Paleolibertarianism

Not to be confused with Paleoconservatism.

Paleolibertarianism was a right-wing populist strategy of political communication of libertarianism developed by American anarcho-capitalist theorists Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the American political context after the end of Cold War, from 1989 to 1995, that sought to deliver the libertarian ideas of opposition to government intervention to working and middle-class people of the time, using friendly messages with their common cultural norms. With these methods it was expected to reconnect the modern libertarian movement with its historical anti-socialist, anti-war and popular roots found in the American classical liberal movement of the first half of the 20th century that was part of the anti–New Deal Old Right (hence the prefix paleo). It sought to move libertarian movement away from the influence of public policy libertarian organizations based in Washington, D.C., who were accused of giving up communicating the complete libertarian message while adopting the political and cultural values of the U.S. capital to gain acceptance among the political elite; and to move the American right-wing politics away from neoconservative movement.

Tenets

According to Rockwell, the paleolibertarian movement hearkens back to such thinkers as "Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and the entire interwar Old Right that opposed the New Deal and favored the Old Republic" and distinguished themselves from neo-libertarians, Beltway libertarianism (a pejorative term used by hardline libertarians to describe libertarians who have gained traction in the Beltway, i.e., Washington, D.C., who are accused of surrendering libertarian values to the Beltway values in order to have better public relations with the Beltway elite), left-libertarianism and lifestyle libertarianism. According to Rockwell, paleolibertarianism "made its peace with religion as the bedrock of liberty, property, and the natural order".

Paleolibertarianism developed in opposition to the link between social cosmopolitanism and libertarianism as if they were indivisible issues. In his 1990's essay "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism", Rockwell charged mainstream libertarians with "hatred of Western culture". He argued that "pornographic photography, 'free'-thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architecture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda—no matter how much individual libertarians may revel in them". Of paleolibertarians, he wrote that "we obey, and we ought to obey, traditions of manners and taste". After explaining why libertarians friendly with conventional culture could make a better argument for liberty to the middle classes, Rockwell predicted "in the new movement, libertarians who personify the present corruption will sink to their natural level, as will the Libertarian Party, which has been their diabolic pulpit".

In short, according to Lew Rockwell, the motivation of this "paleo" libertarian movement —in contrast with the "modal" libertarian movement of the Beltway and the Libertarian Party of the beginnings of the 90s— was the application of the libertarian principles in ways that lead to the radicalization of the middle classes against the state.

History

In the 1992's essay "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement", Rothbard reflected on the ability of libertarians to gain the disaffected working and middle classes using right-wing populism methods to deliver libertarian ideas.

In the 1990s, a "paleoconservative-paleolibertarian alliance was forged", centred on the John Randolph Club founded in 1989 by traditionalist Catholic Thomas Fleming and Rothbard. Rockwell and Rothbard supported paleoconservative Republican candidate Pat Buchanan in the 1992 presidential election and described Buchanan as the political leader of the "paleo movement". In 1992, Rothbard declared that "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy". The Rockwell and Rothbard intention with this alliance was to rebirth an anti-war and anti-welfare right-wing and to fight the neoconservative leadership of the Republican Party in the context of the end of Cold War.

Three years later, Rothbard said Buchanan developed too much faith in economic planning and centralized state power which eventually led paleolibertarians to withdraw their support for Buchanan. In addition to Buchanan's economic nationalism, Paul Gottfried later complained of a lack of funding, infighting, media hostility or blackout and vilification as "racists" and "anti-Semites". John Randolph Club was disintegrated in 1995 due to incompatibility of ideas and personalities between libertarian and conservative factions.

Rothbard died in 1995. Rockwell asserted in 1999 that with Rothbard's death the paleolibertarian season of libertarianism had ended. In 2007, Rockwell stated that he no longer used the term "paleolibertarian" —because it was distorted by its past association with the term paleoconservative as "some kind of socially conservative libertarian", something that "was not the point at all" of paleolibertarianism— and that all libertarians should be "happy with the term libertarian."

Controversy

Ron Paul newsletters

Main article: Ron Paul newsletters

The libertarian publication Reason asserted that "a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Ron Paul—all named the same man as Paul's chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.", although Rockwell denied it.

Reminiscence

In 2012, former National Review writer John Derbyshire argued that "since Lew Rockwell joined La Raza" (referring to a LewRockwell.com article with a soft open-borders advocacy), Hans-Hermann Hoppe was the last real paleolibertarian. However Karen De Coster and Justin Raimondo both continuing to use the term to describe themselves both during and after Ron Paul's presidential campaigns.

In a move similar to his and Murray Rothbard's support for Pat Buchanan, Lew Rockwell was sympathetic to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, particularly for his stance on illegal immigration, along with Justin Raimondo, who voted for Trump on the basis of his foreign policy. In a 2016 pre-election debate with Reason editor Nick Gillespie, Austrian School anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block advised libertarians living in battleground states to support Trump rather than cast their votes for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, citing critical foreign policy differences between the Republican and Democratic frontrunners.

In line with these views, paleolibertarian columnist Ilana Mercer authored a book in June 2016 about presidential candidate Trump titled The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed, the first critical examination of then-candidate Trump from a paleolibertarian perspective. In discussing Mercer's book, Objectivist-libertarian scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra observed that Mercer endorsed "not necessarily the policies of Trump, but 'The Process of Trump'". Scabbarra further noted that "[t]he most interesting of her arguments is the bolstering of liberty by Donald J. Trump [...] smashing an enmeshed political spoils system to bits: the media complex, the political and party complex, the conservative poseur complex. In the age of unconstitutional government—Democratic and Republican—this process of creative destruction can only increase the freedom quotient".

Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, an organization for promoting Mises and Rothbard libertarianism and the Austrian School of economics, said of the alt-right that he found their writings "interesting [...] and somewhat refreshing". In 2017, Deist argued in a speech at the Mises Institute titled "For a New Libertarian", that: "In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance." and indicating that libertarianism doesn't need a new theory but "better libertarians", activists friendly with common people norms and with non-state institutions of civil society. This led to criticism from bleeding-heart libertarian Steve Horwitz, who argued that "the invocation of 'blood and soil' as something that libertarians should recognize as a valid concern and should appeal to should be chilling. That phrase, which has a history going back at least to the 19th century, was central to the Nazi movement and was at the core of their justification for eliminating those people who did not have connections to the German homeland". Horwitz ultimately concluded that libertarianism was not about a narrow view of family, religion, culture and civil society, but instead "liberal tolerance, universalism, and cosmopolitanism, putting the freedom and harmony of all people ahead of the supposed interests of any parochial sub-group, and especially ones defined by the artificial boundaries of nation-states and their subsets".

Sean Gabb, the former Director of the Libertarian Alliance in the United Kingdom, is a close friend of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, attending his Property and Freedom Society conferences every year in Bodrum. Gabb is a libertarian critic of mass immigration. Keir Martland, Gabb's successor, has written in the essay "On Left and Right, Libertarianism, and The Donald" about the nationalism of Donald Trump, writing: "When compared with rule by a socialist mob or rule by a hostile oligarchy of globalists, neither giving a damn about the Nation but only about plunder, nationalism comes off comparatively very well indeed".

See also

• Alt-lite
• Austrian School
• Coalition for the Renewal of the Republic–Liberty and Hope
• Conservative liberalism
• Criticism of democracy
• Dark Enlightenment
• Libertarian conservatism
• Libertarian perspectives on immigration
• National conservatism
• National-anarchism
• Nativism (politics)
• Paleoconservatism
• Party of Free Citizens
• Radical right (United States)
• Real Politics Union
• Right-libertarianism
• Right-wing populism

External links

• Media related to Paleolibertarianism at Wikimedia Commons