America is in a populist moment. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been hearing for the last decade.
Ever since Donald Trump shocked the legacy press, “expert” pollsters, and the political establishment more broadly in November of 2016, we’ve seen endless attempts to explain what was, at the time, seen as a perennial sea change in American politics.
Ludwig von Mises led an extraordinary life, shaped by the turbulent political shifts of the early nineteenth century. Born to a noble family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he published The Theory of Money and Credit by the age of 31. By age 33, he was on the front line in a war that resulted in the collapse of a regime that had held power for centuries.
One of the most important and aspects of Murray Rothbard’s work on the American Revolution is his framing of the Constitutional Convention as a counterrevolution against the radicalism of the 1770s. In bringing this interpretation of the Revolution to his audience, Rothbard drew upon the work of several historians, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s who challenged older narratives about the allegedly non-radical nature of the Revolution.
Most indicators suggest that the Republicans in the House and Senate are going to face a brutal backlash from the American people in November. Polling with generic ballots suggest a big win for the Democrats and likely the loss of Republican control of both houses of Congress.
There is little reason to cheer a Democratic party victory, however Republicans in charge have for the most part earned what is coming to them. They have refused to uphold their Constitutional obligation to take leading responsibility for war powers.
In 1927, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises published a short book titled Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. It was a time when free market capitalism was under attack from all sides. Socialism had been implemented in the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik leaders Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were finding admirers even among Western intellectuals.
In the days of the American Civil War, Americans were not exactly known for their ideological consistency. Many who sang the praises of the American secession in 1776 suddenly decided that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence—where it states that it’s perfectly fine “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”—changed their minds and decided allegiance to the government is the most important thing in the world.
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As an Albanian man, I am usually struck by the ease with which so-called “democratic socialists” in America dismiss any criticism of their beloved socio-economic system. When I point out the fact that “real socialism” has been tried, and it has failed miserably everywhere it has been tried including in my country of origin, Albania, I am usually hit with some meta-Marxian paradigm of how communism is not socialism, and how the dictatorship of the proletariat is not communism.
