From Alan Bock
Here’s a more recent update on the Ron Paul newsletter story, such as it is. Dave Weigel at Reason says he talked to Tom Lizardo, Paul’s congressional chief of staff, and Tom told him the campaign had prepared a statement identifying Lew Rockwell as author of the newsletters in question, but campaign chairman Kent Snyder squelched it. Haven’t talked to either, but it could be the case.
There’s another question worth considering that I might be able to shed some light on: Why would hardline anti-statist anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell make such an effort to reach out to more traditional right-wing social/cultural conservatives? For one thing, we libertarians, for all our talk about how libertarianism is true Americanism and the default position of the founding fathers, are aware that we are a fairly small group in the political landscape. We know that to make an impact we need to seek allies and create coalitions, sometimes on specific issues, sometimes in a broader sense. Ron and Lew and to some extent Murray are what we could call “bourgeois” libertarians (as I guess I am) — married, religious, conventional in cultural tastes if radical in political philosophy — and in 1988 Ron ran a disappointing race as presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party. They all became disillusioned with the LP, especially its tendency to attract weirdoes, and were casting about for a more effective way to promote the freedom philsophy. Thus the development of the idea of paleolibertarianism and the attempt to reach out to cultural conservatives and maybe pull them toward a more consistent freedom philosophy.
As Lew himself wrote some 10 years later, it didn’t work out all that well. But while one may question whether it was wise or ethical to insert quasi-racist buzz phrases into the newsletters in an attempt to be humorous or to speak the language of the presumed target audience — I do — it was hardly the most bizarre things libertarians have done over the years to try to connect with others with whom they agreed on some issues and disagreed on others. Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess actually joined SDS in the 1960s to cultivate anti-war leftists. In the late ’60s and early ’70s a number of libertarians, including several at Reason, were fascinated with the idea of forming a new country, on an island or artificial island or some remote mountainous place, that would be run on libertarian principles. A lot of time and money was spent on the idea.
One more thing. I’m afraid this whole incident will play into the schismatic tendencies of the libertarian movement. It seems that all relatively small political movements have people who spend most of their time denouncing others with whom they agree on about 95 percent of issues, but who are not pure enough or too far on the fringes to suit them. The major schism in libertarian economics, for example, has been between the Austrian school (Mises, Hayek, Rothbard), which uses a priori reasoning, and the Chicago school (Friedman, Stigler, Coase, Frank Knight), which tends toward a more empirical approach. Philosophically, I’m more of an Austrian, I guess, but that doesn’t cause me to despise people in the Chicago school. The times when I talked at some length with Milton Friedman (he was remarkably open to all kinds of people) I came away convinced he was utterly devoted to a freer society, and that’s what counted for me. Both schools have made valuable contributions.
Jamie Kirchick tried to push this kind of schism along by contrasting the yokels at the Mises Institute with the “urbane” libertarians at Cato and the “libertine” libertarians at Reason. There is tension, maybe even some mutual jealousy; they’re fundraising in some cases from the same people, and Ron Paul’s campaign has dwarfed almost every libertarian effort in modern times in terms of attracting young people and new people into the movement (and he’s done it without using any quasi-racist or anti-gay code words). I first met Ron Paul shortly after he was first elected to Congress in 1976, and I think he’s the real deal, though he takes a more populist approach to libertarian philosophy than I would. I like to think I have friends in all camps (though for all I know they all think I’m a jerk even though they’re nice to me in public) and I certainly think there are more ways than one to promote liberty. So I wish them all well and reserve the right to criticize when I think they get off track.
My general rule is: the punier the power, the more bitter the intramural disputes. So I expect this episode will lead to various libertarians reading one another out of the movement, no matter how much I might deplore or regret it.
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