From The End of the Myth (Greg Grandin, 2019) pp218-222
In the years after Reagan’s first election, the New Right spearheaded a remarkable restoration of markets and moralism, a post-Vietnam re-sanctification of the mission that many thought permanently de-sanctifled. It was in the realm of foreign policy and diplomacy where much of the New Right’s efforts at re-legitimation took place, where action could be taken to reestablish authority in the world and ideas could be rehearsed to justify that action. Conservative intellectuals brought early into the administration worked to correct the idea, which took hold after Vietnam, that US power was immoral. Such an idea was confirmed by multiple sources: massacres in My Lai and Kent State, among others; the illegal War on Cambodia; investigations into covert operations around the world, into coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; and domestic surveillance and psych-ops programs used against U.S. citizens, including Martin Luther King.
Skepticism and cynicism spread, creating something more threatening than organized opposition: a culture of deep distrust, alternating between anger and jaundiced apathy and primed to believe the worst of the United States, either related to things Washington actually did secretly bomb Cambodia for years, work to overthrow democratically elected leaders throughout Latin America and elsewhere – or was thought to have done, expressed in the proliferation of conspiracy theories to explain politics.
And so the country might need “a military response to the Soviets,” as William Clark, Reagan’s deputy secretary of state, wrote in 1981, in an influential policy memo that circulated through the administration. But it also needed “an ideological response.” “Our struggle is for political liberty,” Clark said. A policy that emphasized “human rights,” of the kind that Carter had begun to promote during his presidency, might, he thought, help with this ideological project. But some revision was needed. In the immediate postwar years, conservatives successfully prevented social rights from being legitimated within the United States (and from coming in in a “roundabout” way through the back door of colonialism, via Puerto Rico). But in most of the rest of the world, “human rights” meant social rights. New Right intellectuals therefore pushed for a redefinition, hoping to return to a purer “American” understanding, pared down to align with “individual rights.” Richard Allen, Reagan’s national security advisor; agreed, saying that “the notion of economic and social rights is a dilution and distortion of the original meaning of human rights.” “Life, liberty, Property,” Allen said, listing the things that should properly be considered human rights.
Ultimately, however, Clark thought the phrase “human rights” was unsalvageable. He recommended that the State Department“ move away” from its use altogether and instead substitute “individual rights,“ “political rights,” and “civil liberties.” What Clark and others wanted was Andrew Jackson’s understanding of “human rights”: in the middle of Indian removal, Jackson had championed a minimalist definition of government power (“scarcely to be felt”) in the service of a maximal defense of individual rights, which would entail the right to the property taken from the Indians after their removal. Like “freedom,” the idea of “individual rights” could be deployed both as universal appeal – on behalf of people trampled down by tyranny – and as racist dog whistle. It is impossible to extricate “individual rights” – to possess and to bear arms, and to call on the power of the state to protect those rights – from the bloody history that gave rise to those rights, from the entitlements settlers and slavers won from people of color as they moved across the land. “Individual rights,” as Trent Lott acknowledged in 1984, “are things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in.” This reassertion of the ideal of individual rights corresponded to a broader ideological campaign run by corporations, conservative foundations, and libertarian donors. The story is well known: diverse intellectuals and activists, among them the economist Friedrich von Hayek and the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, established footholds in educational and cultural institutions, in universities and publishing houses, and cultivated generations of followers to carry their anti-statist revolution forward, to fight collectivism in all its forms.” When their moment came – when the crisis hit in the 197Os – they were ready, helping to push forth deregulation, privatization, and tax cuts. This revolution is often described as the triumph of the “Austrian” school, in that many of its most prominent economists, such as Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, hailed from Vienna. But the founders of the modern libertarian movements – including those mentioned earlier, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and James Buchanan – understood their mission to apply “the idea of the frontier” to public policy.“ The libertarian revolution proved to be enormously successful (counting among its achievements legal rulings granting the right of free speech to corporations), transforming the fields of economics, law, education, labor relations, and philosophy.
Increasingly politicized elites began to invest vast sum in any intellectual, lawyer, economist, or philosopher willing to tell them they were the new pioneers, that the individual was the sole source of virtue, the only creator of value, that the world was divided between makers and takers, that market solutions were the only effective solutions, and that new economic frontiers were always open to conquest. Decades earlier, similar “masters of industry,” Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out, had proclaimed themselves pioneers and appropriated the symbols of the West to seize “new avenues of action and of power” and “to extend the scope of their dominion.” And here they were again, CEOs singing, “Don’t fence me in.” *
Unfencing CEOs, though, was hardly the kind of “ideological response” that could justify Reagan’s dramatic increase in military spending and support for third world anti-communist insurgencies. Coming up with a vision of the commonweal wasn’t easy when so much of the New Right was bent on destroying the very idea of the commonweal. The richer were getting richer, the poor were becoming poorer, even as New Right policy intellectuals chipped away at welfare, attack public education, and weakened unions. It’s in this context, of a restored imperial presidency trying to reestablish US power on a moral foundation and of a committed cadre of conservative activists who have been happy to strike the word “social” from the dictionary. Reagan threw his support behind immigration reform.
*The Koch brothers, for instance, began their involvement in national politics in 1980, as David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, pushing for an even more extreme deregulatory agenda than Reagan did and rallying his supporters around the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion. Sagebrush emerged in opposition to “end-of-plenty” legislation passed by Congress in the 1970s to better manage western public land, including the Endangered Species Act. Financed by big ranchers, land developers, miners, lumber companies, and independent oil mavericks, Sagebrush was a largely contrived movement to weaken environmental regulations and federal control, with “rebels” fashioning themselves as cowboy-hat-wearing frontier Jacksonians, waging war on federal despots. Reagan, too, supported Sagebrush, and in office he increased the amount of public land open to gas and oil drilling. Over the years, the Kochs have continued to finance so-called wise use campaigns, funding politicians and organizations aimed at privatizing federal land or transferring it to state authority (as well as reducing the size of protected natural reserves and federal land monuments, as the Trump administration has done with Bears Bars in Utah).
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