The official slogan of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “America UnCancelled,” and the conference featured a slate of topics confined to such controversial viewpoints as “Why the Left Hates the Bill of Rights … and We Love It” and “California Socialism: Promising Heaven, Delivering Hell.” Fitting for the single largest annual event for America’s conservative movement, CPAC was hosted at a corporate hotel that strictly enforced a Democrat-controlled local government’s mask mandates and featured a controversial stage constructed by a major Democrat donor.
All of this gave the familiar look of American conservatives standing athwart history yelling stop while handing operational power over to the Left.
Still, more interesting than the official events offered by the American Conservative Union is the larger conversation about the future of the American right. Now that 50+ million Americans have lost faith in the operation of American democracy, with many considering the value of secession, what is the best path forward at a time where a political realignment seems possible?
The political figurehead of the American right is still represented by Donald Trump, as demonstrated by CPAC’s annual straw poll results and the way his presence in Orlando attracted supporters from around the country to rally outside the hotel.
Intellectually, however, there remains a massive void left by MAGA’s rejection of institutions such as the National Review and most of the conservative “think tanks” that occupy the Beltway. It is largely understood that the future of the GOP is one that appeals to the sort of working-class voters who are more victimized by the economic and cultural policies of the authoritarian left. That has left many populist-right figures advocating for a brand of “economically left, culturally right” conservatism, represented in their minds by figures such as Teddy Roosevelt or Huey Long.
The irony here is that Teddy Roosevelt was America’s first progressive reformer in the White House, and the one who began the process of economic cartelization that has created the corrupt corporatist world we now live in. While he likely benefited from higher testosterone levels than your average modern progressive, he helped set the stage for the world they now manage. Similarly, it is precisely the sort of government wealth redistribution programs Long advocated that have, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted, directly contributed to the decay of family structures, civil society, and conservative social order.
The twenty-first-century culturally left–economically left dystopian woketopia is the direct result of mostly twentieth-century culturally right–economically left political actors.
Thankfully for the American right, there is another alternative to the neoconservatism of William Buckley, the neoliberalism of Milton Friedman, and the paleo-progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt: the libertarian populism of Murray Rothbard.
What makes Murray Rothbard such a unique intellectual figure is not simply that he was a brilliant polymath who made original contributions in many fields—prior to the growth of the bureaucratic state, economists were widely expected to be trained in other social sciences—but it was his dedication and energy in trying to make his ideas translate into shaping the real world. While his political strategies and coalition changed over time, the core of his ideas—an uncompromising defense of liberty and hatred of the inherent evils of the state—remained a consistent force in his work.
It is his work in the ’90s that has the most obvious relevance to an American right that today is recognizing the inherent corruption of federal power and the dangers of the war on terror tactics whose use abroad many cheered but that now directly threaten their liberty at home.
In 1992, Rothbard identified that the most important political audience to organize against the American empire is those in the country who suffer the most from its rule: the American middle class. Long before the phrase “the Cathedral” became popularized online, Rothbard noted:
The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of “corporate liberal” Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.
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