Libertarianism’s Divergent Roads
The history of libertarianism as a doctrine and an organized political movement is of interest these days on account of all the attention garnered by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas congressman known as “Dr. No,” in his quixotic yet attention-getting and surprisingly successful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Where do these libertarian types come from, and where are they going? Is their bid to restore respect for the Constitution in American political culture a passing phase, or a portent of things to come? Whether Dr. Paul fought a rear-guard action, or in fact launched the first wave of a continuing assault on the Welfare-Warfare Sate remains to be seen, but if the GOP is dragged down to a crushing defeat by the neocons’ war and its economic consequences, then the Paulistas might have a fighting chance of taking back the Republican party for the heirs of Robert A. Taft and the Old Right.
Yet the Paul campaign wasn’t received with universal hosannas within the libertarian movement. While the great majority of the freedom movement’s rank-and-file were wildly enthusiastic about the Texas troublemaker, a group of self-styled libertarian “leaders”-namely, the infamously smug and self-satisfied minions of Charles Koch and Ed Crane over at the Cato Institute and the editors of the Koch-funded Reason magazine-sneered and sniffed at the culturally conservative, pro-life Paul and wondered aloud if he wasn’t a bit of an embarrassment. In a war of words reported by The Nation, the two wings of the libertarian movement squared off and fired shots. Christopher Hayes reported this eye-popping denunciation of Rep. Paul by the unbearably pompous Brink Lindsey, a Cato Institute “scholar” and recently appointed vice president for research,
“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that’s tapping into those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a sustainable move in the libertarian direction.”
Here’s a new logical fallacy: the argument from snobbery. He isn’t our “kind of person.” What kind of person might that be? Well, it’s not at all clear. What is clear, however, is who isn’t “our kind of person.” As Senor Lindsey puts it:
“You have this weird group of people. You’ve got libertarians, you’ve got antiwar types and you’ve got nationalists and xenophobes. I’m not sure that is leading anywhere. I think he’s a sui generis type of guy who’s cobbling together some irreconcilable constituencies, many of which are backward-looking rather than forward-looking.”
Oh, those backwoods anti-IRS hicks, with necks redder than the reddest state, hopeless Neanderthals who would never read Lindsey’s book, The Age of Abundance, wherein he describes the supposedly “libertarian” utopia being ushered in by “the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a ‘creative class’ of ‘knowledge workers.’”
It sounds like a Georgetown cocktail party, rather than a political or ideological movement, but there you have it. Lindsey and his fellow creative geniuses are too good for the poor untutored hoi polloi who don’t go to the gym four days a week and are neither feminists nor gay. In Lindsey’s lexicon, “Forward-looking” means “people like me,” and “backward-looking” stands for non-feminist non-gay non-gym-going proles, who don’t count anyway.
In any case, sneers Lindsey, Paul “comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do.” Yes, you bet he does.
I had to laugh when I read how Hayes demarcates the pro-Paul “populist” libertarians from the anti-Paul crowd-the latter are deemed the “cosmopolitan” faction! Yeah, as in Cosmo magazine.
Lindsey’s haughtiness is really a joke, especially when it’s married to his clueless political analysis: who are these “xenophobes” he talks about - the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t support his “open the borders” position. And as for these alleged “nationalists” flocking to the Paulian cause: I guess this means they’re attracted to Ron’s questioning of why we’re going to war on account of UN resolutions and entangling alliances. Otherwise, I can’t imagine a less “nationalistic” candidate, in the modern sense of aggressive expansionism - which is a term surely better suited to Lindsey’s own position in favor the “liberation” of the Middle East.
Indeed, Lindsey’s whole critique of Paul is really rooted in Lindsey’s pro-war position. He argued in favor of the Iraq war in a piece for Reason, basically making the neocon “weapons of mass destruction-they’ll-greet-us-as-liberators” argument, while Paul, of course, was against the war from the beginning. Having abandoned the core libertarian stance - opposition to mass murder by the State - Lindsey and his ilk are on their way out of libertarianism, as I’ve explained elsewhere, while Paul and his “backward-looking” brethren represent the future of the movement.
The Cato/Reason crowd is motivated by a different energy than that which fuels the Paulian cause. They represent an entirely different outlook from the one advanced by the Good Doctor, and his intellectual allies and influences, and this is just the latest chapter in the long history of two contending tendencies in the long, tortuous story of the fight for human liberty.
From the very beginning, the laissez-faire movement was beset by the thrilling but utterly mistaken idea that progress toward liberty is inevitable, a long, slow, steady process that coincides with the march of modernity. The rise of the movement for personal liberty and economic freedom was coincident with the growth and development of industrial civilization: as the standard of living rose, so did the advocates of laissez faire gain intellectual and political traction. Yet none of this was inevitable.
In a series of revolutions that rocked Europe and much of the world, laissez-faire liberalism overthrew the Old Order, and yet, as Murray Rothbard pointed out, there was a fatal flaw in the classical liberalism of the 19th century, an “inner rot,” as he put it, that ate away at the ideological core of libertarianism even as the movement began to achieve some of its goals. The flaw was made manifest in the abandonment of natural rights philosophy, and a strategic timidity-one seemed to follow from the other-that reverted to a defense of the status quo.
Secondly, liberalism was lulled to sleep with the seductive lure of evolutionism-the doctrine of Social Darwinism, which saw history as an ever-ascending spiral of progress. According to this theory, the triumph of liberty is inevitable because Reason, Science, and Enlightened Thinking are on our side. The history of the 20th century would soon refute this, but at the time it seemed, well, reasonable: after all, society was progressing, peoples were freeing themselves from the yoke of feudalism and mercantilism, and it looked-if only for a moment-that the cause of liberty might triumph, however long it took.
This Pollyanna-ism was swept aside with the advent of the 20th century and the rise of the totalitarian ideologies-liberalism’s darkest hour. Yet, as proof that no error is ever finally refuted, we see its echo, today, in the abstruse theories of certain Beltway Deep Thinkers who seem to believe that because they’re getting richer, so is everybody else-and that rising income means the increase of freedom. But of course the business cycle is alive and well-thanks to the persistence of fiat money and the central banks-as we are beginning to rediscover. Also raising its ugly head is the specter of constant warfare, the favorite pastime of empires, and this, too, threatens our liberties as well as our lives.
If the 19th century saw the rise of a worldwide movement toward liberty, the 20th saw the progress that had been made repealed and the clock turned back: in the world of ideas, political absolutism ruled the day, and all around the world, the inevitability of socialism was simply assumed. In the U.S., the Great Depression brought about the utter collapse of the old Spencerian illusion that liberty would triumph simply on account of some mechanism inherent in the nature of things. Two world wars shattered the fragile shell of constitutional government in America and opened the door to the demise of our old Republic.
The remnants of classical liberalism went virtually underground; the tides of public and intellectual opinion were running so heavily against them that their ideas were not even considered. The old-time liberals-such as John T. Flynn-were simply out of the running. Park Avenue Bolsheviks such as James Burnham were confidently proclaiming the demise of capitalism and the rise of the “managerial” class of bureaucrats and steely-eyed men in spectacles who would soon put society to rights. Socialism, Leninism, fascism, and all sorts of idiosyncratic social movements and sects sprang up, like mushrooms after a heavy rain, as the Great Depression wreaked havoc on people’s hopes.
Arrayed against these overwhelming currents, a valiant band of counter-revolutionaries fought a heroic rear-guard action: these were the men and women of the Old Right. Forged in the flames of a world at war, the loosely aligned political leaders, resident intellectuals, and publicists who made up this movement began to cohere a fairly consistent set of ideas:
That war breeds tyranny and subverts republican forms of government; that we were fighting national socialism overseas only to witness its triumph on the home front; and, central to it all, an acute consciousness of America’s tragic destiny as an (anti-)imperial power, doomed, like all the others, to degenerate into a parody of itself.
Forced underground in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Old Right persisted-in the voluminous private correspondence of that tireless letter-writer, Rose Wilder Lane. In scattered circles of like-minded individualists, and a few organizations and one-man propaganda outfits, libertarianism persisted, like a subterranean river periodically bursting up to the surface and disrupting the socialist-interventionist consensus. Such stalwarts as John T. Flynn, who continued his radio program well into the late 1940s, and churned out books at a record rate, kept up the fight. In the dark days of postwar America, when the socialist-interventionist consensus was virtually unanimous, a young Murray Rothbard regularly tuned in to Flynn’s broadcasts.
A student of the famed Ludwig von Mises, whose economic theories are the foundation stones of today’s Austrian school of economics, Rothbard is the bridge between the Old Right of the 1940s and the libertarian movement as it exists today. I’ve told Murray’s story in my book, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, in which I perhaps overemphasize his role as a political activist at the expense of his monumental achievements as a scholar. I took this tack, I can see now, because Rothbard’s life and career is really a narrative account of the decline and rebirth of the organized libertarian movement, a history spanning the period from the 1940s to the 1990s.
Rothbard wrote for National Review, where he was restricted to the economics beat, but in private there was conflict: in an exchange of letters with Buckley, Rothbard dissented from the cold warrior fanaticism that animated the Buckleyite right. He was eventually convinced that the NR crowd pined for a third world war in which they wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons-in which case, we were all cooked. Rothbard had thoroughly absorbed the so-called “isolationism” of Flynn and the old America Firsters, and had developed early on a libertarian perspective on the foreign-policy question that was a logical extension of the non-coercion principle.
Just as state violence against its own citizens was to be limited as much as possible, so it is desirable-from a libertarian perspective-to limit, isolate, and restrict states from engaging in coercion beyond their own borders. War, in the words of Randolph Bourne, is the health of the state, and the limited government and free market economics that are supposed to be the cardinal principles of American conservatism have been time and again betrayed on account of their worship of the War God, to whom they owe their primary loyalty.
Rothbard’s break with the conservative movement, and his sojourn into the New Left, occurred at a crucial juncture in our history: the tumultuous 1960s, when war and repression of protest movements were the key issues of the day. A day not unlike our own, at least in certain respects. The Vietnam War was the focus of the national debate, and the rising youth revolution coincided with this development, giving libertarians an opportunity to bring the message of freedom to a wider audience than ever before. The war provided an opening for Rothbard and his growing circle to make an appeal to the left, and their journal, Left and Right, introduced the classics of the Old Right, such as the essays of Garet Garrett, to a whole generation of SDSers-the main youth protest movement with chapters on hundreds of campuses.
The effort had an effect on the more intelligent SDS leaders, such as Carl Oglesby, the group’s first elected leader who later quoted Garet Garrett and favorably cited the Old Right’s anti-imperialism in his book, Containment and Change. By that time, however, he had been purged from the group he had been instrumental in founding for the crime of “right-wing deviationism.”
SDS and the anti-war movement had by then gone into their ultra-Left phase, and went out in a blaze of botched bombings and self-destructive melodrama. Also, at this point, the movement that gathered regularly in Rothbard’s living room had grown too large to fit into that small space, and the first libertarian activist conferences were being held, and the libertarian press was developing apace. Aside Rothbard’s own Libertarian Forum, there was Reason magazine, which started out as a stapled-together 12-page fanzine.
It was only a matter of time until a Libertarian Party was founded, and that occurred in 1972. The LP has been the battlefield on which the whole question of how to function as an organized political movement has been fought, and as such its history provides us with a rich source of material for our speculations as to the future of libertarianism, be it dark or bright.
The party grew, the movement grew, and, by the late 1970s, Rothbard and his associates took it to the next level-with the help of a generous benefactor, whose largess made possible a great leap forward in the pace and quality of libertarian activism.
Let us go back to the year 1978, and look at what had happened to the organized libertarian movement. Suddenly there sprang up the Cato Institute, along with an array of satellite organizations including a student group and the Libertarian Party itself, which became a cog in what we used to call the Koch Machine.
This mighty ideological center was made possible by the largesse of Charles G. Koch, an heir to the Koch family fortune, and Koch Industries, one of the largest privately-owned companies in the U.S.: the father, Fred C. Koch, had made his money in oil, engineering, and cattle, and passed on his fortune to his sons, at least two of whom-Charles and David-shared his libertarian beliefs.
From the outside looking in, all was well: magazine and newspaper articles hailed libertarianism as the Next Big Thing, and profiles of the Institute and its spin-off groups published in the mainstream media glowed with admiration for their organization and enthusiasm, if not praise for their ideas. In the mid-1970s, when Charles Koch contacted Rothbard about what he could do to advance the movement’s goals, the late great libertarian theorist wrote a long memo that projected the creation of a mighty apparatus of libertarian cadre organizing in virtually every arena of American political and intellectual life.
Koch had the money, and Rothbard had the vision. At the core of it all was Rothbard’s conception of the Cato Institute-which, by the way, he came up with the name for-as a thinktank devoted to the development, spread, and popularization of the Austrian school of economics, free market solutions to social problems on the home front, a devotion to the preservation and expansion of civil liberties, and a consistent opposition to U.S. imperialism.
The split between Rothbard and the Institute he had inspired and essentially founded, was occasioned by the presidential campaign of 1980, which Rothbard was most unhappy with. In an incident that has become legendary in LP circles, the party’s candidate, Edward Clark, an oil company lawyer, went on national television to explain to interviewer Ted Koppel that libertarianism was basically just “low-tax liberalism.”
This outraged Rothbard for any number of very good reasons, not the least of which was its strategic wrongheadedness.
The Cato Institute strategy was to target the elites, especially in the media, but also in the two major political parties and government circles. Rothbard, on the other hand, took the diametrically opposite view: he envision a populist revolt against the elites, who profit from the maintenance and growth of State power. Libertarians, he believed, must make their appeal to ordinary people. Instead of aspiring to a position at court in the hope of whispering advice in the king’s ear, it is necessary to appeal to the great masses of Americans, so that libertarianism would become a living and vital political movement, and not just an intellectual parlor game.
When Clark, under the tutelage of the Cato high command, refused to come out for the abolition of the income tax, on the grounds that this constituted an unacceptable radicalism, Rothbard essentially broke with Cato, although the formal divorce didn’t come until a bit later, at the Libertarian Party’s 1983 national convention. Rothbard attacked the Clark campaign in a series of articles that mocked the campaign’s timidity and its rather pathetic appeal to the narrow interests of “low-tax liberals” of a certain class and age.
Rothbard’s erstwhile followers in the Cato group made their appeal to influential sympathizers who must be kept blissfully ignorant of the more controversial aspects of libertarian theory. This was symbolized by their move to Washington, where they built themselves a glass and steel headquarters and set up shop as resident libertarians in the corridors of power.
Rothbard, on the other hand, pursued the path of populism. He insisted that libertarian political action must be directed at the majority of the American people, and not tailored to suit the cultural prejudices and ideological idiosyncrasies of New York Times-reading white-wine-and brie liberals.
Rothbard and Cato went their separate ways, and so did the two wings of the movement-one gravitating in the direction of Washington DC, and the other concentrated in the hinterlands, especially in the West, where a wave of right-wing populism was beginning to rise up in opposition to a regnant liberalism. The Beltway faction of the libertarian movement adapted itself to its surroundings with chameleon-like instincts, while Rothbard and his supporters organized in the countryside, so to speak, planning a guerrilla insurgency and cultivating conservatives who were beginning to resent the incursion of the neocons-invaders from the Left-and the effective takeover of the official conservative movement by former leftists and right-wing Social Democrats.
The Rothbard-Cato split has sundered the libertarian movement to this day, and that was certainly underscored by the response of the Beltway libertarians to the unprecedented success of the Paul campaign. As the Good Doctor began to garner a fair share of media attention, and his polls numbers began to rise, the Beltway crowd sneered that he was too old-fashioned, too culturally conservative, and not likely to make any headway. When he did make headway, and was addressing crowds of many thousands at rallies across the country, and the record campaign contributions began to get the campaign noticed, the Beltway crowd - most notably, the editors and writers at Reason, a Koch-funded enterprise that styles itself the leading libertarian magazine - began to back off, and offer their reluctant (although still condescending) support. But not for long.
The Koch machine was merely revving up its motors for a smear campaign of unparalleled viciousness. Just as the Paul campaign was beginning to break through the wall of silence and liberal media bias, the New Republic magazine came out with a piece by one Jamie Kirchick that accused the Paul campaign and Ron himself of appealing to thinly-disguised racism. In particular, the target of Kirchick’s scrutiny was a series of Ron Paul newsletters written during the early 1990s that violated the canons of political correctness as much for the style they were written in as their contents. The Reason crowd immediately took up the cry of “racism!” and devoted endless articles and blog entries to the ensuing controversy, as the Beltway “libertarians” crowd gleefully prepared for a righteous purge.
Writing in the online edition of Reason, David Weigel and Julian Sanchez (the latter of the Cato Institute) claimed that the whole episode was rooted in a “strategy” enunciated by the late Murray N. Rothbard, the economist and author, and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, designed to appeal to those dreaded “right-wing populists.”::
“During the period when the most incendiary items appeared-roughly 1989 to 1994-Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic.
“….The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”
Reason, of course, in it’s new incarnation as the official organ of the libertarian movement’s aging hipsters and would-be “cool kids,” vehemently opposes reaching out to middle and working class Americans: that is far too “square” for the black-leather-jacket-wearing Nick Gillespie, and his successor, Matt Welch. Right-wing populism? As far as the Reason crowd is concerned, one might as well tout the appeal of “right-wing botulism.” Libertarianism, as understood by the editors of Reason, is all about legalizing methamphetamine, having endless “hook-ups,” and giving mega-corporations tax breaks (so Reason can keep scarfing up those big corporate contributors). The decidedly “square” Dr. Paul-a ten-term Republican congressman from Texas, no less, and a pro-life country doctor of decidedly conservative social views-was and is anathema to Team Reason.
This railing against populism-that is, against any appeal to ordinary Americans-is part and parcel of the Beltway’s perversion of libertarianism, which relegates its pet libertarian ideologues to the role of court jesters, whose intellectual preoccupations-the legalization of drugs, and the celebration of cultural libertinism-are considered amusing and mostly harmless.
In considering the future of libertarianism, one has to imagine at least two futures: one for the kept intellectuals of the Beltway set, and the other for the populist grassroots movement that roiled the American hinterlands with its radical opposition to imperialist wars and fiat money.
The former will persist as long as its subsidies continue, but the so-called Orange Line Mafia has discredited itself with its vicious hostility directed at Ron Paul, which was on display long before the newsletter controversy broke out. On the other hand, the Paul wing of the movement has all the energy, the vitality, and the staying power of a movement that really does have a future.
Foreign policy-the question of whether we’re going to be imperial or return to republicanism-is the overriding issue of our day, and anyone who abstains in this realm really ceases to be relevant. I find it odd, therefore, that the leading libertarian print magazine, Reason, took no editorial stance on the invasion of Iraq, but merely opened it up for “debate.” That’s funny, to these people, such issues as drug legalization and gay marriage are never debatable: the “correct” libertarian position is simply assumed. Yet when it comes to the question of mass murder-well, that’s just a matter of opinion.
The error made by the Cato crowd, especially after their fateful move to Washington, DC, is similar to that made by those French libertarian theorists, including the economist Fénelon, who hoped to persuade the French ruling class to give up its power over the economic life of the nation and inaugurate an era of peace and freedom. Their strategy was to tutor the Duke of Burgundy, second in line to succeed to the French throne, and ally themselves with the Burgundians at court. When the king’s first heir died, their hopes rose: these were dashed, however, as the Duke himself, and his entire family, took sick with the same illness, which likewise proved fatal-dealing a death blow to their plans to make France a laissez-faire paradise.
Writing of the tragic end of the Burgundians in his An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Rothbard was clearly addressing himself, at least in part, to his factional opponents in the libertarian movement, namely the Cato group, which had chosen the path of influencing the elites rather than making a populist appeal to ordinary Americans against the power elite:
“The tragic end of the Burgundy circle,” he writes, “illuminates a crucial strategic flaw in the plans, not only of the Burgundy circle, but also of the physiocrats, Turgot and other laissez faire thinkers of the later eighteenth centuryy. For their hopes and their strategic vision were invariably to work within the matrix of he monarchy and its virtually absolute rule. The idea, in short, was to get into court, influence the corridors of power, and induce the king to adopt libertarian ideas and impose a laissez-faire revolution.”
The Burgundy circle learned it couldn’t be done, but when it comes to libertarians, no strategic error is so egregious that it isn’t repeated at least once a generation, if not more-and always with the same results. The Beltway libertarians are, for the most part, pursuing the Burgundian course, and they will have no better results than Fénelon and Turgot.
On the other hand, the Paulistas-the radicalized, fully energized, and decidedly non-Beltway activists who were and are inspired by Ron Paul’s untrammeled vision of liberty-have had some success.
Surely, the Paul campaign has done more to popularize libertarianism than the combined efforts of the Koch-funded organizations have over the past two decades.
It’s no accident that the Paul campaign springs from the radical Rothbardian wing of the movement. Populism-an appeal to the great majority of the American people-on behalf of liberty is no vice. And if that is extremism, then let the denizens of the Beltway make the most of it.
An early version of this essay was presented before the 2008 Future of Freedom conference, on June 7, 2008.
Comments
Acton was forgotten - Power corrupts. And that corruption always destroys liberty. Even economic power.
(Usually with state collusion - e.g. eminent domain for one railroad that can then be “free” to haul the railroad’s favorites and kill the rest who aren’t free to build competing railroads).
Each generation has those who attempt to forge rings of power - “one ring to find them all and in the darkness bind them” as Tolkien put it. And it is left to the Hobbits of society to undertake difficult journeys to destory the ring. For it is the ring of the elites.
The Sarumans of this world know what is better for everyone, even when they claim it is “liberty”. Freedom as long as they are the providers and controllers.
They want to use the technology, economic power, and eventually violence - to bring freedom. Even when it is clear that freedom is destroyed.
Is it so much better to be snooped on by your neighbor and his cell phone camera then you-tubed than have the NSA listen in? Or as part of every subscriber agreement the corporation can do the same?
Not that I care for Rothbard. The problem is the same thing. Reading how he would have been a better general than George Washington (Generalissimo Washington article at LRC) probably means that he would have opposed Paul because he was not conducting the grass roots revolution the way he wanted. (And there are some anti-war libertarians in the Rothbard wing that literally did that - checkout antiwar.com blog).
While saying the market is too complex to plan, they have every detail of their utopias and campaigns to get there planned worse than anything Stalin’s experts came up with. Their Hubris simply operates at a different level - Cato is obvious, but Rothbard (and his acolytes) knows ethics better than Aquinas or how to do a revolution better than Washington and the other founding fathers? Give me a break! Ayn Rand at least was smart enough to write science fiction, so a mythical shield with infinite mythical energy left Galt’s Gultch without any problems of defense or resource shortage.
And that is the difference between Paul and both wings of the Libertarian party. Paul says he doesn’t and can’t know how to run people’s lives or the economy, or even most things the state does, so he shouldn’t. He didn’t even know how to run his campaign - it just happened.
And Liberty is hard. It takes the difficult work of campaigning door to door, running for delegate spots, finding voters, etc. It won’t magically appear, nor will it be evolved into. We are fallen creatures and every generation is called to fight the fall. To ignore calls for the easy solution or to use power to create liberty. Or to wait for it to just happen (like waiting for the GOP to shrink government). Or to expect an armageddon anarchy after the collapse to reconstitute USA 1800. It is a battle, internal and external, much like Lord of the Rings. Small people and large armies have to act in concert to destroy the tyrannies without succumbing to the temptation to become the good tyrant.
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One small correction may be necessary in what is an otherwise enlightening, well constructed
essay. There is nothing in The Managerial Revolution that would suggest that Burnham, who was
hardly a “Bolshevik” when he published his work in 1940, was waiting fondly for the modern
managerial state. He was merely predicting its inevitability. Especially for those of us who
deplore public administration as an unmitigated evil, it is imperative that we understand
Burnham’s brilliant analysis.
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Justin’s point about the pseudo-libertarian war against populism is well taken. This war nets as many benefits for libertarians as Tory attacks on the “masses,” namely no benefits. That said, true libertarians may have to focus their attention on voting blocs who are most independent of the managerial state’s largesse.
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@ Prof. Gottfried
Justin dismisses all of Burnham’s ideas in Reclaiming The American Right, but it still seems to me as if Burnham was correct when he saw the rise of managerial elites and the way that central governments allow them greater and greater power. Can we have modern industry and somehow not have the managerial elites that Burnham described? I saw the Kelo vs. New London decision as being completely in keeping with Burnham’s predictions.
What say you?
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I wouldn’t downplay the importance of the awfulness of the war on drugs. If appealing to working class and middle class taxpayers resentful of minorities is populist - as in non-elite - then what is wrong with appealing to the interests of both the underclass here and the non-elite abroad, victims of the Drug War?
But your point is well taken that Reason’s insistence of a debate on the Iraq War is a given, but the War on Drugs? Never! That does seem wildly inconsistent.
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Justin, thanks for the essay, both informative and as always a pleasure to read.
Ron Paul’s reluctance to reveal his POTUS voting intentions is fracturing his Movement
between write-ins, Baldwins, and Barrs. Let’s hope he contributes to coelescing these
forces. If he stands-pat on this through the November election he will have foregone
an opportunity to advance “the message”, and the historical record will show “it was the man.”
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Two Bulwarks stand firmly against any kind of Libertarian Government supplanting the lapsed Republic.
First, Washington DC is a kind of Lollapaloozic 24 hour Rave where lies, empty promises, delay, dissembling and cant actually make money . The interests that are arrayed there… from the media to politicians and their Special Interests to the military complex......they will insure that the charade continues to the bitter end.
Secondly, the citizenry has become habituated to a nanny state....a prevailing idea that they can get sumpthin fer nuthin and if a Libertarian Government were to occur, the indignation on the part of our preening and expectant electorate would be loud and relentless. Despite a serial pooching, the people still think they are “the people”.
No, this country will go the way of every other empire of the past and it will do so loudly, energetically and brashly, providing a uniquely American stamp to an old story.
Good luck to those who think party politics and reform will resurrect this carcass. Fortunately, we have four very good current examples of nations that survived the loss of empire quite well: The Netherlands, Germany, Japan and Great Britain. As far as I’m concerned, the end of Militant American Exceptionalism cannot come soon enough. This is a better country when it’s people mind their own business.
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McBrown is out to lunch, it makes all the
difference in the world HOW we get anywhere.
The US and Israel are the leading terrorist states
so they need to declare war on themselves.
This is the best piece Justin has ever done,
often I can’t stand him but this one is good.
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Good work, Mr. Raimondo.
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mcbrown:
“Your worship of RP blinds you to the truth that his “platform” was not Libertarian and is at odds with basic Libertarian tenets. For example, Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, because aboriton is an issue that should reside with the states. The Federal government should have no role in it. RP being pro-life is at odds with that, unless he takes the position that his “pro-life stance was personal, to him,and that his opposition to the decision was based on the States’ rights issue.”
Where have you seen otherwise? I have never heard him say a word about wanting to ban abortion at the fed level. And another thing, there is some dissent that pro-choice is the ‘correct’ position to take. (Rothbard, while always himself pro choice, did not think the pro lifers were ‘wrong’ per se, but that it boiled down to a difference of opinion.)
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Ron Paul’s campaign was far from “quixotic”—that term would be better applied to the campaigns of John Cox, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, Sam Brownback, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore, all of whom flamed out long before Ron Paul.
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And if we’re talking quixotic, let’s not forget Alan Keyes—I just did.
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What is this nonsense? It’s the Catoids vs. the Paulians now? That’s all? And what of the libertarian radicals, who oppose them both?
The Cato Institute/Kochtopus is wrong primarily because it follows the mercantilist Chicago School. They try to overcompensate for their blatantly unlibertarian economics by being “hip” and “cosmopolitan.” There’s nothing wrong with that except that they’re trying to use it as a substitute for genuine libertarian economics, not to mention their abominable pro-war stances.
But the Paulians are no better. They follow barbaric right-wing nationalism and American Exceptionalism. Paul is great when he talks about the Fed or the Income Tax, but when it comes to abortion, immigration, and the Constitution, he predictably follows Rothbard’s Law.
Don’t get me wrong - I sympathize with libertarian populism. But I believe that our populism can, and should, come from a radical interpretation of free-market economics reminiscent of the Individualist Anarchists and Rothbard in the 60’s. Immigrant-bashing and Founding-Father-worship is not populism, but elitism of a different kind.
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I was asked if I wanted to help do the RP Revolution? My first response was Ron Paul wasn’t a particularuly pure libertarian. The reply was true, but he was running as a Republican. I immediately grasped the significance, and the R3VOLution turned out way better than I ever dreamed. The two areas I differ with Paul on is immigration and abortion. As a limited government libertarian he can make a good case for both. As a anarchist libertarian my position by definition must be exactly the opposite. But I can settle for no war, restored Rights and a restored economy.It beats the hell out of the LP pansies who want to give me lower taxes, less government and more freedom.
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I’d like to echo and expand on what M. Palmer said above. I’m not clear on how framing libertarianism as a return to the Old Right is any better a strategy than framing it as ‘low tax liberalism’. Libertarians need to work at spreading the idea that libertarianism is not ‘left’, not ‘right’, and most definitely not ‘some left mixed with some right’, but instead a coherent and powerful movement for individual freedom and responsibility. Getting ourselves tangled up in the bickering of left/right is exactly the wrong strategy for creating a real and lasting understanding of freedom.
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mcbrown, the war on terror is not a war in any real or classic sense. Terrorism is and has always been a criminal act, not an act of war, as is piracy, highway robbery and the like. Even though 9/11’s attackers may have been hiding out with the support of one or another foreign government, they themselves were just a ruthless band of criminals. No nation attacked the United States on 9/11. Thus, no act of war was committee.
Our government has still not rooted out the gang that masterminded the attack and brought them to justice. In the meantime, our government has wasted over 4,000 American lives and untold billions of dollers, not to mention liberties we will never see again, to secure us from fantastic enemies of their own invention in this obscene war on terror you seem to be so proud of.
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McBrown, people like you are not leading us to freedom.
The means are as important as the ends and Raimondo is
absolutely correct to blast Reason and CATO for their
bad views.
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Justin has put his finger on something important
when he notes the easy determinism which is best
associated with the name of Herbert Spencer. This
is a fatal flaw at the core of libertarian ideology,
the idea that an invisible hand is moving us towards
some sort of facile, eudamonistic, utopia. Even Ayn
Rand was better than today’s Washington centered
“cosmopolitan-libertarians”...she knew that sacrifice
was neccessary to attain anything of value (as much
as she rightly hated the meaning of sacrifice in
other contexts). But the beltway libers think that
they can serve the revolution by the usual processes
of social climbing and ingratiating themselves with
the powers that be. As they used to say in old days
TANSTAAFL bros and sises!
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In re Dr. Paul’s position on Roe v. Wade and abortion: as always, he turns to the Constitution for guidance. He is personally against abortion, but the Constitution is silent on the matter, which means it grants no power to the Federal government to legislate, and the Supreme Court has no business deciding whether it’s constitutional. Therefore, the power rests with the States or the People (see Amendment X, US Constitution). Roe v. Wade is ipso facto unconstitutional, and its proponents need to get an amendment passed to change that fact.
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@ Fortner, You have misconstrued what I wrote, I assume unintentionally.
I did not write that I was “proud” of the War, or even in favor of it (I’m not-FYI).
I wrote that the decision to enter a war is something that should be the subject of debate--the main reason the US is in Iraq now--there was no true discussion.
My point, which you should see if you read what I wrote, is that the goal of conservatives should be to get government off our back and I don’t care if it’s accomplished through “populism” or the beltway, AS LONG AS IT’S ACCOMPLISHED.
Hopefuly that clears things up for you.
If not, so sorry.
@ Hardesty, We’ll agree to disagree. The ends are what matters. The means are for “psuedo-intellectuals” who like to label everything, rather than DO anything.
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While Rockwell and Raimondo are locked in a tag team battle to the death with Koch and Crane for the undisputed Libertarian Title of the World, McCain quietly ascends to der Fuhrership.
Can’t you guys settle your differences. I gathered that Boaz was sympathetic to Paul’s quest.
Maybe the libertaian pantheon is big enough for two gods of economics, von Mises and Friedman. Although I would want an asterick beside Friedman’s name notating his gift to fascism, witholding.
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“Although I would want an asterick beside Friedman’s name notating his gift to fascism, witholding.”
You forgot phony money--though he sort of repented toward the end. But it was the institutionalization of the idea that you can have phony money and a free society at the same time amongst the beltway-libertarians that was fascims greatist gift. (I’m not saying Friedman repented in the “libertarian” sense, you know: offering to compensate the victims of his fascist crimes or anything like that...Come the Revolution, maybe his estate should be attached and divvied up amongst everyone who’s ever had taxes withheld from their pay or suffered from the misallocation of resources caused by phony money?
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Mr. McBrown, the pride was implied in your phrase, “‘The War on Terror’ is a real war...”
If indeed you did not mean to endorse with pride this misguided adventure styled a “war” by our idiot-in-chief, then forgive me for so readily reading this into your statement. I feel ever so slightly snookered, a little like this:
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least--at least I mean what I say--that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter....
;)
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“Don’t get me wrong - I sympathize with libertarian populism. But I believe that our populism can, and should, come from a radical interpretation of free-market economics reminiscent of the Individualist Anarchists and Rothbard in the 60’s. Immigrant-bashing and Founding-Father-worship is not populism, but elitism of a different kind.”
You do realize Rothbard was very guilty of founding father worship also, right? Sure, he criticized Washington and Hamilton (as he should). In his series on the Revolution, he tells the story very romantically.
And Rothbard in the 60s? You mean the Rothbard that wrote a eulogy to Che Geverra? Hardly his best. In those days he seemed to want to pretend a bunch of militant Stalinists were libertarians. Consequence? Now being antiwar, once though of as being a thing of the radical right is now viewed as automatically leftist.
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Susan Hogarth,
You’re kidding yourself if you dont think libertarianism has, and will continue to have, camps. When, ever, have they worked as one? One only needs to look to the history of the LP as a example of right/left libertarian infighting.
Rothbard was the most guilty of idolizing the Old Right. Who do you think the term comes from? Ron Paul gets it from Rothbard.
As a side note, I love the high standards the anarchists use. By their standards, everyone is statist, and only they and their rare heroes (none of which have ever had power) are worthy of the term ‘libertarian’. To them, Ludwig Von Mises would be considered just as evil as Ron Paul.
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Justin,
Why do you insist that peace and open borders have to conflict? The truth is that true libertarians oppose both aggressive warfare and legal restrictions on peaceful migration across national boundaries. Ron Paul and you are wrong on immigration, the Beltway “libertarians” are wrong on the issue of aggressive warfare. Stop trying to push a false “peace vs. open borders” dichotomy. There are still plenty of us true libertarians who want total peace and total liberty.
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I forgot to mention in my last post—I greatly admire Ron Paul and feel that if he were the next president, the country and world would be a much better place. The ending of the American Empire is a great enough goal for me to “hold my nose” regarding the xenophobia of the Ron Paul movement and cast a vote for him (which I did in the California Republican Party primary election).
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Susan H. wrote:
>Getting ourselves tangled up in the bickering of left/right is exactly the wrong strategy for creating a real and lasting understanding of freedom.
Susan, I think you’re missing what’s happening here.
I myself am the very model of a modern cosmopolitan libertarian: I am an (occasionally strident) atheist, I’m an outspoken anarchist, I am married to the daughter of Asian immigrants, I have a couple of gays within my own family, I have a Ph.D. from an elite university, and I greatly prefer living in cosmopolitan, multi-cultural California to the provincial, Midwestern city I grew up in. (Raimondo too is not exactly a typical middle-American: he’s a gay guy who lives in San Francisco!)
However, like Justin, I cheerfully supported and voted for Ron Paul and even sent him a few bucks.
Those of us on the Ron Paul side of the great libertarian split are tolerant folks – everyone from people like Justin and myself to Heartland-Middle Americans have been welcome among the Paulistas.
It only takes one side to start a fight. It is the anti-Paulistas, the so-called “Beltway libertarians,” who have been outspoken in their attacks against Ron Paul because he is not sufficiently “cosmopolitan.” Paul and his supporters, on the other hand, have not been attacking people like Justin and me for our being “cosmopolitan”: on the contrary, our support has been welcomed.
Justin (and Ron Paul and I) did not create this split: it is the libertarian “Beltway crowd” who have chosen to start a jihad against anyone who does not meet their standards for being cosmopolitan. (As a matter of fact, none of the Beltway libertarians meet my criteria for “cosmopolitanism” – how many of them can read hundreds of Chinese characters as my kids and I can, for example? – but I do not denounce them for their lack of true cosmopolitanism.)
Justin is not creating this split: he is just reporting on a split brought about by a group of libertarians with whom he has no affiliation. Those “cosmopolitan” libertarians are unwilling to associate with ordinary Americans. They are even reluctant to associate with truly cosmopolitan libertarians such as Raimondo and myself, simply because we are willing to associate with middle-Americans libertarians like Ron Paul.
It only takes one side to start a fight. However, after seeing how those guys behave, I’ve come to think that perhaps it is just as well that they refuse to associate with me – the Beltway libertarians really are pitifully provincial, you know.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Daniel Maxwell wrote:
>As a side note, I love the high standards the anarchists use. By their standards, everyone is statist…
Dan, you’re missing what’s happening here. I’m a ferocious and outspoken anarchist: however, I also supported and voted for (and sent a couple hundred bucks to) Ron Paul.
Last time I checked, Lew Rockwell and Justin, and well-known bloggers like Karen deCoster and Stephan Kinsella, were also anarchists.
We all supported Congressman Paul.
Conversely, a lot of the Paul-haters were limited-government critics of us anarchists.
There were anarchists and limited-governmentalists on both sides of the great Ron-Paul split. And a lot of us on the Ron-Paul side were also strong proponents of “libertarian purity.” These simply have not been the issues.
I’ve been in a number of fights among libertarians during the last year on the Ron-Paul split. The issue has been almost completely as Justin laid it out: should we high-and-mighty cosmopolitan libertarians deign to associate with and support lowly Marcus-Welby-type middle-American libertarians such as Ron Paul or not?
Some of us hard-core anarchists are willing to work with anyone, as long as they meet minimal standards of sanity and decency, who sincerely wishes to advance the cause of human freedom. While I can think of many social, cultural, and religious issues on which I disagree with Ron Paul, and although I am a militant anarchist and he is not an anarchist, I am proud to be a Ron Paul supporter.
It is libertarians like Brink Lindsey, hardly an anarchist or a model of libertarian purity, who choose to look down their noses at Ron Paul.
No, it is not anarchist purism which has kept some prominent libertarians from supporting Ron Paul. It is simply a cultural snobbery and a (false) sense of their own superior cosmopolitanism. It would be tragic if those folks mattered. But they don’t. They are just a joke.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Beware of those who pin a labels on you, classify you into a group. Why do you think they do that?
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I have flirted with a couple of small political parties in the UK. One party was formed by an intellectual. It has moved forward in leaps and bounds since its intellectual leader was replaced by someone more a go-getter politician. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything because the other party is run by a non-intellectual marketing man and is going nowhere, very quickly!
In general, although all parties needs their intellectuals, it is best that they not be the leader or you could (not would) always run the risk of what is happening with the official Libertarian Party.
I am an ex-soldier (not an officer) who spent over twenty years in sales and marketing and over twenty years in journalism. The very many intellectuals, on reading this will automatically discount my remarks. But the sooner they realise that both types are necessary to ensure anything happening on the political front, and can manage to respect each for what they can offer, there will always be the problems that the Libertarian Party is going through right now.
Ampers.
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McBrown, Joe Stalin couldn’t have said it better !
Something about breaking eggs to make an.........
No, good ends are not justified by bad means.
Your anti-intellectualism is as contemptible
as it is culturally common.
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Justin - stellar article as usual.
McBrown - If you take the time to study RPs position, you’d realize his pro-life stance is exactly what you recommend. It is completely a decision for the states.
As for the war, don’t be ridiculous. Pre-emptive war never was, and never will be a libertarian tenant. Only when directly threatened should we defend ourselves. Wake up to the fact that the state is controlling you, even to the point that you are repeating their drivle.
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It sounds as if people here who comment on H. Spencer don’t have a good understanding of his philosophy. The link to the encyclopedia is kind of pathetic.
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@McBrown
I take issue with your statement that both paths to power are acceptable - the point of libertarianism is to eliminate government power.
Ron Paul has many libertarian ideas, but he is not a libertarian, he is a constitutionalist. I support constitutionalism as a very large step in the right direction, but not as our final goal.
As for the pro-life question, again Ron Paul’s constitutionally correct position is that this in not in the purview of the national government. As for whether or not the states should restrict it, that depends on whether or not you consider the unborn to be humans with rights.
As for open borders, I have no problem with them AFTER we have eliminated entitlements. Until that time open borders are an invitation to increased theft and imperialism.
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The division of thought somehow negates the concept that it’s possible to change the current direction of the welfare/war state. While we may suggest fine tuning our ideals we must not divide as any productive movement will surely fail. India may be a fine example in this case and point. Ron Paul is and was a small hope for national attention to the neglect of our freedoms and liberty. The masses are bringing the parties together like never before as only a simple mind would not concede. Less thought on differences of opinion and more thoughts on the core beliefs of our forefathers will get us back on track.
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I never liked the trendy phrase “Too much information,” but it does fit my reaction to this.
The notion of struggle between bad elitists and good populists is on the downswing now.
It will be a long time before I get those old Pavlovian reactions against the
“white-wine-and-brie” set again.
Doubtless the liberal snobs are still awful, but being an unpretentious guy from a from a small town in Texas isn’t going to win you many votes in the rest of the country just now.
“Them vs. us” is probably going to be on hold for a while, until we can deal with some real
world problems.
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PhillO wrote:
>Ron Paul has many libertarian ideas, but he is not a libertarian, he is a constitutionalist. I support constitutionalism as a very large step in the right direction, but not as our final goal.
Right – which is why many of us who are hard-core libertarian anarchists supported Congressman Paul.
However, I would not be too quick to say he is not a “libertarian.” If you’ve followed his career over the last thirty years, as I have, I think you’d see him as a limited-government libertarian who uses constitutionalist arguments when he thinks they are useful in making his point.
Nothing wrong with that – if we have to have a government, it could at least try to obey its own founding charter!
Of course, I’d prefer Ron to be an anarchist like myself, but I still respect him as an honest man who is heroically trying to expand human liberty. After all, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, et al. were not anarchists either, but that does not mean I condemn the Declaration of Independence!
I do notice that some of the “libertarians” who condemn Ron Paul do not seem to have much interest in the libertarians among the Founding Fathers either.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Finally, someone tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
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AL wrote:
> Doubtless the liberal snobs are still awful, but being an unpretentious guy from a from a small town in Texas isn’t going to win you many votes in the rest of the country just now.
Well… actually, an unpretentious guy from Arizona has, unfortunately, won the GOP nomination! And, in the last two presidential elections, the winner was… “an unpretentious guy from a small town in Texas”!
One of the big hits against Barack is that he is indeed a “liberal snob,” and, despite the fact that this should be an absolute shoo-in year for the Dems, Barack may lose because of that. If Barack were “an unpretentious guy from a small town in Texas,” you could bet the farm on his being the next President.
Ron Paul got more delegates than the early front-runner, Giuliani: Rudy actually is an urbane, hip, cosmopolitan dude. Paul lost because, in the end, more GOP voters agreed with McCain on the issues. That is unfortunate, but it is not because Ron Paul is “an unpretentious guy from a small town in Texas.” (Incidentally, Ron was born in Pennsylvania, and Houston is not that small of a town!)
The GOP has never nominated a super-cool, hip dude of the sort that some libertarians prefer for the simple reason that this is not the sort of person who appeals to Republican voters, or, usually, to the country at large. Ron did not lose because of his style; he lost on the issues.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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I think RP is at his best when he uses the Constitution to support libertarian positions. Thankfully, that connection helps to makes his libertarian message a popular one. There is a lot of good work that comes out of the Cato Institute but I do believe that they like many before them have suffered from the proximity to power. The only way to create meaningful “change” is through a truly grassroots effort like Ron Pauls. The “mangerial elite’s” power has grown by creating and constantly growing a culture of dependency and entitlement. Paul’s loss has more to with the elite defending this culture and their perogatives than with John McCain. Ultimately that culture and their power is what every libertarian elitist, libertarian populist, Constitutionalist, old rightist… must battle against.
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Probelm with all these theories about Rothbard is the fact that if Rothbard
knew the kind of people Cato/Koch people were all along, why did he work with
them orginally? The real reason rothabrd was fired from Cato was he keep
missing deadlines for a book and the whole Koch conspiracy theories are
just a smoke screen.
Just like his attacks on Bill Buckley. Rothabrd claims that Buckley was an evil
statist in 1952 because of his Commenweal article YET as late as 1959, Rothbard
was doing economic research on Buckley’s book, “Up From Liberalism”
If Buckley was a statist in 1952, why was Rothbard still working for such a man
in 1959.
Contrary to Raimondo’s thesis, when it comes to Cato and Buckley, Rothbard had a
temper(well know to throw people out of his NY apartment if they disagreed with him..
see Brian Doherty’s book on “Radicals for Capitalism"), he could not bear to have
people diagree with him on LP strategy and so he developed this whole Koch
conspiracy that his minions and groupies peddle to this day.
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Dave Miller in Sacramento wrote:
“Well… actually, an unpretentious guy from Arizona has, unfortunately, won the GOP nomination! And, in the last two presidential elections, the winner was… “an unpretentious guy from a small town in Texas”!”
That was actually my point. This year the candidate will have to be very un-Bush. The “I
don’t know anything about your big city ways” routine is starting to wear thin. If McCain has a
shot it’s because he can claim competence and experience in Washington politics.
“One of the big hits against Barack is that he is indeed a “liberal snob,” and, despite the
fact that this should be an absolute shoo-in year for the Dems, Barack may lose because of that.”
I suspect you are right about that. I wasn’t so much talking about the little things,
like what kind of cheese he puts on his sandwich, how he addresses factory workers or woman
reporters, or how he looks riding a bike. There’s still a lot of opportunity for a candidate to look foreign and strange and snobbish and condescending and lose the election because of it.
I was talking more about the big picture “We little people out West versus you rich snobs back
East.” I don’t know how things are in the rest of the country. Maybe people still eat that sort
of thing up, but I know I’m certainly tired of it, probably because we’ve
heard so much of it from the current administration and its supporters.
My dig wasn’t at Ron Paul, so much as at Justin and the other paleolibs and paleocons.
I still don’t have any love for liberal snobs, but the notion of the “True South” or coming
into its own or populist “prairie fire” from the West cleansing the country has no appeal for
me any more. On most issues, I agree more with Southerners and Westerners than with those on the
two coasts, but we’ve seen enough from the President and the last GOP Congress to get disillusioned
with self-celebratory depictions of the South or the West.
It’s not enough to point to some evil, wealthy East Coast “them” to drum up support for a
candidate. Prove to me first that a candidate is competent and knows what he’s doing.
And it’s not enough to say, “Murray Rothbard hated who you hate” to make people fall all
over him, show us that he really knew what he’s was talking about when he ventured into areas
outside his expertise.
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I knew Rothbard well and once spent close to a full
day in his apt on W.88th. He didn’t throw people out
who disagreed with him. As far as CATO goes he long
had reservations about them and what’s happened since
his death 13 1/2 years ago has aptly borne out his fears.
Doherty’s book is unreliable on revisionist historians,
anarcho-capitalism, Rand’s side of the Branden tiff and
other matters. As far as conspiracies go they exist.
They are a most often prosecuted item under US law.
Buckley was a statist in 1952, check out his Commonweal
article of that time. There were a lot of people in the
first five years who contributed to National Review before
they left in disgust or were purged. Randians, Birchers,
so-called “isolationists” and “antisemites” among others.
JB’s remark reflect a total ignorance of the situation.
Raimondo in this instance is right on target. None of the
critical comments have refuted his essential point.
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AL wrote:
> “We little people out West versus you rich snobs back East.” I don’t know how things are in the rest of the country. Maybe people still eat that sort of thing up, but I know I’m certainly tired of it…
I grew up in the Midwest, go back regularly to visit, and currently live in California, and I am happy to tell you that resentment of the East Coast is indeed alive and well “in the rest of the country,” to use your phrase. But I don’t recall Ron using that resentment in his campaign: as I pointed out above, he is, after all, from Pennsylvania, not exactly a Western state!
AL also wrote:
> If McCain has a shot it’s because he can claim competence and experience in Washington politics.
Well… actually, that was Hillary’s whole selling point, and she lost to a guy who is very inexperienced in Washington politics indeed!
McCain has a reputation (undeserved in my opinion) as a maverick, and that seems to be what he is banking on.
If Obama wins this year, it will in fact be as a “fresh breeze” relatively uncontaminated by Washington pollution. Obama’s big weakness is that his views, on domestic issues, are indeed much more liberal than most Americans’ views.
Which brings me to the real point that you and I seem to be differing on: you and many other critics of Congressman Paul keep looking for something wrong about him or his campaign that caused him to lose.
In fact, Ron was a better candidate –- a much better candidate—by most measures than such experienced politicos as Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, etc. But, in fact, most Republican voters (and indeed most Americans) simply do not agree with Ron Paul’s views. Americans may be disgusted with the war, but few wish to totally give up all the world-girdling bases and all the international swaggering of the “world’s only remaining superpower.” Americans may hate high taxes and Washington corruption, but few are willing to give up Social Security, Medicare, etc.
Our fellow citizens, and, as Doug Payne points out, the power elite do not agree with us. As Doug says, the “managerial elite” has indeed created a “culture of dependency and entitlement” which has captured the hearts and minds of the majority of the American people.
I know that it is a hard pill to swallow, but we do not simply need the right messenger and then our fellow citizens will flock to our side. The power elite is very clever, very entrenched, and, well, very powerful.
In the long-run, the system is not sustainable: the entitlement system is a Ponzi scheme, the Asian powers will not tolerate American bullying forever, etc. But it will be a long, hard struggle to get people to understand these points and to rally to abolish the existing system.
Ron Paul did a great job; that he lost is due to no fault of his own but simply to the fact that it is still very early in the revolution.
Dave
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JB wrote:
> The real reason rothabrd was fired from Cato was he keep missing deadlines for a book and the whole Koch conspiracy theories are just a smoke screen.
My understanding is that Rothbard was a stockholder (not an employee) of Cato, and that he was (illegally) deprived of his stock. You cannot (legally) deprive a stockholder of his stock because he is late on an assignment!
I knew some of the top Cato people (e.g., Ed Crane himself) during the early years of Cato: I was a doctoral student at Stanford, and Cato was also in the Bay Area at the time, so we student activists got to know the Cato bigwigs.
The “pro-Rothbard” stories fit with what I saw from my own personal experience. I, and several of the other student activists, had some real reservations about the Catoites even before the famous split.
You asked why Rothbard worked with Cato and Buckley early on if he knew their evil ways.
Murray was a big coalition builder: over the years, he worked with Taft Republicans, Adlai-Stevenson Democrats, the New Left, etc., indeed with anyone he hoped he might convert to libertarian ideas or who might advance the cause of liberty in a particular situation. I myself thought he was too optimistic and too tolerant in some of these situations, but he argued that it was worth it to give these coalitions a shot in the hope that they might pan out.
JB also wrote:
> Contrary to Raimondo’s thesis, when it comes to Cato and Buckley, Rothbard had a
temper (well know to throw people out of his NY apartment if they disagreed with him…
Did you know him personally? I did, and I did not always agree with him.
But I never experienced this fabled temper, nor did I ever hear from anyone who had personally witnessed the fabled temper. It’s a myth.
Quite to the contrary, Murray was one of the most cheerful, genial, outgoing, friendly, generous people I have ever known.
When one of his political allies took a tack that Murray considered misguided, Murray would indeed publicly and unreservedly critique what he saw as the misguided approach. Justin himself was on the receiving end of such criticism, along with an old friend of mine, Scott Olmstead, as Justin relates in his book on Murray. Murray strongly and forcefully expressed his disagreement with Justin and Scott during the 1984 campaign: as a neutral observer in that political battle who knew all of the combatants personally, I can attest that it was a sincere political disagreement, not a result of some mythical out-of-control temper on Murray’s part.
That, despite this experience, Justin (and Scott also) remains an admirer of Murray’s shows that Murray’s supposed intolerance was simply a myth. (I too disagreed with Murray on a number of points, though I was not important enough in the libertarian movement to be honored with a public critique and disagreement from Murray.)
You are relying on lies told about Rothbard by dishonest and unscrupulous people. I knew Murray; the lies are not true.
Like Mike Hardesty, I’m an actual eyewitness, not some anti-libertarian gossip-monger. I am even old enough to remember when Buckley purged the Birchers, when Rand found out about Branden’s cheating on his cheating, etc.
I knew Murray and several of his close associates and some of his chief adversaries over a period of years. As I’ve said, I disagreed with Murray on a number of issues: I was never a blind follower of Murray’s, and, indeed, I was considered one of the less Rothbardian of the Stanford student activists among Bay Area libertarians.
But I honestly never saw Murray behave in a cruel, dishonorable, or ungentlemanly fashion nor did I ever hear from any eyewitness of his having done so.
Murray was a class act. I wish I could say the same for most “mainstream” libertarians.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Thanks, Dave, for again setting the record straight. I had a number of disagreements
with Murray too over the years but found him far more engaging and tolerant than all
the Objectivists and most other libertarians. In terms of political philosophy and historical
knowledge he had it all over Rand though I think she was a greater philosopher qua philosopher.
Look at ARI and then look at my friend Mark’s ARI Watch and you will see what has become of
political objectivism. They endorse torture ! David Gordon’s The Essential Rothbard is very
worthwhile reading.
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Mike wrote:
>Look at ARI and then look at my friend Mark’s ARI Watch and you will see what has become of
political objectivism.
I have to admit that what I find most irritating about ARI is that they (Lenny Peikoff and his pal Dave Harriamn) are claiming that they have proven Einstein’s theories of relativity to be wrong! As Einstein would have been the first to admit, it is always possible that advances in science will prove relativity to be wrong (I and many other physicists have looked for problems in relativity over the years), but the ARI “discovery” is not based on new science, nor even on an understanding of relativity: it’s simply nonsense.
Harriman’s “proof” that I really love is:
> A man might validly refer to the curvature of his wife’s hips, but he’s talking nonsense if he refers to the curvature of his marriage. And it’s no better to ascribe curvature to space.
This betrays an incredible ignorance of the development of both mathematics and physics during the last two hundred years! (By the way, if anyone wants to irritate the ARI camp-followers, just tell them that any competent physicist will simply laugh at Peikoff and Harriman. This is completely true, but, boy, does it make the ARIistas go nuts!)
Admittedly, this is pretty small potatoes compared to ARI’s defense of torture and mass murder; indeed, it will, perhaps, actually have the salutary effect of causing educated people to not take ARI seriously in any intellectual area at all.
I do think it is symptomatic, though, of the difference between Murray and many other libertarians, especially Objectivists: Murray was intensely curious about what other people knew that he did not know. For example, he once started quizzing me on how classical optics was taught to us physics majors and whether the knowledge of classical optics was actually being lost (it’s not taught much any longer, but I assume that people in some specialized areas do still learn it). No doubt this connected with some larger interest he had concerning intellectual change, the university system, or something of the sort, but, instead of just satisfying himself with his own thoughts, he actually tried to find out facts from other people. I know that he had a similar interest in the foundations of mathematics and the philosophy of set theory.
It’s odd that Murray is so often denounced as an ivory-tower dogmatist. He was actually very empirically oriented, and he had a thirst for trying to fit empirical information together into a coherent story, the same thirst that drives us scientists. No doubt he made some mistakes (who among us does not?), but he tried vigorously to subject his own ideas to the test not only of logic but also of empirical reality.
Dave
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mcbrown wrote:
>In the same vein, even if you assume CATO’s positon viz. the Iraq war was as you assert, which is open to question, Libertarianism, as a philosophy, is not necessarily opposed to war or “intervention”…
mc, you seem to think that people here are not taking seriously what you have written. So, let me extend to you the courtesy of my taking seriously this passage and responding to it.
Recently, I had a discussion in which the other gent declared:
>Killing enemy civilians is not a priori ‘immoral’ for the simple reason that ‘enemies’ are not entitled to moral consideration.
When I objected that this was a horrifically evil perspective, the consensus among the other discussants disagreed with me. Indeed, based on numerous discussions with our fellow Americans, I have sadly concluded that this is just what “war” does mean to the majority of our fellow citizens.
And it’s no wonder – this is in fact how the US government has conducted wars for the last century (the particular topic of the discussion I’m alluding to was the US government’s targeting of innocent civilians in the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
If this is what “war” means – and this is what it seems to mean to both the US government and many Americans – then libertarianism, as a philosophy, at least as I conceive it, is indeed, in your words, “necessarily opposed to war…”
I do not own the word “libertarian,” and I cannot prevent those who hold this horrendous view from calling themselves “libertarians.” Indeed, we all know of many “libertarians” (certainly the most prominent among the Objectivists, as Mike has suggested) who do hold this horrendous view.
But these people are my political opponents: I am not willing to be allied with them or to be part of the same political movement with them. They are not adherents of the idea of natural rights or of the non-aggression principle as I use those terms.
That, I think, is Raimondo’s central point: we have one word, “libertarian,” which now is used to describe two separate political movements – those of us who oppose war as it is now conceived and those who are willing to support it under some circumstances.
I take it you are in the latter group, as are some people at Cato. You guys are simply not in the same political movement as Raimondo or me, and it is good that we all be clear about that.
Of course, there was a time when the word “war” was not taken to imply that “Killing enemy civilians is not a priori ‘immoral’ for the simple reason that ‘enemies’ are not entitled to moral consideration.” But even this more limited, civilized form of warfare, which tried to give limited recognition to civilian rights, did in fact almost always involve serious violations of the rights of individuals —taxation, collateral deaths of innocent civilians, conscription, etc.
As the old saying goes, “War is the health of the state.”
This of course is not an a priori, logical deduction from the non-aggression principle. It rests on empirical, historical knowledge of the nature of the state and of wars between states. But, to me, that historical evidence is so conclusive that, again, I am not willing to view as allies, as fellow “libertarians,” anyone who views even traditional, limited war as consistent with libertarianism.
I truly find it bizarre that so many “libertarians” are willing to anathematize anyone who opposes legalizing marijuana but willing to view as ideological comrades people who view war as acceptable!
Is any sort of “war” defensible? Only, a “people’s war” in which people freely take up arms against a government, not to conquer another country but to rid their own country of a government – whether foreign or home-grown – that denies their natural rights. In some ways, although not consistently, the American Revolution was such a war; the same is true of the current Iraqi resistance to American imperialism.
Again, I am not trying to tell you or Cato or anyone how they must use the word “libertarian.” Call me a “natural-rights,” “people’s-war” non-archist, if you wish. Most people would choose to call me (and Raimondo and several others here) a “libertarian.” Whatever I am called, I am not a political ally of any of those “libertarians” who view war in its traditional sense as defensible.
It is not simply that I find the “war libertarians” to be mistaken or annoying: I actually wish to see them lose politically, for the same reason I wish to see John McCain lose. I view them not as comrades who have gone astray on one issue but rather as political opponents whom I hope to see defeated.
As Rainondo said, libertarianism is now two separate movements. You and I are not in the same movement.
I hope you will see this a serious response to your own points.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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