Death of Politics by Karl Hess

The Death of Politics
by Karl Hess
Posted on Friday, October 16, 2009

Originally published in Playboy, March 1969, this article was
made available for the web by David Schatz and
François-René Rideau <http://fare.tunes.org/> .

This is not a time of radical, revolutionary politics. Not yet.
Unrest, riot, dissent, and chaos notwithstanding, today's
politics is reactionary. Both Left and Right are reactionary and
authoritarian. That is to say, both are political. They seek only
to revise current methods of acquiring and wielding political
power. Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but
to revoke. The target of revocation should be obvious. The target
is politics itself.

Radicals and revolutionaries have had their sights trained on
politics for some time. As governments fail around the world, as
more millions become aware that government never has and never
can humanely and effectively manage men's affairs, government's
own inadequacy will emerge, at last, as the basis for a truly
radical and revolutionary movement. In the meantime, the
radical-revolutionary

position is a lonely one. It is feared and
hated, by both Right and Left ­ although both Right and Left
must borrow from it to survive. The radical-revolutionary
position is libertarianism, and its socioeconomic form is
laissez-faire capitalism.

Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute owner of
his life, to use and dispose of as he sees fit: that all man's
social actions should be voluntary: and that respect for every
other man's similar and equal ownership of life and, by
extension, the property and fruits of that life is the ethical
basis of a humane and open society. In this view, the only ­
repeat, only ­ function of law or government is to provide the
sort of self-defense against violence that an individual, if he
were powerful enough, would provide for himself.

If it were not for the fact that libertarianism freely concedes
the right of men voluntarily to form communities or governments
on the same ethical basis, libertarianism could be called
anarchy.

Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the
economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism
encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and
services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for
value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as
voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be
straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division
of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as
cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and
proudly so.

Libertarianism is rejected by the modern Left ­ which preaches
individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected
by the modern Right ­ which preaches enterprise but practices
protectionism. The libertarian faith in the mind of men is
rejected by religionists who have faith only in the sins of man.
The libertarian insistence that men be free to spin cables of
steel, as well as dreams of smoke, is rejected by hippies who
adore nature but spurn creation. The libertarian insistence that
each man is a sovereign land of liberty, with his primary
allegiance to himself, is rejected by patriots who sing of
freedom but also shout of banners and boundaries. There is no
operating movement in the world today that is based upon a
libertarian philosophy. If there were, it would be in the
anomalous position of using political power to abolish political
power.

Perhaps a regular political movement, overcoming this anomaly
will actually develop. Believe it or not, there were strong
possibilities of such a development in the 1964 campaign of Barry
Goldwater <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater> .
Underneath the scary headlines, Goldwater hammered away at such
purely political structures as the draft, general taxation,
censorship, nationalism, legislated conformity, political
establishment of social norms, and war as an instrument of
international policy.

It is true that, in a common political paradox, Goldwater (a
major general in the Air Force Reserve) has spoken of reducing
state power while at the same time advocating the increase of
state power to fight the Cold War. He is not a pacifist. He
believes that war remains an acceptable state action. He does not
see the Cold War as involving US imperialism. He sees it as a
result only of Soviet imperialism. Time after time, however, he
has said that economic pressure, diplomatic negotiation, and the
persuasions of propaganda (or "cultural warfare") are absolutely
preferable to violence. He has also said that antagonistic
ideologies can "never be beaten by bullets, but only by better
ideas."

A defense of Goldwater cannot be carried too far, however. His
domestic libertarian tendencies simply do not carry over into his
view of foreign policy. Libertarianism, unalloyed, is absolutely
isolationist, in that it is absolutely opposed to the
institutions of national government that are the only agencies on
earth now able to wage war or intervene in foreign affairs.

In other campaign issues, however, the libertarian coloration in
the Goldwater complexion was more distinct. The fact that he
roundly rapped the fiscal irresponsibility of Social Security
before an elderly audience, and the fact that he criticized the
TVA in Tennessee were not examples of political naïveté.
They simply showed Goldwater's high disdain for politics itself,
summed up in his campaign statement that people should be told
"what they need to hear and not what they want to hear."

There was also some suggestion of libertarianism in the campaign
of Eugene McCarthy, in his splendid attacks on presidential
power. However, these were canceled out by his vague but
nevertheless perceptible defense of government power in general.
There was virtually no suggestion of libertarianism in the
statements of any other politicians during last year's campaign.

I was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign.
During the campaign, I recall very clearly, there was a moment,
at a conference to determine the campaign's "farm strategy," when
a respected and very conservative senator arose to say, "Barry,
you've got to make it clear that you believe that the American
farmer has a right to a decent living."

Senator Goldwater replied, with the tact for which he is
renowned, "But he doesn't have a right to it. Neither do I. We
just have a right to try for it." And that was the end of that.

Now, in contrast, take Tom Hayden
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hayden> of the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS). Writing in The Radical Papers, he said
that his "revolution" sought "institutions outside the
established order." One of those institutions, he amplified,
would be "people's own antipoverty organizations fighting for
Federal money."

Of the two men, which is radical or revolutionary? Hayden says,
in effect, that he simply wants to bulldoze his way into the
establishment. Goldwater says he wants, in effect, to topple it,
to forever end its power to advantage or disadvantage anyone.

This is not to defend the Goldwater campaign as libertarian. It
is only to say that his campaign contained a healthy element of
this sort of radicalism. But otherwise, the Goldwater campaign
was very deeply in hock to regular partisan interests, images,
myths, and manners.

In foreign policy, particularly, there arises a great impediment
to the emergence of a libertarian wing in either of the major
political parties. Men who call upon the end of state authority
in every other area insist upon its being maintained to build a
war machine with which to hold the Communists at bay. It is only
lately that the imperatives of logic ­ and the emergence of
antistatist forces in Eastern Europe ­ have begun to make it
more acceptable to ask whether the garrison state needed to
maintain the Cold War might not be as bad as or worse than the
putative threat being guarded against. Goldwater has not taken
and may never take such a revisionist line ­ but, among Cold
Warriors, his disposition to libertarian principles makes him
more susceptible than most.

This is not merely a digression on behalf of a political figure
(almost an antipolitical figure) whom I profoundly respect. It
is, rather, to emphasize the inadequacy of traditional, popular
guidelines in assessing the reactionary nature of contemporary
politics and in divining the true nature of radical and
revolutionary antipolitics. Political parties and politicians
today ­ all parties and all politicians ­ question only the
forms through which they will express their common belief in
controlling the lives of others. Power, particularly majoritarian
or collective power (i.e., the power of an elite exercised in the
name of the masses), is the god of the modern liberal. Its only
recent innovative change is to suggest that the elite be leavened
by the compulsory membership of authentic representatives of the
masses. The current phrase is "participatory democracy."

Just as power is the god of the modern liberal, God remains the
authority of the modern conservative. Liberalism practices
regimentation by, simply, regimentation. Conservatism practices
regimentation by, not quite so simply, revelation. But regimented
or revealed, the name of the game is still politics.

The great flaw in conservatism is a deep fissure down which talk
of freedom falls, to be dashed to death on the rocks of
authoritarianism. Conservatives worry that the state has too much
power over people. But it was conservatives who gave the state
that power. It was conservatives, very similar to today's
conservatives, who ceded to the state the power to produce not
simply order in the community but a certain kind of order.

It was European conservatives who, apparently fearful of the
openness of the Industrial Revolution (why, anyone could get
rich!), struck the first blows at capitalism by encouraging and
accepting laws that made the disruptions of innovation and
competition less frequent and eased the way for the comforts and
collusions of cartelization.

Big business in America today and for some years has been openly
at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire
capitalism. Big business supports a form of state capitalism in
which government and big business act as partners. Criticism of
this statist bent of big business comes more often from the Left
than from the Right these days, and this is another factor making
it difficult to tell the players apart. John Kenneth Galbraith
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith> , for
instance, has most recently taken big business to task for its
anticompetitive mentality. The Right, meantime, blissfully
defends big business as though it had not, in fact, become just
the sort of bureaucratic, authoritarian force that rightists
reflexively attack when it is governmental.

The Left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an
attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between
authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial
business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so
uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms
of capitalism are bad, so that full state ownership is the only
alternative. This thinking has its mirror image on the Right.

It was American conservatives, for instance, who very early in
the game gave up the fight against state franchising and
regulation and, instead, embraced state regulation for their own
special advantage. Conservatives today continue to revere the
state as an instrument of chastisement even as they reject it as
an instrument of beneficence. The conservative who wants a
federally authorized prayer in the classroom is the same
conservative who objects to federally authorized textbooks in the
same room.

Murray Rothbard, writing in <http://mises.org/story/1842>
Ramparts <http://mises.org/story/1842> , has summed up this
flawed conservatism in describing a

new younger generation of rightists, of "conservatives" … who
thought that the real problem of the modern world was nothing so
ideological as the state vs. individual liberty or government
intervention vs. the free market; the real problem, they
declared, was the preservation of tradition, order, Christianity
and good manners against the modern sins of reason, license,
atheism, and boorishness.

The reactionary tendencies of both liberals and conservatives
today show clearly in their willingness to cede, to the state or
the community, power far beyond the protection of liberty against
violence. For differing purposes, both see the state as an
instrument not protecting man's freedom but either instructing or
restricting how that freedom is to be used.

Once the power of the community becomes in any sense normative,
rather than merely protective, it is difficult to see where any
lines may be drawn to limit further transgressions against
individual freedom. In fact, the lines have not been drawn. They
will never be drawn by political parties that argue merely the
cost of programs or institutions founded on state power.
Actually, the lines can be drawn only by a radical questioning of
power itself, and by the libertarian vision that sees man as
capable of moving on without the encumbering luggage of laws and
politics that do not merely preserve man's right to his life but
attempt, in addition, to tell him how to live it.

For many conservatives, the bad dream that haunts their lives and
their political position (which many sum up as "law and order"
these days) is one of riot. To my knowledge, there is no limit
that conservatives would place upon the power of the state to
suppress riots.

Even in a laissez-faire society, of course, the right to
self-defense would have to be assumed, and a place for
self-defense on a community basis could easily be imagined. But
community self-defense would always be exclusively defensive.
Conservatives betray an easy willingness to believe that the
state should also initiate certain offensive actions, in order to
preclude trouble later on. "Getting tough" is the phrase most
often used. It does not mean just getting tough on rioters. It
means getting tough on entire ranges of attitudes: clipping long
hair, rousting people from parks for carrying concealed guitars,
stopping and questioning anyone who doesn't look like a member of
the Jaycees, drafting all the ne'er-do-wells to straighten them
up, ridding our theaters and bookstores of "filth" and, always
and above all, putting "those" people in their place. To the
conservative, all too often, the alternatives are social
conformity or unthinkable chaos.

Even if these were the only alternatives ­ which they
obviously aren't ­ there are many reasons for preferring chaos
to conformity. Personally, I believe I would have a better chance
of surviving ­ and certainly my values would have a better
chance of surviving ­ with a Watts, Chicago, Detroit, or
Washington in flames than with an entire nation snug in a
garrison.

Riots in modern America must be broken down into component parts.
They are not all simple looting and violence against life and
property. They are also directed against the prevailing violence
of the state ­ the sort of ongoing civic violence that permits
regular police supervision of everyday life in some
neighborhoods, the rules and regulations that inhibit absolutely
free trading, the public schools that serve the visions of
bureaucracy rather than the varieties of individual people. There
is violence also by those who simply want to shoot their way into
political power otherwise denied them. Conservatives seem to
think that greater state-police power is the answer. Liberals
seem to think that more preferential state-welfare power is the
answer. Power, power, power.

Except for ordinary looters ­ for whom the answer must be to
stop them as you would any other thief ­ the real answer to
rioting must lie elsewhere. It must lie in the abandonment, not
the extension, of state power ­ state power that oppresses
people, state power that tempts people. To cite one strong
example: the white stores in many black neighborhoods, which are
said to cause such dissatisfaction and envy, have a special
unrealized advantage thanks to state power. In a very poor
neighborhood there may be many with the natural ability to open a
retail store, but it is much less likely that these people would
also have the ability to meet all the state and city regulations,
governing everything from cleanliness to bookkeeping, which very
often comprise the marginal difference between going into
business or staying out. In a real laissez-faire society, the
local entrepreneur, with whom the neighbors might prefer to deal,
could go openly into business ­ selling marijuana, whiskey,
numbers, slips, books, food, or medical advice from the trunk of
his car. He could forget about ledgers, forms, and reports and
simply get on with the business of business, rather than the
business of bureaucracy. Allowing ghetto dwellers to compete on
their own terms, rather than someone else's, should prove a more
satisfying and practical solution to ghetto problems than either
rampages or restrictions.

The libertarian thrusts away from power and authority that marked
the Goldwater campaign were castigated from the Left as being
"nostalgic yearnings for a simpler world." (Perhaps akin to the
simplistic yearnings of the hippies whom the Left so easily
tolerates even while it excoriates Goldwater.) Goldwater's
libertarianism was castigated from the Right ­ he received
virtually no support from big business ­ as representing
policies that could lead to unregulated competition,
international free trade, and, even worse, a weakening of the
very special partnership that big business now enjoys with big
government.

The most incredible convolution in the thinking that attacked
Goldwater as reactionary ­ which he isn't ­ rather than
radical ­ which he is ­ came in regard to nuclear weapons.
In that area he was specifically damned for daring to propose
that the control of these weapons be shared, and even fully
placed, in the multinational command of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, rather than left to the personal, one-man
discretion of the president of the United States.

Again, who is reactionary and who is radical? The men who want an
atomic king enthroned in Washington, or the man who dares ask
that that divine right of destruction become less divine and more
divided? Until recently, it was a popular cocktail pastime to
speculate of the difference between the war in Vietnam under
"Save-the-world-from Goldwater" Johnson, or as it might have been
under wild Barry, who, by his every campaign utterance, would
have been bound to share the Vietnam decision (and the fighting)
with NATO, rather than simply and unilaterally going it alone.

To return to the point: the most vital question today about
politics ­ not in politics ­ is the same sort of question
that is plaguing Christianity. Superficially, the Christian
question seems simply what kind of religion should be chosen. But
basically, the question is whether any irrational or mystical
forces are supportable, as a way to order society, in a world
increasingly able and ready to be rational. The political version
of the question may be stated this way: Will men continue to
submit to rule by politics, which has always meant the power of
some men over other men, or are we ready to go it alone socially,
in communities of voluntarism, in a world more economic and
cultural than political, just as so many now are prepared to go
it alone metaphysically in a world more of reason than religion?

The radical and revolutionary answer that a libertarian,
laissez-faire position makes to that question is not quite
anarchy. The libertarian, laissez-faire movement is, actually, if
embarrassingly for some, a civil-rights movement. But it is
antipolitical, in that it builds diversified power to be
protected against government, even to dispense with government to
a major degree, rather than seeking power to protect government
or to perform any special social purpose.

It is a civil-liberties movement in that it seeks civil
liberties, for everyone, as defined in the 19th century by one of
Yale's first professors of political and social science, William
Graham Sumner <http://mises.org/articles.aspx?AuthorId=761> .
Sumner said,

Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law
and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own
powers for his own welfare.

Modern liberals, of course, would call this selfishness, and they
would be correct with intense emphasis on self. Many modern
conservatives would say that they agree with Sumner, but they
would not be correct. Men who call themselves conservatives, but
who operate in the larger industries, spend considerable time,
and not a small amount of money, fighting government subsidies to
labor unions (in the form of preferential tax and legal
considerations) or to people (in the form of welfare programs).
They do not fight direct subsidies to industries ­ such as
transportation, farming, or universities. They do not, in short,
believe that men are entitled to the exclusive employment of
their own powers for their own welfare, because they accept the
practice of taxing a good part of that power to use for the
welfare of other people.

As noted, for all the theoretical screaming that sometimes may be
heard from the industrial Right, it is safe to say that the major
powers of government to regulate industry were derived not only
from the support of businessmen but actually at the insistence of
businessmen. Uneconomical mail rates are cherished by businessmen
who can profit from them and who, significantly, seem
uninterested in the obvious possibility of transforming the
postal service from a bureau into a business. As a business, of
course, it would charge what it cost to mail things, not what is
simply convenient for users to pay.

The big businessmen who operate the major broadcast networks are
not known for suggesting, as a laissez-faire concept would
insist, that competition for channels and audiences be wide open
and unregulated. As a consequence, of course, the networks get
all the government control that they deserve, accepting it in
good cheer because, even if censored, they are also protected
from competition.

It is notable, also, that one of the most fierce denunciations of
pay TV (which, under capitalism, should be a conceptual
commonplace) came not from the Daily Worker but from the Reader's
Digest, that supposed bastion of conservatism. Actually, I think
the Digest is such a bastion. It seems to believe that the state
is an institution divinely ordained to make men moral ­ in a
"Judeo-Christian" sense, of course. It abhors, as no publication
short of William Buckley's National Review, the insolence of
those untidy persons who today so regularly challenge the
authority of the state.

In short, there is no evidence whatever that modern conservatives
subscribe to the "your-life-is-your-own" philosophy upon which
libertarianism is founded. An interesting illustration that
conservatism not only disagrees with libertarianism but is
downright hostile to it is that the most widely known libertarian
author of the day, Miss Ayn Rand, ranks only a bit below, or
slightly to the side of, Leonid Brezhnev as an object of diatribe
in National Review. Specifically, it seems, she is reviled on the
Right because she is an atheist, daring to take exception to the
National Review notion that man's basically evil nature (stemming
from original sin) means he must be held in check by a strong and
authoritarian social order.

Barry Goldwater, during his 1964 campaign, repeatedly said that
"the government strong enough to give you what you want is strong
enough to take it all away." Conservatives, as a group, have
forgotten, or prefer to ignore, that this applies also to
government's strength to impose social order. If government can
enforce social norms, or even Christian behavior, it can also
take away or twist them.

To repeat, conservatives yearn for a state, or "leadership," with
the power to restore order and to put things ­ and people ­
back in their places. They yearn for political power. Liberals
yearn for a state that will bomb the rich and balm the poor. They
too yearn for political power. Libertarians yearn for a state
that cannot, beyond any possibility of amendment, confer any
advantage on anyone; a state that cannot compel anything, but
simply prevents the use of violence, in place of other exchanges,
in relations between individuals or groups.

Such a state would have as its sole purpose (probably supported
exclusively by use taxes or fees) the maintenance of a system to
adjudicate disputes (courts), to protect citizens against
violence (police), to maintain some form of currency for ease of
commerce, and, as long as it might be needed because of the
existence of national borders and differences, to maintain a
defense force. Meanwhile, libertarians should also work to end
the whole concept of the nation-state itself. The major point
here is that libertarians would start with no outstanding
predispositions about public functions, being disposed always to
think that there is in the personal and private world of
individuals someone who can or will come along with a solution
that gets the job done without conferring upon anyone power that
has not been earned through voluntary exchange.

In fact, it is in the matters most appropriate to collective
interest ­ such as courts and protection against violence ­
that government today often defaults. This follows the
bureaucratic tendency to perform least-needed services ­ where
the risk of accountability is minimal ­ and to avoid
performing essential but highly accountable services. Courts are
clogged beyond belief. Police, rather than simply protecting
citizens against violence, are deeply involved in overseeing
private morals. In black neighborhoods particularly, the police
serve as unloved and unwanted arbiters of everyday life.

If, in the past few paragraphs, the reader can detect any hint of
a position that would be compatible with either the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union or the National Association of
Manufacturers, he is strongly advised to look again. No such
common ground exists. Nor can any common ground be adduced in
terms of "new politics" versus "old politics." New or old, the
positions that parade around today under these titles are still
politics and, like roses, they smell alike. Radical and
revolutionary politicians ­ antipoliticians, if you will ­
should be able to sniff them out easily.

Specific matters that illustrate the differences would include
the draft, marijuana, monopoly, censorship,
isolationism-internationalism, race relations, and urban affairs,
to name a few.

As part of his aborted campaign for the presidency, Nelson
Rockefeller took a position on the draft. In it, he specifically
took exception to Richard Nixon's draft stand, calling it "old
politics" as contrasted with his own "new politics." The
Rockefeller position involved a certain streamlining of the
draft, but nothing that would change it from what it patently is
­ forced, involuntary servitude. Rockefeller criticized Nixon
for having asserted that, someday, the draft could be replaced by
a volunteer system, an old Republican promise.

The new politician contended that the Nixon system wouldn't work
because it never had worked. The fact that this nation has never
offered to pay its soldiers at a rate realistic enough to attract
them was not covered in Rockefeller's statement. Nor did the new
politician address himself to the fact that, given a nation that
not enough citizens can be attracted to defend voluntarily, you
probably also have a nation that, by definition, isn't really
worth defending.

The old politician, on the other hand, did not present quite as
crisp a position on the draft as the new politician tried to pin
him with. Nixon, although theoretically in favor of a voluntary
military, was ­ along with the presumably even more
conservative Ronald Reagan ­ opposed to trying voluntarism
until after the Vietnam war. Throughout the conservative stance
one sees a repetition of this position. Freedom is fine ­ but
it must be deferred as long as a hot war or the Cold War has to
be fought.

All should be struck by the implications of that baleful notion.
It implies that free men simply cannot be ingenious enough to
defend themselves against violence without themselves becoming
violent ­ not toward the enemy alone, but to their own persons
and liberty as well. If our freedom is so fragile that it must be
continuously protected by giving it up, then we are in deep
trouble. And, in fact, by following a somewhat similar course, we
got ourselves in very deep trouble in Southeast Asia. The Johnson
war there was escalated precisely on the belief that southern
Vietnamese freedom may best be obtained by dictating what form of
government the south should have ­ day by day, even ­ and
by defending it against the North Vietnamese by devastating the
southern countryside.

In foreign relations, as in domestic pronouncements, new and old
politicians preach the same dusty doctrines of compulsion and
contradiction. The radical preachment of libertarianism, the
antipolitical preachment, would be that as long as the inanity of
war between nation-states remains a possibility, free
nation-states will at least protect themselves from wars by
hiring volunteers, not by murdering voluntarism.

One of the most medievally fascinating minds of the 20th Century,
that of Lewis Hershey, sole owner and proprietor of the Selective
Service System, has put this unpretty picture into perfect
perspective with his memorable statement, delivered at a National
Press Club luncheon, that he "hate[s] to think of the day that
[his] grandchildren would be defended by volunteers." There, in
as ugly an example as is on public record, is precisely where
politics and power, authority and the arthritis of
traditionalism, are bound to bring you. Director Hershey is
prevented from being a great comic figure by the rather obvious
fact that, being involved with the deaths of so many unwilling
men, and the imprisonment of so many others, he becomes a tragic
figure or, at least, a figure in a tragedy. There is no new or
old politics about the draft. A draft is political, plain and
simple. A volunteer military is essentially commercial. And it is
between politics and commerce that the entrant into radical or
revolutionary politics must continually choose.

Marijuana is an example of such a choice. In a laissez-faire
society, there could exist no public institution with the power
to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people
(criminals), yes. From one's own self, no. Marijuana is a plant,
a crop. People who smoke it do not do so under the compulsion
either of physiological addiction or of institutional power. They
do so voluntarily. They find a person who has volunteered to grow
it. They agree on a price. One sells; the other buys. One
acquires new capital; the other acquires a euphoric experience
that, he decides, was worth allocating some of his own resources
to obtain.

Nowhere in that equation is there a single point at which the
neighbors, or any multitude of neighbors, posing as priesthood or
public, have the slightest rational reason to intervene. The
action has not, in any way, deprived anyone else of "the
exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare."

The current laws against marijuana, in contravention even of all
available evidence regarding its nature, are a prime example of
the use of political power. The very power that makes it possible
for the state to ban marijuana, and to arrest Lenny Bruce, is the
same power that makes it possible for the state to exact taxes
from one man to pay into the pockets of another. The purposes may
seem different but upon examination they are not. Marijuana must
be banned to prevent people from succumbing to the madness of its
fumes and doing some mischief upon the community. Poverty, too,
must be banned for a similar reason. Poor people, unless made
unpoor, will angrily rise and do mischief upon the community. As
in all politics, purposes and power blend and reinforce each
other.

"Hard" narcotics must be subjected to the same tests as marijuana
in terms of politics versus antipolitics. These narcotics, too,
are merely salable materials, except that, if used beyond
prudence, they can be quite disabling to the person using them.
(I inject that note simply because, in my understanding, there
remains at all levels of addiction the chance of breaking or
controlling the habit. This suggests that a person can exercise a
choice in the matter; that he can, indeed, be prudent or not.)

The person who uses drugs imprudently, just as the person who
imprudently uses the politically sanctioned and franchised drugs
of alcohol or tobacco, ends up in an unenviable position, perhaps
dead. That, rationally, is his own business as long as he does
not, by his actions, deprive you of your right to make your own
decision not to use drugs, to assist addicts, or, if you wish, to
ignore them. But, it is said, by Right and Left today, that the
real problem is social and public ­ that the high price of the
drugs leads the addict to rob and kill (rightist position), and
that making drugs a public matter, for clinical dispensation,
would eliminate the causes of his crime (leftist position).

These both are essentially political positions and clearly inept
in a society where the line between mind-expanders such as coffee
or LSD is highly technical. By choosing the economic and cultural
approach rather than a political one, the antipolitical
libertarian would say, sell away. Competition will keep the price
down. Cultural acceptance of the root ethic, that a man's life
and its appurtenances are inviolate, would justify defense
against any violence that might accompany addiction in others.
And what is there left for the "public" to do? Absolutely nothing
­ except, individually, to decide whether to risk drugs or to
avoid them. Parents, of course, holding the purse strings of
their children, can exercise a certain amount of control, but
only individually, never collectively.

Incidentally, it is easy to imagine that, if drugs were left to
economics and culture instead of politics, medical researchers
would shortly discover a way to provide the salable and wanted
effects of drugs without the incapacitation of addiction. In this
as in similar matters ­ such as the unregulated competition
from which it is felt people need protection ­ technology
rather than politics might offer far better answers.

Monopoly is a case in point. To suppose that anyone needs
government protection from the creation of monopolies is to
accept two suppositions: that monopoly is the natural direction
of unregulated enterprise, and that technology is static.
Neither, of course, is true. The great concentrations of economic
power, which are called monopolies today, did not grow despite
government's antimonopolistic zeal. They grew, largely, because
of government policies, such as those making it more profitable
for small businesses to sell out to big companies rather than
fight the tax code alone. Additionally, Federal fiscal and credit
policies and Federal subsidies and contracts have all provided
substantially more assistance to big and established companies
than to smaller, potentially competitive ones.

The auto industry receives the biggest subsidy of all through the
highway program on which it prospers, but for which it surely
does not pay a fair share. Airlines are subsidized and so
protected that newcomers can't even try to compete. Television
networks are fantastically advantaged by FCC licensing, which
prevents upstarts from entering a field where big old-timers have
been established. Even in agriculture, it is large and
established farmers who get the big subsidies ­ not small ones
who might want to compete. Government laws specifically exempting
unions from antitrust activities have also furthered a monopoly
mentality.

And, of course, the "public utility" and "public transportation"
concepts have specifically created government-licensed monopolies
in the fields of power, communications, and transit. This is not
to say that economic bigness is bad. It isn't, if it results from
economic efficiency. But it is bad if it results from collusion
with political, rather than with economic power. There is no
monopoly in the world today, of which I could think, that might
not be seriously challenged by competition, were it not for some
form of protective government license, tariff, subsidy, or
regulation. Also, there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence to
suggest that the trend of unregulated business and industry is
toward monopoly. In fact, the trend seems in the opposite
direction, toward diversification and decentralization.

The technological aspect is equally important. Monopoly cannot
develop as long as technology is dynamic, which it most
abundantly is today. No corporation is so large that it can
command every available brain ­ except, of course, a corporate
state. As long as one brain remains unavailable, there is the
chance of innovation and competition. There can be no real
monopoly, just momentary advantage. Nor does technological
breakthrough always depend on vast resources or, even where it
does, would it have to depend upon a single source of financing
­ unless, again, only the state has the money. Short of total
state control, and presuming creative brains in the community,
and presuming the existence of capital with which to build even
modest research facilities, few would flatly say that
technological innovation could be prevented simply because of
some single source enjoying a temporary "monopoly" of a given
product or service.

The exceptions, to repeat, are always governments. Governments
can be ­ and usually are ­ monopolistic. For instance, it
is not uneconomical to operate a private post-office department
today. It is only illegal. The Feds enjoy a legal monopoly ­
to the extent that they are currently prosecuting at least one
entrepreneur who operated a mail service better and cheaper than
they do.

Politics is not needed to prevent monopoly. Unregulated,
unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism is all that is needed. It
would also provide jobs, raise living standards, improve
products, and so forth. If commercial activity were unregulated
and absolutely unsubsidized, it could depend upon only one factor
for success ­ pleasing customers.

Censorship is another notable example in which politics, and
politicians, interpose between customer and satisfaction. The
gauge becomes not whether the customer is happy, but whether the
politician (either singly or as a surrogate for "the public") is
happy. This applies equally to "public" protection from unpopular
political ideas as well as protection from pornography.
Conservatives are at least consistent in this matter. They feel
that the state (which they sometimes call "the community") can
and must protect people from unsavory thoughts. It goes without
saying who defines unsavory: the political ­ or
community-leaders, of course.

Perhaps the most ironic of all manifestations of this
conservative urge to cleanthink concerns the late Lenny Bruce. He
talked dirty. He was, therefore, a particularly favorite target
of conservatives. He was also an explicit and, I think, incisive
defender of capitalism. In commenting that communism is a drag
("like one big phone company"), Bruce specifically opted for
capitalism ("it gives you a choice, baby, and that's what it's
about"). There is no traditional conservative who is fit to even
walk on the same level with Lenny Bruce in his fierce devotion to
individualism. Lenny Bruce frequently used what is for many
conservatives the dirtiest word of all: he said capitalism. When
was the last time that the National Association of Manufacturers
did as much?

Lenny Bruce wasn't the only man to alienate conservatives by
opening his mouth. In 1964, Barry Goldwater alienated Southern
conservatives in droves when, in answer to a regionally hot
question about whether Communists should be permitted to speak on
state-university campuses, Goldwater said, flatly and simply, "Of
course they should."

Even anticommunist libertarians have no choice but to deny the
state the right to suppress Communists. Similarly, libertarians
who are aesthetically repelled by what they deem pornography have
no other course than not to buy it, leaving its absolutely
unregulated sale to producer, purchaser, and no one else. Once
again, a parent could intrude ­ but only by stopping an
individual, dependent purchaser, never by stopping the purveyor,
whose right to sell pornography for profit, and for absolutely no
other socially redeeming virtue whatever, would be inviolate. An
irate parent who attempted to hustle a smut peddler off the
street, as a matter of fact, should be sued, not saluted.

The liberal attitude toward censorship is not so clear. At this
point, it needn't be. Liberals practice it, rather than preach
it. The FCC's egregious power to insist that broadcasting serve a
social purpose is both a liberal tenet and an act of censorship.
In the FCC canons, social purposes are defined so that a station
can get good points for permitting a preacher free time but no
points ­ or even bad points ­ for extending the same gift
of free air to an atheist.

It is partly in the realm of air, also, that differences
regarding nationalism between the old left/right politicians and
the libertarian antipolitician show up. If today's conservative
has his fervent jingoism for old nations, the liberal has just as
fanatic a devotion to the jingoism of new nations. The
willingness of modern liberals to suggest armed intervention
against South Africa, while ignoring, even in terms of major
journalistic coverage, slaughters in Nigeria and the Sudan, is a
demonstration of interest only in politics ­ and in particular
persons ­ rather than in human life per se.

Of course, conservatives have a similar double standard in regard
to anticommunist slaughter and anticommunist dictatorship.
Although it is not as whimsically selective as the liberal
decision to be revolted or cheered by each particular bloodbath,
the conservative double standard can have equally tragic results.
The distinct undercurrents of anti-Semitism that so obviously
muddle many conservative movements probably can be traced to the
horrid assumption that Adolf Hitler's anticommunism excused his
other, but comparatively minor, faults. Somehow, anticommunism
seems to permit anti-Semitism.

I have met in my time many anticommunists who view communism as
simply a creature of Jewish plotting for world dominion. The John
Birch Society's separate chapter for Jewish members is a
seriocomic reflection, I think, of such good old WASP
anti-Semitism. The widely reported admiration of Hitler by the
head man of the right-wing Liberty Lobby is a reflection,
presumably, of the "you need a strong man to fight atheistic
Communism" school of thought. There are, of course, notable
Jewish anticommunists. And there are many anticommunists who
condemn anti-Semitism. But the operating question for most of the
full-time anticommunists that I have met is simply: Are you
anticommunist? Being also anti-Semitic is not automatically a
disqualification on the Right, though it usually is on the Left.

Conservatives and liberals alike hold in common the mystical
notion that nations really mean something, probably something
permanent. Both ascribe to lines drawn on maps ­ or in the
dirt or in the air ­ the magical creation of communities of
men that require sovereignty and sanction. The conservative feels
this with exaltation when he beholds the Stars and Stripes. The
liberal feels this with academic certitude when he concludes that
Soviet boundaries must be "guaranteed" to prevent Soviet
nervousness. Today, in the ultimate confusion, there are people
who feel that the lines drawn by the Soviet Union, in blood, are
better than the lines drawn, also in blood, by American foreign
policy. Politicians just think this way.

The radical and revolutionary view of the future of nationhood
is, logically, that it has no future, only a past ­ often an
exciting one, and usually a historically useful one at some
stage. But lines drawn on paper, on the ground or in the
stratosphere are clearly insufficient to the future of mankind.

Again, it is technology that makes it feasible to contemplate a
day in which the politics of nationhood will be as dead as the
politics of power-wielding partisanship. First, there is enough
information and wealth available to ensure the feeding of all
people, without the slaughtering of some to get at the
possessions of others. Second, there is no longer any way to
protect anything or anybody behind a national boundary anyway.

Not even the Soviet Union, with what conservatives continue to
fear as an "absolute" control over its people, has been able to
stop, by drawing lines or executing thousands, the infusion of
subversive ideas, manners, music, poems, dances, products,
desires. If the world's pre-eminent police state (either us or
them, depending on your political point of view) has been unable
to protect itself fully behind its boundaries, what faith can or
should we, the people, retain in boundaries?

It is to be expected that both liberals and conservatives respond
to the notion of the end of nationhood with very similar shouts
of outrage or jerks of reaction. The conservative says it shall
not be. There will always be a US customs inspector and long may
he wave. The liberal says that far from ending nationhood, he
wants to expand it, make it world-wide, to create a proliferation
of mini- and micronations in the name of ethnic and cultural
preservation, and then to erect a great super-bureaucracy to
supervise all the petty bureaucracies.
[[]]

Like Linus, neither liberal nor conservative can bear the thought
of giving up the blanket ­ of giving up government and going
it alone as residents of a planet, rather than of a country.
Advocates of isolationism (although some, admittedly, defend it
only as a tactic) seem to fall into a paradox here. Isolationism
not only depends upon nationhood, it rigidifies it. There is a
subcategory of isolationism, however, that might avoid this by
specifying that it favors only military isolationism, or the use
of force only for self-defense. Even this, however, requires
political definitions of national self-defense in these days of
missiles, bases, bombers, and subversion.

As long as there are governments powerful enough to maintain
national boundaries and national political postures, then there
will be the absolute risk, if not the certainty, of war between
them. Even the possibility of war seems far too cataclysmic to
contemplate in a world so ripe with technology and prosperous
potential, ripe even with the seeds of extraterrestrial
exploration. Violence and the institutions that alone can support
it should be rendered obsolete.

Governments wage war. The power of life that they may claim in
running hospitals or feeding the poor is just the mirror image of
the power of death that they also claim ­ in filling those
hospitals with wounded and in devastating lands on which food
could be grown. "But man is aggressive," Right and Left chant
from the depths of their pessimism. And, to be sure, he is. But
if he were left alone, if he were not regulated into states or
services, wouldn't that aggression be directed toward conquering
his environment, and not other men?

At another warlike level, it is the choice of aggression, against
politically perpetuated environment more than against men, that
marks the racial strife in America today. Conservatives, in one
of their favorite lapses of logic ­ states' rights ­
nourished modern American racism by supporting laws, particularly
in Southern states, that gave the state the power to force
businessmen to build segregated facilities. (Many businessmen, to
be sure, wanted to be "forced," thus giving their racism the seal
of state approval.)

The states' rights lapse is simply that conservatives who would
deny to the Federal government certain controls over people,
eagerly cede exactly the same controls to smaller administrative
units. They say that the smaller units are more effective. This
means that conservatives support the coercion of individuals at
the most effective level. It certainly doesn't mean that they
oppose coercion. In failing to resist state segregation and
miscegenation laws, in failing to resist laws maintaining
racially inequitable spending of tax money, simply because these
laws were passed by states, conservatives have failed to fight
the very bureaucracy that they supposedly hate ­ at the very
level where they might have stopped it first.

Racism has been supported in this country not despite of, but
thanks to, governmental power and politics. Reverse racism ­
thinking that government is competent to force people to
integrate, just as it once forced them to segregate ­ is just
as political and just as disastrous. It has not worked. Its
product has been hatred rather than brotherhood. Brotherhood
could never be a political product. It is purely personal. In
racial matters, as in all other matters concerning individuals,
the lack of government would be nothing but beneficial. What,
actually, can government do for black people in America that
black people could not do better for themselves, if they were
permitted the freedom to do so? I can think of nothing.

Jobs? Politically and governmentally franchised unions do more to
keep black men from good jobs than do all the Bull Connors of the
South. Homes, schools, and protection? I recall very vividly a
comment on this subject by Roy Innis, the national director of
the Congress of Racial Equality. He spoke of Mayor John Lindsay's
typically liberal zeal in giving money to black people,
smothering them with it ­ or silencing them. Innis then said
that the one thing Mayor Lindsay would not give the blacks was
what they really wanted: political power. He meant that the black
community in Harlem, for instance, rather than being gifted with
tax money by the bushel, would prefer to be gifted with Harlem
itself. It is a community. Why shouldn't it govern itself, or at
least live by itself, without having to be a barony of New York
City Ward politics? However, I take exception to the notion of
merely building in Harlem a political structure similar to but
only separate from New York City's. And I may be doing Mr. Innis,
who is an exceptional man, an injustice by even suggesting that
that is what he had in mind.

But beyond this one instance, there is implicit in the very
exciting undercurrents of black power in this country an equally
exciting possibility that it will develop into a rebellion
against politics itself. It might insist upon a far less
structured community, containing far more voluntary institutions
within it. There is no question in my mind that, in the long run,
this movement and similar ones will discover that laissez-faire
is the way to create genuine communities of voluntarism.
Laissez-faire is the only form of social/economic organization
that could tolerate and even bless a kibbutz operating in the
middle of Harlem, a hippie selling hashish down the street, and,
a few blocks farther on, a firm of engineers out to do in Detroit
with a low-cost nuclear vehicle.

The kibbutz would represent, in effect, a voluntary socialism
­ what other form could free men tolerate? The hash seller
would represent institutionalized ­ but voluntary ­
daydreaming, and the engineers would represent unregulated
creativity. All would represent laissez-faire capitalism in
action and none would need a single bureaucrat to help, hinder,
civilize, or stimulate. And, in the process simply of variegated
existence, the residents of this voluntary community, as long as
others voluntarily entered into commerce with them, would solve
the "urban" problem in the only way it ever can be solved; i.e.,
via the vanishment of politics that created the problem in the
first place.

If cities cannot exist on the basis of the skills, energy, and
creativity of the people who live, work, or invest in them, then
they should not be sustained by people who do not live in them.
In short, every community should be one of voluntarism, to the
extent that it lives for and through its own people and does not
force others to pay its bills. Communities should not be exempted
from the civil liberty prescribed for people ­ the exclusive
enjoyment of all their own powers for their own welfare. This
means that no one should serve you involuntarily and that you
should not involuntarily serve anyone else. This means, for
communities, existing without involuntary aid from other
communities or to other communities.

Student dissenters today seem to feel that somehow they have
crashed through to new truths and new politics in their demands
that universities and communities be made responsive to their
students or inhabitants. But most of them are only playing with
old politics. When the dissenters recognize this, and when their
assault becomes one against political power and authority rather
than a fight to gain such power, then this movement may release
the bright potential latent in the intelligence of so many of its
participants. Incidentally, to the extent that student activists
the world over are actually fighting the existence of political
power, rather than trying to grab some of it for themselves, they
should not be criticized for failing to offer alternative
programs; i.e., for not spelling out just what sort of political
system will follow their revolution. What ought to follow their
revolution is just what they've implicitly proposed: no political
system at all.

The style of SDS so far seems most promising in this respect. It
is itself loosely knit and internally anti-authoritarian as well
as externally revolutionary. Liberty also looks for students who,
rather than caterwauling the establishment, will abandon it,
establish their own schools, make them effective, and wage a
concerned and concerted revolt against the political regulations
and power that, today, give a franchise to schools ­ public
and private ­ that badly need competition from new schools
with new ideas.

Looking back, this same sort of thinking was true during the
period of the sit-ins in the South. Since the enemy also was
state laws requiring separate facilities, why wasn't it also a
proper tactic to defy such laws by building a desegregated eating
place and holding it against hell and high water? This is a cause
to which any libertarian could respond.

Similarly with the school situation. Find someone who will rebel
against public-education laws and you will have a worthy rebel
indeed. Find someone who just rants in favor of getting more
liberals, or more conservatives, onto the school board, and you
will have found a politically oriented, passé man ­ a
plastic rebel. Or, in the blackest neighborhood, find the plumber
who will thumb his nose at city hall's restrictive licenses and
certificates and you will have found a freedom fighter of far
greater consequence than the window breaker.

Power and authority, as substitutes for performance and rational
thought, are the specters that haunt the world today. They are
the ghosts of awed and superstitious yesterdays. And politics is
their familiar. Politics, throughout time, has been an
institutionalized denial of man's ability to survive through the
exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
And politics, throughout time, has existed solely through the
resources that it has been able to plunder from the creative and
productive people whom it has, in the name of many causes and
moralities, denied the exclusive employment of all their own
powers for their own welfare.

Ultimately, this must mean that politics denies the rational
nature of man. Ultimately, it means that politics is just another
form of residual magic in our culture ­ a belief that somehow
things come from nothing; that things may be given to some
without first taking them from others; that all the tools of
man's survival are his by accident or divine right and not by
pure and simple inventiveness and work.

Politics has always been the institutionalized and established
way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the
output of other men. But even in a world made docile to these
demands, men do not need to live by devouring other men.

Politics does devour men. A laissez-faire world would liberate
men. And it is in that sort of liberation that the most profound
revolution of all may be just beginning to stir. It will not
happen overnight, just as the lamps of rationalism were not
quickly lighted and have not yet burned brightly. But it will
happen ­ because it must happen. Man can survive in an
inclement universe only through the use of his mind. His thumbs,
his nails, his muscles, and his mysticism will not be enough to
keep him alive without it.

[VIEW THIS ARTICLE ONLINE] <http://mises.org/story/3768>

_____________________________

Karl Hess (1923–1994) was an American national-level
speechwriter and author. His career included stints on the
Republican Right and the New Left before he became a libertarian
anarchist. The documentary film Karl Hess: Toward Liberty
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-574553336386396499#>
won the Academy Award for best short documentary in 1981. See
Karl Hess's article archives
<http://mises.org/articles.aspx?AuthorId=1350>

Originally published in Playboy, March 1969, this article was
made available for the web by David Schatz and
François-René Rideau <http://fare.tunes.org/> .




AppendixHere are the reactions triggered by the above article by
Karl Hess and published in the June 1969 issue of Playboy.


* Highest praise to Karl Hess for coming back from the Left to
write "The Death of Politics" (Playboy, March) ­ a fresh
breeze of reason for the smoke-filled rooms. Highest praise as
well to Playboy for braving the fury of the power holders and
power seekers by publishing it. Morgan Eiland Los Angeles,
California * "The Death of Politics" was the best article I
have ever read in Playboy and I hope to see more like it. The
libertarian views of Karl Hess are totally consistent with the
Playboy philosophy of mutual consent between individuals. Bill
Sheppard University of Arizona Tuscon, Arizona * I found Karl
Hess's article interesting, but I also found myself disagreeing
with most of what he said. His reassertion of the traditional and
outmoded American ideals of individualism and laissez-faire
capitalism, which he maintains is the only truly revolutionary
stand that one can take, seems simply reactionary. Maybe this is
just another indication of how fine a line separates revolution
from reaction, but it also reveals a fundamental flaw in Hess's
thinking. All sincere reform movements in American history have
succeeded only to the extent that they have attempted to break
free of the old ideals ­ such as laissez-faire and
individualism ­ to substitute more contemporary doctrines,
such as collective responsibility and government regulation. The
modern industrial economy has become so interdependent that the
old laws of classical economics ­ free competition, for
instance ­ no longer work. I think Hess could spend his time
more profitably if he worked to improve politics, instead of
merely pointing out contradictions on today's Right and Left.
Douglas F. Watt Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts *
You've really done it. In "The Death of Politics" by Karl Hess,
the one idea that really works has been put into the most potent
magazine article ever published. For a number of years, I have
respected similar ideas of Ludwig von Mises, Tom Paine, and
others, but never before have the ideas of archaic modern
governments been so thoroughly put down in one concise article.
Even the interesting contemporary personalities ­ the
Kennedys, Goldwaters, and McCarthys ­ are saddled with their
own political lameness. They are hung up, man, on politics. And
as Hess says, just like Linus, they don't want to give up their
blanket. The blanket of politics has, throughout our modern
history, been destroying society, despite the positiveness,
creativity, and productiveness of most human beings. Peter
Fleming Los Angeles, California

* Thanks for the article by Karl Hess. It put into print what
many of us have been thinking about for years. A few Californians
recently attempted to make the principles of libertarianism a
reality by forming a completely new political party called the
Peace and Freedom Party. Sad to say, radicals from the New Left
soon took control and mismanaged the party into oblivion. Our
republic seems to be heading toward disaster. One alternative
might be the formation of a new national political party based on
the concepts of libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism. This
new movement could obsolete one of the two existing political
parties; take your pick, as they are the same. Ed Wills La Mesa,
California * As a product of the University of California at
Berkeley and the Harvard Law School, I have been exposed to what
Karl Hess would call the politics of both the radical and the
reactionary. Like Hess, I have developed a philosophy that draws
from the thinking of Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand, Norman Maile,r
and Lenny Bruce. Unfortunately, my educational background, which
many would find enviable, has left me isolated and frustrated,
confused and abused. Faced with the political left and right
polarization so socially acceptable in today's America, I have
found myself incapable of bringing together a philosophy that has
heretofore been strewn in bits and pieces within my mind. I
cannot truly say that either Berkeley or Harvard has prepared me
to communicate the ideas I have developed. Fortunately, Hess has
now done so for me. So, to all my friends on both the Right and
the Left: read Hess. Then come and let us reason together. Marc
P. Fairman Harvard Law School Cambridge, Massachusetts * Hess
may not have all the answers, but at least he has declared his
independence of the hypocritical clichés, of the Left and
Right, that have long made me become physically ill every time I
read the latest rehash by a William Buckley or a Tom Hayden. The
world would benefit if Hess and others of similar thinking were
to become the basis or a new political movement. John J. Pierce
The Daily Advocate Dover, New Jersey * After reading a steady
stream of collectivist writing in Playboy, I found "The Death of
Politics" by Karl Hess a refreshing change. I agree with many
points in Hess's persuasive arguments, but I disagree with his
rejection of political action. Believing as I do in a government
of explicitly limited powers, I also believe in government, and I
recognize that it has the unique role of providing the orderly
environment within which free men may live. It follows that I
disagree with the author when he calls for the dismantling of the
nation state. Hess, in an otherwise admirable enthusiasm for
liberty, looks for allies where he will find none. He finds hope
for libertarians in Students for a Democratic Society, yet it is
obvious that the organization is authoritarian. SDS does not
accept laissez-faire capitalism, but posits variations of
socialism. In addition to this key difference between SDS and
Hess, the organization, as demonstrated repeatedly and
conclusively on the nation's campuses, is intent on coercing
individuals and institutions with whom it disagrees. In his
disenchantment with the establishment, a feeling shared by
libertarian and not-so-libertarian conservatives, Hess looks for
revolutionaries and, having found them in SDS, he is happy. But
SDS is not really revolutionary at all. It proposes, explicitly
or in effect, greater government action; an advancement of
contemporary liberalism, the statism that Hess found so
objectionable. * As editor of The New Guard, the magazine of
Young Americans For Freedom, I am in constant contact with the
conservatives whom Hess finds so hypocritical and authoritarian.
Bill Buckley, singled out in the article, began his assault on
the establishment 20 years ago. The phony businessman
conservative and the WASPish anti-Semitic conservative exist; but
from Hess's article, one would conclude that they dominate. Their
influence within the conservative movement is minuscule. A poll
of YAF's membership, for example, showed almost no support for
George Wallace. YAF may not have a revolutionary image, because
we do not engage in destroying private property (as SDS does) nor
in otherwise engaging in violent or coercive activities. But to a
pronounced antiestablishmentarian like Karl Hess, I suggest that
YAF is, indeed, the revolutionary wave of the future. It is YAF,
not SDS, that for years has favored a volunteer military. It is
YAF's "Sharon Statement," not SDS' "Port Huron Statement," that
embraces laissez-faire capitalism. Arnold Steinberg, Editor The
New Guard Washington, D.C. * Karl Hess tells us that
"ultimately … politics denies the rational nature of man."
Nonsense. When rational men revered and engaged in politics,
societies flourished: in Greece for a time and in the formative
period of our own country. The problems we face today will not be
resolved by the abolition of politics. They can be solved only by
recognizing the importance of politics in this era of ultimate
weaponry. Hess is right when he says "man can survive in an
inclement universe only through the use of his mind." He is wrong
in not recognizing that survival depends upon the best minds'
addressing themselves to the improvement rather than the
destruction of politics. Harold Willens, President Factory
Equipment Supply Corporation Los Angeles, California Willens is
co-chairman of the Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace, a
group credited with influencing Lyndon Johnson's decision to
de-escalate the war and not to seek re-election. * Hess is
suspect in his assumptions about human aggression. Perhaps he
would do well to recall the words of the French anarchist
Proudhon: "Liberty ­ the mother, not the daughter of order."
If Hess really wants a free world, he must stop pussyfooting
around with "governments for defense only." After all, to carry
his reasoning a step further, a government strong enough to
defend everything you've got is big enough to destroy all you've
got, too. It's time to put our faith entirely in the hands of
man. Lowell Ponte * Los Angeles, California Ponte is a
Libertarian-anarchist radio commentator in Los Angeles.