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, Mr. Tucker was terrified by Donald Trump’s name chalked over Emory University campus. What a shame.
In light of Hillary Clinton’s recent diatribe, Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Oh, what blathering nonsense!
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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Tucker’s comments on another dichotomy: Harmony vs. Conflict.
Once again, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
“Does society contain within itself the capacity for self-management, or not?”
Only with a moral and legitimate aristocracy. No society can manage when false notions of “equality” are its supposed fundaments.
Exactly. Society needs leading men. Those leading men *should* be the best men, and in a well-ordered system they *will* be. Nevertheless, any nobles are better than none.
As we all know, the opposite of quality is equality.
Any time a person repeats to me, with outrage, the asinine acts of this or that imbecile or group of imbeciles, I like to remind them that “in a democracy, their vote counts the same as your vote.” They generally can’t connect the dots between democracy / equality and our present dire straits.
Another thing I like to do when a member of the Worst Generation (baby boomer) starts to relate their conservative qualifications to me is to grill them about why didn’t vote for George Wallace. Its amusing to hear them immediately start reciting all the “respectable” cuck slogans they’ve been trained to recite about equality, being a nation of immigrants, tolerance, big tent, blah, etc.
This article highlights why I rejected libertarianism years ago, even when I was still more or less a normie w.r.t other Alt-Right and NRx ideas.
Simply put – libertarianism, at least of the hard-core kind that Mr. Tucker seems to represent – is simply too artificial and out of accord with genetic, social, and communitarian realities to be a viable alternative to local and national community. It represents the very worst in “ideology” which refuses to allow its premises to be affected by the real world. Frankly, any ideology which actually believes that roads, courts, and the constabulary powers of society can be privatised to the highest bidder is simply not dealing from a full deck.
The problem is that, like socialism/communism, libertarianism is a child of the “Enlightenment,” and carries with it the seeds of its own refutation, even if its end-workings differ from the others. All of these essentially lead to the nihilism of the atomistic individual.
Libertarianism seems so odd. It’s believers can hold forth a few good points and then turn around and refute those points after a few paragraphs. A Libertarian candidate seems to need no opponent. In a few minutes, he will become his own opponent.
Fisking Mr. Tucker makes less sense than fisking my five-year-old. At least my kid can identify invalid syllogisms.
Eh, Tucker is just basically a progressive. Look at his language in the “emanicpation and progress” section of his FEE article:
“progress” (x infinity)
“broke down barriers”
“evolved”
“rights are universal”
“they look back to what they imagine to be a golden age”
“the ancients universally believed” (with disdain)
How much of this rhetorical language are we hearing from e.g. Hillary?
Tucker is symptomatic of what turned me away from libertarianism: what NRx calls “autism,” a mania for conforming reality to universal rules whereas reality is fundamentally non-rule-based. And his views on (particularly intellectual) property are so simultaneously weak and self-satsified that one has to wonder at the integrity of the whole libertarian edifice.
David Grant does a good job pointing out the flaws in Tucker’s article. I’ll weigh in on two sections in particular:
1) Harmony vs. Conflict
Capitalism is above all else dependent on conflict. Yes, individualist societies co-operate well, but this is ultimately born out of a milieu of conflict, where it’s co-operate-or-die. What’s conscipcuously absent from Tucker’s analysis of conflict is how higher and better forms develop out of it. It’s as though conflict is anathema to “progress” (whatever that is). This is strange, because of course the conflict that capitalism bases itself on is precisely what underlies its unmatched creative energy. But this all smacks of social darwinism, something icky and old. And old things (i.e. “what the ancients universally believed”) are bad. The last thing Tucker wants is to be called a (gasp!) eugenicist. He’s fine with dysgenia, AKA “progress,” AKA the procession of humanity through the ages in absence of conflict.
2) Designed vs. Spontaneous Order
He does, however, have a point here. Broken clock, and all that. The far right seems to recognize a neat dichotomy between order and chaos, but of course in our chaotic world, things aren’t so neat and tidy. Order can and often does arise out of chaos, and better and higher orders at that. Indeed, overdevelopment can itself be a prelude to decay, as the simple and eternal truth of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” attests. Spontaneous order is, after all, the whole mechanism by which conflict produces higher forms in the first place; it’s the act of natural selection generalized. Chaos out of order out of chaos out of… time is cyclical: this is the view of every traditional society in history, and we as reactionaries are nothing if not wedded to tradition. The far right needs to come to grips with this, and fails to do so at its very existential peril. But the notion of spontaneous order is not a new idea; the Daoist concept of ziran prefigures that of the libertarian, and does so in a far more profound way. This is the link between libertarianism (essentially, capitalism) and the far right (essentially, traditionalism). Or at least, it ought to be.
Marx explained that succession before with an all-encompassing theory called Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Quantitative changes leading to qualitative changes, often through revolutionary chaos, bring forth a new order. That’s the spiral of history.
How do you reconcile this with the fact that when order arises out of chaos (and keep in mind here that we need to be using the term “chaos” in the “chaos theory” sense of the term, not simply the colloquial use of the word), it necessarily does so as the result of small yet sensitive changes in a completely deterministic system which are not necessarily system wide?
When Marx used the word chaos, he was referring to chaos as in the violent disruption of the old order, not in its mathematical sense, which is posterior to him. It makes no sense to apply the mathematical theory to his opinions about history.
I didn’t pretend to reconcile the spontaneous order arising from chaos with the Marxist explanation of history. It was merely a description of a pervasive point of view in our modern world.
I’m Thomist.
I apologise Cristina, I should have clarified in my comment that I was directing it to Edward. I didn’t find anything to quibble with in your previous comment.
No apology needed; even so, accepted.
Jeffrey Cucker is a sellout, and his 180-degrees turn is ridiculous and insincere, going over to the left-libertarian camp because, that’s where money is. Just a couple of years ago he advocated death penalty for African-American teenagers (justifying it with “If you are old enough to murder, you are old enough to pay the ultimate price.”), railed against immigration (a standard right-libertarian assertion being that “There is too much legal immigration.” let alone illegal), derided multiculturalism as a lunacy, dismissed third-world peoples and their cultures as inferior, and finally, mocked feminism and the rest of the litany of Cultural Marxist degeneracies without being mealymouthed in the least (his allying with Cathy Reisenwitz was surreal).
My LRx take on Tucker: http://www.zerothposition.com/2016/09/03/on-libertarianism-and-the-alt-right/
As Heraclitus posited, and Nietzsche and Heidegger later expanded, conflict/strife/struggle is the ontological basis of the human condition.
The article by Tucker is shockingly poor and incoherent- we’re talking Tumblr SJW-level incoherence here.
Inter alia, Tucker accuses the Right of promoting a “depersonalization of history itself [based on] the principle that we are all being buffeted about by Olympian historical forces beyond our control as mere individuals.”- and in the next sentence, castigates the Right for over-reliance on the role of Great Men in history.
LOL- here I thought that the Great Man is the limiting case and supplement of purely impersonal forces in history, and that leadership by definition means more than being pushed around by forces beyond one’s control, but anyhow. It is Marxism- and variants of Marxist economism-materialism such as…well, Libertarianism- that see human action as buffeted about by impersonal forces the way kites are blown around in the wind. (Think e.g. the very idea of “market discipline” so dear to the Libertarian heart).
Meanwhile, where Rightists posit deterministic forces in history, they tend to conceive them in terms of culture, which exerts its effects by shaping the wants, preferences, and world-view of men, and so works *through* the will of individuals, as opposed to by-passing or over-riding their will, the way “materialist” economic determinism of any sort, Marxist or Libertarian, does.
“We should give him some credit, however: he has at least read some Carlyle.”
You’re too generous. In that article, he quotes “On Heroes and Hero Worship” and then adds, “And so on it goes for hundreds of pages . . .” But this is actually a short book that is only somewhat over 100 pages. (Page length here: https://www.amazon.com/Heroes-Hero-Worship-Heroic-History-ebook/dp/B0082RYTAK/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=#nav-subnav)
I suspect he just found a few quotes to point and sputter at.
For the most part, he took quotes from the first page. Shows you how far he’s willing to engage with anything he doesn’t already agree with.
I’m a hardcore libertarian but a realistic one, like Hoppe. I believe in the necesity an libertarian-reactionary alliance, and i think you have some good points, but my final goal is a stateless society inspired in western traditions, not another form of statism.
Hoppe was responsible for destroying any hope of a libertarian/reactionary alliance when he attacked Sam Francis and called him a Nazi. In that way, Hoppe is no better than Dinesh D’Souza.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. Citation?
1996 meeting of the John Randolph Club. Tom Piatak wrote an article about it in Chronicles. Thomas Fleming has referenced it several times. Can’t find the article now, but, if you have a subscription to Chronicles, you should be able to find it in the archive. It’s titled: “Nazis and Other Delusions: A Response to Hoppe.”
If I recall right, the essay in Democracy: The God that Failed dealing with conservatism is that article.
I don’t think he called Francis a Nazi. He criticized his economics. http://www.hanshoppe.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/hoppe_nation_household-1996-unpub.pdf
Kinsella +1
I would’ve said the same thing a year ago too. But ultimately, preserving civilization is more important than rigidly following the NAP. When these two come into conflict, you will have to choose.
Hoppe call national socialist, but not nazi. You must understan the meaning of “socialism” in the austrian tradition. He speaks about the necesity of antistate changes for recover a natural order. I don’t think it’s a solid reason for a paleolibertarian vs neoreactionary conflict.
http://barelyablog.com/in-defense-of-hans-hermann-hoppe/
I personally know several people who were in attendance at the meeting. Hoppe was calling Francis a Nazi. There is no ambiguity about the statement. It wasn’t unintentional, a matter of conjecture, or lost in translation from mother tongue to second language.