This
essay originally appeared in the September 1993 issue of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
How
can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil,
fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we
have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism,
socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal
clear to me that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the
sake of ourselves, our loved ones, our posterity, our friends,
our neighbors, and our country, to do battle against that evil.
It
has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have
seen and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists
against it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How
can one see the truth, understand one's compelling duty, and then,
simply give up and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades?
And yet, in the two movements and their variations that I have
been associated with, libertarian and conservative, this happens
all the time.
Conservatism
and libertarianism, after all, are "radical" movements, that is,
they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends of
statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined
such a movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter,
simply give up the fight? Recently, I asked a perceptive friend
of mine how so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that
"he's the sort of person who wants a quiet life, who wants to
sit in front of the TV, and who doesn't want to hear about any
trouble." But in that case, I said in anguish, "why do these people
become 'radicals' in the first place? Why do they proudly call
themselves 'conservatives' or 'libertarians'?" Unfortunately,
no answer was forthcoming.
Sometimes,
people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is hopeless.
We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great economist
Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable,
that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very
successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent
intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within.
His critics charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the
defenders of capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points
out that a rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing
as saying: don't do the best you can to bail out the boat?
In
the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the
statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning
the battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look,
the inevitable may be postponed a bit. Why isn't that worthwhile?
Isn't it better to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second,
at the very worst, it's great fun to tweak and annoy and upset
the enemy, to get back at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile.
One shouldn't think of the process of fighting the enemy as dour
gloom and misery. On the contrary, it is highly inspiring and
invigorating to take up arms against a sea of troubles instead
of meeting them in supine surrender, and by opposing, perhaps
to end them, and if not at least to give it a good try, to get
in one's licks.
And
finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win!
Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the
Soviet Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly
impossible odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed.
Certainly the chances of winning are a lot greater if you put
up a fight than if you simply give up.
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
aide, 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 statist 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 Gulch," 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 backwoods 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 adherents to the State but to the country, the nation,
to our glorious traditions and culture that are under dire attack.
Our
stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, 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, D.C., 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 holing 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
announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory,
have amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale,
a half-way house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to 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 sellouter is morally evil; the
retreatist, in contrast, is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided.
The sellouts are not worth talking to; the retreatists 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 in his inner heart. But call me a
low-life materialist if you wish, but I believe, and I thought
all libertarians and conservatives believed to their core, that
man deserves more than that, that we are not content with the
inner freedom of the prisoner in his cell, 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: