The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
I admit it. I was looking forward to the release of Thaddeus Russell's new book, A Renegade History of the United States.
After all, Russell came pretty highly recommended by no less an authority than our own Tom Woods,
Kids, who wrote in a column for LewRockwell.com back in March of last year that Thaddeus
Russell is a progressive historian who is friendly with libertarians and with whom I
myself have had some valuable correspondence.
When Russell's renegade history of the United States came out in late September, Tom provided
him with a blurb, which now appears both on Russell's website and on the Amazon.com page
for his book.
Thaddeus Russell has broken free of the ideological prisons of left and right, Tom wrote, to
give us a real flesh and blood history of America, filled with untold stories and unlikely
heroes, no waving incense before the sacred personages of Washington D.C. here.
This wonderful book follows the best American traditions of iconoclasm, and, what is the
same thing, truth-telling.
This is pretty high praise, as I say.
Russell wondered, then, that I looked forward to getting my hands on a copy of Russell's
renegade history.
And when I finally did, I found that by and large it justified Tom Wood's encomium.
It does seem, for example, that Thaddeus Russell is friendly with libertarians.
Actually, this much became evident to me even before I had managed to lay my hands on a
copy of his new book.
In mid-October, in an article in the Huffington Post, Russell acknowledged that the people
Russell who had helped him reach the conclusions he expresses in the book were an unlikely
mix of influences, including the hippies and other cultural radicals I had encountered
in my early life, black and gay cultures that showed me a way out of the self-imposed limitations
of being white and straight, and libertarians who caused me to question the commitment to
freedom among the left that I had been born into.
Paul also says such kind things about the market that it fairly takes your breath away
to remember with a start that this is a progressive historian putting these words on the page.
He writes, for example, that, today, many on the conservative side of the political
spectrum like to make the founders into champions of a free market economy, while many on the
left claim that they were simply the tools of the rising merchant class.
Neither of these sides understands that the market economy has always been a friend of
renegades and an enemy of moral guardians.
In Russell's revisionist view of American history, you see, there is an enduring civil
war between these two factions, the renegades and the moral guardians, whom he also calls
the disciplinarians.
But it seems to me that to properly understand what these two factions represent and where
Two main kinds of people fled Europe to live in North America in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
Individualists, who sought freedom from the political interference they were accustomed
to dealing with in Europe, and religious zealots, who sought to create and maintain a Puritan
theocracy on these shores, without interference from the self-same European political authorities
who were also interfering with the individualists.
Some colonists wanted a society in which no one could impose his or her creed on anyone
else.
Both the individualists and the puritans can legitimately lay claim to an authentic American pedigree for their creeds.
Individualism and puritanism originated in Europe, true, but they were never welcomed there.
They were exiled early on, and they caught on in their adopted country as they have never caught on anywhere else in the world.
America proved remarkably hospitable to both creeds.
Both creeds have thrived here, and both richly deserve to be called American.
They are, however, fundamentally incompatible.
In the sort of society an individualist would create, a society based on free choice,
the Puritan would have no way to impose his religious and moral views on others.
In the sort of society a Puritan would create, a society based on duty,
The individualist would be reigned in, prescribed, proscribed, told what to do and told what not to do at every turn.
From time to time, the Puritans and the individualists do see eye to eye on a particular political issue,
abolition of slavery in the years just prior to the U.S. Civil War, for example,
but by and large, they are political antagonists.
As the sociologist Herbert J. Gans put it in his 1988 study of middle American individualism,
individualism is inherently, if selectively, anti-government. In a word, individualists are
libertarians. They believe in small, severely limited government. Puritans are authoritarians.
They believe in strong government, government powerful enough to make sure all their fellow
A third group of individuals left Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to take
up residence in North America, but these colonists were not fleeing anything or anyone.
They had no reason to do so.
They were neither individualists nor Puritans.
Nor did they harbor any other fringe ideas that would make them unpopular in the home
country.
They were in the European mainstream.
They sought first to establish a beachhead on this new continent on behalf of European
civilization, and then to keep it that way.
Keep it European, that is.
They had little or no interest in American ideas, American traditions, a distinctively
American culture.
They thought of themselves as Englishmen, not Americans.
Their descendants today, not their literal descendants necessarily, but those who continue
their Eurocentric way of thinking, call themselves Americans, but they give away their true orientation
when discussing particular cultural and political issues.
What to do about health care or global warming?
What other industrial democracies, code for Germany, France, England, Sweden, etc. do
about these things?
should be our guide. Interested in reading some fiction, seeing a movie, listening to
some music, discussing some ideas? The only fiction worth reading, the only films worth
seeing, the only music worth listening to, the only ideas worth discussing, are all from
European writers, directors, composers, etc. Except, of course, for the almost equally
worthy contributions of homegrown imitators of European styles and European schools of
of Thought.
The Eurocentrics have no use for either individualism or Puritanism.
As has been noted, these are American ideas, not European ones.
In Europe, they never won the support of more than a despised minority.
But the Eurocentrics tend overall to side politically with the Puritans.
After all, a large, powerful government, a government large enough and powerful enough
American culture as we know it today is an amalgam of these three influences.
Or so at least, it seems, from where I sit.
American culture as Thaddeus Russell sees it is a little bit different.
He leaves the Eurocentrics out of the picture entirely and focuses on the long struggle
He is particularly interested in those among the individualists who are mostly or completely
non-ideological, the individualists whose individualism is not based in their commitment
to any particular ideas or principles, but is based instead in their self-serving behavior.
Particularly interesting in this regard is Russell's chapter on slavery.
It is centered around his report that a majority of the 2300 ex-slaves who offered an evaluation
of slavery to interviewers from the Federal Writers Project in the mid-1930s, field hands
and house slaves, men and women, had a positive view of the institution, and many unabashedly
wished to return to their slave days.
As Russell sees it, the ex-slaves looked back on their days as chattels so nostalgically
because they felt they had greater freedom as slaves than they later enjoyed after slavery
had been abolished.
He quotes the testimony of one former slave who told a Federal Writers Project interviewer
in 1937 that he had worked harder since the abolition of slavery than he had ever worked
on the plantation, and that on the plantation he knew that Master would take care of him
and provide him with food and warm clothing and warm housing in the winter months, even
if, along with all or most of the other slaves, he shirked his work and played sick and devoted
whatever resources he did have to pleasure, chiefly gambling, liquor and whores.
As Russell himself puts it, many and possibly most of the ex-slaves did not restrain their
It is, generally speaking, a good thing, Russell asserts, that this uniquely liberated culture
began spreading from the descendants of the former slaves to white-blue-collar workers
in the 1960s, so that absenteeism, workplace sabotage, insubordination toward managers
and union stewards, and other forms of industrial disobedience became steadily more common in
American industry during those years. Russell also writes approvingly of the workers at
the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, who in 1972 staged a walkout in rebellion
against their employer and their union, the United Auto Workers.
These strikers spoke publicly about committing acts of sabotage on the assembly line, spontaneous
slowdowns and shutdowns, showing up late to work or not at all, general goofing off, and
f***ing up any time I can.
Well as Steve Martin used to say, excuse me, but I don't consider unilateral violations
in terms of contractual obligations you voluntarily agreed to earlier as expressions of individualism.
I don't think of endangering the lives of unwitting and innocent consumers because I
don't like my job as acceptable, much less conscionable.
On the other hand, I remember the furor over Walter Block's now classic libertarian work,
Defending the Undefendable, when it first came out back in the 1970s.
More than a few libertarians back then said, in effect, well, of course Walter is correct
that these people aren't violating anybody's rights and they shouldn't be scapegoated,
but that doesn't really make them heroes, does it?
The litterer as hero?
Give me a break.
I remember thinking at the time, what I still think now more than 30 years later, that Walter's
book was written with a light touch, with a consistently light tone.
was illustrated by humorous drawings contributed by a political cartoonist of the time.
The reader was frankly invited to consider Walter's references to people like literars
and pimps as heroes, as open and unapologetic exercises in hyperbole, the deliberate use
of exaggeration, even exaggeration to the point of absurdity, to emphasize an idea,
a point, an argument.
You know all along that Walter is only half serious in calling these people heroes.
With Thaddeus Russell, you know no such thing.
For all you know, this guy is perfectly serious in using terms like individualism and freedom
to describe the life of sponges who are supported by someone else, and who deliberately render
the very least and most slipshod service they can possibly get away with in return for that
support.
On the other hand, there is far more to Thaddeus Russell's new book than just this.
He makes a good case that most, at times perhaps all, of the founders were disciplinarians,
looking for ways to regulate and control the lives of ordinary people in the new republic,
lest they devote their time and money to things like wine, women, song and gambling, things
of which the founders did not approve.
He provides what may be the best short summary of the major ideas and events of the American
Revolution that I've ever seen, six pages packed with relevant, eye-opening information.
He also includes a remarkable chapter on the New Deal as the American version of fascism,
in which he writes that,
The Second World War appeared to many contemporary observers, and still appears to many historians,
as proof of a fundamental antagonism between fascism and the American way of life.
Many have seen the war as evidence that, in particular, the New Deal liberal way of life
was hostile to fascism.
After all, while many Republicans and other enemies of the New Deal were opposed to fighting
fascism abroad, Roosevelt led the nation to war against Germany, Italy and Japan.
More than 400,000 Americans died in the fight, and the Roosevelt administration made sure
to not just defeat the fascist regimes, but to obliterate them.
But the evidence of their similarities suggests that the New Deal and fascism went to war
not over ideas or values or a way of life.
Rather, it seems, the war was a struggle between brothers for control of the world family.
And there's Russell's excellent chapter on the widespread lack of support for American
involvement in World War II by those who were expected to do the fighting.
And there's his series of informative chapters on American minority groups, the Irish, the
Jews, the Italians, and the ways each of these groups gradually advanced from having a reputation
as little better than sub-human to being accepted as fully human, white Americans.
It had a lot to do, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, with convincing the public that group
members had given up their hedonism and libertinism and fallen into line behind the Puritan leadership.
Now don't get me wrong here.
I have no use for Puritans.
I agree with H. L. Mencken that Puritans are people bedeviled by the haunting fear that
someone somewhere might be happy.
But I also agree with Gustave Flaubert, that great hater of the puritanical bourgeoisie,
the man who said, what a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?
Flaubert considered it axiomatic that hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
He believed that the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of
bourgeois stupidity.
But he also counseled a young bohemian of his acquaintance to be regular and orderly
in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Flaubert knew in the 1870s that what Thaddeus Russell calls the renegade subculture was
inimical to the long-term success of those who practiced it.
Thomas Sowell, in his valuable essay Black Rednecks and White Liberals, published just
six years ago, calls it a counterproductive, dangerous and self-destructive subculture.
Even Thaddeus Russell acknowledges that were the heroes of this book to take control of
society, it would be a living hell.
No one would be safe on the streets, chaos would reign, and garbage would never be collected.
The argument here is not that bad people should replace the disciplinarians, but that in American
history the struggles between the two have determined the breadth of personal liberty.
I make no claims for other parts of the world, where at times renegades have overwhelmed
the guardians of order, but in this country, the more bad people existed, resisted and
won, the more freedom was expanded.
Thaddeus Russell's new book is A Renegade History of the United States.
I recommend it highly.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.