Libertarianism and the Alt-Right, Part 2
Christopher Cantwell became notorious after his appearance in the Vice documentary about the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville. (There really should be a better word in English for someone whose notoriety involves both disgust and schadenfreude.) He subsequently became known as ‘the Crying Nazi’ after weeping into his webcam about the warrant for his arrest for pepper spraying protestors. (I won’t call the anti-Nazis ‘counterprotestors’ the way the media do because I don’t consider the Nazis to be ‘protestors’; they were aggressors, as behaviour such as Cantwell’s – and worse – clearly shows.)
Cantwell was an unsuccessful libertarian comedian with a lengthy arrest record for petty crime in New York. (One wonders if he was ever arrested by Anthony Bologna, NYPD officer who… um… pepper sprayed peaceful Occupy Wall St protestors.)
He was also a one-time MRA. As noted, the so-called ‘Men’s Rights Movement’ is yet another “gateway drug” to the alt-Right, and a cult soaked in extreme reactionary libertarianism by the way. (As a 2013 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found, the vast majority of the alt-Right is young, white, and male.)
During his libertarian phase (which, according to him at least some of the time, he never really left), Cantwell was enthusiastic about the ‘Free State Project’ (FSP), a planned political migration of at least 20,000 libertarians to a state with a low population (they eventually settled on New Hampshire) in order to create a utopia of small government, low taxes, etc. Volunteers were required to sign a contract to move to New Hampshire as soon as the minimum number of recruits had been achieved. The irony of loads of libertarian right-wingers migrating, under contract, to forge their own state, doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Nor to Ron Paul, or the Austrian economist Walter Block, or the Austrian-supporting businessman Peter Schiff, or… here we go again… LewRockwell.org and the Mises Institute… all of whom praised the scheme. Cantwell was later expelled from the FSP for advocating the murder of police officers, a stance he justified by pointing out (in yet another example of the right-wing capacity to be spectacularly wrong by virtue of being so nearly correct) that the police are using ‘violence’ by enforcing the law. (Cantwell later repudiated his support for cop-killing… just after he discovered he was wanted for the pepper spraying thing, coincidentally enough.)
In a blog post published just after Charlottesville, Cantwell wrote that, upon beginning studies of the US Constitution (in response to “legal problems”), he happened upon
a video introduction to this document produced by Michael Badnarik, the 2004 Presidential Candidate for the Libertarian Party. I was radicalized before the presentation was half over, because I found out that the government I live under today bears no resemblance to that document whatsoever.
We’ve touched upon why the founding documents of the USA might be congenial to today’s American defenders of white supremacy and the prerogatives of the propertied elsewhere.
I instantly became fascinated with the history, and economics that libertarianism taught. I later became a big fan of Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand. You might be aware, these people are Jewish. Shocking to some then, that I am today a rather vocal antisemite.
As we've also seen, being Jewish was no barrier to anti-semitism for Rothbard.
Cantwell goes on to sketch his subsequent disenchantment, saying that
whatever the virtues of the philosophy of libertarianism, the libertarian movement of modern day was rather degenerate. Rather than supporting Ron Paul, or learning about economics, most of the “activists” I came into contact with seemed a lot more interested in promoting drugs and deviant sexual behavior as societal virtues, even in instances where the State had no interference in such matters.
Much as the paleolibertarians before him had invented their new ultra-conservative version of libertarianism partly in order to escape such deviant and unvirtuous distortions.
He goes on to cite some familiar names.
As immigration became a leading news story in America and Europe, Lew Rockwell gave a talk titled “Open Borders Are An Assault on Private Property“. From here I decided to read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Democracy: The God That Failed”. From these I realized, that the libertine vision of a free society was quite distorted. The society we sought actually would provide far more order and control than modern democratic governments. It would encourage more socially conservative behavior, and less compulsory association. Just when I thought I had everything figured out, I was once again reminded of my naivety. It would not be the last time.
Cantwell is a fervent admirer of fervent-Rothbard-admirer Hoppe, and draws on his rhetoric. Hoppe once said that in “a libertarian social order” undesirables like “democrats and communists” would have to be “physically separated and removed". Following this, Cantwell likes to talk about the “physical removal” of anyone to the left of… well, of himself. Cantwell is very fond of that right-wing joke about “free helicopter rides”, a reference to a political murder technique used in Pinochet’s Chile (the model society Hayek inspired and admired). Salon.com quotes him as saying that “[b]asically you have to start making better people in the society, and that might involve doing things like chucking trannies out of helicopters.” (The gentlemanly Hayek would probably grimace at the vulgarity.)
On his blog, the ludicrous-but-not-incoherent Cantwell goes on to cite YouTube anarcho-capitalist (and liar and ignoramus and pseudo-intellectual and crypto-fascist and con-man and wannabe-cult-leader) Stefan Molyneux as a major influence, specifically regarding a chat Molyneux had with Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, the racist pseudo-science potboiler Rothbard and Rockwell.org have so admired (and recipient of Koch brothers largesse). Cantwell is no stranger to anarcho-capitalism, having co-hosted the ancap radio show Free Talk Live until he was suspended for calling someone the n-word on Twitter.
Cantwell declares, in as many words, his ‘race realism’. He sees racism as a simple admission of unalterable and undeniable realities, and the acceptance of a racial hierarchy as a necessary first step towards a realistic social policy, one that might bring about law and order and peace, etc. He gets there via libertarianism. Via transcending it, or radicalising it, he says. Even so, he demonstrates the path from the libertarian embrace of innate difference as an explanation of inequality, to the nazi race principle.
Cantwell explicates the logical connection quite eloquently for a moron. Race realism, says he,
seemed to coincide well with my libertarianism. Libertarians also want to reduce conflict over scarce resources. In libertarian philosophy, nobody ought to be compelled to associate with anyone else. People should be free to exercise complete control over their own person and property. If blacks are committing crimes, or Jews are spreading communism, discriminating against them is the right of any property owner. The fact that he may or may not miss out on good blacks or Jews is a risk he takes, and the merit of his decisions will be proven out by the market. Since a libertarian society would permit this, it seemed foolish that I should be compelled to support a democratic government policy which did not.
It was only after all this that Donald Trump seemed worth taking seriously.
Not strictly relevant at this point, that last bit. But hey, who am I to censor a connection he himself makes for me?
Salon.com notes that
Cantwell still considers himself to be “foundationally" a libertarian. In a March interview on YouTube, the white supremacist said that he is a libertarian at heart and believes that “everything should be done through property rights and contracts.” He came to the conclusion, however, that “the idea that most of the people we live around today would be property owners in the absence of the state is hysterically, obnoxiously stupid.”
“Those people are not fit for survival in the absence of the state,” continued Cantwell. “So I don’t argue with people who call me a fascist anymore, because essentially these people are products of the democratic state.”
The fascist belief in racial hierarchy has subsumed the anarcho-capitalistic idea of the stateless society. Authoritarianism wins, via the logic of racism. Yet it would be wrong to see this as the ‘defeat’ of anarcho-capitalism or paleolibertarianism (or whatever you want to call it) because the fascist belief in innate racial hierarchies is essentially supported and promoted by such Right-libertarianism, as we’ve seen. It is clearly a major part of how Cantwell got here. It’s an irony, but not a surprising one. And it’s not even especially ironic if you don’t believe that anarcho-capitalism was ever really about trying to abolish the state.
*
So. Enoch and Cantwell – two of the most prominent stars of the alt-Right in its radicalised, offline, openly-fascist form – are both clear examples of the same line. The line traces directly from the anti-statist, anti-socialist libertarianism of Rand, Rothbard, and Mises, to neo-nazism. Inevitable? No. The only such line? No. But a clear and – in its own terms - logical line, all the same. The logical terminus of the ideas accepted by libertarianism, and aggressively embraced by paleolibertarianism, is fascism.
(And yes, I know Rand hated libertarians. It doesn’t matter, she hated everyone and got off on doing so. That is the basis of her ‘philosophy’, far more than Aristotle or objectivity or capitalism – none of which she understood.)
Enoch and Cantwell are not isolated specimens. Though many points of ideology separate libertarianism from the alt-Right they are outweighed by the areas of agreement, including the most fundamental, the one which practically negates almost all the disputes the various flavours of reaction like to indulge in (see below).
A lot of alt-Righters have identified themselves as libertarians at one time or another. The YouTuber Kevin Logan, who has trawled through the darkest recesses of YouTube’s MRA-MGTOW tendencies in his ‘Descent of Man-osphere’ series, and in the process inevitably found himself constantly confronted by people who are also part of the alt-right and alt-lite, has concluded that libertarianism is a “gateway drug” to fascism. The Daily Beast runs through a few of the most prominent libertarians-turned-alt-righters in an article entitled ‘The Insidious Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline’. They cite Milo Yiannopoulos (though he has flip-flopped on this, being the unprincipled little opportunist and liar that he is); Tim Gionet, who was once a Ron Paul supporter; Gavin McInnes (another of Richard Spencer’s “entry points”); Stefan Molyneux (of course), etc.
The article actually makes a very acute and key observation:
It is… true that many of today’s alt-righters are disaffected conservatives. However, there are many more conservatives in this country than there are libertarians, which suggests a disproportionate number of today’s prominent alt-righters began as libertarians.
That isn’t to say everything is peaches and cream on the right. A lot of people on the far-Right consider libertarianism dead, or bankrupt. Peter Brimelow’s far-right website VDARE (named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born on the American continent) considers LewRockwell.org far too left-wing these days. Someone called Geoffrey Hood – writing at the peculiar, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-respectable white-nationalist website Counter-Currents - says that Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party are helping support the mainstream rather than actually opposing it. But Hood also says that
[t]hinkers such as Hans-Herman Hoppe, Murray Rothbard, Joseph Sobran, and others who we could call paleolibertarians didn’t just say “freedom works!” Whatever their failings from the viewpoint of those of us who put race first, these men and those like them at least honestly approached the question of how one can achieve and maintain a libertarian society. And their work made an important contribution to Neo-Reaction, which also helped lead to the emergence Alternative Right. You can’t talk about the Alt Right without acknowledging how so many libertarians and former libertarians understand there should be a government helicopter program.
Yeah, I mean you wouldn’t want to be unfair, would you?
Another admirer of Hans-Herman Hoppe and his book Democracy: The God That Failed is, of course, Menicus Moldbug, software designer and founder of ‘neoreaction’, a minor current within the alt-Right that has punched above its weight in terms of attracting attention, owing to its patina of web-based pseudo-intellectualism and eccentricity.
As our esteemed Sandifer wrote elsewhere, Moldbug is
best known for the astonishing levels of protest that take place whenever a tech conference invites him to speak, generally based on the accusation that he believes in reinstituting slavery and thinks that black people make especially good slaves. The reason for this is relatively simple: he believes in reinstituting slavery and thinks that black people make especially good slaves.
In a post from 2010 on his Unqualified Reservations blog entitled ‘From Mises to Carlyle: my sick journey to the dark side of the force’, Moldbug says that “before I became a royalist or a Carlylean or whatever, I was a libertarian. Specifically, a Misesian”.
After boasting about how much Mises and Rothbard he’s read, and how much he’s not read, he fawns “Mises is a titan; Rothbard is a giant” and “Mises is almost never wrong”.
Having said that, he’s now clearly one of libertarianism’s discontents. At one point in the post he echoes Peter Brimelow in complaining that Lew Rockwell is too left-wing these days.
Lower down, he writes that
[t]here is actually a very easy means by which a Misesian can go past libertarianism. The means has a name: Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Professor Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed is still one of the best anti-democracy tracts I've read, and it was most certainly the first. Professor Hoppe is no Mises, perhaps even no Rothbard, but he is certainly the leading Rothbardian scholar of the post-Rothbard era.
He is irritated with Hoppe for being ambivalent about monarchy. Hacking through the densely overgrown vegetation of Moldbug’s jungular yet remorselessly boring paragraphs, one finds him basically saying that Hoppe looks too Hitlery to be effective because he’s a libertarian anarchist, and the right never does well when it adopts “the weapons of the left” because that makes it look, um, too Hitlery? Something like that anyway. It’s all drivel. He’s basically just spicing banalities with tautologies…as well as missing a pretty crucial point concerning Hitler that cuts deeper than whether his PR strategy will still work nowadays. And this isn’t an isolated incident.
In fairness, he does have a fleetingly-but-genuinely insightful moment a little lower down when pointing out that, though Mises (supposedly) discredited any non-libertarian system of government, he – and libertarianism generally - failed to show why and how and if a libertarian governmental system would work:
Another way to see the problem is to examine that shibboleth of libertarians - limited government. Now, the frustrated English teacher in me notes an interesting fact about this phrase: it is in the passive voice. Who shall limit the government? And how can we assure that they continue to do so? And if some other party does this limiting, who shall limit them? This is, of course, the old quis custodiet problem. To which Rothbard has no better solution than Juvenal.
He has a point, though not a very original one. I think every debunk of anarcho-capitalism asks what power in society will limit power. Should such simplicities really need highlighting?
We needn’t concern ourselves with Moldbug’s non-answer to the problem, in which he declares himself “a third class of libertarian: a royalist libertarian” and longs for a libertarian king who will monarchically enforce statelessness. Oddly, he’s already wistfully mocked the idea that democracy could suppress itself in favour of libertarianism, yet seems to think absolute monarchy will manage it… because if there’s one thing absolute monarchy is famous for, it’s modestly limiting its own power in favour of the liberty of its subjects.
This stuff is basically gibberish, an excuse for a poseurian and fogeyish dismissal of modernity, decorated with glib anti-politics, and ultimately leading to an authoritarianism that constantly peeps at you through its faux-medieval vizard to check if you’re shocked yet.
The point is made. The ‘founder of neoreaction’ got there via Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe.