Notes & asides

National Review, August 8, 2005 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

* Memo

To: WFB

From: Dorothy McCartney

Did you see the article by Bill Steigerwald in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, headlined "Rothbard Nailed the GOP Drift"? Here is what Steigerwald wrote. You may want to comment:

   Why has the party of Lincoln-which
   once stood for a small, constitutional government
   that kept its hands off most things
   at home and minded its own business
   abroad-become the party of Roosevelt
   and Wilson? ...

      Some say Republicans have merely
   fallen in love with power. Or that their
   party has been hijacked by the neo-conservatives,
   those brainy ex-liberal
   Democrats who took us crusading in the
   Middle East and never stopped adoring
   Big Momma Government.

      Whatever it was that turned Republicans
   bad, it didn't begin after 9/11.

      In 1968, Murray Rothbard, the late,
   great economist/historian, was bashing
   the unhealthy leftward drift of the
   American Right, which he
   argued had already abandoned
   its "determined opposition
   to Big Government" and
   "become the conservative wing
   of the American corporate state
   and its foreign policy of expansionist
   imperialism." ...

      An enemy of every inch of the welfare-
   warfare state, Rothbard especially
   was displeased with the aggressive anti-
   Communism of William F. Buckley Jr.,
   whose NATIONAL REVIEW magazine in
   1955 became the official clubhouse of the
   post-WWII "New Right" and ideological
   incubator of the Reagan Revolution.

      Rothbard's excellent essay, posted at
   lewrockwell.com, includes a quote from
   a 1952 Commonweal magazine article
   by Buckley that spelled out what winning
   the Cold War was going to cost
   Americans.

      While calling himself a libertarian,
   Buckley posited that the Soviet Union
   posed such an imminent threat to our
   security that we had "to accept Big
   Government for the duration ... for neither
   an offensive nor a defensive war can
   be waged ... except through the instrument
   of a totalitarian bureaucracy within
   our shores."

      We must therefore all support "large
   armies and air forces, atomic energy, central
   intelligence, war production boards
   and the attendant centralization of power
   in Washington," wrote Buckley.

Memo

To: Dorothy

From: WFB

That passage from my article in Commonweal in January 1952 is every now and then quoted, almost always in the fever swamps, to suggest that I have really been a hidden socialist during the past 50 years. If this were so, I think I could claim the most extensive deception in modern history, in which the readers of NATIONAL REVIEW have been complicit by accepting my false pretenses.

The essay I wrote for Commonweal was the most libertarian stretch of prose I have ever committed. It required the self-delusion of Murray Rothbard (and the indiscrimination of Lew Rockwell, Inc.) to transform it into a declaration of sympathy with statism. I was addressing in Commonweal the election that would take place at the end of the year. The piece was called, "The Party and the Deep Blue Sea." I lamented the weaknesses of the GOP. The subheading given to the article by the editors of Commonweal read "Ideally, the Republican Platform should acknowledge a domestic enemy, the State."

How's that for a socialist declaration?

I did write the words Steigerwald and Rothbard quote. But I wrote them in a particular context, which I herewith supply:

   The most important issue of the day, it is
   time to admit it, is survival. Here there is
   apparently some confusion in the ranks of
   conservatives, and hard thinking is in
   order for them. The thus-far invincible
   aggressiveness of the Soviet Union does
   or does not constitute a threat to the security
   of the United States, and we have got
   to decide which. If it does, we shall have
   to rearrange, sensibly, our battle plans;
   and this means that we have got to accept
   Big Government for the duration--for
   neither an offensive nor a defensive war
   can be waged, given our present government
   skills, except through the instrument
   of a totalitarian bureaucracy within
   our shores. The question is raised: Does it
   make a great deal of difference if we lose
   our freedom to a Georgian bandit or to a
   Missouri ignoramus? The question is a
   good one.

      Still and all, our chances of ultimate
   victory against an indigenous bureaucracy
   are far greater than they could ever be
   against one controlled from abroad, one
   that would be nourished and protected by
   a worldwide Communist monolith.

      Thus, many conservatives, and many
   Republicans, have got to think this problem
   through. And if they deem Soviet
   power a menace to our freedom (as I happen
   to), they will have to support large
   armies and air forces, atomic energy, central
   intelligence, war production boards
   and the attendant centralization of power
   in Washington.

We had all those, and we won the war.

It is a measure of my opposition to statist activity that I should have referred to it as "totalitarian." Wrong word, I think, but the perspective of this 26-year old conservative was that such activity as the draft was totalitarian.