Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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The Orange Line’s Embrace of Black Militants

On New Years, Margaret Roberts at VDare noticed that Rand Paul and the broader Washington D.C. libertarian community has embraced (physically, morally, politically) black militants and their allies in the radical left.

In a move condemned even by Jennifer Rubin, Rand Paul poses with Al Sharpton. So now it appears that House GOP Whip Steve Scalise did not after all speak to David Duke’s EURO group, although the news is disseminating suspiciously slowly [Steve Scalise spoke to civic association meeting, not white nationalist conference, David Duke adviser Kenny Knight says, by Julia O’Donoghue, NOLA.com, December 31, 2014]. This presumably means that the Main Stream Media will be thwarted, for now, in its obvious intent to spread the smear to Senator Rand Paul via his father [If you’re a politician and your chummy past with neo-Nazis resurfaces, don’t worry. Ask Ron Paul, by Jeb Lund, The Guardian, December 30, 2015]. But there can be no doubt that, if Paul had been brought under more pressure, he would have groveled. Perhaps the most ominous trend on the American Right today is libertarians’ adoption of prevailing “anti-racism” dogma, to the point where they can increasingly only be interpreted as overtly anti-White.

“Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color,” Paul wrote late last year. “In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed?” [Rand Paul: The Politicians Are to Blame in Ferguson, TIME.com, November 25, 2014]

Unfortunately for Paul, two assassinated NYPD officers were the predictable subsequent result of the ongoing Leftist agitation to which he was pandering. He had opened the door for his intra-party rivals to run against him on the traditional Republican issue of “law and order.”

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Yet it’s at this moment that Libertarians have decided to ape the electoral strategy of the Democrats: mobilize the fringes of American life against the core. Unfortunately for this strategy, however, it’s the core American population—the married, content, and patriotic—who are most likely to support the values of property ownership and limited government.

Rand Paul and his Left-Libertarians have turned their back on their natural supporters at the very time they most need a champion.

The fringes are easy to get riled up. But the core is the only demographic that really has much skin in the game with respect to property rights. The fringes have no property to worry themselves over.

For those of you who don’t know, ‘the Orange Line’ refers to libertarians affiliated or employed by the Cato Institute, including the editorial staff of Reason Magazine. It’s also sometimes referred to as the ‘Kochtopus’ because of its financial connections to our friends at Koch Enterprises.

From a democratic-politics perspective, it’s even dumber for Rand Paul to be moved by the influence of left-libertarians, because those people will oppose him for other reasons, largely related to foreign policy but also economics, as soon as it is convenient for them to do so.

Indeed, the left-wing Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog accused Rand Paul of being an ‘asshole and moral pervert’ last year, among other things.

Libertarians, especially the academics, have positioned themselves against their natural base, aligning instead with the donor class and radical academics. Because politics is ultimately mock-war, alignment on the battlefield matters more than whatever the generals are talking about to justify that alignment. Who is shooting at whom is more relevant than what motivates all the shooting.

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The Anti-Cop Pose is a Libertarian Strategic Error

Libertarians have found themselves in an impossible position thanks to years of regular anti-police activism, bombastic statements against police, and sloganeering around the Drug War.

I would argue that the leading voice in this strain is  Radley Balko, who ran a widely-read blog on police abuses that he eventually turned into a book contract and columnist gigs at the Huffington and Washington Posts.

The main reason why this strain of activism has turned into a dead-end for the libertarians comes down to a several reasons:

  • The problems of maintaining a stable legal order.
  • Misunderstanding what the Drug War is, due to taking political propaganda at face value.
  • Being unable to speak honestly about race, knowing the fates of Murray Rothbard and H.H. Hoppe for doing so.
  • An emotional and financial desire to reach the mainstream population through the prestige press and television.
  • A misunderstanding of the demographics that are likely to respond to libertarian appeals.

To support the first bullet, let’s get ourselves to Moldbug, who writes:

The problem with Mises as guru is that Misesian classical liberalism (or Rothbardian libertarianism) is like Newtonian physics. It is basically correct within its operating envelope. Under unusual conditions it breaks down, and a more general model is needed. The equation has another term, the ordinary value of which is zero. Without this term, the equation is wrong. Normally this is no problem; but if the term is not zero, the error becomes visible.

The entire idea of a stable libertarian order is predicated on the ‘order’ part of things. When the country is populated by numerous people who have no respect for notions of property and peace, then it’s impossible to maintain the law… and even then, only possible to maintain the law at high expense, with some measure of brutality.

On the second point, contemporary libertarians, for fear of the outer darkness to which anyone who writes about racial differences will be relegated, tend to neglect to discuss the different tendencies of different groups of people and cultures. Ron Paul’s first race in the Republican primaries was damaged badly by the publication of what were really quite mild newsletters in which his ghostwriters discussed race and crime.

Contemporary libertarians tend to over-compensate for this with ostentatious expressions of pro-Civil-Rights rhetoric, contradicting many of their other positions concerning freedom of association.

The libertarian ideology, at least in its most vulgar expressions, tends to float atop a world of pure theory, without reference to its cultural roots or origins.

Finally, it’s the worst possible pose to strike for an ideology supposedly dedicated to the defense of absolute private property rights to support violent rioters who are destroying the property of small merchants. 

The libertarian is supposed to be fighting for the rights of the people like the petty merchants whose businesses the rioters are destroying. The rioter who destroys his shop and threatens his life is a more direct threat than the policeman who collects tax and intimidates the more dangerous men away from his territory.

Similarly, it’s nonsensical to simultaneously support an ideology that supposedly fights for the rights of ordinary people to maintain the integrity of their persons and property against all challengers to express sympathy for assassins of police officers.

Regardless of whatever theoretical reasons there might be for grinning ghoulishly at the deaths of cops, to place oneself on the same side as the communist revolutionaries advocating these disruptions of public order is to be on the wrong side, to ally with the left and the associated forces for the forceful dissolution of society.

In this way, libertarians behave like someone else who called herself a ‘libertarian’ on occasion: Emma Goldman, who allied with Lenin, until the Party purged her and exiled her to America.

Contemporary libertarians who support rioters above police adhere to their own theories, which are obscure and alien to the common people, above the facts of actual events happening outside of their windows.

Arguments about the ‘NAP’ and the ‘absolute right to property’ spoken on one day, in private, become irrelevant to the minds of the common people when they see a libertarian spokesperson go on television and say that the police are at fault, and that the mob (invariably a socialist-democratic mob) is correct to be incensed.

I understand the appeal of striking this pose, because I have stricken something like this pose before for the same reasons, and regret my mistakes.

People like Christopher Cantwell, who are evidently invited to speak at libertarian conferences, speak as if they are either on the FBI’s payroll or on the payroll of whatever succeeded the Comintern:

Even these liberal fuckin idiots who want the government to control every aspect of their lives, are starting to realize that police are violent fuckin monsters who cannot be trusted, and while I don’t like the race pimping or the destruction of private property, if these Marxist fuckin animals can produce just a few more Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s, guys who will whack a couple of the king’s men then take themselves out, well, they just might make up for some of the damage they’ve done to society.

Such statements have little appeal to anyone predisposed to civilized life. It wouldn’t go over well with an insurance salesman with three children in Peoria.

The intellectuals are far more dangerous than the police ever have been and ever will be. Libertarians have created a commons under their intellectual brand, and have subsequently debased it, as Rothbard lamented late in his life.

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That Coup York State of Mind

There’s been national discussion about the growing rift between the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio following the assassinations of two police officers there earlier this month.

This sort of crisis was easy to predict at around this time last year, and the context for this crime won’t be obvious to you unless you also understand at least some of the economic background to it, also, in the same way that it’s not possible to properly understand the collapse of NYC in the 1970s (“Ford to City… Drop Dead”) you also have to know why the town could not afford to maintain its own security anymore.

The economic backdrop is that there is not enough money for the city to maintain the same growth in payments to the police force while still maintaining all the pensioners and other government functions. Something must give, and the police would rather use their positions as the weapons of the state to preserve its own revenues against its competitors (those competitors arguably represented by de Blasio — teachers’ unions, welfare bums, corporate barons who need tax credits, etc.).

The police force has lost legitimacy among the liberal opinion-forming classes and the poor Black communities that commit a disproportionate amount of crime within the city itself.

Simultaneously, a civilian authority that has no enforcement capacity is no longer a sovereign government, except perhaps in the minds of men.

Either the Federal government would need to liquidate the rebellious police force, or some combination of the rebels and local gangsters would step in to fill the sovereign void. Alternatively, the rebels could form a new civilian government that is closer to their liking.

Chuckle it up if you think that can’t happen in the US, but there’s a reason why former mayors and police executives are making the rounds-about TV shows making a case for that in different words, paying publicists to place “…growing calls for the mayor to resign…” into the pens of dozens of journalists at the same time.

Civilian government exists only at the permission of the most capable, unitary group of fighting-men. Legal rhetoric is just chatter without the force to support it.

Fighting-men are not magically bound to civilian political authority. America may like to pretend that it is a history-free zone, but this would not exactly be the first time that a weak executive has been deposed when he discovered that words have no force by themselves.

These particular police have the problem that they have limited legitimacy, or rather, divided legitimacy: the civilian authority, in an attempt to satisfy the mobs (in this case, actual mobs of protesters), promises that it can bring its soldiers under tighter control while still executing the vast body of laws that the state has beholden itself to.

The dilemma there is that what the civilians have promised isn’t possible, even if it truly desired make that happen.

I can’t say that I feel too broken up that a Communist mayor is in risk of losing his sovereign position over America’s premier city, but as with most power struggles, the fight itself is not likely to resolve the underlying issues that the city must tangle with to maintain anything resembling its current position.

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