Betrayal of the American Right

More about the book

It is a cliché of publishing to observe, when a book appears before the public years after it was first written, that it is more relevant now than ever. But it is difficult to think of how else The Betrayal of the American Right can be described. Murray N. Rothbard chronicles the emergence of an American right wing that gave lip service to free-market principles and “limited government,” but whose first priority, for which it was willing to sacrifice anything else, was military interventionism around the world. That sounds familiar, to be sure, but as Rothbard shows, it is neither recent nor anomalous. It goes back to the very beginnings of the organized conservative movement in the 1950s