kochtopus - 1983 libertarian moniker

8/9/2019 Kochtopus - 1983 Libertarian Moniker

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THE A Bi-Monthly NewsletterMurray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER VOL. XVIII, NO.8-12 SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER, 1984Box 341. Madison Square Strtion,.New York, New York 40010 USISSN0047-4517The State of the Movement:The ImplosionThe end of a Presidential election year is a good time totake stock, to ask ourselves how o ur movement is going, andtherefore how it may be shaping up for the future. All right: sohow goes o ur m ovement? Th e quick answer is, not very well.For the last four years, the movement has been sufferingthrough a severe contraction, reaching du ring 1983 and 1984the status o f what wordsm ith Sa m Konkin has called an"implosion." Th e recent imp losion, however, is no reason fordespair. No ideological revolution proceeds on a continuousstraight line from birth to triumphant victory. Every suchrevolution proceeds in a zig-zag manner. The modernlibertarian m ovement took off into explosive growth in 1969-

70,an d accelerated that g rowth during the 1970's. During the1980's we have been in a zag period. The zag period can onlybring despair to those who unrealistically expected QuickVictory, or w ho were lured by honeyed promises of suchVictory to plunge into activity with short-run fervor, only toburn out in disillusion when the triumph never came. Wemust understand that liberty is a lifetime commitment, andnot a quick ticket to fortun e and glory. To the extent that th esummer soldiers and the sunshine libertarians have left thefold, th e movem ent is better off for this recession, better off toremain with "cadre" (i.e. know ledgeab le activists) who a reinured to temporary reverses and who can rise above theslings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

1. W h y the Implosion?Before surveying the terrain in detail, let us sum ma rize thereasons for this movem ent recession. They can be summ ed up

as three-fold: the change in the Zeitgeist , the Reaganphenomenon, and the vagaries of the Kochtopus. The firstand second causes are, of course, interrelate d. The 70's were adecade of endemic discontent with the system and with theU.S.governm ent. Being a time of disco ntent, it was a decadeof searching , of passionate interest in ideology and inexploring alternatives to the status quo. Hence the enormousexplosion of interest in libertarianism, and therefore ofgrowth in the movement and in the fledgling LibertarianParty. The 1980's. however, has marked a return to thesmugness, the contentment w ith "America," that hadcharacterized the 1950's and the Eisenhower Era. On the

campus, there is virtually zero political activity, and equallyzero interest in ideology of any sort. As in the 1950's,careerism is back with a vengeance. .An anecdote will illustrate the ideological and politicalapathy these days on the campus, as well as everywhere else.I've been spending this year teaching in Sin City, Las Vegas.When asked by a national LP leader what activity there wason o ur cam pus during the 1984 campaign, I replied tha t therewas good news and bad news. The bad news is that there wasno LP or Bergland activity whatsoever. The goo d news is tliatthere was no activity for the D emo crats or Republicans either.The Reagan re-election campaign exemplifies this newsmug ness and lack of interest in ide ology. As we have detailedin the Lib. Forum, the entire campaign, and particularly theReagan effort, was the most od ious Presidential cam paign inAmerican history. There was not even a feeble attempt todiscuss ideology or issues. The all too successful nub of theReagan campaign was, like Carl Lewis at the equallyrepugnant and flag-waving Olympics, to wrap himself in theAmerican flag, to make himself "America's candidate"running on the ticket of "America's party," nominated in thehom e of "America's (football) team." The Republicanssuccessfully carried o ut th e strategy detailed in the June, 1984memorandum of Richard Darman, a leading White Houseaide: "Paint RR," he wrote, "as the personification of all thatis right with, or heroized by,America. Leave Mondale in aposition where an attack on R eagan is tanta mo unt t o anattack on America's idealized image of itself - here a vote

against Reagan is, in some subliminal sense, a vote against amythic ' AMERICA .' " Italics Darm an's. Newsweek, ElectionExtra, N ov.-Dec. 1984, p.88).The 1970's was an era of explosive growth in the libertarianmovement and Party because everything came together in1973-75 to spread a healthy disgust amon g the A mericanpeople for the U . S . government. First, during those yearscame the big inflationary recession, the first sign that inflationwas now permanent in Amerimn life, even in the midst of adeep recession. As a result came the breakup of the Keynesianconsensus, and the search for alternatives.among economists,as well as the general public. Something had gone radicallywrong after four decades of arrogant fine-tuning by statisteconomists. Second, the United States, during this same


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Tbe Libertarinn Foruu September-December, 1984

period, suffe red its first losing war, a retribution fo r its unjustimperial intervention and mass murder in Vietnam. TheAmerican public was as fed u p with fo reign intervention a's itwas with inflation. The third mighty blow to the AmericanState came, once again, during the same crucial 1973-75period: the glorious bringing down of the mighty institutionof the Presidency over the crookeries and tyranny ofWatergate.Those three events - nflationary recession, Vietnam, andWadrgate. - happening coincidentally at the same time,e x e r t e d a s y n e r g i s t i c e f f e c t in s p r e a d i n g m a s s i v edisillusionment in the American State. Surely it can be noaccident that this was precisely the beginning of enormousgrowth in the modern libertarian movement. Americans gotincreasingly repelled at high taxes, saw that marijuana lawswere counter-productive, and became far more concernedwith civil liberties afte r seeing the peccadilloes com mitted byth e FBI and CIA during W atergate. A healthy distrust ofpoliticians spread throughout the land. Increasing interest inlibertarianism came as the public grew intrigued with amovement dedicated to getting Big Government "off our

backs."Things began to sour during the last two years of the Carte rAdministration, even while, on the surface, libertariansentiment escalated among the American public, and theMovement grew apace. The powerful, war-mongering forcesof neo-conservatism began to dominate foreign policyopinion in the Democrat Party, symbolized by the dovishCyrus Vance losing out in the Carter Administration powerstruggle to the hawk Brzezinski. The desperate Russianattemp t t o keep Afghanistan in its sphere of influence provedto be the spark that reignited anti-Soviet and pro-foreignintervention hysteria in the Democrat Party and in thecountry as a whole, leading to Carter's ill-advised grainembargo and his scuttling of the 1980 Olympics. Then, theIranian hostage case inspired an apparently permanentresurgence of jingoist hysteria, paving the way for Carter'scollapse and the Reagan victory. Finally, Carter's restorationof draft registration awakened little fur or, and thereby helpedto stimulate a rollback of civil liberties during the ReaganAdministration.Finally, it was in the late 1970's that the Moral Majoritygrew into a mighty force, and formed a powerful element inthe Reagan majority. Theocracy was now a vital part of theconservative movement as it had not been during the entirepost-World War 11 period.

The stage was set for the R eagan victory, which was able t oco-opt much of the anti-Big Government, pro-free marketsentiment, and cement it for the Republican Party. Reagan'smasterful manipulation of rhetoric was enough for whatLawrence Dennis perceptively called the "dumbright;" tokeep the fervent support of the dumbright masses, it was notactually necessary to impiement that rhetoric in action. Pureverbiage was enough.The advent of the Reagan Administration intensifiedenormously the malign underbelly of the later Carter years.Th e famous Reagan personality, tha t has inspired anoutpouring of unconditional love and affection from everyonein America except the tiny staff of the Libertarian Forum, didthe rest. In trying to explain t le unanimous enthusiasm forthe Great Cretin, Chicago columnist M ike Royko speculatedthat Reagan delivers the "snappiest salute to the M arines that

he had ever seen," even including an authentic general, IkeEisenhower. The consequence is that Reagan has managedto bring with him an Endless Summer orgy ~ f f l a g - ~ a v i n gndjingoism, has given even greater life to the theocrats of theMoral Majority, and has managed to convince the quasi-libertarians among the masses that he has actually rolled backBig Government, all failures being successfully loaded ontothe hapless Democrat Party.AS we Wrote in o ur early analysis, ''Move men t Depression"(Lib. Fom m, April 1983), Republican A dmin istrations alwaysbring a financial setback to the Movement, since manymovement-inclined businessmen immediately conclude:"Why educa te? We've already won." This phenomen on,wh ich se t back the movemen t i n t he E i senhowerAdministration and in the early Nixon years, has beenparticularly virulent under Reag an, since Reagan's right-wingrhetoric has intensified the misconception that Victory hasalready arrived. We also wrote that the Reagan recession of1981-83 set back financial suppo rt fo r the movement.Unfortunately, the 1983-84 boom does not seem to haveworked the other way, to revive financial sources for liberty.

Partly this is because many of the libertarian businesssupporters hailed from the old smokestack industries of theMiddle West which have never recovered and are in seculardecline.But there is more to the debacle. For there has been a deepideological shift among many of our business and wealthyindividual and foundation patrons. Many of ,the quasi-individualist Old Right supporters have died off, and havebeen replaced by trendy young neo-conservatives, and hencethe flow of funds has changed accordingly. In contrast tolibertarians, neo-cons are nothing if not Respectable:R e s p e ct a b ly a n t i - C o m m u n i s t a n d w a r - m o n ge r i ng ,respectably in favor o f the w elfare state (if more efficient anda bit tighter), respectably in favor of theocratic and anti-"subversive" censorship, and oh so respectably in favor of theBeloved Little "Democracy" in the Middle East. Th e neo-cons are respectable because at every step of the way in thecareers of this handful of ideologues beginning in the early1940's, they have been in the mainstream of respectableopinion: Trotskyites at the beginning, then pro-war SocialDemocrats, then liberals, then Humphrey Democrats, thencentrists, then Reaganite conservatives. In the entire lives ofthese shrewd and oppor tunistic careerists, not on ce have theygone one millimeter beyond respectable opinion , while at eachstep of the way loudly wrapping themselves in the mantle ofbeing in a heroic "minority." Few in number but ensconced inkey positions in academia and in the media, cunning andeffective organizers who honed their skills in the Marxist sectsof old, the neo-conservatives have been able to bulldoze.dumbright wealthy businessmen into turning their funds andtheir very values over to neo-con control. It is not only theCrane Machine but virtually the entire movement ofconservative and quasi-libertarian supporters who havesacrificed principle for respectability and alleged ragm mat ism.It should always be remembered that neo-conservatives are inno sense libertarians; indeed they are our polar opposite.What they are, as they themselves often proclaim, areHumphrey Democrats, i.e., they are once and present andfuture liberals. Or , as we say in New York , they are "liberalswho have just been mugged." Th at is, they are liberalsreacting in permanent hysteria against all the mixed valuesand movements of the New Left: i.e., civil rights (affirmativePage 2


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The Libertarian Forum September-December, 198action); anti-war and anti-draft sentiment; hostility to thepublic school system; and "liberation" for every allegedly"oppressed" gro up under the su n. For neo-cons, theseobsolete battles of the late 60's are overlaid on top of theirprevious permanent trauma: the anti-vs. pro-Communistbattles at the origin of the Cold War in the late 1940's. It isonly these gangs o f New York liberals for example who canstill wax passionate over such long-dead and unimportantquestions as the Rosenberg Case.2. The Anatomy of the Implosion

We have talked abo ut the causes of th e implosion; it is timet o detail the grisly anato my of th e implosion itself. Fo r it isprecisely one of the hallmarks of this massive implosion thatthere are no longer any institutions or organs of opinion toconvey news and analysis of what is going on to movementmembers. For much o f the implosion occurred in ournewsletters and magazines, indispensable institutions ofcementing the libertarian movem ent, and conveying news andinformation as well as analyses to m ovement members. Ho wd o you keep the movement from fragmenting if there are nomeans of regular com munication? No te the following deathsof magazines and newsletters in the last two years. (Some ofthese defunct periodicals were hardly am ong my favorites, butall together their loss is a deva stating blow to the mo vement.)

InquiryJronrlinesFree TexasCaliberCompetit ion. along with its organization, the effectiveand principled Council for a Competitive Economy (formore, see below).Libertarian Vanguard (if not dead, moribund, along withits organization, the Radical Caucus of the LP),The Voluntaryist (if not dead, moribund).Various Konkin magazinesLibertarian ReviewUpdateLit era tur e o f I.ibert.11

Libertarian institutions have either collapsed, greatlyc o n t r a c t e d , o r a b a n d o n e d p r i n c i p l e i n a g e n e r a l l yunsuccessfuI attempt to corral more support and morefunding (known in the trade as focussing on "outreach" -and to hell with inreach, i.e. movement activity). Thus, ourpremier organ of opinion, Reason, not only remains as oursole outreach magazine now that Inquiry is dead. I t has alsobecome much softer core and much less movement-oriented,even aside from the killing of the movement newsletter,frontlines. It has gotten s o soft-core, a nd so ou treachy (to saynothing of even more boring), that it is now scarcelydiscernible as being libertarian at all.The various think-tanks in our movement are limpingbadly, most of their "activities" (wh en they ar e not beingsellouty) confined to fund-raising of one form or another.(And what must we call an organization in which fund-raisinghas become an en d rather than a means?) One leadingexception to this ghastly trend is David Theroux's PacificInstitute, which has managed to publish a number ofreasonably hard-core, well-edited and widely distributedbooks. But, on the other hand, the Institute for HumaneStudies has had to shut down its once substantial book-sponsoring and publishing program, and has sold off its

inventory o f boo ks. And it has had to kill its scholadjournal, Literature o f Lihertv.One example of the implosion that I am particularlfamiliar with is _the alm ost total c ollapse of th e libertarianmovement in New York City. The Libertarian Party (a topic will deal with in a future issue) has long been very weak inNew York City, and now some of its leaders, after a lengthy

string of declines in votes a nd members, are actually talking onot runn ing a m ayoralty candida te at all in 1985 (Particularlyiron ic since the first ma jor race in th e nation was an excellenrun by Fran Youngstein for Mayor of New York City in1973!) But more dramatic has been the collapse of the rest othe New York movement. The Laissez-Faire Bookstorewhich fo r a decade has been the social center of the New Yo rkmovement, is expanding to larger quarters, but it will nolonger be a store-front bookstore. Dyanne Petersen'sLiber ta r ian Supper Club, once meet ing monthly inManhattan, now hardly meets at all. And the Center forLibertarian Studies has moved o ut of New York t o the morecordial and supportive clime of the San Francisco Bay Area(New address for the CLS: P.O. Box 4091, Burlingame, CA940 11.)3. Big Changes in the Kochtopus

We h ave m entioned as the three basic reasons for the bigzag in the movement in the last few years: the Zeitgeist, theReagan phenomenon, and the vagaries of the Kochtopus. Inour "M ovem ent Depression" art icle we have alreadydescribed w hat might be called th e "Kochcycle," the"Austrian business cycle" that the K och family engendered inour movement by pouring in millions within a few years(largely 1977-80), followed by a severe contraction of fundingin the years ever since. Partly as a result of that contractionand of the general implosion in the movement, there havebeen no news organs to inform the movement about theenormous and highly significant changes that have takenplace within the Kochtopus in the last year or two.Until this mo men t, news of these vast .changes in thKochtopus has been largely confined to excited phonconversations among friends. It is high time that thmovement as a whole found out what was going on. Oncagain, the Libertarian Forum, mindful of its responsibilities tliberty, to History, and to the "Movement's Right to Know,"s teps forward to supply thi s vi ta l gap in movemenknowledge.But first: proba bly on ly ou r oldest and mo st faithful readerhave any idea of what the "Kochto pus" is (nam ed, oncagain, by Sam Konkin, who has contributed such deathleswords as "minarchist" and "Partyarchy" to the libertariavocabulary). The Kochtopus used to include the CranMac hine (CM ) as the clique of "professionals" tha t oncruled the Libertarian Party and was vanquished at the mightyand titanic PresCon at New York City in September 198(For the full story of the PresCon, told in loving andexub erant d etail, see "Total Victory: H ow Sweet It Is!" in ouSeptember-October 1983 issue.) Since that PresCon the CMhas left the Libertarian Party. But the e M , while the mosvisible and dangerous tentacle of the Kochtopus. by no meanconstitutes its entire body, and the time has come to focus othe "organism" and the enormous changes that have beerecently wrought within it.

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The Libertarian Forum September-December, 1984

4. Origins of the Kochtopus: the Founding of CatoThe Ko chtop us began when Charles G. Koch, young multi-millionaire scion of the Wichita-based Koch oil empire, wasconverted from a passive LeFevrian view of libertarianstrategy (he had been converted as a youth to libertarianism

by LeFevre) to an activist stance. This latter transformationwas largely effected by Ed C rane, o n the strength of C rane'srunning of the MacBride presidential campaign in f976. Imyself had been urging Charles (C.K.) to adopt a moreactivist strategy, so that perhaps I might gain some of theresponsibility for this second conversion.Before then, C.K.'s ideological activities had been minimalan d very low-key, and were run by his Wichita-based as sistantand servitor, one George Pearson. After the death of F.A.("Baldy") Harp er in 1973, Ko ch became President ofHarper's scholarly In stitute for Hum ane Studies, an d he alsokcame involved, with Pearson as his satrap, in sponsoringvarious programs and conferences promoting Austrian, orMisesian, economics.The Kochian burst into ideological, and even political,activism at the end of 1976 launched the "Kochtopus." Th efocus of this new activism was the San F rancisco-based C at oInstitute, headed by Crane , which also became the nucleus forCrane's continuing domin ation of the Libertarian Party.(Crane had been, and for a while continued to be, nationalchairman of the LP, and managed t o keep dominat ing the LPuntil the titanic struggle at the na tional convention at D enverin 1981 .) Cato 7s nitial focus was twofold and intellectual: thecreation of the glossy, intelligent semi-monthly Inquirymagazine, which would win an audience of intellectuals andacademics to an appreciation of libertarianism; and theforging of a university cadre of libertarian faculty andstudents. The obvious location for this kind of ideologicaljournal-and-think-tank was New York City; but Crane, inthose days dedicated to San Francisco, insisted on locatingthere. "Cato" was named, at my suggestion, after the Ro ma nopponent of Caesar who had inspired a corps of libertariansin Britain and A merica in the eighteenth century, and whoseideology in turn inspired much of the American revolution.Th e board of C ato had, a nd still has, a low-key inner cadre ofstockholders possessing the ultimate legal power to fire andreconstitute the governing board of directors. The originalstockholders were the three founders of Cato and carriers ofthe Cato vision: C.K., George Pearson, and myself.What was this guiding vision of the new C ato Institute, an dof other institutions tha t were rapidly cr eated, durin g 1977, t oform th e massive new Kochtopus? Th e idea was that C.K.would (as he indeed did) pou r in millions into creatinginstitutions that would find and gather the best and thebrightest of the libertarian movement, mobilized by thesupposed organizing ability of Eddie Crane. T he object was top r o m o t e a c o n s i s t e n t i d e o l o g y o f h a r d - c o r e a n duncompromising radical libertarianism, of which Misesianismwas the economic arm. For a movement that had longlanguished in abject poverty, this was a dazzling visionindeed, and the first year or so was a glorious time for those o fus caught up in the excitement of it all. Inquiry was founded- a great magazine considering its relatively meagerresources and shoddy publishing management, and someexcellent editors passed through its ranks: notably Bill Evers,scholar, journalist, and early top Crane Machiner, who put

his own personal stamp on Inquiry as editor-in-chief thatlasted rem arkably for years after his ouster; Professor RalphRaico, who lasted from beginning to end an d managed to givet o Inquiry the finest-back-of-the-book section in the country;and Professor Ronald Hamowy, thrown willy-nilly into thetask of being Evers's successor, who did a splendid job undertrying circumstances.To "Cato proper," to the academic cadre section, cameDavid Theroux, fresh out of University of Chicago's M BAprogram; his assistant Robert Formaini, out of University ofVirginia graduat e economics; and Leonard P. Liggio as edito rof Cato's new scholarly journal, Literature of Liberty.This was the group housed a t the posh qu arters of Cato onMontgomery Street in San Francisco. Just down the block,another very different, and culturally lumpen-proletarian,grou p began to form in an old warehouse run by Crane butno t officially connected with Cat o. In this "warehouse" wasplaced our raffish brethren. The movement magazine,Libertarian Review, had been pu rchased fro m its founder BobKephart by C.K., with Roy A . ("Roychick") Childs as editor

inherited from the Kep hart e ra. It soon became clear to Craneand the others th at, despite his potential talents, Roychickaseditor and meeter-of-deadlines was in dire need of supervision(In current educationist jargon, Childs might be called theprototype of a PINS, a person-in-need-of-supervision.) Andso Childs and L . R . were brought from New York to thewarehouse down the block on Montgomery Street. Housedwith him in this barracks-like office was the newly createdStudents for a Libertarian Society (SLS), a then radicallibertarian group pungently termed by a perceptive critic a"general staff in search of an army." Yo ung Milton Mueller,an unem ployed film editor ou t of Chicago, was plucked fromthe Windy Ci ty, made head of thi s mighty a rmy of"students," and blessed, at least in the heady first year, withan enormous budget of $1 million. The LP of San Franciscoalso found rental quarters in the warehouse, and this entirebloated and overpaid crew, festering together in a bizarrestew, pushed each other into increasingly weird cultural andideological positions. Jeff Riggenbach was also brought upfrom Los Angeles to take charge of Cato's mighty radiopropaganda effort, now still plodding its way through theunheeding airwaves.In the heady excitement of the first months, it was all tooeasy for us to overlook the pitfalls that this vision of the Bestand the Brightest would inevitably stumble into. Overall,there were two major flaws which would all too soon take overand bring the entire vision down: (1) A monopoly of anymovement lacks the essential feedback and checks-and-balances that com petition always brings; for what happen s ifthe top leader or leaders make mistakes, fall prey totemptation to give up or alter their principles, or, in someway, sell out? The answer is th at th e entire movement can wellbe destroyed on the rock of such errors, and we mustremember that errors by any person or group are inevitable.(2 ) Almost comparably to government action, throwing lotsof money at a problem doesn't always solve it . C.K. threwenormous amounts of money too fast at people (many ofwhom turned out to be turkeys) who scarcely deserved it . Andwhat happens when the inevitable disillusionment sets in?

Add to these systemic problems the fa ct tha t this collectionof the Best, the Brightest, and the K ookiest w as a gathering o fwhat is known euphemistically as "strong personalities."Page 4


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Tbc Libertarian Forum September-December, 1984way it is. and bad cess to them . In th is whole grisly saga, thereal villain is not C. K.. but the legion of men and women w hoproved so willing to sell their minds a nd their souls for a bit ofgruel. I suppose that this is common is the history ofideological movements. but it surely happened much fasterand more thoroughly than usual in our fledgling littlemovement .

All right. so C. K. wanted co ntrol above all, and hence thepurges of the minority who would not go along with thetransformation. But why this particular shift? Here we comet o the second putative part of this pattern of motivation:Namely. Charles wants total control of the movement'sinstitutions, but he wants others to f und them. On its face, thisis a grave inner co ntradiction, for almost always with the flowo f money goes the flow of control. But that is what C harleshas sought for the last five or six years, and what he can notand will never obtain. After one or two years of lavishingfunds on these new organizations, C. K. appeared to panic,and to look a round desperately for ways to get others to fundhis own institutions. On the one hand , this aim might appearperfectly understandable, since he had already poured five orten millions into libertarian institutions, and was tired ofbeing the sole Donor. But then we must stop short and realizethe full implication: that ten million dollars to C. K. isroughly the equivalent of what the rest of us would spend forone month on gasoline. Once put that relative proportion inperspective. and C. K.'s panic at his lavish funding becomesfar less supportable.

I am hardly saying that mistakes were not made. Inparticular, too much was trundled too fast at incompetents,and C. K.'s top honcho, Crane, seemed to have no sense ofcost whatever. For example, it was absured for C. K. not torealize tha t all ideological magazines incur a deficit, and thattherefore that deficit (for Inquiry) should have been foreseenfrom the very beginning as permanent. On the other hand,Crane co mpounded the problem by failing to hire a businesso r circulation manager for the m agazine, for then the half-million a year Inquir~vdeficit could have been considerablylowered.

In fact, the first big crisis at Cato came only six monthsafter it was founded. C. K., appalled at Inquiry's deficit,mandated a sudden death slash of the magazine's budget inhalf. Crane, covering his rear, blamed Evers for going overbudget. Evers, however, had never been permitted so much asa peek at the budget. But Evers then proceed ed to comm it thetruly cardinal Kochtopusian sin: protesting C. K.'s actionsrather than loyally proclaiming his gratitude and going alongwith the program. That was the beginning of Evers's long-drawn-out expulsion from Eden.In the spring of 1979, C. K., in increasing shock at thefailure of others to join him in don atin g to the Ko chtopu s,effected the Great Paradigm Shift. From all indications, heapparently concluded that the main reason why no one elsewas contributing is because no one else - either bigbusinessman or mass of small businessmen - as a hard-coreradical. Koch was learning the lesson he of course shouldhave known from the very beginning: hard-core radicallibertarianism is not a very pop ular cr eed. It might be a noblecreed but i t is alro a lonely one. Hence the new, dawningconclusion: the waj. to get other people to contribute is to softenthe creed. The way to get funding is to become respectable,non-threatening: and the way to become respectable and non-

threatening is to Sell Out. To Sound Like Everybody Else.Hence. the opportunist sellout of the Crane-run ClarkCampaign. In short, you can be very, very rich and still SellOut principle: all you have to d o, regardless of you r wealth o rincome level, is to hold the obtain ing of outside donations o rpayments higher than your own cherished principles. Andthen you have made your Faustian Bargain.The precise etiology of how the Kochtopus made thisdecision is still unclear, but reports are that the guru, thetheoret ic ian who formulated and sold C. K. on thistransformation was none other than Roychick Childs. Childshad always been hard-core, but also he had always lived onthe margins of existence. Now, Roychick on MontgomeryStreet felt a strong, heady whiff of Power. He had the ear ofKing K och, an d, he felt, by formulatin g th e honeyed vision ofOther People's Funding, he could ride the Kochtopus to theheights of absolute Power. Visions of sugarplums, ofhegemony, of riding the Kochtopusian train t o total powerbegan to dance in the Childsian noodle. He began to talkabout running for Senate in California on the L. P. ticket,indeed of actually becorning Senator. And after that, who

knows? Hell, with K ochian billions, and with Cr ane a s theorganizer, all things were possible, all things provided thatsuch inconvenient baggage as hard-core principle werequickly buried and forgotten. For this was the Real W orld atlong last, and Roychick was going t o be up there running it.Roychick had come into his own. In preparation for hishistoric task. he began to groom himself as the greatdemagogic orator of the LP, he who would sweep millions offtheir feet with his masterful oratory. Also in preparation,Childs began to cultivate the steely look of his Master andmentor, Ed Crane.And so 1979 saw the beginning of the radical paradigm shiftwithin the mighty Kochtopus, i .e. , the acceleratingabandonment of hard-core principle in order to attractoutside funding. And that, of course, is virtually the classicdefinition of opportunis m o r "sellout" in ideology or politics.It began with a cloud seemingly no bigger than a man's hand:namely, the hiring of an anti-Austrian Friedmanite at Cato(Dav id Henderso n): followed by the M uellerite SLS comingout against nuclear energy per se in order to try to at tract theleft-liberal students on cam pus. An d the oppo rtunist betrayalhas escalated from there ever since.7. Eater D. K.

The new Kochtopusian Line soon brought its first - n dindeed, up till now, its onk - uccess: the a ttraction into themovement of Charles's younger brother, David. David isnothing if not soft-core, as is show n by his cur t public refusalto su ppo rt the Bergland ticket in 1983-84 if B ergland shouldcome out with such radical an d "crazy" prop osals asabolition of the income tax. (Which Bergland, and Lewis,prom ptly did, to their eternal credit.) It could surely not be anaccident that the entry of D. K. into the Kochtopus in a bigway coincided with the aba ndonm ent of th e old hard-core lineby the Charles Koch-Crane forces.And so the Clark- avid Koch ticket was duly nominatedin Los Angeles in 1979. and D. K. gave approximately $2.1million to the Crane-run presidential campaign. The CraneMachine was truly in its glory.Phase I 1 of the New Order occurred after the Presidentialelection. With Reagan and conservatism ensconced in power,Page 6


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it was apparently determined to move the entire Kochtopus(with the exception of course of M other Wichita) toWashington, D. C., where Cran e and his various institutionscould cozy up to Big Dad dy and slither along the Corrid ors ofPower. The massive shift of the Kochtopus to D. C.symbolized and physical ly embodied the shift of theK o c h t o p u s i a n L i n e to w a r d t h e S t a t e a n d t o w a r dRespectability.And so Cato, which had previously emphasized Inquiry an dthe building up o f a cad re of intellectuals, shifted radieak ly tobecome just another conservative policy-studies Think Tanktrying to Make It in D. C. Inquiry, whose intellectual andleftish tinge was becoming an embarrassment to Catoanyway, was hived off to the Crane-run Libertarian ReviewFoundation, (LRF). In fact, the entire tactical perspective oftailing after the liberal Left, which ha d m otivated th e nuclearpower stance in SLS, and had p ermeated the C lark campaignand Libertarian Review, now had to be dropped amidst thenew climate of conservative victory. The new Rig htward shiftafter the Reagan victory perhaps had something to do withthe killing of Libertarian Review, and merging it into Inquiry.Also both Cato and Charles Koch were relieved of financingthe massive Inqtriry deficit, which was now being picked u p byD. K . This allowed Cato proper to expand without C. K.'shaving to enlarge-his contributions, and perhaps also meantan accelerated implosion and the final dumping of SLS.

And so, from 1981 to 1983, Eddie Crane set astride theentire Kochtopusian world like a Colossus. All of activism,except the CCE, was his. There was the powerful CraneMachine in the Libertarian Party; Inquiry was his through th eL RF; his servitor Jule Herbert was ensconced as head ofNTLF: and Update was founded under LR F to be theMachine newsletter and to do the hatchet work w ithin the LP.At th e center of the pow er web was Crane's Ca to, located inan historical landma rk mansion in W ashington. C ato beganto hold the usual ultra-soft-core conferences, and to push suchsoft-core sleeves as Pete Ferrara's Social Security Plan (keepforcing older people on Social Security and try to transferyouth to private insurance), and to publish a monthly PolicyReport as well as a tri-annual Cato Journal. With theconference and the jour nal, Cra ne began to intrude heavily onthe Austrian economic and scholarly sphere once allocated toPearson, th e excuse being that this w as scholarship applied topolicy quest ions. These applicat ions, however, wereincredibly sellouty; the featured sp eakers a t these conferenceswere invariably Friedmanites or even Keynesians, and a fewmarginal A ustrians were let in a rou nd th e edges, ascommentators. More and more, Cato began to take on thedimensions of yet another Reaganish Washington think tank,except, of course, that it was much less amply funded than,say, AE I o r the Heritage Foun dation. In fact, a case could bemade that, at this point, Cato is less libertarian, at least ondomestic economic questions, than the closely Reagan-connected Heritage, and that is One Hell of a Note indeed.

8. The World of "Scholarship": Enter Ricbie FinkIn the meantime, cu riou s things were happ ening in theP e a rs o n - ru n d o m a i n o f s c h o la r s h i p , a p a r t o f t h eKochtopusian world on which the light of publicity has neverreally shone. The Kochtopus had played a major role inreviving Misesian Austrian economics, with high level

!

Austrian conferences in the summer of 1974, 1975, and 1976,and instructional conferences after that. Also, Austrianfellowships and programs were promoted at New YorkUnivers i ty , w h e ~ e Mises ian economis t Is rae l K i rznerhappened to be located. and then later at George MasonUniversity in Virginia, where a small Center for MarketProcesses (C M P) was set up under Koch topusian auspices.Then , even before Ca to cut loose for D. C., Leonard Liggio'sscholarly quarterly Literature of Liberty was shifted, logicallyenough, to Menlo Park's low-key libertarian scholarlyorganization, the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS).

IH S did no t begin as a Kochtopusian organization. It wasfounded by the late hard-core libertarian Dr. F. A. ("Baldy")Harper in the early 1960's, and it struggled for many years,with little o r no fund ing, buoyed up solely by Baldy's lifelongand heartfelt dedication to the cause of liberty. The Board ofIHS was manned by old friends and colleagues of Baldy's.After Baldy's de ath in 1973, Cha rles Koch, who had been onthe board, agreed to become President, and after that, IHSgradually became drawn into the Kochtopusian orbit, run byGeorge Pearson as Treasurer and through Kochiancontribution s via F ASIL. When Liggio moved the Literatureof Libertj~ peration to Menlo Park, he became President ofIHS, and in another year, Walter Grinder was taken on atIHS as Liggio's assistant i n academic affairs (succeeding ourown ex-publisher, Joe Peden, who had been at IHS for ayear.) Grinder, who had taught economics at Rutgers,Newark, had d ropped out of graduate school at NY U, andthen gon e to University College, in C ork , Ireland for graduatework. There, he had fallen ill, and, his and his family'smedical treatments paid for by Charles Koch, he eventuallymoved to IHS to Menlo Park.

Despite strong Kochian influence, IHS was not yet underfull Kochian power, Not only did much of the Board predateKoch, but also the extensive summer fellowship program waslargely provided by the totally independent (and alsoincreasingly soft-core) Liberty Fund, which was personallyfriendly to Liggio. By 1983, however, Liberty Fund,emboldened by changes in the tax law permitting foundationsto accumulate part of their income, drastically cut back itsoverall f unding , with the result that IH S was one of the first t osuffer. The loss of Liggio's personal financial base, so tospeak, apparently emboldered the Kochtopus to seize totalcontrol. The IHS Board began to meet very rarely, with allimportant decisions now taken by the Koch-controlledExecutive Committee of the Board. And one of its majordecisions was t o remov e Liggio. from all power in IHS, whileretaining him as President as a kind of figurehead, andmoving their faithful and loyal servitor Walter Grinder intothe post, not only of Vice President, but also of CEO of theInstitute.

The time has come to highlight, for the first time, theKochtopusian engineered change in Austrian economics. Forprecisely what Crane did to libertarianism in the LP, otherKochtopusians were doing to Austrian economics and also tomy revered mentor, Ludwig von Mises. For Mises was, ineconomics, the quintessence of uncompromising hard-coreness, both in laissez-faire. and in methodo logy. Mises andopportunism have always, both in his lifetime and now indeath, been totally and diametrically incompatible. And soMises had to go .Mises has been quietlv ditched throughout the world of

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Kochtopusian scholarship. At NY U , Professor Mario Rizzo,who popped up as a Ravenal delegate at the 1983 PresCon,has led the way in dropping Mises altogether and intransforming Misesian economic thou ght into a wishy-washypastiche of "evolution" and w hat could b e called mildlyconservative institutionalism. But Kirzner has been resistingthe New D ispensation. At George Mason's Center for M arketProcesses, however, this new Kochtopusian paradigm couldproceed unchecked and uptrammelled. Instead of the name orthe concep ts of M ises or laissez-faire scaring off acad emics o rspoiling the new scramble for main stream respectability, mostCenter "Austrians" speak only vaguely ab ou t "marketprocess", and of "evolution". No thin g threate ning there.Leading the parade in this betrayal of Misesianism fromwithin was young NY U graduate stud ent Richard ("Richie")Fink, who had studied under Grinder at Rutgers, Newark.Grinder of course gave his blessings to this New Order. Amanifesto for the new paradigm, which Mises would havescorned brusquely as "anti-economics", was an as yetunpublished but widely circulated essay co-written by Finkand by his student at Rutgers and then G eorge M ason, Tyler

Cowen, now a graduate studen t at H arvar d and widely toutedby the burgeoning Fink Mach ine as Th e Comer inAustrianism.And so the important point to note here is that the CraneMachine sellout is not unique; th at it has its precise parallel inthe world of Kochtopusian scholarship. With Fink in chargeat George Mason and Grinder at IHS, the Fink-Grinderapparatus began to dominate the scholarly arm of theKochtopus.

9.- he Big Change: The Coming to Power of the FinktopusRichie Fink, in his academic maneuvering at GeorgeMason, in hanging on at least part-time despite his failure toattain a doctorate, began to catch the eye of C. K. Inparticular, what apparently captivated C. K. was a new planof Richie's, another, very different way of attracting theOutside Funding that C. K. had long craved. Richie's ideawas to set up a lobbying outfit in Washington (where healready was, George M ason being in a Virginia sub urb) -th eCitizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which would do forsoft-core (very soft-core) libertarianism what Co mm on Causehad already done for Establishment liberalism, and what JimDavidson had d one with -th e Natio nal Tax payers U nion:create a flourishing membership organization. If no BigBusinessman except D. K. seemed to fall for the soft-coreKochian paradigm, then m aybe the masses ou t there, the up-dated little old ladies in tennis shoes, could provide the

desired funding, leaving C. K. of course in even more securetotal control than if other big businessmen had been donors.Whoopee! What could be better, from C. K.'s point of view?So young Richie was now the shining star, the Co mer in theKochtopus, but how would he find the funding, the seedmoney, the nucleus, to get launched? C. K. was surely notgoing to provide much anew; in fact, he was presuma bly busycontracting his overall giving rather than expanding it. Whatbetter than using CCE as a launching pad ? There were goodreasons for this. In the first place, CCE was already there, inWashington, with some money and an organizationalnucleus, already doing lobbying. But its head, Rich Wilcke,had fallen out of Kochtopusian favor, and had t o go. Why? I

can only think of two main reasons. One, Wilcke, unlike therest of the Ko chtop us, had never "leaked", i.e. had alwaysmaintained his hard-core, uncompromising, laissez-faireperspective. An d tw o, Wilcke was not a Koch ian Loyalist. Hedid not Clear Eve ~y thin g ith C. K. for an hour every day. Hehad mistakenly thought that his job was to manage CCEhimself and to do well with it. For these two unforgivableerrors he had to be purged.Getting rid of Wilcke, however, was not easy, and theexecution turned out to be a bloody mess. Wilcke did not goquietly, and C. K. was reluctant for a long time to use thefamous Stockholder Ploy which he had used to dump mefrom the Board at Cato. It is true that here at CCE he hadeven tighter control then at Cato; for while Cato had hadthree U ltimate Stockholders, of whom I was one, Charles hadtaken the precaution at CCE to have only one stockholderwhen CCE was founded: himself. (All this conjures up anamusing picture: C. K. enters a phone booth, strips off hisjacket a nd shirt, and reveals a red shirt with S for Stockholde ron it, after which he springs into action.) But C. K. wasapparently reluctant to use his Ultimate Stock holder power atCCE because it would have meant firing the entire board,including a number of Big Businessmen he was trying to getfunds from. But finally, the messy deed was done, and poorWilcke, whose only sin was to be both highly competent andhighly principled, was booted out, without so much as apenny of terminal pay from the organization he had built upand run successfully for years.Th e path was now cleared for young Richie, and the Grea tKochtop usian Reorganization now occurred, during thespring and summer of 1984.The baby Finktopus, son of theKoch topus, was born . F irst, Richie became head of CCE;then CCE was liquidated into the new, mighty CSE, whichalso incorporated unto itself the old lobbying activities ofNTLF. Fink now heads up the lobbying-activist program,luring the masses into su ppo rting the new activism. But to getthe masses you can't be hard-core, at least so runsKochtopusian conventional wisdom. And so it looks as ifFinktopusian activism will be even softer core, and moresellouty, than Craniac activism. Reports are, for example,that the two p lanks th at will be pushed heavily by the CSE are(a) the flat tax - rotten program also endorsed by Big Ed,and (b) widening IRA'S for Social Security - cosmetic thatwould leave the SS intact.But soft: whatever happened to the basic allocation ofpower in the Kochtopus: Crane in charge of activism, andPearson, or later Pearson-Fink , in ch arge of scholarship? Theanswer is tha t this allocation, this "job-description" to usemanagement lingo, is now kaput. All bets are off. Richie Finkis now in charge, not only of most scho larship (and through

his friend Grinder, virtually all scholarship), but also incharge of most Ko chtopusian activism. Consider the dramaticchange tha t h as occurred in 1984 in the relative powerpositions of Crane and Fink. Fink , we are reliably informed ,now reports directly to C. K. himself, circumventing Pearson.In addition, Fink, now in charge of CSE, the old CCE andNTLF, the Center for Market Processes, and throughGrinder of IHS, now bestrides the Koch topusian world like anew Colossus. And Eddie Crane? Consider his current status:Inquiry is now gone, Update is gone, SLS is gone. The Cran eMachine deserted the Bergland-Lewis ticket an d, a t least fornow, in effect has left the LP. C ran e is left in charge on ly ofCato.Page 8


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Not only tha t: but the latest hot news is that IH S itself will,in the fall of 1985, be moved to affiliate with George MasonUniversity, and will be housed in the same building as theCenter for Market Processes. Virtually all of Kochtopusianacademia will then be under Finkian control, both spirituallyand in its physical embodiment in or near Washington, D. C .10, Exit Craniacs

Nothing can better testify to the enormous slippage ofCrane's power within the Kochtopus than the fate, in thewatershed year of 1984, of two of Big Eddie's most faithfulsatraps and servitors: Jule ("The Tool") Herbert andRoychick Childs.For Jule is now reportedly On the Beach: let go from N T L Fwhen Fink acceded to power. Our info rman ts tell us thatCrane pleaded with Fink for mo nths to take on Jule in somecapacity in his expanded CSE organ ization, but n o dice. Whythen did not Cato hire Jule? Presumably either for budgetaryreasons, and/or because his hiring was vetoed by C. K.Whatever the reason, good or bad, Jule is out of favor, and

Crane could not save him. Other former top Craniacs haveearned Big Ed's lasting emmity by accepting jobs in Fink'snew CSE: Bob Capozzi, Kent Guida, and Sheldon Richman.In a sense even more interesting is the recent dismissal ofRoychick, once so close to the Pinnacle of Power, he whothought he always had the C. K.ear. I heard from a highlyplaced source at the PresCon th at the comm and decision h adalready been made to fire Roychick, presumably beca use verylittle foreign policy analysis had been forthcoming fromCato's Foreign Policy Analyst. I didn't reveal this in the

Forum, because to the query, "when?", the Highly Inform edSource said that the timing had not yet been decided. Cranetold Roychick in the fall of 1983 tha t his firing was imminen t,but the other shoe did not drop until the following summer.Why the firing took so long, whether out of humanitariansentiments or t o let Roychick twist slowly, slowly in the wind,is anyone's guess. But at any rate, exit Roychick, the end of a nera. How the mighty have fallen!

And now? Roychick has returned to New York, there towork at the Laissez-Faire Bookstore, and to live in one ofHowie Rich's apartments. The Childsian parabola, hismeteoric rise and fall, his coming full circle, can only be fullyunderstood by being put in historical and sociologicalperspective. For over the years, the Laissez-Faire Bookstorehas become the place where young lads begin their libertariancareer. It is the place where budding libertar ians hop e to ma ketheir mark in the movement, and begin their rise to someth inglike fame and fortune. It is from the bookstore, fo r example,that young anarchist Lance La mberton began as a clerk andbook-packer and then rose in a few short years to the pinnacleof power as a renegade in the Reagan W hite House, only to bedropped shortly thereafter. Indeed, Roychick himself beganhis own career in libertarianism very similarly - s a youngbookpacker in the old L ibertarian Review Book Service. An d

returned to the status o f clerk a nd bookpacker. But thebookstore, one hopes, is a place where one begins, not whereone ends up, not a refuge to which one returns in one's late301s, an aging boy w onder after having once hobnobbed withthe mighty and dreamt great dreams of Total Power.Whither Roychick now? Does h e deserve yet another O neLast C hanc e? Will he redeem himself, become regenerate, andBuild a New Life'?Or will he tax the patlence of b s ndulgentemployers, fail to show up at the Bookstore, and finally bereluctantly let go, then to sink to Lord knows where? Whoknows? Present guesses depend on one's view of humannature in general, and of Roychick's natu re in particu lar. Onelong-time Roychickologist puts the hard line on this questionwith great gusto: "They who keep giving Roy 'One MoreChance' have been preventing the noble workings of SocialDarwinism from giving one of i ts most convincingdemonstrations."

Tune in to the Lib.Forum for the next installment of thiscontinuing, Not Quite Read y for Prime Time Soap Operasaga that is the Libertarian Movement.11. Whither the Kochtopus?

And what of the Kochtopus i tself? And of. the CraneMachine? Wha t will happ en t o them? Will the Crane M achinetry for an L P comeback in 1985 at Phoenix? Or at the nextgreat PresCon in 1987?And even if it wants o try, will it beable to commandeer the Kochtopusian resources to do so?Considering the waning of the Craniac star, this prospectbegins to seem dubious at best.And what o f the Finktop us? Will young Fink continue, infuture years, to domlnate tne ~ o c h t o p u s i a nworld! In Ourview, the answer depends on the success of his Grand Plan tosucker the pant ing masses in to support ing the CSE.Answering that question depends on how clear our crystal ballmay be. But o ur s trong hunch is that th e Fink Plan is going tobe a floperoo. The success of Jim Davidson's NationalTaxpayers ,Union was based o n the fac t that there is a strongconstituency for the neatly-titled NTU, and t ha t, despite itsexcessive moderation, NTU has been doing good and farilyconsistent work in the direction of a clear-cut goal: loweringtaxes and government spending across the board. But a bigconstituency for a very soft-core "sound economy"? Nothardly. if our analysis is correct, then the handwriting is onthe wall for the Finktopus. As for Fink's future as head ofacademia within the Kochtopus, the prognosis, as usual inacademia, is far cloudier. A lot d epends on such factors as thedubious prospect of Fink getting his doctorate, and onwhether Geo rge M aso n U niversity is willing to bet heavily onthe gli t tering but highly unlikely chimera of lots ofKochtopusian money pouring into the new combined CMP-IHS. But at any rate, we would remind young Richie of thelesson already learned painfully by Childs, Herbert, and byCrane himself: sic transit gloria mundi, or, Put Not Your Trustin Princes. $.


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The Libertarim Forum September-December, 1984

Why the Apotheosisof Ronnie? -There is no surcease; every occasion is taken in the mediafor wave after wave of adulation o f the Big Boob. N ow thatthe election is over, even his quasi-enemies hav e thro wn in thetowel. Even left liberals, even the New York Times, havenothing but admiration for the Boob's greatness, his politicalwizardry, his lovability, etc. Even those wh o retain o ne or twonagging dou bts abo ut the wisdom of Reaganism join to singthe praises of Reagan the man, our wonderful All-Americanhero. "Of course I don't like his policies, but he's su ch a greatguy." Is there no rest? And even if we have to concede themajority, where in hell are the Reagan-haters? After all, evenat the height of popularity and adu lation for FD R, ther e wasalways a militant minority of embittered Roossevelt-haters towhom o ne could turn for solace amidst the horrific avalanche

of enthusiasm. Looking back o n these four years of Reagan I,we can see all too clearly that th e historic fun ction of Reagan,the "Reagan Revolution" i f you want to call it that, was lowipe out as if i t had never been the 1970's mass disillusionwith the U.S. government in general, and with the Presidencyin particular. By spreading this disillusion, Nixon andWatergate did more for libertarian sentiment in the U.S. thananyone else in this century. And now, this disillusion is allwashed away, and the American people are back in theirrotten, disastrous love affair with their Sovereign Lord, thePresident of these United States. In the same way, the lessonsof Vietnam have been washed away in the jin go ism -6 fRonnie's heroic conquest of teeny Grenada, that GrandFenwick without an army, navy, or air force, where yet ahandful of Cuban construct ion w orkers were able to hold offthe massed might of U S . Imperialism for a solid week.Ronnie has managed to recreate jingoism and flag-waving,literally and figuratively, with the willing collaboration ofFritz the Pits and the Loyal Oppo sition. And d o we wond erwhy the Libertarian Movement is at a low ebb in America?

If we search, in our bitterness and frustration, for somesolace, for some small beacon light in the all-encompassingdarkness, we will find nothing. But hold! There is something.In the Jan uar y 29, issue of the Village Voice, there is an articleby J. Hober man , "Stars and Hype Forever", t hat warms thecockles of our h eart, Hob erman usually fu nctions as theVoice's movie critic and spokesman for the wierdo avant-garde cinema.

Well, perhaps it takes someone familiar with avant-gardeabsurdism to do full justice to the meaning of Ron nie and hismass adulation by the American public. For once, evenHo berm an's crazed left-Freudianism seems almost plausible.For the appeal of Ron nie R eagan is so irrational, his being awalking, talking contradiction so starkly evident, that itsalmost as i f the irrationality is the essence of appeal. ASHoberman nuts it:"Is Ronald R eagan the greatest American whoever lived, or is he only the most A mer ican? Only afew recalcitrant minorities seemed ab le to resist th espectacle of a 73-year-old ex-actor waxingnostalgic for God, neighborliness, the nuclearfamily, strong leadership, the work ethic, and t he

small-town community. Especially since - aseveryone knew - e himself seldom attendedchurch, rarely gave to charity, was divorced by hisfirst wife, comm unicated badly with his children(and indeed everyone else if there was no script),failed to control his own staff, kept banker'shours , hung out wi th a passe l of corruptbillionaires, a nd had fled the small town (scarcelya No rman Rockwell paradise bu t a place where hishapless father had been the local drunk) for thefleshpots of California at the first opportunity."Hoberman suggests that the American masses love Ronnieprecisely because he's a walking contradiction, a boob, a niceguy, etc. Because that is what thqv are. He notes that DouglasFraser, head o f the United Automobile Workers, told Timemagazine last August that it 's a mystery to him, but thatReagan is "very, very effective with th e American w orker."Hoberm an suggests that the mystery could be cleared up in a nexplanation given by a UAW regional director in the sameissue of Time: "He looks good and he's an actor. He's thekind of guy you could strike up a con versa tion w ith if he livedin the neigh borh ood ." Back in the 1940's, Ho ber ma n rem indsus, Ronnie the movie-star told the fan magazines: "I'm n oFlynn or Boyer. Mr . Norm is my alias." "Mr. Norm " indeed!The mystery begins to clear, As Hoberman explains:

"'At Cam p Dav id, 'Time recently reported in itsNancy Reagan cover story, 'the two former moviestars cozy up o n a sofa in the dark, holding hand sand sharing a bowl of popcorn as they watch good ,wholesome films.' . . . 'I never suggested where theweapons should be or what kind. I'm not ascientist' , he said when questioned ab ou t his starwars prog ram. His confusion of coun tries in SouthAmerica, his blatant ignorance of arms control(which handily keeps him from implication whentalks collapse), his proud lack of cul turalsophistication endear him to the public. Far fromthreatening, the gap s in the president's knowledgeare positively . . . normal."

Brilliant! And now we begin to see where poor JimmyCarter went wrong. Because until Ronnie, the Americanpublic, in its respect and admiration for the office of thePresident, desired to put in there somone greater than they,someone larger than life, someone whom they could admireand look up to as their Sovereign. And Carter t ried so hardworked hard as a beaver, studied, knew a lot, and he lookedso worried as a result. Because, after all, that's whaPresidents always were supposed to do. They were supposedto know a lot, and work very hard and take the cares of th eAmerican people upon their own brows. Hell , theywere supposed to age in office, in order to show how muchthey cared, how responsible they were for what went onUnlike Ro nnie, they weren't su pposed t o be some kind ofDorian Gray.

But Ronnie broke the mold, or perhaps the Americanmasses brok e it for him. Fo r Ronnie is just th e opposite, an dPage I0


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The Libertarian Forum September-December, 19Uthe masses love, adore , worship him precisely because he is so,aw shucks! dumb, cretinous, friendly, normal, just like theyare! Perhaps the numskull Senator Rom an Hruska (R., Neb.)was an unwitting prophet during the Carswell appointmenthearings for the Nixon Supreme Court. When his man wascharged with being "mediocre," Sena tor Hru ska rose to theoccasion. "Well," he com plaine d, "why can't th e mediocrepeople have representation on the Supreme Court?" He waslaughed at by the liberal media, but he may have been aharbinger of the 1980's. Well, if every conceivable group inAmerican life deserves its quota1 representation: the blacks,Hi span i c s , women, e l de r l y , handi capped , one -eyedAlbanians, etc., why not the mediocre? After all, there are ahell of a lot more of them. Why not Mr. Norm? Mencken,Mencken, thou shouldst be living at this hour?

Ho berm an goes o n, with a scintillating analysis of Ron nieReagan as media creation, as the ultimate product of themovie star system and of Hollywood-California politics. Hecites a yuppie quoted in the New York Times as favoringReagan because he is "a John Wayne type," and "standingfor the values of the men" as against women. H ober man notessardonically that, while Reagan and Bush posed in cowboyhats in Texas with a pair of sexy cheerleaders, Fritz playedinto his opponent's hands by appearing "in the MondaleFamily Cookbook wearing an apron. . ."But there is much more to Ronnie as media creation. For,Hoberman adds,

"Like any mod ern politician, Reagan's image ispure feedback. He shows the visage that everyother-directed person in America might presenthad he the benefit of scientific polls, demographicstatistics, and an endless knowledge of old moviecliches. Even his post assassination ripostes werequotations: 'Honey, I forgot to duck,' he toldNancy just a s Jack Dempsey had qu ipped to hiswife after losing to Gene Tunney in 1926. Facedwith death, he thought of the epitaph on W . C.Fields's tombstone: 'All in all, I'd rather be inPhiladelphia.'And then, came this illuminating sentence: '. 'Perhapsbecause he himself is so utterly a product of American massculture, mass culture has proved unusually responsive toRonald Reagan.As a movie critic, Hoberman sees and points out, for thefirst time, that the Republicans waged the Presidentialcampaign in pop-movie and pop-culture imagery, and thatthey "won the battle" to seize tha t imagery for 1984. Inde ed,running through the Hoberman article are quotes from thewildly popular song from Ghostbusters. Hoberman continues:"The 1984 cam paign was domin ated by movieimagery. 'Star Wars 'and the 'Evil Empire 'remained buzz words while Vice-president Bushmocked the D emocratic convention as the 'Templeof Doom' and Reagan appropriated the sloganthat made his erstwhile employer Warner Bros.famous. 'You ain't seen nothin' yet, he affablythreatened the screaming crowds that turned outto see him - he slogan, in its proudly illiterate useof the double negative, echoing the punch line ofthe summer's number one song, 'I ain't afraid ofno gh ost!' (fro m Ghostbusters). Yes, as everyone inAmerica was lining up for the same film, bothDem ocrats and Republicans realized on some level

that the party that controlled Ghostbusters wouldwin the election - nd the Democrats had aboutas much chance of that as Walter Mondale ofwearing his apron to Wyoming and serving thecowboys quiche."Hoberman goes on to analyze Ghostbusters as an arch-Reaganoid film. Since I haven't seen it, you will have to turnto the article for explanation.So far, so wonderfully clear and perceptive. No w com es themurky left-Freudian part, which still seems to make asubstantial amount of sense. Basically, it holds that JimmyCarter's most basic and fatal error was to "secularize theAmerican myth," to reduce "America" to the level ofcommon sense," in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch. In shoft,Jimmy tried to explain to us soberly that "America" was nolonger all-powerful, om nipo tent, king of the walk, a truth th atwas beginning to dawn on the American masses after aquarter-century of Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations,"black and sexual revolutions," and "hum iliation at thewoggy hands of O PE C sheiks and Iranian mullahs." Reagancame to the A merican m asses as America's projected savior,the agent of its religious and theoc ratic "rebirth," its return togreatness. America, in the fundamentalist-pietist image,would be "born again," once more to achieve the certainty, inthe words of Hoberman, that "the president has made quiteclear with his chilling assertions that the U.S. was God'scountry and folksy reassurance of an after life. ( I ain't afraidof no ghosf.)"Hoberman continues:

"Reagan pandered to a latent aggression waitingto be released. To be truly reborn, America wouldhave to (as George Bush said, reasserting hismanho od after the humiliation of having to debateGeraldine Ferraro) kick ass. Where ineffectualCarter chose to scold America for its indulgence,Reagan would show us how to punish the weak tomake ourselves feel strong."

Instru men tal to the success of this "salvation," Ho ber ma ngoes on, was the Hinckley assassination attempt uponRon nie. By rem arkable coinciden ce, he points ou t, both Timeand Newsweek featured cover stories o n "America's climqteof violence" the week before the attempted assassination. Itwas a media "message," opines Ho berm an, that someone likeHinckley might well decide to act upon. Combined with thewidespread popular belief in the "die-in-office" jinx onanyone elected President in a year ending with zero, "hisability to take a bullet in the gut and live gave him an almostdivine aura." And: "If America's problems could be said tohave begun on November 22 , 1963, with the assassination ofJohn F. Kennedy, Reagan's miraculous survival made him akind of JFK redux."

Fascinating! Could this be the reason (along with JFK'smedia-created personality) that Reagan and conservatives -they who once hated the guts of JFK - eep praisingKennedy and trying to cast Ronnie in the mould of JFK, aswell as Truman and FDR?Having surmounted the assassination, having becomereborn, "having proved himself stron g enough to contain thenation's violence, Reagan was manda ted to wield it." Hence,for Hoberman, the enormous military buildup, and therepeated bullying actions of Reaganite foreign policy. Reag anbegan his campaign of rebirth th roug h violence in the summ erPage 11


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L i b e r t ~ o ~ September-December, 1984of 1981 with "two carefully staged events, attack s on symbo lic(and appropriately weak) targets - he labor union PATCOand two Libyan jets. . . . "

However, in late 1981 came a grave setback to Reagan'spopularity - he Reagan recession, and his approval ratingbegan to decline. How recoup? In the words of Hoberman,"When the social fabr ic is straining a t the seams, whencapitalism (sic) reneges on its promise o f universal abu nd anc e,when humiliation is in the air, military nationalism is thetime-tested recipe for the new unity." Specifically, as wa r feverarrived with the excitement over the Falklands wat. and theIsraeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ronnie unleashed twomonstrous, saber-rattling speeches in March 1983, his "EvilEmpire" and "Star Wars" addresses, which, as Hobermancalls them , were "masterpieces of applied irrationality." Hegoes on:"As one conjured up the menace of an implacabledeadly foe, poised to strike, the other raised thepromise of risk-free nuclear war should we,understandably, choose to smash the aggressor

, . first."During the summer of 1983, Reagan heated up thepropaganda against Nicaragua, obviously seeking a war-incident there. Then , in S eptember came the K A L 007 caper,in which, as Hoberman correctly notes, U.S. "War feverreached an almost hysterical crescendo, reminiscent of theanti-Khomeini madness of 1980." Shortly after KA L 007,Reagan began moving toward war in Lebanon, baiting theSyrians until we found th at we couldn't pin the Islamic Jihad'sblowing up of the American Marines on the Syriangovernment i t was at that point that Ronnie Baby found a

safely puny and powerless victim for U.S. blood lust: littleGrenada. For then."A few days later, the marines landed in Gren adaand America went berserk. At last, Reag an hadprovided a war. The remarkable thing aboutGrenada, cited again and again during the 1984campaign as Reagan's supreme triumph, was itsdisproportionate effect upon th e American public.Tawdry as the spectacle of the greatest power onearth subduing the tiniest nation in the Westernhemisphere may have been, it actually sufficed toget America 'standing tall."'

Hannah Arendt once wrote that the whole point of theVietnam War was to enable the U.S. government to "createfor itself an image which would convince the world that it wasindeed 'the mightiest power on earth."' Ho ber ma n writes thaReaganism is a replay with this slight difference: the desire othe U.S. to "create images which will convince itself that it ithe mightiest power on earth." In 1966, Ro nald Re aganh us ed t hat "Politics is just like show business. Yo u need a bigopening. Then you coast for a while. Then you need a bigfinish." Gr ena da's was Ronn ie's big finish. Th e silver lining inthe cloud is that it could have been worse. Thus Hoberman:"Considering how infinitely more costly warsagainst the Sandinistas or Syrians - ot tomention a confrontation with the Evil Empireitself - would have been, one actually has to begrateful for Grenada. If all it takes is shootingdown two Libyan jets a year to keep Reagan fromnuking Moscow - hen , by all means, fire away." f

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