LewRockwell.com has republished a denunciation of fusionism, and (a fortiori) conservatism, by the intelligent but extremely contentious Murray Rothbard.
“Fusionism” has always seemed necessary to American right-wingers. America’s traditions include a great deal that is liberal, so traditionally-minded Americans have always had a strong libertarian streak. Also, for liberty to be something other than getting what one wants by whatever means, which would mean the end of limited government, people have to accept that man is based on something transcending desire, technical skill, and indeed anything directly observable, but nonetheless concrete enough to inspire devotion. It follows that in America freedom has seemed necessary to tradition, and religious tradition to freedom. And in any event, the great enemy of any possible Right, in America or anywhere else, is a managerial liberalism that wipes out both freedom and tradition. So why not put aside differences of emphasis to fight the common enemy of all things human?
Rothbard would have none of that. His reasoning is interesting, not because it is sensible but because it is clear and characteristic of a great deal of libertarian thought about tradition:
“At the heart of the dispute between the traditionalists and the libertarians is the question of freedom and virtue: Should virtuous action (however we define it) be compelled, or should it be left up to the free and voluntary choice of the individual? Here only two answers are possible; any fusionist attempt to find a Third Way, a synthesis of the two, would simply be impossible and violate the law of the excluded middle.”
The whole discussion—I’ve picked one example of many—is a string of either/ors. Everything you can mention is either this or it’s that. That kind of argument can be very powerful, but it depends for its force on our ability to characterize things, situations and persons with utmost clarity. For Rothbard that wasn’t a problem. He lived, it seems, in a world composed of logical combinations of discrete simple entities. Extreme modernists—in the end, there is no other kind—have to view the world that way, since otherwise it would be impossible to analyze the complex into the simple without remainder, and nothing could be known in a satisfactory way.
Those discrete simple entities have to include human beings if human beings can be known at all. Since (as prescribed by the theory) men are utterly simple, and can be completely known and described with limitless uniquivocal clarity, it follows that they either have or don’t have every possible quality, and if they have a quality it is either chosen by them in some act of utterly independent self-legislation or else forced on them by external violence. Things like “love,” “loyalty,” “seduction,” “influence,” or “formative experience” would blur the infinitely sharp analytical distinctions between persons that for Rothbard made knowledge of human beings possible, so no such things can be allowed to exist in a way any of us need be concerned about. And since external violence doesn’t sound so great, and man-the-creative-deity-of-his-own-being sounds heroic, the obvious political choice is libertarianism.
Murray Rothbard
A quotation of Mr. Rothbard has for a long time captured my attention:
Can someone explain to me what he means by “Menshevik fantasy”?
What Rothbard means by “Menshevik,” etc.
Here’s a longer excerpt from that 1992 speech of Rothbard’s, which explains more fully what he means:
“And of course the *first* anti-Stalinists were the devotees of the martyred communist Leon Trotsky. And so the conservative movement, while purging itself of genuine right-wingers, was happy to embrace anyone, any variety of Marxist: Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, Mensheviks, social democrats (such as grouped around the magazine ‘The New Leader’), Lovestonite theoreticians of the American Federation of Labor, extreme right-wing Marxists like the incredibly beloved Sidney Hook, *anyone* who could present not anti-socialist but suitably anti-Soviet, anti-Stalinist credentials.
“The way was then paved for the final, fateful influx: that of the ex-Trotskyite, right-wing social democrat, democrat capitalist, Truman-Humphrey-Scoop-Jackson liberals, displaced from their home in the Democratic party by the loony left that we know so well: the feminist, deconstructing, quota-loving, advanced victimological left. And also, we should point out, at least a semi-isolationist, semi anti-war left. These displaced people are, of course, the famed neoconservatives, a tiny but ubiquitous group with Bill Buckley as their aging figurehead, now dominating the conservative movement. Of the 35 neoconservatives, 34 seem to be syndicated columnists. (…)
“When I was growing up, I found that the main argument against laissez-faire, and for socialism, was that socialism and communism were inevitable: ‘You can’t turn back the clock!’ they chanted, ‘You can’t turn back the clock!’ But the clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back, but lies dead and broken forever. But we must not rest content with this victory. For though Marxism-*Bolshevism* is gone forever, there still remains, plaguing us everywhere, its evil cousin: call it ‘soft Marxism,’ ‘Marxism-Humanism,’ ‘Marxism-Bernsteinism,’ ‘Marxism-Trotskyism,’ ‘Marxism-Freudianism’; well, let’s just call it ‘Menshevism,’ or ‘social democracy.’
“Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire *respectable* political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the left over to neoconservatism on the right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever.”
( http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch1.html )