Libertarian
strategy has always been a vexing topic. Presidential election years, filled
with statist campaign rhetoric, tend to cause existential pain and a
reexamination of the fundamental question before us: What must be done to reduce the size and scope of the state?
How can we realistically create a more libertarian society here and now, given
the resources available and the range of tactical options? Is our primary task
intellectual, with the goal of converting academic, financial, and political
elites to our point of view? Or is a bottom-up strategy superior, one that
focuses on populist messages and grassroots political activism?
Is our
fight intellectual or populist?
Murray
Rothbard addressed both of these approaches in a decidedly un-PC essay written in
1992, an election year that presented libertarians with many of the
same issues faced today. He discusses the goal of influencing elite thinkers, a
process he termed “Hayekian conversion,” and contrasts it with the goal of
reaching the masses through populist messaging.
Typically
for Rothbard, he saw no inherent conflict between seeking popularity for
libertarian ideas and sticking to first principles. As for appealing to elites
or appealing to the masses, he suggests both. But the real subject of the
article is populism, a topic Murray approaches unabashedly: libertarians should
openly embrace right wing populism as the quickest means to generate opposition
to the state and its lackeys, specifically the “technocrats, ‘social
scientists,’ and media intellectuals… who apologize for the State system and
staff in the ranks of its bureaucracy.”
Almost
25 years later, Murray’s analysis sounds quite prescient:
Libertarians have often
seen the problem plainly, but as strategists for social change they have badly
missed the boat. In what we might call “the Hayek model,” they have called for
spreading correct ideas, and thereby converting the intellectual elites to
liberty, beginning with top philosophers and then slowly trickling on down
through the decades to converting journalists and other media opinion-molders.
And of course, ideas are the key, and spreading correct doctrine is a necessary
part of any libertarian strategy. It might be said that the process takes too
long, but a long-range strategy is important, and contrasts to the tragic
futility of official conservatism which is interested only in the
lesser-of-two-evils for the current election and therefore loses in the medium,
let along the long, run. But the real error is not so much the emphasis on the
long run, but on ignoring the fundamental fact that the problem is not
just intellectual error. The problem is that the intellectual elites benefit from
the current system; in a crucial sense, they are part of the ruling class. The
process of Hayekian conversion assumes that everyone, or at least all
intellectuals, is interested solely in the truth, and that economic
self-interest never gets in the way. Anyone at all acquainted with
intellectuals or academics should be disabused of this notion, and fast. Any
libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion-molders are
part of the fundamental problem, not just because of error, but because their
own self-interest is tied into the ruling system.
Why then did communism
implode? Because in the end the system was working so badly that even
the nomenklatura got fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have
correctly pointed out that a social system collapses when the ruling class
becomes demoralized and loses its will to power; manifest failure of the
communist system brought about that demoralization. But doing nothing, or
relying only on educating the elites in correct ideas, will mean that our own
statist system will not end until our entire society, like that of the Soviet
Union, has been reduced to rubble. Surely, we must not sit still for that. A
strategy for liberty must be far more active and aggressive.
Hence the importance, for
libertarians or for minimal government conservatives, of having a one-two punch
in their armor: not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the
corrupt ruling elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more
specifically how they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is
“negative campaigning” at its finest and most fundamental.
This two-pronged strategy
is (a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government
opinion-molders, based on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to
short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses
of people against the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and
oppressing them, both socially and economically. But this strategy must fuse
the abstract and the concrete; it must not simply attack elites in the
abstract, but must focus specifically on the existing statist system,
on those who right now constitute the ruling classes.
Libertarians have long
been puzzled about whom, about which groups, to reach out to. The simple
answer: everyone, is not enough, because to be relevant politically, we must
concentrate strategically on those groups who are most oppressed and who also
have the most social leverage.
Rothbard
makes two important points here, both are which are deceptively simple and thus
often overlooked:
- First: elites are not motivated by intellectual ideas, good
intentions, or the betterment of society. They are motivated by
self-interest, like everyone else. Therefore the question is not
whether we can convince elites that libertarian ideas are better, but
whether they would be better off in a more libertarian world. For many
state-connected elites, the answer is decidedly no. This explains why
Hayekian conversion frequently fails. Rothbard understood the
immense power of self-interested elites working against the
libertarian message. The state and its clients—central bankers, academia,
crony corporations, defense contractors, federal workers, politicians, and
the whole political class—are aligned against us. But as Rothbard posits,
we cannot simply give up on identifying potential allies among those
elites. Organizations like the Volker Fund, IHS, and the Mises Institute
have had success in winning converts and placing libertarians in academia,
and surely we can’t simply cede higher education entirely to
progressives. We also should seek alliances with elite
libertarians in the business and investment worlds wherever possible,
people like Peter Thiel and Mark Spitznagel.
- Second: any successful libertarian strategy must contain a healthy
dose of populism. Austrian economics and libertarian theory often don’t
lend themselves to easy sound bites and simplistic memes. But intellectual
arguments alone won’t carry the day. Effective populist messages contain
an implicit answer to the question of “What’s in it for me” that satisfies
the average Joe or Jane. It’s easy for Bernie Sanders simply to say, “I
want to make college free so that all young people have an equal chance at
success.” It’s not so easy to hand someone 900 pages of Human
Action and say, “Read this, you’ll understand” (but try it
anyway).
Many
Americans are too busy keeping their head above water and raising families to
spend any free time reading economics or libertarian theory. At most, the
average person might pay some slight attention to the campaign season and vote
in the majority of elections. Therefore a winning populist message must be easy
to understand, easy to sell, and obviously beneficial to middle class and
working class constituencies. A populist message by definition is not one that
requires a great deal of work to find or adopt.
Case
in point: Ron Paul managed to enlist thousands of new libertarians during his
2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns by successfully applying two populist
messages: “End the Fed” and “Get out of the Middle East.” Both messages
appealed across ideological lines, and both messages captured the prevailing
mood of the country.
After
the Crash of ’08, many Americans increasingly were wary of Wall Street and its
cozy connections with both the Fed and the Treasury Department. Wall Street got
bailed out, Main Street did not. The public’s understanding of what the Fed
does and how exactly it creates an elite banking class may have been fuzzy, but
so what? The Fed is a great example of an issue where the average person’s
reflexive viewpoint just so happens to be correct and libertarian at the same
time. Ron Paul was able to tap into visceral anti-Fed sentiment in the same way
that progressives do on a host of other issues.Dr. Paul similarly exploited
weariness with our Middle East entanglements by using another simple and
appealing populist message: get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. In doing so,
he correctly sensed that the interventionist sentiment following the events of
9/11 had passed. By 2008, and certainly by 2012, a majority of Americans had
come to the conclusion– however vague– that these two lengthy wars were
producing nothing except casualties, debt, and blowback. So Paul’s principled
antiwar position dovetailed with the national mood, even if most people might
not have articulated a libertarian rationale for that mood.
Libertarian
populism, like any form of populism, can be a double-edged sword. Support for
any candidate or message that is not based on some degree of thought and
deliberation can turn on a dime. But note that many of those initially drawn to
Dr. Paul’s campaigns by its populist themes went on to read books he had
recommended, becoming more fully liberty-minded as a result. And as
Rothbard points out, libertarians ignore populism at our own peril. Just as
every left wing populist has not read Marx or Howard Zinn, we should not apply
intellectual litmus tests to potential libertarian converts. When it comes
to libertarian populism, reflexive antipathy for the state—and an
instinctive recognition of its malevolence—can be enough.
