Movements Becoming Rackets

With the country’s eyes trained on news from Minneapolis and Chicago, the Washington Post’s Max Boot made mention of WinRed, a for-profit company doing fundraising for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Of course, the sleight-of-hand used by WinRed, hid the recurring nature of individual donations. 

The Trump campaign had to return $64.3 million to unsuspecting MAGA donors. One true believer, dying from cancer, had his bank account drained. His brother told the New York Times, “It felt like it was a scam.”  Boot calls it a racket. 

I quickly remembered the first chapter of “Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard.” The chapter, a memo to F.A. Harper and George Resch, entitled “What is to Be Done?” begins,

It is the thesis of this memorandum that the problem of tactics and strategy for advancement of the libertarian-individualist cause is at a critical crossroads, a crossroads in the historical development of this stream of thought, transcending even the important problems of establishing a possible libertarian institute, or of deciding how to rechannel educational funds from various blind alleys into which they have fallen.  

After providing some history of the libertarian movement and its organizations, a 35 year old Rothbard makes the trenchant point,

the tendency for the fellow who can obtain money to be in control of policy, and the corollary tendency to begin to trim the output of the organization to what will attract the money. When the latter happens, the gathering of money begins to become the end, not the means, and the organization begins to take on the dimension of a “racket.”

Ah yes, what begins as a righteous movement, becomes simply a racket. 

The fellow Murray was referring to was FEE founder Leonard Read. While handsome and charismatic, Read was, in Rothbard’s words, “Hardly appreciative of scholarship or of the conditions of free inquiry and research, Read stifled the scholarly and creative productivity of everyone on his staff…” Instead, the FEE founder, “increasingly pitched [FEE publications] toward housewives, rather than scholars, which immediately tossed away the importance of the ‘pyramid of influence’ from intellectual to mass.”

Mr. Read, while remembered as a giant in libertarian history, is also known for his prurient interest in housewives. Murray was more delicate, telling Harper and Resch, “purer libertarian thought was not only discouraged by Read but bitterly attacked.” 

What Read did best was raise money while catering to what Rothbard called the “high school” of liberty.  The current president of the country of Mar-a-Lago also successfully raises money while mouthing freedom bromides to housewives and the like. 

One MAGA supporter, working in the libertarian movement, actually posted that he gave a talk recently and “made the case that the Trump-DeSantis GOP are natural allies for libertarians.”

Rothbard in his mid-thirties was more than concerned with such thinking. In the Harper, Resch memo, he wrote, “the danger is less apparent and more insidious. For it is the danger of the hardcore libertarian being swamped by a growing mass of ‘conservative’ and right-wing thinkers.”   

While Trump and DeSantis are more populist than conservative, their support comes from conservatives and thus the problem Rothbard identified 60 years ago is relevant today. “The result of exclusive emphasis on popular-front work, has meant that a buildup of the ‘Right’ in general, has diluted the hard core, made the public, and the Right itself, increasingly unaware of the crucial differences between a hardcore libertarian and a plain conservative.”

While Rothbard’s thoughts are now six decades old, they are no less true. The following paragraph could have been written yesterday and thus should be cited and thought about deeply.

This transformation, led by the theoreticians of National Review, has transformed the Right from a movement that, at least roughly, believed first of all in individual liberty (and its corollaries: civil liberties domestically, and peace and “isolation” in foreign affairs) into a movement that, on the whole, is opposed to individual liberty—a movement that, in fact, glorifies total war and the suppression of civil liberty; it also glorifies monarchy, imperialism, polite racism, and a unity of Church and State. 

Boot opens the conservative fundraising playbook:

Conservative fundraising appeals, now on the Internet, depend on “triggering” right-wing voters on incendiary issues such as abortion, gun rights, marriage equality, transgender rights, immigrant “invasions,” and now “cancel culture” and “wokeism,” while warning of imminent doom unless you send in your donation today. That creates a financial imperative to wage culture wars to keep the cash registers ringing.

In so many ways, Murray was ahead of his time. Libertarian strategy is no different. Whether 1960’s FEE or 2020 MAGA, a racket is still a racket.