Jeff Tucker on the Old Right vs. the military industrial complex

The existence of such an industry scandalized Americans in the interwar period, and there was one treatise that led the way in helping to foment the ourage. In fact, it was a bestseller book in 1934 with the title Merchants of Death. (Here is the PDF and here it is in hard copy.)

We are justified in calling it the first mega-selling conservative book of the 20th century. Why conservative? The lead author was H.C. Engelbrecht, and, most importantly, its co-author was Frank C. Hanighen, who would later become the founder of Human Events, which was the most important weekly publication on the right in the 1940s and 1950s. In other words, the phrase Merchants of Death did not originate on the left but on the right, during the New Deal period when the people later called conservatives became alarmed about the union between big corporations and big government.

This book is not a typical left-wing style attacks on commerce as the essence of war. In fact, it argues the opposite. "The arms industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry."

The blame, then, lies not with the private sector that makes the weapons. "All constitutions in the world vest the war-making power in the government or in the representatives of the people. The root of the trouble, therefore, goes far deeper than the arms industry. It lies in the prevailing temper of peoples toward nationalism, militarism, and war, in the civilization which forms this temper and prevents any drastic and radical change. Only when this underlying basis of the war system is altered, will war and its concomitant, the arms industry, pass out of existence."

The book holds up as a marvelous analysis of how the merchants of death profited from World War I, a fact that the public found riveting and help solidify a strong antiwar temperament in the electorate during those years. This raised consciousness led to a broader insight about the nature of the warfare state: namely, that they only way to restrain it was to keep centralized power of all sorts at bay. The leading spokesmen for the ideal here was later called the Old Right by Murray Rothbard.

How it came to be that the Old Right cause would later be taken up by the New Left, while the New Right came to embrace the warmongering creed of the Old Left – well, let's just say it was a complicated maneuver accomplished in a brief period of time in the late 1950s. Murray Rothbard was there and he chronicled the transition blow by blow. His book is called The Betrayal of the American Right. Sure enough, checking the book, on page 58, we find a nice discussion of Human Events, Frank Hanighen, and the problem of the Merchants of Death.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "Iron Man and the Merchants of Death," LewRockwell.com, May 7, 2008

Bill Bonner on the historical shift to neoconservatism

After the war [World War II], there was no going back. America was the leading world power. "Isolationism" became a kind of insult. A few of the old conservatives – such as Frank Chodorov, Robert Taft and Warren Buffett's father, a US Congressman – kept wearing their old starched collars. But the fashion had clearly changed. They could vote against government spending programs...and they opposed further military adventures abroad... but they couldn't win national elections and they couldn't participate in the great fun of having an empire – getting to boss people around all over the world. There was no glory in being a conservative. No power. No money. No style.

Then, with the Cold War, even the old die-hards went shopping for new clothes. In their minds, it was a contest between good and evil...freedom and communism...black and white.

Indeed, the Cold War played roughly the same roll as the War on Terror would half a century later – it perverted the old conservative values.

"We are again being told to be afraid," wrote Frank Chodorov. "As it was before the two world wars so it is now; politicians talk in frightening terms, journalists invent scare-lines, and even next-door neighbors are taking up the cry: the enemy is at the city gates; we must gird for battle. In case you don't know, the enemy this time is the USSR."

Few Americans had even met a communist, but they were certain that if they didn't go toe to toe with them in places like Korea, Berlin and Vietnam, they'd soon be stealing the family silver in Dubuque. The urbane, witty, charming and cosmopolitan William F. Buckley:

The "invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union" imminently threatens the United States, he said. "We have 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."

And thus was the fabric laid out...cut and sewn...for America's new conservative outfits. Now, they could fight totalitarians by being totalitarians.

~ Bill Bonner, "Listening to Bill Buckley Give a Speech Was a Painful Experience," LewRockwell.com, March 27, 2008

Robert Taft on liberty vs. central planning

After the American Revolution and the French Revolution the whole world became convinced that liberty was the key to progress and happiness for the peoples of the world, and this theory was accepted, even in those countries where there was, in fact, no liberty. People left Europe and came to this country, not so much because of the economic conditions as because they sought a liberty which they could not find at home. But gradually this philosophy has been replaced by the idea that happiness can only be conferred upon the people by the grace of an efficient government. Only the government, it is said, has the expert knowledge necessary for the people's welfare; only the government has the power to carry out the grandiose plans so necessary in a complicated world.

~ Senator Robert Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (1951)

Robert Taft on foreign policy

An unwise and overambitious foreign policy, and particularly the effort to do more than we are able to do, is the one thing which might in the end destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States...

~ Senator Robert Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (1951)

Joseph Stromberg on Howard Buffett

[Howard] Buffett’s consistent defense of classical liberal, free-market, republican, and anti-interventionist positions makes him an interesting, if little remembered, forerunner of today’s libertarianism and anti-Establishment conservatism. He was, as Murray Rothbard later pointed out, the most hard-core of the dwindling handful of Old Right politicians in the early Cold War period. Buffett contributed occasionally to such journals as Human Events, The Freeman, and later, New Individualist Review.

~ Joseph Stromberg, "The Old Cause," Antiwar.com, April 24, 2001

Robert Taft on the military draft

Military conscription is essentially totalitarian. It has been established for the most part in totalitarian countries and their dictators led by Napoleon and Bismarck. It has heretofore been established by aggressor countries.

~ Robert A. Taft

Robert Taft on NATO

An undertaking by the most powerful nation in the world to arm half the world against the other half goes far beyond any "right of collective defense if an armed attacked occurs." It violates the whole spirit of the United Nations Charter. . . . The Atlantic Pact moves in exactly the opposite direction from the purposes of the charter and makes a farce of further efforts to secure international justice through law and justice. It necessarily divides the world into two armed camps. . . . This treaty, therefore, means inevitably an armament race, and armament races in the past have led to war.

~ Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (1951), pp. 89–90, 113

Howard Buffett on foreign policy (attacking the Truman Doctrine)

Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. . . . We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.

~ Howard Buffett, Republican Representative from Omaha, Nebraska, Congressional Record, 80th Congress, First Session, March 18, 1947, p. 2217