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The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. - book reviews
Reason, Feb, 1998 by John A. Andrew, III
Indeed, YAF provided a training ground for scores of people who would later become influential in conservative politics, including figures such as former Rep. Robert Bauman (and his ex-wife Carol Dawson), fund-raiser Richard Viguerie, pundit/presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Moral Majority and Conservative Caucus co-founder Howard Phillips, and U.S. Circuit Court Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain. More important, perhaps, YAF provided a rhetoric for latter-day conservatism. When Newt Gingrich "told reporters in 1995 that he would cooperate with President Bill Clinton, but not compromise with him, he was speaking a language advanced by YAF in the early 1960s," writes Andrew.
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If The Other Side of The Sixties has a significant failing, it is that the book basically stops with the electoral blowout of Barry Goldwater. This seems to be partly due to archival limitations (Andrew notes that there is "no central manuscript archive for either YAF or the right wing"). It is also partly due to Andrew's interest in exploring less-picked-over parts of the 1960s (an impulse that led him to YAF in the first place). While those authorial decisions are understandable, they mean that the whole story of YAF in the 1960s is not told. It's a tale worth telling, since it completes the narrative Andrew has begun and suggests yet another way that YAF - and the 1960s - remain very relevant to contemporary politics.
By the late '60s, the ideological divisions in YAF between conservatives - who, heavily influenced by people such as Buckley in-law and Goldwater speechwriter L. Brent Bozell, saw the state as a means to achieve a return to a "traditional" society - and libertarians - who championed individual liberty above all else - could no longer be masked over by an overriding commitment to anti-communism. The Vietnam War - or, more precisely, the draft - effectively split the organization. Conservatives felt the Cold War legitimized conscription; libertarians saw the draft as slavery.
At the 1969 YAF convention in St. Louis, a heated debate broke out over the group's position on the draft. Conservatives eventually agreed to call for the replacement of a conscripted force with a voluntary one, albeit on efficiency grounds. When YAF's Libertarian Caucus pushed for a resolution advocating draft resistance as a legitimate form of civil disobedience, conservatives demurred. When a member of the Anarchist Caucus (in the '60s, even a predominantly right-wing organization could support an anarchist faction) denounced the war as an imperialist adventure and burned his draft card, all hell broke loose. The convention devolved into a shouting match between conservatives and libertarians. The latter were derided as "lazy fairies" and essentially run out of the organization. As a libertarian attendee once told me, the scene, a watershed moment for the self-consciously "libertarian" movement, was exhilarating in a very '60s way.
That same split between social conservatives and libertarians only continues to grow in contemporary politics, perhaps made irreparable by the demise of communism and a common enemy. Indeed, conservatives are increasingly viewing libertarians - with their embrace of individual choice and evolving social orders - as their true enemy. In recovering an ignored part of an important decade, The Other Side of the Sixties documents the tensions that existed at an early stage in that once-strong alliance; the institutional history of YAF suggests that the conflict will only become more heated.
