The anarchists are too easily let off the hook by Doherty for their defense of the New Left and their desire to work with them to build a Right-Left alliance. The Cold War state never became a garrison state. Aaron Friedberg’s splendid (and libertarian) history, In the Shadow of the Garrison State, depicts this very well. One libertarian critique echoed that of the New Left during the 1960s: the United States was pursuing an empire and establishing a military-industrial complex (the most memorable phrase Dwight D. Eisenhower ever uttered). Yet even during the height of the Vietnam War, the United States spent no more than 5 percent of its GDP on defense.

If the Cold War and its military spending never raised enough ire among those concerned about a military-industrial complex, what about the Cold War state’s repression of political dissent? What about the draft and the persecution of antiwar opponents and others by government agencies? Such a criticism became a central staple of the Rothbard–New Left axis. While there is little doubt that the Cold War state was repressive against certain citizens and that some of this was unfortunate—especially the spying and harassment of civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr.—some of the repression may have been necessary given the climate of revolution created by those threatening violence against the government. The Black Panther Party, the Weathermen, revolutionary communists like Angela Davis—these were not your ordinary run-of-the mill protesters. They urged a violent overthrow of the government and sought assistance (and sometimes hiding places) from Communist regimes. With regard to the draft, libertarians made the vital argument for a volunteer army, but they were not alone in doing so—conservatives and radicals were also making similar arguments, as was the military, which needed better trained and educated soldiers than the ones provided it by conscription. An all-powerful state would have rejected these arguments and continued drafting young men to serve against their will in the military. But the opposite occurred: at a time when America was still embroiled in Vietnam, the draft ended.

What is so problematic about the effort to unite the New Left and libertarians in an alliance against the state is that the libertarians would have been victims themselves once the revolution occurred. As the state and government grew in size, so did its repressive tendencies. It was liberalism that helped build the state, and it was that same liberal tradition which produced the New Left. The New Left was attempting to wrest control over the state not in order to smash it, but to employ it against enemies of the revolution. Imagine what such a revolution would have brought with it. Spend a little time on a typical campus today, with its speech codes and diversity scolds, and one comes to see that where leftist power dominates, it dominates absolutely. It is amazing that libertarians couldn’t see this.

What comes across in Doherty’s book is the ideological purism of libertarians, their unwillingness to compromise principle for politics. They are, perhaps, the only ideologues of the Right; they hold to principle so stubbornly that they are like the heroes and heroines in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the capitalists in Galt’s Gulch who would rather see the contemporary world destroyed than to live one more day having to compromise their beliefs. There is something to admire about this, something truly radical in its search for roots. Given what has become of Republican Party politics recently, with even conservative Republicans voting to dramatically expand the size of government, a radical alternative can indeed seem refreshing (yet even Ron Paul, a former Libertarian Party candidate and current GOP presidential candidate, has earmarks in his record).

On the other hand, the libertarian pursuit of principle over politics has often cost them support—it has certainly cost the Libertarian Party any chance it once had of growing into a respectable third party. As one libertarian quoted by Doherty puts it, “there is no mass constituency for seven year-old heroin dealers to be able to buy tanks with their profits from prostitution.” Yet, as Doherty reminds the reader, almost wistfully, the move towards a more moderate and respectable libertarianism—the political access that the CATO Institute has gained in Washington, for example—may have shorn the movement of its connections to the eccentric characters that at one time defined it. Every movement goes through such a process. By doing so, it assures that ideas and principles will be around for some time to come. No matter the length of time involved in moving the world in a more truly libertarian direction, the freedom movement Doherty describes will continue to attract radicals and individualists ready to man the barricades against the power of the state. Considering the usual eccentricities of libertarians, they may even be dropping acid while doing so.