Brad
Spangler Brad Spangler is a longtime libertarian activist and writer. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Brad is the proprietor of GoRebel.Biz. CLICK HERE FOR RATIONAL REVIEW NEWS DIGEST SUPPORT OUR
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Libertarians vs.
Pavlov's Dogs of War The Second Gulf War has been the source of an epiphany for me. The matter of whether or not to support a War of Aggression ought not to have been a divisive matter within the Libertarian Party. It has been, though. What ought to have been rejected out of hand was a matter of contention for many. I believe the reasons for this go to the very core of libertarian angst and political ineffectiveness. I remember discussing matters of war and peace and the Libertarian Party with Larry Fulmer on the "Libertarians for Peace" e-mail list a while back. Larry summarized what we were discussing rather nicely: "How the hell did we get to be a faction anyway?" The "we" in question being "Libertarians for Peace." "Libertarians for Peace" is the opposite of an oxymoron. The term is, I say, an absurdist redundancy. One might as well be a "Vegan Against Meat" or a "Masturbator for Orgasm." So what's really going on here? Discuss this
column at Let's look at what the modern "libertarian" movement is. Granted, the Libertarian Party is not "the movement" any more than the United States of America is the North American continent. Even so ... The libertarian movement represents an alliance between the less numerous but far more advanced thinkers who truly grasp the inherent Evil of the State, and the more numerous people who like Liberty even though they don't understand it well enough to overcome the nigh Pavlovian conditioning they have been subjected to that tells them that the State is a "necessary evil." I have now come to believe that, regardless of whether or not that alliance was a good idea in the beginning, it has become counter-productive in the drive for Liberty. Why would it be counter-productive? Because, as a movement, we are losing sight of what we want. In an effort to build a political front to attempt to advance Liberty, we "go along to get along" in our outreach far too much. The coalition between minarchists and anarchists results in a tendency to obscure the anarchist message. The reason for this is simple -- one has to exhibit a certain deference to one's partners in a coalition. In order to work together with minarchists, anarchists must pay at least minimal lip service to minarchism as an equally valid alternative view. It isn't. True, there are plenty of ongoing disputes on the question of anarchy vs. minarchy. It's a favorite past-time in libertarian circles. In libertarian circles is the key part of that. Our message isn't being taken to the general public effectively because the minarchists in "the movement" serve as a buffer between anarchists and the general public. Spineless anarchists deserve a great deal of the blame for that. In a vain effort to build the "libertarian movement," we have refrained from building an "anarchist movement." It's time to begin anew. The simple truth is we all really would be better off with no government at all. That's getting lost in the background noise. You think not? I disagree. The key moment of insight for me came when I received a patronizing little lecture from an amusing fellow on the Missouri Libertarian Party e-mail list. He set about setting me straight about how libertarians were definitely not anarchists. That he was grossly ignorant of the history and composition of the libertarian movement is an understatement. I didn't bother to offer a rebuttal. In short, the libertarian movement has a schizoid double personality. After much soul searching, I have come to believe that dysfunctionality is rooted in the use of electoral politics. Obviously, anarchism is political. As Karl Hess said: "The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics." But is electoral politics the specific avenue we ought to take in our drive to abolish politics? Consider communism for a moment. According to Marxism, the communist revolution was to supposedly abolish the state by means of seizing control of the state and using it to fight capitalism, which they regarded as the evil power behind the State. They succeeded in taking over the Russian State. Once that was achieved, the abolition of the State got put on the backburner, to say the least. Consider the Republican revolution of the 1990s. Nice conservative Christian fellows with bright white teeth were going to take a modest nick or two out of government. All they had to do was get control of the government in order to do so. They got control of the Congress and what happend? The government grew, of course. An organization is a machine of sorts. It will do what the few who really put some drive into building it "program" it to do. Regardless of whether we are talking about the Bolsheviks or the GOP, if the organization is programmed to seize political power, then it will continue to build its own power. Power corrupts, and once you have it you can never get enough. The drive for power will continue well past the point at which there is enough power accumulated to implement the rationale for power. Power becomes its own rationale. Any one person may, if they are wise and of good character, resist this -- perhaps -- but an organization can't. As Robert A. Heinlein said (if I recall correctly): "A committee is the only creature with ten legs and no brain." Libertarianism is being diluted within the libertarian movement because the libertarian movement is focusing on using electoral politics. There is no room for the real message -- that we all really would be better off with no government at all. So what alternatives do we have? That's a darned good question. Ask yourself what it is we really want. By we, I mean the real libertarians -- anarchists in the vein of Murray Rothbard. What do we really want? We want a society based on the Zero Aggression Principle (ZAP). As a matter of fact, L. Neil Smith considers recogniton of the supremacy of the ZAP the definition of a true libertarian. This is how my views ever so slightly diverge from Neil's. I say that recognition of the supremacy of the ZAP ought to be the definition of an anarchist. We should stop using the word "libertarian" as a noun and treat it as an adjective. Why? The dilution of libertarianism in the libertarian movement (which again, consists of an alliance between anarchists and minarchists) has effectively killed the libertarian movement as an ideological transmission medium. Whether it succeeds or not in seizing political power in the future is now irrelevant. You see, the libertarian movement lost. It lost the fight to use an alliance of anarchists and minarchists to rollback statism with electoral politics before succumbing to the corruption inherent to power. It has already succumbed and become corrupted by the mere drive for power. Minarchists underestimate how truly formidable our enemy, the State, truly is. There is an entire ruling class using very sophisticated propaganda techniques, based on very serious psychological techniques, to maintain and extend the foundations of their rule. The hysterical drive for the Second Gulf War illustrates this perfectly. Minarchists, however, tend to be the libertarians most likely to succumb to statist propaganda, though, so that point is often lost on them. They are weak. We must take the anarchist message forward with passion to cut through the present and future propaganda haze. Again, what do we really want? We want private law, private security and private defense. We want a polycentric legal system not tied to geographically-based monopolies on coercion. We want a stateless society -- and politics will never give us that. So how do we get rid of government? We get rid of it the same way the stateless society of the future will suppress future attempts at government. There will always be new attempts at government -- just as there will always be new burglary rings. We face an overwhelming crime problem. Once we truly grasp that we are afflicted with horrendously powerful bandit gangs that call themselves governments -- then it ought to become clear that we need effective private legal institutions, private security and private defense. Columbus discovering America wouldn't have happened if he didn't think the world was round. So too, the private system of law we envision can not evolve until enough people understand that we all really would be better off with no government at all. We need to carry this message forward and build civil society -- because as mutualist anarchists of the left already understand, that is an inherently revolutionary, anti-statist activity. The private courts and robust private security that we envision can not appear in a vacuum. They have to be an outgrowth of a thriving civil society, including both entrepreneurial activity and non-profit voluntary mutual aid. |
