Murray Rothbard as Low Human Capital
A typology of modern American libertarianism.
Note: This essay is very long, around 7,000 words. I suspect that a lot of people don’t want to read something that long but would enjoy listening to it read aloud. (Additionally, there are some sections that just sound better read aloud, such as the extended quotes from Rothbard’s polemics.) The Substack app has an AI text-to-speech that’s usually very good, but it doesn’t appear to be available on browsers, and it reads the in-text parenthetical citations while excluding all footnotes. So I’ve made my own AI audio which you can find above.
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Like a lot of smart people, I used to be a libertarian.1 My otherwise (before and since) apolitical parents became delegates for Ron Paul in 2012. I, too, supported the Good Doctor, and after the Republicans screwed him over at the convention, I stumped for Gary Johnson in my fifth-grade class election. By 2015, I was a devotee of Antiwar.com and the Tom Woods Show. Around that time, I acquired a taste for Murray Rothbard, and I got my hands on the Ethics of Liberty, Anatomy of the State, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and the ultimate page-turner, Betrayal of the American Right.2 (If you can’t tell, this made me a very cool high schooler!)
Friends of mine have gone to Mises U and corresponded with (the now excommunicated) Walter Block. Not quite as cool, I admit, as my friends today who email John Mearsheimer week after week, but we all have to start somewhere. I have, at one point in my life, been on Charles Koch’s payroll. As far as I know, I’m also the only person who ever [REDACTED] at the Cato Institute while [REDACTED]. I once asked the late David Boaz about Rothbard’s button—would you “blister [your] thumb pushing a button that would abolish the State immediately, if such a button existed?”—and he made a quip about Leonard Read before amending the question so that even if he answered in the affirmative he wouldn’t sound like an anarchist, and then said no anyway.
Dear reader, I could regale you for hours with tales of my exploits in libertarianism. Alas, I am here for business. Friends, Substackers, nerds—I have come to bury Liberty, not to praise her.
I.
If you know anything about the modern American libertarian movement (and why, oh why, you poor soul, would you?) you might know that there are, essentially, two types of libertarians. As far as I can tell, this is a fairly widespread observation. Several weeks ago, I overheard someone at my local vegan punk cafe remark that, even though their date the previous night was a libertarian, “she’s closer to the anarchist kind than the Republican kind.” The Republican kind of libertarian, I learned, is also “the fascist kind,” and fascism is just another word for liking the free market.
Godwinian errors aside, this person is nearly right. There are two types of libertarians. One is reasonable and one is whacked out of their gourds. The typology is even close to accurate, although “anarchist” and “Republican” have a hard time explaining some prominent cases. There are plenty of right-anarchists whose first principles hardly jibe with those of most self-styled anarcho-capitalists. David Friedman, Bryan Caplan, and Michael Huemer come to mind. (And perhaps Jan Narveson if we’re being picky.) There are also some Republicans who would fit in better with the anarchist crew than with Friedman, Caplan, and Huemer. Take that lovable 89-year-old scamp Ron Paul. Or the sitting Republican Congressman Thomas Massie.
Although it is widely held that there are two types of libertarians, I am aware of no one to date who has made a good useful typology of modern American libertarianism. Probably the best attempt was by Murray Rothbard, who proposed that the distinction is not really between anarchists and minarchists, but between radicals and conservatives:
Perhaps the word that best defines our distinction is “radical.” Radical in the sense of being in total, root-and-branch opposition to the existing political system and to the State itself. Radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the State with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice. Radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and antistatism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul.
[I]n contrast to what seems to be true nowadays, you don’t have to be an anarchist to be radical in our sense, just as you can be an anarchist while missing the radical spark. … Far better one Albert Nock than a hundred anarcho-capitalists who are all too comfortable with the existing status quo.
We ought to take Rothbard’s typology seriously, and not just because we should expect someone who spent his entire life strategizing for the libertarian movement to be able to speak about the movement with some degree of authority. By invoking temperament rather than ideology, Rothbard solves for the problem posed by non-radical anarchists like David Friedman. Friedman’s writing, Rothbard says, evinces not hatred of the state, but “simply the cool conviction that anarchism would be the best of all possible worlds, but that our current set-up is pretty far up with it in desirability.”
If we’re looking for a useful typology, however, Rothbard’s vibes-based definitions aren’t going to cut it. How are we supposed to tell who hates the state, root-and-branch, with the spirit of liberty and the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns and so on? From their writing? Take a look at the opening paragraph of Democracy: The God That Failed, the magnum opus of Rothbard’s intellectual heir Hans-Hermann Hoppe. (Remember, this is the first thing you read when you open the book!)
In acting, an actor invariably aims to substitute a more satisfactory for a less satisfactory state of affairs and thus demonstrates a preference for more rather than fewer goods. Moreover, he invariably considers when in the future his goals will be reached, i.e., the time necessary to accomplish them, as well as a good's duration of serviceability. Thus, he also demonstrates a universal preference for earlier over later goods, and for more over less durable ones. This is the phenomenon of time preference.
If Hoppe hates the state—and no doubt Rothbard would have said that he does—you wouldn’t know it from his writing. Granted, Hoppe is a German academic, and German academics have a tendency to speak and write in such a way that, even when expressing a profoundly simple idea, they often veer toward verbosity and obscurantism, while appending needless dependent clauses onto their sentences, and they suck out all of the joy and emotion from the topic at discussion, until you lose track of what they were even saying when the sentence began.3 But there are plenty of other “radicals” who supposedly lay claim to Rothbard’s legacy whose intellectual output contains barely a shred of Rothbard’s radicalism.
Even if radicalism and conservatism correlated perfectly with what we expect the libertarian typology to look like, moreover, we should still think that outward-facing temperament is simply epiphenomenal to something more important, like someone’s niche in the social movement ecology or their political strategy. Rothbard surely would have believed that Ed Crane, the longtime president of the Cato Institute, was as conservative as they come. Yet, in a private memo written shortly after the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, Crane decried the U.S. war against Iraq in explicitly moral terms, describing the conflict as one in which “the world’s most advanced military power laid waste to a Third World nation.” When reprimanded by a conservative donor, Crane wrote a groveling apology, but the donor withdrew $750,000 in funding anyway.4
It is possible that many of the “conservative” libertarians, even Crane, feel the same instinctive, burning hatred for the state as Rothbard, but their incentives are simply arrayed so that they have to exude an image of conservatism to keep their funders happy. (And then, after some time pantomiming conservatism, they might come to adopt it genuinely.) Since we can’t know people’s private beliefs with anything approaching certainty, we can’t rely on private beliefs to set the demarcating line in our libertarian typology. Instead, we have to dive deep into the history of the modern American libertarian movement—beginning with the alliance and subsequent split between Rothbard and Crane that set the stage for the libertarian movement as it exists today.
II.
Danny Bessner’s 2014 article on Rothbard is, perhaps, the sole treatment of the intellectual history of modern American libertarianism in the scholarly literature. Bessner concurs that there are, essentially, two types of libertarians. And both of them, he says, can locate Rothbard in their intellectual genealogy. “At the core of [Rothbard’s] project,” Bessner writes,
lay the development of a more sophisticated, if insulated, political strategy premised on popularization at both the elite and popular levels. Rothbard argued that “libertarians must […] engage in hard thinking and scholarship, put forth theoretical and systematic books, articles, and journals, and engage in conferences and seminars” to refine the libertarian message amongst elites. At the same time, they must create and engender “publicity, slogans, student activism, lectures, radio and TV spots, etc.” so that ordinary Americans would learn about the movement.
The operative institution in Rothbard’s political project was supposed to be the Cato Institute, which Rothbard cofounded alongside Crane and industrialist Charles Koch in 1976-77. Cato was initially designed to be an “open center” for libertarian intellectualism, aimed at training an elite cadre to police the “crazies and deviationists” (p. 58) of the Libertarian Party (LP) who sought to compromise the movement’s moral principles for electoral success. In 1976, Rothbard authored an internal memo, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” which called for Cato to adhere to a radical line among intellectuals while simultaneously popularizing a libertarian anarchist vision with the public. In a significantly pared back, public-facing version of the memo, Rothbard warned against “right-wing opportunists” who “openly believe in hiding or working against their ultimate goal [by watering down their message] in order to achieve short-run gains.” The opportunists, he averred, would fail to gain purchase for their ideas in the short-run because the public would confuse them for mainstream liberals or conservatives, and in the long-run, they would lose sight of their principles “and descend into another gradualist, nonlibertarian reform movement.”
From the beginning, however, Rothbard’s cofounder had other plans. While Koch’s primary function was to moderate between Rothbard the radical and Crane the conservative, Crane wanted to use Cato to generate policy proposals that LP candidates could adopt as part of their electoral platforms and inject into the public debate. Crane’s metric for success, therefore, was the number of votes that LP candidates received in elections, even if the candidates downplayed the more radical elements of their worldview. As Bessner puts it, “whereas Crane wanted to change laws, Rothbard wanted to change society.”
Relations between Crane and Rothbard predictably deteriorated throughout the 1970s, due both to the two men’s differing theories of change and their caustic, unaccommodating personalities. Rothbard was incensed that Crane had hired a non-Austrian school economist, David Henderson, to work at Cato, and that some Cato staffers had adopted the idiosyncratic position that nuclear power is impermissible under libertarian theory because radiation violates the non-aggression principle.5 Crane and Koch tolerated the staffers and abandoned the “correct” libertarian position on nuclear power, Rothbard alleged, because a free market in nuclear energy wasn’t “politically potent” (PDF p. 283) or attractive to young left-wing and liberal voters.
Crane, meanwhile, harangued Rothbard for failing to complete a manuscript for the Ethics of Liberty in the same time it would have taken to produce a policy book; denied to a National Review reporter that Rothbard—whom the reporter smeared as “an apologist for Stalin”—was a significant influence on Cato;6 and fired Rothbard allies (p. 55) David Theroux and Williamson “Bill” Evers from their senior positions at Cato and its proprietary publication Inquiry.
Crane and Rothbard’s feud finally became irresolvable during the 1980 presidential campaign, when the LP nominated lawyer and Crane ally Ed Clark for president and Charles Koch’s brother David Koch for vice president. From early on, Clark’s campaign reflected the two core elements of Crane’s political strategy: to build the LP into a formidable electoral vehicle by capturing a significant share of the popular vote, and to move libertarianism into the discursive mainstream by focusing on concrete policy ideas rather than pushing the envelope with radical political philosophy. As Clark’s research director David Boaz reflected on the campaign in 2020, Clark’s run “may have been the most intellectual and wonkish presidential campaign ever,” as it published lengthy white papers on Social Security reform, education, fiscal policy, and foreign and military policy, as well as a campaign book, A New Beginning, that brought together contributions by top libertarian policy experts. From January to November 1980, Crane took a leave of absence from Cato to serve as Clark’s communications director, while most of Clark’s senior staff members either held a position at a Koch-funded outfit prior to working on the campaign or took a job at one soon after leaving. David Koch contributed nearly $2.1 million to the campaign, opening unprecedented access to national broadcast and print media which Clark used to present himself as the erudite, mainstream alternative to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan who advocated low taxes and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Clark’s flagship proposal was to cut the income tax in half and balance the federal budget with even greater cuts to government spending.
Rothbard, committed as ever to purity politics and thoroughly unimpressed by the wonkishness touted by Boaz and others, was furious at what he saw as Clark, Koch, and Crane’s world-historical betrayal of libertarian radicalism. As Rothbard wrote in his newsletter, Libertarian Forum, immediately after the election (PDF p. 339):
The proper epitaph for the Clark campaign is this: “And they didn't even get the votes.” Libertarian principle was betrayed, the LP platform ignored and traduced, our message diluted beyond recognition, the media fawned upon—all for the goal of getting “millions” (2-3, 3-5 or whatever) of votes. And they didn't even do that. All they got for their pains was a measly 1% of the vote. They sold their souls—ours, unfortunately, along with it—for a mess of pottage, and they didn't even get the pottage.
…
The campaign was marked throughout, in strategy and in tactics, by deception and duplicity. The platform was ignored, the message distorted. Basic principles were evaded and buried. The Clark defenders maintain that, in many of the instances of betrayal, he took a good stand from time to time—generally not in front of the media but before small libertarian audiences. My reply to all these feeble defenses is simply this: It’s a helluva note when all we have to fall back on is the inconsistency of our candidate.
Rothbard seethed that Clark had referred to himself as a “low-tax liberal” rather than a “no-tax libertarian,” that Clark promised to keep the welfare state largely intact, that he had staked out an ambiguous position on nuclear power, that he failed to articulate the moral imperative of a non-interventionist foreign policy (i.e., avoiding “mass murder” of foreign civilians by the state). On the whole overriding issue of the size and scope of government, Rothbard complained that Clark had told Nightline host Ted Koppel just days before the election that libertarians merely wanted to cut the federal budget to where it stood in 1962, tainting libertarianism with the left-liberal legacy of Camelot. That is: “We want to get back to the kind of government that President Kennedy had in the early 1960’s.” The Crane-directed and Koch-funded Clark campaign, Rothbard declared, had not merely not educated the public on the libertarian view of politics; it had mis-educated by obscuring and bastardizing the whole libertarian message—and the Crane strategy that guided the campaign was ultimately responsible.
Yet, in the wider movement, it was Crane who got the upper hand over Rothbard in the campaign’s aftermath. Rothbard’s histrionic disavowal of Clark had put Rothbard on extraordinarily poor terms with Charles Koch, the paymaster and effective final decision-maker of the Cato Institute, and opened an opportunity for Crane to convince Koch to expel Rothbard from Cato and fully reorient the organization away from libertarian philosophizing and toward policy advocacy. Thus, on March 5, 1981, Crane informed Rothbard that a majority of Cato shareholders—himself, Charles Koch, and Koch associate George Pearson—had agreed that Rothbard should relinquish his shares in the organization due to “deep-seated” antagonism between Crane and Rothbard (PDF p. 355). When Rothbard showed up to a board meeting three weeks later flanked by an attorney, Koch informed Rothbard that Rothbard was “no longer a shareholder,” as the board had been dissolved and reconstituted the previous night. Sam Husbands, a non-voting Cato board member, observed that it was ultimately Koch’s prerogative to approve such a significant personnel change.
III.
Rothbard’s expulsion from Cato is, essentially, the watershed moment in modern American libertarianism. Prior to the Cato-Rothbard schism, there was no formal institutional separation of the two strands of the libertarian movement. Moreover, the two strands had not fully developed their strategies or theories of change prior to the clarifying experience of the 1980 campaign. Following the election and the split, the modern libertarian movement began to emerge in a form much closer to where it stands in the present day.
For the Koch-Crane wing of the libertarian movement, the lesson of the 1980 campaign was that attempts to promote libertarianism through a mass political program, including attempts to build the LP into a viable political organ, were a fool’s errand. The Clark campaign had received just 921,000 votes, around one percent of all votes cast in the election and less than one-third to one-fourth of what Clark and David Koch had promised supporters. The campaign racked up more than $140,000 in debt, with the Kochs reportedly having to dip into their principal investments to fund the effort. By the end of the year, Charles and David were embroiled in a legal dispute with brother William Koch, who accused them of mismanaging the family business and inappropriately devoting too much time and attention to politics.
In the year after Rothbard’s ouster, then, Crane and the Kochs virtually abandoned Cato’s educational mission, which they believed was an inefficient use of resources, and transformed the outfit into a public policy think tank with only a minor scholarly program. The day Crane returned from his leave of absence following the end of the Clark campaign, he hired Clark’s research director, Boaz, to edit the Cato Policy Report and produce dozens of policy analyses—even though, as the Libertarian Vanguard was eager to observe (PDF p. 5), the Cato board had only commissioned four such studies. Robert Formaini, a Rothbard ally who acted as Cato’s CEO in Crane’s absence, was sidelined by Crane for having prioritized educational programs and presenting a plan to Charles Koch, alongside Rothbard’s longtime friend Ronald Hamowy, to bolster Cato’s scholarly mission (PDF p. 5). By late 1981, Crane had moved the Cato headquarters from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and Formaini left Cato to complete a doctorate (p. 123). Boaz, who was “the only staffer to follow Crane from San Francisco to Washington,” remarked later that the move “was a signal that we were going to focus on public policy and less on intellectual disputes.”
For Rothbard, the lesson of the Clark campaign was that Crane and Koch must never be trusted—and so Rothbard and his allies redoubled their efforts to radicalize the libertarian movement, beginning with the LP, and vowed that activists must “Never Again” let a candidate like Clark win the nomination and allow the so-called “Craniacs” of the “Crane Machine” to run roughshod over libertarian moral principles. By early 1981, Rothbard had joined forces with the conservative editor of Reason, Robert W. Poole, Jr., and the conservative 1972 LP presidential nominee John Hospers to form a “Coalition for a Party of Principle” (PDF p. 360) aimed at blocking the “Crane Machine” candidate from winning the party’s chairmanship at the next convention. The effort was technically successful—the elected chair was Ed Clark’s wife, Alicia Clark, who fired the Crane-backed LP national director the following year—and Rothbard was elected a member of the Libertarian National Committee.7
During the campaign for the 1984 presidential nomination, Rothbard and his allies in the LP Radical Caucus even beat back a Crane- and Koch-backed effort to draft the Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul as the LP’s nominee. Radical Caucus chair Justin Raimondo wrote in the caucus newsletter (p. 1) that Paul’s Congressional voting record betrayed that he was:
a defender of the Social Security system; a bulwark of the CIA; a crusader against freedom of the press, world peace through world trade, and disarmament negotiations with the Soviets; a propagandist for the bloody and brutal dictator [Anastasio] Somoza [of Nicaragua]; a champion of welfare payments to veterans; and a stalwart in the New Right’s assaults on the liberty of gays and on women’s right of choice on abortion.
Rothbard promoted the piece in his own newsletter and added that (PDF p. 458):
Mr. Paul as a candidate for the LP nomination would have to face up to and repudiate his long list of anti-libertarian votes and stands before anyone except the goose-stepping devotees of the Crane Machine could even consider him for such a high post.8
By the time the LP’s 1983 nominating convention came around, the race was between former party chair David Bergland and Cato Institute foreign policy staffer Earl Ravenal, who was backed by Crane and his allies. David Koch, for instance, offered to spend $300,000 (PDF p. 525) to support a Ravenal general election campaign. When Bergland narrowly clinched the nomination, the Kochs and the “Craniacs” left the LP and permanently forsook it as a lost cause. Rothbard’s newsletter declared: “Total Victory: How Sweet It Is!”
IV.
Yet, Rothbard’s victory was by no means total, and it was only briefly sweet. By the beginning of the next presidential election cycle, in 1987, Rothbard had latched onto a new explanation for the LP’s perennial poor performance: the bohemian cultural orientation of the “Modal Libertarian.” The problem with libertarians, insisted Rothbard, is that a marginal intellectual movement inevitably attracts marginal followers (p. 40):
Such movements are filled with what Germans call luftmenschen, people with no steady jobs, incomes, or visible means of support; the sort of people who instinctively alienate the mainstream, bourgeois Americans, not so much by the content of their ideas, but by their style, lack of moorings, and “counterculture.” … [I]f a serious opportunity should arise, … Libertarian luftmenschen will react not with enthusiasm but in fear and trembling. For far greater than their professed love of liberty is their hostility to bourgeois America. As one critical observer of the party has harshly charged: “they want the Party to be a social club for crazies.”
The “Modals,” as Rothbard called them, embraced unpopular, left-wing cultural causes like atheism and feminism. They were less anti-state than anti-authority, and they opposed even private forms of authority like the church and the family that served as cornerstones of Western civilization. They tarnished the libertarian brand and made it impossible for any self-respecting libertarian to build a mass movement by winning over “normal” people who believed in private authority. They were a critical impediment to Rothbard’s political program because, as Bessner puts it, Rothbard believed that the normal, “Middle American” masses were the heirs to a radically libertarian revolutionary tradition that stretched back to the American founding generation. The masses “were therefore naturally libertarian, even if they did not know it,” and could be won over by a radical anarchist message so long as it was not weighed down by the Modals.
“The Libertarian Party is probably irreformable,” declared Lew Rockwell (p. 35), Rothbard’s friend and cofounder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute: “and irrelevant even if it weren’t.” Rothbard, Rockwell, and their allies decided by the end of the 1980s that their best chance to effect the political revolution they desired was to leave the mainstream libertarian movement altogether and to embrace the right. In 1989, Rothbard made contact with Thomas Fleming, the paleoconservative editor of Chronicles magazine, to defend Chronicles and its publisher, the Rockford Institute, from allegations of anti-Semitism.9 Shortly thereafter, Rothbard settled at the Rockford Institute; began publishing a monthly newsletter, the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (RRR), to promote his alliance with the right; and, under the auspices of Rockford and the Mises Institutes, founded the John Randolph Club, a social and intellectual salon for so-called “paleos” whose members included the former White House staffer and archconservative Pat Buchanan, the National Review editor Joe Sobran, Rothbard’s colleague and protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and the white nationalists Samuel Francis, Peter Brimelow, and Jared Taylor.
In his presidential address to the John Randolph Club in 1992, Rothbard savaged what he regarded as the two failed strategies historically adopted by the American right. One, Crane and Koch’s “Fabian” strategy, had given up the game of political change and ended up drawing libertarians more in the direction of statism than it had drawn the state in the direction of liberty. The other—which Rothbard had embraced just years earlier, but which he now ascribed to F. A. Hayek—had sought to effect change by influencing scholarly discourse, which would then “trickle down” to the public.10 The “Hayekian” strategy had failed to gain traction, according to Rothbard, because intellectual elites are far more interested in perpetuating the corrupt status quo from which they gain their status and tax-funded university appointments than in spreading “correct” ideas about undoing or abolishing the state. Arrayed against the structural forces of greed and government, the strategy “at best … [would] take several hundred years” to convert the public to the radical right philosophy Rothbard espoused. And “some of us,” he remarked, “are a bit more impatient than that.”
The solution, for Rothbard and Rockwell, was to appeal to the great unwashed masses of the American public, who they believed were being swindled by the state and who surely would revolt against their plundering oppressors if only they were shocked into a radical right class consciousness. Thus,
the proper course for the Right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.
Rothbard and Rockwell’s “paleo strategy,” fundamentally, was always a right-wing populist strategy. It sought to appeal to that vast middle of society which adheres to traditional social values and which the paleolibertarians imagine to be oppressed by an unholy ruling class coalition of socially liberal big business and media elites, academics, bureaucrats, petty criminals, welfare recipients, and the politicians who portion out their dole. The values of “paleolibertarianism,” as Rockwell elucidates them (p. 34–38), include all the same anti-statist values as mainstream libertarianism, but it grants to the conservative that freedom alone does not make a good society. The paleo believes that egalitarianism is “morally reprehensible,” that most forms of hierarchy other than the state are natural and necessary, that “Western culture [is] eminently worthy of preservation and defense,” and that Christian morality is “essential to the free and civilized social order.”
While the paleo strategy has never been prima facie inconsistent with radical libertarian philosophy, then, its adherents have often adopted apparently un-libertarian or anti-libertarian political positions when the libertarian position has conflicted with right-populism. Although the proper libertarian stance on pornography, prostitution, and abortion is full legalization, Rothbard suggested (p. 9), the paleo “should be willing to compromise … to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and to leave these problems up to the states,” even if the state governments decide to impose restrictions. Although Rothbard historically had opposed state restrictions on immigration, even if the state offers immigrants welfare, the paleo Rothbard came to justify statist immigration restrictions.11 Although it was Rothbard’s longtime ally Bill Evers who had convinced the Libertarian National Committee to endorse NAFTA, the paleos declared that NAFTA and other free trade arrangements were really precursors to world government and “economic planning on a global scale.” (Fear of contrived global government conspiracies was a common theme throughout RRR’s run.)
Accordingly, Rothbard and Rockwell embraced nearly any mainstream political candidate who remotely aligned with their right-populist agenda. In the 1992 election, they called on Ron Paul—who a decade earlier had been unacceptable to anyone except “the goose-stepping devotees of the Crane Machine”—to launch a primary challenge against President George H. W. Bush, as Paul was “the most important and most persuasive political standard-bearer for liberty in our generation.” Once the Draft Paul movement failed, Pat Buchanan was “as close as any real-world candidate could possibly come to paleo-libertarianism.” After Buchanan lost the nomination to Bush, Ross Perot became the paleo choice for president, if only because he was a populist and he had an acceptable foreign policy. And once Perot suspended his campaign, Rothbard, faced with the “crummy, terrible choice” between Bush and Bill Clinton, declared his support for Bush’s re-election.
Such perversion of the radical libertarian message, such a world-historical betrayal, etc. One shudders to think what the Rothbard of 1976-81, who denounced the “Crane Machine” and the Clark campaign, would have had to say about the Rothbard of a decade later!
V.
We have now, after this not-so-brief excursion through history, all the trappings of a libertarian typology.
There is one type of libertarian who follows the tradition of Crane and Koch, or alternatively of Hayek—we may call him (and it usually is him) the “Cato libertarian.” He is effete, respectable, responsible. He acquires influence with politicians and well-placed policy staffers, with academics and public intellectuals who exercise sway over the world’s big decisions and ideas. He aims to make his mark along the margins of government policy and in seminar rooms. His movement is an elite movement, and his job is Isaiah’s Job: to collect and educate the Remnant—those few people with the intellectual wherewithal to comprehend the imperative of Liberty—and to bide his time until the world is ready for his message, while making small progress along the way. Victory is far off, if not impossible, and his life’s work consists in bringing it closer if even by an imperceptible amount.
And there is a second type of libertarian, so firmly nestled in the paleo tradition of Rockwell and (late) Rothbard that we may hardly call him anything other than a “Rothbardian,” except perhaps a “paleo.” He is rough, rowdy, and radical. He aims at nothing less than a world set free in his lifetime, and he is interested in little else. He regards the State and all its functionaries as a gang of thieves and murderers writ large. Since he wants nothing to do with those elites, his is a popular movement—and, though he considers himself a devout and humble Christian, he thinks of his job on par with that of Saint Paul the Apostle: to awaken the masses to the State’s depravity and to ignite in the people their inherent lust for Liberty.12
The distinction we are looking for is not between ideologies, temperaments, or political programs, but between different theories of change. The operative question in the libertarian typology is the one with which Rothbard dealt in his address to the John Randolph Club: “[W]ho is the agency of social change? Which group may be expected to bring about the desired change in society?” We may not know what change each type of libertarian privately desires, as we do not have unimpeded access to their minds, but we can know to whom they appeal to do the changing.
The Rothbardian “revolutionary subject” is the proletarian. His is a popular movement. It is a movement of low human capital. The Cato libertarian seeks to influence governmental or intellectual elites. His is an elite movement. It is a movement of high human capital.
Richard Hanania coined the pop-political-sociological distinction between high and low human capital earlier this year to diagnose the stupidity of modern American conservatism. Social conservatives bumble along as blue-collar workers and small business owners, Hanania says, while liberals populate the world of ideas and seek out high-status low-pay jobs, “where intelligent and hard-working people make less money than they could elsewhere but instead get compensated in status and power.” In fact,
The negative relationship between social conservatism and IQ appears to be practically universal. Whenever you measure people’s intelligence, or a proxy for it, and ask about their views on anything related to race, gays, foreigners, or religion, respondents who hold liberal attitudes are smarter.
The best explanation for this phenomenon, according to Hanania, “is that social conservatism is stupid.”
One could argue that as soon as smart people from different cultures start to think about questions of sexual morality and how they should relate to outsiders, they converge towards liberalism because it is more logical and likely to be correct. … It is a good assumption that smarter people being more likely to believe in something is decent evidence that it is true, all else being equal. If intelligence didn’t predict getting the right answer on most things most of the time, then it wouldn’t be that useful of a trait.
The vast unwashed masses of Rothbard’s revolutionary class are low human capital, and because people who are low human capital are also vibes-based creatures, they are socially conservative. They distrust foreigners, so they oppose globalization; they are uncomfortable around minorities, so they oppose egalitarianism; and in these respects, they drag the paleo movement down with them. Hence the paleo’s embrace of all matter of unlibertarian populists, merely because they appeal to the braying hordes: David Duke—yes, David Duke!—Buchanan, Perot, and now Donald Trump.
VI.
Trump is nearly as far as you can be from a libertarian in mainstream American politics, yet a vague magnanimity toward Trump pervades the paleo movement. Justin Raimondo, the late editorial director of Antiwar.com and a Rothbard ally since the 1970s, was an early paleo stowaway on the Trump train. He had left the LP to become a Republican in 1983, years before Rothbard did—and for a while he filled the strange niche of being the highest-profile openly gay surrogate for Buchanan’s presidential campaigns. (“It is Buchananism or barbarism,” he declared in a nominating speech at the 2000 Reform Party convention.) Raimondo voted for Trump, and after the 2016 election, he suggested that Trump’s critics might suffer from TDS: “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Yet Raimondo suffered a TDS of his own: He believed that Trump was going to end the wars, make peace with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and exit NATO; and that for all these transgressions, he was locked in an epic battle of good and evil with the Israel lobby and the Deep State. Raimondo clung to these beliefs until he succumbed to cancer in 2019.
Rockwell, still chairman of the Mises Institute, best summarizes the paleo magnanimity toward Trump in a 2018 interview (p. 6) with The Austrian, then the Mises Institute’s flagship periodical: “I thought Trump’s campaign was quite wonderful in that it was pro-peace and anti-establishment. … [B]ut unfortunately, few of the programs he spoke about have come about in practice.” However, he says, “I also enjoy the fact that he drives the Left up the wall.”
He drives the left up the wall. “Owning the libs” is, perhaps, the core value of low human capital on the right, just as “owning MAGA” is the core value of low human capital on the left. And, not incidentally, it is a key component of the paleo strategy. The paleo candidate for president this year was Michael Rectenwald, whose claim to fame is that he ran an anti-woke Twitter account while a professor at NYU. He’s authored such books as “Springtime for Snowflakes” and “Beyond Woke.” (Admittedly, I haven’t read them. Although, there are millions of other books about anti-wokeness that I wouldn’t read before I wouldn’t read Rectenwald’s.) When Rectenwald failed to make the final round of balloting at the Libertarian National Convention in May, 37% of delegates voted not to put up a nominee. They opposed the eventual nominee, Chase Oliver, despite the fact that—at least according to appearances—Oliver checks all the substantive boxes the paleos claim to care about. A few weeks ago, Oliver held a campaign event in my city, and I went just to hear his stump speech. He says taxation is theft, the Federal Reserve should be abolished, and Trump and Biden ought to be in prison for war crimes. He’s also said all of these things publicly!
The spite for Oliver—and it is spite, not merely anger, because spite is self-destructive—is simply because he is culturally left-coded. He is gay, he doesn’t think the state should restrict hormone therapy for transgender teens, and he once posted a picture of himself wearing a COVID mask. As far as I can tell, these are his worst transgressions! Yet, if you ask the chair of the paleo Mises Caucus, whose members make up most of the LP leadership, Oliver “promises to be one of the worst candidates in the LP’s history.”13 The party chair, who is backed by the Mises Caucus, can hardly hide (starting at 24:24) her unenthusiasm for her own party’s nominee and her preference that he do nothing to stand in the way of Donald Trump’s second term (from June 3).
I endorse Chase Oliver as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden. That’s what I think this campaign is about. … Now, those of you who are in red states who want to support Chase, and there are some of you, … that’s entirely up to you. That is your choice as a state affiliate. I’m not gonna put my thumb on the scale. … I’m gonna work very aggressively, specifically in blue states, to make sure he has the support that he needs from the national party.
VII.
The worst offense of the paleo movement is not merely that it is populist, that it gets easily swindled by hucksters, or that it forsakes some of its genuinely held principles in the name of courting a conservative base. The proper epitaph for the paleo strategy—to paraphrase Rothbard’s savage postmortem of the Clark campaign—will be that it never even awoke the masses or brought about the supposed revolution in ideas that its proponents had promised. Indeed, it was doomed from the start.
The paleo strategy would make sense if libertarianism were, in fact, popular. But it’s not. In at least most of the developed countries today, libertarianism is naturally a high human capital phenomenon; it is esoteric. Unless one is under the boot of a particularly oppressive regime, it is uncommon for one to understand the importance of economic and personal freedom, as that requires having engaged in some meaningful way with the intellectual world, and most people don’t do that. Show me a libertarian and I’ll show you a nerd.
This is why, if you visit the Cato Institute office building in Washington, D.C., you’re greeted by a bust of economist Ludwig von Mises. Most public events are held in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium, which is connected to the lobby by a hallway named after Rose Wilder Lane. If you go down a flight of stairs, you’ll see a wall of portraits of libertarian intellectual heroes, including such deep cuts as Lysander Spooner and Richard Cobden. Contrast this with the Heritage Foundation, which pollutes its walls with portraits of the washed-up actor and dementia patient Ronald Reagan.
As Bryan Caplan—a rare Cato anarchist, and one who lost some respect for Rothbard upon the paleo turn—suggests, libertarian populism is an oxymoron. Most people, and especially most common people, defend Social Security and Medicare with as much zeal as they’d defend their first-born child. They like war: Nothing makes their true-blue, red-blooded American hearts swell with jingoistic fervor quite like the stench of burning flesh on the other side of the world, especially when that flesh is a few shades darker than their own. Most people love veterans’ benefits, government schools, and being molested at the airport. They think “privatization” is a dirty word. They say they want to cut government spending, but only if you don’t tell them what you want to cut. They say they want lower taxes, but only their own. They say they want government out of their business, but not their neighbor’s.
You can try to appeal to these people by latching on opportunistically to every right-wing cultural cause célèbre and every populist grifter who riles them up. But that’s just going to drag your movement a lot more in their direction than it’s going to drag them in yours. And even if you could convince them, they’re not the type of people who actually make decisions that affect the political world—that’s what the elites do. The elitist Cato Institute, as Bessner tells us, “[a]ccording to the 2011 Global Go To Think Tanks Index Report … is the sixth most influential American think tank, and is the third most influential in terms of domestic economic policy and second in terms of social policy.” Cato has been far more effective in advancing libertarian principles, “[p]articularly when compared to the [Mises Institute], which exists on the fringes of the U.S. political process and has had no appreciable influence on domestic or foreign policy.”
But hey, maybe you don’t trust Bessner. You don’t have to take it from some lefty egghead! As a wise man once said:
Even in the short run, opportunism is self-destructive. Any new ideological movement or party, in order to acquire support—as in the case of new products or firms on the market—must differentiate its product from its established competitors. A libertarian party which, for example, sounds almost indistinguishable from right-wing Republicanism … will fail if only because the voter presented with no clear alternative will quite rationally remain with right-wing Republicans.
That man? Murray Rothbard.
The meaning of “used to” is up for debate here. I don’t call myself a libertarian (and don’t identify with any other political label, for that matter) and I haven’t during any part of my adult life. But most people who speak to me describe me as libertarian or “vaguely anarchistic,” something you might infer from the title of this blog.
I’m not joking! Rothbard’s Betrayal is the most entertaining history (of anything!) that I’ve read, and I can’t recommend it more. Find the PDF here. The Mises Institute also made an audiobook version that you can find on YouTube and the podcast apps.
I’m a quarter German, so I’m pretty good at this. (I understand if, having now learned of my swarthy Complexion, you no longer wish to subscribe to this otherwise fine publication.)
John L. Kelley, Bringing the Market Back In: The Political Revitalization of Market Liberalism (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 194.
The foremost proponents of this view were Roy A. Childs, Jr., editor of the Koch-funded Libertarian Review, and Milton Mueller, head of the Koch-funded Students for a Libertarian Society.
Lawrence V. Cott, “Cato Institute & The Invisible Finger,” National Review 31, no. 23 (June 8, 1979): 741.
Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 419.
Ironically, when Paul actually did run for the LP nomination a few years later—after Crane and his allies had left LP politics—Rothbard changed his tune. As he wrote in 1987 (p. 40):
Former Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas began his four terms in Congress as a dedicated and principled free-market spokesman. Over these eight years, and in the three years since he left Congress, Ron Paul’s libertarian commitment has deepened and radicalized, until now he embraces the entire gamut of libertarian principles from personal freedom to non-intervention abroad. A deeply honest man, Ron Paul always scorned the typical Congressional path of logrolling, compromise, and “going along to get along.” He never went along, but he won the respect of many of his colleagues who hailed him in private for having the courage to stick to truth and principle.
Justin Raimondo and other heirs to Rothbard’s intellectual tradition were also among the most prominent supporters of Paul’s 2008 and 2012 Republican bids for the White House.
Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (New York: Prometheus, 2000), 277–278.
On Hayek and top-down theories of change, see Hayek’s article, “The Intellectuals and Socialism.”
Rothbard had always refused to justify one injustice with another, but overnight the welfare system became his rationale for cutting immigration below its already heavily restricted level. When Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark made the same argument in 1980, Rothbard was outraged, citing it as “probably the greatest (or perhaps the second greatest) single scandal of the Clark campaign.”
Although the Rothbardian scholars, say, at the Mises Institute, are more interested in the finer points of history, economics, political theory and other such intellectual matters—and the good folks at Cato are more interested in churning out policy papers whose conclusions they know far in advance of doing any research—what is meant by the distinction here is not that the scholars of each movement are elite or plebeian, but that the movements they seek to build serve to attract either elites or plebeians.
It is unlikely that Oliver could be the worst candidate in the LP’s history, as the 1992 nominee, Andre Marrou, was a genuine sleazebag:
[Marrou] hadn’t informed the party of some unpaid child support obligations that made it impossible for him to enter Massachusetts without risking arrest on outstanding contempt of court charges; for some reason, he claimed to have only been married twice, when in fact he'd been wed four times; that outstanding investigations into campaign improprieties hung over his head in Alaska; and that he was running up unpaid credit card bills in a campaign PAC’s name without telling the other officers of the PAC, and was to boot habitually months late in house payments.
See Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 515–516.
Now tell us how you went from volunteering for the Cato Institute to caring about Fish Sex.
It’s odd you don’t talk more about Ron Paul as a middle ground. He had some unsavory flirtations early in his career but he has been absolutely unhesitating in calling out Donald Trump and refusing to compromise his principles for trumps faux-populism, and he’s probably the most popular actual libertarian in recent American politics (LOW BAR I KNOW)