:24:40.760 as conservatives. 261 00:24:40.760 --> 00:24:48.080 Indeed, conservatism began in the early 19th century as a conscious attempt to undo and 262 00:24:48.080 --> 00:24:54.340 destroy the hated work of the new classical liberal spirit, of the American, French and 263 00:24:54.340 --> 00:24:57.180 Industrial Revolutions. 264 00:24:57.180 --> 00:25:04.100 Led by two reactionary French thinkers, de Bonnall and de Maistre, conservatism yearned 265 00:25:04.100 --> 00:25:09.820 to replace equal rights and equality before the law by the structured and hierarchical 266 00:25:09.820 --> 00:25:16.980 rule of privileged elites, individual liberty and minimal government by absolute rule and 267 00:25:16.980 --> 00:25:23.980 big government, religious freedom by the theocratic rule of a state church, peace and free trade, 268 00:25:24.340 --> 00:25:31.700 Trade by militarism, mercantilist restrictions and war for the advantage of the nation-state, 269 00:25:31.700 --> 00:25:37.620 and industry and manufacturing by the old feudal and agrarian order, and they wanted 270 00:25:37.620 --> 00:25:43.420 to replace the new world of mass consumption and rising standards of living for all by 271 00:25:43.420 --> 00:25:49.220 the old order of bare subsistence for the masses and luxury consumption for the ruling 272 00:25:49.220 --> 00:25:51.400 elite. 273 00:25:51.400 --> 00:25:56.560 By the middle of, and certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives began 274 00:25:56.560 --> 00:26:01.680 to realize that their cause was inevitably doomed if they persisted in clinging to the 275 00:26:01.680 --> 00:26:07.440 call for outright repeal of the Industrial Revolution and of its enormous rise in the 276 00:26:07.440 --> 00:26:12.720 living standards of the mass of the public, and also if they persisted in opposing the 277 00:26:12.720 --> 00:26:18.360 widening of the suffrage, thereby frankly setting themselves in opposition to the interests 278 00:26:18.360 --> 00:26:26.960 Hence, the right wing, a label based on an accident of geography by which the spokesman 279 00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:32.640 for the old order sat on the right of the assembly hall during the French Revolution, 280 00:26:32.640 --> 00:26:38.280 decided to shift their gears and to update their statist creed by jettisoning outright 281 00:26:38.280 --> 00:26:42.960 opposition to industrialism and democratic suffrage. 282 00:26:42.960 --> 00:26:48.400 For the old conservatism's frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the public, the new 283 00:26:48.400 --> 00:26:53.120 conservatives substituted duplicity and demagogy. 284 00:26:53.120 --> 00:26:57.440 The new conservatives wooed the masses with the following line. 285 00:26:57.440 --> 00:27:01.840 We too favor industrialism and a higher standard of living. 286 00:27:01.840 --> 00:27:06.800 But to accomplish such ends, we must regulate industry for the public good. 287 00:27:06.800 --> 00:27:12.640 We must substitute organized cooperation for the dog-eat-dog of the free and competitive 288 00:27:12.640 --> 00:27:19.120 of Marketplace, and above all, we must substitute for the nation destroying liberal tenets of 289 00:27:19.120 --> 00:27:25.920 peace and free trade, the nation glorifying measures of war, protectionism, empire and 290 00:27:25.920 --> 00:27:28.460 military prowess. 291 00:27:28.460 --> 00:27:35.700 For all of these changes, of course, big government, rather than minimal government, was required. 292 00:27:35.700 --> 00:27:41.600 And so, in the late 19th century, statism and big government returned, but this time 293 00:27:41.600 --> 00:27:52.800 The Old Order returned, but this time the beneficiaries were shuffled a bit. 294 00:27:52.800 --> 00:27:58.240 They were not so much the nobility, the feudal landlords, the army, the bureaucracy and 295 00:27:58.240 --> 00:28:04.760 privileged merchants, as they were the army, the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords 296 00:28:04.760 --> 00:28:09.040 and especially the privileged manufacturers. 297 00:28:09.040 --> 00:28:14.440 Directed by Bismarck and Prussia, the new right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based 298 00:28:14.440 --> 00:28:21.800 on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of business and industry, 299 00:28:21.800 --> 00:28:28.400 a giant network of controls, regulations, subsidies and privileges which forged a great 300 00:28:28.400 --> 00:28:35.480 partnership of big government with certain favored elements in big business and industry. 301 00:28:35.480 --> 00:28:40.200 Everything had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a massive number of industrial 302 00:28:40.200 --> 00:28:43.840 wage workers, the proletariat. 303 00:28:43.840 --> 00:28:49.720 During the 18th and early 19th centuries, indeed until the late 19th century, the mass 304 00:28:49.720 --> 00:28:55.560 of workers favored laissez-faire and the free competitive market, as best for their wages 305 00:28:55.560 --> 00:29:01.200 and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer goods 306 00:29:01.200 --> 00:29:03.600 as consumers. 307 00:29:03.600 --> 00:29:10.360 Even the early trade unions, for example in Great Britain, were staunch believers in laissez-faire. 308 00:29:10.360 --> 00:29:16.200 New conservatives, spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened 309 00:29:16.200 --> 00:29:21.520 the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears about the condition of the 310 00:29:21.520 --> 00:29:28.360 industrial labor force and cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling 311 00:29:28.360 --> 00:29:30.320 efficient competition. 312 00:29:30.320 --> 00:29:37.040 Finally, in the early 20th century, the new conservative corporate state, then and now 313 00:29:37.040 --> 00:29:43.580 the dominant political system in the Western world, incorporated responsible and corporatist 314 00:29:43.580 --> 00:29:49.880 trade unions as junior partners to big government and favored big businesses in the new statist 315 00:29:49.880 --> 00:29:53.940 and corporatist decision-making system. 316 00:29:53.940 --> 00:29:59.720 To establish this new system, to create a new order which was a modernized, dressed-up 317 00:29:59.720 --> 00:30:11.840 The New ruling elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that 318 00:30:11.840 --> 00:30:14.600 continues to this day. 319 00:30:14.600 --> 00:30:20.880 Whereas the existence of every government from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship 320 00:30:20.880 --> 00:30:26.800 rests on the consent of the majority of the public, a democratic government must engineer 321 00:30:26.800 --> 00:30:31.560 to acquire such consent on a more immediate, day-by-day basis. 322 00:30:31.560 --> 00:30:37.560 And to do so, the new conservative ruling elites had to gull the public in many crucial 323 00:30:37.560 --> 00:30:39.880 and fundamental ways. 324 00:30:39.880 --> 00:30:46.100 For the masses now had to be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized 325 00:30:46.100 --> 00:30:51.840 and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers than a freely competitive 326 00:30:51.840 --> 00:30:59.280 That a cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of anti-monopoly, and that war 327 00:30:59.280 --> 00:31:05.260 and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests 328 00:31:05.260 --> 00:31:09.660 of the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public. 329 00:31:09.660 --> 00:31:12.480 How was this to be done? 330 00:31:12.480 --> 00:31:18.540 In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion molders 331 00:31:18.540 --> 00:31:20.500 of society. 332 00:31:20.500 --> 00:31:25.660 For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts. 333 00:31:25.660 --> 00:31:30.940 On the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual 334 00:31:30.940 --> 00:31:35.140 classes, the professional dealers in ideas. 335 00:31:35.140 --> 00:31:41.100 Now throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of states 336 00:31:41.100 --> 00:31:45.940 have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens 337 00:31:45.940 --> 00:31:48.200 in a free society. 338 00:31:48.200 --> 00:31:54.020 Our states have always needed opinion-molding intellectuals to con the public into believing 339 00:31:54.020 --> 00:32:02.060 that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable, into believing that the emperor has clothes. 340 00:32:02.060 --> 00:32:07.600 Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen, or witch-doctors, 341 00:32:07.600 --> 00:32:09.780 the guardians of religion. 342 00:32:09.780 --> 00:32:15.360 It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between church and state. 343 00:32:15.360 --> 00:32:21.000 The Church informed its deluded charges that the King ruled by divine command and therefore 344 00:32:21.000 --> 00:32:23.080 must be obeyed. 345 00:32:23.080 --> 00:32:29.020 In return, the King funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church, hence 346 00:32:29.020 --> 00:32:34.920 the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church 347 00:32:34.920 --> 00:32:36.680 and State. 348 00:32:36.680 --> 00:32:41.700 The new liberal world was a world in which intellectuals could be secular, could make 349 00:32:41.700 --> 00:32:47.180 make a living on their own, in the market, apart from state subvention. 350 00:32:47.180 --> 00:32:52.780 To establish their new statist order, their neo-mercantilist corporate state, the new 351 00:32:52.780 --> 00:32:59.420 conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between intellectual and state. 352 00:32:59.420 --> 00:33:04.900 In an increasingly secular age, this meant with secular intellectuals, rather than with 353 00:33:04.900 --> 00:33:11.900 and Divines, specifically with the new breed of professors, PhDs, historians, teachers, 354 00:33:11.900 --> 00:33:18.980 and technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians, and engineers. 355 00:33:18.980 --> 00:33:22.580 This reforged alliance came in two parts. 356 00:33:22.580 --> 00:33:27.980 In the early 19th century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies, 357 00:33:27.980 --> 00:33:35.300 relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy. 358 00:33:35.300 --> 00:33:40.380 By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could 359 00:33:40.380 --> 00:33:46.740 gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship 360 00:33:46.740 --> 00:33:51.000 the nation-state and its war-making machine. 361 00:33:51.000 --> 00:33:55.480 In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism adopted the trappings 362 00:33:55.480 --> 00:33:58.480 of Reason and of Science. 363 00:33:58.480 --> 00:34:05.480 Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of society by technocratic 364 00:34:05.480 --> 00:34:07.400 experts. 365 00:34:07.400 --> 00:34:12.240 In exchange for spreading this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals 366 00:34:12.240 --> 00:34:19.120 was rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the new order, and as planners and regulators 367 00:34:19.120 --> 00:34:23.880 of the newly cartelized economy and society. 368 00:34:23.880 --> 00:34:29.100 To ensure the dominance of the new statism over public opinion, to ensure that the public's 369 00:34:29.100 --> 00:34:34.640 consent would be engineered, the governments of the Western world in the late 19th and 370 00:34:34.640 --> 00:34:41.080 early 20th centuries moved to seize control over education over the minds of men, over 371 00:34:41.080 --> 00:34:46.320 the universities, and over general education through compulsory school attendance laws 372 00:34:46.320 --> 00:34:49.340 and a network of public schools. 373 00:34:49.340 --> 00:34:54.940 The public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience to the state as well as 374 00:34:54.940 --> 00:35:02.480 other civic virtues among their young charges. Furthermore, this statizing of education ensured 375 00:35:02.480 --> 00:35:08.020 that one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would be the nation's teachers 376 00:35:08.020 --> 00:35:14.300 and professional educationists. One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did 377 00:35:14.300 --> 00:35:25.300 The reason why they did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. 378 00:35:25.300 --> 00:35:35.300 For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as liberals, and the purest and most militant of them as radicals. 379 00:35:35.300 --> 00:35:46.300 have also been known as progressives, because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. 380 00:35:46.300 --> 00:35:54.300 The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words liberal and progressive, 381 00:35:54.300 --> 00:36:03.300 and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, neanderthal, and reactionary. 382 00:36:03.300 --> 00:36:14.300 Even the name conservative was pinned on the classical liberals, and as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of reason as well. 383 00:36:15.300 --> 00:36:24.300 If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as progressive corporate statism, 384 00:36:24.300 --> 00:36:34.300 Another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the 19th century was the growth of a peculiar new movement, socialism. 385 00:36:34.300 --> 00:36:40.300 Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. 386 00:36:40.300 --> 00:36:53.300 The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great pre-existing polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. 387 00:36:53.300 --> 00:36:54.780 and Socialism. 388 00:36:54.780 --> 00:36:59.620 From the classical liberals, the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and 389 00:36:59.620 --> 00:37:06.280 the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of science and reason, and at least a rhetorical 390 00:37:06.280 --> 00:37:11.780 devotion to such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising 391 00:37:11.780 --> 00:37:13.580 standard of living. 392 00:37:13.580 --> 00:37:19.980 Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting 393 00:37:19.980 --> 00:37:26.220 of Science, Reason and Industrialism, and the socialists not only adopted the classical 394 00:37:26.220 --> 00:37:32.620 liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an expanded democracy in 395 00:37:32.620 --> 00:37:37.760 which the people would run the economy and each other. 396 00:37:37.760 --> 00:37:42.500 On the other hand, from the conservatives, the socialists took a devotion to coercion 397 00:37:42.500 --> 00:37:48.240 and the statist means for trying to achieve these liberal goals. 398 00:37:48.240 --> 00:37:54.080 Social Harmony and Growth were to be achieved by aggrandizing the state into an all-powerful 399 00:37:54.080 --> 00:38:00.480 institution, ruling the economy and the society in the name of science. 400 00:38:00.480 --> 00:38:07.360 A vanguard of technocrats was to assume all-powerful rule over everyone's person and property 401 00:38:07.360 --> 00:38:11.360 in the name of the people and of democracy. 402 00:38:11.360 --> 00:38:16.820 Not content with the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for scientific research, 403 00:38:16.820 --> 00:38:23.320 The Socialist State would install rule by the scientists of everyone else. 404 00:38:23.320 --> 00:38:29.040 Not content with liberals setting the workers free to achieve undreamt of prosperity, the 405 00:38:29.040 --> 00:38:35.840 Socialist State would install rule by the workers of everyone else, or rather, rule 406 00:38:35.840 --> 00:38:40.960 by politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats in their name. 407 00:38:40.960 --> 00:38:46.700 Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the 408 00:38:46.700 --> 00:38:52.300 The socialist state would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible 409 00:38:52.300 --> 00:39:00.100 goal of equality or uniformity of results, or, rather, would erect a new privileged elite, 410 00:39:00.100 --> 00:39:07.300 a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality. 411 00:39:07.300 --> 00:39:12.420 Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals 412 00:39:12.420 --> 00:39:18.660 Goals of Freedom, Peace and Industrial Harmony and Growth, Goals which can only be achieved 413 00:39:18.660 --> 00:39:24.360 through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything, by imposing the 414 00:39:24.360 --> 00:39:30.960 old conservative means of statism, collectivism and hierarchical privilege. 415 00:39:30.960 --> 00:39:36.880 It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous 416 00:39:36.880 --> 00:39:46.880 in the 20th century by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation and grinding impoverishment. 417 00:39:47.880 --> 00:39:55.880 But the worst thing about the rise of the socialist movement was that it was able to outflank the classical liberals on the left. 418 00:39:56.880 --> 00:40:01.880 That is, as the party of hope, of radicalism, of revolution in the western world. 419 00:40:01.880 --> 00:40:13.880 For just as the defenders of the Ancien Régime took their place on the right side of the hall during the French Revolution, so the liberals and radicals sat on the left. 420 00:40:13.880 --> 00:40:25.880 From then on until the rise of socialism, the libertarian classical liberals were the left, even the extreme left on the ideological spectrum. 421 00:40:25.880 --> 00:40:34.880 As late as 1848, such militant laissez-faire French liberals as Frederic Bastiat sat on the left in the National Assembly. 422 00:40:34.880 --> 00:40:40.880 The classical liberals had begun as the radical revolutionary party in the West, 423 00:40:40.880 --> 00:40:46.880 as the party of hope and of change on behalf of liberty, peace and progress. 424 00:40:46.880 --> 00:40:54.880 To allow themselves to be outflanked, to allow the socialists to pose as the party of the left, was a bad strategic error. 425 00:40:54.880 --> 00:41:01.120 Error, allowing the liberals to be put falsely into a confused middle-of-the-road position 426 00:41:01.120 --> 00:41:06.400 with socialism and conservatism as the polar opposites. 427 00:41:06.400 --> 00:41:13.120 Since libertarianism is nothing if not a party of change and of progress toward liberty, 428 00:41:13.120 --> 00:41:17.880 abandonment of that role meant the abandonment of much of their reason for existence, either 429 00:41:17.880 --> 00:41:21.940 in reality or in the minds of the public. 430 00:41:21.940 --> 00:41:26.660 But none of this could have happened if the classical liberals had not allowed themselves 431 00:41:26.660 --> 00:41:29.280 to decay from within. 432 00:41:29.280 --> 00:41:35.100 They could have pointed out, as some of them indeed did, that socialism was a confused, 433 00:41:35.100 --> 00:41:41.620 self-contradictory, quasi-conservative movement, absolute monarchy and feudalism with a modern 434 00:41:41.620 --> 00:41:48.280 face, and that they themselves were still the only true radicals, undaunted people who 435 00:41:48.280 --> 00:41:57.720 Who Insisted on Nothing Less Than Complete Victory for the Libertarian Ideal, Decay from Within 436 00:41:57.720 --> 00:42:03.840 But after achieving impressive partial victories against statism, the classical liberals began 437 00:42:03.840 --> 00:42:09.840 to lose their radicalism, their dogged insistence on carrying the battle against conservative 438 00:42:09.840 --> 00:42:13.840 statism to the point of final victory. 439 00:42:13.840 --> 00:42:19.380 Instead of using partial victories as a stepping stone for ever more pressure, the classical 440 00:42:19.380 --> 00:42:25.060 liberals began to lose their fervor for change and for purity of principle. 441 00:42:25.060 --> 00:42:30.520 They began to rest content with trying to safeguard their existing victories, and thus 442 00:42:30.520 --> 00:42:35.880 turned themselves from a radical into a conservative movement. 443 00:42:35.880 --> 00:42:40.620 Conservative in the sense of being content to preserve the status quo. 444 00:42:40.620 --> 00:42:45.940 In short, the liberals left the field wide open for socialism to become the party of 445 00:42:45.940 --> 00:42:52.840 hope and of radicalism, and even for the later corporatists to pose as liberals and progressives 446 00:42:52.840 --> 00:42:59.340 as against the extreme right-wing and conservative libertarian classical liberals, since the 447 00:42:59.340 --> 00:43:04.260 latter allowed themselves to be boxed into a position of hoping for nothing more than 448 00:43:04.260 --> 00:43:08.220 stasis, than absence of change. 449 00:43:08.220 --> 00:43:14.020 Such a strategy is foolish and untenable in a changing world. 450 00:43:14.020 --> 00:43:19.380 But the degeneration of liberalism was not merely one of stance and strategy, but one 451 00:43:19.380 --> 00:43:21.480 of principle as well. 452 00:43:21.480 --> 00:43:26.900 For the liberals became content to leave the war-making power in the hands of the state, 453 00:43:26.900 --> 00:43:32.140 to leave the education power in its hands, to leave the power over money and banking 454 00:43:32.140 --> 00:43:35.500 and over roads in the hands of the state. 455 00:43:35.500 --> 00:43:43.060 In short, to concede to state dominion over all the crucial levers of power in society. 456 00:43:43.060 --> 00:43:49.780 In contrast to the 18th century liberals' total hostility to the executive and to bureaucracy, 457 00:43:49.780 --> 00:43:55.940 the 19th century liberals tolerated and even welcomed the buildup of executive power and 458 00:43:55.940 --> 00:44:00.220 of an entrenched oligarchic civil service bureaucracy. 459 00:44:00.220 --> 00:44:07.220 Moreover, principle and strategy merged in the decay of 18th century and early 19th century 460 00:44:07.220 --> 00:44:13.920 liberal devotion to abolitionism, to the view that, whether the institution be slavery or 461 00:44:13.920 --> 00:44:19.860 any other aspect of statism, it should be abolished as quickly as possible, since the 462 00:44:19.860 --> 00:44:26.100 immediate abolition of statism, while unlikely in practice, was to be sought after as the 463 00:44:26.100 --> 00:44:29.760 only possible moral position. 464 00:44:29.760 --> 00:44:35.660 Therefore to prefer a gradual whittling away to immediate abolition of an evil and coercive 465 00:44:35.660 --> 00:44:42.200 institution is to ratify and sanction such evil, and therefore to violate libertarian 466 00:44:42.200 --> 00:44:44.000 principles. 467 00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:51.040 As the great abolitionist of slavery and libertarian William Lloyd Garrison explained, urge immediate 468 00:44:51.040 --> 00:44:53.900 abolition as earnestly as we may. 469 00:44:53.900 --> 00:44:57.700 It will, alas, be gradual abolition in the end. 470 00:44:57.700 --> 00:45:02.820 We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow. 471 00:45:02.820 --> 00:45:07.060 That it ought to be, we shall always contend. 472 00:45:07.060 --> 00:45:12.140 There were two critically important changes in the philosophy and ideology of classical 473 00:45:12.140 --> 00:45:19.200 liberalism which both exemplified and contributed to its decay as a vital, progressive and radical 474 00:45:19.200 --> 00:45:22.020 force in the Western world. 475 00:45:22.020 --> 00:45:28.080 The first and most important, occurring in the early to mid-19th century, was the abandonment 476 00:45:28.080 --> 00:45:35.440 of the philosophy of natural rights and its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism. 477 00:45:35.440 --> 00:45:40.820 Instead of liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each individual's right to person 478 00:45:40.820 --> 00:45:47.200 and property, that is, instead of liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right 479 00:45:47.200 --> 00:45:54.360 and Justice. Utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the best way to achieve a vaguely 480 00:45:54.360 --> 00:46:01.840 defined general welfare or common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift 481 00:46:01.840 --> 00:46:08.840 from natural rights to utilitarianism. First, the purity of the goal, the consistency of 482 00:46:08.840 --> 00:46:15.400 the principle, was inevitably shattered. For whereas the natural rights libertarians seeking 483 00:46:15.400 --> 00:46:20.720 Inheriting morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle. 484 00:46:20.720 --> 00:46:26.000 The utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. 485 00:46:26.000 --> 00:46:32.280 And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian 486 00:46:32.280 --> 00:46:39.840 in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case, 487 00:46:39.840 --> 00:46:42.520 and thus to give principle away. 488 00:46:42.520 --> 00:46:48.520 Indeed, this is precisely what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England. 489 00:46:48.520 --> 00:46:57.520 Beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they found it ever easier to slide further and further into statism. 490 00:46:57.520 --> 00:47:04.520 An example was the drive for an efficient and therefore strong civil service and executive power, 491 00:47:04.520 --> 00:47:11.520 an efficiency that took precedence, indeed, replaced any concept of justice or right. 492 00:47:11.520 --> 00:47:24.520 Second, and equally important, it is rare indeed ever to find a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate abolition of evil and coercion. 493 00:47:24.520 --> 00:47:33.520 Utilitarians, with their devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of upsetting or radical change. 494 00:47:33.520 --> 00:47:37.520 There have been no utilitarian revolutionaries. 495 00:47:37.520 --> 00:47:42.800 Hence, utilitarians are never immediate abolitionists. 496 00:47:42.800 --> 00:47:48.800 The abolitionist is such because he wishes to eliminate wrong and injustice as rapidly 497 00:47:48.800 --> 00:47:50.700 as possible. 498 00:47:50.700 --> 00:47:57.760 In choosing this goal, there is no room for cool, ad hoc weighing of cost and benefit. 499 00:47:57.760 --> 00:48:05.800 Hence the classical liberal utilitarians abandoned radicalism and became mere gradualist reformers. 500 00:48:05.800 --> 00:48:11.480 But in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably into the position of advisors and 501 00:48:11.480 --> 00:48:14.540 efficiency experts to the state. 502 00:48:14.540 --> 00:48:20.140 In other words, they inevitably came to abandon libertarian principle, as well as a principled 503 00:48:20.140 --> 00:48:22.860 libertarian strategy. 504 00:48:22.860 --> 00:48:29.160 The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the existing order, for the status quo, and 505 00:48:29.160 --> 00:48:35.100 hence were all too open to the charge by socialists and progressive corporatists that they were 506 00:48:35.100 --> 00:48:40.300 were mere narrow-minded and conservative opponents of any and all change. 507 00:48:40.300 --> 00:48:47.660 Thus, starting as radicals and revolutionaries, as the polar opposites of conservatives, the 508 00:48:47.660 --> 00:48:53.620 classical liberals wound up as the image of the thing they had fought. 509 00:48:53.620 --> 00:48:58.020 This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us. 510 00:48:58.020 --> 00:49:04.260 Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism captured free market economics 511 00:49:04.260 --> 00:49:10.040 with the influence of Bentham and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong 512 00:49:10.040 --> 00:49:11.940 as ever. 513 00:49:11.940 --> 00:49:17.460 Current free market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism, with scorn for 514 00:49:17.460 --> 00:49:22.980 ethics, justice and consistent principle, and with a willingness to abandon free market 515 00:49:22.980 --> 00:49:26.500 principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat. 516 00:49:26.500 --> 00:49:33.220 Hence, current free market economics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics 517 00:49:33.220 --> 00:49:46.300 A second reinforcing change in the ideology of classical liberals came during the late 518 00:49:46.300 --> 00:49:51.900 nineteenth century, when, at least for a few decades, they adopted the doctrines of social 519 00:49:51.900 --> 00:49:56.060 evolutionism, often called social Darwinism. 520 00:49:56.060 --> 00:50:01.980 Generally, statist historians have smeared such social Darwinist laissez-faire liberals 521 00:50:01.980 --> 00:50:08.080 as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner as cruel champions of the extermination or 522 00:50:08.080 --> 00:50:12.600 at least of the disappearance of the socially unfit. 523 00:50:12.600 --> 00:50:17.720 Much of this was simply the dressing up of sound economic and sociological free market 524 00:50:17.720 --> 00:50:22.780 doctrine in the then fashionable trappings of evolutionism. 525 00:50:22.780 --> 00:50:28.160 But the really important and crippling aspect of their social Darwinism was the illegitimate 526 00:50:28.160 --> 00:50:34.960 carrying over to the social sphere of the view that species, or later, genes, change 527 00:50:34.960 --> 00:50:39.620 very very slowly after millennia of time. 528 00:50:39.620 --> 00:50:45.860 The social Darwinist liberal came then to abandon the very idea of revolution or radical 529 00:50:45.860 --> 00:50:52.440 change in favor of sitting back and waiting for the inevitable tiny evolutionary changes 530 00:50:52.440 --> 00:50:55.240 over eons of time. 531 00:50:55.240 --> 00:51:00.660 In short, ignoring the fact that liberalism had had to break through the power of ruling 532 00:51:00.660 --> 00:51:06.940 elites by a series of radical changes and revolutions, the social Darwinists became 533 00:51:06.940 --> 00:51:13.300 conservatives, preaching against any radical measures and in favor of only the most minutely 534 00:51:13.300 --> 00:51:16.440 gradual of changes. 535 00:51:16.440 --> 00:51:22.260 Ironically enough, modern evolutionary theory is coming to abandon completely the theory 536 00:51:22.260 --> 00:51:28.780 of Gradual Evolutionary Change. Instead, it is now perceived that a far more accurate 537 00:51:28.780 --> 00:51:36.060 picture is sharp and sudden flips from one static species equilibrium to another. This 538 00:51:36.060 --> 00:51:42.060 is being called the theory of punctuational change. As one of the expounders of the New 539 00:51:42.060 --> 00:51:49.560 View, Professor Stephen J. Gould writes, gradualism is a philosophy of change, not an induction 540 00:51:49.560 --> 00:51:52.000 from Nature. 541 00:51:52.000 --> 00:51:57.860 Gradualism too has strong ideological components, more responsible for its previous success 542 00:51:57.860 --> 00:52:01.900 than any objective matching with external nature. 543 00:52:01.900 --> 00:52:08.560 The utility of gradualism as an ideology must explain much of its influence, for it became 544 00:52:08.560 --> 00:52:13.360 liberalism's quintessential dogma against radical change. 545 00:52:13.360 --> 00:52:17.880 Sudden flips are against the laws of nature. 546 00:52:17.880 --> 00:52:23.520 In fact, the great libertarian Spencer himself is a fascinating illustration of just such 547 00:52:23.520 --> 00:52:29.480 a change in classical liberalism, and his case is paralleled in America by William Graham 548 00:52:29.480 --> 00:52:30.960 Sumner. 549 00:52:30.960 --> 00:52:36.280 In a sense, Herbert Spencer embodies within himself much of the decline of liberalism 550 00:52:36.280 --> 00:52:43.280 in the 19th century, for Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, as virtually 551 00:52:43.280 --> 00:52:45.840 and, finally, a pure libertarian. 552 00:52:45.840 --> 00:52:53.120 But as the virus of sociology and social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism 553 00:52:53.120 --> 00:53:00.200 as a dynamic, radical, historical movement, although without abandoning it in pure theory. 554 00:53:00.200 --> 00:53:06.560 While looking forward to an eventual victory of pure liberty, of contract as against status, 555 00:53:06.560 --> 00:53:12.840 of industry as against militarism, Spencer began to see that victory as inevitable but 556 00:53:12.840 --> 00:53:17.040 only after millennia of gradual evolution. 557 00:53:17.040 --> 00:53:23.480 Hence Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting radical creed and confined his liberalism 558 00:53:23.480 --> 00:53:29.900 in practice to a weary conservative rear-guard action against the growing collectivism and 559 00:53:29.900 --> 00:53:33.260 statism of his day. 560 00:53:33.260 --> 00:53:39.120 But if utilitarianism, bolstered by Social Darwinism, was the main agent of philosophical 561 00:53:39.120 --> 00:53:42.840 and Ideological Decay in the Liberal Movement. 562 00:53:42.840 --> 00:53:48.720 The single most important and even cataclysmic reason for its demise was its abandonment 563 00:53:48.720 --> 00:53:55.000 of formerly stringent principles against war, empire and militarism. 564 00:53:55.000 --> 00:54:01.140 In country after country, it was the siren song of nation-state and empire that destroyed 565 00:54:01.140 --> 00:54:03.620 classical liberalism. 566 00:54:03.620 --> 00:54:09.860 In England, the Liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries abandoned the anti-war, 567 00:54:09.860 --> 00:54:15.660 anti-imperialist, little Englandism of Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School. 568 00:54:15.660 --> 00:54:22.420 Instead, they adopted the obscenely entitled liberal imperialism, joining the conservatives 569 00:54:22.420 --> 00:54:28.300 in the expansion of empire, and the conservatives and the right-wing socialists in the destructive 570 00:54:28.300 --> 00:54:32.400 imperialism and collectivism of World War I. 571 00:54:32.400 --> 00:54:38.400 In Germany, Bismarck was able to split the previously almost triumphant liberals by setting 572 00:54:38.400 --> 00:54:43.720 up the lure of unification of Germany by blood and iron. 573 00:54:43.720 --> 00:54:49.300 In both countries, the result was the destruction of the liberal cause. 574 00:54:49.300 --> 00:54:54.400 In the United States, the classical liberal party had long been the democratic party, 575 00:54:54.400 --> 00:54:58.720 known in the latter 19th century as the party of personal liberty. 576 00:54:58.720 --> 00:55:21.720 Basically, it had been the party not only of personal but also of economic liberty, the stalwart opponent of prohibition, of Sunday blue laws and of compulsory education, the devoted champion of free trade, hard money, absence of governmental inflation, separation of banking from the state and the absolute minimum of government. 577 00:55:21.720 --> 00:55:28.720 It construed state power to be negligible, and federal power to be virtually non-existent. 578 00:55:28.720 --> 00:55:38.720 On foreign policy, the Democratic Party, though less rigorously, tended to be the party of peace, anti-militarism and anti-imperialism. 579 00:55:38.720 --> 00:55:48.720 But personal and economic libertarianism were both abandoned with the capture of the Democratic Party by the Bryan forces in 1896, 580 00:55:48.720 --> 00:55:54.160 and the foreign policy of non-intervention was then rudely abandoned by Woodrow Wilson 581 00:55:54.160 --> 00:56:01.200 two decades later. It was an intervention and a war that were to usher in a century of death 582 00:56:01.200 --> 00:56:08.480 and devastation, of wars and new despotisms, and also a century in all warring countries 583 00:56:08.480 --> 00:56:16.000 of the new corporatist statism, of a welfare warfare state run by an alliance of big government, 584 00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:22.080 Big Business, Unions and Intellectuals that we have mentioned above. 585 00:56:22.080 --> 00:56:28.200 The last gasp indeed of the old laissez-faire liberalism in America was the doughty and 586 00:56:28.200 --> 00:56:33.720 aging libertarians who banded together to form the anti-imperialist league at the turn 587 00:56:33.720 --> 00:56:39.840 of the century, to combat the American war against Spain and the subsequent imperialist 588 00:56:39.840 --> 00:56:45.520 American war to crush the Filipinos who were striving for national independence from both 589 00:56:45.520 --> 00:56:48.720 with Spain and the United States. 590 00:56:48.720 --> 00:56:55.520 To current eyes, the idea of an anti-imperialist who is not a Marxist may seem strange, but 591 00:56:55.520 --> 00:57:02.160 opposition to imperialism began with laissez-faire liberals such as Cobden and Bright in England 592 00:57:02.160 --> 00:57:05.240 and Eugen Richter in Prussia. 593 00:57:05.240 --> 00:57:11.000 In fact, the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by Boston industrialist and economist Edward 594 00:57:11.000 --> 00:57:17.580 at Atkinson, and including Sumner, consisted largely of laissez-faire radicals who had 595 00:57:17.580 --> 00:57:23.160 fought the good fight for the abolition of slavery and had then championed free trade, 596 00:57:23.160 --> 00:57:26.200 hard money and minimal government. 597 00:57:26.200 --> 00:57:32.280 To them, their final battle against the new American imperialism was simply part and parcel 598 00:57:32.280 --> 00:57:39.360 of their lifelong battle against coercion, statism and injustice, against big government 599 00:57:39.360 --> 00:57:44.800 in every area of life, both domestic and foreign. 600 00:57:44.800 --> 00:57:50.200 We have traced the rather grisly story of the decline and fall of classical liberalism 601 00:57:50.200 --> 00:57:55.200 after its rise and partial triumph in previous centuries. 602 00:57:55.200 --> 00:58:00.000 What then is the reason for the resurgence, the flowering, of libertarian thought and 603 00:58:00.000 --> 00:58:05.560 activity in the last few years, particularly in the United States? 604 00:58:05.560 --> 00:58:11.720 How could these formidable forces and coalitions for statism have yielded even that much to 605 00:58:11.720 --> 00:58:14.920 a resurrected libertarian movement? 606 00:58:14.920 --> 00:58:20.320 Shouldn't the resumed march of statism in the late 19th and 20th centuries be a cause 607 00:58:20.320 --> 00:58:27.240 for gloom rather than usher in a reawakening of a seemingly more abundant libertarianism? 608 00:58:27.240 --> 00:58:32.200 Why didn't libertarianism remain dead and buried? 609 00:58:32.200 --> 00:58:38.680 We have seen why libertarianism would naturally arise first and most fully in the United States, 610 00:58:38.680 --> 00:58:42.200 a land steeped in libertarian tradition. 611 00:58:42.200 --> 00:58:48.200 But we have not yet examined the question, why the renaissance of libertarianism at all 612 00:58:48.200 --> 00:58:50.800 within the last few years? 613 00:58:50.800 --> 00:58:56.080 What contemporary conditions have led to this surprising development? 614 00:58:56.080 --> 00:59:01.840 We must postpone answering this question until the end of the book, until we first examine 615 00:59:01.840 --> 00:59:08.120 What the libertarian creed is and how that creed can be applied to solve the leading 616 00:59:08.120 --> 00:59:10.640 problem areas in our society.