 So it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, Daniel McCarthy. I know a lot of you are familiar with him from the old Ron Paul days. He was a vet of the, I want to say 2008 campaign. Of course he was at the American Conservative for some time. He's a columnist at the Spectator and now he heads up Vice President of the ISI, the Venerable ISI and edits its modern age journal which we still get at the Mises Institute which is really a pleasure to receive. Again, he worked on the Ron Paul campaign and he is among other things a great historian of the conservative movement itself and a lot of us understand the idea of fusionism in the national review sense of it. Frank Meyer and other people were trying back in the 50s and 60s just to argue that liberty and virtue were not at odds which I think most of us in this room would certainly agree with. But if you fast forward to the early 1990s there was a new kind of fusionism attempted between paleo-libertarians and paleo-conservatives and this involved people around the John Randolph public Thomas Fleming and Papu Cannon and Murray Rothbard and Sam Francis. So all that said, there's a lot happening in the world today politically and we hope that our view of the world will have something to do with that. So please welcome Daniel McCarthy. Well thank you, Jeff. It's a great honor to address the Ludwig von Mises Institute and one of Murray Rothbard's most famous speeches which in fact was delivered at the John Randolph Club in 1992 wraps up with the stirring commitment that we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the great society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the new deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson's new freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century. Well I'm happy to report that I think our work is proceeding and it takes as much time as it needs to. Of course if we've broken the clock that means it's no longer running and we can set our own timetable. Now this morning we want to stay on a fairly strict timetable however so I will wrap up by 10 a.m. But I hope to leave some time at the end of my remarks for question and answers because I think perhaps the most valuable thing I can contribute here is some responses to questions you may have about what is happening politically and philosophically on the American right among conservatives, perhaps among libertarians to be found in other parts of the country including the swamp of Mordor in Washington D.C. The right is really in a transformative period at the moment and yet it's not the first time that this has happened. And as Jeff's opening introduction indicated there was a time when conservatives and libertarians tried to work together under the aegis of a philosophy called fusionism. There was also a time in the 1990s when paleo-conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and the writers grouped around the Chronicles magazine worked alongside scholars from the Ludwig von Mises Institute in an attempt to basically set America back on a small R Republican path in the aftermath of the Cold War. The Cold War was a time when even many people who had grave reservations about the welfare state and about the scope of government decided to set those reservations aside while the Soviet Union was still in existence and there was a tremendous fear of communism. But at the conclusion of the Cold War there was an opportunity for America to return to an earlier foreign policy certainly and an earlier view of its own way of life. Unfortunately what had been hoped for by paleo-conservatives and by libertarians back in the early 1990s didn't happen. And instead the 1990s and early 2000s became sort of the golden age for neoconservatism. This wound up of course being something of a curse for the neocons themselves. It's the curse of Midas. When you touch you think you turn to gold but in fact Midas found that he couldn't eat gold once he'd turned things into gold and the neoconservatives found that once they actually got the agenda they wanted once they were able to invade countries like Iraq once they were running up the federal deficit and printing money that they in fact were unable to control the machine that they had unleashed and as a result they wound up discredited. And right now we're seeing the aftermath of that where there are new questions and new movements on the right in an attempt to fill the void that has been left by the collapse thankfully of neoconservatism. So let me briefly give you an overview of developments on the right among libertarians and conservatives especially traditionalist conservatives. Those who are perhaps often seen as being at the sort of farthest opposite side of libertarians when it comes to the role of the state or when it comes to the place of economics. A lot of traditionalists are seen as being critical of economics, critical of free markets perhaps in favor of industrial policy and tariffs or perhaps being principled or maybe one would say even romantic agrarians who would like to go back to a much simpler economy and to look a scans at a economy that is very much urbanized and financialized. Well let me begin my tale in the years shortly after World War II but in fact even in the last few years of World War II you saw a great revival of a philosophy which tended to be labeled by its own adherents as individualism. And of course you had a number of great works published in the midst of World War II things like Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert J. Nock in 1943. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek in 1944. You also had books such as Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver in 1948. The idea of individualism that became popular and that many journalists as well as intellectuals applied to themselves was not necessarily strictly defined and in many cases individualism simply meant that you were opposed to the new deal and you were also opposed to communism and some of the opponents of communism were very hawkish foreign policy anti-communists but others were focused primarily on the philosophy of communism itself and its degradation of humanity and the need to counterbalance and counteract the creeping influence of Marxist ideology by endorsing instead a set of ideas of liberty. So you had a figure such as Frank Chaturov for example who was a great libertarian journalist in the 1940s and before. Frank Chaturov had at one point been affiliated with the Henry George School in New York City. Henry George was a tremendously influential classical liberal roughly speaking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry George had some eccentricities. He believed in a land tax for example and he had it as a bit of a nostrum that was meant to fix a number of problems but Henry George was basically a committed anti-statist in other respects and Frank Chaturov was a loyal follower of his philosophy. Chaturov was actually fired from the Henry George School in New York because he opposed US entry into World War II. So Chaturov was a man of deep principle and in the post-war era he wrote a column for human events, one of the leading conservative publications of the era in which he said that if we want to stop communism we actually have to teach freedom. We have to reach the next generation and we have to give them a sense of the principles of our country, the principles of Western civilization, the principles of a free economy. If we're not doing that, if we abandon the field to the communists and the socialists then we are lost no matter what else we do and Frank Chaturov was not a hawkish cold warrior. He was someone who used to say that the answer to having communist infiltrators in the federal government, communist in government jobs was to abolish the government jobs. So Frank Chaturov was someone who was in many respects quite different from what became the typical modal cold war conservative type and in fact Chaturov always eschewed the word conservative. He preferred to be called an individualist. Well one of Frank Chaturov's young friends was a recent Yale graduate by the name of William F. Buckley Jr. And Buckley also had read Albert J. Nock, another great individualist. Buckley himself called himself an individualist, especially in his first book God and Man at Yale which was published in 1951. And Buckley had a Catholic upbringing that was quite strong. So he from the outset had a blend of Catholic ideas as well as libertarian or individualist ideas. He also however served in the intelligence community as we now euphemize it. And that meant that he had very hawkish cold war views indeed. And Buckley became of course a formative figure in the post-Cold War conservative, I'm sorry, the post-war, post-World War II conservative movement. So you had this constellation of people who thought of themselves as individualists and they had a wide range of views on foreign policy. They were all critical of the New Deal. They were all critical of the philosophy of communism and of Marxism. Well around the same time slightly later but closely overlapping with the group I've just mentioned were people who started to think of themselves explicitly as conservatives. And the word conservative back in the 1940s and early 1950s was not one that Americans felt terribly comfortable with. And in fact a number of liberal, modern liberal academics were at this time claiming that America had no real connection to conservatism. Conservatism was a European ideology. It was a kind of thrown and alter ideology. It was something that had no connection to the American founding. And conservatism was as it existed in the United States was not really a principled philosophy with any deep roots in this country. Instead it was nothing but irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas in the words of Lionel Trilling, one of the great literary critics of that era. And Louis Hart's became very well known for publishing a book called The Liberal Tradition in America. And he claimed that again America only had a tradition of liberalism going back to the founding and that it really didn't have much in the way of a native conservative tradition. Well in this era in the late 1940s and early 1950s there is however a revival of interest among scholars in such figures as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Aquinas. And some of the scholars who are interested in reviving the thought of these figures start to think of themselves as conservatives. And perhaps the most notable of these so called new conservatives of the 1950s is Russell Kirk. Kirk I should mention is among other things the founder of the journal that I now edit Modern Age which was launched in 1957. Before Kirk did that however, he published a book in 1953 called The Conservative Mind. And in that book he basically argues that contrary to Louis Hart's and others America did in fact have a true conservative tradition. It was embodied by such figures as for example the Federalists in the early part of the American Republic. And Kirk argued that British conservatism as seen from figures ranging through Edmund Burke to Disraeli in the 19th century all the way to the American expatriate T.S. Eliot in the 20th century. That English conservatism, Anglo conservatism had a deep connection with American conservatism. And this conservatism was not for Russell Kirk so much concerned about specific ideas and policies and issues as it was with an overall philosophy and outlook on life. A philosophy that was very critical of materialism that looked instead to something higher and transcendent as the goal of human activity, both individual life and our life in common. And a conservatism that had a very skeptical view of modern science and technology, mass production. Russell Kirk had experience working in the auto industry in Michigan where he was born. He was conscripted into the army in World War II and he served in a chemical weapons proving ground in Utah. And Kirk saw the development of a kind of not just mass production but also a mass mentality among Americans in the early part of the 20th century that absolutely revolted him. And he looked to the conservative tradition and he looked to figures like Edmund Burke as a spiritual and moral alternative to the kind of mass society that was developing in the post-war era and had in fact been developing even long before that. And Kirk tended to identify what he disliked about the mass society with liberalism. And the reason for that was because so many of the political leaders of the early 20th century in America tended to identify themselves as liberals. And of course they co-opted and they corrupted a term which earlier had a much more anti-statist meaning. In the early part of the 20th century you find figures like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt increasingly using the term liberal as the label for their ideology. And their ideology is of course a very statist one. I should mention as well that what many people may have thought of as classical liberalism had also been discredited in England by its association with a political party namely the liberal party. And it was actually the liberal party under Herbert Asquith as prime minister that led England into World War I. And Lloyd George who was the last liberal prime minister of England continued World War I. The spectacle of a liberal party which previously had been in favor of peace being a war party in the disaster for all of Western civilization that was World War I was highly discrediting to liberalism in the UK. It was highly discrediting to the liberal party which became a third party at that point in the UK. And it also had a spillover effect and disillusioned many Americans with the concept of liberalism. So the combination of that and also the co-option of the term by the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt really created a backlash against the idea of liberalism and the label of liberalism which is why so many of the libertarian or liberty inclined individuals and scholars in the 1940s for example in 1950s styled themselves as individualists rather than as liberals. And it's why people like Russell Kirk and many of the new conservatives in the 1950s they look at the idea of liberalism and they associated with a great many evils that many classical liberals or libertarians would not associate with liberalism that the label had become attached to a number of things through political parties and through political figures that would be very revolting with high degrees of statism and of course with World War I. Well, the success of books like The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk in 1953 leads to the label conservative becoming increasingly popular. So William F. Buckley Jr. initially styles himself as an individualist when he writes God and Man at Yale in 1951 but by the time he launches National Review Magazine in 1955, he is starting to call himself a conservative and many of his associates at National Review are also calling themselves conservatives. I should say one other thing about the fate of the term individualist. So I'd mentioned Frank Charterov a few minutes ago and how he was a sort of mentor figure and inspiration for William F. Buckley Jr. and how Charterov had written a powerful essay arguing that if we want to have liberty in our future, we have to actually inculcate the ideas not only of free markets but also of the values of Western civilization in the rising generation of college students. Charterov was trying to counteract the influence at long range of an organization that had started a couple of decades earlier called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. And so there came about a tremendous interest in Frank Charterov's effort. Charterov wasn't really an organizer at this point, he was someone who wanted to be an ideas man, just wanted to write about the principles of liberty but he started receiving checks in the mail from people saying we need to start an organization to carry out the teaching of liberty to young people. And so Charterov went to the young William F. Buckley Jr. and he said you're a younger man, you can actually sort of head up an institution like this. Buckley agreed to it be at least a figurehead for this new organization. And so Charterov and Buckley founded what was called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists or ISI. And the ISI of which I am now a vice president is in fact the descendant of that ISI. We now are called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute which goes to show how the label individualist fell out of fashion. But the origins of ISI do indeed lie in the label of individualism. But again, even in the mid 1950s, so ISI was started in 1953. National Review is launched in 1955. And over the course of the 1950s you find that the label individualist is losing ground to the label conservative. And this creates a certain amount of confusion. People like Russell Kirk for example are not necessarily very happy to see people who previously had identified themselves as individualists now calling themselves conservatives. And likewise a number of people who had previously called themselves individualists are very uncomfortable seeing some of their friends now calling themselves conservatives. And as a result they themselves get called conservatives. It's there's kind of a sense that there's mislabeling going on across the spectrum now. Some people who might properly be individualists or what we would now call libertarians are calling themselves or being called by others conservatives. And conservatives and libertarians who don't think of themselves as conservatives are both alarmed by this development. One person who tried to sort out this confusion was a senior editor at National Review by the name of Frank Meyer. And Frank Meyer had himself been a communist at one point. He was basically an agent of the Communist Party who was active on college campuses, recruiting young people, basically doing the kinds of things that the Intercollegiate Society of Socialists had been doing except Meyer was not just a socialist he was actually a communist working for the Communist Party. Well Meyer had over the course of World War II repudiated Marxism, repudiated communism. He had read F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom and it had profoundly changed his life. Meyer came to understand the value of individualism and of liberty and of Western civilization. Meyer went to work for National Review as a senior editor, eventually became the literary editor of the publication. And Meyer wanted to sort out the confusion and the anxiety that National Review readers and contributors felt about the labels conservative and individualist and this new label of libertarian that was starting to arise at that time as well. So Meyer developed a philosophy which then gets yet another label and in fact it is a label that is applied by the conservative critics of this philosophy. So Meyer is trying to bring together people who consider themselves conservatives like Russell Kirk along with people who would label themselves as individualists or libertarians and Meyer's saying all of these folks should adopt the label conservative. But one of the sort of hard line traditionalists who is a friend of Frank Meyers but also a strong critic of his is a fellow by the name of Brent Bozell who is actually Bill Buckley's brother-in-law. Bozell is also a contributor to National Review and within the pages of the magazine there's a feisty debate between Meyer and Bozell and other contributors about the nature of conservatism and libertarianism. Bozell is very much on the side of the traditionalists who want to maintain the conservative label and basically not to have people like Frank Meyer call themselves conservatives. So Brent Bozell says that Frank Meyers philosophy really ought to be called fusionism because it is a fusion of libertarianism along with parts of traditionalist conservatism. Now, how did Frank Meyers himself understand this? The answer to that is to be found in a book he published in 1962 called In Defense of Freedom still available from the Liberty Fund. Meyer said that liberty must be the highest goal within politics but that virtue is the highest goal within human life and so Murray Rothbard said that really in most respects Frank Meyers philosophy in politics his political philosophy was libertarian and he additionally had a conservative philosophy in life and in society but fundamentally Meyer was an anti-status. The major difference between Murray Rothbard and Frank Meyer had to do with the Cold War where Frank Meyer having been a communist in the past conceived of communism as being an existential military and subversive threat to the United States and to Western civilization. So Meyer was very much a Cold War hawk whereas Murray Rothbard tended to agree with Frank Chaturov that in fact there was more to be feared from an overreaction here in the United States creating a military industrial complex as Dwight Eisenhower would call it in response to the Soviet Union that the greater threat was coming from basically within from our country adopting statism in response to the statism of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. Well Frank Meyers idea of fusionism was not supposed to be a kind of Frankenstein's monster stitched together out of some limbs contributed by Russell Kirk's conservatism and other limbs contributed by folks like Frank Chaturov and Murray Rothbard and the libertarian individualists. Instead what Meyer thought he was doing was to ironically enough propound a kind of integral or combined singular idea of a unitary tradition a unified tradition in the West of both liberty and virtue. And Meyer argued that this tradition of combined liberty and virtue was something that had characterized the Western tradition from the founding of Christianity all the way through to the end of the 18th century in the American founding. And Meyer believed that something tragic had happened in the 19th century that this combined tradition of both liberty and virtue split. And instead you had different people who were loyal to this tradition emphasizing different elements of it in tension with one another. So some people in the 19th century started calling themselves conservatives and started to focus on the traditionalist aspects of this tradition. They started to focus on perhaps religion and history and they became skeptical of market freedom and some of the ideas of liberty. And conversely you had others who in the 19th century started calling themselves liberals. These were the classical liberals and in many cases they were quite critical of religion. They certainly were very skeptical of the way in which religion had been practiced and institutionalized in state churches up through the 19th century itself. So Meyer said that there was a tragedy that took place in the 19th century with the splitting of this singular tradition of liberty and virtue into two competing strains. And Meyer saw his task in the 20th century to bring these strains back together and to reunite what had originally been a single tendency within the developing Western mind. And you know, I mean, Frank Meyer certainly understood that Western civilization over the course of 2000 years didn't always model either liberty or virtue, but rather he thought both liberty and virtue were the innate tendency within the Western tradition as it had been worked out over the course of centuries and indeed to millennia. So just as Western civilization had reached an apogee with the American founding and with the principles that were enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that was the point at which, you know, Frank Meyer thought you should have had the consummation of the idea of liberty and virtue being part of the same tradition, but instead in the 19th century tragedy struck and you had this division. So Meyer was working assiduously to try to make libertarians more conscious of the need for virtue in society and virtue in individual life without necessarily adopting statist attempts to enforce virtue. And similarly, Meyer was trying to convince his traditionalist friends that they should be anti-statist in politics, but that did not mean they would have to compromise in any respect their traditional moral views in society and in individual life. And Meyer believed that liberty and virtue were not opposed that in fact they went together and that the self-responsibility that liberty imposes upon you, you cannot externalize your, you know, sort of your misdeeds onto the state. If you have to take responsibility for yourself, for your family, for your community, then you will have to be virtuous, that virtue in fact is going to be demanded of you because otherwise you as an individual and your family and your community will all fail. Well, Meyer was not altogether successful in persuading his colleagues at National Review of this philosophy. He continued to have critics such as his friend Brent Bozell. Brent Bozell was a fan of what we would now call Catholic integralism and Bozell looked with great admiration to Francisco Franco's Spain, not as a kind of ideal political order, but rather Bozell thought that at least Franco's Spain was a stepping stone to what he really wanted, which would have been a political order that was more explicitly Catholic and that was willing to enforce, you know, Catholic social teachings and, you know, coercion and religion is something that, you know, Catholics have always, you know, eschewed. At least that is the teaching of the church, but the idea that you can have a social order where the state provides every possible incentive for people to become Catholic and remain Catholic, that was something that Brent Bozell thought was not only possible and not only allowed under Catholic teaching, but was in fact mandatory. So Meyer had worked very hard to promulgate the philosophy of fusionism and unfortunately it wound up being misunderstood by many of its own admirers that fusionism came to be seen over the course of the 1960s and 1970s as a formula for a political coalition rather than being a philosophy. And the political coalition that it came to stand for was one that may or may not be considered principled. It was just a mixture of conservative social policy on the one hand with libertarian or at least quasi-libertarian free market economics, along with a very strong anti-communism and foreign policy hawkishness. This was not what Frank Meyer had in mind, but it was the way in which fusionism increasingly came to be understood. It came to be seen as kind of the default ideology of the Cold War Republican Party. Well, you had another group start to emerge in the 1970s who would become very fateful and in fact very fatal for a number of our countrymen. This group was the neo-conservatives. They initially emerged as a set of intellectuals and journalists in response to what was called the New Left. And the New Left was a breakaway from the old Cold War liberalism. The New Left was much more culturally radical than the Cold War liberals such as JFK and even Franklin Roosevelt had been. The New Left was kind of a predecessor to today's identity politics. It was very much on the side of rioters and criminals whenever there were riots over the draft and over civil rights issues and whatnot. And the New Left was very critical of America's founding. They didn't quite have the ideas of the 1619 project but they basically were tending in that direction. They were very revisionist. Now the New Left did have some critical views of US foreign policy that libertarians and in fact certain anti-war conservatives found quite sympathetic. But usually the New Left would take these ideas in a perverse direction. And it really was the case that for many on the New Left it was not so much that they were anti-war as when they looked at things like the Vietnam conflict they were just on the other side. They actually were rooting for the communists and they were not just critical of America's involvement in this war but they actually thought that it was good to have revolutionaries like Che Guevara for example going around and starting conflicts in the name of a worldwide revolution. The New Left tended to admire not only Che Guevara but also Mao Zedong and a number of other radical leftists around the world who of course have blood on their hands to an incalculable degree. The New Left was so radical that a lot of former Cold War liberals these were people who in many cases had actually been even farther to the left than Franklin Roosevelt and JFK. In many cases these were folks who in their college days for example flirted with non-Stalinist communism in other words Trotskyism. People like Irving Crystal for example. They started moving to the right as the New Left emerged and the reason for this was they saw the New Left as a threat to the Cold War project and they also disliked the cultural radicalism of the New Left. So the Neo-Conservatives were not sort of grounded in the ideas of people like Russell Kirk. The Neo-Conservatives in fact really disdained people like the Southern Agrarians these literary thinkers. They didn't like people like Richard Weaver. The Neo-Conservatives also were not old style individualists or libertarians. The Neo-Conservatives gave at most two cheers for capitalism. The Neo-Conservatives really disliked the idea of dismantling the New Deal and the welfare state. The Neo-Conservatives actually thought you could create a more conservative kind of New Deal or welfare state. And this is actually quite different from someone like Russell Kirk. So even though Russell Kirk was someone who was quite critical of libertarians, Kirk was always a decentralist and Kirk was always a regionalist. And he did not believe in these massive centralized government schemes like the New Deal. The Neo-Conservatives on the other hand were quite willing to use centralized political power in economics and they certainly wanted to use it in foreign policy to prosecute the Cold War. Well, the Neo-Conservatives wound up being the beneficiary of a little bit too much charity on the part of conservatives including traditionalists. That a lot of traditionalists, a lot of conservatives during the Cold War, they welcomed the Neo-Conservatives just because they thought, well, these are new converts who, you know, they're drifting in the right direction. Even if they're not quite there yet, these are nice allies to have. The Neo-Conservatives often had some scholarly background in social science, which many of the traditionalists who had more of a background in literature and history did not possess. So they saw the Neo-Conservatives as being valuable as sociologists for example who studied crime and as being people who had an expertise in the welfare state. They also thought the Neo-Conservatives had a keen understanding of communism because many of them had been Trotskyists themselves in their past and they thought that the Neo-Conservatives were on the side of the angels when it came to opposing the new left's cultural radicalism. So a lot of traditionalist conservatives and other conservatives welcomed the Neo-Conservatives into their coalition. The Neo-Conservatives then stabbed them in the back. The Neo-Conservatives were in a powerful position because they were given a sort of free reign by the coalition they entered into with the traditionalists and with existing conservatives. While at the same time the Neo-Conservatives also were able to go to Cold War Democrats and Cold War Liberals and say well we're the kind of conservatives, Neo-Conservatives, that you can do business with because we're not these radicals who want to dismantle the welfare state. We don't admire the Southern literary tradition. We're not sort of day class say like that. Basically the Neo-Conservatives went to friends of theirs within the liberal community and they said other conservatives are basically what Hillary Clinton would later call deplorables. And we Neo-Conservatives are much more clubbable because again we're on your side when it comes to things like the welfare state and the Cold War. We just don't like the very radical direction that the new left has taken. So the Neo-Conservatives were able to get a certain amount of capital, moral capital, intellectual capital and also of course capital from philanthropy from major foundations. Coming from both the right and from the left. They were seen as being, by the left as being the conservatives who were most close to the left and they were seen by many conservatives as being new converts who should be welcomed in the coalition. The Neo-Conservatives infiltrated the Ronald Reagan administration. This was a matter of tremendous internal controversy in the Reagan days. And the Neo-Conservatives wound up being so successful not only in the Reagan administration but especially in the George H. W. Bush administration subsequently that by the time you get to the end of the Cold War, the Neo-Conservatives are in a position to control most institutions in the conservative movement. And they tolerate some of the old traditionalist conservatives but they don't tolerate many of them. They actually tend to try to exile and excommunicate a lot of traditional conservatives, a lot of people who had been strong even cold warriors. The Neo-Cons tried to excommunicate these conservatives as being racist or backward or generally perhaps anti-Semitic. This was a charge that was labeled at level that Pat Buchanan, for example. Buchanan had been a Cold War conservative. He was not someone who was picking fights with the Neo-Cons for no reason. But when the Cold War ended, Pat Buchanan said it's time to come home America just as George McGovern who had been a hero to the New Left had said. And Buchanan said it's time for us to start to unwind NATO, to start to let Europe take care of its own security and America should return to the kind of foreign policy of non-intervention that we had followed before the World Wars. And actually had followed before the Spanish-American War which was really the time when we abandoned our traditional non-interventionism. So Buchanan stood for non-interventionism and the question of non-interventionism got put to the test very soon after the end of the Cold War. In fact, even before the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991, the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf. And the Persian Gulf War was very divisive among American conservatives. Most of them tended to support the Bush administration. This is George H.W. Bush. But Pat Buchanan and others were very critical and outspoken about their opposition to the Persian Gulf War which they thought would get us involved in the Persian Gulf War in def, sorry, would get us involved in the Persian Gulf and in conflicts in the Middle East endlessly. And of course Buchanan and others proved to be prophetic on that point. When Pat Buchanan and other traditionalist conservatives made this case back in the early 1990s, they were joined by principled libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul and New Rockwell who also said that our foreign policy, which they had been very critical of during the Cold War was going even further off the rails in the post-Cold War era as we were becoming a true empire, intervening, becoming the world's policemen, getting involved in the Middle East and so many other places. And so, ironically enough, a number of anarcho-capitalists, a number of very strict individualists and libertarians who perhaps had been an awkward fit with parts of the conservative movement during the Cold War era, either for foreign policy reasons or for reasons of thinking that the Cold War conservative movement was too statist in domestic policy. People like Murray Rothbard looked at the political situation in the early 1990s and they saw the need to form alliances and friendships with a number of these traditionalist conservatives who had now been exiled from the conservative movement by the neocons. These traditionalist conservatives who were opposed to the Iraq war, these traditionalist conservatives were also outspoken critics of political correctness, which had become a major phenomenon in the 1980s and early 1990s. And you tended to find that the neoconservatives and some of their friends in the Beltway who considered themselves to be libertarians, that they took a softer line on questions of political correctness than either anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard did or traditionalist conservatives like Pat Buchanan did. So political correctness and the way in which America was descending into sort of very high crime rates in the early 1990s, which have really started to return just recently. This was something that brought together a number of libertarians as well as these traditionalist conservatives and they formed an alliance of what came to be called paleoconservatism among the traditionalist conservatives and some of the libertarians identified as paleoliberitarians. So it was sort of a paleo fusionism that took place in the early 1990s. And it was a powerful movement. Pat Buchanan's 1992 effort for the Republican presidential nomination was unsuccessful, but it did seriously wound George H.W. Bush and it showed that George H.W. Bush was not the invincible figure that he seemed to be at the height of the Persian Gulf War when his approval ratings soared into the 90% range. Then in fact, many Americans worked very critical of the agenda that George H.W. Bush and the neo-conservatives were pursuing in the early 1990s. And as the 1996 presidential campaign approached, it seemed as if Pat Buchanan would have an even better chance of getting the Republican nomination or at least getting enough of a spotlight that he would be able to shift the debate on the right away from neo-conservatism and towards paleoconservatism. But a couple of tragedies struck around 1995 and going into 1996. One of these, of course, in January of 1995 was the death of Murray Rothbard. And that was an irreparable loss because Rothbard's genealty, his warmth as a human being, his mischievousness and curiosity, these were qualities that made him the ideal person to have interactions with sometimes quite prickly paleoconservatives, that the paleoconservatives were sometimes very much fixed in their view of the world. They were very skeptical of libertarians whom they considered to be perhaps all crypto-libertines or people who were just utilitarian economists and not people who had a really deep understanding and appreciation for the Western tradition. Murray Rothbard was able to form friendships even with the most skeptical of traditionalist conservatives and paleoconservatives. And so Rothbard was able to build a coalition and a set of friends which otherwise would have been impossible. So Rothbard's death was one thing that posed a tremendous problem. It basically helped to unwind and break down what had been a promising paleo-coalition at that point. The other thing that happens is that Pat Buchanan in 1996 focuses primarily on trade rather than foreign policy. And on trade, Pat Buchanan was an opponent, of course, of NAFTA, an opponent of free trade deals and generally a supporter of high tariffs and of industrial policy. All of which, of course, posed problems for the libertarian side of the Paleo alliance. And, you know, paleo-libertarians and strict anarcho-capitalist libertarians like Murray Rothbard, they were very critical of NAFTA too because they recognized that NAFTA was in fact a managed trade deal. It was a thousand-page agreement with all kinds of regulations and international enforcement agreements and whatnot. And so there was a very strong libertarian case against these trade deals as well. But that was not the case that Buchanan was making in 1995, 1996. And so the coalition of paleos started to unwind. And then, you know, worst of all, the neo-conservatives got very lucky. So at a time when the neo-conservatives have control of most of the conservative movement and they're starting to get funding from people like the founder of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, and you have, you know, at the beginning of Fox News, a number of neo-conservative figures who are brought on as experts and as spokespersons for conservatism. So people like Bill Kristol and his friends at the weekly standard were regular fixtures on Fox News in its first year or two. It's first, excuse me, it's for several years, in fact. Rupert Murdoch owned both the weekly standard and Fox News. And so as a result, it was quite natural for him to feature people from the magazine on his program. And I don't think Murdoch was keeping very close tabs on exactly what the ideological lean of some of these outlets were. And as a result, neo-conservatism got hold of what would become, by far, the most influential mass platform of conservative communications in the late 1990s. And neo-conservatives also made sure to cozy up to and flatter Rush Limbaugh, so they got to have a lot of influence over the radio waves as well. In general, the neo-conservatives, at a time when they had a death grip on the conservative movement, you also had a country which was starting to experience a lot of technological prosperity. This was when the internet first becomes a major consumer good. There's a telecom revolution. You have cell phones becoming common consumer products at this point. And so America seems very prosperous. The neo-cons think that they have an unlimited line of credit with which to wage wars for the promotion of democracy and nation building all around the world. And the neo-conservatives also have tremendous financial resources. And at the same time, this is all happening. The paleo-conservatives and the libertarians who have been their allies are starting to have some tensions and disputes among themselves. So the neo-cons basically rule the roost and they have the very delightful situation for themselves that in 2000, both of the major contenders for the Republican nomination are very compatible with neo-conservative views. Those two candidates, of course, are George W. Bush and John McCain. And you can see how, and again, there's a tragedy that plays out here because with John McCain, the most outspoken neo-con, and in fact, a neo-con who was quite happy to say that he wanted to reach out to the left, with John McCain as the major challenger to George W. Bush, a lot of people who might otherwise have had reservations about Bush, a lot of conservatives who would have seen George W. Bush as a chip off the George H.W. Block tree, George H.W. Bush and raised taxes. He'd created the Americans with Disabilities Act. George H.W. Bush had been a disaster for limited government. He'd been a disaster straight down the line for conservatives. And of course, George H.W. Bush had also given us some quite unreliable Supreme Court justices. Not Clarence Thomas, but the other appointees by George H.W. were dreadful. Well, a number of conservatives who had otherwise have had reservations about George H.W. Bush's son were willing to give George W. Bush a blank check or at least they were willing to give him a chance because the alternative was John McCain. And so George W. Bush is able to get the Republican nomination in 2000. He chooses Dick Cheney as his running mate. Dick Cheney at the time was considered to be just a kind of rock-ribbed Republican. A lot of folks didn't really think of him as being a hardline, ideological neocon. And they should have looked more closely because there were already plenty of signs of that. And during the George W. Bush administration, we would see that in spades. Well, the neocons got lucky in terms of the political environment and the economic environment in the late 1990s. But they wound up being the dog, rather, that caught the car. So they get everything they want. They have full control of the conservative movement. They get a very sympathetic presidential administration in there. And as a result, they are able to pursue their policies both domestically and in foreign policy. And those policies, of course, turn out to be an absolute disaster. So George W. Bush, following the neocon agenda, not only does he respond to the 9-11 attacks with a full-scale invasion and occupation followed by nation-building in Afghanistan, but George W. Bush decides that he's going to do what the neocons have been calling for for years and years, really ever since the First Persian Gulf War. He's going to go and invade Iraq as well. Well, George W. Bush is able to start these wars, but he's not able to finish them. He's not able to establish peace or any kind of humane regime, let alone a pro-American regime, that is stable in either Iraq or Afghanistan. And both of these become endless wars. They become wars that stretch on for a decade and more, and they wind up producing situations that are, first of all, bloodbaths in the immediate term, and then ultimately wind up, in the case of Afghanistan, the Taliban that we overthrew in 2001 simply come back as soon as America leaves, which shows that we accomplished absolutely nothing during our time there. And in Iraq, it's ironic because the neocons had always been even more hawkish against Iran than they had against Iraq. But what we did in Iraq basically made Iran stronger, and it gave Iran more influence over Iraq. And you see that in some of the headlines coming out of Iraq in the past month or so. So the neocons wound up being quite discredited in foreign policy, that they started these wars, that they couldn't finish. As a result, the Republicans who had controlled Congress since 1995, they lose control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. They lose the House of Representatives. And then, of course, in 2008, the John McCain is nominated as the successor to George W. Bush, which he certainly was spiritually in other respects, and McCain loses to Barack Obama. And Barack Obama was a candidate with many deficiencies, but he did at least claim to be against the Iraq war, at least said he was against starting it. And that was quite different from a lot of the other Democrats of that era. So such Senate Democrats as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee, and, of course, Joe Biden, were all supporters of the Iraq war at the time. So the Democrats were not really an alternative to the Republicans, to the neocons at all at that point. But in 2008, you have Barack Obama claiming that he is going to be a force of hope and change, and that the page is going to be turned on this neoconservative imperium that had occurred in the whole country with the George W. Bush administration. And you also have an opening at this point in 2008 for some of the critics of neoconservatism on the right to start regaining a popular audience and regaining traction. And Ron Paul, heroically, mounts a campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination that year. And he is much more successful than any of the Beltway pundits and prognosticators had predicted. Ron Paul becomes a kind of grassroots phenomenon. His fundraising is astronomical. It's really fantastic. And Ron Paul's message is clearly resonating. It's clearly starting to bring in new people to the liberty movement, certainly, and also to the side of people who are not on the left, people who are generally right of center and even personally quite conservative, but who are very critical of the neocons and would like to see the George W. Bush legacy wiped out and just forgotten and completely repudiated. So Ron Paul is kind of the profit of a new populism that starts to emerge on the right. And the Tea Party, which becomes very influential in the 2010 midterms and elects a number of Republicans to the Senate and the House, the Tea Party actually grows out of the Ron Paul movement in many ways. Not that the Tea Party follows a strict kind of constitutionalist, libertarian Republican line like Ron Paul himself, but it does take inspiration from the grassroots energy that Ron Paul had been able to tap into. And so a number of other Republicans, many of whom, in fact, most of whom were far less principled, were able to try to brand themselves as candidates for liberty. And they were able then to take advantage of this Tea Party wave in 2010 and get elected. Of course, the neocons had been a disaster not only in foreign policy, but also in domestic policy. And the George W. Bush administration led us into the Great Recession. The Great Recession was also very discrediting of neoconservative views on economics and on domestic policy. And so there, too, there was an opening for people like Ron Paul and for critics of a loose monetary policy to gain a new audience. And Ron Paul runs again in 2012 because the Republican Party at that point still has not learned its lesson. And the 2012 Republican nominee is Mitt Romney, of course. And Romney is a chip off the old George W. Bush and John McCain Block. There's a limit to how much, however, support Ron Paul is able to garner within the Republican Party. A lot of Republicans and a lot of conservatives still think that libertarianism means, you know, support for drug legalization and maybe support for things like gay marriage, which a number of Beltway libertarians in particular were very outspoken in support of. A lot of social conservatives really thought that libertarians could not be their allies. And even though Ron Paul was quite socially conservative, and Ron Paul, of course, was an obstetrician who opposed abortion because he knew that abortion was the termination of a life in the womb. Despite that, a number of social conservatives were still very skeptical of Ron Paul, did not want to join his coalition. And as a result, there was a ceiling to how much support Ron Paul could find in 2008 and in 2012. Well, in 2016, Ron Paul's son, Senator Rand Paul, is looking to build a somewhat wider coalition. But for a variety of reasons, some of them being, just in terms of personality, Ron Paul is not quite the kind of prophetic figure that his father was. For a number of reasons, Ron Paul is not successful in creating a broader sort of populist liberty movement on the right. A large reason for the failure of libertarian populism to emerge in 2016 is that a different kind of populism emerges with Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is not a tutor at ideologue. He's not someone who knows a great deal of conservative philosophy necessarily. But he's someone who's instincts have always been quite paleoconservative, at least when it comes to issues such as immigration and of course trade, but also foreign policy. And Donald Trump was outspoken in denouncing George W. Bush and John McCain and the Iraq War. And so Trump was able to capitalize in an even bigger way than Ron Paul had on the disgust that many Americans and especially conservatives felt with the way in which the country had gone under the leadership of George W. Bush. And I should point out by the way, a lot of conservatives, a lot of sort of ordinary Republicans, they didn't necessarily think of themselves as being anti-war or against the Iraq War, but they just looked at the result and they said something is wrong here. And maybe we can't even bring ourselves to say what went wrong. But clearly we're ashamed of the results here. We really feel as if something has betrayed our own soldiers. We have failed to live up to the promise that we thought we were offering the people of Iraq. When Donald Trump ran for office and indeed when Ron Paul had run, they were able to articulate these frustrations that many conservatives felt but could not bring themselves to consciously articulate. And so Donald Trump cleared the way to a kind of rethink on the American right. The neo-conservatives had previously been able to co-opt a lot of Christian conservatives. So in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s, you found that neocon-friendly Catholic thinkers such as Richard John Newhouse at First Things Magazine and Michael Novak, that they were very influential in shaping the direction of Catholic conservative thought during those three decades. And you had a number of sort of Beltway libertarians and free market think tanks that also were able, were quite willing to do business with the neo-conservatives. They thought, well, we have some reservations about neocon foreign policy, but we really like the sort of rather more liberal approach to immigration and somewhat open borders that neo-conservatives seem to be much more amenable to than paleoconservatives. Paleoconservatives were always on the side of restricting immigration and closing the borders. And the neo-conservatives also posed as free traders. They were in support of things like NAFTA. And now you see that old neo-conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, for example, and for that matter, I think even Bill Crystal, that they have rebranded themselves. They've decided, aha, what we actually are are classical liberals. So again, this label which had been co-opted by the likes of FDR and Woodrow Wilson at one point is now being claimed by the likes of Bill Crystal. And labeling always becomes very difficult for these reasons. So that is how they are framing themselves these days. On the right, however, there's now a bit of a vacuum and a lot of discussion as to where conservatism should go. And a lot of the institutions that previously had been willing to play ball with the neo-cons are starting to try to rethink radical alternatives now. So that's why you find among Catholic conservatives a re-examination of some of the ideas of people like Brent Bozell when it comes to the idea of having a explicitly Catholic state. And very few sort of Beltway institutions or conservative magazines are adopting a view as hardline as that. But there are a number of influential thinkers, folks perhaps like Soraba Mari, Patrick Dineen and others, who certainly in principle would adopt that kind of approach to the relationship between the church and the state as opposed to a more liberal view or a disconnected view that was characteristic of conservatism up until now. You also have a change among a group that is called the West Coast Straussians and they are identified with the Claremont Institute out in California. Now the Claremont Institute always had some differences with the neo-conservatives. The Claremont Institute, their guiding light was Harry Jaffa. Harry Jaffa was a very bold and cantankerous philosopher. And so he had feuds with almost everyone. He had feuds with libertarians. He had feuds with traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk and Mel Bradford in particular, a Southern conservative. And Harry Jaffa also had feuds with other Straussians, people like Harvey Mansfield for example. But in general, the West Coast Straussians were able to get along to some degree with the neo-con-dominated American right of the 1980s and 1990s. And because of their connection to Harry Jaffa, Jaffa was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Generally, West Coast Straussians are strong critics of the idea of secessionism. And they like the idea of the Declaration of Independence and its universal values. They like to draw a distinction between the American War of Independence and the claims to independence that were made by the American South in the Civil War. What's happened though is that the West Coast Straussians have seen the failures of neo-conservatism. They've seen the emergence of yet another even more radical form of the new left with wokeism and with the BLM movement and other such things. And the West Coast Straussians have also kind of reexamined the idea of secession. Not because they're reexamining Lincoln or the Civil War, but because I think they've reminded themselves that the Declaration of Independence itself was about breaking away from an empire, breaking away from a larger political unit that was no longer representative of the Americans in their own communities. So West Coast Straussians have now become quite strong allies of populist conservatism and quite strong allies of various critics of the neo-cons. I count many West Coast Straussians as very close friends. So the West Coast Straussians are I think a group that libertarians who previously had had strong disagreements with them. They still have principle disagreements over Lincoln and the Civil War and certain issues of philosophy. But even in many practical issues, there's now a crossover that had not been there before. So where do libertarians fit into this new evolving American right? Well, unfortunately, a lot of libertarians in Washington DC and in positions of influence to the extent that any libertarian had any influence, they were always trying to cozy up, first to the neo-conservatives. Subsequently, they tried to say, well, we can be kind of woke too. We don't like woke statism maybe, but we wanna have kind of a free market wokeness or something. This was how these folks branded themselves. They were always going out there and promoting these left-wing ideas. They adopted the camouflage and in some cases actually the principles of the woke left and to some degree the neo-cons as well. Well, they've been totally discredited and we've seen that that brand of libertarianism is so unpopular that it has even been repudiated forcefully by the libertarian party itself, which is now under the control of libertarians who are rather right-leaning in their cultural views. I believe it was the Mises Caucus that took control of the libertarian party, no official connection with the Mises Institute, of course, but they both looked to the intransigent libertarianism of Mises as an inspiration rather than the more compromising libertarianism, perhaps of other figures. So I think within libertarianism itself, you see a lot of the older libertarian institutions in the Beltway and elsewhere, weakened, discredited in the same position as many of the neo-con institutions are, and you see a lot of grassroots libertarians who are hunger for an alternative. They want an alternative to the Gary Johnsons and the Bill Bars and the other sort of hopeless, washed up Republicans that were characteristic of the libertarian party's nominations for a good long time there. Speaking of time, we are almost at my limit, so I'm just gonna wrap up here, but it seems to me that while there are strong philosophical points of disagreement between populist libertarians, between sort of strict sort of Rothbardian libertarians and people like our integralist friends, Sorbammari and others, and some of the West Coast Straussians, people like Michael Anton, for example, even though there are strong philosophical points of divergence, and sometimes clashes of personality as well. I think all of us need to recognize the tremendous danger that is posed to us right now by a newly aggressive left. It's an aggressive left that is not only statist, but also it has adopted basically one of the two general totalitarian strategies. So the totalitarian strategy that was often adopted by the left in the 20th century was the communist strategy of let's try to make the state in control of everything directly. Let's nationalize industry, let's pursue the goals of communism. That was sort of the most radical form of leftism in much of the 20th century. The leftism that's most radical now is actually following the strategy of the other totalitarian power of fascism and Nazism in that just as the Nazis didn't necessarily nationalize every industry, instead the Nazis would go to private businesses and say, hmm, you might want to no longer hire Jews in your company, and you might want to manufacture munitions for us, and you might wanna create barbed wire for us. Basically the Nazis were able to co-opt a lot of private actors and to coerce them indirectly, and in some cases directly as well, into serving the Nazi ideology. Now I'm not saying that there's a direct comparison between Nazism and leftism today, but you'll see that leftism is doing exactly the same thing in terms of trying to extort private sector institutions into following a left wing ideological line, and that's important because as we know the state is monstrously incompetent. So the one good thing you can say about the old status left is that if it actually got what it wanted, it created all these new bureaucracies, they were incompetent, and people very quickly saw they didn't work, the Soviet Union was something that very quickly was not something idealists could support even if they were Marxists because they realized this thing is a total failure in every respect. The new left, the woke left of today unfortunately, is trying to co-opt much more competent allies in the private sector, in corporate America through things like ESG which I know we'll have a session about later today, and of course the left has already completely overrun our institutions of higher education. So this is a real existential danger, not in the sense that we're gonna be put in gulags or what have you, but in the sense that the very ideas of liberty that Frank Chaterov said must be preserved if we're going to have freedom in this country are now being eradicated by social networks that are obeying left wing dictates and they are being strangled and sort of eradicated in our universities as well, and certainly in the press, in the mainstream media. This is a situation that is dire for traditionalists, for Christian conservatives, and for serious libertarians, and so there is certainly a need for these groups to have good conversations among one another, not because conversation can solve every problem, but rather because we want to form friendships with people who realize just how diabolical today's left is and the need for all of us to work together to oppose it. Thank you very much.