Which Groups?

But education is the current strategic problem for the foreseeable and indefinite future. An important strategic question is who: If we cannot hope to convert our rulers in substantial numbers, who are the most likely prospects for conversion? which social, occupational, economic, or ethnic classes?

Conservatives have often placed their central hopes in big businessmen. This view of big business was most starkly expressed in Ayn Rand’s dictum that “Big Business is America’s most persecuted minority.” Persecuted? With a few honorable exceptions, big business jostles one another eagerly to line up at the public trough. Does Lockheed, or General Dynamics, or AT&T, or Nelson Rockefeller feel persecuted?

Big business support for the Corporate Welfare-Warfare State is so blatant and so far-ranging, on all levels from the local to the federal, that even many conservatives have had to acknowledge it, at least to some extent. How then explain such fervent support from “America’s most persecuted minority?” The only way out for conservatives is to assume (a) that these businessmen are dumb, and don’t understand their own economic interests, and/or (b) that they have been brainwashed by left-liberal intellectuals, who have poisoned their souls with guilt and misguided altruism. Neither of these explanations will wash, however, as only a glance at AT&T or Lockheed will amply show. Big businessmen tend to be admirers of statism, to be “corporate liberals,” not because their souls have been poisoned by intellectuals, but because a good thing has thereby been coming their way. Ever since the acceleration of statism at the turn of the twentieth century, big businessmen have been using the great powers of State contracts, subsidies and cartelization to carve out privileges for themselves at the expense of the rest of the society. It is not too farfetched to assume that Nelson Rockefeller is guided far more by self-interest than he is by woolly-headed altruism. It is generally admitted even by liberals, for example, that the vast network [p. 310] of government regulatory agencies is being used to cartelize each industry on behalf of the large firms and at the expense of the public. But to salvage their New Deal world-view, liberals have to console themselves with the thought that these agencies and similar “reforms,” enacted during the Progressive, Wilson, or Rooseveltian periods, were launched in good faith, with the “public weal” grandly in view. The idea and genesis of the agencies and other liberal reforms were therefore “good”; it was only in practice that the agencies somehow slipped into sin and into subservience to private, corporate interests. But what Kolko, Weinstein, Domhoff and other revisionist historians have shown, clearly and thoroughly, is that this is a piece of liberal mythology. In reality, all of these reforms, on the national and local levels alike, were conceived, written, and lobbied for by these very privileged groups themselves. The work of these historians reveals conclusively that there was no Golden Age of Reform before sin crept in; sin was there from the beginning, from the moment of conception. The liberal reforms of the Progressive-New Deal-Welfare State were designed to create what they did in fact create: a world of centralized statism, of “partnership” between government and industry, a world which subsists in granting subsidies and monopoly privileges to business and other favored groups.

Expecting the Rockefellers or the legion of other favored big businessmen to convert to a libertarian or even a laissez-faire view is a vain and empty hope. But this is not to say that all big businessmen, or businessmen in general, must be written off. Contrary to the Marxists, not all businessmen, or even big businessmen, constitute a homogeneous economic class with identical class interests. On the contrary, when the CAB confers monopoly privileges on a few large airlines, or when the FCC confers a monopoly on AT&T, there are numerous other firms and businessmen, small and large, who are injured and excluded from the privileges. The conferring of a monopoly of communications on AT&T by the FCC, for example, for a long while kept the now rapidly growing data communications industry stagnating in infancy; it was only an FCC decision to allow competition that enabled the industry to grow by leaps and bounds. Privilege implies exclusion, so there will always be a host of businesses and businessmen, large and small, who will have a solid economic interest in ending State control over their industry. There are therefore a host of businessmen, especially those remote from the privileged “Eastern Establishment,” who are potentially receptive to free-market and libertarian ideas.

Which groups, then, could we expect to be particularly receptive to libertarian ideas? Where, as the Marxists would put it, is our proposed [p. 311] “agency for social change”? This, of course, is an important strategic question for libertarians, since it gives us leads on where to direct our educational energies.

Campus youth is one group that has been prominent in the rising libertarian movement. This is not surprising: college is the time when people are most open to reflection and to considering basic questions of our society. As youth enamored of consistency and unvarnished truth, as collegians accustomed to a world of scholarship and abstract ideas, and not yet burdened with the care and the often narrower vision of adult employment, these youngsters provide a fertile field for libertarian conversion. We can expect far greater growth of libertarianism on the nation’s campuses in the future, a growth that is already being matched by the adherence of an expanding number of young scholars, professors, and graduate students.

Youth in general should also be attracted by the libertarian position on subjects that are often closest to their concerns: specifically, our call for complete abolition of the draft, withdrawal from the Cold War, civil liberties for everyone, and legalization of drugs and other victimless crimes.

The media, too, have proved to be a rich source of favorable interest in the new libertarian creed. Not simply for its publicity value, but because the consistency of libertarianism attracts a group of people who are most alert to new social and political trends, and who, while originally liberals, are most alert to the growing failures and breakdowns of Establishment liberalism. Media people generally find that they cannot be attracted to a hostile conservative movement which automatically writes them off as leftists and which takes uncongenial positions on foreign policy and civil liberties. But these same media persons can be and are favorably disposed to a libertarian movement which wholeheartedly agrees with their instincts on peace and personal liberty, and then links up their opposition to Big Government in these areas to government intervention in the economy and in property rights. More and more media people are making these new and illuminating connections, and they of course are extremely important in their influence and leverage on the rest of the public.

What of “Middle America” — that vast middle class and working class that constitute the bulk of the American population — and which is often at polar opposites from campus youth? Do we have any appeal for them? Logically, our appeal to Middle America should be even greater. We direct ourselves squarely to the aggravated and chronic discontent that afflicts the mass of the American people: rising taxes, inflation, urban [p. 312] congestion, crime, welfare scandals. Only libertarians have concrete and consistent solutions to these pressing ills: solutions that center on getting them out from under government in all these areas and turning them over to private and voluntary action. We can show that government and statism have been responsible for these evils, and that getting coercive government off our backs will provide the remedies.

To small businessmen we can promise a truly free-enterprise world, shorn of monopoly privilege, cartels, and subsidies engineered by the State and the Establishment. And to them and to the big businessmen outside the monopoly Establishment we can promise a world where their individual talents and energies can at last have full room to expand and to provide improved technology and increased productivity for them and for us all. To various ethnic and minority groups we can show that only under liberty is there full freedom for each group to cultivate its concerns and to run its own institutions, unimpeded and uncoerced by majority rule.

In short, the potential appeal of libertarianism is a multi-class appeal; it is an appeal that cuts across race, occupation, economic class, and the generations; any and all people not directly in the ruling elite are potentially receptive to our message. Every person or group that values its liberty or prosperity is a potential adherent to the libertarian creed.

Liberty, then, has the potential for appealing to all groups across the public spectrum. Yet, it is a fact of life that when things are going smoothly, most people fail to develop any interest in public affairs. For radical social change — a change to a different social system — to take place, there must be what is called a “crisis situation.” There must, in short^ be a breakdown of the existing system which calls forth a general search for alternative solutions. When such a widespread search for social alternatives takes place, then activists of a dissenting movement must be available to supply that radical alternative, to relate the crisis to the inherent defects of the system itself, and to point out how the alternative system would solve the existing crisis and prevent any similar breakdowns in the future. Hopefully, the dissenters would also have provided a track record of predicting and warning against the crisis that now exists.4

Furthermore, one of the characteristics of crisis situations is that even [p. 313] the ruling elites begin to weaken their support for the system. Because of the crisis, even part of the State begins to lose its zest and enthusiasm for rule. In short, a failure of nerve by segments of the State occurs. Thus, in these situations of breakdown, even members of the ruling elite may convert to an alternative system or, at the least, may lose their enthusiasm for the existing one.

Thus the historian Lawrence Stone stresses, as a requirement for radical change, a decay in the will of the ruling elite. “The elite may lose its manipulative skill, or its military superiority, or its self-confidence, or its cohesion; it may become estranged from the non-elite, or overwhelmed by a financial crisis; it may be incompetent, or weak or brutal.”5

• 4Thus, Fritz Redlich writes, “. . . often the soil [for the triumph of an idea] must have been prepared by events. One can remember how difficult it was to disseminate the idea of an American central bank prior to the crisis of 1907 and how relatively easy it was thereafter.” Fritz Redlich, “Ideas: Their Migration in Space and Transmittal Over Time,” Kyklos (1953), p. 306.
• 5Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1520-1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 9. Similar is Lenin’s analysis of the features of a “revolutionary situation”:

   

  “. . . when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes,’ a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way . . .” V. I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International” (June 1915), in Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 213-214.