Whatever their partisans claim, political ideologies rarely succeed in describing some timeless truth about the world. More often, their existence is entirely contingent on the events around them. They serve as gathering points for similar personality types to consider the important issues of their day. When the issues change, most partisans move somewhere else, and the ideology goes stale.
Perhaps the purest contemporary example is libertarianism. In its popular political form, libertarianism enjoyed a brief flowering in the later years of the last Bush administration, peaking with Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, when it took the form of an anti-establishment critique of the destructive wars and economic policies most sacred to our ruling class. A few years later, before it had the chance to win any real victories, it fell as quickly as it rose, pushed aside as Donald Trump and the alt-right monopolized all the energy of the populist Right.
For those of us who called us ourselves libertarians in those halcyon years of the Ron Paul movement, the death of our ideology was sad. But in retrospect, this was only the sadness of a vanished childhood, where we realized that the dreams we once believed so deeply were only dreams. The real tragedy is that, since in the years since its death, libertarianism is reborn—not, as before, as an idealistic attack on a corrupt establishment, but instead as the servants of a corporate, technocratic elite that through its control of social media and other vital institutions of the Internet threatens to impose a new totalitarianism more insidious than anything the old libertarians fought.
In the old days, when libertarians really did fight centralized power, leftists unfairly called them corporate apologists. Now, with their anti-establishment populism gone, this old accusation is actually becoming true. It is just that the corporate power that libertarians now defend is power exercised exclusively for the benefit of the Left. To understand how this reversal came about, it is necessary to retread some of the history of the twenty-first century libertarian movement.
* * *
The central tenet of libertarianism was always simple. It was based around the so-called “non-aggression principle” (or NAP), which held that anyone may do whatever he pleases with his own property so long as he respects other people’s rights to do the same with theirs. Since the boundaries on what it means to encroach on someone else’s property rights are not always clear, the NAP was typically understood as a prohibition on the initiation of force. If, for instance, I put a statue of Mussolini in my front yard, it might “affect” my neighbors by driving down the resale values of their homes. But since I had not used force against their property and only used objects (statue and lawn) that I justly own, they would have no recourse against me. On the other hand, if they lobbied the town government to impose zoning restrictions that would prevent me from putting statutes in my yard, then they would be initiating force against my property and violate the NAP.[1]
Some of the more abstract extensions of libertarian theory were certainly strange. Murray Rothbard deduced that the government could not force parents to feed their children. Walter Block spun justifications for blackmail and littering. Today, if you search the ultra-libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute website for the term “Ebenezer Scrooge,” you will find at least a half dozen independent results on how Scrooge’s miserliness from A Christmas Carol was actually admirable.
Even so, libertarianism gave the right answers to the most pressing practical issues of the late 2000s. It opposed the Iraq War and the post-9/11 surveillance state. It opposed the Wall Street bailouts that followed the 2008 financial collapse and could explain, through Austrian business cycle theory, what caused the stock market bubble in the first place. Before Donald Trump became a politician, libertarianism offered an intellectual framework for Middle American dissident groups like the Tea Party to attack a system that they instinctively knew was against them. In 2010, for instance, the Maine Republican Party adopted a platform that called for reforms like “a return to Austrian economics” and ending the Federal Reserve. Despite showing a slight of misunderstanding of the concepts at issue—Austrian economics was an economic theory developed by continental European Jews in the early twentieth century, not something that U.S. policymakers ever followed, and politicians could no more “return to” it than they could “return to” the subjective theory of economic value—the instincts was sound: existing policy served only the elites, and so the historic American nation should abandon it for something radically different. Events like this caused The New York Times to famously ask in 2014 whether “the libertarian moment [had] finally arrived,” apparently to be ushered in with Ron’s son, Rand Paul’s presumed juggernaut of a presidential campaign.
Of course, that moment never arrived. As the defections of former libertarians and Tea Partiers to Donald Trump and the alt-right showed, a lot of the libertarians from the Ron Paul years fundamentally did not believe in libertarian theory as much as they thought they did. They flocked to it at the time because it offered an intelligent critique of the Left and the mainstream Right that was otherwise lacking in a time when Sean Hannity and Karl Rove were leading right-wing luminaries. But when a meatier opposition arose—based on nationalism, immigration restriction, and economic protectionism—many libertarians saw no problem in dropping their old beliefs for contradictory ones.
I was one of them. I was another millennial who came to adopt the radical strain of Murray Rothbard-style anarcho-capitalist libertarianism through the Ron Paul campaign.
For me, the libertarian dream died with the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri. I watched as black rioters looted and burnt an entire city on national TV, based on lies that media elites (in private companies!) fed to them about racism. When the police rolled in the tanks in to stop the mob and impose order, the typical libertarian reaction was to decry “police militarization.” But in reality, it was the militarized police force—what Albert Jay Nock called “our enemy, the state”—that stood out to me as the true hero of Ferguson. It was only through their use of force that normal people’s lives and property would be protected from a frothing underclass stoked to violence by our own “free press.” I came to realize that, if I had lived in Ferguson, only the police would have taken my side. The libertarian theorists pontificating on how the best solution would be to privatize the roads, abolish the police, or legalize pot offered only platitudes in the face of real life-and-death problems. Other former libertarians of my age would have similar conversion stories. But for all of us, the principle was the same. The theory no longer applied to the real world. And so, we left for other points rightward.
At the same time, others had joined the “libertarian movement” for distinctly leftist reasons. Certain aspects of libertarianism insisted on drug legalization, open borders, and the Right to all kinds of weird sex, in what was then an even more aggressive manner than the mainstream Left. But as the “mainstream” Left adopted increasingly radical positions in the culture wars, such that, today, elected Democratic politicians demand that we “abolish ICE” while Democratic voters nominate transgenders as their gubernatorial candidates, there is little reason for cultural leftists to stick with libertarianism. Why buy the knock-off when the real thing is just as accessible? So these people left too, and joined the freakshow known as liberalism circa 2018.
These defections to the Right and Left left only a small core of true believers: the types, often clustered around the Mises Institute, who really do believe that the non-aggression principle tells us everything we need to know about politics. They were people who would equally oppose the Civil Rights Act, anti-prostitution laws, and the U.S. Postal Service, just because each relies on some initiation of force. But these people were a small sect, and events had apparently left them behind.
Or had they? The most important battle of our time is now shaping up to be the battle against the tech monopolists. Whereas issues like changing demographics, non-white immigration to the West, and the glorification of sexual deviancy and hedonistic consumerism over traditional Western norms all pose existential threats to our civilization, the threat from the tech world presents an even more fundamental problem. It challenges whether we will even be able to talk about these other issues at all. By excluding dissident websites from Google search results, by preventing rightists from using Facebook or Twitter to spread their messages, or by banning the Right from online payment processors, private tech monopolists have every bit the same power to silence critics as the old Soviet Cheka.
In fact, their power may even be greater. The secret police of the twentieth century communist regimes had to rely on glaringly primitive and brutal tactics like the gulag, the torture chamber, and the firing squad. While a force like the Cheka was obviously able inflict much more pain on individual people than Google can, its obvious brutality could not help but stir up popular resentment; thus, the common refrain that by the fall of the Berlin Wall the only people still believing in communism were American university professors. Therefore, the fact that modern tech companies have given up primitive methods of control for more sophisticated ones is an evolutionary improvement in managerial totalitarianism, not a weakness. The goal of the gulags was rarely to hurt individual people; it was to make the cost of opposing the system prohibitive to others. If Google, Twitter, PayPal, or any other company can silence dissent just by changing search algorithms or banning dissidents from using a service, then it has achieved in the same results in a less intrusive way. And because their methods are less obviously evil, they are also less likely to engender popular disillusionment or revolt. As the libertarians always tell us, the free market really does find solutions that the government misses!
And indeed, this is the point where libertarianism rushes to the rescue of the establishment censors. Just at the time that we most need to fight back against tech censorship, the libertarians come in to point out that, actually, Google and Twitter are private companies and can set whatever terms of service they want. Just as I am free to disallow Twitter executives from my house, so can they ban me from using their platform. And for either of us to use force to prevent the other from doing so would be wrong.
Thus, whereas Murray Rothbard once wrote,
Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate “right to free speech”; there is only a man’s property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners.
…now writers at Vox say:
The First Amendment bars the government from infringing on speech, not private companies, meaning Twitter, Facebook, Google, and any other social media companies are free to enforce their content policies and decide what they do and don’t show.
And at Forbes:
The escalating incursion on social media signals government intervention. The problem with such intervention is the very premise. Private entities cannot censor. Professor Ari Waldman, a witness at the Filtering Practices hearing, was correct that “we don’t have a First Amendment right to Facebook’s amplification of our words.”
And a guest on NPR:
[Deplatforming Alex Jones is] not censorship. It’s – this is a private company. That – just the way Disney fired Roseanne, anybody can do anything on private companies.
Of course, the Rothbardians would also extend the premise that “anybody can do anything on private companies” to allow Facebook or Twitter, for instance, to deny service to blacks. This would certainly cause them to part ways with NPR. And yet, the neoliberals defending social media censorship have never shown any compunction about taking the parts of an ideology that they like and discarding the other parts that they don’t like. Even if libertarians only give the neoliberals a small sliver of justification, they have served their purpose. They have given a justification for corporate censorship that is enough to sound reasonable to some conservatives and fence-sitters, while also giving the partisan liberals a plausible veil to justify the things they already want to do anyway. Odd as it may be, the Ezra Klein-Murray Rothbard synthesis is now complete.
A comic has been making its way around our side of the Internet recently, showing a libertarian who is shocked to find himself allied with a fascist against communism and big business. While the comic expresses a nice sentiment, it is far too generous toward libertarians. Though a few of them are starting to realize the nature of this battle, and have been coming up with justifications to harmonize libertarian theory with an opposition to the tech monopolists, their conclusions tend to be weak and unconvincing. They range from an acknowledgment of the problem but a refusal to find a solution (e.g., “a free speech social media alternative will come eventually, so we can ignore the problem for now”) to a half-baked rationalization that government tech regulation really is not regulation at all (e.g., “tech companies get lots of government subsidies, so it really does not aggress against their property rights to regulate them”).
These are just the desperate expedients of people who realize the right solution, but whose ideology will not let them accept it. The consistent libertarians really are the tech apologists. If we take the NAP as our guide, then Google and Facebook really do get to “do anything on private companies.”
But why? Why should Google and Facebook be allowed to silence dissent to aid our ruling class’s efforts to turns America into the Third World and destroy the civilization that we inherited? If the NAP says we are not allowed to stop them, then to hell with the NAP. Political systems should serve the interests of real people, not some ideological constructs of philosophers. And if private companies become a threat to the just interests of real people, then it is the duty of responsible men to rally government force to stop them.
There is a tendency for “post-libertarian” rightists to seek explanations of their move from libertarian to far-right as a consistent progression, not a contradiction. This allows us to accept the sweet lie that we were right from the beginning and did not spend our early years in vain.
As hard as it may be, we have to admit that in this case our old beliefs were simply wrong, that libertarianism is an intellectual dead end with little to teach us today. Worse, in present battles, its theories only serve the Left. If we really want to fight the important fights of our age, the Right must learn to be unapologetically statist, not as the “collectivist” caricature that libertarians will conjure up, but as people willing to use the state as one of many valid weapons in fight the real totalitarian menace, found in the corporate offices of Silicon Valley.
[1] To the objection that zoning laws make communities nicer for nearly everyone and do not significantly harm the few cranks and outliers they inconvenience, libertarians have no answer. The NAP is sacrosanct, so we need to follow it even if doing so creates a situation that is obviously worse than the theoretical “aggression” that preceded it. So even if repealing zoning laws would mean transforming the Vermont village green into a strip mall, we are still morally obligated repeal them; using force to preserve something that nearly everyone appreciates is defined as immoral from the outset. If you ask why this needs to be the case, the libertarian typically retorts by comparing you to Stalin, who also believed that governments can do things.