In a 2007 interview, Lew Rockwell was asked if he considered himself to be a libertarian. The context of the questions was the same then as it would be today for the same question. The question is really this: do you still call yourself a libertarian in spite of all the beltway, pro-government, pro-state intellectuals and activists who also call themselves libertarians? Rockwell answers “yes” because, of the reasons that he states below.
“Conservative” doesn’t work for a variety of reasons, not least of all because, after 2001, most conservatives became apologists for the regime so long as a Republican was in office. By 2007, Rockwell had also abandoned the 1990s term “paleolibertarian” because it was so closely associated with paleoconservative, which was, by then, already a defunct ideological project. “Paleoism,” after all, was a project of the 1990s, when it looked like the conservative movement might evolve into something resembling “the Old Right” which had existed before the Cold War infected the American Right with incessant calls for a bigger and stronger government in the name of defeating communism. After 9/11, it was clear that paleoconservatism, a product of post-Cold War anti-establishment populism, had been defeated and supplanted by the conservative globalism of the George W. Bush era. The “global war on terror” had taken up right where the old Cold War had left off, and thus most conservatives reverted to the usual big-government militarism that Rockwell, Rothbard, and others hoped would be left behind.
This didn’t happen, and by 2007, there was no benefit to using a term that might confuse people into believing that Rothbardian libertarians had some sort of common cause with conservatism which by then was dominated by pro-TSA/pro-Dick Cheney/pro-Patriot Act ideologues.
Rockwell is asked if “libertarian” is still an appropriate term, and he it is probably the most usable term, in spite of its lack of precision:
Johnsson: Do you consider yourself a libertarian?
Rockwell: Most certainly. What are the choices? Conservative is obviously out, even though the media describe us this way. The term’s heritage dates to the Tory party in Britain, the very mercantilist-landowners who resisted change in the Corn Laws. This group opposed capitalism as socially destabilizing. They didn’t like the merchant class making more money than the old families — meaning that they didn’t want to lose their privileges. In the US, the term conservative came about after World War II. It had no meaning, really, other than to refer to the general desire to be prudent in public affairs, in contrast to the revolutionary tendencies on the left. The problem is that it amounted to a defense of the status quo, and, after Buckley, it was irretrievably wrapped up with the Cold War cause.
I like the term liberal since genuine liberalism is our heritage. It was their insight that society is self-managing, and this is the greatest political idea ever advanced in human history. But there are two problems here. The first is that the term was hijacked by socialists during the Progressive Era and especially after the New Deal, when the liberals finally sold out to the state. The second is more obscure but it is important: even the good kind of liberalism was very much bound up with republican theory, that you could have a government made up of the people rather than the elites. This error, which is really utopian, led to a commitment to government as an essential institution. Advances in economics and political philosophy since that time have shown that this is a misnomer. There is no way to keep government in check, since by definition it is guilty of committing the very aggressions it is supposedly designed to keep at bay: namely, theft, murder, counterfeiting, kidnapping, and the like. So the liberal critique of the state just wasn’t radical enough.
There are other options, such as the term I once used, “paleolibertarian,” which refers to libertarianism before the movement emerged to institutionalize it as an ideological wing of the state’s political apparatus. This term was designed to address a very serious problem that libertarians in Washington had come to see themselves as a pleading pressure group hoping to find “market-based” solutions to public policy problems but within public policy, and thus do they support school vouchers, limited wars, managed trade, forced savings as an alternative to social security, and the like. Unfortunately, the term paleolibertarian became confused because of its association with paleoconservative, so it came to mean some sort of socially conservative libertarian, which wasn’t the point at all — though the attempted definition of libertarian as necessarily socially leftist is a problem too.
There are other strange terms bandied about from time to time, but in the end, I think we have to be happy with the term libertarian, while knowing that politics tends to taint all word usage issues. What is a libertarian? It is a person who believes in the absolute right of private property ownership. All else follows from that one proposition.
Many still argue that “libertarian” should be abandoned as a term because it is too open to misinterpretation. After all, there are many people out there with many questionable beliefs who call themselves libertarians. But what ideology is free from the same problem? “Conservatism” can denote a wide variety of groups and individuals from Pat Buchanan to Lindsey Graham. Additional explanation is often necessary, and there is no magic vocabulary that eliminates this problem in the world of ideological schools and movements.
The question of what it means to be a libertarian brings us to a second important question. Is a libertarian necessarily anti-state? The descriptor “anti-state” is probably the most important part of distinguishing the Rothbard-Rockwell school of libertarianism from the “regime libertarians“ and other types of libertarians. In Rockwell’s view—and in my view, for that matter—to be “libertarian” is to necessarily be anti-state, since, as Rockwell states below, “The number one, central, ubiquitous problem of our time and all time is the state.” This is correct because the state is the natural enemy of all real institutions of civilization: family, church, market, and all the private-sector, voluntary institutions that hold communities together. As I explained earlier this year, there are nonetheless some “libertarians” who believe that “freedom” is achieved by using the power of the state to prevent “oppression” by family, religion, or shopkeepers. This is simply a variation of social democracy calling itself “libertarianism.” What really matters is being anti-state:
Johnsson: Your slogan on LewRockwell.com is Anti-War, Anti-State, Pro-Market; how do you define anti-state?
Rockwell: To be anti-state is to hold the intellectual position that there is nothing that society needs that the state can do better than the market. If you hold that view, you are anti-state. So in some ways, to say anti-war, anti-state, and pro-market is to propose redundancies of the same idea. I would defend the anti-state idea in every aspect of human life. The market is better in schools, energy, food, housing, charity, trade, consumer protection, justice, security, and even international relations. I know of no exceptions. The major burden of all the editorial work that I do is to make this point again and again. Does it grow weary? Not in any way. The number one, central, ubiquitous problem of our time and all time is the state. Whenever a criminal band manages to bamboozle the public that it alone should be granted the legal right to aggress on others, there is a problem that needs to be uprooted. The struggle for freedom is precisely this and no other.
