The individualists and laissez-faire liberals were stunned and embittered, not just by the mass desertion of their former allies, but also by the abuse these allies now heaped upon them as “reactionaries” “fascists,” and “Neanderthals.” For decades Men of the Left, the individualists, without changing their position or perspectives one iota, now found themselves bitterly attacked by their erstwhile allies as benighted “extreme right-wingers.” Thus, in December 1933, Nock wrote angrily to Canon Bernard Iddings Bell: “I see I am now rated as a Tory. So are you—ain’t it? What an ignorant blatherskite FDR must be! We have been called many bad names, you and I, but that one takes the prize.” Nock’s biographer adds that “Nock thought it odd that an announced radical, anarchist, individualist, single-taxer and apostle of Spencer should be called conservative.”
But the intriguing point is that, as the far larger and more respectable conservative groups took up the cudgels against the New Deal, the only rhetoric, the only ideas available for them to use were precisely the libertarian and individualist views which they had previously scorned or ignored. Hence the sudden if highly superficial accession of these conservative Republicans and Democrats to the libertarian ranks.
Thus, there were Herbert Hoover and the conservative Republicans, they who had done so much in the twenties and earlier to pave the way for New Deal corporatism, but who now balked strongly at going the whole way. Herbert Hoover himself suddenly jumped into the libertarian ranks with his anti-New Deal book of 1934, Challenge to Liberty, which moved the bemused and wondering Nock to exclaim: “Think of a book on such a subject, by such a man!”
A prescient Nock wrote: Anyone who mentions liberty for the next two years will be supposed to be somehow beholden to the Republican party, just as anyone who mentioned it since 1917 was supposed to be a mouthpiece of the distillers and brewers.3
In fact, the individualists were in a bind at this sudden accession of old enemies as allies. On the positive side, it meant a rapid acceleration of libertarian rhetoric on the part of numerous influential politicians. And, furthermore, there were no other conceivable political allies available. But, on the negative side, the acceptance of libertarian ideas by Hoover, the Liberty League, et al., was clearly superficial and in the realm of general rhetoric only; given their true preferences, not one of them would have accepted the Spencerian laissez-faire model for America. This meant that libertarianism, as spread throughout the land, would remain on a superficial and rhetorical level, and, furthermore, would tar all libertarians, in the eyes of intellectuals, with the charge of duplicity and special pleading."
[Continues on with William F. Buckley, pg 185]
In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation. We now know that Bill Buckley, for the two years prior to establishing National Review, was admittedly a CIA agent in Mexico City, and that the sinister E. Howard Hunt was his control. His sister Priscilla, who became managing editor of National Review, was also in the CIA; and other editors James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall had at least been recipients of CIA largesse in the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom. In addition, Burnham has been identified by two reliable sources as a consultant for the CIA in the years after World War II.
Moreover, Garry Wills relates in his memoirs of the conservative movement that Frank Meyer, to whom he was close at the time, was convinced that the magazine was a CIA operation. With his Leninist-trained nose for intrigue, Meyer must be considered an important witness.
Furthermore, it was a standard practice in the CIA, at least in those early years, that no one ever resigned from the CIA. A friend of mine who joined the Agency in the early 1950s told me that if, before the age of retirement, he was mentioned as having left the CIA for another job, that I was to disregard it, since it would only be a cover for continuing Agency work. On that testimony, the case for NR being a CIA operation becomes even stronger. Also suggestive is the fact that a character even more sinister than E. Howard Hunt, William J. Casey, appears at key moments of the establishment of the New over the Old Right. It was Casey who, as attorney, presided over the incorporation of National Review and had arranged the details of the ouster of Felix Morley from Human Events.
“At any rate, in retrospect, it is clear that libertarians and Old Rightists, including myself, had made a great mistake in endorsing domestic red-baiting, a red-baiting that proved to be the major entering wedge for the complete transformation of the original right wing. We should have listened more carefully to Frank Chodorov, and to his splendidly libertarian stand on domestic redbaiting: “How to get rid of the communists in the government? Easy. Just abolish the jobs.”11 It was the jobs and their functioning that was the important thing, not the quality of the people who happened to fill them.”
It was Kirk, in fact, who brought the words “Conservatism” and “New Conservatism” into general acceptance on the right wing. Before that, knowledgeable libertarians had hated the word, and with good reason; for weren’t the conservatives the ancient enemy, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Tory and reactionary suppressors of individual liberty, the ancient champions of the Old Order of Throne-and-Altar against which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals had fought so valiantly?
And so the older classical-liberals and individualists resisted the term bitterly: Ludwig von Mises, a classical liberal, scorned the term; F.A. Hayek insisted on calling himself an “Old Whig”; and when Frank Chodorov was called a “conservative” in the pages of National Review, he wrote an outraged letter declaring, “As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical.”