FRED FLINTSTONE
In the conservative worldview, the anchor of society is a strong father figure. All good things flow from a strong family unit, and you can’t have one of those without a man who pays the bills and lays down the law. As the prototypical blue-collar guy and paterfamilias, Fred Flintstone was one of the first models of fatherly virtue. Fred was a lover of simple things: rock bowling, driving his rock car, drinking rock beer, and killing pterodactyls for fun.
Untainted by postmodern influences, Fred showed that things were better when the man was the head of the house. He belonged to fraternal organizations like the Water Buffalo Lodge and the John Bauxite Society, which encouraged civil leadership and homogeneous communities. Fred always insisted on ordering as many brontosaurus ribs as he wanted, regardless of Mayor Rockberg’s whining that it was “too much” and would “tip his car over.” Fred created an intellectual justification for wishing you lived in the distant past that conservatives have been cribbing from ever since.
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
The true godfather of modern conservatism, William Francis Buckley Jr. did more to advance the intellectual case for conservative principles than anyone else in the latter half of the twentieth century. He did all this despite being technically dead since the late seventies. As a writer, thinker, and social gadfly, Buckley remains an iconic figure on the right. He’s still regarded as a great mind because he affected a toff accent and was on television a lot. He remains so beloved that even his darting, gila monster–like eyes and tongue are often described by writers even worse than he was as “energetic” or possessing a certain “twinkle.” This impressive appearance made him a memorable party guest and a formidable opponent of civil rights.
Not much is known about Buckley’s early life; he first appears as a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones society, where he quickly rose to prominence by spending the longest time ever jacking off in a coffin. “I feel quite at home in here, Duckie!” he was once quoted as saying during a particularly successful initiation rite. Buckley’s name does crop up again in the public record during his two years working as a professional snitch for the CIA in the fifties; however, it has long been speculated that he was a guinea pig in the Agency’s infamous “Operation F.A.U.N.T.L.E.R.O.Y.,” a Cold War–era mind-control program designed to create the most insufferably precious fancy lad of all time.
After emerging as a fully formed dandy from the Ivies and the Agency, Buckley got his start in politics as a lickspittle for Joe McCarthy and would go on to lend his name and every cliché he could muster to virtually every crackpot right-wing movement or group in America and every blood-drenched dictatorship overseas. He did this as the founder of the premier journal of conservative thought, the National Review, for which he penned classic lines such as “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail [over black people because] . . . it is the advanced race” and “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals” and something to the effect of: I was dead wrong about apartheid in the American South back then but am correct about apartheid in South Africa now.
In both “life” and death, Buckley is often positioned against his great nemesis, Gore Vidal, whom he famously called a “qwee-ah!” on national television. The clash of these two titans of the Left and Right makes for an interesting contrast. On one hand you have Vidal, who produced a major body of work, including dozens of novels and plays and hundreds of essays touching on every aspect of American history, literature, and politics; on the other you have Buckley, who wrote a book about how there are too many Jews at Yale, a few lyrical essays about how much he loved sailing, and a series of spy novels in which a thinly veiled alter ego named Blackford Oakes fucks the queen of England. Vidal and Buckley’s famous spat on television is also funny because it involved Buckley calling Vidal a homo and then threatening to beat him up in the gayest way possible.
Buckley died around 1977, but his shambling cadaver maintained a bizarre form of “un-life” until 2008, robotically churning out columns, making TV appearances, and taking young men sailing. His influence on the American Right is still deeply felt. While many people believe Buckley defined the parameters of the modern right wing, his really lasting contribution is the creation of a pretentious writing style aped by every single slob, moron, and dork to come out of a college Republican group and land bylines in Buckley’s characteristically undead magazine.
MURRAY ROTHBARD AND HANS-HERMANN HOPPE
One of the many ways in which libertarianism is like Scientology is that both organizations try to ease new recruits in. Scientologists don’t bring up Xenu and volcanoes full of dead aliens until one has already signed the trillion-year contract; they start with e-meters and diet tips. Similarly, when libertarians make their pitch to skeptical youth, they tend to emphasize the commonsense, “economics 101” writings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Capitalism is just choice! Everybody loves choice, right? It’s only later, after one has hosted an awkward campaign fund-raiser for Bob Barr and named one’s firstborn Bitcoin that they offer up the hard stuff.
Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe took the fuzzy, freedom-loving logic of libertarianism to its logical endpoint, a place that most of the uninitiated would consider a nightmare of inhumanity. Rothbard, who didn’t leave the island of Manhattan until his forties due to an intense fear of bridges and tunnels, realized that a political system based on property had a child problem: Children don’t own property and they don’t work, so what is the basis for their claim to rights? His answer was: they don’t have one. Children are the property of their parents, who can dispose of them as they wish. They can’t kill them, of course (that would violate the non-aggression principle), but they could starve them to death or, if they’re angling for a trip to Branson, sell them.
For his part, Hoppe reached the conclusion—inescapable, but unspoken by most mainstream libertarians—that democracy is incompatible with liberty. Property is the basis for freedom, so society is, obviously, a mutual agreement among property owners. All functions of the state should be privatized. What about people who don’t own property? asks the nerd. They don’t have rights, bitch, answers Hoppe. Hoppe argued that the most “natural” form of government was feudal aristocracy, and that the imposition of the taxation and redistribution associated with liberal democracy was in fact far worse than the serfdom of an earlier era. Hoppe’s biggest idea was that because democracy is majoritarian by nature, the majority of people will choose to be protected from oppression and discrimination. This, to Hoppe, was why democracy is a terrible evil that must be abolished and replaced with a system of unfettered private tyrannies.
Often libertarians will couch their arguments in terms of personal freedom and sell them based on the idea that if we would only abolish the capital gains tax, the EPA, and public schools, we would all be much freer to be you and me. Once big government is out of the way, we can all smoke weed and fuck whatever our 3-D printers can dream up, so the argument goes. But for some reason, serious libertarians like Hoppe don’t cotton to the notion that their politics are about expanding the personal freedom of other people, particularly young people and racial and sexual minorities. Hoppe correctly realized that the total abolition of the state in favor of a strict regime of private property and laissez-faire economics would involve the brutal curtailment of the freedoms of speech, movement, and bodily autonomy for the vast majority of people, and that was a good thing. He envisioned a society managed by a combination of large landowners, homeowners’ associations, and insurance companies that would enforce the property rights of their customers and no one else’s. What’s more, Hoppe also realized that this society would necessarily involve the forced expulsion of anyone who thought differently. According to Hoppe:
There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian so
cial order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They—the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.III
This is the kind of stuff that would send a normie running for the hills, but once you’ve bought your third Penn Jillette book, you’re pot committed. If any intellectual has laid the groundwork for where the Right is headed now, it’s Hoppe: scorched-earth libertarianism fueled by atavistic hatred of minorities, queers, and Communists.
Now let’s depart from the mind castles of these great figures and witness modern conservatism in practice.
We’re Openly, 100 Percent Evil: Conservatives Throughout American History
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There was a time in the country when men were truly free—when rugged individuals could carve out and tame a piece of the American wilderness, build a home, buy some seed and some workers, and wring wealth from the black earth. A man’s plantation was his castle. A man’s wife was his lady. A man’s slaves were his property. A man’s hat was . . . I don’t know, his daughter. The government existed to protect him from foreign invaders and domestic cutthroats, but otherwise had no power to interfere with his life and works. A man would wake up; spend the morning reading on his veranda being fanned by one of his cheerful thralls; ride his horse through his gorgeous fields of cotton and indigo; shoot anything that flew, walked, or crawled on his property; and have the cook serve it up to him at a sumptuous dinner. This was the real Land of Liberty.
Then, under a dark cloud, the bleeding-heart do-gooders of the nanny state invaded and ruined everything with their freedom-stifling bureaucracy and so-called Thirteenth Amendment just because some visionary liberty-lovers banded together to secede from the union to expand human slavery.
Nothing to Fear but Equality Itself
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But the arc of history bends toward justice. Thankfully, the economics of war created opportunities for capital accumulation beyond the dreams of even the most successful antebellum agribusiness entrepreneur, creating a new class of Free Men: the slanderously named robber barons. These business titans used their massive wealth to push the boundaries of what freedom could mean. Yachts as big as mansions, mansions as big as hippodromes, days filled with oysters, champagne, and showgirls. You could hire Pinkertons to murder Irishmen, name libraries and concert halls after yourself, and get gout. Then, once again, big-government pencil-pushers, jealous of the robber barons’ #successwin lifestyles, destroyed their freedom with the so-called New Deal, all just because unfettered capitalist speculation had destroyed the world’s economy. This is how freedom dies—to thunderous applause.
After that, entire generations were lost—hooked and abused by the foul regulatory regime of FDR’s shock troops. Gender and racial caste systems were thankfully maintained, but the laissez-faire freedom of the wild nineteenth century was replaced by a stultifying order of high taxes, strong unions, and restrained innovation—all because a solid majority of American voters came out of the Great Depression convinced that capitalism needed to be tightly controlled by government oversight! Cowards. So the nation’s achievers and visionaries spent decades in the wilderness, scheming and theorizing about how to get regular schmoes to recognize that untrammeled economic liberty was in their best interests.
Captains of industry spent the 1950s exchanging samizdat by the aforementioned subversive libertarian thinkers Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Count Chocula, and others. They spent money to build an intellectual and media infrastructure that would take their message to the people. By the early 1960s they were ready to unveil a new, vigorous conservatism to replace the stuffy, country-club Republicanism of years past: A bold defense of economic and personal liberty. A muscular military. Down with government meddling, from zoning regulations to taxes to civil rights laws.
These appeals found a ready audience, among not only the white Southerners who had been diaping out since Brown v. Board of Education but also the new generation of suburban strivers. These puds had grown fat and happy in the Keynesian hothouse of the 1950s and yearned for a freakier, more daring capitalism that would give them the status of true gods: a world where they would break the shackles of regulation, where merciless competition would see the best and strongest rewarded for their power, where Communism would be vanquished—not appeased—and where uppity minorities would truly learn their place again. An army of suburban warriors, fired up by this activist reactionaryism, stormed the GOP and nominated Arizona senator and human Lego Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964. But most voters at the time still believed that the media was an impartial arbiter of truth rather than a cultural Marxist brainwashing machine, so when the papers said Goldwater was a dangerous extremist, folks believed them. Goldwater got crushed, and liberals got the Great Society.
The Silent-but-Deadly Majority
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Sicko libs didn’t have too long to gloat, however. The 1960s saw the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of liberal society explode into open conflict. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and a generalized youth culture revolt saw many more middle-class white people coming around to the Goldwaterite analysis of America: it had gone soft. It coddled criminal minorities and Communists here and abroad. The times demanded a return to hierarchy and control, and if that meant sabotaging the burgeoning welfare state, then so be it. Richard Nixon took this reactionary discontent and made it respectable and mainstream. No one could accuse old Dick Nixon of being a fringe crank like Goldwater. His command of the issues and connections to establishment conservatism were unsurpassed. Nixon rode a wave of disenchantment and media acquiescence to a narrow victory in 1968, but paradigm shifts take time. He had to deal with a Congress dominated by New Dealers and was forced to govern from the center-left on domestic policy.
But in the arena of culture, Nixon stoked social conflict and positioned himself as the tribune of the little guy, the silent majority, the hard hat who had been shouted down and bullied by agitating minorities and smart-mouthed student brats. The taciturn bigots helped Nixon roll to a historic blowout win over George “Acid, Amnesty, Abortion, Adult Baby” McGovern. Yet Nixon’s project was undone by the Watergate scandal, in which he sent spies to bug Democratic National Committee headquarters in order to find out whether Jane Fonda liked him or, you know, liked him liked him, which gave the foundering Democrats a new grip on power.
Jimmy Carter came into office with Republicans fully discredited by Watergate and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, just in time to oversee the dismantling of the New Deal policy consensus. Rising foreign competition to American industry, skyrocketing energy prices, galloping inflation, and cost overruns on NASA’s Six Million Dollar Man project caused a crisis for capitalism in the 1970s. Rates of profit collapsed, and firms felt they could no longer afford the postwar deal they had made with workers for union recognition and high wages in exchange for labor peace. With the ruling class unwilling to budge on their monocle allowances, profits would have to be maintained at the expense of labor. So Carter carried out a policy of high interest rates and deregulation that helped the 1 percent get their libertarian revolution without even having to win any elections.
It’s All for You, Jodie Foster
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By the time Ronald Reagan successfully snared the Republican nomination for president in 1980, the stage was set for a politics of purely reactionary cultural grievance. Neoliberal reform of the economy had been implemented without much in the way of public debate or voter input. Reagan’s campaign took this right-wing economic reality and ran with it, promising an unfettered capitalism that would work to reinstitut
e the hierarchical social relationships of pre-1960s America.
But a strange thing happened over the next few decades: the economy became markedly more savage and immiserating. Incomes stayed flat or declined as productivity rose and CEO pay exploded; deindustrialization obliterated entire swaths of the country; and stable middle-class jobs were replaced by precarious part-time service-industry ones. All the while, the cultural drift that had originally alienated and enraged white suburbanites in the sixties accelerated. The underlying racial order, codified by redlining and mass incarceration, remained largely undisturbed, but the flow of culture—from television and movie portrayals to news media framing—resisted control by grassroots reactionaries. For the most part, these right-wingers were people who had grown secure in the waning days of the New Deal consensus era and lived lives of comfort and ease. But even when you’re master of the land, you rage at your inability to control the tides.
Slick Willie Style
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After Reagan and his temporary replacement, George H. W., shuffled out of office, the 1990s dawned as a decade of indiscriminate dudgeon at an indiscreet presidency and culture. The Right hated Bill Clinton less for his policies (most of which were borrowed from the GOP, much as Nixon’s were borrowed from his New Deal Congress) than for his status as an avatar of 1960s licentiousness. Pat Buchanan—the Hitler-sympathizing reactionary who held George H. W. Bush to 53 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary by railing against sodomy, Jewish pressure, women in the workplace, and African immigrationIV—gave the game away in his prime-time “Culture War” speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention:
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 10
