Ideas

No really, what is right-libertarianism?

A frustrating thing about left-libertarians is that they have the same affection for “direct action” as your average Tyranny Response Teamster, but generally not working within political parties, finding things like the tea party distasteful and/or vaguely bigoted. As opposed to, say, shooting back at the police in Ferguson, as someone suggested on Facebook the other day, which is presumably part of the groovy anarcho-revolutionary struggle.

I mention this in the context of the latest exercise in semantic trench warfare (one of many) over at the SFL blog. It seems to me there is a significant contradiction between approvingly quoting the line, “our aim is not to overthrow the state, but to ignore it” and “radical labor activism” and copwatching. At the very least, adopting the left-wing label and tactics evinces a certain solidarity with politics that have never not been about power.

On a conceptual level, if you think you’re going to convince your fellow members of the black bloc to adopt agorism after they seize it, you’re gonna have a bad time. In reality, your comrades are far more likely to get recruited into the Democratic Party, which remains friendly to revolutionary socialism. Leaving the left-libertarian with … what, exactly?

Mr. Gourdie could have saved himself the four paragraphs by just pointing this out, because it shows their lack of seriousness vis-a-vis actually seizing power (not the virtues of right-libertarianism’s “big-tent approach” — you’ll never out-welcome the left), and appended an excerpt of Murray Rothbard’s “Break the Clock” speech:

[T]he Hayekian trickle-down model overlooks a crucial point: that, and I hate to break this to you, intellectuals, academics, and the media are not all motivated by truth alone. As we have seen, the intellectual classes may be part of the solution, but also they are a big part of the problem. For, as we have seen, the intellectuals are part of the ruling class, and their economic interests, as well as their interests in prestige, power and admiration, are wrapped up in the present welfare/warfare-state system.

Therefore, in addition to converting intellectuals to the cause, the proper course for the right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.

Another alternative right-wing strategy is that commonly pursued by many libertarian or conservative think tanks: that of quiet persuasion, not in the groves of academe, but in Washington, D.C., in the corridors of power. This has been called the “Fabian” strategy, with think tanks issuing reports calling for a two percent cut in a tax here, or a tiny drop in a regulation there. The supporters of this strategy often point to the success of the Fabian Society, which, by its detailed empirical researches, gently pushed the British state into a gradual accretion of socialist power.

The flaw here, however, is that what works to increase state power does not work in reverse. For the Fabians were gently nudging the ruling elite precisely in the direction they wanted to travel anyway. Nudging the other way would go strongly against the state’s grain, and the result is far more likely to be the state’s co-opting and Fabianizing the think tankers themselves rather than the other way around. This sort of strategy may, of course, be personally very pleasant for the think tankers, and may be profitable in cushy jobs and contracts from the government. But that is precisely the problem.

It is important to realize that the establishment doesn’t want excitement in politics, it wants the masses to continue to be lulled to sleep. It wants kinder, gentler; it wants the measured, judicious, mushy tone, and content, of a James Reston, a David Broder, or a Washington Week in Review. It doesn’t want a Pat Buchanan, not only for the excitement and hard edge of his content, but also for his similar tone and style.

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Adaptationism: A better architectural analogy for Jeffrey Tucker’s brutalists

The conversation surrounding Jeffrey Tucker’s Freeman article “Against Libertarian Brutalism” resurfaced once again recently, this time from Wendy McElroy in a piece entitled “Relationship of Politics to Morality.”

In Tucker’s article, published back in March, he divides libertarians into two main groups: humanitarians and brutalists — good people and bad people. Humanitarians “seek the well-being of the human person and the flourishing of society in all its complexity” whereas brutalists are “rooted in the pure theory of the rights of individuals to live their values whatever they may be.” If we were to go off of these descriptions alone, Tucker’s dichotomy would be merely laughable since benevolent and rights-based justifications for liberty are hardly mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, he takes the distinction a step further by attaching opposing moral and aesthetic visions to the two invented camps, with far more troubling implications.

Tucker pinpoints the supposed tension between the two groups by explaining that humanitarians stress the “beauty, complexity, service to others, community, the gradual emergence of cultural norms, and the spontaneous development of extended orders of commercial and private relationships” that develops in a free society while brutalists advocate for liberty because it “allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on ‘politically incorrect’ standards, to hate to their heart’s content so long as no violence is used…to be openly racist and sexist.”

He uses the label “brutalist” to identify this nefarious cabal of (unnamed!) libertarians because of the parallels he draws between their supposedly uncivilized ideological underpinnings and the brutalist architectural style of the 1950s through the 1970s which, according to Tucker, emphasized “large concrete structures unrefined by concerns over style and grace.” Brutalists, says Tucker, “valued inelegance, a lack of pretense, and the raw practicality of the building’s use” because they “reject beauty on principle.”

If it seems odd to you that he characterizes those with reactionary views with a modern architectural style, you’re already overthinking it. This taxonomy is more about making a break with views Tucker was formerly associated with and would now like to distance himself from. It’s entirely a matter of marketing. Those who acknowledge the question of scale are brutalists; to say a libertarian order necessarily permits a certain amount of evil to exist rather than tolerate the power required to eradicate it is now a suspect idea — the cardinal sin of a humanitarian libertarian is suggesting things may not work out in the end. In contrast, Tucker’s brave new humanitarian world is a cornucopia of blog posts about structural oppression and hosannas to the conveniences of consumer culture. Surely you can’t be against that!

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Trotsky was a rockist

“Boredom is just a slumber one can be roused from”

A piece of mine was published in The American Interest yesterday, in which I play the Tory anarchist music critic, reviewing Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!:

If you’ve ever seen the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train(1989), you’ve witnessed the whole of pop music criticism in microcosm, in the form of two Japanese tourists spending a night in Memphis while on a pilgrimage devoted to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Mitsuko shows her boyfriend the “important discoveries” in her notebook, pictures of the Statue of Liberty and Madonna; like a parody of the stuffy, tenured Americanist and his archetypes, they all look like Elvis. In another scene they share a cigarette and Jun interrupts her musing about the King by declaring Carl Perkins better.

At the risk of vindicating one side or the other by comparison, the dynamic in this lovers’ quarrel is exactly the same in the contemporary version of this debate: the endless conversation between “rockists” and ”poptimists,” between deriders and defenders of commercial pop music. The latter lines up neatly with a modern culture at war with the notion of guilt or shame of any kind, even that incurred by something as small as a love of the lowbrow—a culture that encourages pride in philistinism. The former consists of people who suggest things like, “if you feel so guilty about it, maybe there’s a good reason.” Not for lack of honest critics trying to kill it, this dichotomy refuses to die, and as of April is still the subject of NPR features. As ever, it’s less about any particular artist than a proxy fight over opposing cultural and ideological commitments.

In a certain sense, the opposite of poptimism is what Trotsky called, the “protest against reality.” Elvis is still the model here, though where his various later iterations fall—like Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury, or Chris Isaak, who I’m sure are all in Mitsuko’s scrapbook and are well-covered by Stanley—is, I suppose, a matter of debate. And on down, too; Stanley identifies psychedelic music as the moment pop became about something other than dancing, or acid house, or punk as a class protest. One could make the case that all of them were “protests against reality” to some extent.

The trouble is that protests against reality have never been very difficult to sell, as Adorno and Horkheimer discovered six years after Trotsky wrote that. And today, now that economic conditions have caused the industry itself to register a sort of protest against reality—by advocating intellectual property regimes that would harm privacy and probably just wouldn’t work, among other things—we appear to have run into some serious confusion.

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kolbe nazis

Being good is not political

Some, like Christopher Hitchens, hold Mother Teresa to be an icon of trite, consumer-ready humanitarianism. This is probably true, at least on some level. My disagreement is with what I perceive as political about this view; a distaste for elevating Mother Teresa above any given saint is because the sentimental modernity that is apparently inherent to the narrative of Mother Teresa. This doesn’t mean that her life of selfless love is less inspiring or worthy of honoring. The modern media’s infatuation is not the exaltation of maudlin sentimentality, but the sigh of a spiritually thirsty creature in the spiritual desert that we inhabit.

Seventy-three years ago today, a friar named Maximilian Kolbe died from a lethal injection in Auschwitz concentration camp as a result of taking the place of a husband and father who was condemned to death. Like Mother Teresa, he led a life of poverty and service to his fellow man. After becoming a political prisoner due to broadcasting opposition to Nazi atrocities via radio, he was taken to Auschwitz concentration camp. The escape of another prisoners came to the attention of camp authorities, and the punishment was to select ten men to be starved to death in a small bunker. When one men selected made it clear that he had a wife and kids that needed him, Maximilian offered to be killed in his place. The purpose of the punishment, destroy the spirit and dignity of those condemned, was defied. When the nine others had expired from starvation, Maximilian remained, and was given the fatal carbolic acid injection. This is a moment when uncompromising peace stood toe-to-toe with uncompromising violence and managed a Pyrrhic victory, which is pretty damn impressive considering the match history between the two.

What political alignment can fit the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s life of and death? I don’t think that’s a meaningful question. Doing the right thing is a personal impetus, and any political element can only pollute it. So whether you’re a socialist, libertarian, feminist, nationalist, or anything else, the indomitable spirit of peace and love that we remember in this man is a message that transcends such divisions. The universal appeal doesn’t cheapen it, it speaks to the message’s peculiarly human truth.

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Families and time preferences: Should a libertarian society be childfree and polyamorous?

Usually when libertarians talk about marriage, it’s about how the government shouldn’t be involved. When we talk about children, we debate whether or not we can sell them. Rarely do we ever talk about the role of the family in a free society. The US is experiencing a huge decline in the nuclear family, and with it, some very clear economic costs. Fewer people are getting married and the ones who do are waiting longer to take the leap. The average number of children per family is down to .9 from 1.3 in 1970, causing some people to refer to our current period as the “baby bust.” In the face of these statistics and the popularity of social experimentation among young libertarians, it is essential to take another look at the role of the nuclear family in relation to both the well-being of society and the individual.

At first glance, it’s easy to look at these statistics and sing the praises of human progress and individualism. In his article, Capitalism and the Family, Steve Horwitz argues it was capitalism that pulled women out of the household and into the workforce, while simultaneously reducing the demand for child labor. In other words, the birth rate declined and women were able to focus on building their careers before getting married.

While I admire independent women (and men, for that matter) and respect a couple’s personal decision to have fewer or no children, I think my generation is going to experience a huge amount of non-buyer’s remorse for choosing the #singlelyfe or the increasingly popular DINK life. To be clear, I think that less child labor and more working women is likely a good thing; I just think that the pendulum may have swung too far to the other side in an attempt to rebel against the “shackles” of traditionalism.

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Ideology will set you free

PUT. THE GLASSES. ON. PUT 'EM ON.

PUT. THE GLASSES. ON. PUT ‘EM ON!

Ideology is not a system of thought that puts a distorting filter on our thinking. The common western vision of communism is that of miserable factory workers kept under watch by uniformed members of the omnipresent party. Anybody who makes the mistake of engaging in free thought is taken away to the even worse gulag. This is only what communism is from our naive, democratic, capitalistic perspective. When we put the glasses on, we can see what’s really going on. Those workers aren’t miserable, they are heroically building communism. Political officers aren’t there to oppress, but to make sure that the revolution which liberated those workers stays in place forever. And the gulags? Those are for quarantining the infection of bourgeois ideology, and perhaps we can even ‘force the glasses’ onto the incarcerated — if they are lucky. Ideology is what illuminates a dark and backwards world, and everything in this world is readily explainable by it.

A great example of the utility of the glasses is to decode the meaning of things that even we ourselves do not know we mean. Our true meaning must be decoded using the assumptions of the ideology. When I say that I want to marry a woman of a different race, the Nazidecoder glasses reveal that I actually want to destroy civilization. When I say I want to start a business, the communist decoder sees right through me — I truly just want to exploit the proletariat. By “employers shouldn’t be compelled to provide any specific benefits to their employees,” I obviously mean “I want to declare a war against women.” Compare Nazism to moderate nationalism, Communism to socialism, and radical feminism to moderate feminism. More than their positions on a spectrum, they are separated by the more radical versions adhering to ideology – they need the glasses. And where would we be without the help of the glasses? The decoder’s outputs are, of course, non-falsifiable assertions. This leaves us with curious ideas: rationalism is not enough. Rationalism is actually an enemy that obstructs the truth and enslaves us to the invisible order we are spontaneously embedded in. Democracy is not enough. Democracy is acceptable as long as the populace is willing to see the light. The webcomic Sinfest is the perfect demonstration of ideology not only to the ideologues that happen to agree with it, but to us benighted pawns as well.

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