Populists Before Trump: John Ganz’s lively new book provides a valuable account of the intellectual origins of Trumpism. (Leon Hadar, 20 Aug 2024, Quillette)
I was therefore surprised to learn that celebrated libertarian economist Murray N. Rothbard was proposing an alliance between classical liberals like me and a bunch of dissident right-wingers known as “paleoconservatives.”
The paleocons contended that America was in peril, that liberalism was the new enemy, and that nationalism was the next big thing. As John Ganz puts it in When the Clock Broke, his new book recalling the paleocons’ intellectual and political odyssey, these thinkers believed that the US should embrace a system that would be “based on domination and exclusion, a restricted sense of community that jealously guarded its boundaries and policed its members, and the direction of a charismatic leader who would use his power to punish and prosecute for the sake of restoring lost national greatness.”
In an attempt to mobilise those he called “radical reactionaries,” Rothbard forged an unlikely alliance between socially conservative nationalists and libertarians disenchanted with open borders and free trade. Speaking before an audience at the John Randolph Club in January 1992, he argued that the task of this new movement was to “finish the job” after the fall of communism and dismantle what he called the “soft Marxism” of the welfare state. “We shall repeal the twentieth century,” he confidently declared, and “nothing less than a counter-revolution” would be required.
This new populist strategy would embrace the power of pessimism, a sharp break with the sunny tenets of classical liberalism and the more familiar conservatism espoused by Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley’s National Review. Paleoconservatives “looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of an earlier time,” Ganz writes. They wanted to “break the clock” of progress, returning America to a “previous dispensation while also creating a new country of their own devising.”
They aren’t conservatives.