Right Young Things
My article in the current Young American Revolution mag is now online here; it’s a look at Frank Chodorov, his 50-year project, and the young Right. You can get a subscription to YAR by donating $50 or more to Young Americans for Liberty — a very good cause.
Terrific piece. Unmentioned, though, is the further fractioning of the libertarian/individualist movement after they split from the early YAF, which has created the depressing mosh we have now, with issues like sovereignty, central banking, respect for southern conservatism and constitutional secession, and others being hotly disputed between Rothbardians and the beltway-Cato-Reason crowd. Not to mention the split among libertarians over acceptance or rejection of lifestyle libertarianism, ie., drug legalization, normalization of the sexual revolution, etc.
When one sits back and absorbs all the history, what’s amazing is just how much influence (bad or good) single individual characters have had on the entire traditionalist/libertarian movement. The students of Strauss alone, especially Harry Jaffa, really harmed the honest interpretation of our founding, being a compact of sovereign states. Irving Kristol, and to a lesser extent, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, Kristol Jnr., etc, (not to mention the evolving NR and Buckley) have convinced millions of a vaguely understood warped notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that our founding wasn’t merely an example to the world as a noble experiment, but an active new philosophy for “Democratic Man”, to be spread with vigor around the world the same way Marxist-Leninism was. That idea may have been seeded in the American psyche with Lincoln and the war, but the above neoconservatives brought it into the American Right, supplanting subsidiarity, natural localist patriotism, and nonideological modesty among conservatives. A relatively small number of intellectuals seemingly accomplished all this. The only optimism comes from the fact (or hope) that technology will allow an equally small number to take the movement (and hence, at least one of the two major parties) in a better direction.
I am as weary of Harry Jaffa’s Declaration of Independence as a statement of “natural right” mandating coercive equality as you are. However, the union of the 13 colonies/future states acting together precedes the emergence of “sovereign states,” Jefferson, Calhoun and other states rightists notwithstanding. Richard B. Morris argues this well in his volume about our constitutional founding, 1781-1789.
The Continental Army besieging Boston, ca. 1775- early 1776 was comprised of officers and enlisted men from all 13 colonies. THAT was the founding of the United States of America. The 1774 Congress of 13 colonies legislating on boycotts became the government providing commissioned officers, organization and logistics to the national army besieging Boston. By fighting together and shedding blood together, the formerly disparate and quarrelsome colonies became a country/state seeking freedom from the British metropolitan power.