political theoretician, and an uncompromising libertarian often at odds with weaker anti-statists. What is less well known is that despite his firm commitment to abstract principles, Rothbard was throughout his life active in practical politics. As an anarcho-capitalist he had little use for politicians, but Rothbard thought it important to use whatever moral means were available to combat the depredations of the state.
While Rothbard was quick to make common cause with people who shared his principles completely, more often he ended up supporting parties, movements, and candidates that, however flawed, would have the practical effect of expanding liberty or impeding statism in their time. For this reason, Rothbard’s political activism was often confusing to people who adhered to a rigid Left-Right ideological spectrum and even to many libertarians who either sought political respectability or whose pursuit of philosophical consistency made practical political involvement impossible.
Though the vehicles for Rothbard’s political activism varied widely, his priorities did not: wherever possible, he sought decentralized authority, a free market unfettered by central planners and central bankers alike, maximum individual liberties, and a noninterventionist foreign policy.
Rothbard began his political life as a man of the Old Right, which at the time still had a home in the Republican Party. As a student at Columbia University, the GOP was his political home too. “The only other Republican student at Columbia was an English major,” he later recalled in Chronicles magazine, “and so we had little in common…” Rothbard was “increasingly steeped in economics,” an opponent of socialism and a defender of genuine free-market capitalism.
During his college days, many Republicans were stalwart opponents of the New Deal at home and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s march to war abroad. They adhered to a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that held most contemporary federal activity to be not just ineffective and unwise but illegal and unconstitutional. And although he could be philosophically inconsistent, politically the most powerful opponent of centralization and interventionism was Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio.
Taft, the son of former President William Howard Taft, would become Senate Republican leader and a credible candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. But more than anything else, he was the undisputed leader of the party’s Old Right wing. Taft was among the most vocal anti-New Dealers in Congress, and he led the America First opposition to American involvement in World War II until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He continued in this vein in the postwar era during presidency of Harry S. Truman.
“Taft was critical of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO, each of which he viewed as either unnecessarily provocative or ruinously expensive,” the libertarian scholar Thomas Woods recounts in his introduction to Rothbard’s book Betrayal of the American Right. “Taft, along with lesser-known figures from the House and Senate like George Bender, Howard Buffett, and Kenneth Wherry, constituted the political arm of the Old Right.”
“In those days, it was a pleasure to pore over the voting records of right-wing Republicans in Congress, especially in the harder-core House, for the common garden-variety rightists of the pre-1955 era make the most right-wing congressmen today seem impossibly leftist and socialistic,” Rothbard would later recall. “My two favorite congressmen were Howard Buffett of Nebraska and Frederick C. Smith of Ohio, both of whom would invariably draw ‘zero’ ratings from the Americans for Democratic Action and other leftist groups.”
