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.
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 nothing happens without everyone—everyone!—agreeing to it. Folk-rocker Ani DiFranco is best known for refusing to be part of a "corporate" machine, saying that the record business is "dehumanizing and exploitative, not much different from any other big business." Thus, refusing to work on Maggie's Farm no more, she operates her own corporate machine, Righteous Babe Records (and pockets far more per record as a result).
Then there's Patti Smith, the over-the-hill punk poetess who once wowed Madison Square Garden audiences with songs about adolescent alienation and all-night sex. Smith includes a 10-minute-plus tribute to Ho Chi Minh and a snappy pop tune against the World Trade Organization on her latest album, Gung Ho.
The point wasn't (simply) to mock hypocrisy, it was to underscore how a world of free minds and free markets pretty much made everybody better off, even those who were sworn to its destruction. Nobody loved the great god of Rock Music more than Brian, even as he realized some of his favorite performers would be among the first to call for people like him to lined up against a wall when the revolution finally came.
Despite having been a professional libertarian (before Reason, he worked at the Cato Institute), he spent much of his time hanging with creative types like the folks at the Cacophony Society, for whom anything resembling partisan politics was just not that interesting. It's not an accident that he wrote one of first serious book-length treatments of Burning Man, which he started attending soon after moving to California in 1994. He rightly saw Burning Man as a delirious and beautiful experiment in living that could have sprung almost fully formed from the brow of Robert Nozick, who philosophized about a "utopia of utopias."
Except, of course, that utopias are never fully formed; they are constantly works in progress. Published in 2004, This Is Burning Man began life as a Reason cover story commissioned by my predecessor, Virginia Postrel. In "Burning Man Grows Up," Brian explained that as the annual festival got bigger and bigger, it had to develop the sort of rules and regulations and restrictions that many of its participants hated in the 9-to-5 world. And it had to do so while simultaneously dealing with more and more hassles from local, state, and federal governments. Some attendees worried that growth might come at the expense of the radical freedom of Burning Man's early days, turning the ultimate escape from everyday working life into a temporary borough of San Francisco's burgeoning tech sector. Silicon Valley was going through its own transformation, from a conscious repudiation of IBM and Xerox and older, more buttoned-down workplaces into a new form of corporate hierarchy and conformity.
Brian's taste for the ragged and extreme edges of the known universe also shaped his interest in the libertarian movement, including its odd and dark corners. It powered his history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, and his coverage of the Ron Paul Revolution too. For my tastes, he was too forgiving at times of the racists and reactionaries adjacent to the libertarian world, but he felt his job was to catalog and map that whole part of the world, not to judge its inhabitants. Alone among chroniclers of Ron Paul's amazingly successful run in the 2008 election cycle, Brian distilled what made the former Texas congressman so popular, especially among newcomers to politics:
One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Kids have gathered, not just from Iowa but from Wisconsin and Nebraska, in classic hop-in-the-van college road trips, to hear a 72-year-old gynecologist talk about monetary policy.
He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn't want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message. First: "I don't want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn't know how to do it, I don't have the authority under the Constitution, and I don't have the moral right." Second: "I don't want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society." And third: "I don't want to run the world….We don't need to be imposing ourselves around the world."
It seemed as if such a libertarian sensibility was about to sweep the Republican Party, if not the country at large, and it remains dizzying that just six years later, Donald Trump not only won the GOP nomination but the White House promising almost the exact opposite of what Ron Paul used to pack college auditoriums.
Trump's win in 2016, then Biden's in 2020, then Trump's return weighed heavily on Brian, as did the rise of populism across the political spectrum. One of the ways he dealt with it was by writing what I would argue is his most fun book, Dirty Pictures, a history of the underground comics world that yielded characters such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman. The subtitle, which he complained was too long, was a litany of various types of contributors to that industry:
The last time I saw Brian in the flesh was last June, in the Southern California desert where he ended up buying a house. He had developed a number of health problems over the years, his once-black hair had turned mostly gray, and he walked with a cane. FreedomFest was in Palm Springs, and a friend bought some tickets for a place nearby called The Integratron, which kind of looks like a planetarium—a bizarre, beautiful, and totally random structure in the middle of nowhere. Built in the late 1950s by a guy named George Van Tassel, who claimed to have been contacted by visitors from Venus who gave him detailed instructions, the structure's purpose is not fully understood but it's now a spot where sound baths and yoga classes are held. To get to the space for the sound bath, we had to climb a steep ladder that presented some difficulties for Brian. But once we made it up, we stretched out on our backs in the large wood-paneled dome room and looked up at the sky through a round skylight.
The sound bath started, with weird ohms and ahs echoing all around us, calling out to the Venusians floating up there far above the 100-degree heat of the desert. At one point, I peeked over at Brian, whose eyes were closed. He had a half-smile on his face and he let out a long, slow breath, a sigh that somehow became a laugh at some private joke.
He was at home at the Integratron and I hope his last sigh ended in a laugh at the absurdity of the way his life ended. And I hope he is at home somewhere in the universe, knowing that his words and life will reverberate for a long to come among all of us lucky enough to have known him and read his work.
