Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Rothbard is the most important link in any chain drawn between the Austrian School and the fringe right. And his creation of paleolibertarianism was a key step in this. Framed as an “Outreach to the Rednecks” strategy, paleolibertarianism aimed to promote the relatively unpopular extreme free-market dogmas of libertarianism by joining them tactically to America’s powerful trends of post-1960s reaction. In practice, this meant cooing appreciatively about David Duke and striking an alliance with Pat Buchanan, who you may remember as the guy Trump confidently predicted he could beat to the 2000 Reform Party nomination because of his excessive fondness of Hitler. The formal alliance fractured not long after Rothbard’s death when Buchanan fell out with Lew Rockwell, and the remaining network of influence was pushed to the margins a few years later by the rise of neoconservatism under Bush, but it continued to seethe gamely on the Internet, where it proved popular among a certain strand of geek. There it interbred with fascism and white supremacism, becoming one of the strands that eventually coalesced into the alt-right.