Source: Liberal Currents
by Janet Bufton
“In 2017, Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains argued that the libertarian movement had helped make overt racism in American politics mainstream and undermined liberal democracy. … but she missed the real story. Bizarrely, MacLean focused on Nobel laureate James Buchanan. The far better target would have been ‘Mr. Libertarian’ and co-founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard. Buchanan was an academic libertarian, while Rothbard spent his later career arguing that libertarianism should ally with the racist, nativist populism of the nationalist right. … The historian Quinn Slobodian takes up MacLean’s task (from a different angle) in his 2025 book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. … Despite its limitations, it demonstrates that libertarians had the intellectual tools to resist the far right’s encroachment but, on the main, chose not to use them.” (10/12/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/a-hard-look-at-libertarianism/