Conservative Populism as a Failed Libertarian Detour
I do not want to discuss this as an endorsement of right-wing populism. I am interested in it as a case study in political strategy, and especially as a warning about alliances with any kind of authoritarian currents.
In 1992, Murray Rothbard published "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement". The basic wager was that libertarians could form a tactical alliance with paleoconservatives and right-wing populists against the liberal-managerial state. Rothbard did not pretend that these forces were libertarian in any full sense. The idea was rather that a populist coalition could attack the ruling elite, delegitimize the central state, and open political space for a more radically anti-statist project.
More than three decades later, this looks like a failed wager.
For anarchists shaped by Bakunin’s critique of authority, this failure is hardly surprising. What is interesting is that, after more than three decades, some libertarians seem to be reaching a similar conclusion from inside the very tradition that once promoted the strategy.
Ryan McMaken’s recent essay, "Conservative Populism: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over, and Expecting Different Results", is useful for that reason. He argues that conservative populism repeatedly asks people to support the next Republican candidate, the next "most important election", the next attempt to seize the state and use it better. But the result is not decentralization, not a weakening of state power, and not greater freedom. The result is a stronger state, more surveillance, more war politics, more border and police politics, and a continuing reverence for the legitimacy of the central regime.
That is the key point: conservative populism does not abolish authority. It redirects authority. It does not attack the state as such. It attacks the current managers of the state and tries to replace them with different managers.
From an anarchist perspective, this is the predictable failure of any strategy that treats authoritarian movements as temporary instruments. Authoritarian currents are not neutral tools. They have their own logic, their own constituency, their own myths, and their own preferred forms of power. Once strengthened, they do not dissolve themselves in favor of liberty. They use the opening to build the kind of order they actually want.
This is why I think the failure of the Rothbardian strategy is worth discussing, even outside the libertarian right. It is a clear example of a broader problem: the belief that anti-establishment energy is automatically anti-authoritarian. It is not. A movement can hate the existing elite and still love hierarchy, police power, nationalism, patriarchy, borders, prisons, militarism, and moral regulation. Anti-elite politics is not the same thing as anti-domination politics.
For left anarchists, the lesson is not "the right failed, therefore the left should make the same mistake with different authoritarians". The lesson is stricter than that. Alliances with authoritarian forces do not become safe because they are described as tactical, temporary, populist, anti-liberal, anti-globalist, anti-woke, anti-capitalist, or anti-elite. If the movement’s actual horizon is command, hierarchy, exclusion, and control, then strengthening it strengthens those things.
McMaken’s essay is useful because it unintentionally confirms a basic anarchist suspicion: you cannot get freedom by empowering people whose political imagination ends at capturing the state. The problem is not only that they may betray anti-authoritarians later. The problem is that they are already pursuing a different project.
The failure of the Rothbardian detour is therefore not just a libertarian-right problem. It is a general warning: anti-statist language without anti-authoritarian commitments can easily become a bridge back to the state.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/conservative-populism-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over-and-expecting-different-results/Open linkView original on lemmy.ml
