The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor. It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

I’m speaking now of the variety of conservatism created by William Buckley, not the Old Right of Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Garett Garrett, H.L. Mencken, and company, though these people would have all rejected the name conservative as ridiculous. After Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, what’s to conserve of the government? The revolutionaries who tossed off a milder British rule would never have put up with it. ~Lew Rockwell

Via Daniel McCarthy

In responding to this, I don’t mean to poach on Michael Dougherty’s future critiques of libertarianism. Incidentally, have you all seen Michael’s redesigned Surfeited with Dainities and his latest posts? Okay, promotion over. Now back to libertarians.

I wonder what Mr. Rockwell would make of all those conservatives who find what Buckley, his successors and their fellow travellers have done to conservatism appalling and perverse. What of those conservatives who agree with Prof. Lukacs that the next great divide will probably be between the sort of nationalists both he and Rockwell oppose and patriots who, like Rockwell, reject the nationalists, their worship of executive power and their acquiescence in every war? He cannot be unaware of these people, whose intellectual predecessors do not primarily include Nock, Garrett and the rest, though we generally admire and respect those men of the pre-war Old Right for their good work, yet he would leave his readers with the impression that the choice is between a basically libertarian Old Right tradition and the perversion of conservatism that prevails in the high places of the “movement” today.

Under this rubric, every conservative gets pushed into the increasingly vague category of “red-state fascism.” To be blunt, “red-state fascism” has become as clumsy a term for political analysis as the old stand-bys “statist” and “totalitarian.” It has increasingly become a term for “everyone on the right Lew Rockwell and company do not accept.”

This so-called fascism now includes such odd elements as “brute force” as the answer to all social problems (which might be fascist, but which applies to traditional conservatives about as well as caricaturing all libertarians as drug-crazed libertines), “imposing truth” rather than risk someone being lost to heresy (not normally something ‘fascists’ worry about, and not something, for good or ill, that traditional conservatives have normally been preoccupied with in any event) and “loving the past more than liberty” (which certainly doesn’t hold for most of the actual nationalists Rockwell rightly criticises, since those people despise the actual American past and actual liberty at the same time).

Every destructive and ruinous policy Mr. Rockwell names in his list has nothing to do with “loving the past,” and most traditional conservatives, who might justly be accused of “loving the past” (or, put more accurately, loving venerable traditions because they are our own, they are part of who we are and they convey the wisdom of generations to us) quite a lot, even if it is not more than they love liberty rightly understood. But freedom as a “self-ordering principle of society”? How could real conservatives believe in something so patently untrue? Libertarians are good ones to talk down to those who “love the past,” when their entire ideology today is not much more than rehashed Continental liberalism conveyed to them by Austrians fleeing the nightmares ultimately of the Austrian liberals’ own making.