Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Introduction xvii
that is relevant to our contemporary predicament, then the
prize trophy is the Articles of Confederation. 6
Although themselves isolated and perhaps discouraged, there
are still some voices on the Left today that bring to mind what
Rothbard sought to cultivate in the New Left. Kirkpatrick Sale’s
words from 2006 may as well be a postscript to those of William
Appleman Williams on the Articles of Confederation:
I am convinced, believe it or not, that secession—by state
where the state is cohesive (the model is Vermont, where the
secessionist movement is the Second Vermont Republic), or
by region where that makes more sense (Southern California
or Cascadia are the models here)—is the most fruitful objective
for our political future. Peaceful, orderly, popular, democratic,
and legal secession would enable a wide variety of
governments, amenable to all shades of the anti-authoritarian
spectrum, to be established within a modern political context.
Such a wide variety, as I see it, that if you didn’t like the place
you were, you could always find a place you liked. 7
For a time, Rothbard’s optimism about the alliance was reciprocated.
“In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are
morally and politically coordinate,” wrote Carl Oglesby of Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967. 8 What went
wrong—the collapse of SDS and Rothbard’s break with the whole
movement—is the subject of the final chapter of this book.
Here we encounter still another endearing aspect of The
Betrayal of the American Right: Rothbard’s willingness to acknowledge
mistakes, or cases when things took unfortunate turns that he
did not anticipate—rarities in the memoir genre. “Looking back
6Ibid., p. 14.
7Kirkpatrick Sale, roundtable contribution, The American Conservative
(August 28, 2006): 28.
8Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull, Containment and Change (New
York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 166–67.