1992 was an interesting year. Nine Inch Nails won a Grammy for saying “fist fuck”. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was released. George H.W. Bush, exhausted from a lifetime of Nazism, vomited on the Prime Minister of Japan. Barney the Dinosaur was debuted. I was born.
All very important events.
But there were also some events that were making some people rather angry. Bill Clinton was elected. Apartheid officially ended in South Africa (sad Elon Musk noises). Protesters were marching in hundreds of thousands on Washington for reproductive rights. Minorities were expressing rage in Los Angeles because murderous cops who beat Rodney King to death got away with it. The Cold War that so many right-wingers had used to justify their spending and growth of power? Coming to a close. A mob boss was sentenced to life. An Exxon executive was murdered in a wooden box.
It was looking like a year when things might not look so good for people who make a whole lot of money and get a whole lot of power and connections off of oppressing people.
In any other circumstance, this might even be considered a victory. But to a certain stock of right wingers, this year was terrible. And instead of understanding what got them there, they simply chose to blame the left.
See, for a long time, various strategies of employment of libertarianism via the state had failed. And a lot of the people involved in the American Libertarian Movement had grown tired of trying to form a third option between the duopoly and forge an entirely different group of people, especially since that means… talking to different people.
*shudders*
So, eventually, they just decided, “Fuck it. We’ll do it live.” And they, threw their entire support, behind the American right wing political establishment. So in 1990, a document came out, a manifesto by Lew Rockwell Jr. A document that would set forth a “paleo strategy” that would be attempted over the next two years. A path to rejecting entirely the notion of libertarianism as an ideal that defends people’s total freedom, and instead pushes it down toward a conservative authoritarian bent with focus on tradition and Christianity. The goal was to make it more palatable to the right and less palatable to the left because they falsely believed that the left was a greater enemy to liberty than the right.
It objected to:
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Porn
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Civil Rights
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Unrestrained Art
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Paganism
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Environmentalism
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Modernist Movies
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Bauhaus Architecture
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Racial Integration
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Any anti-Western Culture
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Anti-authoritarianism
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Anti-Christianism
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… you get the idea.
This unsurprisingly draws a significant amount of Nazis to the movement. But most notably, it allowed for the rise of Pat Buchanan as a key figure in libertarianism. And with Rothbard getting old, the liberty movement on the right needed some fresh blood to make it work. And Rothbard had lost his patience with trying to form a principled form of libertarianism because of the sheer amount of failures that it had. So he was willing to try anything. Including, selling out.
That’s why, in January of 1992, he published his guide for “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy For The Paleo Movement”. A piece he notoriously started by running cover for KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. Murray spent six long paragraphs completely running cover for David Duke and asking questions like, “why isn’t it okay to have been a Klansman?” Then immediately answering this question by saying that people who had been and who matured and improved beyond such collectivist and authoritarian measures had made the wrong decision according to him, and David Duke was making the right one by remaining a right wing populist, just as he was in the Klan. He then spends about as much more accurately stating the relationship between big business and big government, but inaccurately portraying that as some sort of leftist collusion with communism and not recognizing the fact that all of these major institutions he lists are basically arms of capitalism. Things that he might have said earlier in his life when he was writing against state capitalism and recognizing it for the threat it was.
Because of this, his solution to this, while it had some good things in general from your boilerplate libertarian position, including slashing taxes and ending the Fed, it also happened to endorse the idea of forcing a very conservative notion of family values, unleashing the cops to beat the shit out of homeless people, and anyone he deemed to be criminals, gut welfare, civil rights, and more. You can read a more complicated breakdown of this over here.
He finishes his piece by decrying the Cato Institute and a variety of other conservative outlets that he was once a part of, claiming that these billionaire-funded organizations that basically say the exact same things he was saying, but without all the culture war nonsense, were somehow too egalitarian and therefore leftist and communist. He then also decries the Libertarian Party, claiming that basically, as long as they had institutional support from people like the Cato Institute and the Koch brothers, they were effective. But once they lost that support, because they lost steam, they were suddenly less effective. And the failure of the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign in 88 proved it. He claimed that libertarians fail because they reached out to those sorts of people and assumed that the Republican establishment would join them in being libertarian once the Cold War was drawing to a close. He never made the connection that maybe people in the authoritarian right aren’t particularly interested in being a part of a libertarianism that might criticize their authority. And then as to drive the final nail in the coffin of any sort of libertarianism in this piece, he completely endorses Joe McCarthy and ignores all of the tyranny that he used to enact his positions and to get his goals met. Then pretending that Joe McCarthy was some innocent victim of global conspiracy.
This is the level of delusion to which a libertarian can sink when their sole goal is the defeat of communism and everything they saddle communism with regardless of whether or not it’s actually capitalists who did it. The left becomes the enemy and not the state, and compromises are made to the point where Joe McCarthy, George H.W. Bush, and DAVID DUKE are considered defensible beacons of their values to any extent. And it’s with that and in the same issue that he also chose to endorse Pat Buchanan for President.
Pat Buchanan had a slogan. He wanted to “Make America First Again”. But he wasn’t very consistent on that. And in the end run, In an authoritarian speech at the Republican National Convention in 1992, he laid out what he believed to be the culture war, and he endorsed a significant amount of actions that would distract from the America First message in the name of opposing communism. For instance, he endorsed the U.S. arming, funding and training the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. He also endorsed the Contra Affair, where Reagan enabled the Contras in Nicaragua to do regime change. He also shellacked the George H.W. Bush administration and claimed unreservedly that he liberated Eastern Europe. He lionized his foreign policy and claimed that Bill Clinton lacked any at all. He then went on to claim that George Bush was possibly the single bulwark for American Christian values with Bill Clinton allegedly expressing none. He hated the fact that Clinton didn’t hate LGBT people as much as he thought he should. He didn’t like that the Clintons were critical of how the family structure could be used as a form of the state or be weaponized by the state to keep people controlled. He opposed the Clintons on the grounds of “radical feminism”. He claimed that dodging the draft meant Bill Clinton was somehow inferior to Bush. He supported laws against pornography and any level of equality in terms of marriage between straight people and gays and lesbians. He said much of this in a flailing speech where he was in the last throes of his campaign and he knew what was going to happen.
And that year, both he and George, H.W. Bush lost the Presidential election to the Clintons.
Did Rothbard learn that maybe the American people weren’t as united behind his vision as he thought and maybe he should recalibrate his message or the strategies he recommended to people running for office? No. He became progressively more and more extreme in this direction. And then he died in 1995. A final blow that Lew Rockwell would later claim was the death knell of the Paleo movement.
So this is where I tell you that we should learn from this. And instead of trying to find whatever way, no matter how anti-liberty, to quell the conservatives so that they maybe do our bidding and give us a right-wing version of libertarianism… We understand the threat. And we recognize that the only way for any sort of true populist movement is one that reaches across the aisle and tries to understand people who the state wants us pitted against. Instead of taking out our frustrations, much as the populist rights did in the 90s, on LGBT people, immigrants, black people, weird art, and a variety of other pet scapegoats, we should realize that IS the problem. And we should unleash ourselves on the biggest criminals of all. The state – and its consistent division tactics that have rendered us useless since the 70s.
In the coming weeks I will be detailing both threats and boons to such an approach and I will be highlighting what we can do to actually effectively fight back against the machine, because the route forward to Liberty is not throwing our fellow people into the gears so that they may bloody and lubricate its mechanisms. This only ensures smooth operation forever while we blame the people being crushed and not the people operating the mechanism from the top. The culture war is real, but it’s a culture of control versus a culture of freedom. And that freedom is going to look different, the way different people practice it. If your idea of Freedom™ is the ability to control other people, deny their individuality and free will through collectivist bigotry, and mandate a monoculture, which only does what you want it to, you don’t know what the word means and you are a bastard to its intent. And the most hilarious part is that you will most likely fail, because the system already has people who will do that and make it look better. So they have no incentive to help you rise to the top when their chosen actors would operate their machine in a much more effective manner.
You are nothing to them. Stop pretending you have a seat at the table. And for the love of fuck stop begging for scraps in exchange for selling out your fellow person. It’s pathetic, and it makes you nothing more than a good doggy for the establishment. The Paleo Strategy failed, and there are many trying to resurrect it now. Their path has been ruinous for half a century. Follow them and meet the same fate.
Don’t unleash the cops, unleash the people, and forever build a society where they stop treating us like defective hardware if we resist.
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