While thick libertarianism is correct in many of its core insights, such as the view that libertarianism requires a wider cultural foundation or should be connected to values beyond simple anti-statism itself, thick libertarianism also fails on certain levels to adopt the values and priorities necessary for a successful effort at combating the state in a modern liberal-democratic / state-capitalist / totalitarian humanist society. Rather, thick libertarianism in its present form would likely suffer the same fate as the New Left of the 1960s, eventually becoming incorporated into the wider framework of state-capitalism and American imperialism in exchange for ruling class recognition of its social and cultural agenda (which at present differs very little from American and other Western cultural and intellectual elites). The causes of anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, counterculturalism, multiculturalism and environmentalism have advanced considerably over the past four decades. Yet the state has grown ever more expansive, expensive, intrusive and totalitarian. The police state in particular has experienced an explosive growth rate. The corporatist economy has tightened its grip considerably and the position of the poor and working class is on a downward spiral. Under the doctrines of global hegemony, preventative war, the war on terrorism, the global democratic revolution and military humanism, the state currently displays a more brazen commitment to militarism and aggressive warfare than ever before. Clearly, an ascendant cultural leftism has been powerless to prevent such occurrences. Members of demographic groups favored by the Left have proven to be just as corrupt, tyrannical, venal or incompetent once given political power as any of their straight white male predecessors.
What might be some thick values, while irrelevant to the coercive authority of the state per se, that might be helpful as part of a broader foundation for combating actually existing states of the kind found in the contemporary First World?
A defense of the sovereignty of particular nations against imperialism, multi-national nation-states, and international quasi-governmental bodies.
A defense of the sovereignty of local communities and regional cultures against the power of overarching central governments.
Ethno-pluralism or the view that each unique ethnic group should have a territory where it is a demographic majority and with a political system representative of its cultural foundations. The Swiss canton system may well be the most advanced model of this type of any system currently in practice.
The view that cultural differences are best dealt with according to the principles of individual liberty, voluntary association, pluralism and peaceful co-existence where possible, yet where this is not possible localism, decentralism, secessionism, separatism and mutual self-segregation are likely the most preferable alternatives.
A distinction between natural or voluntary hierarchies and authorities, and coercive or artificial ones.
Recognition of the iron law of oligarchy, or the view that elites are inevitable, and an emphasis on meritocracy, as opposed to simply tearing down all authorities, institutions, and organizations, thereby creating a power vacuum that allows the worst to get to the top.
Recognition of the legitimacy of Otherness, and an understanding that true tolerance is not simply tolerating people one likes, but tolerating those whom one finds personally repulsive. Just as toleration of the Other is not synonymous with approval or agreement, so does tolerance of one’s self by the Other not grant the right to demand approval.
Recognition of the inherent inequality of persons, groups, cultures, nations, etc. and that effort to impose artificial or unnatural equality can only result in tyranny, chaos or stagnation.
Adherence to what traditionalist Catholics call the subsidiarity principle, meaning that problems are best dealt with on a decentralized basis by those closest to them, rather than on the basis of abstract solutions imposed from above.
Application of the insights of modern social psychology, which indicates that most people are herd creatures, and inevitably get their sense of right and wrong not from any innate sense of conscience or a rational evaluation of available facts, but according to cues taken from leaders, peers and perceived sources of cultural authority.
Recognition of the value of intermediary institutions, such as families, communities, voluntary associations, independent business and labor organizations, charities, philanthropies, private schools and universities, cultural organizations, and even private citizens’ militias as a bulwark against the all-encompassing authoritarian presence of the state, and the need to defend the sovereignty and legitimacy of such institutions.
Recognition of Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What I have outlined here is certainly not conservatism, at least not as understood in conventional American political terminology. Such an outlook would have no interest in maintaining the American empire and would regard right-wing jingoists of the kind common to afternoon talk-radio with contempt. It would give no support to upholding the interests of the state-capitalist big business elites and would dismiss the religious right as know-nothing ignoramuses operating as stooges for the right-wing of big capital and the Israel Lobby. Nor would it have the cops walk on water mentality common to law and order conservatives or the hysterical Puritanism concerning issues like sex and drugs common to some social conservatives. This movement would share conventional conservatism’s interest in reducing government taxing and spending, but in a radically different way from that championed by the mainstream Republican Party-oriented Right. Instead, a comprehensive libertarianism of the kind being suggested would pursue the goal of reducing or eliminating government intervention into the economy in a way that is compatible with the interests of those classes previously identified as the vanguard of the struggle.
Nor would this movement constitute leftism as conventionally understood. Instead, this new radicalism would regard government taxation, regulation and redistribution with suspicion, and apply the insights of such thinkers as Gabriel Kolko that the regulatory welfare state is a means of eliminating smaller competitors to big capital, co-opting labor and pacifying the poor. It would not share the Cultural Marxism of the Left, which regards virtually the whole history of Western civilization as one big racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, colonialist conspiracy, but would instead recognize that it is indeed the heritage of liberal Western civilization, rooted in the intellectual culture of the classical Greco-Roman civilization of antiquity that found its renewal in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and its political expression in English liberalism and the American Revolution, that provides us with the very cultural foundation necessary to make libertarianism possible. 28 Nor would it champion liberal or Marxist universalism, instead recognizing that libertarianism and its wider civilization foundations are uniquely Western in origin, and while other cultures and civilizations may have overlapping traditions of their own, there is no need for us to export our ways into their societies, nor theirs into ours. Consequently, the foreign policy outlook of this kind of libertarian movement would seek to neither maintain foreign nations as client states nor impose Western standards of democracy or human rights on other cultures. Let the residents of Asia, Africa and Latin America do as they wish so long as they don’t bother us (and, in return, we won’t bother them). 29
No discussion of libertarian politics can be complete without some mention of practical strategic considerations as well as abstract, theoretical ones. If it is the state and its emanations that are to be attacked, and if it is the center-left and the corresponding system of totalitarian humanism that forms the ideological superstructure of the actually existing state, then it follows that the foundation of a viable anti-state movement in the future will be rooted in the populist right, radical middle, extreme left, and the lumpenproletariat as all of these are outside the totalitarian humanist paradigm and under attack in one way or another by the state. The next step will be to splinter and neutralize the center-left by splitting its
constituent groups along cultural, economic, class and ideological lines of the kind previously mentioned. Beyond that, there is the need for a healthy balance between populism and elitism. Until recently, the mainstream Right managed to advance itself politically with appeals to nationalism, economic conservatism and cultural populism. 30 If this is no longer viable, and it appears that it may not be, then the logical alternative would be economic populism (the people verses big government and big business), cultural libertarianism (a leave me alone coalition) and a Jeffersonian version of decentralist patriotism with emphasis on local and regional sovereignty and identities within the context of the American revolutionary tradition.
Libertarians should aspire to be the elite leadership corps of a larger, broad-based populist movement that encourages the development of local sovereignty and secession movements in opposition to the central government and the empire. Given that the majority of the U.S. population lives in approximately one hundred large metropolitan areas, a class-based radicalism would essentially pit the urban poor and working classes and their natural allies (the so-called red state rubes, the lower to lower middle classes from the rural areas and smaller towns) against the urban liberal-bourgeoisie elite who staff and maintain the managerial bureaucracy on behalf of the plutocracy. The political arrangements likely to emerge from the victory of such a radical movement would involve a kind of cultural separatism. Culturally conservative rural communities, small towns, red states and elsewhere would be free to separate themselves from the perceived ills of liberal society as would socially conservative urban racial minorities, Muslims and others who might also have their own separatist enclaves. Yet independent metropolitan city-states would likely remain as cosmopolitan in nature as they are now, perhaps more so, as the expulsion of the state and the overthrow of the plutocracy should bring with it greatly expanded economic opportunities with urban areas becoming even greater centers of trade and cultural exchange than they are now. Minus the overarching authority of the federal government or the influence of socially conservative or religiously fundamentalist rural counties and small towns, urban centers could begin to experiment with many of the radically anti-authoritarian ideas favored by libertarians and decentralists, such as drug decriminalization, citizen militias, common law courts, restitution-based penal systems, the abolition of compulsory education, a free-market in health care (including alternative health care and prescription medicines), expanded rights of self-defense, non-state social services, alternative media, the elimination of zoning ordinances, the repeal of the drinking age and other victimless crime laws, urban farming and so on.
From where have the greatest acts of resistance to the state emerged in the last twenty years? One of these was certainly the so-called L.A. riots of 1992, a massive rebellion that was misguided in many ways, but rooted in resistance to police brutality. 31 Another was the militia movement of the 1990s, which emerged in response to the federal massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Still another was the Battle of Seattle of 1999 pitting a wide assortment of lumpen elements against the police in protest against the plutocracy. More recently, there was the Ron Paul campaign with its libertarian, populist and antiwar themes. It is efforts such as these that provide the models and foundations for a revolutionary anti-state movement on which libertarians should build.
* * *
1 Charles Johnson, Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, The Freeman, July/August, 2008.
2 Roderick Long, Anarchy Plus, Austro-Athenian Empire, November 17, 2004.
3 Johnson, Libertarianism, The Freeman.
4 Bob Black, The Libertarian As Conservative, Address to the Eris Society, Aspen, Colorado, August, 1984.
5 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, (Princeton University Press, 1996).
6 Charles Johnson, Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty, The Freeman, December, 2007; Roderick Long, Corporations Versus The Market; Or, Whip Conflation Now, CATO Unbound, November 10, 2008.
7 Keith Preston, Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy, (Libertarian Alliance, 2008).
8 Keith Preston, Anarchism or Anarcho-Social Democracy, (American Revolutionary Vanguard, 2001).
9 Keith Preston, Conservatism Is Not Enough: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Anti-State Left, (American Revolutionary Vanguard, 2001). Archived at http://attackthesystem.com/conservatism-is-not-enough-reclaiming-the-legacy-of-the-anti-state-left/; Why I Am Not a Cultural Conservative, (American Revolutionary Vanguard, 2002).
10 Johnson, Libertarianism, The Freeman; Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
11 Murray N. Rothbard, Buckley Revealed, The Commonweal, January 25, 1952; Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manque, Modern Age, 1981.
12 Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, Second Edition (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008).
13 Alexander Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion. Archived at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/berkman/kronstadt/berkkron.html; Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State. Archived at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/marxnfree.html; Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years1868-1936, (AK Press, 2001); Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936,After Fifty Years: The Spanish Civil War. Archived at http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bookchin/sp001642/fifty.html
14 Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, (Fox and Wilkes, 1997).
15 Dennis Kimbro, Creating the Millionaire Mind, The Black Collegian. Archived at http://www.black-collegian.com/issues/Gradissue07/millionaire_0607.htm
16 Linda Chavez, Glass Ceiling is a Myth: Reality is Women Make Different Choices, Milwaukee Sentinel, March 25, 1995.
17 Justin Raimondo, Civil Rights for Gays? Free Market, Vol. 14 No. 1, Mises Institute, January 1996.
18 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
19 Bob Black, Feminism as Fascism, 1983. Archived at http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/feminism.html
20 Justin Raimondo, Gay Victimology and the Gay Kulturkampf, Anti-State.Com, May 19, 2001. Archived at http://www.anti-state.com/raimondo/raimondo1.html
21 Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale, (Perigee, 1982).
22 Elana Schor, Big Three U.S. Car Firms Unlikely to Get Bailout, The Guardian, November 17, 2008.
23 Bruce Bawer, Anatomy of Surrender, City Journal, Vol. 18 No. 2, Spring 2008.
24 Hans Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, (Transaction Publishers, 2001)
25 John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority, (Scribner, 2004).
26 Keith Preston, The New Totalitarianism, LewRockwell.Com, January 22, 2007. Archived at http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/preston1.html
27 Keith Preston, Liberty and Populism: Building An Effective Resistance Movement for North America, (American Revolutionary Vanguard, 2006). Archived at http://attackthesystem.com/liberty-and-populism-building-an-effective-resistance-movement-for-north-america/
28 William S. Lind, The Origins of Political Correctness, Accuracy in Academia. Archived at http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html
29 Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism, (Common Courage Press, 2002).
30 Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendency: How the GOP Right Made Political History, (Harvard University Press, 2007).
31 Anonymous, The Rebellion in Los Angeles: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising, 1992. Archived at http://attackthesystem.com/the-rebellion-in-los-angeles-the-context-of-a-proletarian-uprising/
5
The Myth of the Rule of Law and the Future of Repression
Richard Spencer’s article, “Obama’s Enabling Act.” raises some interesting questions regarding the significance of the recent
ly passed National Defense Authorization Act, and its probable impact, that I believe merit further discussion. The editorial issued on December 17 by the editors of Taki’s Magazine, “The Government v. Everyone,” represents fairly well the shared consensus of critics of the NDAA whose ranks include conservative constitutionalists and left-wing civil libertarians alike. While I share the opposition to the Act voiced by these critics, I also believe that Richard is correct to point out the questionable presumptions regarding legal and constitutional theory and alarmist rhetoric that have dominated the critics’ arguments.
Wholesale abrogation of core provisions of the U.S. Constitution is hardly rare in American history. The literature of leftist or libertarian historians of American politics is filled with references to the Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln’s assumption of dictatorial powers during the Civil War, the repression of the labor movement during WWI, the internment of the Japanese during WW2 and so forth. Mainstream liberal critics of these aspects of American history will lament the manner by which America supposedly strays so frequently from her high-minded ideals, whereas more radical leftist critics will insist such episodes illustrate what a rotten society America always was right from the beginning.
Meanwhile, conservatives will lament how the noble, almost god-like efforts of the revered “Founding Fathers” have been perverted and destroyed by subsequent generations of evil or misguided liberals, socialists, atheists, or whomever, thereby plunging the nation into the present dark era of big government and moral decadence. These systems of political mythology notwithstanding, a more realist-driven analysis of the history of the actual practice of American statecraft might conclude that such instances of the state stepping outside of its own proclaimed ideals or breaking its own rules transpire because, well, that’s what states do.
The Tyranny of the Politically Correct Page 6