All right, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, this is Angela Keaton for KS959 and Antiwar Radio.
On the line with me today, we have Professor David Henderson, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Professor of Economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Dr. Henderson, are you there?
Yep.
All right.
Let's jump right in because this is very important.
A few weekends ago when most great patriots were at the CPAC, known through Lou Rockwell as the crazy people at a conference, you were at a very, very different, very important event called Across the Political Spectrum Against War and Militarism.
Can you tell me something about that?
Right.
It was organized some months ago and the idea was to get people from, quote, the right and the left together to talk about something they might have in common, namely their opposition to the current wars we're in and to basically most of American foreign policy for the last many decades.
It was titled, as you said, Across the Political Spectrum Against War and Militarism.
I didn't totally like that title because I'm not against war.
As I pointed out in a piece I wrote about on antiwar.com, I've just been against every war the United States has been in since 1783, with the possible exception of World War II and I'm not even sure of that one.
So what I'm getting at is I'm not a pacifist.
So I just think that you can avoid war in almost all situations and do better.
And so that's why I figured I was close enough to what they were after that I would go to that thing.
Well, we interviewed Kevin Zese and David Beto here last week and there's been, there's many luminaries, but give us a little bit of a feel for what happened at the conference and what you all concluded at the end of it.
Well, the idea was to get people talking whom my late friend Roy Child said once in a letter to me, haven't been talking since World War I.
And granted, everyone in World War I is dead, but what he meant by that is left and right really haven't talked to each other much since then.
And so the idea was, hey, you know, why don't we try to get together, let's see if we have something in common, let's see what we can do with it.
And where we got was that we have a lot in common.
Where we didn't get completely is what do you do with that?
But I think that will happen.
I mean, with email and phone calls and every other thing, I think we can start being in touch with the various people there.
So what happened and what I was worried would happen didn't happen.
What I was worried would happen would be that people would strut their stuff, that everyone would try to distinguish himself or herself, it was mainly men there, so I'm going to say himself for shorthand, by basically emphasizing the things that they knew other people wouldn't like.
And I saw very little of that.
It was a much more mature, much more get-to-the-point meeting than I had imagined it would be.
And so usually at a one-day event, it's probably mid-afternoon before you've gotten past all that stuff and you're able to talk to each other.
I thought we got there pretty early in the morning and that was just incredible to me.
I think I'll take a little credit for that.
There was a man there named Murray Polner, whom I met the night before, who was written on antiwar.com.
He's probably about 80 years old and he and I really hit it off and he said good things about antiwar.com and then I just had a great conversation with him the night before.
We both disliked Rudy Giuliani and loved the way Ron Paul nailed him in the Republican presidential debate.
And so that morning I asked Murray if he would help me lead a song, Viva La Company.
It's an old song that I learned at this event a couple of decades ago and it's just a kind of a bonding song and it worked, I think.
I think people, I'm not saying everyone got into singing it, but I'd say two-thirds of the people did and it kind of helped maybe overcome what otherwise might have been some bumps.
What do you see as the end goal of this particular coalition?
The idea of maybe working together to oppose these wars and by just working together, just that alone, if people identify themselves with their particular ideology and the fact that they're working with others, it can reach out to people who neatly categorize antiwar people.
So you'll have the right will neatly categorize antiwar people as being left.
The left will often categorize right-wing people or libertarian people or conservative people who are antiwar as being kooks.
And so the idea was to try to, you know, I think that what we could do is effectively at times talk about how, no, we agree on these things.
I agree with Ralph Nader on these things.
Ralph Nader can say he agrees with David Henderson on these things and so on, or he can say he agrees with the editors of the American Conservative on these things, if a couple of those editors were there.
And so that can just keep people's minds open a little longer than otherwise, because mine shut very quickly to hearing the message, well, gee, that's interesting.
Why would left and right agree on that?
And then you can kind of make the case.
So that's what I'm seeing.
Now one proposal that was made, and I don't think it went anywhere, but I thought it was a good one, was I think it was the editors of the American Conservative who suggested we could write a joint editorial with the editors of The Nation and publish it in both publications and say, this is being published simultaneously in this other publication.
And I think the American Conservative editors went for it, and The Nation editors didn't.
I don't know.
I wasn't party to what might have happened after that if they talked among themselves, but I thought that was a great idea.
It sounds actually like a wonderful idea, and I would, of course, love that if I could see these big names on an ad in America's Pravda, The New York Times, of people who are saying no to war.
Anthony Gregory was in the interview prior to this one, and he mentioned, one of the things I've noticed when reading the various articles on this particular conference is there's a lot of representation of the left, but I'm not hearing much about representations of actual liberals.
And Anthony made the point that liberals hate the Tea Partyers more than they hate the war.
What is being done to do outreach to moderate liberals on this?
I don't think a lot, and I think through the people around the room, I don't think there were that many moderate liberals, but I think there's a reason for that.
My guess is, because this was organized over a long number, a lot of months, and my guess is that they looked at the list and found not that many people who could both qualify as being liberal and really in a principled way against these wars.
That's my guess, but I don't know.
That's a damning statement, but I'm afraid it might be true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, there's going to be another conference in the fall, so this is an ongoing project.
Oh, there is?
I didn't know.
Maybe I'm not invited.
No, I did a little fact-finding mission this week in D.C. myself, and I went to the offices of the American Conservative as part of that and spoke to Ms. Hopkins.
No, this is absolutely a very, very exciting project, and I hope to do little profiles of all the different people involved, perhaps Jesse Walker next week, to encourage, to bring excitement about and bring a coalition building, but what's interesting, and I know Scott hates when I go off on these biographical tangents, but you're not just an academic and intellectual, but you're an activist yourself.
I mean, you've organized peace events in Northern California, and you've been a longtime libertarian activist on these issues.
Right.
Right.
I'll tell you a little about that.
Actually, peace event.
I organized the anti-Afghan war demonstration last fall in Monterey, and I'm co-chair of a local group called Libertarians for Peace, our local chapter here, and as co-chair, I'm on the steering committee of the Peace Coalition of Monterey County.
Now, it's about 28 organizations, almost all of them left, some of them liberal, and one libertarian group.
No conservatives on it.
I haven't found any conservatives interested, although I keep looking, and so anyway, I proposed this demonstration.
Everyone said, great idea, but no one wanted to organize it, so I felt like if I don't do it, it's not going to get organized, so yes, I did that.
My other big thing, though, which goes way back, was in 79 when Senator Sam Nunn, a Democratic senator from Georgia, was really pushing hard to re-institute the draft, and we had just gotten rid of the draft in 1973, and I had followed the issue.
My boss at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Rochester, my first academic job where I was an assistant professor, was Bill Meckling, who'd been executive director of the Gates Commission that came out against the draft in favor of moving to an all-volunteer force, and I'd learned a lot from him about the issue, so I actually gave some speeches on it and testified before Senator Sam Nunn's subcommittee, and so that was where I was most active, and then the rest of my life I was getting married and having a kid and getting tenure and this and that, but then I got back into it in 1990 when Bush made clear that yes, the Cold War is over, but we're still going to invade Iraq, and I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying why you could not justify that war and grounds of getting oil, because the cost to the U.S. economy from Saddam Hussein having somewhat more power in the world oil market was very small, and so that was where I kind of got back into it.
Isn't there an ethical issue, though, with fighting a war for a commodity?
Oh, sure, but I was trying to talk to people who don't get too upset about that ethical issue to say you don't even have an economic basis for this.
Just a little point on libertarian history, because I know Rothbardians of my generation tend to be a little snarly about Milton Friedman, but you wrote a brilliant article about Milton Friedman ending slavery, if you would elaborate a little bit for our listeners.
Yeah, Milton Friedman was a longtime opponent of the draft.
His major first step in that that a lot of people forget now was there was a conference on the draft held at University of Chicago in 1966, and by the way, Angela, this is an example where there was a kind of a uniting of left and right, so one of the bad guys at this conference was Senator Edward Kennedy, who wanted to keep the draft, and the good guys were people like Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith, who didn't show up, but at least they were able to quote his opposition to the draft.
And Milton got energized about that, wrote the occasional article about it in Newsweek in the late 60s, and then was invited to be one of the 15 members of the Gates Commission that I mentioned that came out against the draft.
And Milton tells that there were five people against the draft to begin with, five in favor and five on the fence, and at the end they came out 14 to nothing in favor of getting rid of the draft.
The one person who didn't sign had been sick, and he said, look, I don't necessarily disagree, but I wasn't at the meetings, I can't really in all conscience do it.
Do you want me to tell you one of the funny turning points in people thinking at the conference with William Westmoreland?
Of course!
Yeah.
General William Westmoreland had been in charge of all the ground troops in Vietnam, not one of his finest hours, and he was in favor of the draft, and what they did was they had people doing studies of what would be the budget implications of getting rid of the draft, but also they had hearings where people in the public, the military, and so on, could make their views heard.
So they're having this back and forth between William Westmoreland and the members of the commission, and William Westmoreland referred to the volunteers as mercenaries, and Friedman said, well, if you're going to call volunteers mercenaries, I'm going to call draftees slaves.
And he went on to say that you are in there voluntarily, General.
That means you're a mercenary.
Our butcher we buy meat from as a mercenary, the lawyer we go to as a mercenary, all it means is you're paid to do something, and so there's no energy in that word.
The word doesn't mean much, it's just this kind of name-calling, but in fact it's more accurate in a certain sense to call draftees slaves, because they are slaves of the state for the period of their draft status, or their time in the military, and of course they might be dead slaves.
It's a powerful way of looking at it, but it absolutely is slavery.
I just want to quickly get in a question from our regular host, Scott Horton here, who's on the line.
Oh, hey, Scott.
Hi, David, how are you doing?
Good, how about you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for being on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Sure.
Listen, so here's my thing.
Well, I guess as you may or may not know, something that I've been talking about on this show for years and years and years is left-right coalitions, and of course most of the people I interview are from the left, because they're the ones who care about the war most and do the best reporting and what have you, and so I mean, I'm kind of the walking example of how well this can work with libertarianism as the real moderate center, where the Liebermans and McCains are seen as the extremists that they really are, and you and I are the real moderates splitting the left and the right.
So it seems like everything's all about TV, and if it's not on TV, it doesn't really exist, and so what really needs to happen here, in my imagination, is some giant conference – remember the Ron Paul counter-convention during the Republican convention in August of 08?
We need a giant thing in a city like that, in the center of America – I think that was in St. Louis or something?
Minneapolis.
Oh, Minneapolis, right.
In the center of America where people can get to it and have a massive convention that has all these leaders, and of course we need to build up our list or whatever faster, soon, and then we need to have a giant new anti-imperialist league that doesn't just have a conference like the one you went to, but has a giant thing, a conference for the cameras and for a massive audience chanting, bring our troops home right now, and really, you know, to put this on the next level, you've got to put on a show, right?
Yeah.
I think that's a great idea.
By the way, one little note to your pessimism about TV is, like, I didn't watch any of that Ron Paul thing on TV, I watched a lot of it on YouTube, and so you don't really need TV.
In fact, when I talk to young people, people under age 25, they're not watching a lot of TV.
So I think YouTube will do it, and that's wonderful.
And I think that's a great idea.
I don't know how to do it, but I think it's a great idea to push for.
One little friendly amendment to the name you gave this one organization, and it came up at our discussion at that Saturday conference, is anti-imperialist league.
You can turn off conservative so quickly with that term, but the conservative who pointed that out, when one of the people on the left suggested anti-empire, he said, oh yeah, I have no trouble with that, and my conservative friends would have no trouble with that.
Yeah, you know, that's something that we talked about with Beto and Zeese as well, but it sort of seems to, I think someone wrote in the comment section on Antiwar.com from that interview, that, come on, if you're not going to call it what it is from the start, then what good is the rest of it going to be, and that's kind of a good point, don't you think?
Well, if it were a true point, it'd be a good point, but it's not a true point.
It's kind of the same thing with the name Antiwar.com, right?
Antiwar...
Scott, let me answer you, okay?
Anti-empire is calling it what it is.
So saying anti-empire instead of anti-imperialist doesn't mean you're not calling it what it is.
Yeah.
Well, I guess I think of it like Antiwar.com people go, oh, was that a left-wing site?
And then you go, no, read Raimondo, check this out, and they go, oh, huh.
And then it's more powerful that it's Antiwar.com, because you would think that would be a bunch of commies, but it turns out it ain't.
You understand what I mean?
I do, and I think you're pointing out the pluses and the negatives.
I mean, when I tell people I write for Antiwar.com, a lot of them won't go read it.
You know?
So they just, they hate that term.
Now, I'm not saying I have a better one for that.
I'm just saying that that is, that does point to a problem.
Yeah.
That really is its own damning commentary itself about our society, where that word makes people cringe.
I know.
And these are not dumb people.
These are smart people.
You know?
So it really is something how people, well, that's people, you know?
Professor Anderson, with all your peers in the libertarian intellectual world, are there many people who are actually giving you any objections, and what do you counter their concerns with?
I would say I get some objections, and it's hard to kind of generalize, except to say the one generalization is most of them are ahistorical.
And what I mean by that is they don't know much history.
And one of the things that really has made me more and more anti-war is the more history I learn, the more humble I become about the views I used to hold.
I used to be a cold warrior, and I just think I shouldn't have been.
And so when people who actually know some history and who are libertarians talk to me, they're usually on my side.
And I've had a number of libertarians, libertarian economists and so on, who have said to me, you know, look, I don't have time to read anti-war.com, given the things I'm writing about, but I'm really glad you're doing it.
So it's, once again, libertarian outsourcing and specialization here.
Yeah, that's well put.
I think, yeah, there's divisional labor, there's specialization, and so, you know, I don't get, let's put it this way, I don't get a whole lot of flack from many of my friends for doing this.
Mainly I get strokes, and that's good.
What do you see?
I mean, you had the vigil in Monterey, but what do you see the role of vigils and protests in actually changing public policy?
That's a tough one, Angela, because I don't know.
In other words, I'm more of an agnostic.
But I just think that the protests have been so bad.
And I think I go back to things like ANSWER back in the early 2000s, where you were going to an anti-war demonstration, and when you got there and you listened to a few speeches, you wondered if you were at the right event.
Because it wasn't anti-war, it was bringing in all their pet issues.
And so what I'd like to do before giving up on vigils and giving up on these demonstrations is do them right, and do them right for a while and see what happens.
And I don't see them alone as ending the war, I see them as a step in building coalitions and building groups of people and so on.
And it's just one step.
It's a positive step, because you not long ago wrote about Cindy Sheehan, and Ms. Sheehan is doing something called Peace of the Action D.C.
And one of my goals, of course, is to get as many libertarians and conservatives to at least spend a few days out there with her protesting the occupation.
Yeah, right.
And by the way, talking about conservatives, we didn't give them much play earlier in this interview.
The conservatives from the American Conservative Magazine, Daniel McCarthy and Kara Hopkins, were tremendous.
I mean, they just, you know, I didn't even think of them as conservatives.
Like I guess I'm used to a certain kind of person being conservative, and it's someone who just tends to be, you know, bellicose about war and so on.
And they weren't.
They were really, I'd say, very libertarian.
Well, getting to know some of the American conservative editors, I do kind of, I think of them, I don't think of them as traditional conservatives.
And I guess the word conservative, as people at LewRockwell.com would say, has been warped to mean, you know, the murder of Muslims and hating minority groups.
So I, it's funny, I don't, I think of them, I guess, as more of old right, as opposed to conservative.
Yeah.
But even for someone, I'm 59 years old, and I'm young enough that I don't even know the old right.
So I don't know them from reading their stuff.
But I didn't intersect with them at all.
I mean, when I got active in politics, or at least thinking about these things, it was the late 60s.
And by then, the old right was long gone.
All right.
Well, before we wrap up, Professor Henderson, where can people read your work, in addition to antiwar.com, of course?
Well, I blog, I blog on mainly economic issues, there's something called EconLog.
And if you just Google EconLog, you'll find it.
And those are the main two places, antiwar.com and EconLog, as well as just, I mean, I do a couple of articles a year in the Wall Street Journal and other places like that.
Well, excellent.
Thank you so much for joining us today, and we will have you back very, very soon to follow up on this issue.
Thanks, Angela.
Good night.
