On Sep 20, 2011, at 6:24 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Truth be told, a lot of this originated with the late Carl Oglesby,
> who was a proponent of this stuff even back when was
> president of SDS. Oglesby was a long time buddy of
> Murray Rothbard, who as a libertarian, had advocated
> an alliance with the New Left in the 1960s.
Funny you should mention this - Jesse Walker had an interesting obit for Oglesby on Reason's blog:
http://reason.com/blog/2011/09/14/carl-oglesby-rip
He wasn't really a laissez-faire man -- he was capable of criticizingEugene McCarthy for opposing a minimum-wage bill -- but he fell in with the libertarians anyway, famously writing in his 1967 bookContainment and Change that "the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate."
...
The center-left establishment, he felt, was much more dangerous than the free-market right.
...
I met Oglesby at a Libertarian Party convention in 1991. We had been seated at the same table during Ron Paul's dinner speech, an anti-imperialist stemwinder that left the old New Leftist dazed and awed. (At one point he turned to no one in particular and let out an impressed "Who is this guy?") There were three or so other people at the table, among them Jeff Tucker, who was covering the convention for the conservative paper Human Events. In one unexpected moment, Tucker had some kind words for Noam Chomsky and Oglesby replied that Chomsky was too left-wing for his taste. Any residual attachment I had to the left/right spectrum should have evaporated right then: I had to pause a moment to remind myself which was the Human Events reporter and which was the former president of SDS.
Oglesby and I spoke occasionally after that but fell out of touch in the mid-'90s; the last I remember talking to him was when I solicited a short piece for Liberty about the death of his friend Karl Hess, a Goldwater speechwriter who had joined SDS. "I think the two of us were bookends," Oglesby wrote. "He came from the Right and recognized the importance of the critique from the Left of contemporary Western society. And I came from the Left, and through a variety of intellectual circumstances came very early in my period of being a public spokesperson against the Vietnam War to understand myself as operating in a tradition of libertarianism. My complaint about the war was a libertarian complaint. My complaint against the government that waged the war was couched in libertarian terms....We felt a real solidarity with one another in trying to work out, in practical terms, what that union of the libertarian Left and the social-conscience Right might be able to offer the country." It still might offer something, even if Oglesby unfortunately won't be around to be a part of it.