Jeffrey Tucker, once a prime suspect to be the author of Ron Paul’s racist newsletters, has been progressing ever more to the Left, now to such an extent that he finds the right hand of the political spectrum far more sinister than the socialists he used to decry. Tucker’s transformation has taken a long time—indeed, for a while he was perhaps the most universally respected man in libertarianism, well-regarded by folks of all such persuasions—but a critical moment was in 2014 when he published Against Libertarian Brutalism, an article which he insisted was directed against an exceedingly small and unimportant group of people but somehow managed to alienate about half of his readers.
Only two, short years later, Tucker was terrified by Donald Trump’s name chalked over Emory University campus. What a shame.
In light of Hillary Clinton’s recent diatribe, Tucker felt it incumbent upon himself to weigh in and inform his remaining followers that the alt-right is bad, very bad, and absolutely unrelated to libertarianism whatsoever. Filling his piece with precisely zero citations of outer right sources, Tucker presents himself as an expert on this extremely varied group based on his experience on social media. We should give him some credit, however: he has at least read some Carlyle.
Mr. Tucker lists five key respects in which libertarianism and the alt-right differ. Description of these differences suffices for his purpose, but more inquisitive minds must raise a couple of questions. For one, is Tucker’s description correct? He doesn’t go into detail, painting with an extremely broad brush, but there’s nothing egregiously wrong about his characterization, except the condescending tone.
Let us begin with history. Tucker presents a simple theory of historical development: Liberty vs. Power:
Liberty unleashes human energy and builds civilization. Anything that interferes with the progress of liberty impedes the progress of humanity.
History is about exactly one thing, and the whole expanse of time from the Babylonians to the present day can be explained by the ratio of Liberty to Power. When this fraction is greater than 1, everything that is good flourishes; when it is less than 1, everything withers; and the greater the superiority of Liberty over Power, so much greater the improvement of humanity.
How does this work, you may ask? Well, you see, when there is Liberty, people get together and do things, like feed the homeless, heal the sick, construct enormous buildings, and write fantastic blog posts. People choose, and people’s choices make history. The greater the preponderance of liberty, the more freely people can choose and the more varied and wondrous the ways in which all of our lives can be enriched.
In the first place, history is a good deal more complex than the battle between two cosmic forces, the side of good and the side of evil. And there are more than mere individuals bouncing around in a vacuum. There are tribes, communities, and races, religions, firms, and political factions. Every historical moment involves a vast interplay of forces, personalities, interests, and ideologies, as well as the all-important factor of chance.
And what about those individuals? Well, not only do they interact with the rest of the world, they influence it, pushing little bits and pieces of it in certain directions. A father teaches his son how to be a man; an engineer designs a new device; a doctor heals a patient. Even a janitor helps keep a building clean. Most of these changes don’t cause great historical changes, but sometimes they can, and one needn’t be a “Great Man” to have a large impact. History does not even record the name of the centurion who threw his unit’s standard into the Macedonian ranks at Pydna, but that small act inspired another small group of people to continue fighting and ultimately allowed Rome to dominate Greece.
Where Tucker sees freedom of choice, a more careful observer sees structure and a complex process of simultaneous determination. Even Marx could glimpse this fact:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
What Tucker perceives as purely restrictive traditions, practices, and regulations often inform individuals’ identity; indeed, it is difficult to speak of someone without reference to the larger groups or culturally-informed ideal types that define them. Whether one is American or English, Nigerian or Pakistani, Hindu or Muslim, Jewish or Wiccan, a classically trained chef, a self-taught hacker, or an experienced NCO is part of who one is, and to cast aside all these distinctions is to ignore who each person truly is.
Now let us move on to Tucker’s comments on another dichotomy: Harmony vs. Conflict.
Once again, Tucker trumpets the benefits of human cooperation and explains that if we were all to simply adopt his values and ideology, then world peace would come about and we would all build a paradise together. This view he champions against the notion that groups of people are somehow doomed to fight each other, to eternally struggle for supremacy.
Of course, in Tucker’s view, these groups don’t really exist—there are only individuals and the cosmic forces, Liberty and Power—so they naturally cannot be at war with each other. Tucker seems utterly incapable of explaining conflict; it comes out of nowhere, or perhaps out of ignorance of the sublime truth that is libertarianism. When whites want to move into black neighborhoods because housing there is cheap, Tucker cannot comprehend how the blacks could possibly object, or why anyone would care. Just let the property owners decide! That will solve all of our problems.
There is, of course, no logical necessity for people or groups to fight, but they manage it anyway. This comes about because people and groups have competing interests and compromise is not always possible. There are things people are willing to kill and die for, and as long as that is the case, there will be conflict. If Tucker believes he can end the bloodshed spanning the whole of human history by preaching his gospel of property rights, he is certainly entitled to that believe, but he should expect no greater prospect for success than far greater persuaders than he have enjoyed.
Next comes Designed vs. Spontaneous Order. Here Tucker does let his imagination run away with him. He imagines that the outer right is under the collective delusion that the only thing holding society together is the supernal will and vision of great leaders, and that without these men the whole of the world would descend into barbarism and chaos.
Where Tucker errs, and errs severely, is to imagine that “Great Men” have no important role to play. This is utter fantasy and can be demonstrated to be so with only a few examples. Philosophy, as we know understand it, is unimaginable without Plato; perhaps mathematics and science would have eventually developed the same results without Gauss or Einstein, but these men undoubtedly exercised tremendous influence; and anyone who doubts the significance of Augustus would do well to review their political history. Great men exists, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, and their efforts combined with those of countless others produce history.
Tucker also lapses into contradiction at this point: earlier he had claimed that the alt-right is enthralled to an impersonal view of history; here he claims it is instead obsessed with the conscious direction of world events by a nefarious and secretive cabal. All that need be said about this is that some conspiracies do exist, though many that people imagine do not.
On Trade and Migration, which you would think to be libertarians’ principle concern, given their ideology’s history and contemporary controversies, Tucker has surprisingly little to say, but where he goes wrong is to say that free trade is always and invariably a good. It is not. There are people who benefit and people who suffer, just as there are with any economic arrangement. Furthermore, since he ascribes no value to cultural identity or group interest, Tucker simply cannot fathom how anyone could object to changing economic relations.
On immigration, Tucker has but three short sentences. He considers it adequate to dismiss skepticism on immigration by saying objections are based on race, which means it’s bad, wrong, and icky. One must wonder how well Tucker remembers the writings of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an anti-immigration libertarian.
Finally, we come to the most important difference between libertarianism and the alt-right: Emancipation and Progress. Here Tucker says little that is new, recapitulating his insistence that the intellectual successes of liberalism, and its eventual conquest of the whole world, have been unalloyed goods for mankind.
In his conclusion, Mr. Tucker summarizes the key issue:
Does society contain within itself the capacity for self-management, or not?
This question is of course nonsense: every society “manages itself.” The rulers of a society are not somehow disjoint from it, nor do they actually decide every single issue, even in the most ruthless totalitarian bureaucracy. Libertarianism, like any other generic form of leftism, prefers simple answers, ones which strictly prescribe opinions and ascribe to its adherents the world-historical significance that their decisions and actions will ultimately bring about the full realization of human potential.