Author Archives: John Jackson

Libertarian Titles: A Top Ten List

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My dear wife (married 31 years this coming August!) told me that as a child she used to love to be in a bookstore or a library and just walk down the aisles and read the book titles. Not open the books. Not read the books. She just enjoyed reading the titles. If you are person who just enjoys reading book titles it is hard to go wrong reading libertarian titles. They may offer extremely questionable answers to society’s problems, they may have morally suspect fellow-travelers, they may show a near-complete insensitivity to the most vulnerable among us, but damn they can write a nice book title. As one who struggles with writing even a passable title, I can only gaze in wonder. There are Mozarts in the world and I will always be Salieri. You know the old saying: “Those who can compose a great book titles compose great book titles; those who can’t compose lists of other people’s great book titles.” What? It is too a saying! Shut up.

Libertarians have great titles because they manage to evoke the core of their ideology in very few words. The language they use is evocative, stirring up emotions while, somehow, simultaneously giving the appearance of cold rationality.

A couple things to keep in mind: first, this is not a list of great libertarian books  (are there any?), it is a list of great libertarian book titles. I’m hardly qualified to give you a list of the books you should read to become a libertarian, but I love these titles. Second, no Ayn Rand titles. Atlas Shrugged may or may not be a good title, but I’m kicking her out of the competition because I’m arbitrary and capricious and narrow-minded.

With all that in mind, I offer to you a Top Ten List of great libertarian book titles.

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More Libertarians: Murray Rothbard and Competitive Racism

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[NB: I quote a lot from Professor Peter Klein‘s comment on this thread regarding Murray Rothbard. I want to make quite clear that my comments about Rothbard are about Rothbard and not about Professor Klein. I thank him for raising Rothbard’s name in this context because he spurred me to write up my thoughts about Rothbard and racism. In no way do I want to impute Rothbard’s beliefs to Professor Klein. Just so we are clear on that.]
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), has been called “the most gifted libertarian writer of his generation” (p. 251). Rothbard prided himself as, in Nancy MacLean‘s words, libertarianism’s “most scathing guardian of libertarian orthodoxy” (p. 147). He was an “anarcho-capitalist” who believed that all governmental functions should be privatized, including national defense and police forces. Unlike someone like James Buchanan, or indeed, most academics, who often work within institutional structures with other like-minded researchers,  Rothbard worked alone for the vast majority of his career. Nonetheless he produced a staggering number of publications. His first writings, published when he was still a graduate student in economics in New York, were in Frank Chodorov’s analysis, by the end of his career he was championing libertarian politicians such as Ron Paul, paleo-conservatives such as Patrick J. Buchanan, and racist provocateurs such as ex-Klansman David Duke. Of this last’s run for the governorship of Louisiana, the Jewish Rothbard wrote of the most famous antisemite in the US:
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?
Rothbard’s extremely rigid views, combined with these worrisome choices of allies, mean that many libertarians try to distance Rothbard from more respectable figures. For example, in our recent libertarian kerfuffle Phil Magness, properly distances James Buchanan from Rothbard’s radicalism. On that same thread I point out what I believe is the case: that there were no libertarians who spoke out against the discrimination or segregation of African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s (at this point, notably, Magness goes silent). At this point Professor Peter Klein brought Rothbard back from exile:
Libertarians such as Rothbard were keenly interested in the civil rights movement and had a quite a lot to say about it. Rothbard contributed a 5,000+ word article to New Individualist Review in 1961 on “The Negro Revolution,” describing the civil rights movement, with all its diversity, in great detail (http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/rothbard-on-the-black-revolution). The article is mostly descriptive and analytical but Rothbard concludes by describing the libertarian position as “oppos[ing] compulsory segregation and police brutality, but also oppos[ing] compulsory integration and such absurdities as ethnic quota systems in jobs.” (BTW on the question of racism and unions, referred to above in the context of W. H. Hutt, Rothbard adds: “some Negroes are beginning to see that the heavy incidence of unemployment among Negro workers is partially caused by union restrictionism keeping Negroes (as well as numerous whites) out of many fields of employment. If the Negro Revolution shall have as one of its consequences the destruction of the restrictive union movement in this country, this, at least, will be a welcome boon.”)
I promised Professor Klein a post on Rothbard’s embrace of Black Nationalism and here we are. The place to begin is with what Rothbard called it in his last public speech: the War for Southern Independence. Those of us who aren’t interested in defending the Confederacy tend to call it the American Civil War.

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Davidson and Buchanan: Why Phillip Magness Should Apologize to Nancy MacLean

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Well, this has been exciting. My post on Nancy MacLean’s new book (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America)—what a friend of mine has dubbed “the libertarian kerfuffle”—has brought new readers to this normally quiet space, for which I’m grateful. I’ve been dubbed “not particularly compelling” by Jonathan H. Adler at the Washington Post! As wonderful as that is (I’m thinking of making it the new tagline for my blog) I feel we ended up spinning our wheels in the comments. So, I’ll try again here and perhaps we can make better headway.

To defend Buchanan, and to defend themselves as inheritors of his intellectual program, many have reacted with accusations that MacLean is a bad scholar, that her citation practices are shoddy, and that she should be sued for libel. It is all very exciting. Well, as exciting as academic arguments get anyway. I’m not saying this is Game 7 of the World Series or anything.

Let’s pick up the argument with the accusation that MacLean imagined a link between southern writer Donald Davidson and James. N. Buchanan.

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Was James Buchanan a Racist? Libertarians and Historical Research

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Note: if you are here because of my discussions of Nancy Maclean’s book, I have several follow-up posts to this one:

This is the cover a new book by Duke historian Nancy MacLean. I was dreading reading it because MacLean is a terrific historian; I’ve long admired her history of the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan, Behind the Mask of Chivalry. This new book appeared to be the history I am working on: its thesis is that the white south’s program of Massive Resistance to Brown v. Board of Education was the start of the right wing’s current attempts to disenfranchise voters and to undermine democracy in order to let the free market operate.

MacLean’s book turns out to be much different from the one I hope to write; her focus is on economist James M. Buchanan who moved easily in the corridors of power in Virginia and beyond. The folks I’m interested in consider Buchanan a pseudo-libertarian for these very reasons. In many ways, MacLean’s book is a story of the straightforward successes of libertarians and I hope my work can complement her achievement.

Needless to say, the libertarians, particularly those of Buchanan’s “Public Choice” school, are not happy. Not at all. They feel MacLean has misrepresented Buchanan and public choice theory and, worse, committed historical malfeasance by altering quotations and quoting out of context. There is a lot of dust in the air right now, and a lot of charges being thrown around. Rather than trying to sort out everything going on, I’ll focus on one particular question:

Was James M. Buchanan a Racist?

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Discrimination, Religion, and Libertarianism: It’s Not About the Wedding Cake

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My mom told me a story once about being a little girl when she and my grandparents drove from their home in South Dakota to California. It was sometime in the 1940s, after the war, and she might have been ten years old or so. Lord knows how long that must have taken in those pre-Interstate Highway days. Obeying some rules of travel known only to her, my grandmother insisted that my mom sit in the front seat between the two adults for the entirety of the trip. My grandmother, with the reasonable patience for which the German people are known, spent a lot of time criticizing her daughter for not having Sitzfleisch.

As difficult (and boring for any normal 10-year-old girl) that trip must have been, it must have been immeasurably more difficult for African American travelers of the time. The South, of course, was legally segregated, but things were not any better in the North or the West. The law allowed any private business to refuse service to African Americans  simply because they were African Americans. When travelling, African Americans could never be sure if they would be refused service at the restaurant they stopped at for lunch, the gas station they stopped to refuel, or the motel they stopped in to rest. One resource they had was the Green Book, a guide that showed them the places where they would be welcome. As the introduction stated:

With the introduction of this travel guide in 1936, it has been our idea to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable.

The legend on the cover has a rather ominous warning: “You may need it.” It was not even a matter of your kids going hungry because you can’t find dinner or sleeping in the car because you can’t find lodging. It was also a matter of avoiding a violent reception in an area where the police could not be counted on to enforce the law.

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Those Radicalized Immigrants: “Alternative Facts” From Fake Experts

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This just in: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal of the Trump administration on the Muslim ban. Over at Breitbart, this news was greeted with the headline: “The Supreme Court Reinstates Trump Travel Ban from Muslim-Majority Countries!”  Well, not quite. First, calling it a “travel ban” is what got Trump into trouble with the Courts in the first place and the Administration tries hard to reign in The Donald when he foolishly tells the truth about it. Second, the Court did not “reinstate” the entire ban, indeed, they upheld parts the stay.. Finally, by the time this gets sorted out, the ban will have expired, the Administration will have to start all over again with a new order without passing GO and without collecting their 200 refugees at the border. In summation: apart from being wrong in nearly every single particular, Breitbart nailed it.

Let’s think about the line of reasoning the makes the Muslim ban so popular among the Alt-Right.  The basic argument looks pretty much like this:

Stop the illegal tide of immigration. Despite the secrecy of our Immigration Service and cooperating agencies on this subject—a secrecy utterly without justification and which could be desired only for concealing enormous irregularities—some of our Congressional spokesmen now claim that hundreds of thousands of immigrants, largely Muslim, are coming across our borders, legally and illegally. From my own studies of immigrants, I know that among them are many pro-Jihad. But all Muslim immigrants, Jihad and anti-Jihad, immediately after arrival are under strong pressure to side with the radical Muslim groups, and most of them will have to yield.

What can the history of the Alt-Right tell us about this line of reasoning?

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Frank Chodorov: Scrappy Libertarian, Crappy Oracle

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Libertarians are a strange bunch. They are the most predictable of political thinkers since the answer to every social problem is the exact same thing: The cause of the problem is government and the solution is less government. Full stop.

You have probably never heard of Frank Chodorov (1887-1966). Born in New York City as Fishel Chodorowsky, he is considered one of the pioneer libertarians of the twentieth-century United States. At the very least, libertarians remember him for a letter he wrote to Bill Buckley’s National Review in 1956, wherein he declared, “I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical.”1 Chodorov’s fightin’ words reflected Libertarians’ delight in considering themselves rough-and-tumble, independent thinkers. I can’t help noticing however, that their fierce independent thinking often matches perfectly with powerful business and corporate interests. Chodorov, for example, first made his mark by busting a union in 1923. Union busting for freedom!

Chodorov is often credited with keeping the libertarian flame alive during the dark days of World War II. A staunch isolationist, Chodorov founded a small newsletter he named analysis which he published between 1944 and 1951 before it merged with Human Events, which is still going strong. analysis was a pure distillation of Chodorov’s libertarianism, his own vision with no compromises—this is what blogging was like in the 1940s. As historian George Nash wrote:

It is a vivid illustration both of the virtually underground character of much of the “classical liberal” movement in this period and of the perseverance of its devotees that this little journal appeared at all. Frank Chodorov was a practicing individualist; he produced his own magazine in a few rooms in an unpretentious building in Manhattan.

In his obituary to Chodorov, Murray Rothbard claimed that analysis was the one place where Chodorov could present his pure gospel of individualism. I thought therefore that reading through analysis might be an important part of the history I’m writing.

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Virginia Is for (Same-Race) Lovers

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Ok, my title isn’t precisely what it says on our license plates:

Virginian_license_plate_(2014—present)

But until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia, as it was in 24 other states. Fifty years ago today, on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Today is Loving Day!

The case was Loving v. Virginia. If you wrote a novel whose centerpiece was a court case on marriage named “Loving v. Virginia” the editor would send the manuscript back to you with a note reading, “Contrived. Change the name.” But that was the name of the couple who challenged Virginia’s laws against interracial marriage.  As the kids say today, “For reals.” (The kids still say that, right?)

In the late 1950s, Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black woman, fell in love and wanted to get married. Because it was illegal in Virginia for them to do so, they hopped on a train up to Washington, D.C. and got married there.

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In Virginia, they were arrested. The case eventually reached U.S. Supreme Court which overturned Virginia’s miscegenation law in 1967.

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You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Racist

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There is a brand new Pew Poll out that indicates that interracial marriage has increased five-fold  in the fifty years since the US Supreme Court found laws banning it unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. Of course, almost half of Republican voters in Mississippi think interracial marriage should still be illegal. Over at the Alt-Right site, American Renaissance they disapprove of interracial marriage (surprise!).

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The rise in interracial marriage seems to belie an old racist idea summarized by the old cliché, “Birds of a feather flock together.” This idea is that it is natural for people of one race to separate themselves from those of a different race. Even today, scientific racists try to offer all kinds of arguments  about how natural race prejudice is. (I’ve published some criticisms of these kinds of arguments here and here.)

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William F. Buckley, Jr., the Respectable Right, and Human Equality

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The right wing. Is there anything better than a visual pun?

The “Alt” in Alt-Right has a double meaning. On the one hand, “alt” is German for “old” and the Alt-Right claims to be the heirs to the isolationist right of pre-World War II America.  On the other, “alt” is also short for “alternative” making the Alt-Right the alternative to the mainstream right wing of American politics. So, you might ask the Alt-Right: what is the “mainstream” right of American politics to which thou art alternative?

You could write a several terabytes on trying to define such a vexed question and people have. Let’s take this handy summary provided by a recent book on conservative politics by George Hawley:

  • Conservatives call for limited, if any, government intervention in the economy.
  • Conservatives hold that tradition, particularly religious tradition, should guide public policy.
  • Conservatives are for a strong military and a strong American military presence in the world.

The Alt-Right holds itself as an alternative to these positions in various ways: Libertarians would claim that limited government might be an improvement over the status quo, but it is still inherently inferior to no government; Randians would claim that tradition, especially religious tradition, is no way to run society; isolationists would withdraw from the world rather than engage with it through our military.

Shifting our focus from the “alt” to the “right” we get a different question: what makes all these differing ideologies “right?” The answer is that both alt and mainstream right adhere to one common tenet: the rejection of “equality” as a supreme value. According to Hawley, the Left seeks equality as the highest value while the Right can and does hold other values as more important than equality. Political theorist Corey Robin argues that the mark of the Right is that it opposes the equal distribution of power. Only a certain kind of people should be making decisions in society; the rest are just not up to the task of governing. Hence, appeals to equality are suspect in all right wing discourse, whether alt or mainstream.

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