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Right On In California

( Mr. Ponte, a liberation activist, plays host on a regular telephone-talk show on KPFK-FM, the Pacifica Foundation station in Southern California. This article is abstracted from his series "Quite Rightly So," copyright 1969 by the Los Angeles Image. He is currently writing a book, A New Right Reasoning.)

A COMMON joke in some circles during the early days of President Kenaedy's administration was that one got to Washington by going to Harvard and turning left. Times have changed, and now it seems one can reach the state house and the White House by going to Southern California and turning right-a la Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

But among the young of the Southern California breeding ground the "right," ideologically and politically, is a fragmented phenomenon, the bits and pieces of which now scatter along a spectrum from fascism to anarchy.

The national convention of the "New Conservative" Young Americans for Freedom held late this past summer in St. Louis revealed symptoms of a deep schizophrenia in the participants. The factions which aired their differences have been privately at odds for a long time, but now their differences have escalated into the same kind of civil war on the Right that split the radical Students for a Democratic Society during the same summer. Nowhere is this Y. A. F. split-a valid reflection of the internal contradiction throughout the American right-wing-more manifest than in Southern California.

Y. A. F. was founded in 1960 by a gathering of young anti-communists and assorted conservatives meeting at William F. Buckley's request at his estate in Sharon, Connecticut. Their resulting document of principles, the "Sharon Statement," upheld free enterprise and tradition as its primary values.

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Thus Y. A. F., the newborn child, had two heads, and they would not face the same direction for long. Buckley in his role as godfather to the organization, stressed traditionalist values. Others, rallying to the teachings of economists Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard, stressed free enterprise. Buckley encouraged a faith in "tradition for its own sake" and plugged for anti-communism, Christianity, law and order, and the flag. Others in the organization idealized laissez-faire capitalism, anti-authoritarianism, and extreme individualism.

COMMUNISM, in Buckley's thinking, was a clear and present danger against which all rightists should unite; and in that schema socialism was, in the hands of callow liberals, useful to communism. Unstated but implicit in such thinking was the assumption that communism was the major threat to human freedom, and that some sacrifices of freedom and comfort and safety were necessary to defeat the red menace. That which strengthened America, even if collectivist, could be rationalized as good; that which weakened America, even if fulfilling of individual freedom, was bad. Many Buckleyite conservatives held these beliefs, not necessarily as absolutely, but certainly as rules of thumb.

Some individualist rightists found the emerging Buckley-Y. A. F. mentality immoral. These individualists, who took up the label "Libertarian" rather quickly, disapproved of communism but did so without much concern for American moral superiority; their feelings were based on anti-statism, and they found no logic in supporting fascism to defeat communism because in their eyes the two were the same. As capitalists they resented Bucklcyite opposition to free trade and Bucklcyite eagerness to escalate taxes and foreign interventions. As Libertarians they were repelled by Bucklcyite eagerness to legislate against pornography, abortion, drugs, and subversion; they believed that an individual did not require government to protect his mind or his body from himself.

Beginning in 1961 clusters of Libertarians began breaking away from Buckley. Many saw themselves as American conservatives determined to preserve an individualist, revolutionary American Tradition; most of these saw Buckley as a transplanted European aristocrat whose brand of collectivist capitalism was a kind of feudalism and whose morality began with social norms instead of individual liberty.

Their break from Buckley scattered them, for these were extreme individualists with no convenient enemy like communism to buckle them into a cohesive group. A few, like the Chicago community at the New Individualist Review or the Colorado congregation at Rampart College focused on attacking Buckley as a detractor of real capitalism, the energies of these groups went toward purifying the New Right by reorienting its faith from anti-communism into pro-free enterprise. Two years ago Rampart College pulled up roots and moved to Santa Ana, near the heart of Southern California's infamous Orange County. Since that time it has been a major organizing force for a large capitalistic cult there. The tiny college has had so much influence on Y. A. F. in California that some loyal Buckleyite board members of the National Organization reportedly suggested that mere affiliation with the school should be grounds for expulsion from Y. A. F. This suggestion was quickly dismissed when detractors were reminded what a sizeable percentage of Y. A. F.'s national elite had at one time or another been affiliated with Rampart.

In California, as elsewhere, many disaffected rightists turned to Ayn Rand; whose objectivist teachings elevated capitalism from economics to religion. Rand shares Buckley's fear, if not his paranoia, about communism; but she philosophizes that communism can be defeated only by capitalism-the rational, selfish, non-altruistic, objective relationship of free people in a free enterprise system. Buckley and his followers, she feels, are traitors to capitalism and are the antithesis of all the qualities a capitalist needs; i. e., Buckleyites are irrational, romantic, superstitious, altruistic, and too confused by their worship of "tradition" to be objective.

Many Libertarians have had at least an affection for Miss Rand, but many have rejected her. Some complain that she is romantic rather than logical, that she is at best a "pseudo-philosopher." Others have "spun out" logically; starting with the premise that the best government is the least government, they predictably have become anarchists and are now appalled that Rand defends government as necessary to national defense. Some have abandoned the Right, in name if not in philosophy; many of these have joined with various "hippies" and New Leftists in an attempt to translate their individualism into life-style radicalism.

And because of the configuration of social and personal influences on young people, more Libertarians are discovering themselves within Y. A. F. all the time. One project among some long-time Libertarians is to induce young would-be conservatives to use marijuana; "once they turn on," one explained, "they can never support a dictator again, even if his name is Buckley." Another project is education, a reason that Rampart College sponsors class and home study courses on free enterprise, and that a dozen large newsletters and magazines now circulate Libertarian ideas. The Bucklcyites in Y. A. F., called the "trads," have reacted to this influence since the last National Convention, where a Libertarian caucus gained the support of more than 40 per cent of the delegates present for resolutions calling for an immediate end to the draft and the war and for immediate legalization of marijuana.

PURGES have begun in Y. A. F. Recently the whole California board of officers found themselves expelled by the National Office, with no stated reason that made any sense. Two months ago eight past members of the California Y. A. F. elite held a press conference, denouncing the organization and founding their own Student Libertarian Alliance. An ally from the hills of Stanford, past chairman Rod Manis formed a parallel Radical Libertarian Alliance; he, too, had been purged, allegedly for supporting Timothy Leary for California Governor (a seeming triviality, until one remembers that Ronald Reagan is on the adult board of Y. A. F. Advisors). Since summer, about half of the California chapters of Y. A. F. have resigned from the organization.

Who would have thought it five years ago-that the Young Americans for Freedom would have to stipulate that no one could simultaneously be a member of Y. A. F. and SDS? Well, since the last National Convention that has been a rule, and now the organization plans to rule formally on whether an anarchist can belong to Y. A. F. Such is the nature of organizations dedicated to freedom.

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