“The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.”<\/p>\n
– Benjamin Tucker (via<\/a>)<\/p>\n Exploring a site<\/a> linked by Justin Raimondo in a recent blog entry<\/a>, I discovered an informative article on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. Bill Kauffman<\/a>‘s The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right<\/em> is a snapshot of a period in U.S. history when the right and left underwent radical changes rarely acknowledged by most Americans. <\/p>\n During the heyday of modern American liberalism, the 1930s, when Big Brother supposedly wore his friendliest phiz, Day and the Catholic Workers said No. They bore a certain resemblance to those old progressives (retroprogressives)–Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and Hiram Johnson–who turned against FDR for what they saw as the bureaucratic, militaristic, centralizing thrust of his New Deal. The antithetical tendencies of the Catholic Worker and the 1930s American left were juxtaposed in the November 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker. Under the heading “Catholic Worker Opposition to Projected Farm-Labor Party.,” the box read:<\/p>\n Farm-Labor Party stands for: Progress Industrialism Machine Caesarism (bureaucracy) Socialism Organizations.<\/p>\n Catholic Worker stands for: Tradition Ruralism Handicrafts Personalism Communitarianism Organisms.<\/p>\n And never the twain shall meet.<\/p>\n An anarchistic distrust of the state, even in its putatively benevolent role as giver of alms, pervaded the Catholic Workers, as it did the 1930s right. But then as the late Karl Hess, one-time Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Wobbly homesteader, wrote, the American right had been “individualistic, isolationist, decentralist–even anarchistic,” until the Cold War reconciled conservatives to the leviathan state.<\/p>\n The 1930s dissenters–the old-fashioned liberals now maligned as conservatives; the unreconstructed libertarians; the cornbelt radicals–proposed cooperatives and revitalized village economies as the alternative to government welfare. The Catholic Workers agreed. The holy fool Peter Maurin, Day’s French peasant comrade, asserted that “he who is a pensioner of the state is a slave of the state.” Day, in her memoir The Long Loneliness, complained:<\/p>\n The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials…. Labor was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Kaufmann’s historical footnotes, and others<\/a>, are missing in this overview<\/a> of libertarian roots in which the authour, Logan Ferree, says egalitarian-minded, left-libertarians have a lot to offer to the Democrat party. Count me out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.” – Benjamin Tucker (via) Exploring a site linked by Justin Raimondo in … Continue reading