Murray Rothbard’s journey from disciple of Ludwig Von Mises to conjurer of a New Left-Old Right alliance to hard-right Buchananite, with numerous circuitous pit stops omitted, confused many by life’s end.
The letters to his friend Frank Meyer, found in a warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, reveal at times an almost Trumpian Rothbard—or at least a libertarian Sockless Jerry Simpson, i.e., one who looks to the masses rather than the elites for political deliverance. Rothbard did not see unlimited wisdom in the polis; he did see them as less likely to inflict damage than the politicians.
His “Memo on Strategy,” unseen since he sent it on September 12, 1955, to Frank Meyer, exposes that this MAGA Murray existed before he turned 30. This involved no compromise in principles. He wished to use a populist strategy for a libertarian triumph. He shared not much of a philosophical outlook with populists but instead an impulse to trust the people over the peerage—but only to a point.
“How can we win back our society and economy from the clutches of statism?” Rothbard asked Meyer in 1955.
In this document heretofore lost to history, he dismissed as the leaders of this fight the big businessmen “wolfing down government contracts,” the bankers “cherishing their bonds and guarantees,” and the farmers “enjoying their subsidies.”
In other words, the groups that Republicans normally courted Rothbard regarded as the problem. And the elitist streak that some libertarians consciously or subconsciously embodied, Rothbard rejected.
“It is clear that the people really suffering from statism are Sumner’s Forgotten Men, the average, middle-class man who is not poor or minority-groupish enough to enjoy government privilege, or rich enough to enjoy other forms of government subsidy,” a 29-year-old Rothbard maintained. “In short, the classic petit-bourgeois masses—those who are supposed to form the classic ‘mass base’ for ‘fascism’ (no help of course from the unionized workers).”
William Graham Sumner first described “the forgotten man,” rhetorically expropriated by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression to apply to those not paying for but receiving welfare, in an 1893 speech that posthumously gained currency after its 1918 publication.
“The Forgotten Man is weighted down with the cost and burden of the schemes for making everybody happy, with the cost of public beneficence, with the support of all the loafers, with the loss of all the economic quackery, with the cost of all the jobs,” Sumner said. “Let us remember him a little while. Let us take some of the burdens off him.”
Rothbard wished to recapture this concept that Roosevelt had earlier used to his very different political ends.
Meyer, loved and admired by Rothbard, nevertheless largely rejected populism. He objected to plebiscites and despised, for instance, 1968 presidential candidate George Wallace. He did not fear a Wallace victory but instead, as he explained to Willi Schlamm, that some enterprising demagogue might model a later candidacy on the segregationist’s presidential bid but without the Alabaman’s racist baggage.
He did write favorably of Joseph McCarthy and advised James Buckley in his successful third-party senatorial run in 1970 to go after the union vote. And, on a few issues, his midcentury beliefs would fit snugly within MAGA conservatism. Rose Wilder Lane, for instance, labeled him a “restrictionist” on immigration and Meyer repeatedly noted that, if not for the disorienting influence of the Soviet Union, foreign aid, concerns about the social systems of other countries, participation in the United Nations, and even the war in Vietnam would strike him as farcical. And as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, he increasingly portrayed the permanentized protest culture as an expression of hatred toward Middle America.
“What gives here?” Rothbard asked on August 3, 1970, on the same 215 W. 88th Street letterhead upon which he had sent the memo 15 years earlier. “For decades you and the other Conservatives have been attacking the masses and democracy year in and year out; what gives the true characteristic tone to Conservatism, from DeMaistre to N.R., if not contempt for the masses?”
He characterized sudden conservative “fondness for Middle America” as “opportunistic.” He expressed agreement with the “hard hats,” who had beaten up anti-war protestors earlier that year in Lower Manhattan, and recommended the period film Joe whose themes vaguely dovetailed with that short-lived phenomenon. “I like populism when directed at the ruling classes,” Rothbard confessed, “but not when it goes too far (as it does in the New Left) to embrace egalitarianism, communalism, stamping out differences, etc.”
That tempered embrace of the political phenomenon echoes the two cheers for populism tenor of the memo that had set off the conversation between the two friends 15 years earlier.
He explained back then to Meyer that libertarians needed a New Deal-style, non-violent revolution, and that it required a charismatic figure to lead it under the influence of libertarian intellectuals.
Rothbard insisted that “the masses must be canalized, must be led by a large group of knowledgeable intellectuals. Masses on their own are (a) stupid, and (b) never libertarian, because of their classic distrust of civil liberties and the non-conformist. Only intellectual leadership can infuse the movement with the principle and keep it civil libertarian.”
In other words, Rothbard’s populism only went so far.
Daniel J. Flynn is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, American Spectator senior editor, and author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer(Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).