“Let me now come to an evaluation of contemporary conservatism, and then go on to explain why conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, why libertarians must be conservatives.

“Modern conservatism, in the United States and Europe, is confused and distorted. This confusion is largely due to democracy. Under the influence of representative democracy and with the transformation of the U.S.  and Europe into mass democracies from World War I, conservatism was transformed from an antiegalitarian, aristocratic, antistatist ideological force into a movement of culturally conservative statists: the right wing of the socialists and social democrats. Most self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives are concerned, as they should be, about the decay of families, divorce, illegitimacy, loss of authority, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, social disintegration, sex, and crime. All of these phenomena represent anomalies and scandalous deviations from the natural order. A conservative must indeed be opposed to all of these developments and try to restore normalcy. However, most contemporary conservatives (at least most of the spokesmen of the conservative establishment) either do not recognise that their goal of restoring normalcy requires the most drastic, even revolutionary, antistatist social changes, or (if they know about this) they are members of the ‘fifth column’ engaged in destroying conservatism from inside (and hence, must be regarded as evil).

“That this is largely true for the so-called neoconservatives does not require further explanation here. Indeed, as far as their leaders are concerned, one suspects that most of them are of the later (evil) kind. They are not truly concerned about cultural matters but recognise that they must play the cultural-conservatism card  so as not to lose power and promote their entirely different goal of global social democracy. However, it is also true of many conservatives who are also genuinely concerned about family disintegration or dysfunction and cultural rot. I am thinking here in particular of the conservatism represented by Patrick Buchanan and his movement. Buchanan’s conservatism is by no means as different form that of the conservative Republican party  establishment as he and his followers fancy themselves. In one decisive respect their brand of conservatism is in full agreement with that of the conservative establishment: both are statists. They differ over what exactly needs to be done to restore normalcy to the U.S., but they agree that it must be done by the state. There is not a trace of principled antistatism in either.”

▪  Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy – The God that Failed (Transaction, 2001) extract from pages 189 through to 191.

SydneyTrads is the internet portal and communication page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young professionals who form part of the Australian paleoconservative, traditionalist conservative, and independent right.