The Specter of Alternative Politics (Part 1)

The foibles of populism, personality cults, nostalgia, and online media voodoo...

It was the early 2000’s. Bush Jr. was the president, and his public image was a stupid religious guy from the south. I had been raised by progressive parents in a northern liberal city and I was non-religious. Republicans and conservatives generally seemed like Christian religious nuts who wanted to control other people’s lives, irrationally worshipped the violent might of the military, and represented a southern and rural culture that I had no basis to relate to and that seemed backwards and uneducated.

When 9/11 happened and the country was led into the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, this was a major turning point in American politics that radicalized me, and the Republicans doubled down on the Christian religiosity, bloodlust, and tribalistic nationalism. Furthermore, Bush Jr. no longer merely represented a stupid religious guy from the south. He represented mass murder, runaway executive power grabs, and the erosion of the privacy rights of the domestic populace. To make matters worse, it became a major public scandal that the pre-text to the mass murder was literally a lie.

One might think, given this, that I became a loyal Democrat. Wrong. I watched the vast majority of the Democrats form a bipartisan consensus in favor of the worst of everything Bush Jr. did, and later on I watched them continue and expand Bush’s policies under Obama. Furthermore, conventional liberal Democrat politicians also tended to strike me as PR salesmen with lofty rhetoric who, when pushed on certain questions of civil liberties, weren’t even very good as liberals. Simple stuff like pot and prostitution legalization was “too radical” for them. Their main selling point was, ultimately, “at least we’re not dumb hicks who hate gays and will outlaw abortion”. They never earned my loyalty on account of any virtue on their part.

As such, I naturally was hungry for an alternative to the conventional Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans. I didn’t actively search out an alternative, but an alternative found me. Cue: Enter a rogue libertarian Republican congressman from Texas named Ron Paul, who I saw give stirring speeches on CSPAN and seemed to be just about the only person in congress who was a real dissident.

Libertarianism and the Ron Paul Cult

In my experience or to my memory, the most popularly known or common “alternative political media” during the early to mid 2000’s was Libertarian stuff, and if you discovered Ron Paul, his website soon led you down a pipeline towards outfits like LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com and Mises.org. There was also a large network of blogs by people associated with such institutions, and the Libertarian Party was pushing political compass tests biased towards Libertarianism online.

In a sense, there is a historically significant pretext to this, as the fall of the Soviet Union was still relatively recent and the establishment consensus among liberals and conservatives alike after that was that socialism of any kind is passe, that global capitalism is the natural order here to stay. It was only natural that in the 90’s and 2000’s, the libertarian capitalist scene was buzzing online, and it had a fairly effective PR machine that was able to capture a portion of liberals and progressives, especially regarding the anti-war cause, along with questions of personal license to do what you want as long as you are not hurting anybody else, which appealed to liberal sensibility.

Being propagandized into libertarianism also made people feel like they were part of a special group with esoteric knowledge, as opposed to the vast majority of society, who were “statist sheep”, asleep to the genius insights of Murray Rothbard. And impressionable young people rode the coattails of libertarian economics and law professors / professional writers and micro-celebrities like Walter Block, Stephen Kinsella, Robert Murphy, Wendy McElroy, and Roderick Long (Long arguably being the best of the bunch). I even had an early email exchange with Walter Block.

And Stefan Molyneux had set himself up as a mix of libertarian advocate and psychotherapy cult leader, with a podcast that lulled you into a trance like state, and a forum that enforced a rigid party line. Unbeknownst to latecomers, Molyneux originally made his mark as an anti-spanking advocate who argued that the family is the root of all evil! (In fact, I “debated” Molyneux on his podcast way back in 2008).

While Ron Paul was not libertarianism as such, he was the main person in an actual position of national political power with connections to the movement. Him and Dennis Kucinich were the most vocal critics of the war in the government, and he had a penchant for giving speeches on the house floor calling out the entire political establishment and often proposing radical bills (which were of course roundly shot down by the majority every time). He was very much the Bernie Sanders of the right, the lone dissident populist figure within his own group. Lets unpack his position.

Ron Paul was against the Iraq War, against the Patriot Act, against the draft, against torture, and against the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking (this one may seem paradoxical for a radical capitalist, to oppose a big banking institution, but if you understand the Austrian school of economics that he hails from, it checks out). He was for legalizing all victimless crimes, and he had reservations about the death penalty. This is all, for the most part, stuff that a lot of progressives could get on board with, and may help explain its crossover appeal at the time.

Once we go deeper than this, into Ron Paul’s libertarian rabbit hole, things start to get more extreme. He favored abolishing the income tax. He opposed just about any and all government regulation of business on principle. He opposed all foreign aid. In many ways, he advocated a politics of nostalgia for an America before Woodrow Wilson, whom he spoke very critically of. He advocated a strict reading of the constitution and sticking to a Jeffersonian understanding of the founding of America, such that just about everything the government has done in the 20th century is illegitimate. And as part of that, he favored abolishing the civil rights act itself.

All of this is stuff that makes liberals and progressives pull their hair out. So does a deeper look at his voting record as a congressman, which included being against abortion, a penchant for anti-immigration positions, and weird pork barrel projects. When all of this is taken into account, we must understand Ron Paul as a paleoconservative, and he was indeed allied with Pat Buchanan. He was opposed to neoconservatism, but his politics is a mix of an older style of pre-WWII conservatism with libertarianism. And while Donald Trump’s politics differs from Ron Paul’s, Trump most certainly drew on the remnants of paleoconservatism.

Indeed, some of the characters that surrounded Ron Paul and the Lew Rockwell crowd who backed him were outright reactionary. White Nationalists and Traditionalist Catholics loomed right around the corner, and it was precisely in the more reactionary corners of the radical libertarian movement where a lot of the pretext to what later would become known as the alt-right lingered. If you were involved in the libertarian movement at the time, which I was, and if you were more liberal if not left-wing in your inclinations, you were constantly battling these people.

By the time of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential bid, I was so knee deep in anarchism, and starting to veer more and more to the left, that I didn’t really care for him very much and argued against voting for him. He also had a major newsletter scandal that revealed the more reactionary positions of his camp, but everyone who was already involved in the libertarian movement already knew about that stuff. But he developed a cult of what we called “Paul Bots” during his 2008 and 2012 presidential bids. Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul, upon entering politics, was also way less radical than him, in the sense that he was pretty close to just being a normal Republican patsy.

Ron Paul, like Trump, wanted to “Make America Great Again”, though his terms for that were somewhat more sound and principled, in that he actually took his own anti-government rhetoric seriously. He essentially promised to live up to the reputations of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover as “do nothing presidents”. And for Ron Paul, the nostalgia ran further back to a 19th century “laissez-faire capitalism”, and even so far back as beefs against Alexander Hamilton for floating central banking.

The Libertarian Road to Nowhere

Ultimately, Ron Paul was a false alternative, as was libertarianism. Ron Paul never had the political clout to even come close to winning a presidential election, and the rationale for his campaign ended up being a public awareness campaign for libertarianism. The libertarian movement was partly a pipeline to reactionary right stuff, and its most radical manifestation as “anarcho-capitalism” was unraveled as an opportunistic whitewashing of anarchism that actually amounted to advocacy for private government. I had to learn all of this the hard way, by being a libertarian. By 2010, I was so disgusted with libertarianism that I left the movement.

It also came to be obvious that the libertarian movement is heavily astroturfed by deep financial interests, and you don’t even have to look very hard or read in between the lines to uncover what the financial connections are. Heck, Burton Blumert, the original publisher of LewRockwell.com, was a coin company owner with an obvious vested interest in the gold bug narrative, who had a comical cartoon personality. His reoccurring writings on the website went into the comedically absurd. The rosters of writers and fellows for these institutions all are boogie people in bowties too. There is rarely if ever a hint of “earthiness” to them. They bleed gold.

What a guy.

Libertarianism is also a false alternative in the sense that the traditional alignment of modern American libertarianism is, in fact, a fusionist allyship with conservatives and Republicans, and there is and was a whole culture of “libertarian light” people who were essentially just normal conservative Republicans with a few off-color positions. It’s kind of hard to be an alternative to the Democrat and Republican establishment when you’re still a patsy for the Republican establishment.

Furthermore, in the age of Trump, the libertarian movement has since effectively split, with a chunk of the libertarian right being coopted by Trumpism. When pushed into a corner, the libertarian right, dressed up in classical liberal rhetoric, revealed itself to be reactionary and neo-fascist, and choked on its own contradictions as it proceeded to favor authoritarian government for “the right reasons”.

The famed Nolan Chart political spectrum thus collapses into absurdity, with the distinction between libertarianism and authoritarianism being in hot water, and with even the most radical of capitalists throwing “laissez-faire” to the wind when the contradictions of capitalism come to the surface. The capitalist does like the iron fist of the state after all. Especially when a businessman wields it or it crushes the left. Lord Ludwig Von Moses, er Mises, gives the game away in 1927:

“It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.” — Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism

This may not be an 100% endorsement of fascism, but it does amount to the view that fascism is “useful” from a radical classical liberal capitalist standpoint, and shows that it is a position adopted, consistent with the logic of liberal capitalism itself, in response to crisis. This quote and its implications has been debated for a long time. But there is an observable pattern here and Mises said what he said.

Hair splitting about what is and isn’t fascism aside, the contradictions in question remain, and the libertarian movement derails people into an ideological cult that takes them to ridiculous positions (including, in the case of our silly old friend Walter Block, “voluntary slavery” and *letting someone hanging from a window sill fall to their death because it’s your property*), proposes useless lifestyle politics, and makes them rub elbows with a motley assortment of rascals:

NAMBLA folks, white nationalists, neo-confederates, monarchists, Silicon Valley tech overlords, people who say fascism is rad, people who want you to move to New Hampshire and have an orgy in a public park just to get arrested on purpose, trigger happy gun owners, Burning Man festival types who think doing drugs and rolling in the mud in Mexico is activism, financial advisor grifters, expats in Estonia, and people who live on a platform in the sea. I’m not sure that’s the best of liberty.

What a world.

“Buy my product…”

Next up in this series, we will be turning the clock more to the 2010’s and shifting our focus towards the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, the rise of “alternative left” media, and the associated resurgence of social democratic politics. Stay tuned.