Betrayal of the American Right

This remarkable piece of history will change the way you look at American politics. Betrayal of the American Right shows that the corruption of American "conservatism" began long before George W. Bush — and its author, Murray N. Rothbard, witnessed it all first hand.

According to Rothbard, the corruption began in the ten years after the end of World War II. Before then, a strong movement of anti–New Deal intellectuals had formed, and there was a burgeoning literature to explain why central planning was bad for American liberty. They also saw that central planning and war were linked as two socialistic programs. These were wonderful thinkers and writers: Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and dozens of others.

Yet little of this movement has made it into the official history of the United States. The Old Right is rarely discussed or even acknowledged, except to be smeared as backwards and isolationist. Countless times we read that the American Right was founded by National Review, and nothing of any merit existed before.

How many historians know anything about these crucial years? How many know that the Left and Right changed places during the 1950s and '60s? Very few indeed. What Rothbard shows is that the cause of peace is our heritage, and that free markets have been united with the antiwar cause from the founding fathers through the Old Right and as late as the 1950s. This book has been the best-kept secret in political writing for the last half century. Now at last it can be revealed to the world. Betrayal is the tell-all book that shows why and how the ideological world turned upside down.