Ron Paul vs. (some) Libertarians

I had blogged on another angle of this earlier. But here we have Justin Raimondo's far more learned response as posted at TakiMag (after presenting a version of it at the 2008 Future of Freedom conference on June 7, 2008), a brief history of the philosophical and strategic differences that point to the primary (papered-over) "split" in the Libertarian Party.

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 State 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....

Raimondo continues at great length before turning to the emergence of the Libertarian party and Libertarianism as an increasingly potent agent...

[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...