# The Movement (June 1980) **URL:** **By** Milton Mueller, Roy A. Childs, Jr. **Published:** June 1, 1980 --- “It’s hard to convey in a brief column what the new war threat has done to America’s campuses.” It’s hard to convey in a brief column what the new war threat has done to America’s campuses. By linking the issues of energy, foreign policy and the draft into a militaristic “Carter Doctrine,” the President seems to have tapped a powerful but heretofore submerged political energy. Between January 23, the date of Carter’s State of the Union Address, and March 22, when a march on Washington 30,000 strong was held, an explosion of rallies, teach-ins, debates and coalition-building took place. And the activity is still going on, as organizing conferences across the country attempt to consolidate student opposition. The scene is far different from the ’60s, however. Today’s student must confront at the outset at least twenty different, already radicalized ideological groups—among them libertarians—rather than start from scratch. Indeed, the sudden, uncomfortable alliance of leftists and libertarians around the draft issue is one of the most unusual phenomena caused by the campus anti-draft upsurge. One event in particular packed all the current anti-draft movement’s contradictory, chaotic tendencies into a single, crowded hall, there to act out a lurid political opera with an all-star cast. This was the all day teach-in held March 10 at New York University. The day’s concluding panel was to be on “Future Political Alternatives,” and featured Barry Commoner on the Citizens Party, Michael Harrington on working for Kennedy within the Democratic Party, Bertell Ollman on the need for a “Revolutionary Socialist Party,” and LR Editor Roy Childs on libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. I arrived at New York University near the end of the next-to-the-last panel, the one on “Cold War and Detente.” Judging from the periodic outbursts of cheers and hisses, I could have been entering a second-rate prize fight. But no, here was the usual obstacle course of outstretched arms hawking _Worker’s Advocate_, the _Militant_, and whatnot. To enter, one had to clear a path through the people at the back of room milling around what must have been sixteen different tables of political groups. Nestled among the outposts of New York’s entire leftwing zoo were the New York SLS, the Free Libertarian Party, and the Association of Libertarian Feminists. Apparently the New York libertarians, not used to participation in left-dominated teach-ins, had reacted to the offhand and continuous assertion of leftist bromides with a futile attempt to argue from the floor microphone before an overwhelmingly hostile audience. As a result, though its relationship to “Cold War and Detente” was not clear to me, libertarianism seemed to be a hot topic during the discussion period. Then it was time for the big name panel, and the room began to fill up. Gradually, the clutter of crooked chairs and political confetti was supplanted by the more orderly sight of rows and rows of faces. Roy Childs spoke first—unfortunately, for this rendered him incapable of speaking directly to any of the points made by the three socialists who followed him. Speaking very quickly, with a kind of good-natured nervousness, Childs briefly explained what a libertarian is and the principles behind our views on foreign policy, the draft and war. From there, he challenged the audience with what he called “Hayek’s dictum” (Hayek’s name drew hisses from a few): the more political power comes to direct a society, the more such power becomes the only thing worth having. People will fight and compete for that power, generating a process in which the most ruthless and unscrupulous will rise to the top. Childs contrasted these truths about government power with the “naive views” of Harrington and Commoner, which he dubbed the “Mary Poppins theory of government,” drawing some appreciative laughter, Childs concluded by attacking the left and right for having “partial solutions” which are offset by their infatuation with state power in other areas, and by calling for a consistent move toward liberty. On the whole, however, the combative atmosphere made Childs’s thrust seem mainly negative, an attack on and differentiation from the left more than a convincing, positive appeal for liberty. Harrington, to his credit, opened with an appeal for unity among anti-draft forces. Harrington is an accomplished orator, but the rising and falling of his powerful voice has started to take on a slightly shrill edge of late, as if he expects people to disagree with him. Harrington presented the success story of the Communist Party in the 1930s—the decade in which it expanded its influence and membership by becoming the “left wing of the New Deal”—as the model for today’s democratic left. While calling the Democratic Party a “sewer” full of racists, imperialists and (worse) capitalists, he asserted that the left would have to accept the fact that the labor, minority and feminist constituencies are all in the Democratic Party. The left should therefore reject ideological “program politics” and go where its people are. Harrington ended with a half-hearted appeal to vote for Kennedy in the New York Democratic primary—“It’s something you might want to consider,” he said. Commoner was next. He wove the issue of the draft, energy and foreign policy into a smooth and persuasive case for Citizens Party-style socialism, blaming all our current problems, from racism to energy, on the pursuit of profits. It was the very simplicity—even simple-mindedness—of Commoner’s economics which en-deared him to the crowd, for they led directly to the conclusion that everything could be set aright if only the right people—“You and I,” he said —controlled the government. If we just take over the oil-fields in Texas instead of those in the Middle East, the whole energy crisis will be solved, because “we” will then allocate oil “in the national interest.” Believe it or not, this is as deep as his political economy goes, for an attempt during the question period to pin him down on _who_ would define the national interest and _how_ scarce resources would be allocated drew little but a contemptuous brush-off about how the libertarian solution to the energy crisis called for “sending libertarians with shovels down into Texas to search for oil.” Commoner had to hurry off right after his speech, after taking a grand total of three questions (and answering none of them). Bertell Ollman seems a nice fellow; indeed, it was apparently his acquaintance with Murray Rothbard and Roy Childs during the last anti-war movement that was primarily responsible for Childs’s participation in the panel. But his talk was, to put it charitably, irrelevant. A soft spoken Marxist scholar who invented the game “Class Struggle,” Ollman attempted to synthesize some of the most rarified Marxist political analysis into a case for a Revolutionary Party which would unify the obviously divided, motley crew he was addressing. This kind of theorizing about the messianic emergence of a real Marxist-Leninist Party had all the urgency and intricacy of a medieval scholastic debate. As soon as Ollman finished, a long line formed behind the floor microphones and the crowd, which had become somewhat restless during Ollman’s ruminations about a Labor party, fell into an expectant silence. This, they sensed, could be the best part of the panel—a true dialogue between the audience and the panelists. But as soon as the first “questioner” opened her mouth, the atmosphere took a strange, destructive turn. “This question is directed at Mr. Harrington,” she began, and what followed was a five minute speech. Harrington, the woman pointed out, had said the same things about Jimmy Carter in 1976 that he was saying now about Kennedy. In a debate with a Socialist _Workers_ Party candidate he had— “Ask a question!” someone yelled from the crowd, but the woman continued to denounce Harrington as a sell-out, her voice getting louder and her rhetoric more strident (and the crowd more impatient) with each breath; finally, after a long and detailed account of the futility of working in the Democratic Party, she ended with a pitch for the Socialist Workers Party. The next “questioner” also directed his comments at Harrington. This one was from the Spartacist League, and he wanted to know— voice rising—why Harrington had supported the Bay of Pigs invasion, and hadn’t he worked for the CIA during World War II and . . . Michael Harrington’s worn, lined face seemed to become more and more sunk-en with each successive realization that this “questioner” too was going to be issuing yet another strident harangue. It might have been at the fourth or the fifth such realization that Harrington’s face sank into his hands and he shook his head from side to side. The audience re-belled and shouted against the long speeches, but the amount of applause for the attacks was surprising. And Harrington’s answers to these “questions” took on a progressively defensive pitch. Oration edged closer to hysteria. “I did NOT support the Bay of Pigs . . . That’s a LIE; I was NEVER a CIA agent . . .” Yet throughout it all he pugnaciously stuck to his defense of Carter in 1976; Carter was “better than Ford.” He defended Kennedy as the best choice now available; he even had a few good things to say about S. 1772, the Kennedy-backed bill which fights crime by abolishing civil liberties. When Childs’s turn came to answer the questions, he began by noting that he felt lucky that libertarians were largely free of this kind of fragmentation— an observation that set Harrington’s head, still seemingly circled by leftwing harpies, to nodding miserably. As we worked our way through the thinning crowd toward the exit, we could hear the booming, beseeching voice of Harrington taking a final turn at the mike. “We’re trying to get socialists to speak American…” we could hear, and then his voice was covered by that of a small black woman with an African accent trying to sell us _Worker’s Advocate_, the pro-Albanian Marxist-Leninist paper. What _“future Political Alternatives”_ did the NYU students see that night, and how did they come across? First, they saw libertarianism fairly well represented, but they must have wondered at its combustive relationship to the socialist paradigm prevalent among anti-war forces. By sheer weight of numbers, the statist view dominates the dialogue, putting libertarians in an intrinsically defensive and controversial posture. Still, our representation on such panels has an extremely important effect on the political dialogue. It is, after all, a paradigm, an entire way of looking at political issues, that we are trying to change, not merely people’s views on specific issues. To accomplish this, to purge American radicalism of its love affair with the state, is an arduous and unpleasant task, comparable to cleaning out the Augean stables, but it must be done. The position of Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, on the other hand, is clearly untenable; and this becomes quickly apparent in any public discussion. The mere fact that DSOC is likely to end up supporting Carter after Kennedy loses—when Carter is precisely the man responsible for Cold War II—should disqualify it from the leadership of anti-war forces immediately. Out of fairness to DSOC, however, it should be noted that only it seems to explicitly recognize what must be a never-ending source of embarrassment to the rest of the left—namely that the labor and minority constituencies it claims to represent clearly are in the Democratic Party, to the extent that they are politically active at all. Just as clear, however, is the fact that the only socialism the Democratic Party is capable of bringing to America is war socialism, the guns and butter socialism of FDR, LBJ and Jimmy Carter. Yet, as Harrington notes, no leftist forces working outside the Democratic Party have ever gotten anywhere in America. Thus can the virulence of the rage inspired by Harrington and DSOC be explained: it is the left raging against its own impotence. Commoner and the Citizens Party represent an attempt to break out of that impotence; yet at the same time the Citizens Party is almost as far removed from the labor-oriented socialism of the ’30s as libertarians are. It actually represents the politics of the New Class, the socialism of university professors and big foundations, of cause lawyers, career bureaucrats and media talk-show hosts. It is the professional class seeking to expand the ethic of bureaucratic planning to the economy as a whole, and its politics is informed by a deep conviction that the main problem is simply that the wrong people are in power. If only they, the good guys, “took power”—and Commoner used those precise words several times—then we could plan our way out of the energy crisis and everything else. Universities, especially elite universities, are ideally suited to the cultivation of such a New Class politics, due to their bureaucratic structure and their insulation from the market. Thus when Commoner told the NYU crowd of mostly white, upper middle class “radical” university students that “the Citizens Party is _your Party_” he was literally correct. It is. from newspapers all over the country fill several large boxes, and more continue to pour into the offices every day. The campaign of libertarian Presidential candidate Ed Clark continues to accelerate both in pace and in media coverage, as the Republican and Demo Despite his wins in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, Kennedy’s delegate totals continue to lag far behind Carter’s, and Carter is showing himself increasingly adept at buying votes in key states through selected federal grants—usually given just before primaries. Despite the media’s love affair with John Anderson, the Anderson campaign has gone nowhere with the rank-and-file in the Republican party, forcing the self-infatuated Anderson to boost his ego instead by running as an independent. Bush’s victory in Pennsylvania was not enough to lift him out of the rut in which his campaign finds itself, and although he may stick with the campaign down to the wire, his chances of snatching the nomination from frontrunner Reagan now seem on a par with those of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In the meantime, Citizens Party candidate Barry Commoner has lurched into the ring, armed with a bromidic leftwing platform which would, above all else, fasten the grip of the federal government on the energy system in this country. While Clark’s Libertarian campaign has yet to receive much attention from national television, or much from _Time_, _Newsweek_ or other guardians of the establishment, it has received a great deal of attention from local media, most of it fair, objective, even favorable. At the Libertarian Party headquarters in Washington, D.C., clippings about Clark and the Libertarian Party One of the chief disputes between Ed Clark and Bill Hunscher during their campaign for the Libertarian Presidential nomination was the issue of a full-time campaign, and Clark’s apparent unwillingness to campaign full-time from the outset. But if Clark has not yet been campaigning full-time, he has certainly been coming close. Campaign appearances during March, April and May were intense: Clark spoke in New Jersey on March 1 and 2, in San Francisco on the seventh, and in San Rafael at a fundraising dinner on the ninth; then he flew to Alaska for appearances on the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, spoke in Illinois on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first, giving a major statement on inflation in Chicago on the last day of his campaign visit there, and travelled to Albany, New York, for the state Libertarian Party convention of the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth. He received significant local television, radio and newspaper coverage nearly everywhere. On April eleventh and twelfth, Clark’s campaign took him to Columbia, South Carolina and to Raleigh, North Carolina. On the thirteenth he settled down with advisors for a day of strategy talks in Washington, D.C. Clark returned to Alaska April 18-20, appeared in Memphis, Tennessee on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, flew to Houston on May 1, appeared at the Libertarian Party convention in Dallas the following day, and then rushed back to Washington, D.C., to attend the prestigious White House Correspondents’ dinner as a guest of _U.S. News_ on the third. A fundraiser was scheduled in Los Angeles on May 8, to be followed by campaign swings through such cities as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Detroit, Louisville, Honolulu, and Indianapolis. Then it was back to Los Angeles for another fundraiser on the twenty-eighth of May. At first blush, the independent candidacy of John Anderson looks as though it may hurt Clark’s campaign, but straws are in the wind suggesting that Anderson’s highly-touted run may fall on its face. So far, the Anderson campaign’s biggest asset has been media attention occasioned by a general abhorrence of both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, combined with Anderson’s novelty. But that novelty appears to be wearing a bit thin, as the media begin to notice a certain element of meanness and arrogance in Anderson, a strong streak of righteous megalomania, and his constant self-puffery about his “principles” and his “integrity.” Both of these are being increasingly called into question. Anderson’s general demeanor suggests that the proper place for the man may not be the White House, but rather the august office of high school principal, one of the meaner sorts, in some priggish, puritanical school district. But when we focus on the man’s record, as the media are beginning to do, his claim to the mantle of “principle” and “integrity” seems about on a par with Jimmy Carter’s claim to the mantle of “honesty” or Richard Nixon’s claim that he was a “man of peace.” Already cracks are beginning to show in the Anderson façade. In the March 24 _Village Voice_, Joe Conason and Jack Newfield did a job on the Anderson record, in an article called _“John Anderson: A Hoax, Not a Hope.”_ Since Anderson postures as someone who is against nuclear power and against militarism, they decided to look at his record, and found that: > Along with John Wydler and Mike McCormack, he has been one of the nuclear industry’s most vocal champions in the Congress. He repeatedly voted for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. He was asked once whether he was the author of the infamous Price-Anderson bill, which offered insurance subsidies and liability to the nuclear industry. No, he replied with his winning smile, but he would have been proud to have written the bill himself. And he has the votes to prove it. In 1974, he voted against an amendment which would have cut off Price-Anderson in 1979 rather than 1987. And in 1975, he voted against the Bingham amendment, an effort to remove Price-Anderson’s $560 million limitation on nuclear industry liability in a nuclear accident…. Anderson’s pronuclear votes are the most consistent part of his record, and the pattern isn’t limited to ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy. In 1977, he voted in favor of development of the neutron bomb. Conason and Newfield also noted Anderson’s support of such things as the B-1 bomber. The disillusionment reflected in the _Village Voice_ is likely to spread as Anderson comes under close and less fawning scrutiny than he has faced thus far. While Clark has not been getting the national press attention of Anderson, a recent poll commissioned by the Clark for President staff shows Clark to have real potential in the November election—if he can succeed in getting his message across to the American people. Opinion Research, Inc., a mainstream polling organization working out of Princeton, New Jersey, recently released the results of a study which surveyed 1200 Americans between the ages of 18 and 40. The results were more than encouraging. The poll found that 47 percent of those surveyed said they believed a strong third party would revitalize our political system; 39 percent disagreed. But an astonishing 45 percent said they would support a third party candidate whose major planks were much lower taxes and much less American intervention in the affairs of other nations—a “criss-crossing” of issues which really shows how far removed many people are from the traditional liberal-conservative pigeonholes. Forty-five percent said they would not support such a candidate, and 10 percent were undecided. With the Clark campaign’s combination of drastic tax cuts and a call for a noninterventionist foreign policy, a significant headway can be made here. Other results: 69 percent favor a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget for the federal government; 71 percent believe the Social Security system is not financially sound (the Clark campaign will issue a major White Paper on Social Security this summer); 63 percent favor a major Clark proposal: federal income tax credits to assist parents in sending their children to the schools of their choice; 57 percent disapprove of the U.S. getting involved in the domestic affairs of other nations; 60 percent say that anti-American sentiment in the Third World is a direct result of U.S. intervention, while only 30 percent say such sentiment is the result of other factors; and 69 percent say that the approximately 60 percent of our defense budget that goes to defend other nations is too high. In a final surprising poll result, in a trial heat against Carter and Reagan, Ed Clark, whose 60 projected five-minute television commercials for the campaign have not yet even begun, comes in with an astonishing 8 percent of the vote. While public opinion is highly volatile these days, Libertarians should remember that the volatility can go either way. Faced with an uphill battle, Libertarians can mount a tough campaign this year on all levels, and break through to a position of permanent importance on the American political scene. With hundreds of candidates running in nearly every state in the union, this may well be the year that Libertarians make their mark, setting the stage for major victories in the years to come.