by Chris Staron | Jan 21, 2025 | Episodes
Candy magnate Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society
Robert Welch was a candy magnate who invented the Sugar Daddy and sold favorites like Junior Mints and Milk Duds. He was also very anti-communist. His dubious research led him to found the John Birch Society, a group whose mission was to spread conspiracy theories worldwide. They had major support from wealthy men like Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers (who financed opposition to Obamacare and climate change legislation).
The John Birch Society spread conspiracy theories in the United States
Some of their most notable campaigns were those against Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren and President Dwight Eisenhower. They claimed that these men were communist sympathizers working behind the scenes to put the communist agenda. Bogus stuff, but they gained thousands of followers across the country. They also fought the income tax, said that black people would not have wanted equality if the communists hadn’t taught them to, and argued that the US is a republic and not a democratic republic.
Some famous leaders of the Religious Right had ties to the John Birch Society
Phyllis Schlafly, RJ Rushdoony, Tim LaHaye, and many others had ties to the birchers. This group had a huge influence on the Religious Right! Not to mention shifting the GOP to accept extremists.
Our special guest for this episode is Dr. Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. His book is Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
Sources:
- Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right by Matthew Dallek
- Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein
- Divided We Stand by Marjorie Spruill
- Helpful Guardian article about the Koch brothers and Americans for Prosperity
- Christian Reconstruction: RJ Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism by Michael McVicar
- NY Times article about J. Howard Pew’s connections to Robert Welch
- Dark Money by Jane Mayer
Discussion Questions
- What is the John Birch Society?
- Was communism a threat to the country in the mid-1900s?
- What would have been the proper way to respond to communism?
- What is the impact of conspiracy theories on American Christianity?
- There are real conspiracies in the US, like those by Donald Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 election. But a lot of Christians don’t believe these real conspiracies. How has an abundance of false conspiracies numbed our ability to recognize reality?
- Are you surprised Tim LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, and RJ Rushdoony were affiliated with the JBS?
- How can believers maintain their faith even when evangelical culture has been corrupted?
TRANSCRIPT – NOTE: this transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate.
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of Season 6, because all of this ties together. This is the John Birch Society.
Darby, Montana is located on the western border of the state, not far from Idaho. The downtown looks like a mixture of Old West and tourist attraction. And in the 1960s, they found themselves with a stack of old Bibles in the school district. They were going to get new ones, but had a question. What is the proper way to dispose of the good book?
A local minister, maybe thinking about how we decommission old flags in this country, maybe? suggested burning them. Again, this was the 1960s, a time of upheaval in the United States. Civil rights marches and protests, Vietnam, drills where school kids ducked under desks in [00:01:00] anticipation of atomic weapons.
The idea of Bibles burning for any reason, to some, was offensive. Perhaps they didn’t hear the part about them being old and needing to be replaced. They just heard Bible burning and got angry.
What followed was a battle that lasted for years, led by the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society is a group of radicals on the far right. They oppose communism, or what they think is communism, and demand pro American messages in public schools. According to Senator Mike Mansfield’s office at the time, these conspiracy theorists were determined to take over school boards across the country.
They wanted approval of textbooks. And in Darby, the school board denied their requests. And then came the thing with the Bibles. Radicals trashed the home of [00:02:00] the superintendent, stalked him, called with threats and then called again. They harassed him until he resigned. Within just a few years, Darby School District lost 16 of its 23 teachers.
using what one historian called scorched earth tactics. Birchers could be anywhere in the 1960s, and their influence reached some of the biggest names in what became the religious right. They picked up existing fears about communism and amplified them. They were a minority, That made a lot of noise and along the way, regrettably influenced modern evangelicalism.
They’re burning anger going far beyond the boundaries of the Bible. You are listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Sta and this is Truce.[00:03:00]
This season, we’re bouncing around a lot in time. Because, really, there’s no one way to talk about how some evangelicals tied themselves to the GOP and do it in a straight line. Previously, we covered the roles that schools and women played. We also investigated some of the guys who provided the theological backbone for ties to the GOP.
And now, we’re dipping into a few ideas that will help us grasp what’s coming. In the last episode, we discussed how libertarianism shaped economic ideas of the religious right. In the next two episodes, we’ll reference this one. Today, a minor but powerful influence on the ways that evangelicals with large followings Sure, my name is Matt
Matthew Dallek: Dalek, and I’m a professor of political management at George Washington University and a [00:04:00] political historian.
Chris Staron: His book is Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. He’s also written on Reagan’s first political campaign and efforts to hold down the home front during World War II. Let’s turn back the clock a little to see how this kind of stuff is kind of in the American DNA.
Matthew Dallek: So the country was founded in a revolution to overthrow centralized power in the form of the British king. Americans harbored deep suspicions of a concentration of power in a distant place. I think that that has lent itself. to this hyper-individualistic ethic in the country and this deep suspicion of federal authority, of elites trampling on individual rights
Chris Staron: The late 1700s were also an era of conspiracies in Europe, many of which were harnessed by the rich and powerful To stay in power. You can read [00:05:00] more about that in the book, Phantom Terror by Adam Zamoyski.
Matthew Dallek: A second element though, and this is obviously true in other countries as well, but it, but it’s especially true in the United States because the country has grown so much through immigration.
There, I think has long been, especially among native. white populations, conspiracy theories that target immigrants, that target Catholics, Jews, foreign ideas.
Chris Staron: For example, some Americans were afraid of new Catholic immigrants, that their growing numbers would make them into a voting bloc that would then take orders from the Pope.
Or that the Illuminati was going to seize the government.
Matthew Dallek: And they’re bringing left wing ideas. Socialism, anarchism, right, communism. They’re bringing foreign religions.
Chris Staron: One of the early purposes of public school was to homogenize the country so that ideas like this wouldn’t take hold. [00:06:00] Our unfortunate love of conspiracies was already in place before the John Birch Society.
In fact, this episode may make it sound like the JBS was the only thing going. It wasn’t. It was one of hundreds of fringe groups in the country by the late 1950s. It just happened to be both influential and well known.
Matthew Dallek: Yeah, so Robert Welch was a candy manufacturer. He was actually a highly successful salesman. He would go around the country and hawking junior mints. He was the vice president of the company. So he was an executive and he was very well off. I actually wrote a book at one point about the art of the sale.
Chris Staron: This was in the 1930s and forties.
Matthew Dallek: He became a fairly prominent business leader. through the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the largest, most influential industrial lobbying groups [00:07:00] in the United States in the mid 20th century.
Chris Staron: You may remember them from Season 3. They advocated for free market capitalism and actively marketed economic ideas to pastors, a perfect breeding ground for what Welch was about to launch.
Its members were rich industrialists anxious about the New Deal and protections for labor. So some of them tried to market God and country as a way to establish order in the United States. Like, actually market it. In publications, ads, campaigns, sponsoring certain candidates. And one of those wealthy industrialists was Robert Welch.
Matthew Dallek: He, in the 1940s and 50s, became something of a proselytizer on the side. Meaning that, especially by the late 40s and early 50s, he would use his position of authority, of, of wealth, and, and just by dint of his authority as a leading businessman, to, uh, write articles and give speeches and, and [00:08:00] publish books discussing the threat that he saw of a communist takeover of the United States.
Chris Staron: Okay, so, cards on the table, there was an actual communist threat in the United States at the time. The Soviets had stolen plans for the nuclear bomb, and the government did turn up legitimate communist spies. And of course, we were spying on them, too. China and Russia saw tens of millions of deaths of their own people through starvations, gulags, labor camps, and straight up disappearances.
Communism was a threat, as were spies, but there are right ways to combat stuff like this, and there are lots and lots of wrong ways. Which do you think Welch chose?
Matthew Dallek: He was a businessman turned hardline anti communist who, in the 1950s in particular, he wrote a series of books, including a book about how the U.
S. was basically selling out its [00:09:00] foreign policy to the communists. As part of his anti communist fervor, he promulgated a number of conspiracy theories. about the alleged communist threat, the communist conspiracy as he saw it within the United States that had explained in his view why the country was losing the struggle against communist evil.
Chris Staron: He was inspired by guys like Joseph McCarthy, the senator who publicly and wrongfully accused people in the government and military of being spies. Look,
Matthew Dallek: he was not operating alone, but also had allied himself with people like, uh, William Noland, who was a hardline anti communist senator, Republican senator from California.
Robert Taft, a conservative, uh, Republican senator. Ohio Senator was one of Robert Welch’s heroes.
Chris Staron: We’ll talk about Robert Taft soon. He was Mr. Conservative in the 1940s and [00:10:00] super duper anti communist. In that era, the government was going through labor pains. Pains with labor. Unions. In the last months of 1946 alone, There were 4, 985 strikes in the United States, which some of these guys saw as proof that socialism had arrived.
To be clear, it hadn’t. But that didn’t stop them from equating labor unrest Rather than, I don’t know, cleaning up their factories, providing a living wage, or improving safety, the industrialists decided to fight back. One way Welch did this was by serving on the board of the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian group, that disseminated scary literature to factory workers on things like taxes and the French Revolution.
They also gave free conservative textbooks to poor schools. Walsh became a popular speaker. He was billed as someone who understood the [00:11:00] wicked ways of communism, and his target audience was well connected businessmen, men of influence who could then change their communities. This led to the founding of the John Birch Society, leading to the question, who was John Birch?
Matthew Dallek: Bill Nolan, the senator from California, who was an ally of Welch, helped Welch get access to files about John Birch. And Birch was an evangelist from Georgia, turned army intelligence officer, who served in China in World War II.
Chris Staron: Birch was murdered by Mao’s Communist army 10 days after the war.
Matthew Dallek: In these files, Welch believed that he had discovered not only that Birch was the first victim of World War iii, of, of communist plot to to take over the world, but he also, his murder had been covered up.
by communists and their sympathizers within the American government. [00:12:00]
Chris Staron: Which played right into the narrative he and McCarthy had already constructed, that the Reds had invaded the American bureaucracy.
Matthew Dallek: But conspiracy theories often take a shard, right, of reality, and they build that into something that’s almost unrecognized.
There’s the illusion that it is, at least in Welch’s telling, that it is based on his extensive research. But the conspiracy theory about the John Birch coverup or even Welch’s later charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy, which really became quite infamous in, in the early sixties, that allegation.
And you know, some of these books are heavily footnoted, but not based on, on real sources, right? Like not based on Or what Welch claims that they, the sources say, don’t really say that. And so no, there was no government cover up, intentional cover up of John Birch’s death.
Chris Staron: [00:13:00] It’s like how people today say they’re going to do their own research on a topic and then read suspicious websites instead of looking for original documents or credible sources.
His research was the 1950s version of that. So there were people who believed that Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Even though, that made no sense. There was an even kookier belief about Senator Taft.
Matthew Dallek: That his death was caused by a radium tube implanted in the upholstery of his senate seat that caused the cancer that had killed him.
Chris Staron: Which is nutty, and based on nothing. And what was Welch’s source?
Matthew Dallek: As has been so widely rumored.
Chris Staron: As has been so widely rumored. He flat out admitted that it was based on rumor, not documented proof. But that really didn’t matter to his fans, who were already hooked. Of course there are genuine conspiracies.
There were. Like [00:14:00] communist spies stealing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. But this was not one of them. Welch portrayed Birch as a martyr to the cause. Let’s be clear. He was a soldier at the time, not a civilian.
Matthew Dallek: Many movements, especially extreme movements, need martyrs. They need their narratives, and within those narratives, there are often heroes placed at the center of them, many of whom have sacrificed, given the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
And Welch really appropriated and elevated this person who, of course, was not alive to protect his identity or his legacy.
Chris Staron: Welch spread the word through a biography of Birch and named his organization after him. Speaking of the organization, It was time to found it. Welch sent out letters, cryptic letters.
Get on a train, but not all together. Pretend you’re someone else, just some [00:15:00] normal businessman on a sales trip. Maybe in December 1958, 11 people, all white, almost all industrial leaders, showed up to a clandestine meeting.
Matthew Dallek: To the home of Marguerite Dice, who was a A member of, she was a minute woman.
Chris Staron: Another anti communist organization. She was already in the far right
Matthew Dallek: world. And Welch sent a letter to these folks saying, I need you for two days in Indianapolis to attend a meeting, but I can’t tell you the subject of it. I want you to stay. At different places. I don’t want you to all congregate at the same hotel.
And if anyone asks, just say you’re in Indianapolis on business.
Chris Staron: And they came. For two days, Welch laid out his plans for the John Birch Society, addressing rumors of a worldwide communist conspiracy. His goal was to take the fight to the communists in the United States.
Matthew Dallek: It would serve as [00:16:00] a kind of shock force.
force or shock troops to go after the alleged conspiracy, whether that was in the public libraries or the local school system or federal and state and local officials, that this movement would be a way to circumvent the parties, the political parties, to try to reach the public directly.
Chris Staron: They were afraid of mainstream media and institutions.
Like any of these groups, They needed to create an echo chamber. Walsh had a lot of ideas that went far beyond the fear of communism. For one, he didn’t like democracy, which he saw as leading to mob rule. The JBS actually handed out stickers claiming,
JBS: This is a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.
Chris Staron: shard of truth there, right? Because the U. S. is a republic. We have people who represent us. But it’s a shard of truth that [00:17:00] goes haywire. Our elected officials don’t do everything. We directly vote on stuff like tax levies and whether or not to expand the rec center. Therefore, this is a democracy. So, which is it?
Is the United States a democracy or a republic? As it turns out, the It’s both. The U. S. is a democratic republic, but the Birchers decided to focus on only half of that equation, taking a shard of truth and running with it. See how they did that? This is something we’ll soon encounter with William F.
Buckley Jr., both a distrust of elites in government and the desire to put elites in power to keep the everyday rabble from influencing the country. Okay, so settle in, here’s just a few of the other things that Robert Welch taught. He denounced the civil rights movement and sit ins as a communist conspiracy, instead of, you know, people fighting for their rights.
He led the [00:18:00] charge in anti fluoride campaigns, didn’t like sex education in schools, and advised his members to scour textbooks, believed pro American ideas should be taught in classrooms, He slammed the New Deal and Roosevelt, said that Black people in the South wouldn’t have wanted civil rights if commies hadn’t convinced them of it.
Birchers tried to save the House Un American Activities Committee after it was rife with scandal. He sought to abolish the income tax, and ban products made in communist countries. By now, a lot of that probably sounds familiar to you. You could say that the John Birch Society was libertarian, but as you know by now, Libertarianism is a giant umbrella.
Matthew Dallek: They were libertarian in the sense that they believed in a radical devolution of federal power, right? They, they wanted to really roll back the federal government to a pre New Deal, even frankly pre progressive era [00:19:00] state condition.
Chris Staron: Like so many people we’ve talked about already, to Robert Welch, the New Deal was a no no.
Birchers didn’t like that the federal government was getting bigger and bigger and more involved in the lives of everyday people. That included how federal courts of the time shaped the country. One of their major campaigns called for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Matthew Dallek: The question is, what did they not have against, uh, Earl Warren and the Warren Corps? To the Birchers, Earl Warren was the, one of the architects of the communist takeover of the United States through a series of liberal decisions, starting most famously, of course, with Bush. Brown versus Board of Education, ordering the desegregation of the schools, but extending to establishing rights for criminal defendants, banning, uh, prayer in public schools.
They were [00:20:00] affronts to local individual control. And this actually became, iconic social campaigns or social movements. of the early 60s. I mean, people remember billboards saying impeach Earl Warren. To Robert Welch and to many birchers, that, that campaign had a kind of shock value that, you know, as Welch once put it, you know, we may not win this battle, but by the time we’re finished, the enemy will know we have been there.
Chris Staron: They used harsh tactics against people they didn’t like, including Justice Warren. That’s why I included the story of Darby, Montana at the top of the show, where they drove most of the teachers and the superintendent out of the district. This wasn’t about just getting their voices heard. They could be nasty.
Matthew Dallek: I opened the book with the story of Patricia Hitt, who was a Richard Nixon loyalist, a California Republican, who was running for a seat on a Republican committee in Southern [00:21:00] California. And the Birchers, who hated Nixon, they also did not like Patricia Hitt. And they targeted her by Calling her at home at all hours of the day, calling her a communist, and they called a number of Republicans, of voters in the district, denouncing her as a pinko, using all kinds of epithets,
Chris Staron: harassing people on the phone.
Applying economic pressure. They showed up at all sorts of big events, like the National Women’s Conference of 1977.
Matthew Dallek: Sometimes the Birchers would picket. Earl Warren would, let’s say, give a speech at a commencement speech. And the Birchers would be out front, you know, basically accusing Earl Warren, the Chief Justice, who had been basically a moderate Republican from California.
accusing him of being a communist. They threw eggs at integrated school buses in Boston. At times they ran phone trees where they would basically call people in their homes, [00:22:00] obviously, with a recorded message about the communist conspiracy.
Chris Staron: Since they were secretive, your friends, co workers, and relatives could be members.
And you wouldn’t know. The Burgers had several key texts, many of them deriving from Welch’s writings and speeches. Like his two day talk that he gave over and over and over. He had
Matthew Dallek: written a long letter to a number of his friends, ultimately called the Politician, in which he charged that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy.
Chris Staron: And FYI, he wasn’t. A second resource came from Welch’s two-day recruiting monologue. It was published as The Blue Book. The guys at the first meeting took tools like these and became apostles of Robert Welch.
Matthew Dallek: These 12 men, including Robert Welch, Went back to their communities, people like Bill Grady from Wisconsin or Fred Koch, who is the father of [00:23:00] the Koch brothers.
Chris Staron: Two of the main donors to the Tea Party in the far right in the last few years. They’re Rothbardian libertarians who put a lot of money into fighting unions. Koch was at that first meeting and became an evangelist for the Birch Society.
Matthew Dallek: They started to put their Their money, and their organizational muscle, and their contacts, their extensive network behind the John Birch Society.
Chris Staron: Spreading these half-truths and all-out lies. They did it through meetings, which were limited to 20 people to maintain secrecy. At first, they targeted people like them. Rich, white industrialists, mostly Christian, and people with high standing in their communities. Mayors, Governors, Doctors, Lawyers Welch didn’t want dissidents, just people who agreed with him.
One catalyzing event happened in 1959, when President Eisenhower hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. It was [00:24:00] billed as an attempt to bring peace during the Cold War, but conservatives viewed the state visit as proof that Ike was soft on communism. They didn’t want peace with Russia, So the Birch Society did what they often did, they started a front group to protest.
It was called the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, or CASE. The Daughters of the American Revolution offered their support, and a petition was circulated to stop this event. Signed by people Jr., founder of National Review. Future GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, libertarian Ludwig von Mises, Pierre DuPont from, you know, DuPont, and of course, Fred Koch.
By now, the Birchers were a known quantity. When Eisenhower discovered that one of his appointees was a Bircher, he had him fired. That’s how renowned this movement was. The sitting president ousted a staffer just for being a member.
Matthew Dallek: And one of the things that [00:25:00] appealed to them is that, as one member wrote, the John Birch Society gives you a chance to fight the communists everywhere that they appear.
I mean, I’m paraphrasing. What I think they meant is that they got to fight the communists at the local level. They got to take the fight to the enemy within their community. And it was a group. As they saw that it was not just about talk and rhetoric, but about action.
Chris Staron: Action, like gaining small offices on school boards and business committees.
They put pressure on people they didn’t like or found suspicious. They placed ads in newspapers, handed out buttons, passed out information at events. Then there were the sneaky tactics. For example, take where I live, Wyoming. Birchers produced a variety of broadcasts that could be syndicated. And in the big cities, they had lots of competition.
But in rural places like Wyoming, they could capture their audience by monopolizing the only radio or TV station in [00:26:00] the region, radicalizing people who had few media options. So people like the pro Birch Reverend Carl McIntyre paid to saturate these rural markets. He gave 1, 000 to the effort. Which probably says a lot about why Wyoming remains so far to the right.
The John Birch Society had the membership. They had money and influence. Soon, they turned their attention to the big show, the presidency. Throwing their weight behind the nomination of one of the most influential people who didn’t become president, but who demonstrated that appealing to the extremes could win the nomination.
The John Birch Society was chasing the highest office in the land. I’ll continue the story after these messages. Why not leave a comment on your favorite podcasting app? It really helps people find the show. Okay, here come the ads.
Welcome back. So far, we’ve [00:27:00] mostly talked about the contributions of men, but they weren’t the only ones involved.
Matthew Dallek: The movement was founded by and run by, in headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, almost all by men.
Chris Staron: All the sectional leaders, many of the big donors, men, men, men.
Matthew Dallek: But the women, especially by I think the early 60s, were in many respects the most powerful force, especially on the ground.
Many were upper class and white. As they said, right, they had the time. They, uh, were often well off enough. So, right, they weren’t necessarily working.
Chris Staron: It gave them more agency. Both waves of feminism led women to write letters, petition, protest, and engage in civil society.
Matthew Dallek: Women who viewed themselves as educators, because again, the Birch Society had pitched itself as an education movement above all.
Chris Staron: So the women educated people. Distributing flyers, leading [00:28:00] discussions, and more. By doing this they could literally play an active role in shaping society. See themselves as part of a movement. They gained agency. While also Fighting their own equality.
Matthew Dallek: The idea that we’re policing morals in the community, I think that also appealed to a number of women as well.
Chris Staron: Within the JBS, women worked as secretaries. No surprise there. But many conservative bookstores that doubled as Berkshire distribution sites were operated, if not owned, by women. Sometimes several stores in one city. Los Angeles alone had 36.
Matthew Dallek: One historian likened them to coffee houses for the left.
Chris Staron: Where women led classes and connected people, which made them a powerful political tool.
Men and women alike wanted to change the country, make it in their image. What better way to do that than through politics? There was a major problem, though. Neither of the [00:29:00] political parties really fit the John Birch Society.
Matthew Dallek: But because Robert Welch had run for lieutenant governor as a Republican, he had attended the Republican convention in 1952, was a big supporter of Ohio Senator Robert Taft.
When Eisenhower won the nomination, he called it the dirtiest deal in American political history. And other founders as well. People like Bill Grady from Wisconsin had actually been both a supporter of Joe McCarthy, but also of Dwight Eisenhower.
Chris Staron: But Eisenhower and Earl Warren were Republicans. And according to the Birchers, they were commies.
Could they really belong to the party of Earl Warren? They would try. So they backed a number of Republican candidates in the 1962 midterms.
Matthew Dallek: And then in 1964, they flocked behind Barry Goldwater.
Chris Staron: Barry Goldwater. Someone we’ll cover soon in more depth. He’s credited by historians as pushing Republicans further to the [00:30:00] right and expanding the party to include extremists.
Like, you know, birchers. Even though he lost by the greatest margin of any U. S. presidential election. Lock that away for the future. Most of their successes were in lower offices. Though they sometimes gained prominent positions. Vice President Dan Quayle’s parents were Birchers. But as far as the far right was concerned, neither Bush nor Reagan met their standards.
They certainly did not like Nixon, despite his hardline anti communist stances. The Birchers were suspicious of Republican leaders. They didn’t really have another option.
Matthew Dallek: By 1968, though, they were very strongly behind George Wallace. The segregationist governor of Alabama.
Chris Staron: The third party candidate who said, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
And thankfully, Wallace lost. So the Birchers failed to win the big office, [00:31:00] but they did manage to push the GOP. Goldwater, whose first Senate campaign was funded, in part, by Welch, famously demonstrated to Nixon that Southern racists were a demographic that could be targeted by Republicans, nudging him in the direction of his long Southern strategy that I talked about earlier this season.
While they never made it to the big chair, Birchers made waves in other places. Notably, in Christian circles, including some of the names we’ve already mentioned this season. Take a deep breath because some of this might give you a headache. One Bircher sympathizer was R. J. Rush Dooney, the father of modern homeschooling and architect of Christian reconstruction.
His base of operations for a time was in Southern California, where some of his financiers read books by the John Birch Society. This is from a letter Rush Dooney wrote to Robert Welch.
RJ Rushdoony: Let me express my great respect for your work [00:32:00] and for you personally. I regard you as the clearest and most courageous public figure of our day.
Chris Staron: Rush Dooney gave money to the society but didn’t sign on as a member, knowing, of course, that a direct affiliation with them might harm his other work. What about Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic woman behind the Stop B. R. A. battle in 1977? Her book, A Choice, Not an Echo, was a bestseller among birchers, and was instrumental in the nomination of Barry Goldwater.
She was a member of the JBS, but revoked her membership in 1964. Notably, she also canceled her subscription to National Review Magazine when it criticized Robert Welch. Her connection makes sense when you consider how she ran her organizations. They had a lot in common with the JBS from the way they subverted traditional media to the use of front groups that appeared interested in a single issue, and her [00:33:00] organized grassroots efforts.
Then there is Tim LaHaye, a hugely influential author in evangelical circles, including the wildly popular Left Behind book series. According to Matthew Dalek, LeHay regularly lectured and ran training seminars for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 70s. He didn’t remain a Bircher, but his later work paralleled Welch’s.
As we’ll hopefully see later this season, LeHay formed the Council for National Policy, whose goal was to fight secular humanism. It’s a shadowy political powerhouse tying religious leaders to big money. One critic described it as
Journalist: A slick, updated, repackaging, birch society philosophy.
Chris Staron: They continue to operate in secret.
One of their members was the late Foster Frese. Now, if you lived in Wyoming, You’d know who I’m talking about. I literally [00:34:00] used to live next door to his investment business, and he funded a classical Christian school in my town. Speaking of deep pockets, there was Joseph Coors, the beer magnate who funded the Heritage Society.
He was pro Birch. And J. Howard Pugh, a wealthy oilman and co founder of the Pugh Charitable Trusts. He was a Presbyterian layman and a major backer of Christianity Today. Which, by the way, feeds ads to this show. His money helped finance Barry Goldwater, Nixon, and Billy Graham. He funded spiritual mobilization, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Christian Freedom Foundation.
He supported the John Birch Society, though he denied that he was a member. membership. But he was on the editorial advisory board of a Bircher magazine, American Opinion, and was a stockholder in Robert Welch, Inc. So, I’m guessing J. Howard Pugh was okay with Robert Welch. Not only were [00:35:00] some Christians with large followings Birchers or Bircher adjacent, a lot of money that funded evangelicalism in the 20th century came from Birchers.
Okay, so let’s check in. Who here’s still breathing normally? Does it lighten the mood if I tell you that Mad Magazine did a riff on the Birchers? I’ll put up a link for patrons who want to see it for themselves. This brings us to a big question. Why did some religious right leaders dabble in bircherism
Matthew Dallek: They sympathize with a lot of the birch worldview, especially on moral questions, right? The idea that the major institutions in American life were corrupting traditional family values, trampling on the Christian character.
Chris Staron: After all, the Warren Court did end required Bible reading and prayer in the schools.
Matthew Dallek: You remember. Sexual revolution, gender [00:36:00] relations, 60s and 70s, women’s rights, it’s a civil rights struggle, the gay liberation movement. progressive education, right? And this is, I think, a worldview that the Birchers held and that attracted people like Phyllis Schlafly, for example, or Tim LaHaye. They wanted to reimpose or restore what they saw as the lost Christian character of the country.
I don’t know that the Birch Society necessarily defined their trajectory. And then I think the Birch Society also inspired some of their organizing. tactics and their strategies.
Chris Staron: strategies. This is not to say that all evangelicals were or are racists or are against the civil rights movement. There was strong pushback against how fast the world was changing, how big the government was getting, and how involved it was in the lives of everyday people.
And yes, there was a lot of pushback against it. Though they hated the government telling people what to do with their lives, they wanted the government [00:37:00] to tell people what to do with their lives, just in their own way. The John Birch Society saw a deep decline in the 1970s, as it was taken over by people further and further from the mainstream.
It lost some of its influence, but is still going today, spreading propaganda, and we hear echoes of it every time a prominent conservative accuses somebody of being a communist, when they’re probably not. We may never understand the full impact that the JBS had on even juggles in that era, but we do know that Lahaye, Schlafly, Rashtooni, and others shared their negative view of America’s trajectory.
They started powerful organizations of their own that went around traditional forms of media. So they couldn’t get fact checked. Sure, a number of birchers in the 1960s considered themselves Christians. Remember the first episode of the season? When someone calls themselves or a movement Christian, we have to ask ourselves, [00:38:00] what did they mean?
Let’s go back to the beginning of the episode, back to the small town of Darby, Montana. Do Christians run teachers and superintendents out of a school district for replacing old Bibles? Who knows? Would Jesus harass someone over the telephone? Do true followers of Christ terrorize their neighbors? No.
Instead, we should be on the lookout for secret societies that claim to have all the answers. And then, expose them. Finally, Should Christians delight in gossip and rumors? Can we participate in spreading conspiracies as the Birchers did? It’s often done today on social media and around the water cooler and seen as harmless, but it’s not.
Listen, we need to reconcile with the fact that when we spread lies, we are liars. Conspiracy theories are not cute. And they’re not fun. They besmirch the name [00:39:00] and witness of God’s church. And yes, there are actual conspiracies in the world. But can we achieve our outcomes by hitching our wagon to dubious organizations?
To lies. When we partner with extremist groups, we do something far worse than looking silly. Or spreading lies. We tarnish the name of God.
Special thanks to Matthew Dallek. I first heard about his book, Birchers, on NPR’s Fresh Air back when I was driving a school bus. And the book is quite good. Other sources can be found on the website or in your show notes, including Before the Storm by Matthew Dallek. by Rick Perlstein. If you want to keep me working on this program instead of driving a school bus like I used to, consider giving a little money each month to help me out.
One other Christian podcast is exploring the [00:40:00] legacy of the John Birch Society. I mean, really? This is important stuff, and the reason I can cover this kind of thing is because I’m an independent, for profit company. If I were running a non profit, I’d be too scared to call out the shenanigans of wealthy financiers I’d be chasing their money.
I want to run this show with 10 to 20 a month coming from a lot of individual donors, instead of by the grace of a few major backers. This gives me journalistic independence that other ministries don’t have. If you want to be a part of this crazy and original project, visit truespodcast. com slash donate.
There you can also learn about bonus materials, like more of my conversation with Matthew Dalek, including how the John Birch Society. laid the groundwork for the Trump era. That’s trucepodcast. com slash donate. Thanks to everyone who gave me their voices for this story, including Jackie Hart and Bob Stevenson.
As usual, I’m indebted to my brother, Nick, and my small group for helping me process this information. Truce is a [00:41:00] production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again soon. I’m Chris Starin, and this is Truce.
by Chris Staron | Jan 7, 2025 | Episodes
Modern evangelicalism sometimes incorporates pieces of different ideas. Things that are in the air. Social messages. Political stances. But has evangelicalism been enchanted by libertarianism?
In this episode, we cover a brief history of libertarianism. What is it and who are some of the main thinkers? We discuss Murry Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Nozick.
What do libertarians believe?
What is a libertarian? Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi define libertarianism by six characteristics. Libertarians are defined by a love of private property, they are skeptical of authority, and they like free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty. We will define each of these throughout the episode.
Our special guest for this episode is Andrew Koppelman, law professor at Northwestern University. He’s the author of the book Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
Sources
- Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. by Andrew Koppelman
- The Individualists by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi
- The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
- Matthew 25
- The Road to Serfdom cartoon version
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (for the Dust Bowl section in book 2)
- 99% Invisible episode The Infernal Machine for information on anarchists
- Teddy Roosevelt’s first address to Congress
- Dark Money by Jane Mayer
- EPA.gov article about The Clean Air Act
- NPR story about law enforcement throwing protestors in unmarked vans
- Listen America! by Jerry Falwell
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (I could only stomach maybe 1/4 of it. I promised myself if she wrote “Rearden Steel” one more time that I would stop reading. She did. So I did.)
Discussion Questions
- What is libertarianism?
- How have you seen libertarianism crossing over into evangelicalism?
- Does libertarianism counter the story from Matthew 25?
- What is the impact of Ayn Rand? Have you read her books?
- Why did Atlas Shrugged suddenly become the “it” book among Republicans in 2020?
- Is there any place for selfishness in the Christian walk?
Transcript (note: this was generated by AI and may not be correct)
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. To do that story, I also have to cover how Republicans changed in that era. Because the Republican Party of Eisenhower is not the same as the Republican Party of Reagan, which is not the Republican Party of today.
This episode can stand on its own, but when you’re done, feel free to go back and start at the beginning of Season 6. This is How Libertarianism Shaped the Republican Party. In Matthew 25, there’s an image of Jesus arriving with the angels and sitting on his throne. There are people on his right and on his left.
The sheep and the goats. He has really nice things to say about the people on the right. They’re going to inherit the kingdom. That guy you saw who was naked, what did you do?
Nick Staron: Here, take this jacket.
Chris Staron: You clothed me. When you saw me hungry, I just made soup. You fed [00:01:00] me. When you saw that I was thirsty, have some of my water.
You gave me something to drink. And the people in this story are like, wait a second, when did we see you naked or hungry or thirsty? What you do for the least of these brothers and sisters, you do to me. What you do for the poor, for the needy, you do for Jesus. These are the people who inherit the kingdom of God, the sheep we talked about earlier.
The goats on the other hand, they didn’t do this stuff. Get out of here, you bum! And they, well, things don’t go well for them. These will go away into eternal punishment. Eternal punishment. It’s a heavy story. But, that is God’s standard for us. We are to take care of the less fortunate. But how? For a long time, we [00:02:00] humans have been looking for ways to bend that standard.
We’re also torn between accomplishing these goals alone, or as a society, or both. These are huge questions. So to lighten it up, I decided to take these puzzles into the real world. Okay. Oh, wow. Look at all of those .
Well, we are here looking at Henry’s Fork in Idaho at the Harriman State Park. We’ve got this beautiful river here and we’ve pulled over.
We’re on a guy’s trip weekend. We were supposed to go biking in Yellowstone. Didn’t get to make that happen. So we thought we’d pull over Look at this beautiful view and talk about libertarianism.
Nick Staron: Is that the cold chill I just got or the snow we’re standing on?
Chris Staron: That’s right. You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church.
We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Starrin with my [00:03:00] friends and this is Truce.
Okay, so, word of warning. We will not be able to cover every libertarian. Instead, we’re going to talk about just a few. Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. Four people in, hopefully, less than an hour. And thankfully, I’m not alone in this exercise.
Andrew Koppelman: I’m Andrew Koppelman. I teach at Northwestern School of Law.
Chris Staron: His most recent book is Burning Down the House. I used multiple sources for this episode, and his is by far the best introduction to this topic. Friedrich Hayek. He’s also written about the litigation over Obamacare and defending religious liberty in the Supreme Court. Okay, so what is Libertarianism?
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarianism is the idea that human liberty can [00:04:00] be maximized by shrinking government. The weaker and smaller government is, the freer we are. That’s the basic idea of Libertarianism.
Chris Staron: According to historians and also Libertarians, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, There are six defining characteristics of libertarianism.
Number one,
Announcer: private property.
Chris Staron: That one’s pretty easy. But for some libertarians, that also means not just your 40 acres and a mule, but also your body and your labor. Your body is your labor. Your property as is the work you do. Number
Announcer: two,
skepticism of authority.
Chris Staron: Does the government have power to do things like run a post office, build roads, compete with private businesses?
Maybe? No. Maybe yes. Or maybe, maybe, depending on who you ask.
Announcer: Number [00:05:00] three,
Chris Staron: free markets. Can I trade without barriers? Like let’s say that I made a bunch of cookies and I want to swap them for a plant that you own. Libertarians generally think that the government should stay out of that. I should be able to sell you a cookie.
Mm, and even go beyond that. If I wanna sell cookies to Japan or Brazil, I should be able to do that without taxation. Or tariffs, and there’s wiggle room here depending on which kind of libertarian you are. Like if my cookie factory is poisoning a river, some think that the government should intervene, others don’t.
Number four, spontaneous order. It’s less complicated than it sounds. Essentially, if there needs to be a system in place, it’ll happen on its own. We don’t need a government puppeteering or rationing. For example, rather than a government telling us how much corn or [00:06:00] bananas to grow, the market will sort itself out.
Farmers will adjust to demand and prices without government telling them how much of which crop to grow and how much to charge. Number
Announcer: 5.
Individualism.
Chris Staron: As Zwolinski and Tomasai put it, each of us is morally significant with our own life to live. We all have the same value. You can’t sacrifice one person for the greater good because we all have the same value.
This gets into tricky territory though. Some libertarians take this to mean that There are no protected groups. In their logic, Black people are not discriminated against. Maybe individual Black people are, though. Or maybe a less charged example would be, Congress doesn’t make laws, but individual lawmakers do.
Libertarians may not like protected groups. 6. Negative [00:07:00] Liberty This is actually an interesting distinction. Libertarian thought is about wanting to be free from. That’s the negative part of negative liberty. They want to be free from government. Taxes, tariffs, police, etc. This is different from freedom to.
Freedom to own a gun, do drugs, or drink unpasteurized milk. Though, because nothing is easy. Some libertarians have argued for those things. To recap, and I know this is a lot of stuff. Libertarians are defined by a love of property. They are skeptical of authority. They like free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty.
According to Zwolinski and Tomasi, libertarians see these six things as moral absolutes. Okay, so we could pretty much stop there. Because we’ve covered a lot of stuff in just a few minutes. But we’ve got a long way to go. [00:08:00] Let’s turn the clock back a few hundred years and see where this all started.
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarians tend to reach back to John Locke, a philosopher who did his most important work in the 1680s.
Chris Staron: John Locke, a name you may remember from high school history class. Okay, so I’m aware that you know who that is, and I know who that is, but Just in case someone else doesn’t remember,
Andrew Koppelman: John Locke wrote in the 1680s in order to justify resistance to the King of England.
He was British,
Chris Staron: and people in England were upset about the policies of the King.
Andrew Koppelman: The dissent against the King eventually led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which oosted the King and put a new regime in place. Locke’s task was to show. that there were limits to the power of government. There had to be limits to the power of government, otherwise the divine right of kings meant that the king could do anything that he [00:09:00] wanted.
Chris Staron: We Americans owe a lot to John Locke for inspiring our founding fathers and our Constitution. For arguing that we, no matter how lowly, Have rights. And when Locke refers to property, it isn’t just, you know, your 40 acres, or in my case, my little apartment. It’s deeper than that.
Andrew Koppelman: Locke thought that if we imagine ourselves in a state of nature, a primitive condition where there is no government.
Chris Staron: Okay, so this is where a show with a larger budget would play a song by John Lennon. You may say I’m a dreamer, but that’s not gonna happen here. No government, no property divisions. In this imaginary world, so. We’re basically in the Garden of Eden.
Andrew Koppelman: Let’s just say that I see apples growing on a tree. And I pick a bunch of the apples and take them back to my home.
Well, those apples are now not like any other apples. The way that Locke puts it is, I’ve mixed my [00:10:00] labor with those apples. And so, if somebody else tries to take the apples away from me after I’ve picked them. pick them, he is trying to get the benefit of my pains, which he hasn’t got any right to. Let him go and pick his own apples.
Chris Staron: In his book, Andrew distills Locke’s ideas down to two main points. One, people are entitled to be rewarded for their work. If I pick those apples, I should be able to eat them, or sell them, or trade them. And two, the institution of property, even though it produces inequalities, is generally good for everyone.
Andrew Koppelman: And Locke thinks that the reason why we form governments is because if we have disputes over property, If we have any kind of disputes, we’ve got to have some higher authority to adjudicate those disputes. Life in the state of nature is dangerous and inconvenient, and so in order to get along with each other, we’ve got to have government in order [00:11:00] to secure the rights that we already have, such as the right to property.
Chris Staron: Like, if someone is going to steal my apples, we need someone to decide what to do with that.
Andrew Koppelman: At a minimum, a police force and judges to adjudicate decisions. And so, some libertarians think that this means that that’s the only thing that government can legitimately do.
Chris Staron: By the way, Locke was not a libertarian.
Because such a thing didn’t exist back then, and he wouldn’t have fit our six points from a few minutes ago. But his ideas became the basis for modern libertarianism. In music terms, it’d be like the backbeat that somebody samples and then turns into their own thing. No longer should people believe that the king and queen can do whatever they want.
We have rights to our property, including our bodies, and our labor. And get this, John Locke was a Christian.
Andrew Koppelman: But even absent the [00:12:00] Christian framework, you could say, even if we’re just in a state of nature trying to arrive at terms of cooperation with one another, we are not going to arrive at terms of cooperation that require us to starve to death.
We must be able to agree to allow one another to take bits of the world.
Chris Staron: In our apple scenario, that idealized petri dish of a world that we were imagining, this is key. We’re imagining that there is plenty to go around.
Andrew Koppelman: But if that’s the purpose, if the purpose is that we get to have property because we need it in order to preserve ourselves, then that is key.
already parts company with the libertarians, because it means that the social contract cannot be such that people are going to be deprived of what they need to stay alive.
Chris Staron: John Locke would not have been cool with me hoarding all the apples in all the trees for hundreds of miles [00:13:00] around. Leaving you with nothing to eat.
Andrew Koppelman: Locke thought that you could justify appropriating things in nature as long as you left as much and as good for other people. If I pick the apple, but there’s plenty of other apples on the tree, nobody else gets to complain. But, if you end up with a state of affairs where all the property is taken and people are starving, You have thwarted the whole purpose of having property in the first place.
So, fundamental divide between Locke and the Libertarians, number one, is that the purpose of property for Locke is in order to enable comfortable self preservation. And so that means that if the political system doesn’t deliver, The means of self preservation, it is not doing its job.
Chris Staron: Let’s try this from a different angle.
Let’s go back to my friends out there near a frozen river in eastern Idaho. There’s this example in [00:14:00] libertarian philosophy of an oasis in a desert. Let’s say I own this oasis in the desert and then you guys come out of, I don’t know, that forest out there and you’re thirsty and you want some water. John Locke, who was writing in the 1600s, would argue that there must be as much and as good for everyone.
So in an ideal world, We’d all have access to water. So he seems like a decent guy, right?
Nick Staron: Yeah, yeah, if I was definitely thirsty at this point, I would appreciate his philosophy. Yeah, you’d
Chris Staron: want to come across John Locke.
Nick Staron: Yeah, that’d be nice. Yeah.
Chris Staron: John Locke is a friend to thirsty hikers, and his philosophy became a major inspiration for libertarian thought.
But ideas don’t stay the same. Put. They get repurposed, stretched, twisted, and become new things. When we return from the ads, we’ll see just how far Locke’s ideas were taken, to the point where some philosophers think, maybe you should be [00:15:00] willing to die to defend my right to hoard apples for myself, or my frozen river.
And we’ll return to Henry’s Fork to see how these ideas play out. Stay tuned. If you like the show, take this time to share it on social media.
Welcome back. This is the Truce Podcast. Did you have a good break? How you feeling, Andrew?
Andrew Koppelman: Yeah, yeah, I’m very comfortable.
Chris Staron: Great. Now that we’ve touched on John Locke, let’s jump forward a few years to the 1800s, when Locke’s ideas about property and labor were taken to greater lengths, used as the backbone for a new thing.
Libertarianism.
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarianism really begins simultaneously in Europe and the United States in the 1800s.
Chris Staron: And at this stage, it looks very different over the pond than it does in the United States. In Europe, it had two adversaries. The first was [00:16:00] feudalism.
Andrew Koppelman: The old privileges that the aristocracy has. In England, there is a huge struggle against
Chris Staron: Which uses tariffs to prevent cheaper grain from being imported.
Which is not great for the consumer because that allows local grain producers to jack up the price.
Andrew Koppelman: Which is great news for the aristocracy who own a A lot of land because it maintains the price of the wheat that their land produces and keeps them rich, but keeps laborers poor because food is very expensive.
Chris Staron: Free trade between England and other nations would likely have made this cheaper. It would have introduced competition. European libertarian enemy number one, a lack of free trade. Then there’s the second adversary, socialism. Central economic planning where the government controls the means of production, and the people keep the profit.
For example, if I’m the government, and we’re organizing things centrally, [00:17:00] I as the government need to plan how much of everything gets made. Let’s say that today I’m looking at dog toys. Last year there were, I don’t know, 10, 000 squeaky toys sold in my country. I’m gonna order the factory to make 10, 000 dog toys for next year.
But then There’s a puppy craze that I didn’t expect. Nobody expected it. Next year, a lot of dogs are going to go without toys. Because no matter how good I am at centrally planning all the items in the economy, these guys argue I’ll never have enough information to get it all right. So Bandit and Patches and Dog the Biscuit Hunter are going without toys next year.
European libertarians did not like central control.
Andrew Koppelman: The best intellectual response to that in Europe is the Austrian economists, people like Ludwig von Mises or his student Friedrich Hayek, [00:18:00] who show quite elegantly that the only way to coordinate production, the only way to figure out efficiently how to invest productive resources is a market.
Chris Staron: Remember the six things that define most libertarians? One of them was free markets. Free markets. Instead of centrally planning things or setting tariffs, we’ll let the market figure it out.
Andrew Koppelman: Because markets give signals to everybody in the economy very quickly about what commodities are wanted and how urgently they are wanted.
The price system is really terrific. for that.
Chris Staron: That’s roughly what happens in Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s. Libertarians oppose feudalism and socialism. In the US, early libertarians were focused on opposing something else, slavery. Remember what Locke was all about, protection of property and labor.
And property could mean your own body. [00:19:00] And slaves were not seeing the fruits of their labor or controlling their own bodies. Those ideas didn’t stop there.
Andrew Koppelman: And that idea of freedom is what leads the Supreme Court to then, on the basis of the Civil War amendments, strike down slavery. Maximum hours laws, wage laws, laws that prohibit employers from firing people who join unions, things like that.
Chris Staron: Again, protecting your property, in this case your body, and your labor. Both the European and American versions came out of Liberalism. I know that sounds confusing.
Andrew Koppelman: Liberalism is used in contemporary political discourse to describe ideas associated with the Democratic Party. But in political philosophy, it stands for a much bigger idea.
Liberalism is the novel idea that what we should be aiming at is individual liberty, giving people the freedom to live as they like. Libertarianism [00:20:00] is the claim that this freedom of people to live as they like will be achieved by shrinking government.
Chris Staron: Doing away with things like regulation, workplace safety, food standards, pollution laws, that kind of thing.
And something we haven’t talked about yet. Redistribution. Taking money via things like taxes from the middle and upper class, and funding things for those in need, or the country in general.
Andrew Koppelman: Things like social security, the earned income tax credit, but actually even free government. public schools for children whose parents are too poor to pay for the education themselves.
On a libertarian account, all of that has to go because government should only be protecting persons and property and nothing else.
Chris Staron: Let’s meet our first notable libertarian. Friedrich Hayek. Hayek was of the Austrian school we talked about a moment ago, from Europe, so he was concerned about socialism.
One of his biggest [00:21:00] contributions was his book The Road to Serfdom, which was published by, can you guess? The University of Chicago. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, This podcast could literally just be about the impact of the University of Chicago. Leopold and Loeb went there. It was the hub of modernist theology.
It was funded by the Rockefellers. And soon we’ll cover how it was the home of Milton Friedman. Something to look forward to. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. And both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan carried out his ideas. And there’s another interesting connection. Hayek got some of his funding from the Volcker Fund, the libertarian think tank where R.
J. Rashtuni worked. The Christian Reconstruction guy, the father of modern homeschooling in the U. S. Remember him? I got red string and pushpins all over my walls, baby! Okay, so back to his book. It was so popular, especially with big businesses. that it was reworked into a comic strip and distributed to employees of General Motors.
Andrew Koppelman: The [00:22:00] road to serfdom is really a response to the program of the British Labor Party in World War II. The book is published in 1944. The British Labor Party has proposed to nationalize the means of production.
Chris Staron: Hayek’s response is essentially, It’s fine to do central planning while the war is going on, when the government needs to ration things like steel so it can build bombs and planes, or cloth to make uniforms and blankets.
But in peacetimes, you don’t want all that central control, otherwise you end up with the dog toy problem from earlier, because no system of central control is going to be efficient enough to anticipate everyone’s needs and adapt. If we go with central control, some dogs will go without.
Andrew Koppelman: And so government shouldn’t direct the economy.
Government should step back and allow the market to operate. And individual consumers will tell you what they want [00:23:00] by sending price signals. If some new product arises that the consumers want, let’s say, The television set, or dog toys, they will buy it, and producers will then respond to these incentives by producing more of these things, and competition among these producers will cause the product to become cheaper, and it will also produce increases in quality, which is exactly what happened.
Chris Staron: To oversimplify Hayek, free markets work better than central control.
Andrew Koppelman: Now, all of this is a response to the program of the British Labor Party. Hayek was a huge hit in the United States because there had been a lot of people business people who had been opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Chris Staron: It is entirely possible that by the end of this season, you’ll be sick of hearing about the New Deal. But in the U. S., it was a real turning [00:24:00] point.
Andrew Koppelman: The problem with using Hayek in order to beat up on Franklin Roosevelt is that Roosevelt’s program was nothing at all like the British Labor Party. He tried out something like this.
central direction of the economy in his first couple of years in office in 1933 and 1934 and was thwarted by the Supreme Court in his early efforts.
Chris Staron: As the U. S. was burdened by both the Depression and the Dust Bowl. which destroyed a lot of crops due to bad farming practices. In the 1930s, the federal government literally told farmers how much of each crop they could grow and would penalize people for going over those limits, which they felt was necessary in order to get prices under control.
And guess what? It worked.
Andrew Koppelman: But he very quickly pivoted away from that. Toward more redistributionist programs like social security and so there was this category mistake right [00:25:00] from the beginning that When libertarians talk about the New Deal and a philosophy of government that is reconciled to New Deal programs, they talk about it as if we were talking about communism.
And I would say if you cannot tell the difference between Joseph Stalin and Dwight Eisenhower, you need new glasses.
Chris Staron: Hayek is not on the extreme end of libertarianism. He thought there was a role for government. Hayek, unlike others, could look at someone who was not thriving in life and understand that it might not be laziness that got them there.
Some libertarians swing that way. It could be that industry left, or they got sick or injured, or dumb luck like a hurricane that destroyed their business. To quote
Andrew Koppelman: Andrew’s book, Hayek’s view did not entail minimal government. It rather imposed strict conditions on intervention in the economy.
Chris Staron: Hayek didn’t [00:26:00] like stuff like social security, but he was okay with things that the private sector is not going to be able or willing to carry out.
Things like roads, police, courts, education, social services, and basic scientific research. In his mind, let the market do it. That is Hayek in a nutshell. Let’s take what we’ve learned and return to the Henry’s Fork River. To see how these ideas play out in our Oasis scenario. We’re looking at this cold river and we’re very cold.
We’re going back to that example of a desert and a body of water. And I haven’t owned the rights to all of this water in this example. Friedrich Hayek would argue that property ownership at that point is stretched pretty far. I have a monopoly on the water and you guys are about to die of thirst because I own all the water.
And therefore, there should be some kind of body that would give you rights to access that water. Andrew said this better than I could.
Andrew Koppelman: Hayek would say [00:27:00] the whole point of having a free market economy is because it makes everybody better off, and if you haven’t done that, then you haven’t done what free market economies are for.
Chris Staron: That means that, in terms of our example with the water, Friedrich Hayek wouldn’t want you guys to die. In order to respect my property rights. So does that sound fair?
Dave: Yeah.
Chris Staron: As one of the people who would be dying in this situation?
Dave: Yeah. I’d appreciate that water.
Chris Staron: Even though he was a libertarian and he believed in property rights, there was an extreme limit to that.
He wasn’t going to push it to the point where you guys would die of thirst.
Nick Staron: Very thoughtful.
Chris Staron: Thank you,
Nick Staron: Friedrich.
Chris Staron: So far, both examples, Locke and Hayek, are pretty generous. If there’s not enough to go around, something has to give. That is not the philosophy of every libertarian thinker. Bringing us to the third figure of our episode, Murray Rothbard.
Andrew Koppelman: Rothbard [00:28:00] was a writer. It gets started in the 1920s. 50s. He works for libertarian think tanks and he is trained as an economist and he is essentially an anarchist.
Chris Staron: Anarchism is also a broad term that means a lot of different things. In the 1800s, groups of anarchists were responsible for a number of dynamite bombings in the United States.
President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. Leaving his Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, to say this at his first address to Congress as President.
Teddy Roosevelt: President McKinley was killed by an utterly depraved criminal belonging to that body of criminals who object to all governments, good and bad alike, who are against any form of Popular liberty if it is guaranteed.
Even the most just and liberal laws who are [00:29:00] as hostile are to the operat exponent of a free people’s sober will As to the tyrannical and irresponsible, desperate.
Chris Staron: Not every anarchist was a murderer. This is yet another big umbrella. Murray Rothbard, as best I can tell, didn’t carry over the same murderous spirit.
Andrew Koppelman: Anarcho capitalism, the idea that’s associated with him, supposes that no governments are legitimate.
Chris Staron: In Rothbard’s ideal vision, Instead of governments as we know them,
Andrew Koppelman: In the state of nature, people would form mutual protective associations, and the mutual protective associations, if there weren’t a state, would enter into consensual arrangements with one another.
Because it’s in nobody’s interest for there to be warfare, and so systems of cooperation, and even courts, would arise [00:30:00] just out of consensual transactions. And so he imagines a civilized world in which there are these multiple centers of armed power in the same geographical area.
Chris Staron: Again, not government sponsored, and Not relying on mandatory taxes.
Andrew Koppelman: That live peacefully with one another.
Chris Staron: So far, this is kind of optimistic, right? Trusting people without compulsion? To live at peace and avoid war? It sounds nice in that petri dish imaginary world just after the Garden of Eden. But, it isn’t practical when it gets into the real world.
Andrew Koppelman: Now this is already ridiculous, because we actually have seen places in the world where there are multiple centers of armed power in the same geographical area.
We call them warlords, and they have trouble getting along with one another, and we see what happens in failed states.
Chris Staron: According to Andrew, the closest example we’ve seen in modern times This is
Andrew Koppelman: [00:31:00] organized crime in the United States in the 20th century, where the, the Mafia Commission organized a number of large quasi monopolistic gangsters, uh, and tried to adjudicate disputes between them because there were enormous gains to be had if they would just avoid violence with one another.
Chris Staron: The same is true for drug cartels in South and Central America that cooperated for a number of years. Until they didn’t. These are non governmental organizations who offered protections without charging direct taxes.
Andrew Koppelman: This actually worked sometimes for years, but this equilibrium was punctuated periodically by wars and assassinations if the balance of power shifted.
I imagine many of the people listening to this have seen The Godfather, which is just a story about what happens when the peace is temporarily broken and [00:32:00] eventually a new equilibrium is reached. But on the way to the new equilibrium, There are a lot of people killed, so this is not as happy a story as Rothbard imagines.
Chris Staron: There are a lot of downsides to Rothbard’s vision, because it leaves the little guy exposed, totally reliant on the powerful to take care of them and stick to their word. In a democratic republic, we can vote people out of office if they misbehave. In a loose confederation with warlords, there’s none of that.
It also overlooks the reality that even if the United States was to shut down the government and go to this freewheeling system, the rest of the world is not likely to follow, leaving a disorganized landmass surrounded by governments that can finance and coordinate a military. It’s simply not practical to maintain the rights of citizens this way.
According to Andrew, it will ultimately [00:33:00] degenerate into feudalism, where a series of elites controls the rest of civilization. Rothbard stuff seems kind of fringy, right?
Andrew Koppelman: But Rothbard is enormously influential, you know, when the Libertarian Party forms in the early 1970s, the Libertarian Party forms because people have less respect for government than they had in the past, largely owing to the Vietnam War, and Rothbard first becomes a prominent public intellectual in the 1970s.
These are the central ideas that the party organizes around.
Chris Staron: Though there is still disagreement in the Libertarian Party. Not everyone is pro Rothbard.
Andrew Koppelman: Some of them believe in an absolutely minimal state, and some of them believe in no government at all. And they remain divided on that question. The other ways in which Murray Rothbard influenced contemporary thinking is, for anybody who took a political [00:34:00] philosophy class in college, you may have read Robert Nozick’s book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Nozick was a protege of Rothbard. Rothbard. Anarchy, State, and Utopia imagines Rothbard’s state of nature and tries to figure out how a state could legitimately emerge from Rothbard’s system of mutual protective associations and he ends up concluding that you would end up with a minimal state, but nothing more than a minimal state that protected persons and property.
Chris Staron: Even Rothbard’s students, like Nozick, don’t agree on his work. There is a lot at play here. Before we get too deep into the legacy of Murray Rothbard, Let’s return one more time to my road trip with my friends. To see how his ideas would play out in our Oasis scenario. Together, Andrew and I are going to walk you through what Rothbard would argue.
Andrew Koppelman: So, you’ll recall I began with the crude libertarian story based on a reading of Locke that everybody’s just got a right in the state of nature to appropriate property. [00:35:00] It’s an absolute right. Doesn’t depend on whether there’s as much and as good left for others. Back
Chris Staron: at Henry’s Fork, we’re looking at this ice cold water.
Murray Rothbard would argue that you guys coming out of that distant forest, you’re thirsty and you need some water. And I have a monopoly on the water.
Andrew Koppelman: It’s mine. If I decide that I am going to make it into a sacred shrine and not let anybody drink from it and only drink the bare minimum from it myself, I’ve got a right to it.
Chris Staron: And that could be by force. It could be with my own private, Army, keeping you out of my water. He would also say that you guys would respect my property rights so much that you’d be willing to die out there in the woods in order to respect my property boundaries.
Dave: Oh, wow.
Chris Staron: That’s pretty unreasonable. Yeah.
No, thank you. We live in a finite world, not an endless Garden of Eden. There’s only so much land, so much water, so much soil to go around, [00:36:00] which would eventually, under Rothbard, lead to monopolies, like my control over Henry’s Fork, and my three friends who desperately want a drink of water, would be out of luck.
Now he also has this idea that if we were to enter into a contract, About this water that you guys can have so much water, but maybe I don’t tell you that this water is contaminated with something he would argue that I would have the right to enter into contract fraud because buyer beware, a contract is something that you only agree to.
If you completely understand all of the elements. And if you guys sign up for something that is harmful for you, or it doesn’t work out, then you’re Buyer beware. Again, this is an extreme vision of libertarianism, but also an influential one, as we’ll see in just a few minutes. If I, I’ve got jugs of water that I’m gonna give you guys who are thirsty, and I know that that water is laced with mercury or, or some kind of [00:37:00] bacteria, you, it would be up to you guys to have done the research to know that that water was poisoned.
Nick Staron: Which is a pretty miserable way to live considering how many products and things you interact with in a day to assume that you had the knowledge of every manufacturing process of every little thing you consumed, forget it. Like, you know, every time you pulled up to a gas station to fill up your car, you’d have to know that that gas station was safe.
Chris Staron: Yeah, and the argument of, uh, that sort of extreme vision of libertarianism would, would say that, oh, the market will inform people. They’re, they’re, the word will get out that if a pharmaceutical company is selling drugs that will kill you, that as a society will come up with ways to know that that, that is poisonous medication and you shouldn’t buy it.
Nick Staron: Except there’s just so many things in this world that could kill you that everybody would just be wiped out by the time we all figured out what was doing it.
Chris Staron: In reality, we can’t always know what’s in a product. This goes back to the food purity movement at the beginning of the 20th century, where food manufacturers were putting sawdust in bread and formaldehyde or [00:38:00] chalk in milk to thin it out.
Somebody who really likes Rothbard would argue that word would get out about these bad practices and we’d simply stop buying their products. Eventually, we stopped buying them. They’ll go out of business. The problem is that that approach leaves a lot of people poisoned before we figure this stuff out, and we’d have to do it for every single product and manufacturer.
Andrew Koppelman: While under the English common law going back to the middle ages, this would have counted as fraud. And the courts would have voided this transaction because I defrauded you. For a libertarian, it’s a contract you entered into. You decided to enter into it. And so, all sorts of things that government now protects us from, workplace safety regulation and consumer product safety, really could be understood as different ways of policing fraud.
That when I buy the products, I don’t know that this particular toy was a choking hazard to my child. [00:39:00] Or in my workplace, I wasn’t, you know, the worker didn’t know that this workplace was dangerous in these various ways.
Chris Staron: Then, too bad! You should have known. This requires all people to be educated on a tremendous number of subjects and to have ready access to good, qualified expert advice about everything.
Not everyone is capable of getting that kind of expert opinion, or even has the time, but that kind of protection you. requires a government.
Andrew Koppelman: But the libertarians, at least the most extreme ones, like Murray Rothbard, want to rethink the role of government from the bottom up and end up with something quite minimal.
Chris Staron: Or in Rothbard’s case, non existent. But his followers might argue, That’s okay, because he has this theory of non aggression.
Andrew Koppelman: So in Locke, the primary commitment was people’s obligation to preserve themselves. Because God wants [00:40:00] us to preserve ourselves. Murray Rothbard’s primary idea As you can see, we’ve got an obligation not to aggress or disrespect one another’s persons and property.
He didn’t have a very good account for why we should have this, but he thought that there was this basic obligation to respect one another’s property. That’s why if somebody’s got the only Oasis in the desert and my family is dying of thirst, I still have an obligation to stay away from his Oasis to respect his property because that non aggression obligation, that obligation to respect his property overrides my obligation to my family.
It overrides everything. Absolutely everything and we can legitimately form mutual protective associations in order to protect ourselves. What we’ve got a right [00:41:00] to. So if the guy who owns the oasis in the desert Surrounds it with armed guards with machine guns He’s just doing what he’s got a right to do.
If I try to slip past The armed guards in order to get some water for my dying children. I am doing wrong I am aggressing against his property and he’s legitimately defending himself and And so If he catches me trying to take some of his water, he is entitled to whatever aggression is necessary in order to defend his person and property.
Chris Staron: Even with the principle of non aggression, you can see how this still kinda leads to aggression. But aggression that favors the property owner over those who might need that property. Sometimes when we talk about philosophy or economics, there are some of us who say, So what? Nobody’s actually going to do this.
It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s quite [00:42:00] another to enact that idea in the real world. Well, Rothbard has had significant influence with powerful people.
Andrew Koppelman: He persuaded a wealthy industrialist named Charles Koch to start a variety of libertarian organizations to promote libertarian ideas. It’s likely that we would not be talking about libertarianism today if Koch, who is not fabulously rich, had not spent millions and millions of dollars on institutions like the Cato Institute to promote libertarian ideas.
Chris Staron: Charles Koch, also known as one of the Koch brothers. The family will come up again in this episode, and in a few episodes, and then later this season. His money comes from oil. Fred Koch, his father, was a founding member of the conspiracy theory spreading group the John Birch Society, which we’ll cover in the next episode.
Where the left has its billionaires in the form of George Soros or Mark [00:43:00] Cuban, the far right has the Koch family. It makes sense that someone like Charles aligns with Rothbard. As a very wealthy man, he can afford the protection of a private police force. Not to mention, he would save a lot of dough if there was no tax on his money.
Though, as I’ve noted in a previous episode, the ultra wealthy don’t actually pay that much in tax in the first place. Among other things, Koch funds the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Enterprise Institute. He also has ties to Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy, which we’ll cover later this season, that ties evangelicalism to the far right.
Though he is not, as far as I can tell, a member, he did get an award from them. Koch is not the only Rothbardian. He’s just one example of a notable funder on the far right who aligns with his ideas. So far we’ve met John Locke, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard. All of them influential. In the [00:44:00] midst of all these dudes, we need to talk about a woman.
One who brought so many people around to libertarianism in the United States. In fact, you might already know her name, Ayn Rand. Her books, including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are massive. Not particularly well written, they’re ranty and steamy, and have achieved remarkable notoriety. Her books don’t fall in line with any of the guys we’ve already covered.
For starters, she’s not like Rothbard, in that she advocates for a government, Albeit a small one. Something limited to courts, police, and the military, but she was not okay with the social safety nets of Hayek. Ayn Rand grew up in Russia. She
Andrew Koppelman: lived through the Russian Revolution, and then she escaped from Russia in the 1920s.
What she saw. In the Russian Revolution and its aftermath was horrendous oppression and incompetence. And when she came to the United [00:45:00] States and she saw what Roosevelt was doing with the New Deal, she thought that she was seeing the same thing operating. And so she becomes more and more afraid that what the liberals are trying to do is going to bring us to Stalinist Russia.
And she never really gets over this. In the 1960 election, she says that if John F. Kennedy wins the presidency, there may never be an election again. So, you know, very silly stuff. And in her novels and then later in her prose writings, she advances the idea that it is only the wealthiest capitalists who produce wealth with their genius and all of the rest of us are dependent on them and government intervention that interferes with the activity of the capitalists is pure parasitism that tries to enslave the most [00:46:00] productive people for the benefit of the weak and useless.
Chris Staron: Atlas Shrug lifts up wealthy capitalists as the people who make the world work. And as Andrew said, it depicts others as trying to pull them down. Because if you’re not rich, you’re probably lazy. These books were all the rage in the GOP in the lead up to the 2020 election, despite Rand’s avid atheism.
Actually, that’s too soft a term. She really hated religion.
Andrew Koppelman: Among the libertarian writers, she sells more copies than anybody else.
Chris Staron: Atlas Shrugged has sold more than 10 million copies, and sales surge every few years. Rand’s influence on libertarian thought in the U. S. Almost can’t be overstated.
Andrew Koppelman: The capitalist vision, and the idea that unregulated capitalism is justice, is more starkly presented in Atlas Shrugged.
The idea that there are [00:47:00] The productive people. And on the other hand, there are the moochers and looters and parasites who want to use government to take away from the productive people.
Chris Staron: This is no small idea. And I’ve heard the same kind of fear a bunch over the years, even from Christians, that if you’re not rich, it must be because you’re lazy.
Speaking of how our ideas have bled over into the evangelical world, In 1991, the Library of Congress released the results of a survey asking Americans which books had the most influence on their lives. Number one was the Bible. Number two was Atlas Shrugged.
Libertarianism is not necessarily Republican or Democrat. And it’s certainly hard to call it biblical when you run it through the literal test of episode one. So, let’s just be honest, the Bible doesn’t advocate for [00:48:00] libertarianism. And for that matter, it also doesn’t advocate for socialism, capitalism, or communism.
So why talk about libertarianism in a season about evangelicals and the Republican Party? Because this philosophy continues to make inroads in both.
Andrew Koppelman: It has become predominant in the Republican Party because the Republican Party since the 1930s has been the opponent of big government, has been the party that is opposed to regulation and redistribution.
It is now somewhat in eclipse in the age of Trump. Shoving peaceful protesters into unmarked vans isn’t quite libertarian.
Chris Staron: As well as increased policing.
Andrew Koppelman: And high tariffs, which libertarians don’t like.
Chris Staron: Because Tariffs get in the way of free trade.
Andrew Koppelman: On the other hand, uh, Trump is quite opposed to regulation.
Trump proposes to dismantle modern [00:49:00] regulatory state, which libertarians want to do, about dismantling or revising Obamacare. The only programs that are out there to reduce the size of, which are politically possible to reduce, are programs that
Chris Staron: benefit the poorest people. That’s not to say that Republicans are the only ones influenced by libertarianism.
Democrats have been acting in Hayekian ways for decades. One
Andrew Koppelman: of Hayek’s ideas that I think became increasingly influential in the Democratic Party is the idea of the great thing about a free market economy. Is that there are gains from trade. It makes everybody richer. And so the party of Clinton and Obama was quite strongly in favor of free trade.
Clinton shepherded the North American free trade agreement because he thought it’s going to make Mexico richer. It’s going to make. [00:50:00]
Chris Staron: Something that was embraced at the time by Democrats and Republicans, though there were fights over how to prepare Americans for the loss of factory jobs that would go to Mexico.
That is just one way that Hayek’s free markets impacted recent history. Another.
Andrew Koppelman: I don’t think that anybody noticed, I didn’t even notice until I started closely reading Hayek, that the basic idea of Obamacare was devised by Friedrich Hayek in 1960. Hayek wrote a book called The Constitution of Liberty in 1960.
Hayek had taught at the London School of Economics for many years, and so he’s quite focused on developments in Britain. Britain had the National Health Service, where you had doctors on the government payroll, and if you get sick in Britain, you go to a doctor that’s on the government payroll. This is something the United States has in one niche of our economy.
The veterans department works [00:51:00] that way, and veterans hospitals work that way. But in general we rely on other means. Hayek said, again with reference to Britain, you really would provide health care better if you just gave people vouchers, if they couldn’t afford adequate health insurance themselves, to buy health insurance on the private market.
Now, of course, you would have to require the insurers to cover everybody, even people who were sick, and you’d have to subsidize for pre existing conditions. You’d have to require everybody to have health insurance, so that they didn’t wait until they were sick in order to buy insurance, because money has to be in the insurance pool.
Everything that I’ve just described is important. is, in fact, how Obamacare works.
Chris Staron: Again, a government program that was proposed by Democrats, following Hayek’s lead. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, wasn’t loved by some when it was proposed because it wasn’t fully funded health care. It was [00:52:00] also opposed by the Moroth Bardian crowd, including Charles Koch, for getting the government involved at all, or using taxes to subsidize it.
Which Rothbard would have seen as an act of aggression.
Andrew Koppelman: The libertarian objection to Obamacare, which was essentially that we were raising taxes in order to provide medical care for people who needed it, the taxes were being imposed on people who hadn’t done anything wrong and so that was wrong, is just a fundamental misunderstanding of Lockean social contract theory, which purportedly is the basis of libertarianism.
Chris Staron: Even though the program follows the plans of a libertarian, Hayek, not all Libertarians may be on board with it. That’s how wildly diverse Libertarian thought is. Bringing us back to Charles Koch, that wealthy oil magnate.
Andrew Koppelman: He organized the opposition to Obamacare largely by disseminating misinformation.
and misleading people about what [00:53:00] the consequences would be. Various libertarian tropes got used. This is distributing to the unworthy, this is distributing to the moochers, this is a government takeover of a big part of the economy. Koch was opposed to it because Koch is broadly Rothschildian. Bardian in his orientation, and he is opposed to any expansion of government at all.
And Obamacare was a massive new redistributive program. That’s fundamentally what it was doing. It was providing health care to people who the economy was not providing health care to. The other big political intervention of Charles Koch, with world historical implications, is his opposition to any government action at all to deal with climate change.
Chris Staron: From healthcare to the environment, libertarians may not agree. But the effect of the libertarians on [00:54:00] republicanism and on evangelicalism is everywhere. If you’re looking for it, from climate denial to fear about health care, worries about wearing an N95 mask if the government tells you to. In a future episode, I’ll demonstrate how people like Jerry Falwell quoted libertarian Milton Friedman in their books as if it was gospel.
Soon, we’ll also discuss two critical pieces of what drove some evangelicals to follow the Republican Party. No surprise, it has to do with taxes, In the 1970s and early 80s, evangelicals with large followings like Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Patton Robertson, and others pushed back against government involvement in the lives of Americans.
That would manifest in things like fighting the teaching of sex ed in public schools. They were also upset that the federal government would force integration of those schools instead of leaving the decision to parents. And when the Carter administration threatened to take away their tax exempt status, they revolted.
I guess you could say that they thought the Carter administration was using taxation as [00:55:00] aggression. Even if they didn’t have the words for it, and they did, judging by their writings, they justified their opposition to the government with libertarianism. Even as they hosted rallies about how they loved the United States, They spread fear about the U.
S. and what it would do to their families. As we covered last season, Christians at the turn of the 20th century were involved in creating a bigger government, one that restricted alcohol consumption, taught required curriculum in schools, honored workers rights, progressive taxes, and so on. Mandatory food purity, and much more.
But three quarters of the way through the century, they switched, wishing for a smaller government. Less taxation. Less involvement in the affairs of their children. They became more libertarian, vacillating between Hayek, Rothbard, and Rand. We’ll continue to see that. As the season continues.
Andrew Koppelman: As American politics has become more tribal, ideas [00:56:00] cluster together as part of the identity of a tribe that really have nothing to do with one another.
If you tell me what you think about abortion, I will tell you what you think of tax cuts. Ideas that have nothing at all to do with one another. You know, in the age of Trump, Christianity has become. Very strange. You see a variety of Christianity in the United States that basically is inclined to regard the Sermon on the Mount as the creed of wimps and losers.
And that is highly ideologically compatible. With an Ayn Rand vision of the world that sees the producers trying to fight off the moochers and looters.
Chris Staron: Bringing us back to where we started today with Matthew 25, where Jesus rewards those who gave a cup of water or clothes to the least of these and [00:57:00] punishes those who don’t.
Some evangelicals today take the Rothbardian approach. Protect your land. Get what’s yours. Or the Randian approach, where God rewards the winners and the less fortunate must be lazy. Some libertarians would argue that they’re okay with helping others. They just want the option to do it on their terms.
rather than have the government do it for them. And some go as far as saying that instead of the government being in charge of taking care of the least of these, it should be churches. Despite the reality that, according to maybe every ministry leader I’ve ever met, churches are generally overwhelmed as it is.
Regardless of the method, it’s worth noting that this warning is very clear in the Bible. If a thirsty person comes onto our property looking for water, Jesus clearly wants us to give him a drink. Not to send in our private police force or expect a thirsty person to die, rather than encroach on our property rights.
The Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of [00:58:00] Jesus are not the beliefs of losers. We call it that to our own detriment. Instead, these teachings are Christianity, they’re a huge part of loving the Lord and loving your neighbor. We’ll end on this big question. Is the Bible still number one in our hearts?
Or has Atlas Shrugged taken its place?
Special thanks to Andrew Koppelman. He was so well spoken and friendly and patient with me, even when we had technical difficulties. His book is Burning Down the House. I used several resources in researching this episode, and his was by far the easiest to read. If you’d like a more thorough exploration of the history of libertarianism, I recommend The Individualists, Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasai.
There is a lot [00:59:00] of content that I had to cut out of this episode. Patrons of the show can hear plenty more with Andrew and also the closing thoughts from my group of friends at Henry’s Fork. Visit trucepodcast. com slash donate for more information. Truce is listener supported and is a for profit company.
That is partially because I could not do episodes like this where I’m critiquing the ultra wealthy like Charles Koch if I relied on big donors. Instead, I want to run this show through small donors like you. who statistically likely wouldn’t benefit from a tax write off anyway. The vast majority of Americans don’t.
That way, if one person threatens to withdraw their contribution, they can’t hold me hostage. I want we the people to support this show. If you want to join us, visit trucepodcast. com slash donate. As always, I’m indebted to my friends who gave their voices for this episode, including Chris Sloan, Bob Stevenson, and Jackie Hart.
Truce is a production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again [01:00:00] soon. I’m Chris Starin, and this is Truce.