The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline
Provocative title, I know. But hopefully by the end of this, you’ll get where I’m coming from. And I want to disabuse you of some potential worries up-front, and clarify that I am not saying that if you are a libertarian that you are fascist, or that you are on your way to becoming a fascist. But I am saying that you might be, and that there’s some intellectual reasons to worry about the potential. So you can rest assured that what we are going to talk about is far more nuanced than saying libertarianism is fascism. Because it isn’t.
I also want to talk for a moment about categories. Or labels. When we communicate about any abstract concepts, we are talking in categories. In fact, every single word you are reading now, is itself an abstract concept. I’m counting on you having a reasonably similar understanding of the words I’m using, in order for you to understand the concepts I’m trying to get across to you. So I want to get ahead of this now: I am actually trying to push on the definitions of what libertarianism and fascism are here a little bit. And I think it’s necessary, because I think we might need some better categories in order to make sense of some of the apparent contradictions we see.
One useful way that I’ve started to think about these categories is not thinking of them necessarily as forms of politics but instead, think of them in terms of tendencies or sentiments. I also want to say up front, that what I am about to describe as the libertarian tendency or the fascist tendency are not meant to be taken as necessarily universal to human nature, outside of a particular set of cultural contexts. Another way of putting this might be: it’s possible that the underlying human tendencies that show up as the libertarian or fascist tendencies only manifest in the context of modern organized societies. I am not sure that this is true, but I suspect it could be, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Because we live in such a context, and intractably so, in a path-dependent way, I am comfortable proceeding with these as general terms, with this caveat in place.
The libertarian tendency is, to me, about the fundamental desire to not be controlled by other agents, and to feel like the author of one’s own destiny. It is preoccupied with skepticism about any system of control on society that would limit ones own options. There’s usually some metaphysical assumptions about free will (see: libertarian free will) that goes hand in hand with the tendency, but we’ll not go that deep for the purposes of this essay. The Austrian school of economics is also built atop these metaphysical assumptions as well, in its adherence to methodological individualism as the basis for all its normative foundations in its economic theories, and at the heart of why libertarian and Austrian school of thought go hand-in-hand.
The fascist tendency, is to me, one that appears in people as an impulse to seek to wield permanent political and economic power, by capitalizing on the cynicism of polities, and using cultural control (propaganda) and a psuedo-religious mythos’ to contain the political conversation in a cultural envelope, that effectuates a form of extreme depoliticization by the average member of that society. This tendency can be driven by feelings or fear of alienation, dislocation and the perceived breakdown of traditional social norms and hierarchies. But in terms of those seeking power, these are fears to be exploited through lies and manipulation.
On the surface, these two tendencies seem in opposition. But they only seem that way, because in order for them to stay in opposition to each other, you have to consider some important things.
The first thing is the subject position of the person with said tendency, and the second thing is the universality of whatever moral and ethical claim being made. So let’s unpack that.
The libertarian will of course be arguing that their political orientation could never be considered fascist, because they would claim vociferously that they are advancing a universalist conception of rights. That, all people have the same rights. That, these rights are about the maximization of freedom. That, these rights are inviolable, in principle, no matter how economically powerful someone is. But here in lies the rub: economic power does have something to do with freedom. Negative rights libertarians will insist it doesn’t, because in their definition of freedom, it’s the state of being free of coercion. But I have long argued this is an impoverished definition of freedom. In fact, I like to use the negative rights theorists own thought experiment of how to think about what rights are and what they’re not to make my point. It is often said by negative rights theorists that “a right is something you can do alone on a deserted island”. But if that’s what’s being used to define what a right is, and the corollary to that, is that’s what defines the contours of what freedom is, then I think it’s pretty strange that people’s dreams of absolute freedom don’t typically entail being stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean. In fact, I suspect for the vast majority of us, there’s nothing particularly freeing about the idea of that at all. In fact, I suspect to many of us, that we would miss our families, access to clean drinking water, a variety of foods, and other modern amenities, that living out our lives like Tom Hanks in Castaway, might seem a lot more like prison than freedom, in spite of the fact there’s no other humans around to coerce us to do anything. So this gets at the root of why I think things like the non-aggression principle (NAP) as a complete foundation for organizing society are not terribly complete ethical systems.
One of the things that sets classical liberals apart from many contemporary libertarians — particularly those of the Rothbard, Block, Rockwell, and Hoppe variety — is the contention that the common good in a society does not exist. Or, it is at best, unknowable. If it can be known, it can only be revealed through emergent price signals in a perfectly free market capitalist society. This in essence, is the basis for praxeology in the Austrian school — a form of methodological individualism — which argues that everything that happens in the economy or the society more broadly, begins with a human action — and the only way individual preferences can be properly revealed is through perfect free markets. They go even further, in fact, and argue that property rights are the core of all rights. In say, Rothbard’s case, he doesn’t just argue that property rights are a necessary feature in social society to achieve economic ends, he actually goes all the way to arguing that property rights are inherent and natural to the universe, and that humans have them regardless of whether they’re socially recognized at all. The quasi-mystical process of how natural property comes into existence is explained in the form of physical goods, through the mixing of labor with unowned resources from the earth, and in the case of land, through the practice of homesteading. In this, the argument is that property rights precede law, culture and society-at-large. It is a seductive claim, and appears to give a framework for a libertarian society that doesn’t seem to require the imposition of a central government to administer. And with this conclusion, you get the ideology of anarcho-capitalism.
In this conception, economic domination, even in extreme forms is justifiable and even argued to be perfectly libertarian, as long as all exchanges leading to that end state occurred through “voluntary” exchange. But it’s important to note that “voluntary” is doing a lot of work here, and implies that everything that’s voluntary is inherently just, because according to the negative rights conceptions the lack of coercion into something is the only concept of oppression. The lack of choice, the lack of resources, or the lack of ability play absolutely no roll in this conception of freedom. In fact, many libertarians will argue that even attempting to address these shortcomings, is a slippery slope to totalitarianism at worst, and say, engaging in something like redistributive welfare is authoritarian at best. In fact, any attempt to provision for the common good at all, is predicated on committing theft in the form of taxation or in the form of inflation, if the redistribution is monetized. I would argue that these thoughts are largely vestigial elements from the Cold War anti-communist reactionary nature of a lot of this thinking, and don’t really stand up to scrutiny at all.
A more important problem with this concept of rights, is because it generally denies the existence of a common good (beyond what free market capitalism reveals through how it allocates resources) is that it’s not concerned with the absolute conditions of humans at all. It’s concerned with the maintenance of property rights above all. If a private fiefdom manages to buy up most of the productive farm land in the world, and they decide to not do business with you — for any reason, including the color of your skin, your beliefs, your color of your clothing — you starving to death is your own fault for not negotiating better private contracts ahead of time to prevent this from happening. A central government enforcing some kind of say, anti-discrimination law, is a violation of the property rights of the people who don’t want to sell you food, and according to say, Murray Rothbard, property rights are the most important rights of all, and thus the right of the owners of all the farm land to not sell you food, leaving you to starve to death, is actually the most important right of all that needs protecting.
Anarcho-capitalists usually respond to this criticism by arguing that this is a silly thing to worry about, because the market incentive would always be to make more money by selling more food, and thus it wouldn’t make sense to engage in behavior like this, that would leave someone starving to death. It’s not even worth thinking about. But it’s a bizarre argument that we can simply put our faith in an “invisible hand” since we have literally seen capitalist businesses use their property rights as a basis for social exclusion like this. In the Jim Crow era in the United States, many private businesses did choose to sacrifice the profits that would have come from welcoming the patronage of black customers. Yet, for other non-economic reasons, they didn’t. So the degree to which anarcho-capitalists assert that free market capitalism incents away all these problems is deeply suspect. Indeed, anarcho-capitalist thinkers like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have expressed deeply bigoted views. He has even spoken at events alongside white supremacists such as Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer. In his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe, a libertarian hero among many, including in the bitcoin community, outright suggests in his description of a society of covenant communities, built around private property and contract rights, that without the forced “tolerance” from what he describes as left-libertarians in laws, private businesses would be free to exclude homosexuals and others from their communities — which he argues would be a good thing.
This is where the fascist tendency is revealed at the bottom of a libertarianism that has no conception of the common good. The libertarian tendency leads to a scenario where the game is to project one's own moral sentiments onto society through economic dominance. The fact that this discrimination is argued to be of a purely private nature, is used to defend the whole enterprise as inherently libertarian by virtue of being limited to the free exercise of the right-to-exclude others — for any reason — from ones own property. In other words, the libertarian tendency has collapsed in on itself, from being one that tries to define itself through lack of coercion by non-economic forces, and then justifies coercion in the name of exercising property rights. There is no place for a concept like general welfare in this conception of the world.
In other words, the world of Hoppe, can easily devolve into a kind of neo-fuedalism or even outright fascism, without ever having to mechanically violate the non-agression principle. In a world where the right to exclude other’s from one’s property is seen as absolute and inviolable, and where no countervailing forces or institutions can check the power of the economically dominant, you essentially just have a might-makes-right society who can largely impose their will with impunity. The libertarians believe lethal force is justified in defense of property, and that in such a society, security is best provided by private contract, and someone with the most security is going to be exceptionally difficult to control or hold accountable. Through this backdoor, the libertarian idea when completely uncontained against some claim on the common good, slides effortlessly into the fascist tendency. It is therefore an unstable idea.
It’s worth mentioning that classical liberals such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson, absolutely believed in a concept of the common good. In fact, Jefferson’s conception of it, shows up in the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution itself — it specifically calls upon government to “promote the general welfare” and to “secure the blessings of liberty” for all citizens; classical liberals absolutely believed in a conception of the common good, and even believed in government, and believed that government should have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence — in service of maintaining rule-of-law so disputes could be settled without violence. Locke’s liberal social contract theory, from which Jefferson was heavily influenced, is very much the intellectual basis for the American constitutional order.
What’s been a particularly bizarre twist for me, is coming face to face with this ideological disposition popping up in Bitcoin. In fact, there’s a popular strain of thought that shows up in among people who promote Bitcoin as a technology, that Bitcoin actually proves that Austrian economics is true. And by extension, methodological individualism, and that this has intractable implications for the future of how society will be organized. That, bitcoin has achieved the dream of Rothbard’s propertarian vision, by manifesting inviolable property rights, which can be the basis for a complete reformation of culture and society around a purely market-driven system, that lessons or eliminates the need for government, taxation, the welfare state, and will finally unleash the market’s invisible hand upon the world to fix all that ails it — and all that ails it, is the malinvestment, cultural degeneracy, and lack of discernment that easy money and credit unleash upon the world, at the end of the barrel of the government’s gun. That, market failures, externalities, liquidity traps, thrift paradoxes, and all the things that literally every practicing macroeconomist thinks about — are all just propaganda for “fiat”, communism or some shadowy totalizing ideology being pursued by a bunch of unaccountable elites.
Other signs you’re dealing with the fascist impulse when you get to the extremes of these ideologies, that has emerged from the progenitor libertarian impulse is these political views are often steeped in deep cultural commentary, talking about things like cultural degeneracy, consumer decadence, talk about incentivizing value-shifts in people from a culture of quantity to one that is more preoccupied with “quality” — more artisanal goods, more “productive” investments, less “hedonistic” consumption. This is the language of virtue. Not the language of objective facts about the world. It’s even internally contradictory with an economic system that claims to be grounded in a fundamental epistemic claim about value, that it’s inherently subjective to begin with.
In other words, we’ve gone through the looking glass, and the fascist golem has found itself looking right back at us. The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is revealed, and its desire to deny the common good seen for what it is, a project focused on the maximization of ones own ego and values to the exclusion of others. It is fundamentally always asking itself the question: who can I exclude? It’s frustration with any conception of the common good, is having such a conception limits the potential answers to that question.
