— From Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2026) —
Appreciating Rothbard’s Political Genius
The late Murray N. Rothbard was known as a vastly prolific writer and thinker whose brilliance was matched only by his prodigious output. He was entirely unafraid to cross disciplines and produce academic work well beyond his primary field of economics, particularly in philosophy, ethics, and history. Most academics know to stay in their lane, as the expression goes. To do otherwise risks ridicule from the jealous guardians of hyperspecialization. But Rothbard was wired differently.
This was an irrepressible man, a man who gave us a full treatise on market economics,2 with significant advancements in praxeology and the most thoroughgoing pure economic critique of state interventionism ever written at that point—complete with a wholesale dismantlement of traditional monopoly/antitrust analysis.3 Yet he also managed to write a staggering five‑volume revisionist history of colonial America4 and a radical normative argument for full anarchism under natural law principles.5
Any one of these works alone would represent career achievements for an ordinary academic or intellectual.
But Rothbard did so much more. For legions of Rothbard fans, his popular rather than academic work—many millions of words across thousands of articles—are his most important legacy. It is indeed that popular work, and his determination to write for lay audiences, which give him far greater reach and relevance. Thus Rothbard enjoys enduring popularity thirty years after his death, while once-prestigious academics fall immediately into total obscurity after retirement.
Rothbard’s popular work was also amazingly broad. While he’s known for deep economic and libertarian theory, he also wrote about everything under the sun: from movie reviews and Olympics commentary to skewering Randian Objectivism and mocking sixties counterculture.
An intellect like Rothbard’s could not be contained.
For this writer, however, it is Rothbard’s trenchant and unyielding political analysis that stands out among all those countless popular articles. His insights were so blistering, and so diamond sharp, that we can only laugh at what passes for effete political commentary today. Anyone who reads Rothbard seriously eventually comes to see him as a political genius.
This genius manifested in two ways.
First, Rothbard possessed an uncanny ability to strip any political figure or movement to its bare essence, leaving the subject unadorned, demystified, and de-sanctified. He was savage in his critiques, but almost never wrong. He was unflattering, but always in service of giving readers the real scoop.
Second, Rothbard was extremely accurate in his political prognostications. Many of the trends and phenomena he predicted and identified in the 80s and 90s are at the political forefront today, especially in the form of Trumpian and Euro rightwing populism. But more on that later.
Beholden to no academic sinecure or party or paycheck, he was free in a way other political commentators were not. This applied across the board, by the way. Murray was an equal opportunity skewerer. It made no difference whether the target was the Dulles brothers, William F. Buckley, LBJ, MLK, Eugene McCarthy, Dick Nixon, or Bill Clinton. Or any number of figures surrounding the libertarian movement and Party. Murray was a reflexive anti-state anarchist, but he was also keenly on the side of the little guy—and viewed the political world through that lens. This provided him with no lack of targets for his acid typewriter.6
To better understand Rothbard’s politics, a bit of background is in order. Born in 1926, Rothbard was surrounded in his modest Bronx Jewish tenement by actual card-carrying Communists. But his father David was that rarest of rarities in the neighborhood: a Republican who believed in individualism, free enterprise, and bootstraps. David, a factory chemist who hated labor unions, definitely shaped Murray’s worldview. Murray’s early unpleasant experiences in Bronx public schools made him appreciate his parent’s sacrifices in sending him to an upper East side prep school, and he emerged as a member of the New York Young Republican Club.
Thus inoculated, bright young Murray entered Columbia to earn an undergraduate math degree—a noteworthy detail overlooked by his future econometrician critics. By the late 1940s he was enrolled in a PhD economics program at Columbia, though he still found time to shock and awe his peers by serving as the only student on campus actively working on behalf of Strom Thurmond’s third-party Dixiecrat presidential campaign!
Rothbard’s early conservative tendencies evolved as he became enamored with important thinkers of what we now term the “Old Right” (1910s–1950s), chief among them John T Flynn, Frank Chodorov, Robert Taft, and especially the anarchist writer Albert Jay Nock. Nock had a deep influence on Rothbard’s thinking in several ways, from his view of the state as parasitic, and thus simply holding a “monopoly on crime,” to his deep anti-war and anti-democratic principles. Nock was also an intellectual and journalist, writing for The Nation before editing The Freeman, a proto-libertarian periodical associated with the single tax movement. It is perhaps Nock who most influenced not only Rothbard’s political anarchism, but also his journalistic style and pugnacity as a popular writer.
This Old Right was decidedly short-lived, unfortunately. It always faced an uphill battle against the natural tendencies of Washington, given its support for unyielding laissez-faire economic policies at home, strident opposition to extraconstitutional New Deal government programs and the fake liberalism of Wilson and Roosevelt, and of course its early version of an “America First” noninterventionist foreign policy.
But the American rightwing was changing, and not for the better. By the early 1950s both Nock and Taft were gone, Taft (like Rothbard) far too early, and the Old Right was on life support. As the old voices on the right fell away, their chief replacements began to coalesce around the East Coast quasi-socialite William F. Buckley and his nascent National Review.
This “new” right jettisoned not only the old thinkers but also their noninterventionist reflexes in favor of an aggressive, hawkish federal government whose main job was to defeat the Soviet Bear. This insistence on placing America at the center of a new unipolar order, combined with their willingness to accept a bigger role for the domestic state (read: welfare) so all focus remained on winning the Cold War, was anathema to Rothbard. And in this he was proven correct, as usual. We need only look at the state of “conservatism” since Buckley’s takeover as evidence of how correct, as detailed in Rothbard’s tremendous alt-history The Betrayal of the American Right.7
In midlife Rothbard famously flirted and advocated alliances with the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. But to be clear, Rothbard’s foray into leftwing circles was brief and driven almost entirely by his disgust and disagreement with the emerging establishment Cold War Right. So, it was necessity rather than temperament that drove Rothbard to consider alliances with the left, particularly owing to antiwar sensibilities apparent in student movements and Vietnam War protests. Rothbard was a radical to be sure, but he was never a man of the left in the most important cultural senses.8 He was not at home there.
As evidence of his cultural sensibilities, we need only consider his now infamous “Paleo” or right libertarian phase of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Here began his break with the Libertarian Party and what he termed “modal” libertarians who coalesced around a movement moving in the wrong direction, toward lifestyle concerns and “self-actualization” and animosity toward authority and hierarchy generally.9 This was not what Murray signed up for, nor did he appreciate the heavy-handed Koch influence on the Party and nefarious organizations like the Cato Institute.
And so he sought intellectuals on the right outside of Buckley’s circles who were reasonable and could be persuaded. The goal was simple but not easy, in that he sought to combine libertarian anti-statism and market economics with the conservative movement’s emphasis on law and order, family and faith, and respect for American traditions. But to be clear he was bringing libertarianism to conservatives, not the other way around. And after a lifetime of marginalization in the wilderness, he understandably sought to move beyond bickering over theory and seek achievable, concrete political victories that advanced liberty,
Undoubtedly Rothbard’s most famous (or infamous) expositions on the need to relocate libertarianism on the right and work with cultural conservatives were his 1992 essays, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement” and “A Strategy for the Right,” both published in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report.10 He envisioned libertarians consciously aligning with the rising populist political tides of Pat Buchanan, and in fact the two were friendly.11 He also pursued a paleoconservative/paleolibertarian alliance with the John Randolph Club, a group he co-founded with leaders of the Rockford Institute and Chronicles magazine like Thomas Fleming, Paul Gottfried, and Sam Francis.
It is important to understand Rothbard’s paleo phase as an evolutionary product. It reflected his immense historical knowledge of American political development and his understanding of how movements capture (or fail to capture) the public imagination. And it is here that his relevance to 2026 politics becomes most striking. With just a few substitutions, his 1992 description of the stakes and the players perfectly frames the battle raging across the American rightwing today.
And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing, and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked Right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.
… I would like to ask: How long are we going to keep being suckers? How long will we keep playing our appointed roles in the scenario of the Left? When are we going to stop playing their game, and start throwing over the table?12
This passage, written nearly 35 years ago, perfectly captures the Trumpian “New Right” phenomenon and the division between younger conservatives and Boomer Cons still clinging to Bush/Romney/Ryan axis.
In fact the “old” right of 2026 consists of the Bushes, Cheneys, Romneys, and Ryans; the Bulwarks and especially the National Reviews, with their insatiable attachment to “propositional” America, endless Third World immigration, and the deadly Neoconservative policies that led the country into unmitigated disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “new” right, by contrast, is the Trumpist/populist coalition which recognizes what the old guard refuses to admit: the culture has shifted dramatically for the worse, the left captured every major institution, and polite conservatism has been a useless 40‑year failure. It “conserved” nothing.
Rothbard would have reveled in the spectacle, energy, and sheer P.T. Barnumesque showmanship of Trumpism—not because he would have loved the man, but because he instinctively understood the strategic value of anyone capable of breaking elite control over the narrative. Rothbard’s paleo strategy rested on the understanding that ideas matter, but they matter most when delivered in a manner capable of actually appealing to normal people. Murray would have understood Trump not as the authoritarian of the left’s fevered imagination, but rather a needed (though deeply flawed) populist pushback against both Conservatism Inc. and the left’s globalist doctrine of deterministic “progress” embodied in the vile Hillary Clinton. Can we not imagine Murray smiling down on us when Trump scalped her in 2016?
But back to the topic of Rothbard’s political prescience. Let us consider his remarkable foresight.
First, he accurately identified the precise populist impulses that would animate Trumpism, Brexit, the Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany, the Marine LePen backed National Rally party in France, Covid resistance, and a host of other 21st‑century rebellions. He understood how elites—left and right—had become a tyrannical managerial ruling class, and how the only viable political energy capable of resisting this was populist, anti‑elite, and anti‑globalist. When elites are corrupt and inept, populism is both warranted and salutary. Rothbard would have paid no mind to the sniffing from self-styled “classical liberals” in this regard.
Second, he squarely understood the growing insecurities behind those populist impulses, especially in America. It was driven by the deep economic insecurity of the middle and working classes, marked by stagnant wages; inflationism as Fed policy; serious price increases in housing, education, healthcare, cars, and now even food; outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing; H1B visas; colleges becoming both unaffordable and hostile to their own children; and a consistent pattern or Fed-induced Wall Street crises and scandals, followed by bailouts.
And yet the political class was AWOL on all of these concerns. Their response?
- Globalist programs taking priority over domestic concerns, including endless unwinnable wars and trade policies that never benefit average people;
- Mass immigration from the Third World, south to north and east to west, at an ever-increasing pace despite never being put to a vote; and
- Disorienting cultural attacks on every facet of traditional life, mockery of marriage and religion, rapid secularization, and a relentless forcing of gay and transgender ideology on middle America.
While conservatives and Beltway libertarians dithered about minutia, Rothbard as always saw the big picture and the urgent need for a populist revolt.
Third, Rothbard was entirely correct in his assessment of “culture wars” and the futility of avoiding cultural concerns in political strategy. He recognized that politics is downstream from culture—sometimes far downstream. The progressive triumphs of the 20th and early 21st century were first and foremost cultural; but the left’s cultural rout of American society yielded several important and lasting political victories. He understood entirely that institutions can never be neutral, and thus the left’s grip on media, academia, think tanks, corporate America, and even religious denominations had to be broken.
Libertarianism, if it was to survive at all, had to embed itself within the only cultural coalition not wholly captured by the Left. This meant working with conservative America and injecting libertarian political economy into a movement with real demographic weight, while understanding (30 years before conservatives) that the left was too far gone culturally for any return to political sanity. Rothbard knew intuitively, given the economic and cultural realities, that “moderates” of all stripes would be crushed into oblivion. And so he embraced the culture wars (e.g. “Unleash the Cops”) as pushback, as self-defense against a relentless leftwing cultural project out to destroy everything traditional and bourgeois. He had the courage to fight the battle where it was, rather than where libertarians wished it were.
In summary, Rothbard’s political genius remains enormously underappreciated. We owe him a debt of gratitude for removing our illusions and making the call for a new populist right-libertarian movement. We should heed that call today.
To the extent that both Trumpism and the post‑Brexit European Right have drifted from Rothbard’s animating antiwar and anti-state principles—toward factionalism, personality worship, grifting for attention, or just good old‑fashioned selling‑out—they have themselves entirely to blame. Rothbard gave the “New Right” a prescriptive blueprint for rolling back decades of leftwing victories, yet the temptations of power and the gravitational pull of money and Washington often overwhelm even the most insurgent of movements.
Meanwhile the Left, as Rothbard foresaw, has grown more radical and more detached from reality. It has abandoned anything resembling old‑school liberalism and embraced total politicization. Nothing, in their framework, is outside the state.
Like it or not, Rothbard was correct. Only the right has the cultural grounding and the latent populist instincts to resist the progressive Moloch. Only a revitalized right—rooted in the best elements of America’s Old Right and animated by fully justified distrust of elites—can anchor liberty in a coherent political program.
Whether such a worthy “New Right” can emerge beyond the noise and incoherence of Trumpism remains to be seen. But its would-be leaders are well advised to read Rothbard. And libertarians cannot remain on the sidelines. Any rightwing politics not grounded in laissez-faire and noninterventionism is stillborn.
We remember, and praise, the late Murray N. Rothbard as an unheralded political genius. He was no armchair theorist but a pugnacious and mischievous intellectual warrior unafraid to carry his most radical ideas into the political arena.
And the banner he carried into that arena, at long last, was rightwing populism.
- Jeff Deist ([email protected]) is former President of the Mises Institute and currently general counsel for Monetary Metals. [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market, Scholar’s ed., 2nd ed. (2009). [↩]
- See Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market, ch. 10. [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, single-volume ed. (2011). [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998). [↩]
- Rothbard undoubtedly could have enjoyed a lucrative career in the black arts of political practitioners, namely as an operative, strategist, or advisor. But he was too honest, too radically anti-state, and too intellectually intransigent for the kind of compromises that world requires. [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (2007). [↩]
- For more on Rothbard’s cultural outlook, see David Bebnowski, “Murray Rothbard’s Populist Blueprint:Paleo-Libertarianism and the Ascent of the Political Right,” Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies 6, no. 1 (2024): 35–53. [↩]
- One modal left-libertarian had the laughable audacity to term Rothbard’s paleo phase “a moral disaster.” See Matt Zwolinski, “Seven Cheers for Murray Rothbard,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Oct. 28, 2013); Steve Horwitz, “How Did We Get Here? Or, Why Do 20 Year Old Newsletters Matter So Damn Much?,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Dec. 23, 2011). On paleolibertarianism, see references in Stephan Kinsella, “The Three Fusionisms: Old, New, and Cautious,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 16, 2022). On “modal” libertarians, see various mentions in Murray N. Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard (Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000). See also Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Libertarianism and the Alt-Right, discussing “Liberallala-Libertarians.” [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (Jan. 1992) and idem, “A Strategy for the Right,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (March 1992). Both are included in Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard, although “A Strategy for the Right” erroneously indicates Jan. 1992 (instead of March 1992) and omits the first three paragraphs of the original essay. [↩]
- Your author recalls being surprised in those pre-internet days of the early 1990s to hear from a friend about Rothbard’s support for Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign. To my mind Buchanan was a protectionist, and free trade was the libertarian issue. But as usual Rothbard was way ahead of us in his understanding of Buchanan as the vehicle for smashing Conservative Inc. and merging a new antiwar, populist coalition on the right. For related criticism of the paleoconservatives, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “From Nation to Household: The Middle American Illusions of Sam Francis (and Pat Buchanan)” (unpublished, 1996); idem, “My Life on the Right,” in The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline, 2d. ed (2021), based on idem, “The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years, The Libertarian Standard (June 10, 2010). [↩]
- Rothbard, “A Strategy for the Right, p. 8. [↩]
