Remembering Brian Doherty (1968–2026)

Journalist and author Brian Doherty died last week at the age of 57. A longtime Reason magazine contributor and chronicler of the world of libertarian politics, Brian also served as the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow from 1999–2000. He had many friends at CEI over the years, and his work influenced and inspired many of us. He will be dearly missed.

Since Brian’s death last Friday, testimonials have been pouring in, especially from his friends and colleagues at Reason. Editors at large Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have both penned heartfelt remembrances. George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan also wrote a personal and moving tribute to his close friend, and Foundation for Economic Education editorial director Katrina Gulliver reflected on his career as well.

In his work for CEI so many years ago, he covered topics that were very much in line with the organization’s policy focus at the time: debunking the panic over agricultural pesticide use and critiquing their regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. He also wrote about how international aid agencies like the World Health Organization functioned more as jobs programs for their employees from wealthy countries than as tools for actually improving the lives of people in the developing world.

The article from those days most consistent with his later writing, though, was a review of Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Brian commented on the book’s history of the rise of standardized testing in college admissions, and the Scholastic Aptitude Test in particular. He notes that Lemann argued for more egalitarian access to professional success in American life, but questioned the author’s conventional definition of success:

[I]n The Big Test’s afterword, Lemann presents a policy prescription that implies that the Mandarin [i.e., elite education] path is the only viable way to a worthwhile and rewarding life: He wants everyone not simply to go to college but to graduate from college. That would be an enormous waste of the time and resources for many people who would prefer to be elsewhere. Nor would it even level the playing field of success that much: An overwhelming social consensus that everyone has to attend college would just make a bachelor’s degree as meaningless as an earlier social consensus has made a high school diploma. It wouldn’t stop social sorting; it would simply bump it up to a higher level.

This theme that “not everyone needs to go to college” and, more fundamentally, “not everyone wants or needs societal approval” would be repeated often in Brian’s later work. Brian was fascinated by people who didn’t chase conventional markers of success or popularity, the eccentrics and weirdoes who marched to their own beat. In Nick Gillespie’s obituary for Reason, he writes:

What I liked most about Brian was his abiding interest in things happening on the margins of American culture, politics, and thought, and his deep appreciation for the prodigious bounty that markets deliver reliably and without moralizing. I remember attending some sort of conservative gathering in Los Angeles with him in the mid-1990s. The speaker talked endlessly and in glowing terms about the ruthless efficiency of capitalism, how it rooted out unproductive workers and businesses with impunity and “punished them with the market!” On the way out of the talk, as valets pulled up our old, beat-up cars (mine a Toyota Tercel with 200,000 miles on it and a padlock on the trunk, his a decrepit Ford LTD station wagon he’d bought from Jacob Sullum), Brian mentioned to me that what he really liked about capitalism wasn’t the way it punished anyone but just how many free riders it enabled. He would marvel often at just how much stuff was available to so many of us, usually for historically lower and lower levels of actual work.

Brian and Nick were, of course, right. A capitalist economic system, contra endless socialist claims to the contrary, does not force everyone to work long hours and conform to the Protestant ethic of productivity and self-denial. If anything, the opposite is true. It is only in a large, diverse, and wealthy society that we are likely to get a rich assortment of eccentrics, artists, amateur philosophers, poets, loafers, obsessive proselytizers, and commune-founding hippies that have so enlivened American life. And, as the history of the early libertarian movement shows, it was often only the fringe characters who were willing to pour their lives and reputations into what seemed at the time like a dead-end cause. You have to be a little crazy to want to fight the accumulated power of the state.

One man who did have a few academic credentials but also shunned conventional wisdom was CEI’s founder and longtime president, Fred L. Smith, Jr. Brian generously included Fred’s story and perspective in his impressive and thorough 2007 book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. He recounted how Fred was radicalized while working as part of the first generation of analysts at the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s, seeing from the inside both the megalomania and dysfunctional processes behind big-government policymaking.

He also described Fred’s view that arguing for less government control and more freedom could only be successful if it was done on a moral and emotional level. Expecting ordinary Americans to care about achieving an additional 0.7 percent of GDP per year was a losing argument, unless you also convinced them that a freer world could also be fair, clean, healthy, and safe for their children. Brian includes Fred’s perspective about “rational ignorance” – why most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about and researching politics – with one of his favorite sayings: “People aren’t stupid because they’re stupid. They’re stupid because they’re smart.” And Fred usually continued, “And if we try to make them smart, then we’re being stupid.”

Brian wrote other books similar to Radicals for Capitalism, including Modern Libertarianism, Gun Control on Trial, and Ron Paul’s rEVOLution. True to his love of the outsider and the fringe experience, he also wrote This Is Burning Man and the book with the amusing endless subtitle Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix.

Brian was a true modern intellectual, equally at home exploring the academic roots of the classical liberal tradition and the 2^nd Amendment to the Constitution as he was writing about free love and smutty comic books. Like Thomas Jefferson’s famous adage that “There is no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer” in the context of lawmaking, so Brian’s career demonstrates that there is no topic to which free citizens might not have occasion to refer in their own private pursuits and lives. Nothing should be off-limits. He was a free thinker in the finest tradition of fearless self-education. All of us who knew him and read his work are better, smarter people for having done so.