I wasn’t sure where to put this. I found this link on a wonderful site called Arts & Letters Daily, an aggregator of many, many publications and interesting sources. I warn you, once you go there, you’ll get lost in all of the topics.
This article stopped me in my tracks today.
The Forgotten Man – On Murray Rothbard, philosophical harbinger of Trump and the alt-right
[Trump’s] presidency and political style were imagined by one man: the libertarian economist and philosopher Murray N. Rothbard, who died in 1995. Not long before his death, Rothbard rejoiced when he saw in the emergence of David Duke and Pat Buchanan, in 1992, his long-held vision for America’s right and concluded that what was needed was more of the same:
And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.
Despite the eerie accuracy of his vision and his prolific writing on every subject from contemporary cinema to the Federal Reserve system, Rothbard’s name is not widely known. It’s not likely to be found in bibliography of a contemporary economist’s paper, but you will find it scrawled on the seamy underbelly of the web, in the message boards of the alt-right, where fewer voices are more in the air than Rothbard’s. One can look at the recent profiles of neo-fascists to find the name Rothbard, and that of his favorite pupil and protégé, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, again and again.
This is a really LONG article, but fascinating. indeed, Rothbard seems to be the wellspring of the attitudes we are witnessing in the Republican Congress and on the right today.
…The writing Rockwell produced on behalf of Ron Paul in the 1980s and early 1990s is quite frank in its racism, homophobia, and paranoia about AIDS—part of what Rothbard described as an “Outreach to the Rednecks.” By 1990, the Ron Paul newsletters started discussing David Duke in favorable terms. But it was in 1992, after David Duke’s failed presidential run, that Rothbard in an article entitled “Right Wing Populism,” from the Rockwell-Rothbard Report, fully puts Duke’s politics in the context of his earlier articulated “populist short-circuit” strategy. There he encourages emulation of Duke:
It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians: lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what’s wrong with any of that?
Ultimately it was Pat Buchanan who was to be Rothbard’s man in 1992.
He applauds the book [The Bell Curve ] for destroying “the egalitarian myth” that “has been the major ideological groundwork for the welfare state, and, in its racial aspect, for the entire vast, ever expanding civil rights-affirmative action-set aside-quota aspect of the welfare state. The recognition of inheritance and natural inequalities among races as well as among individuals knocks the props out from under the welfare state system.” Rothbard continues:
If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance . . . In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.
Here what Rothbard meant when he talks about non-aggression and self-defense is made plain: the ideological rampart of the post-welfare order against egalitarian attacks would have to be scientifically dressed up racism, defending the “property rights” of the rightful masters, sorted to the top by the ineluctable logic of the market. At this point his appeal to the alt-right shouldn’t be much of a mystery.
In July 2016, [Justin] Raimondo wrote in The American Conservative, “Rothbard, who died in 1995, would’ve loved Donald Trump, and he seems to have foreseen his rise as if in a dream.”
I’d encourage anyone who has the time and interest to read the whole article.