Anarchism has come to the right.

The once-comfortable abode of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and Richard Nixon is being revolutionized by an unprecedented number of right-wing libertarians and anarchists. Committed to a Jeffersonian creed of decentralism, tolerance, and laissez-faire, thousands of right-wingers are turning on their conservative leadership, denouncing conservative principles of discipline, authority, and a strong state, and in many cases repudiating America as vehemently as the radical left.

Right-wingers in California recently announced support for Tim Leary over Ronald Reagan for governor. Leading libertarian journals have called for armed resistance to taxation and the draft. A New York leader of the 1969 libertarian revolt in YAF now condemns the U. S. as a monster worse than Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. Every major libertarian organization recognizes at least some aspects of U. S. foreign policy as imperialist and many favor and end to U. S. attempts to quash wars of liberation in the Third World.

The revolt has made shambles of the conservative alliance formed by Wiliam F. Buckley early in the 1950's. To form the alliance, Buckley mobilized all potential allies of the conservatives-including the libertarians.

The rise of the libertarians can be traced mainly to the publication of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in 1958. Buckley had repeatedly vilified the Randist movement for its orthodoxy in his National Review, but it was sufficiently large and committed to be worth courting. Besides, the "Objectivists," as they called themselves, were too independent-and a Buckley-dominated political coalition would tend to bring them into the conservative fold. In 1960, at the Buckley estate in Sharon, Connecticut, the fledgling Young Americans for Freedom adopted planks designed to bring the Objectivists and other libertarians into their organization.

Thus, as the stage was being prepared for Goldwater's nomination by the Republican Party in 1964, Buckley, F. Clifton White, and William Rusher (publisher of National Review ) had effective control of a youthful right-wing coalition whose members ranged from rabid anti-Communists to near-anarchists. All enthusiastically supported Goldwater-even Ayn Rand, supremely contemptuous of politics, said that he was the first presidential candidate since Thomas Jefferson that she respected.

In the bitter aftermath of the Gold-water defeat, however, the libertarians split in three directions. The ideologically pure-the orthodox Objectivists-set out on a course that divorced them entirely from coalition politics; the second course libertarians took was to continue working with conservatives. Some libertarians took a third course and began exploring prospects for a dialogue with the New Left.

It was the third path that led directly to the anarchist revolt now shaking the right.

The growth of radicalism on the left had fascinated many right-wing libertarians. Like conservatism, radicalism grew out of disillusionment with liberal policies-though the disillusionment sprang from a different perspective.

The shift to widespread radicalism on the left began as large numbers of students confronted two peculiarly persistent domestic problems-racism and poverty. At first, the students believed that they had only to bring attention to the areas of neglect-and liberalism would take care of the rest. But as more and more students became personally involved with the system, liberalism's real political silhouette began to emerge.

Political dishonesty, the corrupt judicial system, deadening public schools, debilitating programs ostensibly in existence to help the poor, and the futility of the political process itself all surfaced-destroying the illusions carefully implanted by upper middle class high schools. In response, the left fought to decentralize, to depoliticize justice, to free children from the tyranny of public schooling, and to organize cooperatives. Its efforts were frustrated by liberalism's refusal to dismantle the machinery of power, prompting many on the left to wonder about the legitimacy of that power.

Barry Goldwater's chief speechwriter, Karl Hess, wrote in the August 1968 issue of Ramparts . "What first attracted me to the Left was the familiar ring of what was being said there. Decentralization. The return to the people of real political power-of all power." The more Hess saw of the left, the more he liked it, eventually leaving the libertarian right to become an anarcho-syndicalist.

Other right-wing libertarians took a similar path. The head of the University of North Carolina's Conservative Club resigned to become an active New Leftist; an entire YAF chapter at the University of Kansas voted to become an SDS chapter; the head of YAF at Brooklyn College became a left-wing anarchist; and an Ayn Randist who had spied on SDS in New Jersey for the House Committee on Un-American Activities became a member of SDS.

But most libertarians have stayed with the right and still strongly believe in laissez-faire capitalism. Abridgement of the laissez-faire ethic, they believe, has brought this country a host of large and dangerous problems: pollution-which interferes with the rights of the non-polluters; imperialism abroad-as in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala; and imperialism at home-in the form of police oppression, drug and sex laws, and political rule over the ghetto.

They view America's inefficient and community-destroying highway system as a creation of the Leviathan state, and the monotony and sterility of the media as a result of government licensing. They think that consumers would be far better protected from corporate abuses by cooperatives and testing services such as Consumer's Report than by the present system of government regulation. Essentially, they believe that the contemporary American society "capitalist" society is nowhere near being a laissez-faire society.