Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 257th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I am so excited to have Brian Doherty join us today to talk about his book Modern Libertarianism, a brief history of classical liberalism in the United States, which provides a concise, thorough account of the intellectual roots of the American libertarian movement, with helpful summaries of key figures and institutions, institutions and events. As you can see from all of my bookmarks, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Brian, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: So last year I attended my very first Burning man with my friend Grover Norquist. So I've got to ask, what is your playa name and when did you do your first burn?
[00:00:57] Speaker B: I do not follow the convention of apply a name. I am Brian Doherty. Here, there and everything, everywhere.
I started doing the burning man in 1995.
We don't need to get too deep into the Burning man thing, but one of the organizations that helped move it to the blackrock Desert Playa was a sort of prankster art organization called the Cacophony Society that I was a member of in Los angeles in the mid-90s.
Burning Man's propaganda back then, and maybe even now very successfully sold the notion of that this was a very, very hazardous, dangerous, unpleasant place. Right? You know, it's in this desert playa, nothing but crack dust everywhere, prone to destructive windstorms, can get above 100 in the day, can get below freezing at night, all that. So the first year I heard about Burning Man, 1994, their propaganda actually scared me from going because I'm not a particularly rugged or outdoorsy person. So I could have gone to 94, but didn't 95.
You know, there was a woman who I was working with on a magazine who convinced me I should do it, and I did. It fell in fascination with it.
Have been go. I've gone every single year since that the event has actually been held. And then even one of the two years during the COVID scare, I went to an event like Burning man that was not officially Burning man but held in the same place. So I became a lifer.
I did see Burning man through a libertarian lens, as I see, you know, everything, you know, as a, you know, since my brain got sold on this whole liberty thing when I was in my late teens, I tend to see everything through that lens. And you may know this, you may have had this experience if you talked to people in the libertarian world about, oh, I'm thinking of going to Burning man, or I did go to Burning Man.
There's a fair amount of writing it off as something that's really hippie or really commie.
There are a lot of hippies there. There are a lot of commies there, undeniably. But the root of it, as you might have found, is extremely libertarian, even anarcho capitalist in a way, because it's a, you know, temporary, you know, it's, it's a ticketed event and all that, and it's a party and it's a festival. Even though they hate calling it a festival, it's not really a bad word for it. But it's also a city that we pay for the city services by buying a ticket.
The city services are kind of minimal. You know, they involve the best sanitation solution that the blackrock Desert allows, which are Porta John's with little, you know, sanitizers outside of it. It provides art funding, it provides a little bit of private security, you might say, in the form of Black Rock Rangers. And it's, you know, people have had bad experiences there, but in general it's a remarkably peaceful, remarkably fun, private, you know, chart. You could almost call it a charter city in a way because it has its little set of principles that we're all supposed to follow and, and it works remarkably well. And, and certainly the libertarian vibe not only dominates the actual experience, but you also will meet many fellow libertarians there. Some from the San Francisco Tech world, some from the general, you know, anarchist performing world. It's, I recommend it to all libertarians if you think you can stand the temperature.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Yes, well, I was given a pliant name. People will not be surprised that it's Dagny Taggart. And I was delighted to find out that the CEO of Burning Man, Marion Goodell, is rip roaring Ayn Rand fan. Her father had a company called American Brass and he had a private rail car which he called the Dagny Taggart. So she and I have become closer and I expect I will be there again this year. Brian. So maybe we can meet up on the playa now. Of course, you wrote about Burning man in your best selling book, this is Burning Man. So maybe unpack a little bit more how that experience may have informed your view on decentralized government governance, personal liberty. I mean, to me, yes, there was certainly a fair amount of hedonism, but it was also a demonstration of what man can create without overweening government interference. And also an artistic creativity outpouring and also sort of a way of Individuals trying to trade to find opportunities to benevolently provide value. What was your take?
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's hedonism.
But if you've ever seen picture of it or video of it, it does help to remember someone brought or built generally within the period of about a week or less and having to drag everything it took to build it.
If you're in the Bay Area, it's like four to six air, like it's all coming from very, very, very far away.
It is an incredibly hard working place. Hard work. It is also the wealth that American modernity throws off because on site, but obviously like any human endeavor, like a lot of commerce in, in the basic sense of you are trading your labor and skills with someone else to get something. Like every RV out there, someone either bought or rented, right? Every, you know, stick of wood that was used to build something someone bought from someone else. It's a, it's one of the most glorious little bubble bursts of American quasi capitalist modernity in the first place. So anyone who is there and is griping about capitalism is, is, you know, performatively contradicting themselves in the first place. And so secondarily, it's like the wealth that allows us to play that way is a result of capitalism. And as I was saying, the way the civic experience is structured is purely market.
We pay an organization a ticket price, pretty high one at this point, in order for the right to be there. They actually have a remarkably strong border, you know, for a private city. And they provide a minimal amount of services and allow people to make free choices about how to behave with an ethos that we have adopted by going there, that we are there kind of to delight each other in a way. You know, one of the slogans of the event, one of the principles that is supposed to guide the experience is no spectators. You're not just supposed to go there and gawk at other people's stuff. Though, also, to be honest, like everyone who's going there doing stuff, they want spectators. So it's not, it's not like you can't be a spectator part of the time. In fact, you're definitely being a spectator probably most of the time. But the city is not going to be as interesting, as full of fun art, as full of fun experiences, as full of fun interactions. If you don't shift your attitude to go, oh, I'm also supposed to help. I'm not just supposed to watch the cool things other people do, although I should be watching the cool things other people do. I'm also supposed to do Something cool myself, help out, be interesting, be friendly, and, and it works remarkably well. Like anyone, you can have a bad experience there, like anywhere else, but for the most part, you don't.
Crime of, of the sort a libertarian would respect is not unknown out there, but it's not dominant. You know, things can get stolen, people can get assaulted. It does happen, but there's not a lot of it, and I think a lot less of it than in any gathering of about 80,000 people, which is how many people there are there. So I do think watching Burning man, experiencing Burning man, if you're paying attention, should both make you really feel a great deal of affection for the wealth that capitalism could throw off and a great deal of affection for the idea that people can gather without, without government in a real sense, without central planning in a real sense, and just get along and do interesting things and make an experience. It's actually more interesting than any average seven days anywhere else. I, I, I have always seen it as a very libertarian thing, to the extent it's gotten less so. It's gotten less so because the existing authorities of the world, from the federal government, local sheriffs, do insist on both being there and taking their chunk of the proceeds. There's nothing that can be done about that. But I, I would maintain, for the most part, they're not needed. They are genuinely parasitic on the experience.
There's just unfortunately no way to do it without them. In the world we live in, when you need a piece of land, Burning man needs, because a lot of things get set on fire there, Burning Man. So you kind of needed a, you do.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: But, you know, I think now with some talk about the potential of selling off some federal lands, I wouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves in a place where Burning man is actually able to own part of the land that they now have to, you know, as you correctly described, have to pay obeisance to the Bureau of Land Management. And so we'll see. Now, to switch topics for a moment, Graphic novels are a fundamental component of our strategy here at the Atlas Society to reach new audiences with Ayn Rand's literature with our adaptations of Anthem Red Pawn, Top Secret. You have explored the underground comics in your book Dirty Pictures. So what drew you originally to these rebellious artists? And do you see parallels in their fight against censorship and modern libertarian battles for free expression?
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
Comic books in general. I was just a normal American kid who in 1975, you know, on the way to the beach with my parents, you know, picked up a superhero comic off a rack in a 7:11 and. And fell in love. So I've been like a comics guy all my life. I was not an underground comics guy all my life. And in fact, as the title of my book, if people aren't familiar with what underground comics mean, the simplest way to put it is it was a.
A set of comic books and comic art and cartooning, mostly begun in the mid to late 60s, that in a world where all the comics any American had ever seen were either comic books, which are under the comics code authority, or comic strips in a newspaper that had to be anodyne enough that, you know, a typical suburban dad at a table reading the paper is not going to be offended by it. Comics were very limited in how they could express certain things that I summed up in the phrase dirty pictures.
Underground comics were not always obscene, but they could be obscene, and they sometimes were obscene. They dealt with politics, often radical politics, in a way that comic code comic books or newspaper comic strips did not.
And I argue in the book that even though if you look at the actual original underground comics in the late 60s and 70s, now, a lot of it just seems disturbingly crude or disturbingly politically incorrect in a way that, you know, even most sort of hipsters would not tolerate today.
That the very fact that an organization is respectable as the Atlas Society is delving into graphic storytelling and cartooning as a way to sell political ideas. This is all rooted in the undergrounds. Because the undergrounds, by bursting every barrier of propriety and what sort of topics comics could cover, opened it up not just for stuff that was naughty or stuff that was going to, you know, make certain people want to censor it, but just anything.
Comics can do anything now because the underground cartoonist did what they did. So comics are now respectable literary things. They're winning booker prizes. You know, they're getting nominated for national book awards. Cartoonists are getting Guggenheims. Cartoonists are getting Pulitzers.
Nearly every major New York trade publisher publishes graphic novels like they they.
The underground's innovations took comics from being something that inherently was limited. Or even aimed at children, in the case of comic books, and made it a perfectly legitimate art form. And the sort of main heroes of the book are Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Art Spiegelman is most famous for maus, a book that is still getting in the press to this day for being objected to or censored from school libraries.
If people not familiar with mouse, it is a retelling.
Spiegel and his parents were both in concentration camps during World War II and it's a retelling of his parents story using the cartoon signification of Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats. And it's, you know, when you say it, and my book tells the story, when you say it, you say the idea. It sounds almost ludicrous. And in his attempt to sell the book, he ran into a lot of that for from normal book publishers. Like this is just absurd, this is childish, this is silly, it will never work. But it works remarkably well. The book was an amazing success. It won him a Pulitzer. It sort of laid the groundwork for everything like serious and respectable that's happened to comics since, in the world of galleries, in the world of publishing. And I did think it was interesting culturally to show that the way to make an art form serious and respectable was at the beginning for it to be often very unserious and very unrespectable. That, that, that chopping at the sort of root of the human ID is a little hard, hard to explain if you don't get it. Like if I was trying to explain it to my mom, I think my mom would just be like, what are you talking about? It's just, you know, filthy cartooning. And like, yeah it is. That's one thing that it is, but it also is allowing everything human to be expressed in an art form, which just didn't happen in comics and cartooning until these guys came along. So I think it is a vivid example of how doing things that were literally against the law. Like people actually did get arrested for selling these comic books in the late 60s and early 70s. They literally, what they did was illegal, but what they did shaped and expanded an art form that I think most Americans now understand is not just childish, is not stupid and can, can do anything but the way humans are. It's like the joke you'll always hear about any new technological innovation. The first thing you're going to do with it is do porn. And it's not always exactly true, but there's a lot of truth to it. Like there are certain root things about being a human that society often, for intelligent reasons, you know, tries to sort of suppress a little, repress a little, shuffle off to the side a little bit. But like, if you're going to be a fully expressive human artist, you have to be able to deal with that stuff. And the underground cartoonists broke the law to allow cartooning to mature in an ironic way almost through being childish.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, they, you know, are an example of those who came before laying the groundwork for those who would later elevate a genre to a. To a higher plane. And of course, your book Modern Libertarianism, a Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States, is also a history of those who came before and paved the way.
Now, Mark Twain famously once said, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. What were the challenges of writing this more concise account of modern libertarianism as opposed to your longer, more comprehensive history, Radicals for Capitalism?
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah, super challenging. And, you know, if I were being called to account, you know, at the gates of heaven or whatever, if there is a heaven, and sort of asked, you know, which. Which is the, the more major work, I would have to say Radicals for Capitalism, the longest one feels more significant, but especially, you know, that book was published in 2007, and especially as we we've entered the kind of podcast and social media age, I definitely recognized, and the Cato Institute, who published this new one, Modern Libertarianism, recognized that there was probably room for a more concise swing at this material and that it's actually far more likely that someone, you know, under the age of 35 or whatever in, in 2025 is more apt to read this than to read Radicals for Capitalism. I mean, ever since that book came out, I've had people just sort of say its length is daunting. And I understand its length is daunting, but the length of modern libertarianism is not daunting.
It's all reduction. Right? A lot of the stuff that might have been in radicals and is not modern libertarianism, some of it is almost the comedy, a little bit like libertarianism, like any radical philosophy, tends to attract radical people in, in the simplest, crudest way. It attracts a lot of strange people, a lot of weirdos, and radicals for Capitalism sort of explores the strange weirdness of the world maybe more than modern libertarianism does. I think modern libertarianism, I think, wants to be more just the cream of the crop, the real important stuff, not. Not the side roads like focus on the major figures who can and are still read rewardingly to this day. Your Ayn Rands, your Ayek, your Mises, your Rothbards.
On the COVID you'll see Barry Goldwater, interestingly, a figure who I wouldn't say is a libertarian, but the reason he's on the COVID is because his role in injecting libertarian ish ideas and spirit into actual electoral politics in the early 60s was brain blowing. Because the libertarian movement, such as it was in the 40s and 50s, did not even dream of actually impacting real electoral politics. It was such a derided, such a hated, such a completely underground philosophy that even the people who advocated it professionally mostly understood that like we are not ready for prime time right in any way, shape or form.
But Barry Goldwater success again with ideas that were not libertarian across the board, but libertarian ish helped change that. And I also found in researching radicals originally that if you were a professional libertarian and you were like a teenager during those early Goldwater years, you almost certainly went through a Goldwater phase. Goldwater was somewhat of a hero to you.
Going far, I feel a little bit here. So yeah, I think like in doing the story shorter, focus on more of the stuff that stands the test of time and of enduring interest to anyone who understands liberty. Maybe some of the more entertaining and wild and silly stuff got chopped. I definitely still would like to tell anyone who is very interested in this stuff. Radicals for Capitalism is still certainly worth reading.
Modern libertarianism is, is the new one and, and, and probably an easier thing. And I, I actually think it, it wasn't intentionally written as a primer, but I sometimes refer to it as a primer. I think it. Modern libertarianism is a great book for like a college student thinking about politics, even a high school student thinking about politics. And design wise, Jennifer, I'm not sure what our age difference is, but when I was in grade school in the 70s, we had lots of little books that looked like modern libertarianism. So I was actually excited when I saw it. I'm not a guy who knows how to design anything that looks good or interesting. So I was very pleased that the people at CATO designed the book to look to me like something that, that a kid in school would want to buy and read. And I think especially if you're like an adult and you have youngsters in.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Your life, I think it would definitely be for the Atlas Society's Gulch Gulch type student audience.
Now, diving a little bit into the substance of the book, obviously the audience here knows that at the Atlas Society we are promoting the literature and philosophy of Ayn Rand, which of course includes her strong moral case for capitalism. Now in modern libertarianism, you write, libertarians believe either that people have a right to be left alone if it doesn't harm others, or that things will on balance work out best that way, generating the most varied and rich culture, or more commonly, both.
As you might suspect, I'm of the belief that if we fail to make the moral case for capitalism, this utilitarian case puts us constantly on the back Foot, what is your view?
[00:22:45] Speaker B: I doing what I've done for most of my career, which is trying to explain libertarianism to as wide a world as possible. I am what you might even consider Pollyanni ishly big tent because I've noticed, and I'm confident this is true, that different arguments for libertarianism are going to appeal to different people. Like there is, there is a definite range of human types. Right. So I, I don't want to say like this is the way I think there has to be a lot of different ways.
I do, I, I do want to give Ayn Rand all the credit here because Ayn Rand, you know, as I said, I think most libertarians believe both of those things. To state it again, they both believe that liberty leaving people alone to follow their own will and their own choices, as long as they're not directly harming other people's personal property, is the right thing to do. Humans are definitely moral animals. Absolutely.
I've occasionally met a person in life who seems to think that they don't follow a moral code, but I think even they, as Ayn Rand would point out, you know, you do, you might be ignorant of it, you might not have reasoned it through, you might not have figured out how to do it non contradictorily, but you are, you are following some sort of sense of morality. But as I pointed out, she argued that the nature of human beings and the nature of the human mind are such that being free and allowing other to be people to be free is what is going to lead most of the time to the best utilitarian result. Which is why I think most libertarians, even if they're not specifically influenced by Rand, do believe both things and they don't think it's like a weird coincidence. It's not just oh, how convenient for you libertarians that the thing you, you think is right, you also think is going to place. Well, no, as Ayn Rand argued wonderfully, there's a reason for that. It's the nature of humanity, the nature of the human mind, the nature of how humans have to cope with the reality in front of them, how they have to take the things of the world and use reason and logic to turn them into other things that help meet our needs. Like it's just, it actually is a fact. Orandian would argue, and I believe as well, that following libertarian political principles is actually what is going to lead overall to the richest, most wealthiest, most diverse, most choice filled, wealthiest society. And I've actually seen thinkers say that, oh, that's A cheap rhetorical trick libertarians use to, to mix the utilitarian and the moral. But it's not like, you may think Rand didn't prove her case, but she made a really excellent case. Murray Rothbard influenced by Rand in many ways. So he, he soft peddled that later because he got mad at her. Kind of worked in the same vein, that sort of Aristotelian natural rights, natural law, tradition that, that, that shows why the nature of humanity requires or demands that, that we be free and that we let other people be free. And, and so, yeah, I do think most of us believe both, but it's not just like convenience or coincidence. It's the nature of the human right.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Well, one person who may or may have not have believed both is Ludwig von Mises. And his advocacy of economic and personal liberty is something you describe as explicitly utilitarian, springing, quote, not from a metaphysical belief in rights, but because liberalism delivers the the greatest wealth and abundance for all, end quote. Do you think this more utilitarian approach contrasting with Rand's moral approach may have contributed to their, you know, somewhat more contentious relationship?
[00:26:33] Speaker B: You know, Mises and Rand are a fascinating, you know, couple of people to consider.
A lot of the lore about the two of them, when you dig into it, comes down to just like an anecdote that someone remembers and you can't always be sure it's 100% true, but because, for example, I've seen a story and I'm pretty sure it's in both of my libertarian history books, in which I think Hazlett, the book Gnosis, for sure, we write books because so the books can be smarter than we are. But I think it was Henry Hazlett who told Rand that he heard Mises refer to Rand as the bravest man in America. And Rand was just like, man? Did he say man? And just was like delighted. Just like it warmed her heart.
Yeah, and ran in sexual politics and gender politics is a very, very complicated thing. We're not going to settle here. But it's amusing that we saw her in a masculine way. So they're definitely. And I've seen letters from Mises, private letters in which he absolutely was an enormous fan of Atlas Shaw, an enormous fan of Ayn Rand. And Mises was one of the few economic thinkers who, you know, the organization that was spreading objectivism in the 60s and Nathaniel Brandon Institute would recommend Mises work.
And again, this is, I think, again, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong, the book will get it right. So I don't remember if this is something Rand wrote or something someone remembered Rand saying. But when someone would press Rand, it's like, come on, Mises is so wrong on so many things when it comes to Objectivism.
She actually said something like, you know, he's done so much, he's done so much good. I'm gonna leave him alone on that. But on the other hand, I've also heard one person who had been in Rand's inner circle and became estranged from Rand, as many in her inner circle did, and I take this with a grain of thought because this was written in a letter in which this person, who I'm not going to name was obviously very much just writing out of anger at Rand, said something like, oh, I never heard Rand refer to Mises as anything other than like that damn fool or something. So there was a lot going on. But, but I think for the most part, Rand did understand in certain cases that there were people who she would give a break on not understanding and grasping the full edifice of Objectivism and recognize that they did a very positive thing for spreading intelligent economic thinking. And that's what she thought of Mises. But definitely she could never have been a full fledged Mrs. Ian Mises could never have been a full fledged Objectivist. But perhaps in a lesson for all libertarians, they could and did promote and praise each other's work despite not agreeing with it all the way down the line.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: I love that very much in consonance with the open Objectivist approach that we take here at the Atlas Society. And that includes a lot of debate and dialogue. So in that spirit, here we are. Halfway through, I'm going to get to a few of the questions that have been coming in.
Did the Mises Caucus take over the LP because the old guard was weak on Covid and the 2020 riots?
You do write about this in your book.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah, and I've written about it.
I've written about that point.
It's a little bit in the new book. There's a lot more of it if you just Google. You know, I write for Reason magazine. I've written a lot of things on Reason's website. If you Google like my name, Mises Caucus, whatever, you'll. You'll find some stuff I've written about it all. You know, social and political events are multi caused. But what you just said, I think is certainly a fair way to consider it. That. I mean, on the most very basic level, the Mises Caucus was able to take over the party because they were able to organize well enough to get a bare majority plus of delegates who showed up at the Libertarian party convention in 2022 who supported their beliefs. But yes, I think the reason they were able to succeed in doing that is the perception. And I, I don't want to say here that I agree with the perception, but they definitely sold the perception that the LP's previous management was not hardcore enough about fighting Covid tyranny.
Even though the, the 2020.
Yes, 2020. The 2020 presidential candidate Joe Jorgensen told me for a reason that she considered covet tyranny like her main issue. So it wasn't like the candidate wasn't against covet tyranny, but they felt the party didn't mess it strongly enough against it or whatever. And yeah, there was also, I think, a general right wing ish cultural bent of the Mises Caucus libertarians that helped organize them, that helped inflame them. And I think you can see this clearly in the fact that many high level Mises Caucus people, including the woman who was heading the Libertarian national committee with the MC support, Alex Angela, sorry, Angela McArdle absolutely became full out Trump fans in 2024. So yeah, that's.
There's again, you can find more of this in more depth by googling my name.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: We will put that in the, put that link in the, in the comments.
Okay.
I like numbers. Asks how important is the underground or anti establishment? How important is that and coherent part of the liberty movement?
[00:32:16] Speaker B: You know, I think there's a way and certainly when I was a collegiate libertarian and even like a high school kid starting to get the idea of what political liberty meant to me, like it was, it was delightful for a young person and I think still is delightful for a young person especially to feel like a rebel. Right.
I feel less like a rebel nowadays. But I, I just think it is a fact that if you believe in libertarianism and you're actively promoting libertarianism, you are a rebel in modern culture. You're maybe less of one than you were in the 1980s or 1990s. Libertarianism has made amazing inroads in the fields of tech, in the fields of social media, in the field of, you know, the, the hottest, newest media trend of this ticket decade, past decade, the podcast world, like libertarianism is a lot more dominant there. So maybe you feel less alone and you know, the definition of what underground means, you know, underground people, artsy people, love, love, love arguing about that stuff and love always feeling that they're more underground than the other person.
And you know, Burning Man's another example of this. When I got into Burning man In the mid-90s, it was fair to think of Burning man as kind of an underground thing. It's definitely not accurate to think that way about it any longer. It's, it's a entrenched part of American culture. It's, it's, you know, it's almost like Mardi Gras. It's just like this interesting wild party that happens every year and everyone knows about it and everyone has an opinion about it.
And, you know, as an old man working for Reason magazine, it's probably almost definitionally true that there's a lot of, like, truly underground things happening that I don't know about yet.
[00:33:57] Speaker A: Yet.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: And I'd like to know about them. So I do think with a philosophy like libertarianism that is still in opposition to the dominant culture, still in opposition to government, still in opposition to most media, that it's kind of all underground in a way. And there's probably some real serious underground stuff that by its very nature I don't know about, but maybe you do. But, but I, I can understand as a cultural historian that it's out there and it's making important things happen that maybe won't be obvious to people like me for two, five, ten years.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: All right, Jackson Sinclair asks question do you think there was were a special set of circumstances that led to the rise of libertarian thinkers?
Do you think it's still possible in today's more polarized environment?
So what were the circumstances that led to the rise of the modern libertarian moment?
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Mostly, I think the, the quickest answer to that is the New Deal, right in the 30s and 40s, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, saw a wave of government centralization and control and bloodshed and terror. That a very tiny, and I mentioned this before, a very tiny, tiny body of thinkers with an audience that was a little better than the little bigger than the number of thinkers, but honestly not terribly that much bigger, were completely alone in seeing that there was something off, putting wrong or mistaken about this. And Hayek's very famous book the Road to Serfdom, which came out toward the end of World War II, kind of does the best job of, of helping a modern reader understand this, because he really is looking, he's like, okay, the Western powers, Britain and the United States, you think you're fighting fascism right in this war that's going on right now, but some of the things you were doing that you did both to allegedly fight the Great Depression and to fight World War II are actually kind of the same things that the fascists had to do in terms of centralization. So it was a warning, a very well laid out warning, that war centralization, New Deal centralization was dangerous to liberty and it was dangerous to prosperity. And so I think that's the intellectual historical environment out of which it arose. Now you might be saying, and you'd be right to say, hey, in 2025, what the government is doing in many ways is, is wider and more controlling and more wealth consuming even than what the government was doing in the 30s and 40s. And I think you'd be mostly correct to say that. And so the conditions to create and maintain that rebellion are as strong as they ever were. And I think they have. I mean, especially if you read this book or read Radicals for Capitalism, you, I think it will be a very bracing and encouraging thing for anyone involved in libertarianism now to see how small, how abused, how derided, how hated libertarian thinking was in the 40s and 50s. It's so, so, so much better now. It's better now because thinkers like Hayek and Mises and Rand and Rothbard and Milton Friedman were, had the gumption and had the will and had the strength of character and the confidence in their own beliefs to say like, okay, the whole world thinks I'm crazy. I don't care. I'm not crazy. I'm right. And I'm going to spread these ideas and I'm going to argue these ideas, I'm going to fight these ideas. And then they had, you know, Ayn Rand the most. But the other is plenty of disciples, followers, people who just were convinced by them. And it's not.
I have colleagues at Reason, Nick Lesky, Matt Welch, who do a lot of arguing that I find somewhat convincing, but not always completely convincing about how the very realities of technology and capitalism create. Even within the sort of the case that government tries to keep us in a world where our freedoms to live and make choices actually are still incredibly rich. You know, no matter how much of the GDP government is taking, no matter how many hoops you have to jump through to start a business or whatever, like, it's worth celebrating because like, we believe in capitalism, right? We believe in free market markets. We believe they make the world a richer place. And even as constrained as government makes them, market forces, human reason are so powerful that even constrained by government, they do amazing things. And it's good to be optimistic, right? I mean, I'm not necessarily temperamentally optimistic. So it's actually good that my intellectual work requires me to confront reasons to be optimistic. And even, like, I am definitely not one of these libertarians who sees a lot of hope or encouragement in the Trump thing. So I am perhaps as dismayed by certain things about the political world today as I have been in my lifetime. But still, like, it's both good for your spirit and good intellectually to keep your eye on what's better, what freedom has already brought us. And to be able to point to that, to help make the argument that. And even more freedom is going to be even more better.
And I think it will be. I've honestly lost track of where this question started. Sorry.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: Yeah, no, but you know, we are biologically wired to over stress, threats and problems. So it's something that here at the Atlas Society, and we talk about gratitude as a virtue and a value because it makes us look and try to find what is going well in our own lives. And just that very exercise of doing that gives us confidence that whatever challenges we may face, that we will be able to overcome them. All right, I'm going to take one more question, but then I have so very many of my own.
And this is from Iliacin wanting to know, Brian, what do you define as modern libertarianism in comparison to classical liberalism?
[00:39:57] Speaker B: It's the tradition, as the book argues, that kind of began in the 40s. The, the organization that I consider the first distinctly modern libertarian educational organization is the foundation for economic education, which still exists. We often call it fee. It's founded by Leonard Reed. Its story is told at some length in modern libertarianism.
The distinction that I think is most important in, you know, and I think it's fair for a modern libertarian, if he wants to call himself a classical liberal for whatever summoning of a spirit of the past that he respects of your Spencer, your Mill or your Smith or whatever, or whether he just thinks it's, you know, works better rhetorically.
Because there might be things attached to the term libertarianism that he doesn't like nowadays. Like, it's not unfair for a modern libertarian to call himself classical liberal. But the idea that has been injected into modern libertarianism, even though Mises did not believe it, Ayn Rand did not believe it, Friedman did not believe it, Hayek did not believe it. But the fifth figure who I posit is the five foundational figures of modern libertarianism, Murray Rothbard did believe it, and he was a very good seller of it. And I think it's really defined what makes American libertarianism distinct from classical liberalism, which is the anarchism element. Right.
Rothbard believed not Just in a strictly constitutionally limited government. He believed that true liberty meant that there was no institution that actually had, you know, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. And that idea and kind of Rothbard's personality, I think we might be talking more about. Rothbard later injected a rebellious and radical sort of strain in people who call themselves libertarians. And of course not everyone who calls himself libertarian isn't an anarchist or an anarcho capitalist in the way that Rothbardians use it to distinguish themselves from the anarcho communists. But I, I think it's fair to say that Herbert Spencer, you could argue a bit right, to ignore the state, we can't get into that. But for the most part, the classical liberal tradition was not anarchistic. The classical liberal tradition maybe had more respect for democracy as a decision making mechanism than the Rothbardian anarchist strain has. And I think that's the best way to say it and a simpler way to put it is, I would agree.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: But you know, you said something that was a bit provocative perhaps for this audience. In your book you write that quote, Ayn Rand, whether she admitted it or not, was a libertarian, one of the most important ever. Now, while she herself may have rejected that description, probably rather strenuously, why do you think it fits?
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Because Ayn Rand's politics, distinct from her epistemology or anything else about, or all the other things that she actually thought were more important than the politics. Because in randy and thinking politics, epiphenomenon is probably not the right word. But like, you have to build from ontology and epistemology before you get to politics. But the politics that she got to were libertarian. Like by any definition of what libertarian means a belief in government limited only to the defense of people's personal rights and property. And Rand, by playing with the idea of voluntary taxation, actually in a way I think got close to anarchism, like she believed, and she has very good arguments for it that you, you had to have one institution, right? You couldn't have multiple institutions using force. So she believed there should be just one. But she did believe it should be funded voluntarily.
So yeah, I mean, it's as simple as that. Like Rand's politics were libertarian. What she didn't like was that people who came across calling themselves libertarian a she thought, and in many cases she was right, got their politics from her in almost a stolen concept way because they didn't get to them the way she thought you had to get to them. So she's like a, you, you're, you're Kind of wrong and you're plagiarizing me. And also there were lots of people who call themselves libertarians who were not objective, and she thought you ought to be an Objectivist. So it irked her to be lumped in with people who might have shared her politics but were not full fledged objectivists. So I understand why she didn't like the term, and given her personality, I understand why she railed against it. But I think as an outside intellectual looking at this, it's like, how do you describe Ayn Rand's politics? Well, libertarian. That actually is the actual way to describe them.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: Okay, I get it now. Until reading your book, I had been only vaguely familiar with the Volcker Fund. And what struck me was your description. Quote, unlike most charitable foundations, people didn't come to Volcker looking for support.
Libertarian views were so rare at the time that the fund had to actively search for thinkers worth worthy of its support. So we've certainly come a long way since then. As I was, we were chatting before, here I am in Chicago going to foundations and looking for support.
Talk about this tremendous growth since then. And what to what do you attribute its growth?
[00:45:30] Speaker B: Yeah, one of the things the Volcker Fund did, it would pay people like Rose Wilder Lane, who was a friend and a little bit of an influence on Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, to like, just read journals and read newspapers looking for people, academics, authors who seem to share libertarian ideas. And by the time I started researching this stuff, a lot of the people involved with the Volcker Fund were dead. But I did get to spend a lot of time with a very interesting guy named Richard Cornell, who had been a program officer at the Volcker Fund. And he told me two different things that I think really illuminated the state of the libertarian movement in the 50s. He said sometimes they would find someone who, say, wrote a academic journal article that they thought, oh, this guy seems to have libertarian leanings. And they would approach him and the person would just.
Cornell would say, like, they would be practically weeping with the knowledge that, oh my gosh, there are other people out here who believe this stuff, who think like me. I just didn't think there were any, and just would be delighted to get connected with the Volker Fund. And then you would find people who maybe had written something that seemed libertarian in one respect, but when you approach them, and they would get the sense of like, the larger libertarian, you know, world from which Volcker arose, and they'd get angry. They'd be like, no, no, I don't believe all that stuff, you know, I might believe this one thing that fits with you, but I don't. I don't believe all that stuff you believe. So both the joy and the anger at being kind of identified as libertarian, I think says a lot about the state of libertarians. And then. And ironically, it's probably not the right word. Interestingly, it's probably the right word. One of the reasons why that has changed a lot is because the very work the Volcker Fund did. I'm going to talk about Milton Friedman here. He hasn't come up yet, but a very important figure, obviously. And in, you know, Chicago school economist.
Look him up if you don't know him.
He wrote, he published a book in 1962 called Capitalism and Freedom that was one of the major, important books that actually tried to bring together the argument that the book's title indicates that, like capitalism and freedom are intricately connected. Capitalism is. Is an aspect of freedom. And he explained in great detail how the combination of those two things made for a richer, better world. And that book was formed mostly of lectures that Friedman gave in the 1950s under the auspices of the Volker Fund.
The Volcker Fund was also the place where the entire intellectual field of law and economics was incubated.
It's a little bit of a kind of an academic eggheady interest. You don't see it as much in popular literature about libertarianism, but analyzing the law through an economic lens has had incredible effects on actual practices of antitrust law in. In America, actual utility law, like, very specifically through Supreme Court decisions and judicial decisions. America is a freer place in many respects because of the field of law and economics, which was incubated at conferences and with funding from the Volcker Fund. The Volcker Fund helped keep Murray Rothwart alive. So everything that resulted from him, whether you love it or hate it, that's Volker. So Volker Volcker working in this. This, you know, jungle of this forest. This. Get whatever metaphor you want. The work they did helped change all that. Like they. They did what they intended to do incredibly well.
[00:48:48] Speaker A: It's. It's an amazing history.
So we're getting close to the end. We've got about 11 minutes left. Talk about the conservative libertarian divide, how that manifested, say, in the 1950s and how that's changed over time.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: Yeah, in the 50s, 40s and 50s. You'll pick this up if you read Modern Libertarianism. The. The divisions I talked earlier about, how this was really an anti New Deal coalition. Right. And the divisions within that anti New Deal coalition were not quite as cleanly limbed as they became. You know, William F. Buckley, big new biography about him, which I just reviewed at Reason.
He started National Review in 1955, the flagship of conservatism. He, he felt he had a lot in common with libertarians. He was friends with Rothbard, he published Rothbard.
But the issue, and I think Leonard Reed of Fee, if you read his work, and Rothbard too, actually are the greatest exemplars of this. The conservative movement in the mid-50s were really powerful cold warriors, right?
They're like, we hate communism. Well, yeah, libertarians hate communism too, but the conservatives, the Buckleyites thought that, well, the appropriate response to that was a government. Even Buckley was actually comfortable using the word despotism. He's like, we might need a native despotism, we might need nuclear war in order to defeat international communism. And that is stuff that the libertarians, in that tradition, your Leonard reads, your Rothbards, your baldy Harpers who founded ihs, they did not believe that, you know, they saw war, particularly nuclear war. Like nuclear war was not something that could be fought in a way that libertarians could accept. It was necessarily mass murder of innocence and you couldn't countenance it. And the libertarians who saw themselves as libertarians were pretty solid on this point. Of course, there's other things as well, like, you know, vice laws and such. But honestly, when, when you read the libertarian work of the 50s, it's not that a libertarian would have supported vice laws, but it wasn't like an issue that they really front and centered a lot. Like, like, I mean, the drug laws existed in the 50s, but it wasn't a major politician public policy issue. So you weren't seeing like, oh, anti drug war stuff, which became big in libertarianism in the 80s on. You didn't see a lot of that in the 50s, so you didn't see that distinction. But the war issue, the how do you combat communism? Reed and Rothbard would say, well, it's an ideological battle. You. Reid has a great quote, which is definitely in radicals. It might be another libertarianism about. It's like, it's not. It's like we're fighting communism through a war of ideas. We're not fighting communists. You know, we're not fighting them. We're not killing them for having these ideas. We're trying to convince them that they're wrong. So. And in a. Other issues have arisen since then.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: Abortion being one.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: Sorry, I have to plug my phone in. Abortion, you know, immigration now, weirdly, but Anyway.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: So you have in modern libertarianism a chapter on Atlas Shrugged and the Objectivist movement. Now, certainly at its heyday with the Nathaniel Brandon Institute and the books and the events, it was having an outsized impact.
I have my own theories about why that impact has waned over time, but I'm curious to hear yours.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: I'm probably going to punt to you. I will think out loud about this. Sometimes I just note historical trends and I'm not sure I know the reason why. I. I would probably have said, well, there was a certain newness to random objectivism in the 50s and 60s. Right. Atlas Drug came out in 57. She was like, culturally hot in a way. And every few years that you, I'm sure, professionally have had to notice this, and I have had too. Every, like four or five years, there's a wave of stories in Normal press about Iran's back, baby, and like, it's always a little bit true and a little bit not true. Of course, she never went away in a sense, but there was a sense of cultural heat about her that I think probably faded.
But otherwise, I actually want to hear your answer because I'm not sure that I have ever come up with an answer that I find convincing.
[00:53:08] Speaker A: Well, I do think, of course, the split between Brandon and Rand and some of the. The deceit surrounding that in terms of not explaining some of the circumstances behind that was very disconcerting and confusing and really took the wind out of a lot of young Objectivists at the time. I also think that this closed approach to Objectivism, which is very judgmental and only sees this philosophy as limited to what Rand said or wrote during her lifetime, when in fact, Ayn Rand said a few years before she died, the elaboration of a complete philosophical system is a job that no philosopher can complete in his lifetime. There is still a great deal of work to be done, and I think that that kind of closed approach is one that psychologically, among other things, is limiting. Right. Because if you're protecting and preserving this kind of gospel, you don't have an orientation where you are going to take risks. Right. And you are going to seek other alliances and opportunities to have dialogue. So, you know, our open approach to the philosophy and to the ideas, I think has, is partly what's been responsible for the dramatic growth in the Atlas Society over the past few years. So that's one of my theories. All right, well, we have just a last few minutes, so I wanted to ask you. Last week we had our third Galt's Gulch student Conference and also with the launch of Atlas Society International earlier this year and our 20 John Galt schools globally at our new European conference, it's pretty striking that the momentum for growth of Objectivism has in many ways shifted overseas. Do you think that's unique to Objectivism or does it apply more broadly to the libertarian movement with, you know, great victories like that of Milan, Argentina and elsewhere?
[00:55:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it is my understanding that what you're saying is absolutely true. I have to say, shamefully, as a mono glot American and as someone whose historical focus has been on the American libertarianism movement, I cannot speak to this with the granular knowledge that I would like to, but because of people I know who work in libertarianism internationally, I absolutely have come to understand that Latin America, I mean Milei speaks for himself in a way like it's amazing that a guy with his beliefs, and in saying this I'm not ratifying every single thing he's ever said or done, but that, that he won an election in a major country is brain blastingly wild for someone who grew up in libertarians. And to see happen Latin America, Europe, I even hear hints of, you know, Middle east and China. Yeah, I think libertarianism as near as I almost doing better in a way speaking places. But I can only speak to it as kind of an outside observer, not someone who actually understands the players or understands the dynamics. But I do understand it well, I.
[00:56:32] Speaker A: Can, as somebody who does have some granular exposure to the key performance indicators, if you will, can certainly confirm that we had an extremely long list from or our international scholarships from the student conference and had to really work pretty hard to get us students interested in attending. And also just with our digital content, let's say if one of our normal videos, our Draw My Life videos for example, will get on average a million views in English, it will get 5 million views when we adapt it to Spanish, it'll get 7 million views when we adapt it to Hindi.
And by far the biggest audience size for our video content is Arabic and Middle East. So I think that there's probably a lot of preference falsification going on where you don't necessarily see these changes that are, that are underway, but I think it is, it's very encouraging now balanced against all of that abroad here at home. Given the MAGA movement and the MAGA moment and the upswing of populism at home and well, actually abroad, do you fear that young people will be lured into supporting more collectivist liberal policies?
[00:57:59] Speaker B: Yes, I do. I do think in the American context, As I interact with it, I think that's definitely happening. I think. And you see it in many specific cases. Like you can follow individuals if you've been, you know, whatever Facebook friends are following certain people on Twitter from like the Ron Paul days to now. You see it happening. It's not happening universally, but definitely a kind of angry populism. A kind of populism. A lot rooted in a real despising of what they associate with like left wing mores, you know, like the tribe movement. It's like you might have started as libertarian and then you get into like, well, I didn't like the sexual revolution. And I think, you know, women should be having six children at home with a strong, rugged man who takes care of them. And like, that's a great way to live. And like, that's not a libertarian question. But sociologically, you definitely note that people who think that have a tendency to maybe start to see like they, they really think the. The more. And society has gone in a wrong way in ways that actually are connected with government. In a way, they're. Everything that happens in this culture is connected with government. But it's not necessarily a question of, oh, this government policy should happen or not happen. But they, they just are so mad at the way the world is that they're more willing to entertain and we've got to do something about it. I think immigration is an issue like that. I do not believe, believe there is a libertarian case for immigration enforcement. But a lot of people are just like, look, I don't like it. I don't like. I don't like the way this neighborhood looks. I don't like that I'm hearing Spanish everywhere. Whatever it is they don't like, they're like, okay, I'm. I'm willing to see, you know, ICE agents throwing people into vans or whatever. Like, I'm fine with that. And they come up with an explanation that allows them to square being libertarian with it. We're not going to settle that here. But I actually, I. What I like about that phenomenon, actually is that people seem so attached to the label libertarian. They like, love thinking themselves as libertarian that they're willing to do mental gymnastics to go, like, I still want to be a libertarian, but I actually want to see people who haven't violated anyone's rights, you know, flown to a prison in El Salvador. And in a way that says something nice about the lure of libertarianism, but it's a bad thing. I think that people who want to slot themselves in the libertarian movement are supporting all this Trump nonsense. And, and I think a great deal of it is just kind of right wingy, traditionalist perceptions about the outsider and the family that are overwhelming. A dedication to what Leonard Reed called anything that's peaceful, which I think is the greatest way to sum up what libertarians are for or what libertarians will allow or tolerate, which is anything that's peaceful.
[01:00:38] Speaker A: Anything include, yes, I would say preferably, you know, sure, it's great to say don't hurt people and don't take their stuff, but I guess what we objectivists try to bring to the table is like, okay, you're not going to take stuff. Are you going to make stuff? You're not going to hurt people. Are you going to seek out other ways to provide value by being entrepreneurial? So it's the question of what are you going to do with your freedom Again, Brian, thank you so much for joining us, everyone. I highly recommend that you go out and buy modern libertarianism.
And we look forward to Brian, to your, your next, your next great book. So thanks, thanks so much for joining us.
[01:01:24] Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate it.
[01:01:27] Speaker A: All right. And next week, everyone, I hope you will join us again. I will finally be back home after two weeks on the road. We're going to be talking with author Laura Delano about her book Unshrunk the Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. We'll see you then.
