Two Items Relating to Paleoconservatism versus Libertarianism

Thing one is a headline at LewRockwell.com, by none other than Rockwell himself:

Mises Was a Nationalist

Thing two is a name change. Sean Gabb recently abdicated as head of the UK's Libertarian Alliance. His successor, Keir Martland, writes:

the organisation I now own will not be called the Libertarian Alliance, but the Ludwig von Mises Centre (or Mises UK)

The splintering of the paleoconservative movement away from libertarianism seems to be complete, or at least very near completion. That final break has been a long time coming.

I suspect it became inevitable when Murray Rothbard died with head still fully jammed up anus vis a vis the "paleo strategy." He was always mercurial with respect to strategy. If he had lived longer he almost certainly would have done a 180 at some point. But he didn't live long enough to extract cranium from rectum.

In his absence, the lesser lights who took over his work were in various ways unwilling¹ or unable² to do so either. Like a rocket in deep space that runs out of fuel for maneuver, they just kept going straight in the direction he had most recently pointed them. And when the tether connecting the paleo strategy to libertarian ideology (which led in a very different direction) got too taut, they decided to start sawing through that tether rather than let it drag them back toward sanity.

On the one hand, I'm a bit sad to see some seemingly good people floating rudderless off into the darkness on Spaceship Paleo. Fortunately quite a few have launched their escape pods from, or were made to walk the plank off of, that ship in recent years and returned to libertarianism where they are back to making positive contributions (two that come to mind are Sheldon Richman and Jeffrey Tucker), and others may yet do so.

I also wish that the paleos had listened to MacBeth -- "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly" -- rather than try to drag libertarianism along behind them for more than two decades.

But better late than never.

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1. Hoppe wasn't just whistling Dixie (pun intended) when he framed his approach as an attempt to put libertarianism on the rails of Marx's theory of history. His class theory is "race realism," his class war is bordertarianism, his revolutionary method is "physical removal," and his dictatorship of the proletariat is the construction of faux "private property societies" as a proliferation of Hoxha-style mini-Albanias.

2. Rockwell isn't a system-builder or an ideologue. He's a salesman. When Rothbard died, Rockwell just kept selling what Rothbard had most recently sent him out to sell while looking for new faces to put on it. Once the Ron Paul presidential campaigns were done, that model started to go sour on him. Then Trump came along. I think we have the results of the 2016 presidential election to thank for the paleos' decision to finally and forever cut their tether to libertarianism.

Let It Bleed

Bleeding Heart Libertarians is running a "symposium on left-libertarianism." Interesting stuff. The material is varied enough, and my own thoughts on that fragmented enough, that doing a full-on review/critique seems like a bad idea. So I'm picking one piece (Steve Horwitz's "On the Edge of Utopia"), and one tidbit from that piece, to respond to.

Horwitz:

Left-libertarians often seem to argue that even just a little bit of statism so distorts markets that the results produced by the mixed economy bear little relationship to what a freed economy would produce.  Just as putting one drop of a liquid one owns into an unowned lake does not make the whole thing yours, neither does one drop of statism suddenly mean that the results of a mixed economy are vastly different from the results produced by a freed market.

I've got two problems with Horwitz's formulation.

The first is that there's never just a "little bit of statism" involved, nor, in my opinion, can there be. The evolutionary trend of the state runs in one direction: Toward more -- and deeper -- economic intervention and regulation. Rollbacks of state economic intervention/regulation are the exception, not the rule. Since the birth of the Westphalian nation-state, nearly every state has been, at nearly all times, progressing toward, not away from, total statism.

The second is that even little interventions which only slightly change the direction or velocity of a thing can result in very large effects over time. If you don't believe me, take off from Jefferson City in a small plane and fly 1000 miles due south, then 1000 miles at 20 degrees east of due south, then 1000 miles at 20 degrees west of due south. You'll find yourself in three very different places (very roughly, Baton Rouge versus Austin versus Tallahassee).

Contra Horwitz, I regard things like state-mandated limited liability for corporations as having likely produced long-term growth a) in very different directions, b) to much greater proportions and c) among particular entities, which would not have gone those ways absent the surplus profits created by the state miracle-ing away the need for investors to insure versus liabilities connected to their portfolios.

Unlike many left-libertarians, I'm less cocksure in my claims about precisely where things would have gone absent state intervention, or my predictions concerning precisely where they might go if the state disappeared this afternoon ...

... but I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that things economic would look very different today absent (to take three English economic interventions of past centuries because they're handy to my thoughts at the moment) the Statute of Anne, the Inclosure Acts, and the state privileges granted the East India Trading Company) ...

... and that it's reasonable to hypothesize that if Murray Rothbard's "destroy the state" button got pushed today, things economic would look a lot different a century from now than they will if, as I expect, the state continues to totter on for awhile longer.

The danger of the paleo flirtation

The New Republic posted a second batch of Ron Paul newsletter excerpts yesterday. A number of people, myself included, expected them to be more damning than the previous batch. A number of people, myself not included, ended up concluding that they aren't. I'll get to why they are in a moment, but first some context:

Julian Sanchez and David Weigel of Reason explore the authorship questions some more. I'm not as interested in authorship per se as I was at first [1], but the article does lay out some historical timeline material that goes in directions I am interested in. Namely, it explores why one might or might not have expected to find this kind of stuff in "libertarian" publications of the time.

During the period when the most incendiary items appeared -- roughly 1989 to 1994 -- Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic.

This raises a serious question in my mind: "What the fuck were those guys thinking?"

Let me explain:

Although I began self-identifying as a libertarian in the early 1990s, I entered the libertarian movement from the paleoconservative side because that was where I found the opportunities to do so. My early movement involvements were with the militias and the Constitution Party (Aaron Russo's short-lived project, not the current abomination iteration). It took me less than a year to get deeply involved, recognize the racism, homophobia and other bizarre psychoses which permeated the "populist right wing" and the dangers those psychoses represented, and get the hell out of there (and I suspect that Russo was similarly motivated, although he cited his "Mad As Hell" project as the reason for his exit from the Constitution Party). By early 1996, I had gone over to ideological anarchism and politically to the Libertarian Party.

Less than a year for me to get shut of the "paleo" impulse. And for Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard? Much longer, if ever.

Now: I don't dispute the possibility that there might have been a point in time when the libertarian and paleoconservative ideological trains found themselves sharing a short section of political track. But that the putative heirs of Ludwig von Mises were possessed of such utter hubris as to attempt not only a long-term hitching together of those trains, but a fueling of the hypothetically resulting powerful locomotive with the worst material they could find ... well, that just creeps me out.

Now, to those newsletter excerpts. Why are the new ones even worse than the old ones?

The racism in the first batch of excerpts was explicit, but read just the right way it was possible -- barely possible, but possible nonetheless -- to write it off as a childish expression of rebellion against the excesses of identity politics and "political correctness." Yes, it was wrong and it was vile, but the possibility existed that we were seeing the results of poor judgment rather than of cold calculation.

In the newly released excerpts, that conclusion isn't available to us. These excerpts include:

- The second revealed instances of the newsletter lauding David Duke, and in a specifically racial context. The previous excerpt cited his "anti-establishment" cachet and wrote off racism as the important factor in his popularity. The new excerpt addresses Duke positively in a piece that refers to "the blacks" in vile collectivist terms multiple times. It's not plausible to write that off as mere coincidence.

- The first revealed instances of thes newsletter not only specifically and approvingly quoting/citing a publicly avowed "white separatist" (Jared Taylor) but offering subscription information for his magazine (American Renaissance) to the readers of the newsletter. This belies the possibilities mentioned in the previous paragraph as well. It bespeaks an informed interest in white identity politics rather than merely a knee-jerk reaction to black identity politics.

- The first revealed instance of the newsletter bemoaning not just the existence of black identity politics but the non-existence of a popular white equivalent. That the author subsequently quails from the obvious followup (a raised-hand chorus of "white power!") and instead segues to a stilted and weak-kneed plea that the reader work to preserve "western culture" makes it very clear that that author knew quite well what kind of fuse he was holding a match perilously close to ... and that he was resisting the urge to light it off.

These excerpts take the plausibility out of my hypothesis that this might have just been a case of a normal politician having temporarily fallen into some of the prejudices of a particular time and place, later to be embarrassed when that old failing was exposed. Rather, they point to a calculated intent to encourage and play on racist sentiments for political gain -- a plan that Rockwell and Rothbard had previously publicly advocated, a plan that was stump-stupid at best and indescribably evil at worst, and a plan that Ron Paul allowed to be (thankfully unsuccessfully) implemented in his name.

1. The authorship question is no longer of particular interest to me because Paul admitted to authoring at least some of the material, and defended it, in 1996, before denying authorship and repudiating the material from 2001 on. Apart from outing Paul as a liar at precisely the moment when he most needs to be perceived as honest, this establishes that Paul knew about, and was conversant with, the material in question. Ghosted or not, the material is Paul's baby.