ABSTRACT
The modern American Right began, in the 1930s and 1940s, as a reaction against the New Deal and the Roosevelt Revolution, and specifically as an opposition to the critical increase of statism and state intervention at home, and to war and state intervention abroad. Therefore, all energies must be directed to battling and destroying that "threat". In the course of this shift of focus from statism to communism as the "enemy", the Right-wing somehow failed to see that the real "external" threat was not Soviet Russia. For the blight that destroyed the libertarianism of the Right-wing and effected its transformation was nothing less than hysterical anticommunism. The libertarian needs, perhaps most of all, to be informed by history, and to realize that conservatism was always the polar opposite of classical liberalism. Socialism, in contrast, was not the polar opposite of either, but rather, in my view, a muddled and irrationally contradictory mixture of both liberalism and conservatism.
