Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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PLOWBOY:Karl, everyone familiar with your career is intrigued by the switch you've made from traditional right wing conservatism to the New Left yet your book, Dear America, is a fervent call for a return to what can only be described as "Old-Fashioned American Values". Have you really changed so much?

HESS: No. I still believe in the same' things I've always believed in.

PLOWBOY: Which are?

HESS: Individualism. Self-reliance. Decentralization. Individual responsibility.

PLOWBOY: Those seem to be rather strange commodities to expect from the left.

HESS: Maybe so. But I'm no doctrinaire liberal. I don't now believe in the welfare state any more than I once really believed in the warfare state. I'm still holding out for the same old values I always supported the only difference is that I've changed my mind about the identity of the good guys and the bad guys. The New Left now seems to me to be espousing the causes that the Old Right once stood up for: individual responsibility and self-determination.

PLOWBOY: And you no longer feel that the right ran deliver such values?

HESS: No. Not since it was captured by corporate capitalism. The right still talks about self-reliance and free enterprise and individualism, you know, but it delivers something else entirely. It delivers bureaucracy and collectivism.

Corporate capitalism, in fact, is the worst enemy that free enterprise currently has in this country. To be quite blunt about it, the big guys are very deliberately using our "free enterprise" system to stamp out the little guys. But don't take my word for it, look at the statistics: There are fewer and fewer independently owned businesses--per capita-here in the United States every day.

PLOWBOY: Is there any similarity between this pressure being exerted by America's big businesses and, say, the collectivism of Soviet Russia?

HESS: Certainly. They're much the same. In the Soviet Union, the economy is developed under the ownership of a bureaucracy which shot its way to power, while in the United States exactly the same pattern exists except that our collectivists just buy their way to power. In either instance, the final result is the same: You owe your loyalty to the collective unit the corporation or the state, as the case may be. You're subordinated to its plans and processes.

There's no essential difference in the kind of world that either the large corporations of the U.S. or the collectives of the U.S.S.R. would impose on us. Back in the thirties, in fact, Jim Burnham wrote a book, The Managerial Revolution, in which he said that a DuPont bureaucrat could join a planning commission in the Soviet Union and never even know he'd changed jobs!

PLOWBOY: And the point is ?

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