Our Permanent War Economy, Predicted by John Flynn

Over the last couple of days, I've been reading some writing by Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian, who's work is often offered to the readers of the libertarian website Lew Rockwell.com.  I've never thought of myself as a libertarian, and while I find some of their stuff rather bizarre and extreme, the historical writing of Murray Rothbard has been very insightful and helpful in understanding where we are politically in the US these day. 

Also, I have to say that it was the essays from Lew Rockwell.com (and the Daily Reckoning.com) that persuaded me about five or six years ago to take seriously our very precarious financial situation, and thus to be able to predict the financial/housing crash of '08, long before it arrived.  I also like their principled antiwar position.  (Perhaps I'm more libertarian than I realize?)

In Rothbard's historical essays, he describes an important figure of the libertarian persuasion (aka 'old right' or what we today would call 'paleoconservative'), a writer/intellectual named John T. Flynn, who wrote in the thirties, forties, and fifties of the 20th century.  Flynn was a pre-New Deal liberal/progressive who opposed the New Deal and World War II for ideological reasons, and who was blacklisted as a 'Nazi', even though that was a ridiculous charge.

What really interested me was how accurate Flynn was in his prediction of how militarized and imperialistic (and therefore, akin to fascist) America would become  if we went in this direction.  Read the following excerpt from Rothbard's essay and see if it doesn't sound what we have become.

All in all, the Old Right was understandably gloomy as it contemplated the inevitable approach of war. It foresaw that World War II would transform America into a Leviathan State, into a domestic totalitarian collectivism, with suppression of civil liberties at home, joined to an unending global imperialism abroad, pursuing what Charles A. Beard called a policy of "perpetual war for perpetual peace." None of the Old Right saw this vision of the coming America more perceptively than John T. Flynn, in his brilliant work As We Go Marching, written in the midst of the war he had done so much to forestall. After surveying the polity and the economy of fascism and National Socialism, Flynn bluntly saw the New Deal, culminating in the wartime society, as the American version of fascism, the "good fascism" in sardonic contrast to the "bad fascism" we had supposedly gone to war to eradicate. Flynn saw that the New Deal had finally established the corporate state that big business had been yearning for since the end of the nineteenth century. The New Deal planners, declared Flynn,

"were thinking of a change in our form of society in which the government would insert itself into the structure of business, not merely as policeman, but as a partner, collaborator, and banker. But the general idea was first to reorder the society by making it a planned and coerced economy instead of a free one, in which business would be brought together into great guilds or an immense corporative structure, combining the elements of self-rule and government supervision with a national economic policing system to enforce these decrees. . . . This, after all, is not so very far from what business had been talking about. . . . It was willing to accept the supervision of the government. . . . Business said that orderly self-government in business would eliminate most of the causes that infected the organism with the germs of crises."

The first great attempt of the New Deal to create such a society was embodied in the NRA and AAA, modeled on the fascist corporate state, and described by Flynn as "two of the mightiest engines of minute and comprehensive regimentation ever invented in any organized society." These engines were hailed by those supposedly against regimentation: "Labor unions and Chamber of Commerce officials, stockbrokers and bankers, merchants and their customers joined in great parades in all the cities of the country in rhapsodical approval of the program."13 After the failure of the NRA, the advent of World War II re-established this collectivist program, "an economy supported by great streams of debt and an economy under complete control, with nearly all of the planning agencies functioning with almost totalitarian power under a vast bureaucracy."14 After the war, Flynn prophesied, the New Deal would attempt to expand this system to international affairs.

Foreseeing that the federal government would maintain vast spending and controls after the war was over, Flynn predicted that the great emphasis of this spending would be military, since this is the one form of government spending to which conservatives will never object, and which workers will welcome for its creation of jobs. "Thus militarism is the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement."15 Hence, as part of this perpetual garrison state, conscription would also be continued on a permanent basis. Flynn declared:

"All sorts of people are for it. Numerous senators and representatives – of the Right and Left – have expressed their purpose to establish universal military training when the war ends.

The great and glamorous industry is here – the industry of militarism. And when the war is ended the country is going to be asked if it seriously wishes to demobilize an industry that can employ so many men, create so much national income when the nation is faced with the probability of vast unemployment in industry. All the well-known arguments, used so long and so successfully in Europe . . . will be dusted off – America with her high purposes of world regeneration must have the power to back up her magnificent ideals; America cannot afford to grow soft, and the Army and Navy must be continued on a vast scale to toughen the moral and physical sinews of our youth; America dare not live in a world of gangsters and aggressors without keeping her full power mustered . . . and above and below and all around these sentiments will be the sinister allurement of the perpetuation of the great industry which can never know a depression because it will have but one customer – the American government to whose pocket there is no bottom."

Flynn unerringly predicted that imperialism would follow in militarism’s wake:

"Embarked . . . upon a career of militarism, we shall, like every other country, have to find the means when the war ends of obtaining the consent of the people to the burdens that go along with the blessings it confers upon its favored groups and regions. Powerful resistance to it will always be active, and the effective means of combating this resistance will have to be found. Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic device, we will do what other countries have done: we will keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves embark upon imperialistic enterprises of our own."

Flynn noted that interventionism and imperialism had come to be called "internationalism," so that anyone who opposes imperialism "is scornfully called an isolationist." Flynn went on:

"Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people. It is an assertion of stark, bold aggression. It is, of course, international in the sense that the aggressor nation crosses its own borders and enters the boundaries of another nation. . . . It is international in the sense that war is international. . . . This is internationalism in a sense, in that all the activities of an aggressor are on the international stage. But it is a malignant internationalism."

Flynn then pointed out that countries such as Great Britain, having engaged in "extensive imperialist aggression" in the past, now try to use the hopes for world peace in order to preserve the status quo.

"This status quo is the result of aggression, is a continuing assertion of aggression, an assertion of malignant internationalism. Now they appeal to this other benevolent type of internationalism to establish a world order in which they, all leagued together, will preserve a world which they have divided among themselves. . . . Benevolent internationalism is taken over by the aggressors as the mask behind which the malignant internationalism will be perpetuated and protected. . . . I do not see how any thoughtful person watching the movement of affairs in America can doubt that we are moving in the direction of both imperialism and internationalism."

Imperialism, according to Flynn, will ensure the existence of perpetual "enemies":

"We have managed to acquire bases all over the world. . . . There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort in which, if we wish to use the pretension, we cannot claim that our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over a continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the most powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies."

A planned economy; militarism; imperialism – for Flynn what all this added up to was something very close to fascism. He warned:

"The test of fascism is not one’s rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is – how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept. . . . When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.

Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans . . . who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up . . . and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy."

You can find more of Murray Rothbard (and therefore John Flynn) at this website.