In our era of bipartisan bliss and ideological convergence, when the prefix neo is attached like a for sale sign to all of the old ideologies, we are expected to believe that the actions of politicians and parties are undertaken for the good of the country rather than the vulgar self-interest of the participants. Of these, the third is most vital in keeping the present order together, for it is the job of the intellectuals to confer legitimacy on those who rule, introducing what the Marxists used to call false consciousness among the producing classes. In Toward a Theory of Libertarian Social Change , an unpublished book dealing with the strategy and tactics of the movement for a free society, the late Murray N. Rothbard defined the two great opposing classes by citing John C. Calhoun s happy distinction between net taxpayers and the net tax-consumers who constitute the State and its privileged and subsidized allies. From a libertarian perspective, these are the bad guys the leaders of the tax-eating coalition while the good guys are their taxpaying victims. Who the ruling class may be at any given time depends on an empirical analysis of the concrete conditions of the real world.
Contemporary conservatives are open to the same charge.
They spent the decades of the Cold War denying the existence of a ruling class in Washington and concentrating on the alleged threat from the competing gang in the Kremlin. Faced with the bloated arrogance and increasing lawlessness of their own ruling elite made more apparent and ominous since the fall of the Berlin Wall the American right is just beginning to distinguish friend and foe. The problem, at least in part, is precisely the contempt that the mandarins and intellectual gatekeepers the David Corns of this world and their right-leaning equivalents have for conspiracy theories. Too many on the right live in fear of this disdain. But perhaps an even bigger problem, avers Rothbard, is that many libertarians believe that statism has grown purely as the result of intellectual error, or imbibing erroneous ideas about what set of governmental policies will further the general welfare.