04/24/07 – David Beito – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Also putting all these interviews up in the archives, Antiwar Radio you can find at the top of the page at antiwar.com.
And my first guest today is David Beto.
He's one of the head guys or something or other at the Liberty and Power blog at the History News Network website.
He's a history professor from the University of Alabama, is the editor of a book called The Voluntary City, Choice, Community, and Civil Society, and is the author of From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Fraternal Societies and Social Services 1890-1967, and Taxpayers in Revolt, Tax Resistance During the Great Depression.
He's a former president of the Alabama Scholars Association, a fellow at the Independent Institute, and a civil rights activist.
Welcome to the show, David.
Thank you for inviting me.
It's great to talk to you.
It's great to talk with you.
I'm a big fan of your show and often listen to it, with my door closed, of course.
The other history professors frown on this kind of thing, is that it?
Oh, they know where I'm coming from.
Well, I've been a big fan of the Liberty and Power blog for a long time.
You have a lot of great bloggers there, and it's that pure kind of libertarianism that I look for.
It was a great opportunity, because I was asked five years ago by the History News Network, which was the leading history news service in the country, to take over a blog.
And originally it was individual, but I thought, let's get all the radical anti-war libertarian historians we can find and get them on the site.
And unfortunately, there aren't many radical libertarian historians, so basically academics who are anti-war and libertarian.
That's what we've mainly targeted for membership on the blog.
Yeah.
It just seems, I guess, basically, from what I've come to understand about academia in America, it's not a very good place for libertarianism, is it?
Well, it depends on your point of view.
Yes, my colleagues are overwhelmingly liberal, left of center.
I mean, that is all true, right?
There's not much ideological diversity in academia.
However, although you suffer from it somewhat, your research agenda is something that, you're coming in from such a different perspective that you can have an impact, because you look at the same issues in different ways.
So people of goodwill, and there are a fair number of them in academia who may be left of center, will see this and go, oh, this is kind of interesting.
I hadn't thought of this before.
Looking at tax revolts, or looking at fraternal societies, or looking at the role of classical liberals in anti-imperialism.
Yeah, you're at some disadvantages, but you've got an advantage because you can do something new.
And I would urge people to think about an academic career, much as I've had difficulties with it.
It opens a lot of doors, and we have something very powerful to offer.
And right now, the debate is pretty much dominated by the left.
And there are a few conservatives out there, frankly, that I don't think are often very effective.
Yeah.
Well, and ultimately, I guess if you're defining yourself as a classical liberal, then that makes you a man of the left, too, doesn't it?
In a lot of ways.
I mean, I agree.
I can agree with a lot of my colleagues.
I'll put up stuff on my door about Ron Paul's campaign.
And it throws them off, because some of them want to pigeonhole me into a category, right?
If I'm against Clinton or I'm against the Democratic Party, well, gee whiz, that must make me a right-winger.
And it's kind of fun, in a way, to throw them a little bit off balance on issues like the war and on the war on drugs.
And now, I really brought you on to talk about history and the history of empire and how we got to where we are, but it seems maybe a corollary to that or something, how the republic became the empire or when it did, is when liberalism became socialism and how it did as well.
I think that the Progressive Era is the most crucial period in American history for both of those trends.
And you look at Woodrow Wilson as an example, interestingly enough, of this.
In 1896, he had voted for the Gold Democrats, which was a classical liberal third party.
He voted for this party, got a little over 1% of the vote, and had all these great classical liberals in it.
And I think he always had these tendencies, but he is one of the champions of progressivism, so he moves completely away from that position in just a few years.
And you have a relatively non-interventionist foreign policy, at least outside the United States, before the Spanish-American War, and of course that all changes, at first the Caribbean, but then I think once you've opened the door to ending the non-interventionist policy in the Caribbean and Hawaii, then you've opened the door to ending it elsewhere as well.
So I think that that's just a major turning point in American history, the major turning point.
I'd rate it even more important than World War I, which I would rate very highly as a turning point.
Well, you know, my anarcho-communist history teacher at the high school I went to, she taught us that America was always an empire, and if it went from republic to empire, it was when they ratified the Constitution.
She has a good point, because we did have an internal empire, and in some ways we glorify the founders just a little bit too much, because after all, Jefferson doubled, more than doubled the size of the United States, and you could argue, well, he was trying to preserve it for free states, but he also protected slavery in those areas, and that had dangerous consequences in the long term.
So I think that she has a point.
I think there's something to that.
There was an internal empire, but as far as an external empire and overseas imperialism, I do think that the major turning point was later.
Was it Sumner who wrote that the Spanish had actually conquered us during the Spanish-American War?
Oh yeah, I signed this essay, to my students, my undergraduate students, I pair it with Roosevelt's essay, The Strenuous Life, which is a fire-breathing defense of imperialism, a naked defense of imperialism, written the same year as Sumner's, I think 1899, and Sumner is a classical liberal free-trader, gives this speech where he says, we have defeated Spain, poor pitiful Spain with wooden hull ships and medieval society, we've defeated them in a war, but we've actually adopted the Spanish way, so they have conquered the United States.
He ends with this prediction, that the 20th century is going to be an era of constant war, of increased debt, of growth of plutocracy, which essentially is the military-industrial consequence, and he just nails it perfectly, and this is his prediction, he says, we have now adopted the Spanish way, we've gone from republic to empire.
I'm not sure if you did that on purpose, but the military-industrial consequence, I think he just coined a new phrase, I like that, and really, that is kind of, well, you know, if you wanted to measure that, what you really should do is go back to the end of World War II, right?
Because wasn't it then that Truman decided that rather than dismantling the military, like, had always been the tradition after a war, and trying to get back to normalcy, that they would go ahead and keep it World War II forever, just like on the Discovery Channel?
Yeah, although there was tremendous demobilization briefly, and one argument Robert Higgs makes is that's when we finally really get out of the Depression, because we have this big demobilization of governmental power in 1945 and 1946, and all the liberals were predicting a Depression and it didn't happen, instead that's the beginning of the post-war boom, but very rapidly, yes, we begin to return to a war footing in 1946 and 1947, and Truman makes that decision, and there were others, such as Senator Robert Taft, who urged a different chorus, but that was sort of the last gasp of the defenders of kind of the old republic.
And now, where do you come down on World War II, are you pro or con, I know it's too late now?
I am con, I think there was no military threat, significant military threat, and this was well understood by the people who studied the issue, the Council on Foreign Relations from Germany.
There's an interesting book on this, I don't know if I entirely buy the thesis, but it's by Patrick Hurdin, I may have it on my shelf here, but I would highly recommend it to your readers if you want a revisionist view of the war, I don't see it here, but it's Patrick Hurdin, I can try to dig it up for you, but it's something like Hitler and Roosevelt, and so I think we should have tried to avoid that war, I think we should have followed Mencken's advice, H.L.
Mencken, the great libertarian writer, recommended that we provide a refuge for Jews in the United States, that we open the door and let them in, and of course Roosevelt did nothing to do that, in fact he turned back ships of Jewish refugees.
Now again, December 8, 1941, at that point Japan has declared war on us, and Germany declares war on us, at that point I guess it's unavoidable, but I think that there were all sorts of things that could have been done before that point to have avoided that attack and to have avoided the war.
Well, but you know, the story goes, and I mean, I guess this part is beyond dispute that the enemy, at least in terms of Nazi Germany, and perhaps less so with Imperial Japan, although they're pretty close runners up to the contest for pure evil, and that no matter what the consequences of stopping them down the line, they absolutely had to be stopped.
Well, there's a lot of evil in the world, and in terms of pure evil, our ally, our wartime ally, the Soviet Union, Stalin outdid Hitler, and of course once you get past a few hundred thousand people, I don't think it makes much difference, but in terms of murdering people, Stalin and Mao were the two greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, yet of course everybody, almost everybody, thought it was a wonderful idea for us to, for example, open the door to China during the Nixon administration, or to negotiate with Stalin.
So I think there's a little bit of a double standard, there's going to be plenty of evil in the world, but I think there were other ways of handling it.
One way is simply to let Stalin and Hitler fight it out, essentially, which I think they ultimately would have done anyway, because Hitler had ambitions on the East, and to burn themselves out.
And if you would have had that happen, you would have had two dictators essentially destroying each other, and creating instability in their own regime.
And instead we saved one to defeat the other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And what do we have at the end of the war?
Have we won, really?
Because all of Eastern Europe, as a result of the war, has gone over to Soviet control.
The instability created by the war leads to the fall of the rise of Communist China, North Korea.
Right?
So what are the consequences of the war?
There was a book written by Chamberlain called America's Second Crusade, years, many years ago, and he asked that question, okay, who won the war?
The war was for the defense of Poland, was launched for the defense of Poland, but what happens to Poland after the war?
It becomes part of, in fact, loses its independence and becomes part of the Soviet bloc.
So you have all sorts of unintended consequences.
Yeah, well, and America basically inherited the empires of all our allies, plus Japan's too.
Mm-hmm.
So that's really why they had to rearm, because they had an empire to defend.
The policy of the US in the post-war period is to recreate the greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere.
Yeah, to create a market for Japan and the Far East, and to build it up.
Yeah, didn't they even call it the same thing?
I don't know if they did, but I think some people probably recognize that that's what was happening, that that was the effort.
I mean, originally, Roosevelt's idea was China, where he sort of built up China to be one of the four policemen, or five policemen, I guess, or something.
He had pretensions for China to be a great power, Ching Kai-shek, and of course that failed, so then Japan became the choice.
That was not their first choice, is this is gonna be our junior partner in the Far East.
So when people talk about how wonderful it is, how MacArthur and the Americans came and rebuilt Japan, and we're not like the Japanese who just obliterate their enemies, when we obliterate them, we rebuild them and make them our friends, that was only second choice because Mao had won China?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's funny.
If Roosevelt had lived, I think it's quite clear that he would have kept dropping atomic bombs until Japan completely submitted.
As it was, little known story is that Japan's surrender was a conditional surrender in the end, because this is discussed in Thomas Fleming's book, because they said, after two bombs, they still insisted on keeping the emperor.
And Truman, to his credit, said, okay, you know, enough, enough, we've killed hundreds of thousands, enough, and agreed to a conditional surrender, which he probably could have gotten earlier.
Right.
I was gonna say, isn't that the condition, the only, like the last non-negotiable condition that they had been sticking to for a couple of few months by then, right?
Yeah, they had opened up peace dealers a long time.
Often this is an interesting debate, you know, and I get students in this thing, they look at, okay, we could have either lost a million people in a land invasion, that's somewhat dubious, but let's assume it's true, or, you know, or we dropped the atomic bomb, false dichotomy because that assumes unconditional surrender, which we didn't have in any way in the end.
We could have had a sort of a surrender from Japan earlier, a de facto surrender that would have left Japan, I mean, I don't know for sure we could have had it, let's put it this way.
We could have pursued that as a negotiating strategy, the Japanese certainly were willing.
You know, give up all your conquest, get to keep your emperor, you know, that sounds like a pretty good deal.
Yeah, and you know, the other thing about World War II, and I kind of mentioned this sarcastically earlier, is on the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, it's still World War II all the time.
And it's kind of the founding myth of American empires, it's like Roosevelt is America's founding father, not George Washington.
Yeah, Roosevelt is, I think, one of the worst presidents in American history.
And he is still, still deified.
And that's certainly an example of that, I mean, he lied us into war.
And this is, this is admitted by the by the most fervent pro-Roosevelt historian that he lied us into, tried to lie us into a war in the North Atlantic, that was really their main focus, but Hitler wouldn't take the bait.
But we're playing a game of chicken with the Germans in the North Atlantic, and Roosevelt is desperately searching for an incident.
And now, you know, when I first got interested in this kind of thing, I kind of, you know, in stages, I realized, wow, ever since World War II, the Cold War, you know, we were just as much the bad guys as the Soviets in that case, at least if you lived in one of the other countries subject to our power rather than here.
And then I kind of, I went back and I learned about Woodrow Wilson in World War I.
And and, you know, basically, Morgan had made a bunch of loans to the British to buy a bunch of arms, and if they lost the war, he was going to go bankrupt.
So the push was on to get America into that war.
And then you go back a little bit further and, well, Abraham Lincoln kind of invaded and conquered the south and wouldn't let them secede and, of course, the Indian Wars and the extermination of the red Indians in America.
And you just keep going back.
And it's on one hand, I want to argue that, you know, America is a democracy and an empire, and it shouldn't be.
We should go back to some old republic.
But I can't find the old republic to go back to at this point.
The closest approximation is the Articles of Confederation.
But you're right.
I mean, this is it makes you cynical in a way and how the land was stolen from the Indians and the way they did it, which was basically, you know, they'd find a few Indians who would go heavily into debt and they'd say, okay, here's how you can repay your debt, sign over all your land.
And of course, these Indians didn't have any claim on the land necessarily.
But they signed it over and, you know, and then you get the beginning of plantation agriculture in the south, slave-based plantation agriculture, assembling these big estates and again, Jefferson was involved in this.
So it's hard to find, you find some heroes among the founders, but you got to go up back a lot further and be somewhat tentative in this.
I mean, I think the Constitution was saved by the Bill of Rights, which was an anti-federalist legacy.
So I think that it was salvaged to some extent by that.
And that's how I view the Constitution as in part an anti-federalist legacy and that part of it, the Bill of Rights, was, you know, was the most worthwhile part of the document.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Beto.
He's a history professor at the University of Alabama and runs the Liberty and Power blog at the History News Network.
Have you ever read Philip Drew, Administrator, A Story of Tomorrow?
No, I haven't, but I read a recent biography, I don't have, I don't remember who wrote it, but it was published within the last two years, on Edward M. House, Colonel House, who wrote this creepy novel, so I hear, where he lays out his agenda.
And I have not read the novel, but I did, certainly this book had much discussion on it.
And it seems so typical of progressivism from when I saw this idea of an administrative elite.
Yeah.
Well, it's basically about a guy who becomes the wonderful fascist dictator of America and remakes everything his way.
It was written in 1910, and it basically lays out how to create a League of Nations and a New Deal and central banking and all the rest of it.
Basically it foreshadows not just Wilson's time in office, but Roosevelt's as well.
And in fact, it was written at a time, well actually, I guess 10 or 15 years or something after he wrote it, it came out that he was the author, because it was originally published anonymously.
And Edward at Mandel House bragged that, yes, I anticipated Mussolini by several years.
You know, he was an even more visionary fascist than Mussolini was.
And this is the guy who was Woodrow Wilson, everybody's second or third favorite president's handler.
Yeah, Woodrow Wilson called him his second personality.
And they were so close.
Now House was also an advisor to Roosevelt, interestingly enough.
Before he died, he was meeting at the White House with Roosevelt, and Roosevelt, by all accounts, highly respected his advice.
And by the way, anybody who attempts, in his novel where he's the dictator, anyone who attempts to reinstate the Constitution suffers penalty of death.
He's the decider.
Does he completely abolish the Constitution or reinterpret it?
No, no, he absolutely abolishes it.
He wins one major battle and throws out the corrupt government, becomes friends with all the corrupt politicians and bankers who he overthrew in the first place.
And they work together.
He puts a bureaucrat on every board of directors of every corporation, and central banking, income taxation, you know, all pensions and the whole welfare regulatory state and a league of nations, too.
Yeah, I mean, in some ways it sounds a lot like Roosevelt, too, because Teddy Teddy Roosevelt, because he, you know, we often think of him as this big trust buster, and yeah, you know, he was the boss, right?
But his idea was to, somebody said, not to bust up the trust, but to muster them.
To muster them into what he saw as the national service.
So yeah, he'll beat up on these guys, but ultimately he sees them as, you know, he doesn't believe in small business or anything.
He thinks that that's outmoded.
So they're going to be doing your part, they're going to work under him.
Yeah.
Isn't it a great audience?
Isn't it refreshing to hear his story, and who has Wilson and Roosevelt at the bottom of his list of favorite presidents, and Warren G. Harding at the top?
Tell us about Warren Harding.
Well, you know, it's hard to find, every one of these guys, you can find something you don't like.
So you're comparing evil, essentially.
But I still have some fondness in my heart for Warren G. Harding.
He was elected president in 1920, as kind of part of a backlash against the hyper-statism, attacks on civil liberties, attacks on economic liberty that you got under the Wilson administration.
And so people turned to Harding.
And what does he do?
Well, he releases all of Woodrow Wilson's political prisoners, he goes to the South, and gives a speech in Birmingham defending civil rights of blacks.
He negotiates the Washington Naval Treaty, which is probably the most radical arms limitation treaty in American history, or close to it, anyway.
Now, it unraveled, ultimately, but that's mainly because of the Depression, which nobody could have anticipated.
And you had a Depression during this administration, a hangover from the war, a very severe Depression, and it lasted less than a year.
Why?
Because Harding took the attitude that 19th century presidents had had, and said, let it play out, let wages fall, let the economy hit bottom, and we'll bounce back.
And we did.
Of course, Hoover, given the same choice, and Roosevelt, go in the opposite direction, and as a result, you have the longest Depression in American history in the 1930s.
So Harding, on a number of issues, I think, was a man who was modest about his abilities.
A lot of people make fun about this.
He supposedly said once, like, I'm not fit for this job.
Right?
Well, Harry Truman said things like that, too, and everybody portrays him as the plucky little guy from Missouri who was modest.
Harding says that, and he's portrayed as an idiot.
Again, his cabinet was a cabinet of great minds.
The scandals of this administration did exist, but he had no personal knowledge of them, and frankly, I think that they were insignificant compared to a lot of the corruption that we see in later administrations.
So I would rate him very highly.
Certainly as far as 20th century presidents, I would rate him at the top.
Now, isn't it strange that the liberal professors prefer Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the people who expanded the state in its violent capacity in the very most?
Get us in a war, and you've got a very excellent chance of being ranked highly.
Whatever happened to peace and love and all that hippie stuff?
You know, it says something more about the liberal historians than something deep-seated, because we all remember, it was less than 10 years ago, that almost all the liberals or the vast majority of them were all for war when it came to Kosovo, which makes me think that if Gore had been in the White House on September 11th, that we would be seeing that now, that the conservatives would be anti-war, and the people on the left, with some notable exception, would be pro-war.
So I think a lot of this is just naked partisanship.
Yeah, well, it makes it seem like 90% of it is naked partisanship.
Yeah, 90%.
It sounds like a good figure to me.
Yeah.
What a sad state.
Well, I wonder if we can learn anything as, you know, my next interview in the next hour is going to be James Bovard talking about the president's new expanded powers to declare martial law, and as it looks like, you know, whatever semblance of the Constitution that had remained after Roosevelt and, you know, 50 years of Cold War and all that.
Now that it looks like the very last remnants of it are, you know, being shredded and burned and their ashes thrown over the end of a cliff, I wonder if there's anything that you know about the anti-imperialist league from the days of the war with Spain, or from the America First Committee that opposed World War II, or from the New Left and the anti-Vietnam War movement, lessons that can be learned for application now in the beginning of the 21st century, particularly in terms of bringing disparate voices together to agree on one thing, and that is to end the empire.
Well, the anti-war movement, of course, in the Spanish-American War was basically led by classical liberals, but it was a diverse coalition, and you have some progressives in it, you have some labor union leaders.
It was also led by a lot of very wealthy people, interestingly enough, like Edward Atkinson, a fire insurance executive, a real rabble-rouser.
So, certainly you want to have a diverse coalition.
I would think one thing I think is crucial.
We don't want to compromise on some basic issues.
And one thing that did happen to the anti-imperialist movement is elements within it were ultimately willing to compromise, and take the position that, well, as long as we don't colonize, it's okay.
So, even though during the Progressive Era, I mean, essentially, in some ways, the anti-imperialists won.
They were having new colonies after 1898, with a couple exceptions.
But we're intervening repeatedly into Cuba, into Haiti.
It's more of an informal empire, in some sense.
And a lot of these guys were weak on that, because they said, we're against colonialism, so we're going to compromise.
And now I think we're seeing that with the anti-war movement.
Let's vote more money for the troops, the Democrats say, but then we'll have some squishy time limits as well.
You've got to draw a higher line, you've got to take some chances.
And you've got to say, enough is enough, let's end it.
And in some ways, I think that's what the public wants now.
But I think the Democrats are probably behind the public on this, they're too cautious.
So I think you've seen that, I see that over and over again, where anti-imperialist, anti-war movements, they want to appear to be too responsible, and they want to cut deals, and they want to settle for halfway measures, and clever little gimmicks.
So I think we want to avoid that.
I wish I had some grand advice, you know, beyond that, I don't know if I really do.
Well, it seems to me that everybody who's really opposed to the Empire and the end of the Bill of Rights, as it's taking place in the current administration, is basically doing the same thing as me.
They're sitting behind a computer all day.
And to the rest of the population, the anti-war movement really can only be measured in how many people show up at a protest outside.
So it seems like the anti-war movement is basically doing nothing and going nowhere because everybody's blogging instead of meeting together in, you know, places where they can all get their pictures taken.
Well, there are other ways of doing it.
And I wish I could tell you, be more encouraging, there's a group among historians called Historians Against the War, and I'm a member of it.
And it's dominated by left-wing historians, and every one of them is left-wing.
And I keep saying to these guys, you've got to reach out to conservatives and libertarians.
You've got to find a place for them, and they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But whenever I propose to anything, like, for example, a group blog that would include primarily leftists but also historians, they just don't want to do it.
And it's perplexing.
I think online, though, is the frontier.
I don't think it's protest demonstration.
I mean, that's old hat.
I think blogs, I think groups of interest groups, like, for example, historians or doctors or whatever, I think that might be a place for classical liberals to get involved, despite the fact that I haven't had overly positive experiences, you know, doing things like that and focusing, getting your message out online.
So, no, the old going to demonstrations, I don't do that a lot.
I mean, I might occasionally, but I don't think that's where the future is at anyway at this point.
Yeah.
And again, I guess it goes back to, well, that division, that left-right division.
I mean, for me, I was a young person, somebody explained it to me once and I snapped right out of it.
You don't measure in left and right, you measure it in terms of liberty and power.
That's the measure is, you know, not liberalism or conservatism.
What's it going to take for this society to snap out of this false dichotomy?
I mean, I wish I could say, but I mean, I think a lot of the problem is a lot of the liberal libertarians and a lot of the conservatives don't want to talk about the war.
They don't want to address it.
They see it as secondary.
So maybe in a way, one of our missions is to be kind of pest in a way, to force these people, to prod them to take positions to address this issue.
Some of these organizations, I'm very positive about a lot of these organizations, like Institute for Humane Studies and CAIDA will have these academic conferences.
Well, we need to speak up a little bit more, even if we're talking about patents or copyrights or something and say, well, why don't you have a session on the war?
We need to try to get more conservatives and libertarians to confront this.
And that's very modest in a way.
But if we can do that, maybe we can get that this issue out there more, because we have something very, you know, very particular to offer on this, an analysis, Hayekian analysis, and the great economist Friedrich Hayek focused on unintended consequences of government intervention, of government central planning.
We can turn that to the foreign policy issue, be tremendously effective, because a lot of people on the left are making those kinds of Hayekian arguments.
And we need to say, hey, by the way, there's this whole tradition here.
And go to conservatives and say, you know, what about the war and how does this fit into this Hayekian tradition, and confront these people a little bit.
I mean, there are blogs out there like the Holy Conspiracy, and it's a conspiracy basically not to talk about Iraq.
And I like it.
It's a good website.
They link to liberty and power.
But say to these guys, well, why don't you guys talk about the war at all?
What do you think of the war?
Because I think that that's the main problem I see among libertarians.
It's not that they've refused to address the war, well, it's not that they take a position on the war that's bad necessarily, it's that they won't talk about it.
And you've got to be pests and pains in the neck, I guess, a little bit.
And I think, you know, the average conservative voter out there, if in his perspective, the only people who disagree with the war are people who he would consider to be hippie liberal left socialist types, you know, he's probably not going to be won over by an argument.
It's going to be a matter of whose team am I on, not theirs.
Yeah, but I, you know, I go to sites like Free Republic, they haven't kicked me off yet.
And I'll try to go in there and prod these people, and you do see a lot of them are becoming very frustrated by the war.
Free Republic, of course, is the leading conservative site in the country.
So I'd urge people to go on there and maybe just be careful, but use that as an opportunity to prod them along a little bit, because there are anti-war conservatives.
In fact, maybe you could look into this, maybe I can look into it.
I'm wondering what the polls show now as far as conservatives in the war.
Are conservatives, self-described conservatives now supportive of the war?
If that's not true, you know, something should be made of it, that that has shifted.
And you know, I'd be interested to see how many, you know, what percentage of people even identify themselves as conservatives compared to how many did before the war.
I bet, oh, I think it's plummeted.
I think young people, I'm seeing that in Alabama.
I think conservatism is, and libertarianism, they don't know about libertarianism, but what they do know maybe is kind of watered down libertarianism that won't talk about the war, right, which is the key issue of today.
Absolutely.
It is a central issue.
I was amazed that the libertarian party is talking about avoiding the war.
That is the main issue now.
From a practical standpoint, it makes no sense at all to refuse to address this issue.
Oh, no, you're absolutely right.
If anybody in a couple of hundred years even remembers that the libertarian party existed, this will be measured as its biggest mistake, that they did not make the libertarian party a synonym for the anti-war movement beginning in 2002.
Well, you know, it was at one point.
1979, I'm showing my age here, but I was involved in the anti-draft movement quite heavily with Students for a Libertarian Society, and at that time, we were the leader.
The SLS did the first anti-draft demonstrations after Carter brought back draft registration.
We organized against it, and we linked it clearly to foreign policy, and in 1980 the libertarian party, when they ran Ed Clark, took a very strong anti-interventionist anti-draft position, and that was lost, and I think it was lost primarily because we got too close to the conservatives, because Reagan won, and a lot of us were bewitched by that and ended up aligning with conservatives, and that alignment continued through the Clinton years and was reinforced by Clinton hating, and I hated Clinton with the best of them, by the way, although he didn't look so bad now compared to our current incumbent.
We got so close to these folks that when September 11 came, well, we separated, we stood where and most of them, unfortunately, had become too close to the conservatives and either refused to address the war or took a pro-war position.
Yeah.
Well, and also, as the libertarian movement became closer to the conservatives, more and more conservatives began identifying themselves as libertarians when really they never were.
Yeah.
And you've got, I mean, I don't know, so many examples of that.
I mean, I've heard people claim that Giuliani is a libertarian.
Oh, geez.
Yeah.
And he actually, I've talked to a number of libertarians, or people who say they are, who like him.
You know, I mean, I just got to shake my head, and they think that he's the best pragmatic choice.
Well, Rudy supports the surge.
The surge is already in smithereens.
A year from now, he's either got to backtrack for that, or if he sticks to it, he's going to go down.
Yeah.
Well, that's what's being forgotten here.
He's also already claimed the power to arrest Americans with military power and detain them indefinitely.
He's already claimed the authority to fund a war even if Congress doesn't want to.
You know, there's not a thing libertarian about him.
The thing is, it goes back to that confusion about left and right.
He's not a conservative right-winger, so he must be a libertarian, when in fact, he's a moderate, which means he's an extremist.
He's a centrist, which means he's for government doing everything to everyone all the time unceasingly.
There's nothing libertarian about that.
He's also a demagogue, the way as a prosecutor, somebody needs to look at some of these cases.
He was like a Mike Niphon, right, except he went after people, you know, he went after big business people, right?
And so, okay, you can screw them, even if you're a Mike Niphon, right?
He was a very, I think, an ethical, very power-driven prosecutor, and that's what we're going to get as president.
Yeah.
So, hey, let me ask you real quick, last few minutes here, David Beto, Liberty and Power blog at the History News Network.
Speech codes, university campus stuff, I know this is very important, but it has nothing to do with me, and I'm very confused.
I know that, well, as we discussed, pretty much all of academia is dominated by left-wingers and they have all kinds of speech codes where you can't say bad words and you can't hurt people's feelings and all that kind of, you know, Brown University political correct garbage from the 1990s, but on the other hand, I see ex-communist turned right-wing warmonger people like David Horowitz trying to do their own kind of anti-speech code thing, and I have a feeling that neither side is right or, you know, maybe one's a little bit worse than the other, can you help clear that up for me?
They're both wrong.
Horowitz essentially wants to bring in right-wing speech codes, and his view is, although he's slippery on this, but his view is basically if a student thinks a professor is biased, that that student will be able to take some sort of action, like go to, I don't know, go to a dean or something and complain.
It's the exact same thing as on the left, if a professor like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a libertarian professor at UNLV got in trouble for this, says something that's controversial.
You know, Hoppe was just talking about controversial research issues, and a student is offended by that, then they can go to some administrator and complain.
The effect is the same in both cases.
You're going to get professors who refuse to do anything controversial, who refuse to assign work that might be thought-provoking, and that's what universities are supposed to be for, and that's what tenure is supposed to be for.
I'm no fan of tenure, but I'll tell you, if you didn't have tenure, you would have mass firings, because the administrators, they are almost all anti-liberty and all basically into building bigger and bigger and bigger universities through increasing student body count.
It's all geared to that, and they would love it if nobody said anything controversial on American campuses.
So Horowitz has some real grievances.
Some of his complaints about left-wing speech codes are very, completely valid, but his solution is, in effect, to pile on new speech codes on top of the old, and also to bring in diversity in hiring.
So we're going to have to hire equal number of conservatives.
The trouble with that is, okay, who gets the benefit?
Is it going to be conservatives?
Is it going to be libertarians?
I don't want a university where I'm asking my people I'm going to hire what are their political views.
I want to hire people on the basis of the strength of their research.
So that's another problem with Horowitz's agenda.
Well, and this is just kind of a common theme, that no matter what the problem is that the law created, that we've got to pass a new law to make the problem worse from the other direction.
More and more bureaucracy.
That's all you're going to get, and less and less willingness to adopt, discuss controversial issues.
As it is, most faculty members are cowardly.
They will avoid controversy at all costs.
This will make it even worse.
All right, we're all out of time.
I'm sorry.
I'd like to have you back on some time.
We can talk more about American history and so forth.
David Beto from the Liberty and Power blog is the author of a bunch of great books.
He's a fellow at the Independent Institute, civil rights activist.
And yeah, you can find him.
Is it just libertyandpower.com, David?
Yeah, libertyandpower.com or.org.
I think both will work.
Okay, great.
All right, thanks a lot for your time today.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.