Politics

What the Latin American left could learn from Ron Paul?

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Ron Paul is clearly one of the most influential politicians in America. His presidential campaigns popularized libertarianism in a way no one had  before. Libertarians overseas know him, and a lot of them had a genuine appreciation, but people outside the United States who are not libertarians don’t know him. The foreign media probably doesn’t have a clue why a Republican Party presidential candidate is against war and supports drug legalization.

I’m a Peruvian who came to politics from the radical left but after getting familiar with libertarianism, I think there are a lot of things that the Latin America left could learn from Ron Paul.

Ending the War on Drugs is the most obvious libertarian idea that the left should embrace. Prohibition of drugs was part of an imperialist policy that generated the corruption of Latin American governments and had caused the boom of large narco guerrillas which endanger the civil population mostly in Mexico and Central America but also in Peru and Colombia.

The drug legalization argument could be based on the idea of individual responsibility and freedom of choose, conservatives would sound like hypocrites if they attack these policy on that grounds.

Oppose corporate free trade deals. That’s a position that the left wings in most countries oppose, but Chile, now governed by the Socialist Party, supporting TPP shows that there are exceptions. Even in countries where there is a right-wing government the left should use the argument that free trade deals are just corporate protectionism and have nothing to do with free markets. What could be reaction of conservatives in a parliament if a left-wing congressman argue against free trade while mentioning Ron Paul and the works of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute on the matter? The conservatives would not only look like hypocrites but also ignorant if they continue to support that policy.

Show respect for civil liberties. The Latin American left had a bad experience in the past with coup d’états promote by the United States but I hardly believe that the protests of indigenous people in Bolivia or Ecuador are a product of imperialism. The right of free speech and free assembly should be consider fundamental for any left-wing government.

Stand for anti-imperialism. Imperialism is not a myth of the left but a real policy of global expansion of influence by the United States. Quoting a conservative congressman from United States would made clear that imperialism is not creation of the left but a reality.

Closing U.S. military bases in the region should be a priority, and reducing military spending. The nationalism of Latin American armies is dangerous. A lot of corrupt military leaders had participated in coup d’états in the region. Giving more money and power to them is not a good idea.

While maybe some readers could had been surprised at beginning of the text, there are several policies proposed by Ron Paul that the Latin American left could embrace. In the American context, Ron Paul is to the left of Barack Obama. Ron Paul had spoken that despite not agreeing with the policies of Venezuela, he doesn’t think that sanctions have done any good. Ron Paul has been saying that United States shouldn’t intervene in Latin America and that the embargo toward Cuba must end. He has some fans in the region — probably not part of left — but maybe Latin American radicals could learn something from the Ron Paul revolution.

Why is a libertarian Nobel Prize winner in favor of free college?

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Mario Vargas Llosa’s politics are confusing for a lot of people, in Peru some called him a neoliberal and in United States some think he is conservative, but the fact is that he calls himself liberal and he explains that he is classical liberal, not a Keynesian. The Peruvian Literature Nobel Prize winner is a supporter of democracy, free markets, abortion and gay rights.

He sounds like a serious libertarian, but he supports a policy few libertarians would support — free college. How to explain his support for a policy that socialists like Bernie Sanders have embraced? Well, he is man of his own and even criticize libertarians for focusing more on economics than culture. Libertarian bating sites like Salon usually promote the idea that libertarians are only white male readers of Ayn Rand but I wonder that social democrat writers would think of libertarians supporting free college.

Mario Vargas Llosa studied Literature in National University of San Marcos, the most ancient university in the Americas. In Peru, public universities are completely free. Mario Vargas Llosa had spoken that his alma mater was where he convinced himself to be writer and spoken about the fundamental role of the public education in the development of the country. I attended to the same alma mater that Mario Vargas Llosa, I studied Philosophy there and I know that most students and even professors define themselves as leftists. There are not many people there who define themselves as libertarians but a funny anecdote was when social democratic professor of social science propose to privatize the university. So who was the libertarian and the social democrat in that case?

I think that people are more than political labels, independent thinking is always needed. The libertarian icon Karl Hess used to make fun of libertarians who defined themselves as Hayekians or Misesians, saying they were in same trap of Marxists who called themselves Stalinists or Trotskyists. Karl Hess, like Mario Vargas Llosa thought that politics was more than a devotion to a certain political philosopher or only economics but the product of one’s own experience and culture. Mario Vargas Llosa novels might not be as resolutely pro-free market as some libertarians would like, but the fact is that with his diverse visions of liberty, the Peruvian writer teaches a valuable lesson to supporters and critics of libertarianism, a real free individual is one who can think on his own, not someone who repeats like a parrot the things written in a book of economics.

What’s behind the #cuckservative phenomenon? A reply to Ace

Thanks to assists by Eric Erickson, HotAir, the Daily Beast, the New Republic, Buzzfeed, and the Washington Post, the term cuckservative is probably here to stay:

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The hashtag shows a steadier increase:

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A week after Eric Erickson first tweeted about it, twice as many people per day were using the word. The question now — the eternal question — is whether this mainstream media-driven neologism is racist. Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos doesn’t think it is inherently so, but if you check Twitter, it’s hard to come away with any other conclusion. This Twitter mob seems to have greatly unsettled Ace, who isn’t sure where they all came from. Most of the social media confrontations involving the term have been with the conservative online community, which has been the quickest and strongest to denounce the term and, though often skeptical of identity politics in the mainstream media, they have pretty much universally — except Ann Coulter, basically — deemed cuckservative racist.

If the popularity of ‘cuckservative’ does indeed indicate a growing tsunami of white nationalism, perhaps one ought to consult survivors from the last town the tsunami leveled. Which, believe it or not, is the dreaded neoreaction. That’s not too surprising when you think about it — there’s only so much room on the dissident right, and neoreaction was started by a Jewish guy; its most popular exponent is a post-Marxist philosopher living in Shanghai. A few months ago, several bloggers who identified with the movement disappeared from the public Internet, in some cases citing rising amounts of abuse from these people. Whether these neoreactionaries continue to discourse in secret is a matter of speculation, but they do occasionally raise periscopes. Here is one:

I almost liked Ace’s post, but I couldn’t quite get there. There was a critical amount of causal depth missing that I’m pretty sure Ace already agrees with, based on his other and more recent writings, and which he chose to omit for — I’m guessing — prudential reasons. The necessity of which is really the heart of the problem, isn’t it? I’m surprised he didn’t focus more on the related simultaneous phenomena of Trump’s sudden popularity amongst a base that feels unrepresented and betrayed with no alternative.

Specifically, he says this ‘came out of nowhere,’ and also at some other points in his post, makes as if it’s some kind of weird and ugly surprise to him.  “Whoa, who are these ‘fringe’ wackos? Who knew there were so many of them, or that their heads weren’t permanently kept down! Where do these guys comes from?!”

But I don’t think that’s really true at all. And I suspect he joined me in long thinking a development of this sort was all but inevitable given recent trends in the evolution of progressive rhetoric and tactics and of course their steadily escalating fanaticism, aggressiveness, and, alas, effectiveness.

The truth is #cuckservative, for all its ugliness and unnecessary extra derogatory baggage, seems to have touched  a very raw nerve and resonated with people in a way that is revealing of many things (some quite nasty and unreflective of my own views). But one of those revelations is that what remains of the mainstream movement is being painted into a shrinking corner where it is impossible to complain politely about one’s bad circumstances, and so it is inevitable that one’s impolite fringe would be the only ones left to take up the banner.

Let me lay out my thinking a little on this. See, to my mind, this is all a little rich coming from Ace. Yeah, I can sympathize with his need to preserve his marketability and a robust reputation for respectability, but again, that’s the problem. When’s the last time Ace linked to Sailer? Maetenloch did it during the whole UVA rape-date thing, once, and that’s the last I can remember. Not a lot of dissident-right linkage over there in general, but, in my view, Sailer is a special case. Sailer is of course radioactive, but not because he’s crude, uncivil, unprofessional, vulgar, unhinged, or anything. Only because he is a thought-criminal who is obsessed with telling the most important hatefacts that explain what is really happening to our world, and are the most significant overlooked factors with major implications for the wisdom of various policies, because no one else will.  But what does it mean to scrupulously avoid any possible guilt-by-association with the most professional presentation of hatefacts possible?

I mean, even Sailer is trying not to touch this stuff with a ten-foot pole or associate with it. He’s got a pretty good sense for staying consistently classy and above the level of dirty partisanship and emotional name-calling. But if what Sailer does write stands for anything, it is the fact that every single major issue of our day is absolutely dripping with the pretty lies of The Narrative that can only be addressed by mentioning and noticing patterns of human non-equality, each of which that the left has now successfully placed beyond the pale of acceptable civil discourse.

So Ace spends every single day chronicling two related phenomena. In his own way of presentation, these are:

  1. The crazy, evil, delusional, and mendaciously defamatory way that megaphone-holding progressives frame reality as if every problem in the world — real or fabricated — is at root the fault of George Washington Archetypes. And, as a corollary, how all their ‘solutions’ are thus unjust penalties and oppressions against people who resemble that Archetype.
  2. The absolute and catastrophic failure of the Republican Party and conservative movement to slow down the progressive agenda, to stand up for clear principles, to fight every good fight with everything they have, or, really, to even do what their constituents want them to do, and vote how they’d like them to vote, most of the time. This has pissed him off so much lately that he’s actually sworn off being part of Team Republican and the conservative political movements, because it’s in such a shambolic travesty of a condition, and he just doesn’t have the heart to bite his tongue or spin the situation anymore, if for no other reason than it’s now obviously counterproductive.

Now, what is the tone over at Ace’s place in general? He’d probably dislike the characterization, but if the shoe fits, then he should wear it, and the answer is really “neoconservative.” I don’t mean that in the derogatory ‘NYC Jew entryist’ sense, but in the positive frame that a self-identified neoconservative would defend, their Americanist politics. That is, a ‘reconstructed right’ that declares that America is fundamentally a ‘propositional nation’ with a specific historical purpose to be a continuing experiment in human freedom, that its history of arising out of a particular people, history, and tradition is fortunate and praise-worthy, but at root, merely contingent and not essentially connected to any particular characteristics, and that it should be based on a dedication to a universalist creed of equality in rights, the project of which potentially any human anywhere can accept and join without real limitation regarding nationality or race, with perhaps the mild exception of having to fit into a secularized version of the the ‘Western, Judeo-Christian’ traditional set of values that underpin the commitment to essential liberty.

Ok, that’s a mouthful, but you get the point. Neoconservatism rejects ‘This is a Christian nation’ talk, in favor of their compatible set of civil virtues and values, and to the extent it can tolerate any racial realism, nevertheless insists on colorblindness as a principal virtue. It seems to me that to the extent Ace is a social conservative, he is a social neoconservative. To the extent he leans libertarian, he is a neoconservative libertarian. If you presented the Sailer Strategy to him in explicit terms — The Republicans can only win if they embrace being The White Party — they would recoil. Even if they accept the realities of the demographic disparities in affiliation to the right, they can’t quite believe it must always be thus. It’s too important to their self-image that their movement is not a crude, old-world one of naked self-interest of ethnic factions, but a universal ideal to which anyone from any origin should be equally recruitable.

And that’s not my problem with him at all really. It’s certainly arguable that, whatever its flaws, this ‘propositional nation’ stuff is perhaps the least-goofy, least-ineffective set of ideas that has had any success whatsoever is slowing the roll of the progressive agenda by being a relatively defensibly and attractive alternative pole, even if it was only for a limited time, and that anything else would have been worse. Ok, whatever.

The problem is that it’s no longer working. What the progressives have discovered over time is a near perfect refinement of the PC-oppression-framing of everything conservative constituents complain about. Everything possible is now racialized (or genderized, or whatever) to the nth possible degree. All roads lead immediately to crimestop, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Against this, a conservative ideology that pretends they can still play a game of idealizing colorblindness is worse than useless.

In the minds of these voters, conservative representative politics is supposed to serve as some kind of outlet for them to express their grievances and petition for relief that will support their interests. But what they are discovering — what Ace himself complains about every day — is that Republican politicians simply won’t do it. And so why won’t they do it?

Well, ‘internet folk-neoconservatism’ has a few half-answers, which is that “the donors make them sell out their principles and their base’s birthright for reasons of evil corporate greed,” or else “they are elites (i.e. near-progressives) who are only pretending to be conservatives, and only vote against the progressives when they absolutely have to or else it just doesn’t matter.”

Besides that there are also the pragmatic political concerns of doing what it takes to hold together a ‘big tent’ large enough to get majorities and be viable. But who controls the direction of the opinion of the public over whom you’d like to cast your big tent? And you can’t be ‘big tent’ and viable without being respectable, and you can’t be respectable if you’re being called racist or whatever-ist or whatever-phobe, and to the extent the progressives can leverage some statement, incident, or position to make that accusation such that enough people can be conned into believing it, you have little choice but to capitulate and give them what they want and avoid the matter altogether as a big loser of an issue for you.

And the effect, it seems to me, has been to push enough of the articulation of any legitimate basis for counter-progressive policies out of the Overton Window into taboo territory, which ends up completely silencing the high status and respectable elites who run and pay for the Party, and preemptively neutralizing any good those ideas could have had in terms of policy if only had it been possible to discuss them openly.

Immigration is the clear example, but you could use any of the manufactured progressive outrages of the past few years. Progressives want open borders because it will hand them a Brazilian one-party-state. Conservatives try to argue against it on pragmatic grounds. Progressives point, sputter, and scream, “Racist!” and conservative elites decide they simply have to avoid that because they can’t win that fight, but might as well make lemonade out of lemons and court the immigrant-labor-hiring donor class. So they start lining up to pass amnesty (or transparently merely pretend to fight against Obama’s executive amnesty), which is the opposite of what their base wants.

I could say the same for crime, for housing, for education, etc.

And Ace, what does he do in situations like there? He is appalled and angered of course, and he thinks it is horribly unfair and abusive for the progressives to accuse the conservatives of racism, but he doesn’t make the final leap and conclude, “It is the ability of the progressives to successfully win this issue by credibly threatening to accuse their opponents of racism in a way which will be believed enough, by enough people, that lies at the heart of this issue, and is the root cause of the awful, cowardly, and politically treasonous behavior I’m observing. So long as that works, and for every issue for which that works, well, we’re doomed.”

That’s why both Charles Murray and Robert Putnam, in writing books about cultural fragmentation and underclass behavior, are obliged to focus exclusively on white people!

He doesn’t seem to get there. Why not? I’m not sure exactly. Maybe he has actually and I missed it. After all, he posts a lot, and I don’t read them all. Or maybe he is on his way to figuring it out, or was on his way, before the radioactive white nationalist moron hater fringe make him “feel dirty” about sharing beliefs with that crowd and want to distance himself from them.

But also maybe he understands that this conclusion can only lead in two bad directions (1) Utter Despondency, or (2) A need to do whatever is necessary to take on the progressive structural advantage of crying-racist, which has lately grown to immense magnitude.

And (2), and the strategies that might exist under it, is a deeply troubling and ugly thought to contemplate for your standard internet quasi-neoconservative. Whose interests are your trying to defend, against what, and perpetrated in the name of what? Because progressives are dominant as the “party of non-whites,” conservative elites are stuck with a mostly white constituency who is begging for some relief from anti-white progressive policy, and the movement intellectuals have spend the last 20 years trying to beat around that bush and argue in terms of abstract ideas and human universals, and for whatever good that may have ever done in its time — that time is now over.

And so what I’m getting to is that it was simply inevitable that you would end up with a Republican Party and conservative movement machine that simply could not perform its basic function for its constituents, because the progressives have made those functions and the expression of the rational for them completely taboo. Since, with the exception of a few reckless or too-old-or-honorable-to-care types, most of these elites simply will not step outside the Overton Window, then it was likewise inevitable that a gap would grow and widen between the behavior and expressions of the politicians and their increasingly frustrated, angry, and alienated base.

This is like being a buyer in a real estate transactions, realizing the interest of your ‘agent’ isn’t quite aligned with your own, because your realtor is working on commission based on the final sale value, and so is more interested in talking to accepting the latest counteroffer instead of aggressively negotiating with the other side and helping you get the lowest price, but risking the possibility that the deal may go south and he’ll have to spend more time on your next attempt, but without any more compensation. At 3 percent commission, there are still plenty of decent realtors who care about their reputation to be honest buyer’s agents. But if that commission starts going up to 10, 20, or 50 percent, all of a sudden, every buyer is going to hate their realtor and the guaranteed betrayal of their interests, and want to spit when they hear their name. That’s what’s been happening with the Republicans. Ace spits constantly.

And so the question is what is a dejected ordinary right-leaning individual supposed to think about this whole problem of bad agents and bad agency and conspicuous public embrace of the progressive mantras that 90 percent of his own side’s voters despise? What is his explanation for why Republican and Conservative elites are so unable to speak plainly and clearly about the real troubles of the day, and seem to let the liars and defamers roll right over them?

And I just think that this state of affairs, the gap, the failed agency, the silenced neutralization, and above all the intense-identity-politics-basis and racialization of all political issues surrounding the current Big Government State, was just bound to find outlet and be expressed in some explicitly race-conscious manner as continued playing along with the racial equality delusion became too exhausting and self-destructive, and racial-equality-narrative-fatigue set in amongst the class of people that are most severely affected, least likely to defect to progressivism, most likely to feel intense frustration, and most willing to embrace risky or extreme subcultures. One can already guess without looking what the demographic profile of the #cuckservative retweeting population is.

Now, look, it would be nice if there were a polite and socially acceptable way to articulate this whole problem without being accused of racism oneself. If you were to somehow to strip the ugly, nasty, crude, and hateful connotations and meanings behind #cuckservative away, there would still be this problem of a need to have a way of naming and describing the consistent betrayal of the interest of one’s side that necessarily includes the cravenness of an agent selling out his principle in favor of staying in the good graces of the counterparty, and the consistent cowardice and inability to act or speak in defense of those interests because of a particular kind of crimestop that the adversary has been working overtime to apply to anything and everything.

So, if I were having a beer with Ace, I would ask him what exactly frustrated people in his big tent should call the elite politicians that he complains about daily for what is, in essence, the same forms of cowardice and betrayal, and which derive from the same causes? What is the essential nature of the criticism being levied? And I think it would be pretty clear that is had just become inescapable that the problem gets into the ‘icky’ territory again and again, that Ace and his kind would rather avoid for as long as possible — indeed, have avoided for as long as possible. And now it’s not possible. If the respectables can’t be the voice the movement, refuse to be in the face of overwhelming threats to their livelihoods, well then, the ugly mob will fill the vacuum from now on, and no one should be surprised that of course you aren’t going to like what they say and the way they say it.

And of course, the ultimate tragedy of all this is that it plays right into the progressives’ hands because it Dylann-Roofs the entire meta-dispute. By saying only neo-nazis could possibly fight their agenda, they make in inevitable that actual hipster-pretend-wanna-be-white-nationalists are the ones who become the face of The Lost Cause, which is just rocket fuel for the fire of progressives using that fact to smear and stamp out all the otherwise potentially respectable oppositions. And this is of course what Ace is complaining and rightly terrified about. And that’s forgivable and understandable. I mean, look what happened to the Confederate Flag and now that’s going to happen to things that were, until yesterday, just barely within the Overton Window too, which just makes things worse in Ace’s eyes. But again, what is the alternative if one isn’t willing to admit and take on the fundamental structural problem at play here?

And it just seems to me that Ace simply isn’t willing to do this, not if it means he can’t avoid associating himself with explicitly racially conscious people, which whites are not allowed to be. He wants a party that can be an anti-anti-white party, and least in most of its representative agenda, but without having to openly admit that’s what it is, and what it’s now principally about, and instead be able to hide behind the plausible cover of simply meritocratic justice and fairness and universal principle (i.e. the progressive pretense). He wants the Sailer Strategy’s end state, but not as an actual overly racially-conscious program, which is simply ideologically unpalatable for him.

And that requires people out there to bite their tongues about this stuff. But he has been a tongue-biter, and practically no one more or better than he has made the case (and recently!) that the progressives have made this completely impossible, and of the absolute futility and counter-productivity of right-wing tongue-biting that characterizes our current political stage and state of affairs. So, if he has another accurate term he’d like to use for people in his own tent to throw at the leadership that he despises and is descriptive of the character and true origin of their condemnatory behavior, then be my guest and offer one up as an alternative! I hope he figures it out quick, but, until then, #cuckservative.

The Mitrailleuse does not endorse these views, but we are committed to free, and respectful dialogue. At least, if lines have been crossed for airing views of this kind, we can be confident they are less odious than those given a hearing in the Washington Post.

Anarchy in Athens

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Greece had been in the news since its financial crisis began, then it return to news when the far left party Syriza won the elections. Syriza provoked mixed feelings, some American conservatives were supporters and some Greek anarchists were enemies. The government of Alexis Tsipras put Yanis Varoufakis in the key position of Minister of Finance. Varoufakis is a self-described libertarian Marxist and a Professor of Economics in the University of Athens. His works on game theory had made him known in the international academic community.

The mandate of Tsipras was twofold because it implied maintaining membership in European Union without implementing austerity measures. Both Tsipras and Varoufakis have tried to deal with the pressure from the Troika but there were some differences. After the referendum that was a victory for SYRIZA, Tsipras call that a victory for democracy but Varoufakis resigned. There were several speculations over what was the real reason for Varoufakis to resign, the most interesting is that the libertarian-Marxist had developed an emergency strategy that will use bitcoin as the Greek currency, which sound more an anarcho-capitalist idea to deal with the crisis. The SYRIZA government had generated discontent among its members because under the pressure of Germany and the Eurozone, it announced the austerity measures. Obviously, anarchists are telling I told you so.

Now even Bernie Sanders is talking about Greece and Ron Paul too. The radical left, the populist right and hardcore libertarians agree that the large international organizations like IMF or the World Bank that supposedly promote “free markets,” actually promote crony capitalism which is why the benefits of a corporate global hegemony mostly go to the rich and well connected. One could accuse these institutions of the problems in Greece but the question remains of what to do. As someone who studied philosophy as a major, I remember hearing a lot that the origin of democracy was in Greece. It was a land of great philosophers, writers, artists and athletes which bring democracy to Western Civilization. But one have to wonder by the realities of the present, when we say “democracy”, if we are speaking of the same Greeks.

Left-libertarian philosopher Roderick Long had a wonderful text about it called Libertarian Athens in which he argued that democracy in the Greek sense was a form of direct democracy closer to what the New Left called participatory democracy than to elections which is what most people thinks when we talk about democracy. The reason is that Athenian democracy wasn’t based in majority rule (electoral democracy) or minority rule (oligarchy) but in debate between free men of Athens. Direct democracy sometimes is called anarchism. In the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999, when there were people chanting “This what is what democracy looks like”, they were right. Democracy isn’t the oligarchy by the corporate and political elite that we see today.

aBack to Greece, when a lot people speak about the country going in an anarchist direction they confuse the chaos and the masked protesters with I think a much deeper concept of anarchy. Bitcoin despite not becoming the official Greek currency is popular in Greece, generally crypto-currencies are associated with anarchism and to a large extent, they are right this is some form of anarcho-capitalism. For another thing, there are now worker-controlled TV stations now, which is some form anarcho-communism. I wouldn’t be surprised if some workers of the collectivized TV use bitcoin because in the end, anarchism is more than capitalism or communism.

I’m not predicting an end of the Greek state, but I think in the long run not only Greece but several countries around the world where governments push authoritarian practices against is citizens will face a backlash. Crypto-currencies are one way, but also black markets, which for example are very popular in Latin America. Anarchism seem to me as a noble idea that could well represented by a teenage girl in High School in West Virginia protesting against the American foreign policy or a scholar in political science from Yale fighting his social democratic colleagues. If we think that the limits for a state in the concept of Aristotle should be the city, one have to wonder where is the legitimacy of the modern Greece. Maybe Greek anarchists need to start reading their own history with other eyes, maybe us too.

Jim Webb and #BlackLivesMatter

At first sight, Jim Webb doesn’t sound like the kind of candidate that could capture the Democratic nomination. He talks a lot about bringing disenfranchised poor whites from Appalachia into the Democratic Coalition, but for now the Democratic Party relies on a coalition of urban progressive whites and ethnic minorities. He was and still is in my opinion the biggest challenger of the status quo of American Politics, he is better than both Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders on foreign policy, but it should be said that he is a realist, not a non-interventionist, which could explain why he could sound a little hawkish with respect to Iran.

Webb was among the first to talk about criminal justice reform when he was in the Senate. There are reasons for that, most Democrats since McGovern until recently had been afraid to talk about the subject, since they were afraid to be portrayed as soft on crime, but someone like Webb who had an accomplished military record could take on these issues without being portraying as a hippie. But even with his background some advisors were afraid of Jim Webb pointing to issues like criminal justice reform in his campaign for the Senate back in 2006, now with the irruption of #BlackLivesMatter, things could be different

The problem of Jim Webb in today’s Democratic Party is not necessarily that the party has gone so far to the left. Obama opposed single-payer healthcare and supported trade deals like the TPP. The problem is that the left had become tribalist, the confrontation between Latinos and Afro-Americans over the California Democratic Senate nominee show us that very well. Jim Webb has strong record of talking about justice for minority communities, however I think he would be dismissed by #BlackLivesMatter for his cultural conservativism. This is a mistake. Both Jim Webb and conservatives like Rand Paul have been good on the issue of criminal justice reform, but liberals don’t like to give them credit.

People think that ethnic minority politicians should be the ones talking about these issues but the fact is that a lot of them have already endorsed the corporatist and militarist Hillary Clinton. I think that if Webb focused on those issues, minority Democrats and progressive whites could support him. I would never have imagine that a Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration could be better on those issues than a socialist like Bernie Sanders, but the fact is that political courage has characterized the political career of the former Senator. A soldier in his fight for justice started a crusade that for some had been seen as quixotic, now the entire country is talking about it.

Don’t forget Nietzsche’s right-wing readers
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Left to right: Friedrich Nietzsche, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Richard Posner.

One useful ideological function the Internet has performed has been to explode the idea that the American right is intellectually monolithic. Libertarians, paleoconservatives, traditionalist Catholics, foreign-policy realists, neoreactionaries, secessionists, and more have carved out online niches, either reinvigorating existing intellectual traditions or synthesizing new ones. As an editor and blogger, The Mitrailleuse’s own J. Arthur Bloom has done a great service in publicizing these often obscure corners of online political discourse; see his alt-right reading list here. I don’t consider myself a conservative, but my understanding of conservatism has been greatly enriched by many of these writers.

But an important American intellectual strand of the right seems to me to have been left out of this online profusion of non-mainstream views. Since I know of no better name for it, and because of the admiration for the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche common to its members, I’ll refer to this tradition as right-wing Nietzscheanism. It includes figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, and Richard Posner. (H.L. Mencken might also be a member, but he’s a somewhat more complicated case.) I’ll sum up the main right-wing Nietzschean theses to show what unifies these figures as an American tradition, then say why I think they are still worth considering.

Right-wing Nietzschean theses:

1. There are no eternal standards of justice, rationality, or truth. In an early and unpublished fragment, Nietzsche famously called truth an “army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” rather than anything fixed or absolute; he would later claim, in the Will to Power notebooks, that there are no facts, only interpretations. And in the Genealogy of Morals, he articulated the radical idea that moral values are historically situated and fluid. Holmes, referred to by Posner as the “American Nietzsche,” thought of truth as just whatever “I cannot help believing.” Like Hand, Posner is a skeptic who has bluntly argued “there is no truth ‘out there.’” Right-wing Nietzscheans believe value and truth are projected by us highly-evolved animals onto a bleak, valueless, materialistic universe. There is no God or even any eternal standards to guide us. We are alone in the universe, accountable only to ourselves. As Holmes wrote, it cannot be the case that “the ultimates of a little creature on this little earth are the last word of the unimaginable whole.”

2. Democracy is the only measure against which we can judge our values. Holmes admitted he came “devilish near to believing that might makes right,” but what keeps right-wing Nietzscheans from going all the way down that path is their shared belief in democracy. Since we live in a democratic society, brute force alone cannot determine truth. Instead, we should judge truth in what Holmes called the marketplace of ideas: “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” This faith that the best idea will win out in a fair competition separates these thinkers from the anti-market left. Leftist Nietzscheans like Michel Foucault are skeptical of the possibility that the best ideas ever fairly win out; such competitions are inexorably distorted by power and can thus never be neutral or fair, Foucault argued. Like Nietzsche himself, Foucault is dubious about democracy. But right-wing Nietzscheanism is an American ideology and consequently, like its cousin American pragmatism, deeply appreciative of what Posner has referred to as the “hurly-burly” of “robust and freewheeling inquiry with no intellectual quarter asked or given.” Right-wing Nietzscheans reject Nietzsche’s Übermensch elitism in favor of the democratic process.

3. Institutions and policies instantiate human desires and needs, and should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences. What should guide the democratic institutions we place our faith in if there are no absolute standards we can use? For right-wing Nietzscheans, all we have to judge our democracy is the real-world consequences of our institutions and policies. As Posner puts it, we should be:

…looking at problems concretely, experimentally, without illusions, with full awareness of the limitations of human reason, with a sense of the “localness” of human knowledge, the difficulty of translations between cultures, the unattainability of “truth,” the consequent importance of keeping diverse paths of inquiry open, the dependence of inquiry on culture and social institutions, and above all the insistence that social thought and action be evaluated as instruments to valued human goals rather than as ends in themselves.

Without the help of any external standards, our institutions can serve only our ends, and should be judged on the modest scale of their ability to tackle concrete problems producing optimum results for human purposes, needs, and desires. Unlike elements of both left and right, right-wing Nietzscheans don’t want institutions to serve abstract ideals like Principles of Justice, the Will of God, or Inalienable Human Rights. Human institutions are just there to get things done that humans want. All we can use to evaluate whether our institutions are working is to ask, as Holmes said, whether “such and such a condition or result is desirable and that such and such means are appropriate to bring it about”; the best we can say about the policies and institutions constituting our democracy is, in Posner’s words, that they are “the product of shifting human desires rather than the reflection of a reality external to those desires.”

4. Humans are just monkeys with large brains – nothing more, nothing less. Many conservatives see human beings as made in the image of God and therefore possessing inherent dignity, while others see humans as bearers of innate human rights. Right-wing Nietzscheans regard such ideas as illusions. “All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man,” Holmes scoffed in 1916. “People are monkeys with large brains,” Posner quipped in 2009. While perhaps initially frightening, for right-wing Nietzscheans this fact about ourselves is liberating. “It is enough for us that the universe has produced us and has within it…all that we believe and love,” as Holmes wrote in one of his most existentialist passages. Their insouciance about innate rights or dignity separates these thinkers from many left-wing materialists. Rights are conferred by institutions, not by human nature, and so we should create the best institutions we can to make sure rights are spread as widely as possible, a process that can be messy and even violent. “No doubt,” Holmes argued, “behind these legal rights is the fighting will of the subject to maintain them…A dog will fight for his bone.” And in this complicated process of improving our democracy, we must be allowed to make the mistakes we will inevitably make: “we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death,” as Holmes famously put it in his dissent in Abrams v. United States. For example, neither Holmes nor Posner puts much faith in the regulation of the market, as the left does; they regard regulation as inefficient and ineffective. But if it is the will of the people to do so, in the interest of improving our finite human lives, a society should be allowed to engage in such no doubt fruitless efforts.

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Some might wonder what separates what I call right-wing Nietzscheanism from American pragmatism. Posner calls himself a pragmatist; Holmes was a member of the Metaphysical Club along with classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, as discussed by the scholar Louis Menand; and Hand was James’s student at Harvard. But I distinguish pragmatists from right-wing Nietzscheans because the pragmatists were typically much more optimistic about the possibility of achieving genuine progress via social and political institutions. Right-wing Nietzscheans, following the German sage, take a darker view of progress and human nature, and so tend to be suspicious of left-wing social engineering. But if you like, right-wing Nietzscheanism can be seen as a subgenre of pragmatism.

These considerations might begin to answer my puzzlement about why this tradition has not been rediscovered with as much gusto and vigor as other conservative schools of thought in recent years. The profound, intellectualized cynicism of right-wing Nietzscheanism can be quite alienating; it is obvious why it has not formed the basis of a lasting political movement. This pessimism led to Holmes’s endorsement of eugenics, as evidenced in the infamous and repugnant 1927 Supreme Court opinion he wrote in Buck v. Bell, and to the perhaps misguided interpretation that Nietzsche himself held views similar to a vulgar Social Darwinism. These facts understandably make contemporaries wary.

Hand called himself “a conservative among liberals, and a liberal among conservatives”; such fence-sitting never makes one popular. Many conservatives distrust right-wing Nietzscheans because of the latitude they have afforded to political liberalism in the humanistic spirit of experimentation and democracy. The echoes of Holmes and Hand can be heard in Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinions that have held up Obamacare: as he wrote in 2012, “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” The infamous neoreactionary writer Mencius Moldbug quipped that “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?” Right-wing Nietzscheanism offers one way to understand why “progress” marches on, without having to agree fundamentally with every aspect of that progress. Holmes, Hand, and Posner show why we should allow our fellow citizens to experiment with our shared democracy, even when we ourselves think such experiments useless.

These ideas still have currency. In an age of skepticism about value and about what government is good for, right-wing Nietzscheanism is worth taking seriously for its radical commitment to democracy without metaphysical or moral foundations.