Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (43 page)

The demise of NBI, if anything, accelerated the transformation of Objectivism into a bona fide movement, rife with competing schools who all cited Rand in support of their position. Anarchists were challenged by “minarchists,” supporters of a minimal state, who closely followed Rand’s arguments about government in “The Nature of Government,” an essay from
The Virtue of Selfishness
. In this essay Rand argued that government performs a vital social function by “
placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control
—i.e., under objectively defined laws” (italics in original). Governments permited individuals to live in peace and to form long-term contracts, knowing they would be objectively enforced. Rand was adamant that anarchism, “which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom,” could not work. To claim that man could live without a state was naïve, she insisted. Even a society of completely rational and moral men would still require
objective
laws” and “an arbiter for honest disagreements among men.” “ Nonetheless, both sides of the anarchist-minarchist debate insisted only they understood the true implications of Rand’s political philosophy.
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Rather than seeing these debates as a sign of intellectual health and fertility, a testimony to the excitement and energy her ideas engendered, Rand was violently opposed to any unapproved usage of her work. Even as she laid down an official party line, she insisted, “Objectivism is not an organized movement and is not to be regarded as such by anyone.” But such stern warnings did little to stop her readers from calling themselves Objectivists and creating lectures, parties, social clubs, and newsletters devoted to her thought. Rand’s principled opposition to the draft had-endeared her to politically aware students who sought a rational justification for their opposition to the war. Beyond that,
Atlas Shrugged
had indelibly etched the idea of a stateless capitalist utopia onto the right-wing psyche. Anarchists were right to recognize that Rand’s ideas had first opened them to the possibility of radical antistatism. By denying the morality of both conscription and taxation, Objectivism de-legitimized two fundamental functions of any state. At the same time Rand’s fiction suggested that an alternative world was within reach. Once imagined, Galt’s Gulch could never be forgotten.

Rand’s ideas became a powerful current in the fast-running tides of the student right, referenced by a popular new symbol, the black flag of anarchy modified with a gold dollar sign. A broad reference to radical libertarianism, the flag had multiple meanings. The dollar sign, the totem of John Galt and
Atlas Shrugged,
was a clear allusion to Rand. Its juxtaposition on the flag of anarchy, however, indicated allegiances beyond Rand, usually to anarchism. Whatever its exact meaning, the black flag looked menacing to conventional conservatives as it spread beyond the Objectivist subculture into the wider conservative movement. Reporting on a southern California Young Americans for Freedom conference held in conjunction with Robert LeFevre’s radically libertarian Rampart College, Gary North, a writer for the conservative newsletter
Chalcedon Report
, was dismayed by what he found. Instead of studious conservatives affirming faith in God and country, the conference was filled with eccentrics waving the black dollar-sign flag. Enthusiastic libertarians debated proposals to create offshore tax havens and argued over the finer points of Objectivist doctrine. “When the talk drifted into a debate over whether or not Rearden was the true hero of
Atlas Shrugged,
given the world in which we live, I left,” North reported. He concluded, “I think it is safe to say that YAF is drifting.”
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North’s reaction was representative. Many conservatives simply could not understand the new vogue for libertarianism, to them a bizarre tendency that might become dangerous if not nipped in the bud.

YAF was indeed drifting, particularly in California. By the late 1960s a significant number of chapters and the state director identified as libertarian rather than conservative. In early 1969 the Californians and their allies in other states organized a Libertarian Caucus to increase their influence within YAF. Libertarians committed to aggressive anti-statism now questioned YAF’s reflexive patriotism, cultural traditionalism, and explicit identification as a conservative group. A cultural gap was opening between libertarians and the clean-cut, anti-Communist YAF majority, whom libertarians derided as “trads,” short for traditional conservative. Sporting long hair, beards, and bell bottoms, libertarians delighted in shocking trads with proposals to legalize marijuana and pornography. Calling the United States a fascist state, they openly swapped draft evasion tips. The YAF National Office kept an uneasy eye on these developments. The libertarian upsurge came at a critical time for the organization, as it was positioning itself to wealthy donors as the one group that could effectively challenge SDS and other student activists. But now some YAF members looked and sounded like the dreaded New Left itself.

How much of this new wave of libertarianism in YAF drew from Rand’s work? In 1970 an informal survey published in the
New Guard,
YAF’s magazine, listed 10 percent of members as self-proclaimed “Objectivists.” It is likely, however, that Rand influenced a broader group than those willing to identify as official followers of her philosophy. If exact lines of influence are hard to quantify, they are easy to trace. From the outside, at least, many saw Rand and libertarianism as interchangeable and used Rand as shorthand for all libertarians. Running for the national board on a unity platform, Ron Docksai published a campaign pamphlet that suggested, “Let us waste no energy in intramural debate over each other’s credentials, but let us combat those Leftist merchants of death who will burn a book irrespective of whether it was written by Russell Kirk or Ayn Rand.” Writing to the Libertarian Caucus prior to the national convention, Don Feder asked, “Are you saying to the Traditionalists in YAF, ‘Either become Objectivists or leave the organization’? This seems to be the case.” According to Feder, “an avowed Objectivist” ran the Boston
University delegation. Berle Hubbard, the mastermind of security for the Libertarian Caucus, queried a friend about
For the New Intellectual:
“Could you dig it? Or was it too heavy for you?” Rand was far from the only source of libertarianism in YAF; others mentioned Robert LeFevre, Milton Friedman and his son David, the novelist Robert Heinlein, and Ludwig von Mises as key influences. But she was an essential part of the libertarian stew.
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In 1969 this combustible mixture of anarchism, Objectivism, and traditionalist conservatism erupted in full display at the YAF annual conference in St. Louis.
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The Libertarian Caucus brought an ambitious program to the convention. Their goals included making all seats on the national board elective, developing a resolution on YAF’s direction in the 1970s, and amending the Sharon Statement, YAF’s founding credo. Libertarians wanted to remove the Sharon Statement’s opening reference to “young conservatives” and add domestic statism to international Communism as a “twin menace” to liberty. In short, they were proposing major changes to the YAF’s governance, goals, and values.
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It was a bold agenda for the three hundred activists in a population of more than a thousand delegates. Not surprisingly, most of their alternative planks were soundly rejected by the convention, including those that advocated draft resistance, an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, and the legalization of marijuana.

On the third day of the conference libertarian frustration bubbled over when their antidraft resolution went down to defeat. Not only did the convention reject the libertarian plank, but in the plank that passed they included a pointed clause condemning draft resistance and the burning of draft cards. The convention’s decision to endorse abolition of the draft, but not resistance to it, was critical. It signaled that there were definite limits to YAF’s antistatism. The organization would remain firmly within the political establishment. Rhetorical support of limited government was fine, but anarchism and radical libertarianism were beyond the pale.
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In the face of this insult, the libertarians could no longer resist their innate impulse to challenge authority. A small pack of students gathered in a conspiratorial knot. One of the group had a facsimile of his draft card. (Apparently the conservative within him lived still, for he was unwilling to sacrifice the actual card.) Another dissident seized a
microphone and announced to the assembly that any person had a right to defend himself against violence, including state violence. Then “he raised a card, touched it with a flame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash.”
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The symbol of YAF, a hand holding the torch of liberty, had been deftly satirized and openly mocked.

After a few moments of shocked silence, pandemonium erupted on the convention floor. “Kill the commies” yelled the patriotic majority. Amid shouts, shoving, and fisticuffs, the traitorous facsimile draft card burners were ejected from the convention floor. Around three hundred of their ideological brethren followed the rebels out of the convention, and out of Young Americans for Freedom. A chasm now separated the libertarians and the traditionalists. By the end of the year a substantial number of YAF chapters had either left the organization or had their charters rescinded. California alone lost twenty-four chapters.
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This libertarian secession was the culmination of a dynamic that had plagued modern American conservatism since its emergence earlier in the century. Postwar conservatives had crafted a careful synthetic ideology with a productive contradiction at its core: the tension between free market capitalism and cultural traditionalism. Clashes over the balance of power had broken out regularly ever since, with Rand’s excommunication by
National Review
among the most prominent. The cultural upheavals of the late 1960s were a watershed, for they made stark the difference between laissez-faire libertarians and tradition-bound conservatives. Taking inspiration from the revolutionary language of the New Left, libertarians finally had enough confidence and strength to identify themselves as a distinct political movement. They were no longer conservatives, but following in Rand’s footsteps they would remain part of the right.

Immediately after the convention Murray Rothbard and his new comrade Karl Hess attempted to pull the exodus of libertarians to the left, but it was Rand who emerged as a more decisive influence. Rothbard’s call for a pan-ideological movement was soundly rejected by Libertarian Caucus organizers. In an open letter to Rothbard distributed in St. Louis, Don Ernsberger scoffed at Rothbard’s “small group in New York” and told him, “Join the Left if you will Dr. Rothbard, but don’t try to hand us that crap about the forces of freedom being there.
Your view is pure negation.”
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Rothbard and Hess pulled together a few left-right conferences in the year following St. Louis, but their Radical Libertarian Alliance was short-lived. More durable were the many neo-Objectivist groups that emerged in the fall of 1969. In open revolt against YAF the UCLA chapter began putting out “some real volatile stuff,” one California libertarian informed the deposed state director. “It has black flags with dollar signs and quotes from Rand yet.”
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At the University of San Diego another student reported that the local YAF leader “has changed her chapter into an open Objectivist group and has been holding extensive and intensive study groups in the area and has been sponsoring speakers on campus.”
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The largest and most influential organization to emerge from the libertarian secession, the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL), grew out of Objectivist roots. The group was formed by a merger between YAF’s Libertarian Caucus and the Society for Rational Individualism, publisher of
The Rational Individualist
. One of the organization’s first press releases, “S.I.L. Asks Release of Imprisoned Radical,” blended fiction with reality by objecting to the imprisonment of John Galt. The group rallied in protest on November 22, the date given in
Atlas Shrugged
for Galt’s delivery of his famous sixty-page speech. The small band of libertarians waving black flags with dollar signs in front of the Philadelphia Federal Courthouse was largely misunderstood, with several passersby accusing them of Communist sympathies.
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Even a reading of Galt’s individualist oath did little to clarify the protest’s intent.

However inscrutable to outsiders, SIL quickly emerged as the central clearinghouse for the libertarian movement by dint of its free-form membership structure and the enthusiasm of its founders. Immediately after its birth SIL claimed 103 chapters, and at its first-year anniversary boasted thirteen hundred members, three thousand persons in contact with the organization, and 175,000 pieces of literature distributed.
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The 1972 directory of SIL was fat with libertarian organizations. Subdivided into multiple categories, the directory provides a snapshot of the early libertarian movement: 36 Libertarian Action Organizations are listed, along with 98 local SIL chapters, 33 institutes, 4 foundations, 29 booksellers, 31 libertarian-friendly publishers, 6 education endeavors, 24 enterprises, and 13 new community projects. The directory also identified a range of issue groups and political action groups, including
nine antidraft groups and others dedicated to antiwar, antitax, abortion rights, mental health, gun control, women’s liberation, gay liberation, legal defense, and marijuana legalization.
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