Gold and Brown

Libertarianism, Fascism, and Democracy

This was meant to be the usual Sunday reading round-up for paid subscribers, but it turned into more of an essay. Sorry, or, you’re welcome, I guess.

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• Also, I appeared with my friends Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman on their great show Know Your Enemy to discuss everything going on.

• I wrote a piece for Saturday’s AirMail about Meade Esposito, the legendary Brooklyn political boss and patron of Fred and Donald Trump. 

• My first column for The Nation will be available online this week I believe, so keep an eye out for that, too! 

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Looking back over the past decade, one central interest—if not the central interest—of mine, has been the strange fusion of libertarianism and fascism in the United States. This was once called the libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline. In libertarians’ self-understanding, this would seem to be an impossible contradiction: fascism is the ultimate “statist collectivism” and they are the ultimate “anti-statist individualists.” And yet I noticed, as many others did, that nearly all the neo-Nazis interviewed in the wake of Charlottesville, cited Ludwig von Mises, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Murray Rothbard as the beginning of a political journey that brought them to the racist extreme right. Now, we are facing another apparent contradiction in concrete politics: a movement that claims to be populist and “pro-worker” but is undertaking a radical libertarian project of state demolition at the instruction of billionaires, most of whom came from the libertarian movement. Curtis Yarvin is only the most famous now of these authoritarian-libertarian amphibians.

There are many ways to understand this phenomenon and they all have something to recommend themselves. You can look at it politically—as a coalition of diverse, but temporarily consonant interests; sociologically— a movement that encountered each other at the fringes of American political life and cross-pollinated; psychologically—both simultaneously revere and want to re-establish hierarchy but are deeply resentful about existing elites, whom they feel as socially or racially inferior to themselves. Extending that theory into political economy, one could say both are movements that attract an alienated petit bourgeoisie that feels threatened from above and below; that looks at the present disposition of society as unfair or unjust to them in particular but doesn’t want to destroy private property or the economic system altogether. There is also a strong historical factor to consider: private property, particularly entrepreneurial private property, is so central to American ideology that it makes sense that any extreme right in this country would speak in its name. From this perspective, the combination of unbridled capitalism and racism is not some exceptional thing that needs to be explained but a pretty accurate summary of the history of the United States. (Here the far right and some on the left agree: the far right is the true inheritor of the American tradition.)

My approach to the question has been mostly historical: I tried to trace the roots of this alliance or affinity as a political force in the modern era. The particular episode I focused on was the “paleo” alliance of national populists and radical libertarians around Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s. The two chief intellectual figures in that combination were Samuel T. Francis, who I think it’s not too much of a stretch to call a fascist—he called himself one on occasion—and Murray N. Rothbard, who called himself an “anarcho-capitalist.” The use of demagogic right-wing populism to affect a radical libertarian project of state demolition was the conscious political strategy cooked up by Rothbard. In 2016, Rothbard’s biographer and confidant Justin Raimondo, “Rothbard, who died in 1995, would’ve loved Donald Trump, and he seems to have foreseen his rise as if in a dream.” I agree and I’ve written in the past that we seem to be living in Murray Rothbard’s America.

(I struggle with the question of how important intellectuals are: do they guide or merely reflect social movements? This is a complicated historiographical and sociological problem that I don’t intend to solve and maybe doesn’t need to be solved, but I’ll just say you can learn quite a lot about Trumpism by reading Rothbard and Francis, whom neither he nor most of his followers have ever read. J.D. Vance, Yarvin, and Thiel, all definitely have, though.)

Historically learned readers will know that Rothbard-Francis-Buchanan was not the origin point for this strange political combination. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises—Rothbard’s teacher—praised Mussolini for saving capitalism. I wrote recently about the classical liberal collaboration with Mussolini on privatization and austerity. The America First and isolationist movements included many “individualists” who sympathized with Hitler. They could perhaps plead ignorance: the true extent of fascist crimes wasn’t known yet. But then why did Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek also offer support to Pinochet’s coup? And why did Rothbard, aside from mere perversity, look with such interest at both the rise of David Duke and the historical fascist movements? It’s striking to look back at Rothbard’s strategy memo for the Cato Institute and observe the way he tried to appropriate fascist strategy and tactics but to see the substantial parallelisms he detected between fascism and libertarianism. In a section on the fascist’s “cult of youth,” he discusses the French fascist intellectual Robert Brassilach and notices “eerie” similarities to Ayn Rand:

A fascinating problem for libertarians is how a man like Robert Brasillach, a fierce individualist influenced by anarchists, could call himself an “anarcho-fascist” and become the leading pro-Nazi among French intellectuals. As a right-wing anarchist and individualist who believed in the inequality and diversity of men, a believer in the virtue of. the elite and having contempt for the masses whom he felt would have to be led by the elite; himself led by emotion and knowing nothing of economics or political philosophy and totally out of sympathy with systematic thought of any kind, it became easy for Brasillach to slip into view that the elite should dictate to the masses through a strong State. That this was a contradiction in his thought is obvious; but then again, most important political ideologies have contained numerous crucial contradictions, which did not prevent them from holding sway over numerous people. In fact, many of Brasillach’s statements are eerily akin to those of Ayn Rand (especially the non-philosophic Rand of the suppressed passages of the first edition of We the Living) as well as some of the more moderate speeches of Adolf Hitler.

A little bit below Rothbard addresses the classical liberal approach to Mussolini:

Perhaps even more interesting to the libertarian was the early support to Mussolini and Fascism by such classical free-market economists as Maffeo Pantaleoni, Ernesto Rossi, the Misesian Luigi Einaudi, and Alberto DeStefani, Fascist Minister of Finance until 1925. These liberals hoped, in the long run in vain, to use an authoritarian dictatorship to impose free-market, free-trade, low-budget, and privatization policies. Einaudi’s disillusion was swift, while DeStefani was partially successful until his ouster in 1925, after which Fascism became fully corporatist and statist. Particularly fascinating to libertarians is the case of the important , early Fascist theoretician Massimo Rocca (not to be confused with the statist and corporatist Fascist theoretician Alfredo Rocco), who began as an individualist anarchist; and who constantly strove to use Fascism and the cult of Mussolini’s personality to achieve free-market, low-budget, and anti-statist goals, as against the statist aims of the Fascist party militants. Rocca moved step-by-step toward an exaltation of the cult of his early ally, Mussolini, and even toward a kind of Herbert Hoover “voluntarist” corporatism. He was ousted from the Fascist party and expelled from Italy.

Rocca, as the historian Adrian Lyttelton writes, saw “the mission of Fascism as the defence of free enterprise and even free trade. This new liberalism was bound up with the defence of the middle-class consumer and taxpayer.”¹ (Perhaps there are some potential movement dynamics there: an initial libertarian phase followed, because of some economic distress, by a more welfarist and corporatist phase—who knows?)

A couple of brief comments. First, to bang my drum again, if you’re an authoritarian right-wing movement that contains both disaffected former socialists and libertarian radicals who want to privatize the state, you might be, definitionally, historically, Italianly fascist. Second, doesn’t this all recommend the much-deprecated formulas of the Communist Third International, like Dimitroff’s definition: “Fascism is the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital?”² In a way, yes, but that doesn’t explain why those “elements” became that way.

For my part, I’ve always found something unsatisfying about all the explanatory frameworks. I don’t think history, politics, sociology, or psychology provide a satisfactory account. I don’t think this is all an accident. I think there’s something else at the core that determines the affinity between libertarianism and fascism. This was what I was trying to grasp in 2017 when I wrote about Rothbard in the wake of Charlottesville and said that they were both united by the notion of naked, brutal self-interest: radical libertarians believed this on an individual level, fascists, on the collective level, and it was not hard to switch between the two. Many commentators—both pro- and anti-capitalist—have noticed the analogy between the invisible hand of the market and a Social Darwinian “state of nature.”

Rothbard, in his discussion of Robert Brasillach, used the biography by William Tucker, The Fascist Ego. As Rothbard seemed to faintly recognize, the fascist ego and the radical, “anarchist” libertarian ego are identical on a structural level, that is to say, they are the same form of subjectivity in different moments. That is not to say that every single fascist is a libertarian or vice versa, or that they exactly have the same psychological origin story. What they both share is a fundamental misrecognition of the Other: the other is just a thing, some material for exploitation or domination. As such, they cannot understand and fundamentally distrust anything that doesn’t openly declare a relation between self and others that is non-exploitative or based on non-domination. They both cannot recognize any universal interest, only the wars and temporary alliances of particular interests, be they individuals, nations, or races. To put it somewhat differently, their universal is just the particular, it becomes the Absolute. Libertarians like to say, “Well, we hate the state, while fascists worship the state.” But this is merely a semantic game. The state as fascists understand it is not the state as liberals and socialists understand it: as the sphere where pluralistic, particular interests are reconciled for the general good. They have no such ideal. They view the state instead as a crude vehicle or weapon for the movement or the race. And neither have any conception of “citizenship” as conventionally understood, a set of inalienable rights: citizenship is a mutable and revocable thing like employment, based on the notion of one’s productive contribution to the whole.

The radical libertarian critique of the liberal state and the fascist critique of the liberal state are functionally identical: they both contend that the interests of the nation are not represented or generated in the state, rather the state represents some particular group or groups lording it over the rest of society, inherently corrupt, often racially impure, and therefore must be destroyed. One might recognize superficial and deceptive similarities to the left-wing critique of the liberal state, which says that the state is not a neutral, rationalistic, universalistic body dedicated to the common good, but is dominated by one class to ensure the continued domination of the other classes. The left-wing critique of the state usually includes the notion that its class domination can be altered or, at least, ameliorated. The fascist and radical libertarian believe that nothing like a universal state can exist, except as a form of lying and manipulation. They also both reject the Marxist doctrine of class struggle and divide the population instead into a productive Volk against a parasitic political, bureaucratic, and intellectual class. By doing this they appear to synthesize the interests of industrialists and laborers. It can be both elitist and populist. As Lyttelton writes, “the battle of ‘producers’ against ‘parasites’ might seem to suggest the defence of labour against finance; but it could also serve as a slogan for the industrialists’ resentment of the parliamentary class.”³

To use Hegel’s terminology, the world of business and commerce is “Civil Society” or “Bourgeois Society” and is defined by self-interest and self-assertion, it is the realm of particular interests. What fascism and radical libertarianism both want is the subordination of the state to “Bourgeois Society,” not as a sociological category, but as a type of social activity, namely unmediated productive self-seeking and self-interest. Fascist politics and radical libertarian politics are both resolutely anti-political: they reject the legitimacy of the parliamentary political process and both “seek to replace the political sphere with a technocratic rejection of politics as such.”⁴ Some of the most incisive observers of fascism do not even dignify the fascist political entity with the word “state:” Franz Neumann in his famous analysis Behemoth described Nazi Germany as not being unified by a single legal, rational order, but instead as a chaotic collection of competing power centers, that ruled through terror, arbitrary decree, and personal patronage.

Usually, the consolidation of authoritarian regimes is understood to be the State attacking Civil Society, but it really should be understood as Civil Society—the regime of business and enterprise—attacking the State. Both the “corporatist” and the “anarcho-capitalist” want to replace the State with Civil Society itself, just understood in slightly different ways: a corporatist views Civil Society in terms of self-organizing, hierarchical wholes, while the anarcho-capitalist views market competition as the only necessary principle of organization. The process of privatization and corporate coordination are identical in effect: they both seek the replacement of the state with the direct, unmediated rule of industrial concerns. This accounts for Yarvin’s synthesis of monarchism and libertarian anarchism and is the inner truth of Ross Perot and Donald Trump’s desire to “run America like a business.”

It’s not at all clear to me that most Americans have any idea any longer that a constitutional government is meant to be something different than a massive firm, that it guarantees rights and prescribes certain duties. It doesn’t seem to me that they know that the goal of the United States government is something other than “efficiency” or that they view what’s currently happening as the destruction of their freedom as embodied in the State, rather than some interesting corporate reorganization that may yet yield better results. They may not wake up until suddenly they get the message: “You’re fired.”

1. Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919-1929, 62

2. “Finance capital” in Marxist-Leninist talk is not just the financial sector as we speak it, but the oligopolistic combinations of industry and finance that typify capitalism in the imperialist phase

3. Lyttelton, 42

4. Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, 42