This interview is based on Reid Kleinberg’s new article:
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For readers who might not be familiar, what is paleo-libertarianism and why is it an important ideology to consider when studying contemporary reactionary politics, particularly in the USA?
I would describe paleo-libertarianism as a fluid intellectual and political movement. It coheres around themes like an understanding of America as a unique civilization that is white, Christian, and conservative, that the modern democratic state should be dissolved and that goods, services, and community should be distributed only through voluntary involvement in the market. In this sense, calling it ‘libertarian’ launders the supremacist nature of the ideology. The belief structure leads to an extreme anti-statism that is ultimately anti-social. Paleo-libertarians are fine with race-based segregated communities, or patriarchal communities, and don’t seem to mind if the ‘crack up’ of modern states would lead to destitution in the pursuit of these goals. Scholars have typically suggested paleo-libertarianism ‘officially’ begins in the 1990’s with an organization called the John Randolph Club that brought together members of the Misis Institute (conservative anti-statist libertarians) and the Rockford Institute (the ‘paleo-conservatives’, or extreme socially conservative white nationalists). That history to me is a bit myopic. I read paleo-libertarianism as a diachronic discourse and extend the origins back to Murray Rothbard, a Jewish, New-York based disciple of Hayek and Misis, who in the 1950’s rose to prominence as the in-house intellectual of a conservative libertarian organization called the Volker Fund. If one reads paleo-libertarianism in this diachronic way, it becomes clear that it has been quite prevalent and adjacent to many of the significant moments of the post-war American conservative movement, for example the conservative effort to reverse integration in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to paleo-libertarianism because it has been, and is increasingly becoming, influential to and impactful on American politics. One of the things I show in the paper is the extent to which paleo-libertarian networks and organizations drove the so-called ‘culture war’ of reactionary attacks on local school boards on a nation-wide scale following the 2022 mid-term elections.
In this paper you bring into question the distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘reformist’ conservative libertarians. Why is this binary potentially problematic when analysing paleo-libertarianism?
The binary comes from intellectual historical studies of the emergence of paleo-libertarianism in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Danny Bessner deployed the distinction in a trailblazing article on the career of Murray Rothbard and identifies a split that happens between the Cato Institute and Rothbard, and Rothbard’s departure to launch the Misis Institute. In this sense, the term was useful because Cato has always been more integrated into the Republican Party mainstream and more widely known amongst the general public. The Misis Institute and more extreme conservative libertarian organizations were for a long time a minority intellectual movement, even if they punched-above their weight in terms of influence and capacity. The distinction between ‘radicals’ and ‘reformers’ becomes problematic when one assumes it as a concrete distinguisher of allegiance, organization, and strategy. One of the things that I found while studying the DeVos network and that I wanted the paper to make clear was the very integral partnerships and connections between conservative oligarchs in establishing donor and policy networks that buttress conservative libertarian think tanks and political initiatives. We have revealing insights from investigative journalists like Jane Mayer and Anne Nelson that all the money and professionals working across the ‘radical’ and ‘reformer’ camps come from the same origins. For example, the Minnesota think tank Center for the American Experiment (CAE) is a member of the Koch and DeVos funded national organization the State Policy Network. Logan Carroll, an investigate journalist from Minnesota, showed that after she was fired for a racism scandal, the former head of CAE Kim Crockett went to work for the successor organization of Rothbard’s John Randolph Club. Basically, from a bird’s eye view there are qualitative differences between hubs like the Cato and Misis Institutes, but they are very much directed by the same network and often advance the same strategy of laundering elite-driven anti-statist policies through local initiatives.
We are now over 100 days into the second presidency of Donald Trump. What role has paleo-libertarian thought played in this administration’s policy agenda and discourse so far?
I’ll preface this by saying that I think the overdetermining force in the Trump administration is of course Trump himself. The last word and plot of the administration will always ultimately be steered by the whims of Trump. That said, I think Quinn Slobodian has said it best: “We are witnessing something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture, anti–New Deal conservative think tanks, and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome”. I think it is fair to say that many of the observers of paleo-libertarianism were surprised by how quickly the conservative tech oligarchy coalesced around Trump. The bellwether for me was when Mark Zuckerburg, who during the Obama years was darling of progressive neo-liberalism, came out so heavily for MAGA in the run-up to the election. There have always been figures like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreesen who were comfortably aligned with if not directly engaged with and supported paleo-libertarian initiatives like sea-steading and contract cities. But the intensity of the tech-right’s support for Trump and especially Musk’s DOGE and the Administration’s deportation initiatives matched the coherency and competence of these quite familiar paleo-libertarian efforts. There is a pretty clear formula between what happened in places like Flint, Michigan in 2015- where stealthy enacted carve-outs of the law gave unelected managers (Emergency Managers) the power to dissolve public assets and services and supersede popularly elected local governments- and what the Administration has tried to do with DOGE and CECOT- liquifying public services according to carceral and buccaneering logics. Rothbard, the arch-paleo-libertarian was extremely vocal about the desirability of privatizing security and carceral functions. It is going to take us some time to wrap our heads around how much of that vision is coming to fruition in the current moment when we hear reports about how much the Administration has outsourced the deportation work to private firms owned by reactionary tech-oligarchs like Thiel’s Palantir.
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Dr. Reid Kleinberg is a member of the RPRN and a Teacher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex and a member of the University of Essex’s Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis. His research interests are Discourse Theory, radical politics, nationalism and transnationalism, and intellectual history. His doctoral research examined the normative and strategic problems of left-populist nationalist discourses and the case of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 2017 presidential campaign in France. Other avenues of Reid’s work concern far-right articulations in the United States such as the Trump movement and paleo-libertarian networks and their roots in extremist, conspiratorial, and oligarchic discourses.
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