It’s always been hard to be a libertarian. An ideology of individual freedom attracts a lot of nutcases. I now think the label has been irreparably tarnished.
Political labels are never tidy. The sum total of someone’s ideological beliefs rarely fit neatly into a pigeonhole. Still, they are a useful shorthand to summarise someone’s broad position.
I expect socialists to say and do awful or stupid things. Their ideology, for all its pretence to egalitarianism, is economically illiterate and seeks to subject people to the callous whims of a ruling authority and dispossess them of the fruits of their own labour.
It is cringeworthy, however, to watch people who believe themselves to be enlightened believers in individual liberty and free markets say or do things that at best unnecessarily raise the hackles of the general public, and at worst are just reprehensible or insane.
For years, it seemed the primary plank of any libertarian platform was ‘legalise pot’, as if libertarianism was just a crude expression of the rebellious streak of youthful punks. As noble as a campaign against the state’s cruel and counterproductive war on drugs might be, this is not how you win friends and influence people.
Exposed
Gatherings of libertarians were places where you needed a thick skin. Who can forget the candidate for the chairmanship of the U.S. Libertarian Party who got on stage, stripped to his underwear, said it was a dare, and dropped out?
Dear James Weeks, you stood for the leadership of what might have been a consequential third party in the greatest democracy on Earth. Instead of trying to win converts to the cause of liberty, you acted like a drunk frat-house student. If the socialists planted a saboteur inside the party, they couldn’t have been more successful.
It’s no surprise that voters, despite being deeply discontented with their government, have always shunned the Libertarian Party. It has rarely achieved even 1% of the vote in U.S. presidential elections, with Gary Johnson’s campaign in 2016 peaking at 3.3% against the extraordinarily flawed major-party candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
It is true that the U.S. electoral system is strongly biased towards two-party dominance, and against third-party candidates, but the truth is voters just don’t like the Libertarian Party.
The Republican Party was born out of a third-party victory for Abraham Lincoln, who won almost 40% of the popular vote in 1860 in a four-way race. Ross Perot, in 1992, won 18.6% of the vote on a platform of fiscal responsibility. It can be done. Just not by libertarians.
Mises Caucus
In May this year, the U.S. Libertarian Party elected a slate of office bearers led by Angela McArdle, from what is known as the Mises Caucus inside the party. Its goal, the insurgents said, was ‘to make the Libertarian Party libertarian again’.
On the surface, this sounds great. The party certainly is in dire need of good leadership, and tying such leadership to the economic ideology of Ludwig von Mises is a splendid idea.
Mises, after all, campaigned tirelessly against the Keynesians who gave governments virtual carte blanche to inflate the money supply in order to fund deficit spending, which in turn assured the loyalty of their voter base. He argued against economists who believed government could, and should, direct the economy through monetary and fiscal policy based on mathematical models of how people might respond to economic interventions by the state.
In its stead, he argued that growing prosperity and human flourishing is only possible in a world of free markets, private property, and strictly limited government, in which subjective economic valuations are unknowable by any central authority and therefore cannot be manipulated to suit such an authority’s ends. In this world, the default view of state intervention should be that it is harmful and leads to socialism.
Besides Mises, they take their inspiration from Murray Rothbard, a libertarian anarchist, and Ron Paul, the far-sighted former U.S. presidential candidate who predicted the 2007 financial crisis in exacting detail in a speech to Congress in 2001.
So far, so good, then. I could get behind a party based on such principles.
Edgelords
Unfortunately, the Mises Caucus does not live up to its illustrious namesake. In its determination not to bow to modern political correctness and the woke sensitivities of mainstream politicians it has actively courted the alt-right alliance that elected Donald Trump.
They’re a bunch of ‘shitposting edgelords’, as Reason Magazine reports critics describing them. And indeed, on issues ranging from vaccinations to immigration, they sound a lot more like alt-right Trumpists than principled libertarians.
You don’t have to dig far to find examples.
‘Being an extremist is a good thing, actually,’ the party’s official Twitter channel announced three days ago. I mean, I understand what they’re trying to say – I’m also fairly extreme on my support for individual liberty and free markets – but what are they, 16? How do they think this will win them voters?
It’s not like this sentiment is new and original. It harks back to Senator Barry Goldwater, who said, ‘I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!’
That may be true, but it is also why Goldwater lost the 1964 campaign for the U.S. presidency by a landslide. He alienated the moderates in his own party and carried only six states to the 44 won by incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson.
His sole achievement, or rather, his dubious legacy, was that his opposition to the Civil Rights Act turned the racist Deep South, which had hitherto voted Democrat, solidly Republican.
Having self-identified as an extremist, that is exactly how Johnson portrayed him, and Goldwater sank like a stone. Why, 58 years later, would the Libertarian Party think that this strategy would now work better?
Being a ‘proud extremist’ is a naïve and puerile political position that harms, rather than helps, your cause.
And it’s not an isolated occurrence. In response to a rather strange speech by U.S. president Joe Biden, bathed in fascist black and red colours, in which he denounced Trump supporters as enemies of the nation, the Libertarian Party retweeted: ‘Being “a threat to our democracy” sounds pretty cool, actually.’
No, actually, it doesn’t. By all means, challenge Biden, but don’t prove him right. Besides, he spoke about Trump supporters. What is the Libertarian Party doing responding on their behalf?
Hoppe
The Mises Caucus frequently appeals to Hans-Herman Hoppe, a German-American economist, philosopher, and political theorist, on issues like immigration. On 2 September, it wished him a happy birthday.
Hoppe is certainly a notable star in the libertarian firmament. He’s a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist and an economist in the mould of Mises. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
However, he holds some repellent views that are entirely incompatible with the notion that everyone merits equal rights to individual liberty. Those views are (or rather, should be) anathema to modern moral sensibilities.
He wrote: ‘In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, … naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.’
That sounds suspiciously like fascism, not libertarianism, and a particularly insular, hateful, discriminatory sort of fascism to boot. Try to sell that to the average voter who has experienced apartheid or heard of Hitler, why don’t you?
Hoppe argued at length against democracy, and largely for good reason, since he feared mob rule and majoritarianism. A popularly elected authoritarian government is no better than one that seized power by other means.
The liberal solution to this problem is to insist on a constitutional democracy, in which the power of the state is limited and the rights and freedoms of individuals are protected from abuse by the government.
Blue bloods
Hoppe, however, is a monarchist, and holds an elitist, aristocratic view of society. For all his pretensions to anarchism, he does see a role for the state in expelling undesirables and keeping immigrants out.
He wrote: ‘The natural outcome of voluntary transactions between private property owners is non-egalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist. In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on. … [A]ll immigrants must demonstrate through tests not only (English) language proficiency, but all-around superior (above-average) intellectual performance and character structure as well as a compatible system of values – with the predictable result of a systematic pro-European immigration bias.’
This is a full-throated defence of racism and the right of blue bloods to rule as any I’ve ever heard. (The term ‘blue blood’ originated in Spanish Castille, where it referred to the blue veins of pale-skinned families who claimed never to have intermarried with Jews or Moors.)
The notion of race is inherently unscientific and unhelpful as a characterisation of individual people. While there are undoubtedly differences between people, and some of those may be genetic, the differences within one so-called race are far larger than the supposed differences between races.
Constructing an arbitrary, culturally dependent measure such as the intelligence quotient, and using that as a basis for placing rulers over subjects is not only unscientific, but it is also abhorrent to libertarian ideals of individual freedom and equality before the law.
Russian propaganda
Speaking of Hitler, the Libertarian Party also retweeted a meme saying Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelenskyy is what you get when you order Hitler on Wish. It comes complete with a doctored photo of Zelenskyy with a crudely painted-on toothbrush moustache.
This is entirely reprehensible. Zelenskyy is a Jew, for starters. He is the leader of a country defending itself from a foreign aggressor. That aggressor is a revanchist fascist who hopes to restore the Soviet empire that was lost in 1991.
There’s a reason that aggressor, Vladimir Putin, refused to grant former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev a state funeral, and refused to attend the funeral, too. He thinks Gorbachev betrayed the Soviet Union, and Russia’s rightful place in the world as a great empire.
There are undoubtedly neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but you’ll find more than half of the world’s neo-Nazis in Russia, which has allowed the ethnic nationalist movements to flourish for years. Describing Zelenskyy as a Nazi is to fall hook, line, and sinker for Putin’s war propaganda.
What started, perhaps, as a principled anti-war stance, objecting to U.S. support for Ukraine on the grounds that the U.S. should not meddle in foreign affairs, has turned the U.S. Libertarian Party into a farcical echo of Kremlin disinformation.
Public perception
One could write this off as a single libertarian organisation having gone off the rails, but my interactions with libertarians both in South Africa and abroad don’t fill me with confidence that these are unfortunate, but rare, incidents.
Too often, racism is implicit or even – as in the case of Hoppe – explicit in libertarian discourse. Avoiding racism at libertarian gatherings is like avoiding weirdos at a furry convention. It’s possible, but it takes effort.
When a Libertarian Party launched in South Africa in 2013, it was headed by six white men. Sure, in principle neither race nor gender ought to matter, but seriously? Is political naïveté a requirement to be libertarian? Predictably, the party was stillborn.
Alt-right beliefs and characteristics, including strident machismo, ethno-nationalism, and prejudice have found fertile ground among libertarians. They also harbour many anti-scientific nutcases with fringe theories about health, including irrational fears of modern medicine, synthetic chemicals, or cellphone towers.
While everyone has a right to their own opinions, even if wrong, presenting these as libertarian taints the public perception of what it means to be libertarian just as much as going on about legalising pot does.
Voter concerns
Even if this new generation of libertarians did get their stateless utopia, presumably filled with people who by virtue of racial, ethnic, or cultural affinities cower together in enclaves hostile to outsiders, armed to the teeth and ruled over by hereditary nobles, they fail to answer the actual needs of voters.
Voters are concerned with unemployment. They’re concerned with failing healthcare systems. They’re concerned with rising prices for fuel and foodstuffs. They’re concerned with poverty and hunger. They’re concerned with the corrupt relationship between big business and the government. They’re concerned with inequality. They’re concerned with crime and violence in communities.
It is true that libertarian principles can address these issues, or change how one views these issues, but it takes a lot of explaining. Often, the solution is not the ideal that an ideologically pure libertarian would like.
‘Abolish the government,’ isn’t a very appealing slogan to someone who earns little but needs healthcare. ‘Defund the police,’ isn’t very reassuring to people who worry about gun violence and criminality. ‘Tax is theft,’ isn’t a winning slogan when a majority of the voting population is poor or unemployed, watching the rich live lives of unimaginable luxury and comfort.
Libertarians should be explaining exactly how the private sector can supply socio-economic needs for all, including the poor; what sort of role a legitimate government ought to play; and how practical, material goals can be achieved quickly and with a minimum of pain.
Instead they’re prancing around in their underwear, hanging out with alt-right podcast bros, promoting xenophobia and unscientific ideas about racial intelligence, lobbying for intoxicants, legitimising Russia’s fascist propaganda, or giving credence to depopulation plots by Bill Gates, the deep state or the New World Order.
Tarnished
If you’ve been a long-time reader of mine, you’ll have noticed I refer to myself as libertarian far less often than I used to do. I’m still a libertarian, by definition. I still espouse Austrian economics, and still believe government is a necessary evil that ought to be chained to the wall. Yet I now prefer the term classical liberal.
I’ve come to fear the associations that taint the label libertarian. If they were merely shade cast by its socialist enemies, I’d stand up and fight them, but it is intolerable that most of the craziness that clings to libertarianism is perpetrated by libertarians against their own ideology.
I don’t want to have to constantly make excuses for, or dissociate myself from, this or that self-proclaimed libertarian who has divested himself of some peculiarly offensive, puerile and unlibertarian bit of batshittery.
I’d rather associate with people who act like adults, take the socio-economic struggles that matter to people seriously, and advocate solutions based on the political principles of individual freedom, private property, free markets, the rule of law, small government, and political accountability, freedom of conviction and expression, and non-racialism.
Libertarian is a descriptive label which I’ll miss, but I fear it has become irreparably tarnished.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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