PFP047 | Richard Spencer, The “Alternative Right” in America (PFS 2010)

by PFS on January 27, 2022

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 047.

This lecture is from the 2010 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: “The ‘Alternative Right’ in America,” Richard Spencer (USA). PFS 2010 Playlist.

Youtube:

Note: This took place well before the “alt-right” had fully emerged and around the time Spencer launched his Alternative Right magazine. The contours of the alt-right became clearer later, which Professor Hoppe criticized in “Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change (2017)“:

However, several of the Alt-Right’s leaders and many of its rank and file followers have also endorsed views incompatible with libertarianism. As Buchanan before and Trump now, they are adamant about complementing a policy of restrictive, highly selective and discriminating immigration (which is entirely compatible with libertarianism and its desideratum of freedom of association and opposition to forced integration) with a strident policy of restricted trade, economic protectionism and protective tariffs (which is antithetical to libertarianism and inimical to human prosperity). (Let me hasten to add here that, despite my misgivings about his “economics,” I still consider Pat Buchanan a great man.)

Others strayed even further afield, such as Richard Spencer, who first popularized the term Alt-Right. In the meantime, owing to several recent publicity stunts, which have gained him some degree of notoriety in the US, Spencer has laid claim to the rank of the maximum leader of a supposedly mighty unified movement (an endeavor, by the way, that has been ridiculed by Taki Theodoracopulos, a veteran champion of the paleo-conservative-turned-Alt-Right movement and Spencer’s former employer). When Spencer appeared here, several years ago, he still exhibited strong libertarian leanings. Unfortunately, however, this has changed and Spencer now denounces, without any qualification whatsoever, all libertarians and everything libertarian and has gone so far as to even put up with socialism, as long as it is socialism of and for only white people. What horrifying disappointment!

See also Professor Hoppe’s speech delivered at the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey, on September 17, 2017:

The errors of the alt-right and its incompatibility with libertarian theory can be seen as a sort of failure of a third attempt at conservative-libertarian “fusionism”. For more on this, see Stephan Kinsella, “The Three Fusionisms: Old, New, and Cautious.”