When Frank Met Friedrich | The American Spectator

As Daniel Flynn shows in his new book, Frank S. Meyer, The Man Who Invented Conservatism, first had to grapple with Communism. That murderous ideology was all the rage in the mid-1940s when the USA allied with the USSR to take down Hitler’s National Socialists. Josef Stalin became the benevolent “Uncle Joe,” and White House resident Harry Hopkins urged FDR to give the Soviet dictator everything he wanted. (RELATED: The Organizer of Victory: Frank S. Meyer)

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In these conditions, Frank Meyer encountered Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. Still a Communist, but with surging doubts, Meyer reviews the book in The New Masses, the flagship of the left:

The appeal of his argument to decent, democratic people lies in the contention that government economic planning demands the accumulation of immense power in central organs and that therefore, so long as production is not unlimited, what men shall have and do will have to be decided by the arbitrary decision of other men. To the immediately obvious answer that this all depends upon whether the planning authorities are democratically chosen and controlled, he rebuts that the kind of decisions which have to be taken by such authorities are not the kind upon which a majority can ever agree. Such decisions, he says, necessitate an independent choice by governing authorities, even though they are democratic, between the claims of minorities. This necessity will in the end amount to the choice being arbitrarily made by those who exercise the power. He claims further that because agreement on such questions cannot be arrived at democratically, those who govern, no matter how democratically they are chosen, no matter how good their intentions, will then have continually to increase their use of sheer power to enforce those decisions. The net result will be a completely regimented society in which the individual would have no freedom and no real voice.

The conditions Hayek described — arbitrary state power, individuals with no freedom or voice — already existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, which Hayek contended were basically the same. That was also recognized by Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, author of Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. “In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany,” Massaquoi wrote, “the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

Frank Meyer had some distance to travel before he finally ditched Communism and invented conservatism. His encounter with Hayek is on page 126 of Flynn’s book, with hundreds more to come, based on the cache of papers Flynn discovered in a warehouse. This writer has yet to reach the end, but Flynn has already provided good service on Communism in the USA, a subject largely unknown to many Americans. (RELATED: Finding the Lost Papers of the Conservative Movement)

Readers meet William Z. Foster, author of Toward Soviet America, the outcast Jay Lovestone, Communist Party USA boss Earl Browder, Stalinist writer Howard Fast, and many others. Through Meyer, readers learn of the Popular Front and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. As Flynn shows, Stalin’s alliance with Hitler drove many out of the Communist Party.

Meyer remained as the CPUSA rebranded as the Communist Political Association, and the Communist International, better known as the Comintern, became the Cominform. Stalin ended that accommodation through the Duclos letter, a signal to launch the war against the West and hide Soviet control of national Communist parties.

As Flynn notes, after his review of The Road to Serfdom, Meyer never wrote another article for The New Masses. At the time Hayek’s book got a frosty reception, and so did George Orwell’s anti-Stalinist Animal Farm, rejected by several publishers, including T.S. Eliot on behalf of Faber and Faber. American politicians show little if any familiarity with these classics.

For example, Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, who has spent time in Communist China, describes socialism as “neighborliness.” New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani claims socialism means only that the state “provides whatever is necessary for its people to live a dignified life.” So the government should take over apartment buildings, open grocery stores, and so forth.

Refugees from Cuba and the Eastern Bloc could testify that such measures don’t work. Friedrich Hayek and ex-communist Frank Meyer could explain how the free market always outperforms a command economy, and it’s not even close. Here’s hoping that The Man Who Invented Conservatism gets the readership it deserves.

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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.