As discussed on the show yesterday, the "Right" as we know it today is a carefully constructed, controlled movement that has nothing to do with the classical liberal live-and-let-live view that characterized the "Right" at the beginning of the 20th century.
Murray Rothbard outlines the takeover of this political movement in his groundbreaking work The Betrayal of the American Right.
A summary of the book can be found here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/betrayal-american-right.html
The PDF of the book can be downloaded for free from mises.org:
http://mises.org/books/betrayal.pdf
Or buy the hard copy from mises.org for $20:
http://mises.org/store/Betrayal-of-the-American-Right-The-P434.aspx
Another terrific and much shorter essay by Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, addresses the illusory battle between Left and Right in post FDR New Deal America. Here he observes that those who believe in individual liberty mistakenly believe themselves to be members of the "far right" when in fact the right-wing conservative movement has nothing to do with individual liberty. Conservatism in America is Fascism, plain and simple. The movement towards individual liberty has never in history been conservative, and that is still true today. It is instead a radical movement that is neither conservative in the right wing sense, nor progressive in the left wing sense. To be so ideologically lazy about a particular issue as to simply ask "is it conservative?" is in fact to ask "is it fascist?"
Read it online here: http://mises.org/daily/910
Or download the PDF here: http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/lrpfl.pdf
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