Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

PREFACE TO THE 1991 REVISION
The manuscript of the greater part of this book, The Betrayal
of the American Right, was written in 1971 and revised in
1973. Little of this original manuscript has been changed
here. In a profound sense, it is more timely today than when it was
first written. The book was a cry in the wilderness against what I
saw as the betrayal of what I here call the “Old Right.” Or, to allay
confusion about various “olds” and “news,” we call it the Original
Right. The Old Right arose during the 1930s as a reaction against
the Great Leap Forward (or Backward) into collectivism that characterized
the New Deal. That Old Right continued and flourished
through the 1940s and down to about the mid-1950s. The Old
Right was staunchly opposed to Big Government and the New
Deal at home and abroad: that is, to both facets of the welfare-warfare
state. It combated U.S. intervention in foreign affairs and foreign
wars as fervently as it opposed intervention at home.
At the present time, many conservatives have come to realize
that the old feisty, antigovernment spirit of conservatives has been
abraded and somehow been transformed into its statist opposite. It
is tempting, and, so far as it goes, certainly correct, to put the
blame on the Right’s embrace in the 1970s of Truman-Humphrey
Cold War liberals calling themselves “neoconservatives,” and to
allow these ex-Trotskyites and ex-Mensheviks not only into the
tent but also to take over the show. But the thesis of the book is
that those who wonder what happened to the good old cause must
not stop with the neocons: that the rot started long before, with
the founding in 1955 of National Review and its rapid rise to dominance
of the conservative movement. It was National Review that,
consciously and cleverly, transformed the content of the Old Right
into something very like its opposite, while preserving the old
forms and rituals, such as lip service to the free market and to the
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