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256
LEGACIES
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microphone and announced to the assembly that any person had a right
to defend himself against violence, including state violence. Then “he
raised a card, touched it with a fl ame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it
over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash.” 22 The symbol
of YAF, a hand holding the torch of liberty, had been deftly satirized
and openly mocked.
After a few moments of shocked silence, pandemonium erupted on
the convention fl oor. “Kill the commies” yelled the patriotic majority.
Amid shouts, shoving, and fi sticuffs, the traitorous facsimile draft card
burners were ejected from the convention fl oor. Around three hundred
of their ideological brethren followed the rebels out of the convention,
and out of Young Americans for Freedom. A chasm now separated the
libertarians and the traditionalists. By the end of the year a substantial
number of YAF chapters had either left the organization or had their
charters rescinded. California alone lost twenty-four chapters. 23
This libertarian secession was the culmination of a dynamic that had
plagued modern American conservatism since its emergence earlier in
the century. Postwar conservatives had crafted a careful synthetic ideology
with a productive contradiction at its core: the tension between free
market capitalism and cultural traditionalism. Clashes over the balance
of power had broken out regularly ever since, with Rand’s excommunication
by National Review among the most prominent. The cultural
upheavals of the late 1960s were a watershed, for they made stark the
difference between laissez-faire libertarians and tradition-bound conservatives.
Taking inspiration from the revolutionary language of the
New Left, libertarians fi nally had enough confi dence and strength to
identify themselves as a distinct political movement. They were no longer
conservatives, but following in Rand’s footsteps they would remain
part of the right.
Immediately after the convention Murray Rothbard and his new
comrade Karl Hess attempted to pull the exodus of libertarians to
the left, but it was Rand who emerged as a more decisive infl uence.
Rothbard’s call for a pan-ideological movement was soundly rejected
by Libertarian Caucus organizers. In an open letter to Rothbard distributed
in St. Louis, Don Ernsberger scoffed at Rothbard’s “small group
in New York” and told him, “Join the Left if you will Dr. Rothbard, but
don’t try to hand us that crap about the forces of freedom being there.
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