The Strange Death of Libertarianism

 

Where are they?  What happened to them? 

The people called "libertarians"* in the USA always seemed to me to be people who had gone so far into their intellectualism that they disappeared up their own assholes.  Or, to put it nicely, they seemed "idealistic."  They seemed completely divorced from the material reality of everyday struggles of working people - instead they treated human beings as abstract, ideal concepts - vague, transparent beings without shape, color, depth, or determinate characteristics.  

"Libertarianism" seemed simple-minded in the extreme.  For instance, when they said that every individual being had to be entirely individually responsible for its own welfare, it seemed to me that they had not considered blind people, or deaf people, or cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, or quadriplegics, or the mentally ill, or all people, once they get old enough, and develop dementia and all the infirmity of old age, or pregnant people, or babies, infants, toddlers, or... you get the idea.  Nor had they considered that humans evolved from other apes, who do not seem to be "individualistic" at all.  So why, exactly, are we supposed to be individualistic?  Because it says so, according to the libertarian ideology, which must be obeyed, for... some reason.  Because it sounds like a good idea when you're 17, and some people never grow out of it.

Nonetheless, libertarians seemed sincere.

Even if their worldview seemed simplistic, and rigidly, dogmatically so - as though they were fiercely determined not to let any new information or experience enter their heads - I had to admire their consistency.  They seemed quite devoted to their moral principles, and with applying them universally, without exception.  They seemed passionate, even somewhat fanatical, at times.  I admired their clarity, their uncompromising rigor, their intransigent opposition to all forms of authoritarianism and tyranny.

So you can imagine my surprise. 

You can imagine my surprise when all the libertarians just suddenly disappeared.  The moment a right wing authoritarian stepped up, all the so-called "libertarians" just dried up and blew away.  These people were so brave and uncompromising when they had to stand up against imaginary tyrants.  Now, all of the sudden, when real authoritarianism has come to the USA, they either have nothing to say, or, worse, they are loudly supporting it.

So I was wrong.  These people weren't idealistic, they weren't uncompromising, they weren't simplistic.  They were liars. 

This upsets me, because, I have to admit, I had a kind of grudging respect, and even some affection - maybe even, slightly, admiration - for libertarians. 

I knew some "libertarians" in college.  Some were of the "Ron Paul Revolution" variety, some were of the "minarchist" variety, most were of the "I like to smoke pot" variety.  Remember, this was the 90s, and pot was still illegal.  (I guess it still is, in some weird places.)  You could say that these were single issue voters.  (There was even a "Marijuana Reform Party" back then.)  (I also knew about one and a half "Objectivists" back then - followers of Ayn Rand.  I say 1 1/2, because one of them professed to be an "Objectivist" but didn't show a clear sign of having actually read any of her books.  Instead he complained about "altruism," and his constant example was Mother Theresa, and his source was Christopher Hitchens's book on the subject.  Apparently he didn't know that Hitchens was a Trotskyist.  Anyway, I'm not sure whether to include Objectivists as libertarians - Rand herself held the libertarians at arm-length, saying rather gnomically that the enemies of her enemies were not necessarily her friends. She even suggested that libertarians are the enemies of capitalism - which shows that she was smarter than some of her followers.  Objectivists and libertarians have called each other names ever since.)  I even argued against these people back in those days.  Most of these people grew up and grew out of their half-baked libertarianism and became mainstream liberals or possibly republicans - I don't know, I've lost track of most of these people.

I can't really find that much fault with the dumb young people I hung out with back then.  After all, you have to understand, this was the 90s, and they actually taught us this stuff in school.  My fellow students may have been easily-duped suckers who swallowed whatever they were told, in a vague, superficial way, but the teachers were the real deal.  My economics professor would fume and rage libertarian gobbledy-gook all day long.  And the kids just ate it up.   

In the intervening decades, I've been arguing online against so-called "libertarians" (and "Voluntaryists" and "anarcho-capitalists" and so on).  Their language, if anything, got all the more strident as the years went on.  Not only did they insist that taxation is theft and that everything the government does is slavery, but I remember one person that I sparred with on the internet claiming that every single government employee, and everyone who would defend a government employee, are all "psychopaths".  

Some of them took a darker turn.  They warned of "FEMA camps" which they thought were going to be built or which they believed had already been built, and claimed that soon the government would start rounding up people and putting them in these camps as authoritarian government took over.  Some of these people claimed to have guns, and suggested that they were ready to take up arms against the government if it became as tyrannical as they expected it to.

So where are they?   

It pains me to say: now the mask has come off.  Authoritarianism is here, and they suddenly either have gone silent entirely, or they are now rooting for the authoritarianism.

Exhibit A: Stefan Molyneux.  This is the guy that claims to be a philosopher who has figured out absolute ethics, once and for all, and who created a podcast called "Freedomain Radio," where he constantly rants for his "anarcho-capitalist" politics, militant atheist attitude towards religion, and bizarre self-help/psychological theories.  Or at least that's what it used to be.  Now, all of a sudden, the anarchism and the libertarianism are gone (as is the atheism, interestingly enough), and instead he's constantly talking about race, asserting increasingly authoritarian policies, defending McCarthyism, and supporting Trump.  

What the hell?  Has he suddenly changed his mind?  I humbly submit that we have to consider the other interpretation: that he was never a libertarian, but that for years, he considered it preferably to pretend to be one.  And now things have changed.

And he's not the only one - far from it.  There are "libertarians" everywhere who are suddenly revealing that they never were that libertarian.  The libertarian-to-authoritarian pipeline is real, flabbergasting, and a little scary. 

In times like these, I keep thinking of the interview with Putin where he said that communism was a "fairy tale."  Imagine - here he was, a member of the KGB for decades, presumably willing to fight and kill and potentially die for what he always considered a "fairy tale."  

Just as Putin is what you get when the nomenklatura acknowledges that communism was a fairy tale, so Trump is what you get when the Republicans admit that neoliberal libertarianism was a fairy tale.

* It should be pointed out, of course, and Noam Chomsky has pointed out for decades that originally, "libertarian" referred to anti-capitalists like Joseph Dejacque, who actually coined the term, and then this term was consciously and deliberately co-opted by rightwingers in the USA such as Murray Rothbard, who wrote: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. 'Libertarians' had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety."  This was a deliberate program of obfuscation and indoctrination of potential rebels.