Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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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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Can Neoreaction Avoid Libertarian HIV?

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Patri Friedman, noted ex-polyamorist and Seasteading pitchman, has taken an interest in creating a ‘politically correct’ neoreaction.

Jim writes often about entryism — the corollary of Robert Conquest’s second law of politics as retold by John Derbyshire. Reproducing it here:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will
sooner or later become left-wing.

This has been evoked regularly on Twitter and elsewhere with reference to libertarians, who themselves have been infested by essentially left wing thinkers of various kinds. Part of this owes to the character and works of Murray Rothbard, who is libertarianism embodied in all of its aspects, good, bad, and ugly.

As retold by Stephan Kinsella, the word ‘libertarian’ dates only back to the 1950s and 60s, as Leonard Read and Rothbard tussled with each other for leadership of what remained of the classical liberal remnant after World War II.

The muddled nature of libertarianism today owes to the muddled nature of its beginnings in excerpt from an article by Dean Russell:

Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.” Webster’s New International Dictionary defines a libertarian as “One who holds to the doctrine of free will; also, one who upholds the principles of liberty, esp. individual liberty of thought and action.”

Russell, with a boy’s innocence, attempts to unite liberals, conservatives, and classical liberals under the same umbrella. While he stated overt opposition to leftism, the simplistic formulation of the ideology left open the entrances to anyone who could figure out the clever rhetorical crannies into which leftism could sneak into.

Rothbard himself allied with the new left during the 1960s, establishing a journal called ‘Right and Left.’ This strategy ultimately failed, because the left is insane and evil:

“To put it bluntly, the convention was a disaster. As Rothbard feared, many of the SDS libertarians were infected with extreme left- ism. One of the left-wing libertarians denounced “all academic economists” and the wearing of neckties as great evils which the libertarian movement should focus on destroying.”

It’s for this reason that Hoppe hews to the later Rothbard, in advocating for explicit rightism, to the exclusion of the leftists. It’s because, by bitter experience, his teacher taught him that the original formulation of ‘libertarian’ was doomed to incoherence and neutralization by the left.

This is rather serious. John Payne recounts

“Former Barry Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, who had been converted to anarcho-capitalism by “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” and conversations with Rothbard, but had drifted toward anarcho-socialism in the interceding year, sealed the conference’s fate when he spoke on Saturday night. Wearing Fidel Castro-style battle fatigues and a Wobblie pin adorning his hat, Hess roared out to the audience, “There is no neutral ground in a revolution. . . . You’re either on one side of the barricade or the other.” He proceeded to implore the crowd to join him in a scheduled anti-war march on Fort Dix the following day.”

Truly, there’s little that’s new in history.

Considering that libertarianism isn’t even a century old, and that it became subverted within its first two decades of existence, it’s sensible to avoid going down the same permissive & disorderly path that it did, to avoid suffering the same fate in the same manner.

The promiscuity of ‘libertarian’ as a term, and the promiscuous nature of many of its institutions, give it something a lot like Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but for an ideology. This is the case for all ideologies permissive to leftism, and to all ideologies that appeal to the leftist psychology, defined as it is by ressentiment, which popular followers of libertarianism are prone to (as criticized frequently by Hoppe).

The solution to this is to not hop onto any leftward social trend that appears merely because it’s both growing fast and dislikes the current government. Discriminating against people that would create a kinder, gentler, more politically-correct neoreaction doesn’t mean destroying them — just ensuring institutional separation and clarity of language.

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