American Libertarianism – Between Left and Right

By Tom Rogers

This video seems to be about tactics and strategy for right-libertarians. I am not well-schooled in the internal politics of the libertarian community and the different strands of thought, but if I understand correctly, the argument seems to be that provoking both sides of the conventional political spectrum will cause more people to come over to libertarian ideas. This is based on an assumption that right-libertarianism stands outside the ideological war between the Right and Left. That premise wouldn’t hold in my country, Britain, but I suppose in an American context, where libertarian-type thinking is deeply interpolated into the public consciousness, right-libertarianism can be presented as the non-ideological Centre.

A major issue today in all Western societies is of course mass immigration.  I’m sure somebody will come along to correct me on this if I am mistaken (I am not an expert on all these different strands of right-wing anarchoid/libertarian thought), but my understanding is that the intellectual luminaries of right-libertarianism, Messrs. Mises and Rothbard, were firmly against mass immigration and would have accepted the need under present conditions for Western societies to collectively defend themselves. We are, after all, talking about a threat to the very existence of libertarian ideas. The moral and ethical difficulty that Western intellectuals seem to have in recognising this threat is what I call the Knappian Paradox, which I described in a previous thread [‘Karl Popper and the Intolerance of the Intolerant’]:

“The Knappian Paradox sums up the Western liberal dilemma, which is that tolerance itself leads to intolerance, and that arguing against the intolerant who defend tolerance leads to greater intolerance. To put it brutally, Mr Knapp is arguing against himself. It would actually be quicker if he just put a gun to his own head.

“The Paradox is that in order to defend tolerance, you must also be prepared to be intolerant. If you are not willing to be intolerant, then your tolerance will eventually negate itself and become the embodiment of the thing that you set out to oppose. You will also kill your own civilisation in the process, or at least, change it in such a way that it becomes unrecognisable, as it will be detached from its own biological roots.

“So, intolerant ideologies can be a vaccine and antibody against intolerant enemies.

….

“A resolution of the Paradox requires that the liberal be intolerant so that the LIBERAL can survive (and thus, his standards of tolerance can endure in some form).”

Accusing others of horrible ‘racism’ and ‘nazism’, while failing to acknowledge the need to defend the very civilisation that gave you the freedom to believe in nice things, does present rather a dilemma if your ‘libertarianism’ leads to the destruction of any possibility for the practical realisation of those principles.

That’s not to say that non-Western societies are incapable of sustaining liberty. I know a few contributors to this blog believe that to be so, but I don’t myself hold that view. I think it’s true that in many non-Western countries, what appears to us to be liberty and an absence of repressive linguistic correctness and all the other trappings of the European censorious Left, is in fact just expediency and government weakness. However, I see no inherent reason why non-whites cannot build and sustain comparably free societies. The real issue, as I see it, is who the society is being built for. It is the ‘Who’ question that is being ignored.

I think some kind of anarchy is the destiny of any civilised, high-trust society. This will probably take the form of global socialism, relying on automation for most labour and distribution needs. A civilised people have no use for a ‘state’, private property or formal hierarchies and will probably want to be rid of such things in time, but that’s just my preference. I accept that certain of these things could survive in an advanced society with a market or capitalist basis, along the lines supported by Hoppe, among others.

The fundamental problem for people who have this sort of vision is that in order for libertarian and anarchist priorities to survive, these have to be subordinated to the civilisational questions of race, culture, borders and immigration, which are among the overarching issues of our time. The nagging paradox is that you must be prepared, in practice, to abandon or weaken your principles in order to preserve any chance that they might one day become reality.

Thus, the Alt Right and other similar intellectual currents, such as national-socialism, have to be seen as the antibody that protects the civilisation. Building a border wall between the United States and Mexico is, from one perspective, firmly illiberal and anti-libertarian, and libertarians can also fairly argue that the existence of such a wall might contribute to a more intrusive climate within American society. But there is another perspective on this, which is that if you want American society to evolve in a more libertarian direction, then you need to have a culture that favours libertarianism, which in turn means you need to have some control on who enters the country. Libertarianism that destroys libertarianism isn’t libertarian. Libertarianism that acknowledges the hard realities within which society has to work, potentially could be.

From where I’m sitting, libertarianism at this stage appears to be more akin to a luxury parlour game and is of no practical use. Sure, I’d like a libertarian or anarchist society. Wouldn’t we all? It’s a bit like saying you like chocolate ice cream or burger and chips. I’d like to lose five stone too, but the problem is, I have to make a choice of one or the other. I can either kill myself or I can live. Libertarianism might help to create a freer society, but Quixotic libertarianism will kill us.

I’m not saying libertarianism is childish or utopian. I accept it has a realist basis to it. What I am suggesting is that to advocate libertarian or anarchoid philosophies now as anything other than a possible long-range aim or goal is to be impractically idealistic. It can’t work unless the people themselves are politically conscious in some comparable way, which they are not, and the prospects for this will diminish unless the civilisation itself that gave rise to these ideas is defended. For that reason, I would actually question whether libertarianism – of anything other than the most realistic kind – can be regarded as a distinct political tradition at all. I think under present conditions it is just a disposition in most cases, and where organised, as in the United States, amounts to a disguised ginger group for corporate interests.