Ron Paul and Libertarianism's Dirty Secret -- Pandering to Racist "Rednecks" to Get Ahead

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been essential reading on Ron Paul’s cynical embrace of racist populism and subsequent refusal to own up to it.

But while I imagine Dr. Paul doesn’t believe in the inherent criminality of black males (though I’d bet he does believe some variation on his newsletter’s remark that “only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions”) these comments didn’t originate in a vacuum.

Here’s why they happened: Years ago, a bunch of libertarians decided to act like huge racists to win votes. Reason explained it in 2008:

The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”

That’s Murray Rothbard, the legendary libertarian thinker.

There are, broadly, two different versions of American libertarianism: There’s Reason Magazine and Cato Institute libertarianism — “cool” libertarianism — and there’s Mises Institute/Lew Rockwell libertarianism — old crank libertarianism. Ron Paul is a Mises Institute libertarian. (Gary Johnson, more of a cool libertarian.)

The origins of the philosophical split are explained nicely by Brian Doherty in this piece on the late Murray Rothbard. To drastically oversimplify, guys like Hayek made pragmatic economic arguments (and left room for a “limited” state to provide some measure of assistance to the needy) and Rothbard made Randian philosophical arguments (and was radically anti-state). And Rothbard went full-on neo-Confederate in order to win over the “rednecks.”

Ron Paul’s libertarianism has plenty of room for nativism and racism because so much of it does sound like a Pat Buchanan-style call for America to return to a golden age of white privilege. Paul isn’t a futurist, like the libertarians who write hilarious odes to the coming “singularity,” when we’ll all become immortal cyborgs. He’s a goldbug. He’s a deeply religious anti-abortion small-town country doctor who basically wants the government to operate as it did in 1837.