 Last weekend we applied a libertarian lens to take a look at the modern progressive movement in America and found it distinctly ill-libertarian, regressive, and not very liberal at all. This weekend we'll take a look at the modern conservative movement in the U.S. and try to ask some questions like why don't they actually conserve everything? What's behind the imperial presidency that they've created and now fear under Hillary? Why did they abandon any principles that the old right once held? And why and how have they entirely botched U.S. foreign relations, hopefully not forever? So if you're interested in where the American right went wrong, stay tuned. Welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and if you were listening last weekend we talked about the trouble with progressives from a libertarian perspective and we promised that we would do the same thing this weekend for our conservative friends or enemies such as they may be. To begin it's beyond the scope of our time or our discussion today to talk about the old right. Now what do I mean by the old right? I'm talking about the pre-World War II people like Albert J. Nock, H. L. Mankin, John T. Flynn, former Senator Robert Taft. There is much to admire and much to like about the old right. They're interested in America first. They're interested in a truly constitutional non-interventionist foreign and domestic policy. But the old right is gone. It's buried. If you want to learn more about it I'm going to recommend Justin Raimondo's great book Reclaiming the American Right. Justin's written quite a bit about Taft and Garrett Garrett and the non-interventionist impulses of what used to be considered the right in this country. If you'd like to know more about how the right was stolen or co-opted by the Buckleyite forces and of course now by Neoconservatives I'll recommend another great book to you by Murray Rothbard called The Betrayal of the American Right. It really lays out the factual and historical context behind how the right was taken over by activist Neoconservatives and warmongers and Buckleyites. What I'd really like to talk about today is the current right, the Republican Party and conservatives as we find them here and now today in 2016 particularly in the context of what appears to be Hillary versus Trump in the general election in November. You know, a good place to start and we will provide links to both Murray's book on the American Right and Justin Raimondo's book but I want to provide another link to you on an article that actually just came out in April. It's in the Neoconservative Magazine commentary. It was written by a gentleman named Matthew Contanetti and it really is great because it lays out kind of the whiny particulars of what conservatives have become today and it laments the fact that they're losing their power particularly in terms of foreign policy where more and more people are starting to question what Neoconservatives are saying and whether or not our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan for instance were wise or judicious. So anyway this Matthew Contanetti article called The Coming Conservative Dark Age was I mentioned first of all it's whiny and second of all it's so over the top with his hand ringing. You know, first of all he slurs the old right here. Let me quote him real quick. The American Mercury which doesn't aside is an absolutely fabulous old periodical that you should go and look up. We have copies of the bound copies of the American Mercury here at the Mises Institute. It's far more intelligent, more erudite, more interesting than the political and social commentary that passes today at Salon or National Review. But anyway he says the American Mercury for which Buckley worked briefly was a nest of anti-Semites. The libertarian Freeman was beset with infighting, more interested in criticizing the New Deal than in coalition building. Cranky, conspiratorial, bigoted, frustrated, powerless. This was the conservatism of William F. Buckley's young adulthood. So you can tell where this guy is coming from. He's basically insinuating that these dark ages in conservatism which are actually the bright ages in conservatism are coming back somehow and of course he has to drop the anti-Semitic canard which is as played and as meaningless as the racist allegation. But as we continue here in the article he laments that the gatekeeper theory of media has been lost. In other words, the greatness of William F. Buckley in the minds of people who read commentary magazine was that he had this great purge. He got rid of all the old guard, non-interventionist, bircherite, right-wingers and replaced them with new New York intellectuals who would guide National Review and guide conservatives into greater victories. And part and parcel of this was appointing themselves as gatekeepers of conservative thought. And Buckley and National Review certainly were at the center of this. So let me quote Con Nenny again here. He says, publishing a magazine and producing television is expensive. Not everyone can do it. But anyone with the internet can write a blog or tweet or Facebook post or can Skype or record a podcast. The castle no longer has walls. The gatekeepers are mostly useless. And this is, of course, a bad thing in his mind because important gatekeepers like the New York intellectuals, as he puts it in National Review, ought to be running the show and deciding what is allowed and what is not allowed within conservatism. And of course, he sees no link between this and their lack of electoral success. He doesn't understand, at least on a visceral level, that populism is how you win. That's how the left has made huge, albeit incremental, progress over the entire 20th century. Not by being pointy-headed intellectuals. But anyway, he finishes the article by talking about, and of course, this is their whiny lament that not all right-wingers are of their kind and preferred type and that there's been a rise of the alt-right, which of course he associates with Trumpism, even though it's not always a one-to-one direct comparison. So I'm quoting him one last time here. He says, what at first seemed like absurd and unintentionally hilarious articles are in fact quite malevolent. They are the vehicles by which anti-liberal and dehumanizing sentiments become legitimizing conservative circles. They are evidence that we are living in the midst of a sort of historical counterfactual. What if the Birchers had expelled Buckley and not the other way around? They are the stepping stones on the path to a pre-National Review media universe, not forbid, of embattled and bittered impotent conservatives, another conservative dark age. Well, the irony here is just too thick to cut with a knife because if nothing else, the National Review is asian of the conservative movement is exactly what made it impotent. So one of the points he makes here is that one of Buckley's great achievements was of course welcoming neo-conservatives who had changed their minds, so to speak, into the Republican Party and into the conservative movement. What's a neo-conservative? It's not a slur, as some people claim. Most neo-conservatives are not Jewish in fact, and of course Irving Kristol defined neo-conservatism for us. So it's not a made up word by people who disliked them. But for our purposes, we can say they are people who were formerly liberals or Trotskyites or Marxists, who were thereby comfortable with big government programs, with welfare programs, with entitlement programs, but have taken a hard turn to the authoritarian right with respect to foreign policy and advocate for a muscular foreign policy. And what's so interesting of course about neo-conservatives is they're entirely willing to entertain and permit and even support a gigantic welfare state and a gigantic regulatory state as long as that sort of keeps the masses happy and comfortable and not questioning their foreign policy adventures, so you see what they value the most. So understanding neo-conservatism is really at the heart of understanding from a libertarian perspective what's wrong with conservatism today. So when we're looking at the right, when we're looking at the landscape in 2016, you know I'm reminded there's the famous quote by Lysander Spooner, who was about a generation behind the Founding Fathers, and of course he's an anarchist hero for writing about how the Constitution has no authority. So here's this quote he says, but whether the Constitution really be one thing or another, this much is certain that it is either authorized such a government as we have had or has been powerless to prevent it, in either cases unfit to exist. Close quote. And I really think the same is true for conservatism, right? Either conservatives believe in the culture and the society and the government we've got today, or they fail to prevent it. So either way they're culpable. My definition of conservatism would be something like this. A conservative is someone who believes state power should be used judiciously if at all, and only to protect rights, not to engineer society, not to engineer outcomes. So this would be roughly a limited constitutionalist viewpoint, not my viewpoint, but if I had defined conservatism that is how I would define it. But today of course we find that conservatives have conserved nothing. What it really means to be a conservative today is you believe the same things democrats believe except 20 or 30 years later. Democrats fold on everything, both in the realm of economic issues, constitutional matters, social issues, and now foreign policy. But if we ask modern conservatives, how do you define conservatism? What do you think it means to be a republican or a conservatism? What would they say? Well, I believe in tradition. Not really. We're a secular country at this point. Not too many people going to church, not too many people having large families, not too many people having intact families, not too many people living by religious principles. So they can't really call themselves the party of tradition or religion or culture because those things have been lost. They're no longer here for republicans to hang their hat on. But what they will try to hang their hat on is the idea that they're for limited government, which presumes some sort of fiscal restraint, some sort of spending restraint. And this is the point that Mises made. He said the key to maintaining liberty is to restrict government spending and restrict government funding. But we don't see that today. I remember distinctly I traveled with Ron Paul one time during his 2012 campaign to Iowa. And we were going around. We met the Iowa governor, Terry Brand said that day. We were sitting in an office with the Iowa GOP state chairman and he didn't favor Ron. Ron was certainly not his candidate. But nonetheless, he was entertaining our meeting. And I remember him saying something like, well, what would it take for you guys to stop bashing conservatives and for Ron Paul to really be in the fold once again? And I piped up and I said, well, you can start by repudiating George W. Bush, right? The most unconservative Republican president, perhaps of all time. And of course, he didn't like that to kind of look down his nose at that suggestion. But my point was that Republicans can't claim the mantle of fiscal restraint unless and until they repudiate the big spenders in their own party. And W is the biggest spender in Republican history. And I also remembered quite distinctly, while we're talking about fiscal restraint, the passage of the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. This is a bill that was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president, George W. Bush, in 2003. And if you recall, this bill was just a naked play to get more seniors to vote for W in 2004 against John Kerry. That's the entire reason this bill was brought up, the entire reason it was passed. All the Dems or virtually all the Dems voted against it. Not that they didn't want a drug benefit. They just didn't want to help Bush be Kerry. If you go back and study a little bit about that bill, you'll find that future Medicare costs are based on actuarial tables and actuarial predictions dealing with life expectancy, new treatments and modalities, and of course demographics. So it turns out that when you offer seniors free prescription drugs, they'll take you up on it. And as a result of this, Medicare Part D, if you extrapolate out into the future, is estimated to cost more in the future than the original Medicare bill passed in the 60s under Lyndon Johnson cost. In other words, the cost of giving people prescription drugs, not coincidentally, the big pharmaceutical companies loved George W. Bush for creating a whole new cohort of people who could now afford their drugs. The cost of giving people free prescription drugs actually exceeds the cost of doctor visits, giving them free doctor visits. So Medicare Part D was an unmitigated disaster for the U.S. economy and the U.S. budget. It's going to cause huge dislocations in the future, more than Medicare has caused and will cause. And it's going to cause our budget to be even more unbalanced. It's going to cause the fiscal gap to widen. And it's about as unrestrained a bill as Congress has ever passed. And as I mentioned, I recall being there, this bill has been termed one of the most contentious votes in the history of Congress. Ultimately it was not passed till about 5 a.m. after some exceedingly bizarre parliamentary maneuvering by Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert, who were then the majority whip and speaker of the House, respectively. So it was a very unholy bill from the get-go, was supported by the pharmaceutical industry. It was designed to help Bush win reelection. It was passed in the dark of night with some serious arm twisting. The whole thing to me really exemplifies what the modern Republican Party is all about. No principles and do anything you have to do to win. There's nothing conservative or constitutional or cultural or religious or traditional about this party. The other interesting thing is that apart from fiscal restraint, conservatives like to say, well, they're for free markets. And of course, what we found, free markets means globalism. It means support by people like Paul Ryan for global managed trade schemes that require thousands of pages of legislation somehow to pass like the WTO bill like NAFTA, bills that set up international bodies to regulate trade in direct contravention, by the way, of the Constitution, which authorizes Congress and Congress alone to regulate trade. Oh, and by the way, you can't give away and express constitutional power by treaty, regardless of what anybody in the Senate might say. And one of the most interesting things about the modern globalist free trade, so-called posture of today's GOP is that the Republican Party hates its base. They hate the people who vote for them. And that's a big part of the Trump phenomenon. At some point, the base got wise to this. Another thing that conservatives today will tell you they stand for is life, that they're against abortion. If there's one thing you can count on from your Republican congressman or senator or a Republican presidential candidate is they'll say, well, I'm pro-life. But let's examine that for a second. Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973. And since that time, millions upon millions of dollars have been spent supporting supposedly pro-life candidates, supporting supposedly pro-life causes and lobbying. And I think to myself, if all of those millions of dollars and all the human time and energy behind the pro-life political movement had simply gone into helping young pregnant girls in trouble in whatever way, housing them, helping them get through their pregnancies to give up their babies for adoption, whatever it might be, if all that time and money and energy had just been spent outside of politics on creating a culture where young women didn't want to abort their babies rather than trying to ban it and always use federal law, nationalizing everything, federalizing everything. If you look at Article I, Section 8, Congress doesn't have any authority in areas of social matters and criminal matters have always been left to the state. So clearly, by omission, the abortion question constitutionally, which is, is a legally ought to be left up to the states. And the Republican Party has never been comfortable with that approach or that answer. They've always tried to federalize it. They've always tried to overturn, quote, unquote, Roe v. Wade. And they've done nothing. They've done nothing. If you're against abortion, it's every bit as legal today as it was in 1973. And they dance around the issue. They try to come up with partial term abortion bans and that sort of thing. And it just, it saddens me that some people, sometimes senior citizens like my mom get sucked into this idea that the Republican Party or the conservatism is pro-life because it just isn't so. And the one last thing I'll leave you with on the abortion question is they can't even really attack Roe v. Wade properly. They have to fight this right to privacy business instead of getting at the root of it, which is, of course, judicial review, right? Article 3, read Article 3. The Supreme Court's not supreme over other branches of government. It's just supreme over lower federal courts. The whole idea of judicial review of allowing the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of congressional or executive actions is bunk. It was created out of whole clock in the early 1800s in the Marbury v. Madison decision. Conservatives will never attack the root. They'll never get to the root cause of what's wrong with activist government and activist and imperial presidency and activist courts. They always try to dance around the issue and therefore they never have any success. But you know, the one area, the one issue where modern conservatives or Republicans, I won't say they're principled, but they're actually steadfast, let's just say, is foreign policy. It's the one issue they care about and the one issue that they won't compromise over. We have to rule the world. They care far more about blowing up Syria than they worry about blowing up the U.S. budget down the road by passing this crazy Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. There's anything they believe in today, they, meaning conservatives, it's intervention, intervening using military force and sanctions, nation building, making the world safe for globalist democracy. None of these things, of course, are conservative, meaning judicious. They're all very un-conservative. But this is the one area where conservatives are remarkably just hell bent on blowing up the world. And when we do this, when we engage in nation building, a la Bill Crystal, a la Max Boot, a la Bill Weld, the LP vice presidential candidate, a la National Review, very, very bad things happen. We added a couple trillion dollars in debt for starters to the U.S. balance sheet just because of these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We killed more than 100,000 people just in Iraq alone, many of them civilians. And worst of all, for someone like me who has kids, we are creating deep-rooted animosity against America, against the West, throughout the Islamic world. And this is something that is going to come back at us in countless ways that we can't predict and we can't know. And it's going to come back on my children. It's going to make them hated Americans. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not what conservatism should be all about. And let's not forget that our conservative friends, our Republican friends have also created thousands upon thousands of wounded military veterans who will now need a lifetime of expensive VA care, adding to that same fiscal gap made worse by their Medicare bill. So this is not the party of life, ladies and gentlemen. So how do they get away with all this? How do they get away with not being particularly pro-life by prosecuting and dragging us into disastrous wars by passing terrible pieces of legislation, by rolling over to the Democrats on every social issue imaginable? And yet they still control state houses across America. They still control a majority in the U.S. House. Just a few years back, they controlled the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. Oval Office under Bush. So how do conservatives do it? How do they continue, I won't say to win ideologically or issue by issue, but get to get paid? How do they stay in office, stay in power, keep themselves paid even while they're losing every political and ideological battle? Well, that's an interesting question, and it's one that people on the right who identify as conservatives are finally starting to ask. And this is something that Beltway conservatives, neoconservatives, national review conservatives cannot stand. And this is something the alt-right so-called excels at. The alt-right came up with this term conservatism, Inc. And it describes this sort of vast jobs program that exists mostly in D.C., also in New York to a lesser extent, and certainly in the suburbs of northern Virginia, where defense contractors live in gigantic houses in places like Potomac, Maryland, and Great Falls, Virginia. I can absolutely attest to that fact. So conservatism, Inc. consists of the mothership, of course, national review, publications like commentary, but it also consists of think tank them, a vast sort of network of think tank them. I would say heritage, the Heritage Institute is really at the core of conservatism, Inc. And also the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, is the home of neoconservatives. It's the home of neoconservatism, Inc. And of course, their name has never made any sense because they're not interested in enterprise or business or capitalism in the slightest. Mostly what they talk about is foreign policy. So while why they're called the American Enterprise Institute, we have no idea. But nonetheless, conservatism, Inc. is real. It's very well-funded. And it's certainly not going to go away anytime soon, even as conservatives increasingly lose their way ideologically and at the ballot box. You know, a couple of years ago, I was looking at the financial records of a major conservative organization in Washington, D.C. And in the particular year in question, they had brought in about $90 million in donations. They had spent in that same year about $70 million on expenses. So a big operation. But they banked $20 million in a single year. And then looking at their financial portfolio, they had assets, mostly stocks and bonds invested in the market, of about $700 million, almost three-quarters of a billion dollars in assets. They had a $20 million surplus for the particular year. I can't recall which year it was for which I was looking at their financial records. And imagine the hubris. Imagine an organization like that sending a letter to a senior citizen and asking them for $50 or $100. When they've got $700 million in investments and a single year surplus of $20 million, but they do it, they do it relentlessly, they do it repeatedly, they do it shamelessly, and they never get anywhere legislatively. They use direct mail, they use phone banks, they use all kinds of tactics to raise money from people, promising results they never get. And it's a vast enterprise. So out of all the reasons we might be cynical towards the modern Republican Party, this is number one. This idea that lots and lots of people get paid and paid handsomely, mostly around the Potomac, and never produce any results, meaning they never really stop history. They never stand a thwart history like they claim. They never stop the legislative juggernaut that is modern progressivism. And they don't even advocate policies that we could particularly view as conservative. Certainly not in the sense of the real meaning of the word, which is judicious. So I'll leave you with this one final thought today. If we could summarize politics in America really around the world, but if we could summarize modern politics in America, it would be one statement, we don't believe you. In other words, when Hillary comes out and says, look, we just want to have some reasonable background checks for gun purchasers so we know that former felons and people with mental health issues don't end up owning and using dangerous weapons. It's pretty reasonable on its face, right? But everybody on the right hears this from Hillary and instinctively says, we don't believe you. You say that that's what you want, but we know what you really want is to start confiscating guns. You're just going to do it incrementally. And one of your incremental steps is to say, gee, let's just have a database to keep guns away from crazy people and criminals. Well, the same thing is entirely true of the right. We don't believe you. When the right says, we want smaller government. When the right says we're pro-life. When the right says America has interests in the Middle East that require blood and treasure. When the right says send us money for our legislative agenda, we don't believe any of it. And neither should you. So it's not like if the Republican Party and the conservative movement begin to wither away rapidly that we will lose some bulwark against the growth of progressivism. Republican Party and conservatives in the United States have been part and parcel of that growth. They have been a handmaiden to it. They've done nothing to stop it or really even slow it since probably about the World War I progressive era. So if they do in fact go the way the wigs, I say good riddance and I say no great loss. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.