Truth! The NAZIS, Like The Republicans, Disagreed With Everything FDR Ever Did and Fought Him Every Inch of The Way

[Inconvenient Rightist Truths]

In the crusade against Obama administration efforts on behalf of economic
recovery and health care reform, we encounter lies, damn lies, and
Republican talking points. Touchstones like: “government takeover,”
“government-run,” “profligate spending,” “usurpation of power”—where did
they all come from? Well, in a word, they all came from this guy named
Albert Jay Nock.

nock_albert_jay



Albert Jay Nock was one of the most virulent critics of President
Roosevelt and his administration’s efforts to extract the nation from
the Great Depression. Nock’s opus, Our Enemy, the State, published in
1935, attacked the New Deal in terms that, well, you’d have to listen
to Glen Beck to replicate. Or Michele Bachmann. Or Rush. It is the
source code for anti-Obama talking points.

Our Enemy, The State

Born in Pennsylvania and based for much of his life in New York
and
Brussels, Nock was a visiting professor at Bard College and a lecturer at
University of Virginia. He was a failed Episcopalian cleric who wrote
proto-libertarian works rooted in a philosophical tradition that would
never fly today. Yet many of his sound bites endure.

Nock saw the state as “them,” not “us,” and “them” really came
to mean Roosevelt. You must know that Roosevelt was hated by
many during the Great Depression. Not disliked, hated. The
laissez faire crowd saw every move toward government relief of
intolerable conditions as government
self-aggrandizement—Nock’s term, not mine. Despite the fact
that people were desperate in the streets, extreme-sport
capitalists saw only usurpation of the powers of the church
(as the precursor to the modern social relief agency) and the
individual—that old fall-back, the rugged individual—Nock’s
term, not mine.

Nock preferred alms-to-beggars to a hand-up from the
government, and said so, as he does here in lamenting
government involvement in social relief programs as somehow
causing individuals to fall away from the ethos of mutual
assistance:

We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own
disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been
moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the
State's relief-agency.

Initiatives like the legendary Civilian Conservation Corps,
the CCC, were presented as Mr. Roosevelt “announcing the
doctrine, brand-new in our history, that the State owes its
citizens a living.” And such a measure, he felt, was simply a
pretext for increasing government control. “Thus the State,”
he wrote, “‘turns every contingency into a resource’ for
accumulating power in itself…”

Hated Roosevelt, Hate Obama

The issue was with Roosevelt himself:

State power has not only been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has
been so far concentrated into the hands of the Executive that the existing
régime is a régime of personal government.

Professor Nock pulls no punches. With a Beckian flourish he
proclaims, “This regime was established by a coup d'État of a
new and unusual kind, practicable only in a rich country.”
Yup. A coup d’etat. You almost want to ask for Mr.
Roosevelt’s birth certificate.

Nock’s antipathy to Roosevelt knew few boundaries.
Perversely, Nock saw in the New Deal, “the erection of poverty
and mendicancy into a permanent political asset.” As if,
rather than responding to a national emergency, Roosevelt was
amassing poverty as political capital, as an opportunistic end
in itself even during the depths of the Great Depression. To
a Republican of a certain brand, this was gospel.

Socialists by Any Other Name

Here is Nock’s take on the form of relief that would become
known as Social Security:

The method of direct subsidy, or sheer cash-purchase, [as if Roosevelt was
literally buying the poor] will therefore in all probability soon give way
to the indirect method of what is called “social legislation”; that is, a
multiplex system of State-managed pensions, insurances and indemnities of
various kinds.

Instead of socialists, Nock railed against “collectivists.”
Nock remarked, “One of my friends said to me lately that if
the public-utility corporations did not mend their ways, the
State would take over their business and operate it.” Of
course, Nock felt this was repugnant. But what he doesn’t say
is the utilities weren’t bothering to electrify vast expanses
of rural America because there was no money in it.

Nock was an adherent of mid-19th century English
proto-libertarian Herbert Spencer. Spencer was to
contemporary social thought what the reptilian brain is to
Einstein. Spencer characterized any government-run effort as
“slow, stupid, extravagant, unadaptive, corrupt and
obstructive.” Interestingly, Nock professed this belief as
his own just ten years before the “greatest generation” went
to war under Roosevelt and saved the world, for a while
anyway, from fascism.

Birthing Cato

“Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in
turn another, and so on indefinitely…” wrote Nock. And every
intervention, life-saving or not, was seen as usurpation of
individual power. In that jealousy he established that
elected government was a thing to be hated, and ultimately,
abolished. In this respect, his thought was a precursor to
the anarcho-capitalists, or as I call them,
anarcho-libertarians. Little known but influential
libertarians such as Frank Chodorov and Murray Rothbard were
his intellectual progeny, as was William F. Buckley, Jr., who
got to know Nock, a supplicant of Buckley senior, while still
a child. Ayn Rand fits in here, too. So we see these two
strands emanating from the visiting professor’s thought,
tangling and untangling over time, but always united in
opposition to the State, enemy of freedom.

In Nock’s construct, individual perogatives were manifest as
social power, as opposed to State power. Corporate power,
too, was social power:

Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special
instance - then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep
its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance,
wastefulness and corruption, intervene to "supervise" or "regulate" the
whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire.

In a rare moment of informality, Nock bends to facetiousness. Having the
State take over failed financial institutions is represented pretty much
as a crime against nature. And somehow, Nock manages to see the Crash of
’29 as a mere “special instance,” an “Oh, that” moment. Furthermore, he
has the temerity to go on the offensive against any and all regulation
after the nation’s life savings have been wiped out. And what were they
wiped out by? The market abuses of a decade of laissez faire government.
One can only think, “Cato Institute, here we come!”

To Nock, as to libertarians today, social power is locked in a
zero sum gain struggle with state power. If state power can
in any way said to be increasing, then social power must be
decreasing. Sarah Palin rushes to these ramparts with her
codified rhetoric under the banner of freedom. Michele
Bachman is her lesser echo. Freedom from government. Freedom
from them—us.

There is a technical political term, called
paleoconservatism—you can’t make this stuff up—that describes
Nock-inspired thought. Paleoconservatism espouses
anti-communism, isolationism, “family values,” Americanism,
rugged individualism, anti-Statism, and religion (Christians
only, thank you). The term is used in opposition to neocon.
The paleoconservative motto might be, “Praise God, but get
even.”1 Visiting professor Nock may have been the original
paleoconservative, the Lucy of his ilk.

Nock’s thought arises a multi-layered 19th century tradition
of philosophy. He was well-read in the Federalist papers. He
is about Hegel. And early 20th century anti-statist Franz
Oppenheimer. He even critiques Plato. Serious scholarship
could be performed on this guy. But why bother? In his heart
of hearts, he was like Beck, a mouthy polemicist.

“History? We don’t need no stinkin’ history!”

It is an overworn truism that those who do not learn from
history are destined to repeat it. But who would have guessed
that any party could break its back to repeat it so
thoroughly, in the carbon copy reaction we see in the
Republicans at this moment?

The Obama administration will never be able to prove that
financial catastrophe was avoided by its interventions (and by
the impossibly ironic Paulson-led interventions of the dying
Bush regime). You can’t prove a negative like that. And, in
that respect at least, the present moment is far different
than the Great Depression, when they went over the falls.
History, I predict, will attest to the very great likelihood
that the Obama administration did stem the tide of disaster.
And it will show that for the most part the administration
held its nose as it did so. Despite this, Obama will forever
wear the mantle of usurper, government overstepper, just like
Roosevelt, in the rhetoric of that obscure, somewhat creepy
(he wrote an essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled "The Jewish
Problem in America") ex-cleric from Scranton.

Let them—the Republicans—say what they will, history
proclaims Roosevelt was right, and that only a cohesive
federal government can marshal the forces necessary to
counter a national economic collapse.

But we have an entire party, a party bereft of a moderate
wing, standing in the town square, fingers in ears, screaming
“Redo, redo!” And while the Republicans still envy the spoils
that control of the State entails, in their mushy heart of
hearts that tiny anarcho-libertarian muscle is beating away, a
little Energizer Bunny from a paleolithic era of political
thought.



Note to Scholars: I readily acknowledge that Nock was in no way the only
Depression-era antecedent for current conservative talking points. He was
merely one of the most visible and audacious. We would not want to forget
Mr. Hoover, who railed against Roosevelt for the better part of a decade
after losing office.