 This week we're joined by Brian Doherty. Brian is a longtime senior editor at Reason Magazine, where he's written on an incredibly broad range of libertarian topics for more than 20 years. His articles also appear in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Spinn, The Weekly Standard, and National Review. Brian is also perhaps the preeminent historian of the modern American libertarian movement, as the author of two books, Radicals for Capitalism and Ron Paul's Revolution, both of which effectively serve as biographies of that movement. We discuss his own role as both the participant in and observer of libertarian circles, the impact of Austrian economics on today's intellectual debate, Ron Paul's lasting legacy, and why, for the first time ever, it's cool for a young person to be a libertarian. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mises Weekends. I'm Jeff Deist, and we are joined by the aforementioned Brian Doherty. Brian, how are you today? Doing great. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Brian, let me throw this out. I've met you a couple of times, spent a little bit of time with you. You and I are both members of Generation X, more or less. And it's interesting, when you and I were first starting out, let's say in the 80s, it was certainly not cool for a young person to be a libertarian. And I'd like to get your take on whether you think that has that changed for the millennials? It certainly seems to have changed. I mean, all of us are victims in a sense of the social world that we choose to move in. But the great thing about the technologies of the internet is it allows you to have a sense of what people are thinking and discussing outside the small circle of people that you might personally meet. I mean, I was at the University of Florida in the late 80s. I was a member of the University of Florida College Libertarians. We brought Ron Paul to speak in that year. He was running for president with the LP then. He drew about 100 people, you know, got a front page article in the student paper, which really did treat both him and libertarianism in general as something that was newsworthy because it was so weird. You know, it wasn't newsworthy because he was a real player in politics. It was just like, huh, these people with these strange beliefs. And the term itself was a mystery to most people. And that has changed so entirely. I mean, I see a lot of this change through the lens of Ron Paul himself because I first met him in 88. And then I wrote a book about him during the 2012 campaign. And when Ron Paul visited major college campuses by 2011, he was not drawing 100 people. He was drawing thousands of people, even at places like Berkeley. Not known to be a hotbed of, you know, freedom-oriented ideas. So the combination of that experience and all of the ferment and discussion and hundreds of thousands of people in debates in which, you know, the name Murray Rothbard is understood, you know, and maybe they don't love Murray Rothbard, a lot of them don't, but they know who he is. You know, he's someone they can either argue for or against. I just have all this evidence that there are so many people who love these ideas now and the promotion of these ideas and the hashing out of the meaning of these ideas is a big thing in their life. There are active college national groups for these ideas now, which there were not in the late 80s and not just one, but two. You've got both young Americans for liberty and students for liberty, both of whom, as near as I can tell, are doing very well, throwing great events, you know, have lots and lots of local chapters. And, you know, one of the most interesting things to point to when you begin wondering, hey, are libertarians making any traction is the fact that instead of just being ignored and if not ignored, laughed at, we are being attacked everywhere, every day. You know, I blog, you know, at recent website, trying to sort of keep up, keep my eye on, you know, what's going on and the way the world deals with libertarianism and I could spend half a day every day, you know, trying to send off these usually ignorant and frightened attacks places like so on, alternate, you know, everywhere where leftist progressive, even normal Democrats gather, they seem to think it very important and very vital that they attack libertarianism. And I definitely think they see it as a market share fight now. I think they recognize, especially after Ron Paul, that libertarianism with its vision, you know, at root of, hey, why don't we let people alone to do their own thing, you know, that's the sort of most unphilosophical way to put it is very appealing to young people. And I think the left absolutely senses that, wow, this set of libertarian ideas is a real market share threat to us now, and we've got to fight it everywhere we can. So, you know, even since I finished writing my book on history of the movement, which I finished in 2006, the growth has been enormous and enormously encouraging. Well, Brian, I think one reason for that growth, just since your book Radicals for Capitalism came out, which is not that long ago, is of course, the emergence of social media beyond just the early websites. And certainly young people own and dominate that social media. That's why I think you find yourself at the reason blog, for instance, doing such battle with, let's say, you know, somebody from Salon, because there's so much out there on social media. But here's my fear is that a couple of million dedicated libertarians who are active online, who are active on social media can feel like an 800 pound gorilla. But then when you dial back, we have a country of about 318 million people and that sometimes we get an artificial sense of the size of our own movement. That's probably very true. There is, as far as I know, not a lot of what you would call real serious social science, political science research that really rigorously identifies how many people are libertarian. I'm a little skeptical of a lot of these, you know, oh, people answer questions that indicate that they're kind of socially liberal and kind of fiscally conservative. That to me doesn't necessarily add up to what I would consider a true blue libertarian. That said, that in itself is something to cheer. I mean, even if we don't get to the point where there's, you know, 20 million Americans who agree with every word, you know, Lou Group on Mises or Murray Roth might ever wrote, this sort of general sense that we don't want government managing all of our lives, we don't want to be overtaxed and over-regulated. Maybe the government is overreaching a bit in both its spending and its foreign policy. Like even getting that sense in people's mind is a great thing. Of course, people might want to ask, where does the rubber meet the road on this? Where does it affect policy? You know, we can have 2 million people chattering on the Internet saying, yay, libertarianism, but as long as the state and the local and federal governments are still doing all the terrible things they do, still over-taxing us, still over-regulating us, what does it matter? Well, it matters because what we're doing is setting the intellectual atmosphere in which politics works. And to me, one of the most encouraging things about studying intellectual history in the way I did in researching radicals for capitalism is that you can see that enormous changes in the general zeitgeist of what people think about politics do happen, that they've happened already in a bad sense. You know, the 19th century, at least ideologically, was a far more libertarian era in many respects than the late 20th century. And the 21st century could be the century where that turns back. And you should never assume that, oh, the regnant ideology that's around me right now is unstoppable. I mean, it feels unstoppable. Like you don't know, you know, how can I change 10 million minds, but you know, an interesting economics analogy to me is it's like prices. It's like when we face the economy, we sort of feel like, oh, the price is a given data, and it's hard to see. You need to really think hard about it to realize, no, we in our actions in the market help form prices in the same just as much as prices help form our opinions. And it's the same thing about ideology. Like you, in every conversation you have and every post you make and every article you write, you are helping shape the ideology of the world. And politicians, as Leonard Reed, the great libertarian founding father understood, are generally going to be lagging indicators of public opinion. It's rare that you're going to find a politician who is going to dare to be ideological ahead of the pack. Occasionally, we do get ones like Ron Paul, Rand Paul to a certain extent, and these are great outliers, and they're important, but what we want to get to is the point where any politician looking at the electorate is going to go, hmm, if I want to keep my phony baloney job, I need to appeal to these people who want government to stop growing and maybe shrink, who want government to do less instead of doing more. And with every mind you change, any way you change it, you're helping shape the atmosphere that the politicians face. So the policy stuff is always going to lag, but we certainly have every reason to believe that these kind of changes can't happen because they have happened for the worst, and they can also happen for the better. Well, Brian, it seems like our friends on the left, our progressives, tend to do better at creating big tents. And certainly, as somebody who's been around in the movement for a couple of decades, I'm sure you're acutely aware of the degree to which libertarians have this sort of incredible ability to divide among themselves. I mean, just one example, the libertarians who believe in political action versus libertarians who think political action is a terrible idea and a waste of time. I mean, it seems like we have an ability to create an incredibly small tent sometimes in our movement. Sure, I as a libertarian, you know, my temperamental sort of edge toward this idea is I'm reluctant to tell any other libertarian, hey, you're doing it wrong. Like I can see the benefit of political action for libertarians. I can see it more than I would have seen it six years ago, you know, to bring it back to Ron Paul when when when Ron Paul started running in 2007, I underestimated how well he would do every step of the way. Like he exceeded my sort of cynical libertarian expectations every step of the way. Both in the 2008 run and then again in the 2012 run, you know, I would have been one of these libertarians if you ask me in late 2006, hey, is there any point in libertarians trying to get involved in federal electoral politics? I would have thought, yeah, no, probably not. But I was proven completely wrong about that. That said, I don't think there's any point in trying to harangue a fellow libertarian into being politically active, if that's not what they want to be. I mean, there's definitely, you know, the base of it all, as I was saying before, is ideological change because the political change, I believe, is going to follow the ideological change. So even if all you're doing is trying to change minds bit by bit, how even if all you're trying to do is live a more libertarian life, you know, like you see a lot of the people with the Free State Project in New Hampshire, it's very encouraging just watching people figure out, hey, how can we use technology? How can we use the space that America provides to evade the government, deal among ourselves, you know, use Bitcoin or, you know, use the internet, whatever tools you have to live a more free life, that's valuable as well. Like every time I see anyone pushing either their own life, their own mind, other people's mind in the direction of appreciating freedom as a movement activist and movement watcher, I'm pleased. And I don't think I know, you know, what the best strategy is. You know, I don't know if strictly talking about economics on the academic level, is that what you should do? Is strictly trying to get libertarian leaning politicians in office, is that the only thing to do? The great thing about Division of Labor in the market is it's probably important that all those things happen and it's probably important that they be driven by the people who want to do them. Like, the one thing that's probably that I will be daring enough to say is probably a waste of time for libertarians is wasting your time trying to convince other libertarians to pursue the strategy that you think is best, except, you know, and even there, I'll be even more ecumenical and say, if that's fun for you, which it seems to be fun for a lot of people, go ahead, but don't think that you're actually changing the world that way. And that's fine too. Everything doesn't have to be about changing the world. You know, we can enjoy our lives as well as we try to change the world. Well, I would say this, Brian, that any libertarian of any stripe who wants to know more about the foundations of at least the American libertarian movement could do no better than your book, Radicals for Capitalism. We mentioned it earlier. I enjoyed it immensely, but what I'd like to touch on briefly here is your treatment in that book of Austrian economics and its role in the modern libertarian movement. I think you give a very fair and very thorough exposition of the history of Austrianism, but I'd like to get from you an opinion of whether Austrian economics has perhaps gotten the credit it deserves for providing the libertarian movement with a framework to counter Marxism or socialism when they encounter it in an arena like Salon, for instance. Yeah, I would say that from the 40s through the 90s, it is unquestionably true that the Austrian approach, as derived from Ludwig von Mises, was the intellectual framework that allowed almost everyone who was a self-conscious libertarian to understand exactly how and why government intervention in the economy tended to not be a good idea. I mean, most libertarians throughout movement history are sort of a combination of the utilitarian and the deontological. It's very rare to find someone who genuinely says, let justice be done though the heavens fall and actually believes that the heavens will fall. What Austrian economics helped libertarians understand is how you might have had a moral and ethical predilection toward the notion that, hey, you shouldn't aggress against other people's personal property, but you also wanna understand how is the social world going to work if we follow this line of thinking and Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and the others in that tradition, help us understand exactly how and why a free and prosperous commonwealth likely would develop by pursuing a libertarian politics. Though the Austrian economists as economists were very correct to note that we're not about values. We're not actually here to push any particular political or ethical values. Their economics helped you understand that pursuing the political and ethical values of libertarianism would tend to lead to a rich world worth living in and that's super important. And I think that's still happening today. I mean, Ron Paul who is obviously the greatest influence on the most young people and bringing them into libertarianism today has been a great promoter of an Austrian understanding of economics that's been particularly important in his understanding of currency and the role of the Federal Reserve and banks in the economy. As there are more libertarians of all sorts, you're going to see more libertarians who don't come out of that tradition and you're gonna even see some who maybe are a little jokey or contemptuous of that tradition. And it's probably true that in the present and near future that the libertarian movement will be less purely Austrian than it used to be, but the Austrian tradition both historically and intellectually is clearly the easiest, best, most efficient to use the economics term way to actually understand how and why free markets lead to a better life for most people. So I do not think even if we go a hundred years in the future that you're going to see libertarianism losing its roots in the approach to economic thinking that Ludwig von Mises took forward from his forefathers and spread very efficiently to lots and lots of students and fellow teachers in the present, it's still to me the most powerful intellectual engine for relating libertarian politics to understanding how the world is actually gonna be a better place, which is important to most people. I mean, yes, it's great to have a pure ethical and moral understanding that aggression is a bad thing. But you also want to understand, hey, how's the world gonna work if we're not aggressing against people? Because that is to me one of the biggest intellectual problems in trying to sell libertarianism to people as a lot of people really can't wrap their heads around the ridiculous cliche question, what about the roads? They have a hard time seeing, they see a world completely embedded in statism and it takes a certain leap of intellectual imagination to understand, hey, how could a modern industrial society survive in a way that I'm gonna think is worthwhile without the state doing everything? And the Mizzizian Austrian tradition is the best way to actually help people see that. So just like Leonard Reid understood when he founded FI, the Foundation for Economic Education, economic education is very key to helping people understand how a world with less government or dare I say, maybe even a world with no government could actually work and be worth living in. The question today becomes, well, we think of young people as coming to Austrianism via libertarianism, let's say through Ron Paul, they hear about Mizziz or Murray Rothbard or whomever, but as your book makes clear really, especially in the mid 20th century, a lot of people came to libertarianism through Austrianism, in other words, the opposite direction. And I think Murray Rothbard graphs more than anyone else, bridged that gap between the two and brought Austrianism to an enormous lay audience, which I think that the academic establishment in economics really resents the fact that there's just a lot of ordinary folks out there reading about the Fed, we certainly get the sense that that bothers a lot of academics. Yeah, there's certainly the social networking world exposes you to a fair amount of that. A lot of academics have the sense that academia somehow just ended in itself and like being well judged by academia, having your books published by certain respectable university presses, having a high profile job is somehow the be all and end all. And if academia is all that important to you, that's fine. But if you care about these ideas in a movement sense, if you care about them because you think they're important and you think they make the world a better place, what's really important is that the idea is spread and that the idea is convinced to people. And A. Murray Rothbard, even if his best university position with UNLV has affected more minds, has been a greater and more effective teacher to more people than almost any sort of more high end respectable academic of the past 50 years has been. So unless academia is an end in itself in your mind, I think there is certainly no reason to be snooty about the notion that certain thinkers have managed to get past academia and reach a mass audience. Hayek himself in the old Hayekian pyramid of influence, the reason why Hayek stressed academia is because he believed that academia was the place where ideas spread down to other people, intellectuals, politicians. Well, if you can make an end run around academia as places like fee and the Meese Institute and anyone, even a reason, anyone who just pushes these ideas directly to the populace, that's all to the better. I mean, unless you see receiving a laurel from an academic institution as an end in itself, that sort of snobbery seems to me completely misplaced. What you care about is the spread of these ideas, then you need to look to the people who actually have been the great teachers of mass numbers of people. And that's, you know, no one has done better about that with libertarianism than people like Rothbard and people who Rothbard directly influenced like Ron Paul. And again, as a libertarian, you know, 10 years ago, I would have wanted to wash my mouth out with soap to say that a politician, a presidential candidate, was going to be a great educator for liberty. But, you know, it happened, you know, it happened right in front of my eyes. I cannot deny it. And it's been a great thing for the, if you actually want these ideas to take hold in the culture, because academia is not the only way to spread ideas. And in the internet age, it's, I think, becoming less and less important. Well, Brian, we're ready to wrap up, but I'm just going to leave you with this. What seems to be unique about you is you've been both part of the modern American libertarian movement for the last 20 or 30 years. But you've also been an observer and a journalist with respect to that movement. Has that been difficult for you to be objective about the topics you cover? I hope it hasn't been. I mean, obviously, I approach what I write about with respect and understanding. And I think that that's actually good. I mean, if you read books about movements or bad ideas written by people who are just sort of contemptuous and uncaring about them, you know, that doesn't equal objectivity to me. And I don't know that objectivity, whatever that might mean, is the be all and end all. I mean, I'm certainly very clear when I write about these things. If you read the introduction to radicals for capitalism, it's very clear that I've been an active part of this movement I'm writing about. And to me, being an active part of it has made me understand it better than any else. I think it's actually one of the great lessons of the internet age is that it's not that you're seeking some sort of complete above and all objectivity, but what you're seeking is openness, seeking the sense that, okay, here's where I'm coming from. Here's why I think what I think I'm trying to be fair and honest about what I'm seeing around me. But certainly, if you look at a topic through eyes that say, hey, I approve of what these people are trying to do, it's gonna be different than if you look at and go, I think these people suck in what they're trying to do with evil, it's gonna be different. And if you're looking for a discussion of libertarianism through eyes that are ignorant and contemptuous, maybe you just go to salon. If you wanna look at it through eyes that actually understand it and appreciate it, that's what I and my colleagues at Reason and various other places are trying to do. And hopefully that's a useful contribution to the history and historiography of this great set of ideas that is changing the world more and more every day. Ladies and gentlemen, that's it for Mises Weekend. Brian, thank you very much for your time. Groovy, thank you so much.