Hoppeanism Is A Right Wing Ideology and That's Not Up For Debate
With this article I hope to convince a great many readers that Hoppeanism is a right wing ideology and that its precursor (Rothbardiansque liberty) always has been. So while I do mention Professor Hoppe in this article I feel it is more important I focus on Hoppe's primary influence, Murray Rothbard.
I, as well as most readers will know of the late-great Murray Rothbard and his seeming penchant for straddling the left-right divide. I’m here to tell you that is the furthest thing from the truth, Murray Rothbard grew up as a right winger and left this Earth as one.
This will come as a shock to some, especially those among us who we would classify themselves as so-called “left-libertarians,” “left-Rothbardians,” “thick-libertarians,” “Leftarians,” “lolberts,” or any other number of other delusive and specious terms. Those who would seek to relegate Rothbard to a pit of reference material and ambiguity using contextless quotes and spurious claims to defend their out-right proto-communist actions and beliefs.
Where did these people come from? Why do they insist on being associated with people who, by definition, are right wingers? To explain this clearly we have to back to the 1960’s in what some would call Rothbard’s “leftist” phase.
At the time, Neoconservatism had taken the stage on the right and had begun a subversionist plot to undermine what is now known as “the old right.” You can read more about this in the book Reclaiming the American Right by Justin Raimondo. Rothbard, feeling an overwhelming disdain for the new right and feeling ideologically homeless took them to task on many occasions and set out to do anything he could to further the cause of libertarianism. In the spring of 1965, Rothbard established “Left and Right” a new journal with the author Karl Hess to further his ideas. In this new publication he would shun the new right and attempt to draw what he dubbed “the new left” closer to his ideas. Essentially, Rothbard employed a Trotskyist or Leninist strategy to 5th column the left into embracing the ideas of liberty.
At first, Rothbard saw success with this strategy. Two years later in the Spring of 1967 Rothbard has earned recognition from leftists around the country who also saw the rise of this neo anarchistic left-wing movement. Rothbard had penned an article around this time entitled SDS: The New Turn, (no doubt a reference to Trotsky’s French turn), he noticed that the new left had begun to replace the old guard and lean in his direction, particularly among students in a group called Student’s for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Though Rothbard did see a number of early warning signs in the primary new left constituency within SDS, such as their penchant for constant revolution from within their own ranks, a clear aversion to academic economics, and a destruction of property rights Rothbard still felt emboldened by the anarchistic nature he saw growing on the left.
In 1969, Rothbard had organized a meeting between anarchistic leaning left wingers and anarchistic leaning right wingers and dubbed the conference the Radical Libertarian Alliance. He noted at the time in an article to this right-wing group, having been disenfranchised by the Neoconservative take over.
* I grew up a right-winger, and became more intensely a libertarian rightist as I grew older. How come I am an exile from the Right-wing, while the conservative movement is being run by a gaggle of ex-Communists…?*
As John Payne notes in his booklet “Rothbard’s Time on the Left” the conference was an utter “disaster.” Rothbard had feared the left was irredeemable and this conference had proved it. The “coalition,” as it were, was not to be. The left in all their typical glory made the conference a mockery. Even to the surprise of Rothbard, Karl Hess did nothing but exacerbate the issues by declaring in so many words that there was no middle ground and that everyone was “either with us or against us.” Indeed, not all were on the same side.
The conference ended with Hess leading the more left leaning group to an anti-war march while those who had leaned more right simply went home. The left’s penchant for radical inanity had surfaced and destroyed Rothbard’s plans. Hess, now the intellectual heir to the 1% and Occupy Wall Street movement as noted by Maureen Tkacik in Reuters, had become the final nail in the coffin so to speak for “anarcho-coalitionism” as it is known today.
In 1971, post the disaster of the attempted coalescence of the right and left anarchist movements Rothbard, unflinching in his desire to create a real movement of people, helped found the Libertarian Party, which we’ll return to later. In 1974 Rothbard went on to write his seminal essay “Egalitarianism As a Revolt Against Nature” in which he wholly dismembers the very nature of leftist thought and remains to this day, a highly influential piece.
Rothbard Notes:
For well over a century, the Left has generally been conceded to have morality, justice, and “idealism” on its side; the Conservative opposition to the Left has largely been confined to the “impracticality” of its ideals…In no area has the Left been granted justice and morality as extensively and almost universally as in its espousal of massive equality. It is rare indeed in the United States to find anyone, especially any intellectual, challenging the beauty and goodness of the egalitarian ideal…We end with the conclusion that egalitarians, however intelligent as individuals, deny the very basis of human intelligence and of human reason: the identification of the ontological structure of reality, of the laws of human nature, and the universe. In so doing, the egalitarians are acting as terribly spoiled children, denying the structure of reality on behalf of the rapid materialization of their own absurd fantasies. Not only spoiled but also highly dangerous; for the power of ideas is such that the egalitarians have a fair chance of destroying the very universe that they wish to deny and transcend, and to bring that universe crashing around all of our ears. Since their methodology and their goals deny the very structure of humanity and of the universe, the egalitarians are profoundly antihuman; and, therefore, their ideology and their activities may be set down as profoundly evil as well. Egalitarians do not have ethics on their side unless one can maintain that the destruction of civilization, and even of the human race itself, may be crowned with the laurel wreath of a high and laudable morality.
It is clear at this point, just four years after the disastrous conference Rothbard’s seeming welcoming nature that invited the left into the new anarchist movement was, in effect, dead on the vine. Rothbard had seen the very nature of the left. He saw the conference and the bridges he saw to build burned essentially at the stake of egalitarianism. It is apparent he knew from this point forward that any coalition or alliance of left and right to be a rejection of basic morality and sense. Rothbard learned from his mistake but unfortunately it kept following him.
In 1977, Rothbard met Charles Koch. Koch, emboldened by the writings of Murray Rothbard, was so enamored with Rothbard he wanted to start an institute to further libertarian ideas. This institute would later come to be known as the Cato Institute. Koch immediately made Rothbard a joint stockholder in the Cato institute and they set off on a path to make libertarianism a mainstream ideological force, or so Rothbard thought. Soon after Rothbard began to see that Cato was not exactly what he had signed up for.
Suffice it to say, Rothbard had seen a more politically motivated institute determined to influence Washington D.C. become the forefront of the institute’s policy while a more academic approach to economics and philosophy was put to the side. Just as he had witnessed the left do in his dealings with them in the past they had placed other goals above the ideas. Nonetheless he carried on until the hiring of one David Henderson. Henderson was for all intents and purposes and Chicago school economist and not in any sense an Austrian. This was an affront to Rothbard. Afterall, what place did a Chicagoan have in an Austrian style institute?
This was only the beginning, with the advent and founding of the Libertarian Party the Kochs and Ed Crane heavily influenced the policy of the party, much to Rothbard’s disdain. In 1980 Ed Clark, propped up by the Koch machine, was running for the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party. Clark, on one occasion referred to himself as a “low tax liberal” this infuriated Rothbard. Rothbard was no liberal, and certainly not “low tax,” when he was advocating for the direct destruction of tax system and he certainly was not about to support one being a libertarian nominee.
So, of course, Rothbard did what he always did, he wrote…and oh boy did he write a furious amount about Ed Clark and his so called, “low tax liberalism.” At this point the connection between the Koch machine’s need to further its political focus and popularity and Rothbard’s ideologically academic approach had been completely severed. By 1981, the Koch’s had illegally confiscated Rothbard’s shares in Cato, removed him from his board position, and sent him packing. It is no coincidence that in 1982 the Mises Institute was founded.
By 1989, Rothbard saw the inescapable plague of egalitarianism infecting the party and simply left unceremoniously. Once again, this rabble of unprincipled leftism had permeated his sphere and he was not-at-all happy about this. The next year in 1990, after the advent of the corruption of the Libertarian Party, Lew Rockwell with the help of Murray Rothbard put forth a new brand of libertarianism in an article entitled: “The Case for Paleo-libertarianism,” which you can read here.
In this article Rockwell and Rothbard lay out re-integrating libertarianism with right-wing conservative culture where it had always belonged. Rockwell and Rothbard take leftism and its inevitable nature of cultural degradation to task by laying out what would hopefully be a bedrock foundation for an incorruptible fusion of ideology and culture. Hans Hoppe would go on to take this fundamental bedrock and expound upon in it in a speech at the property and freedom society entitled “Realistic Libertarianism as Right Libertarianism” and his latest book, “Getting Libertarianism Right” in which Professor Hoppe completely deconstructs the left-libertarian narrative.
Related videos below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO68Kvb9fD4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYG6s4xc8Kg
Five years after Rothbard’s departure from the party Rothbard let us know the reasons for his departure as noted in “The Irrepressible Rothbard”:
Shortly before I left the libertarian movement and Party five years ago, a decision which I not only have never regretted but am almost continually joyous about, I told two well-known leaders of the movement that I thought it had become infected with and permeated by egalitarianism. What? they said. Impossible. There are no egalitarians in the movement. Further, I said that a good indication of this infection was a new-found admiration for the Reverend “Doctor” Martin Luther King. Absurd, they said. Well, interestingly enough, six months later, both of these gentlemen published articles hailing “Dr.” King as a “great libertarian.” To call this socialist, egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious opponent of private-property rights, a someone who, to boot, was long under close Communist Party control, to call that person a “great libertarian,” is only one clear signal of how far the movement has decayed.
Indeed, amidst all the talk in recent years about “litmus tests,” it seems to me that there is one excellent litmus test which can set up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and what we can now call “left-libertarians.” And that test is where one stands on “Doctor” King. And indeed, it should come as no surprise that, as we shall see, there has been an increasing coming together, almost a fusion, of neocons and left-libertarians. In fact, there is now little to distinguish them…This grass-roots right-wing is very different from anything we have yet seen. It profoundly dislikes and distrusts the mainstream media. And, by extension, it has no use for Beltway organizations or their traditional leaders. These grass-rooters are not content to kick into the coffers of Beltway organizations and obediently follow their orders. They may not be “socially tolerant,” but they are feisty, they hate the guts of the federal government, and they are Rising up Angry. In this burgeoning atmosphere, the supposedly pragmatic Beltway strategy of cozying up to Power is not only immoral and unprincipled; it also can no longer work, even in the short run. The oppressed middle and working-classes are at last rising up and on the march, and the new right-wing movement will have no time and no room for the traitorous elites who have led them by the nose for so many years.
I’m sure, much to reader’s surprise, this wasn’t written today. It was written in 1994. Rothbard’s knack for pinning the right/left divide is even more pronounced in today’s context.
Rothbard in this time period wrote a litany of right wing articles you may or may not have heard of.
Here are some great resources:
He saw through experience the left was incompatible with hierarchical order, that its premises were not based in reality, that these fundamental ideas were in direct opposition with traditional libertarian thought of academic economics, and private property. Rothbard saw it, so why are some attempting to repeat the mistakes of the past?
At this point, can anyone really say that the left has any place among right-libertarians, paleo-libertarians, Rothbardians, or Hoppeans? Can anyone say that fusionism with the left can be achieved knowing they are strict egalitarians?
I certainly believe Rothbard wouldn't think so.
