For several years some of us have been proclaiming, unheeded, that the New Left was very different from the Old; that this was not just another embodiment of the old Liberal-Socialist-Communist attitudes and coalition. Now the press is beginning to catch on; everyone knows that the fiery leader of the French student revolution, Daniel (Danny the Red) Cohn-Bendit, is an anarchist and not a socialist, that Red Rudi Dutschke, the German student leader, has at least anarchist tendencies, and that anarchist views permeate the New Left in the United States. C.L.

When they finished nominating Dick Nixon at Miami Beach, the Republican delegates were far from happy at a job well done; instead, they were gloomy, glum, and dispirited. And why not? They had just nominated a two-time loser, a man who had not won any election for eighteen years, a man who inspires no enthusiasm anywhere in the country, a man consistently behind Nelson Rockefeller in the public opinion polls.

In all the stupefying tedium, hypocrisy, and flatulence of the Republican National Convention, there was only one refreshing moment of truth and candor: when the convention’s youngest delegate got up to speak. Paul W. Walter, Jr., twenty-one years old, had unexpectedly won his primary in Cleveland on an anti-Vietnam platform. Now he arose to second the clearly futile, sad, but somehow noble candidacy of Harold E. Stassen for president. To a bored and unheeding audience, Paul Walter addressed these words:

Mr. [Stephen P.] Halbrook’s article in the May Outlook is a veritable curiosity, akin to the talking dog or the two-headed man. If nothing else, Mr. Halbrook’s portrait of Mao Tse-tung as libertarian and free enterpriser is certainly original. The tone of his thesis, however, has an all-too-familiar quality; one is reminded of nothing so much as the most starry-eyed of the Stalinist tracts of the 1930s: when we were treated to a picture of the happy and productive Soviet society.

One of the longer lasting aspects of the Great Ecology Scare of the 1969–70 intellectual season (a craze which seems to have faded away since the orgiastic exercises of “Earth Day”), is the Population Hysteria. The Left has clasped to its collective bosom the idea that population growth is the root cause of our Environmental Crisis, and Zero Population Growth clubs have sprouted over the nation’s colleges. Young men and women solemnly take the pledge never to have more than two children and thereby cause population growth.

Recently a great deal of publicity has been given to a burgeoning split in the right wing, a split between the dominant Buckley-National Review conservatives and the new libertarians.

Twenty years ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone “Neanderthal” (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that “Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists.” Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce US imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed by a single iota in these two decades!

abortion, 148

African-Americans, 37–38, 43–46, 102, 160

and conscription, 122

and conservatives, 159

and Rothbard, 151

as colonized people, 41–42, 46

Agnew, Spiro, 127–28

Algeria, 119

Americans for Democratic Action, 61, 62, 159

American Telephone and Telegraph, 50

Anarchism, 125–26, 160

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Rothbard), 11

antiwar movement, 83–84, 100, 109–10, 129–30

and liberalism, 159

Arendt, Hannah, 159

Bay of Pigs, 86

Biafra, 48

The fantastic, incredible, shattering events of April Fool Week came with such bewildering speed that it’s almost impossible to sort them out and analyze them at this early date. We pundits and columnists were taken by surprise almost every day, and many of us formed brilliant theories one day, only to see them shattered by the onrushing and changing facts of the day following.

Okay. I deplore and condemn the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. But no more and no less than I deplore and condemn any murder of any man. The attention and the brouhaha being paid to the King murder is more than a little ridiculous and more than a little revolting.