The Re-Emergence of Central Themes of the “Conservative Revolution”
by Tom G. Palmer1
“It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
– Steve Bannon, November 2016
“There must be an authority standing above experts and officials, with full liberty of initiative and decision….
That was the path along which we came to the Single Party; it was that which made National Socialism appear to us to be not entirely repulsive and which suggested to us that it might contain material which could be so shaped as in the end to provide us with a really practicable new solution. It was a mistake, and indeed, a fatal one.
But was it so reprehensible or even so stupid as it is usually represented in democratic quarters?”
– Herman Rauschning, The Conservative Revolution, 1941
Old political ideas, when resurrected, are re-appropriated and re-expressed in different contexts to people with different memories, expectations, and sensibilities. Thus, were one to compare communist thought in 19th century Germany with communist thought in 1930s Russia, one should not be shocked that the context, the language, and the applications would be rather different, although common themes and core texts could certainly be identified. We are today witnessing the reappropriation of a number of key ideas of the “Conservative Revolution,” a movement that preceded National Socialism in Germany and paved the way for the erection of a totalitarian state that exercised terror over millions of people from 1933 to 1945. Some of the leaders of that movement later disavowed or quietly withdrew from alliance to the National Socialist German Workers Party and its supreme leader, Adolf Hitler; at least one was executed; others pledged their absolute loyalty to the National Socialist movement and “the Leader.”
The Conservative Revolution movement that emerged after the first World War in Germany shaped a great deal of political discourse in Germany and beyond through the 1920s and until the NSDAP took power. Indeed, those ideas profoundly shaped the policies of the totalitarian one-party state. Some, but not all, of the theorists of the Conservative Revolution enthusiastically joined the National Socialist Workers Party and participated in building the Third Reich; prominent examples included Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, both of whom have had significant influence on political thought in recent decades.2
A few were seen as rivals and eliminated, notably Edgar Julius Jung, who had argued for the replacement of the Weimar republic by a dictatorship, but who was not so enthusiastic about the dictator he got. Some never joined the NSDAP and either went into exile (notably the Jewish sympathizer with the Conservative Revolution Leo Strauss, who had an influence on Schmitt in tipping him into open embrace of National Socialist tyranny3) or became less political, such as Hans Freyer, who never joined the party and later repented of his earlier views. Some of the academics and writers of the Conservative Revolution who joined the NSDAP later fell out of favor or lost out in power struggles with more ruthless or slavish competitors, but that is irrelevant to the fact that they actively made possible the totalitarian state. They cannot escape responsibility for what followed, just as the murder of Leon Trotsky by Stalin and the persecution of Troysky’s loyal followers did not absolve Trotsky and his followers of responsibility for building the one-party totalitarian Soviet Union and sending countless “class enemies” to be tortured, enslaved, and murdered.
There has been underway for more than a decade a resurgence of interest in the ideas of the Conservative Revolution, not just among intellectual or political historians, but among active political practitioners. I’m not referring merely to the mutterings and crude graffiti of tiny fringes of transgressive extremists who unfurl swastikas and have shrines to Hitler in their homes, as we saw with the “Golden Dawn” party, which had representation in the Greek and European parliaments until 2019. Conservative Revolutionary ideas are re-entering the political mainstream, whether labeled national conservatism, anti-globalist patriotism, or something else, and they have even come to be politically dominant in some circles and even countries. My claim is not that all those who are repackaging the ideas of the Conservative Revolution are National Socialist anti-semites, holocaust deniers, and the like, although some of them seem quite willing to work with and repackage the ideas of that ilk, but that the ideas they are advancing are undermining liberal democracy and may usher in something quite terrible, perhaps as terrible as what ravaged the world in the 1930s and 1940s. (Few in 1932 thought that what would emerge from Hitler’s taking of power would be concentration camps, mass slaughter, and world war.) They latch on to, appropriate, and deploy as weapons (the polemical use of ideas is prominent in such circles) ideas from other intellectual trends – conservative, socialist, populist, mercantilist, nationalist, etc. – and have even appropriated and profoundly distorted ideas identified with liberalism, all on behalf of profoundly illiberal agendas.
The ideas of the Conservative Revolution were articulated from the 1910s though the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes by former soldiers who had experienced combat in World War I – the “front experience,” notably the war veteran, novelist, and political polemicist Ernst Jünger and the writer Ernst von Solomon, who was a Freikorps fighter and engaged in combat in the Baltics and Silesia as a German nationalist, and they played clear roles in paving the way for replacement of a flawed and faltering representative government by an absolute, brutal, and murderous dictatorship under the National Socialist one-party state. Ideas from that period are circulating again and are having substantial influence, especially in Europe and in North and South America. In some cases, old books are being reprinted, translated, and disseminated through mail-order and across the internet via publications such as Junge Freiheit, the Daily Stormer, and Arktos Media. Whether the current ideologues who are focused on destruction of liberal institutions and practices draw directly from those tomes or not, themes are being reappropriated today and actively put to work undermining liberal, constitutional democracy. Often, especially among those who relish transgressions against what they perceive as “political correctness,” the original sources are acknowledged, although then covered over with a veneer of irony, allowing them, when called on for promoting ideas that in the past resulted in genocide, to respond, “oh, it was all ironic,” or “really, you don’t get the joke?”
Conservative, Revolutionary, and Collectivist
The ideas of the conservative revolution were not rooted in any attempt to conserve worthy institutions of long-standing. In fact, the Conservative Revolutionaries were – as their present epigones are today – thoroughly alienated from the institutions around them. Nor did they want to return to any other recent set of institutions, most of which they also scorned. Instead, they held up “values,” often rooted in a mythical heroic past, which they believed were being suppressed by all the institutions of modernity – values such as sacrifice, valor, courage, perseverance, “manliness,” discipline, duty, obedience, an iron will, resoluteness, self-denial, “being toward death” (to use Heidegger’s memorable phrase), and others associated with martial virtue and combat.
As Edgar Julius Jung, one of the key figures in the formulation of the Conservative Revolution, wrote in 1927:
The impulse to preserve these [values] at any price, can be called conservative. Insofar as previous generally valid judgements of value are suited to generate a false attitude toward these highest values, to that extent we are for a ‘revaluation of all values.’ If this revaluation is equivalent to the overthrow of things, then we may be called revolutionary. Our justification is this, that one must, from the deepest will to preservation, destroy.4
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who popularized the idea of a “Third Reich,” exclaimed that “a conservative’s function is to create values worth conserving.”
A key motivation of both historic and contemporary Conservative Revolutionaries is the demand for identity and authenticity. The influential works of Martin Heidegger, which have puzzled and intrigued people for decades, have in more recent years been shown to be profoundly collectivist. His cryptic treatments of discussion of Dasein (existence, being-there) were not calls for achieving individuality, but for submersion in collectivism. His writings show that Dasein is something of which one can speak only in the collective “we,” and specifically, the Dasein of a particular people, the German Volk. That is not immediately evident from Being and Time, although there are hints, but Heidegger declared in his lectures after the National Socialist seizure of power (and which were kept under lock and key for many decades after the defeat of the National Socialist-state):
The German people is now passing through a moment of historical greatness: the youth of the academy knows this greatness. What is happening, then? The German people as a whole is coming to itself, that is, it is finding its leadership. In this leadership, the people that has come to itself is creating a state.
That is to say, in “finding its leadership,” the leader (“der Führer”) will decide for all of the people. And, indeed, that collective Dasein, by finding its leadership, will be infused with power: “Only when we are what we are coming to be, from the greatness of the inception of the Dasein of our spirit and people, only then do we remain fit for the power of the goal toward which our history is striving.”
The Assault on Deliberation
A core motivation was a pure and unwavering hatred of liberalism and its associated manifestations: free trade and private property in economic relations, deliberative democracy in political relations, pluralism in social, cultural, and religious matters, well defined and legally secure equal fundamental rights in legal relations. The Conservative Revolutionaries identified all of those ideas as “un-German” and thus to be destroyed. Liberalism, they argued, was inimical to all of their “values.” Many proposed an alliance of a renewed German Empire with the USSR in order to cleanse the world of liberalism. (Indeed, for a while that did exist, as the USSR facilitated German rearmament and then signed a formal alliance to divide up Eastern Europe with the third Reich, an alliance that was only ended with Hitler’s invasion of the USSR.) Ernst Niekisch, a central figure in the Conservative Revolution and a founder of Germany’s National Bolshevik movement, proposed a “resistance movement” on behalf of “the German struggle for freedom”:
The resistance movement is directed simply against the ideas of the West, no matter in what form they affect Germany’s fate. It holds as an indispensable prerequisite for the German struggle for freedom the uprising against ideas of Roman rule, against Roman law, against the ideas of 1789, against the ideas of civilization, individualism, liberalism, democracy, against the bourgeois view of the world and economy. To the resistance movement, turning away from the goods of Europe is not just a matter of lip service; it is the willingness to draw the consequences of this stance in all its scope and severity. The resistance movement demands, among other things: a resolute political turn to the east … establishment of relations with all oppressed peoples, kindling of irredentist movements in all states in which German nationality is suppressed. Accustoming the nation, especially the youth, to a frugal life of discipline and duty. Cultivation of defense by all means; renunciation of the principle of private property in the Roman law sense. Restriction of control over private property. Departure from the capitalist economy and the capitalist form of society. Comprehensively prepared and ruthless withdrawal from the world economy with all the consequences.
Leaders of the far-right of the political spectrum were, as we have witnessed again in recent years, quite happy to be allied with the far-left in order to destroy the liberal center.5
In his vigorous and absolute defense of Hitler’s assassinations of his opponents initiated on June 30, 1934 (“The Night of the Long Knives”), Carl Schmitt insisted, in his essay “Der Führer Schützt das Recht” that “the liberal way of thinking about law” was the “Magna Carta of traitors” and that “the highest justice justifies itself”:
In truth the Fuhrer’s action was true judging. It is not subject to law but is in itself the highest justice. It was not the action of a republican dictator who creates a fait accompli in a space free of laws while the law for a moment closes its eyes in order that, on the basis of those new facts, the fiction of a legality free of gaps may again take its place. The judicial quality of the Führer comes from the same source of justice from which all the justice of every folk derives. In the greatest emergency the highest justice justifies itself and there appears the highest degree of avenging judicial realization of its law. All law comes out of the people’s right to life.
The Conservative Revolutionaries of today similarly are willing to smash to bits all institutions, constructed or evolved, that thwart the realization of what they consider their values. Their conservatism is not rooted in the thought of Edmund Burke; it is not rooted in caution about altering what has persisted for long periods of time; it is a reckless assault on institutions, with no concern about what may come afterwards.
The contemporary Conservative Revolution is unmoored from understanding of cause-and-effect relationships in social processes, from insights drawn from economics and sociology, from appreciation of the value of discussion, dialectic, and deliberation, from any appreciation of rules or process, from any sensible conservatism regarding the folly of wantonly smashing and destroying inherited institutions.
The contemporary Conservative Revolutionaries prefer action for the sake of action, a principle that was articulated clearly by the Conservative Revolutionaries in the 1920s. Detailed programmes of reform are beside the point, because the point is to gain power and to use it to smash the institutions of liberal constitutional democracies. In place of a programme of reform, Conservative Revolutionaries generally prefer to substitute a leader with power unhedged by rules, checks, balances, and procedures. They are against what they imagine exists and they want someone to smash it. Whatever they are for, they are definitely against “the globalists.”6 As to having any kind of reform agenda, they are largely mute, beyond waving around the usual illiberal policies of more restrictions on international trade, more subsidies and lower tax burdens for their constituencies, restrictions on the free speech of those they abhor, and so on.
Action, not Talk
As Roger Woods demonstrated in his study of The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, the Conservative Revolution was ultimately unable to agree on a common programme with clear elements and steps, but instead focused on the need for an authoritarian or totalitarian state with a powerful leader. What mattered was the making of decisions, not what decisions were to be made. Thus, as Woods notes (citing Martin Greiffenhagen), “instead of calling for sacrifice for the sake of generally recognised goals, conservative theory goes in search of values and institutions for which it is worth making a sacrifice.” Decisionism, a favorite theory of both Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger during various periods of their careers, was a frequent theme in their assault on liberals and liberal ideas. In the words of Ernst Niekisch in 1936:
The characteristic things about this whole period [the years of the Weimar Republic] is that ‘decisionism’ is made into a system in its own right. Decisions are made not on the basis of compelling ideas, but an idea is made into something compelling by commitment to it. The bourgeois world is aware that it lacks substance and has become a void. It expects that whoever commits himself to it will bring new values with him.
To take one theme that has been advanced by political figures whose advisors draw from this well of decisionism and resoluteness, Conservative Revolutionaries agree that there is altogether too much talk, when what is needed is action! Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán refuses to debate his political rivals (he also denies them broadcast coverage by means of his total control of radio and television in the country7) and justified his refusal in 2010 to debate in quite clear terms:
No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious . . . I am sure you have seen what happens when a tree falls over a road and many people gather around it. Here you always have two kinds of people. Those who have great ideas how to remove the tree, and share with others their wonderful theories, and give advice. Others simply realize that the best is to start pulling the tree from the road. . . . [W]e need to understand that for rebuilding the economy it is not theories that are needed but rather thirty robust lads who start working to implement what we all know needs to be done.
No more talk. It’s time for action! Donald J. Trump in his inaugural address expressed the same idea in similar terms:
In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it. The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action. Do not allow anyone to tell you that it cannot be done. No challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America. We will not fail. Our country will thrive and prosper again.
“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.” Lest one complain that talk about empty talk is just so much empty talk, the speech was written by two figures who are certainly aware of and influenced by the ideas of the Conservative Revolution, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
One of the twentieth century’s most prescient and trenchant critics of totalitarianism and most clear-eyed defenders of liberal democracy, F. A. Hayek, warned in 1944 of the destructive appeal of such dismissal of “empty talk” and preference for “action”:
We must here return for a moment to the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime. In this stage it is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal. It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal. ‘Strong’ in this sense means not merely a numerical majority – it is the ineffectiveness of parliamentary majorities with which people are dissatisfied. What they will seek is somebody with such solid support as to inspire confidence that he can carry out whatever he wants. It is here that the new type of party organized on military lines, comes in.
I expect that we will be hearing more such talk of “action, not words” in future and I believe that it would be well for us to heed Hayek’s warning, as he had lived through precisely that discourse before the National Socialist seizure of power.
It’s worth emphasizing that in making comparisons between contemporary figures and those of the 1920s and 1930s, I’m not asserting either that they are or that they were all backers of Hitler’s state or of the full National Socialist agenda of totalitarian dictatorship, collectivism, war, and extermination of Jews, Roma, the disabled, and all political rivals. Rather, such denigration of “talk” in favor of “action” is worrisome because it is an attack on deliberative government, on government by discussion and it made possible those horrors and we may anticipate similar horrors, if not the same, if the contemporary Conservative Revolutionaries prevail.
Achievement of concord and resolution of differences by discussion, deliberation, persuasion, negotiation, and exchange is a core element not only of market economies, but of liberalism per se, as Schmitt noted. Schmitt took great pains to distinguish “parliamentarism” (with all that talking, in the form of hearings and debates and the like) from “democracy,” a concept he associates exclusively with the formulations of Rousseau. Schmitt goes so far as to stipulate that “the essence of the democratic principle is … the assertion of an identity between law and the people’s will.” It is an eminently contestable claim that alleged identity as the “essence” of the democratic principle; it is, moreover, quite ahistorical, as that is not how it has generally been used before, during, and after Schmitt’s time. It has become, however, the standard approach to populist assaults in the name of “democracy” against pluralistic societies and deliberative democratic government.
One student of politics who had some role in the promulgation of the term was Aristotle, who in The Politics described the popular understanding of democracy:
(1) Now the basic premise of the democratic sort of regime is freedom. It is [1317b] customarily said that only in this sort of regime do men partake of freedom, for, so it is asserted, every democracy aims at this. One aspect of freedom is being ruled and ruling in turn. (2) The justice that is characteristically popular is to have equality on the basis of number and not on the basis of merit; where justice is of this sort, the multitude must necessarily have authority, and what is resolved by the majority must be final and must be justice, for, they assert, each of the citizens must have an equal share. The result is that in democracies the poor have more authority than the well off, for they are the majority, and what is resolved by the majority is authoritative. (3) This, then, is one mark of freedom, and it is regarded by those of the popular sort as the defining principle of the regime. Another is to live as one wants. For this is, they assert, the work of freedom, since not living as one wants is characteristic of a person who is enslaved. (4) This, then, is the second defining principle of democracy. From it has come [the claim to merit] not being ruled by anyone, or failing this, [to rule and be ruled] in turn. It contributes in this way to the freedom that is based on equality.8
Democracy, in the liberal understanding, is neither a machine for guaranteeing “an identity between law and the people’s will,” nor a system for registering preferences encoded in the people in order to generate a social welfare function that would be susceptible to being tabulated independently of their behavior. Liberal democracy is no contradiction, as Schmitt and other Conservative Revolutionaries insist, for at its core is a concern with the sustainability of discussion as a means of resolving differences and even of formulating and ascertaining majority preferences for those issues on which collective choice is unavoidable.
Democracy is only sustainable when it is liberal, that is, when the law applies to all (“being ruled and ruling in turn”) and the citizens live in freedom (“to live as one wants).” Liberal democracies are political systems that enable people to deliberate about the public good in order to live together peacefully and to resolve their differences through deliberation and collective decision-making processes that are expected to be fair to all. It is a means by which people arrive at their considered views, which should not be confused with “the people’s will,” whatever that might mean. As the economist and philosopher Frank Knight put it, democracy is a system of “government by discussion.” A democracy founded on pure majoritarianism alone would soon cease even to be that, for the suppression of dissenting minorities by majorities eliminates the very means by which majority preferences can be formulated and ascertained. When dissent is forbidden and punished, expressions of support for state policy are increasingly expressed out of fear and one loses the ability to know what majority sentiment is.
The French statesman and historian François Guizot, a target of Schmitt’s attacks, observed that it is humility – remembering that we may be wrong – that demands democratic liberties:
At the very moment when it presumes that the majority is right, it does not forget that it may be wrong, and its concern is to give full opportunity to the minority of providing that it is in fact right, and of becoming in its turn the majority. Electoral precautions, the debates in the deliberative assemblies, the publication of these debates, the liberty of the press, the responsibility of ministers, all these arrangements have for their object to insure that a majority shall be declared only after it has well authenticated itself, to compel it ever to legitimize itself, in order to its own preservation, and to place the minority in such a position as that it may contest the power and right of the majority.
Democratic governments do, indeed, act after talking, but the Conservative Revolutionaries talk about acting without talking, and that kind of talk paves the way for dictatorship. That is reason enough to call it out for what it is.
Denigration of representative and deliberative government
Just as the Conservative Revolution and those who have reappropriated its themes call for action, rather than talk, the procedures of representative government are increasingly seen as illegitimate. Thomas Mann explained in his 1918 jeremiad, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, that political democracy was unsuited for Germans: “I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself, and that the much decried ‘authoritarian state’ is and remains the one proper and becoming to the German people, and the one they basically want.” (It should be noted that by the overtaking of power and the establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship Mann had changed his views and became active in opposition and became openly supportive of democracy.)
The very idea of representative and deliberative government is called into question by the Conservative Revolutionaries. According to them, there never is any real deliberation; there is only window dressing over the efforts of plutocratic elites to extract rents, of shadowy elites to swindle the people, and so on. All the talk that liberals see as central to legitimate government could not “actually endanger the real holders of power.” According to Carl Schmitt, in his influential 1926 critique of parliamentarism:
There are certainly not many people today who want to renounce the old liberal freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and the press. But on the European continent there are not many more who believe that these freedoms still exist where they could actually endanger the real holders of power. And the smallest number still believe that just laws and the right politics can be achieved through newspaper articles, speeches at demonstrations, and parliamentary debates. But that is the very belief in parliament. If in the actual circumstances of parliamentary business, openness and discussion have become an empty and trivial formality, then parliament, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has also lost its previous foundation and its meaning.9
Schmitt understood that what he was calling into question was the entirety of liberalism. “It is essential that liberalism be understood as a consistent, comprehensive metaphysical system. Normally one only discusses the economic line of reasoning that social harmony and the maximization of wealth follow from the free economic competition of individuals, from freedom of contract, freedom of trade, free enterprise. But all this is only an application of a general liberal principle. It is exactly the same: That the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of opinion and that competition will produce harmony. The intellectual core of this thought resides finally in its specific relationship to truth, which becomes a mere function of the eternal competition of opinions. In contrast to the truth, it means renouncing a definite result.”
Schmitt’s critique is common today, as well; “the will of the people” is being thwarted by so much “empty talk.” For Schmitt, as for the National Socialists, democracy doesn’t require discussion at all:
The will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus that has been constructed with such meticulousness in the last fifty years. The stronger the power of democratic feeling, the more certain is the awareness that democracy is something other than a registration system for secret ballots. Compared to a democracy that is direct, not only in the technical sense, but also in a vital sense, parliament appears an artificial machine, produced by liberal reasoning, while dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not only can produce the acclamation of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic substance and power.
Similar complaints are heard today. Unfortunately, they are sometimes mixed in with arguments from the economic study of public choice, with the baleful effect, not of supporting limits on the extent of public choice, but of undermining deliberative processes and rules of procedure per se, that is, they are deployed to eliminate deliberative democracy, quite contrary to the understanding and intent of such public choice scholars as James M. Buchanan.
It’s long been known, and was clearly articulated by the Italian fiscal theorists, that transaction costs differ between small and organized producer interests, who are readily identifiable to each other, and the larger groups of unorganized consumers. Regardless of their democratic or autocratic character, states have the power to impose relatively small costs on large numbers of people and to award relatively large benefits to small numbers of people, owing to the asymmetry between large and small groups of costs of information and other transactions costs. The members of particular industries, trades, guilds, and so on typically constitute small groups and the consuming public typically (but not always) much larger groups. Consider, say, the likely actions of hundreds of millions of consumers of sugar, and then the likely actions of small numbers of producers of cane sugar in Florida and Louisiana and beet sugar in the Midwest of the United States, and ask how much the former would invest to avoid a few pennies a day of additional expense and how much the latter would invest to reap millions a day in rents. Once one understands that the sugar producers are more likely to hire representatives to lobby the legislators than are the consumers, who may be said to be “rationally ignorant” of the whole process, legislative processes do start to look rigged, illegitimate, shady, etc. (Indeed, they frequently are.)
Liberals study and publicize such systems of “rent-seeking” in order to understand the predatory redistributive powers of states and to strive to limit them and to secure imprescriptible rights for the people. The Conservative Revolutionaries, on the other hand, argue that all “talking” processes are rigged against “the little person” or “us” and that the solution is not, pace liberalism, to limit state power, but to put a stop to deliberation.
Similarly, but among a narrower group of people, the dependence of outcomes on voting procedures, which can be gamed, and the possibility of voting cycles, have led some to conclude that democratic processes are a fool’s game from the start. Such conclusions overlook the processes of debate and deliberation – of government by discussion – that are central to liberal democracy. In response to worries about so-called voting paradoxes, James M. Buchanan embraced majority rule over limited matters of public choice when the majorities emerged from discussion and deliberation:
precisely because it allows a sort of jockeying back and forth among alternatives, upon none of which relative unanimity can be obtained. Majority rule encourages such shifting, and it provides the opportunity for any social decision to be altered or reversed at any time by a new and temporary majority grouping. In this way, majority decision-making itself becomes a mean through which the whole group ultimately attains consensus, that is, makes a genuine social choice. It serves to insure that competing alternatives may be experimentally and provisionally adopted, tested, and replaced by new compromise alternatives approved by a majority group of ever-changing composition. This is democratic choice process, whatever may be the consequences for welfare economics and social welfare functions.
Having one’s eyes open to spoliation or to the possibilities of collective irrationality, in the form of non-transitively ordered preferences, however, should not blind us to the benefits of deliberative legislative processes when compared to autocracies, dictatorships, one-party states, and the like.
Among the alt-right, identitarian, and authoritarian movements who have embraced the Conservative Revolution’s rejection of democracy one also finds borrowed and distorted concepts from the economics of property rights. Thus, one vociferously anti-liberal writer, Hans Hoppe, confuses “possession” with “property” and argues entirely on a priori grounds that absolute monarchies are preferable to democracies, because “a monarch treats his “possession” (Besitz) with care.” In an interview with the leading publication of the Conservative Revolution in Germany today, Hoppe made his case:
Interviewer: “Your thesis is that democracy is a political order that guarantees, not the rule of the people, but their exploitation.”
Hoppe: “The essence of democracy is redistribution, which corresponds completely to the distribution of political power. That is, those in power redistribute in favor of their own clientele at the expense of the other party’s clientele. That has nothing to do with justice, and in cases of doubt basic rights such as property rights are quickly lost. To make matters worse, the party that is currently in power has only four years to do it – until another vote is held. This redistribution takes place all the faster and more irresponsibly. In the case of monarchy, on the other hand, the overthrow of which democracy is wrongly regarded as the “fortunate” outcome, the state was potentially in the hands of one and the same dynasty forever. Accordingly, a monarch treats his “possession” (Besitz) with care. In a democracy, on the other hand, the state does not belong to anyone, so the ruling party sucks it dry.”
Not only does Hoppe fail to understand a basic distinction between “Besitz” (posession, tenure, or occupancy) and “Eigentum” (property), but he shows no understanding of the relationship of property rights and capital values. Property rights are traded on markets and, for durable items that can be resold, capital values are established; the right to capture the residual (e.g., the difference between the purchase price and the sale price) is what leads people to take actions that will increase the capital value of their property; since there is no market for the buying and selling of monarchical “Besitz,” there’s correspondingly little incentive for monarchs to act so as to increase the capital value (since there’s no market to establish one) of what they “possess,” namely a country. It’s worth noting that Hoppe is not referring to constitutional monarchies such as Britain or the Netherlands, which are constitutional democracies, but of monarchical governments unconstrained by democratic accountability. One might compare the experiences of monarchies the rulers of which considered the entire realm their “Besitz,” over which they exercised absolute control, with republican / democratic regimes such as Switzerland and the United States during the last few centuries to see how they have fared.10
The late Mancur Olson saw an important relationship between the institutions necessary to economic freedom and those of democracy:
Interestingly, the conditions that are needed to have the individual rights needed for maximum economic development are exactly the same conditions that are needed to have a lasting democracy. Obviously, a democracy is not viable if individuals, including the leading rivals of the administration in power, lack the rights to free speech and to security for their property and contracts or if the rule of law is not followed even when it calls for the current administration to leave office. Thus the same court system, independent judiciary, and respect for law and individual rights that are needed for a lasting democracy are also required for security of property and contract rights.
The appropriation and abuse of economic concepts to undermine the legitimacy of liberal democracy and thereby to justify a range of autocratic regimes echoes and reproduces arguments and claims advanced by the theorists of the Conservative Revolution in their successful campaign to overturn democracy and institute in its place a dictatorship.
Liberals have a responsibility to rehabilitate deliberative, representative government. The fact that it is imperfect is no reason to smash it and then hope that whatever emerges will be more rights-respecting. The prisons and camps of any future dictatorship will, no doubt, hold many of those who will have hoped for the “right dictator.”
Abstract and Universal Values and Principles as “Imperialism”
A common theme of the writers in the Conservative Revolution that has been reappropriated is that any talk of universal values or principles is a form of imperialism that crushes the freedom of those nations that reject such values or principles. In particular, the post-World War I settlement in Germany was perceived as imposition of a republic by Western powers on a defenseless Germany and the claim was made more generally that the ascendancy during the 19th century of liberal values of democracy and individual rights, of the rule of law and market economy, constituted a general liberal assault on the particularity of individual nations, to which relativism and nationalism were the answer. In Ernst Jünger’s words:
We nationalists believe in no universal truth. We believe in no universal morality. We believe in no humanity as a collective entity with a central conscience and a uniform justice. We believe in the value of the particular.
Today it is common to be told that even uttering critical remarks about authoritarian states, whether the governments of Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or Iran, is itself a violation of the “freedom” of those national states to reject the principles of liberalism. It is, of course, generally left unspecified who is rejecting the principles for whom. If the question is whether to have rank-choice voting vs. winner-take-all-first-past-the-post, that’s one thing; if it’s the right to express criticisms of the executive power or the police, to follow one’s conscience with regard to religious practice, or to depart for another country to live elsewhere, it seems unlikely that those being thrown in prison or executed would experience a lack of freedom if the imprisonment and executions were to stop. The “freedom” that is being defended by apologists for the regimes in Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on is the license of the autocratic rulers to imprison, torture, or execute the people over whom they rule autocratically and to do so without any criticism from anyone. The pluralism they seek to protect is not within political orders, but among tyrannies.11
The equation of liberalism with imperialism was made explicit by Carl Schmitt, who, rather unironically, went on to write a powerful justification for Germany’s own imperial expansion, in defense of “the juridical concept of Reich – Reich as a Großraum order ruled by certain ideological ideas and principles, a Großraum order that excludes the possibility of intervention on the part of spatially foreign powers and whose guarantor and guardian is a nation that shows itself up to this task.” Thus:
The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.
As he noted:
The eighteenth-century humanitarian concept of humanity was a polemical denial of the then existing aristocratic-feudal system and the privileges accompanying it. Humanity according to natural law and liberal-individualistic doctrines is a universal, i.e., all-embracing, social ideal, a system of relations between individuals. This materializes only when the real possibility of war is precluded and every friend and enemy grouping becomes impossible. In this universal society there would no longer be nations in the form of political entities, no class struggles, and no enemy groupings.
Since for Schmitt, the concept of the political is constituted by the distinction between friend and enemy, liberalism eliminates the political as such. (He considers provision of public goods, for example, to be non-political, comparable to buying a train ticket, and of provision of law as like the publication of a train schedule.)
All liberal pathos turns against repression and lack of freedom. Every encroachment, every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competition is called repression and is eo ipso evil. What this liberalism still admits of state, government, and politics is confined to securing the conditions for liberty and eliminating infringements on freedom.
We thus arrive at an entire system of demilitarized and depoliticized concepts.
The horror of “an entire system of demilitarized and depoliticized concepts” fueled Schmitt’s lifelong war on liberalism. The friend/enemy distinction is ever present in Schmitt’s mind and informed his totalitarianism and his anti-semitism. Toward the end of his life, Schmitt revealed who the “real enemy” were all along: “Jews remain Jews, while Communists can improve themselves and change …. The real enemy is the assimilated Jews.”
National Conservatism
The contemporary national conservative writer Yarom Hazony has spoken out for nationalism and for national conservatism. He not only has to engage in multiple contortions to argue that National Socialism was not nationalistic, but also that liberalism is inherently imperialistic, merely by advancing universal principles. Thus, he claims that:
The new world they envision is one in which liberal theories of the rule of law, the market economy, and individual rights – all of which evolved in the domestic context of national states such as Britain, the Netherlands, and America – are regarded as universal truths and considered the appropriate basis for an international regime that will make the independence of the national state unnecessary. What is being proposed, in other words, is a new “liberal empire” that will replace the old Protestant order based on independent national states. It is empire that is supposed to save us from the evils of nationalism.
In a convoluted and ahistorical attempt to define nationalism and to defend illiberal nation states Hazony does violence to the text of Ludwig von Mises’s 1927 book Liberalism, claiming that “in the early twentieth century Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism in the Classical Tradition openly advocated dispensing with national states in favor of a ‘world super-state.’” The context is Mises’s criticism of the League of Nations, within which he endorses the “protection of national minorities.” Mises wrote:
This permits us to hope that from these extremely inadequate beginnings a world superstate really deserving of the name may some day be able to develop that would be capable of assuring the nations the peace that they require. But this question will not be decided at Geneva in the sessions of the present League, and certainly not in the parliaments of the individual countries that comprise it. For the problem involved is not at all a matter of organization or of the technique of international government, but the greatest ideological question that mankind has ever faced. It is a question of whether we shall succeed in creating throughout the world a frame of mind without which all agreements for the preservation of peace and all the proceedings of courts of arbitration will remain, at the crucial moment, only worthless scraps of paper. This frame of mind can be nothing less than the unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions, if the prerequisites of peace are to be created and the causes of war eliminated. As long as nations cling to protective tariffs, immigration barriers, compulsory education, interventionism, and etatism, new conflicts capable of breaking out at any time into open warfare will continually arise to plague mankind.
Mises is quite clear throughout the text that “the international superstate” is none other than “the society of nations,” not a global imperial state. Thus, “The narrow-mindedness which sees nothing beyond one’s own state and one’s own nation and which has no conception of the importance of international cooperation must be replaced by a cosmopolitan outlook. This, however, is possible only if the society of nations, the international superstate, is so constituted that no people and no individual is oppressed on account of nationality or national peculiarities.” It is not global military force that Mises is calling for when he writes of international order, but rather a global “frame of mind,” which is, in fact, precisely what Hazony is also trying to achieve, albeit a radically different frame of mind. Hazony wants a global frame of mind favorable to his peculiar understanding of nationalism. Mises makes a case for a global frame of mind based on rebuttable arguments that free trade reduces conflict and concludes that “Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions, if the prerequisites of peace are to be created and the causes of war eliminated.”12 That is, if you want peace, you must accept liberal principles. And, indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that that is the case.
What are we to make of Hazony’s equation of liberalism and imperialism, considering that the principled opponents of imperialism, from Adam Smith onward13, were generally informed by liberal ideas? According to Hazony’s logic, if you believe in common standards, you must believe in a single provider of that standard. But that simply isn’t the case. Multiple providers of measuring tapes produce tapes that are based on the same measuring systems, with inches on one side and centimeters on the other. That does not require a global monopoly of one measuring tape company. Monetary systems tend to converge on common standards without requiring common providers of money. Multiple textbooks teach common principles of mathematics to children, without requiring a global monopoly school system or a global super-state. For the same reasons, national states, city states, federations, global business consortia, arbitration firms, and other arrangements may provide common standards of respect for freedom of conscience without having to be forcibly incorporated into one world state. The emergence of an idea, whether the Pythagorean Theorem or moveable type or freedom of conscience, may have an identifiable history, but that history does not limit its application to only people who live in the same place or speak the same language as those who originated the idea.
The idea that liberals, simply by advancing abstractly formulated principles, are somehow imperialistic and infringing on the freedom of those who wish to continue with systems of religious persecution, forced labor, or similar practices is also promulgated by the contemporary Conservative Revolutionary Alexander Dugin, the Russian anti-liberal ideologue who explicitly seeks to resurrect the Conservative Revolution, along with a dizzying mix of traditionalism, esotericism, Heideggerian metaphysics, theories about ancient Aryans, Schmittian geo-political theorizing, and more. Thus:
Undoubtedly racist is the idea of unipolar globalization. It is based on the idea that the history and values of Western, and especially American, society are equivalent to universal laws, and artificially tries to construct a global society based on what are actually local and historically specific values – democracy, the market, parliamentarianism, capitalism, individualism, human rights, and unlimited technological development. These values are local ones, emerging from the particular development of a single culture, and globalization is trying to impose them onto all of humanity as something that is universal and taken for granted. This attempt implicitly argues that the values of all other peoples and cultures are imperfect, underdeveloped, and should be subject to modernisation and standardisation in imitation of the Western model.
Globalisation is thus nothing more than a globally deployed model of Western European, or, rather, Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, which is the purest manifestation of racist ideology.
The man who argues that human rights is a racist idea has openly called for “genocide” to exterminate Ukrainians and is working today for the conquest of Ukraine and the assimilation and Russification of a suitably purified population. He is one of the most open borrowers from the Conservative Revolution, but he is far from the only one.
Concluding Thought
It’s hard to argue that Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Edgar Julius Jung, and their Conservative Revolutionary colleagues should not bear blame for the horrors of the Third Reich. Whenever one thinks of the kindly elderly writer and collector of hourglasses who allegedly suffered an “inner emigration” during the dictatorship, which he served in military intelligence in Paris, one should recall these words of his:
The genuine revolution has certainly not yet happened. It marches inexorably onward. It is no reaction, but rather an actual revolution with all its characteristics and manifestations. Its idea is that of the Folk, honed to as yet unknown sharpness; its banner is the swastika; its outward expression the concentration of the will in a single point – dictatorship! The dictatorship will replace word with deed, ink with blood, the phrase with sacrifice, the pen with the sword.
Conservative Revolutionary Steve Bannon promised that his vision of the world “will be as exciting as the 1930s.” Let us hope it is not too late to avoid all that excitement.
NOTES
- A version of this article was delivered in the form of a speech for the 75th Anniversary General Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society on Liberal Institutions and International Order: renewing the infrastructure of liberty, Oslo, Norway, October 4-8, 2022 ↩︎
- Heidegger’s star has begun to wane as more people have realized that his opaque language is frequently designed to camouflage his embrace of National Socialism, which he made explicitly when the Nazis came to power and then denied in a cloud of deceit after the defeat of the NS state. See See Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993), and the recent work by Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). ↩︎
- The relationship between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss has been discussed in a number of books, many of which dance around the question of Strauss’s admiration for fascism. See Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” postscript to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 97-122, Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and C. Bradley Thompson, with Yaron Brook, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), esp. chapter 9, “Flirting with Fascism.” In American exile, Strauss became an inspiring teacher and a much discussed theorist of the political who seemed in some ways to have made his peace with liberal democracy. There is, however, the matter of Strauss’s letter of May 19, 1933 to Karl Löwith, written from Paris after the victory of the National Socialists in Germany. Strauss writes that it is horrible that “the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat is here” (in Paris) and that he would most prefer to return to Germany, but, he notes, Jews are no longer welcome in Germany. He added, though, that nothing against the principles of the right follows from the fact that Germany, having turned to the far right, would not tolerate them (Löwith was also Jewish): “daraus, dass das rechts-gewordene Deutschland uns nicht toleriert, folgt schlechterdings nichts gegen die rechten Prinzipien.” “To the contrary,” he wrote, “only with the principles of the right— – fascist, authoritarian, imperial principles—can one fight against the whole miserable mess with decency (‘mit Anstand’) and without absurd and pathetic appeals to ‘the imprescriptible rights of man.’” He added, in a rich metaphorical twist of the knife in the corpse of liberalism, that “There is no reason to contritely crawl back on one’s knees to the cross [a rich phrase in German that is not so easy to translate, especially as it refers to “the cross” and Strauss was a Jew, which is probably why he used it], and not even to the cross of liberalism, as long as the spark of true Roman ideas still glimmer somewhere in the world; and anyway, better the ghetto than any form of the cross.” Letter of May 19, 1933 from Leo Strauss to Karl Löwith, in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, Hobbes’s politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften—Briefe, second revised edition, ed. by Heinrich and Wiebke Meier (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler), pp. 624-26. Strauss’s defenders, when they have acknowledged the letter, have gone to some pains to explain away what he meant, but it seems far more than likely, given his explicit positive invocation of “‘Fascist, authoritarian, imperial principles” that “the spark of true Roman ideas” was a reference to the Fascist state that Mussolini had established in Rome, which was attempting to establish a “New Roman Empire” and was, at that time, a rival, not an ally, of Hitler and the National Socialists. Moreover, Italian Fascism did not at that time incorporate anti-Semitism into the state ideology. ↩︎
- It bears mentioning that Jung prepared the way for dictatorship, but he blanched at the dictatorship that was established. He was arrested while packing his bags to flee the country and was executed in 1934 as a part of the Night of the Long Knives. ↩︎
- From January 2015 to June 2019 Greece was ruled by a coalition of SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, and ANEL, the Independent Greeks – National Patriotic Alliance, a national-conservative party. It’s worth noting that key figures in the Russian radical illberal movement that explicitly draws on Conservative Revolutionary thinking had very close connections with the two most important ministers in that far-left/far-right coalition government, Panos Kammenos of ANEL, a close associate with Kremlin-insider Konstantine Malofeev, was Minister of Defense, and Nikos Kotzias of SYRIZA, who was strongly pro-Kremlin and had connections with Russian Conservative Revolutionary thinker Alexander Dugin was Minister of Foreign Affairs. Thus, the Kremlin-aligned radical anti-liberal and anti-NATO figures had strong connections with the two most significant – from the Kremlin’s point of view – posts in a NATO member state. See Meike Dülffer, Carsten Luther, and Zacharias Zacharakis, “Caught in the web of the Russian ideologues: Powerful Russians want to drive a wedge into the EU and are fighting for Moscow’s dominance. Confidential emails reveal how they are influencing the Greek government,” Zeit Online, February 7, 2015 ↩︎
- The term typically used to denote advocates of globalization is “globalists,” a term almost exclusively used by people who oppose whatever they understand by “globalization.” “Globalist” has emerged primarily as a term of abuse, especially on the far-right. According to the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, “There is no more left and right. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists.” “Patriots vs. Globalists replaces the left-right divide,” Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, April 18, 2022. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, maintains that, “conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as what it is—US vs THEM, everyday people vs globalist elites, who’ve shown they hate us.” Thus globalists are alleged to be anti-patriotic and enemies of “US,” that is, of “everyday people,” whom, it is alleged “they hate.” Another polemical use of the term has been advanced by the left-wing writer Quinn Slobodian, who defines “globalism” as “a coherent ideology” and “a project to restore class power.” Donald Trump was more direct, “You know what a globalist is, right? You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.” “Donald Trump Holds a Political Rally in Houston, Texas, October 22, 2018.” ↩︎
- A total of five minutes of media exposure were accorded to the opposition – one time – in the runup to the most recent parliamentary election. As center-right opposition leader and Mayor of Hódmezövásárhely Péter Márki-Zay noted “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to give the opposition five minutes to speak in four years.” Júlia Tar, “Opposition PM candidate Márki-Zay Allowed at State Television for First Time,” HungaryToday.hu, March 16, 2022, and Richard Good and Ádám Magyar, “Claims of media bias overshadow Hungarian election campaign,” EuroNews, March 29, 2022. ↩︎
- Aristotle’s Politics, trans. by Carnes Lord, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), VI, 2, pp. 172-173. On the role of personal freedom and deliberation in Athenian democracy, see also Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), Kurt Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). ↩︎
- Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1926) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 50. Schmitt understood that what he was calling into question was the entirety of liberalism. “It is essential that liberalism be understood as a consistent, comprehensive metaphysical system. Normally one only discusses the economic line of reasoning that social harmony and the maximization of wealth follow from the free economic competition of individuals, from freedom of contract, freedom of trade, free enterprise. But all this is only an application of a general liberal principle. It is exactly the same: That the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of opinion and that competition will produce harmony. The intellectual core of this thought resides finally in its specific relationship to truth, which becomes a mere function of the eternal competition of opinions. In contrast to the truth, it means renouncing a definite result.” ( p. 35)“Only if the central place of discussion in the liberal system is correctly recognized do the two political demands that are characteristic of liberal rationalism take on their proper significance with a scientific clarity above the confused atmosphere of slogans, political tactics, and pragmatic considerations: the postulate of openness in political life and the demand for a division of powers, or more specifically the theory of a balance of opposing forces from which truth will emerge automatically as an equilibrium.” (p. 36) ↩︎
- Responding to a criticism of his poorly reasoned attack on democracy by Alberto Benegas Lynch, who challenged Hoppe to show evidence that monarchies produce better results than constitutional democratic republics, Hoppe responded that such an appeal to evidence could not refute his claims, because “It would be an error, for instance, to illustrate my theory of comparative government by contrasting European monarchies with African democracies or African monarchies with European democracies. Since Caucasians have, on the average, a significantly lower degree of time preference than Negroids, any such comparison would amount to a systematic distortion of the evidence.” Hans H. Hoppe, “On Theory and History. Reply to Benegas-Lynch, Jr.,” in Gerard Radnitzky, ed., Values and the Social Order, Vol. 3 (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997) That is a telling response. ↩︎
- As Jerry Muller summarized the Conservative Revolutionary approach of Schmitt to pluralism, “Legitimate pluralism existed not in the domination of the state by competing socio-economic interest groups, but in the competition among the cultures of the Völker, each embodied in its own state.” Jerry Muller, “Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, and the Radical Conservative Critique of Liberal Democracy in the Weimar Republic,” History of Political Thought, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 1991), 695-715, p. 711. ↩︎
- Mises, p. 115. The full context makes it more clear: “To be sure, the League does hold out, even though very cautiously and with many reservations, the prospect of some future boundary adjustments to do justice to the demands of some nations and parts of nations. It also promises—again very cautiously and qualifiedly—protection to national minorities. This permits us to hope that from these extremely inadequate beginnings a world superstate really deserving of the name may some day be able to develop that would be capable of assuring the nations the peace that they require. But this question will not be decided at Geneva in the sessions of the present League, and certainly not in the parliaments of the individual countries that comprise it. For the problem involved is not at all a matter of organization or of the technique of international government, but the greatest ideological question that mankind has ever faced. It is a question of whether we shall succeed in creating throughout the world a frame of mind without which all agreements for the preservation of peace and all the proceedings of courts of arbitration will remain, at the crucial moment, only worthless scraps of paper. This frame of mind can be nothing less than the unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions, if the prerequisites of peace are to be created and the causes of war eliminated. As long as nations cling to protective tariffs, immigration barriers, compulsory education, interventionism, and etatism, new conflicts capable of breaking out at any time into open warfare will continually arise to plague mankind.” ↩︎
- “Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.” ↩︎
Tom G. Palmer is the George M. Yeager Chair for Advancing Liberty and executive vice president for International Programs at the Atlas Network and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and director of Cato University. Send him mail.
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