Libertarianism

Remembering Brian Doherty, Chronicler of and Participant in Wild and Wonderful Subcultures

The Radicals for Capitalism and This Is Burning Man author was more than an observer of the movements he wrote about.

Nick Gillespie | 3.16.2026 7:30 AM

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(Brian Doherty/Reason)

Jesus, how do you write an obit of someone you hired? It is with a heavy heart but many, many fond memories and intense gratitude that I write about my colleague Brian Doherty, found dead unexpectedly on Friday at the age of 57. I joined Reason in the fall of 1993. He was hired later in 1994 and then left the staff for a while around the end of the decade. When I became editor in chief of the magazine and website in 2000, he was the first person I called. Come back, I said, Reason needs you.

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.

He delighted in the contradictions of right-wingers who were secretly socialist and lefties who were secretly capitalist. As he wrote in "Rage On: The Strange Politics of Millionaire Rock Stars" (2000):

Comrades in the struggle to overthrow "late capitalism" include Chumbawamba, a collective of British anarchists who hit major pop stardom with their rousing 1997 sing-along drinking anthem "Tubthumping." Chumba (as their fans call the group) declares on its Web site that it wants "to destroy the moral code that says you can only have what you can afford to pay for." And it wants a social order where........

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