What’s Left?
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey — Ephemera, blog post, 3-19-09
The idea of expanding the traditional one-dimensional Left-Right political spectrum into a two-dimensional political map is an old one. Beginning in the 1950s, several double-axis models were proposed: Authoritarian-Democratic/Radical-Conservative (Eysenck), Left-Right/Ideological Rigidity (Greenberg & Jonas), Traditionalist-Secular/Self Expressionist-Survivalist (Inglehart), Liberty-Control/Irrationalism-Rationalism (Pournelle), and Kratos-Akrateia/Archy-Anarchy (Mitchell). The American libertarian David Nolan proposed his two axis diamond-shaped Nolan Chart in 1969 based on economic freedom and political freedom, which everybody knows about but nobody uses outside of libertarian circles. Which brings is to the problem of libertarianism.
A basic two-axis political model was promulgated concurrently by Bryson and McDill (Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, 1968), and Meltzer and Christie (The Floodgates of Anarchy, 1970); an economic Left-Right/political Authoritarian-Libertarian foursquare arrangement that has since become a boilerplate for the political compass used by the website of the same name. In turn, the political compass format has become a widespread internet meme. The top left square represents the authoritarian left, the top right square the authoritarian right, the bottom left square the libertarian left and the bottom right square the libertarian right. Each square embraces numerous political thinkers, leaders, organizations, and parties, but only three of these squares actually represent real existing political systems. There have been authoritarian left societies like Communist China, authoritarian right societies like Franco’s Spain, and for brief periods of time various libertarian left anarchist and socialist societies. But there have never been any libertarian right societies. No real existing hidden Rocky Mountain Mulligan’s Valley redoubts. Ever.
This lack of a “Galt’s Gulch” in a Colorado mountain valley somewhere, past or present, is the necessary starting point for critiquing the absurdity that is libertarianism. For the moment, forget that a right wing politics obsessed with property rights has unashamedly stolen the terms “libertarianism” and “anarchism” from the Left to use in defining themselves. Right libertarianism is all theory and no practice, with no “in real life” to get in the way of its bullshit abstractions. It’s no accident that Milton Friedman’s Chicago School monetarist economics was first implemented in Chile by the fascist Pinochet government. Right libertarian economics are not anchored to any corresponding social reality, never have been and never will be. It exists only as pure fiction, in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and nowhere else.
This lack of social grounding to the economic theories of right wing libertarianism, and in particular anarchist capitalism, accounts for assholes like Murray Rothbard and his loathsome politics. Rothbard disagreed with Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, just about anybody who claimed a similar laissez-faire economics because, when there’s no social reality to back up your economic theories, every faux detail of your pretend system becomes crucial to defend. It’s like Medieval Scholasticism arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Rothbard quickly abandoned any pretense of defending liberty (and “libertarianism”) in calling himself an anarchist capitalist, and more specifically a property rights anarchist as private property was the only right he assiduously defended. Along the way, he made it clear he despised women, people of color, and LGBQTI+ people in particular and any form of civil rights in general. He criticized “the cult of science” and defended holocaust denialism, sought to gut civil liberties and proposed a retributive “eye for an eye” criminal justice system, justified the torture of criminal suspects and railed against free market open borders, ad nauseam. His consistent antiwar stance and his nominal defense of children’s rights notwithstanding, Rothbard’s politics were so thoroughly reactionary that it’s little wonder there’s a hazy continuum, no, a slippery slope between right wing libertarianism and far right fascist politics.
Matt Lewis described this as “The Insidious Libertarian-to-Alt-Right Pipeline” in The Daily Beast when he wrote:
A friend of mine who is libertarian suggests that other libertarians never liked [Christopher] Cantwell, and that he was simply using libertarianism “as a shield for expressing a lot of disturbing viewpoints.” Despite the negative stereotypes, casting yourself as libertarian still has some cache[sic]. Celebrities like Bill Maher and Vince Vaughn have identified with the label—which seems to be a way of expressing some conservative viewpoints while still supporting the decriminalization of marijuana and distancing yourself from social conservatism. Libertarians won’t continue to enjoy this status if the alt-right is allowed to tarnish their philosophy, too.
And conservative pundit Michael Brendan Dougherty calls it “The Libertarianism-to-Fascism Pipeline” in the National Review in defending his fellow conservatives by claiming:
If libertarians have a pipeline for kooks, it is probably because they have some non-mainstream views. But if you have perfectly acceptable views, you probably have a pipeline for grifters. Conservatives have a mix of mainstream views and non- mainstream views. Consequently we are always fending off kooks on one side while being preyed upon by grifters on the other.
My explanation is far simpler. If you’re not grounded in social reality, if you have no “real existing” social system upon which to base your theories, you have nothing to prevent yourself from drifting into reactionary absurdity, if not outright genocidal fascism.
(Mainstream conservatives have long decried libertarianism (meaning the Libertarian Party) as “unwitting enablers of socialism,” defenders of “open borders” against sensible immigration policies, supporters of “unpleasant, unaffordable housing,” and opponents of “vital enabling infrastructure.” (Edward Ring, American Greatness, 10—2-19) Their argument is that the Libertarian Party unwittingly tilts “the political balance in favor of the progressive agenda across a host of important national issues.” It’s far better to realize that libertarian economics are a joke because they don’t work without the backing of statist politics.)
I won’t regale you with my sad slapstick attempt as an anarchist to work with libertarians over forty years ago. I’d rather approach the utter lack of social reality behind right-wing libertarianism from a different angle, that being the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. As a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist, I’ve long espoused the ideal of a stateless, classless, global human community based on to each according to need, from each according to ability. Formulated by Karl Marx, the Leninist version of this ideal realized Marx’s “lower stage of communism” as a one-party totalitarian state socialism of breadlines, secret police and gulags. The anarchist version, as realized in the anarchist regions of Spain during the 1936-39 civil war, witnessed the burning of monasteries and nunneries, pistolero justice, and the CNT/FAI eventually joining the Republican government according to Paul Preston. Kenan Malik well illustrated the discrepancy between the ideal and the real in the Kurdish libertarian socialist experiment in Rojava when he wrote:
Influenced by the American environmentalist and libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, [Abdullah Öcalan] has rejected the idea of a separate Kurdish nation state, arguing instead for “direct democracy without a state” and for the centrality of women’s rights in any social change. […] There is a danger of romanticising the Rojava revolution. There have been credible allegations of ethnic cleansing and of the silencing of dissent. A report from Chatham House, the international affairs thinktank, suggests that, for all the talk of decentralisation, the PYD still ensures it retains access to power. [Guardian Weekly, 10-27-19]
Mussolini said of Fascism: “The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” But, in the case of both Italian Fascism and Nazi Germany, the centralizing and totalitarian drives of Fascism were never actually fully realized. In both regimes, for instance, the church as a social institution was never completely subordinated to the state. Lastly, one can only wonder with horror about the society that would emerge from an economic theory that promotes the complete privatization of all social and governmental services (licensing, standards, police, courts, money coinage, etc) and the conversion of all social relationships into property relationships. However, I think a terrifying inkling can be gleaned from an Ann Coulter MSNBC commentary when she said: “My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that’s because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism.”
Libertarian—laissez-faire—free-market economics have long been a tool used by governments of various stripes: conservative, fascist, liberal, even socialist. But a fully realized libertarian society—a stateless society based on “pure” capitalism—has never existed and never will. Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about something really crucial; whether or not to support Aragorn II, son of Arathorn II and Gilraen, King of Gondor, for the throne.
SOURCES:
Know Your Enemy:
Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative and It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille
Critiques:
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy and Grundrisse by Karl Marx
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin
“The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer” and “Why Libertarians Apologize For Autocracy” by Michael Lind
“Critiques of Libertarianism” by Mike Huben
“Libertarianism, Capitalism and Socialism” by Richard D. Wolff, Economic Update (12-12-19)