DemocracyThe God That Failed (43 page)

The beginnings of the modern libertarian movement in the United States go back to the mid-1960s. In 1971 the Libertarian party was founded, and in 1972 the philosopher John Hospers was nominated as its first presidential candidate. It was the time of the Vietnam War. Simultaneously, promoted by the major "advances" in the growth of the welfare state from the early and mid-1960s onward in the United States and similarly in Western Europe (the so-called civil rights legislation and the war on poverty), a new mass-phenomenon emerged. A new "Lumpenproletariat" of intellectuals and intellectualized youths—the products of an ever expanding system of socialist (public) education—"alienated" from mainstream "bourgeois" morals and culture (while living far more comfortably than the Lumpenproletariat of old off the wealth created by this mainstream culture) arose. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism (live and let live) and egalitarian antiauthoritarianism (respect no authority) were elevated from temporary and transitory phases in mental development (adolescence) to permanent attitudes among grown-up intellectuals and their students.

The principled opposition of the libertarians to the Vietnam War coincided with the somewhat diffuse opposition to the war by
the New Left. In addition, the anarchistic upshot of the libertarian doctrine appealed to the countercultural left.
²¹
For did not the illegitimacy of the
state and the nonaggression axiom (that one shall not initiate or threaten to initiate physical force against others and their property) imply that everyone was at liberty to choose his very own nonaggressive lifestyle? Did this not imply that vulgarity, obscenity, profanity, drug use, promiscuity, pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, polygamy, pedophilia or any other conceivable perversity or abnormality, insofar as they were victimless crimes, were no offenses at all but perfectly normal and legitimate activities and lifestyles? Not surprisingly, then, from the outset the libertarian movement attracted an unusually high number of abnormal and perverse followers. Subsequently, the countercultural ambiance and multicultural-relativistic "tolerance" of the libertarian movement attracted even greater numbers of misfits, personal or professional failures, or plain losers. Murray Rothbard, in disgust, called them the "nihilo-libertarians" and identified them as the "modal" (typical and representative) libertarians. They fantasized of a society where everyone would be free to choose and cultivate whatever nonaggressive lifestyle, career, or character he wanted, and where, as a result of free-market economics, everyone could do so on an elevated level of general prosperity. Ironically, the movement that had set out to dismantle the state and restore private property and market economics was largely appropriated, and its appearance shaped, by the mental and emotional products of the welfare state: the new class of permanent adolescents.
²²

²¹
While ultimately judged a failure by most of its former protagonists, the alliance between the fledgling libertarian movement and the New Left during the midand late-1960s can be understood as motivated by two considerations. On the one hand, by the mid-1960s American conservatism was almost completely dominated by William Buckley and his
National
Review.
In contrast to the decidedly anti-interventionist (isolationist) conservatism of the Old Right, the "new conservatism" espoused by Buckley and the
National
Review
and represented most visibly by the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, was an ardently pro-war, pro-militaristic, and even imperialist movement. Based on this, any form of libertarian-conservative alliance had to be judged as simply out of the question. On the other hand, when the New Left began to emerge around 1965, it appeared far more libertarian on crucial issues than the conservatives for two reasons later summarized by Rothbard:

(1) [The New Left's] increasingly thoroughgoing opposition to the Vietnam War, U.S. imperialism, and the draft—the major political issues of that period, in contrast to conservative support for these policies. And (2) its forswearing of the old-fashioned statism and Social Democracy of the
Old Left led the New Left to semi-anarchistic positions, to what seemed to be thoroughgoing opposition to the existing Welfare-Warfare postNew Deal corporate state, and to the State-ridden bureaucratic university system.

Writing nearly a decade later, Rothbard acknowledged a two-fold strategic error in his erstwhile attempt to forge an alliance between libertarians and the New Left:

(a) gravely overestimating the emotional stability, and the knowledge of economics, of these fledgling libertarians; and, as a corollary, (b) gravely underestimating the significance of the fact that these [libertarian] cadre were weak and isolated, that there was no libertarian
movement
to speak of, and therefore that hurling these youngsters into an alliance with a far more numerous and powerful group was bound to lead to a high incidence of defection... into real leftism of the left-wing-anarchist-Maoistsyndicalist variety.
(Toward
a
Strategy
of
Libertarian
Social
Change
[unpublished manuscript, 1977], pp. 159,160-61)

²²
Murray N. Rothbard has given the following portrait of the "modal libertarian" (ML):

ML is indeed a
he;
.
.
.
The ML was in his twenties twenty years ago, and is now in his forties. That is neither as banal, or as benign as it sounds, because it means that the movement has not really grown in twenty
years;... The ML is fairly bright, and fairly well steeped in libertarian theory. But he knows nothing and cares less about history, culture, the context of reality or world affairs. His only reading or cultural knowledge is science fiction,... The ML does not, unfortunately hate the State because he sees it as the unique social instrument of organized aggression against person and property. Instead, the ML is an adolescent rebel against everyone around him: first, against his parents, second against his family, third against his neighbors, and finally against society itself. He is especially opposed to institutions of social and cultural authority: in particular against the bourgeoisie from whom he stemmed, against bourgeois norms and conventions, and against such institutions of social authority as churches. To the ML, then, the State is not a unique problem; it is only the most visible and odious of many hated bourgeois institutions: hence the zest with which the ML sports the button, "Question Authority." ... And hence, too, the fanatical hostility of the ML toward Christianity. I used to think that this militant atheism was merely a function of the Randianism out of which most modern libertarians emerged two decades ago. But atheism is not the key, for let someone in a libertarian gathering announce that he or she is a witch or a worshiper of crystal-power or some other New Age hokum, and that person will be treated with great tolerance and respect. It is only Christians that are subject to abuse, and clearly the reason for the difference in treatment has nothing to do with atheism. But it has everything to do with rejecting and spurning bourgeois American culture; and any kind of kooky cultural cause will be encouraged in order to tweak the noses of the hated bourgeoisie. ... In point of fact, the original attraction of the ML to Randianism was part and parcel of his adolescent rebellion: what better way to rationalize and systematize rejection of one's parents, family, and neighbors than to join a cult which denounces religion and which trumpets the absolute superiority of yourself and your cult leaders, as contrasted to the robotic "second-handers" who supposedly people the bourgeois world? A cult, furthermore, which calls upon you to spum your parents, family, and bourgeois associates, and to cultivate the alleged greatness of your own individual ego (suitably guided, of course, by Randian leadership) the ML, if he has a real world occupation, such as an accountant or lawyer, is generally a lawyer without a practice, and accountant without a job. The ML's modal occupation is computer programmer;... Computers appeal indeed to the ML's scientific and theoretical bent; but they also appeal to his aggravated nomadism, to his need not to have a regular payroll or regular abode The ML also has the thousand-mile stare of the fanatic. He is apt to buttonhole you at the first opportunity and go on at great length about his own particular "great discovery" about his mighty manuscript which is crying out for publication if only it

This intellectual combination could hardly end happily. Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And in trying to
combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social "discrimination" and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.

Contrary to the left libertarians assembled around such institutions as the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice, for instance, who seek the assistance of the central government in the enforcement of various policies of nondiscrimination and call for a nondiscriminatory or "free" immigration policy,
²³
true libertarians must embrace discrimination, be
it internal (domestic) or external (foreign). Indeed, private property means discrimination. I, not you, own such and such. I am entitled to exclude you from my property. I may attach conditions to your using my
property, and I may expel you from my property. Moreover, You and I, private property owners, may enter and put our property into a restrictive (or protective) covenant. We and others may, if we both deem it beneficial, impose limitations on the future use that each of us is permitted to make with our property.

hadn't been suppressed by the Powers That Be But above all, the ML is a moocher, a bunco artist, and often an outright crook. His basic attitude toward other libertarians is "Your house is my house." ... in short, whether they articulate this "philosophy" or not, [MLs] are libertarian-communists: anyone with property is automatically expected to "share" it with the other members of his extended libertarian "family." ("Why Paleo?"
Rothbard-Rockwell
Report
1, no. 2 [May 1990]: 4-5; also idem, "Diversity, Death, and
Reason,"
Rothbard-Rockwell
Report
2, no. 5 [May 1991])

Also see Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
The
Case
for
Paleolibertarianism
and
Realignment
on
the
Right
(Burlingame, Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1990).

More specifically, left-libertarians (LLs) employ and promote the employment of the federal government and its courts to squash discriminatory and presumably antilibertarian state and /or local laws and regulations; they thus contribute, regardless of their
intention,
to the antilibertarian end of strengthening the central state. Correspondingly, LLs typically look favorably upon Lincoln and the Union government because the Union victory over the secessionist Confederacy resulted in the abolition of slavery, but they fail to recognize that
this
way of achieving the libertarian goal of abolishing slavery must lead to a drastic increase in the power of the central (federal) government, and that the Union victory in the Southern War of Independence indeed marks one of the great leaps forward in the growth of the modern federal Leviathan and hence represents a profoundly antilibertarian episode in American history. Further, while us criticize the current practice of "affirmative action" as a quota system, they do not reject the so-called civil-rights legislation from which the present practice developed as entirely and fundamentally incompatible with the cornerstone of libertarian political philosophy, i.e., private property rights. To the contrary, LLs are very much concerned about "civil rights," most prominently the "right" of gays and other alternative life-stylers not to
be discriminated against in employment and housing. Accordingly, they look favorably on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Brown
vs.
Board
of
Education
to outlaw segregation and the proto-socialist "civil rights" leader Martin Luther King. To be sure, as typically recognize the categorical difference between private and socalled public property, and at least in theory they admit that private property owners ought to have the right to discriminate regarding their own property as they please. But the LLs distinctly egalitarian concern for the lofty yet elusive idea of the "progressive extension of
dignity"
(instead
of
property
rights)
to "women, to people of different religions and different races" [David Boaz, p. 16, reference below; my emphasis], misleads them to accept the very
principle
of "nondiscrimination," even if it is only applied and restricted to public property and the public sector of the economy. (Hence the LLs advocacy of a nondiscriminatory or "free" immigration policy.) Theoretically, LLs thereby commit the error of regarding public property as if it were either unowned "land" open to unrestricted universal homesteading (while in fact all public property has been financed by domestic taxpayers), or as if it were "communal" property open to every domestic citizen on an equal basis (while in fact some citizens have paid more taxes than others, and some, i.e., those whose salaries or subsidies were paid
out
of
taxes, have paid no taxes at all). Worse, in accepting the principle of non-discrimination for the realm of public property, LLs in fact contribute to the further aggrandizement of state power and the diminution of private property rights, for in today's state-ridden world, the dividing line between private and public has become increasingly fuzzy. All private property borders on and is surrounded by public streets; virtually every business sells some of its products to some government agency or across state borders; and countless private firms and organizations (such as private universities, for instance) regularly receive government funding. Hence, as seen from the perspective of the agents of the state, there is practically nothing left that is genuinely "private" and thus does not fall under government purview. Based on this all-pervasive entanglement of the state and public property with private business and private property, and given the government's unique—coercive—bargaining power, it can be safely predicted that the policy of "nondiscrimination" will not remain a principle merely of
public
policy for long, but will instead increasingly become a general and ultimately universal principle, extending to and encompassing everyone and everything, public
and
private. (Characteristically, LLs are typically also proponents of Milton Friedman's school voucher proposal and are thus, it would seem, totally unaware that the implementation of the voucher plan would invariably lead to the expansion of government control from public schools to one including private schools and the destruction of whatever autonomous decisionmaking rights the latter schools presently still possess.)