Frank Meyer and Sydney Hook — Summary

This file is a short polemical essay by Murray N. Rothbard from January 1991. Its scope is strategic and intra-conservative: Rothbard rereads Frank Meyer’s fusionism and Sidney Hook’s prestige in order to explain how, in his view, anti-communism displaced anti-statism as the organizing principle of the American Right.

Rothbard begins by treating Meyer with marked ambivalence. Meyer is praised as a genuine libertarian-leaning conservative who defended decentralization, the free market, Christianity, and resistance to National Review’s purges of “extremists.” Yet Rothbard argues that Meyer’s fusionism contained a fatal contradiction: it sought to unite libertarians and traditionalists, but made the anti-Soviet crusade so central that socialists could enter the conservative coalition if only they were anti-communist.

In short, Frank’s strategic focus, The Enemy for him and for the conservative movement, was not statism and socialism but communism.

That sentence supplies the essay’s core conceptual move. Rothbard shifts the criterion of political judgment away from Cold War alignment and toward the broader question of state power. Meyer’s personal anti-communist history, Rothbard argues, made him too receptive to anti-Stalinist socialists; this opened the door for neoconservatives, whom Rothbard presents not as renewed conservatives but as social democrats in conservative dress.

The essay’s middle section, “The Main Menace: From Communism to Social Democracy,” uses the collapse of Soviet communism to intensify rather than soften Rothbard’s polemic. With communism no longer a plausible civilizational enemy, Rothbard says the Right must recognize the more durable danger: welfare-warfare statism, world government, interventionism, and hostility to ethnic self-determination.

But another vital aspect of this new post-communist world is that The Enemy of liberty and tradition is now revealed full-blown: social democracy.

For Rothbard, the “new world order” is not a conservative triumph but the revival of a social-democratic project: international management through the United Nations, permanent intervention abroad, and centralized rule at home. His argument depends on redefining neoconservatism as a tactical language for older left-liberal ambitions.

In short, on all crucial issues, social democrats stand against liberty and tradition, and in favor of statism and Big Government.

The essay then turns from diagnosis to strategy. Rothbard’s “New Fusionism” is a proposed alliance of paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives against social democracy. Its claim to relevance rests not on institutional power but on Rothbard’s belief that it expresses latent American instincts against elite-managed politics.

What we need to learn is how to mobilize the overwhelming support of the mass of Americans, and thus to undercut, or short-circuit, their domination by a small number of opinion-moulding leaders.

The final section, “The Litmus Test: Sidney Hook,” makes Hook the symbolic embodiment of the conservative movement’s degeneration. Rothbard dismisses Hook’s intellectual stature, portraying him as a fashionable ex-communist whose lifelong socialism did not prevent his canonization by respectable conservatives. Hook matters less as a thinker than as evidence that anti-communism had become a permission slip for statism.

More honest than his colleagues, he referred to himself candidly until the end as a Marxist and as a socialist.

Rothbard’s sharpest formulation presents Hook as the test case for whether a conservative movement still has principles beyond anti-communist respectability.

Thus, Sidney Hook, the Nestor of social democracy, was in his own unimpressive person the living embodiment of what the conservative movement has become: i.e., the disastrous subordination of every cherished principle to the slogan of “anti-communism,” and hence the permanent embrace of war and statism.

The essay closes by linking Hook’s theory of “heresy” and “conspiracy” to a broader fear of neoconservative limits on speech. Rothbard argues that once “democratic values” become the criterion for permissible expression, state power can be used against an ever-expanding range of dissidents, including paleoconservatives and libertarians themselves.

Note that this is a crackdown upon speech, press, and teaching, and not upon actions such as concrete plots to overthrow the State.

The work is thus both obituary-like polemic and strategic manifesto. Its thesis is that the old conservative fusion failed because it mistook communism, rather than statism, for the fundamental enemy; after 1991, Rothbard insists, the Right must reorganize around opposition to social democracy, interventionism, and ideological policing.