 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by James Foster. Neoconservatism vs Libertarianism Part 2 In 1971, Irving Crystal, the godfather of neoconservatism, published an article in the New York Times magazine, Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship. The article holds a special place in my memory because it was the subject of a ferocious argument in 1974 that I had with Roy Childs, one of the most influential figures in the early phase of the modern Libertarian movement. Our argument per se was of no consequence. We remained close friends until Roy's untimely death in 1992, but the intellectual factors that contributed to our disagreement are directly relevant to a key question. How fundamental are the differences between neoconservatism and libertarianism? It will take a while to explain what precipitated my argument with Roy, so please bear with me. In late 1974, around a year after I had moved from Hollywood back to Tucson, I asked Roy to serve as best man at my wedding. Roy agreed, so I sent him plane tickets. Shortly before all this occurred, the first issue of Libertarian Review, October 1974, was published. This issue contained Roy's review of Irving Crystal's On the Democratic Idea in America, an anthology that includes Crystal's previously mentioned article on censorship. It was Roy's favorable review that occasioned our argument in Tucson. I accused Roy of sucking up to Crystal, and Roy did not respond well to my unfortunate choice of words. Things got ugly after that. I knew of Roy's plan to review Crystal's book. He'd mentioned it to me some time earlier while we were both living in Hollywood. I knew nothing about Crystal at the time, so Roy explained that though Crystal was not a Libertarian, he might be persuaded to the Libertarian point of view. This was more than idle speculation. Roy, as usual, had a plan. Roy had written a prize-winning essay, The Defense of Capitalism in Our Time, that won him a trip to the 1975 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Brussels, where he would present his paper for a distinguished audience that included Irving Crystal. Roy's paper began. In an address before the Mont Pelerin Society, social philosopher Irving Crystal has given us a searching and challenging account of the moral dilemma of our time, of the contemporary dispute and conflict between capitalism and socialism, and nihilism. Crystal's thesis is a paradoxical one. In briefest essence, Crystal maintains that while the advocates of capitalism and bourgeois liberal society are winning the battles, they are losing the war. The war for liberty and a free market society against the onslaught of opposing ideologies and the encroaching power of the state. Roy's paper was part of his grand design to convert Irving Crystal, so, in my opinion, was his L.R. review, published before he delivered his paper in Brussels. Roy hoped to show how libertarianism could solve the moral dilemma of our time and thereby win a sympathetic hearing and perhaps outright agreement from Crystal. As I said, I knew nothing about Crystal before I read Roy's review of the Democratic Idea in America. His praise for the book was high indeed. On the Democratic Idea in America is a collection of eight of Crystal's major essays published during the last seven years. Every one of them, without exception, is brilliant, probing, and profound. In the last paragraph of his review, Roy wrote, While I do not agree with all of Crystal's analysis, that of pornography and censorship is particularly inadequate, most of it is so refreshing and so profound that I found the book an experience at once exciting and disturbing. It's at my mind racing with new ideas, the level on which most political radicals, including libertarians, address cultural, social, and political problems, is so distressingly simplistic that this is more than welcome. When all is said and done, Irving Crystal and the Neoconservatives take reason, liberty, and civilization seriously. Roy's effusive review made Crystal's book so appealing that I immediately ordered a copy. But the book did not set my mind racing with new ideas. On the contrary, many of Crystal's points struck me as little more than hackneyed clichés, elegantly written to be sure, but hackneyed clichés nonetheless. If anyone was simplistic about matters pertaining to culture and values, it was surely Irving Crystal. I felt mildly annoyed while reading the first few essays, but my mood quickly changed to disgust upon reading pornography, obscenity, and the case for censorship. A treatment that Roy described as inadequate was nothing less than an unvarnished defense of censorship, not only of pornographic photographs and movies, but also of obscene art and literature, as Crystal put it, and lest there be any misunderstanding as to what I am saying, I will put it as bluntly as possible. If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship. This was the issue that provoked my argument with Roy. For Crystal to defend censorship was bad enough, but his claim that opponents of censorship do not care about the quality of life in America was at once ignorant and arrogant. Fully to appreciate why I responded so vigorously to Roy's positive review, you need to know a little about our friendship. Although only one month my senior, Roy had functioned as my mentor in some respects, especially during the year that we lived in the same apartment building on Selma Avenue in Hollywood. I was working on my first book during that period, and Roy was writing his brilliant series of articles on anarchism and justice for the individualist. As writers are wont to do, Roy and I were always looking for things to do other than write, thus in addition to going to movies and haunting bookstores, we spent endless hours discussing the fine points of libertarian theory, objectivism, and other matters, including the importance of history. I learned much more from Roy than he learned from me. Indeed, Roy altered the trajectory of my intellectual career with one comment. George, you are great in philosophy, but you are tabula rasa in history. It was at this point that I resolved to read virtually nothing other than history for the next five years, a span of time that would stretch into a decade. This is how seriously I took Roy's ideas and recommendations. Moreover, I knew that Roy pulled no punches when writing book reviews, even though books for libertarians, originally SIL book review and later libertarian review, was a commercial enterprise in the business of selling books. Rare is a reviewer who will trash a book that he hopes to sell, but this is precisely what Roy did in his 1972 review of It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuchilly. Roy hated Tuchilly's satirical skewering of Ayn Rand and other libertarian figures. This book should never have been published, he wrote. Tuchilly shows that he does not take the libertarian movement or the tiny band of heroes at its apex seriously and that he does not respect them or honesty. Roy continued, Consider the fact that libertarianism is vitally important for man, a life or death matter. Consider the fact that Rand and Rothbard are the Jefferson and Payne, the garrison and spooner of our tiny movement. Then consider the fact that it is these people, among others whom Tuchilly attempts to ridicule. It is not, you see, that he wants to demolish them. He just wants them not to be taken seriously. At least that is the impression one gets while reading this book, which makes both look like eccentric nuts. Given this background, I could not understand how Roy could write such a favorable review of the democratic idea in America, unless his purpose was to curry Crystal's favor. As I saw the matter, Roy's comments were strategically motivated. The fact that Crystal's defense of censorship was inept only made matters worse. Crystal's arguments, which were as far removed from brilliant probing and profound as it is possible to get, appeared sleazy to me. It was the sort of performance that I expected the Roy I knew to call rat poison. So I was astonished that he settled for inadequate. Roy stood his ground, always looking for bridges to build between the libertarian movement and other movements on both ends of the political spectrum. Roy insisted that libertarianism and neoconservatism shared a good deal in common and that there was no need to alienate neocons unnecessarily. I maintained in contrast that the differences between neoconservatism and libertarianism were fundamental and irreconcilable. Any similarities between the two ideologies were relatively superficial. Such similarities were no more significant or promising than the occasional overlap of views between libertarians and modern liberals and or conventional conservatives. Our argument resolved nothing, as is normally the case when two young libertarian warriors, each brimming to his eyeballs with intellectual testosterone, square off. I do not know if Roy ever changed his opinion about neoconservatism, but my opinion has never changed. While rereading dozens of Irving Crystal's essays over the past few weeks, I experienced a sense of deja vu, feeling the same queasy frustration that I experienced in 1974 when I first read the Godfather of neoconservatism. In my next essay, I will explore Irving Crystal's ideas about personal freedom, ideas that are shared by most neocons in more detail. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.