Wally Conger

Sunni: So how did it come to pass that you wrote, a few years back, an essay exhorting libertarians to “cheer up”?

Wally: Believe it or not, despite my cynical, curmudgeonly, short-term pessimist exterior, there’s a little child in me that’s always been a long-term optimist.

Sunni: [laughs] Hey, that works for me. Do you still agree with that essay?

Wally: Yup. Libertarians may be rivaled by modern liberals in their overall negativity, but at least liberals aren’t defeatist. Liberals believe, even in the direst of times, that they’re gonna win eventually. Most libertarians, though, drop their heads and talk like the struggle for freedom is already lost. You can’t attract people with that attitude. What this movement needs is a strong vision for victory.

Sunni: So true. But it’s hard to believe that liberty will win, even long term, when we see shit like Homeland Security and the TSA apparently meekly accepted by the bulk of the American populace.

Wally: Optimism is hard work. No doubt about it. But it’s made even harder when you focus strictly on the short term. Concentrate on the larger picture. As Rothbard always pointed out, the long-term historical trend runs against the old order and towards liberty.

Sunni: Do you really think a strong vision can cut through the growing tyranny?

Wally: Sure. Think about the American Revolution. In 1775, colonists were pissed and noisy but—let me paraphrase Jefferson here—they were still more inclined to suffer England’s crap than pursue rebellion. One year later, Tom Paine’s visionary pamphlet Common Sense set a fire under colonial butts, and the revolution was off and running. Four decades ago, Tom Hayden’s “Port Huron Statement” galvanized students and unleashed SDS and the New Left. Karl Hess’s manifesto “The Death of Politics” became a rallying cry for the first modern libertarian radicals.

Sunni: Okay [pauses] Where might such a vision come from today, and what might it look like?

Wally: Who knows? I’m dying to find out. [laughs] That’s the fun part.

Sunni: [laughs] I suppose I might see it that way too, if I weren’t so bloody impatient. Who or what was your introduction to the freedom philosophy?

Wally: I guess it was Ayn Rand. I was a high school Republican punk and card-carrying member of Young Americans for Freedom in 1970. Somebody somewhere handed me The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand was grouchy but interesting. [laughs] At the same time, though, I was reading articles and columns by libertarians like Jerome Tuccille, David Friedman, and Philip Abbott Luce in YAF’s monthly New Guard magazine—and this was after the famous 1969 Labor Day purge in St. Louis. Imagine that! Then, at a YAF summer leadership conference in Glendale, I spotted some kids hoisting laissez-faire signs and an enormous black flag. They handed me a shitload of free reading material: issues of The Match! and photocopies of things like Rothbard’s “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” from Ramparts and Hess’ famous Playboy piece, “The Death of Politics, ” which I mentioned before. Within a few months, I had subscribed to the Libertarian Forum newsletter and had read Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative. I was calling myself an anarchist before I turned 17.

Sunni: I don’t know if you know it, but I interviewed Jerry Tuccille not too long ago. That was a lot of fun.

Wally: I’ll bet it was. Radical Libertarianism is still the best primer this movement’s ever seen. I hope it’s still in print. [It doesn’t appear to be.]

Sunni: But you, right wing?

Wally: Big time. I was raised in a Goldwater household. My first memory of politics is when I was 10. It was summer 1964. I was sitting on the davenport with my mom, watching Barry Goldwater accept the Republican nomination at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. It’s so weird now to think I was listening to a speech written by a then-unknown speechwriter named Karl Hess. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Magnificent words.

Sunni: Yes, absolutely. Before I approached you, I asked Tom Ender if he thought you’d be willing to go through this torture with me, and over the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I thought of myself as being a more right-leaning anarchist, mostly because it was Ayn Rand’s fiction that introduced me to the freedom philosophy. But he pointed to several things, including my atheism and experiments in polyamory as being counter to that. And I had to admit that he was right, but that left me even more confused about what the terms “right” and “left” mean in a libertarian context. And as far as left and right anarchism goes, I’m totally lost! What’s your take on those descriptors?

Wally: It can be confusing, can’t it? [laughs] But I try to keep it simple. I’m a Hess-Konkin fundamentalist on left and right designations for the broad political landscape. Given Rothbard’s claim that our libertarian forebears were late 18^th, early 19^th century classical liberal “leftists”, and subscribing, as Hess and Konkin did, to the idea that politics follows a straight line, not a circle, I believe liberty lies in the leftward direction and culminates at the farthest left in statelessness, or anarchism. Likewise, as you travel rightward along the line, you move toward bureaucracy and concentrated power and wealth. That direction terminates in, well, tyranny, despotism, and repression. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and FDR were all men of the right. Fidel Castro oversees a right regime. George W. Bush, of course, falls on the extreme right, as do Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the reptilian Chuck Schumer. Whatever their rhetoric, they all believe in consolidating power into the fewest possible hands.