Amerika

We all like the idea of libertarianism: a society organizing itself around markets, where productive behavior is rewarded and everything else passes on through the mechanisms of Darwinism.

Like most human ideals, it consists of One Big Idea Applied Everywhere (OBIAE) and appeals to our sense of simplicity in firm answers. We have a theory! It will fix everything. This is part of the talisman-scapegoat dichotomy in human thinking.

In the Age of Symbolism, we explain everything in terms of language, symbol, and logical relationships. Other people become allies or enemies because of the symbols we use, so we have to pick carefully, and this favors having one over-arching symbol to explain everything.

The problem with this approach is that life is nuanced. It has lots of nooks and crannies of logic where things that apply a certain way somewhere else apply a different way. Conservatives reject the unproven new and favor a few general principles applied on a case-by-case basis for this reason.

This is unfortunate because libertarianism works very well in some contexts. It works best as a method, not a goal, since it is incomplete as a goal; a libertarian society would be a shopping mall with rental units and no culture, no shared interaction, and probably no ability to unite to face natural disasters or enemies.

In other words, like the liberalism from which it descends — libertarianism is liberalism plus social Darwinism, an attempt at compromise with the Revolutionaries — it can only be conceptualized in terms of a civilization that already exists and faces no actual threats or challenges.

Unfortunately for libertarians, this means that most of their thinking comes from the same armchair bourgeois mentality, which is the desire for a fix that can be articulated at the pub which would require the least from the person speaking and the most from society at large through externalities.

Where the libertarians prove supreme is in their observation that free markets are more precise, localized, and efficient than central command economies like Communism and Bidenomics. They perceive that property rights allow natural selection to continue as well as provide the best stable mental state for citizens.

However, libertarianism breaks down when it comes to threats to the culture itself. Individualists do not unite in time of war, but act toward whatever benefits them personally the most; similarly, they do not defend culture except as a hobby, or act to ameliorate natural disasters except in their own community.

The individualist side of libertarianism explains why libertarians have never had a workable foreign policy or relationship to nationalism, and this failure to uphold standards and act in defense of a civilization makes their plans unappealing to most people for good reason.

Libertarians also fail to recognize the biological imperative toward healthy breeding. Anarchy and freedom lead to a proliferation of lesser quality people. Egalitarianism, which is implicit in libertarianism, includes tolerance of the mentally defective.

Some have pointed out the tolerance inversion or that tolerance for the defective results in a weakening of the group:

For instance, he suggested that life is a struggle for human beings and that, in order for the best to survive, it is necessary to pursue a policy of non-aid for the weak: “to aid the bad in multiplying, is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies” (Spencer, 1874: 346).

Libertarianism will never thrive because it relies on the symbolic instead of the literal. Granting “freedom” to the bad simply results in the bad winning because they are laser-focused on their simple goal while those who want normal lives have many objectives.

Similarly, libertarian foreign policy denies that bad actors exist who will attack and a nation of individualistic property owners will not unite to fight them off. It might try to bribe them, but bribes only work until the enemy realizes that the property it can seize is worth more than the bribe.

Increasingly conservatives are speaking out against the bourgeois nature of libertarianism:

The 1,200-word essay that kicked off the fireworks, by writers Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein, spent little time on the ousted Fox host’s incendiary racial and cultural statements, but instead lingered on his professed disdain for mainstream American elites. “Carlson’s insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority,” they wrote, noting his evolution from libertarian to “rejecting many of the free-market doctrines he’d previously espoused.”

Among other things, the piece cited his skepticism about free trade, his monologues against monopolistic Big Tech firms, and a viral segment about potential job losses from self-driving cars. It also noted that he attacked establishmentarian GOP leaders over their support for the Ukraine war.

Classical liberalism, from which libertarianism derives, was an accommodation to liberalism; it tried to find a way that, in the new liberal system, conservatives could have normal lives, and it settled on laissez-faire free markets as that solution.

This new approach dovetailed with the bourgeois idea of avoiding conflicts that might impede the personal collection of wealth, power, and status. Libertarians became the ultimate armchair activists and those who would punt on any important issue because it is not a personal and individualist issue, but a collective one.

For example, how does society respond to an invasion or natural disaster? What about a massive opportunity such as space flight? Or even to knowledge itself, when standardizing something like a new management style might improve efficiency or quality across the country?

Libertarianism addresses none of these. It is a fallback position for conservatives who want to pretend that political pluralism can exist:

Old-fashioned conservative “fusionism” — a synthesis of anti-communism, moderate free market economics, and the genteel traditionalism represented by Russell Kirk — was replaced in the wake of the Cold War by what might be called Fusionism 2.0 and its allies on the hawkish left. This post-Cold War coalition, which culminated in the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, was a radical movement, not “conservative” in any sense. It was based on the simultaneous promotion of three utopian projects: spreading “the global democratic revolution” through “wars of choice” and “humanitarian interventions” in the Middle East and elsewhere; radical libertarianism in trade and immigration policy, combined with the repeal of the New Deal through the privatization of Social Security and Medicare; and the imposition of “family values” as defined by the evangelical Protestant minority that formed the base for the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority.

Fusionist conservatives wanted to pretend that “Christian libertarianism” could replace actual conservative thinking and win elections. This required talking about any issues related to the logical need for inequality in nature, including darwinism, genetics, social class, and race.

Because of that, many have turned to the libertarian position simply because it is socially acceptable to Leftists and therefore, less likely to generate controversy.

Many now talk about simply wanting to be “left alone,” but this dodges what Plato and Aristotle observed: you will have leaders, so you either choose good ones or get ruled by people who want to use you for their own benefit.

Libertarianism works great as a method but not as a goal. For many issues in life, we can rely on culture and free markets to promote the good and remove the bad. This type of Social Darwinism however still offends the Leftists, so expect it to be adopted and then converted into Leftist programs.

At its core, libertarianism is simply a gentler form of egalitarianism. It assumes that all people are equal and will magically organize into functional societies. This forgets that by the chaotic and relative nature of the universe, many people are simply destructive, including foreign groups.

A libertarian society throws up its hands at the question of human civilization. It discards the need for leadership and culture, replacing them with a crass marketplace. This determines that people will be ruled by committee, consumerism, and peer pressure instead of developing functional civilizations.

Tags: fusionism, libertarianism, libertarians