The reason this is a disaster is not because the Libertarian Party was ever the perfect embodiment of libertarian ideas, but because the treason of the ‘party of Principle’ is symbolic of everything wrong with libertarianism, which itself has a great deal to do with everything which has become wrong with America.
I.
Look from Bob Barr to Ron Paul to Lew Rockwell- the spokescreatures for the libertarian movement are everywhere conservative monstrosities. This is not a question of a Party/non-party split, extreme/moderate split, or minarchist/anarchist split. Some of the libertarians most alienated from the LP are among the worst (and some of the individualists remaining within the movement are Party members, minarchists, and political moderates),
The problem is with libertarianism, the idea and the concept- with an idea of liberty with has come to coalesce not around individualism and the completion of the Enlightenment project but around an anti-contextual hatred of the modern nation-state which simply begs for cooptation by reaction and obscurantism. Those calling themselves libertarians today do not foremost cry out for the human spirit to be able to think for itself and create its own life; they have united instead on a negative, *against* one recent and narrow form of tyranny and allied themselves with those who seek a return of earlier and more awful forms. Libertarianism as an ideology no longer works on balance as a force for liberation of the individual mind and spirit in today’s world- partially, it never did. This should have been expected given that ‘libertarianism’ as *anti-statism* rather that a positive affirmation of the cultural institutions of individualism is not much more of a coherent philosophy than ‘anti-Communism’ or anti-fascism, and similarly utterly vulnerable to use by vicious people for horrific purposes.
Ditching the Party is not enough. What has happened to the Party is the symptom. The Party did not betray libertarianism; the Party and libertarianism have both betrayed the Enlightenment, and both were set up without any structural safeguards which could prevent such a betrayal. The word ‘libertarianism’ does not mean freedom for living, breathing individuals if the mind and spirit of individual liberty becomes absent, and there was never anything in libertarianism to ensure that it was present.
II.
The trouble is that libertarianism was always the Archamerican Philosophy, and the corruption of libertarianism has a great deal to do with the changes which have come to America in the last thirty years. From 1776 to the counterculture, America once really did, despite its faults, at least to some relative degree embody the ideals of Enlightenment and individualism of which libertarianism was supposed to be an expression. But America is being thoroughly taken over by the other heritage which distinquished in from the Old Country- its violence, miltarism, bigotry, provincial ignorance, anti-intellectualism. and religious fanaticism. In an almost perfect morality play, America’s original sin of slavery has indeed at last destroyed it, for as Kevin Phillips’s _American Theocracy_ well observes, it is the Southern cultural patterns orginally produced by a slave society (and the worst and oldest of Cavalier British classism, before that) which have now spread to a working plurality if not simple majority of America. When the ideals of modernity started unvoidably hitting everyday culture in the 60s and 70s, a good part of America decided the deal wasn’t worth it, and what Leanprd Peikoff called the ‘nation of the Enlightenment’ is the headquarters of the most dangerous court of church and altar and (badly) storied pomp in the West. In 1929, *any* party which considered itself the embodiment of the German spirit would be in deep trouble, even if the German spirit it originally held in mind was that of Lessing, Schiller, and Beethoven.
Libertarianism has always been both explicitly and implicitly tied to a specifically American social system, culture, and mentality. If America fails, libertarianism will either have to recreate itself according to the grammar and rhythms of different traditions or perish ignomiously, tied in what remains of educated world opinion to a derided and discredited system which by all evidence is going to crash brutally with immense harm to all sorts of innocent (and less-than-innocent) bystanders. In New Zealand, the Libertarianz and ACT parties are far less devoted to liberty than to Americanism and are for all practical purposes aligned with more mainstream forces which, if successful, will see what is happening to America (and the UK and elsewhere) also come here. As for those mainstream forces, the same Kiwis who have expressed to be they would like New Zealand to imitate America simulatenously believe in ‘modernising’ in the manner of Singapore and China- for that is what America means to the world; wealth and efficiency by any means necessary (torture, for instance. Meanwhile those who practise liberty (along with many who don’t) rightly see America as the most *relevant* symbol of threatening authoritarism.
Libertarianism would have to de-Americanise itself to survive. but I doubt it can; libertarian theory is so caught up in unconscious American parochialism that it has little appeal outside the United States for both fairly good and pretty lousy reasons (just as ‘anti-Americanism’ has always been both a rational if preoccupied judgement *and* a resentful bigotry of ignorant and cynical premodernists). Even if libertarianism did fully de-Americanise, the perception that libertarianism=capitalism=America is going to make life difficult for libertarians in much the way as the existence of the Soviet Union once made life very difficult for anti-authoritarians who still held to pre-Soviet notions of communism.
Personally, I think it is more likely that many wonderful things- things like individualism, the market economy. high standards of living, the counterculture, modernity itself- will, as with 1929, be unjustly blamed for a failure which resulted precisely from their betrayal. I think the eclipse of America will do immense and very possibly fatal damage to libertarianism and to far, far more than libertarianism. The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it. Every illiberal force in the entire world will work to make that happen- to convince the world that Imperial America rose and fell *because* of the Statue of Liberty- and sociobiology and 10,000 years of patriarchal tyranny will make it very easy for a world full of ignorant and brutalised people to believe them.
* * *
I put my money with the European Union, statist and badly flawed as it is. If the individualist way of life has any future it is there. India, I don’t know much of. But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink. Get me six drinks and a glass of blue acid to wash it down with. I’ll be considerate, but probably not kind, and wash the glass.
Wonderful job we’ve done with this world of ours. If there are gods, they probably long ago disowned the human race in disgust.
I.
Look from Bob Barr to Ron Paul to Lew Rockwell- the spokescreatures for the libertarian movement are everywhere conservative monstrosities. This is not a question of a Party/non-party split, extreme/moderate split, or minarchist/anarchist split. Some of the libertarians most alienated from the LP are among the worst (and some of the individualists remaining within the movement are Party members, minarchists, and political moderates),
The problem is with libertarianism, the idea and the concept- with an idea of liberty with has come to coalesce not around individualism and the completion of the Enlightenment project but around an anti-contextual hatred of the modern nation-state which simply begs for cooptation by reaction and obscurantism. Those calling themselves libertarians today do not foremost cry out for the human spirit to be able to think for itself and create its own life; they have united instead on a negative, *against* one recent and narrow form of tyranny and allied themselves with those who seek a return of earlier and more awful forms. Libertarianism as an ideology no longer works on balance as a force for liberation of the individual mind and spirit in today’s world- partially, it never did. This should have been expected given that ‘libertarianism’ as *anti-statism* rather that a positive affirmation of the cultural institutions of individualism is not much more of a coherent philosophy than ‘anti-Communism’ or anti-fascism, and similarly utterly vulnerable to use by vicious people for horrific purposes.
Ditching the Party is not enough. What has happened to the Party is the symptom. The Party did not betray libertarianism; the Party and libertarianism have both betrayed the Enlightenment, and both were set up without any structural safeguards which could prevent such a betrayal. The word ‘libertarianism’ does not mean freedom for living, breathing individuals if the mind and spirit of individual liberty becomes absent, and there was never anything in libertarianism to ensure that it was present.
II.
The trouble is that libertarianism was always the Archamerican Philosophy, and the corruption of libertarianism has a great deal to do with the changes which have come to America in the last thirty years. From 1776 to the counterculture, America once really did, despite its faults, at least to some relative degree embody the ideals of Enlightenment and individualism of which libertarianism was supposed to be an expression. But America is being thoroughly taken over by the other heritage which distinquished in from the Old Country- its violence, miltarism, bigotry, provincial ignorance, anti-intellectualism. and religious fanaticism. In an almost perfect morality play, America’s original sin of slavery has indeed at last destroyed it, for as Kevin Phillips’s _American Theocracy_ well observes, it is the Southern cultural patterns orginally produced by a slave society (and the worst and oldest of Cavalier British classism, before that) which have now spread to a working plurality if not simple majority of America. When the ideals of modernity started unvoidably hitting everyday culture in the 60s and 70s, a good part of America decided the deal wasn’t worth it, and what Leanprd Peikoff called the ‘nation of the Enlightenment’ is the headquarters of the most dangerous court of church and altar and (badly) storied pomp in the West. In 1929, *any* party which considered itself the embodiment of the German spirit would be in deep trouble, even if the German spirit it originally held in mind was that of Lessing, Schiller, and Beethoven.
Libertarianism has always been both explicitly and implicitly tied to a specifically American social system, culture, and mentality. If America fails, libertarianism will either have to recreate itself according to the grammar and rhythms of different traditions or perish ignomiously, tied in what remains of educated world opinion to a derided and discredited system which by all evidence is going to crash brutally with immense harm to all sorts of innocent (and less-than-innocent) bystanders. In New Zealand, the Libertarianz and ACT parties are far less devoted to liberty than to Americanism and are for all practical purposes aligned with more mainstream forces which, if successful, will see what is happening to America (and the UK and elsewhere) also come here. As for those mainstream forces, the same Kiwis who have expressed to be they would like New Zealand to imitate America simulatenously believe in ‘modernising’ in the manner of Singapore and China- for that is what America means to the world; wealth and efficiency by any means necessary (torture, for instance. Meanwhile those who practise liberty (along with many who don’t) rightly see America as the most *relevant* symbol of threatening authoritarism.
Libertarianism would have to de-Americanise itself to survive. but I doubt it can; libertarian theory is so caught up in unconscious American parochialism that it has little appeal outside the United States for both fairly good and pretty lousy reasons (just as ‘anti-Americanism’ has always been both a rational if preoccupied judgement *and* a resentful bigotry of ignorant and cynical premodernists). Even if libertarianism did fully de-Americanise, the perception that libertarianism=capitalism=America is going to make life difficult for libertarians in much the way as the existence of the Soviet Union once made life very difficult for anti-authoritarians who still held to pre-Soviet notions of communism.
Personally, I think it is more likely that many wonderful things- things like individualism, the market economy. high standards of living, the counterculture, modernity itself- will, as with 1929, be unjustly blamed for a failure which resulted precisely from their betrayal. I think the eclipse of America will do immense and very possibly fatal damage to libertarianism and to far, far more than libertarianism. The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it. Every illiberal force in the entire world will work to make that happen- to convince the world that Imperial America rose and fell *because* of the Statue of Liberty- and sociobiology and 10,000 years of patriarchal tyranny will make it very easy for a world full of ignorant and brutalised people to believe them.
* * *
I put my money with the European Union, statist and badly flawed as it is. If the individualist way of life has any future it is there. India, I don’t know much of. But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink. Get me six drinks and a glass of blue acid to wash it down with. I’ll be considerate, but probably not kind, and wash the glass.
Wonderful job we’ve done with this world of ours. If there are gods, they probably long ago disowned the human race in disgust.
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