Libertarian Ascendancy
Libertarian ascendancy research, and (often) war, libertarians de- Chris Berg reviews viate sharply from the conservative move- Radicals for Capitalism: ment. Ayn Rand, in her typically venom- ous, Randian manner, held conservatives A Freewheeling History ranging from National Review’s William of the Modern American F. Buckley to Ronald Reagan in utter con- tempt, dismissing them as wallowing in Libertarian Movement the ‘God-family-country swamp’. by Brian Doherty And that swamp is repelled by lib- (PublicAffairs, ertarians’ radical views on emotionally charged issues, some of which can border 2007, 768 pages) almost on satire. Libertarianism often re- joices in how off-putting its beliefs are, rel- f one relationship illustrates the un- ishing its outsider status. Doherty quotes a founder of the New York State Libertarian comfortable and slightly paradoxical By the early 1970s, Hess’s position as relationship between modern, big- Party who says that ‘hard-core libertarian- I a libertarian anti-war protester had been ism has no mass constituency … there is tent conservatism and the radical libertar- the subject of numerous profiles in the ian movement, it is the one between Barry no mass constituency for seven-year-old mainstream press. His relationship with heroin dealers to be able to buy tanks with Goldwater and Karl Hess. Goldwater was, however, just as strong. Hess was first and foremost an ac- their profits from prostitution’. Hess maintained that Goldwater, despite Doherty structures Radicals for Capi- tivist, standing in contrast to the more his position as the proto-typical American numerous academic types who consti- talism around five major figures: four conservative, was still a perfect fit for his economists, Ludwig von Mises, Fried- tuted the American libertarian move- libertarian anti-war coalition, telling the ment in the 1960s and 1970s.
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