1.

  The most important figure in the secessionist alliance was Murray Rothbard. Born in the Bronx in 1926, he came up through the world of neoliberal think tanks, becoming a member of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1950s.4 Throughout his career, he developed a particularly radical version of libertarianism known as anarcho-capitalism. He had no tolerance for government of any kind, seeing states as “organized banditry” and taxation as “theft on a gigantic, and unchecked, scale.”5 In his ideal world, government would be eliminated altogether. Security, utilities, infrastructure, health care: all would be bought through the market with no safety net for those unable to pay. Contracts would replace constitutions, and people would cease to be citizens of any place, only clients of a range of service providers. These would be anti-republics, private ownership and exchange displacing any trace of popular sovereignty.

  How to arrive at such an extreme destination? Although the idea of national self-determination was the basis of the modern state system he wanted to escape, he thought a radicalization of national self-determination might provide the means of exit. Accelerating the principle of secession would spark a chain reaction of disintegration. Most new polities would not be anarcho-capitalist, but the process of breakup would strip the state of its most precious asset—its impression of permanence. Creating new flags and new countries eroded the legitimacy of old ones and chipped away at their self-serving mythologies. If new territories avoided being crushed by the vengeful central government, they would take on different shapes and forms. What if some opted for his preferred mode of statelessness? “The more states the world is fragmented into,” Rothbard wrote, “the less power any one state can build up.” It was a first principle for him that secession movements should be celebrated and supported “wherever and however they may arise.”6 Crack-up was the flywheel of human progress.

  Rothbard’s life was marked by a search for signs of potential secession—fractures in the edifice of public faith in existing states. When he found them, he did his best to deepen them. In the 1960s, he saw promise in the New Left’s opposition to the Vietnam War.7 Rothbard hated the war too. He saw America’s self-appointed role of global policeman as a pretext for centralizing state power and expanding the cronyism, waste, and inefficiency of the military-industrial complex.8 A tax-funded standing army with a monopoly on modern weaponry was anathema to his principles, and conscription was “mass enslavement.”9 Although Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism was rejected by the socialist New Left, he wondered if their opposition to some actions of the state might be converted into hatred of the state as such. Taken seriously, wouldn’t “dropping out” translate into exit? In a journal that Rothbard helped launch called Left & Right, he propagated secession as revolutionary praxis. Radicals should not seize the state but get out—and make new polities of their own.

  As fuel for secession, Rothbard saw nationalism as a positive force. Separatist movements, from Scotland to Croatia to Biafra, were built on a common sense of group belonging in a nation or an ethnicity.10 In the United States, he was especially interested in the potential of Black nationalism. He admired those in the Black freedom struggle who aimed for communal self-help and collective self-defense and endorsed Malcolm X’s call for separatism over Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for restraint and nonviolence.11 Rothbard and his collaborators believed that Black secession from the United States was achievable; indeed, communities should respect the principle of racial separation.12 He became frustrated by the cross-racial collaboration of white and Black radicals. Blacks should work with Blacks, he thought, just as it was “the responsibility of whites to build the white movement.”13

  The deviation of the New Left from his preferred script of racial exit turned Rothbard violently against it by the early 1970s. Their dogged egalitarianism was an affront to his belief in the biologically hardwired hierarchy of talent and ability in both individuals and groups.14 He condemned affirmative action and quotas for underrepresented groups, comparing them to a British dystopian novel called Facial Justice, in which the state dictates medical operations to ensure that “all girls’ faces are equally pretty.”15 What was needed, he thought, was a countermovement—a revolt against human equality. After helping found the Cato Institute with Charles Koch in 1976, he aided with the launch of a new think tank in the Deep South in 1982: the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics in Auburn, Alabama, named after Hayek’s mentor, the Austrian economist whose seminars Rothbard had attended in New York from 1949 to 1959.16

  Although Mises was no anarcho-capitalist himself, the institute which took his name became the flagship think tank for the most radical strain of libertarianism. Its distance from the Beltway signified its rejection of the politics of lobbying used by more mainstream groups like Cato and the Heritage Foundation. Instead, it pushed more politically marginal positions like the virtues of secession, the need for a return to the gold standard, and opposition to racial integration. Its director was Rothbard’s kindred spirit and closest partner, Llewellyn “Lew” Rockwell Jr., both a radical libertarian and an advocate of racial separatism ever since his first position at the conservative publisher Arlington House (named, with little subtlety, after the last residence of Confederate general Robert E. Lee). As an editor, Rockwell commissioned books on the disastrous effects of desegregation and the betrayal of white politics in southern Africa, published alongside David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom and panic-mongering bestsellers like How to Profit from the Coming Devaluation.17 One book Rockwell pitched to an author was called Integration: The Dream that Failed; his personal opinion was that the only option was a “de facto segregation for the majority of both races.”18

  Like Rothbard, Rockwell combined extreme laissez-faire politics with a fixation on race. In 1986, he began editing the investment newsletter of the politician and coin dealer Ron Paul, which trafficked in similar themes.19 The newsletters were lucrative—subscriptions brought in close to $1 million a year in revenue.20 A kind of IKEA catalog for the coming race war, the newsletter—which changed its name to the Ron Paul Survival Report in 1992—riffed on current events and listed books and services on how to bury your belongings, convert your wealth into gold or stash it overseas, turn your home into a fortress, and defend your family.21 “Be prepared,” it read. “If you live anywhere near a big city with a substantial black population, both husband and wife need a gun and training in it.”22

  South Africa appeared as a cautionary tale, with articles lamenting its “dewhiteization” and advocating cantonization.23 If Palestinians could have a “homeland,” the newsletter asked, why couldn’t white South Africans?24 The Survival Report presented a vision of universal racial separatism. “Integration has not produced love and brotherhood anyplace,” it proclaimed. “People prefer their own.”25 The “disappearing white majority” meant that the United States was becoming South Africa in slow motion. Whites were “not replacing themselves,” and minority groups were capturing state resources.26 The solution proposed was an old one. “The Old South had it exactly right: secession means liberty,” the Survival Report stated in 1994.27

  Not coincidentally, the newsletters’ themes echoed the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which the duo began publishing in 1990.28 (The publication was later renamed Triple R; when Paul returned to Washington, his readers were given free subscriptions.) Rockwell called the ideology he and Rothbard were developing “paleo-libertarianism.”29 The prefix signaled their belief that libertarianism needed to be “deloused” of the libertine trends of the 1960s in favor of conservative values. The paleo-libertarians hoped to “hive off” the “hippies, druggies, and militantly anti-Christian atheists” of the broader libertarian movement to defend Judeo-Christian traditions and Western culture and restore the focus on the family, church, and community as both protection against the state and the building blocks of a coming stateless society.30

  Paleo-libertarians wished for a capitalist anarchist future but they did not foresee an amorphous mass of atomized individuals. Rather, people would be nested in collectives scaling upward from the heterosexual nuclear family in what Edmund Burke called, in an often-repeated quote, the “little platoons we belong to in society.” It was taken for granted that these little platoons would divide according to race. “Wishing to associate with members of one’s own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse,” Rockwell wrote. “There is nothing wrong with blacks preferring the ‘black thing.’ But paleolibertarians would say the same about whites preferring the ‘white thing’ or Asians the ‘Asian thing.’”31

  The revival of secession at the end of the Cold War looked to paleo-libertarians like a prime opening for a new political geography. “This is what it must have been like living through the French Revolution,” Rothbard wrote. “History usually proceeds at a glacial pace … And then, wham!”32 Of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rothbard remarked that it was “a particularly wonderful thing to see unfolding before our very eyes, the death of a state.”33 By this he meant, of course, both a specific state but also, optimistically, the death of states altogether. Secession was the means; anarcho-capitalist society was the end. Paleo-libertarians hoped they could keep the dissolution rolling back across the Atlantic. Rothbard’s rhetoric was severe. “We shall break the clock of social democracy,” he wrote. “We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state.… We shall repeal the twentieth century.”34

  Paleo-libertarians saw their task as preparing for the day after the collapse. Looking at the fate of the USSR, they asked compelling questions: What would happen in their own country if the regime crumbled overnight? How could collective life continue to function? The thought was not unpleasant. It offered the tantalizing prospect of sweeping away decades of quixotic state intervention, leaving a blank slate. Rockwell fantasized about a self-administered shock therapy, privatizing air, land, and water; selling off highways and airports; ending welfare; returning the dollar to gold; and letting the poor fend for themselves.35 Yet paleo-libertarians also recognized they would need some way to construct a new order out of the wreckage at ground zero. They found common ground with the Far Right in the need for tradition and civilizational values to bind collectives together. Both groups embraced explicitly racial consciousness, a move that banished them to the margins of mainstream opinion but offering a space for collaboration.

  Rothbard brokered an alliance with a Far Right group based out of the Rockford Institute in Illinois who called themselves “paleoconservatives.” Both sides of the “paleo alliance” felt it was time to stop denying the reality of cultural and racial difference, and redesign political entities to reflect basic facts of psychology and biology. They both scorned the programs of the “warfare-welfare state.” Overseas military interventions, civil rights legislation, and federal antipoverty efforts were merely make-work programs for shiftless bureaucrats and platforms for parasitical politicians.

  The paleo alliance held their first meeting in Dallas in 1990. The plains around Dallas and the veld of South Africa were not so different. Both places were crucibles of enduring myths. Both saw waves of white settlement and the nineteenth-century conversion of communally owned territory inhabited by indigenous people into individually owned properties. South Africa had Voortrekkers pushing into the interior; Texas had wagon trains that made their way from the West to the waters of the Gulf. A residue of stories remained in the wake of both migrations: about the malleability of political geography, white hands drawing value from supposed wasteland, and the need for racial solidarity against a darker-skinned existential enemy. Settler ideology united people half a world apart. Rothbard gave a special status to the pioneer and the settler, whom he saw as the ultimate libertarian actor—“the first user and transformer” of territory.36 He placed the ownership of “virgin land” seized and made valuable by labor at the core of “the new libertarian creed.”37 To the objection that settlers never found land truly empty of humans, Rothbard had a rebuttal. North America’s indigenous people, even if they did have a right to the land they cultivated under natural law, had lost this right through their failure to hold it as individuals. Indigenous people, he claimed, “lived under a collectivistic regime.”38 Because they were proto-communists, their claim to the land was moot.

  The new group was called the John Randolph Club, named after a slaveholder whose catchphrase was “I love liberty, I hate equality.”39 It was a who’s who of the Far Right.40 A founding member was Jared Taylor, whose white nationalist journal American Renaissance protested the ongoing “dispossession” of whites by non-whites.41 Another was Peter Brimelow, the most prominent opponent of non-white immigration, whose book Alien Nation brought an “explicitly white supremacist position” back into mainstream discussions.42 Others included the columnist Samuel Francis, who called on Caucasians to reassert “identity” and “solidarity” through “a racial consciousness as whites,”43 and the journalist and politician Pat Buchanan, whose nativist tirades against non-white immigration presaged the rhetoric of Donald Trump.44

  Rather than indigenous self-determination, the John Randolph Club championed the demand of autonomy for white Southerners, better known as the neo-Confederate movement. And it was these enthusiasts for the Old South who most directly brought the global spirit of secession into US politics. The neo-Confederates attempted to make their case by constructing a wobbly body of research claiming that Southerners were ethnically distinct from Northerners, comprising migrants from Wales, Ireland, and Scotland rather than England.45 The so-called Celtic South Thesis, based in large part on a 1988 book called Cracker Culture, was full of obvious holes—not to mention the small problem of the history of slavery and its demographic legacy—but it sufficed as a makeshift translation of parallel developments across the Atlantic. The neo-Confederates were explicitly inspired by European examples. Their main organization, the Southern League (later League of the South), took its name from the Lega Nord, a right-wing political party that sought to separate northern Italy from the rest of the country. The Southern League’s “New Dixie Manifesto,” published in the Washington Post, called for exit from the “multicultural, continental empire” of the United States and the creation of a Commonwealth of Southern States.46 Their website included a page on “homelands,” with web links to secessionists ranging from southern Sudan and Okinawa to Flanders and South Tirol. “Independence. If it sounds good in Lithuania, it’ll play great in Dixie!” the site read.47 The page also linked to a party that would eventually spark the successful departure of Great Britain from the European Union: the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

  While the neo-Confederates were not anarcho-capitalists for the most part, Rothbard endorsed the need “to preserve and cherish the right of secession, the right of different regions, groups, or ethnic nationalities to get the blazes out of the larger entity; to set up their own independent nation.”48 He also held a revisionist interpretation of the Civil War. He compared the Union cause to the adventurist foreign policy of the United States in the 1990s: America roved the world looking for monsters to slay in the name of democracy and human rights, a perverse campaign whose outcome was death and destruction rather than any of the stated aims. “The tragedy of the southern defeat in the Civil War,” he wrote, was that it “buried the very thought of secession in this country from that time forward. But might does not make right, and the cause of secession may rise again.”49

  At the inaugural meeting of the paleo alliance, Rothbard explained that their vision united around the twin ideas of social conservatism and exit from the larger state. In a world without central government, the shapes of new communities would be determined by “neighborhood-contracts” between property owners.50 Elsewhere, he called these entities, which closely resembled Neal Stephenson’s idea of the phyle, “nations by consent.”51 Disintegrate and segregate was the program, installing homogeneity as the basis of the polity.52 Merely stopping new immigration would not suffice. The “Old American republic” of 1776 had been swamped and overwhelmed by “Europeans, and then Africans, non-Spanish Latin Americans and Asians.” Because the United States was “no longer one nation,” he wrote, “we had better start giving serious thought to national separation.”53 They might start small, claiming only a portion of the national territory. “We must dare to think the unthinkable,” he said, “before we can succeed at any of our noble and far-reaching goals.”54 If he had his way, the wonderful death of the state would come to America too.

  2.

  We often speak of secessionist and Far Right movements such as the neo-Confederates in purely political or cultural terms, as symptoms of a sometimes pathologized fixation on ethnicity that crowds out all economic concerns. But this is wrong. We should also think of the radical politics of the 1990s in terms of capitalism. Rothbard and Rockwell’s own reasoning began with economics. As adherents of the gold standard, abandoned by the United States in the 1970s, they felt that the fiat money system was doomed to a coming period of hyperinflation. Breaking up large states was a way to get out ahead of the pending monetary meltdown and create smaller states more able to reorganize after the crash. Ron Paul spoke of his conviction that change would come “with a calamity and with a bang.” “Eventually the state disintegrates under the conditions we have today,” he said, comparing the United States to the Soviet Union. He described his daydream of a Republic of Texas with “no income tax and a sound currency and a thriving metropolis.”55